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justice4falum · 4 years

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do NOT give money to tumblr user roboticwheelchair

Hi, so you’ve probably seen this post or some of its permutations on this website lately! (The old version of this post broke because I mistakenly deleted it. Let’s try this again, shall we?)

This is a “RAFFLE” for a Nintendo Switch Lite and the poster is asking people send them $10 to earn a spot in the raffle, of which there are 52. People have already sent money in.

This post was made by user roboticwheelchair and the name which currently displays on their paypal is “Mick Garcia” - it’s very possible you’ve heard their story already from several weeks ago. User roboticwheelchair claims that they were physically assaulted for being a transgender man, and that they sustained a concussion.

The BAD news is that roboticwheelchair is a blog which has been on tumblr for a very long time, and used to belong to someone named Falum Gibson. You may have heard this name from their #justice4falum campaign ages ago. They are a notorious scammer and has been doing this since 2016. LET’S REVIEW (LONG, LONG, LONG POST AHEAD.)

Part 1: #BieberMeetFalum and Meeting Ed Sheeran

In 2016, Falum ran a Justin Bieber fan account on Twitter called @bieberfreezer (account has since been suspended). They began a campaign called #BieberMeetFalum by posting a Twitter thread about their disability, cerebral palsy, and how they had intended to meet Justin Bieber personally because his music was important to them. However, the venue he was performing at was not wheelchair accessible and Falum uses an electric wheelchair. They were trying to get the attention of him or his team in order to ensure they met. (LINK)

This was a reasonable thing to post about! Accessibility is a necessity. We know this. And they weren’t asking for money. Twitter got this the attention it needed and they were able to meet Bieber despite the trouble. (LINK)

Later on, they gunned to meet Ed Sheeran and succeeded.

Part 2: #TaylorNoticeFalum

In 2018, Falum was on Tumblr as user taylorsgetawaycarxo. At this point they still say they have cerebral palsy, but has also said they have COPD (something they later will drop.) Claiming that they are terminally ill and has 2 years left to live, they talk about how Taylor Swift is their idol and they want to meet her before they die.

This came right after they had done the same thing with Demi Lovato fans, claiming they idolised Demi and needed to meet her, so on and so forth. They ran a GoFundMe for this.

The GoFundMe is now defunct, but the URL was “falumlastwish” I believe. Here’s where the plot gets a little lost, because the sheer number of different GoFundMes, donation posts, and meet-a-celebrity campaigns that Falum was running in these couple of years is... pretty wild. There’s a post from another blog here on Tumblr about the Taylor Swift fandom’s run-in with them. (LINK)

Here’s a GoFundMe they ran from a music fan account on Instagram, where they were asking for help escaping homelessness. They raised almost 5,000 dollars out of the 10,000 they were asking. (LINK)

At some point they also ran a GoFundMe for a PTSD service dog. I’m not sure how much they were asking for this one, but they apparently made $880 off of it.

Part 3: Ellie Elizabeth

This part is a little muddled, because the tumblr blog connected to it has been deleted and it’s really difficult to find archives of the posts, but at some point in early 2019 Falum started using the blog ellie-elizabeth21 to ask for money as well. The story was that they were being sent to conversion therapy for being bisexual by their father, who had them deemed legally mentally incompetent. Further stories they posted about were potential evictions, needs for grocery money, etc.

Here’s a link to an imgur album of some of the posts this account made. Many of them achieved their goal of over $200 or more. (LINK)

“Ellie” also ran a GoFundMe to escape conversion therapy. Although the person running the campaign was listed as Ellie Elizabeth, the “beneficiary” listed on the campaign is Falum Gibson, proving that Ellie was another pseudonym - just a better hidden one. Here’s the link to that GoFundMe, where you can see it for yourself. (LINK)

This was Ellie Elizabeth’s PayPal account at the time, I believe? And anyway, you might note that they apparently made nearly $6,500 on this account.

Part 4: #Justice4Falum

Now in November of 2019, Falum moved away from the world of Fan Internet and decided to try out something new. They made the blog roboticwheelchair in September of 2019 and reblogged a photoset of cats to it, which for a while was the only thing on the blog besides the donation post they initially made. They’ve gone through a cycle of reblogging and deleting things there, basically clearing out the blog every couple of weeks to make a new post.

At this point they were also @falumgibson on Twitter. The account has since been locked. This is when they posted a GoFundMe describing medical abuse they were allegedly undergoing at the Ottawa Hospital. Weird side note, this GoFundMe is still running and can be donated to, though obviously I’m recommending you don’t do so. (LINK)

They made several donation posts on Tumblr about this campaign, frequently linking it or their PayPal account and asking people to donate. Sometimes it was to go directly to their legal fund for this lawsuit, other times they were asking for money for medications or other immediate costs.

Side note, they had claimed to be in the hospital since August of 2019 due to suicidal ideation and claimed they had been psych warded. From what I can tell, the Ottawa Hospital General Campus they claimed to be hospitalised at does not actually have a psychiatric ward. It has a mental health team, but they appear to do outpatient work. It’s not really clear what they were in the hospital for at this point.

#Justice4Falum was originally about fundraising for a place to live because apparently they were in danger of being forced to leave the hospital due to homelessness. Later on they turned it into a legal fund to sue the hospital for mistreatment.

Part 5: Further Fundraising, Coming Out As Trans

While Falum was in the hospital, they started identifying as nonbinary. I’m not in any position to speculate about whether or not Falum is transgender, because that’s honestly not the point. Either way, they have started using their trans identity in much the way they use their disabilities - as a way to garner sympathy and trust, and to scam people out of money.

On their Twitter at this point, they did seem to have kind of a bizarre interpretation of how transition worked and appeared to be under the impression that the first thing trans men do is get top surgery? (LINK)

Shortly after this, still during the November that #Justice4Falum ran during, they began asking for donations to a different PayPal account than their normal one, because their stepdad was dying of cancer. There was a GoFundMe for this as well, but it appeared to feature their parents and was possibly not created by Falum.

No date on this tweet unfortunately, but right after that, they made a post about how they had been outed to their transphobic father and needed to escape living with him.

At this point, Falum has added several diagnoses to those they claim to have. In addition to cerebral palsy, they now claim to have multiple sclerosis and several mental illnesses. No more COPD, though! I’m very impressed that they recovered from a terminal illness!

Now that they’re out of the closet, in early December they begin making donation posts on Tumblr again and have now made a Patreon. (LINK: POST) (LINK: PATREON) Soon after this, they apparently left their home and became homeless, and started posting about this on Twitter and linking their PayPal.

In late December they posted on Twitter about having attempted suicide by taking 75 extra strength Tylenol. Warning for a photograph of their IV in this link. (LINK)

Not very long after, Falum returned to their narrative of being terminally ill by posting about how their multiple sclerosis (something they have only claimed since 2019, I believe) causes them over 20 seizures a day and will eventually kill them. (LINK)

Then they locked their Twitter account and decided to try something new.

Part 6: Connor Kay, “anontransman”

Enter Connor Kay. At this point Falum makes a new Twitter account called @ConnorIsTrans which eventually morphs into @anontransman. They initially link this account to their old main account, saying that they’ve switched in order to be openly trans on their new account because their transphobic father is stalking them. (LINK)

They continue asking for donations on Twitter, now with a Ko-Fi account called Connor Rocks.

They also post a story about an ex-friend of theirs spitting on them for being trans, apparently, and say they’re calling the police on her, which really doesn’t seem like something that’d be safe for a disabled trans person to do but whatever. (LINK)

On their blog at roboticwheelchair, they post stories about how they are being assaulted and mocked for being transgender. I should note that on Twitter they’ve said they are not out IRL and have not taken steps to transition.

Not only does this particular story sound kind of like the “down with cis bus” post, it’s also somewhat suspect that they allege they were called a tr*nny as an AFAB trans person, given who is generally targeted by that word. But. Moving on.

When the COVID-19 pandemic came around, Connor created a Facebook group for disability support. This was run by the Facebook account Connor Kay, which has since been deleted. It was the same account that they used to have and they’d not changed anything except for the name; prior posts showed it was Falum Gibson’s account.

It turns out they deleted this Facebook account because someone on Facebook posted about their years-long history of scamming people online. Here’s a link to an imgur album of some of the Facebook callout and the images the OP posted. (LINK)

So Falum, or Connor, decides to start anew with an all new PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon and Twitter account. At this point they begin to break away from linking these accounts to the name Falum Gibson and their past donation posts, although they are still using the same Tumblr blog. They change their Twitter handle to @anontransman and remove links to Falum. (TWITTER SCREENCAP) (KO-FI SCREENCAP) (PATREON SCREENCAP)

Then they tweet about how they have been diagnosed with cancer. (LINK) Then they begin asking for $100k to go to the US for treatment. (LINK)

Soon after, this Tweet has been completely deleted and they have instead started asking for money for top surgery. (LINK) I believe this is in reverse chronological order, but here are a week’s worth of tweets from them - all deleted at random times in order to make room for the others - asking for money for various reasons. Yes, this was all literally within the same week. (LINK)

Note the very last image of that album contains a reference to an “Amazon Raffle” - they were basically telling people that donations would win them a spot in a raffle for an Amazon gift card or something? It seems they moved on from the @anontransman account before the raffle could come to fruition, or possibly that they just deleted all references to it. Not sure.

In April of 2020, roboticwheelchair posted a specific donation post about being attacked for being transgender and sustaining a concussion. They said they did not see a doctor after the assault because they didn’t think it was important, so their concussion went untreated and because of it they were unable to get groceries. The donation post linked to Connor Kay’s PayPal account. It was deleted and reposted several different times, with basically the same text.

Part 7: Mick Garcia

This is a more recent post with the exact same story, now about their multiple sclerosis medication. The only difference is now that the PayPal link sends you to the PayPal of Mick Garcia. Mick Garcia has a different PayPal username than Falum, Ellie, and Connor did.

On April 12th, the @anontransman account deactivated after Falum, or Ellie, or Connor, or Mick decided to leave Twitter. Then yesterday on April 19th, it reactivated and they tweeted once again.

However, around this same time, another Twitter account under the name Mick Garcia with an icon @anontransman used to use and a very similar tone/style cropped up.

The Mick Garcia account has not tweeted yet, as it appears that they may be staying with @anontransman for their current purposes, but it appears that for some reason or another they’ve decided to start going by Mick Garcia now.

I guess it’s probably relevant to note that while I suppose there are probably some white people out there with the last name Garcia, Falum is really seriously white and it’s suspect they would pick out Garcia as a pseudonym, whether they list “white” in their Twitter bio or not.

More from the current state of the roboticwheelchair blog includes many, many posts where they’re either reposting their own petitions or basically grabbing for as many followers as possible. You can probably guess why. (LINK)

As of April 20th, 2020, there are 2 donation posts still standing on their blog. Here are both of them. (LINK)

Finally, The Switch Raffle

Literally today, April 20th, roboticwheelchair posted something that is allegedly a raffle. They claim to be giving away a Nintendo Switch Lite to a lucky winner. There are 52 slots in the raffle; they are asking that people send them $10 over PayPal in order to enter. They’re also claiming this is to further fundraise for their medication.

They are claiming their doctor has put them on an MS medication that costs $450 every two weeks. (Note that if they’re trying to make money for that right now and also going to buy a Switch for the winner, than they’d only have about half of that at the end? The Switch Lite is about $260 in Canada and their total earnings from a full raffle would be $520.)

You should not give money to them for this raffle, or for any reason. The reason I’m compiling all of this is because after months of seeing them pull this scam over and over again, they’re now promising people an actual product that given their history, I would say they are highly unlikely to deliver.

Given their past, it is most likely they will delete this raffle once they have the money they want, and refuse to allude to it ever again. Or maybe they’ll just disappear! Or hell, maybe they’ll have some kind of nebulous problem ordering the Switch when someone wins, and that’ll be that.

But it’s clear based on this history, I hope, that Falum or Ellie or Connor or Mick has a long history of taking lots and lots of money from strangers online. Like, a lot of money. My estimate is that they’ve made over $15k on this, and that’s exclusively based off of the visible numbers on their GoFundMes and Ko-Fi accounts.

Please do not give this person your money. They are not trustworthy. There are other people who need it - like you, or maybe like, someone you personally know and not some complete stranger who keeps telling people they’re terminally ill so they can meet a cool musician.

Disclaimer

I’ve compiled all of this information to the best of my ability, but I am just one person and it took a lot of digging due to the deleted accounts involved.

Falum is actually disabled; I believe they do have cerebral palsy and may have other disabilities. I do not know if they really have MS, but it’s hard to trust them because they previously lied about having terminal COPD.

I have no idea if Falum is really transgender or not. They have apparently taken no concrete steps to transition, which I know means very little. That being said, if they are transgender, they are leveraging their identity in dangerous ways against other people for money and sympathy. Their stories about being assaulted by strangers for being transgender are highly suspect, given their lack of transition and the fact that the scenarios they describe are highly cliche.

Finally, I’m not trying to harass Falum or threaten them in any way. I don’t know them. If they’re interested in talking candidly about what they have been doing all these years and why, that’s fine. I would honestly love to understand, but at this point it seems like the only thing they can do is apologise for their dishonesty and stop doing this.

Reblog this post if you want! The point is to get the word out there, because this person has been a pervasive presence on this website for some time and has not yet been called out.

#tumblr scam #signal boost #donations #falum gibson #roboticwheelchair #anontransman #connor kay #mick garcia #ellie elizabeth

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dandymeowth · 4 years

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Many of the landholders are newcomers from out of state, though some old-timers remain—families that earned their deeds generations ago, the principal paid by ancestors who shivered through pitiless winters in tar-paper shacks. Wilson has been hiking and hunting the Crazies since he was a little kid, but only in the past year or so, he says, have the private ranchers seemed more like obstacles than neighbors. “They could shut down pretty much the whole interior of the Crazy Mountains, as far as I can see,” he says.

He trudges up a rooty slope and, after a blind bend, sees something straddling the trail that stops him cold. It’s a padlocked metal gate. He hiked this trail a couple of weeks before, and the fence wasn’t there. A sign on it reads, “Private Property: No Forest Service Access, No Trespassing.” It’s exactly the kind of sign he’d been bad-mouthing a few minutes earlier, but he wasn’t expecting to see one here. The locked gate feels like an escalation, a new weapon in an improvised war.

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A debate is taking place across the country over preserving land for recreational public use, but most of the attention is focused on vast swaths of historically or scientifically significant terrain that Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and to a lesser extent George W. Bush protected under the national monument designation—for example, Bears Ears in Utah and Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine. These disputed trails leading into the Crazy Mountains represent another front in the escalating battle over control of federal territory, and the fighting here is just as contentious as over the monuments. Historic settlement patterns in the American West created a checkerboard pattern of landownership: Public properties are often broken-up plots, resulting in numerous access disputes. According to a 2013 study by the Center for Western Priorities, that dynamic has effectively locked the public out of about 4 million acres of land in Western states; almost half of that blocked public land, or about 2 million acres, is in Montana, according to the study. The push to end public thoroughfare is either an overdue reassertion of private property rights or an openly cynical land snatch, depending which side of the gate you’re standing on.

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In late October 2-16, in the dying days of the Obama era, a U.S. district judge issued a verdict that seemed to set a precedent for paths like this one. The Texas-based owners of a Montana property called Wonder Ranch, about 100 miles southeast of the Crazy Mountains, had sued the Forest Service after the government filed a statement of interest claiming an easement—a legal agreement to use a portion of someone’s land for a specific purpose—on a trail that ran across the ranch’s property before reaching the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. The Forest Service said the trail had been routinely used as an access route to the forest by the government and the public for decades, and therefore it should be considered public because of historical use. The owners’ suit argued that the government had no right to an easement. The Department of Justice countersued, producing evidence dating back more than a century showing that the public and the government consistently used the trail for packhorses and hike-ins. The Forest Service won the case.

Had the landowners been able to show that the trail had been used for at least five consecutive years only by those who’d received their permission, their claims of private control might have held. That helps explain why Alex Sienkiewicz, the forest ranger overseeing the district that includes the Crazy Mountains, every year sends an email to his staff reminding them never to ask landowners’ permission to use trails that the government already considers public. “By asking permission,” he wrote in 2016’s reminder, “one undermines the public access rights and plays into their lawyers’ trap of establishing a history of permissive access.” That didn’t mean anyone could veer off the trail and slip onto the private property—that’s trespassing, no question about it—it just meant the trail itself should be considered a public throughway.

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For a while, it seemed that attitude might be one of the rare Obama positions that President Donald Trump could live with. In a pre-election interview, Trump told the magazine Field & Stream he didn’t like the idea of transferring the land to the states, suggesting such transfers could erode public oversight of them: “I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do,” he said. “I mean, are they going to sell if they get into a little bit of trouble? And I don’t think it’s something that should be sold. We have to be great stewards of this land. This is magnificent land.”

Public land advocates smelled a contradiction, since the new president was positioning himself elsewhere as a champion of private property rights. And regardless of what he said, Trump’s campaign had tapped into a very deep well of antigovernment sentiment, the sort that Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy appealed to when he occupied public territories and led armed standoffs against federal agents in 2014 and again in 2016. The co-chair of a state group called Veterans for Trump pleaded guilty to helping organize the ad hoc rebel militia, and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, has been one of Bundy’s most vocal supporters. Immediately after the election, whether or not the results had anything to do with their actions, the Crazy Mountains landowners launched a collective blitz to take control of the trails leading to Forest Service property.

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Gregoire decided to go for it. When the trail veered through a private plot called the Hailstone Ranch, he spotted a No Trespassing sign that read, “The Forest Service Has No Easement Here.” He ignored it, consulting his GPS to make sure he never strayed from the path onto the private ranch land. The landowner somehow detected that he was using the trail (“I think he had an alarm or something,” Gregoire later speculated) and called a sheriff’s deputy, who was waiting for Gregoire to return at the end of the day. The deputy charged him with criminal trespassing.

Shortly after that, the owners of nine ranches neighboring the Hailstone went after Sienkiewicz. Back on July 20, 2017, a volunteer at Public Land/Water Access Association Inc., a Montana nonprofit that supports open public access to federal lands and waterways, had gotten hold of, then posted on its Facebook page, Sienkiewicz’s most recent annual email reminder to his staff advising them never to sign visitor logs for trail access or ask permission. The property owners apparently assumed that Sienkiewicz had posted the item himself—proof that he was behaving as a political activist, not a public servant. The ranch owners sent a letter to U.S. Senator Steve Daines, a Republican representing Montana, saying in part, “As a direct result of this inflammatory Facebook post, we have many questions about the FS position regarding access across our private property.” Several of the ranchers who signed the letter have also been listed as contributors to Daines’s political campaigns in the past five years.

In May 2017, Daines echoed the landowners’ complaints—and forwarded a screen shot of the Facebook post—in a letter to Thomas Tidwell, then the chief of the Forest Service, and to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose agency oversees the Forest Service. Less than two weeks later, Representative Pete Sessions (R-Texas) got involved, firing off a similar complaint to Perdue and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has a long history in Montana. An avid hunter and fisherman, he was born in Bozeman, about 40 miles from the Crazies. He was also a Montana congressman, filling the seat Daines had occupied before he moved to the Senate. (At least one of the ranchers donated to Zinke’s campaign.)

In his letter, Sessions described the Forest Service’s approach to public access as part of “the war on private property owners conducted by the Obama administration.” The Wonder Ranch owners hadn’t been among the nine who signed the initial letter, but they were the link that got Sessions involved. One of the co-owners, a Texan named Chris Hudson, lives in Sessions’ district, and Sessions proposed that Hudson and Perdue meet. Sessions also recommended that the Forest Service issue a nationwide directive to prevent rangers or individual districts from declaring paths and roads public based on historic use.

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Defenders of Sienkiewicz and Gregoire—a group that included land access advocates, proprietors of recreation businesses, wildlife groups, and individuals—cast the developments as evidence of an under-the-table assault on public lands that the Trump administration appeared to endorse, if not initiate. In spring 2017, Trump requested that Zinke’s Department of the Interior review national monuments, designated or enlarged since 1996, and possibly downsize them, a step he said could rectify what he considered a “massive federal land grab.” Several politicians from Utah, such as Orrin Hatch, Rob Bishop, and Jason Chaffetz, had led the downsizing push, and for years they’d been advocating turning such lands over to the states—the strategy Trump had earlier declared would result in a selloff to the highest bidder. The department eventually suggested downsizing six of the 27 monuments under review, but the ultimate fate of those lands and waters remains in limbo; the matter will go to Congress, and the conservationists have said they will fight the new boundaries in court.

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Anderson has carved out a field for himself in something called free-market environmentalism. Along with his job at PERC, he’s a professor emeritus at Montana State University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a libertarian-leaning think tank. In op-eds published across the country, he’s an evangelist for limited government and private property rights. He views many environmentalists with undisguised contempt, and they generally return the favor.

Like many nonprofits, PERC doesn’t disclose its funding sources, but Greenpeace International has posted records showing that they’ve included Exxon Mobil Corp. and the industrialists Charles and David Koch. Anderson probably wouldn’t worry too much about how that looks: He believes the private sector, in most cases, is a better steward of nature than the government.

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Quilici’s plan was seat-of-the-pants. He thought he might spend three or four days hiking to an exit point on the far side of the mountains, but he didn’t realize that the most direct trail was blocked by the gate Wilson had confronted. Other possible paths were also contested. When I told him this, he redirected his criticism away from the parking lot and toward the landowners. “I bet they have some lobbying power,” he said. “They just want to keep everything like it’s their own private reserve.”

Herein lies the big challenge for the landowners and their defenders: Survey after survey has shown that the public hates the idea that someone can lock taxpayers out of public land, and that they’re suspicious of transferring control of such tracts to private enterprise. Nevertheless, Anderson and PERC deny that their position is out of step with public opinion, even casting it as pro-access. Their rationale is oblique: If the Forest Service insists the public has a right to use the trails, they say, private landowners will naturally rebel; numerous court battles will ensue, tying up the trails in years of litigation and costing the government millions of dollars. And as the cases proceed, the landowners will take steps to secure their property rights, blocking traffic on the trails until the mess is sorted out.

“In the places where now there are signs,” Anderson predicts, “you’ll see a locked gate.” His comment is an informed one. He counts several of the landowners involved in the Crazy Mountains disputes as friends, including the owners of the Rein Anchor Outfitting and Ranch, who operate a hunting lodge and signed the letter against Sienkiewicz. PERC’s affiliation with politically connected outfitters that stand to profit if trails are closed bolsters the sense, to Wilson and others confronting locked gates, that a void in coherent policy about public land management is being filled by cronyism that rewards wealth and connections above all else. Another co-owner of the Wonder Ranch, Frank-Paul King, a friend and former student of Anderson’s, served on PERC’s board. Hudson, the man who got Representative Sessions involved, is King’s brother-in-law, and he’s also a board member and the former president of the Dallas Safari Club, a group that made national headlines in 2014 when it auctioned off a trip to Africa to hunt an endangered rhinoceros. (The winning bidder, who paid $350,000, traveled to Namibia and shot a black rhino bull, an animal the club said had threatened the rest of the herd.) The Dallas Safari Club has granted PERC funding for, among other things, a study on “private conservation in the public interest.”

In 2016 the Dallas Safari Club hosted a fundraiser featuring the big-game hunting enthusiast Donald Trump Jr. that netted $60,000 in campaign donations to the Republican National Committee. “The candidate’s family connection to hunting and its legacy gives DSC a huge opportunity to have the right people in place as advocates for our mission,” the club’s newsletter stated. After Trump was elected, Hudson was listed as an organizer for a post-inaugural fundraiser called “Opening Day 45,” which featured Eric and Donald Trump Jr. as co-chairs. It was canceled after TMZ published an early draft of the invitation in December 2016, promising personal access to President Trump, along with a multiday hunting excursion with his sons, to anyone who donated more than $500,000, sparking criticism that the sons planned to peddle access to their father.

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The trail access issue was extremely sensitive inside the Forest Service, she explained, and potentially costly, too. The Trump administration was proposing a 73 percent cut in the Forest Service’s capital improvement and maintenance budget and an 84 percent reduction, from $77 million to $12 million, in its trail program budget. The Wonder Ranch case, she observed, had cost the government “in the millions of dollars,” and it wasn’t over yet—the landowners were appealing the decision, and it now sat with an appellate judge. “I’m not saying we’re never going to go to court, but the Forest Service is going to be careful about when we go to court and make sure we’re going to court on cases we can win,” she said.

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The agency in mid-October announced it was giving Sienkiewicz his job back. But Gevock’s frustrations spoke to an unresolved question underlying all of the disputes: Who, exactly, is the Forest Service supposed to serve? On the agency’s website, former Director Thomas Tidwell wrote that its guiding principles were clearly established by Gifford Pinchot, the service’s founding chief, during the Gilded Age—“a time when the nation’s resources were being exploited for the benefit of the wealthy few,” Tidwell stated. “The national forests were based on a notion that was just the opposite—that these lands belong to everyone.”

The public access advocates say they’re not sure they trust the spirit of Pinchot’s original message has survived intact. The mixed signals coming from the Trump administration mean everything rests on how those sometimes conflicting messages are interpreted. Zinke has repeatedly insisted, without offering specifics, that he is pro-access, and on his first day in office he pledged to fight against the “dramatic decreases in access to public lands across the board” that he said were plaguing America. “It worries me to think about hunting and fishing becoming activities for the landowning elite,” he said.

But in July 2017, while public land advocates were protesting the Interior Department’s pending move to downsize the national monuments and hikers were cursing the new No Trespassing signs in the Crazies, Zinke traveled to Denver to speak at the annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. The group, a conservative lobbying coalition that helps lawmakers draft legislative proposals, has energetically pushed for the potential transfer of federal lands to the states. Whether Zinke’s speech clarified the government’s general, overarching philosophy on public-vs.-private control of lands that are currently federal, only members of the lobbying group can say for sure. Unlike several other speeches delivered at the conference, Zinke’s wasn’t transcribed or published, and it was closed to the general public.

#environmentalism #conservation #national parks #long post -#public lands #republicans #classism #capitalism #eat the rich

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trainsinanime · 4 years

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Red Web Mystery Reviews

Red Web is a podcast by Rooster Teeth featuring two guys from that whole Achievement Hunter thing that I can never tell apart (but you don’t need to know anything about this) about unsolved mysteries that often but not always have something to do with the internet. Let’s review the episodes out so far, because… well, no reason, honestly, I just wanted to.

Lake City Quiet Pills

Based on their information presented here, this whole thing and their explanation for it seem plausible enough. You have to assume that this group of apparently assassins is kind of bad at operational security, but there’s actually a lot of cases where big criminals got exposed because they used the same URL or E-mail address or similar.

Satoshi Nakamoto

I already knew about this beforehand, and I would say they did a good job explaining it. Personally, I think they should have gone into a bit more of how much a shit-show the whole Newsweek Dorian Nakamoto thing was; in short, there was no reason to believe this person had anything to do with Bitcoin, he didn’t even speak good english (which is probably what caused some of the misunderstandings), and it was both a huge embarrassment for Newsweek (at least I hope they felt embarrassed) and they needlessly hounded a completely uninvolved person for this.

But then they get into new evidence, and we see a problem that I think is a bit systematic: They don’t really go into how trustworthy the evidence is. Specifically, they say that the one person who can cast light on this might be… John McAfee. Fucking John McAfee. Seriously, that guy?

For context: John McAfee did indeed create the antivirus company that still bears his name. But he sold it in the 1990s, and thanks to money and drugs, he’s just gotten plain crazy ever since. There was the whole thing where he was implicated in a murder in Belize a couple of years ago; he kept blogging from a jail in Guatemala, later returned to the US, and keeps being part of outlandish schemes (including two presidential runs, though he failed to get the nomination for libertarian candidate both 2016 and 2020), controversies, and supposedly super-awesome tech startups that never go anywhere. It makes perfect sense that he’d claim to be involved in the creation of Bitcoin. It makes no sense whatsoever to believe him. If you’re interested and have way too much time, read what El Reg has to say about him.

Mortis

Oh god. This one makes me both want to laugh and cry. Mostly laugh, to be honest, because it is such an obvious nothing burger, but also weep for the internet that was.

The story is that they found a participant in an early internet warez network who wasn’t that great at OpSec. This is only fully revealed at the end, and they don’t even seem to have noticed that this case is clearly and completely solved.

Most of the humour for me comes from the fact that they’re rediscovering the old pre-social web, and are convinced that it’s all weird and nefarious. Why would one person register websites for their interests, and then never do anything with them? Because that’s what the internet was like back then in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Hey, look, here’s my ugly special-interest website from that era that hasn’t been updated in years and isn’t going to be updated any time soon either. That’s just what was normal back then. Same with a website for every person, or trying to do your own garage sales via your website. That was the thing to do back then. And yes, obviously it sucked and didn’t work very well.

They even realise that this is what „might“ have been going on, and theorise about this hypothetical early web. „Maybe if there was some website that linked all these together and allowed you to search“ - yeah, those existed. Digg and Technorati and Del.icio.us, remember those? All bought by Yahoo and promptly forgotten. And to be fair, they never worked as well as real social networks did.

But back then we had this glorious freedom. No sudden porn bans like here on Tumblr; no need to match any predefined template for what posts are, no user tracking by Facebook, nobody telling you that you’re tagging your posts wrong…

It’s understandable why we lost that web. Linking together is much easier if all content is owned and controlled by like four companies. It also makes it much easier to set up a new account; setting up a new website is just a lot of pain and knowledge you have to have that you don’t necessarily want to have.

But now we live in our monocultures and must live with whatever content decisions our corporate overlords make and then sell us as „community standards“, and the wild and weird web that we used to have is only a memory. And sometimes not even that; sometimes these new young kids treat it as a „weird nefarious mystery“. Actually, I just looked it up, and Alfredo and Trevor are both around 30, just a few years younger than I am. They were alive for at least the tail end if this. These guys could have known this shit!

So, yeah, the story here is not the mystery; it’s a lament for the web we lost.

D.B. Cooper

Again one I already knew, and I think they gave a good overview. Personally I’m in the camp of people who assume that he failed to make a safe landing.

Happy Valley Dream Survey

This seems vaguely interesting. One thing that kind of annoys me about this podcast is that they (well mostly Alfredo) generally assume that everything strange is necessarily nefarious, without any evidence. The whole thing here leads nowhere, after all.

Lead Masks Case

Again, I’m not sure how much weight to put on the other evidence they listed, especially that whole supposed UFO sighting. Yes, that one woman may have been very respected in her community and/or had a high social status, whatever that means. But the thing is that rich people who are super-involved in their church community or whatever can still (through no fault of their own) be unreliable witnesses and invent things that weren’t there, or not the way they were described.

Cicada 3301 (parts 1 and 2)

Personally I find this one less interesting because it’s not a mystery, it’s a riddle, and that’s way less fun. Much of the circumstances are weird enough, I guess.

What confuses me the most about this is how it’s supposed to be a recruitment tool, but it doesn’t seem to be very good at that. A lot of the steps don’t really seem to be that difficult and require just some fairly standard hacker skills. This is similar to the Satashi Nakamoto case, where one hint was „knows C++ programming“. Lots of people know that, and it’s something you can totally teach yourself. And if the people who were recruited through this were really supposed to program software, well… why did no part of this test whether they could do so? That’s a whole different skill. My conclusion is that this Cicada group is either a long con or a group that is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is.

One thing to note here: They just casually assume that the FBI and NSA and so on are monitoring the whole internet, in real time, all the time. Which is true, we know that thanks to Edward Snowden. Isn’t that much more nefarious than any of the other mysteries here put together? How did we get to a place where Americans both think „this is the country that has all the freedom“ and „if you say or search for the wrong things you’ll get put on a government watchlist that’s just normal“ at the same time? Pervasive monitoring of a population is pretty much the exact opposite of freedom, but apparently we all in the western world just take it in stride anyway. That’s nothing to do with this podcast, though.

Conclusion

Generally okay podcast. The hosts are good storytellers, even if the stories are sometimes a bit shaky. It is at least at no point overly gross or insultingly stupid (unlike the official Rooster Teeth Podcast, which is both). So I think I can recommend it if you need something, anything to fill the quiet, and you’re already out of episodes of Black Box Down.

#red web #rooster teeth

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teacup-peony · 5 years

Text

okay, update time, lets do this.

TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide, abuse, trauma

TL;DR: My dad remarried an emotionally and verbally abusive woman who pushed me to a suicide attempt, I now have six-maybe-seven mental health diagnoses and I haven’t been on my meds since August, I was homeless for a few months, my dog died, I’m thirty now.

I don’t remember when I was on here last except that apparently I was on here when I was last living in my house like a year ago and I have no memory of that, so forgive me for repeats

- I moved out of my apartment and all my friendships finally crumbled, more or less. I have a couple people I still depend on but the friends I’ve had 20+ years all faded to “yeah, it’d be cool to see you when I’m in town next” so there’s that.

- I mean sometimes it’s like we’re all good friends again but they don’t reply to my messages and have all unfollowed me on Facebook, and one time I sat in the car and then in front of them crying and begging them to invite me to things again and they never invited me anywhere ever again, soooo I don’t know what to do with that

- I moved back in with my dad. It was supposed to be three months but it was hard finding a job I could do with my MULTITUDE of mental health problems (we’ll swing back around to that).

- He started dating and then married this woman named Cassandra. I have a bunch of stepsiblings technically but I don’t talk to them. Two of them are little kids who call my dad ‘dad’ and it’s fuckin’ weird, but okay.

- Cassie full on hates me. She also brainwashed my dad a good one month into the relationship (they got married after three). My dad was learning and growing and discovering who he was and now they’re together and he has whatever opinion she wants him to have. Also he was really highly intelligent and knew how to work a situation to his favor but now he’s following her version of dealing with situations, screaming and throwing a fit until you get what you want.

- Not even kidding, this is why CPS is investigating them, because she kept screaming at people and they got worried. And all dad does is post on social media about how they’re gonna destroy CPS and making not-so-vague threats even though literally everyone is telling him to stop

- In June of last year I was in a bad place. Dad had either married or was about to marry I can’t remember which, and my dog was acting out because there were a LOT of people around who thought they knew how to handle animal-aggressive dogs and did NOT, and to make a long story short I was packing a bag in case I needed to check myself into a hospital because I didn’t feel safe. My dad (who has apologized and explained this was PTSD related) called me manipulative and selfish to Cassie, Cassie waited until I was in earshot to say I was manipulative, selfish, and narcissistic (she has never apologized for this), and then she came to scream nonsense at me (literal nonsense; she claimed her son had to squeeze my dog the same way he squeezes his service dog or his bond with his service dog would be destroyed).

- That night I attempted suicide because I’d rather be dead than live with Cassie. I woke up over a day later, and the next day went to my psychiatrist, who sent me to a hospital. OH BOY.

- This was a behavioral hospital that was coed and mostly housed inmates with anger issues. It was terrifying. The worst part was when my psychiatrist decided to have an appointment in the hallway less than ten feet from where everyone in the ward was sitting.

- The other worst part was when they put me back on Prozac and upped my dose and immediately released me even though we’d come to the conclusion that Prozac is a big part of why I tried to kill myself in the first place.

- My dad sat in on one (1) appointment with my therapist and my psychiatrist to ask how to deal with me. My diagnoses were not discussed. This turned into an issue

- Blah blah blah, my childhood house was sold and we were moving, blah blah blah, Cassie was emotionally abusive to me in a massive scream fest for 20 minutes saying I was a liar and selfish and only cared about myself and I didn’t have any mental health problems and she knew this was true because her husband talks to her, blah blah blah, my dad told her everything in the psychiatrist appointment without actually coming to me about his concerns and confusions or asking if I was okay with it, blah blah blah, dad told me I just needed to let her scream at me and also took her side, blah blah blah, I was told I wasn’t allowed to have memory problems at her house (not THEIRS apparently, HERS) and it’s not something I can help so blah blah blah I became homeless.

- Luckily i had a friend who let me crash with her. The place was so infested with cockroaches that they swarmed on you when you slept and eating them was unavoidable, but hey, it wasn’t the street, which was where I would have gone the next day if she didn’t answer her phone.

- My dog died while I was crashing on my friends couch and it was one of the worst things ever because Penny was the only one who was there when I found my mom dead and the only other one with that memory and now she’s gone

- A friend I met on Tumblr and I were in contact and she moved into an apartment with another friend and invited me to join them so YAY I HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE it was in another state though so that was not great, but at least I’m away from the abusive stepmother and the not-so-great friends.

- I got the money from my moms lawsuit but it was basically nothing and I didn’t get my fair share and the move took a lot of it and now it’s basically gone and I still can’t work and I still have no medical coverage and I’m avoiding medical bills so that’s terrifying

- I also haven’t been medicated since August which is bad because those meds are what kept me from hurting myself after the 20 minutes of abuse instance

- My phone was “stolen” (left in a Lyft with a driver who replied to me once and then dodged all calls from both me and Lyft) back in March and Lyft keeps saying they’re getting it back and sending to me but where is it???

- My grief over my mom got real intense and then it was Mother’s Day and my PTSD just FLARED THE HELL UP so that’s fun

- Also I’m 30 now???

#PTSD #suicide #abuse #trauma #about me

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spideycents · 6 years

Text

B-Roll // Shawn Mendes - 2: quiet on set

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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The first extras call for The Breakfast Club is posted almost a week after I apply to be a makeup assistant. It's the middle of the night on what is hopefully our second to last day of filming at this camp. The goal is to wrap second team shoots tomorrow night, then we'll be done, but we keep having to pause filming for stupid rain that won't seem to go away.

During one of the rain breaks, we're at the top of the hill at the onset extras holding under a really large picnic pavilion. Everyone's on their phones or asleep or playing group games to try to stay awake. I'm spacing out and Michael's on twitter when Julie-Anne squeals loudly and shows us the casting call.

"They're looking for high schoolers!" she says excitedly.

"Sheet!" Michael sits up quickly and types fervidly on his phone.

"Are you gonna apply?" Julie-Anne nods at me while she works on her own application.

I shrug. "Later."

"Why not now?" Michael questions me like I'm crazy for not jumping to apply instantly. "We've got plenty of time."

I purse my lips. "I know, but my phone's in my jacket and I don't feel like getting it out right now."

They both laugh and Julie-Anne says: "Mood!"

They're quiet for bit while they finish their applications and find other days to apply for. The irony that we only ever get hired as teenagers when we're all in our 20s now. Extra irony that Julie-Anne is the oldest, but she looks younger than both me and Michael. I don't know why, exactly. We assume it's her round cheeks or the freckles, but we're not entirely sure. She claims she found the fountain of youth. I wouldn't be surprised since her whole family looks pretty young. Especially her mom and she's practically the spitting image of her.

"And done," Michael exclaims loudly and drops his phone into his lap. He falls back in his chair, flails his legs out, and let's his head fall back so he's staring at the ceiling, then he lets out a rather obnoxiously loud Dying Puma.

At least 20 heads turn and look in our direction. Julie-Anne and I both giggle wildly, but Michael's head is still tilted back, and his eyes are closed, so he's oblivious to the audience he's gathered.

"I have three left," Julie-Anne grumbles.

"Bitch." Michael lifts his head and looks at her with super squinty eyes. When his face is as pinched as possible, that's peak judgement. "Gotta get that Verizon."

She glares at him. He smirks. She sticks her tongue out him. He bends his right arm and twirls his wrist, then opens his hand and juts his chin out slightly. She flips him off. He flips her off too. She looks away. He tilts his head back again.

It's basically the silent equivalent of an argument that goes:

"Fine."

"Good."

"Fine!"

Then they both humph loudly and storm off in opposite directions.

The most Julie-Anne and Michael ever do is stop looking at each other. It's okay anyway, their arguments never mean anything. They can't even jokingly insult each other without feeling bad about it. Michael was just joking once when she was throwing away everyone's trash for them. He told her that while she's at it, she should climb in there too. She actually tilted the trash can and lifted her leg to get in, for the meme, but Michael was already freaking out and apologizing because he felt that that was the meanest thing he's ever said to her. That happened eight months ago and he still brings it up.

"I really hope we all get booked," Julie-Anne mumbles, but she doesn't look up from her phone. "And I hope we get to work with Shawn."

"SAME!" Michael super exaggerates the word, turning each letter into its own syllable.

The switch in language when talking about celebrities after you've worked with them, is so apparent to me. Other fans might say they want to see someone, we talk about working with them and mingling like we're co-workers. When, in reality, the most I've ever said to a principle actor was when I told Alexandra Shipp that I liked her shoes and she told me that costumes picked them out, then she walked away.

***

We wrap second team the next day and as we're pulling off the lot as the sun is rising, Michael plays One Last Time from Hamilton and as happy as I am to see the park get smaller and smaller in the rear-view, it's a little bittersweet.

Michael leaves to go back home later that evening, after first getting a well deserved, and extended nap on my couch.

It's a struggle, saying goodbye to him. Even if we don't know when we'll see each other next, the universe somehow finds a way to always bring us together every couple weeks. The longest we've been apart since we met was 23 days, and that was within the first few months of our friendship. Sure, we text and call and facetime and Skype and DM on basically every social media platform possible, all day, every day, but the separation anxiety is still so real. I'd say I have a panic attack about losing him and Julie-Anne every other day or so. It's exhausting.

I still don't know how to tell them about all this shit in my head. They've given me so many opportunities, so many windows, and I keep not taking them. Being open and vulnerable with anyone is terrifying. I still have to work myself up for a few days, sometimes weeks, before I can tell my mom something and I tell her everything.

"Sorry Dad."

He's sitting at the breakfast table, painting with watercolors in one of his sketchbooks. He doesn't look up from his work while he speaks. "What are you sorry for, Rosie?"

I smile slightly at my dad's nickname for me. He's been calling me Rosie or Rosebud since I was little.

I wring my hands in my lap. It's a nervous tick I picked up from my mom.

I shrug and drop my head so my chin is tucked into my neck and I'm staring at my hands. "Everything, I guess."

Dad laughs lightly. "I'm going to need you to be more specific."

I'm not looking at him directly, but I can see him in my peripherals and he's watching me intently, but with kind eyes. Which is how he usually looks at me lately, unless he's mad, but that almost always fades within minutes. He started looking at me with those gentle eyes a few years ago. Whenever it happens, I feel like I'm six years old again, but not in a condescending way. I feel innocent. I feel cared for. I feel protected, safe. He looks at me like that and I feel like I'm home.

I mean, I literally am home. I've been home for awhile, but that's beside the point.

Today's different though. Today I don't deserve to feel warm and fuzzy. I deserve to feel small and weak right now, because that's where I am today. I'm 23 years old, I'm not in school, I'm broke, I'm unemployed, and I'm still living with my parents. I feel about as small as anyone could possibly ever feel.

I scratch red lines into the back of my left hand. "I don't know." I shrug again. I shrug a lot. When you don't know things, shrugging's what you do, and I don't know anything.

Dad rinses off his brush, then dries it and sets it down on a paper towel on the table beside his laptop. "Lyla," he sits up straighter and turns toward me. "Are you okay?"

I don't look at him, but I nod. "I'm okay," I say a little louder than the whispers I've been at. "It's just a weird day."

"Well, you know can talk to me about anything," he's quieter now too. Somehow our big kitchen now feels cramped. Like it's the middle of the night and we're talking softly so we don't disturb anyone.

"Maybe later." I push my chair back and get up.

"Can I give you hug?" Dad asks quietly.

I'm glad he doesn't stretch his arms out toward me cause then I feel like I have to hug him or than I look rude.

"Not right now," I mumble and go up to my room.

"I love you." His voice echoes up the stairs, filling the hallway. All our doors are closed so it feels like the sound just keeps bouncing back and forth. Even after silence has fallen, I can still hear his voice in my head and my ears ring with regret.

I lock my door behind me and turn off the lights before climbing onto my bed. I pull my comforter around me and curl up into a ball in the back corner. I have a big bed so seeing all the empty space around me just makes me feel smaller.

Nothing in particular happened to trigger this sudden onset bout of weirdness, but I guess that's how depression works. Some days are good and others are weird. I don't want to say bad, because they're not really. I just drift through them. I'm probably like this today because I've been non-stop for the past few weeks and now that Michael's gone, I've kind of hit a wall. I just need some introvert time to recharge so I can get all my energy back.

It's funny to word it in that way.

Recharging.

It's like people are batteries and we spend our energy until we're drained so then we have to find a way to get all that energy back. I get my energy back from alone time or caffeine usually, but a good song or a good movie or book also helps, but that's mainly just to make me feel better. Spending time outside or eating a good meal or getting a good night's sleep is also extremely refreshing. But, so is a nice shower or a bath. Honestly, I find energy through lots of things. Even being around my friends or family when we're happy will help. It varies for everyone though, but whatever you have to do it's basically like plugging yourself into a wall until your angry red light turns into a bright, happy green one.

Speaking of charged.

I unplug my phone and roll over so I'm facing the wall while I unlock it and scroll through my different feeds. I like some random Instagram posts from different celebrities and some wedding photos from someone I knew in college who invited a ton of our friends to their wedding, but didn't say a word about it to me. It's annoying to hear about your friend's engagement through a Facebook post, like everyone else they don't care about.

Yay.

I close Instagram and open Twitter.

My feed has been nothing, but angry political debates since 2016.

I've thrown my two cents into the void, but the only people who follow me are my friends and family and a few random One Direction fans from the good old days in 2012/ People rarely see my posts and I don't want to seek out people and start drama with them or respond to problematic tweets that I see from people I follow. A lot of people get really vicious and evil with their responses and I know I'm not the kind of person who can walk away from that kind of battle unscathed. There's definitely a war raging on the internet and I'll stick to serving as medic rather than a soldier.

I scroll a little farther down Twitter, but there's not a single happy or wholesome thing in sight.

I close Twitter and open Tumblr.

Thank God for memes.

As I'm scrolling, I catch a few South Park posts and DM them to my cousin, Esther, and I spot some Marvel things and share them with Michael, and then Shawn fucking Mendes appears on my dash.

Michael's right. I'm never going to be free of him.

It's a gifset of him lying half-naked on a couch.

It's a nice couch.

I scroll down to find another post about Shawn directly below it and reblogged by the same person too.

This is just one photo, a black and white still on him sitting on a bed. Subject matter aside, I have to admit that's a pretty good shot. The way the light's hitting him, the contrast of the shadows, the general composition...it's just really pleasing to look at.

I heart it and keep scrolling. A few memes and text posts and random quotes on nature photos later and I run into another Shawn post.

Another gifset and this work of art is a collection of moments of Shawn licking his lips.

Lovely.

Leave me alone, Mendes.

I close the app and lock my phone. I push it away and pull my blanket over my head. I lay there in the dark for a little, listening to my breathing and the faint murmur of my dad watching Seth Meyers downstairs.

My phone buzzes once.

An email.

It's probably spam, but I turn over and grab it.

It's from the movie.

I got the job.

I'm going to be working as a makeup assistant on The Breakfast Club remake.

I might have to put makeup on real actors.

I might have to work with Shawn Mendes.

I might have to put makeup on Shawn Mendes.

Oh my god.

—-

It’s cringey, but now it’s public so... *shrugs* Tell me your thoughts in the tags or message me.

#b roll #shawn mendes fanfic #shawn mendes #shawn mendes fanfiction #shawn mendes story #shawn peter raul mendes #mendes army #shawn #mendes

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thisdaynews · 3 years

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FBI Releases Incriminating Chat Between Hushpuppi and Abba Kyari

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/fbi-releases-incriminating-chat-between-hushpuppi-and-abba-kyari/

FBI Releases Incriminating Chat Between Hushpuppi and Abba Kyari

A US Court archive has nitty gritty discussions between Nigeria’s observed Deputy Commissioner of Police, Abba Kyari, and scandalous suspected fraudster, Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, assumed name Hushpuppi in regards to pay off and capture of another suspected fraudster.