#Intelligent Pigging Services

[generalmarketresearch-blog]

https://www.htfmarketintelligence.com/report/global-intelligent-pigging-services-market

[thediaryofaurora]

It’s ok if you can’t but I would love for the next headcanons for creepypasta character could you do X-Virus.

General HCs

X-Virus/Cody Anderson

Sorry this one is sooooo long. I have so much to say about this nerd.

- Seventeen! Barely older than Toby.

- Roughly 6’0, maybe a little over. He isn’t very toned, since he really just sits in the lab all day.

- White with mostly Welsh heritage.

- He was in foster case from about seven to thirteen. His mom was neglectful and a drug addict so child services inevitably took him away. He was adopted by a pathologist who created and spread chronic diseases that only he knew how to treat, which he profited from since he was the only person who knew how to cure them.

- His foster father had used Cody as an assistant and made sure he knew his way around the lab. They would often test the diseases on animals first and see if the cure worked just enough so that people would continuously come back for medication rather than completely healing. At around fifteen Cody was trusted to be in the lab alone, so he would take the time to test more fatal things on the test subjects. A few years later when he was about seventeen, he was a little too desensitized to fatal infections and death. He thought seeing how animals reacted to his creations weren’t enough to prove the data he wanted.

- With that, he went into one of his lonesome neighbor’s homes in the dead of night and tested one of his viruses on him. He had planned to return home and brush it off, but Slender thought he was too valuable to let him go.

- This dude is a GENIUS, and a massive nerd. Most of the residents overlook it since he’s just a dumb teenager who works in the infirmary, but he’s extremely intelligent. He spends all of his days studying and analyzing data, so it’s kind of a given.

- Mainly gets along with Toby, EJ, and surprisingly Helen.

- Since him and Toby are extremely close in age, they naturally hovered to each other when they first met. They aren’t necessarily similar, but they do have a brotherly connection.

- Him and EJ work together in the infirmary/ lab, so they have to communicate and at least slightly get along. Jack almost sees him as an annoying little sibling, but it’s a nice presence. Cody really looks up to him and that means a lot.

- Helen stops by on occasion to talk to Jack and over time he started talking to Cody. They’re strangely compatible given their age difference and personalities, but Helen’s a listener and Cody can’t help but ramble. Helen does botany in his free time, so he’ll bring by plants for him to study or incorporate into his excitements. Cody always makes sure to track Helen down and give him all the results and notes he took of whatever plant he had brought.

- Germaphobe. His hands are DRY from over washing and using so much hand sanitizer.

- He has a bunch of rodents and other test animals for his experiments. He’s made sure to tell Nina if she ever doesn’t want her guinea pigs anymore he’d be glad to take them.

- Strangely smells like a dentist’s office. With all the chemicals, hand sanitizer, and air fresheners in the lab he’s bound to.

- Allergic to dogs, and cats, and everything ever.

- He’s a pretty big recluse. A perfect day in his eyes is sitting alone in the lab and testing a bunch of random shit, which sounds pretty boring to anyone he tells that to.

- Cyber punk enthusiast to the absolute core. You can’t look at him and think otherwise.

- He rarely goes on missions. Usually he’s stationed in the lab to either cover for EJ or do whatever the hell he wants. In the occasion that he does get sent out, him and Jack make a great pair. Since EJ can sense pretty much anything and everything, all Cody needs is the go ahead to take the kill.

- Straight, but he doesn’t really think about intimate relationships very often. If he’s watching a movie with romance in it he might think on it for a little, but he prioritizes his work over anything. If he had to date someone in the mansion, it would probably be Nina. She’s as hyper as him and doesn’t know anything about science, so she gladly listens to whatever he’s working on. However, in realistic terms he wouldn’t date her.

- He likes musicals, I specifically mention this because Repo! The Genetic Opera reminds me of him and he would absolutely love that movie.

- Listens to a surprising amount of goth music. He thinks it’s the only music that makes him feel more productive, so he puts in his wired headphones and works while listening to it. Massive Siouxsie and the Banshees fan.

- His room is PRISTINE. Absolutely no decorations, just scattered files and white bedding. Since he’s such a germaphobe he tries to keep his room as clean as possible, even if he’s not in it very much. He thrives on energy drinks and the most sleep he gets is a nap, usually in the lab with his head down on his desk.

- HORRIBLE handwriting, definitely adds up with him being somewhat of a doctor. Pretty much only him and Helen can (almost) decipher it.

- He gets soooo giddy when referred to as Dr. Anderson. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does he’s ecstatic, especially because that’s what his foster father went by.

- Wears a lab coat and goggles on the regular. It’s not always necessary, but he feels so accomplished when he does. Occasionally wears scrubs.

- He’s been one of my favorites for like five years.

Thank you for reading! Feedback and requests are welcome.

✧✬✧✬✧✬✧✬✧✬✧✬✧

[corpsebridalshower]

Why is Bonnie in hell? I understand the whole witch thing, but I feel like there’s more to it that meets the eye.

Well when Bonnie was a young child, she had witness witch craft first hand from her family. Her family was kind, well known for their work in the community. No one knowing of their history behind closed doors.- but aside from the witch craft-

Bonnie was a sweetheart! She was kind, smart, understanding and a bit manipulative. But of course she wasn’t manipulative in the way that you’d think. No, She only used it for small things, such as getting the last piece of cake for desert at the dinner table, or when she’d want to stay out a bit longer than eight o’clock at night. She was an ordinary girl! But an intelligent one.

The older she got the more she witnessed sexism, racism, unwanted sexual advances. But of course she tried to move forward! She didn’t want the past to affect her future, but over time all these repetitive advances and threats were beginning to mess with her, deep down. It was boiling, seething in her.

Until one day she took it upon herself to use her charm for a much more useful act of service. She witness this young girl being hit on by a not so young man and it seemed to be making her rather uncomfortable but he could clearly care less. So she used her charm and her smart wit to lure the pig in her direction. Until she had him in place, and of course you know the rest! I would write more but I’m not to sure if that’s what you’d all want! It would be awfully long after all. (FYI her backstory will change through time! So not set in stone)

[bengiyo]

Get to Know Me Tag :)

I was tagged by @telomeke and shaded by @lurkingshan.

do you make your bed?

Not usually, but I don't have a partner right now. I find that I'm actually really good at cleanliness when I have people in my space regularly. I am better about taking care of things when I'm doing them for the ease of others.

what's your favourite number?

14, but I couldn't tell you why. I think it has something to do with a girl named Ciara who I sat behind in elementary school.

what is your job?

I fix things for a government agency.

if you could go back to school, would you?

Probably. I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I went to college, and was far too much a mess at the time to study what I really should have. If I could do it and maintain my expenses, I'd retrain for my preferred profession.

can you parallel park?

Yes. I am the gay who drives.

a job you had that would surprise people?

I was paid for over two years to be really good at D&D.

do you think aliens are real?

So... I gotta be honest... I hate this question. This feels as loaded as the "Do you believe in God?" question. We are not aware of the existence of life on other planets, let alone sentient life. There is nothing for me to believe in. Do I hope that there are other intelligent beings out there? Yes. I think it would be really cool to engage in communication with a species that also crawled their way out of the muck and made it to space. I think there's much we could learn from each other about life and the universe itself. But belief is such a loaded term for me as a lapsed Catholic. I do not believe in aliens, but I hope that we'll get to meet some in the future.

can you drive a manual car?

Nope! Never needed to learn.

what's your guilty pleasure?

Hmm... Nothing really anymore?

tattoos?

Nah, I've always worked in the public sector in a way that hasn't made it an advisable choice, and I've rarely cared enough about something to mark my body with it.

favorite color?

Purple most of the time, but my wardrobe would say I'm in my green era.

favorite type of music?

I'm a soft rock 90s kid who embraced a lot of 2000s and later alternative. I've been on a huge synthwave kick lately. However, because I grew up in the 90s and remember the era of radio, I have a deep affection for Soul and R&B, classic rock, and pop.

do you like puzzles?

Yes? But not in a way that makes me yearn for them.

any phobias?

Probably falling, but that seems like a normal one for survival purposes.

favorite childhood sport?

Baseball! I was a shortstop.

do you talk to yourself?

Not often. I don't actually have an internal monologue, so I don't need to talk to myself often to get through it.

what movies do you adore?

This is...so difficult. I'm just going to name a ton of films: Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin, Pacific Rim, Ghost Dog, Master and Commander, The Man From Earth, The Sum of Us, Big Eden, Kill Bill 1 and 2, Knives Out, Muppet Treasure Island, Gattaca, C.R.A.Z.Y., Weekend, First Blood, Robocop, Starship Troopers, Drive My Car, Nine Days, Really Love, Set it Off, Make the Yuletide Gay, Shelter, Pig, Kiki's Delivery Service, The Digimon Movie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Star Wars IV and V, Isa Pa With Feelings, The Way He Looks... and probably many more.

coffee or tea?

Coffee. Tea does so little for me.

first thing you wanted to be growing up?

A train conductor or an astronaut! Trains are so cool, and space is the final frontier! We have to boldly go where no one has gone before!

I'll tag @shortpplfedup, @negrowhat, @chicademartinica, @so-much-yet-to-learn and @happypotato48

[justforbooks]

In 1941 a secret British radio station called on Germans to rise up against Hitler. Run by German exiles, it was explicitly left wing. The station’s target audience was “the Good German”. Its broadcasts were serious and idealistic: a ray of light amid totalitarian darkness. They were also a complete flop. With Nazi propaganda rampant, and Hitler’s armies seemingly invincible and on the march across Europe, few bothered to listen in.

It was at this point that Britain’s wartime intelligence services tried a more radical approach. That summer, a talented journalist called Sefton Delmer was given the job of beating the Nazis at their own information game. Delmer spent his childhood in Berlin and spoke fluent German. In the early 1930s he chronicled Hitler’s rise to power – flying in the Führer’s plane and attending his mass rallies – as a correspondent for the Daily Express.

Working from an English country house, Delmer launched an experimental radio station. He called it Gustaf Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Instead of invoking lofty precepts, or Marxism, Delmer targeted what he called the “inner pig-dog”. The answer to Goebbels, Delmer concluded, was more Goebbels. His radio show became a grotesque cabaret aimed at the worst and most Schwein-like aspects of human nature.

As Peter Pomerantsev writes in his compelling new study How to Win an Information War, Delmer was a “nearly forgotten genius of propaganda”. GS1 backed Hitler and was staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Its mysterious leader, dubbed der Chef, ridiculed Churchill using foul Berlin slang. At the same time the station lambasted the Nazi elite as a group of decadent crooks. They stole and whored, it said, as British planes bombed and decent Germans suffered.

Delmer’s goal was to undermine nazism from within, by turning ordinary citizens against their aloof party bosses. A cast of Jewish refugees and former cabaret artists played the role of Nazis. Recordings took place in a billiards room, located inside the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire, a centre of wartime operations. Some of the content was real. Other elements were made up, including titillating accounts of SS orgies at a Bavarian monastery.

The station was a sensation. Large numbers of Germans tuned in. The US embassy in Berlin – America had yet to enter the war – thought it to be the work of German nationalists or disgruntled army officers. The Nazis fretted about its influence. One unimpressed person was Stafford Cripps, the future chancellor of the exchequer, who complained to Anthony Eden, the then minister for foreign affairs, about the station’s use of “filthy pornography”.

By 1943, Delmer’s counter-propaganda operation had grown. He and his now expanded team ran a live news bulletin aimed at German soldiers, the Soldatensender Calais, as well as a series of clandestine radio programmes in a variety of languages. Delmer’s artist wife Isabel joined in. She drew explicit pictures showing a blonde woman having sex with a dark-skinned foreigner. Partisans sent the pamphlets to homesick German troops stationed in Crete.

Others who made a contribution to Delmer’s productions included Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and the 26-year-old future novelist Muriel Spark. Fleming worked for naval intelligence. He brought titbits of information that made the show feel genuine, including the latest results from U-boat football leagues. Many Germans guessed the station was British. But they listened anyway, feeling it represented “them”.

Pomerantsev is an expert on propaganda and the author of two previous books on the subject, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda. The son of political dissidents in Kyiv, he was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. During the 00s he lived in Moscow and worked there as a TV producer. Since Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion he has been part of a project that documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Like Delmer, Pomeranstev has personal experience of two rival cultures: one authoritarian, the other liberal and democratic. He draws parallels between the fascist 1930s and our own populist age. The same “underlying mindset” can be seen in dictators such as Putin and Xi Jinping, and wannabe strongmen and bullies such as Donald Trump. “Propagandists across the world and across the ages play on the same emotional notes like well-worn scales,” he observes.

In Pomerantsev’s view, propaganda works not because it convinces, or even confuses. Its real power lies in its ability to convey a sense of belonging, he argues. Those left behind feel themselves emboldened and part of a special community. It is a world of grievance, victimhood and enemies, where facts are meaningless. What matters are feelings and the illusion propaganda lends of “individual agency”. Its practitioners bend reality. And – as with Putin’s fictions about Ukraine – make murder possible.

The book offers a few ideas as to how we might fight back. When horrors were uncovered in Bucha, the town near Kyiv where Russian soldiers executed civilians, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to the Russian people. This didn’t cut through. Most preferred to believe the version shown on state TV: that Moscow was waging a defensive fight against “neo-Nazis”. It was a comforting lie that absolved Russians of personal responsibility.

Ukrainian activists hit a similar wall when they cold-called Russians and told them about the destruction caused by Kremlin bombing. Many called relatives in St Petersburg and other Russian cities to explain they were under attack. Typically, their family members did not believe them. “They really brainwashed you over there,” one said.

The activists had more success when they mentioned taxes or travel restrictions – issues that spoke to the self-interested “pig-dog”. Pomerantsev suggests that Delmer’s approach worked because he allowed people to care about the truth again, nudging them towards independent thought, while avoiding the pitfall of obvious disloyalty. He brought wit and creativity to his anti-propaganda efforts as well, turning his radio shows into bravura transmissions.

Pomerantsev makes an intriguing comparison between der Chef and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who in summer 2023 staged a short-lived rebellion against Putin. Two months later, Prigozhin died in a plane crash. The oligarch was a charismatic figure who roasted Russia’s generals for their incompetent handling of the war. He used earthy prison slang. It was this ability to communicate in plain language that made him popular – and a rival.

The book muses on whether Delmer was ultimately good or bad. Are tricks and subterfuge justified in pursuit of noble goals? It concludes that the journalist’s greatest insight was his understanding of his own ordinariness, and how this might be exploited by unscrupulous governments and rabble-rousing individuals. “He was vulnerable to propaganda for the same reasons we all are – through the need to fit in and conform,” Pomerantsev notes.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[canadianabroadvery]

The Roman state would eventually give free rein to Christians and their extremist views, who destroyed pagan shrines and images, or who committed violence against pagan leaders. They attacked people at pagan services and destroyed their temples as a means of enforcing Christianity on the people. Arson was a favorite tactic. From the late 300s on, monks stand out as the primary aggressors in the battle to suppress pagans. Even Christian documents describe them as violent and crime-prone, beating people they considered sinful, stirring up sectarian strife. 

The pagan Eunapius remarked that these monks looked like men but lived like pigs, “and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes.” [Eunapius, 423] He added bitterly, “For among them, every man is given the power of a tyrant who has a black robe and is prepared to behave badly in public; they are not above murder.

Hypatia was born around 370 AD in Alexandria, Egypt. From a young age, she showed extraordinary intelligence, which is why her father taught her the study of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and above all, philosophy. 

Hypatia believed that culture was a good that belonged to everyone, not just a few privileged individuals, which is why she often held her lessons in the street, among the common people, just as Socrates did. The entire city loved and honored her, while the authorities often consulted her on public matters.

She spoke, disseminated knowledge, opened minds, but above all, she refused to submit to the Christian system that wanted her subdued, as a woman. And this was intolerable for the Patriarchal Christans. 

It happened that one day, Bishop Cyril passed by Hypatia's house and saw a large crowd in front of her door. When he asked the reason for all the commotion, he was told that this was the house of Hypatia: a great philosopher who had earned the respect of the entire city through her genius and intelligence.

Bishop Cyril, consumed by envy, began to plot her murder. Cyril incited the Christians against Hypatia, accusing her of being a witch, a pagan. Bishop Cyril’s flock lay in wait to surprise Hypatia, as she returned home. They surrounded her, dragged her with violence to a church; and after tearing off her clothes and brutally beating her, they killed her using shards and then burned her remains.

[antoine-roquentin]

This is part of a series on American assassinations of foreign and possibly domestic leaders, and part of a miniseries on the American intervention in the Dominican Republic and Cuba during and prior to 1965. It has been held up to some extent by writer's block surrounding the use of violence and detail. I hope the salaciousness meets but does not exceed nor lag expectations. The previous part, part 7, is available here.

On the afternoon of March 4, 1960, a Belgian ship was offloading 76 tons of explosive munitions directly onto the docks at Havana. At 3:10, an explosion rocked the ship. It was big enough to damage the docks, and dozens were killed or wounded. The Cuban army organized a relief effort. Che Guevara, a trained doctor, drove down as fast as he could. Fidel Castro observed overhead in a helicopter. 30 minutes after the first explosion, a second, seemingly well-timed, hit the relief workers and damaged the helicopter. The total death toll may have been as high as 100. The American State Department in memos blamed the French, who they said were incensed by Cuban support for an independent Algeria. At a memorial the next day, Castro made it quite clear who he blamed. A photojournalist took the following pictures there, including perhaps the most famous image to ever be placed on a t-shirt:

A few days later the Miami Herald, whose journalists in the employ of the CIA were known as AMCARBON-1, -2, and -3 (AM being Cuba), published an interview fingering a culprit. A man had witnessed William Alexander Morgan, an American who had fought with Castro, board the ship the day before. Morgan was both a strong believer in the Cuban Revolution and a liberal who insisted that Castro had no communist leanings. He'd actually participated in the armed suppression of a Trujillo-backed invasion months before. Dominican intelligence agents had approached him and offered $1 million, raised in part from American mafia figures, with a quarter as a down payment to facilitate the landing of former Batista soldiers and arms. Morgan pocketed the money then told the Cuban government, and the invasion force was either captured or slaughtered. Trujillo placed a bounty on his head. He walked hand-in-hand with Castro and Che during the memorial service, but by June 1960 at the latest he was known to be smuggling weapons on behalf of the CIA to rebels. He claimed he was disenchanted with Cuba's increasing closeness to the Soviet Union. Ultimately, he was arrested and executed the month before the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Adam Driver will be playing him in the biopic.

On March 17 and April 14, Eisenhower once again affirmed the plans for Castro and Trujillo, albeit with hours of discussion on the former and only minutes on the latter. American staff did "not find Cuba to be under Communist control", but nevertheless felt that Castro was "the Communist type", as "his confused doctrine of Castro-humanism will take him to a position of world prominence as a radical agitator of under-developed areas". Castro, meanwhile, was still hedging his bets, buying guns from the Czechs rather than the Soviets directly, who he did not allow to reopen their embassy in Havana. While “Trujillo is a man of great pride with great love for his country, his people and his family,” he had to go because “it appears impossible to shake the belief of Latin America that the Trujillo situation is more serious than the Castro situation. Until Trujillo is eliminated, we cannot get our Latin American friends to reach a proper level of indignation in dealing with Castro.” The plan for Cuba was to flood the country with propaganda, train dissidents in peaceful and violent protest, and build a paramilitary force for an eventual invasion. The plan for Trujillo was to "make prior arrangements with an appropriate civil military leader group in a position to and willing to take over the Dominican Government with the assurance of United States support", then take out Trujillo through bribery, pressure, or violence, as well as any others who stood in the way of that group.

One reason Eisenhower's staff did not take kindly to the attempt by Castro to play one imperialist against another was because they were intensely racist and regarded any effort by post-colonial states to manage their resources in their own interest as a sign that they were being controlled by the Soviets. A typical example was the incoming administration of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. At the end of July, Lumumba stopped in America to visit New York and then Washington D.C. He hoped to woo prominent business leaders and then meet with the president. However, in New York, he explained against the advice of his advisors to a group of bankers that Congolese uranium would now be traded under new agreements since the old ones with the Belgians were void. The next day, an advisor to Eisenhower called an advisor to Lumumba and said "I’m sorry, tell your Prime Minister that the President prefers to go and play golf than to meet Lumumba". Like with Castro, the Americans stonewalled Lumumba, and then when he looked instead to the Soviets for aid, they decided he was an open communist. On 18 August 1960, Eisenhower met with his National Security Council and made a vague comment that he wished somebody would get rid of Lumumba. During a 20 minute break in the meeting, he authorized $10 million for the coming invasion of Cuba so long as it consisted entirely of Cuban nationals. Three days later, America cut off diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic on the urging of President Betancourt of Venezuela, who Trujillo had openly tried to assassinate in a carbombing, and downgraded its embassy to a consulate.

Around the same time, a CIA agent named Sheffield Edwards, known for doing odd jobs for director Allen Dulles, was meeting with a man named Robert Maheu. As a former FBI agent, Maheu had struck out on his own in 1947, doing wiretaps, burglary, and intimidation in the name of protecting a list of clients that included Howard Hughes and members of the Mafia. Maheu went through a mid-level mafia man named John Roselli to set up a meeting between two CIA agents, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante, both of the Chicago mob, in late September. Together, they began to plot ways to kill Castro and get back the $100 million they'd lost in Cuban casinos to the revolution. Five- and six-figure cheques flowed freely. Poison was ordered, both to Cuba and the Congo. When it arrived in the former, a mafia man in charge of distributing it was told to keep it away from heat, so he stuck it in a freezer and rendered it useless. A plantation in Guatemala found where 500 men could be trained for an invasion, with 6 men a week ferried in teams to the mainland to build networks of anti-Castro Cubans. Reportedly, they were all were killed or captured. A few weeks later, an FBI agent in Miami told the CIA station chief there that he'd better plug up his leaks, since they'd picked up chatter among Castro's agents in the city as to a plan to kill Castro and invade from Guatemala. By November, the magazine Nation had reported what they'd learned from Guatemalan newspapers about the paramilitary training operation. By January it was in the NYT. For Trujillo, the plan was merely to send people who knew him, like his close friend and CIA agent William Pawley who'd helped overthrow Arbenz, to convince him to retire, as well as to supply small arms to rebels.

This period was largely overshadowed by the election, particularly due to JFK's shenanigans. It's unknown who let it slip to him that there was an invasion being planned, but Allen Dulles was one of the suspects. JFK's foreign policy experience in the senate had largely been to spout liberal bromides about economic development as a greater cure for communism than military might. One man he'd held a true admiration for was Patrice Lumumba. However, he was also someone who delegated rather than bringing his own ideas to the table. His dad Joe Kennedy had a meeting with Henry Luce, the CIA-linked boss of Time Magazine and namesake of Warren Hinckle's chimp, whose emissary to the agency was Charles Douglas Jackson, the mentor of Sacha Volman. Luce told Joe that any candidate he backed would have to be very tough on Castro. Joe told JFK, and his advisors came up with a wonderful idea: since his opponent Nixon couldn't mention the planned invasion of Cuba because it was covert, he should suggest that very action repeatedly and loudly, claiming that Nixon's failure to do the same was a sign he was easy on communism. It worked so well that Trujillo poured some money and manpower into JFK's campaign, which he felt would get him back into America's good books once he was elected. Part of this was because Trujillo often hung out in the same group of friends as the Kennedy family. For instance, Igor Cassini, a Russian aristocrat who fled the revolution, had become an American gossip columnist covering what he termed the "jet set", including the Kennedy family. He plead guilty in 1963 to using his influence as well as that of his brother, the designer of many of Jackie Kennedy's dresses, to try and convince JFK to back Trujillo. JFK also had an assist in the very close election campaign from the Chicago machine, an integrated network of Democratic politicians, mafia men like Giancana, and other power players in Illinois. Additionally, his token effort on civil rights, getting the son of a local preacher named Martin Luther King Senior released from prison in Georgia, won him a few votes. Ultimately, his margin in Illinois was less than 9,000. An interesting figure here is Judith Exner, a mistress of Kennedy's who was recorded visiting the White House a number of times (Bobby Baker quotes JFK in Seymour Hersh's book: "You know, I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day"). While her story repeatedly changed over the years, she claimed to have been introduced to both Kennedy and Giancana by Frank Sinatra, becoming a go-between on both the 1960 campaign and the attempts to kill Castro.

By Kennedy's election, any chance of a friendship between the American and Cuban governments had died. It was a typical tit-for-tat escalation. America threatened to withhold sugar rights if Cuba didn't return plantations owned by Americans but redistributed to Cuban peasants. Cuba then did a deal with the Soviets to sell sugar for oil. America banned its citizens at Cuban refineries from working on Soviet imports. Cuba nationalized American refineries. In October, America blocked all non-food exports to Cuba. In December, Cuba issued a statement saying they supported Soviet foreign policy wholeheartedly. That was the last straw. Castro had called in 1959 for a $30 billion American investment in Latin America to serve as a Marshall Plan for the region and was laughed out of the room by Eisenhower's flunkies. Kennedy announced a similar $20 billion investment two months after he was inaugurated specifically to counter Castro's popularity and was condemned by him as an imperialist. One month later, on April 15, the Bay of Pigs Invasion began. Kennedy had cut off Eisenhower's all-hands-on-board meetings with his diplomatic, military, and intelligence leadership because they bored him. He claimed he had not been told how bad the chances of success were despite being presented with documents stating a 30% chance of winning. To some degree, he was right. Dulles and Deputy Director for Plans Dick Bissell had systematically suppressed any reports that said Castro was popular. They were so sure the Cuban people hated the revolution that they immediately rewarded anybody they could find who said so. The result was a series of operational failures that doomed the invasion long before it started. Dulles called it the worst day of his life. Kennedy had slept peacefully through the election nailbiter but could not get a moment of rest on the night of the invasion. His most prominent demand had been for plausible deniability that America backed the attempt, yet the media had gotten the story out months prior. The result was the near death of America's Latin American priorities and national humiliation. It took weeks for Kennedy to get over it, after which he told his advisor McGeorge Bundy "Well, at least I've got three more years. Nobody can take that away from me."

At the very same time, the head of the American consular mission in the Dominican Republic, Henry Dearborn, was getting word of the plans for a new assassination attempt against Trujillo. When diplomatic relations had been broken off the previous August, both the ambassador and the CIA station chief had left the country immediately, and Dearborn filled in for both. He had already made contact with a group of conspirators believed to be sufficiently pro-American. They'd asked for small arms and funding. He was friendly to their cause, once comparing Trujillo to Dracula. As Dearborn told Charles Stuart Kennedy in an engaging interview, "I knew they were planning to do it, I knew how they were planning to do it, I knew, more or less, who was involved. Although I was always able to say that I personally did not know any of the assassins, I knew those who were pulling the strings. I knew everything except when. The only reason I didn't know when was because they didn't know either. There had to be a certain set of circumstances when they could put their plan into action." The reason for this was that the conspirators could only act when Trujillo was unguarded, which meant when he had gotten the urge to visit a favourite young mistress of his. He preferred she remain a secret and would only go to visit her at night in a 1957 blue Chevy Bel-Air with a chauffeur and no guards.

They counted among their number Antonio de la Maza, brother of Octavio who was killed in prison and used as the scapegoat for the silencing of an American citizen who had participated in the Galindez murder. Antonio and the entire de la Maza family had despised Trujillo since he came to power in 1930. The year after, he'd taken shots at an army patrol, a teenage idealist hoping to force an uprising. His father was friends with a general who put in a good word for him with the president. It was suggested that he join the army as penance. He rose to become a lieutenant, then retired to go into business. Most of the conspirators were like him. They'd spent time working for Trujillo in the military but had been poisoned by the various indignities they were forced to suffer. There were many in the country like this, who'd had a relative murdered, or a wife or daughter whose virginity Trujillo demanded as proof of their complete loyalty. General Juan Tomas Diaz had a nephew participate in an assassination plot, forcing him and his mother to seek asylum at the Brazilian embassy. Trujillo ordered him to get them out, and when he couldn't, he was forced into early retirement. General Antonio Imbert had a brother in prison for similar reasons and his career was on thin ice. They worked with a man named Severo Cabral, a longtime friend of de la Maza who was in contact with a local American grocer recruited as a deep cover CIA operative. The collective was named EMOTH, EM for the Dominican Republic.

The CIA wanted them to get an actually serving army officer as a patron to ensure they could take over once the deed was done. They managed to get General Pupo Roman, the nephew-in-law of Trujillo. Pupo had run up large debts due to his incompetence running his businesses and, while indecisive, was also easily flattered. The conspirators told him he would be interim president and saviour of the country from communism, and that the CIA had endorsed (in actuality, said he was acceptable) his candidacy for the office. Moreover, Pupo's incompetence had also earned him repeated scoldings over decades from Trujillo. He'd been placed in higher positions because the leader knew he would never act on his burning desire for revenge. Now, an easy way to do so had presented itself. One last figure of importance was Amado Garcia Guerrero, a member of Trujillo's personal guard who held a "rabid hatred of the man" because he prevented him from marrying his sweetheart, the sister of an anti-Trujillo rebel. He was the one who suggested the method of assassination. Together, the men plotted at Juan Tomas Diaz' house, often after watching a Hollywood film on his 16mm projector. Seeing people killed from a moving vehicle repeatedly was one reason they ultimately went with Guerrero's plan.

They imported a Chevrolet Biscayne on credit, knowing that American cops favoured it for its no-frills interior and high speed, and upgraded an old Oldsmobile. Juan Tomas had his service weapon, a .45. Together they came up with two hunting shotguns as well as a Remington and sawed off the barrels. The CIA added three .38 Smith & Wessons and six M-1 carbines with 500 rounds, a disappointment for the assassins but easily enough to get one tortured if they were caught posessing them (codename EMDEED). They staged their drive over and over, plotting out bullet trajectories and wind speeds to determine angles of fire. They almost went on May 17, but Trujillo decided to go to a brewery instead. On the 24th, they waited again in ambush in their cars on the side of the road. Trujillo had a fever. One of the men's wife asked him on the 29th how he would escape retribution for killing the dictator. "This is a man's plan, there is no need to hide," he replied. On the evening of the 30th, Trujillo visited an air force base with Pupo. There was a leaky faucet near the front door and mud had collected outside. Trujillo had gotten his boots muddy days ago and the problem had still not been fixed. He forced Pupo to stand in it and gave him a dressing down for letting the problem fester, telling him to stay at the base until it was fixed. Just before leaving, Trujillo had informed his driver that he would be going to see his mistress a day earlier than usual and that he should be prepared for when he got back. Fortunately, Guerrero had overheard and gotten the word out.

De la Maza, Guerrero, Imbert, and one more sat in the Biscayne by an on-ramp to the Sanchez highway at the edge of the capital, in a position where they could see any car coming from a long distance away. Two others were in the Oldsmobile three kilometres away, waiting for a flash of headlights from the Biscayne to block Trujillo's car if it could not be overtaken. Two kilometres further, a third car waited with only its driver for a second chance to block. All carried at least one weapon supplied by the Americans. The chauffeur was an old comrade of Trujillo's from when he was out raping and killing peasants for the Americans, who knew to turn off the police radio because the dictator did not enjoy the chatter. As it passed the Biscayne, Imbert did a u-turn and floored it. At the 3 kilometre mark, the cars were only 150 feet apart. The Biscayne, driven by a vengeful chauvinist, did not give the signal to the Oldsmobile but instead made to pass the Bel-Air, which pulled into the slow lane to facilitate. They came side by side. De la Maza opened fire with his lever action shotgun. The first shot was true. "Cunt, I've been hit," said Trujillo. The shotgun jammed and a few seconds passed before he was hit again. The Bel-Air pulled over and the Biscayne overshot it by a few hundred feet. "Get the guns, we fight," screamed Trujillo, referring to the Thompsons and pistols in the car. The chauffeur tried to turn the car around and drive back to the capital, but Trujillo pulled open his door, and he was forced to stop it lest the man spill out. Instead, he picked up the gun from the side passenger seat and opened up on the attackers, who had jumped out of the car and lay prone on the pavement. De la Maza was impatient and in the midst of a berserker rage, hoped to make the final kill. He charged forward, shotgun at the ready. Imbert ordered the other two men with the M-1s to cover him and ran too. Trujillo crawled, hands on his personal .38, firing the odd shot in the direction of his attackers. Both Imbert and de la Maza would claim they made the final shot. It ripped through the man's body and he fell to the ground, limp. The chauffeur was hit, a bullet chipping off the top of his skull, and he fell, unconscious but not yet dead. De la Maza stood over the Trujillo and took one more shot, sending his dental bridge flying into the bushes where it would be used two hours later to confirm his death. The quadrumvirate had all at least been brushed by a bullet themselves if not hit directly. When the Oldsmobile came close, the four, thinking they were being attacked by Trujillistas, fired and hit their co-conspirator. All of them were in need of medical care and made to get it. Dazed and confused, they did nothing to cover up their act save for loading the body in their trunk to bring to Pupo as proof of the act. Juan Tomas had given his .45 to de la Maza and it lay on the sidewalk, serial number in plain view for anybody who sought to look it up. It was just after 10 pm.

It was here that the conspiracy collapsed. Three groups raced independently to find Pupo, who had already been spirited away within minutes of the killing by Trujillo's henchman Arturo Espillat. As the killing took place, Espillat was with his wife parked at the highway entrance and heard the gunshots. He got close enough to the gunfight to see the muzzle flashes, then decided he would be better served getting Pupo's help. The two of them drove past the car with Trujillo's body inside of it. The latter were in search of Juan Tomas Diaz to bring to Pupo's now empty house. Under Espillat's watchful eye, at no point did Pupo ever call for his coup d'etat. Instead, everybody acted as though Trujillo was still in charge but hiding. His family, who had tried to kill him many times themselves, refused to believe the words of Espillat and his boss, intelligence head Johnny Abbes, assuming that this was a plot to see what they would do if he died. They could have easily been overruled by a stronger authority figure. The conspirators meanwhile were quick to tell their family members and the doctors they sought out for treatment what they had done, feeling a sense of pride. Wiretapped phone calls, as all in the Dominican Republic were, ensured that the man in the Oldsmobile who'd been shot had secret police in his room within 3 hours. He quickly gave up Pupo. By 7 p.m. the next day, they had another who had given up more names and the CIA connection. By June 2, 3 of the 7 were in custody or dead while the CIA station chief was on a flight to Puerto Rico. By the 5th, two more were taken and Dearborn was out too. Juan Tomas, de la Maza, and Guerrero all went down shooting. Others were tortured. The last two, one of whom was Imbert, would never be caught. Neither would Severo Cabral.

The men who ended up in charge were Joaquin Balaguer and Ramfis Trujillo. The former had been appointed puppet president by Trujillo in one of his periods of international pressure where he could not be seen taking a direct leadership role. The latter, the dictator's son, had come back from his playboy life on his French estate with Porfiro Rubirosa the day after the assassination. He ruled simply by virtue of most others in the state apparatus listening to him despite his lack of a formal role. He finally had his cousin-in-law Pupo arrested on the 5th and subjected him to such intense tortures that he tried to commit suicide by eating a lightbulb and hitting his head on the toilet repeatedly. His death came four months later when Ramfis, torturing him while holding a loaded gun for fun, accidentally shot him. By that point, Ramfis' mental state had taken a nosedive. Dominicans began to protest, acting out when the symbol of their oppression had been removed. Johnny Abbes, who was brutal enough to repress them, was forced out to a diplomatic post in Japan for fear that he might take control. Arturo Espillat, despite being a loyal supporter, was tortured for a few days and then released to flee the country. The rest of the Trujillo family had their own little fiefdoms and resented Ramfis' increasing control. Two uncles in particular, Petan and Hector, were considered even more brutal than Rafael had been. JFK nicknamed them the "wicked uncles". They used their connections in the Popular Dominican Movement, the fake communist opposition their brother had set up to convince the Americans that there was a serious threat of the country going red, to stage riots. The American regime duly responded with 40 ships off the coast.

America was threading a tight needle. It wanted recognition in Latin America that it was a force for good after the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs which committed it to at least a "facade of democracy", in the State Department's words. At the same time, its greatest fear was another Castro, and it was far more willing to support another Trujillo, referred to by both the Americans and the Dominican opposition as the "Nicaraguan option" after the Somoza family there, than a democratic election where a left wing government won. Preference would be given to whoever could suppress the riots and keep the communists down without violating human rights too blatantly. The opposition had two elements. One was the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) founded by CIA asset Juan Bosch. He had the moral support of Latin America's liberals, including the very strong government of Venezuela. The other was the nascent National Civic Union (UNC), essentially a shell for businessmen and notables opposed to Trujillo. It had some popular support because its leader was Severo Cabral, the middle man between the CIA and the conspiracy to kill Trujillo. Many other members had been close to the conspirators. In this way, the CIA defined Overton Window of the Dominican opposition.

Things were in chaos for the summer and fall. Ramfis forced out his wicked uncles only to see himself become the face of brutality, with Balaguer capitalizing. He increasingly tortured for fun and pleasure because running the country made him feel sick. By November, he'd had enough. He allowed his uncles back in for one final explosive moment. Using his connections, he staged the escape of the remaining conspirators, having a few cops killed so their bodies could be dumped by a police van supposedly carrying the prisoners. He then took the conspirators to an estate and let the extended family have a go at tormenting and shooting them. He ditched the country for Spain on his personal yacht with his father's body and hundreds of millions in savings. His uncles proclaimed themselves leaders, then woke up days later with American ships once again in harbour forcing them to step down. Balaguer thought he'd taken over, but by January 1962 he'd stepped down from his post, forced to share power with UNC and military figures, including Imbert and the 7th co-conspirator who were finally able to come out from hiding, in a council system in a desperate attempt to claim legitimacy.

The initial budget for the covert program against Cuba was $5 million, and it would ultimately grow to $50 million a year. It was named Operation Mongoose. It covered a host of actions against Cuba, mostly sabotage and bombings, but also assassinations. Bobby Kennedy was in charge since he felt personal animosity towards Castro. Unfortunately, we don't have a clear picture of it because a significant amount of the records were destroyed in 1967. Today, Cuba is still under control of the same government as under Eisenhower. Meanwhile, 6 rifles, 3 revolvers, and a few thousand dollars were enough to change the Dominican Republic and overthrow the longest ruling dictator in the history of Latin America until that point. However, it was an operation the president was far less willing to support, as Trujillo was respected in the social circles of the richest Americans and had dozens of Senators and Congressional Representatives on his side. Of course, the question of what the president was willing to support has always been a bit of a mystery, as plausible deniability has always been on the minds of those in a position to know the true history of America's system of espionage.

Dick Bissell: “If you had asked Eisenhower what he was thinking at that moment he probably would have said, ‘I sure as hell would rather get rid of Lumumba without killing him, but if that’s the only way, then it’s got to be that way’. Eisenhower was a tough man behind that smile.”

[forensicated]

Information about The Bill for use in fan fictions or anything similar. (aka: how I found out there's a character limit on Tumblr) This will be edited, please feel free to comment anything you want adding or editing.

Part 2

Nicknames for the police/officers:

The Old Bill, Bizzies (busybodies or 'too busy to help'), Feds, Bluebottles, Coppers, Bobbies, Rozzers, Peelers, The Filth, The Fuzz, Dibble (Officer Dibble from Top Cat), Pigs, Plod, Plonk (Person Of Limited Or No Knowledge), The Thin Blue Line, Bacon ("Can you smell bacon?") "The Babylon" (Jamican slang), Boys In Blue, Hawaii 5-O, Woody/Woodentops, The Scum, PoPo, The Law, Gammon.

In the earlier series, CID would refer to Uniform as Woodentops and Woodentops would refer to CID as Superstars.

Community Support Officers: CHIMPS (Completely Hopeless In Most Policing Situations), Hobby Bobby, Plastic Policeman,

Police Lingo, acronyms and abbreviations

ABE: Achieving Best Evidence - recording a victim of serious sexual assault on video for their first statement so it can be played in court to show how they were/the state they were in and try and limit the victim having to be there in person/cross examined etc.

ABH: Actual Bodily Harm

AMIP: Area Major Incident Pool (now Specialist Crime And Operations)

ANPR: Automatic Numberplate Recognition

AP: Agrieved Person - Victim

ARV: Armed Response Vehicle

ASBO: Antisocial Behaviour Order.

ASNT: Area Searched No Trace.

ASP: Baton

Big Red Key: The enforcer

BIU: Borough Intelligence Unit - this is where they could check facial recognition, check through CCTV and use the computers to check for suspects and find out peoples backgrounds.

BLO: Borough Liaison Officer

Blues and twos: Lights/Sirens on police cars

CAD: Computer Aided Dispatch

CIB: Complaints Investigation Bureau, later DPS (Directorate Of Professional Standards)

CID: Criminal Investigation Department

CIM: Critical Incident Manager - Inspector usually who oversees all the big jobs and makes decisions to keep things rolling smoothly rather than lots of chiefs making conflicting decisions.

Civvies (normal civilian clothes - ie a PC changing for an obbo)

CO19 (Used to be SO19 - armed officers. Smithy and Max used to be CO19 officers.) Apparently now MO19!

Code 11: Off Duty

CPS: Crown Prosecution Service

CPT: Child Protection Team

Crimint: Criminal Intelligence

CRIS: Crime Report Information System

CS Spray: Sprayed at criminal resisting arrest. Temporarily makes them unable to see properly and irritates their respiratory system. to enable them to be arrested. Sometimes now called PAVA spray.

CSE: Crime Scene Examiner (was SOCO- Scenes Of Crime Officer)

CSU: Community Support/Safety Unit Now joined with DVU and called SODAIT - Sexual Offences And Domestic Abuse Investigation Team

CLO: Community Liaison Officer

D&D: Drunk And Disorderly.

DVU: Domestic Violence unit. See CSU.

ETA: Expected Time Of Arrival "ETA, 5 minutes."

FATAC: Fatal Accident

Fence: Someone who buys and sells stolen goods

FED REP: Federation Representatives. Officers trained to support officers who are accused of crimes or otherwise want to take the service/bosses on.

FIU: Financial Investigation Unit

FLO: Family Liaison Officer (supports the family members/person who is going through a horrendous time. IE: Jim when Eva's daughter when missing and Smithy to Leanne Samuels when her daughter Carly was murdered)

FME: Force/Forensic Medical Examiner (Police doctor who reviews and treats criminals (and occasionally injured staff) who have gotten hurt, have complex medical issues or who need medication)

FPN: Fixed Penalty Notice - an on the spot fine.

GBH: Grievous Bodily Harm

Grass: informing on someone who has done a crime. Handling: someone who has accepted/bought stolen items either knowingly or unknowingly dependant on circumstances.

IBO: Used in later years instead of the CAD room, the Integrated Borough Operations handled non emergency telephone calls, CCTV viewing, contacting officers and similar. The CAD room was not needed as emergency calls were answered at Scotland Yard or Hendon and then sent to the relevant IBO Operator for the borough (which would be at Bow Central Communications Command) who would then send it to Sun Hill's IBO so all information can be relayed to the officers attending. Much like CAD, the IBO has a Sgt and PC's who would monitor the CCTV and IBO computers and assign officers to calls.

IC1-6 This is how the officers described skintones when searching for suspects/victims/witnesses.IC1 is White skinned european. IC2 is Dark Skinned European. IC3 is Afro Caribbean appearance, IC4 is Asian appearance (Indian Pakistani or Bangladeshi), IC5 is Chinese or Japanese appearance and IC6 is Arabian/Egyptian appearance.

Index: Vehicle registration - spelt out phonetically

India 99: Police helicopter.

IRB: Incident Report Book (Notebook) apparently now it's a force/work phone!

IRV: Incident Response Vehicle

LIO: Local Intelligence Officer

LEO: Local Enforcement Officer

LOS: Lost or Stolen

Misper: Missing Person

MIT: Major Incident Team (Used to be Murder Investigation Team)

MP: Met Police Information Room (Scotland Yard)

NCPA: No Cause For Police Action

NCS: National Crime Squad

NFA: No Further Action

NOIP: Notice Of Intended Prosecution. You're not arrested but the police are coming to take you to court soon.

Nonce: Sexual Offender - most used for Paedophiles.

OBBO: Observation - Keeping watch on suspects

OP: Observation Point

PACE: Police And Criminal Evidence Act - The police are bound to act by all rules, objectives and codes of conduct of this act of parliament in every part of their work.

PANDA: Normal police car that's not used for pursuing other cars. That's generally left to the Area Car or an IRV.

Pimp - someone who takes money from a woman on the sex trade. Also known as living off immoral earnings.

PIT: Precision Immobilisation Technique Manoeuvre (usually they try using a stinger to burst the tiers of a car thats speeding away from the police but it's not always possible. Where the road is wide enough and no one will become endangered by it,advanced drivers who are TPAC trained can do a manoeuvre to the car they're chasing and put it into spin to stop it. It CANNOT be done to busses/trucks/motorcycles etc and it's advised to not do it to a car you fear may be carrying armed occupants but to be honest it's not a massively used thing in the UK.)

PNC: Police National Computer = Real time checks on criminal records, outstanding warrants, missing and wanted people, registration checks etc.

PolAc: Police Accident (Ie car crash or hitting a pedestrian etc when it's a police officer involved)

PR: Officers police radio.

Refs: Refreshments/break time

Ringer - A vehicle that has been made up of parts of other cars or identity changed. Sometimes called a Cut n Shut.

RJ: Restorative Justice - a criminal doing something instead of being cautioned/imprisoned - like painting over their graffiti with a new coat of paint.

RTA/C: Road Traffic Accident/Collision

Rule 43 (Now 45): Vulnerable Prisoners in a prison. Smithy endured bullying to avoid being put in this as it means segregation and would bring him more attention and also a lot of isolation. This is for prisoners who are sex offenders, mentally ill, have a target on their back for grassing or being a convicted police/prison officer etc.

RUI: Released Under Investigation - bailed but the case is still being investigated and can be rearrested at any moment. The police hate this but the government have got touchy over bailing people.

Section 59 - Anti Social Behaviour Vehicle Seizure - you've kept driving like a prat so they're taking your car.

Section 165 - Seizing a car for no insurance. Most likely to be crushed.

Shout: A call out/incident communicated over the radio.

Sierra Oscar: Sun Hill Station Call Sign

Snout: Registered informant who gets paid for giving info. NNo sometimes CHIS - Covert Human Intelligence Source or Informant.

SO10: Now Covert Operations - Undercover Policing - can be long term and go really deep undercover. Stevie used to be in this dept. Now includes Counter Terrorism.

SOCA: Serious And Organised Crime Agency

SOPO: Sex Offenders Prevention Order (useless essentially!)

SOR - Sex Offenders Register

Stretch: Prison sentence.

TIU: Telecoms Investigation/Intelligence Unit

TOA: Time Of Arrival "Show me TOA 13.23"

Tom: Prostitute

TPAC Tactical Pursuit And Containment - trained officers who bring vehicles to a stop - like boxing cars in etc.

Trojan Unit: Armed Police

TSG: Territorial Support Group

TWOC: Taking a car without owners consent

VIN: Vehicle Identification Number

VRN: Vehicle Registration Number

Phonetic Alphabet Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebeck, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, Xray, Yankee, Zulu.

Areas Of Sun Hill/Canley Wharfs/Docks Jubilee Wharf, India Wharf, Limeharbour Dock, Sussex Wharf, Limeharbour Dock, Sussex Wharf, Old Jubilee Dock & Boatyard, Masters Wharf, Dockland Pier, Skippers Wharf

Council Estates Aldbourne, Bronte, Abelarde, Antrim Green, Canley, Farley, Parkmead, Jasmine Allen, Coal Lane, Cockcroft, Whitegate, Hardie, Larkmead, Tankeray, Copthorne, Netherlake,

[The earlier series had Riverdale Estate and one of the blocks was called Elizabeth Garret Anderson]

Other Stations Barton Street (Sierra Bravo) , Spicer Street, Putney Green, Stafford Row (Sierra Charlie), Tottenham (Echo Oscar) Diplomatic Protection (Delta Papa)

[Tower Wharf mentioned in series 2]

Industrial Estates

Cheetham Road Industrial Estate

Streets Trafford Way, Loftus Road, Leermont Road, Gatley Street, Purchase Road (Red light district), Brands Square, Jamaica Lane, Larkway Street, Godwick Street, Sun Hill Road, Shadwell Street, Harlow Street, Dunsford Street, Brown Square, Victoria Road, Dorral Road, Alforn Street, Mallan Street, Ashon Street, Brim Road, Rudcus Street, Cheetam Road, Cheetham Side, Jessop Street, Halpern Street, Tallow Street, Hoxton Road, Backhouse Street/Lane, Mournemouth Street/Avenue, Rudkin Road, Bagford Street, Brunell Avenue, Askill Road, Limefield Walk, Railton Street, Canley High Street, Ida Lane, Tubbs Lane, Claydon Street, Woodley Heath Road, Ballina Road, Starkwater Road, Calico Street, Tedder Street, Greenroad Way, Greaton Road, Mooreland Road, Ibbot Street, Rudleigh Road, Westway, Abbey Road, Broom Lane, Foundry Way, Humber Street, Muston Street, Valance Street

Prisons Longmarsh

Hospitals St Hughs

Schools

Cheetam Primary/Junior School, Shad Thames Infants School, Elcott Primary,

Canley Comprehensive, Harvey Wallace Comp, Deansgate Comprehensive, Cheetam Bank,

Pubs

Canley Arms, Askill Arms, Rose And Crown, The Green Archer, The Bears Head, The Elcott Arms, The Seven Bells, The White Swan, The Scales, The Grape And Bottle, The Dog And Gun, The Pikes Head, The Thames Tavern, The Pikes Head, The Tully Arms, The Boat Inn, The Tug, The Emma Hamilton, The Cock And Crown, The Sultan. Lord Banbury

Misc

North Canley Sports Center, Canley Fields, City Farm, St Ann's Church, Cheetham Community Support Center,

[aggressivelyaverage21]

Chapter 2: Red Coat Marine with the lovely @kloperslegend

She's an exhausted senior, she's a... ground intelligence officer?

They’d picked her out early. Day one, as soon as they’d been separated into their platoons. The tall, bulky man she’d come to know as Sergeant Instructor Walters skimmed down the list as he paced up and down the line of presenting candidates. When he got to her, he squinted at his clipboard before snapping his small eyes up as he walked past. “Harvard huh… You’re not too good for us, are you, Harvard? This ain’t the fucking Ivy League. ” 

And then Beatrice had opened her mouth. A simple, “No, Staff Sergeant,” had the hulking man spinning on his heel and coming back to her. 

His face inches from hers. “You fucking with me, Harvard? What the hell kind of accent is that?” 

“No, Sir. I grew up in London, Sir.” 

“Well, I’ll be damned. Looks like we got a regular Benedict Arnold.” Beatrice knew better than to correct the Sergeant. She really, really did. It didn’t mean she didn’t want to, though. She’d been called worse by her parents, but being singled out like this didn’t sit well with her. “And I’m not a Sir! Get on your face.” 

She had listened, immediately dropping into the increasingly familiar pushup position as she yelled, “Aye, Staff Sergeant!” at the top of her lungs . 

This particular morning, there hadn’t been any ‘ pushing ’ yet, though Beatrice was sure there would be at some point. She hadn’t done so many pushups in her life, and she’d only been here for three days. 

But the running part? This part, right now? She looked forward to it.

In less than a mile they came to a stop in the worn, patchy grass in front of the old line of pull-up bars, with their yellowing stale tape and rust. It was hardly a warm-up, but that didn’t stop several of her classmates from needing to catch their breath with their hands on their knees, only to get scolded.

Though ‘scolded’ was maybe a bit mild for, “Have you never gone for a fucking jog , candidate? Are you telling me you can’t lug your fat body here from the squad bay without wheezing like a little pig, candidate? Don’t worry. We’ll fix it.”

Beatrice had no idea how the Sergeant Instructors still had voices, considering how much they yelled. Come to think of it, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d yet heard something that wasn’t yelling. She’d even heard one of the candidates whispering something about how they practice yelling at trees… an entirely unhelpful image to have in her mind as she tried to keep her ‘military bearing.’ 

Noise was something she was starting to learn to tune out to a degree. If the yelling wasn’t at her, she found a way to let her mind wander, usually to other things they needed to know, what she needed to be doing, material they needed to be reviewing—with what little sleep they were getting, even seconds of memorization review was priceless. 

While her classmates were getting smoked in the grass next to her she looked at the aged pull up bars. A distinct path had been worn through the grass between the pavement and the bars themselves, and the concave impression in the dirt beneath the bars betrayed the passage of many feet. 

How many Marines had used them? Certainly every officer since at least Vietnam, maybe even before that. And then the line from that to the legends they had already been getting told about, like some sort of combination between service folklore, bedtime stories, and genuine awe at the individuals. Those legends must have touched these, too, or ones like these. People many hailed as heroes had stood where she stood. Done the same things she was doing. 

She’d naively thought her parents' expectations were impossible shoes to fill. They couldn’t even be measured on the same scale of the expectations she was facing now. 

And these expectations had purpose.

KEEP READING

[mariacallous]

The relative Russian success in the Ukrainian war is revealing how we still fail to find the language to understand the West’s enemies. We accuse the pro-Putin faction in the US and Europe of spreading “fake news” or “lies”. Or, in the case of the admirably robust Senator Thom Tillis, of talking “total and unmitigated bullshit”.

Tillis was responding to J.D. Vance, a Trump-supporting senator (and a Putin-supporting senator, come to that). Vance claimed that “some people in this town are saying we need to cut social security and throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelenskyy’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?” 

It was fake news, and a lie, and total and unmitigated bullshit, and every other insult you wish to cite. There is no prospect of benefits to elderly Americans being cut to fund aid to Ukraine. And only a malicious fraudster, which is to say a member of the majority faction in the modern US right, would dream of insulting our intelligence by saying so.

And yet if we have learned anything in the past decade it should be that it is not enough  to expose news as fake. There is now a substantial body of academic research on the effectiveness of the fact-checking services reputable news and third sector organisations run. It tells us what we ought to know from our own experience: revealing a lie to be a lie has a limited impact on the ideologically committed. (Parisian researchers studied supporters of Marine le Pen. Although they accepted that she dealt in “alternative facts”, to put it gently, the knowledge that she embraced fake news did not weaken their support for her.)

It is the height of liberal naivety to imagine that, if we expose the lies of the far right (or left), all will be well. Life is not  an exam. You do not succeed merely by knowing the right answers. 

We ought to know by now that demagogic politicians and hucksters do not just lie, They lie with a strategy that tells a kind of truth their supporters want to hear.

I call it “shitty realism” – or if you do not like the coarse language, distorted truth. It’s shitty because unscrupulous operators pile up the lies and hysterical exaggerations. In the case of Vance, he is being a total shit when he pretends that the benefit payments of poor, elderly Americans will go to Ukraine. Quite deliberately and shittily, Vance plays on the fears of the vulnerable and confused that they will face an impoverished old age. 

He then appeals to the fears of the paranoid that a clique of politicians is plotting to steal money from Americans to give to foreigners. Vance finally adds that those foreigners are corrupt, and will use US money to buy yachts rather than fight a war of national survival. His ability to invent the rabble-rousing idea that aid for a fellow democracy in its hour of maximum danger is being stolen from the poor and given to the corrupt shows that Vance is an accomplished and instinctive liar, and of course a piece of shit.

But exposing him will do little good. Trump supporters won’t necessarily care for two reasons. First because a few will hope for a Russian victory. I and many others have written about the admiration in a section of Western reactionary thought for Putin’s contempt for human rights, and in particular LGBT+ rights, and the admiration for a strongman leader. 

But many more understand that Vance is, despite everything, telling a larger truth that American money given to Ukraine cannot be given to Americans.

Vance understands that shittiness needs to be dressed up to make it more acceptable. And so he pretends that there is a plot to steal money from poor Americans and give to Ukrainian criminals. But the fact remains that Western money and arms have gone to Ukraine and much more must go if we are not to live with an aggressive Russia for the rest of our lives. To win the political argument it is not enough to reveal the lies of Trump and his supporters, you need to take on the truth behind the lies and justify aiding Ukraine openly and proudly, by explaining that the defeat of Russia will be a blessing,

Being realistic about shits, and understanding that even the worst of them may tell a kind of truth on occasion, strikes me as the only sensible political posture. To take another example, it is no good trying to argue for net zero by saying, truthfully, that the UK’s Tory press was engaged in wholesale climate-change denial until as recently as a decade ago. It’s  a true and tempting allegation. But the fact remains that when conservative say the transition to net zero is hugely costly and uncertain, they are telling the truth, regardless of their histoires, and unless you take them on, you run the risk of losing the most important argument of our time. 

In their contrasting ways both US and UK politicians are hopeless at winning arguments.

Hyper-partisan America makes its politicians lazy. They are not good at winning over potentially biddable voters on the other side of the divide. If you assume your opponents are wicked or demented, the art of persuasion dies. If they could rediscover political skills, pro-Ukraine Democrat politicians could seduce a portion of the currently wavering supporters of Vance and Trump by appealing to their patriotism. (Notice I say a “portion”. Not all or a majority, but enough to hurt the far right.)

As Fiona Hill, a clear-eyed adviser to successive US governments said this week, “Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership. For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”

Allow Ukraine to lose, and no ally will trust the US again. 

In the UK the situation is almost the precise opposite. The problem with  our culture is that it is nowhere near partisan enough. With an election coming, neither main party wants to make expensive commitments and so neither dares argue in public that we will have raise substantial amounts of military and financial aid for the struggle against Putin,

You cannot win arguments you duck. The case for saving Ukraine can only be won by fighting the pro-Putin faction point by point, not merely by shouting “you liars”.

“Never wrestle with a pig,” goes the old saying. “You both get dirty and in any case the pig likes it.”

But in the case of Ukraine we must wrestle with the pigs of the far right. For unless we take them on and beat them, we will all be in deep shit.

[okcomputeroknotok19972017]

Something very intelligent briefly flitted through my head about what the saw franchise has to say about cops but i can't catch it again. i'm skipping thru 5 looking at my favorite scenes and during mark's recruitment john talks about his torture games as exactly the same as or even better than police work. talking about reoffenders and efficiency and "public service" ..... pig motif too? oink oink? fuck all cops

[stoicbreviary]

Chuang Tzu 5.4 

Duke Âi of Lû asked Kung-nì, saying, "There was an ugly man in Wei, called Ai-thâi Tho. His father-in-law, who lived with him, thought so much of him that he could not be away from him. His wife, when she saw him, ugly as he was, represented to her parents, saying, 'I had more than ten times rather be his concubine than the wife of any other man.' 

"He was never heard to take the lead in discussion, but always seemed to be of the same opinion with others. He had not the position of a ruler, so as to be able to save men from death. He had no revenues, so as to be able to satisfy men's craving for food. He was ugly enough, moreover, to scare the whole world. He agreed with men instead of trying to lead them to adopt his views; his knowledge did not go beyond his immediate neighborhood. 

"And yet his father-in-law and his wife were of one mind about him in his presence, as I have said—he must have been different from other men. 

"I called him, and saw him. Certainly he was ugly enough to scare the whole world. He had not lived with me, however, for many months, when I was drawn to the man; and before he had been with me a full year, I had confidence in him. 

"The state being without a chief minister, I was minded to commit the government to him. He responded to my proposal sorrowfully, and looked undecided as if he would fain have declined it. I was ashamed of myself, as inferior to him, but finally gave the government into his hands. 

"In a little time, however, he left me and went away. I was sorry and felt that I had sustained a loss, and as if there were no other to share the pleasures of the kingdom with me. What sort of man was he?" 

Kung-nì said, "Once when I was sent on a mission to Khû, I saw some pigs sucking at their dead mother. After a little they looked with rapid glances, when they all left her, and ran away. They felt that she did not see them, and that she was no longer like themselves. What they had loved in their mother was not her bodily figure, but what had given animation to her figure. 

"When a man dies in battle, they do not at his interment employ the usual appendages of plumes: as to supplying shoes to one who has lost his feet, there is no reason why he should care for them—in neither case is there the proper reason for their use. 

"The members of the royal harem do not pare their nails nor pierce their ears; when a man is newly married, he remains, for a time, absent from his official duties, and unoccupied with them. That their bodies might be perfect was sufficient to make them thus dealt with—how much greater results should be expected from men whose mental gifts are perfect! 

"This Âi-thâi Tho was believed by men, though he did not speak a word; and was loved by them, though he did no special service for them. He made men appoint him to the government of their states, afraid only that he would not accept the appointment. He must have been a man whose powers were perfect, though his realization of them was not manifested in his person." 

Duke Âi said, "What is meant by saying that his powers were complete?" 

Kung-nì replied, "Death and life, preservation and ruin, failure and success, poverty and wealth, superiority and inferiority, blame and praise, hunger and thirst, cold and heat—these are the changes of circumstances, the operation of our appointed lot. Day and night they succeed to one another before us, but there is no wisdom able to discover to what they owe their origination. 

"They are not sufficient therefore to disturb the harmony of the nature, and are not allowed to enter into the treasury of intelligence. To cause this harmony and satisfaction ever to be diffused, while the feeling of pleasure is not lost from the mind; to allow no break to arise in this state day or night, so that it is always springtime in his relations with external things; in all his experiences to realise in his mind what is appropriate to each season of the year—these are the characteristics of him whose powers are perfect." 

"And what do you mean by the realization of these powers not being manifested in the person?" pursued further the duke. 

The reply was, "There is nothing so level as the surface of a pool of still water. It may serve as an example of what I mean. All within its circuit is preserved in peace, and there comes to it no agitation from without. The virtuous efficacy is the perfect cultivation of the harmony of the nature. Though the realization of this be not manifested in the person, things cannot separate themselves from its influence." 

Some days afterwards Duke Âi told this conversation to Min-tsze, saying, "Formerly it seemed to me the work of the sovereign to stand in court with his face to the south, to rule the kingdom, and to pay good heed to the accounts of the people concerned, lest any should come to a miserable death—this I considered to be the sum of his duty. 

"Now that I have heard that description of the Perfect man, I fear that my idea is not the real one, and that, by employing myself too lightly, I may cause the ruin of my state. I and Khung Khiû are not on the footing of ruler and subject, but on that of a virtuous friendship." 

[gryficowa]

Time for a controversial post:

Israel is the colonizer and Zionism is the Nazis of today

Pinkwashing/queerbaiting/homonationalism is queerphobic, not pro-queer

Trans women are women and trans men are men

Gender-segregated professions should cease to exist because they consider gender to be binary and that's what they were created for, because fragile masculinity was afraid that a woman would beat them

Radical feminists are not feminists, but misogynistic people pretending to be feminism

Harry Potter is a boring series and Rowling is a piece of shit

Harris is a Zionist and the Vote Blue people are Islamophobic and ableist

Disney and Pixar movies aren't as great as cartoons like "Gravity Falls" and "The Owl House" (Fuck Disney)

Hitler was a right-winger, and fascism is an extreme right-wing (Stalin, by the way, was not a leftist)

People who say "Political Correctness" and "Woke" are not very intelligent people

Bumblebees are the most underestimated pollinators of flowers

Radical feminists don't care about non-white women from Palestine, Sudan and the Congo

Gender is a spectrum

Hate men is not true feminism

Choosing the lesser evil doesn't work

Capitalism is a piece of shit

Trans women's rights are cis women's rights

The right to abortion should be legal

Fuck the USA because it has paid medical services and ambulances

If you are LGBT+ but you hate trans people or Muslims (Or use autism as an insult) then you are a hypocrite who doesn't know the history of LGBT+ people

Asexuality and aromaticity are part of LGBT+

Shipping a canon aroace character with another character is sus

Media representation of autism, muslims and aroace is a problem

"From the River to the Sea" does not mean the extermination of all Jews, it is Israeli propaganda

Animals like pigs, horses and spiders are greatly underrated in mainstream media

Enderman is the cutest mob, it looks a bit like a bumblebee, meaning it's big and loud

Manji is not a Nazi swastika

Being queerphobic is being a Nazi, because Nazis targeted gays and trans people

Being anti-Zionist is not anti-Semitic

Fuck corporations, many of them support Israel

Dividing people into races is fucked up and involves dehumanizing those who are considered an "inferior race", and the fact that new races are still being created is sick

Animations are not a medium only for children

I don't know what else to add

[texashuntranch]

Hog Hunting in Central Texas - Let the Adventure Begin

Hog hunting is considered an underutilized activity in Texas. There are so many ranches that provide the services of hog hunting, but you have to choose the best one. Texas Hunt Rach has provided the word class services of Hog hunting since 2002. It offers top-notch - hog-hunting adventure services to make the hunting lover's experiences memorable and fun. This considers and provides the best native and exotic animals like Hogs, Elk, Axis Deer, Red Stag, Black Buck, Ibex, Sika Deer, Fallow Buck, white deer, and more. In this article, we dive deep into hog hunting in central Texas.

Why You Consider Hog Hunting In Central Texas?

Wild hogs are invasive, causing financial damage to farmers. They also create an uncontrollable environment for thriving and can transmit diseases to domestic pig populations.

Wild hogs threaten nature; they prefer to eat turkey and quail eggs, turkey poults, and newborn deer. They are extremely intelligent, approximately only at night, and can smell a hunter from a mile away. These wild hogs are popular among society as a game animal that advocates for liberal hunting seasons and regulations. Feral bacon is also one of the finest game meats available, and the ability to hunt year-long combined with the prospects of a good old-fashioned pig roast should incite a craving from all who enjoy the outdoors. This is the great South Texas hunting

Where You Do Hog Hunting in Central Texas

Unlike the greater part of the country that stands by to fill its destiny with people, Texas and Florida have the advantage of geography. Texas alone accounts for an estimated number more than any state, with Florida signified in second place. From the state hunter’s point of view, the whole of the state of Florida does not come under consideration because 160 Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) occupy nearly 6 million acres of public land.

Private property gives hunters the privilege of the top pick of spots, even if it requires additional budget. Although there are isolated cases of exceptions, wild hog hunting in public land is limited to another season where hunting other wild animals is also permitted. Most states have created laws allowing hunters to hunt private lands year-round and at night with the landowner's written permission. Certain states don't even provide for one to have a license while hog hunting. Ask the private landowners around countywide wildlife areas if any issues are carried over. Especially they express that they want to solve the issue so does the counselor.

The USA’s other best states for bagging a boar are Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Only conduct fishing in the areas permitted by your state’s regulations. You may also consider the bow-hunting ranches in Texas.

For more information, You can visit Texas Hunt Ranch's official website.

[carsonian]

stony prompt: blind date au 🥰 thank you!

SOOO this is a Modern, No Powers AU where Steve and Tony are on everyone's favourite internet shitshow, "The Button", but sideways. Because maximillian shenanigans must be had. Thank you anon for the prompt! <3

I Can See Clearly Now The Blindfold's Gone on AO3 | 3,559 words | Rated M

"Alright, one of you needs to step away." Vision intones. He's been working through more polite iterations of that for the past few minutes but apparently, artificial intelligence has a limited patience, too. Point being, he's managed to inject a hell of a lot of judginess into his latest, pleading request. 

Steve can't see Tony—duh, they've got blindfolds on—but at this point in the date, he reckons he knows the man well enough to know that he's too stubborn to step away. Too fucking bad for Tony; Steve's undeterred. His grade school teacher would back him up here, wrote it right there in the report herself: "undeterred pleasure to have in class". And class isn't over.

He clenches his jaw but refuses to cross his arms. Even if Tony can't see him, there's no need to look defensive in front of Natasha and her camera crew. 

"The date can not continue if one of you doesn't step away." Vision repeats. 

"I guess this date's out of time." Tony's voice is dripping with the restrained manic of a man with his hands inches from a prize. Steve knows better than to celebrate early. He knows the difference a few inches can make; he learned that in high school.

"That's. . . not how the game works." The pause in the sentence is a sweet touch, Steve'll admit, but it's an artificial intelligence. Emphasis on artificial. Because that's what all of this is. Artificial.

.

Alright, alright, here's the behind-the-scenes footage that didn't make the cut.

Natasha had emailed him with a date, time and location. The subject had read, "REMEMBER YOU OWE ME FOR THE NUDE PAINTING CLASS". Helpless to the truth of that, Steve had shown up and realised he was a guinea pig for a social experiment Natasha was conducting as part of her many pet projects. 

An hour later, he found himself seated in front of cameras with a blindfold secured on his face, an obnoxious button by the name of "Vision" on the table and an even more obnoxious guy seated opposite him.

To his credit, "Tony" didn't start off too obnoxious. 

.

"I work in tech." Tony says.

(Somewhere, Sam Wilson shoots up off the water bed, takes the cucumbers off his eyes and says, "That's a red flag.")

"Oh." Steve says, "I work in art curation."

"I never got art."

"I guess it's not for everybody." Steve replies, "Like technology."

". . .Well. Everyone's got a phone."

.

To his discredit, it didn't take long for Tony to verge into obnoxious territory, and it all just spiralled away from then on.

.

"Well, hypothetically, if they were in a position to help the aliens, I don't see why a piece of paper telling them otherwise should stop them. Not if they're genuine heroes." Steve argues.

"But the point is that it's not just a piece of paper." Tony protests, "It's legislative infrastructure—"

"Legislative infrastructure? You're just making up convoluted terms—"

"I'm sorry, I forgot I was talking to "like, an artist, man"."

"I'm from Brooklyn, I don't know where that accent's meant to be from but it sure as hell ain't—"

"Oh my god, Brooklyn. What is Brooklyn but hipsters and overpriced cafes?"

.

Vision tried to intervene multiple times to move the conversation towards a more positive topic, but each new tidbit from the other's profile only served to ignite further miscommunication and disagreement between them. In short: they kept rubbing off against each other in all the wrong ways.

.

"Did you know Steve served?" Vision offers.

". . .Like, looks?"

"No, the army."

"Of course he did." Tony mumbles.

"What's that mean?" Steve asks. 

"It means thank you for your service." Tony says brightly.

"Sure it does."

"Tony describes himself as a philanthropist?" Vision tries.

"Amongst other things." Tony clarifies. 

"Of course you describe yourself as that." Steve says.

"What, you got a problem with philanthropy now?"

"Sure, I got a problem with rich people giving away money as a tax write-off and then calling themselves philanthropists."

"Why do you assume I'm rich?"

"Uh, I don't know, maybe the entitlement?"

"Bold words from someone who feels entitled enough to pass judgement on someone they met ten minutes ago."

"Like you're not doing the same."

"Oh, fuck off, hypocrite."

"Language!"

"Wh-aow. You sure you were in the military?"

"You sure you're not the charity case?"

.

All that to say, the newfound silence between the two of them is a snuffed, deafening thing. 

"Can I confirm that neither of you are willing to press me and step away from the table?" Vision obviously doesn't deal with awkward silences well.

"By all means, Tony." Steve says.

"Feel free, Steve." Tony volleys. 

Spiritually, they're in a staring contest. Physically, Steve feels like an idiot schmuck wasting his Saturday afternoon away in Natasha's studio. 

"Then, without further ado, I'd like to offer my sincere congratulations to the two of you for winning the all-expenses paid date."

"What?" Steve straightens. 

"Pass." Tony says at the same moment. 

"That's the point of this game, if you two can recall anything from before your effusive debate about Star-titled enterprises." Vision says. 

"Star Wars." Tony says.

"Star Trek." Steve hits back. 

"That and much more can be discussed between the two of you on an all-expenses paid date. In a galaxy far, far away from here." Vision says. 

"I'm not doing that." Tony insists. 

"Can I take the blindfold off?" Steve asks.

"Go ahead." Vision says. 

Steve hears rustling opposite him as he drags his blindfold off his face. A few moments pass where he's just blinking through the glare of the studio lights and when he finally looks up, he immediately makes eye contact with Tony just as the man's blinking his own eyes open. 

A goatee that should look hopelessly outdated. Dark hair curled over his ears. Brown eyes outlined with visibly thick lashes. The kind of lips that promise trouble.

I'm in trouble, Steve thinks.

The realisation hits like a sucker punch, like the deepest injustices writ true, like assuming life's given you lemons and opening the basket to find limes. Steve stares at Tony, gobsmacked, and it's that very inability to look away that has him hurtling right on to another realisation. 

The brown eyes he's been struck by are looking at him with the same cocktail of emotions Steve's trying to swallow down. 

The realisation that the guy they've each been fighting for the past ten and change, the guy they've managed to get on the wrong side of for every fucking point that's come up—

That guy's hot.

Tony's lips curl in self-contained disgust and Steve feels his own eyebrows flatten in irritated reflex before they both lean forward, and in a show of coordinated, petty competitiveness, slap a hand down on the button. 

"First." Tony huffs triumphantly, and the smug smirk suits him a little too well. Steve wants to bang him like a fucking screen door in a hurricane. He wants to churn him like butter. He wants to choke him on his dick. He wants to ask him if he really doesn't like art or if he just had a bad teacher. He wants to slap that smirk off his face and soothe the sting with his lips.

". . .Whatever." It's a weak response and the brunet recognises it as such, head slanting the faintest as he considers Steve.

"I wasn't red when you pressed me. So that doesn't count, which you'd know, if either of you were paying attention to the briefing." Vision's voice is as flat as an AI can get, "You can both go on your date now."

"The date that's not happening, you mean?" Tony asks, "That date?"

.

"It's happening." Natasha crosses her arms, and why on God's blue Earth—the sea levels are rising and Steve's rising to meet 'em head-on—does it not look defensive on her? She's staring at Steve with enough heat for him to consider that maybe global warming's her fault. 

"Been an awful lotta greenhouse gases around since youse was born." Steve says unthinkingly. 

"What is wrong with you?" Natasha asks.

"I meant that you're full of gas." Steve makes a quick recovery, "It's one thing to have me cover for the participants of your social experiment not showing up but it's altogether another thing to make me go on a date with a guy I don't even—"

"I saw you staring at his ass." Natasha points out, "And then I saw you shake your head."

"Why'd he wear such tight pants?" Steve hisses. 

"As I believe you Americans say," Natasha pauses dramatically here, and it becomes pretty fucking obvious where Vision got his theatrical sense of timing from, "If you've got it, flaunt it."

"He doesn't got it." Steve lies.

"Isn't English your first and only language?" Natasha points out, "How the fuck are you so bad at it?"

"Je parle—"

"Yeah, you parlay all over the place." Natasha cuts him off, "And yes, you're going, Steve, because I didn't tell you to go all Stevie Rogers on him and refuse to step away just to make a point that didn't even make sense."

"The point was that the one who's being a prick should step away." Steve says.

"Then by all rights, both of you should have stepped away." Natasha says, "The tension was insane. I can't figure out if you two have brilliant chemistry or are just a failed chemistry experiment."

"And this is your way of finding out?" Steve asks.

"No, Steve, I could care less about what happens with you two. I just need to follow up because our methodology included a post-date debriefing for every couple that didn't press the button on each other. Which, if you remember, was what you both didn't do. Et voilà, you have a date." 

"Ugh." Steve rubs a hand over his face, "You swear this isn't a longwinded way of setting me up with someone?"

"Would I do that?" Natasha asks.

"Uh, yeah?" Steve answers with the same tone a person would answer the question: is the sky blue? Which is to say he spoke with a certainty wavering only because the question's obvious to the point of redundancy. Like just. Look up. Natasha's texts to Steve.

"Then I guess you'll never know the real me." Natasha uncrosses her arms, "'Cause I gave up on your love life after you passed on Carynne."

"I didn't pass on her."

"You literally said pass!"

"Yeah, as in pass the fucking salt. Jesus, we were at my ma's for dinner, Natasha."

"The timing was suspicious. Auspicious, even." Natasha shakes her head, "Now listen, come on, just go get burgers, don't kill him, and then a few weeks later, wax poetic about how you can't get to know anyone in a meaningful way during a ten minute game designed to artificially heighten your sense of alienation."

"Aren't you tampering with the experiment?" Steve points out, "Tellin' me all this?"

"It's a social experiment, Steve. Everything's staged."

.

"So." Steve attempts once he's had two bites of his cheeseburger, "How'd you get involved in this experiment?"

From across the table, in a scene both familiar and new—the light in this diner is a lot less forgiving than in the studio, and also, Steve doesn't have a blindfold on—Tony watches him carefully.

"Uh, Bruce. He designed Vision? Or well, we did." Tony's index finger scratches a nervous line against his ear, "Uh, we were actually designing this AI for—a class." Tony shrugs swiftly, "It didn't take but the core code was solid, and Bruce ended up repurposing it for this."

"I guess you're kinda like the estranged father, then." Steve says unwittingly. 

Tony's cheeseburger stays lofted halfway to his mouth, a single raised eyebrow levelled at Steve.

Alright, Rogers, commit or quit. Steve takes a sip of his jumbo coke.

"Y'know, 'cause Bruce ran off with the kid." Steve explains.

The raised eyebrow lowers, meets its companion in the middle in a furrowed expression.

Then, almost abruptly, something softens. Steve's not sure what exactly but he watches it ripple over Tony's face as the man goes, "Guess I'm taking after my father then."

The snort is natural, and Steve covers it up with a hand, surprised at his own reaction. 

When he dares to look over again, Tony's eyes are practically twinkle, twinkle, little star-ing at Steve. 

"You know," Tony starts after a few moments of weighted silence wherein they pretend they're not sneaking looks at each other, "I wasn't trying to insult art."

"You did a good impression of it, then." Steve says.

"I just," Tony scrunches his nose in uncertain thought, "I don't really get how certain paintings have more value than others when there are some that are obviously much easier to make. Like, I could totally make—"

"A Jackson Pollock?" Steve interrupts, raising his eyebrows in a silent "gotcha" when Tony startles, "Yeah, I know. Point isn't that you could do it. Point is, you didn't."

"But that doesn't explain scale." Tony returns.

"Art's not about—" Steve rubs a hand over his mouth, "Here, look. There're measures people use to try and quantify a piece's value and sure, some of it even makes sense, but the point—the point is how it makes you feel. What emotions it stirs in you. How it challenges you."

"And what if it doesn't stir up anything?" Tony asks, "'Cause I got four contemporary art pieces in my apartment I feel nothing but the vaguest pleasantness for, and the only challenge is figuring out how much maintenance they need."

"Two things." Steve picks up a french fry, "Either you're not looking deep enough, or you're not an art person. Actually, three things. Why do you have four art pieces at your apartment if you're not into art?"

"I have a convincing assistant." Tony says before leaning back, "Also, y'know, some people just aren't art people."

"Nah. I bet I could persuade you over to the dark side." Steve says.

Tony squints his eyes at him. "Not a Star Wars guy, huh?"

"I never said I wasn't a Star Wars guy." Steve corrects, "Just that Star Trek was objectively better."

"Huh." Tony picks at his cheeseburger wrapper, "So, upon review—I don't actually hate art. You don't actually hate Star Wars. That's two things we got wrong."

"You hate the military?" Steve asks.

"Yeah." Tony says, "Sure."

"You. . .hate soldiers?" Steve checks.

"No, I don't hate veterans." Tony catches on, and then smiles down at his cheeseburger, "You really don't know who I am, do you?"

"Well, I'm not gonna be taking back the entitled thing anytime soon." Steve says, mostly in a murmur to himself except he doesn't adjust the volume or nothing. So it's really just something he says.

"Tony Stark, as in Stark Industries?" Tony clarifies, and then raises his eyebrows in a mirror of Steve's own surprised reaction, "So, no, I don't hate veterans, and if a camera is put in front of me, I'll even say I don't hate the military complex."

"You're Tony Stark," Steve breathes out, "Huh."

"Turn off?" Tony asks. 

"Not anymore than you not being into art." Steve says. 

Tony swipes a hand over his mouth, hiding the pleased twist of his lips from Steve as he flits a quick, restless glance around the diner. 

"We really got our wires crossed, didn't we?" Steve asks.

"Well." Tony shrugs, looking back at Steve, "I usually just cut the wire."

"How's that work out for you, normally?" Steve asks. 

"Eh, hit or miss." Tony leans forward, folding his hands together over the table, eyes uncharacteristically solemn as he proposes, "Do you wanna go back to my apartment and fuck?"

"Yes." Steve answers readily, "Will you let me try and explain the art pieces to you?"

"Ah. So it's like that?" Tony asks, a touch of appreciation in his voice.

"It's like that." Steve decides. 

"Is this another dashing facet of your personality?" Tony asks, "Leaping without looking?"

"It's called a leap of faith." Steve says. 

"How's that work out for you, normally?" Tony echoes.

"Hit or miss." Steve echoes in return. 

". . . Okay." Tony says, biting his bottom lip thoughtfully, "I will let you explain the art pieces to me. . .if we can do a Star Wars marathon for the second one."

"Someone's assuming." Steve says, "Second one, huh?"

"If you're as easy in bed as you are on the eyes," Tony shrugs, "Why not?"

"Okay, smart mouth." Steve says, leaning back, "Lucky for you, that's my type."

"You know, I totally thought this would end with a hate fuck." Tony says, taking a sip of his coke, "This is much nicer. I like a good cuddle after, you know? Stay in bed," Tony takes another sip, "Do the daily crossword and whatnot."

Steve licks his lips before saying, low and intense, "Okay, you're gonna stop sucking that straw so obscenely and finish your coke so that we can get outta here and back to your place."

At that, Tony takes off the lid and straw, and downs the remaining coke in one easy sip. The notch of his throat as he swallows is just as obscene as the blowie he'd been giving the straw. When Tony puts the cup back down, the smarmy look on his face tells Steve that he knows it too.

Yeah, Steve's gonna have to fuck him.

.

A decent chunk of time later, Steve finds out that Tony wasn't lying about enjoying a good cuddle after sex and also that one of the four paintings Tony's interior designer picked out is genuinely trite. 

"So, not all art is good art?"

"Are all AIs Vision?" Steve volleys against Tony's temple. 

"No, most of 'em are Ultrons." Tony sniffs, stroking a finger down Steve's forearm. 

"Ultrons?"

"It was the name of our first attempt at an AI." Tony explains, "Shitshow, that one."

"Why was it a shitshow?" 

"Pft." Tony mumbles against him, "Tons of reasons. It's a long story."

"Well." Steve says, "We got more than ten minutes. And no button in sight."

"Well, alright." Tony says, "So, uh, it was two years ago, and. . ."

.

"Not just a pretty face, am I?" Steve asks a little later than that. Tony's crossword app is still open on the bed.

"Mm." Tony screws up his eyes at him, "A pretty face with a pretty dick."

"Pretty brain, too?"

"Yeah, you're no Brooklyn hipster. And besides, I fumbled over the manufacturer for one second." Tony rolls his eyes, "I'm a genius, you know."

"Yeah, yeah, whatsit? Genuis, billionaire, playboy—"

"—philanthropist." Tony finishes with a touch of irony, "Thanks."

"Vision's a shit wingman." Steve says.

"Oh, absolutely." Tony thunks his head against Steve's chest, "I mean, why would he bring up that I was a "guns aficionado" after you said that your least favourite part of basic training was the shooting?"

"We were set up." Steve says.

"Soooo set up." Tony says, "But, you know, I'm also an asshole, so. Putting that out there."

"It's fine, I can be a dick." Steve shrugs it off.

". . .Aw, we fit." Tony says.

"Whaddya—oh." Steve turns his gaze heavenward, "Hey, where'd that button go off to?"

.

"How do you think the blindfold and button affected your ability to connect with the other person during the blind date?" Vision's voice is cool through the button.

"Well, firstly," Steve sends a shiteating quirk of the lips—he's not a grinner—Natasha's way, to where she's standing behind the camera, "It's difficult to have a meaningful connection with someone in just ten minutes, especially when the independent variables are designed to enhance feelings of alienation."

". . .And what about you, Tony?" Vision asks. 

Sitting across from him, Steve's partner offers a shiteating grin—he's a grinner—to the camera. 

"Oh, I think it was fabulous." Tony says.

"It seems you still disagree on many topics even after commencing a romantic relationship." Vision says.

"Not everything." Steve points out.

"What topics do you agree on?" Vision asks.

"Politics, surprisingly," Tony lists off, "TV shows, not surprisingly. Cutest animals, obviously—"

"Sex positions." Steve pitches in. 

Tony snaps his fingers at Steve, "Yes, that's crucial. Thank you, honeypot."

Steve winces before leaning forward to admit, "We disagree on appropriate pet names."

.

"So it really wasn't on purpose?" Bruce asks. They're reviewing the footage from the interview, editing down the more inappropriate aspects at the behest of the SI public relations team.

"I'm a human, Bruce," Natasha drinks from her coffee mug, "Not some manipulative mastermind. How could I have predicted that Steve and Tony would get together? They're totally different on paper. I mean, Tony's all digital, you wouldn't even find him on paper."

"An HTML document, maybe." Bruce thinks out loud, "Huh. I guess opposites really do attract."

"Chemistry." Natasha squints her eyes, "Riiiight."

"Hey, I'd call this experiment a success." Bruce says, putting his hand out for a high-five. Natasha brings her hand up and brings Bruce's hand down.

"That's because you haven't looked far ahead enough." Natasha says, "You don't realise that we've just put the most argumentative, polarising individuals we know into a relationship. For a social experiment."

"Oh." Bruce turns faintly green. "Oh, shit—"

.

"Hit." Steve says.

"Total hit." Tony agrees.

And if they can agree on that? Then the rest's all lemons.