#World's Largest Secret Society

[xtruss]

The Freemasons Have Inspired Centuries of Conspiracy—This Is Their Real History

The Story of How a Stonemasons’ Guild Became the World's Largest Secret Society is Less about Conspiracy and More About Enlightenment Thinking.

— September 19, 2023 | By Erin Blakemore

The Title Page of the Freemason Constitution at the Museum of Freemasonry in Paris. Freemasonry traces its roots to medieval stonemason guilds, though its modern iteration dates to the 18th century. Photograph By Godong, Universal Images Group/Getty Images

What do Rev. Jesse Jackson, George Washington, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Duke Ellington, and Buzz Aldrin have in common? All are members of the world’s largest secret society, the Freemasons—a group whose members include some of the world’s most influential people and whose secretive rituals have persisted for centuries.

Conspiracy theorists speculate the group pulls the strings of international power and finance and is responsible for high-profile murders—some even claim its members worship Satan.

Where is the line between fact and fiction within this secretive society? Read on to learn more.

18th Century Italian-Austrian Artist Ignaz Unterberger Painted this Initiation Ceremony in a Viennese Masonic Lodge in 1789. Photograph By Deagostini, Getty Images

The Origins of Freemasonry

Though the Freemasonry movement has roots in medieval guilds of stonemasons, the vast majority of the movement’s members are not masters of stonework. It’s believed that as stonemason membership decreased, the group began accepting “speculative,” or honorary, members to bolster their numbers. Freemasonry’s modern incarnation dates to the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, when educated Englishmen aimed to commune with others and discuss issues of philosophy, religion, and life in an organized setting.

Fraternal organizations had existed for centuries, but in the 18th century, a variety of men’s groups named after the English pubs at which they met joined together in what they called a “Grand Lodge,” an association that would meet to hold rituals and ceremonies and induct new members. Now known as the Premier Grand Lodge of England, the group was the first of its kind, and as membership expanded so did its list of secret rituals and ceremonies and its membership requirements.

According to the Masonic Service Association of North America, there were about 898,000 Freemasons in the U.S. as of 2020, and there are an estimated 6 million Freemasons worldwide.

Freemasons hold a Lodge meeting in Bordeaux, France, in 2008. Photographs By Regis Duvignau, Reuters/Redux

Who Can Be a Freemason?

Today, membership requirements are relatively simple: Though each group, or Lodge, of Freemasons has its own rules, in general a Freemason must be a male who is recommended by other members of the Lodge, believe in a “Supreme Being,” be of good moral character, and pledge to learn the ways of the fraternity and conform to what Freemasons call their “ancient uses and customs.”

Those customs include a strict hierarchy and a variety of ceremonies and rituals. After they are initiated into their lodge, members go through a series of “degrees” of membership, rising from Entered Apprentice to Fellowcraft to Master Mason. Along the way, they learn the language, rites, and beliefs of the “craft,” engaging in rituals that harken to Biblical beliefs . They also adopt emblems that range from the square and compass, which represents morality, the beehive, which is said to represent cooperation and work among members, and the “Eye of Providence” or “All-seeing Eye,” which represents God’s eternal watchfulness. Some of these symbols are so well known that they are familiar to non-Masons—for example, the Eye of Providence can be found on U.S. one dollar bills.

The masonic symbols of a square (virtue) and compass (wisdom) are placed atop a Bible, which is open to the Gospel of St. John, during a Freemason ceremony. Photograph By Raquel Clausi Rochina, Cordon Press/Redux

Why Catholicism Forbids Freemasonry

When they’re not holding elaborate membership rituals, Freemasons often engage in community service and philanthropy, provide mutual support to members, or work with associated organizations. But despite this charitable focus and the fact that it is not a formal religion, Freemasonry isn’t universally accepted. In fact, Freemasonry is banned by Roman Catholicism, which forbids Catholics from joining and encourages them to associate with Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus instead.

“Their principles have always been considered undesirable by the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden,” the Church declared in 1983. “The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.” As Catholic Herald’s Ed Condon explains, the Church opposes Freemasonry because of its secular focus and its role as a sanctuary for “those with heterodox ideas and agendas.”

Power and Panic

Those agendas have long spurred controversy because of the political power wielded by some Freemasons. Though the rules of most lodges discourage members from discussing politics, many of its members are active in political parties and government and the organization’s secrecy and vows of brotherhood have spawned conspiracy theories about its members’ political agendas.

Most conspiracy theories speculate that all Freemasons have the same beliefs and act as a body, tying in with modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that associate the group with a shady “New World Order” which controls international finance and relations.

Left: Seats for high-status members are seen in the Freemasons Hall of the United Grand Lodge of England in London. Photograph By Peter Dazeley, Getty Images

Right: A statue of George Washington in a Masonic apron stands inside the New York Grand Lodge Headquarters. Photograph By Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times/Redux

As a result, Freemasonry has become iconic in popular culture and among non-members who are intrigued by its shady rituals. Yet membership has dwindled for years. Why the decline? Some connect it to a larger trend among fraternal organizations and service clubs like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, which have seen steep declines over the decades. Others attribute falling membership to the movement’s refusal to recognize women despite the existence of some all-female lodges.

Or perhaps the fall is due to growing public awareness of the movement’s once-secret rituals, historian John Dickie told NPR in 2020. “I think possibly actually the issue is that secrecy has lost something of its magic," Dickie said. “In an age when it can take two minutes or less on Google to find out what the Freemasons' secrets really are, I'm not sure that they can really hold that much mystique for members anymore.”

Despite controversy and condemnation, the movement persists—but only time can tell whether Freemasonry can remain relevant in the 21st century. Meanwhile, its members say they see Freemasonry as everything from a powerful brotherhood to a chance to give back to the community to what one English member calls “an avenue for personal growth and development.” For now, Freemasonry’s secretive rituals and symbols live on—along with the influence of its best-known members.

[iguanodont]

Lineup of metallic dragons, as they appear in my personal setting. From left to right:

Gold: Among the largest and most politically ambitious of dragons. They rarely use their immense might to seek dominion over humanoid races, instead investing their First hoard (typically sea-jewels and their own shed scales) in the success of kings and cities that answer only to them, thus expanding their own wealth through mercantile success. Their wisdom spans generations, making them valuable advisors and patient strategists.

Copper: A mid-sized dragon, and the most playful. Their fascination with humanoids lies almost exclusively in how they entertain themselves. These glittering tricksters make their lairs in the hearts of theaters, theme parks, circuses, and other locales of escapism, stretching and bending the laws of reality to the awe and delight of their audience.

Silver: The smallest and most ephemeral of dragons. Though solitary among their own as all dragons, they are fascinated by the social lives of humanoids. They may spend a majority of their lives playing pretend as ordinary folk, using their silver tongues and seemingly inexhaustible work ethic to worm their way to the top of a corporate ladder or the heart of a secret society, only to leave it headless when the game is won and they seek a fresh start elsewhere.

Bronze: Smallest after silver, and cheeriest of dragons, perhaps because they remain the closest of their kin to Mother Sea, from whence the first dragons are said to have crawled. Likewise their motivations seem the most simple: to create paradise at these sacred shores. They are lorded as guardians of beaches and shallow seas, yet their vision of perfection may prove so infectious that those who visit forget the world beyond the gentle surf and glittering sand, and those who are wrenched from it find Elsewhere hollow by comparison.

Brass: The tallest, and loneliest of dragons. These flightless behemoths roam the desert in their youth, taking in everything from the goings of the skittering beetle to the rise and fall of cities. But over centuries they grow so tall they can no longer interact intimately with the many subjects of their interest. Instead they totter aimlessly from place to place, magically broadcasting their vast repository of histories, biographies, and opinions on the weather to anyone who might be there to listen.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

America's largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel

It’s not that conservatives aren’t sometimes right — it’s that even when they’re right, they’re highly selective about it. Take the hoary chestnut that “incentives matter,” trotted out to deny humane benefits to poor people on the grounds that “free money” makes people “workshy.”

There’s a whole body of conservative economic orthodoxy, Public Choice Theory, that concerns itself with the motives of callow, easily corrupted regulators, legislators and civil servants, and how they might be tempted to distort markets.

But the same people who obsess over our fallible public institutions are convinced that private institutions will never yield to temptation, because the fear of competition keeps temptation at bay. It’s this belief that leads the right to embrace monopolies as “efficient”: “A company’s dominance is evidence of its quality. Customers flock to it, and competitors fail to lure them away, therefore monopolies are the public’s best friend.”

But this only makes sense if you don’t understand how monopolies can prevent competitors. Think of Uber, lighting $31b of its investors’ cash on fire, losing 41 cents on every dollar it brought in, in a bid to drive out competitors and make public transit seem like a bad investment.

Or think of Big Tech, locking up whole swathes of your life inside their silos, so that changing mobile OSes means abandoning your iMessage contacts; or changing social media platforms means abandoning your friends, or blocking Google surveillance means losing your email address, or breaking up with Amazon means losing all your ebooks and audiobooks:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave — because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in — the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

It’s not that public institutions can’t betray they public interest. It’s just that public institutions can be made democratically accountable, rather than financially accountable. When a company betrays you, you can only punish it by “voting with your wallet.” In that system, the people with the fattest wallets get the most votes.

When public institutions fail you, you can vote with your ballot. Admittedly, that doesn’t always work, but one of the major predictors of whether it will work is how big and concentrated the private sector is. Regulatory capture isn’t automatic: it’s what you get when companies are bigger than governments.

If you want small governments, in other words, you need small companies. Even if you think the only role for the state is in enforcing contracts, the state needs to be more powerful than the companies issuing those contracts. The bigger the companies are, the bigger the government has to be:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

Companies can suborn the government to help them abuse the public, but whether public institutions can resist them is more a matter of how powerful those companies are than how fallible a public servant is. Our plutocratic, monopolized, unequal society is the worst of both worlds. Because companies are so big, they abuse us with impunity — and they are able to suborn the state to help them do it:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

This is the dimension that’s so often missing from the discussion of why Americans pay more for healthcare to get worse outcomes from health-care workers who labor under worse conditions than their cousins abroad. Yes, the government can abet this, as when it lets privatizers into the Medicare system to loot it and maim its patients:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-01-patient-zero-tom-scully/

But the answer to this isn’t more privatization. Remember Sarah Palin’s scare-stories about how government health care would have “death panels” where unaccountable officials decided whether your life was worth saving?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26195604/

The reason “death panels” resounded so thoroughly — and stuck around through the years — is that we all understand, at some deep level, that health care will always be rationed. When you show up at the Emergency Room, they have to triage you. Even if you’re in unbearable agony, you might have to wait, and wait, and wait, because other people (even people who arrive after you do) have it worse.

In America, health care is mostly rationed based on your ability to pay. Emergency room triage is one of the only truly meritocratic institutions in the American health system, where your treatment is based on urgency, not cash. Of course, you can buy your way out of that too, with concierge doctors. And the ER system itself has been infested with Private Equity parasites:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Wealth-based health-care rationing is bad enough, but when it’s combined with the public purse, a bad system becomes a nightmare. Take hospice care: private equity funds have rolled up huge numbers of hospices across the USA and turned them into rigged — and lethal — games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Medicare will pay a hospice $203-$1,462 to care for a dying person, amounting to $22.4b/year in public funds transfered to the private sector. Incentives matter: the less a hospice does for their patients, the more profits they reap. And the private hospice system is administered with the lightest of touches: at the $203/day level, a private hospice has no mandatory duties to their patients.

You can set up a California hospice for the price of a $3,000 filing fee (which is mostly optional, since it’s never checked). You will have a facility inspection, but don’t worry, there’s no followup to make sure you remediate any failing elements. And no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks complaints.

So PE-owned hospices pressure largely healthy people to go into “hospice care” — from home. Then they do nothing for them, including continuing whatever medical care they were depending on. After the patient generates $32,000 in billings for the PE company, they hit the cap and are “live discharged” and must go through a bureaucratic nightmare to re-establish their Medicare eligibility, because once you go into hospice, Medicare assumes you are dying and halts your care.

PE-owned hospices bribe doctors to refer patients to them. Sometimes, these sham hospices deliberately induce overdoses in their patients in a bid to make it look like they’re actually in the business of caring for the dying. Incentives matter:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

Now, hospice care — and its relative, palliative care — is a crucial part of any humane medical system. In his essential book, Being Mortal, Atul Gawande describes how end-of-life care that centers a dying person’s priorities can make death a dignified and even satisfying process for the patient and their loved ones:

https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/

But that dignity comes from a patient-centered approach, not a profit-centered one. Doctors are required to put their patients’ interests first, and while they sometimes fail at this (everyone is fallible), the professionalization of medicine, through which doctors were held to ethical standards ahead of monetary considerations, proved remarkable durable.

Partly that was because doctors generally worked for themselves — or for other doctors. In most states, it is illegal for medical practices to be owned by non-MDs, and historically, only a small fraction of doctors worked for hospitals, subject to administration by businesspeople rather than medical professionals.

But that was radically altered by the entry of private equity into the medical system, with the attending waves of consolidation that saw local hospitals merged into massive national chains, and private practices scooped up and turned into profit-maximizers, not health-maximizers:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-02-qa-corporate-medicine-destroys-doctors/

Today, doctors are being proletarianized, joining the ranks of nurses, physicians’ assistants and other health workers. In 2012, 60% of practices were doctor-owned and only 5.6% of docs worked for hospitals. Today, that’s up by 1,000%, with 52.1% of docs working for hospitals, mostly giant corporate chains:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-04-when-mds-go-union/

The paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring transhuman colony organism that calls itself a Private Equity fund is endlessly inventive in finding ways to increase its profits by harming the rest of us. It’s not just hospices — it’s also palliative care.

Writing for NBC News, Gretchen Morgenson describes how HCA Healthcare — the nation’s largest hospital chain — outsourced its death panels to IBM Watson, whose algorithmic determinations override MDs’ judgment to send patients to palliative care, withdrawing their care and leaving them to die:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-hospitals-push-patients-hospice-care-rcna81599

Incentives matter. When HCA hospitals send patients to die somewhere else to die, it jukes their stats, reducing the average length of stay for patients, a key metric used by HCA that has the twin benefits of making the hospital seem like a place where people get well quickly, while freeing up beds for more profitable patients.

Goodhart’s Law holds that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Give an MBA within HCA a metric (“get patients out of bed quicker”) and they will find a way to hit that metric (“send patients off to die somewhere else, even if their doctors think they could recover”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Incentives matter! Any corporate measure immediately becomes a target. Tell Warners to decrease costs, and they will turn around and declare the writers’ strike to be a $100m “cost savings,” despite the fact that this “savings” comes from ceasing production on the shows that will bring in all of next year’s revenue:

https://deadline.com/2023/08/warner-bros-discovery-david-zaslav-gunnar-wiedenfels-strikes-1235453950/

Incentivize a company to eat its seed-corn and it will chow down.

Only one of HCA’s doctors was willing to go on record about its death panels: Ghasan Tabel of Riverside Community Hospital (motto: “Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life”). Tabel sued Riverside after the hospital retaliated against him when he refused to follow the algorithm’s orders to send his patients for palliative care.

Tabel is the only doc on record willing to discuss this, but 26 other doctors talked to Morgenson on background about the practice, asking for anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the nation’s largest hospital chain, a “Wall Street darling” with $5.6b in earnings in 2022.

HCA already has a reputation as a slaughterhouse that puts profits before patients, with “severe understaffing”:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/workers-us-hospital-giant-hca-say-puts-profits-patient-care-rcna64122

and rotting, undermaintained facililties:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/roaches-operating-room-hca-hospital-florida-rcna69563

But while cutting staff and leaving hospitals to crumble are inarguable malpractice, the palliative care scam is harder to pin down. By using “AI” to decide when patients are beyond help, HCA can employ empiricism-washing, declaring the matter to be the factual — and unquestionable — conclusion of a mathematical process, not mere profit-seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/ggarbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

But this empirical facewash evaporates when confronted with whistleblower accounts of hospital administrators who have no medical credentials berating doctors for a “missed hospice opportunity” when a physician opts to keep a patient under their care despite the algorithm’s determination.

This is the true “AI Safety” risk. It’s not that a chatbot will become sentient and take over the world — it’s that the original artificial lifeform, the limited liability company, will use “AI” to accelerate its murderous shell-game until we can’t spot the trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/10/in-the-dumps-2/

The risk is real. A 2020 study in the Journal of Healthcare Management concluded that the cash incentives for shipping patients to palliatve care “may induce deceiving changes in mortality reporting in several high-volume hospital diagnoses”:

https://journals.lww.com/jhmonline/Fulltext/2020/04000/The_Association_of_Increasing_Hospice_Use_With.7.aspx

Incentives matter. In a private market, it’s always more profitable to deny care than to provide it, and any metric we bolt onto that system to prevent cheating will immediately become a target. For-profit healthcare is an oxymoron, a prelude to death panels that will kill you for a nickel.

Morgenson is an incisive commentator on for-profit looting. Her recent book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America (co-written with Joshua Rosner) is a must-read:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

[Image ID: An industrial meat-grinder. A sick man, propped up with pillows, is being carried up its conveyor towards its hopper. Ground meat comes out of the other end. It bears the logo of HCA healthcare. A pool of blood spreads out below it.]

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[mariacallous]

BERLIN — For the first time since the Nazi era, a far-right party in Germany has won the largest piece of the electoral pie in a state election.

Mainstream politicians and Jewish leaders are expressing alarm following Sunday’s elections, in which the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic and pro-Russia Alternative for Germany party came out on top in the state of Thuringia, with 32.8% of the vote.

The 11-year-old party also earned second place to the traditional conservative Christian Democratic Union party in the neighboring state of Saxony. Both states are in the former East Germany.

“No one can brush this off as a ‘protest’ vote anymore,” Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said in a statement late Sunday.

“Exactly 85 years after the start of World War II, Germany is in danger of becoming a different country again: more unstable, colder and poorer, less secure, less worth living in,” said Knobloch, a former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who herself survived the Holocaust in hiding.

The election came just over a week since a Syrian refugee was arrested after a deadly stabbing spree at a festival in the city of Solingen, and only days after Germany resumed its program of deporting refugees convicted of crimes. The knife attack, in which three people were killed, reignited popular anxiety about social unrest connected with the more than 1 million refugees admitted to Germany since 2015.

AfD stresses isolationism, takes an anti-EU and pro-Russian stance, and is accused of fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment. Some of its most extreme representatives have also belittled the Holocaust, saying that Germany has paid enough penance for the sins of an older generation.

Mass protests against the party took place earlier this year following revelations that the party had held a secret meeting at a lakeside villa to discuss plans to deport foreigners, including those who had become German citizens. Prominent neo-Nazis attended the meeting, according to the news organization that broke the story, inducing painful echoes of the gathering of Nazi leaders at nearby Wannsee in 1942 to devise a plan to deport and then murder Jews.

But while support for the AfD dipped in polls at the time, it soon rebounded and then accelerated. Now, it has achieved breakthrough results in state elections and raised concerns for next year’s national elections.

The party — whose Thuringen leader, Bjoern Hoecke, has been convicted twice of using a Nazi slogan to boost his party — is unlikely to form a ruling coalition in either state, since it is shunned by other parties. Still, it will have additional seats in the state legislatures and will have the numbers, particularly in Thuringia, to interfere with some governing decisions.

A far-left party, Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance or BSW, also produced notable results, coming in third in Thuringia with 15.8% of the vote. Last month, the current head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, warned that the party, which has accused Israel of genocide in its war in Gaza, was “fueling hatred of Israel in Germany.”

The new election results bode ill for Germany’s future, Schuster said on Sunday.

“Can we recover from this hit?” Schuster wrote in a column in the Bild newspaper. “Our free society must not fall, especially in the face of Islamist terror. Unvarnished truths — honesty and sincerity — are needed, not populist pseudo-answers from radical parties.”

In Thuringia, the mainstream Social Democratic Party barely squeaked in, with 6.1%. Several parties, including the Greens and Free Democratic Party, received so few votes that they will not have any seats at all.

BSW also came in third in Saxony, with 11.8% of the vote, following the AfD with 30.6% and the CDU with a narrow win at 31.9%.

Younger voters overwhelmingly favored the AfD in this week’s elections, according to an NTV-Infratest exit poll.

“The survivors are asking themselves: ‘Didn’t we do enough to teach, to tell, to show?” Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, told the Guardian.

Some Jewish leaders say German politicians would do well to address the concerns apparently expressed by voters this weekend.

“The election results in the German federal states of Thuringia and Saxony are a clear wake-up call to the centrist parties in Germany to listen to the real concerns and fears of the people,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said in a statement. “When half the population votes for parties on the extreme fringes, their problems must be addressed openly and honestly.”

Sunday was an “insanely sad” election day, German Jewish journalist Samira Lazarovic wrote on Facebook. She said her 96-year-old father compared the outcome to the opening salvo of World War II, exactly 85 years ago.

Lazarovic said it was is urgent to reach out to younger voters. “It’s not that we know better than they; but we should shape the future together.”

Obviously, it wasn’t enough to take to the streets and protest against the far right, she added: “Populists all over the world have one thing in common. They mean exactly what they say and do everything they can to turn their words to deeds.”

[deimcs]

Deep beneath the Frostback Mountains sits Orzammar, largest and proudest of the two remaining dwarven cities. Once the seat of an underground empire, Orzammar now stands alone, cut off from the world by the darkspawn, still clinging to the memory of its former glory. Below the vast statues and gilded halls where the noble families play at politics, the lower castes live in their shadows, scurrying to serve like their Ancestors before them. Below that… is you. You are casteless, the dirty secret staining Orzammar's perfect society, forced, along with your sister, to sell your services to the crime lord, Beraht. To the rest of Orzammar, you are proof that the casteless deserve their fate; but you know you do what you have to—the same as everyone—just to survive.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

These MAGAts were once conservatives who despised Russia and now they want to fellate Trump and Putin.

NATO isn’t just a defensive alliance, these are major trading partners and allies on a host of issues linked to preserving geopolitical stability and general world order, the rule of law.

Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO but wants to join. Some of you may question supporting Ukraine or even say it’s race based. Ukraine serves as a buffer between our western allies and our greatest geopolitical rival, Russia. More importantly Ukraine is one of the world’s largest suppliers of wheat and more to the point the largest individual supplier to the third world. If Russia were to knock out Ukraine there would be widespread famine across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Accompanying this would be worldwide trade disruption and more than likely a worldwide depression leading to more wars over resources and trade.

Demagogues like Trump know very little about what they are pontificating on. He has no knowledge of the big picture. Businessmen who enter politics rarely do. It’s not as simplistic as a family business (the Trump Organization) with a balance sheet. World affairs are 4-D chess with countless intertwined variables. Trump repeatedly shows how he doesn’t have a clue about how NATO operates no matter how many times it’s explained to him by policy advisers, the press, and world leaders. He refers to NATO members as being delinquent or in default which is simply not true. They haven’t borrowed money from anyone nor do they owe NATO. Each member voluntary pledges to spend 2% of GDP on defense *if it is economically possible at the time. It’s not carved in stone and is written as an aspirational goal only. The US does not have to pay more if another country isn’t able to spend 2% on itself in any given year. Further NATO members have standardized military equipment, much of which is purchased from the US. If a country is removed from NATO then they won’t be purchasing as much or at all from US defense contractors and our economy would take a big negative hit.

Republicans have been fed lies about NATO since Trump’s run for office started in 2015. Germany is a major player in NATO. Trump and the American far-right NAZI movement have long despised German politicians, like Merkel for example, for their suppression of Nazism since the end of the 2nd World War. These same far-right Neo-Nazi Republicans have also been fed a steady diet of lies about how unfair it is that the US, in their eyes unfairly, over pays the UN and they have been told to equate this to NATO which has a completely different structure and purpose. Neo-Nazi’s have a million and one bizarre conspiracy theories about the UN and now Trump MAGAts have linked this to our greatest ally NATO. One could write a book on the far-rights conspiracy theories about the UN which include replacing white people, secret governing societies, alien overlords, transfer of wealth to the 3rd world, forced same sex marriages, sterilization, UN military takeover of the U.S.,etc.

Threatening to surrender our NATO allies to Russia and/or withdrawing from NATO are the ramblings of a poorly educated, uninformed, lunatic who has no clue about foreign policy. The resulting worldwide chaos and economic collapse that would follow would cost a million times more than the pitiful few dollars MAGA morons think it would save. Try getting favorable trade deals from a resulting hostile European Union after you signed their collective death warrants.

[your-local-nerd-0405]

The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black Pt1

Next on the list is by far the most known family as well as the largest which is why i'm splitting this into multiple parts. The Black family colors is black, green, and gold and their Hogwarts house is of course Slytherin. Their family motto is Toujours Pur which is French for always pure. Despite popular belief there is nothing in their family line that would lead us to believing they are French. I know we all wish they were and I too blush like a highschool girl at the thought of Sirius flirting with Remus in french or Regulus only being nice to James in french. Don't worry you're not alone.

The family experienced their "rise to fame" after the fall of the House of Gaunt. They were still pretty well respected within wizarding society before this, but weren't really considered "royalty" until what was thought to be the end of the Gaunt's male line.

The family tree is located in the drawing room of the family's town house in London called Grimmauld's Place. The tree is bordered with gold trim that has the words "En stirps nobilis et gens antiquissima Black" repeated on it, which translates to " A noble and ancient Black race". The family is known for having pitch black hair and pale skin. Along with that they are known for their rather extreme views on blood purity and their long history of incest. Due to the long history of incest members of the noble house of black are not known to live for a long period of time, and often times are very sickly. However despite their sickly health they are known to have strong magical cores and are skilled in many different forms of magic.

It is unclear as to whether or not Grimmauld's Place is the family's primary residence but I imagine that due to the family's extensive wealth (and willingness to flaunt said wealth) they have a manor much like the Malfoy's do.

The Black's are known for their numerous traditions and my favorite tradition that they have is their naming tradition. All members of the Black family have a star related name and sometimes when a person marries into the family they will change their name to match this tradition. The female members will often still stick to this tradition when marrying and having their own children.

It is no secret that the Black family has very extreme Blood purist views and where avid supporters of Voldemort however despite this only 3 members out of the many Blacks family members alive at that time where actually Deatheaters.

The family's reputation took a huge hit after the first wizarding war and the last name Black no longer held any power. People in the wizarding world begin to regard them as a family full of mad people, and in 1994 the last bearer of the family name, Sirius Black, was killed by his cousin Bellatrix Lestrange nee Black effectively putting an end to the noble and most ancient house of Black.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Polish Defense Spending to Hit 4.7% of GDP by 2025 | Gen. Jarosław Kraszewski

Poland's largest defense expo is underway in Kielce, with over 750 companies displaying cutting-edge military technology. Notably, Poland is increasing its defense budget to 4.7% of its GDP by next year. Amid the signing of major contracts, including an airport protection system from a Spanish firm, there’s also a push to develop domestic production, such as a planned ammunition factory. Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has also emphasized the need for "precise" contracts, including ongoing negotiations for more K2 tanks from South Korea. General Jarosław Kraszewski, former Director of the Armed Forces Supervision Department at the Polish National Security Bureau, joined us today on TVP World to discuss these developments.

P.S. The Poles have made a very correct decision! Glad to hear: "Poland is increasing its defence budget to 4.7% of its GDP". Considering the high level of political corruption in the West and the extent to which Russian spies and agents of influence have infiltrated Western societies, Western security "guarantees" and "international laws" cannot be relied upon at all: 1) The Russian imperialists would never have started the war against Ukraine if Western capital, specifically German, French, Dutch, American and all other businessmen, had not invested huge funds in the Russian economy and in the restoration of the Russian military potential (the Russians obtained the military technology they lacked, both directly and indirectly, the West donated for the Russians possibility to steal Western military technology secrets without hindrance); 2) The West significantly reduced the military potential of Western European countries and CATEGORICALLY REFUSED TO INCREASE the defense of Eastern Europe and the Baltic regions at leas since 2006. Even when the Russian invasion of Georgia began in Europe in August 2008, the West pretended that nothing was happening...;

Even more, Western politicians started pushing the idea that NATO is no longer needed, the Western fiasco in Syria, and the West went so far in an absurd situation that they even started talking about giving the Russians a "sphere of influence" in Europe...it must be allowed to attack Ukraine and the Baltic States without hindrance. A. Merkel's German policy in relations with Russia was a particularly big shame for Western politicians, and of course the political circus organized by Donald Trump in America.... It is such a shame that there are no words to describe it... Of course, the Kremlin and Beijing saw all this activity of the Western useful idiots very well... the Russian army, together with Iran, entered Syria without interference, continued attacks in Ukraine, Beijing is becoming more and more aggressive, and this is only thanks to the useful idiots of the West, who have betrayed absolutely all the West's civilization values....

[krobus-void-monster]

A life well lived part 4 (Final )

The Stardew Valley bachelor/ bachelorette growing old with the farmer headcanon like an entire generation has passed and there kids have grown up and work on the farm as well as have kids of their own

Thank you all so much for the positive comments this is my first time doing this type of stuff and the support is what inspires me to do this . I don’t know if I will I will do more stuff like this but I do have some ideas for future stuff and if you don’t agree with my headcanon please feel free to write your own post I would love to see your take I wrote these posts because I didn’t see any one else write stuff like it . And without further ado

( penny Maru Lean ) + special bonus character

Penny : she has the largest family of any other bachelor or bachelorette with 6 kids and 9 grandchildren who all live on the farm or within walking distance. She is the sweetest old lady her cooking has improved greatly . She is greatly involved in her entire valleys lives she even has recorded messages for the life events of her grandchildren that she will likely miss . When she does pass the entire valley will be at her funeral to mourn her . She will be buried on the farm right next to the farmer who died a year earlier.

Maru : She is still as smart as ever with multiple degrees her inventions have contributed to the betterment of society and the world as a whole. She may or may not have been a part of top secret government projects, she will never tell . She still makes inventions to make her and the farmers life easier. She has designed and created a mini rocket to send some of her ashes to space .

Lean : she is a we’ll known artist who is famous around the world for her art she has converted her old cabin into a full on art studio . She is always supportive of he kids and grandkids art and hangs there art in her studio ( no matter how bad it is) when she does pass away she will leave behind a legacy spanning decades and an incomplete statue. she wants her ashes spread in her childhood town and her old cabin .

Bonus character

Krobus : shadow people have a life span lasting thousands of years so Krobus is there long after the farmer dies. Even though the farmer was but a blink in life of Krobus they cared deeply about each other the farmer planted trees all around the farm so Krobus could walk around without having to worry about the sun . A hundred years later those trees have become a forest were monsters from the mines taken refuge on the surface and in the middle of it all is Krobus watching over it .

[seriousbrat]

gobbledegook and notes on goblins (part 2 of 2)

Part one covering the language here.

GOBLIN NAMES:

(Some of these are from canon and some are ones I’ve made up/taken from various places, including ALL the female names because no goblin ladies are ever mentioned in canon sadly)

MALE NAMES:

A goblin male name often ends with a hard “k”, which is considered a strong, masculine sound. If not a k, then they almost certainly end with another hard consonant. Male names usually feature “o” and “u” sounds, though an “a” or an “i” is often present in the first syllable of the name.

Alguff

Bodrod

Bogrod

Burgok

Garkun

Gnarlak

Gornuk

Gringott

Griphuk (often spelt by wizards, including Harry, as Griphook; “uk” and “ook” are two English spellings of the same Goblin rune)

Hodrod

Nagnok

Odbert (old name, obsolete)

Ragnok

Ragnuk

Ranrok

Rikbert (often spelt as Ricbert by humans, “k” and “c” are one letter in the goblin script)

FEMALE NAMES:

Female names often feature “s” or “z” sounds, which are considered sharp, snappy, and fresh– feminine traits in goblin culture. They often end with “i” or “a” sounds.

Adartza

Arantza

Eguzki

Garazi

Isaskun

Itziar

Joska

Nadezhda

Saveka

Sigdrífa

Revka

Rifavka

Rizakva

Urdza

Urzuri

Zevka

Zigrífa

GOBLIN SOCIETY:

Goblins generally prefer to live underground or in cave-houses, in proximity to the ore and metal that is so important to their society. Most live together in large underground cities. The largest of these in Britain is Lekbek or Lek Fell in the Yorkshire Dales, which is connected through what is known to humans as the Ease Gill cavern system, part of the wider Three Counties system. The larger group of goblins in a particular territory, such as Britain, is known as a Bastion.

It is of interest to wizarding scholars that there is not as much linguistic variation among Goblins in different parts of the world, compared to humans– it is theorised that they have some method of communication between Bastions hidden away deep in their underground cities. This is a secret closely guarded by Goblin leadership.

Most goblins are miners or smiths/artisans, and in opposition to a common human misconception only a few are involved in banking or monetary transactions with wizards. The goblins usually encountered by humans are the Gringotts goblins, who act as a liaison between humans and goblins— this fact warps the perception the Wizarding World has of the species. It is ore, not coins, that is of value to goblins, as casting galleons, sickles, and knuts takes little real skill. To them, wizarding currency is merely a way to maintain influence over wizarding society. Still, each smith tasked with minting coins employs a mold with his or her serial number as a method of tracking those coins. Knuts and sickles contain trace amounts of gold, as gold is unable to be produced magically, and goblins can tell instantly if the coin is counterfeit.

Many of the Gringotts goblins are members of the same sprawling extended family tree, and though many do not know each other they share a common descendant in the goblin Gringott, who founded the bank in 1474. This is not at all universal, however, as many goblins now working for Gringotts were born to miners or smiths and simply displayed a good head for numbers or the diplomatic skills necessary to treat with humans from a young age.

Goblins have a loose system of factions— most of the time, those born to mining families become miners, while those born to artisans become artisans, and those descended from the goblin Gringott remain bankers. However, this system is usually maintained out of habit, as it is not enforced and is not rigid— Goblins prize raw talent, and if a young goblin can prove their skills in a different area than that of their parents, then they are happily accepted and permitted to shine.

Goblins have different ideas about property than humans. They prize talent and the ability to create above all things, and therefore believe that true ownership of an object rests with its maker— “buying” the object is viewed merely as a loan. Among themselves they are typically generous and neighbourly, and do not exchange money but goods and services. For instance, a miner might need a brooch for his daughter— if he provides the artisan with extra raw metal, the artisan will make it and the daughter is permitted to wear it until her death, upon which it returns to the smith. If the smith is no longer alive, it goes to whichever smith has taken over his tools and trade, who may or may not be a blood relative.

Some more radical elements believe that wizards should have no rights to own any Goblin-made items at all, but this is not a view shared by all. However, inheritance by blood is not a Goblin value, and nearly all goblins believe that upon the death of the human “owner” of a goblin-made artifact, the artifact should return to its makers rather than passing onto the descendants of the wizard who, in their eyes, have done nothing to deserve it. They do not respect or understand wizarding laws regarding this matter.

Goblin leadership is run by a Council of Elders, composed of the Grauld, the oldest goblins in each Bastion. They aren’t voted into their positions, but simply come into them upon reaching a certain age and if they are willing to leave their previous role behind. Supposedly banking, smithing and mining goblins are represented equally, but in practise the banking goblins have long held more sway than they should given their smaller numbers. (nearly 100% of banking goblins join the Grauld whereas many smithing goblins opt to continue their trade, and mining goblins have a higher rate of mortality) Some theorise that this is because of their close association with wizards, and that the Ministry of Magic is pulling the strings to make sure that their influence over goblin politics remains stable, as many in the smithing and mining factions often call for isolationism and a total withdrawal from humankind.

Goblins tend to believe that humans are lazy and resort to magic to fix every problem and create the things they need, rather than valuing the time and effort needed to carry out a trade and create quality artisanal goods. The few wizards who have ever earned even grudging respect from goblins have tended to be particularly brilliant inventors, though wizarding smiths are often regarded with suspicion and contempt.

Goblin leadership has also long had an interest in Muggles and Muggle technology; however, the Ministry of Magic keeps an extremely tight leash on goblins in this regard; they are expressly forbidden from contacting or approaching Muggles in any way, and have been promised harsh consequences if they do.  

OTHER NOTES:

Gravak Leshak: the Goblin Liberation Front (literally “Goblin Freedom”, the “Front” is added on by wizards.) An organisation devoted to the advancement of Goblin interests in wizarding society. Mostly comprised of banking goblins, (as the other factions, particularly the miners, tend toward an isolationist approach) they advocate for more power and influence over the Wizarding World, and have often resorted to violence to achieve these ends as well as strikes and picketing. Gravak Leshak is not officially supported by Gringotts Bank, which maintains a neutral position— however, many of the top officials at Gringotts have ties to the organisation.

Other goblins: There are goblins living assimilated into the Wizarding World, especially in rural areas. They may work as artisans or barkeeps. They tend to be solitary and not care much for politics, and usually maintain cordial relationships with neighbouring wizards. It is these sorts of goblins who typically beget half-goblin children, as mainstream goblin society is by and large hostile towards humans.

Gobbos vs wand-carriers: While the term “Vvargden” in Gobbledegook is simply a neutral term for wizard or witch, Goblins use the literal translation in English of “wand-carrier” as a despective term. Conversely, many humans refer to goblins with a variety of rude slurs, the most common of which is “gobbo”

Ak Varld Vvargden: a popular Goblin rights manifesto, perhaps the most widely distributed Gobbledegook text in existence. It is typically studied by humans who are learning the Goblin language, owing to the slightly more tempered views it expresses when compared to other Goblin political writings– which on the whole tends to be rather bloody and violent. This is because it was originally written with the intent to reach a Wizarding audience as well as Goblin.

Euskaldunak: As mentioned in part one, Basque wizards and Goblins have had a unique relationship throughout history in that there has been markedly more cordiality and cooperation, even friendship, between the two than in other parts of the world. This relationship still remains to some extent, but it has largely diminished due to the best efforts of the Spanish Ministerio de Magia to quash it. Nevertheless, goblins around the world have more respect for the Basque language and culture than for any other group of wizards.

[redhoodinternaldialectical]

Introducing my jaytim fanfiction series Chained!

This is the largest writing project I have ever attempted! Currently (March 29th, 2024) it sits at a length of 153,000 words published and some back of the napkin math puts the final product in the ballpark of War and Peace’s 500,000+ words. halp lmao! This post is designed to serve as an introduction to what the story is about, what my Tim and Jason are gonna be like, and what parts of canon I’m sticking to

"So, what’s the premise ya dorkus malorkus?”

Jason is set in front of a contract that will grant near omnipotence over every facet of reality. The catch is that it requires the person who actually gains the power to be permanently bound into the service of someone else. Afraid of what this could do in the wrong hands, Jason asks Tim to be his new Master.

(a picture of Jason with the halo and armor the contract grants him that I drew :3 also, have a link to the fics!)

After many hours of intense negotiations (the entire first fic in the series), they produce a subcontract designed to maintain Jason's basic rights as a person while still granting them enough power to overcome whatever whatever caused the contract to be written in the first place. Now all that's left is to destroy the evidence, win the fight, and start remaking the world in their image...

Expect to read about: extensive theological discussions complete with readings of the Bhagavad Gita, shape shifting, hijinks, Harley Quinn being a menace to society really good therapist, redonkulous amounts of time travel and time loops, murders most foul, webs of lies and deceit as Oracle works to uncover their secrets, angst, fluff, hurt, comfort, and I’m gonna stop there before I overpromise myself, turn into a puddle, and never manage to finish the damn thing, lol

The draw of the premise for me is exploring the constant renegotiation of boundaries between Jason and Tim as they navigate a truly terrible idea of a romance. This is slow burn in that it takes them a really long time to get together properly due to the aforementioned terrible idea part, but they know they’re in love very early on.

“Lay out the dynamics there hoss”

I reserve the right to fuss with these, but my intention is:

Jason/Tim = the genius fragile human made of pure spite and determination and their sentient bodyguard/servant monster who they like lowkey have a thing with. Think Integra Hellsing and Alucard.

Barbara Gorden versus Tim Drake = genius versus genius 5D chess headgames war. Think L and Light with Jason as Ryuuk. But like if Light was into Ryuuk.

Tim/Jason versus [MAIN VILLAIN SPOILERS] = warring Gods. The source of a new mythology.

Honestly, just mark down Hellsing Ultimate and Death Note animes as major influences.

“What’s a folk gotta do ta get some headcanons and characterization in this joint?”

For Tim I’m going mainly with him in his Red Robin run where he finds Bruce, blows up the League of assassins and shit like that. I love how absolutely arrogant this man is, and I find the way he struggles with the ethics of the job really neat. This version of Tim seems perfect to act as the commander: always tempted to do more, tempted to go further into the dark with power, but also having a lot of self control and dedication to doing right.

In terms of personal headcannons I am making him trans (cause I can), ADHD/Autistic (because it makes sense), and a dabbler in mild, lowkey amphetamine abuse (The coffee chugger who never sleeps of fanon intrigues me, but also caffeine kinda doesn’t do that, whereas adderall definitely does. He’ll use both stimulants as available and needed. I like a man who knows he badly overworks himself but who can’t realistically say he shouldn’t be overworking himself.)

Jason is a much harder cat to herd because writers have long been playing tug of war with his characterization, dragging him over the line to unhinged villain then back to just another bat over and over. I always like Jason, but I think he’s at his weakest at both extremes of the spectrum. He’s a good villain/antagonist in general, but a phenomenal one when he has real goals and morals. He’s a good anti-hero/tenuous ally in general, but a phenomenal one when he and the family have serious disagreements and Jason is still a killer.

I’m keeping this fic as canon compliant as possible, but there is a bare minimum amount of rearrangement necessary to make Jason consistently morally grey rather than an ethical checkers board that looks grey when you turn it sideways and squint.

Headcanons for Jason include chronic pain (I just think being blown up should screw with a guy’s nerves), trans (cause I can), and having schizophrenia (cause I see some possible canon evidence and he’s had a LOT of ableist stuff thrown his way and I don’t really like ‘well I’m not actually mentally ill’ as a resolution point to that. I am leaving it ambiguous if this has anything to do with the Lazarus Pit, but I intend it to be very unambiguous that it has nothing to do with why he has beef with the rest of the bats. His grievances are not delusions. His moral positions are not delusions. He will hallucinate and I may have him develop delusions, but he’ll also take medication for that and employ coping mechanisms like real life people with schizophrenia do. The mental illnesses are something he deals with, not something that controls him into being evil, no matter their source.)

Oh and it should go without saying that everyone has so much PTSD!

“Cut ta the chase already jabrony, give us da timeline”

Crisis on Infinite Earths, Final Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint, Convergence, and the Rebirth changes happened in this fic's canon. We are dealing with multiple multiverses. If you’re familiar with the concept of ‘Hypertime’ used to facilitate the Elseworlds series and elaborated on during the Dark Knights: Metal stuff, I’m building off of that. If you’re not, don’t worry about it, there will be a far better explanation in the fic as the characters discover this shit for themselves.

This takes place during the "Rebirth" era of DC comics canon in a fanfic universe I made up within that canon multiverse called Earth 69. Earth 69 is my idea of what the pre-flashpoint timeline might have looked like if flashpoint never happened. Essentially I'm taking the post crisis stuff and extending it by acting as though that timeline just kept going, with plot points from New 52 and Rebirth canon welded onto the end of it. Keep in mind though, Earth 69 only coincidentally mirrors pre-flashpoint events; that canonical pre-flashpoint multiverse still exists!

Now lets go through just Earth 69′s timeline, focusing on Tim and Jason

Based on the letter Jason sends to Kid Devil, I put the year of his death as 1985. Ten years have passed since then at the start of this fic, making Tim 23 and Jason 25. The influence of alien tech and supergeniouses accelerated cultural and scientific growth such that while the fic takes place in 1995, every bit of tech and culture from 1980 to 2024 is fair game to show up. I find it fun to play around with laser turret drones and microfiche spy tactics all in the same story, so our heroes listened to My Chemical Romance on their smartphones while watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on live TV.

Batman (1940) issues #419 - #429 aka Jason’s post-crisis Robin years happen almost identically to the comics, except that Jason is a trans man and it was the Penguin that got Willis Todd locked up for life and then killed instead of Two Face. Bruce eventually finds out he’s trans and is supportive if understandably clueless. He raises Jason as his son. It’s important to me that Jason’s beef with Batman not leave either side objectively correct. Their relationship and hurts are a lot more compelling to me if Bruce isn’t transphobic.

A Place of Lonely Dying and the Robin (1993) series happen with very few deviations, with the understanding that I've read less of this than would be ideal and might get some things mixed up as I go along. Those deviations include Tim also being a trans man. Because he was looking into transition care for Jason, Bruce already knows about puberty blockers and HRT and supplies them to him. That becomes a big part of why Tim’s Dad is so freaked out by Tim being Robin. In this timeline, one of the major reasons Tim is so attached to the role of Robin is that it’s the first role in his life where he gets to be himself.

Lost Days happens as it did in comics except for two changes. Firstly when Talia sleeps with him, it's not sex, it's fully clothed cuddling and actual sleeping. I think this compromise preserves the important emotional conflict that I identified in this reading of her motivations, while sidestepping some of the problems the sex caused. The second change is that Jason won't have ended Lost Days by going to talk to Hush...

Because I HATE Thomas Elliot as a character. I hate how he was implemented. I hate that he kept showing up. I hate that they killed off Harold. I hate Hush. So it never happened on Earth 69! Instead I'll be emphasizing Tim and Jason's later fights, which have some similar emotional beats.

Now, whether or not Jason held a knife to Tim’s throat is kinda fucking important to how their relationship is interpreted! Most people, understandably, make this a serious event between the two. However, in all the comics I’ve been reading, I have seen zero characters ever acknowledge that Jason was involved. Tim hasn’t thought or said anything about it, even when it really seemed relevant. Jason technically tells Batman he did it in UtRH, but it's never brought up again and at this point it feels almost like Judd Winick tricked DC into publishing a headcanon that applies nowhere else lmao. Therefore I feel fine with just ditching this and putting more emphasis on their later fights which have similar emotional beats.

Under the Red Hood happens, with one modification. He knows about Stephanie's death and treats it with the gravity she deserves. He is targeting Black Mask because of Steph's death, and something very similar to the excellent fanfic 'hangman is coming down from the gallows' by nex_et_nox happens.

Young Justice (1998) happens, except for some of the mythological encounters. They did watch Santa get blown up, but I will be taking liberties with how the Greek Pantheon operates, and holy fucking shit, no they did not meet the goddess Kali like that, what the fuck, did no one even try to do a basic level of cultural sensitivity research?!? Anyways.

Jason does fight Batman, Green Arrow, and Mia as told in Green Arrow (2001) #69 - #72. Roy does hear about this, but he hears about it the way that Mia herself tells it when asked about it in the comic, i.e. “He didn’t hurt me. We just talked.” So he's not exactly all that freaked out about it.

Roy Harper and Jason first meet in Outsiders (2003) #44 - #46 where he helps Roy and Dick exonerate Black Lightning with no ulterior motives, as in the comics.

Teen Titans (2003) #29 (The Titans Tower fight) happens as it did in comics. i.e. It was a fair one on one fight in which both participants understood that the other was not trying to kill them and both combatants walked away with nothing more than superficial injuries. Tim came away from that with a black eye and a grudge; Jason came away from it thinking Tim was pretty alright in his book. The writing on the wall was either Jason’s own blood, or red paint, because there is simply no earthly way that was Tim’s blood.

Teen Titans (2003) in general happens to Tim, though there’s a lot that connects to Countdown to Final Crisis (which can only have happened in the canonical pre-flashpoint multiverse) that may or may not need to be edited and removed.

The combination of events from Countdown to Final Crisis and Teen Titans (2003) #47 also happens, in which Jason attempts to save Duela Dent from murder, fails, connects with Donna at her funeral, and then is interrogated by Tim and Dick who suspect Jason murdered her. Oh and also it's where Tim kicks him in the pants lol. Obviously the reason Duela died and who murdered her has to be different, but all that should be details that don't matter for the fic's purposes.

I've already mentioned that Robin (1993) was being considered canon to Earth 69′s timeline, but make special note here of issue #177, in which Tim sends Jason to jail (his first prison stint, yay :D). One modification here: Jason's plan is to manipulate the established mob families into fighting the cops, leaving the local communities to govern themselves, not to use "kid gangs" to soften up the cops and the mob like happens in the comic. Because like... the on panel plan makes no sense, either logistically or for his character, and idk why but the way the author uses the concept of “kid gangs” leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Nightwing (1996) #118 - #122 aka Brothers in Blood aka the one where Jason becomes a tentacle vore monster happens exactly as depicted in comics. Exactly. As. Depicted. Well okay not exactly, I need him to not have threatened to bomb a building full of innocent people, that is a bridge too far, but everything else stays!

The Red Robin series happens as depicted, except for how Tim got the costume. The Red Robin costume that Tim wears in the pre-flashpoint multiverse was from that multiverse’s Earth 51. On Earth 69 the Red Robin costume was what Bruce made for Jason in anticipation of him wanting to outgrow the Robin mantel one day, like Nightwing did (tho uhhh great job reframing why the Nightwing mantel exists there Bruce lmao). When Dick gave the Robin role to Damian, Tim took the Red Robin outfit for himself from it’s pedestal next to The Memorial Case. There was a considerable amount of spite towards multiple people involved in that decision.

Battle for the Cowl is where it gets trickier. I am going to gut most of the plot of BftC and combine a few plot elements from it with the Batman and Robin (2009) series in order to create a much longer lasting conflict that preserves Jason as an anti-hero and his partnership with Scarlet/Sasha as a competing vigilante force to Dick and Damian.

After Bruce’s “death” Dick super does not ever want to be Batman. No one does really. Jason hears Bruce's post-death message and is understandably fucking devastated. He decides to say fuck that noise, Bruce is gone now, and I'm gonna be Batman since no one else seems willing to do it, and I'm gonna do it my way! Another Batman running around shooting people dead forces Dick’s hand and he takes up the Batman mantel to fight him. Batman and Robin (2009) #3 - #6 happen roughly as depicted, but with Jason still claiming to be Batman, and he doesn’t have red hair. (I’m so sorry white suit + pill helmet costume, but I must leave you behind for the sake of continuity). Jason's stint in Arkham and then Blackgate happens. Batman and Robin (2009) #23 - #25 happen as depicted, minus the part where Jason rigged the entire fucking civilian tram line to explode. After Jason and Scarlet fly off into the sunset together, they come back to Gotham and keep fighting.

Sometime after he's free again he does Roy a favor. I haven't decided what exactly, but it's big. I’ve toyed with the idea that he broke him out of prison because he doesn’t want to see Liam grow up without a dad in a move very similar to the Outsiders thing and roughly analogous to how he meets Roy in Red Hood and the Outlaws (2011), but that seems a lil repetitive and why would Roy even be in jail, so idk.

By this point the events of Red Robin are over and Tim has joined Dick and Damian in fighting Jason. Sometime before the climactic battle, Scarlet leaves for [FANFIC SPOILERS] reasons, so it becomes just Jason again. He goes through with something like the plan from Battle for the Cowl, luring Tim to his Batcave and offering him a place as his Robin. As in comics, Tim's answer is to pick up a crowbar and wack Jason across the face with it! Jason wins the fight and stabs Tim in the chest, knowing it's not gonna kill him, but fine with it leaving one hell of a scar! Dick's fight with Jason afterwards, and Jason jumping from the train into the harbor, happens as it did in BftC #3 with the exception of Dick wearing the Batsuit instead of Tim.

Starfire contacts Roy for help with a lengthy, off planet mission - one that absolutely needs a Bat on board. Every single Bat is up to their eyeballs in fires to put out and projects to run... except for Jason. Roy knows a lot of other Heroes with very good reasons to hate him, but in his personal experience, Jason’s always been a reliable if shady and asshole-ish guy working for the greater good. Ya’know. A Bat. It helps that they both think Bruce treats Dick like garbage sometimes and thus are inclined to be sympathetic towards Jason's beef with him. Roy vouches for him and brings him on board. They work well together, they save the days in outer space, and after a particularly dangerous mission they have a "thank fuck we're not dead" threesome together. This replaces the New 52 version of Red Hood and the Outlaws.

During the trip back to Earth, Jason confides in them about his woes and they encourage him to sort his shit out and get his life back together. Jason agrees and after considering it for a while he asks Roy and Starfire to help negotiate a truce between him and the rest of the Bats. They agree and thus begins two years of ceasefire and getting more friendly with the other Bats.

During those two years, the events of Dark Knights: Metal occur. The Source Wall is broken, and all the peoples of all the earths are plunged into a nightmare world. No one really remembers what happened, it’s all very vague and drifty, like remembering a dream, unsurprisingly. People have been referring to this event as The Nightmares.

This two year period also contains my version of Rebirth Red Hood and the Outlaws. Jason attempts to infiltrate Black Mask’s gang because the real Black Mask should be super dead and super unwilling to work with him. He’s a LOT more competent about it than in comics tho.

The biggest change is what goes down with Cobblepot. Jason’s original intention was to fake the penguin’s death and take all his power and assets from him, as he did in comics. However, he loses Artemis and Bizzaro before he goes through with that plan instead of after. At the last minute he switches the blanks out for lead. The Penguin is super dead.

He fights back when Bruce confronts him, but it's still a brutal fight and ultimately Roy has to separate them. Then Jason follows his father’s trail to the experimentation prison thing like in comics. Roy doesn’t die along the way, we don’t have the scene with Bruce at the diner, but in the end it turns out that his father is actually dead. No one survived that place. He only found boxes of dusty, decaying files, a grave out back, and Dr. Fate. Once he was convinced there was nothing more to find, Dr. Fate took him to John Constantine and The Contract, and that’s just about where our story begins!

Have another link, and I hope some of y’all enjoy what I’ve got so far!

[vacantgodling]

holds microphone up to u

may i hear about tmc

gimme your thoughts

WELL <3 since you asked so nicely <3 (jkjk but thank you eeeee)

so-- surprisingly atm i'm trying to figure out The Plot. i wasn't sure if i was ever going to make ?? a proper plot for tmc just because like. i love tmc and the kiddos so much but bc i know i want it to be a webcomic style thing that's just scared me off from working on it. basically bc art hard. But i should do it because i want to have fun and i had a few like. lingering dream-thoughts about some things so i thought i'd try and push it more.

rn i'm toying with the idea of expanding what's going on with society. because right now basically, there's the "city thing" that chidori and co live in which is dominated by trains. but i don't think anyone knows the kinda Back Drop for tmc?? cuz i never talk about it?? but basically this is a futuristic wip where humanity had to adapt to earth's sea levels rising WAAAAY up (in a way that is totally improbable but like i'm not hard worldbuilding this world at all bc this is supposed to feel shonen anime like PFFFF. basically anything goes cuz i said so energy). so they use train rails and special train types to get around. tm.

this is old art from an old ask but this is the gist basically LMAO im sorry its so shit PFF

i was originally thinking of making wholly different societies that have something different instead of train masters BUT TBH, i think everywhere has train masters like its a global thing but chidori's city is just a big ass city and governments are still different like how bangkok, nyc, and paris all have different currency pff. basically my scope of the world is just expanding.

anyway tho, chidori's city has the largest population and by virtue of that its the one most prone to diseases, struggling, and economic stagnation. rich people gotta rich so they hate this.

my thought for the plot is actually around the strength of the sturgeon dollar. tl;dr the money in chidori's city is called "sturgeons" like the fish (and is colored similarly) but its actually got a poor exchange rate with the other cities. this is something that is concerning to the herme family who bellamy is the youngest child of. (bellamy below--the diamond prince and one of the s-rank train masters tm)

bellamy is technically the "odd one out" of the herme family and is treated very poorly behind closed doorsaside from his illustrious and beloved image by the public. his family is full of law makers and politicians, but they also have heavy ties with crime (which is what i'm kinda developing now) and they have links to crime various other syndicates across the flooded world. the problem is, because the sturgeon dollar is so weak it puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiations with other politicians and syndicates. so with the under-the-table go ahead from the government, they have begun operations to start working towards destabilizing pretty much every city society (at the expense of civilians obvs) to try and either make the sturgeon dollar stronger, or to introduce an entirely new method of currency only for the elites.

me playing with the idea of yagmur being a double agent has to do with the fact that yagmur is a secret train master branch basically akin to the fbi or z-rank. they're covert ops. he's technically been assigned to work for the government of chidori's city to help with whatever tf this plan is but at the same time, he and bellamy are in a not-so-secret secret relationship and despite coming from money, bellamy hates his family. so yagmur is loyal to bellamy before anything else. but at the same time, bellamy isn't necessarily concerned with citizens--he's concerned with revenge and tearing down his family. so if i were to classify things as they currently are:

chidori and his main friend group (amehana, solange, bev, folami, and markis) are on the side of their city and protecting it from like everything.

bellamy and yagmur on their own side trying to take down the herme family.

the herme family and government (and some other entities) are on their own side trying to sabotage other cities to strengthen thier own dollar and since yagmur works for the government he's also kind of involved in this too.

so that'sssss currently where i'm at. i still need to figure out how the train academy works, what's up with these semi-magical weapons, redesigning folami (AGAIN but thankfully i think i have a good idea this time) and just other stuff to uhhhh make this make sense. maybe figure out the city situations as well?? just a lot tbh LOL

[queenjunoking]

Wolf Taming 63

Everything hurt.

My head hurt from crying. My muscles ached from the treadmill. I was dehydrated from a combination of both. My nipples stung from the clamps. Any pointless attempt to get more comfortable was met with jingling.

I was sure how long I’d been left here at this point. An hour? Surely longer than that. Time couldn’t feel this long. There was nothing to look at or pay attention to, I was stuck staring at the ground. I couldn’t even hear the activities from the barn. With how loud the activity was I knew I was fairly deep in the woods. I tried my best to ignore the thoughts clawing at me, but my defenses were weak. Eos was right, this was like the barn.

The barn was far enough from the pony people that you couldn’t hear them. There were three things you hear in the barn. The hum of the milking machines, the occasional chatter of those tending to the cows, and the sound of the cows when they were given “special attention.” The barn was the end of any hope. The ponies I’d met all worked hard because they recognized the truth of their situation. Despite what she did to Audrey, there was no “best” in the barn. Audrey was treated the way she was to send a message. There was likely some sort of punishment is cows didn’t produce as well as the others, but there was no way to excel. There was no way to be better. There were better ponies. You stood out by doing well. Cows were objects that did nothing but sit there, permanently bound in those awful frames, and be exploited by those monsters.

I couldn’t do it.

I knew I couldn’t do it.

Being trapped in that cage in Z’s basement had been bad enough. I needed to move. Sitting still was awful. It was why I became an athlete. It helped burn all that restless energy I had. Being locked in one of those frames for an entire day would have been torture.

(CLarity walks up, stands there silently before speaking)

“Mistress Eos made an announcement.” Clarity said, obviously laying out to hook to skewer myself on. “As you know, Ember was demoted to being a pleasure pony. Many of our racers are lusting after her. Whether from pure attraction or the fairly open secret that she failed out of the Society. Some view it getting to use her as revenge. Which is likely why Mistress Eos has decided to make Ember a trophy.”

I turned my head and did the best I could to look up at Clarity. It hurt, but I couldn’t just keep staring at the ground for the rest of this conversation.

“What do you mean?” Part of me was afraid how literal the idea of being a trophy might be. After what they did to Lucky and Clover it wouldn’t surprise me if they had some way to dip someone in gold and keep them alive.

“There are six brackets. Three for each gender. It’s based on size and weight. The smallest division is around five to five and a half feet. Middle division is five and a half to six. Large division is over six. Ember was in the smallest bracket while both you and Frost are in the largest bracket.”

I felt a twinge of guilt when she brought up Frost. I had tried to do a good thing and it resulted in her getting injured. But why was she bringing up Frost? There was a game here Clarity was dancing around.

“Mistress Eos has decided that the two large brackets will be allowed to race for the trophy. Which means you’re eligible to race for her. You seemed disgusted by the idea of pleasure ponies before.” The tone Clarity took was strange. Almost like she was trying to reason with me instead of just telling me to do something. “There’s nothing that says you having Ember means you have to use her like a pleasure pony. You could just lay there with her. Listen to music. Time with you means time others aren’t using her. With Frost injured there’s no one else in her size division with good intentions.”

It finally clicked into place. Clarity had said her family was Society. She was a failure just like Ember.

“You feel uncomfortable seeing someone like yourself demoted even further. You grew up in this world and you know if you fuck up you can fall even further.” The slight glance away from me told me I was right. “You know there's nothing stopping Eos from randomly deciding to put you in the barn one morning or throw you to the other slaves as some kind of sex slave like Ember is being made into.”

She was quiet for a few more moments before she spoke.

“The winners of the two races will get permanent first dibs on Ember on the schedules. That is the prize.” Clarity ignored what I said, but it was clear I hit a hidden fear. “It’s up to you. The race is optional. You can choose to help her or you can choose to let whichever wolves win get full access to her. You saw how some of the others looked at her before.”

She was manipulating me and we both knew it. Clarity knew I was disgusted by everything here and was dangling a chance to save one person from it occasionally. The idea of being able to do something good for someone else, to save them from something, was something I wanted badly. It didn’t matter where Ember came from, she was here now. No one deserved to be treated like this.

“What about that other one they hung out with? Velvet whatever?” Why was I being asked when there was someone else she hung out with?

“Friends are a precarious lot.” Clarity sighed. “Frosthoof doesn’t really use pleasure ponies. If she could race I wouldn’t bother trying to ask you. Velvet Soul has no such hesitations and is known for being… rough with them. She is one of the wolves in pony tack so to speak. She is a high performer which gets her a lot of privileges which she largely uses to enjoy the pleasure ponies. She’d love to have and abuse first dibs on one. In the same way someone with better intentions might choose to do to lighten their load.”

I was losing this war. Fighting back just resulted in more people getting hurt. If I acted out of line then Lucky and Clover would get punished in my place. If Eos decided I wasn’t worth it I’d be tossed in the barn. This race was optional but not trying to win meant just letting others take advantage of someone without any effort to save her.

That was the problem though.

I had to do those stupid exercises in the pens. I had to train. I was going to be forced to race. Not this time though. This was optional. Doing this meant giving in. It meant I had to do my best or the effort and humiliation of agreeing was pointless. I could either hold onto my dignity or give in and try to do what good I was capable of doing in this situation.

“What do I have to do?”

I heard the jingling of keys and the process of the frame was finally off my neck. A few seconds later I felt it release my feet and I was finally free from it.

“We have to practice.” She said, giving my legs a massage. “The ones you’ve been racing against have been ponies for much longer than you have. However, few came here as athletes like you are. Your test results have been fantastic and I believe you have the ability to pull off a surprise win. You need to prepare though and the rest of today is going to be rough.”

There wasn’t a moment here that wasn’t rough. I knew she was right though. I couldn’t just skate by on the bare minimum if I was humiliating myself like this. If I was going to try to do some good I had to actually try.

“Now is as good of a time as any to get started I guess.”

She slowly helped me back to my feet from the awkward position I’d be stuck in for the last hour or two. Part of me felt some distress that I didn’t trip over my feet in these awful boots, that I was used to them already. Unfortunately, it was a good thing right now. If I couldn’t walk I wasn’t going to be able to win.

“Let's go.” Clarity placed the bit back in my mouth and attached a leash to my collar. “We have a lot to do and not much time to do it.”

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Ladies and gentlemen, eighty years ago today, Field Marshal Montgomery – Commander in Chief of the Allied Ground Forces – wrote in his message to all soldiers on the eve of D-Day:

‘To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom, which will live in history; and, in the better days that lie ahead, men will speak with pride of our doings’.

Today, we come together to honour those nearly one hundred and sixty thousand British, Commonwealth and Allied troops who, on 5th June 1944, assembled here and along these shores to embark on the mission, which would strike that blow for freedom and be recorded as the greatest amphibious operation in history.

Those who gathered here in Portsmouth would never forget the sight. It was by far the largest military fleet the world has ever known.

Yet all knew that both victory and failure were possible, and none could know their fate.

Aircrew flying overhead, sailors manning warships; or troops in assault craft battering their way through the stormy swell to the shore; whether dropping by parachute, landing in a wooden glider, or taking that terrible leap of faith onto the beaches... all must have questioned whether they would survive and how they would respond when faced with such mortal danger.

The poet Keith Douglas, who was killed in action three days later, wrote of the embarkation:

"Actors waiting in the wings of Europe, we already watch the lights on the stage and listen to the colossal overture begin.

For us entering at the height of the din, it will be hard to hear our thoughts, hard to gauge how much our conduct owes to fear or fury."

At this remove, eight decades later, it is a near impossible task to imagine the emotion of that day:

The pride of being part of so great an enterprise, the anxiety of in some way not coming up to scratch, and the fear of that day being their last.

I recently myself spoke to veterans who, to this day, remember with such heartbreaking clarity the sight of those many soldiers lying on the beach, who drowned before they could even engage in combat.

The stories of courage, resilience and solidarity which we have heard today, and throughout our lives, cannot fail to move us, to inspire us, and to remind us of what we owe to that great wartime generation – now, tragically, dwindling to so few.

It is our privilege to hear their testimony, but our role is not purely passive:

It is our duty to ensure that we, and future generations, do not forget their service and their sacrifice in replacing tyranny with freedom.

Our rights, and the liberty won at such terrible cost, bring with them responsibilities to others in the exercise of that liberty.

The Allied actions of that day ensured the forces of freedom secured, first, a toehold in Normandy, then liberated France, and ultimately, the whole of Europe from the stranglehold of a brutal totalitarianism.

And as we remember, with humility, pride and gratitude, let us never forget that the soldiers who fought in the campaign launched from this place came from thirty nations, from across the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Allied countries; while elsewhere in Europe, Allied forces continued to make vital progress in their successful Italian campaign; and while halfway around the world, at that same moment, the critical battles of Imphal and Kohima raged on in what was then Burma.

The 1944 Victoria Cross roll of honour includes Sikh, Muslim and Hindu soldiers – a reminder that events that year shaped our world then, and the society we share today.

While it was the frontline troops who faced the greatest personal dangers, the privations and sacrifices of war were endured by so many more.

The Allied victory was a truly collective effort, born of the fortitude and hard work of those who remained on the Home Front, toiling in factories, under our land in the mines, out in the fields, or working in secret – men and women alike.

Their collective industry, ingenuity and commitment helped our soldiers, sailors and airmen to prevail.

So, as we give thanks for all those who gave so much to win the victory, whose fruits we still enjoy to this day, let us, once again, commit ourselves always to remember, cherish and honour those who served that day and to live up to the freedom they died for by balancing rights with civic responsibilities to our country. For we are all, eternally, in their debt.

Source: Royal UK

A speech by The King at the UK's National Commemorative Event in Portsmouth to mark #DDay80

5 June 2024

The King addresses veterans, serving forces and and members of the public at the UK's National Commemorative Event in Portsmouth to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Landings.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 19, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 20, 2024

Today a Russian court sentenced 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony after convicting him of espionage in a secret three-day trial. The U.S. government considers Gershkovich “wrongly detained,” a rare designation signifying that he is being held as a political bargaining chip. 

Today, President Joe Biden said that Gershkovich was “targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American. We are pushing hard for Evan’s release and will continue to do so.” He added: “Journalism is not a crime. We will continue to stand strong for press freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists.”

Last night, a faulty update of software from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed computer systems all over the world. Banks and hospitals were locked out of their own programs, and government services shut down. In the U.S., more than 2,600 flights were canceled and 9,000 were delayed. Bloomberg’s David Rovella quoted Australian security consultant Troy Hunt: “I don’t think it’s too early to call it,” Hunt said. “This will be the largest IT outage in history.”

Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a candidate of “unity.” 

This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump’s acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the evening played out.

Since Saturday’s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been a medical review of Trump’s injuries, although he has said he was injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media appears simply to be letting it go on Trump’s say-so, something that adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden differently.

Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting last Saturday’s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, “it can only be a bullet.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again. 

With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he would bring the country together. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” he said. “We rise together. Or we fall apart…. I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”

But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes, making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep. 

He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going up (it’s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we’ve ever had (it’s around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple people’s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this “imaginary”), and so on. Dale called it “a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.” 

Journalist James Fallows posted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I've heard over the years, this was overall the worst.” Statistician Nate Silver’s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began with “It’s a weird but a pretty good speech,” then posted “Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.” Shortly after, came: “Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.” 

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: "This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who's been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it's really wearing thin."

The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal Lecter—who he might think was real—as it always has been, was to present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a “unity” message because “Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.”

For years, observers have noted that Trump’s approach to politics is patterned on the “kayfabe” at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing must be fake, they played along with the illusion.

But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life insults—the more outrageous the better—and real-life events. Decoding what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves fans. This “neokayfabe,” Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.” 

Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, “turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul.”

Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when he chose McMahon’s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration during his presidency.  

Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan, and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all participated. 

“So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags…. Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!" Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the convention, he painted a portrait of Trump’s presidency, and of the United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the performance and one must vanquish the other.

Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past, but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: “It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore.” But the Allied soldiers in World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism. The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States, and the communist Soviet Union. 

It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn’t know even the most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers today.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Bezzle excerpt (Part IV)

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

This week marks the publication of my latest novel, The Bezzle, and to celebrate, I'm serializing an excerpt from Chapter 14 in six parts:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The Bezzle is a revenge story, a crime novel, and a technothriller. It stars Martin Hench, a hard-fighting forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding high-tech scams. Hench made his debt in last year's Red Team Blues (now in paperback!); The Bezzle is a standalone followup:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865854/redteamblues

The serial tells the tale of Stefon Magner, AKA Steve Soul, a once-famous R&B frontman whose disintegrating career turned to tragedy when his crooked manager forged his signature on a rights assignment contract that let him steal all of Stefon's royalties, which ballooned after modern hiphop artists discovered his grooves and started buying licenses to sample them. The first three installments related the sad circumstances of Stefon's life, and the real-world analogues (like Leonard Cohen and George Clinton, both of whom were pauperized by sticky-fingered managers) as well as one real-world countermeasure, copyright termination, a thing that more artists should know about and use:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Today's installment weaves in a major subplot for the first time in the serial: Los Angeles's notorious, murderous Sheriff's Deputy gangs. These are another unbelievable true tale: for decades, the LASD's deputies have formed themselves into criminal gangs, some of which require that initiates murder someone to be inducted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

They sport gang tattoos, have secret signs, and run vast criminal enterprises. This has been the subject of numerous investigative press reports, and one extensive official report that called the gangs "a cancer":

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/deputy-gangs-cancer-los-angeles-county-sheriffs-department-scathing-re-rcna73367

The sordid tales of the LASD gangs beggar belief. For example, deputies in charge of LA County jails forced inmates to pit-fight and took bets on the outcomes:

https://www.aclu.org/publications/report-cruel-and-usual-punishment-how-savage-gang-deputies-controls-la-county-jails

The taxpayers of LA have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to settle claims against LA's criminals with badges:

https://news.yahoo.com/deputies-accused-being-secret-societies-230851807.html

Periodically, LA judges and officials will insist that they are tackling the problem:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-17/dozens-of-lasd-deputies-ordered-to-show-suspected-gang-tattoos-reveal-others-who-have-them

But at every turn, the LA police "unions" manage to crush these investigations:

https://abc7.com/los-angeles-county-lasd-deputy-gangs-cliques/13492081/

And top cops are right there with them, insisting that these aren't "gangs" – they're just "subgroups":

https://lapublicpress.org/2024/01/former-la-sheriff-villanueva-sheriffs-gangs-are-just-subgroups/

It's very weird being an Angeleno and knowing that one of the largest, most militarized, best funded police departments in the world has been openly captured by a hyperviolent crime syndicate. When I was in the Skyboat Media studios last December with Wil Wheaton recording the audiobook for The Bezzle, Wil broke off from reading to say, "You know, someone's going to read this and google it and have their mind blown when they discover that it's real":

https://sowl.co/8nyGh

That's one of my favorite ways to turn literature into something more than entertainment. It's why I filled the Little Brother books with real-world surveillance, cryptography and security tech, giving enough detail to advance the plot and give readers an idea of what search terms would let them understand and use the concepts in the novel. That's something I'm happy to keep up with the Hench novels, unpicking the inner workings of scams and corruption. The more of us who are wise to this, the sooner we'll be able to get rid of it.

Here's part one of the serial:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/17/the-steve-soul-caper/#lead-singer-disease

Part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#copyright-termination

Part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#lawyer-up

And now, onto part four!

The last of the boxes had been shelved.

Benedetto rose from his chair. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said to the movers, and dug a roll of twenties out of his pocket and handed each of them two of their own. He turned to me as they filed out. “You wanna get sushi? The place next door is great.”

The empty storefront was in a down-­at-­heels strip mall in Eagle Rock. On one side, there was a Brazilian jujitsu studio that never seemed to have any students training in it. On the other side was Sushi Jiro, name on a faded sign with half its lightbulbs gone. Beyond that was a vaping store.

“The place next door is good?”

He laughed. “You San Francisco motherfuckers got terrible LA restaurant radar. Put Sushi Jiro in the Mission and it’d have a Michelin star and a six-­month waiting list. Here it’s in a strip mall and only the locals know how good it is. Bet you never had a decent meal in this town, am I right?”

“I’ve had a few,” I said, “but I admit my track record isn’t great.”

“Let’s improve it.”

The sushi was amazing.

#

Inglewood Jams had the kind of books that were performatively bad, designed to foil any attempt at human comprehension.

But whoever cooked them was an amateur, someone who mistook complexity for obfuscation. Like cross-­referencing was a species of transcendentally esoteric sorcery. I don’t mind cross-referencing. It’s meditative, like playing solitaire. I had Bene­detto send over some colored post-­it tabs and a big photocopier with an automatic feeder and I started making piles.

One night, I worked later than I planned. Sushi Jiro was becoming a serious hazard to my waistline and my sleep-­debt, because when your dinner break is ten yards and two doors away from your desk, it’s just too damned easy to get back to work after dinner.

That night, I’d fallen into a cross-­referencing reverie, and before I knew it, it was 2 a.m., my lower back was groaning, and my eyes were stinging.

I straightened, groaned, and slid my laptop into my bag. I found my keys and unlocked the door. The storefront was covered with brown butcher’s paper, but it didn’t go all the way to the edge. I had just a moment to sleepily note that there was some movement visible through the crack in the paper over the glass door when it came flying back toward me, bouncing off my toe, mostly, and my nose, a little. I put my one hand to my face as I instinctively threw myself into the door to close it again.

I was too late and too tired. A strong shoulder on the other side of the doorframe pushed it open and I stumbled back, and then the guy was on me, the door sighing shut behind him on its gas lift as he bore me to the ground and straddled my chest, a move he undertook with the ease of much practice. He pinned my arms under his knees and then gave me a couple of hard hits, one to the jaw, one to the nose.

My lip and nose were bleeding freely and my head was ringing from the hits and from getting smacked into the carpet tiles over concrete when I went down backward. I struggled—­to free my arms, to buck off my attacker, to focus on him.

He was a beefy white guy in his late fifties, with watery dark eyes and a patchy shave that showed gray mixed in with his dark stubble. As he raised his fist for another blow, I saw that he was wearing a big class ring. A minute later, that ring opened my cheek, just under the orbit of my eye.

Apart from some involuntary animal grunts, I hadn’t made a sound. Now I did. “Ow!” I shouted. “Shit!” I shouted. “Stop!” I shouted.

He split my lip again. I bucked hard but I couldn’t budge him. He had a double chin, a gut, and he was strong, and used that bulk to back up his strength. It was like trying to free myself from under a boulder. That kept punching me in the face.

The strip mall would be deserted. Everything was closed, even the vaping store.

Shouting wouldn’t help. I did it anyway. He shut my mouth for me with a left. I gagged on blood.

He took a break from punching me in the face, then. I think he was tired. His chest heaved, and he wiped sweat off his lip with the back of his hand, leaving behind a streaky mustache of my blood.

He contemplated me, weighing me up. I thought maybe he was trying to decide if I had any fight left in me, or perhaps whether I had any valuables he could help himself to.

He cleared his throat and looked at me again. “Goddammit, I messed your face up so bad I can’t tell for sure. I hope to fuck that you’re Martin Hench, though.”

Even with my addled wits, this was an important piece of intelligence: he came here for me. This wasn’t a random act of senseless Los Angeles street violence. This was aimed at me.

I was briefly angry at Benedetto for not warning me that Chuy Flores was such a tough son of a bitch. Then I had the presence of mind to lie.

“I don’t know who the fuck this Mark Hendricks is.” My voice was thick with gargled blood, but I was proud of Mark Hendricks. Pretty fast thinking for a guy with a probable concussion. The guy slapped me open-­handed across the face, and as I lay dazed for a moment, he shifted, reached into my back pocket for my wallet, and yanked it—­and the seat of my pants—­free. Before I could react, his knees were back on my biceps, pinning my arms and shoulders. It was a very neat move, and fast for an old guy like him.

He flipped my wallet open and squinted at it, then held it at arm’s length, then smiled broadly. He had bleach-­white teeth, a row of perfectly uniform caps. Los fucking Angeles, where even the thugs have a million-­dollar smile.

“Shoulda sprung for botox,” I slurred.

His grin got wider. “Maybe someday I will. Got these in trade from a cosmetic dentist I did some work for.” He dropped my wallet. “Listen, Martin Hench, you stay the fuck away from Thames Estuary and Lawrence Coleman.”

“It’s Lionel Coleman,” I said.

“What the fuck ever,” he said. He labored to his feet. I stayed still. He looked at me from a great height, and I stared up his nostrils. Without warning, he kicked my ribs hard enough that I heard one of them crack.

“You’ve been told,” he said to my writhing body, and let himself out.

ETA: Here's part five!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#poacher-turned-keeper