#CIA Officers Memorial Foundation | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theculturedmarxist · 2 years

Text

I am hesitant to write this because I do not want to leave the reader with the idea that I support the use of nuclear weapons. I do not. But the people of the United States, thanks to inept and corrupt political leadership, live under the fantasy that we are still in the strategic world that existed in the 1990s, when it was understood that a first-strike nuclear attack by the United States or Russia against the other would result in an unstoppable response that would leave both countries devastated and confront the world with a possible nuclear winter. In other words, Mutual Assured Destruction.

But then George W. Bush happened. In June of 2001, George W. Bush unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If your are younger than 40 years old, you probably have no memory of the ABM Treaty. Here’s a quick refresher:

Signed in 1972 by Washington and Moscow to slow the nuclear arms race, the ABM Treaty barred both superpowers from deploying national defenses against long-range ballistic missiles and from building the foundation for such a defense. The treaty was based on the premise that if either superpower constructed a strategic defense, the other would build up its offensive nuclear forces to offset the defense. The superpowers would therefore quickly be put on a path toward a never-ending offensive-defensive arms race as each tried to balance its counterpart’s action.

I remember Bush’s first year in office clearly. My writing at the time was focused on the Bush Administration’s utter neglect of counter terrorism en lieu of focusing on developing a missile defense system. That was the priority of the Bush National Security team in 2001 until 9-11 happened. The Bush Team ignored the CIA warnings that Bin Laden was planning to hit the United States and only convened its first inter-agency meeting on terrorism on September 10:

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US was the title of the President’s Daily Brief prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency and given to U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday, August 6, 2001. The brief warned, 36 days before the September 11 attacks, of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, including “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for a hijacking” of U.S. aircraft.[1]

In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, the Bush Administration pivoted to a perverse counter terrorism policy highlighted by invading Afghanistan and going to war with Iraq. The new CT policy shifted the U.S. Government’s defense policy from building and deploying the ballistic missile defense system that was Bush and Cheney’s dream in the first 8 months of their Administraion, to combating terrorism and nation building. Billions of dollars that could have been spent on a new ABM system were gobbled up with feckless military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and other back waters in the the Third world.

What did Russia do? Initially, the folks in Moscow complained:

Senior Kremlin spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhhembsky said Moscow will voice regret about the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty, but would otherwise remain calm. Mr. Yastrzhembsky said Russia’s own nuclear arsenal is sufficient to protect the country in the future. The chief of the Russian General Staff, General Anatoly Kvashnin says U.S. withdrawal from ABM will have an impact on strategic stability. General Kvasnin says it will open the way for some countries to embark on an international arms race. But, he says it will not threaten Russia’s security. Some Russian politicians are less restrained. Duma Deputy Vladimir Lukin of the liberal Yabloka Party describes the U.S. move as a major mistake. Mr. Lukin says ‘it’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.” He accuses the U.S. of using Russian assistance in the anti-terror coalition and then ignoring Russian concerns on other issues, such as the ABM treaty.

And then Russia did what Russians do–they created a robust, echeloned ABM defense. My friend, Andrei Martyanov, offers a general description Russia’s response in his terrific book, Losing Military Supremacy:

“Furthermore, if in the naval field the United States still maintains some strong positions, not least through the sheer size of her navy, the current situation and trends are even worse in the other military-technological fields. The F-35 or Littoral Combat Ship disaster are just few indications of the overall slide in American conventional capabilities, such as American air defense for the US proper which is simply non-existent—a rather telling fact for the nation which thought it didn’t need to have one. This shouldn’t be mistaken with anti-ballistic missile defense which does exist in the US—which is absolutely useless against sea- and air-launched land attack cruise missiles which have the capability to attack crucial American military infrastructure—a capability Russia demonstrated to dramatic effect in Syria. Unlike Russia which boasts arguably the best, deeply echeloned, national air defense, which today deploys the best anti-air and anti-missile complexes in the word, American shores are virtually defenseless. Deployment of batteries of the Patriot PAC-3 system, whose reputation is not very high to start with, or of the AEGIS ships along the American shoreline, does not provide a guarantee against conventional or even nuclear retaliation against the US proper in case of a major conflict. With the project 885 Severodvinsk-class nuclear-powered submarines coming on-line, together with the modernized project 949A class, all armed with the latest TLAMs, it is very difficult to foresee any measure which can realistically secure the US proper from a massive cruise missile attack.”

So, here is the critical question–Can the US block a nuclear missile?

A new study sponsored by the American Physical Society concludes that U.S. systems for intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles cannot be relied on to counter even a limited nuclear strike and are unlikely to achieve reliability within the next 15 years.

If you are a Russian military planner, you realize that M.A.D is no longer a reality. In the event that Russia believed it faced a genuine existential threat from the West from a nuclear strike, even a tactical hit, the Russian military could present President Putin with a viable plan that would destroy the U.S. nuclear response with limited (albeit horrific) damage to Russia. I am not suggesting that Russia would walk away unscathed. But Russia, with a field tested, integrated anti-ballistic missile defense system, would have a better than even chance of surviving a nuclear exchange with the United States.

I will repeat–this is a last resort action and I am steadfastly opposed to it. But I think it should be part of the public discussion. Too many ignorant pundits and politicians in the West disparage Russia’s military capabilities as second rate at best. Jeffrey Lewis, writing in Foreign Policy four years ago, understood the reality of the moment:

“The real genesis of Russia’s new generation of bizarre nuclear weapons lies not in the most recent Nuclear Posture Review, but in the George W. Bush administration’s decision in 2001 to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the bipartisan failure by both the Bush and Obama administrations to engage meaningfully with the Russians over their concerns about American missile defenses. Putin said as much in his remarks. “During all these years since the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty,” Putin explained, “we have been working intensively on advanced equipment and arms, which allowed us to make a breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons.” Those technological breakthroughs are now here. Sadly, we’re never got the diplomatic ones we needed.”

The war in Ukraine has given Russia a stage to showcase some of its advanced weaponry, such as the hypersonic Kinzhal. This missile has hit targets in Ukraine before the air raid warnings went off. Andrei Martyanov explains:

“many true professionals were gasping for the air when the Dagger (Kinzhal) was unveiled. This is a complete game changer geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and psychologically. It was known for some time that the Russian Navy was already deploying a revolutionary M=8-capable 3M22 Zircon anti-shipping missile. As impressive and virtually uninterceptable by any air defenses the Zircon is, the Kinzhal is simply shocking in its capabilities. This, most likely based on the famed Iskander airframe, M=10+ capable, highly maneuverable, aero-ballistic missile with a range of 2000 kilometers, carried by MiG-31BMs, just rewrote the book on naval warfare. It made large surface fleets and combatants obsolete. No, you are not misreading it. No air-defense or anti-missile system in the world today (maybe with the exception of the upcoming S-500 specifically designed for the interception of hyper-sonic targets) is capable of doing anything about it, and, most likely, it will take decades to find the antidote. More specifically, no modern or prospective airdefense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the destruction of any[…]”

M.A.D. is dead. Let us pray that we survive.

#ukraine #russia #nuclear war #russian military

6 notes · View notes

olexxorodnixxsxyswifxx · 1 month

Text

0 notes

doctorveranair · 6 months

Text

What is the Foundation?

For our purposes, The SCP Foundation is an international clandestine paramilitary organization dedicated to protecting the world from anomalous threats. These anomalies, be they deceptively humble or mind-numbingly grand, are Secured, Contained, and then Protected in specialized bases around the globe.

The Foundation is as wide reaching as it is ethically gray. Never afraid to sacrifice its own employees or even masses of civilians for the sake of the greater good, the Foundation researches its acquisitions, when possible, to the point of invention. Almost all of this technology is used only in secrecy for that most sacred of goals. To secure, contain, protect.

While the Foundation has saved the world from countless unknown threats, they remain entirely underground. They hire from pools of workers who have little family or friends. People who are in serious debt or trouble with the law. Students out of college, the army, and even high school, whose futures aren’t promising or who can be bought with the call to adventure. Many never leave their desks and offices at the Foundation's various headquarters. The largest groups of field workers are placed into specialized battalions of soldiers, researchers, medical staff, and additional support and dispatched to handle situations.

It isn’t exactly mentioned in the recruitment handbook, but most Foundation workers, other than the rotating chain of non-essential employees, don’t survive years of work in the fight against anomalies. Those employees permitted to leave the organization are given memory altering chemicals called amnestics and new resumes that they sort of remember.

Many whose memories are too complex to be erased without serious consequence, such as Dr. Vera Nair, are closely monitored wherever they go. Some are even considered a large enough threat to be terminated. After all, an information breach could spell disaster.

The Foundation does make a point of coordinating with major authorities such as the CIA or MI6 when absolutely necessary, but those who find themselves able to remember their interaction after the fact generally regard them as duplicitous and selfish partners.

Opposite to this cooperation, there are several hundred Groups of Interest (GOIs) who bring the Foundation grief on a regular basis. Some GOIs are mild inconveniences with less than ten members. Others are thousands strong. They are usually interested in select SCPs that would aid their unique cause and, like the Foundation, will do what is necessary.

#foundation

0 notes

zooterchet · 10 months

Text

The War on Terror ("Chet")

Enhancement Drug Record:

CIA Gamers: "Gulch" LSD. Warren Foundation: Mexican Psilocybin. DEA Mississippi: "Blue" Psilocybin. Marlboro PD: "Cholo" Chronic Marijuana. Van Meter Skulls: "Blue Cheer" Vincebus Eruptum. CIA Orchard Hill: "Paisley" Muhijideen Psilocybin. Taunton MI-6: "Oolong" Wellbutrin. UMass-Amherst PD: "Sample Sheet" Chloroxipin. AFROTC Mental Health Police Station: Zyprexa. Norton Behavioral FBI Checkin: Abilify. Boston Chinese Triads: PCP laced marijuana. PLO Dr. Federman: "Rat Poison" Seraquel. IRA Dr. Killian O'Connell: "Hazelnut Concentrate" Trilophon/Perphenzanine. Marvel Comics Jim Shooter "Dr. Golden": "GHB" Respiradone. Russian Orthodoxy Boston: Depocate. Kennedy Foundation: Invega.

Confinement Record:

Taunton Behavioral Clinic: MI-6 Cipher Ritual, "ZAIN", and Wellbutrin, applied. Identified as homicidal, karate.

UMass-Amherst Mental Health Services: Assigned Skulls CIA psychiatrist, and political science psychologist, professor of literature (Nautical History, British and New England, East Seas Shipping Specialty). Police Chief Barbara O'Connor, brought on as advisor specialist. Chloroxopin, Zyprexa, applied. Identified as top film and literature candidate, historian Ghandhian.

Norton Rehabilitation Ward: FBI staff files given to merchant staff Slavic, assigned Abilify. Identified as drug user in natural state, cleared of charges given drug use with Jenna Williamson, in highschool, by externa (unlinked use of drugs in different social circles).

Coolie Dickinson Hospital: Given one week layover with MI-6 staffer councilor, Venezualan Army adjunct. Individuals having resulted in incarceration identified, among Hell's Angels Harvard, and warrants issued, through British Navy, office of "Rick Moranis", real name John "Logan" Waders. Retroactive withdrawal from second sophomore semester, cleared, on virtue of service to State of Massachusetts, captures or surveillance of Fugitive Slave Law Rockefeller Center, NYPD RCMP unit, linked to sales of Fentanyl intended for Rhode Island People's Center (Fascista International, Est. 1498). Identified as rapid recovery, ablative to antisocial and sociopathic disorders, natural criminal while law abiding; success of Hopkinton program noted, forwarded to office of Senator Barack Hussein Obama.

Federman and O'Connell: Identified as carrying both al-Saffah, compatible with Seraquel, and Hugh O'Neill, compatible with Trilophon. Staged into Seraquel, arranged for John Phillips, Boston PD, to take over Triads with financial data on M3, grant given to Sayed Adnan to escape prosecution in trial, name changed to "Jeffrey Lange"; CIA status restored, to family, since Iranian transfer of hostage, by Alice O'Neill, RCMP SIS. PCP hit, for Puerto Rican Mexica bloodline, given,to stage into Trilophon, theoretically dynamic #2, Wadi Hadid, tested on Carlos the Jackal, failure. Identified as having a father unaware of Nazi culture, despite abiding by it; investigation to father, Michael Charlebois, and ties to United Arab Emirates, begun.

START Program: Tested to see if able to quit marijuana, in favor of liquor and cigarettes. Full memory test complete of NA and AA and Scientology programs, from study at home dormitory over summer school, however proper hours and times and locations and paperwork study given and cleared, by START program submission and staff. Given access to Lutheran CIA dealer, back in Hopkinton, for a two hour road test, one way, then the other, to run an eighth of marijuana, to a waiting undercover officer, in Samuel dormitory. Cleared for Gotham project, COINTELPRO IDF. Identified as high functioning polygot, modeled on "Buster" from "Arrested Development".

Arbor-Fuller Dual Diagnosis Ward: Committed for dependence on marijuana and Seraquel, tested on full spectrum in AA programs with intended demise from MI-6 planned, as well as cross in to infiltrate CIA from Rhode Island PD, as well as attempted assassination from Attleboro residents having been rejected from marijuana smoking in congregant group with addicts active in the Spanish Mob, through Jenna Williamson. "That Fateful Lightning", historical fiction of Ulysses S. Grant, consumed, to select "Leaving Las Vegas", to cross Rhode Island PD, into MI-6 hit, getting Detective John Willie, crushed in a car compactor, as David Charlebois, UMass-Amherst PD. Identified as KIA, real name, Tiago Rodriguez; name struck from wall, of Judi Dench's hookups. "He had the sexual maturity of a Navy SEAL, Your Majesty".

Brockton-McClean Hospital: Distress call after Fentanyl poisoning, suspected to be Matthew Lennox, actually IDF phone taps from Boulevard Pizza, results in dozens of American intelligence and MI-6 operatives meeting on hospital, with FSU monitor Sean Peters, drafted State Police, through self, with phone number given to Boston Police, clearing as a Police Sergeant; return to duty, on M3 MUSH, as a journalist and FBI agent, returned to home bearing, after a decade on the street, jumped by FSU for being a pot dealer on the side. Identified as heterosexual, producing semen, reported by room mate, Dr. Golden, real name, "Jim Shooter".

Middleboro-McClean Hospital: Three visits, on standard commitment, three months coming down from a Thorazine hot shot ordered by Obama, and one final week to get life back together, after Dr. Golden got sued for being under influence of Korean Mafia, out of Taliesein Games and the Israeli Defense Forces, through Dogg the Bounty Hunter, attempting to prevent Daniel Monahan from taking power as a bail bonds man, however a person of colour; Korean-Viet, a high blood from the Korean Conflict, one leader per side, both military commanders, Kim Sung-il and Jynghman Rhee, a trapped CIA and a USMC irregular. Identified as Jim Madison by genetic build, Presidential Freemasonic Lodge of Langley, West Virginia.

Pembroke Military Hospital: Interred for three days, did one extra day due to courts being in process. Identified through as CIA coordinator, age 17, behind modification to federal healthcare legislation, and used as escaped. Visited by British MI-6 mercenary, Har Rosen, and met Andre Berube, real name, Andre Beatman, the CIA mercenary running the entire MUSH program from a lockup cell, after having been homeless. Met Steven "The Rifleman" Flemmi, and cured his Alzheimer's temporarily, getting the blessing to be a Boston Mafiaso. Identified as permanently shellshocked, took drop from college at declaration of Irish Republican Army ties, joining Winter Hill's future, instead of taking Marvel Cinematic Universe. Too long gone, with comics, and the Chamber of Commerce, the FBI Forensics Division.

SIS Field Team:

NSA: Charlebois, Smuggler. FBI: Ahlquist, Forensics. CIA: Daignault, Sharpshooter. NPC: Gagnon, Game Theory. IDF: Monahan, Bail Bonds.

MI-6 Team:

RCMP: Alex Fleming, Undercover Narcotics. Haverhill: Joshua Moen, Street Informant. Germany: Ellen Page, Film Deputy.

COBRA:

Steve-O, Lennox, Brick Remby, Cassie-Leigh, Stephy Tomasic, Jessica Bailey, Mike Hsu, Ahlquist, Larry Hama, Kara Daignault, Tom the Bagger, Jenna Williamson.

CIA:

Sayed Adnan, Roland Spencer, Christiano Marisco, Will Morgan Jr., Alexandra Rhzanova nee Gaetano.

The Chamber of Commerce (Department of Commerce Comics; DC Comics):

DC Comics, was formed as "The Crime Syndicate of America", by a Popalzai Afghan hog butcher, and pistol champion, aliased "Lucky Luciano", real name changed for successful act under provisions by Royal Canadian Mounted Patrol.

A child, is raised in creche care, in an advanced scholastic town, with a mother that's been caught in public as a NATO agent. He's placed as the opposite of his mother's profession, to specialize in ameloriating the condition least suspected by town.

Each unit recommendation, is contradictory a common media character, where the polyface, has a tradition in print, therefore the villain; nameless, of course, in terms of actual reference, their case references gathered through other report.

They are locked into a five set compartmentalized logic, non-sequenced, in research, to perform a set of field actions on a free report and then report to a printer's station, of any type, under American provisional codes of law, not title, however Italian Papist Catholic, a Laety's rank called an "Archangel", a "Morningstar"; the Turkish code of the spy jannissary, a playwright spy.

I've written for Batman, I've been modeled as 007, I've inspired Brian Herbert's House Corrino and Butlerian Jihad trilogy, I've been given the mission as "Neo" in The Matrix, and I've been featured as several Hasbro toys (Megatron, Gen1, Beast Wars, Hannibal: Reborn, COBRA, GI Joe Comics, among others).

I used Brookline Theater, in Boston's Metrowest, as my field set, after 9/11 and the World Trade Center attacks, the "fiasco" as I termed it in my paper after the attacks, for junior year English, having witnessed them live on television. "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind", the act film, "Adaptation", the technique writ, and "Fidel", the cover alias. See those movies, they're fun.

Personal Log:

I've been Irish Catholic, an O'Neill Druid (Solomon's line, cousins with Radu, U'Niall, Baldwin IV, The Witch of Endor, Prince Consort Philip, and the King of Jordan), my entire life.

When my mother mistook me as gay, for being initiated as a Rabbi (a ritual stolen from the Druids, to make us murderers of pedophiles, the homosexuals), and masturbating to pornography of black women receiving rim jobs from white men with Jewish perms (an old shot of Michelle Obama, her stewardess days for the CIA's sorority union she was in), she killed herself.

After the War on Terror began, I happened to read Herman Wouks "The Hope", about likening the Israeli military and struggles, to National Socialist Germany, however smaller and harder hitting, like a spear, an elite unit. Disillusioned after they thought I was gay and sided with Iran, the Leibman Program an Iranian spy program claiming Israel, I supported corporate America's takeover of the Ku Klux Klan (Jewish unions), Scottish Clans (British unions), Posse (Slavic unions), Panthers (criminal unions), and Nazis (labor unions), to remove Iran from politics, and support Barack Hussein Obama for President, was a bass line chop given to Ryan Lewis in Van Meter, my Air Force ROTC dormitory for airbase deployment training as officer's staff. The cadence appeared in "Thrift Shop", by Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis, forcing corporate America and MTV, on Barack Obama, ending the Jannissary (the homosexual) and the Rabbi (the fraudster), as a tradition, in America.

I have a long record of Warren Foundation narcotics cocktails, from our friend Elizabeth Warren, our state legislator behind vice and prostitution, and psychiatric medicines and paperwork movements against corrupt cops serving Lutheran and Anglican orders. Rumors remain of me being "French", for being Palestinian Arab (Charlebois, the Italian-Arab term for "bad luck", a disgratzia, a Canadian cop family) and "Frog" for being Danish-Druid (Paradis, the Boston Irish term for "Chinese crow", a moltisani, a royal family in hiding in Boston).

After the contract heist of DC Comics brands, FBI forensics, by the Israeli Defense Forces, however with the help of the Congressional Budget Office, through UMass-Amherst AFROTC and the police undercover unit (Mental Health Services), Israel has been destroyed, and Trump has bombed Iran, through a mathematical integer false positive in the "Gotham" television show, the takeover of the Boston Police Department by New York Fire Department SWAT, abolition of slavery and removal of contract fraud debt, through the IRS, through SWAT scion, David Masouz, fully trained at multiple Sandhurst military and martial arts, Boston's new protector.

I'm happy to have provided work for Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto 6, Cyberpunk 2077, Arkham Asylum, Epic Rap Battles of History, Assassin's Creed, Super Mario Odyssey, Left 4 Dead, and Dead by Daylight, all stories of the original Mossad, the one we had in the 19th century, the fight between the Haganah, the Jewish MI-6, that you know as Marvel, and the Sicilian Mafia, the Roman Lodge, that you know as the Skull and Bones.

I'm a Skull, 1/16th Iroquois.

1 note · View note

rockislandadultreads · 1 year

Text

Nonfiction Thursday: New Memoirs

By All Means Available by Michael G. Vickers

In 1984, Michael Vickers took charge of the CIA’s secret campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Inheriting a strategy aimed at imposing costs on Russia, Vickers transformed the campaign into an all-out effort to help the Afghans win their war. More than any other American, he was responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War.

In By All Means Available, Vickers recounts his remarkable career, from his days as a Green Beret to his vision for victory in Afghanistan to his role in waging America’s war on terror at the highest levels in government. In captivating detail, he depicts his years in Special Forces, revealing how those experiences directly influenced his approach to shaping policy, and offers a deeply informed analysis of the greatest challenges facing America today.

This is a riveting and illuminating insider’s account of the military and intelligence worlds at every level.

Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza

When Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn to build a life of her own, she found herself surrounded by queer stories: she read them on landmark placards, overheard them on the pool deck when she joined the world’s largest LGBTQ swim team, and even watched them on TV in her cockroach-infested apartment. But these stories rarely featured lesbians who could become her role models, in romance as in life.

This is the story of Possanza’s journey into the archives to recover the stories of lesbians in the 20th Century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed, and where their memories echo and live on. Centered around seven love stories for the ages, Possanza’s hunt takes readers from a Drag King show in Bushwick to the home of activists in Harlem and then across the ocean to Hadrian’s Library, where she searches for traces of Sappho in the ruins. Along the way, she discovers her own love—for swimming, for community, for New York City—and adds her own record to the archive.

At the heart of this riveting, inventive history, Possanza asks: How could lesbian love help us reimagine care and community? What would our world look like if we replaced its foundation of misogyny with something new, with something distinctly lesbian?

What the Dead Know by Barbara Butcher

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous – she loved it.

Butcher (yes, that is her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

This is the fascinating and stunning real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put it down.

When the World Didn't End by Guinevere Turner

On January 5, 1975, the world was supposed to end. Under strict instructions from her Family Leader, seven-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited for her salvation--a spaceship that would take her and her peers to live on Venus. But the spaceship never came.

Guinevere did not understand her family was a cult. She spent most of her days on a compound in Kansas, living with dozens of other children who worked in the sorghum fields and roved freely through the surrounding pastures, eating mulberries and tending to farm animals. But there was a dark side to this bucolic existence: When selected girls in her community turned twelve or thirteen, they were "given" to older men on the compound as wives in training.

Then, at age eleven, Guinevere's world as she had known it ended. Her mother, from whom she had been separated since age three, left the Family with a disgraced member, and Guinevere and her four-year-old sister were forced to go with her. Traveling outside the bounds of her cloistered existence, Guinevere was thrust into public school for the first time, a stranger in a strange world with homemade clothes, clueless to social codes. Now, in the World she'd been raised to believe was evil, she faced challenges and horrors she couldn't have imagined.

Drawing from the diaries that she kept throughout her youth, Guinevere Turner's memoir is an intimate and heart-wrenching chronicle of a childhood touched with extraordinary beauty and unfathomable ugliness, the ache of yearning to return to a lost home--and the slow realization of how harmful that place really was.

#memoir #autobiography #biography #nonfiction #nonfiction reads #nonfiction books #new library books #reading recommendations #reading recs #book recommendations #book recs #tbr #tbr pile #to read #booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog

0 notes

guigz1-coldwar · 3 years

Text

"Unforgivable": New chapter for "Redemption in a Spirit in a Cold War" is out!

Chapter Summary: A new revelation from Perseus came to shake down Yirina's thoughts as she's trying to stay strong at this...still believing in her fight to stop Perseus...

To read it on AO3, click here!

Words : +3100

Taglist: @snowgoldwaylon , @clxudtea , @efingart

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought the whole world was going to crush me now, right after I discovered the first lines of the file that Perseus handed over to me...it's exactly what I was believing at this day that was changing...just this could have been put back into question the very senses of my fight against Perseus and it was doing it, shaking the foundations of what I am now. I couldn't know if this file was speaking the truth but since we saw him like this, I'm sure that he wasn't willing to keep a secret to himself...even if the truth he holds wasn't the one I wanted to think about once...

For all this time, I blamed Perseus for my parents' death in 1956 and I knew it when I got this memory of me & Zasha visiting this village years later but the file...the file was saying something different: it was the CIA that killed my parents...ordered by the young CIA officer Emerson Black at this time...this name, I heard it a few times before, he was the guy in charge of supervising the missions three years ago and seeing it on that file...it was giving enough hatred against the CIA...they changed my life two times...two worst fucking times...

Honestly now, I could storm out of here and never go back, I was very angry and I was trying to hold it inside of me but it was hard to hide to Park & Perseus who immediately saw that there was a huge problem at my eyes. Perseus was however looking normal & rather apologizing to make me look at this as Park was directly up to reach me at my side, wanting to take a look at the file and if I wanted to throw the file away, I instead give it to Park before turning my back around, hands around my waist and trying above all to stay calm at my best.

"All these years...these months...I thought it was you!" I mumbled, looking down at my feet but my voice was directed to Perseus. "It was clear but now, everything I believed is hurt," I added, opening my right eye and getting my head slightly up.

"I'm sorry, Yirina," Perseus could only say this to me...only this...

"Bloody hell!" Park's voice was exactly giving away my thoughts...shock...incomprehension...

"Yirina, listen to me," Perseus pleaded as I was keeping my back turned against him & Park.

"Did I know?" I asked him a simple question but one who was hurting me to know, even my chest wasn't ready to endure the response.

"Fuck...Jirina...I'm..."

"DID I KNOW?" I repeated myself, inadvertently cutting Park with my anger while turning around to look at Perseus with a deadly glare.

"You knew," Perseus admitted at my greatest fears...the CIA...everything was going back to them, they're the one that put me here...the fuckers. My body was surely going to leave me at hearing this but I was staying up, still shocked as Park...I could see her looking at this file...her face was saying it all.

"My father was against you, why did the CIA kill him?" I demanded at him.

"It's true...it...it doesn't make any sense at all," Park thought, looking up to see Perseus who moved his hand with his tissue to cough. "Why did the CIA kill Yirina's parents?" She asked him too, throwing the file on the little table between the two couches.

"Partially...partially," Perseus muttered as he slowly moved to reach back his couch, repeating himself after another cough, louder than the first ones.

"What do you mean, partially?" I questioned, getting next to the table exactly where the file was, keeping a not-happy face...I needed more answers.

"The CIA killed your parents...but we were the one to make them do this...without thinking about it," He revealed, me & Park going to look at each other with incomprehension as Perseus sit back on his couch before laying down on it. "I played a part in your parent's death...but we never lay a hand on them,"

"Can I believe you?" I asked him and he shook his head after sneezing a little with another tissue.

"You can't...it's only my words...you can trust me...or can't," He replied after he was done, moving his eyes back at me and with his right hand, he gestured with his fingers to sit down again, maybe to make me calm and I complied first for my own sake. "I won't be lying anymore, my life was filled with lies," He added, Park, going to sit too.

"Tell us," Park demanded in a half-polite voice, she was clearly like me here...fuck...her was the only thing that can't change here...she wanted to know more like me.

"Yirina's father...was a good man, I recognize that...a strong opponent," He started, me joining my hands together to not make me do a mistake here...stay calm, Yiri, everything's fine. "At this time, he was investigating on us, and...we weren't for the brutal force," He said, his eyes drifting to look mostly at me. "We tried to persuade him to leave peacefully, no harm but he never wanted to leave, his family was too important for him,"

"He never wanted to let us..." I muttered, trying to remember the only memory I have recovered as a child...only one...why just one? "Damn it..."

"What?" Park whispered, seeing me turning my head a little.

"I don't even remember my mother's name as if she was a stranger to me," I responded to her, I know a lot about my father but my mom, I don't know who she was...and what's her name...my duty to recover my memories is a mess...a damn mess. "You know it, right?" I presumed, looking back to Perseus who nodded at me.

"Tanya...Tanya Grigorieva..." He revealed to me and at this, my brain was starting to process to search for that name...I hope that I can have a memory of her soon. "Her & your father met during the war...at the end of it," He explained as his voice was taking a very calm & positive tone to me. "I know that...I know that because...I couldn't forget them," He said, coughing again more this time.

"You couldn't," I mumbled.

"Because I took the responsibility to raise their child," He told me, having heard me talk silently. "This was to repair my mistake of having to lead the CIA to this," He declared, finding out that he raised me to fix the mistake of having my parents killed...guilt..."Your father insisted and at this time, we, Perseus, made a reunion of what to do...we decided to make him a traitor to the eyes of his organization...my idea," He exclaimed and this...it was giving my father the worst humiliation of being seen as a traitor...

"You monster," Park muttered next to me, a voice lower than Perseus wasn't seeming to hear it.

"We created proofs that your father was going to defect and we thought that the MI6 would get him back...we didn't think at one second that the CIA would take the case and do this," Perseus affirmed to me, admitting his guilt into my parent's deaths but sad about how things turned out. "When we heard that the CIA crossed the line, we moved in to secure the village but we got too late to save anyone...you were the only survivor of your village," He declared and at this moment, I could hear myself cry for help...child's cries echoing in my head...

"And you found her," Park presumed, Perseus nodding at it.

"When I realized that she was still alive, I decided to take her with me, to try to give her a chance to live a normal life," He told us and one simple word wasn't taken well by me...one...

"Normal?...a normal life...you have words, you don't realize how much they mean," I exclaimed, pointing my index finger at him. "Nothing I lived was normal, you forced me into this path...and I can't go back," I was thinking that my anger was going to take the control of me when I almost got up again from my seat, just to readjust myself on it. "It's too late for that,"

"I know," He said before coughing this time violently, and then, I could see from where I was some blood on the tissue, like the time in that office in Verdansk. "Ah...this sickness...I don't know if it's to punish me of my deeds or to free me of this corrupt world," He thought, looking over his bloodied tissue.

"After what you did, I don't think you're redeemable," Park confessed, showing no signs of concerns about him.

"I know that miss Park, people don't forget...nothing is forgiven," He confirmed to her, starting to wrap the bloodied tissue away and then put it on part of the little table before moving to grab a little box...a box of tissue. "I regret parts of my life...but raising Yirina wasn't part of it," He presumed with a little smile that I couldn't even reciprocate...even if I wanted to fake it.

"I regret it...to live a life that wasn't supposed to be mine," I cut him the hopes of making me forget him about his actions, seeing it clearly on his face. "You got me to believe into this fight for a...for a Greater Russia...and I wasn't caring about it because...I wanted to live a normal life," I added, starting to get up from the couch I was on, feeling Park going up. "Instead, you gave me a gun in my hands and probably told me that the only way to live was to follow you," I slowly walk around the table to get next to him but not too close, enough to make him see me entirely. "That's a normal life to you?"

"I was raised like this, Yirina," He started to cough again, minimal but it took him a few seconds to catch his breath. "I was ten years old when the communists were fighting the white armies, I was given a rifle and got told to fight...I lived that since it's normal for me," He assumed his choices, giving me a glimpse about his past...a monster but still feeling like an unknown man at some parts."I regret things, I acknowledge this but...at this time, I believed that our country wasn't going to survive with the communists and I wanted to change by peaceful means...it never worked,"

"Greenlight..." Park whispered, this time louder than the last time she did this.

"It was a mistake, our first downfall," Perseus admitted, releasing a small breath about this. "This day, a lot happened...right?" He presumed, redressing himself on the couch to look at me and I could only nod, knowing what day he was talking about. "Cleaning up the loose ends,"

"I understand now...he feared that sooner or later, I will know about what happened," I predicted, making the links between Black's involvement in my parent's death...and Adler's motive...no, something isn't linking up but that's the only thing I can think about.

"So, he asked Adler to kill you...bloody hell," Park joined in, thinking along with me about this as she moves her hand over her waist, shaking her head. "Something's wrong?" She asked me.

"Something isn't adding up but I don't know what," I gave her my thought about this quick, giving to Perseus a questioning glare. "Adler...what do you know about him?" I asked him as he was going back into laying down on the couch, avoiding our look.

"You know...I always wanted you to live your life...but I was blinded by my fight," He said, his eyes looking over the ceiling of the room, his hands above his chest as his voice was getting lower, sounding tired. "The West will always see me...as the most wanted man of the world...but I'll be a ghost when this time will arrive,"

"What do you mean?" I demanded, curious.

"I'm dying, Jirina, I'm in my last days," He confirmed, his voice getting along this mood...I was feeling bad for him but the anger was still against him too. "Stitch is thinking about saving Perseus, to make the fight continue over the years and he will...he will not live enough to see it," His hands joined together over his chest, a smile starting to form on his face. "I think that you need to leave now...I want some rest...I'm an old man..."

"An old unforgivable man," I told him straight but he wasn't taking it as an insult at all, acknowledging that fact about him, Park & me nodding to leave this place but not before taking with us the file Perseus gave us, wanting to show it at the CIA's nose later.

"Yirina!"

"What?" I turned around as I was going to walk away with the file, Park has taken some steps to reach the door to leave the room.

"Don't give up, that's all I asked from you," He advised me, and from him, I was wondering why he wanted me to not give up my fight against his way of thinking, this man was different to me now. "Goodbye, Yirina, I hope your life will be better than me," He hoped, a low tone in his voice as he wasn't looking to hold me back here any longer before he went back into looking at the ceiling, layed down on his couch.

It's with a last look over him that I decided to leave this room and then this house, maybe seeing this man for the last time ever and to this, I was mixed about things, angry about others...It was a total mixture in my head. To a part, I was feeling bad about Perseus, seeing him at first as a monster and now realizing that he was human after all because of how he was sick...coughing blood, a low voice. I could have forgiven him but I didn't...I didn't because he was unforgivable to make me live all of this...

He played a part in having my parents killed by the CIA and that's the thing that wasn't going to make me forgive this man, not after what I lived under his control. When I & Park opened the front door to get out, I thought that I was going to cry and break myself after thinking about all I discovered but instead, once I closed the door behind me, I went to sit down on the porch, putting my back again the door as my eyes went over the file that I put on my lap...I was shaken down by it.

"I thought this was a lie...that Perseus killed my parents and blamed it over the West," I murmured in a low voice as I could see Park kneeling in front of me. "The West killed my parents, how should I feel now?" I demanded to myself.

"I don't know," Park replied, thinking that I asked her about this...this was a question without an answer....an answer that I prefer to know later.

"I hate him for what he made me become but now, I went to see him as a sick dying man...I don't know what my head wants to think about him," I said my doubts about him as I raised my legs a little, putting my hands over my kneecaps. "You should hate me, Park,"

"Why I would?" She demanded, sounding worried.

"I know that sometimes, my decisions are stupid, that I can get us killed but you're always agreeing with me in every way...always, you never went against a decision of mine, even the risky ones," I told her and even if I wasn't angry at all against her, I thought she needed to be like it with me. "Be angry, I'll take it," I suggested, ready to endure this on many occasions but Park's face, she wasn't looking to do this.

"You know that I will not, Yirina," Park admitted, one of her hands moving over mine on my kneecaps. "Do you think that I want to be angry with you, after what we learned? No, I won't and never will be angry against you," She proclaimed with seriousness in the tone of her voice, her hands gently getting on mine.

"You don't need to risk your life for me," I muttered.

"I do...I owe you more of my damn life...the only person I don't want to lose is you," She said to me as she moved closer to my lap, she was speaking the truth here by looking at her face. "Yirina, I love you, you just mean the fucking world to me," She declared with a little smile, hoping to give me some smile too and she managed by a little, only bringing out a grin at this.

"Me too," I affirmed to this as my hands moved away after a few seconds to grab the file before starting to get up, a feeling of determination & a bit of anger taking over me. "We should leave now, I don't want to stay here any longer," I admitted, this place was making me uncomfortable to stay and Park was thinking the same, nodding back at me before we started to leave the porch. "Where's Freya?" I demanded as when we arrived next to the car, Freya wasn't around it or in it.

"That's strange," Park looked around us to see if Freya wasn't hiding somewhere before moving to reach the door of the driver, its window looking opened. "There's a piece of paper on the steering wheel," She discovered a small paper on it, me looking at it as Park took it in her hands to read it...that's weird. "It says that...she allowed us to leave but she can't bring herself to drive us back to Kyiv...she left right after we got in," Park revealed the content of that piece of paper that she handed to me over the car when I start reading it...Freya was still shocked by the news we gave her and because of it, she wrote that she didn't want to make a mistake...she left...

"It was too much for her," I thought, wrapping the piece of paper and putting it in one of my pockets. "I understand," I added before I let out a little breath, sounding exhausted. "You drive?" I suggested to Park.

"I will," She accepted with a nod, starting to open the door and get on the driver's seat, the car keys having been left over by Freya. "Okay, we should be...be back to Kyiv in an hour or two," Park presumed as I sit next to her, thinking about everything that I know now.

"I'm going to rest a little, I think I need it," I told Park who immediately nodded at me as I decided to lay my head against the headrest of my seat and look outside while Park was starting to drive away...

Yeah, I need to rest now...all of this...I need to close my eyes & think a bit...all I need...

#call of duty cold war #black ops cold war #cod black ops cold war #cod cold war #cod cw #cod bocw #call of duty #cod #fem!bell #helen park #yirina grigoriev #bell x park

7 notes · View notes

somethingjustsouthofbrilliance · 6 years

Text

I Got You (Tony/Rhodey secret service AU) Chapter 9

Some background information about the residents of the September Foundation. Plus Rhodey learns something new about Tony :)

Warning: Mentions of abuse in this chapter. Nothing graphic, but a warning just to be safe

Links to Chapter 1, Chapter 8

Tagging @jamesrhodey @supernaturalyloki @chanderefk @aimeeroot21 @markedplaces @mostly-marvel-stuffs @matre-dee @le-ephemere @lo-anlurui @savedbyholmes @kimmycup @typicalcampbell @natty-ts70 @damnhiatus @pubzie @giulisetta @goose-danvers @donttellanyoneitsmebabe @bookwermthings @tonystark5ever @polygamoussquamous @swanheart69 @schalabi422

Chapter 9

He stares at the closed door in a stunned stupor, listening to the sound of Pepper’s retreating footsteps. He doesn’t know much about Maria Stark – she was never famous like her husband, stayed in the shadows her whole life. But her death, her death he remembers rather well. There was a TV special about the Starks that he had stumbled upon a few years back: “A Curse upon the House of Starks” it was called, if he remembers correctly. The narrator talked about the tragic circumstances in the deaths of both Howard and Maria Stark, the violent nature of them. Howard perishing in an explosion that destroyed the family mansion; his wife Maria dying in a fiery crash several years prior. He remembers the narrator wondering darkly if the Fates have somehow been turned against this family, if they had hung a curse upon the Stark bloodline, and if the younger Stark would fall victim to that family curse as well, if he would suffer the same spectacularly violent, fiery end as his parents.

He never thought about it before, never questioned the official story: Howard Stark’s latest experiment going wrong, Maria Stark falling asleep behind the wheel….

But the Fates had nothing to do with it, did they. Sta- Tony’s convinced that his father’s death had been orchestrated by someone from the White House. And Maria… if he understood what Pepper was implying, Maria may have been killed by Howard himself.

Which is… impossible. Ridiculous even. More ridiculous than Tony’s wild insinuations that Obie and Justin were the ones behind Howard’s death. Howard Stark was a visionary. An engineering legend. A weapons icon.

A man like that – an abuser? A murderer? How is that even possible?

“Howard didn’… didn’ hit me so much when Obie was there. It… nice… t’was nice…”

He sucks in a sharp breath as Tony’s pain-slurred words flicker across his memory, unbidden. Casts a glance at the unconscious man’s face, his stomach churning with nausea and dread. He thought he’d misheard him then. He hoped he’d misheard him. Because it was too ugly, too horrifying to process. Because it was the Starks. Because…

Oh dear god…

“Mr. President?”

The door opens with a soft squeak, and one of the teens from earlier slips inside. Shifts awkwardly on the doorstep, looking everywhere but at James.

“Your…uh… your room is ready and… uhm… Miss Potts said to tell you that we’ll be having dinner in twenty minutes, if…uh…,” he risks a glance at James, shifts it almost instantly toward Tony before dropping it back down to the floor, “if you’re hungry.”

His stomach rumbles at the thought of food, loud enough that the teen shoots him another awkward glance. “I suppose that answers that question,” he jokes and frowns in confusion as the teen looks away again. “Something wrong?”

The teen fidgets.

“Kid?”

“I’m sorry about before,” the boy blurts out suddenly and he’s looking right at James now, eyes wide, cheeks flushed with… shame? “Pulling the gun on you,” he elaborates at James’s deepening frown. “Harley and I… it’s our job to protect this place when Mr. Stark isn’t here. He said so himself. And then when you showed up, I…. But Miss Potts explained… she told us that you came here like us and Mr. Stark, he…”

“Kid…” He holds up his hand to forestall the rest of the verbal assault, rubs his throbbing temples. “You’re kinda starting to give me a headache. No offense.”

“Sorry.” The teen bites his lip, stares down at his feet again.

“Look,” James heaves out a sigh, pushes himself to stand, casting one last look at the man on the bed. “I think we got off on the wrong foot here.” Slowly, he crosses the room, coming to a stop in front of the boy. “How about we try again, huh? Hi, I’m James.” He holds out his hand expectantly and smiles when the kid returns the gesture after a moment’s hesitation.

“Peter. Parker. Peter Parker.”

“Good to meet you, Peter Parker.” He squeezes the boy’s hand lightly before letting go. Nods approvingly. “Nice job earlier, by the way. Impressive. I think Mr. Stark would be proud.”

The teen, if possible, blushes even more at the praise, his face and neck growing pink, and James barely manages to suppress a snort as he claps the boy on the shoulder before following him out the door to his new room.

***

Twenty minutes later he makes his way down the hall that Peter had indicated to him earlier and finds himself inside a light and spacious dining room that almost rivals the one at the White House. There’s a long country style oak table in its center, set for ten. Everyone’s plates are full, but no one has started eating yet. Waiting for him, James realizes, even as all the attention in the room turns toward him.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Pepper rises to greet him, gesturing to the empty chair beside her. Smiles as he sits down cautiously beside her, trying to take in all the curious faces, some already familiar, some not. “Why don’t we all go around and introduce ourselves?” she proposes, nodding at the quiet murmur of approval from the others at the table. “I believe you already know Peter,” she motions to his teenage guide who grins widely back at her. “He and his aunt are one of our oldest residents.”

“His aunt?”

“Me, Mr. President,” comes the quiet, amused response, and, oh, James wants to facepalm himself now. Because, of course, of course. Parker. The kid said his last name was Parker. How did he not make the connection?

“How did you…?” he gestures inarticulately at their surroundings, struggling to make sense of it all. Because he can’t understand why a woman with a cushy government position would abandon it all like that, disappear off the face of the earth. Because he keeps remembering the dark look that flashed in Stark’s eyes when he had asked him about the reasons for May’s departure. Because he knows he’s missing something important here.

May presses her lips together, flicking a quick gaze at Pepper as if for reassurance. Raises her hand to push a strand of hair behind her ear. “Senator Hammer began making sexual advances toward me after about a year of me working for him,” she says finally, determined and furiously blunt.

And, no, that wasn’t at all what James was prepared to hear. This was… this is… His mind flashes back to Justin, to the leering look in the man’s eyes that he had glimpsed more than once when the senator would stare after a female colleague. Oh no…

“I repeatedly told him to stop, filed several complaints with the HR, but nothing ever came of that. And then one day we were working late, and he called me to his office and locked the door. He knew I had just filed for permanent guardianship of Peter the week before, and he told me that if I screamed, he’d contact his buddy at the Child Protective Services and have Peter taken away from me.…”

Beside her Peter makes a choked off sound of anger, the boy’s hands curling into fists, and she smiles at him, small and watery. Reaches out to cover his fisted hand with her own.

“It’s alright,” she says. “I’m alright. You know he didn’t get far.”

“Still wish I was old enough back then to break his stupid face,” Peter grumbles unhappily.

And, yeah, James can understand the sentiment. Can feel his own fists itch with the useless desire to punch the lewd bastard.

May’s smile grows a bit brighter at that and she raises her other hand to ruffle the teen’s hair. “As much as I appreciate the sentiment, sweetheart,” she murmurs, her eyes warm, “I’m afraid Tony got there first.” She turns her attention back to James, her expression turning serious once more. “Tony lost his job because of that incident, got an assault charge on his record, and for that I am truly sorry. But I’m not sorry for what he did.” Her hand tightens around Peter’s. “We are safe here. Happy. I can never be sorry for that.”

“I… I understand,” James manages, his throat uncomfortably dry. But the thing is, he doesn’t understand. Any of it. He worked with Justin. Rubbed elbows with the man almost on a daily basis. He never knew… how did he not know? He shakes his head, feeling irrationally angry with himself. Stupid, he thinks. Naïve and stupid.

“Laura?” Pepper addresses a short slender brunette sitting on the other side of James, breaking the awkward silence that settles at the table following May’s story. “Would you like to go next?”

The woman shrugs her assent, gives him a small, hesitant smile. She has a plump-cheeked bright-eyed toddler bouncing excitedly on her lap, small, chubby fingers reaching hungrily for the plate. “Well, I’m Laura,” she begins, smiling indulgently at the toddler even as she gently guides the little hands away. “And this little troublemaker is Nathaniel.” She nods at the two children sitting next to her. “That’s Cooper and Lila. We’ve been living here at the Foundation for about…,” she looks back at Pepper for verification, “two years now?”

“That’s right,” Pepper inclines her head in agreement before turning to address James. “Laura’s ex-husband is a former CIA operative whose cover got burned during a mission with a Russian double-agent. He has since disappeared. There are speculations that he had switched sides and went on the run with that Russian woman.” She gives Laura an apologetic look, her mouth pinching unhappily. “Either way, Laura and the kids were left out in the open as potential targets to anyone whose path he ever crossed.”

“Jesus…” James can’t help the exclamation that escapes him as he stares with mounting horror at the three little kids at the table. How could someone endanger their own children like this? Why?

“Clint was never good about thinking things through,” Laura dismisses with a shrug, her smile just a tad too strained. “Luckily for us, Tony got to us first.”

And, yes, James thinks, lucky indeed. He can’t even imagine what would have happened to this little family if Tony hadn’t intervened. He’s seen enough reports about families of compromised agents where the subjects were not quite so fortunate. Some of those gave him nightmares for weeks after. For a husband, a father to willingly…

He shakes his head, grits his teeth against a wave of anger against a man he doesn’t even know. “How did… how did Tony find you?”

“The Shield.” It’s Pepper who responds.

“The… what now?”

“The Shield. It’s an AI program that Tony and Jarvis, Tony’s… guardian, have created,” she clarifies, her lips twitching in amusement at his open-mouthed confusion. “It monitors police and military channels, reports from CPS and other government agencies according to the parameters that Tony set up, sends him alerts whenever something falls within those parameters and…,” she shrugs, “then Tony goes to investigate.”

James blinks. Blinks again. “You’re telling me that Tony Stark… former Special Agent Tony Stark… created an artificial intelligence program?”

Pepper’s laugh, lighthearted and contagious, resonates across the room. “Surprised you again, didn’t he. Told you he’s good at that.”

“Tony graduated from MIT at 17,” another kid chimes in, gruff. It’s the other teen from his welcoming committee: an unruly mop of curly hair falling over his ears and sharp blue eyes drilling holes in James from across the table. “What, you thought he’s just a dumb jock like all the other boneheads you call secret service agents?” The kid scoffs, rolls his eyes with obvious disdain, bumping shoulders with a little girl sitting beside him, who giggles in delight. “Please, the guy’s a genius. And Pete and I, we’re following right in his footsteps, ain’t we, Pete.” He winks conspiratorially at Peter, who has the decency to duck his head and blush. “I’m Harley, by the way. The hacker.” And there’s a wickedly mischievous glint in the teen’s eyes that has James shaking his head in wary bemusement.

The kid’s trouble.

“Harley here,” Pepper cuts in with an indulgently disapproving tilt of her head, “got on the police radar at 10 years old for somehow hacking into the local mayor’s home computer and projecting….” She pauses, lips pursed, as if she’s searching for the right word. Grins at Harley, her eyes sparkling with mirth. “…compromising pictures from the mayor’s birthday party onto the wall of the City Hall.”

The bark of disbelieving laughter bursts out unbidden. “You’re serious?”

“The town’s water tower got busted,” Harley shrugs, unconcerned. “The whole town was without clean water for weeks and that asshole wouldn’t do anything. So I had to give him some… incentive.”

“Right.” Pepper’s smile dims a bit. “Unfortunately, the mayor wasn’t quite as amused as the rest of the townsfolk. And when he found out that Harley and his sister had been living without proper parental supervision…”

“Our dad split when I was 5 and our mom spent more time looking for another Mr. Right than she did at home with us,” Harley clarifies with another shrug and James cringes at the forced carelessness of it.

“The mayor’s lawyers argued parental neglect,” Pepper continues, confirming what James is already thinking. “Child Services got involved, the mother walked away and the kids got placed into a group home. Spent months there by the time Tony managed to push the adoption paperwork through and bring them both out here.”

“And next year I’m going to MIT,” Harley concludes with a cocky one-sided grin, shoveling more potatoes onto his plate. Bristles at Pepper’s chidingly raised eyebrow. “What? Tony said so.”

Somehow James doesn’t doubt him.

He shakes his head, stares numbly at his still empty plate. All these people, all these potential tragedies averted. They all could have become just another statistic, another tragic loss. But here they are – happy and thriving and safe. A patchwork family, broken but somehow perfect. And it’s all because of Tony. He tries to reconcile that with the image of the annoyingly self-assured, abrasive asshole he met in his office all those weeks ago, the guy he’s been so irritated with only a few hours prior.

He feels like such a jerk.

“A lot to take in, isn’t it,” Pepper asks him quietly over the clinking of silverware and the low din of resumed conversations. Smiles knowingly when all he manages is a silent nod. “You should eat,” she tells him. “I’m going to go check on Tony after dinner. I’m sure you’ll want to join me.”

And, yeah, yes, he will. But first… “Were you also… Did Tony… What did he do for you?” He flusters as her smile falls, her lips thinning out. Backtracks awkwardly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to assume. I…”

She waves off his apology, reaches to unbutton the right-hand sleeve of her shirt. “My ex-boyfriend, Aldrich, had a very… fiery temper,” she murmurs, slowly pushing up the white fabric. There’s a long thin burn scar that runs along her forearm, marring the smooth skin. “He did this after I tried to leave him the first time. Told me he’d burn me alive if I tried again.” She drops the sleeve, lets it fall back over the damaged skin. Waits in silence as James stares back at her in open-mouthed horror, words he was about to say stuck painfully to the back of his throat. “I had just graduated college. I was still so young… naïve. Didn’t really know what to do, where to go.” She smiles again, a bitter twisted little thing. “I couldn’t sleep that night, I was so scared. So I called Tony. Sobbed to him over the phone.” She pulls at the edge of the sleeve again, fiddles with the button there, threading it back through the loop. “He came over that same night. Drove… god knows from where.” She shakes her head, her expression turning wistful. “He came inside, told me to go wait in the car…”

James watches her expectantly as she falls silent all of a sudden, lost in the memory. “And?” he prompts gently, curious despite himself.

She blinks as if coming out of a trance. Looks up at him, her eyes hard once more. “And I did,” she says simply, holding his gaze as if daring him to question her further. “Tony came back out a few minutes later. He got in and we drove off. That’s all.”

James knows better than to ask anything else.

#ironhusbands au #secret service au #president James Rhodey Rhodes #special agent Tony Stark #bamf Tony Stark #Pepper Potts #Harley Keener #May Parker #Peter Parker #Laura Barton #hurt/comfort #angst #mentions of abuse #somethingjustsouthofbrilliance writes

51 notes · View notes

thedcdunce · 5 years

Text

Lucius Fox

“I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you look like hell, Bruce.” - Lucius Fox

Gender: Male

Height: 5′ 11″

Weight: 180 lbs (82 kg)

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Black (Graying at temples)

Abilities:

Business Management

Leadership

Military Protocol

Weaknesses:

Detoriating Health

Universe:

Earth-One

New Earth

Base of Operations: Gotham City

Citizenship: American

Marital Status: Married (Tanya Fox; wife)

Occupation:

CEO of Wayne Enterprises

Atwater Air

Education: Graduate of the Morton Business School

First Appearance: Batman #307 (January, 1979)

Last Appearnace: Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! #1 (February, 2012)

Abilities

Business Management: Lucius Fox is unparalleled in the world of business and finance.

Leadership: He commands the respect and attention of those under his charge and is largely responsible from rescuing Wayne Enterprises from ruin and forging it into the multinational corporate giant that it is today.

Military Protocol: Lucius Fox has mentioned serving active duty in the U.S. Military during the Korean War.

Weaknesses

Detoriating Health: Lucius's health has greatly deteriorated after suffering a stroke.

History

Lucius Fox was the CEO of Wayne Enterprises and a sought after businessman all over the corporate world.

Origin

As a young man, Lucius Fox became a member of La Resistance during World War II, on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services, later called CIA. During this time, Fox worked with the legendary French hero, Mlle. Marie.

Later, Lucius graduated magna cum laude from the Morton School of Business. After school he took a position at Atwater Air and saved it from near bankruptcy to success.

Lucius first met his future employer Bruce Wayne in Paris, when Wayne saved him from a mugger's attack. The two became fast friends and Bruce invited him to help him start a charity organization that later became known as the Wayne Foundation. Lucius started working at the Finance Division, where he was in charge of dealing with Wayne Enterprises' financial and stock management. But Bruce soon recognized Lucius's strong business knowledge and ethics, and Fox was promoted to Bruce's personal assistant and financial adviser for Wayne Enterprises.

One of Lucius' first private assignments for Bruce was to make a background check on a new investor called Selina Kyle. Eventually, Lucius met with Selina but made the mistake of telling her about the background check, which caused Selina's anger towards Bruce Wayne, shortly after they had started their relationship. The mistake caused Lucius to lose concentration on his daily chores and he lost a big deal for Wayne Enterprises.

Lucius was soon approached by one of Gregory Falstaff's men. Falstaff was the primary competitor of Wayne Enterprises and he wanted to make a deal with Lucius. Despite his best judgement, Lucius agreed to meet with Falstaff and after listening to his job offer, Lucius turned him down in favor of keep working for Bruce at Wayne Enterprises. After this event, Lucius had a breakdown due to his personal troubles and tried to resign, but Bruce gave him a leave of absence until he found a solution for his troubles.

When Bruce decided to resign to his position as CEO of Wayne Foundation and Wayne Enterprises, he handed the job to Lucius, who was shocked at first, but was grateful for the trust.

Facing Danger

As a renowned public figure and close to Batman's affairs, Lucius Fox was target of several criminals during his career as CEO of Wayne Enterprises.

While working late one night at Wayne Enterprises, Lucius was attacked and kidnapped by the Mad Hatter, who used Lucius to claim a two million dollar ransom. However, Hatter was not going to return Lucius safe and sound, but instead, he would've wiped out his memories using a special machine of his own device. Lucius was saved by Batman's arrival. A short time later, Lucius was attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who were unleashed by the magic of Dr. Zodiac and Madame Zodiac.

After a while, the members of the board at Wayne Enterprises suggested that Lucius run for Mayor of Gotham City and he considered the option, which would mean he would have to stop working for Bruce Wayne.

While traveling through Europe, Fox was kidnapped by Baron Bedlam in Markovia. Batman asked the Justice League to launch a rescue mission, but they refused because it would violate U.S. diplomatic policy. Batman quit the League and launched his own rescue mission with Black Lightning posing as Fox's brother. They break Fox out of his cell, and leave him with a gun to take charge of the prison guards. This mission caused Batman to create the Outsiders.

Lucius Fox was eventually kidnapped by Black Mask and forced to reveal information about Bruce Wayne, until he was saved by Bruce himself, disguised as "Skullface".

A short time later, Fox was targeted by Cypher, a criminal with hypnotic powers that wanted to sabotage a project in which Fox was involved. Cypher hypnotized Fox and commanded him to jump off a bridge and commit suicide, but Fox was saved by Batman, Robin and Jean-Paul.

Lucius next attended a Charity Function at Gotham's Civic Center, where he was joined by Leslie Thompkins, Sondra Kinsolving and Bruce Wayne. Lucius asked Bruce about his absence from business, but before they could talk more, Lucius and all the people at the event were hypnotized by Poison Ivy. Ivy kidnapped all the men from the event and took them to her secret greenhouse in order to take away their wealth and their lives. She was about to give Lucius her deadly kiss when Batman saved him and stopped Ivy.

Superhero Business

After Black Mask became the undisputed crime lord of Gotham, Wayne Enterprises was the target of a hostile takeover that caused the Research and Development Division to be sold to a foreigner company and Bruce Wayne was removed from the board of directors. Lucius tried to tell Bruce about the situation, but he was always unavailable and Alfred would make up stories for Lucius to stop calling. However, when Fox researched one of Alfred's lies, he learned that Bruce wasn't out of the country and he went to Wayne Manor and told the whole story to Bruce Wayne.

Some time later, after Bruce's disappearance, Vicki Vale approached Lucius asking for Bruce, and he managed to avoid giving her a straight answer. This is most likely because even he didn't knew about Bruce's whereabouts.

When Bruce returned after his long absence, he approached Lucius and informed him of an official partnership between Wayne Enterprises and Batman. Wayne told Fox to start the development of technology to help the crime fighter on his crusade and Fox started working on remote control androids and high-tech mechanical suits for Batman and Robin.

Personal Life

Lucius Fox was married to Tanya Fox with whom he had two daughters, Tiffany and Tamara and a son called Timothy.

Unlike his sisters, Timothy was a young rebel in his teen years, which is why Lucius worried about him. After Lucius was given leave of absence from work, he learned that Tim was involved with some street gangs and when he tried to confront the thugs, he was badly beaten and taken to the Gotham General Hospital to recover. After his recovery, Lucius told his won the truth about his "friends" and a regretful Timothy apologized to his father.

#lucius fox #dc #DC comics #thedcdunce #Wayne Enterprises #batman #bruce wayne

8 notes · View notes

class-wom · 6 years

Link

Jan-Michael Vincent, who starred in such action fare as The Mechanic, White Line Fever and TV's Airwolf before a raft of personal problems and illness sent him on a downward spiral, has died. He was 73.

Vincent died Feb. 10 of cardiac arrest at Mission Hospital's Memorial Campus in Asheville, North Carolina, according to his death certificate obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

Vincent had a very public battle with drug and alcohol abuse and his career was already on the wane when he was drunk and involved in a 1996 car accident in Mission Viejo, California, that broke his neck and damaged his vocal cords.

Twelve years later, Vincent was in another car crash, then contracted an infection that led to two sections of his right leg being amputated. He spent his final years broke and living in the South.

Things were much different in the mid-1970s, when Vincent was poised on the cusp of superstardom. A chiseled heartthrob with a mane of flowing hair, he capitalized on his hunky image by appearing shirtless in photos and on the big screen, and the agent who discovered him also discovered James Dean.

Vincent portrayed up-and-coming characters in Michael Winner's The Mechanic (1972), as the too-ambitious protege of contract killer Charles Bronson; in Vigilante Force (1976), as Kris Kristofferson’s brother; and in Hooper (1978), as a stuntman mentored by Burt Reynolds.

Vincent also starred as a popular high school jock opposite Joan Goodfellow in the tragic love story Buster and Billie (1974), directed by Daniel Petrie, played the rebel trucker Carrol Jo Hummer in the violent White Line Fever (1975), and went along with being mistaken for a Marine Corps hero in Baby Blue Marine (1976).

After a bit of a career lull, the blue-eyed Vincent played naval officer Robert Mitchum's black-sheep son and wooed Ali MacGraw on the acclaimed ABC 1983 miniseries The Winds of War, adapted from Herman Wouk's best-selling work of 1930s fiction.

He then was cast as Stringfellow Hawke — the pilot of a high-tech, CIA-created Bell 222 helicopter and the brother of a missing Vietnam vet — on Airwolf, created by TV action maestro Donald P. Bellisario. The series, which also starred Ernest Borgnine, aired from 1984-86, and Vincent at the time was among the highest-paid actors on television.

But with all his troubles, his career would never be the same after Airwolf.

"He had tremendous natural ability, and that was his curse," David Grove, author of the 2016 book Jan-Michael Vincent: Edge of Greatness, said in a January 2017 podcast interview with Phil Hall. "When you are born with natural ability, there's a tendency to get by on that. It's like a well; when it's dry, there's nothing left, because you've never worked to build that foundation."

Vincent was born in Adams, Colorado, on July 15, 1945, and raised in Hanford, California, about 30 miles south of Fresno. His father, a bomber pilot in World War II, owned a sign-painting business.

Vincent graduated from Hanford High School in 1963, went to Ventura College in Southern California when he wasn't surfing and served with the National Guard. He then met Dick Clayton — who had discovered Dean, Lee Majors, Tuesday Weld and many others — and the talent agent got the virile youngster into the training program at Universal Studios.

In 1967, Vincent was in a Hardy Boys TV movie and made his movie debut opposite Robert Conrad in the Mexico-set The Bandits. A year later, he guest-starred on Lassie and Bonanza, appeared in Universal's Journey to Shiloh and was a regular on Danger Island, a serial that ran on Saturday mornings on The Banana Splits Adventure Hour.

After working opposite John Wayne and Rock Hudson in The Undefeated (1969) and playing Lana Turner's son in the short-lived ABC drama The Survivors, Vincent won notice when he played a hippie-type Marine opposite Darren McGavin in the 1970 ABC telefilm Tribes.

He then played Mitchum's son for the first time in Going Home (1971).

In his '70s heyday, Vincent also starred as a Tarzan-like character in Disney's The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973) and appeared in the well regarded endurance horse race actioner Bite the Bullet (1975). He also toplined the post-apocalyptic Damnation Alley (1977), and in John Milius' Big Wednesday (1978), he played a self-destructive surfer, a role perhaps too close to home.

Vincent reportedly was Universal's choice to portray oceanographer Matt Hooper in Jaws (1975), but Steven Spielberg went with the more-nerdy Richard Dreyfuss instead. (The character was a studly guy in the Peter Benchley best-seller on which the movie is based.)

Vincent appeared in Buffalo '66 (1998), but most of his final efforts were lower-budget actioners and thrillers, many of which went straight to video.

Survivors include his wife, Patricia.

Duane Byrge contributed to this report.

#jan michael vincent #RIP

9 notes · View notes

hidingupatreeorsomething · 6 years

Text

Hunting down Homeland in Berlin

So I was just in Berlin - lucky as I am, I got to go for work, to cover the European Athletics Championships, and then tagged some holidays on the end.

I was joking with some HL pals about the fact the Berlin tourist industry lacks a Homeland tour - we thought there’d be a market for a “peer through this glass, looking grief-stricken, while your friend lies twitching on the other side” stop-off, and a souvenir shop selling “Cinder block and cable tie” sets.

It didn’t take too long before I started tripping over some of the big locations as I went about the city - first Hauptbahnhof -

Where I took the escalators but nobody thrust a phone in my hand and asked me to contact Saul, much to my regret -

and then there was Straße des 17 Juni with the Victory Column at the end -

I’d not really intended to look for any other spots, especially as I’ve not watched s5 for ages so wasn’t sure I’d recognise much. But I was curious enough to have a look online to see what there was, and found this brilliant article. Turned out I’d already been in and out of Hackescher Markt Bahnhof a few times, where Laura met Numan to pick up the memory stick of hacked files (I think?!) so the next time I went through, I snapped it -

And just around the corner was the During foundation, but meh, it was just a fancy office block so I won’t bore you with that one. This were only a block from the river, which set me wondering, and wandering - and sure enough, two minutes’ walk away is what I now think of as Dar Sandwich Park, where our perforated hero went and met his handler to tell him he’d accidentally fallen in with a bunch of the CIA’s most wanted. Here it is then -

and now -

still looking much the same, tho missing the park benches, which I’m guessing HL brought along themselves - there were just a couple of cheap looking plank & metal benches. Wider view then -

and now -

I had a lie down on the grass where they’d had their talk, to rest my tourist-weary feet, and imagined I was listening in to a plot to foil international terrorism against the rattle of the S-Bahn.

A short walk south along the riverside and you reach Imma Jump In The River Now, I’ve Really Had Enough of This Shit Quay -

Then -

And now, in daylight, minus a hot spy with a hole in his middle -

I would never have known it was there without the article, as it’s basically under the bridge with no direct pedestrian access, but photographable and pretty unchanged.

Then I was trying to work out whether the next span of the bridge was Fuck It, Maybe I Just Climb In This Dumpster That Might Work Archway - here it is then...

and now...

I wasn’t sure it was the same spot, but when I looked carefully at the wall at the end, you could still just see the faint remains of the ‘e’ in the graffiti that Quinn staggered by.

So that pretty much confirmed it. Good graffiti-ing, Berliners.

And that was that!

I really enjoying spotting a few familiar places in between my touristing, was newly-amazed at the way location scouts/directors/actors manage to weave together different locations into a smooth whole. And I still had lots of time left over for being a normal sightsee-er and completely falling in love with the rest of Berlin, which is just the most wonderful city - go visit if you can.

And if you’re not into Berlin, I’ve just resumed ficcing over on Archive of Our Own, continuing my alternate happy ending for Quinn, where he goes off to find Julia and help her raise young Johnny…

#homeland #berlin #homelandS05

17 notes · View notes

postapocalypsecomedownblues · 3 years

Text

Amityville, Giallo, and Weaponized Cinema - Part 1

“The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as - if not sooner than - we are aware of it as present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until arrival of the preservative, cinema.”

Angela Carter; The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

(Kirk’s journals - 11/1/2021)

What are movies? What purpose do they serve?

I don’t know if we as an ostensibly modernized civilization have asked these questions enough. I certainly didn’t until a few years ago. In another lifetime I was a screenwriter and hosted a horror movie podcast. In short, gory movies were my thing.

I have this problem where once I start going down a certain rabbit hole I don’t stop. While researching a particularly grim film known as SALO, I discovered that the director of the film - Pier Paolo Pasolini - was suicided a few days prior to the film’s release.

Both the obviousness of the cover-up and the lack of any independent investigation spoke volumes, especially given the film’s plot.

I spoke with Dub about some of this, and as usual he had a lot to say. The following notes are the result of our conversations.

To understand the Amityville Horror, you have to first know – not just believe but know, carnally, at a bone deep level – that the story as it’s presented by the Lutz family in the Jay Anson book (which later became the basis for the screenplay) is toxic bullshit from beginning to end. It also helps to know the difference between bullshit and toxic bullshit. Regular bullshit can be a labor of love, a work of fiction or even a 70-year marriage that rests on an ever-shifting foundation of pleasantries and white lies; these are the sort of innocuous bullshit that forms society’s mortar. Toxic bullshit is weaponized disinfo and misinfo. The official narratives around the MLK assassination and 9/11 are toxic bullshit. The Lutz/Jay Anson story is toxic bullshit.

And like the toxic bullshit that swirls around 9/11, it revolves around a very real crime – the DeFeo murders, in this case. To understand the Amityville Horror you is not a matter of a definitive answer to the question of its haunting. Definitive answers are one of those tricks They use to get to you, dear reader. And that’s the name of the game – getting to you.

That’s all they want. That’s all they’ve wanted – officially and on the record – since 1962. Let’s shift gears for a minute and focus on some other conjectures and hypotheses. We’ll need some reference points:

Project MKOFTEN – founded in 1962 according to the heavily redacted CIA documents along with related projects MKULTRA, MKARTICHOKE, MKSEARCH, Bluebird, Big City, et al) is a spin-off of the MKULTRA mission that focused on the occult, including but not limited to Black Magic, Witchcraft, Voodoo, and Satanism.

Elements of this project included CIA funding asset Anton Szandor LaVey in order to officially establish the Church of Satan. Additional funding went towards film director and renowned Satanist Kenneth Anger, who went on to direct erotic horror films expertly designed to psychically disturb the viewer. Many of Anger’s films featured members of the Manson family in starring roles.

While the CIA was busy creating an actual government funded Satanic counterculture, former Army Intelligence officer and member of the Jesuit Society William Peter Blatty was using the latest and greatest tech in modern psy-war techniques to create a movie called The Exorcist, which scared a number of people into hospitalization. While it’s arguable that The Exorcist was one of the most effective “weaponized” film of its time, it was hardly the first.

Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968 through the same syndicates behind both Deep Throat and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Unlike the other two films, and due to a quirk in the legality of the film’s release, it fell instantly under the status of public domain, meaning anyone capable of copying the film could air it any damn how they wanted to.

It doesn’t take much digging to link organized crime rings to intelligence rings, nor to the grindhouse films that were often drummed up by intelligence operatives and distributed back to grindhouse theatres owned by organized crime rings, allowing theater owners to kick the money back up through local police bribes. See the all-devouring serpent; its endless coils, malignant and muscular, onyx mirror scales that if you look directly into you can see what forever looks like.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Long Island in the 70s and 80s was dark as fuck. I came up in one of the cosmic crossroads of the Great Spookytown. In 1978, I was treated for a head injury at the St. John’s Hospital across the street from Untermeyer Park, where the Son of Sam cult used to ritually murder German Shepherds (and possibly a few unlucky passers-by) during the height of the more public facet of that case. I used to play in the rubble of the Pilgrim State Mental Hospital when I was a kid, and later on cut my teeth on the Simonomicon at the King’s Park Mental Hospital featured in the documentary Cropsey.

My mother lived in San Francisco in the late 60s where LaVey’s Church of Satan was warring for billboard space with the Process Church of the Final Judgment. The Process Church of the Final Judgment is believed by some to have created a weaponized version of Scientology in order to create zombified serial killers that can be directed at the whims of their handlers.

And so it goes.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m an experiment gone wrong. I can close my eyes and see the DeFeo/Lutz house, with its angry-eye windows looking out over that dock, the smell of Long Island river water lapping indolently against creosote pylons. .

Cover-ups, ritual murder, government spooks, and tulpas. Oh my...

“The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of aging, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw or smokes shadows of fresh pain with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact. Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine.”

― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

#mind control #writing #metaphysics #fiction

0 notes

dunnystuff · 3 years

Text

Sent: Monday, June 21, 2021 5:00 PM

Subject: Rich's Blog

Comrades ! You WILL drink the Kool-Aid, and like it

Hi to all -

Dong Jinwei

No, this is not a male porn star. It is the name of a high-level Chinese defector who fled his nation to come to America (not too many people are fleeing America to move to China). What makes him so interesting is that he was a very senior minister in The Department of State Security, otherwise known as 'Guoanbe'. In China, this is a kind of blend of FBI, CIA and NSA all under one roof. This guy could tell you what the Great Dictator had for lunch, and likely dinner last night.

He and his daughter brought gifts with them. Many terabytes of data on what is actually going on in China. He contacted our authorities, and offered them his information. This happened a few weeks back, but it is just now becoming public. Dong had conclusive proof that China was actively engaged in bioweapons research at Wuhan, and that this virus was not a disease, but a manufactured weapon that China unleashed on the world, either accidently or maybe not. He had a lot of other information as well. Seems Dr. Fauci has been less than candid with us. You can tell from his most recent pronouncements, intended to deflect attention from his own culpability. And, this could also explain why Biden is suddenly interested in the Wuhan lab, as a source of the virus. If we are lucky, we will soon hear a lot more very interesting stuff.

Certain of our own scientists have said that they ignored the 'lab leak' theory, because Trump suggested it, and so of course, it must be false. Besides, who wants to be called a 'racist' for questioning why a dangerous virus might have come from China's only Level 4 lab? Dr. Fauci is now denying that he suppressed any such speculation, or did not consider it worth investigating. Compare that to what he was saying a few months ago.

California

Warning everyone! We have a problem. The power is going to go out, rolling brownouts all over the state. Please do not turn on your air conditioner - even if it is hot outside. Your masters cannot figure out how to keep the lights on in California - just like North Korea.

And, to think that just a few years ago, California had an economy greater than all but a half dozen nations!

Lockdowns

Data is accumulating on the effects of these lockdowns - done for our health and safety, of course. During the last year, there were more than 90,000 suicides, an all-time record high - many among the young people. Depression, isolation, loss of jobs leading to economic hardship (even with that $600 'stimulus' check!), and inability to go anywhere or do anything really took a toll on the nation. Drug overdose deaths were also at an all-time high. It seems that the cure may have done more harm than the disease.

Gaza

Did you know that the Palestinians are getting up to one million doses of the vaccine? Guess where this is coming from? Did you guess the WHO? Other Arab neighbors? Europe? The US? Nope, you would be wrong. These vaccines were a gift from Israel.

Atheists

They are busy again, targeting Christians. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (who makes up these names? And, who pays for this stuff?) has tried to ban Bibles from military base displays of POW-MIA memorials. Those memorials generally include a round table, candles, an overturned glass, and other objects, symbolic of many values and virtues of our soldiers. But, according to the atheists, this is 'against the military core values, and hurts unity and 'diversity' (oh, that explains it all). For atheists, you cannot ignore the one object you disagree with, but you must destroy it for everyone - how dare any soldier have religious values !!! My bet is that these atheists have never been in the military, or combat. Remember, boys and girls, 'there are no atheists in foxholes'.

This attack was directed against NAF Atsugi, Japan. They have approached other military bases in the past. What this really means is that they are at war with Christians, and especially the Christian God. If they do not want God, then you are not allowed to want Him either. This will get worse - Marxism embraces atheism, and they are intent on destroying all religious values and practices, as was done in Russia and elsewhere. To the extent that they succeed, they will achieve the same results for their people.

'Juneteenth'

Yesterday, democrats in congress passed a bill to make this a national holiday, and Biden signed it, just like everything else they slip in front of him. The newest member of The Squad, Cori Bush (D-Missouri) called it a good first step. 'Now we need to get those reparations going for the oppressed victims of white supremacy. Let's make 'black liberation' a reality', she says.

Marjorie Taylor Green

She is a congressperson from Georgia. As a republican, conservative and very outspoken lady, she instantly drew hate from the left. They removed her from her committee assignments, and did all they could to marginalize and discredit her. But she is raining on their parade. She introduced a bill to abolish the ATF, for their many crimes, going back to 'Fast and Furious', and lots of other illegal actions. She agreed with the Chinese defector that the virus was a weapon, and that we should respond to this as an attack on the US. And, she has filed articles of impeachment against Biden - saying he is not legitimate, or even capable of doing the job. This does not endear her to the locals, but it does to the rest of the nation.

Hawaii

Did you know that Russian warships are conducting naval exercises off the coasts of Hawaii? The Russian navy is not designed for 'blue water' operations, and generally sticks close to home. So, this is a big deal for them. Did you see how strongly Biden reacted to this? Neither did anyone else.

Nate Silvester

You will remember him as the police officer who did the sarcastic video on social media mocking LaBron James. He pretended to be stopping a violent encounter, but had to stop and call LeBron for advice, first. Well, as expected, the liberal politicians in his town were 'outraged' (they never seem to have a sense of humor), and fired him. Nate was doing an interview on TV about this, when, live on air, he got a job offer to join the force in Pinal County, Arizona.

Arizona is joining Texas in a project to build the wall. And law enforcement from Florida, and now Georgia and a couple of other states, are going there to help with the flood of illegals unleashed by Biden and Harris.

So. Dakota

After all the hype about 'alternative energy' and promises of how those jobs would replace oil workers, guess what? The wind turbine factory located there is closing, permanently, in August. The company cited the cancelling of the tax credit (you see, we have been paying subsidies to these operations for years, since they are not economical to produce, and cost a lot more to operate than fossil fuel plants), and the ever-popular 'foreign competition' (i.e. China builds these things cheaper). The workers, lured by false promises, are not happy.

Stacy Abrams

She and her partner in crime, now Senator Warnock, are all over TV claiming their love of voter ID laws, and that they never, ever opposed such things. Didn't take long for news shows to post videos side by side of 'then and now' statements. See, the winds of change show that voters do not feel disenfranchised by voter ID, but rather, protected by such ID laws. So, being good followers of whatever direction the wind blows, Stacy and friends raced to that bandwagon.

Military Strength

All through history, we have seen that successful nations not only have a strong economy, but also a strong military to protect it. Japan attacked us because they saw us as weak in military matters (we were. Finland had a better military force than we did in 1941). The same has happened over and over. Hundreds of years ago, Italy was divided between Florence and Pisa, as rival economic centers. But, Florence also had a military force, and went after Pisa, which had none. So, Pisa was forced to hire mercenaries to protect their city. The greedy always prey on the successful but weak neighbors who have something they want. I hate to think what our 'woke', diversity loving, warriors will do when faced by real troops - like those from China.

As the levee breaks for the left, expect them to do even more radical and nonsensical things. They really do not understand that their ideas are nuts, and always fail, and they just cannot believe that the world will not conform to their vision of reality. They will likely get very nasty. (Let's see if Big Brother declares this muse to be 'spam', or that some of you are 'blocked', or that it is all just fabrication...they have been busy of late.)

Rich

0 notes

asflowersfade · 7 years

Text

Ficlet: Your Average Joe

A MacGyver ficlet. They’re on a stakeout and they’re bored, bored, bored! So bored, actually, that it’s starting to make Mac cranky. Mac’s POV.

Eh, I don’t even know what this is. I just sat down and started typing and this happened. Eh.

They’re on a stakeout, he and Jack, in a town better not named, staking out a military facility that officially doesn’t exist, waiting for someone - for whom, the intel didn’t specify, of course - to try to get their thieving little hands on a weapon that officially doesn’t exist either. And it’s sweltering hot. Just another lovely day at the office.

Mac’s not cranky. He’s not. But they’ve been sitting there for hours - and hours and hours! - and Jack’s been listening to the same Willie Nelson CD on repeat - over and over again! - and Mac’s almost out of paper clips, the dashboard’s littered with his doodles!

The last song on the CD is slowly winding down. And if Jack starts playing the damn thing from the beginning again, Mac will blow up the stereo on principle. He’s a patient man but even he has his limits!

Distraction, that’s what he needs.

“Hey, you’ve never actually told me why you left the army, back then, after Iraq,” Mac blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind when he sees Jack reach for the stereo button. “I mean, you always sound so proud when you talk about your Delta Force days, so... it never made much sense to me.”

The car remains blessedly quiet as Jack drops his hand and contemplates the question. But the longer the silence lasts, the more apprehensive Mac feels; he hopes he didn’t ask the wrong thing. He only wanted to distract Jack a little and he would hate it if his question brought back bad memories, if it hurt Jack.

Finally, Jack replies, staring out through the windshield at the sun-baked street, “I guess-I guess I loved the army but I didn’t particularly like it.”

Mac frowns, looking at him. “I don’t follow,” he admits.

Jack shoots him a self-deprecating smile. “Look, we both know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I’m not dumb but I’ll never be as smart as you.”

Now Mac’s frown deepens. He hates it when Jack talks like that about himself because, yeah, sure, Jack might not know how to turn a cellphone into a bomb but he’s one of the wisest people Mac’s ever known, even though one needs to know Star Wars by heart to actually get his point most of the time. “That’s not true!” he protests.

But Jack shakes his head. “Hey, I’m not putting myself down, just stating the truth. Most people on this God given earth will never be as smart as you, kid, and I don’t mind joining the masses there. I’m your average Joe. I was a good football player but not good enough to make a career out of it. I got into college but I wasn’t smart enough to actually finish it.

“But I’m really good at this.” He pats his gun holster. “At fighting and shooting, kicking people’s asses… protecting them.” He gives Mac a meaningful look and Mac smiles. “So, you could say that I enlisted - that I chose this line of work - because of that. But... it was more than that.”

Mac turns in his seat a little to see Jack better. “Tell me,” he prompts.

Jack sighs and takes a moment before replying. “I love what the army stands for. And not just protecting my country, being a patriot and things like that. No. I love that it’s a home away from home. Your unit’s your family outside your family, you get me?” He glances at Mac.

But Mac… doesn’t, not really. Well, he does, in theory, but he’s always been more of a loner. Until he met Jack, that is, who chose Mac as his son slash little brother slash charge, basically his responsibility. And Mac loves him for it more than Jack will probably ever know, for giving Mac the sense of… security.

“So, yeah,” Jack continues. “I loved that about being in the army. But at the same time…” He shakes his head a little. “I hated being used as a-a hammer, sometimes without regard for collateral damage. I get it, it’s not easy to make decisions and give out orders, even from the safety of your office, but… to actually see the end result up front…

“So I left, after Iraq. And I joined the CIA, thinking that maybe it would suit me better, being able to make my own decisions in the field, as long as the mission was accomplished,” Jack says. “And, yeah, I got that. I was my own man, more or less. But at the same time, I couldn’t trust anyone, not even the people I was working with. Sure, there was Sarah. And Matty. But those were the exceptions. And I hate not being able to trust people, it eats me up on the inside.”

Mac nods. He knows that. Jack hates secrets and lies.

“And so I went back, thinking that maybe something changed, that it would be different, being in the army. Maybe my pa’s passing had something to do with it, too, I don’t know.” Jack pauses, then sighs. “But it wasn’t. Different, I mean.”

“Well, if the army disappointed you and the whole spy business, too, then why are you here? Working for the Foundation?” Mac asks.

Jack laughs quietly and thumps Mac on the thigh with his fist playfully. “Why? Because then you came along, you fool.”

“Me?” Mac says, a little surprised.

“Yeah, you,” Jack replies, still smiling. “Pale and skinny, with the nerdiest, most ridiculous name ever and I realized, I didn’t need the army. All I needed was to find the right people and stick with them.”

“So… I’m the ‘right people,’ then?” Mac asks with a small smile.

“You know you are, man,” Jack tells him, completely serious. “I’ve never trusted anyone the way I trust you. I would follow you anywhere. And you know why?”

Mac shakes his head a little.

Jack looks at him, hard. “Because I know you would never abuse it.”

Oh, Mac thinks, dropping his eyes. “Thanks,” he replies thickly because… what else could he say to that? Nothing would be adequate.

“Does that mean you won’t blow up the car stereo, after all?” Jack asks and when Mac looks up quickly, he sees Jack smirking mischievously.

“How--?” Mac stammers out in surprise.

Jack’s smile widens. “You do this-this thing with your face when you’re really annoyed, bordering on homicidal.”

“I do not!” Mac replies, affronted.

“Yes, you do. You always clench your jaw real tight and then this little vein you’ve got here” --Jack points-- “starts pulsing like crazy. Let me tell you, that’s not good for you, longterm. You’re lucky the Foundation has a good dental.” He nods sagely.

“That’s not-- I don’t do that!” Mac protests, huffing, and straightens up in his seat. Nonsense, this!

But Jack lifts his eyebrows and his head bobs. “Yes, you do, you so do! And you also--”

Luckily, their thief arrives soon after. But it doesn’t stop them from bickering all the way through the car chase and the apprehension of said criminal in a rather spectacular fashion at the local mall. It’s all quite flashy and unforgettable. Matty will be so pleased. Not.

And then, since they’re already there - though the mall’s looking rather worse for wear despite their best efforts - Mac gets Jack a new Willie Nelson CD because the old one got trashed together with their car. And Jack gets Mac a big box of paper clips.

Tomorrow, they’ll do it all over again. And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

#macgyver #angus macgyver #jack dalton #thehemingwaygoldfish #my fics

17 notes · View notes

friend-clarity · 4 years

Text

Obama, Biden Oval Office anti-Trump meeting to overturn democracy

Obama, Biden Oval Office Meeting On January 5 Was Key To Entire Anti-Trump Operation. Susan Rice's bizarre Inauguration Day email about that meeting helps explain the campaign of leaks, lies, and obstruction that followed.

The Obama-Biden attack on democracy: This stunning operation was not just a typical battle between political foes, nor merely an example of media bias against political enemies. Instead, this entire operation was a deliberate and direct attack on the foundation of American governance. In light of the newly declassified documents released in recent days, it is clear that understanding what happened in that January 5 Oval Office meeting is essential to understanding the full scope and breadth of the corrupt operation against the Trump administration. It is long past time for lawmakers in Congress who are actually interested in oversight of the federal government and the media to demand answers about what really happened in that meeting from every single participant, including Obama and Biden.

Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist, May 8, 2020

Information released in the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case it brought against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn confirms the significance of a January 5, 2017, meeting at the Obama White House. It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.

“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote in an unusual email to herself about the meeting that was also attended by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey, and Vice President Joe Biden.

A clearer picture is emerging of the drastic steps that were taken to accomplish Obama’s goal in the following weeks and months. Shortly thereafter, high-level operatives began intensely leaking selective information supporting a supposed Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the incoming National Security Advisor was ambushed, and the incoming Attorney General was forced to recuse himself from oversight of investigations of President Trump. At each major point in the operation, explosive media leaks were a key strategy in the operation to take down Trump.

Not only was information on Russia not fully shared with the incoming Trump team, as Obama directs, the leaks and ambushes made the transition chaotic, scared quality individuals away from working in the administration, made effective governance almost impossible, and materially damaged national security. When Comey was finally fired on May 9, in part for his duplicitousness regarding his handling of the Russia collusion theory, he orchestrated the launch of a Special Counsel probe that continued his efforts for another two years. That probe ended with Mueller finding no evidence of any American colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, much less Trump or anyone connected to him.

An analysis of the timeline from early 2017 shows a clear pattern of behavior from the federal officials running the collusion operation against the Trump campaign. It also shows how essential media leaks were to their strategy to sideline key law enforcement and intelligence officials and cripple the ability of the incoming Trump administration to run the country.

Here’s a timeline of the key moments and news articles of the efforts, per Obama’s direction, to prevent the Trump administration from learning about the FBI’s operation against it.

January 4: Following the closure of a pretextually dubious and politically motivated FBI investigation of Flynn at the beginning of January, the leadership of the FBI scrambled to reopen a case against Flynn, the man who in his role as National Security Advisor would have to review their Russia collusion investigation. FBI officials openly discussed their concern about briefing the veteran intelligence official on what they had done to the Trump campaign and transition team and what they were planning to do to the incoming Trump administration. Flynn had to be dealt with. The FBI’s top counterintelligence official would later memorialize discussions about the FBI’s attempts to “get [Flynn] fired.” No reopening was needed, they determined, when they discovered they had failed to close the previous investigation. They found this mistake “amazing” and “serendipitously good” and said “our utter incompetence actually helps us.” Even more noteworthy were texts from FBI’s #2 counterintelligence official Peter Strzok to FBI lawyer Lisa Page noting that the “7th floor,” a reference to Comey and his deputy director Andrew McCabe, was running the show.

January 5: Yates, Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper briefed Obama on Russia-related matters in the Oval Office. Biden and Rice also attended. After the Obama briefing, the intelligence chiefs who would be leaving at the end of the term were dismissed and Yates and Comey, who would continue in the Trump administration, were asked to stay. Not only did Obama give his guidance about how to perpetuate the Russia collusion theory investigations, he also talked about Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to both Comey and Yates. Interestingly, Clapper, Comey, and Yates all said that they did not brief Obama about these phone calls. Clapper testified he did not brief Obama on the calls, Yates learned about the calls from Obama himself during that meeting, and Comey also testified he didn’t brief Obama about the calls, even though the intelligence was an FBI product. Rice, who publicly lied but later admitted under oath to her widespread use of unmasked intelligence at the end of the Obama administration, likely briefed Obama on the calls and would have had access to the intelligence. Comey mentions the Logan Act at this meeting.

It was this meeting that Rice memorialized in a bizarre inauguration-day email to herself that claimed Obama told the gathered to do everything “by the book.” But Rice also noted in her email that the key point of discussion in that meeting was whether and how to withhold national security information, likely including details of the investigation into Trump himself, from the incoming Trump national security team.

January 6: An ostensibly similar briefing about Russian interference efforts during the 2016 campaign was given to President-elect Trump. After that briefing, Comey privately briefed Trump on the most salacious and absurd “pee tape” allegation in the Christopher Steele dossier, a document the FBI had already used to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page. Comey told Trump he was telling him because CNN was looking for any reason it could find to publish a story about Russia having compromising information on him, and he wanted to warn Trump about it. He did not mention the dossier was completely unverified or that it was the product of a secretly funded operation by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee.

January 10: In an amazing coincidence, CNN found the excuse to publish the Russia claims after a high-level Obama intelligence operative leaked that Comey had briefed Trump about the dossier. This selective leak, which was credulously accepted by CNN reporters Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein, may have been the most important step in the operation to harm the incoming Trump administration. The leak of the briefing of Trump was used to legitimize a ridiculous dossier full of allegations the FBI knew to be false that multiple news organizations had previously refused to report on for lack of substantiation, and created a cloud of suspicion over Trump’s campaign and administration by insinuating he was being blackmailed by Russia.

January 12: The next part of the strategy was the explosive leak to David Ignatius of the Washington Post to legitimize the use against Flynn of the Logan Act, a likely unconstitutional 1799 law prohibiting private individuals, not public incoming national security advisors, from discussing foreign policy with foreign governments. Ignatius accepted the leak from the Obama official. He wrote that Flynn had called Kislyak. “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about ‘disputes’ with the United States. Was its spirit violated?” Flynn’s routine and appropriate phone call became fodder for a developing grand conspiracy theory of Russia collusion. In discussions with investigators, both DOJ’s Mary McCord and Comey conspicuously cite this Ignatius column as somehow meaningful in the approach they would take with Flynn. “Nothing, to my mind, happens until the 13th of January, when David Ignatius publishes a column that contains a reference to communication Michael Flynn had with the Russians. That was on the 13th of January,” Comey said of the column that ran online on January 12. In fact, quite a bit had happened at the FBI prior to that leak, with much conversation about how to utilize the Logan Act against Flynn. And the leak-fueled Ignatius column would later be used by FBI officials to justify an illegal ambush interview of Flynn in the White House.

January 23: Another important criminal leak was given to Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller of the Washington Post, also based on criminal leaks. Their article, headlined “FBI reviewed Flynn’s calls with Russian ambassador but found nothing illicit,” was intended to make Flynn feel safe and put him at ease about the FBI stance on those calls the day before they planned to ambush him in an interview. The article was used to publicize false information when it said, “Although Flynn’s contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were listened to, Flynn himself is not the active target of an investigation, U.S. officials said.” In fact, emails prior to this date confirm Flynn was their prime target. This article was later cited by McCabe as the reason why they were justified in concealing from Flynn the real purpose of their interview. Flynn later asked McCabe if he knew how all the information about his phone calls had been made public and whether it had been leaked. Any potential response from McCabe to Flynn has been redacted from his own notes about the conversation.

January 24: Comey later admitted he broke every protocol to send agents to interview Flynn and try to catch him in a lie. FBI officials strategized how to keep Flynn from knowing he was a target of the investigation or asking for an attorney to represent him in the interview. The January 23 Washington Post article, which falsely stated that Flynn was not an FBI target, was key to that strategy. Though the interviewing agents said they could detect no “tells” indicating he lied, and he carefully phrased everything in the interview, he later was induced to plead guilty to lying in this interview. Ostensibly because White House officials downplayed the Kislyak phone calls, presumably in light of what Flynn had told them about the calls, Yates would go to the White House the next day and insinuate Flynn should probably be fired.

February 9: The strategy to get Flynn fired didn’t immediately work so another leak was deployed to Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post. That article, headline “National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say,” was sourced to people who happened to share senior FBI leadership’s views on the Logan Act. This article was also based on criminal leaks of top secret information of phone call intercepts and laid out the FBI’s case for why Flynn’s contacts with a foreign adversary were a problem. The fact that such phone calls are routine, not to mention Flynn’s case that improved relations with Russia in a world where China, North Korea, and Iran were posing increasing threats, never made it into these articles for context.

February 13: The operation finally succeeded in getting Flynn fired and rendering him unable to review the operations against the Trump campaign, Trump transition team, and Trump administration.

March 1: Flynn was the first obstacle who had to be overcome. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was the next. The Trump loyalist with a strong Department of Justice background would also need to be briefed on the anti-Trump efforts unless he could be sidelined. Comey admitted that early in Sessions’ tenure, he deliberately hid Russia-related information from Sessions because, “it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations.” To secure that recusal, yet another leak was deployed to the Washington Post’s Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller. The leak was intended to tar Sessions as a secret Russian agent and was dramatically spun as “Sessions Spoke Twice To Russian Envoy: Revelation contradicts his testimony at confirmation hearing.” One meeting was in passing and the other was in his function as a United States Senator, but the hysteria was such that the Post authors could get away with suggesting Sessions was too compromised to oversee the Department of Justice’s counterintelligence operations involving Russia. It is perhaps worth noting that the Special Counsel idea was pushed in this article.

March 2: Sessions recused himself from oversight of the FBI’s anti-Trump operation, providing no meaningful oversight to an operation that would be spun into a Special Counsel by mid-May. With the removal of Trump’s National Security Advisor and his Attorney General, there was no longer any chance of Trump loyalists discovering what Obama holdovers at the FBI were actually doing to get Trump thrown out of office. After Trump fired Comey for managerial incompetence on May 9, deceptively edited and misleading leaks to the New York Timesordered by Comey himself were used to gin up a Special Counsel run exclusively by left-wing anti-Trump partisans who continued the operation without any meaningful oversight for another two years.

This stunning operation was not just a typical battle between political foes, nor merely an example of media bias against political enemies. Instead, this entire operation was a deliberate and direct attack on the foundation of American governance. In light of the newly declassified documents released in recent days, it is clear that understanding what happened in that January 5 Oval Office meeting is essential to understanding the full scope and breadth of the corrupt operation against the Trump administration. It is long past time for lawmakers in Congress who are actually interested in oversight of the federal government and the media to demand answers about what really happened in that meeting from every single participant, including Obama and Biden.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of

Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court

. Follow her on Twitter at

@mzhemingway

0 notes