#and she's running a massive faction of the russian one

[mariacallous]

Top diplomats from the United States’ foreign allies are flocking to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Wisconsin this week to make inroads with a Republican Party that some fear could abandon them under the ascendant MAGA movement.

Ambassadors from around 20 European countries plan to head to the convention with pitches on the value of alliances that they hope are tailor-made for former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party—with talking points that emphasize how they are beefing up defense spending and toughening their stances on China. What’s unclear is whether their messages will get through to the skeptics.

“It’s our last-ditch pitch to the MAGA wing of the party,” said one European official, who, like many of the more than a dozen officials whom Foreign Policy spoke to for this story, requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. “We have a lot to offer. I just hope they are willing to listen.”

For supporters of Ukraine, the RNC got off to a rocky start. On Monday, the convention’s opening night, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and political donor David Sacks took to the stage to bash President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party—including through jabs about the war in Ukraine that mirrored narratives frequently seen in Russian propaganda outlets. Biden “provoked, yes provoked, the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion,” Sacks said. (All NATO allies sharply dispute this characterization and say that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the war unprovoked.)

It’s common for diplomats from U.S.-allied countries to attend both the Republican and Democratic conventions in election years. But this election cycle has taken on a new level of urgency for European allies due to the prospect of Trump and his newly anointed running mate, J.D. Vance, taking the White House in November.

Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO allies and vilified the European Union as an arch economic rival, rather than a valuable ally, of the United States. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, has parted with many Senate Republicans in calling for a halt to U.S. aid to Ukraine—a point that has unnerved U.S. allies and energized Russian media circles as the war in Ukraine drags into its third year. The bulk of Republicans in Congress support NATO and Ukraine, but the faction of the party that is skeptical of alliances and continuing support to Ukraine is rising, particularly with Trump’s pick of Vance as running mate.

Jovita Neliupsiene, the EU ambassador to Washington, is currently in Milwaukee and downplayed the narrative of a Europe gripped by anxiety over a second Trump term. “You have to keep a cool head and do your work,” she said in an interview. “Yes, it takes a bit of effort to explain how interlinked we are,” she added, but her message this week to skeptical Republicans is that “we would be better off together.”

Ukraine—and many NATO allies—rely heavily on the U.S. military and its massive defense industry to keep supplying Kyiv’s defense against Russia and deter attacks on NATO’s European allies. Many allied countries believe that Ukraine would quickly lose ground if the U.S. cut off support—and Moscow could set its sights on invading other countries on the alliance’s eastern flank next if it is victorious in Ukraine.

“I cannot think of a moment in time over these long years where the presence and role of America in European security has been more important than at this crucial moment in history, where we have an ongoing war with a nuclear power in the heart of Europe,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a top German foreign-policy thinker who runs the Munich Security Conference. (Ischinger flew to Milwaukee on Tuesday to host his own MSC events on the sidelines of the RNC. He noted that he will attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this year, too.)

Yet the view that Europe has for too long freeloaded off U.S. military might and still isn’t spending enough on defense has taken root in the populist faction of the Republican Party that has shown up in force in Milwaukee for the convention. Some hawkish pro-NATO Republicans, such as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined the roster of speakers at the convention.

Yet skeptics of Ukraine aid and European alliances also got their own top speaking slots—indicating that Europe’s battle for the narrative in Milwaukee was far from a done deal. These skeptics included Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (who has repeatedly parroted false Russian conspiracy theories on Ukraine), and the influential conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.

Like much of Washington, European governments were caught flat-footed by Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 presidential election, leading to the surge in engagement at this year’s RNC.

“Embassies do not want to be in the same place they were in 2016,” said Heather Conley, the head of the Washington-based German Marshall Fund think tank. “They were surprised and just did not have connections into the administration,” she said, “so this time it’s clear they learned their lesson and are trying to make new contacts, reach out to folks in the Republican world they do not know.”

For European ambassadors, the RNC also represents a unique opportunity to pitch the importance of trans-Atlantic ties to the Republican Party machinery outside the Washington bubble—if the skeptics are willing to engage and listen.

One main pitch is focused on the Republicans’ top foreign-policy priority: countering China. On Tuesday, the EU’s ambassador to Washington, Neliupsiene, the EU ambassador, hosted a meeting in Milwaukee on U.S.-EU ties with China with Republican Texas Rep. Nathaniel Moran and Elbridge Colby, a prominent conservative foreign-policy thinker. Colby has ties to Trump campaign circles and has called for the United States to step back from supporting Ukraine and redirect military resources to confronting Beijing.

“The best 5G technologies, apart from Chinese [options], are in Europe. If we’re serious on de-risking from China, we have to work together, the EU and U.S.,” Neliupsiene said.

Another focus for allies at the RNC, officials said, will be driving home the message that Europe is taking its own defense more seriously and ramping up investments in its militaries—a main thorn in the side of U.S.-Europe ties during Trump’s first term. (In 2014, just three member states met the NATO threshold of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense; this year, 23 of the 32 allies are slated to meet that target.) The British, German, Swedish, and Canadian ambassadors will speak at an event about NATO on the sidelines of the RNC hosted by Politico on Thursday, fresh off the heels of a NATO summit in Washington last week that was overshadowed by doubts about Biden’s own ability to stand for a second term given his age.

Ischinger said that Europeans need to stop hand-wringing about the prospect of a second Trump term and muscle through managing trans-Atlantic ties.

“I will spend quite a bit of time in the next couple days trying to tell my Republican friends: ‘You should actually dispatch smart people from the Trump camp to Europe in the coming months before the election to explain [that] the world is not going to end if the Republicans take over the White House again,’” he said.

“We’ve had too much panic-driven commentary in European thinking,” he said. “There are problems, yes, and they need to be discussed … but we have solved them for almost 80 years, and we can do so again.”

[boyakishantriage]

Eyes looking up, she woman called.

"hey. Richie? You work at NEO right?"

"uhhh. I'm a little busy."

"you see the shapes too?"

"... Yeah."

"how many?"

"48."

"how many people?"

"all of them."

"including..."

"yes the Russians are talking to us too. They're just as confused."

"... Thanks mate."

"no problem."

I took a deep sigh. Invasion. Great, lovely. Of course. An invasion force, identified to not be friendly and a message sent that they'd send a force to defend us. Helpful, we had to defend our planet soon after gaining a seat. I rose, hand reaching for my phone. Best to make some calls.

It took three weeks, three weeks for the aliens to fully land, one for the military to start running. A month, a month before the planet admited defeat. Surrender. Surprising, considering how little we really did.

"Our spit were poison, minds tools and the earth our field." I said to the group. Staring the group down before they could speak.

"Not only that but you turned our children into monster that we fought. You killed our elders so you can make your little drone army stronger. You tried to wipe us out for your lovely little kingdom right were all royal enjoy the amazing beauty, fucking us all over you never have a shit about us. You don't give a shit about this coalition. Every new planetz person. Person from a planet told me the same story. You were welcoming, then you invaded, everyone who wasn't given help immediately or pushed you away. They died, or were under your thumb."

She took a shakey breath, loudly into the microphone. Growling and laughing, a clear sign she wasn't just angry.

"So tell me tell me how evil we are. When you sent f****** war machines already. Practically a declaration of war by your entire planet to us. And y'know? The only reason we have not nuked your stupid little planet and turned it into a massive experiment about nuclear weapons. Is because our leaders wanted to to figure out. Was this a misunderstanding is there something we missed that makes you justify so much death."

The woman was coughing, badly now. Practically spitting poison as she shook with rage. The iron pedestal glowing violently, before.

SNAP.

"and like the Romans you basically we were gonna invade y'all. We were a threat, but the thing is. We mastered war a long time ago. We ain't gonna fight if you don't fight. Basics of trade. You have things we want. We have things you want. Rather than lose lives, let's swap the two. Everyone here knows it. No too hard. But you, you fuckers." She pulled out her firearm, a useless stick that could hardly break cartilage of crackerbremdians.

BANG.

The titanium stand exploded into shards, a knife embedded into the internal structure of the stand.

"I declare war upon those I dub the elves. Independent of any faction, allegiance. I declare so long as this who knew any about the attack and beyond reasonable doubt what they were doing and did it regardless of what it was. Shall be thrown to the grounds and killed before this very council. Any objectors to this shall also be killed, collaborators. Anyone who helps beyond standard business shall die in twice. Nay. Thrice as harsh a fashion and if that shall fail I will burn this universe to the ground."

She declared, throwing the knife through the neck of the youngest of the delegates to the newly dubbed 'elves'.

"SO PRAY TELL ELF. ONE REASON WHY I SHAN'T TURN YOUR SPECIES TO THE ABYSS THAT IS DEATH?"

The hall said nothing, as she spat onto the body of the elf, stepping back to her seat as she quickly snapped back to her bored state.

"alright. That's my bit."

[rhetoricandlogic]

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

Matt Hilliard

Issue: 11 April 2016

True to its title, Ian McDonald's latest novel, Luna: New Moon, takes place almost entirely in a sprawling Moon colony. Technically, everything on the Moon is operated by a company called the Lunar Development Corporation, but in practice the colony is controlled by five powerful family-run businesses nicknamed the Five Dragons. The narrative focuses on the Corta family, who are both the youngest of the Five Dragons and the most precarious. Their founder, Adriana Corta, worked for another great family, the Mackenzies, before she secretly secured outside investment to start her helium business, thus earning her the lasting enmity of the Mackenzies as well as their ferocious competition. Under Adriana's leadership the Cortas have achieved incredible success, but she's near the end of her life and is transferring power and responsibility to her sons.

Rafa is the eldest and therefore next in line, but her second son Lucas is thought by many, not least himself, to be the shrewder and more ruthless businessman. The already delicate situation is inflamed when someone tries to assassinate Rafa. Is it the Mackenzies trying to sabotage the succession? Is it Lucas, trying to take the place of his brother? As accusations fly and tensions rise, the rest of Adriana's children are drawn into the growing crisis. Ariel Corta, Adriana's only daughter and an influential lawyer, finds herself being courted by several different factions hoping to gain from the crisis. Carlinhos Corta manages the family’s day-to-day mining operations, so he is on the front lines as dirty tricks escalate into outright violence. The youngest son and family black sheep, Wagner, meanwhile makes it his mission to find out who is attacking the family who mostly shun him.

The powerful, feuding families have led many, not least the author himself, to compare the plot with Game of Thrones. McDonald has also compared it to the television show Dallas. These comparisons are useful for marketing because they promise readers who liked a certain work that the same thing they liked will be in the new book, but they aren't wholly positive, particularly in science fiction. In a genre that prides itself on new ideas, "X but in Space" might be fun—but it's not the most exciting of premises. Luna's plot indeed feels very familiar and, worse, quite predictable as it proceeds through the usual moves and countermoves toward a not-at-all shocking revelation about the forces behind the assassination attempts.

One better reason for transposing a familiar narrative to a science fictional setting is to use it as a framework to explore a new environment. Compared to its overfamiliar plot, Luna does far more to distinguish its moon colony from its many science fictional predecessors. First, as one would expect given the focus of previous McDonald novels on non-Western countries, his Moon is a multicultural place. It's not just that there are some token characters from other cultures; Americans and western Europeans are almost entirely absent, making room for characters from Brazil and the rest of the southern hemisphere along with some Russians and Chinese. And whereas traditional science fiction often forgets poor people exist, Luna's corporate-run colony is a place of massive economic inequality. The wealthy Five Dragons live amid opulent gardens and citadels, throwing lavish parties and hosting sporting events. But many more live day to day doing menial labor, struggling to pay for the very air they're breathing. Unlike the rich who live far underground, the poor live near the radiation-drenched surface, and although there are medicines that can cure the resulting cancers, that treatment must also be paid for.

This setting seems like a springboard for a critique of crony capitalism or libertarianism, but after the opening scenes that introduce the divide between the rich and the poor, there's not very much in this vein. The Five Dragons are companies, yes, but their family ownership, dynastic succession, marriage alliances, private armies, and prioritization of loyalty and honor over profit all conspire to make them feel a lot more like the noble families of a weak monarchy than weakly regulated companies. It's also never made clear how this situation came to be. Adriana mentions investors when describing the founding of her company and there is a board of directors, but in practice she seems answerable to no one. The government of China is said to have been an early investor in another of the Five Dragons but since forced out. Otherwise Earth governments don't seem interested in controlling the Moon (apparently their militaries haven't read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).

The one perspective we have from outside the rich and powerful comes in the form of Marina Calzaghe, an immigrant woman doing menial jobs and living in dire poverty. Her story provides an intriguing answer to the question: "How does one become a poor, menial laborer on the Moon?" She has a "postgrad degree" in "computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture" but the contract that brought her to the Moon fell through after she arrived, leaving her unemployed and almost immediately impoverished. As a reminder that, in the Moon's heartless and exploitative economy, even someone with an elite education is just one paycheck away from homelessness, she should be the most interesting character. Instead, she's almost immediately swept up into the Cortas' orbit and becomes a starstruck bystander to great events, her perspective compromised by access to money and incipient romantic feelings. Little is made of the glaring fact she is likely far more educationally accomplished than the Cortas she works for.

This decision to focus on the scheming, incredibly rich, and often ruthless Corta family could easily have been a disaster. Other stories of this sort, such as Game of Thrones and Dune, ease the reader into their worlds by letting them follow sympathetic children who are young enough that they are (initially, at least) innocent victims of family infighting rather than perpetrators of it. McDonald has what could have been similar characters at hand in Adriana's three grandchildren, but instead most of the narrative is devoted to Adriana's children and augmented with her own first person reminiscences.

Yet the characters are easily the strongest part of the novel and elevate it from a potboiler with nice scenery into something memorable. Each of the Cortas has a distinct personality and voice, something that is impressive by itself in a novel with a large cast. There is conflict among the family members but, at least within the family, there aren't any actual villains. One could easily imagine a version of this story in which Rafa is the rightful heir and Lucas is a scheming upstart, or one where Rafa is the dissolute incompetent who will waste his inheritance while Lucas is hardworking and unappreciated. Instead, both of these dichotomies are present but neither is definitive. All of the Cortas are flawed, but none of them are evil. Rather than root for one against the others, the reader is encouraged to hope—as Adriana does—that they find a way to put aside their differences and work together to avoid a disastrous conflict with the Mackenzies.

As the situation escalates, all the adult characters get a chance to be active and make choices that feel grounded in their personality and circumstances. There's never a sense that a character is doing something (or worse, behaving stupidly) merely because the plot requires it. The third person narrative provides just enough access to their thoughts and feelings for their decisions to be understandable, but although some characters are beset by anxiety or self-pity, McDonald trusts the reader enough to let this show through their actions instead of wallowing in it.

The reason the characters work so well is that the narrative pays attention to their lives and slows down to depict a few illuminating moments that have no direct relationship to the setting or plot. We find out, for example, that Lucas Corta has a secret passion for music that develops into a secret passion for a particular musician. This small subplot does nothing to advance the overall story and sheds no further light on the setting, but it makes Lucas into a real character instead of a simple stereotype. Taken together with a dozen similar moments with other characters, it enables the novel to finally mount an unexpected criticism of the Moon's rampantly capitalist society. There have been many stories about futures that involve a few rich people living among an impoverished many, but Luna's focus on character allows it to ask whether these rich people are happy and, if not, what would make them happy. This is a crucial question in a story where the great families' struggle for money and power is destabilizing both their own positions and the entire society.

So far the novel lets the reader draw their own conclusions about this question, but then conclusions are one thing the novel does not attempt to provide. This is a self-contained novel only in the most literal of senses. In the last few pages, various characters are hung off their respective cliffs in preparation for the second novel and the story simply stops. For readers who are most interested in plot, the story here probably isn't interesting enough on its own to justify its lack of closure. But those interested in spacefaring settings and, in particular, those who enjoy reading about compelling characters in those settings, Luna: New Moon is well worth the price of admission.

[priioritys]

if crazy equals genius, then I'm a fucking arsonist - i'm a rocket scientist. you can set yourself on fire, but you're never gonna burn, burn, burn. you can set yourself on fire, but you're never gonna learn, learn, learn.

closed starter for @50shadesofkola // crazy=genius by panic! at the disco

it’s quite the sight, iona imagines, but thus is the life of a criminal like her. she’s dressed like she’s working in an office, blonde hair laying flat against a nice blouse that’s tucked into a pencil skirt above some modest heels, but everything else in the scene is like a nightmare. there’s a smoking gun in her hand - complete with a silencer - and a bloody body in front of her, slowly seeping into the concrete. the sound of footsteps has her spin on her heel, pointing her gun at the intruder. “if you even think about snitching, you’re next.”

[newstfionline]

Sunday, September 12, 2021

Americans less positive about civil liberties: AP-NORC poll (AP) Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, Americans were reasonably positive about the state of their rights and liberties. Today, after 20 years, not as much. Far fewer people now say the government is doing a good job protecting rights including the freedom of speech, the right to vote, the right to bear arms and others. For example, the poll finds that 45% of Americans now say they think the U.S. government is doing a good job defending freedom of speech, compared with 32% who say it’s doing a poor job and 23% who say neither. The share saying the government is doing a good job is down from 71% in 2011 and from 59% in 2015. Dee Geddes, 73, a retiree in Chamberlain, South Dakota, said she was frustrated at the government’s apparent lack of ability to safeguard the amount of private information available, especially online. “It bothers me when I can go on the internet and find pretty much anything about anybody. It makes me feel sort of naked,” said Geddes. About half now say the government is doing a good job protecting freedom of religion, compared with three-quarters who said the same in 2011.

20 years later, fallout from toxic WTC dust cloud grows (AP) The dust cloud caught Carl Sadler near the East River, turning his clothes and hair white as he looked for a way out of Manhattan after escaping from his office at the World Trade Center. Gray powder billowed through the open windows and terrace door of Mariama James’ downtown apartment, settling, inches thick in places, into her rugs and children’s bedroom furniture. Barbara Burnette, a police detective, spat the soot from her mouth and throat for weeks as she worked on the burning rubble pile without a protective mask. Today, all three are among more than 111,000 people enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which gives free medical care to people with health problems potentially linked to the dust. Two decades after the twin towers’ collapse, people are still coming forward to report illnesses that might be related to the attacks.

US producer prices jump an unprecedented 8.3% in August (AP) Inflation at the wholesale level climbed 8.3% last month from August 2020, the biggest annual gain since the Labor Department started calculating the 12-month number in 2010. Inflation has been stirring as the economy recovers from last year’s brief but intense coronavirus recession. Supply chain bottlenecks and a shortage of workers have pushed prices higher. Food prices were up 2.9% last month after falling in July. Over the past year, wholesale food prices have climbed 12.7%, including surges of 59.2% for beef and 43.5% for shortening and cooking oil. Energy prices rose 0.4% from July and are up 32.3% over the past year.

Wigged out: A Venezuelan spymaster’s life on the lam (AP) Wigs, a fake moustache, plastic surgery and a new safe house every three months—these are just some of the tools of deception authorities in Spain believe a former Venezuelan spymaster relied on to evade capture on a U.S. warrant for narcoterrorism. The two-year manhunt for Gen. Hugo Carvajal ended Thursday night when police raided a rundown apartment in a quiet Madrid neighborhood where they found the fugitive in a back room holding a sharp knife in what they described as a last desperate attempt to evade arrest. Nicknamed “El Pollo” (“The Chicken”), Carvajal has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration since 2014, when he was arrested in Aruba on a U.S. warrant only to go free after President Nicolás Maduro’s government pressured the small Dutch Caribbean island to release him. While on the lam, he was rumored to be in Portugal, then a hideout in the Caribbean. The reality was much simpler: The 61-year-old had never left Madrid. His last hideout was a mere 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the headquarters of the National Police.

Denmark lifts all coronavirus restrictions and celebrates ‘a whole new era’ (Washington Post) Some countries are setting records for daily covid-19 infections. Others are pursuing sweeping rules to mandate vaccination. But in Denmark, something like normal life has resumed. After nearly 550 days, the Scandinavian country has lifted the last of its domestic pandemic-era restrictions, declaring that the coronavirus is no longer a “critical threat to society.” Denmark appears to be the first European Union member to issue such a declaration, potentially providing a glimpse into the future of the bloc’s recovery—or serving as a cautionary tale of a nation that moved too quickly. The country’s leaders have pointed to its high vaccination rates—among the best in the world, with nearly 75 percent of residents fully immunized—as evidence that the step is justified.

Russia begins major military drills with Belarus after moves toward closer integration (Washington Post) Russia and Belarus began a massive week-long military exercise on NATO’s borders Friday after President Vladimir Putin and Belarus’s leader agreed on a new effort toward integrating the nations, including creating a “single defense space.” The Zapad 2021 exercise, involving 200,000 personnel, has NATO members and other neighboring countries on edge, echoing worries this spring over an unannounced Russian military buildup near Ukraine. The Zapad (meaning West) exercise is held regularly, but this iteration comes as Russian relations with NATO are increasingly fraught.

Pope Francis to visit impoverished Roma quarter in Slovakia (AP) Pope Francis is paying a visit next week to a neighborhood in Slovakia most Slovaks would not even think about going, which until recently even the police would avoid after dark. Francis will make the visit to the Roma community in the Lunik IX quarter of Slovakia’s second largest city of Kosice one of the highlights of his pilgrimage to “the heart of Europe.” Francis will be the first pontiff to meet the most socially excluded minority group in Slovakia. A fitting place to go for the “pope of the peripheries,” Lunik XI is the biggest of about 600 shabby, segregated settlements where the poorest 20% of the country’s 400,000 Roma live. Most lack basics such as running water or sewage systems, gas or electricity. “It’s a huge honor for us,” said Lunik IX mayor Marcel Sana, who has been a local resident since he was 2. “Even if he says just a few words, his presence will be a big boost for all those living here, the socially disadvantaged and poor people who need such support.”

Fleeing China, Hong Kongers flock to Britain (Los Angeles Times) He has no job, he’s still grappling with English and the climate is often cold and wet, but Dennis Chan is still grateful to be setting up his life in Britain. The 34-year-old arrived in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, alone in April after quitting his job as a cargo officer for Cathay Pacific airlines in Hong Kong. He had never set foot in Britain before. But he also felt he didn’t recognize his own homeland any longer amid China’s relentless crackdown on political dissent and civic freedoms. After Beijing imposed a sweeping new national security law on Hong Kong in July of last year, he felt an urgency to leave. Within two months of making the British National Overseas visa available in January, the British government received 34,000 applications. It estimates that about 300,000 people could take up the offer within five years; others say the figure could wind up being closer to 500,000. For many new arrivals like Chan, who is still living in a rented room and finding his bearings, the transition has not been easy. Although Britain boasts a well-established Chinese community, many of the Hong Kongers who have immigrated in recent months have found it difficult to land a job and make connections, especially in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. They miss—or even fear for—loved ones left behind, and they sometimes feel the sting of racism here in the land that ruled Hong Kong for 156 years as part of its globe-straddling empire.

Lebanon gets a new government after 13 months of collapse (Washington Post) Lebanon finally got a new government Friday, after 13 months of tortuous negotiations that left the country leaderless and paralyzed during the worst economic and financial collapse in its history. The formation of the new cabinet, headed by billionaire tycoon Najib Mikati and seemingly supported by almost all factions, means the country will be able to get down to the business of steering its way out of the crisis, which has wiped billions of dollars from the banking system and impoverished millions. Mikati, the new prime minister and one of the country’s wealthiest men, seemed to fight back tears as he delivered his inaugural speech, describing the problems of parents who cannot afford to feed their children, send them to school or find medicine to treat them when they are sick. But given the country’s kleptocratic system of government, there are few reasons to believe that Mikati’s administration will be capable of undertaking the radical reforms that are essential if Lebanon is to climb out of its depression, analysts say.

[ticktockthem]

this got really long but here’s a bio for Charlie

Name: Rimon “Charlie” García, formerly Rimon Rosenthal

Age: about 24-25 (obviously it would depend on when in her canon we’re talking about but that the age i usually draw her at)

Birthday: June 8th (Gemini)

Sexuality: Pan/Bi

Relationship status: In a very complicated open polycule

General physical description: 5′10″, skinny with lean muscle, red curly hair cropped short, green eyes, red-toned medium/light skin (often sun-damaged), freckles freckles freckles.

Scars/skin markings: a two-inch scar on the outside of her upper left arm, where she removed an implant. Two scars on the left side of her neck from a raider that had attempted to slit her throat. A large uneven scar below her right collarbone from a Legion spear. An approximately 8-inch long scar on the left side of her rib-cage from another Legion spear. A large patch of road-rash looking skin on her right forearm, caused by localized radiation exposure.

Hometown: Vault 46. Originally meant to breed animals to be used in the war effort, the equipment for genetic splicing is now used to combine animal and human DNA to try and create offspring better suited to survive and fight in the wasteland.

Current family/group: She has a family group that has its homebase in the Stillwater reservoir, which dried up long ago. It’s in Rhode Island. It’s now called the Stills. Her adoptive mother and father, Paul and Stephanie García live there. Matthew, the leader of the group, is Paul’s adoptive father as well as Charlie’s genetic great-great-great(etc) grandfather, because he is one of the original humans that was used to introduce human DNA into the cocktail that eventually became Deathclaw DNA. Charlie’s maternal grandmother, Wilhemina, lives in Louisiana with her girlfriend, Audrey. Wilhemina also escaped the vault, and left a trail for Charlie to follow. When they finally met up, Charlie stayed with them for a while, learning survival skills from Audrey, a ghoul who had been a homesteader before the war. Charlie calls Audrey her ‘Meemaw,’ as Audrey hates being called ‘grandma.’ Charlie’s twin brother, Reid, still lives in the vault. It’s Charlie’s biggest regret that she left him behind, but the security in the vault makes it unlikely for her to get back and escape a second time.

Family background: Daniel and Lisa Rosenthal are her biological parents, though Charlie hates them because they support Vault 46′s Overseer and don’t want to escape the vault. Her family is Jewish (specifically Polish Ashkenazi) on her mom’s side and Choctaw/white (the common american blend: a little French, a little Scotts-Irish, a little German, not particularly tied to any culture) on her dad’s side.

Other close relationships: god there’s so many uh im just gonna list them

Merlin (princeof-flowers‘s oc, also a dethclaw hybrid, they consider each other siblings)

Callinan (undeadcourier’s oc. more to come on that? which would necessitate that she’s also buddies w/)

Arcade

my SoSu (CherryBomb. General of the Minutemen),

Hancock,

Preston,

Alma (a french ghoul that cooks drugs and lives in Goodneighbor),

William (Alma’s husband, a Russian merc),

Jude (a synth based on pre-railroad Deacon),

Atlas (a Greek man who lives in The Stills),

Castor (Atlas’s ghoul husband)

Claude (a ghoul frenemy of Charlie’s, who is in a band with a friendly rivalry towards Charlie’s)

Lyre (my raider queen of nuka world)

Luca (Lyre’s eye-candy husband)

Relationship with men: Trusts them less as a rule, tends not to feel as romantically attracted to them even when close

Relationship with women: she tends to idolize strong women a lot more, and is willing to forgive women easier

Dress style: Armor when she’s scavenging/travelling, loose tops and tight pants when she’s in a safer area and feels more comfortable

Religion: Jewish, non-practicing

Attitude to religion: You keep yours and she’ll keep hers. She can’t stand  someone’s religion encroaching on the personal freedom of others, or cult-like recruitment and captivity.

Favorite pastimes: Once she’s made sure everything is safe, all of her weapons are clean, and any upkeep on her items is done, you can find Charlie reading anything legible she can get her hands on, fixing up old lighters, and sewing or embroidering.

Favorite foods: Steak, eggs, candy, cake, anything with loads of protein or sugar really.

Strongest positive personality trait: Will defend her friends, or any apparently helpless person with everything she has.

Strongest negative personality trait: Runs away from and ruins relationships due to her fear of abandonment/rejection (“If I leave them, they can’t possibly leave me.”). Incredibly stubborn and refuses to ask for help.

Sense of humor: Loves snappy quips and wordplay, especially literary references. Uses gentle ribbing and antagonism as a bonding exercise.

Temper: Yes.

Consideration for others: Probably too much, considering her environment.

How other people see them: Manic, moody, jittery, flirty, just very much all-over-the-place.

Opinion of themself: Pretty much beats herself up constantly, but won’t stand for anyone talking to her the way she talks to herself. She’s garbage but she’s better than everyone she doesn’t like. Sees herself as a massive hypocrite because she’ll kill people she doesn’t know (she often takes mercenary work), when that’s most of what people vilify raiders for.

Other traits, especially those to be brought out in story: hates being seen as weak or naive, incredibly loving, extremely sympathetic to others, she expresses love by giving gifts and sharing stories but prefers to receive it via words of affirmation and touch, she’s extremely guarded about herself and her past, and worries a lot about people close to her

Ambitions: She wants to prove herself to her new family, provide trade and safe interaction with others to The Stills. She wants to help take down the Institute and any other faction that seeks to control people.

[nothingman]

No political organization in the recent history of the world has had a gift for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory quite like the Democratic Party. This is the party that has managed to lose three of the last five presidential elections, despite only once in that period getting fewer votes than the opposition. Although the Democrats nominally hold positions with broad majority support on a wide range of issues, following the heavy losses of the 2010 and 2014 midterms the party found itself in its worst nationwide position since the early 1930s.

For much of the 20th century, Democrats understood themselves to be the party of permanent hegemony on Capitol Hill, no matter who was in the White House: Between the Franklin D. Roosevelt election of 1932 and the Newt Gingrich election of 1994, the party held a House majority for 58 out of 62 years, and a Senate majority for 52 of 62. Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from an east Texas district that is now (of course) solidly Republican, was House speaker for more than 17 years, a record that will surely never be broken. That history has almost become a curse from the past, haunting the Democratic present; it’s like a lost paradise, and every few years a new messiah shows up to tell the faithful that (s)he knows the true path that will lead them back. Or it’s like the idyllic garden in “Alice in Wonderland,” which Alice knows she can reach if she can only squeeze through the door.

There is no garden, no path and no door. This mythic certainty that their kingdom will come again — expressed more recently in the mantra that “demographics is destiny” — has prevented Democrats from perceiving the true nature of their predicament. Over the last three decades, the party has been virtually wiped out in numerous states between the coasts where it was once competitive (or even dominant). It now holds a legislative majority in just 14 states. You can slice and dice the history of American party politics in all sorts of tedious ways, but there is no clear precedent for such an imbalance. More to the point, there’s no precedent whatever, in the United States or anywhere else, for a situation where one party appears to represent majoritarian opinion and typically gets more votes, but has conclusively been shut out of power.

Oh but wait, you say: Blue wave incoming! Yeah, whatever. Presented with the powerful unifying force of a massively unqualified and uniquely divisive president, Democrats may indeed win a House majority this fall. (The Senate remains unlikely.) But I don’t feel like betting the ranch on that outcome, do you? What may be even more impressive than the Democratic record of losing winnable elections is the party's aptitude for finding someone else to blame every time it happens. It was the Russians. It was Ralph Nader. It was the Swift-boat ads. It was liberal complacency. It was gerrymandering. It was all the mean things Republicans said. It was the unfortunate fact that the voters don’t like us all that much, which definitely isn’t our fault.

READ MORE: Bill Browder and Vladimir Putin: A tangled tale of two nations, two centuries and a lot of history

Over the past few weeks, ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's startling primary victory over Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., we’ve seen a remarkable display of intra-party, bad-faith concern trolling — an area where Democrats have set a high standard. Various “mainstream” or “moderate” figures in or around the party are already seeking to pin blame for a hypothetical November defeat, in advance, on the insurgent “socialist” faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders. My daring analysis: This does not bespeak enormous confidence.

To be fair, Democrats of all factions and ideologies were united this week in telling former FBI director James Comey — a lifelong Republican, at least until he worked for President Donald Trump — to shut up and go away after offering unsolicited advice to Democratic voters:

Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left. This president and his Republican Party are counting on you to do exactly that. America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.

— James Comey (@Comey) July 22, 2018

Lordy, no -- not the socialist left! As many people observed, the guy who may have single-handedly tipped the balance in the 2016 presidential election should perhaps not view himself as a fount of political wisdom. But at least Comey’s tweet seemed like a sincere opinion, consistent with his grandiose view of himself as a white knight who embodies all the most honorable tendencies of America in one extremely tall white man.

Joe Lieberman, however, the onetime Connecticut senator and 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, is just an odious little garden gnome, in constant danger of being peed on by the family Schnauzer. He seems, in fact, to have undergone the same process of physical and intellectual shrinkage as Rudy Giuliani: Was this a bargain offered by an evil sorcerer, which conveys immortality at the cost of one’s soul, stature and spine?

Lieberman was purely trolling, in especially distasteful fashion, in writing a July 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed that Red-baited Ocasio-Cortez with an extraordinary assortment of lies and urged Crowley, the 10-term incumbent she defeated in the June Democratic primary, to run against her on a third-party line in the fall. Since the Journal article is behind a paywall, here's a taste:

Because the policies Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advocates are so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems. Thanks to a small percentage of primary votes, all of the people of New York’s 14th Congressional District stand to lose a very effective representative in Washington.

Fortunately, Joe Crowley and the voters in his district can prevent this damage. On Election Day, his name will be on the ballot as the endorsed candidate of the Working Families Party. But for Mr. Crowley to have a chance at getting re-elected, he will have to decide if he wants to remain an active candidate. I hope he does.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform, like hers, is more Socialist than Democratic. Her dreams of new federal spending would bankrupt the country or require very large tax increases, including on the working class. Her approach foresees government ownership of many private companies, which would decimate the economy and put millions out of work.

First of all, Lieberman surely knows that Crowley will do no such thing — he’s a decent guy and a party loyalist, and the PR damage would be enormous — and that Crowley would lose even worse the second time around. (I live in the 14th district; I doubt Lieberman has been here in 30 years, except crossing overhead on the Cross-Bronx Expressway.)

Secondly, the actual point here may be to none-too-subtly remind Journal readers that Lieberman himself ditched the Democratic Party after his own primary defeat in 2006, and endorsed John McCain against Barack Obama in 2008. Whose interests is he serving by encouraging Democrats, in the pages of the house organ of Big Capital, to sabotage a young, progressive woman of color?

None of this makes clear why powerful people like Comey and Lieberman are so worried about a small-scale insurrection within the Democratic Party that is nowhere near as "far from the mainstream" as they pretend, and is also a long way from staging a coup and hanging portraits of Trotsky and Che in DNC headquarters. Socialist-dread syndrome also appears to have driven the recent gathering of “moderate” Democrats in Columbus, Ohio, under the aegis of the think tank Third Way, as reported in a widely circulated piece by Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News (a former Salon staffer).

Several attendees said they were worried that single-payer health care and abolishing ICE and other Bernie-fied policy proposals of the “angry left” would alienate swing voters and damage the party’s prospects for victory in the midterms. That’s at least a valid debating point, although it has been the Democratic default setting for decades. (And has led to that, um, amazing record of uninterrupted winning.)

I was struck by the comments of former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, who admitted that Democratic moderates find themselves on the defensive in ideological terms: "The only narrative that has been articulated in the Democratic Party over the past two years is the one from the left," he told Seitz-Wald. "I think we need a debate within the party. Frankly, it would have been better to start the conversation earlier."

Markell is absolutely right: A debate is overdue. But a debate about what? The problem for Democratic moderates is precisely that they will not define or explain their positions clearly, except in wonky, granular, political-calculus terms, in large part because their ideas are widely discredited and massively unpopular.

Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois told reporters in Columbus that she stands for "a silent majority who just wants normalcy. Who wants to see that people are going out to Washington to fight for them in a civil way and get something done. ... There's a lot of people that just don't really like protests and don't like yelling and screaming." As Seitz-Wald observes, Bustos sounded more like a Nixon-era Republican than a traditional Democrat, but in any case that's a statement about messaging and style that deliberately avoids any discussion of ideology or specific policy proposals.

At the Democratic convention in 2016, I tried to find a single elected official or candidate who would tell me, straight up, that the financial deregulation and free-trade agreements and welfare cuts and mass incarceration policies of the Bill Clinton years had generally been good ideas, whatever bumps we might have encountered along the way. Nobody would do it — but I don’t think that was because none of them believed it.

Attendees at the Third Way conference were clearly aware that middle-path Democrats will need big, new ideas in order to compete successfully with Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, debt-free college and the other dangerous pinko proposals that would have had near-unanimous support in the pre-Reagan Democratic Party. Here's what they came up with: A private-sector, employer-funded universal pension plan to supplement Social Security. OK, I'm just spitballing, but that probably isn’t going to suck the wind out of the red sails of Bernie’s fleet and sweep Mitch Landrieu (or whomever) into the White House.

I’m not saying that so-called moderate or mainstream Democrats don't have  ideas worth discussing or don’t possess a legitimate ideology. I am saying, with Jack Markell, that it’s long past time for them to tell us clearly what they believe and defend it forcefully. Because there’s a widespread sense that the Democratic Party has some hidden agenda or obscure set of motives beneath its bland, corporate, coalition-building exterior, and that has been infinitely more damaging than any amount of socialist fervor. On the right, it has fueled the perception that Democrats are a pack of conspiratorial scolds who want to limit the freedoms of others -- and so has driven conservatives to the polls. On the left, it has fueled the perception that the party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs and its ilk -- and so has driven progressive apathy. (If neither stereotype is fair, neither is entirely false.)

This quantum ideological uncertainty is what drove people crazy about Hillary Clinton, I think, fueling the Trumpian narrative that she was deceptive or dishonest. (Which was hilarious in that context, needless to say.) She seemed impossible to pin down, first attacking Bernie Sanders as a wild-eyed radical, then gradually embracing the “progressive” label and finally running on a platform that incorporated most of his ideas. She seemed insulted by the suggestion that her Goldman Sachs speeches created any kind of political problem or required any explanation.

Clinton's political flexibility or malleability -- according to the conventional Democratic playbook -- was supposed to be a source of strength, a sign that she was a hard-headed, pragmatic decision-maker who would not be guided by doctrine. Amid the reversed magnetic field of the 2016 election, against an opponent who repeated the same forceful (if meaningless and insincere) phrases over and over again, it just looked like mendacity.

Like her entire generation of Democrats, Clinton had been programmed down to the cellular level with the early-‘90s creed that ideology itself was dangerous and toxic and likely to scare away suburban voters who just wanted civility and decency and problem-solving. Well, folks, I’m not a liberal or a conservative. I’m more of a Republibservatron! This avoidance or denial of ideology — the ideology of no-ideology — had perverse results: It elected two Democratic presidents to two terms apiece but left their party rootless and in ruins, seemingly defenseless before a deranged radical minority with a decaying relationship to reality (but no shortage of fervent ideology).

It’s tempting to say that a specter is haunting the Democratic Party and it’s the specter of socialism, blah blah blah. But that’s largely untrue: The specter is imaginary and so is the socialism, pretty much. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their loose array of allies across the country are a modest contingent within the party. Only a handful of them will win elections this year, and in any case they’re closer to being old-time left-wing populists, with a 21st-century overlay of multiculturalism and intersectionality, than, you know, to this:

VIDEO

Hubert Humphrey, the leading Democratic moderate of Hillary Clinton’s youth, would find little to object to in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, beyond the labeling on the package. (Once the Happy Warrior figured out what ICE and super PACs were, and what they had done to America, he’d go out and ring doorbells in her district.) Then again, Humphrey had no fear of open and often heated ideological conflict, which was a staple of Democratic discourse for decades and is exactly what the “democratic socialist” insurrection has reintroduced since 2016.

Those who shut down such internal conflict and purged the activist left from the Democratic Party, on the premise that it was the only possible way to win elections in a "centrist," anti-ideological nation, have never faced the consequences of their historic blunder. They have lost repeatedly and on a grand scale, insisting every time that they really should have won — or in some other, better world, did win — and that whatever went wrong was somebody else’s fault. They are the ones who appear committed to an inflexible, dogmatic ideology that is out of step with political reality. They are surprised and outraged to learn that if they want to continue their losing streak, they will have to fight for it.

Does the Democratic Party need an overhaul?

New York congressional candidate Max Rose hopes to flip NYC's lone Republican seat -- but says his party must change.

via Salon

[stoweboyd]

Looking Back: Reviewing 2017 Predictions

Here’s the recap of last year’s predictions. See this year’s predictions, here.

Below, the prediction indented, my comments follow. Bolding is from the original post:

1. Work chat will continue to dominate the market for enterprise ‘collaboration’, and AI-based ‘team members’ with deep learning skill sets will become commonplace, building on chatbot models of interaction but assuming larger roles in project management, development, marketing, and HR. Slack is acquired by Amazon for $35 billion, and loosely integrated into AWS.

Got the first part right.  Many, many bots are in use, so kinda good on that. Slack was NOT acquired by Amazon or anyone else in 2017.

2. The hottest business trend of 2017 will be AI-based ‘driverless management’, displacing Holocracy and other management ‘business operating systems’ fads. AI will play a significantly larger role in areas that human cognitive biases are most problematic, like hiring and promotion, decision support, and ensuring diversity, equality, and well-being in the workplace. (Daemon (via Daniel Saurez) meets the workplace.) Several unknown start-ups will lead this new exploding sector.

I was just too early with this, although the driverless management trend is heating up.

3. Following Trump’s proposed withdrawal of US supporting NATO troops in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin’s Russia will occupy some part of the Baltics, like the Latgale region of Latvia, which is ~40% ethnic Russian. Mike Pence resigns as Vice President following major disagreements with Trump on the Baltics and NATO. Trump nominates Elaine Chao as Vice President, his Secretary of Transportation, and she is appointed in October, the first woman and first Asian American to serve in that role.

This move by Putin didn’t happen, but joint military exercises in Belarus involved as many as 100,000 Russian troops. Russia rejects Ukrainian assertions that most of the troops were left in place.

4. North Korea will fire a rocket that hits Kodiak Island in Alaska, although it carries only a conventional warhead. Kim Jong-un says the rocket was supposed to have crashed in the ocean before landfall, but many believe it was on track to hit Anchorage.

This has not happened, but the degree of staging up to a new war state with North Korea has been fairly terrifying. NK can now hit all continental US with nuclear warheads, experts agree.

5. Trump raises massive trade barriers to Chinese goods, sparking a trade war that damages both countries’ economies. This is in part because of an inability to get China to – in effect – take control of North Korea, but also as part of an attempt by US and European companies to make China’s markets more open: a second Opium War.

Trump’s trade war has been minimized by the conventional GOP buffer zone around him now. Score that a miss.

6. Britain begins that actual process of Brexit in mid 2017, leading Scotland to a referendum in favor of leaving the UK and applying to the EU for membership.

Yes, they did start the process.

7. The US Congress will pass legislation in early 2017 to repeal Obamacare, but defers any implementation until 2018 at the earliest, because they can’t agree on how it will be replaced or by what approach. Trump proposes a single payer system as a companion to a radical restructuring of the tax code, as he had hinted in his campaign, and falls into open discord with the establishment wing of the GOP.

Trump and company were unable to repeal ACA, but they did sneak a repeal of the individual mandate into the tax cut bill, so I’d say that a mixed result.

8. Driverless car fleets are rolled out by various car companies (Ford, Chrysler, Tesla, etc.) and car hailing platforms (Uber, Lyft, etc.). Car ownership in major urban areas continues to decline, and many municipalities create partnerships with fleet owners to augment conventional mass transportation solutions. The value of New York City taxi medallions drops over 75%.

A little early on the rollout of car fleets, but it’s coming soon. We’ve only seen small pilots in 2017. But the taxi medallions fell like a rock in 2017.

9. Amazon will buy Snapchat, and announce a new take on augmented reality glasses, picking up where Google dropped the ball years ago. Building on the success of Alexa-based Echo devices, Kindle, Fire TV, Amazon Prime, and the growing popularity of Snapchat, Amazon Eyes are the hit of Christmas 2017, with over 50 million ordered in November and December.

Amazon did announce Echo-enabled glasses are coming, but they haven’t shipped them in 2017. Snapchat has not been acquired.

10. The war in Syria comes to a Korean War-like end, with a partition of the country into various regions, and a unceasing belligerence on all parts. It is clearly a shadow war between factions backed by the West, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Russia. The stalemate here is a reflection of the reappraisal of loyalties and goals of the shadow players, more than the aims of the Syrian government and the insurgents. Bashar al-Assad rules a rump state of western Syrian, with much of the rest of ‘Syria’ in shambles.

Looks like the end state accelerated faster than I imagined, because of close work between Russia and US to crush ISIS, along with the complicity of Iran.

11. Hillary Clinton files for divorce from Bill Clinton in March 2017, and assumes the role of president of Harvard University, two weeks later.

Didn’t happen.

12. Marine Le Pen loses an unexpectedly close run-off with François Fillon, but the close election pulled Fillon and his Republicans farther right than in recent decades.

Emmanuel Macron didn’t even have a political party at the start of 2017, so that was a real surprise. The collapse of the conventional parties is the real story, and Le Pen did get to a direct election for the presidency, and lost, which is part of my prediction.

13. Oprah announces that she intends to run for President in the next election.

Still possible?

14. Angela Merkel narrowly wins reelection, after wide-spread controversy of scandals uncovered by leaks generally attributed to Putin’s brigade of hackers.

A few scandals, but mostly growing concerns about immigration and the direction for Europe: this one I got right.

15. Barack Obama joins Andreessen Horowitz as a partner, and leads a round funding AdjectiveNoun (fictitious, note), one of the most promising ‘driverless management’ startups. He also comes out in support of Oprah Winfrey’s candidacy.

Obama seems content to take it easy, and hasn’t decided what to do aside from writing some books.

16. Microsoft acquires Salesforce for $75 billion. Marc Benioff leaves to run philanthropy (amid discussions of political ambitions).

Didn’t happen, but still could.

17. Apple acquires Tesla for $75 billion. Tim Cook announces retirement, Elon Musk becomes CEO.

Now that the iPhone X is starting to look like a dud, this might become more realistic. But it didn’t happen.

18. Despite inaction by the US Federal Government, and chaos in the EPA and Energy Department, CO2 levels continue to fall worldwide. Environmental groups suggest that we may have turned the corner on energy in 2017, because solar is now cheaper than other energy sources in most places in the world. However, global temperatures continues to rise, and many models show that it might take 1000 years to reduce global temperatures.

Alas, we hit record levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2017. But solar is falling in price, leading to more coal power plants to close.

19. California and San Francisco, with support from Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and other platform companies, announced a project to convert increasingly unneeded parking lots to small ‘park villages’ with dense, micro-apartment developments, for low-income and homeless residents. Trump-sponsored infrastructure funds are directed to US micro-building factories and a new California Construction Corps, which is strongly supported by both Democrats and Republicans. The state’s program is seen as a blueprint for the rest of the country.

This was far too hopeful. None of this has happened, and Trump -- despite his infrastructure mumbo-jumbo -- is cutting funding that might be used for projects like ‘park villages’.

20. Michael Bloomberg announces plans to create a third ‘Pragmatist’ party, based on economic conservatism and social liberalism, and rapidly attracts a large minority of GOP and Democratic legislators in Washington who have been whipsawed by the 2016 elections, and by the growing discord in both major parties over the future of their platforms. Some project that the Pragmatists could gain as many as 30% of the seats in the House, and as many as 10 governorships in coming years. Bloomberg announces his plans to run for President.

It may be more reasonable to imagine Steven Bannon starting an independent run for the White House. But at this point it doesn’t seem that Bloomberg is planning a run.

On the whole, I did fairly badly, really. None of my acquisitions came together, North Korea didn’t bomb us, the Clintons didn’t divorce, CO2 levels continue to rise. And of course, astride the year like Godzilla was Trump, and I made very few predictions about him, and those I did were really off. I don’t think we realized how bizarroland it was going to get.

Even though my results were lousy, I am taking another run at it, in Some Predictions, 2018. 

[itsfinancethings]

The electricity was out at Fatima Al Mahmoud’s Beirut home even before a colossal explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital late on Tuesday afternoon, killing at least 135 people, and wounding a further 5,000.

A senior editor at online city guide Beirut.com, the 22-year old had been working remotely due to COVID lockdowns when a blast she initially mistook for an earthquake rattled her family’s apartment. Moments later, a much larger explosion—so big it was felt 150 miles away in Cyprus—shattered her bedroom windows. Mahmoud dragged her 12-year-old brother to the relative safety of their corridor and in the 25 minutes before the generators kicked back in and restored her Internet connection, agonized over the safety of her other teenage brother. The panic and uncertainty brought to mind the summer of 2006, when war broke out between Lebanon and Israel. But the terror she experienced at that time, Mahmoud says, “was nothing compared to what I felt yesterday.”

Mahmoud, who managed to locate her brother and whose apartment sustained only minor damage, is among Beirut’s more fortunate residents. The blast, which Lebanese authorities say took place at a warehouse containing massive quantities of explosive materials at the capital’s port, has left Beirut’s downtown strewn with rubble and twisted rebar. It blew out windows at Beirut’s airport more than five miles from the blast site and rendered 200,000 people homeless according to Beirut’s governor Marwan Abboud, who estimated the cost of the damage at up to $5 billion. After a night during which radio presenters read out the names of the missing and injured as relatives scrambled to locate loved ones, rescue teams were on Wednesday still pulling wounded survivors from the rubble, and retrieving bodies from the water. The death toll could rise still further, with many still missing according to Lebanon’s health minister.

Hassan Ammar—APBeirut’s destroyed port seen after the massive explosion one day earlier, on Aug. 5

Marwan Tahtah—AFP via Getty ImagesWounded people walk through the debris in the heart of Beirut following a twin explosion that shook the capital on August 4, 2020.

The tragic impact of Tuesday’s blast is compounded by the pressure it will exert on Lebanon’s already devastated economy. Amid scrutiny over the government’s culpability, Lebanon’s already volatile political climate is expected to further heat. Beirut’s port, which houses the country’s only grain silos and receives 80% of its imports, was “basically the only still thing still keeping us going,” says Mahmoud. “It’s where the wheat is stored, the medicine is stored, the fuel is stored. Now all of that is gone.”

Lebanon’s economy had already been on the brink of collapse. Beginning last October millions of Lebanese protesters directed their anger at inefficient government services, corruption in Lebanon’s patronage-based political system, interference from foreign states like Iran, and the worst economic crisis since Lebanon emerged from its 15-year long war in 1990.

Government shutdowns in response to the global pandemic halted Lebanon’s protest movement, but they also added to its economic desperation. One in three Lebanese citizens is unemployed, the currency has lost 80% of its value against the dollar since last fall, and mains electricity is only available for a few hours each day. In a statement accompanying a July 28 report that showed that almost a million people in greater Beirut do not have money for sufficient food, Save the Children’s acting Country Director Jad Sakr said: “We will start seeing children dying from hunger before the end of the year.”

Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesLebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab makes a speech on the massive blast in Beirut.

Tuesday’s blast will heap yet more pressure on Lebanon’s embattled government. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hassan Diab said in a statement that 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate, which is typically used as an agricultural fertilizer, had been stored at a port warehouse for six years, “endangering the safety of citizens”. As for why it was there, “you will have to ask customs,” Lebanon’s Interior Minister Mohammed Fehmi told local reporters in Arabic on Tuesday. Asked why fireworks were stored near the ammonium nitrate—a reason local media has provided for how the explosives were ignited—the Director-General of Lebanese Customs Badri Daher shifted blame to Beirut’s port authorities.

Reports have linked the ammonium nitrate to a Moldova-flagged cargo ship called the Rhosus, which was carrying the same quantity of the explosive material to which Diab referred in his statement before Lebanese authorities impounded it in 2014. In a letter sent to Russian journalists in 2014, the ship’s Russian captain said the chemicals onboard effectively made the vessel a “floating bomb.” How and why they remained at the port for six years is still unclear, but Reuters reports that Lebanon’s government has agreed to place all Beirut port officials who have overseen storage and security since 2014 under house arrest.

Patrick Baz—AFP via Getty ImagesAn injured man sits next to a restaurant in the Mar Mikhael neighborhood of Beirut on August 5 in the aftermath of the massive explosion.

Buck-passing has long been a facet of Lebanon’s dysfunctional political system, but it also underscores the fact the Lebanese state does not exercise full control over the port, says Lina Khatib, who leads the Middle East and North Africa program at London-based think tank Chatham House. Hezbollah, a militant Iran-backed political faction close to Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun is known to have a hand in the running of Beirut’s Port.

In addition to being vital to the Lebanese economy, the port has long been a conduit of smuggling for multiple political groups in the country. Hezbollah, which the U.S. and some European countries has designated a terrorist organization, “has in the past used the port to smuggle explosive material into Lebanon for the manufacturing of ammunition,” Khatib says.

There is no evidence that was the intended purpose of the ammonium nitrate said to have caused Tuesday’s blast, and an initial investigation has reportedly found years of inaction and negligence over its storage. Still, Hezbollah’s oversized political role in Lebanon is one factor in the country’s economic crisis, which has been exacerbated by the White House’s maximum pressure campaign. That had made Lebanon’s European backers, such as France, wary of providing financial support in the recent past.

In the wake of the blast, offers of aid have come from countries including Qatar, France, Russia, Iran, Russia, and even Israel, which is still technically at war with Lebanon. France’s President Emmanuele Macron is set to meet Aoun on Thursday. But longer-term, Khatib says, “the only way forward is for the [International Monetary Fund] to support Lebanon.” Talks over a bailout stalled last month and the IMF has conditioned its assistance on Lebanon implementing a range of measures designed to increase transparency and financial accountability. Failing to undertake urgent reforms now, says Khatib, will push Lebanon to become a “failed state.”

For now, civil society groups have stepped in to fill the gaps left by the government. Mahmoud, the Beirut.com editor says that she and her friends set up an online volunteer group that gathers donations to help people struggling to buy food and other essential goods after the blast. An Instagram page called @open_houses_lebanon offers accommodation for the displaced in over 150 locations across Lebanon. On Twitter, others offered vacant rooms under the hashtag #ourhomesareopen.

Still, the immediate focus on helping those most urgently in need will not detract from public anger at the government, says Mahmoud. “People are promising that today we mourn our martyrs and tomorrow we go back to the streets,” she tells TIME. “I hope that’s true.”

[courtneytincher]

Ruling party set to lose seats in Moscow election despite crackdown

Candidates backed by the opposition's tactical voting campaign were set to beat out the ruling party for several Moscow city council seats after independent politicians were barred from running despite weeks of massive protests. Magomet Yandiyev of the party A Just Russia was defeating Valeriya Kasamara, the candidate backed by the ruling United Russia party, in a closely watched downtown district with more than half of the ballots counted on Sunday night, according to data from the public electoral observation headquarters. In addition, the head of the Moscow branch of United Russia and the incumbent head of the city council were reportedly losing to communist challengers Sergei Sevostyanov and Alexander Yefimov in their districts. In a fourth district, a ruling party candidate was trailing independent Darya Besedina, according to observers.  Municipal deputy Ilya Yashin, who was barred from the city council race and kept in jail for 42 days as the protests unfolded, had backed Mr Yandiyev in his district as part of a “smart voting” campaign against United Russia. A Just Russia is one of the “system opposition” parties that rarely challenge the Kremlin line in parliament and other bodies. Speaking to the Telegraph and other media after casting his own ballot, he called on supporters of the embattled liberal opposition to vote “not with your heart, but with your head” to help second-choice candidates edge out ruling party competitors.   “If we can get at least a nominally independent majority, that will give us a chance to control budget spending” and stop Moscow's Kremlin-backed mayor from “treating it like his own wallet,” he said. He also said falsifications could quickly erase any smart voting victories. Vladimir Putin casts his ballot on Sunday at a polling place at the Russian Academy of Sciences Credit:  Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Preliminary results suggested that United Russia would suffer an embarrassing defeat in the eastern region of Khabarovsk, which would become the first province where another party controlled the executive and legislative branches as well as municipal organs. The Liberal Democrat party, in fact a nationalist faction, was poised to take a majority in the city and regional parliaments and send its candidate to the national parliament after winning the governor's seat last year.  United Russia candidates were nonetheless set to win numerous other races, including the acting head of Russia's second city St Petersburg, whose main rival suddenly bowed out a week before the vote. Tens of thousands repeatedly took to the streets of Moscow in July and August after almost two dozen independent candidates were barred from the city council race on technicalities mostly involving the onerous paperwork and supporting signatures required to run.  Rather than compromise, the authorities doubled down. Baton-wielding riot police arrested more than 2,700 people, and five of them received prison sentences last week on trumped up charges of violence against police and participating in unsanctioned protests. With few options left, opposition leader Alexei Navalny launched the controversial “smart voting” campaign for a list of registered candidates, mostly communists, that he believed had the best chances of beating United Russia.  Supporters have said the tactic would chip away at United Russia's monopoly on power, while critics have complained it would keep up the charade of free elections.  President Vladimir Putin dismissed a question about the number of candidates on the ballot while he was voting on Sunday, arguing that “in some countries there are 30, 50 or 100, the quality of their work doesn't change”. More than 10 people were arrested near city hall wearing t-shirts with the faces of jailed protesters. Among them were journalist and municipal deputy Ilya Azar and Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina.  United Russia's brand has become so toxic in the capital that its candidates all ran as nominal independents. But they still enjoyed perks like television time, appearances at public events and get-out-the-vote efforts. There were reports around the country of state employees, students and soldiers being forced to vote en masse, as in past elections.  A particularly blatant example of ballot stuffing in Kazan. A Just Russia & communist observers also found falsifications at several other polling places but in at least one case authorities refused to seal off the urn in question https://t.co/03BLnh5LmUpic.twitter.com/74bKZCQ1Hl— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) September 8, 2019 Electoral observers in other regions reported dozens of violations including blatant ballot stuffing captured on video. A poll at a demonstration last week suggested that up to two-thirds of protesters agreed with the “smart voting” tactic.  “United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves. We're all tired of them. We can't really do anything, but at least we can do this,” architect and Yashin supporter Tatyana Krasheninnikova said after voting for Mr Yandiyev. “We have lots of information about their real estate …  They got rich at the city's expense. The less people like this on the city council, the better.” Student Daniil Azarkevich said he would instead spoil his ballot in a “small protest” since “it's already decided who will win”.  The election monitoring center during the 2019 Moscow City Duma election Credit: TASS At a polling place in an outer district of Moscow, pensioner Yulia Gusarova said she had voted for United Russia municipal deputy Svetlana Volovets because the district had a “lots of factories, it's very active, and she supports all this”. But for many, anger with the authorities will continue to build regardless of the election results, Mr Yashin told the Telegraph at a polling place where a belly dancer with a peacock was helping to get out the vote. “It's not about the Moscow city council, it's about injustice,” he said. “People sense injustice, they understand that they are being humiliated and their opinion is being ignored, and it's not especially important what becomes the immediate reason for the protests.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Candidates backed by the opposition's tactical voting campaign were set to beat out the ruling party for several Moscow city council seats after independent politicians were barred from running despite weeks of massive protests. Magomet Yandiyev of the party A Just Russia was defeating Valeriya Kasamara, the candidate backed by the ruling United Russia party, in a closely watched downtown district with more than half of the ballots counted on Sunday night, according to data from the public electoral observation headquarters. In addition, the head of the Moscow branch of United Russia and the incumbent head of the city council were reportedly losing to communist challengers Sergei Sevostyanov and Alexander Yefimov in their districts. In a fourth district, a ruling party candidate was trailing independent Darya Besedina, according to observers.  Municipal deputy Ilya Yashin, who was barred from the city council race and kept in jail for 42 days as the protests unfolded, had backed Mr Yandiyev in his district as part of a “smart voting” campaign against United Russia. A Just Russia is one of the “system opposition” parties that rarely challenge the Kremlin line in parliament and other bodies. Speaking to the Telegraph and other media after casting his own ballot, he called on supporters of the embattled liberal opposition to vote “not with your heart, but with your head” to help second-choice candidates edge out ruling party competitors.   “If we can get at least a nominally independent majority, that will give us a chance to control budget spending” and stop Moscow's Kremlin-backed mayor from “treating it like his own wallet,” he said. He also said falsifications could quickly erase any smart voting victories. Vladimir Putin casts his ballot on Sunday at a polling place at the Russian Academy of Sciences Credit:  Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Preliminary results suggested that United Russia would suffer an embarrassing defeat in the eastern region of Khabarovsk, which would become the first province where another party controlled the executive and legislative branches as well as municipal organs. The Liberal Democrat party, in fact a nationalist faction, was poised to take a majority in the city and regional parliaments and send its candidate to the national parliament after winning the governor's seat last year.  United Russia candidates were nonetheless set to win numerous other races, including the acting head of Russia's second city St Petersburg, whose main rival suddenly bowed out a week before the vote. Tens of thousands repeatedly took to the streets of Moscow in July and August after almost two dozen independent candidates were barred from the city council race on technicalities mostly involving the onerous paperwork and supporting signatures required to run.  Rather than compromise, the authorities doubled down. Baton-wielding riot police arrested more than 2,700 people, and five of them received prison sentences last week on trumped up charges of violence against police and participating in unsanctioned protests. With few options left, opposition leader Alexei Navalny launched the controversial “smart voting” campaign for a list of registered candidates, mostly communists, that he believed had the best chances of beating United Russia.  Supporters have said the tactic would chip away at United Russia's monopoly on power, while critics have complained it would keep up the charade of free elections.  President Vladimir Putin dismissed a question about the number of candidates on the ballot while he was voting on Sunday, arguing that “in some countries there are 30, 50 or 100, the quality of their work doesn't change”. More than 10 people were arrested near city hall wearing t-shirts with the faces of jailed protesters. Among them were journalist and municipal deputy Ilya Azar and Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina.  United Russia's brand has become so toxic in the capital that its candidates all ran as nominal independents. But they still enjoyed perks like television time, appearances at public events and get-out-the-vote efforts. There were reports around the country of state employees, students and soldiers being forced to vote en masse, as in past elections.  A particularly blatant example of ballot stuffing in Kazan. A Just Russia & communist observers also found falsifications at several other polling places but in at least one case authorities refused to seal off the urn in question https://t.co/03BLnh5LmUpic.twitter.com/74bKZCQ1Hl— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) September 8, 2019 Electoral observers in other regions reported dozens of violations including blatant ballot stuffing captured on video. A poll at a demonstration last week suggested that up to two-thirds of protesters agreed with the “smart voting” tactic.  “United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves. We're all tired of them. We can't really do anything, but at least we can do this,” architect and Yashin supporter Tatyana Krasheninnikova said after voting for Mr Yandiyev. “We have lots of information about their real estate …  They got rich at the city's expense. The less people like this on the city council, the better.” Student Daniil Azarkevich said he would instead spoil his ballot in a “small protest” since “it's already decided who will win”.  The election monitoring center during the 2019 Moscow City Duma election Credit: TASS At a polling place in an outer district of Moscow, pensioner Yulia Gusarova said she had voted for United Russia municipal deputy Svetlana Volovets because the district had a “lots of factories, it's very active, and she supports all this”. But for many, anger with the authorities will continue to build regardless of the election results, Mr Yashin told the Telegraph at a polling place where a belly dancer with a peacock was helping to get out the vote. “It's not about the Moscow city council, it's about injustice,” he said. “People sense injustice, they understand that they are being humiliated and their opinion is being ignored, and it's not especially important what becomes the immediate reason for the protests.”

September 08, 2019 at 10:19PM via IFTTT

[nahret]

For Honor

This is where it all started. Before I discovered the gods from the stars, my first love in this newly discovered world of otome games were the brave men of the Shinsengumi, a group of samurai in 19th century Kyoto. It’s a funny thing how I got there. Apparently, my browser had realized that I had started to learn Japanese, and in a well-targeted add, it showed me the title picture of this particular set of stories. I have to say, I do love it when the algorithm gets stuff right. And here we are, one year and countless stories later, and yet I’ve never written about the Shinsengumi.

The truth is, I needed a break. After reading a few of the stories, I was desperate for something more frivolous, more light-hearted. The stories of the Shinsengumi are good. They are very good. But because of their very nature, they have a capacity for tragedy unmatched by titles set in the modern world, for example. Death is possible every time the men set foot outside the compound; and when they come back alive, there’s still no guarantee that they will be healthy in body and mind. If, like me, you get emotionally invested in characters, that really takes a toll.

But it’s been a year, and I thought I’d pay a visit to my favorite samurai (I know, they are technically ronin, themselves). Maybe with some light-hearted holiday fluff? But first, obviously, I owe you an introduction.

What’s the Story?

Kyoto, 1863.

After the untimely death of her father, a doctor, the MC takes over running his clinic. While not fully trained, she is able to make simple remedies, using her father’s notes and journals for guidance. One day, a young man she’s never seen before stops by the clinic to have a minor wound treated. Overhearing the patients in the waiting room talking about a band of ronin who are supposedly in town, the man advises the MC to be careful “around those wolves”, lest she be devoured. When she chides him, he apologizes for his thoughtless words and is on his way.

A stranger at the clinic…

A chance encounter in the streets…

Are we surrounded by wolves?

That very same evening, the MC comes across an errand boy being accosted by just such a ronin. Being who she is, she is ready to rush into the situation, even though the ronin is armed. Fortunately, a casually dressed stranger steps in and defeats the ronin. As he runs for his life, the ronin shouts something about wolves. Could this stranger be one of the wolves the young man at the clinic mentioned?

When the MC tells her friend Oryo what happened, and how she was saved by a “wolf”, Oryo is shocked. She tells the MC that, of all the ronin in the area, those wolves are the worst ones. They dress in pale blue coats with a jagged white pattern on their sleeves, and they apparently loot and pillage their way through town – or so she heard from a customer. Another man standing nearby, reassures the women: those wolves will soon be expunged from this world; peace will come once again.

That night, as the MC is poring over her father’s books, several ronin break into the clinic. They are looking for a place to hide, since they are being pursued. Despite blowing out the candles, it is not long before the men who are after them find them. They are all wearing sky blue coats with a white, jagged pattern on their sleeves… As the newcomers fight the ronin in the MC’s house, a fire breaks out. The MC, who had made it outside, runs back into the flames to save her father’s medical journals. As she loses consciousness, she feels that she is lifted from the ground.

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The MC comes to in an unfamiliar room. Beside her, a man is sitting, apparently watching over her. He gives her a change of clothes, and one of her father’s journals that he was able to save from the blaze. It is thus that she is formally introduced to the men in the blue coats: they are the Shinsengumi, an elite police squad under the patronage of the Aizu clan, come from distant Edo to provide protection to the shogunate, and root out the lawless ronin that have been terrorizing the city. Since her house was burnt to the ground by the ronin, Kondo, the commander of the Shinsengumi, asks the MC to stay with them. She has nowhere else to go, and they could use the assistance of a fledgling doctor. Also, the Chōshū – the ronin sowing terror in the city – know her face, so, it turns out, it is actually in her best interest to remain under the protection of the wolves…

Left to right, top to bottom: Hijikata Toshizo, Okita Soji, Harada Sanosuke, Saito Hajime, Kondo Isami, Takasugi Shinsaku

The Guys

Hijikata Toshizō, also known as “the Demon Deputy” is a harsh man. As Kondo’s second in command, he supervises the Shinsengumi with iron discipline. There is, however, a softer side to him, for he likes to gaze at the moon and write poetry.

Okita Sōji, renowned swordsman and a bit of an ass, is as fierce in battle as he is irreverent outside of it. He is charming and surprisingly good with children, who love hanging out with him. He generally gets on well with people. It’s a good thing they don’t know he comes home every night, drenched in blood.

Harada Sanosuke is a tall, forbidding, and taciturn young man. He wants nothing to do with weaklings, and by extension, with women, since they are weak. His opinion on the latter is, as we can imagine, subject to change. So much so, that he puts his life on the line to save the MC.

Saitō Hajime is one of the best swordsmen in existence, which is notable especially since he is left-handed. He is also a blank canvas, a man with no memory of who he was before he was found by the Shinsengumi. What we do know is that he cannot cook to save his life.

Kondō Isami, the commander of the Shinsengumi, is an honorable, benevolent, and warm person. Nothing is more important to him than the well-being of his men, and of the citizens of the capital who have been entrusted to him.

Takasugi Shinsaku is a traitor. That is to say, he is not one of the Shinsengumi, but of the opposing Chōshū. All I know is that he is a very handsome man, as is commented upon in almost every route, but he is also the enemy, and I never considered playing his story.

Why would I date you?

You mean, apart from the fact that they are samurai? There needs to be an additional reason? Have you no honor? Okay then, how about this: these characters are men that actually existed. Yes, indeed, the Shinsengumi were real.

History

Since European wars have a way of spilling all over the world, an incident between England and the Netherlands in which Japan was collateral damage, led the Tokugawa shogunate to double down on its policy of “Sakoku”, closed country, which prohibited foreigners from stepping foot on Japanese land. The strictest application, which also sought to expel foreigners from Japan, remained active until 1842.

Friction arose between factions of differing philosophy regarding the usefulness of employing technology and knowledge gained from the limited exposure to foreigners the Japanese had had so far. Some argued that only traditional Japanese methods should be employed to stave off increasing foreign influence, others felt it necessary to “control the barbarians with their own methods”. In the end, it was again the white people who forced Japan’s hand, this time in the person of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who simply threatened the Japanese with violence if they did not open up to trade.

Japanese depiction of Perry’s ship. Looks benevolent.

The results were political and economic instability. The shogunate was weakened after having had to concede in the treaties with the Americans and the Russians, which came soon after. Since the exchange rate between gold and silver in Japan was “cheaper” than in the European-controlled world, foreigners bought gold in massive amounts in Japan, thus destroying the Japanese currency and its economy. As is also the norm, the foreigners brought a heretofore unknown disease with them. Cholera wiped out several hundred thousand people.

Finally, in 1863, an Imperial Order was issued to “expel barbarians”. And while the Emperor was the head of government, of sorts, his role was understood at the time as ceremonial, much as it is today. Therefore, an order issued by the Emperor that contradicted the policy of the shogunate was… difficult. The Chōshū clan, however, immediately began to carry out the order, in open defiance of the Tokugawa shogunate. After a failed attempt by the Chōshū to restore Imperial order over the shogunate, the Tokugawa, Aizu, and Satsuma clans expelled the Chōshū from the palace.

This is when the Tokugawa gathered an elite force to patrol the capital and protect the interests of the shogunate against the Chōshū incursions. After a predecessor of the group fell apart, the Shinsengumi were formed. They then also requested permission to patrol the streets of Kyoto from the Aizu, a request which was granted.

The real Hijikata Toshizō

The Serizawa faction of the Shinsengumi, however, was more disruptive than beneficial to the capital, which is why the Aizu ordered Kondo to eliminate Serizawa and his officers. Yamanami Keisuke and Hijikata Toshizo ordered one of Serizawa’s men to commit seppuku for breaking regulations. Serizawa himself was assasinated by a small force led by Hijikata. This left Kondo as the leader of the Shinsengumi.

The showdown in the main stories of our fictional Shinsengumi is the real-life Ikedaya Incident: there, the Shinsengumi killed a group of ronin in the employ of the Chōshū, who had apparently planned to kidnap the daimyo of the Aizu clan, and set fire to Kyoto.

Kondō Isami, born in 1834, was the youngest of four siblings. The son of a farmer, he was adopted by the third generation master of the Tennen Rishin-ryū, Kondō Shūsuke, who had seen him train in his dojo. He became the fourth generation master, and took over the running of the Shieikan (the main dojo). It is there that he first met Hijikata. Kondō was known to be an avid reader and scholar. He was apprehended by Imperial forces in April 1868, and was executed by beheading on May 17th, 1868. His head was publicly displayed on a pike.

The son of a well-to-do farmer, Hijikata Toshizō was born in 1835, the youngest of ten children. It is said that he was uncommonly tall compared to the average male at the time, and he was handsome. It seems that he was also a bit of a spoiled brat when he was young. He helped in the family business of selling their Ishida sanyaku, a herbal remedy for treating bruises and broken bones. Through his brother-in-law, he was introduced to Kondō and the Shieikan. He never fully mastered the Tennen Rishin-ryū, but instead developed the “Shinsengumi-Kenjutsu” fighting style. In the final battle of the Boshin War, Hijikata gave his page his katana, a photo of himself, a letter, a few strands of his hair, and a death poem, to be taken to his brother in Hino: “Though my body may decay on the island of Ezo, my spirit guards my lord in the East.” On June 20th, 1869, he died by a gunshot wound sustained while leading his men into battle.

Okita Sōji‘s older sister Mitsu was adopted by Kondō Shūsuke, so that she could marry the adopted son of the Okita family. This is, of course, the same man who had adopted Kondō Isami. Okita started training at the Shieikan at the age of nine. He was unusually gifted, and had mastered all the techniques by age 18. He was born in 1842 or 1844, which made him one of the youngest recruits of the Shinsengumi. He is described as charming and polite, but also as strict as an instructor of kenjutsu for his students. He was appointed by Kondō to become the fifth generation master of the Tennen Rishin-ryū. Okita developed a signature technique, called “Mumyo-ken”, which could attack the opponent’s neck, left shoulder, and right shoulder in one motion. Okita was hospitalized during the Boshin War, and when the shogunate forces retreated, he stayed behind in Edo in the care of his sister Mitsu. He died of tuberculosis on July 19th, 1868, at the supposed age of 25.

Nihonbashi bridge in Edo

Harada Sanosuke was born in 1840 into a family of chūgen: better than commoners, but less than samurai. He was trained in the  Hōzōin-ryū style, using a spear as a weapon, rather than a sword. Once, he was taunted by a higher-ranking retainer of the Matsuyama clan that, given his low social class, he didn’t even know how to properly commit seppuku. Upon which he immediately drew his sword and attempted to actually do it. The wound, however, was shallow, and Harada survived. After leaving the Matsuyama’s service, he went to Edo to train in Kondō’s Shieikan.Having left the Shinsengumi after the defeat in the Battle of Kōshū-Katsunuma, he returned to Edo, where he fought with the Shōgitai, who also sided with the Tokugawa shogunate, in the Battle of Ueno. He was severely wounded by enemy gunfire, and died two days later, on July 6th, 1868. There is, however, an interesting rumor, that Harada did not die, but was able to flee to China, where he then became the leader of a gang of bandits on horse-back. He is also rumored to be the mysterious old man who came to the aid of the Imperial Forces in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894/5…

Little is known about the early years of Saitō Hajime. His birthname was Yamaguchi Hajime, and his father was a foot soldier in the employ of a samurai in Edo. Saitō left Edo after accidentally killing a hatamoto (a ronin in the direct employ of the Tokugawa shogunate). He was of an age with Okita when he joined the Shinsengumi, making him one of the youngest in their ranks. Saitō Hajime was, even in real life, the dark, mysterious kind, in that he spoke sparingly. He was also known for his immaculate appearance and exemplary posture, typically sitting in the formal seiza position. Believed killed in the Battle of Nyorai-dō, Saitō managed to escape alive and rejoin the ranks of the Aizu. However, when Aizuwakamatsu Castle fell, he, along with other Aizu soldiers, was held as a prisoner of war. The surviving Aizu traveled to Tonami, the new domain of the Matsudaira clan of Aizu, and Saitō with them. In 1874, he returned to Edo, which in 1868 had been renamed “Tokyo”. There, he began working for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. In a twist of fate, he fought, in this capacity, on the side of the Imperial Army against the Satsuma Rebellion*, former allies of the Aizu. In 1875, he assisted in setting up a memorial for Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō. Saitō Hajime died in 1915, at the age of 72 years, in his living room, while sitting in perfectly straight seiza posture.

Takasugi Shinsaku was born in 1839 in Chōshū Domain, present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture. He was a samurai and a brilliant military tactician. In 1862, Takasugi went on a reconnaissance mission to China, to observe the effect of western influence on the country. Shocked by what he saw, he returned to Japan determined to avoid the fate of colonization. He formed the revolutionary shotai, a militia comprised of not just samurai, but people of all classes. Apparently, everybody from farmers and merchants to sumo-wrestlers and priests could (and did) enlist. He also provided this new militia with western weapons and tactics, thus outwitting the traditional Tokugawa forces. In the end, his approach proved successful: the Tokugawa shogunate fell in 1868, and the Meiji Restoration restored (hence the name) the Emperor to power. Takasugi, however, did not live to see the day; he died in May 1867 of tuberculosis.

* The Satsuma Rebellion was the last stand of samurai Saigō Takamori. The movie “The Last Samurai”, featuring Ken Watanabe and Tom Cruise, tells his story.

What’s with the history lesson?

What? Like this isn’t interesting? I guess not everybody gets a kick out of history, huh. What I’m quite impressed with, though, is how some of the corner-stones of the real Shinsengumi’s peculiarities were worked into the stories here. I really appreciate that, because research has clearly been done, and the stories are better for it. No, that doesn’t mean they’re historically accurate. That wouldn’t be very… romantic. But the characters are recognizable from their templates.

I choose you!

I’ve read the main stories of Hijikata, Okita, Saito, and Harada. And yes, we call them by their family names. Kondo was too pure for my tastes, and indeed, my friend The Librarian found his story to be rather boring. Don’t get me wrong, he is a very good man, but the vibe is more “guardian” than “lover”, I guess. All the stories are really intense, as the threat of death constantly hangs over the men. Especially Saito practically seeks it out. If you’re looking for gut-wrenching, you’ve come to the right place.

A word on our MC: I like her. As opposed to her modern-day counterparts, this girl is actually a virgin, so all the blushing has a place. What she also is, though, is courageous, and capable. She learned medicine from her father, and continued his clinic on her own after his death. She is not squeamish around blood (it’s just that sometimes, there’s a bit much of it). Actually, she is not squeamish in general. After initially being intimidated, she finds her place among those “brutes”, as Kondo calls them.

This is still one of my favorite titles. Even if it’s a bit much for my poor heart…

Era of Samurai: Code of Love A historical drama about samurai who were actually people in real life. Includes a history lesson. You're welcome. For Honor This is where it all started. Before I discovered the gods from the stars…

[flowing-paint]

Mercs baby!

You know those days you keep preparing for and then they turn out even better than what you expected? Yesterday was one of them. But let's rewind this a little bit: yesterday I went to my friend's place to play some Mercs. It was his first time and I was so happy to see he totally had a blast! Wanna know more?

I know I've said this many times but a friend of mine was willing to get into tabletop wargaming and I offered him a Mercs demo game. This is basically the reason why I was holding back my Warhammer painting these days: I was preparing my USCR faction to be able to field two complete forces and trying to crank out as many terrain pieces I could. As it turns out I went a little short on the second goal but I was able to walk into my friend's house with two usable squads. It was USCR vs Kemvar.

USCR

Commissar

Heavy

Engineer

Behemoth

Gunner

KEMVAR

Leader

Heavy

Demo

Sniper

Shock

Assassin

Even though we didn't dive straight into the game (I'll explain why at the end of the post) we were both really excited to try Mercs because it's one of the best skirmish games to teach wargaming to newcomers: models look great, rules are easy to digest and the game plays super fast.

As you can see from the USCR heavy in the pictures above, the models are dynamic and full of detail. They're slightly hard to tackle if you are a beginner but the game provides some solid fun which is a good motivation.

Batrep. Sort of.

We decided to randomly assign the factions: I ended up with the USCR and my friend took Kemvar so I finally got a chance to see why a lot of people hate them. We also decided to place all the terrain I brought alternating back and forth but we ended up with a first game table setup which was not super optimal. The scenario: Kemvar attacking a USCR fueling station located in the middle of the table. Here you can see a couple of poor pictures.

We had containers, ammo boxes, and some road barricades but we felt the field was a little bit too open. I should have worked harder! Unfortunately, we didn’t have a nice gaming mat so, let’s say we were in the middle of the desert.

Anyways, the game started as usual with the Kemvar moving super fast forward and the USCR spraying them with relentless fire. God, that mimetic armors are good... the first turns USCR were just cycling through ammo clips with no tangible result while the Kemvars were totally controlling the field. Lucky dice rolls were helping but that sheer supremacy was fun to watch. Even from the USCR side. The Kemvar sniper was systematically breaking USCR armors but the bullets were too weak to actually do any good.

Then the wind changed: you know? When they're in active camo, those chameleons are hard to hit but when you do damage their armor they start falling like autumn leaves. It happened when the USCR heavy climbed on a shipping container and started to unleash a storm from elevated ground on the enemies with his lightning cannons. A couple of missed dice rolls for the Kemvars and the battle was over in two turns. The Kemvar leader, last of his men still standing, decided to flee leaving the USCR with a couple of dead bodies and some pretty badly wounded soldiers but still holding control of the fuel station. USCR wins.

Second Wave

As the first game was more of a learning session we decided to go on with another battle in the same setting, this time playing with the following rules/background:

The Kemvar leader went back and gathered a new squad to try again to destroy the fueling station. This time is a suicide mission: conquer the station or blow it up.

Kemvar must reverse the fueling station pump direction and blow it up.

USCR must stop them at all costs.

Maximum of 5 turns. At the end of the 5th turn, the winner will be determined depending on the current pump flow direction.

The Kemvar jumped into action, immediately trying to leverage their superior movement skills. With the USCR slowly advancing from the distance in their clumsy power armors, the Kemvar raiders managed to reverse the pump flow on the second turn. Only three turns to hold before the mission completion. The USCR group decided to split: a back support team with the Behemoth, the Commissar, and the heavy with some massive suppression fire actively limiting enemy’s movement and a fast moving front assault team consisting of the Engineer and the Gunner. With the Engineer engaged in a sustained fight with the Assassin first and the Shock later, the Gunner was free to get to the pump control console and reestablish the proper settings. Unfortunately, the USCR heavy miscalculated his line of sight when attacking an already badly wounded Shock and the Gunner fell under friendly fire that left him surrounded by enemies in a broken armor. It was the last turn when the Kemvar leader finally made his run to the console claiming his revenge for all the fallen Kemvar comrades. The Gunner was there, alone, under friendly and enemy fire, only a few centimeters away from that damn button, swearing while desperately trying to crawl to the console when a giant fireball erupted from the fuel tank, blowing away all that was left of the two groups. Kemvar wins.

Wrap up

We played two games and we had some real fun. There was strategy, last-second game-changing moves and all the good tactical aspects Mercs is known for. Even during the learning first game, it was fun to see how easy this game is to pick up. I have to admit that my friend is a hardcore boardgamer with an eye for miniature-rich ones but still, after two or three turns we had all rules nailed down. We did not use any advanced rule though. No, check that: I used some bounding because those Russians are super-slow movers but that’s it.

Being the first time I played with the USCR I can say that they look really cool but as far as strategy goes, they’re only good at spraying the enemy with bullets. They are slow movers and even though their armor is pretty thick (they almost don’t get any wound) it breaks up really easily. The Behemoth and the Heavy have surprisingly high TN so they’re not super good at killing foes in cover. I was hitting on 9s and 10s for the whole game even from elevated position. They do grant you some good zone control because of their scary weapons though. The Gunner and the Engineer were surprisingly good at moving and shooting with the Engineer also able to get double activation once. The two of them almost won the second encounter.

The Kemvar, on the other hand, showcased all the faction strengths: they move really fast, they hit easily (even though with low strength) and they are super hard to hit when the armor is working. The Sniper always hit because of her Aim keyword but with a strength 1 bullet, she is just good at breaking armors. In the first game, she managed to pin down three of the USCR but they were in good positions for shooting anyway and the final result showed how useless the Sniper was. I don’t even need to comment on the notorious lethal power of the Assassin and the Shock: they were tearing apart USCR power armors barehanded. The shock destroyed the Commissar in two rounds by making him flying around and bouncing him on a shipping container.

Final thoughts

If you can get your hands on some Mercs factions, do it. The game is cheap, fun and easy to learn/teach and I think it’s every wargaming lover duty to spread this as much as possible. Of course, because of the factions limitations, it may not offer the same tactical depth other games show but with proper terrain selection and deployment together with balanced faction choices, you are pretty much set up for endless fun.

Last point: why didn’t we jump immediately into the game? Cause we bought Warhammer 40k Dark Imperium starter set and we were unboxing. We split the contents. I got some Nurgle love... Of course, you’re all gonna hear more on this....

.... game on!

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

UN chief warns China, US to avoid Cold War (AP) Warning of a potential new Cold War, the head of the United Nations implored China and the United States to repair their “completely dysfunctional” relationship before problems between the two large and deeply influential countries spill over even further into the rest of the planet. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke to The Associated Press this weekend ahead of this week’s annual United Nations gathering of world leaders. Guterres said the world’s two major economic powers should be cooperating on climate and negotiating more robustly on trade and technology even given persisting political fissures about human rights, economics, online security and sovereignty in the South China Sea. “Unfortunately, today we only have confrontation,” Guterres said.

Canada votes in pandemic election that could cost Trudeau (AP) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gambled on an early election in a bid to win a majority of seats in Parliament, but now faces the threat of being knocked from power in Canada’s election on Monday. Polls indicate Trudeau’s Liberal Party is in a tight race with the rival Conservatives: It will likely win the most seats in Parliament, but still fail to get a majority, forcing it to rely on an opposition party to pass legislation. “Trudeau made an incredibly stupid error in judgement,” said Robert Bothwell, a professor of Canadian history and international relations at the University of Toronto. Trudeau entered the election leading a stable minority government that wasn’t under threat of being toppled.

Biden easing foreign travel restrictions, requiring vaccines (AP) President Joe Biden will ease foreign travel restrictions into the U.S. beginning in November, when his administration will require all foreign nationals flying into the country to be fully vaccinated. All foreign travelers flying to the U.S. will need to demonstrate proof of vaccination before boarding, as well as proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within three days of flight, said White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients, who announced the new policy on Monday. Biden will also tighten testing rules for unvaccinated American citizens, who will need to be tested within a day before returning to the U.S., as well as after they arrive home. Fully vaccinated passengers will not be required to quarantine, Zeints said. The new policy replaces a patchwork of travel restrictions first instituted by President Donald Trump last year and tightened by Biden earlier this year that restrict travel by non-citizens who have in the prior 14 days been in the United Kingdom, European Union, China, India, Iran, Republic of Ireland, Brazil and South Africa.

Recall vote highlights California’s geopolitical divisions (AP) The California recall election was a blowout win for Gov. Gavin Newsom that reinforced the state’s political divisions: The Democratic governor won big support in coastal areas and urban centers, while the rural north and agricultural inland, with far fewer voters, largely wanted him gone. “It’s almost like two states,” Menlo College political scientist Melissa Michelson said. Though California is a liberal stronghold where Democrats hold every statewide office and have two-thirds majorities in the Legislature, it is also home to deeply conservative areas. Those residents have long felt alienated from Sacramento, where Democrats have been in full control for more than a decade. A conservative movement in far Northern California has for years sought to break away and create its own state to better reflect the area’s political sensitivities.

US launches mass expulsion of Haitian migrants from Texas (AP) The U.S. is flying Haitians camped in a Texas border town back to their homeland and blocking others from crossing the border from Mexico in a massive show of force that signals the beginning of what could be one of America’s swiftest, large-scale expulsions of migrants or refugees in decades. More than 320 migrants arrived in Port-au-Prince on three flights Sunday, and Haiti said six flights were expected Tuesday. In all, U.S. authorities moved to expel many of the more 12,000 migrants camped around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after crossing from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. The U.S. plans to begin seven expulsion flights daily on Wednesday, four to Port-au-Prince and three to Cap-Haitien, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Madrid street party (Reuters) Roughly 25,000 Spaniards joined in an illegal mass drinking party on the streets of Madrid on Friday, which took police until 7 a.m. the following day to break up. The huge outdoor parties, known as “macro-botellon,” have been resisted by Spanish authorities for years, and have taken on renewed significance as coronavirus restrictions limit public interactions. Police may find quieter streets next weekend as closing times for Madrid’s bars and clubs are finally extended to 6 a.m. from their previous 2 a.m. limits.

Thousands flee as lava spewing from volcano on Spain’s La Palma island destroys houses (Reuters) Authorities have evacuated about 5,000 people from villages in the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma as lava spews from an erupting volcano, local officials said. The 15-meter high lava flow has already swallowed 20 houses in the village of El Paso and sections of roads, Mayor Sergio Rodriguez told TVE radio station on Monday morning. Since erupting on Sunday afternoon, the volcano has shot lava up hundreds meters into the air and poured flows of molten rock towards the Atlantic Ocean over a sparsely populated area of La Palma, the most northwestern island in the Canaries archipelago. La Palma had been on high alert after more than 22,000 tremors were reported in the space of a week in Cumbre Vieja, which belongs to a chain of volcanoes that last had a major eruption in 1971 and is one of the most active volcanic regions in the Canaries.

Shooting at Russian university leaves at least 6 dead, 24 injured (Washington Post)  At least six people were killed and 24 were wounded after a gunman opened fire at a university in the northwestern Russian city of Perm, the government in the region said Monday. President Vladimir Putin called the shooting at Perm State University “a tremendous tragedy, not only for the families who lost their children, but for the entire country.” Such a rampage, which sent students hurling themselves from windows in a bid to escape the gunfire, is extremely rare for Russia, which has little experience of the kind of mass shootings routinely seen in the United States. Russia’s Investigative Committee, a law enforcement agency, said the attacker was a student who had purchased a hunting rifle in May. The agency said he had been apprehended and is in the hospital for treatment of wounds suffered while resisting arrest. Russia has strict laws on civilian gun ownership and requires people to pass psychological exams before obtaining a license for hunting and sport firearms.

Evergrande debts (NYT) Once China’s most prolific property developer, Evergrande has become the country’s most indebted company. It owes money to lenders, suppliers and foreign investors. It owes unfinished apartments to home buyers and has racked up more than $300 billion in unpaid bills. Regulators fear that the collapse of a company Evergrande’s size would send tremors through the entire Chinese financial system. Yet so far, Beijing has not stepped in with a bailout, having promised to teach debt-saddled corporate giants a lesson. Evergrande is on the hook to buyers for nearly 1.6 million apartments, according to one estimate, and it may owe money to tens of thousands of its own workers. As Beijing remains relatively quiet about the company’s future, those who are owed cash say they are growing impatient.

Pacquiao for president? (Foreign Policy) Manny Pacquiao, the former professional boxer and Philippine senator, has said he would run for president in next year’s election, accepting the nomination put forward by a faction of the ruling PDP-Laban party. His decision comes after Christopher “Bong” Go rejected a presidential nomination from a rival PDP-Laban faction earlier this month, although his running mate, President Rodrigo Duterte, accepted the nomination for vice president. If electoral authorities recognize Pacquiao’s nomination, he may still face competition from Sara Duterte-Carpio, the mayor of Davao and daughter of the president. Duterte-Carpio has topped recent opinion polls but has been cagey about her plans for higher office, saying last week that she would run for another term as Davao mayor in 2022.

Talibanning Women From Work (Guardian, BBC) In mid-August, with American troops still present, the Taliban vowed to respect women’s rights, forgive those who fought against them, and ensure that Afghanistan won’t become a haven for terrorists. Zabihullah Mujahid, long-time Taliban spokesman, gave his first ever public news conference, saying leaders had encouraged women to return to work and girls to return to school. He promised women would retain their rights, but qualified that as being “within the framework of Islamic law”—specifically, Sharia law. To no one’s surprise, it was just ‘happy talk’ meant to allay suspicions of world powers and the fears of Afghans. Soon there were ample reports of Taliban soldiers going house to house, searching for “traitors” and executing them. Working women were told to stay home and schools were shut down, although it was labeled a temporary security measure. In Kandahar, women bank tellers were forced out of their jobs at gunpoint. In the next days and weeks the group’s new government issued decrees restricting more rights of girls and women. Female students in middle and high schools were told they couldn’t return to classes, although boys were allowed to. Female university students were informed studies would now take place in gender-segregated settings, and they must abide by a strict Islamic dress code. Other crippling measures from when the Taliban ruled in the 1990s surfaced unofficially, including a requirement that Afghan women have a male guardian accompany them in any public place. On Friday, female employees in Kabul city government were told they couldn’t return to work if their job could be performed by men, meaning almost 1,000 women who were part of the city’s workforce of nearly 3,000 lost their jobs. The Taliban shut down the Women’s Affairs Ministry, replacing it with a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” tasked with enforcing Islamic law.

The Taliban vs. ISIS (Washington Post) After years of waging a holy war to overthrow the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have struggled to adjust to their new day job: the mundane task of securing a city. “All of my men, they love jihad and fighting. So when they came to Kabul they didn’t feel comfortable. There isn’t any fighting here anymore,” Taliban commander Abdulrahman Nifiz told The Post. But the Taliban still faces a violent foe: the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, which claimed responsibility Sunday for a series of blasts over the weekend in the country’s east that reportedly killed several people and injured tens more. The improvised explosive devices were set off Saturday and Sunday around the city of Jalalabad, known as a stronghold for the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K).

Troll Farms (MIT Technology Review) A report produced by a Facebook employee details the enormous impact troll farms—that is, organized networks designed to spread misinformation—have on the social network. The October 2019 report identified that the most popular pages for Christians and Black Americans were, in fact, operated out of Kosovo and Macedonia. As of October 2019, 15,000 Facebook pages with a predominantly American audience were operated out of those countries, reaching 140 million U.S. users every month. Troll farms operated the fifth-largest women’s page, the second-largest Native American page, 10 of the top 15 African-American interest pages, and every single one of the 15 top pages targeting Christian Americans.

[stoweboyd]

Some Predictions, 2017

I’ve been late to the prediction game, but I will riff on some ideas inspired by recent events. Some of these are a bit fabulous, but bear with me: what is coming could wind up being much more strange than these vignettes. (Numbered but not ordered in any particular way.)

Work chat will continue to dominate the market for enterprise ‘collaboration’, and AI-based ‘team members’ with deep learning skill sets will become commonplace, building on chatbot models of interaction but assuming larger roles in project management, development, marketing, and HR. Slack is acquired by Amazon for $35 billion, and loosely integrated into AWS.

The hottest business trend of 2017 will be AI-based 'driverless management’, displacing Holocracy and other management ‘business operating systems’ fads. AI will play a significantly larger role in areas that human cognitive biases are most problematic, like hiring and promotion, decision support, and ensuring diversity, equality, and well-being in the workplace. (Daemon (via Daniel Saurez) meets the workplace.) Several unknown start-ups will lead this new exploding sector.

Following Trump’s proposed withdrawal of US supporting NATO troops in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin’s Russia will occupy some part of the Baltics, like the Latgale region of Latvia, which is ~40% ethnic Russian. Mike Pence resigns as Vice President following major disagreements with Trump on the Baltics and NATO. Trump nominates Elaine Chao as Vice President, his Secretary of Transportation, and she is appointed in October, the first woman and first Asian American to serve in that role.

North Korea will fire a rocket that hits Kodiak Island in Alaska, although it carries only a conventional warhead. Kim Jong-un says the rocket was supposed to have crashed in the ocean before landfall, but many believe it was on track to hit Anchorage. 

Trump raises massive trade barriers to Chinese goods, sparking a trade war that damages both countries’ economies. This is in part because of an inability to get China to -- in effect -- take control of North Korea, but also as part of an attempt by US and European companies to make China’s markets more open: a second Opium War. 

Britain begins that actual process of Brexit in mid 2017, leading Scotland to a referendum in favor of leaving the UK and applying to the EU for membership.

The US Congress will pass legislation in early 2017 to repeal Obamacare, but defers any implementation until 2018 at the earliest, because they can’t agree on how it will be replaced or by what approach. Trump proposes a single payer system as a companion to a radical restructuring of the tax code, as he had hinted in his campaign, and falls into open discord with the establishment wing of the GOP. 

Driverless car fleets are rolled out by various car companies (Ford, Chrysler, Tesla, etc.) and car hailing platforms (Uber, Lyft, etc.). Car ownership in major urban areas continues to decline, and many municipalities create partnerships with fleet owners to augment conventional mass transportation solutions. The value of New York City taxi medallions drops over 75%.

Amazon will buy Snapchat, and announce a new take on augmented reality glasses, picking up where Google dropped the ball years ago. Building on the success of Alexa-based Echo devices, Kindle, Fire TV, Amazon Prime, and the growing popularity of Snapchat, Amazon Eyes are the hit of Christmas 2017, with over 50 million ordered in November and December.

The war in Syria comes to a Korean War-like end, with a partition of the country into various regions, and a unceasing belligerence on all parts. It is clearly a shadow war between factions backed by the West, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Russia. The stalemate here is a reflection of the reappraisal of loyalties and goals of the shadow players, more than the aims of the Syrian government and the insurgents. Bashar al-Assad rules a rump state of western Syrian, with much of the rest of ‘Syria’ in shambles.

Hillary Clinton files for divorce from Bill Clinton in March 2017, and assumes the role of president of Harvard University, two weeks later.

Marine Le Pen loses an unexpectedly close run-off with François Fillon, but the close election pulled Fillon and his Republicans farther right than in recent decades.

Oprah announces that she intends to run for President in the next election.

Angela Merkel narrowly wins reelection, after wide-spread controversy of scandals uncovered by leaks generally attributed to Putin’s brigade of hackers.

Barack Obama joins Andreessen Horowitz as a partner, and leads a round funding AdjectiveNoun (fictitious, note), one of the most promising ‘driverless management’ startups. He also comes out in support of Oprah Winfrey’s candidacy.

Microsoft acquires Salesforce for $75 billion. Marc Benioff leaves to run philanthropy (amid discussions of political ambitions).

Apple acquires Tesla for $75 billion. Tim Cook announces retirement, Elon Musk becomes CEO.

Despite inaction by the US Federal Government, and chaos in the EPA and Energy Department, CO2 levels continue to fall worldwide. Environmental groups suggest that we may have turned the corner on energy in 2017, because solar is now cheaper than other energy sources in most places in the world. However, global temperatures continues to rise, and many models show that it might take 1000 years to reduce global temperatures.

California and San Francisco, with support from Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and other platform companies, announced a project to convert increasingly unneeded parking lots to small ‘park villages’ with dense, micro-apartment developments, for low-income and homeless residents. Trump-sponsored infrastructure funds are directed to US micro-building factories and a new California Construction Corps, which is strongly supported by both Democrats and Republicans. The state’s program is seen as a blueprint for the rest of the country.

Michael Bloomberg announces plans to create a third ‘Pragmatist’ party, based on economic conservatism and social liberalism, and rapidly attracts a large minority of GOP and Democratic legislators in Washington who have been whipsawed by the 2016 elections, and by the growing discord in both major parties over the future of their platforms. Some project that the Pragmatists could gain as many as 30% of the seats in the House, and as many as 10 governorships in coming years. Bloomberg announces his plans to run for President.