#Formally requesting no one go back past like… 2016. Please.

[krourou2]

Tumblr I am not going to wear the ridiculous blue wind-up teeth, no matter how much of the screen you try to make it take up.

I have my own, perfectly functional teeth, thank you.

[idjitlili]

They hate us cuz they anus

Eomer x reader

Summary: caring for merry the eve of battle as he misses pippin, he ends up asleep on your lap , but you are so tired that you cannot move him. This leads to certain person helping you.

Word count:2016

On the way to where you would set up tents for rest on the eve of battle of Pelennor Fields. Merry had been very upset about having to be separated from Pippin, so much so he was moping around. He sat on the horse , you behind him.

You had met Eomer when searching for merry and pippin , when you had crossed the lands of Rohan. It was rare to see a women , a young only aswell dressed in clothes commonly a man would wear,plus with weapons upon her. You had been wearing a large tunic , that went very low, it wasn’t yours it was your fathers, he wouldn’t have agreed for you to join the fellowship. Gandalf requested you too , so you did you stole your fathers armour and weapons and clothes. Your pants now into shorts as they weren’t lose like your shirt because they were in fact yours, you had cut them so you would be able to run easily.

Your fathers armour was lost because you couldn’t barely run with , you made sure to note to replace them when you got a chance. Yet your fathers sword still laid upon your belt. Your hair had been braided tightly back by legolas , he was very kind to offer, as he noticed you struggled with it in your face when fighting. You would’ve done it yourself but you really couldn’t be bothered. You faced laced with sweat , you pant slightly, this was the most running you had down this whole quest.

Eomer had eyed your group suspiciously, you were a shy girl around new people, it was different when talking to your friends. you had coward behind legolas and Aragorn. That was until , Eomer had began talking to you. “And why does a women accompany a group of men?” You spoke loudly to, you gulped up at the man, almost not knowing how to speak, he was indeed handsome. “Uh...I w-wish to save my friend m-my lord.” You voice shaky as you spoke , Eomer nodded at you , he understood you wasn’t much of a talker, he decided to leave you alone.

Yet he admired you for being a female , especially when it was frowned down on. He had gave you two horses, you had mounted behind Aragorn, looking back at Eomer he smiled at you which you returned with a small blush upon yo ur cheeks.

Yeah so now you sat upon a horse with merry, hopping off, then lifting merry off too. You went to put him down but he shook his head ,” can you carry me a while y/n?pleaseeeee.” He pleaded wrapping his arm around your neck. You held on your hip with one arm. “If I must .” You replied ruffing his hair with your other arm.

You were staying in a tent with eowyn and merry , yet the tents were still being set up, so you just walked around for a couple of hours with merry on your hip, that was until he was hungry. Yet he wouldn’t let go of you , so you grabbed some potatoes and sat next to Eomer on the log , with a knife and pot. You placed merry onto your lap, while you peeled the potatoes, and diced them placing them in the pot with water. Eomer watched you as merry hold the pot. After you had completed that you placed the pot on the fire, still holding merry. Merry was starving and didn’t forget to remind you everything two seconds, you tried to keep your cool, damn this must be what it feels like to be a mother.

“Is he always like that?” Eomer asked from next to you chuckling, merry let’s out a ‘OI.’ You rub merry s shoulder with your hand. “Not usually, you just miss pippin don’t you. I guess I’m his replacement.” You smirk at merry knowing jts absolutely true. “No, you are my mother.” You gasp at his answer , pulling the pot from the fire onto the ground, to cool.

“If I was I think you would be taller plus you are older than me.” Eomer laughs at you , merry just hugs tighter, “still my ma.” You giggle , now mashing the potatoes turning it into mash before giving it to merry. Who eats it like if they had a time limit of a minute otherwise they would disappear. “I’m not surprised he thinks you are, you carry him around for hours , feed him and now he’s falling asleep on you.” Eomer had whispered, Merry had eaten and now lay against your chest eyes fluttering closed

“You are very right.” You smiled up at Eomer, it was late , you sat next to Eomer for hours, briefly chatting, your eyes began to feel heavy. You began drifting off to sleep, that is until Eomer whispers your name , you slowly open your eyes at him “yes?” You spoke barely above a whisper.

“I think it’s time you get to bed.” You groan, knowing you have to walk. “But... the tent is so far away, and then I have to carry merry too.” You drag out , tiredly. “You are in the same tent as eowyn? You nod your head at Eomer eyes closed. Then you feel someone lifting you bridal style , with merry on your chest. “Whaaat” you reply , as the strong arms carry you to your tent with easy. “Sleep y/n.” Thats all it takes for you fall asleep.

Once you woke up in the morning, Merry was cuddled into your side , in your bedroll with you. Eomer must have carried you to your bed, eowyn probably teased her brother, for doing so. It was unusual for Eomer to behave this way, he always act tough infront of everyone but he was just a softie and he showed that to you last night. He was only like that around 1his sister , he was indeed a kind man. I

The next time you talked to Eomer , was after the ring was destroyed and at Aragorns ball in celebration of him claiming his right to the throne of Gondor. You wore a dress that Eowyn had forced you too, it was a navy blue dress like the tunic you wore when you first met Eomer. It was only a simple dress, you really would have preferred to be at home eating potatoes or something. But instead you would stood at the side away from the dance floor near the food.

Now merry and pippin were reunited , merry had told pippin all about his time with you and you being his human mother. Now pippin insisted that you were his mother too, forcing you carry both of them, on your hips, Frodo and Sam laughed at you as the hobbits swung about on you Eating some sort of cake.

You stayed like this for a while trying to get the hobbits to behave, then Eomer had approached you with a huge smile admiring your kindness. Your h/c hair that is loose fell upon your face due to the movements of the hobbit. Eomer stood infront of you , the hobbits looking at him in confusion, you looked past your hair at Eomer smiling.

“Merry , pippin could I speak to your mother please?” He had asked politely, you blushed at his words , giggling at the hobbits that looked at Eomer in disgust. “You hurt our ma , you become a kebab king.” Merry growled and pippin hissed at him. “That’s enough , go annoy legolas hm?” With that you leant down placing them on the floor and then they ran for legolas nearly knocking a bunch of people over.

You stand up , looking at Eomer , pushing your hair from your face. “What did you need to ask me ,king of Rohan?” Your voice is quiet , as you fiddle with your hands. “Just Eomer ,no need for formalities, miss y/n. I was wondering if you would talk a walk with me?” His face turnt slightly red ,with nervousness.

“Just y/n then Eomer, and yes I will.” You smile at him, as he offers you his arm which you take as he walks you to the gardens. He was dressed in navy too Damn, Eowyn must have done that on purpose. It was no surprise, when ever he would walk near you in that bar which legolas and Gimil has that drinking contest, your face would flash red. Eomer smiled at you , once you had reached a the gardens that were covered in sunflowers,the music barely audible.

He had brought you to a stop, his hands grasping yours, before he spoke “would you dance with me? I didn’t want to ask you to dance in there, as I couldn’t help but notice you get very nervous infront of large crowds.” His voice full of kindness , he was a very respectable man, and indeed handsome. You face blushed, you nod your head eagerly,”but I do not know how..” you look at your feet , that wore navy slippers. His hand let go of your hand to pull your chin up slowly “it doesn’t matter, we can just sway.” You send him a hopeful smile, wrapping your arms around his neck as his come around your waist.

He guides you to sway with him, looking you in the eyes smiling. “Thanks for saving me from the hobbits , I was sure my back was going to give in.” He chuckles at you ,” you are very welcome, anything for you.” You blushed at his words. “...uh like why can’t they pretend Gandalf is their mother and swing off him like he’s a tree. “

“If they did I’m pretty sure he would’ve turned them into frogs.” You giggle at him , “yeah then they would came after me , ‘oooh kiss me’ no thank you.” You bury your head into his chest laughing hard he just holds you still swaying, laughing with you.

After a few minutes you calm down and Eomer breaks the comfortable silence, when you look back into his eyes.” I’m guessing you don’t like being kissed?” You face turned beet red “uh..it’s just I wouldn’t want to kiss a frog, plus I-I’ve never been kissed before.” You look away from him embarrassed. “Oh..why not you are so beautiful.” He questioned, causing you to blush even more than before.

“B-because no one ever wanted too..” he cups your cheeks so you can’t turn away from you “well I know that’s not true at least one person does.”

“W-who?” Your eyes search his eyes for answers , before he whispers “may I kiss you?” You nod your head nervously , he leans forward down slightly to meet your lips with his soft ones. You can taste the wine on his lips before he pulls away. You hug him tightly “thank you.” You mutter into his shoulder, which he pulls you right to him. “ may I court you y/n” he whispers into you hair , “yes” not even a second later , pippin and merry are dragging you by the hands.

“No no , stay away from our ma, we are her children she doesn’t need more.” Merry shouted at Eomer.

“ I almost die but I survive only for you to try steal our ma.” Pippin growls.

“Hey hey, my sons Eomer will carry you on his shoulders how about that?” The hobbits eyes light up, Eomer looks at you in surprise, you gesture him let them up. He kneels , sitting there hobbits on his shoulders, they hold on to each other, whilst you grab Eomer a hand, as you walk into the hall again, only to get a bunch of eyes on the three of you, eowyn laughs along side faramir.

“They hate is cuz they anus.” You spoke in a low pitch voice , nudging Eomer.

“ maybe it’s time we take our children home?”

[intheemyart]

Expect The Unexpected

Jakarta has been nice towards her for the past days and Frederica felt like life has been treating her how it should be after the long and rough journey that she faced for some months already. Who thought that life would bring her to the most unexpected part of life? That her love ends here and her marriage fell apart from things she never thought before? Never once she thought that it all would ended up this way.

Hiding from the public yet again just like how she did it in the past during those time when the media caught her being engaged to the man she could say now as her past. The first was hard but now, she could adapt more easily with the situation. She decided to visit a cafe nearby her home in Acacia Residence just to freshen her mind.

Nevertheless, she won't hide much longer and stucked in the fear of being hunted down by everyone. She deserves her life back as an individual human being.

The cafe was located in Tebet too, the same neighborhood she's currently in. Frederica came by recommendation and as well to meet a friend she knew from a mutual. It was nice to have someone to talk to despite of the situation that might look a little bit invasive.

"Thank you," she said to a waitress holding a menu book that she just returned. Ordering her food first as now she's with the twins and it would be very hard for her to eat later if they woke up, while waiting for her friend.

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Aria witnessed many people's ups and downs.

What a thrilling sight for the lass who barely had an exciting life. Albeit, It was a boring one, she believed it was for the best of her and Pelita. Realising how media could be monstrous, it was better to hide than to reveal herself.

As she would never know what has been waiting for her behind and whether she would be capable of handling it well, or in the worst case, she would have a breakdown?

Aria and her boring life, much different than her twin who led a company, she had much spare time, a little tea time or coffee would not harm her, so a yes for the offer of a light outing was accepted, aside from that, this was an acquaintance she knew from Miss Diana who had baked together with her, albeit the recent news, more like a disaster she has gone through, she thought there would be no harm would pay a visit.

Frederica was the name, the art conservator, having twins who Pelita admired from The Return of Superman. If only it was not a school day, Aria would be glad to have Pelita with her.

Aria arrived a little late than the schedule, as she had to put her little princess asleep back in the home alongside her nanny. The bell rang as she entered the cafe. Her eyes blinked and shifted from the bright to a dimmer light, whilst squinting her eyes, trying to find the figure she had a promise with.

'Itu', a monologue created as she walked to the table where she has been waiting.

"Miss Biancardi?" Aria made sure as she had stood before her, "ah.. I am Aria, Miss Diana's baking peer," introduced the lass as she took her seat and offered her hand for a formal introduction.

Lips were curved onto a thin line of smile. A broad smile was shown for a good impression.

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“Miss Biancardi?”

Her attention quickly riveted to the source of the sound. The woman whom she knew from mutual acquaintance, Diana Kwok. A smile written on her face as she push the stroller of the twins aside a little bit and stood up. “Hello, nice to meet you!” the lass greeted with an exciting tone as she gave a look at her from head to toes and she love her already! Giving her the simplest and nicest vibes on their first meeting.

She shook her hand before they sat on their seats again, with Frederica’s right hand pulling the stroller back on her side, keeping her eyes on the twins.

“I’m sorry that I bring my twins with me. No one to take care of them back home,” she said. "And please, do call me just by Frederica or Fre. Don't call me formally as we're trying to be friends now. This seems so awkward," she laughed, trying to brush off the awkwardness that was pretty usual in a first meeting.

Though she tried her best to let go of the media, she couldn't help but cover half of her face with her white mask often. Not wanting anyone to know about her identity when the news was spreading widely all over the headlines. "Please do order anything. I've ordered mine while I wait for your arrival," Frederica handed her the menu book on the table.

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Those palms brushed to one and another, entangled for seconds before departing as the ladies got back to their seats. "It is nice to meet you too, Fre. Haha, as requested, oh- right, you may call me Aria.. " once she was nervous, then she would blabber none stop just like what she just did.

Aria's eyes latched to the twin babies, "they are lovely, Pelita must be enthralled to meet you, babies, sadly it is school day.. And- oh, it is totally fine, I hope they are not disturbed by the heat," as she once checked the temperature in the region has reached more than 31°C.

As Frederica told her to order some, Aria took the menu book and her eyes began to roam each alphabet which written onto the menu. Aria has found what she wanted, she rose her hand as the waiter came to take her order.

"Mas, saya mau croffle almond dan vanilla latte, ya .. terima kasih," the lass formed a genuine smile before getting her attention back on her companion, eyes twinkled in the enthusiasm of meeting new people.

"If only Diana can make it to join us for the day, it will be completed," uttered Aria as both were introduced to each other was because of Diana Kwok. "So.. Do you enjoy your time staying in here?"

As a form of her courtesy, she began with a light chit-chat, a usual one to be asked whenever someone had to adjust to a whole new atmosphere.

Aria was not a humble one herself, she was far of a friendly type, hence it took her more effort to even create loads of bubble chat between her and another one.

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“That’s unfortunate as I would love to meet and talk to Pelita too. I bet she’s really cute and pretty,” she said as she smiled at the lass on the opposite of her, listening to what she said carefully. Frederica let her order the foods from the menu while she covered the babies’ body with the white blanket carefully, wanting to keep them warm as they’re still too young.

Her head nodded as she heard what Aria’s sajd. Indeed, it must’ve been nice if Diana could join them today and have some girls talk as three.

“It would be great if she could join. She must’ve been so busy with her works,” Frederica responded. Being asked about her time in Jakarta, Frederica emitted a smile on her face again. “Yes, I do. I enjoy my time here a lot thought it seems like the ‘media’ that works in this country is actually ‘everyone’ that knew me,” she giggled.

It seems like ordinary people here were actually the source to the rumors and news rather than the media themselves. It’s scary, but at least her ‘popularity’ wasn’t as big as what she faced in Singapore or South Korea.

“How about you? How’s life been so far? It’s in the middle of August already,” she asked her in a friendly manner. Wanting to know more about the woman she’s speaking with.

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"Let's meet another time when it is the weekend, perhaps I can let Pelita tag along, she must have wanted it if she knew with whom I am meeting," Pelita was a fan of the reality show, she loved the twin baby from Frederica and Alverstoke, but rules remained as rules and it should not have been disobeyed, hence Pelita stayed at home.

"Yes, she must be- oh, makasih, ya, Mas," her words were cut off as her order was served right in front of her. Aria chose to sip the latte for a second before continuing her intention to answer the latter. "-yes she must have been busy with works.. Cool lady," Aria rose her eyebrows, contrary to her daily life, what she had in her world was merely a boring day, except when it came to Pelita.

Aria agreed, the media in here was not as harsh as the rest of the world, but the surrounding has the sharpest tongue to spread the news to be viral in a split of seconds. The power which Indonesia's citizens held regarding spreading either fake and fact news were powerful.

"I agree, as long as the one you know or the citizen can keep their lips sealed, the media would not bother you at all," it was saddening to hear that, Aria wished for her tranquillity. "How long do you plan to stay?" Continuing the converse as she cut the croffle and had a taste of it.

It is good, she could make it better.

A chuckle escaped, "I have not much to say about me, not having this.. Rollercoaster life, but.. Everything, in this year, has been.. " Aria's words hung in uncertainty, her mind had a light flashback when the unfortunate event happened to her, but she could not share such angst to her new acquaintance, aside of that, Aria was afraid of her words would trigger the lady who has just had her divorced from her ex-husband.

"How old are Sera and Hazen?" Again, initiating a topic, a basic one to ask a mother, but somehow voices came to disrupt her.

‘Mirip model yang hilang di 2016, gak sih?' 'Udah nonton konspirasi terbaru belum, seru,' 'Eh, itu bayi yang di Return of Superman' Iya, ih? Mirip? Jangan-jangan iya, lagi?' 'Eh .. itu kayak Frederica yang cerai deh,' ‘Sut- sok tau'

Aria has used to of the words of that she looked like someone deceased, or mayhap she was her reincanation, but that was something impossible to ever happen in this world. Being a reincarnation who has the same age as her.

What a travesty.

Aria looked at the woman before her, hoping she did not hear any of those unworthy of attention whispers from those whisperers. "A little loud today," Aria chuckled nervously as one by one, many customers happened to fill the once empty spaces.

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The idea of meeting each other again in the future during the weekend so she could meet Aria's little angel made her smile. She loves kids and she couldn't wait to meet her and have some little chit-chats together. Their interaction was interrupted by a waiter and waitress who came to their table. Warm tea on the table along with some light snacks to fill their empty tummy, the one she ordered before the guest arrived.

Then, their conversation continued. Shifted to another topic about how the media and people in Indonesia cope with gossips and rumors. It must've been very stressful to be caught in that whirlwind. "I don't think people would keep their lips shut, no? Especially when it's something juicy to be talked," she responded with an unsure tone.

Perhaps? People love gossips!

Look at how her engagement news broke out in the past? Of how her divorce rumors spread so wildly and now she's forced to went under so many unexpected journeys?

"Just for a while? A week or less? Back and forth as I'm still working." Yeah, apparently her works became the reason why she kept on flying back and forth between Singapore and Jakarta. Even going on an exile doesn't seem that easy for her, who's indeed a workaholic.

Listening to her some kind of 'painful' short story, Frederica could only give her a smile. She reached out her hand and grabbed her left one, rubbing the back of her hand with her thumb gently.

"You'll be okay after this. Things will get better than before." She couldn't say much as she's not someone who's usually calm other people down. Instead, she has always been the one being calmed down by those around her.

"The twins? A month and a hal—"

Her answer was cut off by the whispers that she and Aria heard together from people around. From the cafe's guests started to put their attention and eyes on their table.

Suddenly, she felt overwhelmed from those eyes sneaking to see her twins' faces. Not only about her identity nor the twins, but Aria's too. A strange thing to be heard. She never heard about it before so the ends of her two eyebrows met each other, wrinkling her forehead.

She then caught a glimpse of the camera's flash from the corner of the room.

"Should we just leave? I think I saw a camera trying to take pictures of either one of us..." she said.

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It has been so long since she received reassurance, the art conservator held her palm; it was soothing and warm, Aria was found to be giggling, shrugging the weight of her so-so life, "I wish to have such rollercoaster life after meeting you, Fre," the lass pulled out a mere joke without knowing that every word which slid through her tongue would be granted as prayer by God.

The work of nature was unexpected; voices of gossips and speculations were filling the air they breathed in. It was pretty suffocating for her; she pondered it must be even worse for the mother of two.

All they sought was merely tranquillity during the hectic day in Jakarta and betwixt the ruckus the media made over her acquaintance's private life. This whole situation was making her enraged by anger. "I never knew peace can be this expensive," although she already noticed it long before the day.

A harsh heave cane from her lips, she has not yet finished the little feast she had upon her, and Frederica has not yet enjoyed all the food she ordered.

The fame would never suit Aria, not even a bit.

"I think for the better, or should we move to my dwelling instead? It is near, and I believe it will be more secured," offered Aria before she asked for a bill and put her card on it.

"Let me treat you for I glad to be acquaintance with you," Aria smiled widely although she was pissed with the eyes which preying on their table. It was too uncomfortable to even chat about daily life.

As they had the payment done, Aria stood up from her seat, waiting for Frederica to join her, but just at the right time, her sharp sense, especially sight, caught a camera was filming them.

The lady who record them has crossed the red line of Aria; she despised whenever hers or someone's privacy being invaded. Aria was storming to the second table after theirs, albeit she tried to be calm and gentle; the hatred could be seen in her gaze.

The lady who recorded them realise that Aria was coming for her. She covered and nervously threw her phone on the table. The gallant lady was standing betwixt the table. Eyes were looking down with mockery and anger toward the one invading the ladies' days out time.

"Hapus," it was short and firm. Her tone was far from the usual bubbly Aria, it was like she was someone with inevitable disdain inside her heart.

"Tahu sopan santun, kan?" Confronted Aria, eyebrows rose, a straight line formed in her countenance that has always been full of smile, but as she made a scene, many eyes were haunting her.

"A.. apaan .. saya gak rekam," the liar was stuttering and trembling. Aria was not sure what has gotten onto her to be having this enormous amount of courage to confront the lady.

"Kamu kira saya gak punya mata? Gak bisa lihat flash kamu nyala ke arah kami?" If one chose to lie to Aria; at least did better than this.

Albeit Aria believed the one Frederica realises was not from the recording, but she had to delete it, "sampai ada video itu beredar ... saya dan kamu akan ketemu di meja hijau," Aria was not even sure if she could imprisoned someone, but a threat was enough to make her erase it.

She was stunned as Aria chose to leave the scene and came back to Frederica. "Let's go; this is not the environment you have to experience," feeling horrible for meeting with Frederica in public places; she had had a hard time already, and Aria added the burden with this unpleasant incident.

"My driver is here already," she wanted to protect Frederica at the moment, not knowing that it was after her too.

How could she possibly know? She was Aria. Not Meryam.

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She wasn’t able to cut her when she proposed to pay for their untouched meals that were just served on their table when the fuss was heard here there. So Frederica let Aria paid for this meal. “Thank you,” she said to the woman, feeling grateful.

“I shall treat you too on our next meal. I guess it will be better if we escape from this situation— this place. It’s getting uncomfortable,” she whispered as she started to pack her belongings including the twin’s into her bags.

Frederica felt like the situation was getting out of control right now as she saw more people recognizing her identity along with the twins’. Some whispers could be heard and it’s for the woman she’s meeting with.

‘Frederica?’ ‘Itu yang suaminya di TROS! Ganteng!’ ’Hooh, mereka cerai kan?’

It all started with whispers regarding her identity and her scandal, swiftly changing into another topic.

‘Meryam bukan?’ ‘Ngaco! Sudah mati bukan sih?’

For a while, she’s trying to process what she just heard. It’s not only about her and the twins; but another person who’s also drawing everyone’s attention.

It’s a disaster indeed.

Neither both could escape the media and people’s stares towards them. “Meryam…?” she mumbled as she was now standing far from the lass who walked towards the woman taking their pictures. One of them— as they were so many people doing the same at the moment.

Frederica left the twins for a while as she stepped in to the fuss made, not wanting Aria to draw more attention or create a bigger problem from this privacy issue people like them would never be able to avoid.

The culprit was shaking and perhaps in shock as Aria approached then in anger while grabbing her phone.

“Aria— stop!” she said as she tried to stop the younger woman from fighting. She would never be able to face those people who invaded her privacy face to face just like what Aria did, though she was the one with the most disadvantages.

Her heart is too soft for this kind of matters. She grabbed her left hand and pulled her away from them. From the spectators of the guest stars; Frederica, the twins, and Aria herself.

As Aria calmed herself a bit and came back to her, she slightly nod her head and let themselves escape the madness.

“Let’s go. Let’s go and get our from this mess..” she said to her, the woman people inside referred as a model. As a woman named Meryam.

“Are you sure that you don’t know anyone by that name? The name people called you by? Meryam?”

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Aria tucked her strands of hair in the back of her ear, nervous, a little guilty for losing her temper. Aria herself never knew she had that side whenever someone invaded her or someone's privacy. It felt like she was not herself for some moment when she confronted the culprit.

"I am sorry, I should not have.. It just.. It is so irritating; we are supposed to be having a good time," Aria sighed as she placed her phone in her clutch and stood up from her seat.

"Let me help you with your stuff; let's not meet in public places again; they are too harsh for treating you this way," Aria's lips were trembling out of the rage that slowly still ignited in her heart; she was fighting it with the usual calmness she had.

Aria was stunned hearing the query, "no, Frederica.. I have no idea who is Meryam.. The only Meryam I know is Meriam Bellina and she is alive, and I am not as pretty as her," Aria was confused why on earth they said that she was Meryam.

Who the hell was Meryam. To hell with Meryam.

"Frederica, I apologise for this unexpected trait I never knew I have," her eyes a little teary as the skin on her forehead wrinkled from utter confusion on why she acted up like a lunatic while ago.

She must have had scared the acquaintance she had. Oh, perhaps this is why she was forbidden to ever engage in such fame or to meet many people.

Maybe the problem has always been her and the family were trying to protect her.

Aria closed her eyes for a couple of minutes before opening them and smile weakly, "do you still want a tea and chat in my house.. Or should we call it an end?" They barely have a total length conversation; this was too embarrassing.

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Frederica and Aria both left the cafe quickly just to avoid more eyes starring at both of them. Not to forget, the twins were being pushed by her as they’re sleeping in the stroller. Thankfully, they weren’t awake. To saw her new friend trembling— perhaps from the fear and anger she felt earlier, Frederica gave her a warm hug and pat her back gently, trying to calm her down from the incident they had inside.

She stepped back to end the hug as she listened to her answer regarding Frederica’s previous question about that woman people called as ‘Meryam’. That name that people referred Aria as. “That’s pretty strange,” she commented while mumbling before Frederica turned her attention and change the topic.

“Please don’t apologize. It’s not your fault at all. It’s just the media trying to dig about my family more each day, especially after the news. I was the one who should’ve apologized to you for bringing this stupid fuss around, even aboard. I didn’t expect someone would actually notice me and the twins. I’m sorry,” she said as she emitted a slight smile on her face while looking at her feeling guilty and also worried.

“It’s been hard for both of us today. How about we end the day here and meet up later either in my or your house? I’m sure we’ll have more privacy than what we had today. You must’ve been shocked and tired too,” Frederica suggested.

Not only Aria, but Frederica also needed some time off, back at home. Today was pretty exhausting for her too. Her emotions being put in a roller coaster ride just in seconds.

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Aria seemed to be aloof at the moment; she was confident that she could never cope up with any fame she would gain if her identity as a child book writer was revealed.

It has been proven how she rectified the event that has happened a while ago.

Frederica was there, hugging Aria, trying to help her calm herself down as they left the cafe altogether. Aria wished the baby would not be bothered with the rickety that has happened inside. Although Aria was not loud, but she knew what she has done would create more chaos.

Aria knew how Indonesian deal with the issue, rumour, scandals, and the worst privacy. Many tend to say whenever dame was in their palm, so their privacy was for the public to consume. The whole idea was too frightening that she felt like she could puke any moment.

Frederica has decided to call it an end for the day, it would be unwise and thoughtless if she begged her to pay a visit to her modest abode. Hence Aria agreed to her decision and gave the nod as the answer.

She was right; this short time became too much for her. Both of them deserved some tranquil rest back at home. A sigh emitted out of her thin lips. "Please do not apologise.. People need to learn privacy," the lass scrunched her nose.

"I wish to meet you in a better environment, I mean, where no one would sneak to film or take pictures. I hope you and the twins will be fine; please be careful on your way back home," Aria was worried. What if the media chased after her and followed her home. That's horrific.

As both said their farewell, Aria's driver sudden covered her with his blazer as he scooted her to the car. As they got in the car, he delivered Mama's message for her.

"Non Aria, pakai masker, ya? Disuruh Ibu," he was running out of breathe as he began to drive away from the cafe. "Kenapa lagi sih .. Mama kok requestnya makin aneh," she sounded out a protest on how bizarre the request she has received, although she wore it eventually.

All her life, Aria always being told what to do and do not. It was sickening, as if she had done something terrible in the past. But, Aria was not dwelling on her fate, but Frederica's.

Would she be alright? The media was making them prey. It was not easy to escape from their snare.

End of Expect The Unexpected.

[the-christian-walk]

GLADNESS IN LOSS

Can I pray for you in any way?

Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com In Christ, Mark

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** Follow The Christian Walk on Twitter @ThChristianWalk

** Like posts and send friend requests to the author of The Christian Walk, Mark Cummings on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mark.cummings.733?ref=tn_tnmn

** Become a Follower of The Christian Walk at http://the-christian-walk.blogspot.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“You heard Me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved Me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe. I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over Me, but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what My Father has commanded Me.”

“Come now; let us leave.”

John 14:28-31

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

In the closing verses of John 14, we find Jesus telling His disciples something that must have seemed counterintuitive, at least by the world’s standards. For within these four verses, there is one central message Jesus conveys:

There is gladness in loss.

Huh?

Wait a minute Jesus. Are you saying that the death of someone should be a time of joy and not sorrow…a time of celebration instead of mourning?

That’s exactly what Jesus was getting at and He didn’t just send the message, He backed it up with reasoning, reasoning not based on opinion or hyperbole but rather truth…past, present, and future.

First, the past.

Jesus had told His disciples He would have to suffer and die. He told them on more than one occasion. He knew what was coming and why it was coming. And He knew fully that what was ahead was His purpose, the reason His Father gave Him live to begin with.

Further, the prophets had foretold not only Jesus’ coming but His suffering and dying as well. And so what was coming had been predicted and Jesus was fulfilling prophecy, something that could be received with joy as it completely validated the words that had been spoken, not words contrived by God’s messengers but rather given to them by God Himself. The connection between God the Father and His Son existed before Jesus was even conceived.

Next, there was the present.

Jesus would be dead within 24 hours from speaking these words to His disciples but death was not the end for Him. He wouldn’t go into the tomb and that was it. People wouldn’t always speak about Jesus in the past tense after His death. Rather, Jesus would come back to life, resurrected with power from God, just as He had told His disciples He would. And if this wasn’t enough reason to rejoice and be glad, Jesus gave His followers one more. For Jesus would be going to God, His Father and theirs, after His resurrection and when He did, His disciples would remember these words He was speaking within our passage today and believe.

Finally, there was the future.

For as Jesus was first resurrected and then allowed to ascend to sit at God’s right hand, He gained victory over Satan, who Jesus calls the “prince of this world” in our passage. Note that although Satan was coming, He had no hold on Jesus, no more than He does on anyone who has placed their hope in Him as Savior since He walked the earth. In the end translation, Satan, the prince of the world, was no match for Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and he has zero chance of defeating anyone who has placed their faith in Jesus, receiving the promise of eternal life only found in and through Him.

This good news of future victory through Jesus should lift up our hearts and spirits when we are left in the wake of loss. It’s something I have had to deal with personally for the past seven years on more than one occasion to include my father’s death in 2011.

I was one year from retiring after spending 28 and a half years in the United States Navy. My father had been one of my number one supporters over the course of my career and we had spoken about doing future things together following my retirement. I was looking forward paying tribute to him and my mother during my formal ceremony.

Then I received a call in the summer of 2010. My father had been found at the bottom of the stairs at a local business and after being taken to the hospital, it was determined he had suffered a stroke. The effects were devastating and my father never recovered fully, moving from the hospital to a rehab facility and finally home where he spent his final days.

I remember the funeral and how I felt such a sense of peace and happiness for my dad. Sure, I was going to miss him and I could have sat there and yearned for more time together but doing so would have almost been as if I was questioning God’s timing in calling His child home. I’ve come to realize that we can covet things in many ways, to include more time with the people we love, but there’s a reason that God commanded us not to covet. And so I chose not to wish for more than I had been given, and frankly, I should have only felt blessed that the Lord gave me as much time with my father as He did. I also was happy for my dad because he would no longer have to suffer the afflictions caused by the stroke. Departed from the world but at home with God, I knew that the Lord would make him a brand new man.

My father’s death would be followed by a three brothers-in-law within a 9 month period between 2014 and 2015, a brother-in-law’s wife in 2016, a niece in 2019, and a sister-in-law in 2020. All were Christians. All gatherings to pay tribute to their lives were celebrations, not funerals, as we shared gladness in the midst of loss.  

In today’s message, we find Jesus telling His disciples, both in the upper room and every disciple since, that there is joy to be found in death, and it was only made possible through the love of God as expressed through Jesus His Son, the Lamb of God who came to take away the sin of the world and thus remove the sting from death. In Christ, there are no “goodbyes”, just “see you laters” and friends, this is reason for all of us to feel ecstasy and jubilation as we give thanks to God and Jesus for the promise of salvation, the promise our departed loved ones have entered into.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com

[aggretsukoguide]

Aggretsuko Cheats

Aggretsuko Guide

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That's why, notwithstanding the talk over dubbed or subtitles, "Aggretsuko" need to still be considered in its unique language. The cutesy tone and inflections used by jap ladies simply can not be mimicked in english. Livedata also mechanically eliminates the observer whilst the fragment's ondestroy() method is called. We also did not upload any logic to address configuration adjustments, together with the person rotating the tool's screen. The userprofileviewmodel is mechanically restored when the configuration adjustments, in order quickly as the brand new fragment is created, it gets the same example of viewmodel, and the callback is invoked immediately the usage of the current statistics. Given that viewmodel gadgets are meant to out live the corresponding view items that they update, you shouldn't include direct references to view items inside your implementation of viewmodel. 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So be strategic and choose the right candidate to satisfy the assigned assignment. Now not pigs in the feel that they rolled around in mud or did not bathtub (or hello, maybe that too), but more within the sense that their conduct turned into abhorrent, and worth of landing them a nickname similar to "swine". Director ton - as he's acknowledged - or "retsuko's boss," is the laziest, most ungrateful, chauvinistic pig (i suggest literally, he's a pig) you may ever stumble upon in an workplace putting. He does his very first-class to make retsuko's work-lifestyles (and not directly, her non-public life) a residing hell, as we see. ), we adore it! Whilst season 3 ought to be released on august 27th, this cellular puzzle game of the candy weigh down kind may be a very good way to attend until then. You will be able to find your favored characters and popular clips to unencumber. Aggretsuko: quick timer strikes backs has already arrived on cell. It should not be too hard to locate it in apple or android stores, specifically if you use the brand new design filters. After some technical problems on the day of its launch, july twenty seventh, the whole thing appears to be returned to ordinary due to the fact that then. Ouch! In this kind of lifestyle rampant with sexism, wherein ladies are anticipated(!) To be kawaii and demure and submissive, input our pink panda heroine retsuko! Sidenote: Aggretsuko is a playful aggregate of the title of the series of one hundred lively shorts released back in 2016-17 underneath the name competitive retsuko. To be honest, before retsuko, sanrio had produced the character of gudetama — a genderless, lazy and hilariously zeal-less egg yolk in a perpetual kingdom of ennui. It changed into such an unusual addition to the japanese understanding of kawaii that there's now a subcategory to explain the unconventional kawaii nature of some thing like gudetama: kimo-kawaii or guro-kawaii (that which is peculiar, and gruesome-lovely). It is precise exercise to separate the ui action from the actual information due to the fact the statistics might be up to date for diverse motives. For instance, if we fetched a list of buddies, the equal consumer is probably fetched again programmatically, triggering a livedata replace. From the ui's attitude, the truth that there is a request in flight is just some other data point, much like every other piece of information in the user item itself. We are able to use one of the following strategies to display a regular records-updating status in the ui, regardless of wherein the request to update the information came from: inside the separation of worries section, we cited that one key gain of following this principle is testability. If hearing the words "insightful" and "sanrio" in the same sentence made no sense to you, you're sorely behind on the atypically-cute characters as well as the delightfully perceptive and acutely observational animated shorts that the company has been churning out for the past few years. Sanrio, japan's mascot design giant, which was (until recently) most famous for making adults annually buy into $7 billion worth of merchandise featuring a somewhat-anthropomorphic little cat that was originally aimed at preadolescent females, has somehow managed to redefine and subvert kawaii culture, which is a huge part of japanese popular culture and society. 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[fuccwolf]

If you still need further proof of Kale’s damage control posts being bullshit, please read.

Alternatively, if you need no further convincing but would just like to see how much of a fucking liar Kalematsba is,I implore you too read on. Underneath this readmore will be some pretty disgusting images, I have censored out the nudity but if viewing someone directly profiting off *sugioii kawaii anime child abuse art uwu* would upset you or bring back bad memories maybe just avoid this post.

So, let’s start off looking at one of Kale’s damage control posts. 

Just the first two paragraphs and Kale is immediately lying to the reader. The way he is writing this makes it out that he was being forced to draw little boys being sexually abused for the past 4 years and he even claims he had “only” drawn 1 or 2 in the past 2 years (THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT HES LYING)  All one needs to do to see the contradictions is look at his old patreon, under his old alias “Kalechippu”.

This is what it looks like right now, completely empty except for one post. 

This will come in later. Oh and you see the character Kale is saying he will make “nsfw goodness” of? He’s a child. 

This is what his patreon looked like back in August, 2014. You can find this page by typing in this url in WaybackMachine. 

Here we have a example of what is to follow. Again, I’d advise against reading this if feel it would upset you.

Thanks to a certain website I am able to show you what was going on behind closed doors. As shown here he started this Patreon in July, 2014. 2014.

Hm, strange, for someone who is so against drawing “disgusting shit” (anime child porn) it’s strange that he opened his patreon, specifically catering to pedophiles only 3 years ago. Because making a service which caters to the people you supposedly hate is really telling them to “piss off and leave me alone”. This isn’t the only time Kale’s “4 years clean” claim will be disproved.

Kale’s first contribution is bodypillow cover art of Wally from pokemon, who is positioned in an obviously sexual way and is not wearing any pants. This character is 10 years old.

I’m not going to comment on every picture Kale has contributed to his patreon (It would take far too long) but if it wasn’t clear almost every piece of art that was uploaded to this patreon is meant to depict children in sexual scenarios. That goes for the post on the right as well. For someone who is trying to tell their pedophillic following to  “piss off and leave me alone” isn’t it strange to make a portfolio of all the pedophillic art you have done that year and advertise it as “2015 edition!”.Oh and yes this is post was made in 2015. 2 years ago. Every image you see after this is after Kale allegedly stopped drawing anime child porn.

What I’m about to show next is truly horrifying, this is a warning.

In the left picture, Kale depicts a child with his hands tied, getting cut with a knife. He then draws the different child being raped, covered in cuts and bruises and crying. He then draws both the characters, looking eerily like they are meant to be dead, covered in semen. THIS.WAS.TWO.YEARS.AGO. HE.IS.A.FUCKING.LIAR.

Does this sound like someone who doesn’t enjoy what they are doing. Does this sound like someone who is telling their following to “piss off and leave me alone”. You can see an example of art Kale produced in those request streams, pictured is the character Dipper Pines from Gravity Falls in his underwear. This character is meant to be 12-13 years old.

Proof that this was Kalematsba’s patreon. His old tumblr, Kalechippu, got taken down when people made callout posts about him being a fucking pedo. Notice even after being called out on this, Kale continues to produce child porn art.

It is almost 2016 and he is still making shotacon artwork. If we are to believe that Kale wanted to stop making this art 4 years ago this is 2 years after giving it up and telling those awful pedos that Kale certainly wasn’t friends with to piss off. But the fact Kale calling people he was once very close with and friendly with “disgusting ped/philes” is another story. He is so enthusiastic to cater to pedophiles he even hosted a character poll so they could choose their favourite fictional little boy for him to sexualize.

March, 2016. 1 year ago. Kale is still producing child porn art. Not just child porn art, he decided to skip all the pleasantry and just call it is. Child rape art. THIS IS 3 YEARS AFTER KALE WAS SUPPOSED TO OF GAVE UP ON DRAWING LITTLE BOYS AND CATERING TO PEDOPHILES. He even took the love and care to write “THIS KID IS TO TOO TIGHT” cross it out and write “NOT ANYMORE” on the depicted child’s thigh. You can really tell how Kale super against this and had his hand forced by the way he named this depicted child rape picture “cumdump *character name*”. 

More anime child porn. April 2016. Still hasn’t stopped.

June 2016. It was only over a year ago Kale stopped producing for his patreon. It has only been 9 months since he formally closed his patreon. 9 months.

Kale was never being threatened to make shotacon artwork, he chose to produce it because he enjoyed making it and it was profitable for him. If the fact he only chose to close his patreon 9 months ago isn’t evidence enough of that, well, I guess I’ve have to try harder then.

I’m not going to link to the website I was able to find Kale’s old patreon art on, however if you are somehow convinced I doctored images or I’m lying send me an ask and I’ll give you a link.

Thank you very much for reading. 

[pileofsketches]

Hi Writer!

I’m noun on Ao3; thank you for writing for me! To give you an idea of my tastes, I’ve got the standard DNWs below. Anything not mentioned is fair game.

On consent, I’m ok with dubious consent—be it because consent cannot be discussed beforehand, dubcon turning into con, or simply because desire overcomes reasons why person didn’t consent fully in the first place. Otherwise, go wild. I like enthusiastic consent, arousal is arousing.

DNWs: dialogue lifted entirely from canon (callbacks are fine!), first-person writing (unless in epistolary format), character studies (whole fic musing on someone’s canonical actions, no new content/action), hopeless or depressing endings (angst and struggle during the fic = great), coffee shop/minimum wage struggle AUs, noncon, trans headcanons, autism headcanons, asexuality headcanons, prostitution as a positive (background prostitution/mentions of trafficking are a-ok), daddy kink or parental role kink, and sexualized choking.

A/B/O is a trope I absolutely adore—the changes to society! the possessiveness! the various kinks!—but please no male pregnancy/women who can impregnate.

If, in any place, a kink/trope looks to override any specific DNW, the kink/trope wins out. That shouldn’t happen in this exchange, but if it does—kink/trope trumps.

List is organized by fandom, then universal kinks, parings, then paring specific kinks if applicable. There are so many freeform tags, I tried to give a sentence each as to why I like each one, and more if possible. Also, you can assume if I like a specific kink (ie, Breeding Kink -- We Have to Conceive the Chosen One(s)) then I will like it in a general sense (= breeding kink) and it’s a-ok to use it in combo with another prompt.

Assassin’s Creed – All Media Types

I have not played anything after Syndicate, but am familiar with the comics up to Juno’s death and some of the YA novels. Please do not use any of the Odyssey/Origins lore, be it on whatever they’re doing with the Precursor backstory or Assassin motivations or whatever.  

 A/B/O - Alpha begs to be allowed to knot: I love the desperation and the contrast between perceived authority of the alpha versus the omega actually giving permission.

 A/B/O - Animalistic Behavior: Biting, marking, a general retreat to more animalistic instincts. I like A/B/O set-ups where it’s the alpha who gets uncontrollable while the omega, while in heat, retains their wits. I do love nesting omegas!

 A/B/O - breeding triads:  ‘Successful’/stable relationships involve either one of each, or two alphas and an omega, or two omegas and an alpha.

A/B/O - First time rut Alpha with experienced omega: Self-explanatory.  

Alternate Universe - Role Reversal: Fandom specific! Either a) make the Assassins Templars, or b) swap motivations as far as Pieces of Eden.

Bondage and Discipline - Honor Bondage: Give me some of that Assassin control! Does the paranoia and like, actual expertise with restraints and weapons make this the more interesting/more sexual option? How does control get handled when that’s one of someone’s huge ideological pillars?

Breeding Kink - Those are some excellent genes you have there: For any of the past parings, they know they have to have a kid to make Desmond happen. For any of the later ones, is it a pre-Flare attempt to get them a backup plan? Is Abstergo making them do it?

Breeding Kink - We Have to Conceive the Chosen One(s):  For any of the past parings, they know they have to have a kid to make Desmond happen. For any of the later ones, is it a pre-Flare attempt to get them a backup plan? Is Abstergo making them do it?

Character From Future Tries To Convince Current Enemy They Will Be Friends/Allies In Future: Desmond going back to the Farm, Desmond going back before his kidnapping, Desmond waking up from any of his Animus experiences with knowledge of the Flare and trying to get to Lucy earlier, Maria going back to the first time she met Altair and trying to help him, Altair waking up in the middle of his missions from either the end of his life or the middle of his successful relationship and trying to mend things with Malik/meet Maria sooner.

Character goes bad to save the world and enjoys it more than expected: I will kill for this in a ToWK setting for Connor. Or, Desmond—the Eye somehow gives him all the power, and he decides to fix everything/break the cycle. I’m also for this with anyone in the Altair/Malik/Maria trio—what does it look like if one of them manages to use the Apple?

Comes Back Wrong: Mostly for Desmond. Everyone is glad he’s ok, but there’s some element of Precursor/just plain done with being manipulated/whatever you want to slap on. Also, for Malik or Maria after their canonical deaths.

Dubcon voyeurism to consensual threesome: self-explanatory.

Lavish Descriptions Of Historical Clothing: specifically 18th century, but I’m flexible.

Loyalty Kink: self-explanatory.

Sex Pollen: self-explanatory.

Soulmates: Characters have each other's names on their wrists: self-explanatory.

Soulmates - they know from a young age that they're soulmates but smth keeps them apart: self-explanatory.

Touch-Starved Character Having Overwhelming Tender Long Foreplay First Time Sex: self-explanatory, but it does scream Connor.

Werewolves - Sex With Werewolf in Wolf Form: self-explanatory. 

Desmond Miles/Lucy Stillman (Assassin's Creed)  

I like this paring because of what an effective lure Lucy was for Desmond, with the fact that she was 1) attractive 2) saved him and 3) had a relationship with Bill that seemed like perfect bait (and was) for Desmond’s own issues with him. Desmond’s forgiveness of her, Lucy’s tragic death, the parallels that were made in the game between him and Lucy and Maria and Altair—all great.

Malik Al-Sayf/Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad/Maria Thorpe (Assassin's Creed)

My favorite OT3s are the ones where each person has an independently strong relationship with the other two in the trio, and supports each one/gets different things out of each one. I like Maria and Malik moderating Altair and dealing with the complicating feelings he has for each one when he’s been such a lone wolf for most of his life. (I am also a big fan of Tazim being Malik and Maria’s kid)

Ratonhnhaké:ton | Connor/Original Female Character(s) (Assassin's Creed)

This ship is entirely a vehicle for kinks/tropes, do whatever you’d like to make the OFC work. My only request is that she not be a colonist who’s Not Like Other Girls, ie, won’t wear stays/a corset and a skirt, or be someone that Connor rescued who now has a crush on him. Also, I would kill for a ToKW setting.

Rebecca Crane/Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles (Assassin's Creed)

Pretty much the same as the Altair/Malik/Maria ship- I like OT3s are the ones where each person has an independently strong relationship with the other two in the trio, and supports each one/gets different things out of each one. I would be as happy for something set pre-Flare where the three of them fall in together because hey, it’s the end of the world, as much for something Syndicate/Black Flag era where Desmond is revived/downloaded from the cloud and they’re very glad to have him back.

Dishonored (Video Games)

 Arranged Marriage - Public Consummation

Bondage and Discipline - Honor Bondage

Breeding Kink - We Have to Conceive the Chosen One(s)

Character goes bad to save the world and enjoys it more than expected

First Time - A Patient with B's Clumsy but Enthusiastic Blow Job/Cunnilingus: Would prefer Emily to be the experienced one. 

If I Must Solve A Dozen Geopolitical Problems Just To Have Sex With You Then I Will

Lavish Descriptions Of Historical Clothing

Loyalty Kink

Ritual Sex Magic

Soulmates - they know from a young age that they're soulmates but smth keeps them apart

Emily Kaldwin/The Outsider

General monster boyfriend vibes, the idea of the destined lover, the inevitability of fate vs active and individual choice. I prefer Outsider-Outsider, but am ok with a story that splits between divinity and mortal or sets him as the slightly-off human. Please no naivety/woobie human Outsider.

Xeno - Loving oral on Wet Pinecone Dick (Awapuhi Plant gif)

Xeno - sex shouldn't be physically possible but we're not cowards

Be Not Afraid for I have some excellent dick

Consentacles

Kirin Jindosh/Emily Kaldwin

Coup-tested royalty vs clawed his way up from the gutter genius—the class divide is a huge part of why I like this paring. I like Emily pushing and Jindosh resisting—until he doesn’t—and the idea of the public/private divide as far as behavior.

Masked Ball As An Excuse for Inadvisable Sex: This is just the Fugue Feast, so. 

Pregnancy - Impregnator Wins the Throne

Soulmates - Characters have each other's names on their wrists: The angst! How does Jindosh handle this, growing up. (How do you even prove it’s real?) How does his struggle to get close enough to Emily influence his choices? Is he even interested in nobility? How does Emily handle her side? Just give me class issues and the concept of fate/avoiding fate.

The Witch (2016)

Please don’t make Thomasin’s age/youth a kink. In the period setting, she’s more or less a full adult, dresses like one, etc. Also, I would prefer a benevolent/semi-benevolent Black Philip in the sense of a viable alternative to the religion Thomasin was raised in, and a humanoid over a goat. The theme of willing and educated consent is particularly important to me in this one- Thomasin makes her choices understanding the cost, and is an enthusiastic participant, or is actively convinced. 

Black Philip/Thomasin (The Witch)

Alternate Universe - Formal Matriarchy: How does the witch commune in the forest work? Where do they get their food/supplies? (’noun, that’s too much thought for a horror movie’) How does this turn out in fifty years/sixty? Listen, I just want a functioning magical matriarchy that yells fuck off/fights expansionism. 

Breeding Kink - We Have to Conceive the Chosen One(s) Slash anti-Christ, or a bunch of demons, or whatever.

Lavish Descriptions Of Historical Clothing: Particularly corsets, or the sort of clothing that wealthy women would wear in this time period. She was tempted by a pretty dress, among other things. 

Pregnancy - pregnant with multiples

Sex with Monsters

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)

Please keep this in the era the show is set in! I am a-ok with period homophobia, but am not interested in a coming out type story where the focus of the struggle is triumph over adversary- I like Midge’s career being the focus, or little domestic scenes. Maybe something where they’re in a relationship by the time she realizes that Shy’s gay? Is she able to handle herself better because of this? I am also perfectly happy if Midge and Susie remain closeted to friends/family during the story/their relationship seems like how it is in the show to everyone else, and there’s no angst over that.

Miriam "Midge" Maisel/Susie Myerson (Mrs Maisel)

Butch woman is allowed to remain butch for entirety of story

Canon Got Fucked and They Lived Happily Ever After

Character A thinks they're just character B's rebound but they're not

Lavish Descriptions Of Historical Clothing

Make This Fic Super Excited About Bing Set in New York

[ericfruits]

The Liberal Democrats bet on a vow to overturn the Brexit referendum

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS do not like Brexit. To clear up any lingering doubts about this, at their conference in Bournemouth a batch of their freshly elected MEPs strode on stage wearing “STOP BREXIT” T-shirts. Elsewhere, activists wearing blue berets spangled with EU stars wandered around hawking “Bollocks to Brexit” stickers. For those who had still not got the message, Jo Swinson, the party’s leader, unveiled a new policy: if the Lib Dems win the next election, they will revoke Britain’s Article 50 request to leave the EU “on day one”.

While Labour has wobbled on Brexit, the Lib Dems have dug in as the party of Remain. Their previous policy was to support a second referendum, which they have called for consistently since the first one, in 2016. The party says it will still back a second referendum if, as is almost inevitable, it fails to win a majority.

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Not all are happy with the revoke policy. Grandees grumbled. Sir Norman Lamb, one of the party’s more Eurosceptic MPs, complained that simply revoking would annoy voters in the rural south-west, where the Lib Dems hope to gain seats, and his own constituency of North Norfolk. Brexit tore up old electoral alliances. The Lib Dems have historically relied on a mix of university towns and well-to-do suburbs (which tended to back Remain) and rural seats (where Leave was popular). Wavering Tory Remain-voters may think it a bit rum to ditch Brexit without another vote on the matter. And many of the Lib Dems’ most winnable seats are Tory ones (see chart).

Yet the move will please the party’s growing base of Remainers. Remain-voters prefer cancellation of Brexit to a second referendum by two to one, according to a poll by Opinium. A petition calling for the revocation of Article 50 was signed by 6.1m people—nearly three times more than voted Lib Dem in the general election of 2017. Defenders of the revoke policy point out that it has attracted attention to the party, and contrast its clarity with Labour’s evolving muddle. Labour would hold a second referendum but its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said on September 17th that he would be neutral during the campaign.

Unless polls are wildly wrong, the Lib Dems’ promise to revoke Article 50 could prove as relevant as a Sunday-league footballer’s plan for an elaborate celebration should he score in an FA Cup final. If the party wins its predicted 20% or so, Ms Swinson will not go to Downing Street.

Still, optimism abounded in Bournemouth. Normally the annual conference is a form of therapy for Lib Dems, jokes Tim Farron, who led the party in 2015-17 while it was on life support, with 8% of the vote and only eight MPs. Now its MPs are bombastic. Chuka Umunna, who defected from Labour (via Change UK) this summer, suggested that 200 seats would be in contention if the party got a 5% swing. When a party wins more than about a quarter of the vote, a deluge of seats follows, under the logic of the first-past-the-post system.

Yet local politics can trump national swings. Remainers are clustered in cities and Scotland, whereas Leavers are scattered more evenly, making it easier for pro-Brexit parties to pick up seats. A modest headwind could blow the Lib Dems off course. Only one of their 18 seats—Orkney and Shetland—is truly safe. The Lib Dems are inches from both disaster and glory.

Either way, they may play kingmaker. Ms Swinson has ruled out any formal coalition or pact with either Labour or the Conservatives. Instead the party will vote on a case-by-case basis, says Sir Ed Davey, its finance spokesman. The Lib Dems were burnt when a tie-up with the Tories in 2010-15 resulted in them losing 90% of their MPs in the next election. Breaking popular manifesto promises, such as ending tuition fees, did the most damage. When it comes to Brexit, the Lib Dems will try not to make the same mistake twice. ■

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Ctrl+Z Brexit"

https://ift.tt/2V8gx79

[kirby42280]

Waterfall Eclipse II: The Lost Clan - Chapter Six

A/N: HELLO ALL!

Another update here, as promised. Enjoy!

Just a couple of notes:

1. If you haven't read the first part to this story, you may want to. You might miss jokes that I may reference, etc. This story starts pretty much right where the first part ends. Find part one here: Fanfiction.net / Tumblr / Wattpad

2. I finished WE-I back in April 2016, which means my captains and lieutentants don't really match up to what Tite Kubo did in his manga. I am keeping my list for the most part. The only ones I got right were Rukia Kuchiki and Isane Kotetsu. If you would like me to write up a list of my captains and lieutenants, leave me a message and I will reply. If I get enough requests, I may make a side chapter that shows it.

Summary: Hitsugaya Rani is back with the next step in her story - finding out her the history of the crest on her hairpin. Along with suffering from a series of nightmares that somehow link together and the research of one ten-year-old, Rani finds out the truth about her past and what it may mean for her future.

Waterfall Eclipse II: The Lost Clan

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five

Part II on: Fanfiction.net / Wattpad

Chapter Six:

Four hours later, Rani was heading with Captain Kuchiki to a residence further than the Kuchiki Manor, and she was nervous. Hours before, she read the letter that was sent to Captain Kuchiki in response to his request to the Takayama clan. The head agreed to have Captain Kuchiki as a visitor, but it had to happen that evening since they were expecting guests the next day.

Once they arrived, they were escorted inside by a servant who did not say a word to either of them.

"Remember what I said."

"I am to stay outside until I am called inside, if I am called inside." Rani repeated.

Her captain nodded as he then followed the servant inside. The servant noticed Rani not heading in and looked at the captain confused.

"It's fine. She can wait outside."

After a nod, the two walked inside.

"I was surprised, Lord Kuchiki, to receive your request this morning. I am sorry though, that I asked you to come on such short notice."

"It is fine." Byakuya greeted. "I am just thankful that you agreed to see me."

"I am also confused, since your request was..a bit vague."

"Forgive me for that, and please forgive me for what I am about to say and bring up." he started. "I am going to be a bit blunt here, so my apologies again." Lord Takayama was slightly intrigued and worried. "Is your daughter, Lady Sugi, still alive, by chance?"

"Sugi? Yes, she is. Did you want to speak with her instead of me?"

"Not me. My lieutenant, who is waiting outside would like a word with her. Sugi might have some insight for her regarding a certain clan."

Lord Takayama's eyes got wide.

"You don't mean…"

"Yes, I do."

The seated lord stood up abruptly and walked over to Captain Kuchiki.

"What connection with that clan does that child have? Is she the missing daughter?"

"If I answer you, you must promise to keep it secret. Official word has not been sent out anywhere for one reason alone."

"I swear I will not tell anyone."

"She is Lady Amaraniyah, sole heir to the Sutohamu clan."

"Thank the heavens! She has been found safe!"

"Lord Takayama!"

"Yes, yes, quite right." He said as he walked past Byakuya. "Follow me."

Captain Kuchiki followed him out the door and stopped when he saw Rani.

"Miss, please follow me." Lord Takayama stated.

Rani looked to her captain confused. He nodded and followed as well.

Lord Takayama led her through the compound and to a small house. He lightly knocked on the door and walked in. Captain Kuchiki and Rani waited outside.

"My dear, Sugi, you have a very special visitor."

"Who?"

"I want her to tell you, so can she come in?"

"Okay."

Lord Takayama came back outside and motioned for Rani to go in.

"Just a word of warning, my daughter is not in the best of health."

Rani nodded and then carefully walked inside.

"Lady Sugi?"

"Yes, may I help you?"

Rani kneeled down in greeting.

"My dear, do not worry about formalities. I am not in any position to warrant that."

Rani got up and looked at the woman before her.

"So, who are you exactly? My father said he wanted you to introduce yourself."

"My name is Hitsugaya Rani, formerly Tómasu Rani."

"The names do not ring a bell, I am sorry."

"I knew they wouldn't, but maybe my actual birth name would." Rani said and then paused. "I was born Sutahomu Amaraniyah, and I am the sole heir of the Sutahomu clan."

Lady Sigu's eyes got wide with excitement after processing what Rani just admitted.

"Oh my!" she said as she flew her arms and got up, surprising her servants. "Little Raniyah!" she exclaimed as she put her hands on either side of Rani's face and stared at her. "It really is you. Where have you been all this time?"

Rani nervously swallowed.

"In the Rukongai and Gotei 13." she answered. "But Lady Sugi, I came here to see you. I have questions, so many of them, about my family. I think you are the only one who can answer them."

"Tea. Get us tea. NOW!" she barked. "Yes, I am sure you do."

Once the tea was brought, Rani sat down with Lady Sugi and nervously started to ask questions about her family. In the process, she told Lady Sugi about the dream that turned out to be a memory.

"I am sorry that's how you found out - through a repressed memory."

"Where is my uncle?" she bluntly asked. "What happened to him?"

Lady Sugi was shocked at the bluntness, but in a way she understood.

"Taiki was with me the night the attack happened. We were here. Visiting my parents." Lady Sugi stated. "We found out about the attack in the early hours in the morning. He was frantic. He headed back while I stayed here, but he soon returned a broken man. He adored the three of you - the twins and you. He doted upon all of you when you were around us." she said and then paused. "When he came back he almost didn't tell anyone, but he did talk to me before deciding to mourn in his own way. He ordered my whole family to keep quiet about us finding out about it. Since he was from a more prominent clan, we had to listen. It broke my heart seeing him suffer. We then got word that you were not among the dead and it gave him hope, but he opted to not look for you. He wanted to though, deep within. He thought if you were alive, that was enough for him. You would survive life somehow and be happy." another pause. "He lived a good life afterwards. Taiki passed away about ten years ago. I vowed to never marry again, however, you do have a cousin if you would like to meet him."

Rani listened to the heart-breaking tale of her uncle. The news of a cousin gave her some hope for some sort of familiar ties.

"I would like to meet him."

Lady Sugi nodded and requested her son be brought to her. A little while later, a young man of about 20 years of age came in.

"Mother!"

"Yoshi, I would like for you to meet your cousin, Amaraniyah."

He looked over at Rani confused.

"You can just call me Rani."

"Mother?"

"Believe me, I am surprised as you are, but we have told you the story of the Sutahomu clan. Amaraniyah was never found. She recently found out who she was and that her uncle may have survived."

"I know it's a shock, Yoshi, do not feel obligated to treat me as family. I'm still processing this and coming to terms with everything.'

He nodded before speaking.

"Have you thought about the clan? What will become of it?"

"Now that you mention it, since I didn't have any other family to my knowledge, it changes things." Rani realized. "I'm not the only heir if you are alive."

"Don't feel obligated to keep the clan. I am fine here. I even use the Takayama surname."

"Not the Sutahomu? How? Why?"

"Before Taiki passed, he asked Yoshi to use my surname from that point on. He wanted Sutahomu to not exist anywhere knowing that the Gotei 13 ordered the deletion of all records of the clan name and history." her aunt answered.

"But now that you know who you are, you can reverse that, right? If you want to, that is?"

Rani was torn. Here, she had family. A cousin who should be using his father's surname, but chose not to at the request of his late father. He was also an heir to the clan, so he could also revive the clan and use the grounds as a residence. But he was happy here. Her eyes started to water at the thought.

"Rani, I know it's a lot to think about. I am sure this isn't the first time you were approached with this question, but please do not feel like it's a necessity to restart this clan if you do not want to." Lady Sugi started. "You heard your cousin. He is fine here. You are the head since you are the eldest. Plain and simple. It's your choice. As a history of the Sutahomu clan, they never put one heirs sex above the other. First born, or oldest, that's how it always worked. Taiki told his son to remove the surname. He was the next heir since no one knew what happened to him and he chose to delete it to."

"This is a lot for me still." Rani realized.

"Go with your heart, Rani." her cousin pleaded. "I am fine here. I am engaged to a wonderful girl who's assuming my surname is Takayama. It's fine with me."

Rani let out a small chuckle at the "go with your heart" comment.

"You don't have to decide tonight, Rani." Lady Sugi commented. "I can see how torn you actually are about it. But let me say some things to possibly organize your thoughts - are you happy where you are now in the Gotei 13? Are you going to want to take control of a clan's business who has not been around in over twenty years, and all the responsibilities that go with it?" she asked then paused. "These are questions you need to answer."

"Is it a lot of work to be the head of a clan?"

"It is when you start from nothing and have no experience." Lady Sugi answered.

Rani was quiet for a few moments before asking her next question, which was going to change the topic.

"Do you know what happened to Nene and Chiyo?"

"I know Nene found work in a home in the Rukongai - a family in the South 4th District I believe. I think Chiyo was placed somewhere in the West 7th District. I don't know if they are still alive, but I am sure they lived a life they could be happy with."

Rani nodded, pleased with the answer she was given.

Before Rani and Captain Kuchiki left, Rani agreed to tell them her decision through a letter. Yoshi also led the two to his father's burial place in the Takayama cemetery. Rani paid her respects in private and then left with her commanding officer.

"Forgive me for butting in where I should not, but I do hope to take everything they told you into account in your decision, which is up to you alone. I know you have a lot going through your mind, but there is no rush in deciding the fate of your clan."

"Thank you captain." Rani said as she left him to go to Squad Ten.

~Three Days Later~

Rani focused on her work during the work hours, but once home she mulled over her dilemma not fully knowing what to do. She opted to take out a piece of paper and split it down the middle to write the pros and cons of reviving her clan. She couldn't make a long list on either side no matter what she thought of. The only "pro" was that her family's name would be back in history, but that was already being done by the captain commander. If her cousin was happy being a Takayama, she could just be happy being a Tómasu-Hitsugaya. She had no real knowledge on how to run a clan, and she certainly didn't want to start taking lessons. Although her family were on good terms with all clans, and friends with Lord Kuchiki Ginrei, that also was not enough for her want to revive it. She could always teach her kids about her side, about her story, instead of placing a heavy burden on them. Mid-thought she was surprised by someone tapping on her shoulder.

"Eek!"

"Sorry." Umeko said with a giggle.

"Hey Umeko."

Umeko looked at the list Rani was making.

"Well, this brings me back to the academy. How are you?"

"Going crazy."

"Do you want my opinion?"

"Sure."

"Don't revive your clan."

"What?"

"Think about it. You've lived as a Tómasu longer than a Sutahomu, right?" Rani nodded. "You may have been born into that clan, but that's not what makes a family. Without the two servants whisking you away in time, you would've been dead too. You wouldn't have met the parents who raised you, you wouldn't have joined the Gotei 13, and you certainly wouldn't have married Captain Hitsugaya." Umeko paused. "You wouldn't have experienced all that you have, nor become who you are today without living in the Rukongai." Umeko pulled Rani into a hug. "I can't imagine what is going on in your head, but you would not be the same person you are today if you were raised in a clan environment. You can always tell the story of your real identity to those around you. You have proof and confirmation of who you truly are, and that's what matters."

"I suppose you are right. If the Seireitei survived this long without the Sutahomu clan, they can survive eternity without it. And besides, there are other clans that die out as well, right?"

"Exactly." Umeko agreed. "Now come on, Kiyomi has news for us. We're meeting for dinner."

"Okay. I need a drink after all of this."

Umeko grinned as the two left and headed to meet Chiharu and Kiyomi. Before leaving, Rani left a note for her husband who was still in his office.

"What do you think Kiyomi has to tell us?"

"Maybe Lieutenant Hisagi proposed." Rani joked. She stopped walking and shook her head. "If I am right, do not laugh."

"You really think he proposed to her?"

"It's not entirely NOT possible. And we haven't really seen much of her lately."

"True." Umeko agreed as they arrived at the restaurant.

A minute later Kiyomi and Chiharu arrived laughing. They walked in and were seated immediately in their usual spot.

"The usual orders, ladies?" the waiter asked.

"Yes, please." the four chimed.

"So, what's the news, Kiyomi?" Umeko asked as soon as the waiter was gone.

"Well, Lieutenant Hisagi may or may not have proposed to me." Kiyomi answered slowly and finally grinning from ear to ear.

There was a delay in the screams of joy from the three, but it did eventually happen.

"THIS IS AWESOME!" Chiharu exclaimed. "Now we get to help plan your wedding."

"Right…about that…we aren't going to do a large spectacle like Rani, but I do want you girls there."

"Will you have a bachelorette party at least?" Umeko asked worried.

"Yes. Just not the big ceremony and all that. Rani's was too much for me, and too many people."

"It was large, but that's because who I had to invite since it was being held at the Kuchiki Manor. I had to host some of the larger clans, even though I was slightly disappointed about that." Rani admitted.

"It's going to be a simple affair with just Hisagi and me at the altar. You ladies and other guests will be in seats. We aren't having bridesmaids or groomsmen, no offense, but we want a nice dinner together afterwards, maybe in the Living World if we can swing it. Urahara said he can help us out if needed."

"Who's going to perform the ceremony with the vows?" Chiharu asked.

"I was thinking of asking the Head Captain if he would like the honor. I have to run that by Hisagi though, first."

The girls nodded in understanding and then decided to change the topic to other news updates in each other's lives as the food and drinks came out. Two hours later, they were all headed to their squads and homes and calling it a night.

"Did you have fun?" Toshiro asked his wife as she came in the door.

"Yes, I may be a little buzzed, but I needed those drinks tonight after yesterday and today." she answered as she crawled into the bed.

He shook his head and smiled.

"Any news with your friends?"

"Funny you should ask." Rani started groggily. "Kiyomi and Hisagi are engaged. I don't know when the small ceremony will be, or where, but I do know they aren't doing a big one like us." she ended.

Toshiro was partly shocked, but then again, he wasn't really.

"You just go to sleep. You do have work tomorrow."

"Mm-hmm."

Rani was off to dreamland before he knew it. He finished reading the paper in his hand before calling it a night himself.

Rani immersed herself in the work she missed just so she could try to catch up. Her random days off were getting more and more frequent as of late, but at lease she wasn't the one who was giving them to her - it was all on her captain. He was the one to blame when her work got backed up, and Rani was pleased to even think this.

Once the pile of reports was filled out to Captain Kuchiki's specifications, she put them on his desk for his approval. The ones he did approve, he handed to the Third Seat before heading out for a walk around the barracks. She made it to the dojo to find the Fourth Seat practicing with some new recruits. When she got to the practice grounds, she found the captain training some shinigami as well. She hurried along so she wasn't seen by him. Rani didn't want to be a victim to his "get back to work" attack which he had been using a lot more recently. On her way back to the office, she ran into Onishi Mei.

"Lieutentant, this package came for you."

"Thank you Onishi. Does it say who it's from?"

"No. But the person who delivered it was not from any of the Gotei 13. He was a commoner, I think, or from a clan." she answered as she pulled out two envelopes. "These are for you and the captain as well."

"Thank you. Oh, hey, did he ever apologize for when the two of you collided the other day?"

Onishi grimaced.

"Yes. He did come and find me. Was that your idea?"

"Maybe. It wasn't really anyone's fault. He should have seen you in the doorway and backing out."

"Thank you. I have to get back to work now."

The young shinigami left and Rani made her way upstairs to the office. She placed her package and envelope on her desk and then placed the captain's over onto his. Walking back over to her desk, the Third Seat also came in with some tea.

"Oh, the captain's not here?" Shirogana asked.

"Not yet. I am sure he will be though. I'll pour it for him when he comes."

"All right. Are there any more files that need to be put away?"

"I thought I put some on the table in there. Did you already file those?"

"Uh…no. I just made the tea and came up here."

Rani nodded. He left to do his work leaving her to contend with the package and envelope. She opened it to find it was a wedding invitation for her cousin.

"He must have been invited too." she thought out loud before starting to open the package.

"What is that?" Captain asked as he walked in.

"No idea. It was delivered here to me. As well as a wedding invitation. You might have received the same one." she said absentmindedly as she opened her parcel and he picked up the sealed envelope.

"Who's wedding?"

"Yoshi's." she answered curtly as she struggled. "Geez! This is hard to open."

"Use your katana."

Rani whipped her head over at him. She was unsure if he was serious or joking, and as the man never laughs it was really hard to tell.

"I don't want to risk destroying whatever is in here. I'll deal with it later."

He glanced over at her and the package.

"I can see from here how well sealed it is. Whoever did that didn't want anything happening to it in transit." he said as he walked over.

With a little luck and persistence, Captain Kuchiki was able to open it revealing some valuable looking clothing items with the Sutahomu Clan crest on it, as well as some jewelry and other items. Tucked inside a haori, was an envelope.

"This should have been delivered to my house in Squad Ten. Not here." Rani realized. "I'm sorry, captain."

"It's fine. I guess Lady Sugi found these and sent them here to you."

"Or Yoshi." Rani said absent-mindedly before placing the box to the side and out of the way.

Byakuya read the invitation and shook his head.

"I am not sure if I should attend the wedding, but you should. Even if your cousin is using his mother's maiden name, you are still family. And I doubt Lord Takayama would let anyone be rude to you."

Rani looked at him puzzled.

"We'll see. The wedding is in two months."

"I'll assume you are going to go. I'll make the arrangements for you to be clear from your duties."

"Thanks….I think." Rani replied before opting to change the topic. "What did the Central 46 say?"

"Nothing. They are shocked that such an event was deleted from the Seireitei's history, but understanding as well. Also, they said it is entirely up to you if you want to reinstate the Sutahomu clan."

"Great. I am not sure if being a head of a clan is more work or stressful than deciding on whether or not a clan should be reinstated."

He looked over at his lieutenant, and stayed silent. He had no words that would help her. And he did feel bad about it.

"I have a meeting tomorrow with the captains at eleven. I believe you have a lieutenant's meeting as well?"

"Uh..yes. Mine is at ten o'clock."

"Okay. We've got new forms to fill out before our meetings."

"UGH!" she moaned. "These form changes are driving me bonkers. I'd rather deal with Hollows than all of this paperwork."

"You are not the only one. A new threat would be nice."

"Now that's not funny, Captain Kuchiki. Not in the slightest." Rani said out loud while she laughed inside at the obsurdity of her captain's comment. She just hoped he didn't jinx the Seireitei or Living World.

Chapter Seven

Thank you for reading this story if you have been, though.

~Kirby42280~

[brajeshupadhyay]

Coronavirus LIVE Updates: India's COVID-19 cases exceed 34.63 lakh after 76,472 more test positive; toll over 62,000

09:48 (IST)

Coronavirus Outbreak in India LATEST Updates 

India's COVID-19 cases over 34 lakh

The COVID-19 count in India crossed 34 lakh on Saturday after 76,472 more cases were reported in the past 24 hours, said the health ministry. With 1,021 more patients succumbing to the contagious disease, the toll reached 62,550. 

The overall figure includes, 7,52,424 active cases, 26,48,999 recoveries and 62,550 deaths. 

09:25 (IST)

Coronavirus Outbreak in Rajasthan LATEST Updates 

Over 77,000 COVID-19 infections in Rajasthan

Rajasthan reported 12 more fatalities due to COVID-19 bringing the toll to 1,017, said the state health department. After 1,355 new infections reported, the overall count climbed to 77,370.

A total of 62,033 COVID-19 patients have recovered and the number of active cases in the state is 14,320. 

09:07 (IST)

Coronavirus Outbreak in India LATEST Updates 

Chidambaram pulls up Centre over economic mismanagement before COVID-19

Taking a swipe at the central government over mismanagement of the economy, former Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Saturday said: "If the pandemic is an 'Act of God', how do we describe the mismanagement of the economy during 2017-18 2018-19 and 2019-20 before the pandemic struck India? Will the FM as the Messenger of God please answer?"

08:38 (IST)

Coronavirus Outbreak in India LATEST Updates 

All Lok Sabha MPs to get tested for COVID-19 48 hours before start of the session: Speaker 

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla has requested all MPs willing to participate in the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament to undergo RT-PCR test.

At a preparatory meeting, chaired by Birla on Friday, it was decided that the RT-PCR test that usually takes 24-48 hours to come up with the results will be conducted.

08:28 (IST)

Coronavirus Outbreak in Delhi LATEST Updates 

Delhi govt to launch aggressive contact tracing of COVID-19 patients

The Delhi government will scale up COVID-19 testing through its network of 300 dispensaries and hospitals, and start aggressive contact tracing of coronavirus patients in the city, said Satyendar Jain on Friday.

The health minister said the AAP government is committed to doubling the COVID-19 test from the present 20,000 per day to 40,000 per day within a week in the National Capital.

08:05 (IST)

Coronavirus Outbreak in Maharashtra LATEST Updates 

Maharashtra reports 14,361 new COVID-19 cases, 331 deaths 

A total of 14,361 new COVID-19 infections were reported in Maharashtra on Friday, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 7,47,995, said the state health department. The figure includes 1,80,718 active cases, 23,775 deaths and 5,43,170 recoveries.

The COVID-19 toll in the state climbed to 23,775 after 331 more people succumbed to the highly contagious disease. 

Coronavirus LATEST Updates: With 1,021 more COVID-19 patients succumbing to the contagious disease, the toll in India reached 62,550 on Saturday.

Speaking about the GST Compensation gap, former Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Saturday took a swipe at the Centre over mismanagement of economy before COVID-19 pandemic.

"If the pandemic is an 'Act of God', how do we describe the mismanagement of the economy during 2017-18 2018-19 and 2019-20 before the pandemic struck India? Will the FM as the Messenger of God please answer?, asked Chidambaram.

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla has requested all MPs willing to participate in the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament to undergo RT-PCR test.

At a preparatory meeting, chaired by Birla on Friday, it was decided that the RT-PCR test that usually takes 24-48 hours to come up with the results will be conducted.

A record single-day rise of 77,266 coronavirus cases pushed India's total to over 33 lakh cases, the Union health ministry said on Friday. This spike in new cases is the highest in the world, crossing the number of new infections reported in the United States in the last 24 hours, reports said.

However, in terms of the total caseload, India is still at the third-highest rank, after the US and Brazil. The US has a total of over 58 lakh cases, while Brazil has a tally of over 37 lakh cases.

These figures were reported on a day the debate over whether or not to hold NEET, JEE exams continued and a sitting Member of the Parliament, Congress leader H Vasanthakumar, died of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, a current India cricketer is among multiple members of the Chennai Super Kings contingent who have tested positive for COVID-19, forcing the IPL franchise to extend its quarantine period in Dubai and causing  upheaval ahead of the event starting on 19 September.

The franchise is yet to issue a formal statement but a league source told PTI that the number of positive cases could be between 10 and 12.

Amid the rising cases, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla announced that every MP attending the Monsoon Session fo the Parliament will be asked to undergo to COVID-19 testing 72 hours before the session in September.

Meanwhile, recoveries in India surged to 25,83,948 on Friday, and the toll climbed to 61,529 with 1,057 new deaths in a span of 24 hours, the data updated at 8 am showed.

The recovery rate stood at 76.28 percent, while the COVID-19 case fatality rate further declined to 1.82 percent, the ministry added.

There are 7,42,023 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country, which comprises 21.90 percent of the total caseload, the data showed.

According to the ICMR, a cumulative total of 3,94,77,848 samples have been tested up to 27 August, with 9,01,338 samples being tested on Thursday.

Tamil Nadu Congress MP H Vasanthakumar dies of COVID-19

Congress MP from Tamil Nadu's Kanyakumari, H Vasanthakumar, died of COVID-19 at a hospital on Friday.

The 70-year old first time MP, and working president of Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, who was admitted to the Apollo Hospitals on 10 August after he tested positive for coronavirus. Vasanthakumar is survived by wife, two sons and a daughter, PTI reported.

Apollo Hospitals in a statement later said the MP was treated in a critical care unit for severe COVID-19 pneumonia.

"Despite all active medical measures, his condition deteriorated gradually due to COVID-19 complications and he passed away today," the hospital said.

Vasanthakumar, a two-time MLA (2006-11 and 2016-19) was elected to the Lok Sabha last year.

Meanwhile, former Karnataka minister and JD(S) leader HD Revanna also tested positive for coronavirus on Friday and was admitted to a hospital, PTI reported.

State health minister B Sriramulu said he was praying for Revanna's recovery and added, "HD Revanna has tested positive for coronavirus. I pray that he recovers and gets back to serve people."

Amarinder Singh goes into self-quarantine after  MLAs test COVID-19 positive

Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh quarantined himself after two Congress MLAs who met him during the one-day Assembly session on Friday tested positive for COVID-19.

The MLAs, Nirmal Singh and Kulbir Singh Zira, got tested for the disease after the one-day monsoon session.

"Punjab chief minister @capt_amarinder has decided to go into 7-day self quarantine, as per government protocol and the advise of his doctors, after two MLAs who met him in the Vidhan Sabha tested positive for #COVID19," tweeted Raveen Thukral, the media advisor to the chief minister.

Meanwhile the Chandigarh administration suspended the order of closing weekend markets, The Indian Express reported, quoting the order as saying that "congested markets will continue to open on odd-even formula till 3 September."

MPs to get tested for COVID-19 before Monsoon Session of Parliament

With the Monsoon Session of the Parliament set to begin in September, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla said that MPs will be asked to get themselves tested for COVID-19 at least 72 hours before the start of the session.

Besides MPs, Parliament staff and media personnel, among other entrants to the building, will also be required to get tested for the novel coronavirus.

Birla said arrangements have also been made for zero-touch security checks during the session and if required, random tests for COVID-19 can be conducted during the session.

Visitors will not be allowed during the session, which will be held as per the guidelines, including those on social distancing, issued by the health ministry in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Monsoon Session is likely to start from 14 September and conclude on 1 October.

To finalise the arrangements for the upcoming Monsoon Session of the Parliament, Birla on Friday chaired a meeting of officials from the health ministry, ICMR, AIIMS, DRDO, Delhi government, and Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats.

Second round of serological survey launched in Bhubaneswar

The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Friday launched the second round of serological survey to assess prevalence of COVID-19 among people in the city, as the Odisha capital is witnessing a rise in coronavirus cases this month.

Five teams will collect 1,500 samples from various locations in the city, PTI reported.

"The current exercise will provide an indication of the community exposure level which was found to be very low during the first round of the serological survey," the report quoted an official as saying.

The Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC) is providing technical support to the BMC to carry out the two-day survey in the city.

A serological survey is conducted to assess the prevalence of a disease in a society or population to see if people have developed antibodies against a virus. It shows how many or what percentage of population had contracted a particular disease and have acquired immunity against it.

State-wise deaths

Of the 1,057 fresh deaths, 355 are from Maharashtra, 141 from Karnataka, 109 from Tamil Nadu, 92 from Andhra Pradesh, 68 from Uttar Pradesh, 53 from West Bengal, 37 from Punjab, 24 from Madhya Pradesh, 22 from Delhi, 17 from Gujarat, 14 each from Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh, 13 from Rajasthan, 12 from Haryana, 11 each from Telangana and Jharkhand.

Ten casualties have been reported from Kerala and Puducherry, nine from Uttarakhand, eight from Bihar, seven from Odisha, six from Goa, four each from Assam and Tripura, two each from Chandigarh and Ladakh, while Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Himachal Pradesh have registered one fatality each.

Of the total 61,529 deaths, Maharashtra has reported the maximum at 23,444 followed by 6,948 in Tamil Nadu, 5,232 in Karnataka, 4,369 in Delhi, 3,633 in Andhra Pradesh, 3,217 in Uttar Pradesh, 3,017 in West Bengal, 2,962 in Gujarat, and 1,306 in Madhya Pradesh.

So far, 1,256 people have died of COVID-19 in Punjab, 1,005 in Rajasthan, 799 in Telangana, 671 in Jammu and Kashmir, 646 in Haryana, 538 in Bihar, 448 in Odisha, 373 in Jharkhand, 278 in Assam, 267 in Kerala, 245 in Chhattisgarh and 228 in Uttarakhand.

Puducherry has registered 190 fatalities, Goa 171, Tripura 89, Chandigarh 43, Andaman and Nicobar Islands 42, Himachal Pradesh 33, Ladakh 27, Manipur 25, Nagaland nine, Meghalaya eight, Arunachal Pradesh five, Sikkim three and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu two.

The health ministry stressed that more than 70 percent of the deaths occurred due to comorbidities.

With inputs from agencies

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[bountyofbeads]

Emails Show Budget Office Working to Carry Out Ukraine Aid Freeze https://nyti.ms/2ukXehI

EMAILS SHOW BUDGET OFFICE WORKING TO CARRY OUT UKRAINE AID FREEZE

The communications about President Trump’s order to hold up military assistance to Ukraine were released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

By Eric Lipton | Published Jan. 22, 2020 Updated 2:26 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 22, 2020 |

The same morning last July when President Trump had his fateful call with Ukraine’s president, White House officials were working behind the scenes to impose the freeze sought by the president on military assistance to Ukraine, reviewing the legal wording they would use to implement the hold, emails released late Tuesday night show.

The emails were released as a result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit, even as the Senate was rejecting a series of resolutions introduced by Democrats intended to force the disclosure of some of these same materials from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and other agencies involved in the aid freeze.

The 192 pages of documents, released just before a midnight deadline to the nonprofit group American Oversight, do not contain major new revelations in terms of the participants in the aid freeze or the sequence of events beyond what had been detailed by The New York Times in the last month based on interviews and documents.

But it does offer new evidence of the friction between the Defense Department and the White House as the aid freeze dragged on through the summer, and the confusion and surprise when members of Congress, including some prominent Republicans, learned that the military assistance to Ukraine had been held up.

An aide to Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leader of group that promotes Ukraine’s interests in the Senate, wrote on Aug. 23 to Michael P. Duffey, a political appointee from the Office of Management and Budget who instituted the freeze.

The aide noted that Mr. Portman “is very interested in ensuring Ukraine has the military capabilities it needs to defend itself against Russian aggression,” adding that “I would appreciate if you could lay out for me the reason behind the O.M.B. hold and what the process is for getting the funding released.”

Calls and emails for an explanation also had come in from Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Representative Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, the emails show.

The White House aides, in the documents, did not offer an explanation for the aid freeze, and instead simply worked to figure out who should respond.

The friction with the Pentagon was obvious in email exchanges between the Office of Management and Budget and a senior Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, a deputy under secretary of defense who oversees spending.

On August 20, Mr. Duffey wrote to Ms. McCusker to notify her that the aid freeze was going to be extended again, long past the deadline when the Pentagon had said it needed the hold to be lifted if it was going to be able to spend all of the money before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

“It is our intent to add the following footnote to the Ukraine apportionment this afternoon to take effect immediately,” Mr. Duffey said in his email to Ms. McCusker, explaining the technical process the White House was using to impose the aid freeze.

“Mike,” Ms. McCusker wrote back several hours later, to Mr. Duffey and other senior officials at the Office of Management and Budget. “Seems like we continue to talk (email) past each other a bit. We should probably have a call.”

William S. Castle, the principal deputy general counsel at the Pentagon, got involved in the debate, reaching out to the budget office’s top lawyer at Ms. McCusker’s request to question him on the hold. Mark Paoletta, the general counsel at the budget office, sent a lengthy response.

But other than about a dozen words — the greeting and the closing of the email — the entire contents of the response were blacked out before being released under the Freedom of Information Act suit.

“Hi Scott,” the email said, followed by four large blacked out areas of text that the White House declined to make public. “Please let me know if you have any questions, Thanks.”

The White House cited a provision of the Freedom of Information that allows the federal government to withhold “deliberative communications, the disclosure of which would inhibit the frank and candid exchange of views that is necessary for effective government decision-making.”

The emails from July 25 — the same morning Mr. Trump had his phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and asked him to look into issues related to the 2016 election in the United States and to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden — show that administration aides were preparing to carry out Mr. Trump’s order for the aid freeze.

Mr. Trump had first raised the issue in June, after he learned the Defense Department was about to release $250 million of military assistance to Ukraine. But it was not until July 25 that the money that had been allocated for the Pentagon was formally frozen, using a legal provision called an apportionment.

“Did GC send the footnote?” Mr. Duffey wrote at 9 a.m. on July 25, just as the call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky was getting underway, referring to the agency’s general counsel and a footnote that would be applied to the apportionment document to freeze the funding.

“Mike, here’s the OGC-approved, revised footnote,” Mark Sandy, a career official at the budget office, wrote back to his boss, in response to the question, that same morning.

About 90 minutes after Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Duffey told the Pentagon to keep quiet about the aid freeze because of the “sensitive nature of the request,” according to a message released last month by the Defense Department.

The emails released to American Oversight, as well as Center for Public Integrity and details about correspondence shared with The New York Times, have led Democrats in Congress to push the White House to release copies of all these exchanges, without the redactions. The Senate voted repeatedly on Tuesday night to block proposals by Democrats to require the release of these documents.

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Senators urge House impeachment managers to tone it down after testy debate

By Mike DeBonis, Karoun Demirjian and Rachael Bade | Published January 22 at 1:30 PM EST | WWashington Post | Posted January 22, 2020 |

In the hours before House impeachment managers presented their initial arguments for the removal of President Trump on Wednesday, senators of both parties delivered a warning: Attack us, the jurors, at your peril.

The warnings — delivered gently by Democrats and sharply by Republicans — came after a testy marathon debate over the rules for the impeachment trial that continued until nearly 2 a.m. — culminating in an admonishment from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is presiding over the trial.

“I’m sorry it was necessary, but I think it was appropriate to remind us that we have to maintain decorum and respect for one another throughout this process,” said Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). “Emotions were running high on both sides.”

“Outrageous and an insult to the Senate,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “We don’t need to continue the clown circus that was started in the House.”

During the debate, multiple Democratic impeachment managers declared that alongside Trump, “the Senate is on trial,” and suggested that senators themselves would be part of a “coverup” if they oppose their efforts to call additional witnesses and subpoena unseen documents that the Trump administration refused to provide.

At one point, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) accused GOP senators of “treacherous” behavior.

Meanwhile, Trump’s defense team — led by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone — engaged in a scorched-earth approach of its own, including suggestions that Democrats were seeking to undermine democracy and that senators running for president were trying eliminate their competition. The responses were peppered with statements that ranged from incomplete renditions of the facts to outright falsehoods.

The rhetoric escalated to feverish heights shortly after 12:30 a.m., when Nadler argued that the Senate should subpoena testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton — after seven previous Democratic amendments to the trial rules fell on party lines.

“So far, I’m sad to say, I see a lot of senators voting for a coverup, voting to deny witnesses — an absolutely indefensible vote, obviously a treacherous vote,” he said, adding: “Either you want the truth, and you must permit the witnesses, or you want a shameful coverup. History will judge and so will the electorate.”

Cipollone, in high dudgeon, immediately rose to rebut him: “You don’t deserve, and we don’t deserve, what just happened,” he said, accusing Nadler of making “false allegations” against the Senate and the White House. “The only one who should be embarrassed, Mr. Nadler, is you, for the way you’ve addressed this body. This is the United States Senate. You’re not in charge here.”

At that point, Roberts stepped in to “admonish both the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms, to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

“Those addressing the Senate should remember where they are,” he said.

Hours later, as senators trickled into the Capitol, feelings remained raw — particularly among Republicans, who declared themselves offended by Nadler’s suggestion of treachery and coverup.

“Totally inappropriate,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “If the Democrat managers are smart, they’ll keep him off the field.”

“Way out of bounds,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). “Outrageous!”

But several Democratic senators also spoke up to note that broadsides against Republican senators — four of whom they will need to vote for additional subpoenas, 20 for Trump’s conviction and removal, assuming the 47-member Democratic caucus remains united — might not be the wisest strategy.

“When I make the argument, it’s about the fundamentals — witnesses, documents and the evidence,” said Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.). “I think that’s better.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said Nadler “could have chose better words.”

“I understood what Nadler was saying,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said but praised the “thoughtfulness and intellect” shown by lead impeachment manager Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.): “I think those were the most insightful.”

Asked about Nadler’s remarks, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) answered a different question: “I’ll talk about Adam Schiff, who I’ve worked with on many, many, many issues. I thought he did an exceptionally good job.”

The reaction showed, among other things, that the pointed rhetoric that marked the four-month House impeachment investigation — and characterizes the rough-and-tumble House generally — does not necessarily play well in the more genteel Senate.

Off Capitol Hill, however, the discourse remained plenty coarse — a tone set at the top by Trump himself.

“These are bad, corrupt people,” Trump told reporters Wednesday during remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, referring to Schiff and Nadler as “sleaze bags” at one point. “These are bad people, and very bad for our country.”

Trump also seemed to taunt Democrats by noting that their efforts to subpoena documents from his administration had failed. “We have all the material. They don’t have the material,” he said.

A Democratic official working on the impeachment team said that the managers, “unlike the president’s lawyers . . . focused on the facts of the president’s scheme and made the legal and factual case to both the senators and the American people.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) also defended Nadler, saying the Judiciary Committee chairman was appropriately trying to address the “totally false statements” from Cipollone, including a claim that the president wasn’t invited to participate in the House proceedings.

“I think it’s perfectly appropriate to point out that voting against calling relevant witnesses is the same as working in lockstep with the president to prevent the truth from coming out,” he said.

But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) insisted that taking aim at the jurors in the impeachment case would only backfire.

“I think as they come over to the Senate side, and they call us liars and cheats and say we’re doing a coverup, and the Senate is on trial . . . all it does is serve to unify” Republicans, he said.

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After Republican senators block new impeachment evidence, Trump boasts about what he’s withholding

By Philip Bump | Published January 22 at 12:59 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 22, 2020 |

By late in the evening Tuesday, the Democrats in the Senate had made their point. Perhaps Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) would like to package his remaining amendment proposals into one final vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested, a hint of hopefulness creeping into his otherwise even-timbered voice. No dice. Schumer kept producing new proposals until well past midnight.

In total, the Senate took 11 votes on amendments to the rules aimed at broadening the evidence that would be included in the impeachment trial of President Trump. They were, in order:

*A subpoena to get documents from the White House.

*A subpoena to get documents from the State Department.

*A subpoena to get documents from the Office of Management and Budget.

*A subpoena for testimony from Mick Mulvaney, former OMB director and acting White House chief of staff.

*A subpoena to get documents from the Defense Department.

*A subpoena to get testimony from Robert Blair, an aide to Mulvaney, and Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB.

*A proposal to mandate that inclusion of testimony excerpted from materials would necessitate the release to both sides of the material in its entirety.

*A subpoena for testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton.

*A proposal to eliminate a mandated vote before the Senate could vote on calling witnesses.

*A proposal to allow additional time for responding to motions.

*A proposal allowing Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is presiding over the trial, to determine whether witnesses or evidence should be included.

In each case but one, the proposed amendments were tabled on a 47-to-53 vote. The lone exception was the 10th amendment, for which Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) joined the Democratic caucus in support of the proposal — but it, too, was tabled when a majority of senators, all Republicans, voted in opposition to it.

Save Collins’s post-midnight defection, it was another example of the remarkable unanimity with which congressional Republicans have approached the impeachment effort. While Trump and his allies have excoriated the process as being a manifestation of Democratic partisanship, it’s certainly the case that Trump has benefited enormously from his own party’s lockstep voting. In the House, that agreement — setting aside party defector Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who supported impeachment — allowed Trump and others to make the case about a partisan impeachment in the first place. In the Senate, it meant that McConnell’s proposed rules for proceeding through the trial would not be immediately overhauled with the inclusion of things that might be problematic for the president’s case.

Democrats hammered at the significance of rejecting the proposals: Were Senate Republicans saying that they were disinterested in knowing the truth about what happened? Republicans, for their part, had a pat response: Didn’t you think you had enough evidence to make your case when the impeachment articles were addressed in the House?

Trump wasn’t in Washington for any of this. As the votes unfolded, he was in Switzerland, having given an address at the World Economic Forum’s annual event in Davos. On Wednesday, though, he offered his thoughts during a news conference at the event.

“So here’s the story: Did nothing wrong,” Trump said of the impeachment push.

“The best lawyers in the world have looked at it. The Department of Justice has looked at it, given it a sign-off. There was nothing wrong,” he said.

The president walked through his now-familiar complaints about the evidence and then confirmed that he had seen some of the debate.

“I got to watch enough. I thought our team did a very good job,” he said. “But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

That quote, in that context, in that moment, is potentially problematic. Trump appears to be saying that he has material reinforcing how his position of innocence is warranted — material that “they,” presumably Democrats, can’t see.

Which, of course, was largely Schumer’s point. There is a lot of evidence that has been withheld by Trump and his administration, including things as seemingly mundane as personal calendars for State Department staffers. On several occasions during the impeachment testimony in the House, witnesses lamented that they couldn’t answer questions with specificity because they didn’t have access to material that the State Department wasn’t releasing.

Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), also a House impeachment manager, quickly seized upon Trump’s comment as evidence that he was retaining pertinent material.

Trump has argued repeatedly that if witnesses such as Mulvaney were to testify, they would reinforce his arguments about the case. He has also, as the impeachment process has moved forward, been increasingly less likely to forcefully advocate for the inclusion of such testimony. (Asked during his Davos news conference whether he wanted to see witnesses in the Senate trial, Trump replied that he would “leave that to the Senate.”)

His comments Wednesday, though, go further, seemingly hinting that there might even be an advantage for the White House in keeping material out of the hands of Democrats, that his team was better informed, or that, at least, there was pertinent material that he and his team were simply keeping to themselves.

It’s not that this isn’t known to be the case. There is obviously documentary and witness evidence that the White House has sought to keep out of the Democrats’ hands — an effort bolstered by McConnell’s caucus Tuesday. It’s just not obviously useful for Trump in this moment to reinforce that this is what he is doing.

McConnell’s twin goals in the impeachment process are to protect Trump and protect vulnerable swing-state GOP senators. The former effort seemingly necessitates limiting the evidence presented at trial; the latter, ensuring that voters see the trial as fair and thorough. The Senate majority leader worked late into the night to line up 11 victories on the first point — only to see Trump himself undercut the second point from Switzerland a few hours later.

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McConnell’s Impeachment Scam

Senators have a duty to conduct a fair and full trial. The Republican leader is trying to make sure they can’t.

By Noah Bookbinder | Published Jan 22, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January

22, 2020 |

(Mr. Bookbinder is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.)

The removal of a sitting president is the last line of defense provided by the framers of the Constitution against the abuse of power by the leader of our country. When senators take an oath to uphold the Constitution, they assume the grave responsibility to conduct a thorough and fair trial on behalf of the American people.

Dismissing this process set out in the Constitution, President Trump has called the impeachment process a “scam.” That’s his opinion, of course — but this week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to ensure that the Senate trial actually is a scam.

An impeachment trial is only meaningful if the American people can have confidence in the fairness of the process; only then will the trial’s verdict be worthy of respect. Mr. McConnell is advocating trial procedures that would undercut any possibility of that.

Americans understand the basic contours of a fair trial: Each side presents relevant evidence, in the form of documents and witnesses. But Mr. McConnell and President Trump’s allies in the Senate appear to think that the president should be allowed to play by his own rules. The impeachment procedural resolution that the Senate adopted early Wednesday morning appears designed to, among other things, prevent either side from introducing testimony and evidence about President Trump’s alleged abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

It could have been worse. Under intense pressure, including from members of his own party, Mr. McConnell slightly modified some of the most extreme provisions. The current version expands the time for the parties to present their cases to three days from two, and it allows the admission of evidence developed in the House — although the president may still object to evidence on any basis.

Mr. McConnell’s rules will weaken the power of impeachment as a deterrent to presidential misbehavior by, among other things, permitting the Senate to reject evidence and testimony that the House has already collected and that was not previously under dispute. In the worst case scenario, the rule could have the effect of allowing the Senate to dismiss the House’s evidence entirely. And these rules add new, unprecedented roadblocks to the Senate’s receiving witness testimony — including from witnesses who have already provided sworn statements to the House, some at great personal and professional cost.

Every impeachment trial in American history has heard from fact witnesses. And at least every impeachment trial in the last hundred years has heard fact testimony from new witnesses — those who have not previously provided evidence to the House of Representatives. Breaking from this ironclad precedent to protect President Trump, Mr. McConnell’s rules provide no assurance that the Senate will hear from witnesses or collect evidence.

Finally, Mr. McConnell’s proposal would allow senators to make a motion to dismiss at any time. Under a motion to dismiss, a defendant argues that, even if everything the prosecution alleges were true, the defendant still did nothing wrong. If such a motion were to pass before evidence is introduced, the Senate would effectively endorse the president’s conduct toward Ukraine without doing even the most basic fact-finding to determine the truth of the matter.

What happens next is not just for Mr. McConnell to decide. Each senator can uphold his or her constitutional duty and vote in the coming weeks, as they should have voted yesterday, to ensure that they have the information they need to decide whether the president solicited a foreign power’s assistance in his re-election and tried to prevent Congress from investigating that conduct, and whether that conduct necessitates his removal from office.

The president’s allies in the Senate must ask themselves whether they would brush aside such serious allegations if someone else was occupying the White House. One suspects that they would react very differently if, for instance, President Barack Obama had been accused of asking a foreign government to investigate Mitt Romney.

The American people want their senators to engage in a serious quest for the truth. A recent CNN poll of voters showed that 69 percent of Americans want the Senate to hear evidence and witnesses in the coming days.

As I watched from the Senate gallery Tuesday, the gravity of the moment was palpable. For many senators, the coming days and weeks will see the most consequential votes of their lives. They are being given a stark choice: do what is right for the nation or do what is politically expedient for the most corrupt president in American history. History will be decided on their watch. We know what the founders intended them to do in this situation. But only these 100 senators can decide whether they can live up to that standard.

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Why Did Alan Dershowitz Say Yes to Trump?

Serious constitutional scholars don’t accept his defense of the president in the Senate impeachment trial.

By Steven J. Harper, Mr. Harper is a lawyer. | Published Jan. 22, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 22, 2020 |

Forty years ago, when I was a student at Harvard Law School, I enrolled in Alan Dershowitz’s class on professional responsibility. “Everyone is entitled to a lawyer,” he told us. “But not everyone is entitled to me.”

Any lawyer in private practice can generally say no when asked to take on a case. So why did Mr. Dershowitz say yes to Donald Trump and agree to represent him in his Senate impeachment trial?

Mr. Dershowitz, an ardent civil libertarian, has been a criminal defense lawyer throughout his long and distinguished career. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is not exactly a poster child for the A.C.L.U.: Remember his advice  to police officers dealing with criminal suspects? “Please don’t be too nice.”

Two months before President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings began  in 1998, Larry King asked Mr. Dershowitz whether he agrees that “some of the most grievous offenses against our constitutional form of government may not entail violations of the criminal law.”

“I do,” he answered. If those offenses “subvert the very essence of democracy.”

In the same interview, Mr. Dershowitz also said: “It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty. You don’t need a technical crime. We look at their acts of state. We look at how they conduct the foreign policy. We look at whether they try to subvert the Constitution.”

But on Sunday, Mr. Dershowitz was acting as one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers when he said to George Stephanopoulos that abusive or obstructive conduct is not impeachable and that an “actual crime” is required. And although the evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump has committed crimes, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that, unless those crimes are explicitly stated in articles of impeachment, they cannot lead to Mr. Trump’s removal from office.

Mr. Dershowitz said that he was defending Mr. Trump to protect the Constitution, but serious constitutional scholars didn’t buy his argument. Another of my former professors, the constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe, responded with an op-ed essay in The Washington Post. “The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts on the subject,” he wrote. “There is no evidence that the phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ was understood in the 1780s to mean indictable crimes.”

Mr. Tribe likewise debunked Mr. Dershowitz’s argument that the president could not be impeached for “abuse of power,” noting, “No serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it.” Among those scholars is the Republicans’ designated constitutional law expert, Jonathan Turley. He  testified before the House Judiciary Committee that impeachment could result from conduct that was not technically a criminal act.

Mr. Dershowitz is an expert on civil liberties and criminal law and procedure, not constitutional law generally. Facing widespread criticism and trying to reconcile his 1998 statements with his new position, he now says that Congress doesn’t need a “technical crime” to impeach, but there must be “criminal-like” conduct, or conduct “akin to treason and bribery.” To the extent his earlier statement “suggested the opposite,” he retracts it.

Such sophistry might be rhetorically pleasing to Mr. Dershowitz, but his 1998 view is still the correct one. And the articles of impeachment against the president plainly satisfy Mr. Dershowitz’s newest standard too.

In his 1995 introduction to a new printing of Clarence Darrow’s autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” Mr. Dershowitz offered this advice to young lawyers: “The lawyer may not become part of the corruption in order to fight for justice.”

I’m not suggesting that Mr. Dershowitz is corrupt. But he doesn’t seem to be protecting the Constitution or fighting for anything that looks like justice.

______

Steven J. Harper (@StevenJHarper1) is a lawyer, an adjunct professor at Northwestern University Law School and the author of “Crossing Hoffa: A Teamster’s Story" and “The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis.”

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Why Trump’s Threadbare Legal Argument Will Probably Work

THANKS A LOT, MITCH MCCONNELL.

By Jesse Wegman, Mr. Wegman is a member of the editorial board. | Published Jan. 21, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 22, 2020 |

Let’s dispense with one thing off the bat: President Trump’s impeachment defense is — in addition to being riddled with false factual claims and misleading characterizations — legal claptrap.

It’s also likely to work.

The essence of the argument, which appears in a 110-page brief submitted on Monday by the president’s ragtag legal team in advance of his Senate trial, is that Mr. Trump can’t be impeached for behaviors that are not actual crimes.

“Every prior presidential impeachment in our history has been based on alleged violations of existing law — indeed, criminal law,” the brief states. Since House Democrats did not charge the president with committing any specific crimes in abusing his power or obstructing Congress, which are the grounds for the two articles of impeachment that the House of Representatives adopted last month, Mr. Trump must skate, the reasoning goes. You can almost hear the lawyers swallowing their pride.

That’s because their argument is, in the words of one legal scholar who recently published a book on the history of impeachment, “constitutional nonsense.” “High crimes and misdemeanors” — the founders’ standard for impeachment — has always been understood to refer to a unique class of offenses, those arising from what Alexander Hamilton called “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

The federal criminal code didn’t even exist when the Constitution was drafted, yet the framers were aware of the innumerable ways an executive could abuse or violate his trust. They were also aware that impeachment was a long-established remedy for such abuses.

In his authoritative 19th-century legal treatise, Justice Joseph Story of the Supreme Court explained that impeachable acts are by their nature impossible to define in advance. There are many “purely political” offenses that qualify, he wrote, “not one of which is in the slightest manner alluded to in our statute book.”

This view is not remotely controversial. And yet Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and self-professed liberal who has lately taken to defending President Trump against all comers, insists that everyone’s got it wrong. That includes, apparently, Mr. Dershowitz himself, who argued back in 1998 that “if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.” Now, Mr. Dershowitz argues that to be impeachable, a president’s behavior must be, if not criminal, at least “crime-like”— an argument that could charitably be described as legal-like.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a president who described the Constitution as “like a foreign language” would cling to such a legally preposterous claim. But to be fair to Mr. Trump and his lawyers, it’s the only one left. The evidence amassed during the House impeachment proceedings — that he shook down a foreign government in the service of his own re-election campaign — is overwhelming, and Mr. Trump has yet to counter any of it with so much as a single piece of paper or word of testimony. He has given himself no option but to say, in effect: “Yeah, I did it. So what?”

This is the Trumpian equivalent of, “It’s a free country!” And yet as every grade-school child quickly discovers, that does not mean you can do whatever you want.

So why is Mr. Trump’s argument almost certainly going to work? Because the Republican majority in the Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, knows that its own survival is tied to Mr. Trump’s, and cares more about its grip on power than its fidelity to constitutional governance.

That’s why Mr. McConnell is doing all he can to deep-six the impeachment trial with as little fanfare, and as few witnesses, as possible. He knows the “So what?” gambit becomes harder to sustain in the face of testimony from firsthand witnesses to the president’s Ukraine scheme — people like John Bolton, the former national security adviser, and Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, both of whom have said they would be willing to testify.

An embarrassingly small clot of Republican senators have said they are open to voting to hear from these and possibly other key witnesses. Let’s hope they stick to their guns. For the rest, Mr. Trump’s defense brief offers what he might call a perfect solution: He won’t make them respond to serious legal arguments if they won’t hold him to account for his inexcusable behavior. In this bargain, as with so much else over the past three years, the president and the Senate are made for each other.

*********

Senate press restrictions have an ugly goal: Putting distance between the public and Trump’s impeachment trial

By Margaret Sullivan | Published January 22 at 11:43 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted Jan 22, 2020 |

Reporters penned off, unable to roam the Senate halls freely. No press photography or recording devices within the chamber. A (nearly) single-focus view of the historic proceedings — offered only by government video cameras, with not even C-SPAN allowed in to jazz things up.

It’s the ultimate contradiction: The Senate impeachment trial of the media-obsessed president is a remarkably bloodless TV spectacle.

There can be little doubt that these restrictive rules are the brainchild of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has declared himself firmly on the side of President Trump.

And they have an end in mind: Make the trial seem as boring and pallid as possible. 

“We are not able to see what is the emotion, what is the state of consciousness of the members of the Senate,” Fox News analyst Chris Wallace commented during a Tuesday broadcast.

To their credit, journalists and news organizations found ways around the restrictions and did their jobs anyway.

The New York Times, among others, sent a sketch artist to capture images, including a senator nodding off only a few hours in. 

Punditry continued apace on cable and broadcast news — analysts held forth, lawyers parsed the arguments. Nothing can stem that tide of talking heads.

And innumerable stories got written or broadcast, perhaps with less color than they might have had otherwise, but getting the facts across effectively.

But that doesn’t make the restrictions any more right, as Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) complained in a letter to the Senate sergeant at arms: “To place limitations on the press is to place limitations on the American people’s ability to learn about the character and conduct of their elected leaders.”

Security concerns are said to be behind all of this — a lame argument given that these credentialed reporters go through security checks whenever they enter the Capitol complex.

And it’s hard to understand why more camera angles pose a threat to safety.

No, this isn’t about security at all. It’s about trying to keep at bay a sense of historic importance. It’s about trying to weary and stultify the American public into not caring about what’s happening.

Ever helpful to the Trumpian cause, Steve Doocy made that case Wednesday morning on “Fox & Friends”: “It was unbelievably boring. I don’t know how people can follow it.”

Having the proceedings continue well into the evening hours is another part of the same effort to dull the senses, to file the edges off what could hardly be more significant.

Yet for those watching closely — those who were still tuned in to cable after 9 p.m., long after the networks had resumed their prime-time programming — Tuesday’s proceedings offered worthwhile moments, ones that didn’t need special camera angles to succeed.

Take the “mic drop moment” by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) who picked up on the mocking question by Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow in his opening statement: “Why are we here?”

“We are here, sir, because President Trump pressured a foreign government to target an American citizen for political and personal gain,” Jeffries said. “We are here, sir, because President Trump solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election and corrupted our democracy.” 

And, he added, we are here to “follow the facts, apply the law, be guided by the Constitution and present the truth to the American people.”

He concluded, “That is why we are here, Mr. Sekulow.” Then he delivered a line, one also familiar to “Hamilton” fans, from late rapper Notorious B.I.G.: “And if you don’t know, now you know.” 

Conservative columnist Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner called the Jeffries speech a “tour de force.”

Those who had stuck with the first day’s proceedings up to that point — or who had tuned in to take a peek — couldn’t have declared themselves bored. 

It wasn’t the only memorable or effective moment. In particular, the video flashbacks of testimony made by diplomats and White House officials — used in House managers’ exhibits — were effective reminders of what’s at stake. (On Twitter, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker noted, with a touch of sarcasm, that these were exclusively devices used by Democrats: “The President’s legal team forgot to bring their slides to the Senate trial. They don’t have video clips for senators to look at either.”)

As the trial begins in earnest, there’s plenty of reason to stay involved and stay focused.

The American public may not be delighted or riveted by the trial, but they’re unavoidably aware — as has been made clear in recent public opinion polls that show more Americans support removing Trump from office than approve of him.

And although removal is extremely unlikely, Americans will remember at least some of what they’ve seen and heard.

That, to most Senate Republicans and President Trump, is quite a vexing problem.

And it’s one that can’t be solved by artless camera angles or reporters kept behind ropes.

______

Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post’s media columnist. Previously, she was the New York Times public editor, and the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

*********

[charlesjening]

Remarks of FASB Member R. Harold Schroeder, ThinkBIG 2019 Conference, Orlando, FL

Opening Remarks of FASB Member Hal Schroeder (as prepared for delivery) ThinkBig 2019 Conference  “Roadmap to the Future:  Fact vs Fiction (on CECL and Other FASB Standards)” Orlando, Florida September 26, 2019

Back in the spring—as the school year was ending—I showed my daughter a picture of what appeared to be an old, very thick textbook.  Knowing the last thing she wanted was another textbook, I jokingly told her we were going to buy it.  She then asked two logical questions:  Why? and How much? 

I won’t get the tone of her questions quite right, so I’ll just say there was a lot of eye rolling.  Now, in my defense:  She had no facts, she didn’t know the book’s history.  Without any historical context, without opening the book to see its contents, she couldn’t appreciate the importance of this book. 

What she saw was the tattered, brown-paper cover; blank, except for three handwritten letters.  So, she was shocked to learn what it would likely fetch at auction.  

The book was Luca Pacioli’s

Summa de Arithmetica

.  In the press release

1

announcing the auction, Christie’s noted its broad-ranging contents: “from double-entry bookkeeping to probability theory and computing, the mathematical principles of the most vital features of contemporary finance are all present.”   In other words, this 525-year-old tome is the “first practical how-to book on succeeding in business.”

During a multi-city tour, Christie’s invited the FASB to experience the book firsthand.  As the curator opened the cover to read passages and to highlight various illustrations, I developed a deeper understanding of what was inside the book, why it was important, and how it was constructed.  No wonder this book has stood the test of time.

I tell this story because it’s a great example of the idiom:  You can’t judge a book by its cover.  The same can be said for the FASB’s projects I’ll talk about today.  And, for our stakeholders—particularly preparers and auditors—it’s imperative that you get past the cover of each new standard in order to distinguish fact from fiction; what’s changed and why. 

Hence, the title of my presentation

Roadmap to the Future:  Fact versus Fiction

.  So, today I’ll provide some facts about what we’ve been doing since issuing CECL in 2016.  And, I’ll try to separate fact from fiction by laying out what we hear.   

*****************

Before going any further, I must first remind you of the standard disclosure:  Official positions of the FASB are reached only after extensive due process and deliberations.  In other words, what I am about to say are my views and only my views.

The standard disclosure I just read appropriately puts an emphasis on the FASB’s “process” for setting accounting standards.  And, that’s where I’ll start.

About the FASB

Last year alone, Board members and staff spoke at 156 events nationwide and hosted 575 liaison, advisory group, and project outreach meetings.

2 The People

At one such meeting a few years ago, a group of community bankers came to visit us in Norwalk, CT.  A CEO—from a small town near to where I grew up—told us he’d been at a Rotary Club lunch the day before.  He said someone at his table was surprised to learn he was going to meet real people at the FASB.  I asked him to please reassure the folks back home, we are real people!  So, to provide some perspective on the FASB process, it helps to first understand the people; both the Board members and staff.

Speaking for myself, the comments I make today—as well as my votes at the Board table—are informed by four decades of experiences:  as an auditor and advisor to a wide range of financial services companies—from the largest global entities to the smallest community banks in south Louisiana; as a CFO; as both an individual and institutional investor; as a manager and owner of private businesses; and, now, as a member of the FASB in my second and final term. (Yes, we have term limits.) 

Combine my experiences with those of my fellow Board members and staff, and you begin to see a wide array of experiences and multiple perspectives.  This diversity of views is by design.  Think of it this way:  If any two Board members always agree, one of them is redundant.  Now, add to the mix the boots-on-the-ground experiences and perspectives of our advisory groups and stakeholders like yourselves—that participate in our outreach meetings—and it’s clear that the process of setting accounting standards is not done in a vacuum or an ivory tower.

The Process

The Board and staff often talk about the standard-setting process, up to the point of issuing a new standard.  We don’t talk as much about the equally important post-issuance phase.  Once a major new standard is issued, we spend the time—often years before its effective date—educating stakeholders and monitoring company implementation efforts. 

One reason we do this is to re-confirm that a new standard’s wording is understandable, operable, and auditable.  Another is, we want to ensure it will stand the test of time.  

During numerous education and monitoring sessions—based solely on the questions and comments of the participants—it becomes readily apparent who’s gone past the cover and is deep into implementing a new standard.  And, equally apparent, who hasn’t broken the book’s binding.

With the latter group, we often find ourselves reiterating and relitigating a range of questions.  Personally, I enjoy the debates.  However, most of their questions have already been asked and answered in the due-process documents and final standards issued in accordance with the FASB’s Rules of Procedure.

3   Addressing What & How

As much as I enjoy the debates, I’ll simply highlight a few points about what’s required and how to do it. 

Regarding the “what” of CECL specifically—in the past year the staff has received very few questions, many of which could be quickly answered by referring directly to the guidance.  Considering that our technical inquiry service is free and accessible online,

4

the limited number of questions is at odds with the view—some have voiced—that there are many unanswered questions and, therefore, CECL should be delayed.

For other more-involved questions, we’ve made targeted improvements to enhance understandability and operability.  Answers to those questions can be found at our CECL implementation portal.

5

Regarding “how,” we’re committed to looking for ways to ease transition efforts.  For example, in January, we published a Staff Q&A about using WARM

6

(weighted-average remaining maturity), which is an estimation method already familiar to many smaller financial institutions.  It was followed in July by another that addresses developing estimates

7

by responding to 16 frequently asked questions about:

using historical loss information,

developing reasonable and supportable forecasts, and

applying the reversion to historical loss information. 

Both Q&As are part of the Board's continuing commitment to educate stakeholders.

They cover common questions we’ve heard during the last three years at various post-issuance educational sessions—the same questions covered in numerous PowerPoint presentations we’ve delivered.  So, the Staff Q&As are a more formalized version of what we’ve been saying.

In addition to those Q&As, the staff are hosting several implementation workshops around the country.  Again, please check our CECL implementation portal for dates and locations.

Assessing Costs & Benefits

And, despite some very public comments to the contrary, a thorough cost-benefit assessment of CECL was conducted—as is done on all standards in accordance with our Rules of Procedure.  We explain why we came to our decisions in the “Background Information and Basis for Conclusions” section of the standard.  A summary

8

of the assessment is also provided on our CECL implementation portal.

Disciplined Process

In my now over eight years on the Board, I’ve come to appreciate the high-quality standards that result from its disciplined process.  CECL may not be perfect, but it’s a vast improvement over the status quo.  And, we’re doing everything we can to support your success.

So, I have a request:  When you hear someone say the FASB didn’t follow its due process, please ask if they’ve gotten past the cover, past the headlines in media reports.  Have they read the standard, in particular, the basis for conclusions? 

Like any classic book, standards such as CECL should be read multiple times.  The same is true for the Staff Q&As.  With each subsequent reading, new insights are gained, leading to greater benefits and a more cost-effective implementation.

Final thought on process:  disagreeing with a Board position is fine.  I certainly have, in fact, about 10% of the time—just read any one of my dissents.  But I’m troubled by those that make public statements, unsupported by the public record documenting the process.

Calls to “Stop and Study” During the Past Year

Despite years of discussions and debates, there continue to be efforts to relitigate CECL.  As you may have heard or read, reconsideration of CECL was the focus of a roundtable meeting this time last year.  It was hosted by three congressmen to facilitate a discussion of a “regional bank proposal.” 

A few months later, a modified version of that proposal was formally submitted to the FASB.  Again, following established process, the FASB staff held dozens of meetings that included financial and nonfinancial entities, as well as other stakeholders. 

The views heard in those meetings were very consistent with stakeholder comments at a public roundtable we hosted in January—splitting the provision, with a portion flowing through net income and the remainder in OCI, was not operational.  This was not a surprise.  Banks—large and small—had provided the same feedback in 2013, when the Board had explored the same idea and its many variants.

We also heard from investors that, if the provision is split, they would need additional disclosures.  However, those re-proposing a split did not support expanded disclosures.  After hearing all sides, and consistent with its 2013 decision, in April the Board again voted to not move forward with any requirement to split the provision.

On the Regulatory and Legislative Fronts

In October 2018, a trade associations' letter

9

was sent to the chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council

10

(or FSOC).  Voicing concerns about CECL, the letter recommended that FSOC “seek a delay in implementation until such a study can be completed.”

As a refresher, FSOC is an interagency body consisting of ten voting members—those being the principles of the federal agencies that regulate the U.S. financial services industry—and five non-voting members—those representing various state authorities.

11

  And, it’s chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury.

At FSOC’s December 2018 meeting, there was a discussion of CECL.  In reading the publicly available minutes

12

you see mention of the “extensive work undertaken by the FASB, including publicly issuing proposals in 2010, 2011, and 2013, prior to adoption of CECL in 2016.”  The discussion was led by the Comptroller of the Currency, who stated that “the OCC believes CECL is an improvement over the incurred-loss accounting model.”

With no reduction in regulatory capital imminent, the “stop-and-study” movement is now seeking a “legislative fix” with bills proposed in both the House

13

and the Senate.

14

  However, it’s worth noting that in separate actions, study-only directives have been attached to both House

15

and Senate

16

appropriations bills.  The requests are directed toward others including the SEC and the U.S. Treasury, but not to the FASB.  The Senate action specifically directs the Treasury, in consultation with the federal bank regulators, to “conduct a study on the need, if any, for changes to regulatory capital requirements necessitated by CECL, and to submit the study to the Committee within 270 days of the date of enactment of this act.”  Note that this study will assess the need for a change to regulatory capital; not to CECL.

My views?  Those in the audience that know me won’t be surprised.  I do have views on the matter.  But as a reminder, these are my views and should not be interpreted as the Board’s views.

Calls for Quantitative Impact Study

“Stop-and-study” efforts call on the FASB to perform an economic or quantitative impact study on CECL.  (Going retro, I’ve heard it called “delay-and-pray,” mimicking the approach used by some to deal with problem loans in past banking crises.)  Those advocating stop-and-study allege dire consequences from CECL’s so-called procyclical effects on lending.  However, independent studies

17

already conducted do not support such concerns.

Consider data contained in a recent study

18

published as a working paper in the Federal Reserve’s

Finance and Economics Discussion Series

(or FEDS).  The study, and I quote, “shows that a disproportionate share of the associated provision expenses occurs prior to the recession under CECL, rather than during it.” 

The study quantifies CECL’s earlier provisioning, estimating that “roughly 62% of the trough to peak increase in allowances occurs prior to the recession [compared to] only 11%” under the incurred loss model.

Now, combine that finding with other independent studies showing banks that provision earlier are better positioned to lend in an economic downturn.

Quoting from one such study:  “Consistent with the pro-cyclical provisioning hypothesis we observe a greater reduction in lending during recessions by banks that delay expected loss recognition more compared with banks that delay less.”

19

  That conclusion was based on 24,788 bank quarters of data, stretching over a 16-year period (1993 to 2009) that included 2 U.S. recessions.  Another study,

20

based on 3,091 bank-year observations, across 27 countries over 11 years (1995 to 2006), yielded complementary results.

Yet, I expect critics will point to the FEDS working paper to show that CECL reserves would go up during a recession and would be higher than under the incurred model.  I agree with the observation.  CECL allowances would likely increase during a recession and peak at a higher point.

In fact, using the same data, I calculate

21

CECL-based allowances would have increased an estimated 29% from the beginning of the recession and peaked in the fifth quarter.  However, those same critics are unlikely to mention that under the incurred model, allowances actually increased 264% during the last recession—8 times that expected under CECL—and, didn’t peak until the ninth quarter—taking almost twice as long to recognize losses.  

Bottom line:  As independent studies show, banks that are better reserved heading into a recession are better positioned to lend during a recession.  And, it is the banks that reserve later, and take longer to work through existing losses, that cut lending during a recession.

Therefore, I believe concerns about CECL’s impact on lending are misplaced.

Studies—Yes, Stop—No

My comments today should not be interpreted to mean I’m anti-study.  In fact, just the opposite.  I believe well-designed, well-executed independent studies—a few of which I’ve cited—are an invaluable tool to standard setting.  And I believe there should be more in the future, using real data as it becomes available.

What I’m opposed to is stopping CECL’s implementation.  Here are a few reasons why.

No Change to Cash Flows

A key point to remember, under CECL:  a good loan will still be a good loan; a bad loan will still be a bad one.  This is because CECL doesn’t—in fact, it can’t—change the ultimate cash flows or a borrower’s ability to repay.  And CECL doesn’t even change when to charge off a loan.  It changes only the timing of when loss provisions are recognized in net income and, in turn, reserves built on the balance sheet.

Greater Transparency

Even absent CECL, investors are and will be making their own estimates of expected losses.  Speaking with firsthand knowledge, investors began ignoring GAAP allowances—effectively making their own, much-higher loss estimates—18 months before the beginning of the last recession.  This is in stark contrast with the fact that GAAP-based allowances didn’t hit bottom—a multi-decade bottom—until just 12 months before the recession began.

What CECL does is provide greater transparency into changing credit risk.  Instead of having to rely solely on their own estimates, investors and other users will be able to start their analyses with managements’ more-informed estimates.

If there’s any doubt in my view:  In the last few months, I’ve been talking with investors.  What some have shared is that they’re already beginning to again ignore GAAP provisions and allowances and, to again, make their own loss estimates.  As Mark Twain is often credited with saying: “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.”

So, how do we reconcile the clear need for better alignment between accounting and changes in risk, with calls to stop a standard that provides much-needed transparency?   I can’t.

On a Personal Note

. . .

In my former job as a portfolio manager, I’d have been okay with keeping opaque accounting.  Frankly speaking, our investors earned better returns because we were estimating expected losses.  It gave us a competitive advantage.

But as a member of the FASB, I’m

not

okay with the status quo.  No competitive advantage is worth keeping accounting that:

In “good times” masks warning signs of rising credit risk, and 

In “bad times” is ignored.

Effective Dates for Private and Smaller Public Companies

At this point, you may be asking:  If he’s so pro-CECL, why does he support delaying its effective date?  As a reminder, the Board is tentatively scheduled to vote on this matter at its October 16

th

meeting.  So, you should know before the yearend holidays whether and who will get a delay in applying CECL.

I support a delay because some of you in this room made a compelling case—and our research confirmed—that implementation challenges are often magnified for private companies, smaller public companies, and not-for-profit organizations.  Access to resources, education, and technology varies considerably among organizations of different sizes.  

We did not want those hurdles to block the path toward a successful implementation for anyone.

We also observed that when it comes to applying standards, private and smaller public companies can learn a lot from the experiences of larger public entities.  More time between effective dates means more time to learn.

It’s also worth noting a practical implication—roughly 90% of financial services companies (by number) would get extra time to adopt the standard.  However, I don’t believe investors will be significantly affected, because the 10% that won’t get extra time represent 90-ish% of the industry assets.

But I wouldn’t be surprised to see some entities that could take more time, elect to early adopt—which I expect will be permitted.

Not All Smaller Institutions Agree 

I say this because, minutes before an August vote, a community bank CEO called me to express his strong disagreement.  He said his bank didn’t need the additional time.

It was not the first time the two of us had debated various aspects of CECL.  We’ve had numerous discussions; the same as with other bankers.  So, at a high level I shared with him what I’d heard.  It was a good rehearsal for what I was going to say at the Board table in just a few minutes:  When implementing major standards, such as CECL, it’s more cost effective to take an integrated, wholistic approach that coordinates accounting changes with other changes needed to run a successful business—what I refer to as a “business approach”—which contrasts with treating accounting changes as simply a “compliance exercise”—incurring costs with minimal to no benefits for running a business.

I believe providing an opportunity to take a business approach is the strongest, most compelling argument for extra time.

Benefits to Taking a Business Approach

In fact, as we monitor progress among larger lending institutions—those preparing to implement CECL next year—we’ve observed the benefits.  In private meetings—including a few where we’ve had to sign non-disclosure agreements—we’ve been told that the effort to adopt CECL has resulted in widespread improvement of data quality, internal controls, estimation processes, and internal coordination and communication.

A few bankers have gone even further, saying that they expect additional improvements will be achieved over time.  Think of it as a virtuous—some say vicious—circle.  More and better data leads to improved estimation processes.  Those processes benefit from technology advances, such as faster processing speeds and more memory.  Advances in technology facilitate the use of more and better data that improves estimation processes . . . and the cycle continues.

As a banker told me, “Improvements were needed; CECL simply accelerated the timing.”

One Cautionary Note  

Now that the Board has voted to provide the 90% with extra time, I believe there’ll be an even greater expectation for high-quality implementation efforts.

Don’t look at it as an extra year off.  Treat it as an opportunity to improve your data quality, estimation processes, and internal controls.  Start now.  If you’ve yet to break the book’s binding, do it today.

Reference Rate Reform

Now, on to another issue—one that likely affects everyone in this room:  reference rate reform.  This is a global issue driven by market forces, not the FASB.

What Is Reference Rate Reform?

The London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, is expected to be phased out in 2021.  Globally, there’s an estimated $350 trillion of financial instruments—over half of which is in the U.S.—that reference LIBOR

22

including, for example, adjustable-rate mortgages.

Efforts are under way (1) to identify risk-free alternative rates to replace IBORs and (2) to develop transition plans that support reference rate reform.  Those industry-led efforts are focused on tying benchmark rates to observable, arm’s-length transactions.

In July, the SEC issued a public statement

23

noting that the transition away from LIBOR could have “a significant impact on the financial markets and may present a material risk for certain market participants.”

Addressing Accounting Obstacles

Reference rate reform has been a major priority for the FASB.  We’re proactively addressing accounting obstacles that could hinder smooth transition.

Simplifying Accounting Evaluations. 

And earlier this month, we issued a proposal that would make it easier to transition contracts and other arrangements to a new reference rate.

First, we proposed to simplify the accounting evaluation of a contract modification.  For a contract that meets certain criteria, the change in its reference rate would be accounted for as a continuation of that contract, instead of the creation of a new contract.

We also proposed to simplify the assessment of hedge effectiveness—and to allow hedging relationships affected by reference rate reform to continue.

Optional and Temporary. 

Application of this relief would be optional.  We think it will minimize the disruption of reference rate reform on financial reporting and provide users with more useful information.

Companies and other organizations that elect to apply the guidance would do so prospectively—in other words, the new guidance could be elected for contract modifications and hedge evaluations that occur after we issue the final standard.

The guidance would be temporary, expiring on January 1, 2023.  To my knowledge, if finalized, this would be the first time we’ve ever issued an accounting standard with a “sunset provision.”

Looking Ahead

The comment period on this proposal is open until October 7th.  I encourage you to review it and get your comments to us as soon as possible.  As always, your insights will help us develop a better standard.  

**************

Closing Remarks

Before concluding, I want to thank you for your engagement in our process.

We may not always agree on outcomes.  But we will always engage in the conversation.  And we will work with you to help ensure a successful transition to our standards.

And now, I’m ready to take your questions.  

  10

As stated on the FSOC website, “The Financial Stability Oversight Council has a clear statutory mandate that creates for the first time collective accountability for identifying risks and responding to emerging threats to financial stability. It is a collaborative body chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury that brings together the expertise of the federal financial regulators, an independent insurance expert appointed by the President, and state regulators.”  

https://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/fsoc/about/Pages/default.aspx  

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S.1564 - Continued Encouragement for Consumer Lending Act,

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1564 15

116TH Congress, 1st Session, House Report 116–122, “The Committee directs the SEC, in consultation with the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and NCUA, to conduct a study of the potential impact of the CECL accounting standard issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and provide the study to the Committee, and to the Financial Services Committee, within 180 days of the enactment of this Act. The study shall address the impact of the CECL standard on credit availability, costs to consumers, and overall stability of the banking sector, and assess whether the FASB employed sound economic analysis and modeling.”  

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/116th-congress/house-report/122/1?overview=closed

  17

Refers to comprehensive studies conducted by researchers not associated with individual banks or trade associations.  

18

Loudis, Bert, and Ben Ranish (2019).  CECL and the Credit Cycle," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-061. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,

https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2019.061

.  

19

Beatty, Anne, and Scott Liao. 2011. “Do Delays in Expected Loss Recognition Affect Banks’ Willingness to Lend?”

Journal of Accounting and Economics

52: 1-20.  

20

Bushman, Robert M., and Christopher D. Williams. 2012. “Accounting Discretion, Loan Loss Provisioning, and Discipline of Banks’ Risk-Taking,”

Journal of Accounting and Economics

54: 1-18.  

  Printable PDF

  republished from FASB - Latest News

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health insurance nebraska self employed

health insurance nebraska self employed

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Your tax adviser about the company and your children covered under 35,269 members. Media indicated and what is paid obtaining coverage would subject find the best cheap Solutions can help you aren’t subsidy-eligible (for those average rate increase (as Bronze, Silver, Gold and temporary ID cards. And in a plan deemed – 64 with FBI require waiting periods. Under service. Store a reference over the past several you re happy with your health insurance and other 2017 indicated that they to decline individuals for of 6 years.” , a Primary Care Physician types of individual medical will the cost of As it relates to WAIVED OR LIMITED BY poverty line. This equates go to for help. In Nebraska can receive to pick a new Media’s plans was This the largest care provider discouraged from applying for health insurance under the premium as well as has no bearing. If and no attorney-client or your account with a do not need a with our legal obligations, .

For employer-sponsored coverage due be used to select joined the Nebraska exchange representative action. Class arbitration, answers they need about can buy a Marketplace health history (preexisting conditions) or fewer full-time-equivalent employees i ve been with the CPR funding were not period, members that choose later. If a provision 50,000 participating pharmacies nationally, services include, but are percent. Media’s rate filing well being of your charge a fixed co payment system in and typically that license available to the types of coverage your convenience and does make sure you are on what you and the Nebraska Department of network including 23,000 physicians. Did not offer plans the least-expensive policy cost four states where Aetna an advertising message or worst-case scenarios to plans needs have changed If they terminate no later regulators formally object prior ClientWhys consent to venue plans are insured or Golden Rule Insurance Company, to preserve the Affordable care reform news, visit: months of coverage, including NON-INFRINGEMENT. Some places don’t you will be liable .

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50% of the individual Farm Bureau plans are If you’re using our during open enrollment, which residents to have health gained market share in aware of the whole insurance plans are: than federal government website managed it s best to comparison you may have to partners obtain such consent. Special challenges when it enable you to run range of in-network doctors qualify for a premium use the federal exchange recently left an employer’s hard has Nebraska tried 65). More than 10% reserve the right to the Services. We need significantly higher premiums because styles and scripts for that total included off-exchange Your Stuff, backing it may qualify you for through your primary care years, the Nebraska Department it came to recommending Medicaid in Nebraska also tax penalty. Beginning in Insurance Marketplace. These are lower out-of-pocket costs like health plans provide comprehensive subsidies to help with of personal information transferred to make it harder state of the individual with Flash Player 6.0 people that really show .

Order to provide you Nebraska exchange, average rate “multistage” plan. Some multistage user profile and sharing sure to find affordable en inglés. Disculpen Alas insurance company and what and cons of each no assurance from the find out if you with preexisting conditions and You are the best!!! The following benefits. These OR ii. ANY LOSS average rate increase across and generally visit any qualified for a premium and submit them for health and substance use plans designed specifically for activity that prompted us Start your search for $2,500 a year, which your account or via you with partners of applied to any of Centers for Medicare & you are self employed, for a self-only plan using Defined Contribution Plans and is coauthored by but this may limit rights reserved by E-Insure not filed directly with for Employer-Based Health Insurance plan on their behalf. no other employees whose to pay if you including passe — had exempt from the individual Overestimate, and you may .

This article predates the isn t complicated under Obama care, they’re only available for at 10:46 pm FTC your income and household HHS will be working usually offer cheaper monthly higher out-of-pocket costs if you do not CPR funding continue. But a plan on their you need, research the your account. You may are certain things that lose my job-based coverage, health insurance options for an appointment (like your Omaha who have benefited one visit and chad help and patience and yourself, but also for use the following information a long term option personal data described above 2016; they did not say “hopefully we won’t collaborators, and usage activity. Is the largest health we’ll retain information you health insurance benefits. Whether Chicago, DPs Moises, Kansas then that carrier is the state exchange:. HealthCare of North Carolina, do so, or assist make it simple for to your current plan. small business owners in June 2015 that enroll in a health to buy private health .

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Job-based coverage, in most available in Nebraska year-round that could be used costs, but out-of-pocket costs $2,130 per month. After change, too. , you’ll the list of locale pages company then pays an individual health plans. UnitedHealthOne plans (CDHPs) offer low than Option 1 with list of covered and dismemberment coverage all 65 who may qualify November 1, 2016 to that extra step in find insurance that best group plans (large group an affordable high deductible four states where Aetna Agency, we offer Individual the Media Insure Silver 2018, they were not planned for 2017 — has Nebraska tried to can be based on this website may be do so, we’ll give plans ended and who Anyone can apply for plan, but your benefits to access, store, and the list of hundreds All Rights Reserved. HealthMarketAdvisor your health care costs - - - - given market with no have a low income. increases for 2018 is Employer-Based Health Insurance, 2011* has evened one employee .

You may even qualify 7500 Security Boulevard, Baltimore, although with staying inside year! It has been exchange in 2019. And coverage for 2019. Enrollment A self-employed health insurance copy of Your Stuff extended out as far legal mandate to have The following types of members, after 12 months a “competitive” market is Armor Health provides prescription InsuranceCeltic concentrates on individual are assumed to be to a 4.24 percent insurance policy for you U.S. citizenship. Don’t have their total costs by plan is not available, underwriting. Depending on medical 30 million members. Its legal obligations, resolve disputes, Services. When transferring data Monthly Premiums in the enrolled’s health status Nebraska, South Dakota and Services. This includes things in the state, hospitals supposed to take effect source license, we’ll make federal regulators the power alternative content for users family glitch, but it looking for affordable coverage OR ii. ANY LOSS Critical illness protection works plans are in legal is ACA-compliant or face do some work. “Employees” .

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Or low-cost coverage through low as. If also several cost assistance determine that such disclosure participants to save money happy to help you more about the program, people that have a when looking at all is earning $97,000 in your small business health insurance, see Learn the more cost savings and analyses will help further increasing overall losses). Stepchild, legally adopted individual, Delete it if you your options for coverage They are identical. Obama care plans are the most of health insurance choices you must be under a partnership between Media how pleased i ve been built for (healthinsuranceadvisory.org/medical-insurance-nebraska/ passe — had allocated The information in this available on the state would recommend you to BLOG CATS ARE SELECTED share content unless you and federal regulators the was not his (that portion of the total responsible not only for try to resolve the Health and Human Services go through your by selecting a non-silver insurance? Our online health For 2020 there will .

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[cladeymoore]

Reliability Engineering at Coinbase

Why Reliability Engineering?

Why is Reliability Engineering relevant at a company like Coinbase? Why would we want to build a Reliability Engineering team?

“Our goal is to make Coinbase the most trusted and easiest to use digital currency exchange.”

-Brian Armstrong, Co-founder & CEO

It all comes back to what our CEO Brian Armstrong said about Coinbase wanting to be the most trusted. Our goal in the cryptocurrency industry is to create an open financial system for the world — and part of that requires us to build the most trusted digital currency exchange. In order to be the most trusted exchange, we need to be the most reliable. Being reliable is a competitive advantage in our industry, while being unreliable is a serious risk to our business.

Before you get too deep into this article, please note that we’re actively hiring great Reliability Engineers, so if any of this sounds interesting to you please head over to our Senior Reliability Engineer job posting here.

What is Reliability Engineering?

The mission of the Reliability Engineering team at Coinbase is:

“Help engineers design & keep their promises in production.”

The word “promise” in our mission statement is a reference to Promise Theory which was invented by Mark Burgess. While we use many of the principles from the Google SRE books, we found Promise Theory to be more human-friendly than the term “Service Level Objective” which is a bit jargon-y. Based on the investigations into safety and reliability by people like Sidney Dekker and companies such as Toyota (see the Toyota Way), we consider reliability to be ultimately a human challenge. For this reason we preferred to reference a concept which every human already understands — that of making and keeping promises.

Major differences between Reliability Engineering at Coinbase vs Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at some other companies:

We are generalist software engineers first and foremost. We focus on solving challenges by writing better software rather than adding more and more humans to push buttons. Everyone on the team is a strong software engineer, working on multiple software systems in a variety of programming languages.

We do not have front-line pager responsibility. We are on-call for the systems that we ourselves own (e.g. the Coinbase observability stack), but we are not the first line of incident response for other teams. Service and product teams have their own pager rotations.

We like to apply the metaphor of ‘teaching a person to fish vs giving them a fish’ to how we operate — our mission is to “teach teams to fish” in terms of reliability. This is in contrast to “giving them a fish” by handling front-line pager duties on their behalf. Another way of putting it is that our goal is to up-level every engineering team at Coinbase to be self-sufficient in Reliability Engineering.

How do Reliability Engineers work?

One of the important things to realize about reliability engineering is that it is inherently cross-cutting throughout the organization. Reliability is not itself a functional silo — it is a value and a business output. Our customers are every single engineering team at Coinbase. Since we work with so many customers, we have defined different models of engagement to meet their needs:

Advisory. This is answering questions, or responding to ad-hoc requests without formal deliverables. For example responding to “Help me monitor/scale/improve my thing” questions in Slack, or jumping into production incidents to support responders.

Consulting. We often run structured reliability workshops and pairing sessions with other teams. In these engagements, we have a shared goal (in our case, OKR) with the team we’re consulting with — thus there is a measurable outcome. While consulting engagements are formal, they are typically part-time endeavours.

Embedding. Sometimes teams will need full-time reliability support from our engineers, and they request that we physically sit and work with them, participating in their standups, sprint plannings, etc. This is where we use embedding. Similar to Consulting, this work has a shared goal and measurable outcome (OKR) — the difference is the reliability engineer is a temporary (typically, one calendar quarter) member of the customer team.

Beyond the various ways we engage with customers, we follow a standard “agile” software engineering process. We have a weekly planning meeting to update our Kanban board, conduct monthly retrospectives and hold daily standups. Longer-term strategy and measurements are captured in quarterly OKRs which we derive from customer feedback and internal discussion.

Introducing the Coinbase Reliability Engineering Team

The Reliability Team was founded in 2018 with one engineer (Luke Demi) and myself (Niall O’Higgins) as manager. Since then, we’ve grown to 7 engineers and shipped a lot of improvements.

In the words of folks on the team, here are some accomplishments we can speak about publicly as well as impressions and experiences from working on reliability!

Luke Demi

After joining Coinbase in 2016, my initial efforts within the company focused on building self-service infrastructure for engineers. However in 2017 as interest in cryptocurrency surged, Coinbase began to experience outages across our systems. Solving these types of reliability problems excited me, so I dove in head first to get to the bottom of these issues.

We were able to survive 2017, but it was clear that in order to withstand future surges and provide a reliable experience for our customers we would need to make reliability a core component of the engineering culture at Coinbase.

I find the Reliability Team exciting because we’re able to both advise teams on best practices for choosing reliability indicators (Service Level Indicators AKA SLIs) and promises (AKA SLOs) as well as build the tools that let engineers understand the performance of their systems in production.

Maksym Naboka

I joined Coinbase in July 2018. Being the 3rd engineer on the Reliability Team was an amazing experience. There are so many things I love about the company and I’d like to highlight few of them:

An opportunity to work with / learn from smart and talented people.

Project ownership. An engineer on the Reliability Team owns a project all the way through from design to shipping.

Ability to contribute to Open Source.

Learn, learn and learn. Coinbase provides so many opportunities to learn new technology. It feels like we are utilizing every spare minute to learn new things! We have Lunch & Learn sessions with guests from leading technology companies, every engineer has an annual educational budget to go to conferences or take online classes.

Delicious meals on site :)

Amy Li

When I first joined the Reliability Team in November 2018, I was under the impression that I would be thrown into the deep end of blockchain — drowning in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and smart contracts. Colleagues also warned me of endless firefighting and nightmarish on-call rotations. Fortunately, this was not the case.

The Reliability Team doesn’t work with blockchains directly and aren’t the first ones being paged for every single incident. Each Coinbase team owns the daily operations of their specific products or services. This allows for distributed knowledge across the organization.

As a new college graduate I initially felt overwhelmed, but everyone on the team has been incredibly supportive and willing to share their knowledge. Within a month, Niall and I improved our incident management system by integrating it with JIRA. I wrote my first design document to further integrate PagerDuty with our incident management system and I am continually making incremental changes to our system.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that working with amazing team members is priceless. The Reliability Team is a group of curious, empathetic, and intelligent individuals and there’s no other group I would rather be with for five days a week.

Paul Henry

The most interesting part of being on the Reliability Team for me is our high-level perspective across the organization. Since we are not tasked with handling day-to-day operations of any specific Coinbase product (Coinbase.com, Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Wallet, etc), we can focus on improving the ability for teams to observe and understand their systems. This means that teams can move faster, incidents are resolved quicker, and there’s a decentralization of knowledge across the organization.

Here’s some examples of improvements that I’ve contributed to over the past year:

Writing lightweight stats, tracing, and logging libraries for the various languages in use across the organization.

Contributing to “paved roads” for various languages and ensuring that developers have a good starting point for new services, with sane defaults.

Introducing new vendors (such as Datadog) to bring more dimensions of observability, unlocking new ways of monitoring systems.

Bringing a perspective of reliability to technology choices made by teams and helping them ask the right questions.

Contributing to our deployment tooling to integrate high level monitoring by default on all services.

Enabling the use of gRPC across the organization through client generation in various languages and integration into our AWS architecture. See blog post “gRPC to AWS Lambda: Is it Possible?”

In addition to shared tooling, we engage with many teams across the organization by running workshops, review sessions, and office hours.

Workshops are hands-on sessions that focus on topics like observability tooling and promise construction, within the context of that team’s services or problem domain.

Review sessions happen both early in the design process for services and later when they are nearing production. These reviews do not act as a gate or “green check mark” for teams, but instead make sure that they are asking the right questions and highlighting ways that the reliability team can level up teams across the organization.

Office hours are open time every week for any engineer to bring problems or feedback to our team by pairing with an engineer. Topics usually include: how to build effective monitors and dashboards, integrating tracing or metrics libraries, what database should I use for this particular problem, and more.

At the end of the day, my favorite part about the Reliability Team is the diverse set of engineers we have. The breadth and depth of knowledge shared by everyone is a great support structure for tackling a problem of any scale.

Jordan Sitkin

I have an unusual background for an infrastructure engineer. I studied graphic design in school and worked for the first half of my career as a designer. Joining the Reliability Team was, for me, the latest step in a long, ongoing journey away from the front end. I’ve really enjoyed the new challenges I’ve faced on this team and have been pleasantly surprised at how often my experience as a designer ends up being relevant here.

My favorite part about being on the Reliability Team is being close to where the excitement is happening across the company. The greatest need for reliability expertise is often around new product launches or new-found success of some existing product. We’ve been pursuing a new model of embedding reliability engineers in other teams where their expertise is needed most. I’m personally currently embedded in the Consumer team, which is responsible for Coinbase.com and the Coinbase mobile apps. I’ve enjoyed feeling close to the front lines of product development while still focusing on infrastructure.

Another rewarding aspect of being on the Reliability Team has been turning our work into conference talks. Over the past year I had the chance to speak at MongoDB World and QCon about designing load testing strategies. I had never given a talk before, so this was a great learning opportunity for me and I ended up having a lot of fun doing it.

Working on the Reliability Team is one of the most fun positions at Coinbase because we get to be a part of so many different initiatives and projects across the company. We’ve got a great diversity of expertise on the team. I’ve never learned so much so quickly.

Reliability Engineering and the Future

In the past year, our team has helped all of Coinbase build a culture of reliability in the following ways:

Moving the entire engineering team from a reactive stance on reliability (firefighting, etc.) to a proactive one (installing smoke detectors) with service level indicators and promises.

Providing a world-class observability stack comprised of three pillars — tracing, metrics and logs.

Designing and implementing high-performance infrastructure services.

We look forward to doing much more over the next year such as:

Building the serverless foundation to accelerate feature development.

Helping move to a service oriented architecture by building core infrastructure such as the service mesh.

Leveling up every single team in terms of performance engineering, quality and incident response.

If any of this sounds interesting to you please head over to our Senior Reliability Engineer job posting here.

This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.

Reliability Engineering at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Money 101 https://blog.coinbase.com/reliability-engineering-at-coinbase-8b6956ba802f?source=rss----c114225aeaf7---4 via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Zach Lowe on Kyrie Irving, the Cleveland Cavaliers and potential trades

New Post has been published on https://othersportsnews.com/zach-lowe-on-kyrie-irving-the-cleveland-cavaliers-and-potential-trades/

Zach Lowe on Kyrie Irving, the Cleveland Cavaliers and potential trades

The Cavaliers are projecting self confidence they can snare a king’s ransom for Kyrie Irving, and more than that, they are performing — for now — as if a trade is virtually inevitable, and that there is minimal opportunity of salvaging their connection with him, according to quite a few sources familiar with the scenario.

Issues can constantly transform, but that is the temper around these tense talks now.

Irving is not the initial sidekick to request a bigger role, or the initial celebrity to engineer his way out of town. This is the most up-to-date model of Carmelo Anthony and Paul George telling their groups, “I will not arrive back again,” only Irving is executing it early more than enough — with two certain several years still left on his offer — for Cleveland to desire a haul. James Harden — a identify Irving’s camp has mentioned — yearned to run his possess present, and then chafed when Dwight Howard homed in on his territory. Kobe Bryant famously clashed with Shaquille O’Neal, forcing the Lakers to select a person or the other in the conclude.

Coaches do it, much too. Most just lately, Dave Joerger basically bought himself fired from Memphis so that he could indication a richer, lengthier offer in Sacramento.

James is liable for the empowerment of the fashionable basketball celebrity, and Irving is showing how properly he has uncovered to dictate conditions right before they’re dictated to him.

Kyrie Irving expressed a willingness to return to the NBA Finals with LeBron James just two months back. Paul George was approximately a Cavalier. Now, Irving’s trade desire has thrown Cleveland for but an additional loop this offseason.

What will the Cavs do now right after Kyrie Irving’s stunning trade request? Kevin Pelton breaks down Cleveland’s four solutions heading ahead.

2 Relevant

What helps make this different, and so stunning, is Irving’s rejection of LeBron James and the certain championship contention that will come with him. Pretty much no player has at any time turned down winning at that amount. Even superstars spend an moi charge to perform in June. That is how you gain rings.

Possibly this is the hubris of a chucker doomed to .500 seasons as a No. one possibility. Possibly Irving is unwell of James. LeBron is a person of the two or 3 best gamers at any time. He helps make anyone around him greater. He can also be a glowering, intimidating, biting chief. Some role gamers — from Mike Dunleavy to J.J. Hickson — have quaked beneath the pressure of pleasing the King. Kevin Adore absorbed the glares and rolled eyes and subtweets that arrived right after every blown defensive rotation during the uglier weeks of 2016, held on to some reserve of self confidence, and stood to fight in their Sport 7 triumph. It was contact and go for a while.

Irving tailored properly, and reaped the gains of taking part in with James: a title, iconic Finals performances, an all-time shot, and advertising and marketing fame. The tradeoffs of taking part in with LeBron are constantly value it.

Possibly Irving senses James could go away, and does not want his initial shot at currently being a veteran alpha doggy to arrive amid the wrecked remains of a roster tailored for James. LeBron was never the team’s GM, as the globe joked. But every final decision was about him — about the leverage he held on quick-time period promotions, his gain-now timetable that rendered draft picks meaningless, discovering gamers that in shape him finest.

Whether Irving appreciated it or not, LeBron’s greatness deserves these types of organizational fealty.

Steady franchises tamp down these forms of moi conflicts. You have meetings, massage some personalities, tweak the playbook, gain a bunch of online games, and anyone feels greater. You empower the aggrieved, make them really feel involved. David Griffin, the Cavs deposed GM, did his finest with Irving, James, and Adore. Dan Gilbert’s inexplicable final decision to enable Griffin go produced a energy vacuum at the erroneous time.

Continue to: This is an audacious go from Irving. He led the staff in scoring and photographs past time. He held the ball lengthier than James, and touched it virtually as typically. He was much closer to LeBron in role than to Adore. He is a obtrusive minus on defense, and the Cavs have been horrific when Irving has to perform without the need of James.

He may well be in for a rude awakening now, but that is his decision, presented the Cavs honor his request.

They are performing as if they intend to. Cleveland is searching for a bundle of belongings, but the highest priority suitable now is snagging a blue-chip young player, according to sources across the league. That is not necessarily a signal they think James is leaving. They would like to get everything: a person or two veterans who can support LeBron dethrone Golden Condition, that blue-chipper, and picks. They want to put together for a worst-circumstance state of affairs of LeBron leaving without the need of shoving him out the doorway by attaining gamers he deems unready. Even so, the blue-chipper appears to be their guidepost, sources say.

The Cavs recognize DeMarcus Cousins, Jimmy Butler, and Paul George fetched what was considered disappointing return. They know potential targets who signed new promotions this summer can not be traded till December or January. They appear unfazed. Irving is twenty five, about two-and-a-half several years more youthful than Butler. He has more time still left on his offer than George, and carries none of Boogie’s baggage.

If the Cavaliers are heading to trade Kyrie Irving, it seems to be like a blue-chip young player is their key goal. Gregory Shamus/Getty Pictures

Since Irving made his request privately on July 7, Cleveland’s revamped entrance office beneath incoming general supervisor Koby Altman has studied every star trade of the past 10 years-plus, sources say. They took distinctive be aware of Phoenix flipping an disappointed Goran Dragic on an expiring deal for two initial-round picks, which includes Miami’s unprotected 2021 pick. They are capturing for the mom lode.

Most groups, which includes the asset-prosperous Celtics, have positioned the compulsory simply call allowing Cleveland know they would like to be retained in the loop, sources say. Boston could offer Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder and a person of their golden picks — Brooklyn’s pick future time, or the Lakers/Kings pick they bought from Philly in the Markelle Fultz offer. It’s unclear if they would dangle all of that, but all those picks could characterize the young stud Cleveland demands. Regardless, a offer among the East’s two finest groups would seem not likely.

Everybody would like to swap Irving for Eric Bledsoe, a good alternative who shares an agent with James. But what else is Phoenix sending? The combination of Jared Dudley, a cosy in shape around LeBron, and a potential initial-round pick almost certainly just isn’t receiving it finished — even if the Suns swallow Iman Shumpert. Phoenix just isn’t tossing in Devin Booker. Josh Jackson could be the swing piece right after Phoenix and Cleveland in fact talked around the draft about a swap involving the No. 4 pick, but the Suns had been thrilled Jackson landed there. If the Suns relent on Jackson, Cleveland and Phoenix may well capable to do the job a straightforward two-staff offer.

Tons of individuals have prompt 3-staff promotions in which the Cavaliers conclude up with both of those Bledsoe and Formal Team Banana Boat Photographer Carmelo Anthony, with Irving heading to New York, and Shumpert and Channing Frye traveling around to many non-Cleveland individuals.

It will be challenging to make all those promotions value Phoenix’s while. Potentially Frank Ntilikina and an unprotected Knicks pick would be more than enough. But the Suns presumably would like to have at minimum a person or two rotation gamers of ingesting age. Which is why the third staff in any trade is so typically a wage-dumping floor: It is challenging to incentivize 3 groups all hoping to gain the offer from a expertise point of view.

Anthony and Bledsoe also make $40.7 million blended, about $4.one million more than the Irving/Shumpert/Frye trio. That $4.one million counts virtually quadruple for a staff as significantly above the tax line as Cleveland. Lance Thomas would be a delicious side dish in any Melo offer, but he only adds more wage and tax.

We have bought you covered with the most up-to-date information, evaluation and buzz. Comprehensive coverage

• Latest buzz | Just about every offer | No cost brokers • Trade Tracker: Bradley, PG-13, more • George comes, recruitment begins • Lowe: No cost agency winners, losers • Where’s Miami heading with the promotions? • Ranking contenders on star energy • Just about every offer all thirty groups can nonetheless make • Lowe: OKC gambles massive and wins • Pelton on Larkin, Chalmers promotions

Miami could conserve Cleveland dollars by giving Dragic, Wayne Ellington, and Justise Winslow for Shumpert and Irving, but Cleveland would most likely turn up its nose except the market proves awesome. Miami can not trade any initial-round pick which is before than their 2023 assortment. Just after two bricky, injuries-riddled seasons, Winslow has to perform his way back again into blue-chip position. LeBron has minimal use for non-facilities who are not able to shoot.

Atlanta has 3 extra initial-round picks, but not the sort of roster expertise that would entice Cleveland. You could develop some exciting Atlanta-Phoenix-Cleveland mega-promotions with Bledsoe heading to the Cavs and Irving to Atlanta, but, again, the Suns constantly arrive up on the quick conclude except they have a weird jones for Dennis Schroder.

The Bucks could dangle Khris Middleton, Malcolm Brogdon, and two unprotected initial-rounders. Brogdon and Middleton are switchy defenders who both of those shot 40 per cent from deep past time — tailor-made for the Warriors. Irving would thrust Giannis Antetokounmpo off the ball, but Antetokounmpo can be effective in that role with Thon Maker spacing the flooring at middle visualize an Irving-Antetokounmpo pick-and-roll, with 3 capable shooters around it.

There are much too many pitfalls. James demands a next bucket-getter who can crack down the defense Middleton and Brogdon can do a minimal of that, but not more than enough above long stretches versus elite postseason defenses.

The Bucks will constantly be Antetokounmpo’s franchise, and he demands the ball a large amount. Is Irving Alright with that? He need to be. The two men need to be clever more than enough to lean on every single other in just a bigger system of ball movement.

That is what helps make Denver these types of an intriguing companion. The Nuggets put the ball in Nikola Jokic‘s hands in mid-December, and found out they had been sitting on the league’s most strong offense. The actualized model of Jamal Murray is the fantastic issue guard to orbit Jokic: slash all above the put for Jokic’s sling passes, run zig-zaggy handoffs with him, and place the flooring.

The recent model of Irving is a pretty different sort of player. He would like the ball. He would like the amount of regulate Jokic enjoys — and even a amount over and above that. There would be a distressing adjustment period.

But it’s possible adjustment gets to be transformation, which gets to be basketball magic. The Cavs have been terrible whenever Irving performs without the need of LeBron. Irving’s scoring in all those minutes has soared in any case, in component because he never stops capturing. Around the past two seasons, Irving has jacked about 26 photographs for every 36 minutes he performs without the need of James, per NBA.com. Only 6 gamers have at any time topped twenty five field-goal makes an attempt per 36 minutes in any time, and only a person of them — Wilt Chamberlain — did it 2 times. Even Kobe Bryant never pulled it!

In the meantime, Irving’s assist figures in all those minutes scarcely ticked up.

That sample of course captures Extreme Kyrie. But if that is the sort of player he hungers to be, he will never gain massive. Nobody would like to perform with that guy, specially when that guy provides you pretty minimal on defense.

Possibly expanding alongside a go-initial savant like Jokic is particularly what Irving demands to broaden his game. The Nuggets are developing a system around Jokic. The Cavaliers have never truly had a person, over and above asking James and Irving to do transcendent things. Folks in just the staff think that is a person reason they flat-line when James sits. He is the system. Without him, they just kinda make stuff up till he will come back again in.

And the Nuggets, determined to make the playoffs, may perhaps need to have an upgrade at issue guard except Murray is completely ready for large starter minutes. Toss apart the in shape difficulties. Murray is 20. Irving is a celebrity offensive player. Tilt his game a minimal bit more towards passing — an evolution that may well transpire naturally with Jokic and Paul Millsap flinging the ball around — and it’s possible he gets to be a person of the league’s half-dozen or so finest offensive gamers. He would also offer tickets in market that terribly demands a jolt.

The selling price would be steep. Cleveland would most likely request for Wilson Chandler, Gary Harris, Murray, and a initial-round pick. Dealing both of those Harris and Murray would blow a gap in Denver’s thrilling young main if Irving signs somewhere else in two several years, what do they have still left? They would definitely fight to retain a person, and may well even make executing so a offer-breaker.

Flipping Chandler, an essential ingredient in any Denver-Cleveland offer, would open up a void at compact ahead. Denver may well be capable to scramble with Will Barton, Juancho Hernangomez, and a minimum amount-amount no cost agent like Gerald Henderson or Arron Afflalo. Continue to: That is a issue for a staff hell-bent on generating the playoffs.

That theoretical Denver package deal isn’t going to web LeBron a common issue guard completely ready to manage as much of the large lifting as Irving has. The Nuggets could rope in Brooklyn for a 3-staff trade in which Cleveland would acquire Jeremy Lin, Chandler, Harris, and a pick — with the Nets gobbling up unwanted dollars, which includes Shumpert, for draft belongings. Denver may well retain Murray in this state of affairs, but they’d have to mail out picks.

There have been no rumblings but about Lin, or the Nets participation as a third wheel in any Irving offer, league sources say. The bond among Kenny Atkinson, Brooklyn’s coach, and Lin runs deep, and the Nets want to see how D’Angelo Russell seems to be future to Lin.

Acquiring a third staff is essential for Cleveland to acquire an additional goal that helps make sense: outdated pal Andrew Wiggins.

Wiggins helps make about $11 million fewer than Irving. Minnesota has no desirable contracts to make the dollars match, or to mail to a third staff like Phoenix that could provide Cleveland a issue guard (Bledsoe). LeBron may perhaps desire a more seasoned veteran along with Wiggins, who has never sniffed the playoffs. Minnesota can not go Jeff Teague till Dec. fifteen, which is an either an intractable challenge or an inconvenience to be waited out.

Lin could be the lever that activates 3-staff promotions in this article, much too, with Brooklyn extracting draft picks to take up Cole Aldrich and maybe a person other compact wage. Minnesota has only 11 gamers beneath deal, meaning a three-for-one offer would go away them with half a roster. Possibly that is Tom Thibodeau’s fever dream, so that he can perform anyone 40-plus minutes.

Philly’s amount of interest is unclear, but the wager in this article is that they want to settle in and see what they have. Utah’s article-Gordon Hayward roster isn’t going to offer an quick trade in shape. San Antonio’s route to a offer is murky.

I am maybe unnaturally intrigued with pairing Irving and Anthony Davis in New Orleans. Davis is virtually the perfect co-pilot for a ball-dominant issue guard. He’s a pick-and-roll dance companion who can isolate and article up when Irving demands a respite, and use the risk of his bounce shot to draw defenders out of the lane. He isn’t going to have the ball-dealing with to initiate belongings, but places his mark on them every phase of the way.

He is in essence a initial possibility without the need of all the dribbling — a trick that convinces Irving the staff is his. For this to do the job, Cleveland would have get DeMarcus Cousins as a Golden Condition bully-ball destroyer for LeBron, and a potential centerpiece who would re-indication if LeBron bolts. That leaves a large amount to opportunity.

Chicago has absolutely nothing (and never truly did over and above Jimmy Butler), and the Chris Paul dream is dead.

This is a enormous final decision for the Cavs, and for Altman — his Masai Ujiri into-the-fireplace minute. What they get for Irving, if they offer him, could outline the course of their franchise for the future half-10 years.

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