#The reason behind his whole Toddler-like behavior is he's a foreigner

[kakusu-shipping]

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR MUSHISHI S/I!! Where did he come from?? Does he have a relationship with Ginko or anyone else?? I bet he researches Mushi, right? That seems on brand with you and your curious lil brain

Aaaaah you'd think right. I am once again answering an S/I ask with Actually I have two different Self Inserts for this fandom fdkgjfdkg

The other one, an adult who lives alone and runs a hot spring in the mountains Ginko regularly visits does Research Mushi, and writes about them in his novels. He's part of the ever growing Aro Ginko Polycule, I've talked about him a few times, he's not interesting, just kind of domestic and in love with Ginko who pays him a visit once a year or so.

A lot of my younger self inserts are much more Head Empty than my older ones, the one your asking about especially

He's a kid inflicted by the Ginko who just showed up one day in Adashino's village. Adashino assumed him some sort of love child of Ginko's and sent a letter telling him to get his ass over here as soon as possible.

He appears about 7 or 8 years old, but it's hard to tell sense his knowledge seems toddler like. He doesn't know how to use chop sticks, or what he can and can't eat, or how to dress himself, and doesn't speak or seem to understand much of what anyone says to him.

He has a bad tenancy to grab Mushi by the handful and shove them in his Tokoyami filled eye, which is what lead Doctor Adashino to bandaging up the opening, sense he assumed that probably wasn't a good thing to be doing.

In the few weeks it took Ginko to arrive, Adashino got pretty attached to the kid, getting rather use to parenting his larger than most toddler. However, like Ginko, if in one place for too long Mushi will begin to swarm around him, making it dangerous for him to stay in the villager, or anywhere for that matter.

It took a lot of convincing, but Ginko eventually agreed to take the kid on as his apprentice, taking him on his travels and teaching him the dangers and nuances of Mushi.

Basically, he becomes Ginko and Adashino's adopted son over time. Whenever he gets to talking he calls Adashino "Papa", but Ginko remains just Ginko or some form of "Master"/"Sensei" when he's learning. He also calls Tanyuu variations of "Mama" or "Auntie", with Tama being "Grandma" exclusively. He doesn't like Kumado at all.

[justjessame]

Babysitting Butcher Chapter 32

Life as a human guinea pig is a strange thing. First of all, there's the questions. The same questions over and over, to the point where the machines and medical doodads and the noise that became almost normal for me, but the questions became the irritant of the day.

"How are you feeling today, Dr. Taylor?" As I'd squint into the bright light being forced into my marrow it seemed. A muttered reply from me, and honestly the same answer in varying degrees of annoyance or acceptance depending upon the day and how many times I'd been asked it so far. "Uh huh, and are you feeling warm? Is there tenderness in your abdomen?" While they poked and prodded, testing skin, muscle, bone and eventually blood.

Did you know the average human adult has around 1.2-1.5 gallons of blood which equals roughly 10 units? I know this because I wanted to be certain that I'd have enough after all the blood testing. Research would either be the way I kept sane or what finally pushed me over the ledge into complete madness, mark my words.

Billy visited, as often as he could, and every single time he'd greet the head poker in residence with his own version of the repeated question game. "How is she? What's the bloody progress?" At which I would inevitably check the arm that seemed to be their favorite vessel for bloodletting. "How much longer?" And then he'd meet my gaze and focus his attention on ME, rather than on my medical condition.

Yes, I was calling it a condition. If I let the reality of my situation fully grip me, then I'd scream. And I had moments of it, trust me.

How would you feel if every single time the man you loved walked in and spoke about your person as though you were a petri dish experiment before reminding himself, through sheer force of finally SEEING you, that you were in fact the woman he loved?

Now take that feeling you just got from that scenario and add the annoyingly taunting voice of the caped asshole who caused this whole fucking irritating bullshit situation reminding you that you fell in love with a man for whom hatred of supes is as natural as inhaling. Feeling just a hint of discomfort? Just add the sound of beeping, buzzing, and dripping to remind yourself of the fact that this was all happening while I was being held hostage as a "let's see what happens if we try this mixture to counteract the demon juice flowing through her veins" was tried over and over.

Strained. My nerves, body, and brain felt strained. Even after the feeding tube was gone and Billy could kiss me. Even after I was given the go ahead to work from my hospital bed. Frayed would be a kind way to say how absolutely on edge I felt.

And the worse part? I felt like I was missing something. Something important. Something paramount. Just out of reach and as though, even surrounded by my laptop and notes, something that was keeping me out of an important loop.

The longer that I stayed in the 'undisclosed medical' location, the more that I wanted to be anywhere else in the world. Literally anywhere. I started to yearn for Bolivia and the Black Ops team that had gotten caught up in the web of a rogue agent and 'died' implicated in a massive fuck up of epic proportions.

When a rational woman who knows how the inner workings of other people's brains and behavior follow reliable patterns starts thinking fondly of the heat of a tropical place where she had to wade through more red tape than most people would assume humanly possible to unravel the truth, all while hearing the type of rumors about the men she was trying to clear and resurrect from faked death, then shit has hit epic levels of horrible. It did remind me to contact that team to see how their return to their former lives had worked out, and wonder if their leader had gotten over his own tragic ability to attract murderous women.

I wanted to go further than the small courtyard deemed safe enough for me to explore, and near enough to make them taking me off the dialysis machine after another fun round of 'clean her blood again' reasonable. I wanted to sleep in my own bed and watch television at my discretion without interruptions for another round of the questions and poking I wanted, in short, to be back to normal already.

I might have been empathizing with Billy's urge for the Vought wankers (his word, I swear) to find the magic solution so life could go back to the routine we both wanted a return to. Or I might have been trying to only see the positive outcome, since there was a creeping feeling that maybe, just maybe there wasn't an easy fix or a fix at all.

A month passed, with my cabin fever slowly increasing by the day, and with it my internal and external temperatures. Oh yeah, that's right, I might have forgotten to mention that while the steaming was at bay, now it was just my actual body temperature that would fluctuate and freak every single fucking person all the way out. When Billy said I nearly went "nuclear" he hadn't been joking, apparently I could have fucking exploded like a goddamn human time bomb and I didn't want to consider just how fucking messy that would have been for the janitorial staff.

Finally, maybe because I wanted some type of control about the questioning, I started asking some probing ones of my own. And what I found, when they would meet my eyes and answer me as fully as I wanted, was that that creeping feeling was growing more likely.

The issue wasn't simply that they didn't know which variation of Compound V that Homelander had me infected with, it was that as they broke down the components and addressed each one, my body didn't simply fight their attempts, it attacked itself. The asshole, it would appear, had basically chosen the self destruct version, and it was trickier than any puzzle these 'real doctors' had ever come across. I was truly feeling the confidence of having a toddler performing my brain surgery with this knowledge.

Oh and that wasn't all, even IF they figured out how to 'neutralize' the formula inside of my bloodstrain, then there was a probability that I could pass it on to any future children. Isn't that some kind of amazingly poetic bullshit to hear after you chose to evict a foreign invader from your uterus? That the one stabilizing agent I'd had scraped and dumped was the ONLY one that I would ever get to actually be allowed to experience. Remind me to send Homelander a HUGE fucking thank you card, would you?

Early into my first true consciousness, before I found out just how fucked the pompous dick had made my entire existence, Billy had told me that my parents had visited while I was knocked out. Apparently near death experiences make even the weirdest of families reunite. And mine was no different.

Mom became a regular visitor and I was shocked by how much I started looking forward to her visits. She was strangely comforting, and tried to keep my spirits up, she even made peace with Billy. Dad was less frequent in his contact, but Mom told me it was difficult for him to see me look like a shell of myself.

And I did. I looked like a ghost that's haunting what was left of my body. The feeding tube had kept me nourished, but my muscle mass had suffered from the amount of time I was forced to spend in bed. I was constantly tired, my work hours going from nine to six to an hour here, a few minutes there, and the amount of napping I did would make most house cats jealous. The gowns that I wore hung from my frame, my appetite was scarce and I felt like this was the LONGEST goodbye letter ever to be written.

As the days passed, one merging into the next without me taking stock of how much I missed, how much that puzzle of what I was missing had bothered me early on, the negative ideas started creeping in. Homelander's voice grew louder. His smug question about Billy and me and what my condition would mean for the two of us in the end kept pushing through my attempts to distract myself.

I was sitting in the soft chair they'd brought in for me by the window, staring out and thinking of my options when Billy came in for his visit. I heard him, in the background noise of beeps and whirls, ask his questions. I felt him when he was nearer to me, but my eyes stayed on the 'view'.

He started to greet me, but my mouth opened and the question came out without me thinking about it. "How will you do it?" I watched a leaf, one missed by the obsessive groundskeepers, dance in a breeze I wish I could feel. He was confused, his reflection showed that much. "When you kill me, how will you do it?"

"Veronica," I could hear the pain in his voice, the fear hiding behind it. "I wouldn't-"

"Frenchie then?" I tilted my head considering. "MM? Hughie barely managed to make the choice with-" I stopped and took a breath. "Kimiko?" I sighed and pulled my legs up onto the chair, hugging my knees. "I hear she makes quite a mess of her prey." My voice wasn't loud and it didn't sound anything more than resigned, and I was a little curious. "If you can get Starlight to do it, you could make it seem like self defense? Or," I sighed, and bit my lip, "it would finally give you a reason to take her out too."

"Ronnie, love, that's not gonna-" I turned and he flinched when he saw that I was serious and not the least bit upset. "Ronnie?"

"Billy Butcher, I wrote the book on you." My smile felt wrong to me, but right at the same time. "I know you inside and out, or at least I think I do." I had the research on the flash drive that was hooked into my laptop on the bed. "You are single minded in your focus and your focus has been on eliminating supes from the world for a very long time." I turned back to the window, staring past the view and at the reflection of the room behind me. "It was one of the things I found the most attractive about you, I think. That you could see a goal and pound away until you master it." He sat in the chair close to me, but at a distance far enough that he'd have to work to touch me. "So, how will I die, Billy?"

"You'll die safe and sound, of old age in our bed, Veronica." I smiled sadly at this pipe dream of a fairy tale he wanted so badly to believe. "When you're sick of me, remember?" I could hear how badly he wanted it to be true, how much he wanted to hold me and it to all be a terrible dream.

"Never took you for a nursery rhyme and fairy stories fan," my eyes were still on the window. "This isn't going away, Billy, what he put in me isn't going away. And you will start to look at me like you look at him." My eyes found his, and face to face I wanted to force him to see it. "You will. And then, just like you, Frenchie, and Hughie brainstormed about Translucent and the best way to end him, you'll start to consider my pressure points." I gave a harsh, humorless chuckle. "And the funniest part is that Homelander built mine in for you, all you have to do is take me off the blood cleanse for a day and my own body will do it for you." His eyes tightened at the reminder of how many close calls I'd had. "Oops, I guess I just planned it for you."

"Please don't." He was begging me to let him pretend it wasn't the truth, that he wouldn't lose me too, and because of the same supe as Becca's cause of death. "Don't do this."

I smiled sadly, knowing he knew, even without me telling him, what was going to happen next.

[azworkingdogs]

How To Read Dog Body Language

Do you have a dog who doesn’t seem to be learning how to behave as quickly as you’d like, and you’re concerned that if you don’t figure out how get through to him his behavior is going to keep getting worse?

If so, don’t feel bad! Getting stubborn dogs to learn how to be calm, obedient, relaxed dogs is really hard to do if you don’t understand how to read dog body language.

Not learning how to read dog body language is like trying to communicate with someone who ignores things like your facial expressions, eye rolling, or arm crossing when you don’t want to talk. Ignoring the subtle, nonverbal parts of communication ends up creating situations like this:

It’s a funny cartoon, but it’s not that funny when you watch YouTube videos like this, where the dog is OBVIOUSLY giving off signs that he doesn’t want the toddler to be crawling on him, and it ends badly. Remember, a dog’s mouth is a very dangerous weapon if pushed too far, as this poor family found out the hard way:

Obviously, this is an example of a dog showing body language that leads to aggressive behavior. But, dogs show many other types of body language signs too…  like fear, happiness & stress. By learning how to read this canine body language and reading your dog’s entire body, life with your dog stops being a one-way conversation and creates a shared communication between pets and their owners.

Knowing that this Secret Dog Body Language Exists, What Should You do About It?

Well… have you ever been in a situation where you had to try and communicate with someone who didn’t speak the same language as you?

Like maybe you tried to learn where the bathroom was in a foreign country and the person you asked didn’t speak English?

What did you end up doing to try to communicate?

Maybe you did some pointing? Maybe you crossed your legs to act out that you ‘had to go’ to get the point across?

In most cases, whenever we humans know we’re not being understood, we try to find some sort of a common language. We know there’s a language barrier, so we turn to other types of communication.

So this begs the question…

What “language” do canines understand?

While it is true that dogs can learn to understand verbal cues and vocalizations…

(because after all they need to know that growling from another pack member means, ‘back the ‘F’ off’)

… vocalizations are NOT the primary way dogs communicate and learn from each other.

The primary way that dogs communicate with each other is actually more through NON-verbal communication.

What we tell our clients here at TheDogTrainingSecret.com is that if you have a dog who is ignoring you, it’s usually because dogs don’t listen with their ears very well… they actually “listen” more with their eyes. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that dogs can’t learn to listen (I’ll actually show you how to get them to listen later on)… I’m just saying that it’s not the DEFAULT way dogs communicate.

To show you what I mean here’s a simple ‘Turning Head’ test you can perform on your dog to see if your dog has this same type of listening problem. By turning your head away from your dog so he can’t see your mouth or your facial expressions, you can find out if your dog was actually listening to the words you were saying, or just reading facial expressions.

Try This Quick ‘Dog Listening Test’

Pretty crazy huh? My dog wasn’t listening at all! He was reading my facial cues! So the second I hid them from him, he was essentially DEAF to my commands. And many, many dogs are like this.

This happens because dogs are experts at nonverbal communication. They are constantly using their eyes, mouth, tails and body posture to try to tell us how they’re feeling. If we want our dogs to learn behaviors as quickly as possible, we first need to get better at understanding the nonverbal communication signals they’re sending us ALL day long.

So let’s first start with…

How to Read Your Canine’s Mind Through Their Eyes

When learning to read your dog’s eyes, you need to be able to identify the three different types of eye cues dogs give you, which are Neutral, Aroused/Anxious, or “Whale Eyes”. Here’s a great video on reading dog eye cues. See if you can look at the image below and match the pictures of dog eyes to the appropriate eye cue type.

Step #1: Match the Dog Eye Images to the Three Types of Dog Eye Cues

Also… watch for dogs who look at you from the corner of their eyes, or avert eye contact. This is a common look for dogs who are feeling fearful. It’s also common for these types of dogs to keep their mouths closed tightly, and hold their breath. If you see a dog doing these things, he’s telling you he’s scared!

Watch For ‘Averting’ Eye-Contact

Remember, if you see a dog exhibiting signs of fear or stress, they will typically respond in one of three ways: fight, flee, or cower.

Humans are pretty bad at actually noticing these signs in dogs. So bad, in fact, that a recent study of dog experts who analyzed dog body language signs in social media pictures where dog owners were hugging their dogs, noted that 80+ percent of dogs were showing signs of stress while being hugged. And the owners had no idea! Learning how to spot these signs is going to make your pooch’s life so much less stressful!

Step #2: Learn How to Read a Dog’s Mind Through Their Tail

The way your dog wags his tail is a fascinating study.

Tail wagging to a dog is like facial expressions to us humans. So just like how we know a smiling person is approachable, and an angry person should be avoided… dogs get that same information from a tail wag.

Here’s a few tips on how to read this nonverbal communication:

Reading Tail Height

How high a dog’s tail is can be a pretty good way to gauge the intensity of your dog’s emotions.

If your dog’s tail is middle height he’s in a pretty relaxed state. If the tail goes straight up, the dog is getting too excited or upset; and the lower it gets the dog is getting more upset or anxious.

But height isn’t the only thing to pay attention to.

The direction your dog’s tail wags, and the speed at which he wags his tail mean different things too.

For example. a tail wagging to the left, like in the images below, is a negative tail wag. A dog wagging his tail in this way is in a negative state of mind. A tail wagging to the right says the dog is in a positive state of mind, and a tail tucked between his legs means he’s feeling submissive.

I recommend taking this chart and starting to pay attention to other dogs while out on walks. See if you can gain some more insights into their emotions. The first time I did this, it was like those videos of people who have their ears cured and hear for the first time; because you realize there is this whole level of communication that your dog has been trying to tell you that you never new about. It’s really pretty cool.

Step #3: Reading Your Dog’s Posture

There are a few reasons you want to make sure you learn how to interpret a dog’s posture.

The first is if you are interested in socializing your dog to other dogs. Socialization is a two-way street with dogs. You need to be able to look at your own dog and read his comfort level around other dogs so you don’t push him too fast and CREATE an anxiety issue. But, even more important, you need to be able to read BAD dog behavior from afar, so you can avoid them.

You don’t want to blindly let your dog walk up to a dominant dog only to end up having to break up a dog fight.

The Pass/No Pass Philosophy

Here at TheDogTrainingSecret.com we teach a pass/no-pass philosophy to people who are training their dogs how to properly interact with others out in the world. What pass/no-pass means is that we want to stay VERY far away from dogs with certain types of posture, as we can tell that they are likely to lunge, bark or attack our dog if we get too close. When people make this mistake and allow their dog to have run-ins with dogs like these, it builds their dog’s anxiety “Head Trash” when they see other dogs (this is especially important when working with a new puppy). So, instead of praying that a dog-to-dog interaction will go well, just walk far around these types of dogs, or step off the side of the path and stay far enough away to prevent an accident.

Here’s an example of dogs you should steer clear of and ones that are ok to walk by:

Also… if you notice YOUR dog doing any of the behaviors in the RED zone on the above graphic, please do other dog owners a favor and steer clear of other dogs, as your dog is not yet ready to interact appropriately. You won’t be doing either dog a favor if you try to approach a submissive dog who’s hiding behind his owners legs, or who seems overly excited to play.

Usually, if you follow those large posture cues you’ll be doing pretty well. But there are some other, more subtle, body language cues that you’ll want to learn how to spot.

Identifying the More Subtle Nonverbal Signs in Dogs

A dog’s posture is the next thing you need to pay attention to, specifically, if you are trying to read a dog who has fear, anxiety or aggression. As with all cues, some can be subtle, and some are more obvious.

Here’s a quick list:

Excessive Yawning

Lip Licking

Raised Hackles (these differ based on dog breeds)

Heavy Panting

Avoiding Eye Contact and Lowering his Head

Rapid Pacing Back & Forth Like He’s Nervous

And to help you know what each of these looks like, here’s a video that shows you examples of each.

How To Spot Fearful Body Posture In Dogs

Are you starting to see why learning to read your dog’s body language is so key in helping him learn how to behave? Who would have thought that whether or not your dog licks his lips too much was a warning sign, right?

Once we better understand how to tell what your dog is thinking through body posture, types of eye contact, and tail position and movement, the question should be…

What Should You Do When You See Signs of Stress in Your Dog’s Body Language?

When your dog’s body language suggests he’s stressed, we believe in using a handful of different strategies for helping them overcome their fears and anxieties, by working ‘Below their Emotional Threshold’ with low level stimulus. We even built a whole course around this called Impulse Control that you can check out here.

For example…

Let’s say you have a dog who is fearful or anxious around other dogs. In that situation, take your dog to an area where you know dogs will be, like a park or trail. Experiment with how close you can get to other dogs before your dog starts to show body language cues that he’s feeling stressed. Let’s say in this example that is 30 feet away, and you notice your dog start to lick his lips all of a sudden when he’s that close to another dog.

If 30 feet is the distance where your dog starts to feel stressed, then that’s the place we need to start!

If we try to push it and force our dog to work through his fears while he’s 10 feet from the other dog, that’s too much emotional intensity for your dog to make progress.

Be Wary of Forcing Your Dog to Push Through His Fears

There is a very popular dog trainer on TV that has made a name for himself by using video editing to make it look like he can fix fearful dogs by dominating them and forcing them to submit to his ALPHA will.

I cannot even begin to express how dangerous, and harmful, these approaches are to your dog’s ability to have emotional resilience.

When you take the approach of forcing your dog to confront his fears full on, and at their full intensity, you get one of three responses. Your dog will try to flee, fight or cower. Just like you wouldn’t take someone with a fear of spiders and lock them in box full of Tarantulas (in the hopes that’d they’d just ‘get over it’), we don’t want to flood our dog’s emotional system with overwhelming fear and anxiety. Doing so actually makes it MORE likely that your dog will become MORE fearful, anxious and submissive.

Like these poor dogs who’ve been trained to cower submissively by a dog trainer who uses electric shock as a consequence the second their dogs get out of line. Is this what you want your dog to look like?

Don’t Take That Approach, Do This Instead…

Instead of using methods like the trainer above, we want to use training methods that teach our dogs to be calm and relaxed when in the presence of things that get them overly emotional.

We want dog’s that look like this while out on a walk: happy, calm and well adjusted, and NOT like the video above.

By taking the time to learn how to read the different types of anxious, excited, fearful and aggressive body language that dog’s are displaying, we take a HUGE leap forward in our ability to be better communicators with our dogs. Better communication leads to a deeper bond, and more obedient behavior.

  The post How To Read Dog Body Language appeared first on TheDogTrainingSecret.com.

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[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: March 16, 2018

This week, the United States belatedly joined France and Germany in standing with Britain and accusations by the government of Prime Minister Theresa May that the Russian government was almost certainly behind the chemical weapons attack on an exiled Russian former intelligence officer and his daughter, both of whom remain in hospital in serious condition. The brazen attack, which may have been undertaken with a nerve agent, on British soil, upped the ante still further on actions which the Kremlin is willing to take in order to silence or avenge former intelligence and government officials who have defected to the West for various reasons. In response, the Russian ambassador demanded that the British government provide “material evidence” that the attack was ordered and/or undertaken by the government of Vladimir Putin. When the Kremlin failed to respond to a midnight deadline for answers, Theresa May’s government acted by labeling 23 Russian diplomats persona-non-grata, effectively forcing them to leave Britain within 24 hours. If it has not been pondered by others before this point, it is worth considering whether we have reentered a nascent version of the Cold War, which dominated European and American politics and the World stage for sixty years after the end of the Second World War. There is no question that Russian and American interests diverge or collide with each other around the globe, just as during the Cold War, but there is considerable more soft-power being applied with asymmetric military actions resulting in the seizure of territory, intervention in foreign conflicts, and the direct interference in western elections. While the prevailing fear during the Cold War, was mutual nuclear annihilation, or perhaps at best a large-scale war in between East and West in Continental Europe (something which Tom Clancy’s novel “Red Storm Rising” does an excellent job of portraying), now the fear is that our enemy, if we can call Russia that, can reach directly into the heart of our democracy and upend its very principles by undermining citizens’ trust in government.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has attracted considerable criticism for the way it is perceived to drag its feet over the implementation of further sanctions against Russia, in the face of clear evidence of Russian involvement in actions taken to undermine the American government. But this week, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions which were being instituted specifically in response to evidence of Russian meddling with the 2016 election. The sanctions which are financial in nature, apply to individual members of the Russian government and other high officials in Russian society, as well as specific companies with ties to the Kremlin. While the implementation of sanctions is a welcome sign, this raft still represents a very basic level of what the United States government could do, if it so chose. The Constitution gives the power of handling foreign affairs to the Executive Branch, however, and if that branch for some reason declines to implement sanctions, this provides significant barriers to other parts of the government from doing so.

This week, for the first time, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller III (who I saw referred to on Twitter as “Bobby Three Sticks,” which I sorta like), subpoenaed documents from the Trump Organization, the umbrella corporation which President Donald Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, have run ever since their father was elected president. It is not known what exactly Mueller is seeking or what the scope of his subpoena is, but it has been long suspected that Donald Trump, when he headed the Trump Organization, fostered business ties between himself and the Russian government, particularly in 2013, and that these ties may form the basis for the belief that evidence of compromising behavior by the president is held as a form of blackmail over him by the Kremlin. Even if this grand conspiracy is found to have no basis in truth, but is in fact a series of coincidences that appear as a pattern, this does not exclude the possibility that Trump or individuals working for his corporation participated in unethical or illegal behavior during these previous attempts at forming a business relationship. The president is said to have drawn a line for Mueller, saying any extension of the investigation into his personal financial doings represents a “red line,” that may not be crossed. Whether this means that a foray into this part of the life of the 45th president means Trump would attempt to fire Mueller is unclear, though it seems highly doubtful that such a threat would affect Mueller’s activities.

And now on to this week’s features:

While the subject of climate change and its effects upon our society and infrastructure unfortunately remains a controversial subject in this country, there can be no denial that we are experiencing changes in global weather patterns that do not match our experiences since weather was first officially, regularly recorded in the 1870s. Rolling Stone analyzes several worst case scenarios for events in various parts of the country which could occur and, if they do, would create widespread migration. Whole cities or regions of the country may be abandoned by swathes of the public, with consequences that could undermine our national economy and perhaps even the social structure. This is certainly an apocalyptic vision which assumes many extremes which, the article concedes, may be mitigated by proactive human actions in the interim, but respecting the worst of what could happen does tend to force people and governments to undertake preparations that they always may not.

The end of repressive communist-dominated governments in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War seemed to create a new wave of enlightened thought in which the attitudes and broad social mores of the West would finally be successfully adopted by the East, creating harmony and prosperity based on shared continental governance; the European Union would be the uniting political structure while NATO would ensure the defense of this system against rogue or wayward nation states or actors. This inevitable outcome seemed to move closer to fact, as many former Eastern Bloc, Warsaw Pact nations, joined the EU and NATO. Geopolitical crises which created humanitarian nightmares have erupted in recent years, provoking the resurgence of virulent, post-Communist nationalism which abhors the notion of inclusion and multiculturalism, and instead embraces the preservation of a perceived unique historical identity. This, as the writer of this piece points out, is most clearly seen in Hungary, which has acted as a great barrier to refugees and migrants from the war-torn Middle East, forcing them into neighboring countries or forcing them to languish in place, in an unsteady limbo which preserves the wretched state of the migrants. This new form of nationalism combined with populism, has also led to a spate of historical revisionism in other parts of Europe, such as Poland where a new law (or more accurately, an amendment to an existing law), seeks to recast Poland’s role in the Holocaust and the war itself.

The mob or mafia is well-known in American culture through popular movies, television shows, books, and through infamous times in which agents of this shadowy world pulled off a record breaking heist, or gunned down a rival in the criminal world. The American mafia is descended almost entirely from the Sicilian mafia, which maintains a significant presence on the large Italian island to this day. But have you ever considered when and how the mafia came into existence and became the social and political power that it has been in Sicily for generations? This study traces the evolution of the mafia in Sicily based upon the economic factors which plagued the island in the mid-nineteenth century. It also examines the effects of mafia control of territory; rises in illiteracy and infant mortality, decreases in effective local government and economic development.

What is the earliest memory you can recall in your life? The first age at which I can remember certain daily interactions or occurrences is about 3, and the first major news story which I can recall watching and being engrossed by, was when Baby Jessica was rescued from a well in Texas. In the nineteenth century, conventional wisdom was that the brain of an infant and later of a toddler, which not sophisticated enough yet to produce memories. Research today indicates that this is not the case, that infants and toddlers and young children do create memories, but their endurance is low; ranging from a single day to a month to a handful of months. The average age at which the mind creates memories which seem to have a sort of permanence is about age 3.5; i.e. matching my own personal memory timeline above. And this is not because the brain is undeveloped at these early ages, its more that its pathways have not been refined enough to prioritize certain functionalities over others. And it seems that this process is necessary to the development of the adult brain. This is a really interesting story.

Anyone who has flown more than a handful of times in life has experienced at least one “bumpy” landing. Landing and takeoff are the only times in which an airplane is essentially locked into flying a particular speed, altitude, angle, and in a particular geographic location; pilots can fly around known pockets of mid-air turbulence, but a runway is where a runway is. Because of this reality, pilots are required early on in their training to learn the art and technical skill of landing in severe crosswinds. And while viewing a plane tossed sideways by the wind is terrifying to most people on the ground—to say nothing of the passengers in the aircraft—the truth is, most pilots consider landing in crosswinds to be, sort of, fun.

This past Tuesday, Democrat Conor Lamb scored an upset victory over Republican Rick Saccone in the Pennsylvania 18th congressional district special election. Saccone was not exactly an inspired candidate—especially in contrast to the telegenic Lamb—but the district was won by Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 20+ points in November 2016. This marked the most recent edition in a series of state and federal special elections in which Democrats have vastly improved their performance over Republican opponents and, in several cases, scored surprise victories in deeply conservative states, notably Oklahoma. Kyle Kondik of the Center for Politics looks at these races and analyzes whether Republicans face further trouble in upcoming special elections, particularly another congressional special election, this time in Arizona.

 Welcome to the weekend.