#then I actually like did research and got educated and wow! I changed my opinion

[lovemesomesurveys]

[zombiebandido]

Can you recommend any Neil Gaiman to me, aside from Stardust or Good Omens? I’m not familiar with his work.

What's the best concert you've been to, if you've been? Jonas Brothers and Green Day.

What's the funniest screenname you've ever seen? I’ve been on the internet since I was like 9 years old, I’ve come across many.

Is there an animal you like that most people don't? I don’t think so. Most people don’t seem to dislike giraffes, which are my favorite animal. <<< Same. And doggos.

Is there an animal that you think is overrated in terms of how it's liked? No.

Is there a time period you think is underrated? I’d love to bring the 90′s back, that’s all. <<< I’m in.

What about music? Hmm.

Do you find yourself listening to music that's a bit more esoteric? No.

What are your three favorite books and why? I’m gonna give you my three current favorite artists instead: AJ Rivers, Willow Rose, and Mary Stone. They’re murder mystery and psychological thriller authors with tons of books and I’ve really enjoyed the many I’ve read from each of them.

What about authors? ^^^ Do you have any likes you wouldn't tell someone until you got to know them? Hmm. I think things would just come up over time, not because I’m waiting to tell them.

Do you have a favorite language? Spanish.

What about a place you've always wanted to visit? I’d love to be able to travel all over.

What's something someone does or says that just makes you laugh? Tell me a lame dad joke. I’m a sucker for those. <<< lol I am, too. I came across a compilation post recently on here that was pretty great.

Do goldfish crackers ever make you sick, or is that just me? I’ve never had that issue.

Do you have a favorite art style? No.

Do you have a favorite myth/fairy-tale? There’s several I find interesting and enjoy.

Who is your favorite person aside from family? Alexander Skarsgard. ;)

Do any of your pets (if you have them) have weird quirks? My doggo is very quirky. She’s such a goofball.

Do you listen to music from anywhere besides America? Some.

Have you ever "quit" a site and came back to it more than once? I don’t think so.

Do you have an "odd" fascination with anything? Hm. I don’t think I have any “odd” fascinations. 

What is the thing you want most at this moment? I’d really like to just feel decent today so I can enjoy a nice Easter with my family.

What was the last book you read and what was it about? I’m currently reading, “Cold Highway” by Mary Stone, which is the 4th book in a series.

What was the worst book you've ever read & why? I can’t believe I ever read the Fifty Shades of Gray books. *facepalm*

Do you have a favorite breed of dog or cat? Which? Labs and German Shepherds are awesome.

If you like any anime/manga, what are some titles you recommend? --

What do you think about school in general? I think it’s important to get an education. <<<

What's the hardest thing you've been through, & what did you learn from it? The accident that made me a paraplegic and everything that resulted from it ever since.

What are three "unrealistic" things you want most? Good health is the most unrealistic. 

What are some of your favorite foods? Ramen, garlic parm and lemon pepper boneless wings from Wingstop, and scrambled eggs and biscuits smothered in country gravy.

Where do you like to buy your clothes? Boxlunch and Hot Topic. 

Do you take any daily vitamins? No, but I definitely should be.

Who are three of your favorite fictional characters of all time? There’s so many to choose from, though.

If you had to give the world a pre-existing mythological/fictional being, what would it be? Superheroes, maybe? 

When buying Slurpees, if you do, do you get only one flavor or mix them? I always liked mixing Coke and cherry together.

Do you have a favorite 7Eleven food? I liked getting snacks and drinks from there, but I never ate their pizza or hot dogs or anything of that sort.

Do you have any desire to learn (a) foreign language(s)? Which? I’d just like to be fluent in Spanish.

If you could have any career, "realistic"-ness aside, what would it be? I still don’t know.

What are three memorable movies from your childhood? Mary Kate and Ashley movies, Disney movies, and The Rugrats Movie. Ha, I know I cheated by grouping some together, but whatever.

Do you, personally, put a space after ellipses, or not? No.

What do some of the things that inspire you have in common? I haven’t felt inspired in a long time.

Micky D's sweet tea, y/n/other? I used to like it when I was younger. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I had it, though. 

What are three of your best (non-physical) qualities? Blah.

What are three of your worst (again; non-physical) qualities? Blahhhh.

What is one of your firmest beliefs? My belief in God.

Do you ever question things until you're unsure of even the silliest thing? Sometimes.

Do you have anything that keeps you from doing something you'd truly enjoy? My health.

What are your three biggest pet peeves (personality-wise) in others? Arrogance, close-mindedness, and people who just jump on the bandwagon with certain things without doing their own research and forming their own opinions, not even really knowing what the issue is, they’re just following the crowd. 

Do you work to fix your faults? Or at least, admit to them? I’m quick to own up and admit to all my faults, but do I do I shit about them? ...

What are three of your best physical qualities? (NOT EYES!) Blehhh.

What are some of your greatest aspirations? I don’t have any. :/

How do you hope the world will change, if at all? I wish we could see less division and violence.

Who are three (fairly known) people you find very intriguing? Hmm.

What are three things that make you the happiest? God, my family, and trips to the beach.

What is/are your view(s) on god, religion, spirituality, or relations to? I’m a Christian.

Are you arachnophobic or scared of spiders in the least? YES.

Do you play WoW? What do you think of it either way? Nope.

What kind of computer do you have? Windows 7/Vista/XP/Other? I have a MacBook Air, which currently runs on macOS Sierra.

What are you good at? Nothing.

What career do you hope to have? I really don’t know. :/

Are you taking any interesting classes in school/do you not attend? I’m finished with school.

If you don't attend, are you taking any "lessons" for anything? Nope.

A book/piece that has had an exceptional impact on your life? The Bible.

If you know of pandora.com, what is your favorite station? Actually, I was listening to Pandora recently for the first time in years and came across this 90s, 2000s, and Today’s Hits station that I was really enjoying.

Have you ever "lost" a friend in any way? How did you deal? Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of friends. Some were harder to deal with than others.

Any music recommendations? Check out that Pandora station.

What are at least three of your biggest fears? Losing my loved ones, death, and never getting better/getting worse.

Most recently read book that you liked? I’m currently reading, “Cold Highway” by Mary Stone, which is the 4th book in a series. 

Do you have a piece of jewelry you don't like to take off? No. I haven’t worn jewelry in a long time.

Do you have a favorite quote? Why is it your favorite? I have many. Any odd pastimes you have? I don’t consider any of my pastimes odd.

Are you quirky in any way? (Name them please). My eating habits, for sure. I’m just really picky and particular.

Have any practices you aren't opposed to but wouldn't do yourself? Uhh.

Political standing?

Do you have any piercings/what do you think about piercings? I just have my earlobes pierced.

Do you have a favorite material? My soft, fuzzy throw blanket.

What are three names you'd name a pet if you HAD to get a pet right now? I don’t know. I’d have to see them and see what vibe I get.

Do you like to listen to dorky/amusing music? What would be considered dorky and amusing music?

Coffee vs. Tea vs. Energy Drinks: Order from favorite to least favorite. Coffee, energy drinks (only the Starbucks Doubleshot coffee energy drink), and tea.

Do you like more "fruity" sweets or "savory" sweets? Uhh, I like cupcakes, donuts, brownies, cookies, muffins, and cheesecake type of sweet.

What do you hate the most? My health, myself, and where I’m at in my life.

What genres of music are your favorite? I like variety.

Do you believe in true love? Yeah.

Do you believe in love at first sight? If yes, why? No.

What are some of your favorite clothing accessories? I just wear leggings and graphic tees.

If reincarnation exists, what sort of person would you want to be next? What are some things you believe strongly in? My faith.

Where's your favorite place you've been? Beaches and Disneyland.

What sort of books and movies do you like? Horror, psychological thriller, mystery, and YA for books, horror, psychological thrillers, drama, superhero films, some sci-fi and fantasy stuff like Star Wars, action, adventure, and romcoms for movies.

What's your favorite thing to do on a rainy Saturday? I don’t do anything different, but I do love when it rains.

Is there a book you've read that really touched you? Yeah.

Do you have a favorite artist? As in a painter? No.

PC or MAC? Mac.

What do you love doing? Spending time with my family, reading, scrolling through Tumblr, catching up on social media and trending topics, surveys, listening to ASMR, watching YouTube, watching my favorite shows, drinking coffee, sleeping...

If you could create the perfect world for yourself, what would it be? All my loved ones would be there, good health, money wouldn’t be a concern, happiness, I’d have a house on the beach, I’d be comfortable and relaxed and at peace... stuff like that.

Do you think that fate plays a part in people's lives? No.

Are you religious, spiritual, atheist...? I am a Christian. 

What are your opinions on the media? There’s the good and bad. It can be pretty brutal and problematic, for sure.

Do you think that people throw the words "love" and "hate" around too much? Yes.

What is your favorite piece of technology that you own? My laptop and phone.

What's a piece of technology you'd like to own? I have what I want at the moment. 

Are you afraid of technology developing to where we're too reliant on it? Oh, we’re waaaay past that point.

Does it bother you when people do things to fit in with a certain crowd? When they’re doing problematic things. 

Hot or cold? I’d much rather be cold. I like being wrapped up in a blanket, wearing hoodies/sweatshirts, and drinking hot coffee. Being hot is just miserable.  Do you think that Bzoink should extent the character amount for questions? I don’t use Bzoink.

Do you have a favorite combination of complimentary colors? A lot of colors look nice together.

Do you know why all the young people who have nice cars always look grumpy? I don’t think I’ve noticed that.

What's your favorite odd ice cream flavor? I don’t like any odd flavors. What’s with you and odd stuff?

Where do you like to get your ice cream? I’m not a big ice cream person, but the store is fine, ha. It was nice going somewhere like Cold Stone or something as well, though. I haven’t had ice cream in years, though.

What's your opinion on stereotypes/labels? Labels can be useful in some cases.

Do you ever use random word generators for Bzoinkoids?

Do you believe that history repeats itself? Absolutely. There’s proof of that.

Would you rather learn from your mistakes or just undo them? Ha, it’d be nice to be able to undo them.

What was the most interesting class you had in school? I always enjoyed English. And then of course I found a lot of my psych classes interesting. Do you write? If so, what? Nope.

Do you have a favorite website? Tumblr and YouTube.

Do you think that the quality of TV shows is going down? No, there’s so many good shows.

Do you have a favorite culture? Learning about different cultures is interesting. What was a story you heard as a child that really affected you? Hmm.

Who was your favorite grade-school teacher and why? Mr. McG, my 4th and then 8th grade teacher. He was everyone’s favorite. He made learning so much fun and really cared about his students.

Do you think that the world will end? How? Yes, how the Bible says it will.

Do you believe in Global Warming? Have you researched it? Yes.

Do you prefer piercings or tattoos? I only have my earlobes pierced and I have zero tattoos, soo I can’t say I’m big on either one.

Do you remember your dreams? Very, very rarely.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #342

“in this farewell, there’s no blood, there’s no alibi  /  ‘cuz i’ve drawn regret from the truth of a thousand lies”

What’s your all-time favourite cartoon? Does anime count? In which case I'd say Fullmetal Alchemist, or the original Pokemon. If we're not including anime, then uhhhh Avatar: The Last Airbender, even though I have much more to go in the series. Have you ever taken dance lessons? What kind? Yeah, I've done a few for many years: jazz, clogging, modern, and hip hop. When did you last run and why? I literally couldn't tell you. I don't even know if I can run with the current state of my legs. My knees would probably crumple. Does your house/flat/whatever the hell you live in need cleaning? Not necessarily cleaning, but sorting. I still have boxes outside and inside my room of my stuff I need to put up somewhere... but whenever I prepare to do it, I just get so overwhelmed and shy away from it. Then there's the spare room, that's a total mess loaded with boxes and the like. Mom and I have just avoided it like the plague. Was your last relationship with a man or a woman? Woman. What do you think your next achievement will be? HOPEFULLY getting a job... Do you like mushrooms? NOOOOOOO. What dream do you remember most vividly? I'm not talking about it. Favorite kind of bread? Pumpernickel. Rabbits or hamsters? Rabbits. I've never met a nice hamster, and I just think rabbits are cuter. A movie you’ve never seen that it seems like every one else has? Harry Potter films. Favorite dog breed? I'm biased towards beagles. When was the last time you climbed a tree? Never, actually. Where I live, there aren't really many weighty trees with low branches. Just pine trees. Most common lie you tell? That I'm "fine" when I'm not. Ever seen your parents make out? Jc no, I'll take a hard pass there. Do you put your hair up a lot or down? It's too short to put up. Most of the time do you straighten or curl your hair? Neither. What piercing do you hate? I'm not a fan of cheek dermals at all, but you do you 100%. Were you raised in a religious house? Yes; I was raised Roman Catholic. Do your parents get mad when you're on the computer for hours? Mom used to for many years until I became an adult and she just realized it was in vain. I haven't lived with Dad since I was a teenager, but when my parents were together, he usually didn't say anything. Have you ever been asked for a nude picture? No, thankfully. I'd stop talking to the person immediately. What would you do if your parent hit you? I honestly feel like I'd slap them back and get the fuck out. Or just freeze in shock and cry. What's your most common mood? Stressed but distracted. Do you like poems? Yeah, usually. Ever kissed someone half-naked? Uh yeah. Have you ever been in a parade? No. Do you still play Pokémon? I play Pokemon GO, and I've actually been tempted to get out my DS and play one of the games I have (I can't remember which). I do find Pokemon games to be VERY grind-ey, though, so I can't play them for too long without getting bored. What is your favorite Pokémon? Ninetales. I also really love Espeon, though, and Charmander will always have my heart. Is there an animal you like that most people don't? Bats! :') Is there an animal that you think is overrated in terms of how it's liked? No animal is overrated. Have you ever "quit" a site and came back to it more than once? Uhhhh I don't think so. Do you have an "odd" fascination with anything? Most would probably consider "vulture culture" to be pretty weird, being drawn to dead animals and all... What's the hardest thing you've been through, & what did you learn from it? The breakup with Jason. I learned that some people make promises they aren't afraid to break, that someone can promise "forever" and not mean it, that the most unexpected can just snap their fingers and forget about you... I learned a lot. And most things, not positive. What are three "unrealistic" things you want most? 1.) To be able to financially support myself by just freelance nature photography; 2.) sooo many different kinds of pets; and 3.) to be totally rid of my mental illnesses. Do you take any daily vitamins? No, but I would if I was the one who bought groceries and stuff. I do however take Vitamin D once a week for my legs. Who are three of your favorite fictional characters of all time? JUST THREE??????? FUCK MAN idk. Uhhh well there's of course Darkiplier and Wilford Warfstache, then uhhh probably Pyramid Head. If you had to give the world a pre-existing mythological/fictional being, what would it be? Idk, I'd really need to be more educated on their lore before I made that decision. Do you have any desire to learn (a) foreign language(s)? Which? I both do and don't want to resume learning German. I got very good at it and could have basic conversations, but lack of application has slaughtered my vocabulary. Now it's like, it'd be nice to try again, but for what purpose? I don't think I'll ever actually apply it to my life, so it just seems like it'd be a load of wasted effort. But then on the other hand, I also feel that doing something you simply want to do isn't a waste of time. Idk. What is one of your firmest beliefs? Equality for all. No race, religion, whatthefuckever makes you more or less valuable than someone else. Do you have anything that keeps you from doing something you'd truly enjoy? Oh yes. Depression and anxiety, mostly. Do you work to fix your faults? Or at least, admit to them? I definitely try, and I'll certainly admit to them. How do you hope the world will change, if at all? I just want more compassion, less violence, more understanding... What is/are your view(s) on god, religion, spirituality, or relations to? In short, I believe that something sentient created the universe, and it/they/he/she/what-have-you just... let life play out from there, I think. I like to believe there's a plane of consciousness like an afterlife that exists, but if not, I don't really care. I hope the evil get what was coming to them, and the good get back what they gave, but maybe we're all better off without life after death. We'll all find out one day. Are you arachnophobic or scared of spiders in the least? Some, yes; others, not so much. This is very situational. Do you play WoW? What do you think of it either way? Haha, you're asking an avid player. I enjoy it, but not as much as I used to. At one point I was a Heroic raider, sometimes dabbling in Mythic, but now I'm just mostly a casual mount collector that likes chatting with my guildies and just doing dailies 'n shit. I owe a lot to the game, honestly; it helped me stay occupied throughout the breakup, and still today gives me something to do. What kind of computer do you have? Windows 7/Vista/XP/Other? I have an Acer Nitro with Windows 10. Are you taking any interesting classes in school/do you not attend? I'm no longer in school. If you don't attend, are you taking any "lessons" for anything? No, but I would like to join a photography course somewhere. A book/piece that has had an exceptional impact on your life? Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo just made me hate war more than I innately did. What genres of music are your favorite? Just metal as an umbrella term. Some heavy stuff, some less, some in the middle, some leaning towards other genres... but I just like metal. Do you think that fate plays a part in people's lives? No. Wouldn't "fate" just make it all... worthless? Like we're just storybook characters with a predetermined ending? What are your opinions on the media? One word: manipulative. What's a piece of technology you'd like to own? I REALLY want a PS4, especially lately. There's just a lot of games I REALLY want to play. Are you afraid of technology developing to where we're too reliant on it? We're already *too* reliant on it, which I do believe is a bad thing. I know, absolutely hysterical for me to be talking. What's your favorite odd ice cream flavor? I don't think I've ever had a truly odd ice cream flavor. There's this local place though that makes a kind that tastes JUST like s'mores, and I can fucking murder a cup of that. What's your opinion on stereotypes/labels? They're limiting and devalue uniqueness, imo. I know very, very few people who totally fit a certain stereotype, so why even bother. Like I don't care if you use them as adjectives to some extent, just don't put too much weight on them. Just be you. Do you believe that history repeats itself? It's not necessarily doomed to, but it happens sometimes, obviously. Would you rather learn from your mistakes or just undo them? Depends on the mistake. What was the most interesting class you had in school? Probably Mythology in high school. Do you write? If so, what? Yeah, meerkat role-play. And every now and again, poetry. Do you have a favorite culture? No; I'm not educated on nearly enough to pick one. Do you believe in global warming? Have you researched it? Lol no shit I do. I don't exactly think it takes much research to see with your own two eyes that it's factual. Do you prefer piercings or tattoos? Tattoos, if I had to pick. What comedy movie is your favorite? White Chicks. Have you ever meditated? Yes. Doesn't work for me. What comes to mind when you think of a great moment in your life? Realizing it was my choice to liberate myself and my happiness from my ex. He didn't and never should've carried it, because that's my right. What do you like about springtime? Aaaaall the flowers. <3 How have you handled having to stay in? It's not really different from my average day, so... How would your friends describe you? Quiet and overthinks literally everything. Have you ever hallucinated? When I was coming off a certain med in middle school, I saw black moving shadows. What (or who) is the best thing that ever happened to you? The partial hospitalization program I attended for two months following my suicide attempt. It's where I met my psychiatrist, who set my medication straight. Medicine besides though, I learned so many coping techniques and just how to deconstruct my trauma. As well as possible, anyway. What is the worst decision you ever made? Handing over the ability to make happiness for myself to another person. What is your favorite arcade game? Don't have one. Do you feel neglected? No. What school subject(s) are/were your best? English, Arts, Science. Are you allergic to pollen? Yep. What style of wedding dress do you like best? Probably ballgown. Are you over your first love? I probably never will be in complete totality. Do you always answer your phone? No. I only ever do if I recognize the number. Who was the last person you know to have a birthday? Today is actually my sister's birthday. What song is currently stuck in your head? I have Halocene's cover of "What I've Done" on a loop right now. It has me absolutely covered in goosebumps. Do you ever use coloring books? Not really anymore. Do you personally know anyone who is an author? Not to my knowledge, no. What’s your favorite kind of salsa/dip to go with tortilla chips? Just your normal, mildly hot salsa. Do you wash your car by hand or drive through a car wash? Mom's car hasn't been washed in... well, years, given its bumper. Mom worries that in a car wash, it'll be broken off (it is literally held on with a lot of zip ties and duct tape), and we ourselves don't want to wash it, so... Do you have any uncommon kitchen appliances, such as espresso machines, waffle irons, etc? I know we have one or two, but idk what they're called. What did your parents major/minor in in college, if they went? Dad never went to college. Mom changed her major a few times, but her latest was social work, I believe. Has either of their careers influenced what career you chose or want to pursue? Not at all. What kind of natural disaster is most common where you live? Hurricanes. Why is your least favorite season your least favorite? Because it's hot as fuck and humid. Have you ever had an animal get into your attic? No. When was the last time you started a “new chapter” of your life? I don't know. Hopefully I'll start one soon when I leave PHP and pursue a job... What room in your home do you spend the least amount of time in? I'm always in my room. Do you do anything to reduce the amount of electricity you use? I feel awful admitting I do quite the opposite... Being in the dark during the day affects my depression, so I'll have my lamp (or both) on even if it's just sort of shaded inside. Are you usually open to trying a new food that you aren’t familiar with? Eh, it depends on the food. I'm not very adventurous with foods though. Do you listen to Panic! At The Disco? I do. Have you ever had a kinky dream about a celebrity? ... It wasn't "kinky," but it was a dream lmao. Has anyone ever told you that they loved you, and you couldn’t say it back? That's how I ended the whole Joel childishness. Which friend do you confide in most? My mom. Do you wear a cross? No. What is your favorite doughnut? That's so hard. :( Krispy Kreme's normal glazed though probably takes the cake. I also love chocolate frosted and just totally plain, though. Do you have a hot tub? If so, where is it located? No. Did you read the Twilight series, or jump on the bandwagon after the movie? Neither. Do you or your parents rake your yard? Dad did growing up. Now nobody does or needs to. Who did you last go to the movies with? Dad, I think? What color was the last vehicle you were in? White. Do you have any family members in the military right now? No. Is there a ceiling fan in the room you’re in? Yeah. Have you ever heard voices? No. If you’re not straight, who was the first person you came out to? Sara. Do you remember the first time your first crush ever said hi to you? No. Do you ever go places with wet hair? Yeah, idc. Who is your favorite little girl? My nieces. What do you want the most in life? To feel like I made a difference, even a tiny one. If you could have anyone’s singing voice, whose would you choose? OBVIOUSLY Amy Lee's. What’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought that turned out to be a waste of money? *shrug* What’s something you’ve bought that turned out to be way more useful than you anticipated? Hm. Have you ever been on a ship? No. Would you ever date a disabled person? (Be honest) Yes. Would you rather adopt or have your own child? IF I wanted kids, which I absolutely do not, I'd rather have my own. I know I'd feel a deeper connection. What would you class as cheating on someone? As soon as you do/say something you don't want your s/o to know about, you're cheating. As far as earrings go, would you rather wear hoops or studs? Studs. Do you recycle? Yes. If someone dislikes you, what is most likely to be the reason? People have thought I don't try hard enough before. Do you put a line through your "7"s? Yes. ^ What about your "Z"s? Yes. What are you most known for? My art "skill," at least irl. How do you feel about shameless self-promoting? Depends on when, where, and how. As someone who's trying to be a freelance photographer, I get that it's sadly necessary, but there are some places it's just uncalled for.

[alaina-achilles]

ii

challenge one

((sorry for the kinda short fic haha, I’m getting crazy busy with assignment deadlines smh. anyways thanks for the nice rp anna @arin-schreave. and love our rps as usual ana!! @itssara-oc @itzelbm-oc ))

The etiquette lesson was… uneventful. And I certainly was not ready to be thrown on so much information so early in the morning. Especially with an empty stomach. Luckily I’ve got that covered and ate a packet of oreos in my room before going out. And I’m also lucky I know most of the basics thanks to the gatherings my sisters and I are often forced to attend. My maids were really nice and they did my hair nicely and I opted for a simple and formal dress for the interview.

The interview.

I sigh as I think about it. To be honest, I’m quite… nervous. I've had many interviews in my life before and my mom has certainly prepared me well for each and every one of them. It’s not the cameras that worry me - I’ve had a few interviews with them before on my book and career… It’s the prince. I’m so used to knowing the interviewee well (by doing my research, of course) that I often know just what to say to please them and make them like me. But I know none of that about the prince.

I sigh and bite my lip and turn around to walk to the food when I see the girl I was hoping to see for the entire morning.

“Hey!” I say as a way of greeting. My friend looks up, sees me and immediately smiles.

“Achi!” I smile at the sound of my new nickname. Sara quickly pulls me into a hug. “that quick etiquette class was something…” she lowers her voice. “I'm sure I wasn't the only one who can feel the tense atmosphere.”

“I know what you mean... I’m glad I already know the basics... how are we supposed to learn all of that in one go” I agree with her, shaking my head as I feel sorry for those who have never learnt any of that before. We talk more about the class and decide to start piling food onto my plate. I hope nobody heard my stomach growl.

“You know I'm so tempted to ask to switch seats but I know it probably won't be the best idea.” Sara says as we groan about how far each other are.

I giggle at the thought of Sara asking another girl to switch seats. “yeah, i guess it’ll be a good chance for us to meet new people…” I frown as I stress about how I haven’t actually met anyone else yet. “Have you met any other girls yet?”

Sara chuckles. “I guess you can say that.” She cocks her head to the side and sighs “I've said a few words to some of them but I'm not sure anyone clicked with me like you. How about you?”

I smile at her words. “yeahh I havent really too…” I say with a shake of my head as I think of how I spent the whole night talking to my sisters instead of socializing. I turn to the drink selection and widen my eyes in awe. “I never knew there are SO many types of milk!”

“Ah milk something I wish I could drink but I'm lactose in tolerant” Sara replies with a giggle. “Anyway look at all the food. I'm just hoping to enjoy my time here!” She smiles, but for some reason, it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I don't feel like I'll last one. First of all the prince isn't in my opinion really aware that this is a selection, he has 35 girls hoping to ask for his hand in marriage. Second of all, as someone who was once thinking of marrying the so called love of my life I know he's not completely over his ex, and third there is going to be a lot of drama.”

I cock my head to the side as I think about her words, not expecting that. “Yeah I know what you mean... The prince doesn't seem happy at all.” I sigh. “I honestly don't know what to do with the interview later... hopefully he’ll find someone he can love and be happy about”

She shrugs in response. “I don't know how I'll introduce myself. I could smile and lie or tell him what I really think.” She bites her lip. “I really do hope he finds someone among these girls to make him happy. Or at least someone who would even remotely fall in love with him despite possibly being a rebound. Anyway, do you know who's gonna be at your table? Anyone you wanna be friends with?”

I nod at her words. “That’s true... I think I’d give him one chance, the interview, to see who he really is…” I say with a smile. Sometimes I forget that this selection goes both ways too. I’m not the only one who has to be liked by the prince. “I’m not sure but I think Itzel’s on my table... I haven't met her yet but she was sitting near me during the etiquette class so yeah. You?”

“I wish I could but I myself am in a similar situation as him. And I feel awful I took a place of someone who would have tried harder. Or at least wanted this. Anyways, I'll be cheering for you!!” She says with a smile. “What kind of vibes does she give? She seems cold and intimidating to me. Jen and Andromeda, and a couple more. They seems nice. I just hope I'll be able to make small talk.”

I thank her with a smile. “And I hope you also find the one you love and loves you back... “ I pause as I think about her question. “Itzel... I don’t know, she seems like a bit cool and we didn't say much just now. Hopefully some good food will cheer her up!”

We continue chatting about Itzel and other stuff as we continue to fill our plate. We finally decide to finish our conversation to go and enjoy our food after a short while. I tell her good luck with finding new friends.

She nods and gives me thumbs up. “I will try my best, Achi.” For some reason, I feel like she’s acting a bit off, but I brush it off as nerves from the interview. But as we walk away, I turn back around and mouth “thanks bun” to which she smiles in response. I sigh and look at my plate of food happily as I walk back to my table.

“Hi, Itzel, right?” I say to the girl near me.

She smiles politely, nodding in acknowledgement. “Hello and you are correct, I am Itzel.” She hums in thought as she looks at me. “I am trying hard to remember names and faces, I am bad at this so I am sorry for not quite knowing. I believe your name starts with an A, right?”

I brighten up at her guess. “Yup!! I’m Alaina!” I look at my plate. “How’s the food?” Food is always a good topic to start off.

She chuckles. “Well, it's a pleasure to meet you Alaina. It is delicious. There's quite a few things that are new to me so I'm very happy right now.. You'll enjoy the food very much. Are you excited to meet the Prince after this?”

I smile at her reply and take a bite of my food and widen my eyes. “this IS good!!” I laugh. “ I am! And also quite nervous”

We continue to talk more and I learn that Itzel is into neuroscience.

“Wow neurology and neuroscience... I did a few psychology courses in uni and I struggled so badly with the neuro stuff.” I tell her truthfully with a laugh. “You are one brave girl for wanting to do that.”

Itzel turns out to be super nice as we get to know each other. She also helped calm my nerves as we finished our lovely breakfast. I make a mental note to tell Sara about it.

“Anyway, let your other friend know I'm not THAT bad. I could see her shake every time she looked at me.” Itzel tells me as we stand up, seeming to have read my mind.  

“I definitely will!! And good luck on your interview with the prince!” I tell her with a laugh. She smiles and wishes the same to me and soon we are ushered into a waiting room. I look around to find Sara, but can’t see her as I scan the room a few times. I shake my head, she’s probably touching up in the bathroom. I sigh and before I can even choose a new girl to talk to, I’m called into the room.

I take a deep breath and hold my head high like Mom always tells us to as I step into the room filled with cameras. I smile at the cameras and try to keep my walking natural and elegant.

You can do this.

And if all goes wrong, blame your sister. She caused all of this anyways.

I hide my smile at the silly thought and turn my focus to the gorgeous guy that is the prince. While I may not know the prince well, one thing I know for sure. He is definitely good-looking. Despite the lack of a er genuine smile. He must not have been taught acting in his education. I think with a giggle as I keep my smile intact. I don’t miss him looking at my name tag. And I guess, he also didn’t take the time to learn our names.

“Good morning, Lady Alaina, please have a seat.” He says formally, motioning to the sofa.

“Good morning, your highness.” I say with a smile before pausing in slight anxiety. Do I curtsy or…? I decide to quickly bob into one before sitting down hastily. I can instantly hear my mom’s voice in my head.

Be professional, Alaina. Stop with the fidgeting nonsense. You’re a lady, Alaina. And don’t ever drop that smile. You know that’s one of your best physical traits.

Prince Arin sits down next to me gracefully and angles his body towards me. “How are you doing this morning?”

A simple and straight-forward question.

I place my hand on my lap as my mom has taught me to since I was a little kid. “I’m good. I met some of the other girls and that was quite interesting-” I answer. “And also what you’ve been doing the whole morning.” I add with a laugh. “How’s yours?”

He nods at me. “It’s going well, thank you. Did you sleep well?” I vaguely remember some random guy saying their morning had been bad but now that they’ve met me, theirs is perfect. I almost laugh at the memory.

Focus, Alaina.

“I didn't sleep for very long as I was busy talking to my sisters.” I tell him truthfully as I smile fondly at the thought of my sisters. “But the sleep is good, the bed is really comfy!”

He nods. “I’m glad you were able to speak with them. Big changes can be difficult.” His eyes go to the cameras then back to me. I wonder what is he thinking. Does he wish for them to be gone like I do? I wonder if he is different when away from the cameras. I catch myself almost frowning at the thought but quickly smooths my face back to the perfect smile. “Which province are you from?”

“Atlin.” Then I decide to try to make him smile. My friends laugh a lot at this alliteration. “Alaina Achilles of Atlin.”

He does not smile. “And what do you do in Atlin?” I almost frown again as I realize how factual his questions are. All of them should be written in my profile or something…

Maybe it’s all just for the cameras.

“I just got my degree and was in the process of finding a job. I ended up deciding to give writer another try.”

He nods again. “What kind of writing do you do?”

“Fiction…” I look a bit embarrassed as I think about my published book that I’m not very proud of. It was definitely not my best work. I sigh and lower my voice so that only he can hear. “Okay fine, y’all prolly have had people stalked us thoroughly so no point in hiding this... “ I say then louder “I wrote and published a book a few years ago.”

He does not just nod at this! “Oh.” He pauses as his head bobs. “What kind of book? I didn’t read your files so I’m not up to speed on your accomplishments.”

Guess the questions aren’t just for the cameras then.

I almost scoff at his choice of words. “Accomplishments” make this really sound like a job interview. Perhaps it is, in a way. So instead I act surprised and look down as I realize I have to tell him about my book in front of cameras. Not like the media doesn’t know about this already. “it’s a um teen romance…”

“I haven’t read any books from that genre but I’m sure it must be wonderful. Being published is an accomplishment.”

Accomplishment.

“It’s not... it’s a cheesy book written by a sixteen year old…” I peeks at him through my eyelashes. “I’m sure you’re gonna laugh if u ever came across it.”

And for the first time, he actually shakes his head instead of nodding it. “I tend to stick to non fiction so I think you’re safe.” He finishes with a weird expression that looks suspiciously like a ghost of a smile. I soften as I realize how much this is bugging him as it’s bugging me and decide to laugh it off to ease the tension.

“Well it’s actually called “the bad boy ruined my project” so I’m not really worried. Do you like reading?”

“I do, if I can find the time. Your book sounds like something my sister would enjoy.” He looks a teeny bit more relaxed as we talk about something less er formal.

I nod. “Well, then I’ll recommend it to her when I see her. Any favorite genres?”

“I’ll read mostly anything.” I almost roll my eyes at his answer that tells me nothing about him. He glances over at his watch then looks back to me. “Thank you for speaking with me this morning, Lady Alaina, it’s been a pleasure.” He says as he stands up.  “I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.”

I instantly nod and stand up as well, relieved that this is finally over. “Thank you for your time, your highness. The pleasure’s mine.” I tell him with a smile as I awkwardly bob another curtsy. “You too.” I say as he just looks at me without any expression at all. I hold back a sigh and smile at the cameras again and give them a little wave as I walk back out of the room.

I take a deep breath the moment I step out of my room. I really need to talk to someone. That interview was… nothing that I ever had before. I think about going back into the waiting room, but I really am not in the mood of making small talk with other girls. So I decide to go back into my room. Since I’m one of the first few girls to have finished the interview, the halls should be nice and quiet.

As I walk up the stairs to my room, I hear a bit of hushing and then a closing of a door followed by the sound of the door locking. I ignore the sound as I walk past the first two rooms to my room. As I walk past Sara’s room. I pause. There seems to be someone else in the room with her… But I know for sure, she isn’t due to have her interview until later…

I shake my head and decide she has probably met a new friend. Despite myself, I can’t help but feel a bit sad. Even Sara’s making new friends, probably someone she enjoys the company of over me since I haven’t been to her room before. What am I doing here? I ask myself as I walk into my own room and unzip my dress.

Not bothering to pull my dress off, I reach for my phone and call my sisters.

[jupiterjunebug]

WHERE'S THE WEREWOLF ESSAY, OP??

@malaloba @bisexualducknewton You also dared me to say this so you get a tag

Okay so fun facts about Tyler Keegan Casey (I literally just wanted to make a joke about Tyler Casey abbreviating to Tyler K.C):

His parents, Edgar Casey and Rebecca Wilson, got married at 18. Their reasoning was "hey, we've been together all of high school, we still like each other, and I think our kids would be really hot." A bit of the shine wore off for Rebecca, though, when it turned out Edgar inherited a controlling streak from his parents. He got it in his head that his growth as a person required moving as far away from tiny little Casper, WV as he could. Which was fine, and would've been true if he’d put any actual EFFORT into growing up, except he made that decision without consulting his wife. Family was the most important thing in the world for her, which meant she didn't want to leave. Unfortunately, family was the most important thing in the world to her, and Edgar was technically her family.As far away as possible turned out to be Fortville, Indiana. At around 3000 people, it was certainly bigger than Casper, but much smaller than Edgar's ambitions. Unfortunately, they'd run out of gas, and got stuck in town long enough for Rebecca to work up her courage and deliver an ultimatum: they were eight hours from Casper, close enough to drive over, and she'd live no further away than that.Tyler was born a few years later and grew up the only "daughter" of the household, pretty in a generic way and polite to a fault. His homesick mama taught him that he'd know when he found his people on account of the decision to give up everything for them would only hurt a little. His pyramid-scheme chasing daddy taught him that the key to success is for people to think you're one of their people, and who gives a shit if it's true or not?Up until he was twenty he was a full-on social chameleon: he wore the closest thing he could get to the "right" clothes, he did his hair in the "right" way, he laughed at the right jokes and had a crush on all the right boys. Third runner up for prom queen, dated at least three members in the football team (the breakups were never his fault, of course. He'd take a relationship as far as the other person wanted, he only dated them because they wanted to date him after all), popular but not so popular for people to consider him a threat.Every holiday, Tyler and his mama went off to Casper to visit her family. That meant he ended up at the kids table with his two younger cousins Franc ( @keplersheetz) and Vicki. Franc and Vicki were practically sisters, Franc lived with Vicki's parents whenever her ma was off dealing with her host of mental issues, which meant that Tyler was kind of the third wheel.

Tyler ended up the responsible one, and town gossip went on about how they hoped he'd be a good influence, because wasn't he just a perfect little child? Gossip about Franc went on about how she was wild, about how she didn't follow rules, if she wasn't careful she'd end up just like her mother and didn't Vicki's parents worry about if she was a bad influence? No one gossiped about Vicki at all.

It created a weird circle of jealousy, where Tyler envied Franc for having the guts to be herself, Franc worried that Vicki would end up liking Tyler better than her, and Vicki wished somebody might talk about her instead of other people’s “influence” on her. In general, Tyler and Franc didn't get along on account of they were very different and had no interests in common, but when you spend months each year as an obligatory playmate you end up developing at least a little fondness.Tyler went to Indiana University Bloomington, close enough to home for both his parents and also in possession of a Bachelors program for early childhood education. He quickly acquired a job at the library, a reputation as "a pleasure to have in class," an overcommitment to several clubs, and a thoroughly mediocre boyfriend. He also ended up in two classes with and as a coworker to Monet, ( @pleasekalemenow). In sophomore year, the two were roommates and in three classes together, which was haha a funny coincidence. Then in Spring term Tyler had a stress breakdown and Monet was so thrown by composed, fake-ass Tyler losing his shit over something completely minor that she ended up sitting with him for four hours and now they're best friends.In the summer before Junior year he was like "hey wait a fucking second, if I'm completely changing my personality around other people so that they'll like me...do they actually like me?" and decided that fuck it, I'm going to just have my own personality and work my hardest to make it so people find that person likable. The most obvious shift - aside from him breaking up with his mediocre boyfriend and quitting half of his clubs - was coming out as, you know, a dude.

His parents didn't really...get it? His mom continues to this day to treat it as something she supports but just can't understand, and his dad kind of took it as a personal attack because his dad is a self-obsessed jackass. The rest of the family didn't really express an opinion on any of this, on account of Vicki had a baby and Franc ran away from home just a little while later. Compared to having a daughter under 18 and just straight up disappearing, being trans wasn't all that embarrassing to them.Things went pretty decent for half of Junior year. Then one day while he was watching a kindergarten class, the last kid to be picked up at the end of the day turned into an eldritch horror and ate the other student teacher. The FBI’s Paranormal Research and Investigation division showed up and was like "hey I'm pretty sure you can guess that we're going to tell you to keep this hush hush, so keep this fucking hush hush." Tyler went "wow you know I don't like being kept in the dark about all this," so he changed his major to criminal justice and worked his ass off to graduate at the same time as everyone else. Then he joined the FBI, and when they were interviewing him he dropped some line about "oh, I saw something once and the, uh, I think it was PRI? Said that it was top secret dangerous business. I'd like to solve murders like that :)" and the PRI kind of went "well...I guess? we can hire? Him? He did a god job on all of his exams...we have no reason not to."At around this time he played the love interest in Monet's breakout limited access TV show, Once Upon a Cryptid. This show eventually gained Dr. Horrible levels of cult-classic fame, and Tyler is eternally thankful that T has at this point changed his look enough that no one really recognizes him beyond people he talks to on case being like "haha isn't it funny that you look kind of like actor Tyler Casey and you're an FBI agent just like his character?" And he just says "haha yeah I get that a lot :)"The PRI was also like "hey can you keep an eye on this person who is causing trouble with conspiracy theory shit?" Tyler says "uh yeah, sure? Anything I should know?" And the PRI is like "well it's your cousin, but other than that, nah, glhf :)"Tyler found this situation Vaguely Uncomfortable, so instead of being actually good at his job he took this opportunity to leave reminders to eat and warnings to keep her head down when she overreached. They were all signed with "The FBI Agent That's Watching You Right Now" and wow isn't it fucked up that they're closer as anonymous FBI stalker and conspiracy theorist than they were as proper childhood playmates? It fucks me up sometimes.Five years before the game starts, he goes on an investigation into what may or may not be a supernatural murderer. While in the area he runs into August Caraway ( @transagentstern), who is. Super his type. He immediately starts finding excuses to spend time w/ the hot, sensitive, painter, asking August to be his guide around the area. And also if he could see that painting that August is working on because it sounds really :) great :). Eventually he comes to the conclusion that the long periods of time between attacks and the COD indicate either a werewolf attack or a very patient predator. He goes "well, it's the new moon tonight...so if I take August out on a da-I MEAN INVESTIGATION into that clearing in the woods it'll be safe."Spoilers! It isn't!They get attacked by a werewolf. Tyler says "well, I'm an FBI agent so I should be the one to sacrifice myself" and tries to shoot the werewolf. It quickly takes him to the ground, but hey! At least August has time to run! Except instead of running, August goes up to try and save Tyler. Which ends in them both getting bitten before the silver bracelets August always wears fend the thing off. August manages to drag Tyler to civilization before losing consciousness, and the two wake up in separate hospitals. August is told Tyler got sent to a special FBI hospital, but is fine. Tyler is told August got tired of waiting around for him to wake up and left. (More fun facts: this happened the day before Pigeon's birthday! Wow! Terrible)Tyler is kept under observation for the rest of the month, just to make sure he's fine. He is, of course, not fine. The PRI is super stoked to have access to someone who is fully willing to spend the rest of his month j chillin' and then come in on the full moons, on account of most of the werewolves they have access to are ones they caught and have to keep hold of all the time. Which, like, unlawfully contained civilians are a shitty baseline.So, despite having research in their name, the PRI kinda fucking sucks at research. Their methodology is to just try shit until they figure out 1. How to kill the monster and 2. How to spot the affliction/how it progresses. They are perfectly aware of how to kill werewolves, so really all they do is stage observations under different stress conditions to play “how to spot a werewolf”.

Every experiment is just put them in a cage with moonlight access, see whether the transformation is faster/slower when the person has a certain diet/fitness level/etc. Most of the subjects can’t leave bc they’d run away and are also liable to transform sometimes which is inconvenient.

The PRI isn't especially concerned about Tyler, because they know one of the conditions for a transformation is high stress and if there's one thing he's good at it's completely repressing an anxiety attack, so he's able to pretty much do his job aside from the whole "locked up under the full moon" thing. Of course, he's ostracized by his coworkers on account of he's like. Literally a monster. But that's fine! He has Monet! Who he never tells anything about all this because he doesn't want to worry her, and also because her brother (coincidentally August, though Tyler doesn't know that) died around the time of his attack and he doesn't want her to blame herself for never trying to come see him.Good things that happen in these 5 years: he has an amicable relationship with Franc. He gets good at his job. He and Monet discover that the uncanny coincidences which led to them always having classes together carry over into their adult life, and they constantly run into each other while performing their respective jobs. She sometimes invites him to parties to stop men from hitting on her, and because he looks vaguely like Jake Gyllenhaal (that's Tyler's face claim) they get to laugh about all the tabloid rumors that Monet is dating Jake.The bad news is Tyler never had access to the other werewolves prior to the attack (it wasn't his division, and he wasn't usually in a position to take anything alive) which means he's never been around to see a new one, to watch the arc of their deterioration. Usually it goes like this: they wake up, alone and naked in a room with only a bed, a desk, and an uncomfortable wooden chair. They are given clothing by an FBI agent, sometimes that agent is sympathetic, sometimes sneering, but usually expressionless. Each full moon they transform, and remember nothing of it save pain, hunger, and the feeling of their claws digging into the metal walls. Fear is a trigger for transformation, as is anger. They are always afraid, always angry. Eventually, it becomes rare to see them in their human forms.The PRI is fucking stupid. A reasonable person might say "duh, werewolves turn when they're scared, maybe if we put them someplace less scary they'll stop turning so much." Instead, they write in their notes, the notes Tyler receives, "we're fairly certain that, at some point, the humanity of a werewolf is completely lost." He only sees werewolves that have not been human in months, or even years. Or, he sees the ones who are even worse off.The worse news is that Tyler is told there's a cure. Sometimes, the PRI manages to poke and prod at a werewolf and for reasons we just don't understand they never transform again. So he doesn't argue with the tests, and even if he writes a will he doesn't tell Monet anything because he might be fine, and he doesn't want to worry her. He throws himself into his work and into making Monet happy, because he wants to make sure that if he is lost he leaves a legacy. There's something to prove that Tyler Casey's existence was justified.Then he finds out what the cure entails. It's not recovery, not at all; it's pushing someone so hard, making them so afraid, that their body can't take being afraid anymore. A person who’s too tired to feel doesn't shift, not even under the full moon, because the werewolf's state of mind is defined by the person's emotions before it happens (so if someone was actually CALM, really truly calm, then they'd manage to control it, but hunger and anger and fear can all throw that out of wack). If the person is numb, there is nothing for the curse to react to.Tyler Casey would rather die after trying his hardest than live longer but not be able to do anything. So, when he manages to find a job opening at The Askar Foundation, a secret society with more funding and more knowledge than the FBI could ever hope for, he has no qualms spilling the PRI's secrets in exchange for a position as a field agent.As you can probably guess, August, Monet, and Franc are all there as well. The circumstances of their recruitment were significantly less...consensual than his (Monet and Franc recently saw too much and got pressganged in, and after nearly killing Franc while transformed August got dragged in for Askar's own brand of tests). This leads to a veritable five layer dip of fucking drama:1. Franc and Tyler have a private conversation which leads to the revelation of several character secrets on both their parts. This ends when Tyler and Franc both insist that they saw different things during one of the scenes. Franc has always had the ability to tell when people lie to her, but she is also convinced she's right about their topic of conversation (which uh, she IS right, so). That means that, despite the fact that she can't feel him lying, he MUST be. She's convinced that he's had the supernatural ability to get around her own uncanny powers this whole time, and thus they engaged in a Comedy of Errors where instead of mistaken identities it’s Tyler saying things that further convince Franc he's trying to manipulate the entire team2. The Askar foundation would very much like to keep their shiny new field agent, and also Tyler still has connections to the FBI and him snitching to them would be.........inconvenient. So they're willing to put effort, within reason, into making sure he doesn't find out anything that might cause problems, like the fact that August is a kind of monster Tyler has a massive vendetta against. Or uh...anything else that might make him question them. This leads to3. Askar shutting down a conversation between him and Monet, leading to her concluding that talking about their past experiences with the supernatural OR the workings of Askar will never go well. (Exacerbated by the fact that Askar had already been trying to keep her from finding out shit about her brother) 4. Consequently, Monet will no longer talk to him about deep personal topics if they lead back to these things at ALL5. Franc ended up in a romantic entanglement w/ the monster of the week, who is a shapeshifter unwillingly being used to bring about...the apocalypse. He thinks the reason she doesn’t trust him is because she figured out he was a werewolf, and doesn’t trust him/is keeping an eye on him so she can put him down when he becomes dangerous. So he thinks she hates him bc he’s a shapeshifter that has no control over himself, but then she’s fine with...the OTHER shapeshifter that has no control over himself.6. August thinks Tyler hates werewolves because of the attack, and is afraid to enter a relationship with him because he wouldn't be able to keep his condition a secret7. Tyler refuses to let himself entertain notions of actually DATING August, because Tyler thinks he's going to die and doesn't want to hurt even MORE people when he goes8. Tyler and Monet platonically love each other so much and are also living together in Seinfeld's mansion that she stole the keys to, and Tyler is an idiot which means August thinks Tyler wants to date Monet (August's SISTER)So tl;dr, Tyler thinks that after Franc gained access to more Askar files she suddenly doesn't trust him (he assumes she knows he's a werewolf), he knows that Monet suddenly doesn't want to TALK to him and knows that if he discovers anything suspicious he thus cannot tell her, and he knows he......really, really, REALLY is starting to enjoy August's companyThis means that conversations oscillate between Tyler being professionally friendly with all his coworkers, Franc interpreting something random as a personal attack, Monet deeply wishing she could tell Tyler something, and then a completely stupid conversation where Tyler and August are flirting about something stupid and getting cockblocked by Tyler's hangups and August remembering that as far as he's concerned Tyler and Monet should get together.Oh and also Askar definitely is fucking with his head at least once a session.

[taexual]

HOLIC - 2 | jb x reader

Strangers, united by their big dreams, try to learn to live together and lift each other up to reach their goals without losing themselves or their relationship on the way to the top.

pairing: Im Jaebum x Reader

genre: enemies to lovers au | roommate au

warnings: strong language, mentions of sexual themes

words: 2.9k

disclaimer: i do not own the gif, please let me know if it belongs to you, so i can give proper credit

          prev / next

You and Jaebum watched each other for a good minute, both unable to find the words to say in this situation. The classic “so, we meet again” crossed your mind but it sounded oddly childish so you chose not to voice this thought and stayed quiet while Jaebum’s unreadable eyes burned into yours.

“I don’t understand,” he was the one who started to speak. You felt like you’ve won the game of who could stay quiet longer, even if neither of you had officially agreed to play it. “You’re… you.”

He wasn’t very specific with his description but you understood exactly what he meant.

“Yeah,” you said, crossing your arms over your chest defensively. “And you’re… a-a guy.”

“Obviously,” Jaebum retorted. “But how you are a girl is beyond me. We’ve been talking for, what, two months now? And you never once mentioned you were a girl.”

“You never mentioned you’re a guy, either.”

“That’s because I thought you were, too!”

“Well, I thought you were a girl,” you said. “You had a cat as your profile picture, what kind of guys use cats for their—”

“What, so now only girls are allowed to use cats as their profile picture?” he countered before you finished. “How is the usage of cats for profile pictures even restricted to a specific gender?”

He did have a very good point that completely shattered all arguments you might have had and that frustrated you. What pissed you off even more was the small part of your mind – the same part which hated all men today, even if you knew it was stupid and, probably, temporary – kept whispering to you, he’s a guy! It’s his fault! All of this!

“So am I to blame for this?” you decided to say. “If I remember correctly, you never clarified what your gender was, either. Def sounds exactly like something a girl who’s trying to go for a mysterious look would use as her username.”

“How is Def mysterious?”

You looked away from him. “I thought those were your initials.”

“Oh, so did my initials sound feminine to you?” Jaebum’s voice had risen. “Is that why you assumed I was a girl so easily?”

Not liking the way he continued to act as if all of this was your fault, you groaned. “Well, did I sound masculine to you? What was it that made you think I’m not a girl? My excessive usage of emojis when we first met? My undoubtedly very masculine profile description which has an all-girls school listed as my education?”

“I…” Jaebum was quick to open his mouth and just as quick to close it again. But then he scoffed, his cocky attitude returning. “Did you really think I checked what school you went to? How was I supposed to know it’s an all-girls one?”

“So, you did exactly zero research about the person you were moving in with?”

“Of course! I’m not a stalker.”

“Yeah, you’re a dude alright,” you snarled.

Jaebum frowned, finally giving you an emotion that wasn’t as self-assured as the ones he’s shown you before. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” you responded and the two of you went back to the angry, confused silence you’ve shared before.

This time, neither one of you broke it for another few minutes. Then, you both got tired of standing there, staring at each other as if the two of you were having a face-off in a western movie. Next line would have surely been, “this apartment ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

But no next line came because Jaebum huffed – breaking the silence for a brief moment – and turned around to face the door of the apartment. He was here for less than ten minutes and now he was off again.

“What are we going to do?” you ended up calling after him, knowing that you were absolutely not going to sit still and think about this while he was out, cruising for a new one-night-stand, most likely.

“What is there to do?” he replied, not turning back. “This whole thing is too weird. We’re not doing this.”

“Alright,” you played along even though the easy way he said it offended you. You two may have only known each other in real life for one day – or one night – but he could’ve still shown a little bit of regret, given the fact that you’d spent two whole months getting to know each other before you found this large gap in your knowledge that seemed to change everything. “Which one of us is moving out, then?”

“I meant, we’re not talking about this like—” Jaebum started to explain and, for the lack of a better comparison, ended up saying, “—like we’re a couple on the verge of a break-up, alright? We’ll just deal with this later. I don’t know.”

You didn’t like later. Later meant you had to spend the whole night tossing and turning in bed as your mind was busy trying to come up with a solution to a problem that clearly didn’t seem all that important to your roommate.

“Deal how?” you pushed, fighting for a peaceful night of slumber. “In my opinion, there are only two ways to solve this. Either you move out or I do.”

“Why would I move out?” he questioned. “I found the apartment.”

“I-I—“ you began but the sudden surge of anger at his particularly egotistic response overwhelmed your mind so much that for a moment, you weren’t able to formulate a single coherent thought. “Wow, okay. So, you want me out of here, then?”

“You said there are only two ways to solve this,” Jaebum replied, shrugging his shoulders.

He wasn’t looking at you so you couldn’t tell if his face looked as remorseless as his words were but you had a feeling it did. What exactly had attracted you to him that night at the bar? He was starting to seem more repulsive by the second.

“Right,” you said. “And, naturally, you’re going with the solution that benefits you the most.”

“Wouldn’t everyone?”

“I don’t know,” you shot back. “Normal people would try to find a compromise.”

Jaebum rolled his eyes at this, rolling his head back as well, before looking at you with pursed lips that strengthened the annoyed look he was going for.

“You’re doing this again,” he informed you, his voice irritated.

“Doing what? Trying to decide what’s going to happen on my own because you’re being no help?” you tried.

You could tell you were pissing him off more by purposefully pretending to misunderstand everything he was telling you and countering everything he said with something that actually made sense, but you couldn’t stop now. Perhaps the rational thing to do would have been to try to calm down and then talk about this like adults – which, clearly, neither of you were – but Jaebum was getting on your very last nerve and you’d have rather died than not done the same thing to him in retaliation.

“I’m going to go,” he said and you knew this statement was a final decision. You weren’t sure what he was going to do if you disagreed with this and yet, for some reason, you didn’t want to find out. “You can do whatever you want here.”

Whatever you wanted was exactly what you did as soon as he left. You went back to your room – although it wasn’t really your room since, apparently, you’d be moving out of here soon – and returned everything you’ve unpacked into the boxes again. You only left the sheets on the mattress because, whether Jaebum liked it or not, you were spending this night here. It was almost eight-thirty already, there was no way you were getting another van to transfer your stuff someplace else.

Sitting down on the mattress, you almost laughed at the thought of having to call the same driver who had explicitly warned you to make sure he won’t have to take your belongings out of here after you met your roommate. God, you really should have seen this coming. Everyone else did and they warned you about it, too.

You hated yourself for jumping head-first into this adventure-gone-wrong and you needed to talk to someone about it. Getting your phone out, you texted your friends’ groupchat. You tried to reply to some of their messages but they quickly noticed that you seemed distracted and asked what was wrong. Right as you finished typing the message about what went down when you moved in, you hesitated, your finger hovering above the “send” button.

They warned you it could come to this since you didn’t know enough important information about your roommate and here you were, about to prove them that they were right. That you were wrong. The patronizing “I-told-you-so” wasn’t going to make you feel better about yourself and your very poor decision-making skills.

Deleting the text message, you chose to give them the abridged version of what happened.

“My roommate is out,” you said under your breath, typing the words as you spoke them. “I haven’t gotten a chance—no, wait, but I did get a chance. He was back here and he was a complete dick about everything.”

You groaned, deleting the message again. There really wasn’t much you could have told your friends without revealing the entire truth and without having to lie.

Finally, you ended up just letting them know that you were tired, so you’d be going to sleep. They didn’t pry – they could tell you didn’t want to talk about it right now – and instead changed the topic. You were surprised that reading their text messages about the most mundane things actually calmed you down. There was Kiera still freaking out about her crush from work. There was Hyojin who had just broken her oven after she didn’t read the instructions on the microwave pizza box very carefully. And there was May who was sick and tired of studying – it was her last year of college, that poor girl – so she was just looking for someone to drink with.

They didn’t have to worry about suddenly moving in with their one-night-stand – and thank God for that – and they surely didn’t have to worry about finding a proper excuse to explain the reasons why they had to move out twelve hours after moving in.

Another thirty minutes later, you sighed, pulling away from the calming groupchat and putting your phone down. You had secretly hoped Jaebum would return before you fell asleep so maybe the two of you could finally talk about this and find a sensible solution – you didn’t want to live with him, either, but moving was a difficult process and you’ve already unpacked almost everything – but, clearly, Jaebum wasn’t going to be back unless you were sleeping.

No surprise there. He’s already bailed on you while you were sleeping once.

You thought you heard the first bump in your dream so you didn’t react in any way. The second bump, however, happened much closer and you flinched, startling yourself awake as you realized you weren’t dreaming at all. Someone really was approaching your room.

You debated screaming but as soon as you opened your eyes, you were really more terrified of the unknown surroundings – because you weren’t in your bedroom –  than the mysterious noises. This wasn’t the room you were used to and you spent at least twenty seconds trying to understand how you got here before your sleepy mind finally allowed you to remember that you’d moved out.

Grabbing your phone to call 911 because the steps outside of your door were getting louder, you also glanced at the time. 3:58am. The perfect time to get killed while half asleep.

You clutched the blanket tighter to yourself, not really planning to use it as a weapon in case this was an actual intruder, but rather hoping to use it for safety purposes and, for example, throw it on the attacker while you fled. It seemed like an innovative and, hopefully, successful idea and you felt a little more confident as you awaited the door of your bedroom to open.

The thought that this could have just been Jaebum finally returning home didn’t even cross your mind, so when you saw his face behind your open door, you gasped as if you’d seen a complete stranger, just wandering in your apartment at the witching hour. To some extent, he really was just a stranger. But you were living with him. For tonight, at least.

Just like that, the memory of the argument you’ve had before he left returned.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” you yelled, your voice groggy from sleep and irritation. “Do you know what time it is?”

“No,” Jaebum replied, talking quietly because he didn’t think it was right to speak louder in your pitch-black room. He could only see a meter in front of him because that’s how much the light from the hallway illuminated, so he took a small step forwards. “What time is it?”

“Definitely not early enough for you to be in my room,” you shot back, watching him take another tentative step towards your mattress. His legs seemed to wobble a little as he walked and you squinted at his silhouette. “Fuck, are you drunk?”

“I’m not, shit, there are just so many boxes in your room and it’s dark, and—”

“Why are you in my room?” you cut him off, hoping he’d stop walking before he tripped over a box and then proceeded to sue you because of it. He seemed exactly the type of person to do this. But, then again, you could have attributed all the worst traits to Jaebum simply because he woke you up after leaving you hanging in the middle of an argument.

“I wanted to apologize,” Jaebum said and silence was the response to his statement because an apology was not what you had expected from him. Realizing this, he continued, “I was rude. I didn’t mean to act like I’m kicking you out of this apartment. It’s not fair for me to do that.”

It only took him seven hours to realize this. You couldn’t help but still feel vexed with him.

“Well, then,” you said. “I’m glad you finally see it.”

Jaebum remained unphased by your harsh tone, though. “I just wanted to say that we signed the lease on the apartment on the same day, so it’s equally yours as it is mine. It really wouldn’t be fair for either of us to move out.”

You had a hunch where he was going with this and yet your heart still started to beat faster in anticipation of his next words.

“Maybe we should both stay,” he said, having a hard time speaking because he still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness of your room so he couldn’t see your eyes. “We both have jobs, I’m sure we won’t see each other that often anyway. Maybe it’ll work.”

You had been angry at him for attempting to kick you out but you weren’t sure if you wanted him to take his words back and offer to try living together instead. Naturally, this should have been the solution you’ve been looking for since you were so opposed to moving out, but it still felt weird.

Jaebum was the person you had slept with. He had left before you woke up so he wouldn’t have to participate in any type of pillow talk the next morning. He had thanked you for a “good night” in a note, which, you were obviously still bitter about.

But… at the same time, he was also the person that you’ve gotten to know from an ad. He was the same person who understood your complaints about commercial holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, because both of you had spent the majority of these holidays single and frustrated. He was also the same person who had stayed awake with you a couple of nights in a row, because the two of you were so deeply involved in a discussion about your favorite artists that you simply couldn’t go to sleep.

You could see very clearly now that Jaebum had multiple sides to him. There was the side he’d shown you as a temporary lover – you cringed at the word – and then there was the side he’d shown you as a friend and a potential roommate.

You couldn’t control your curiosity as you wondered how many more sides of him were there and how many of them were fake. You weren’t sure if he’d ever satisfy your curiosity by actually revealing himself to you but, at the end of the day, you didn’t care about that as much as you cared about having an actual roof to sleep under.

“Yeah, alright,” you decided, hoping that the late hour didn’t influence your decision and, contrary to the morning after you had slept with him, you weren’t going to regret this tomorrow. “Let’s see what happens.”

               chapter directory

[this-i-i-love]

Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?

A Special Interview With Dr. Richard M. Fleming By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Welcome, everyone. Dr. Mercola, helping you take control of your health in these crazy times and we've got an incredible author and physician and scientist and researcher, Dr. Richard Fleming, today, who's going to discuss with us his new book, “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?” that is an incredibly well-documented with respect to the assertions and the history that many of us aren't aware of. I mean, I knew that this was a bioweapon, well, that it was an engineered virus, which is the first step, a gain-of-function virus this year. But as Dr. Fleming will go into deeply, and this thing goes back not a year or two, it goes back two decades, two decades, which is crazy, that they've been working on it this long, and they finally brought it to fruition. So a lot of good information, and welcome and thank you for joining us.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

So, I would think rather than me trying to summarize your prolific career, why don't you give us a summary of your expertise, because you're a physician, a researcher, a lawyer, an attorney. So, you've got a lot of skill sets. A nuclear cardiologist, too, I believe.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Right. Well, no, I'm originally a physicist. This is now, I think, year 53 for research for me, and began very early in life, just [crosstalk 00:01:32].

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

What about three or four years old, or what?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, actually, seventh grade was when the JFK administration's program kicked in and kind of-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Really?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, I did some of us out of our normal life what we were doing.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Wow. What did you do in seventh grade?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, I apparently offended somebody enough to be part of the program. Now, my area of aptitude, which we were being tested on long before the seventh grade turns out to be physics and calculus was just the mathematic language for that. But physics and particularly high-energy particle physics and something that I find very fascinating, very interesting. I eventually kind of wound up doing some of that later on in life as a nuclear cardiologist, so it's kind of hard to get away from a field that you find very fascinating and makes sense to you over the course of time. So, 53 years of research in physics.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And in medicine, and as many people know, I actually developed the inflammation in heart disease theory and presented it American Heart [Association] in 1994. I joined American Heart [Association] in 1976 as the youngest faculty member at that time, and I got put in several standing committees as a result. Basic and advanced cardiac life support as well as the physician cluster education faculty. And I did a lot of the research on dietary influences and factors that are critical, not only for in the end, heart disease, but other chronic inflammatory diseases, be that cerebrovascular diseases or strokes, or diabetes, or cancer for a wide variety of problems that I know you and probably many of your listeners are aware of with the prior work that I know that you've talked about. And then-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Well, I want to learn more about that. But I want to add another credential to your list that you may not mention that I think I'm really proud of you because it shows you're a man of integrity. And that as a researcher, you were on the Editorial Review Board for The Lancet, and you quit in protest of the horrendous article they published to disparage hydroxychloroquine and the fraudulent data that was submitted by Surgisphere. So, thank you for doing that.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, people either thought I was nuts or had some credibility, I think when I did that. But yeah, really, I research, review for something like 16, 17, 18 journals. And I'm editor on a couple and it just really, this is a violation of science. Scientific medical journals are not political journals. They're not, I mean, we do have opinion pieces, but those opinions are supposed to be in areas of science. They're not supposed to be in areas of politics. And as a cardiologist, I point out to people that this problem with hydroxychloroquine and again, I don't classify any of these drugs.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

The research that I did for finding treatments for SARS-CoV-2 and COVID had to do with the mechanisms of action or how the drugs work, not what category you want to lump them into. I mean, every drug works in more than one way and can be used for more than one purpose. And I think that that's something that apparently the FDA has forgotten for the physicians being able to use on off-label uses.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

But hydroxychloroquine actually was actually problematic for heart rhythms. You've seen Anthony Fauci and a lot of other people coming up and saying, "Oh, we got a case of

polymorphic ventricular tachydysrhythmia or Torsades de pointe." And you haven't seen that and the reason why you haven't seen it is because nobody's reported an actual rhythm problem with hydroxychloroquine. And that's kind of, what's the expression "egg on the face" for him.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

But yeah, I just couldn't continue. I resigned from The Lancet. I resigned from British Medical Journal Open Quality because of the same concerns that I saw going on. And, eventually we either stand behind principles or we acquiesce and become nothing more than what the German doctors of Nazi Germany did during World War II. And as history showed us, they eventually paid a price at the Nuremberg trials. After the original Nuremberg trials, there were both the doctors trials and the jurist trials or the attorneys and judges trial.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, these are things that, there are people powers that be that kind of think that they have things going their direction, but it's very clear to me that they're not as confident that they've got everybody under control. Because the way in which this is all being handled demonstrates that they're more worried about the truth coming out than not. And I think they're worried about the consequences and as well, they should be.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, it's an effective strategy. There's no question because I'm convinced now that part of their process is to get into masked psychosis that people around and I mean, they're doing with this propaganda. And part of the propaganda strategy is massive censoring, which, thankfully, you chose to not participate in.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

So that was, but this is a good segue, because you mentioned the Nuremberg trials and how ultimately, the medical professionals that were working with Hitler were prosecuted. So, what were your motivations to write this book? And maybe we can dive into some of it because it is just a fascinating illustration. You did a great job of doing the documentation. I mean, some of it, I mean, it's really well-documented. You've got all the patent numbers, all the details that you've reviewed the studies that go back for two decades. So, why don't you tell us the story of what brought it together and your connection to what you believe might have happened to the equivalent 21st Century of Nuremberg?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Right, well, so as 2019 did the same thing to me as it did the rest of you. It kind of changed my life and what I thought it was going to be doing. I had developed, I'd spent a couple of decades correcting errors in diagnostic imaging and developed something that I called FMT VDM or it's now come, many people know as Fleming method. It's a way of accurately measuring what's going on inside the body, so instead of giving you a yes, you think you have a problem, no, you don't. It actually measures what's going on inside the body.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

And what does that tool or assay primarily target? What type of clinical conditions?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, actually everything, the entire health spectrum. And that's one of the things that I've encouraged people to think of this as a health spectrum. So, it began with my investigation into heart disease, and then it evolved into cancers, and then infections like SARS-CoV-2. So, by using Fleming method, what we measure is, first off, we calibrate the camera, so they can accurately work because they're not accurately calibrated right now for quantification or measurement. And then it can distinguish dead from normal living from inflammation and infection to pre-cancers to cancers. And then coronary artery disease isn't really what people think it is.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

What type of cameras are these? Infrared cameras or?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

No, so these are nuclear imaging cameras.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Nuclear? Okay.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, they could be plain or SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography). They could be PET (positron emission tomography). So, I'm one of three actually certified in PET imaging and the only American. There's a lot of people who do it, but they're not actually certified in the way that they should be. And then, Yoshida is in Japan and Schneider is in Switzerland, and I'm here in the U.S., Dallas, in particular.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, it measures regional blood flow and metabolic differences and that allows us to determine what's going on in tissue. And then heart disease is the inability of the artery to relax to increase blood flow and that requires an equation that I developed a number of years ago, a proprietary equation to measure that. So, this test allows us to actually do a body image scan measurement of what's going on. And there are areas that you can define as inflammatory or infectious processes and what that allowed me to do was to say, "Well, what are the treatments for this? And let's set up a study."

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, part of what I did at the beginning of 2020, was to do an exhaustive review. As a Fleming, I was hoping I didn't have to go into infectious disease like Sir Alexander Fleming did, but I kind of got dragged into it. And I really just did a literature review, which included about 300 to 400 papers of all sorts of different viral strategies, different viruses, whether that be Zika virus or HIV or any of a number of things. And to really look at how they reproduced themselves, what drugs might do what. And then I laid out a series of strategies, both for people as outpatients who might have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus, and for people who get hospitalized with this inflammothrombotic response disease that I talked about first in 1994, the inflammation in

heart disease. But it's an inflammothrombotic response, where I also pointed out that bacteria and viruses cause this, it's one of the reasons.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And so, I had the tool for measuring it and it was simply a matter of putting together a strategy. And so, I set up the study in seven other countries, 23 different sites with 1,800 people and we actually measured what worked and what didn't work over the time that the patients are in the hospital and pre-hospital-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

These, you measured clinical interventions?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

What we actually did above and beyond clinical interventions, we measured something much more important, which is what's happening at the tissue level, which is what Fleming method allows us to do. So, you can every three days measure whether a drug is working or not at the tissue level, and how the infection and inflammation is responding. And what that allowed us to do was every three days for the people who came in the hospital with COVID, they would have Fleming method and a variety of other tests, and they would randomly be assigned to one of 10 treatment strategies. And then three days later, that would be repeated and if they got substantially better by definition, then they were kept on that treatment. If they get substantially worse, the treatment was stopped and another treatment randomly assigned. And if in fact they didn't get better or worse, they kind of held their own, then another treatment was randomly added to that.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And so, those 10 treatments became 52 different treatment combinations. And so, the study got divided into two parts, so a Phase 1 and a Phase 2. Phase 1 was really sorting out what drugs work and what combinations and then Phase 2 was taking those combinations that have proven themselves and actually then applied them right up front. So, over the course of that study, we saw hospitalizations go from five to six weeks down to one to two weeks with turn around. And we were very specific in how the ventilators were supposed to be used because they're being used incorrectly. And we've known that the incorrectly is just nobody seems to be reading the papers.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So on the website, FlemingMethod.com, one of the categories are published papers, and there's over 160 papers now on that site for people to look at the EUA (emergency use authorization) documents of the vaccines. How different drugs may treat these viruses. What do the vaccines do? Just do the genetic sequences of the drug vaccines actually get into human DNA? That type of thing. So, instead of asking opinions, because there's enough people giving enough opinions, my area is science. I'm a research scientist physician and I'm adamant that you kind of have to come up to speed and present a scientific proof of what you're talking about. And sometimes that means I'm not going to be first, but I'm going to be right or at least as right as humans can be with our science. So, that was kind of the goal.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And then in the process of doing that research, I simply dug more and more and more and investigated what was going on and that led me into the background of the research that many of these people had been doing. The millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars that had been funneled out of the U.S. and Anthony Fauci has helped with that. I mean, he's been on those committees. You can see it in the book. You can see the grant numbers in the book. You can see the gain-of-function, which is the research that tries to look at viruses or other infections. But in this case, viruses to say, "Well, if we could make the virus just a little more infective, maybe we could stay ahead of it." And that theoretically, sounds really good and I think as a research scientist is good.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Unfortunately, the question becomes, “What happens when people go beyond the really good things or what happens when people start doing things that maybe have some nefarious motives?” And that's kind of what you see happening. You see real efforts to produce viruses, coronaviruses, in particular. Spiked proteins of coronaviruses to be even more specific, as I show in the book, paid for by the federal government by people who say that, "No, we’re not involved in gain-of-function research. Well, their fingerprints are on the documents or on the published papers or on the grants or on the patents. You can't say that you're not involved in things when the documents show differently.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And it shows the work that came out of the federal government that went to Peter Daszak, Ph.D., at Eco Health, that went to Ralph Baric, Ph.D., at the University of North Carolina, Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and other places. I mean, these aren't the only places involved, but there's certainly, big names that are involved in the process. And for me, as a researcher, obviously, once I start to investigate something about the only way you can stop me from doing that is to put a bullet in my head. And otherwise, I'm going to stay after it. And one thing led to another and we have been actively following this investigation.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

There are things obviously that are not in the book that are going to come out at international court that I'm saving for that, for the International Criminal Court because this virus is, by definition, a biological weapon. It violates the Biological Weapons Convention treaty. You just have to look at the definitions. It provides nothing useful to humanity. It's dangerous. When Fort Detrick is involved and the Department of Defense is involved and these guys aren't working with the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. And you see these monies and you see the people who are involved, you realize that, as I put it to people, the United States was playing China, China was playing the United States, and you saw who got caught in between, and they're still playing the game.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And it's, for lack of a better term, this book is an indictment. And that's now my attorney hat going on saying that I have provided in this book [inaudible 00:17:07] of evidence that I would take to a grand jury and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, a blind person, if needed, we could put it in

[inaudible 00:17:17] what's going on. And only if you choose not to do this, can it be ignored." But I'm not somebody who is going to give up on having these people dealt with because all the freedoms that we have, and the rights that we have as individuals, not to mention just the numbers of people who have died.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And my argument is, if they got the virus, and they died with these diseases, they did die from the virus. The reason why they died is because they didn't get treatment for the inflammation and the blood clotting that I've shown works and other people, other doctors have shown that they have data that they believe works, right? And the ultimate argument is that you can't kill somebody more than dead, so if they don't have the measured data, which I think that they should have, and I would help them if they wanted. What we do know is that they can't do worse than kill the patient. And we've already seen what doing nothing does. It kills the patient.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

At no other time in American history have doctors looked at patients and said, "We can't do anything for you. Go home and come back when you get sicker." And we have always treated people with breathing problems with medications for breathing. We've always treated people with clotting problems with medicines to stop the clotting. And so, the reason why this is so critical to understand is because the same people who were involved in the funding of this bioweapon are the same people who have interfered with doctors providing treatment to patients, are the same people who have been involved in the development of these vaccines. And once you appreciate and it's up to you, the reader, “Is COVID-19, a Bioweapon? The Scientific and Forensic Investigation,” it's up to the reader to decide, is it a bioweapon?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

But if you come to that conclusion and I think you will, then you have to recognize that the vaccines that are nothing more than the genetic reproduction of that bioweapon is a bioweapon. And now, what you see is the same people who made the weapon blocking treatment and disseminating more the weapon producing harm. And right now, the Delta variant is a classic example of pressurization, of selective pressurization of this virus to go that pathway because natural immunity gets you immunity to the spike protein, to the nucleocapsid, to the rest of the components of the virus and if you only target the spike protein, and that spike protein changes then the idea of a drug vaccine biologic is just laughable because it won't work. It's going to be too different from what you expose the body to, and it's not going to recognize it.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, we have taken this mass forced vaccination of a bioweapon, we have not provided informed consent because if you look at the package inserts, they're blank, intentionally blank. I've shown that at Event 2021, and other people have shown it. So, there is no informed consent for physicians to provide. So, if you're injecting someone with these drug vaccine biologics, you are injecting them with something that you cannot possibly give them informed consent for, which means you're violating your Hippocratic Oath, you're violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Treaty, you're violating the Nuremberg Code, you're violating the

Declaration of Helsinki. It's right across the board. It's not even something that you can pretend doesn't happen anymore. It's just in everybody's faces.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And you can see that the powers that be are so stressed out right now that they are cajoling and coercing and manipulating and attacking. And in Italy, my friends in Italy, tell me that the behavior of the Italians from people feeling stressed, the vaccinated people are behaving in the same way that they did during World War II towards the Jews and the intellectuals. And let's remember, the first people that Hitler put in concentration camps weren't the Jews. The first people were the intellectuals because if you take the intellectuals and the doctors off the street, if you stop people from talking, you can control the people.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, the pressure being put on the medical community in this country, in Italy, in other countries around the world to simply go along is nothing more than the equivalent of what Adolf Hitler did and the SS did during World War II when they rounded up the intellectuals. And it's just one will lead to the next and there's nothing about this that has been a successful campaign to control an infectious virus and a manmade one at that.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, well, that's a lot of information. So, I would suggest that it's a bit different than what Hitler did because that was a while ago. We're talking 70, 80 years ago. So we've gotten much more sophisticated technologically, and the propaganda campaign is exponentially, exponentially more effective. So it's much easier to control the population through propaganda than it is through carting them off in trains and putting them to the concentration camps. So, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the equivalent of this vaccine. I mean, many people are calling it the “kill shot” with respect to the equivalent of essentially getting people and putting them on the trains and sending them to the camps.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, the answer to that question is, all you have to do is read the Emergency Use Authorization documents. And I'm just stunned at how many people have not read this. I'm stunned at physicians not having read this. I mean, I thought we always read the package insert or at least read the Emergency Use Authorization documents. And when you do that and you can go to FlemingMethod.com. I've got several presentations on there, PDFs, you can download, where I've done this. And you read the Emergency Use Authorization documents and you take the data out of those documents and you ask very fundamental scientific questions.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Is there any statistical difference in the people, in the number of people who developed COVID or who die and the people who are vaccinated versus those who are not vaccinated? And you come to a very definite conclusion. There is no statistical difference in the two groups. The vaccines do not statistically reduce. There are fewer cases, but not statistically.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And nobody in their right mind, I think, who's a physician would walk up to somebody and say, "Mrs. Jones, Mr. Jones, I have this drug that I want to give you to prevent you from getting heart disease. Now, it won't do anything more than a sugar pill, but I want you to take it." Physicians wouldn't prescribe that. And patients I think, if they fully listen to the statement, wouldn't take it. They would go, "Well, why would I take something that's going to have no better outcome for me than doing nothing, right?"

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, you look at that and then you look at the fact that there are side effects, right? There are side effects. There's inflammation and blood clotting, like I've talked about and we're seeing it because when you look at these vaccines, and you look at Pfizer and Moderna and you look at how many mRNA are in there, it's about 13.1 billion, right? And you look at the double-stranded DNA with AstraZeneca and Janssen, which is what people call Johnson & Johnson, and that's 50 billion. So, after doing-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Are you sure?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Excuse me for the interruption because some others are saying it's 40 trillion and I'm wondering where they come up with that number. I've seen that 40 trillion referenced a few times now, but you're saying 13 billion? I mean, they're both huge numbers, but [crosstalk 00:25:49].

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Right, so yeah, it is. Well, there are actually equations that you can use and I've put those references on the website as well. But you can actually go calculate based upon the size of the molecules and the size of what you're putting in how many versions you're getting at it, so that's where those-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Okay, so 13 billion.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah. It's 13.1 billion for the mRNA and 50 billion for the double-stranded DNA. So, here's the thing, when you have a person transferring from person-to-person the actual virus, even though it's a gain-of-function manmade virus, they're getting hundreds, thousands, I don't know, let's be generous and say 10,000? Okay?

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, every one of those has to attach to a cell and they put in one genetic code sequence. Now, you give vaccines, so what happened was the people with the comorbidities, they already had heart disease and high blood pressure. They died, because they already had inflammation and blood clotting going on and this just made it worse. And unfortunately, nobody treated them for the inflammation and the blood clotting. Have they done that, I would argue that these people would still be alive. In fact, our study showed 99.83% success, which means maybe we had lost 20,000 people in the U.S., which is still a fair number of people, don't get me wrong. It's just not over 600,000, right? We lost three people in this study and those three people I still think about every day, because they're three people that we lost.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, you get that type of phenomenon and what you see is person-to-person only has problems if you have underlying diseases that don't get treated. Now, what you take is you mass vaccinate the population and you have people who are healthy. And that's what we're seeing, healthy people having reactions. Why are they having reactions? Because they're healthy. They're getting inundated with billions of genetic sequences making spike proteins that don't stay at the site of injection. We know Moderna did a study that we published, that's on the website, that Moderna published using lipid nanoparticle vaccines for influenza and they published it in 2017. And the animal models show that the lipid nanoparticles didn't stay at the site of injection. They were in the brain, the bone marrow, the liver, the spleen, every part of the body.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, for people to come up now and say, "Gosh, golly, gee whiz, we just didn't expect that" is a little disingenuous. And I think you kind of have to ask yourself the question, “Why does the cardiologist know about the 2017 paper, but the people responsible for the technology claim that they don't?” And so, what you see are normal healthy people responding to a massive production of spike proteins and those people should, healthy people should make a massive immune response. And what does that immune response do? It produces inflammation and blood clotting, and then the spike proteins go across the blood-brain barrier and causes prion diseases just like what's been shown in the humanized mice and the Rhesus Macaque models.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Now, I'm willing to bet that the people who made this gain-of-function virus I already knew that because retrospectively, one of the things that I discovered, one of the things that had the government coming after me early on and Big Pharma coming after me in the 1990s, in the early 2000s, was the fact that the research that I was doing in dietary and inflammatory disease has the same neuro-5-AC raft receptor that the glycoprotein 120 of HIV that Shi Zhengli put in, in 2004, attaches to. So, the people that were doing this were paralleling my research, except stupid me, I was just focusing, I thought on something really good, inflammation and heart disease and that type of thing. But it turns out that that information is critical for getting this virus to be able to attach and to infect people like it's doing.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, it's interesting how you can be minding your own business and doing really good research and trying to answer some questions and it might just expose the people that are doing nefarious things, but it's very clear. And the question that the book asked is, "Is COVID-19 a bioweapon?" And the data is extremely, painfully clear. The next question is, "What are we going to do about it?" And I think the answer is very clear. Unless you think — these people did not develop this and stop. This is not the first go round. In fact, Li-Meng Yan points out very clearly that her work over in China that she knew very clearly that SARS-CoV-1 was the first bioweapon.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And one thing that's pointed out in the book is that in 2006, the Chinese published a paper where they did a gain-of-function virus that they combined four viruses in, in 2006. Those viruses were HIV, hepatitis C virus, SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 and they labeled it that way. They labeled it that way. So in 2006, they had this, they were working on it.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Is it Baric in North Carolina?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

No. That was another group of researchers out of China, so the Chinese were putting this together. This was, so when I say that, more than Baric and Shi Zhengli, I mean, there's evidence to show that a number of countries were involved. It's just that the U.S. and China managed to excel at this. And I got a job offer the other day to try to recruit me to be the physicist imaging specialist for an NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) project on viruses at Fort Detrick.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Nice.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, yeah. When I got those email requests, I thought, "You have got to be kidding. Do you know who I am?" I mean, you know what I mean? This is a nice example of people looking out there for the right people with the right type of training to do things. But not asking that fundamental question of, “What are the ethics of these people?”

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, well, that will be one of the major factors contributing to their ultimate downfall. I want to go back to a point you mentioned earlier with respect to the individuals having to decide about taking this COVID injection. I hesitate to call [it] a vaccine, because it really isn't by any definition, strict definition. Assumed that if the average individual knew that there was just no statistical difference and it was essentially a placebo why would they take it?

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Well, there are external factors that can contribute to that. I mean, certainly, when people, many people have been in communities where they could have been part of a lottery, win $1 million to $5 million is one. And then the others, I mean, I think Biden administration is now considering, maybe it's implemented by the time this interview airs is $100 if you get the vaccine. But even more importantly, it's mandatory for large segments of the population. And even though, and I'd like your comments on this, because in my mind, that is an absolute distortion of law, the rule of law because there's no way this could be mandatory. It's an absolute violation of First Amendment principles for the freedom of choice.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

So, because like every government employee is now mandated to get it and I think they're the biggest employer in the country and large corporations, Facebook. CNN showed a nice little attack on me recently. They just fired four people who came to work who weren't vaccinated. And there are many large companies who are getting away with it and other than the justification that it's illegal to do. So, many of these people don't have that freedom of choice. They just, they literally don't. I mean, if they want to participate in society as they normally did.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Right. Well, to begin with, I would argue there's several legal violations that are going on here and-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, yeah, but please expand. There's not many more people qualified than you to address this.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, the biggest problem are all the private industries because the Constitution of the United States doesn't apply to private corporations, right? The Constitution of the United States applies to a contract or a compact actually, between the states and the federal government, but it's important to note that the federal government, in this compact that we call the U.S. Constitution is actually subservient to the states. The states are not subservient to the Federal government.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And so, the states have the power and the authority to determine what happens. And anything that's public and cannot coerce people to do that. Now, how do we know that? Well, because Article III of the U.S. Constitution states that interpretation of what's constitutional is or not, is the right of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court has already ruled that there are personal privileges and liberties that people have including sex, health care and family. And all you need to do to prove that, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, is you need history, custom and tradition, which we have in this country.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

We have a history of patients being treated by their doctors and not coercing people to be vaccinated with experimental research. We have a history of doctors using off-label drug use,

which raises the question about how the federal government is violating the ability of physicians to practice medicine. We have a government, custom of the government not interfering with this doctor-patient relationship. We have several Supreme Court cases in which the Supreme Court has ruled that people have the right to health care as they wanted.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Rochin versus California had to do with an individual who was forced to undergo emetic medications to force him to vomit, to bring up things in his stomach that the Supreme Court said, "You do not have a right to force this medication on people." Griswold versus Connecticut showed that the U.S. government cannot take away the personal rights of healthcare in individuals unless there's some type of compelling and substantial reason and then it has to be put into law. It can't come out of the executive branch. Cruzan versus Director of Missouri Department of Health in 1990, specifically stated that patients have a right to refuse any treatment. You cannot force treatment on people.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, this is forced treatment. This is coerced treatment. And Doe v. Rumsfeld proved in 2004 that investigational drugs could not be forced upon people unless there is a presidential waiver or informed consent. Well, here's the kicker on presidential waiver, which is what they're going to go to.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Is that the justification they're using to make this happen?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, yeah, so here's the thing. Anybody who takes an oath of office, the President of the United States, senators, representatives to Congress, governors, police officers, judges, lawyers, administrative officials, anybody who takes that oath cannot violate the U.S. Constitution. If they do, they've committed treason, by definition. In the U.S. Constitution, it states that Treaty Law and the Constitution and statutes are the supreme law of the land. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights specifically states that you cannot force people to take a drug that they have to have informed consent, and that animal research has to have been done beforehand to prove it's safe. So, if a President including this one, issues an order that this is a mandate and required, then he is violating the U.S. Constitution by violating Treaty and therefore has committed treason.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

It's an impeachable offense.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

It's not only impeachable offense, it is punishable by death because that's treason. You can't force U.S. citizens to undergo forced experimentation. And you can't get around that by doing something cute like having the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) say, "Whoa. Well, we've now approved it, okay?" Because the Supreme Court has already ruled that you cannot force people to take a treatment and the only party that can change that is the Supreme Court. And that

would require a court case taken to the Supreme Court where they said, "Well, we were wrong before."

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Has that ever happened? It's happened once in the history of this Supreme Court only once, only once. The Supreme Court is not going to turn around at this point in time and tell American citizens that you must be vaccinated. Because you can see right now the vaccines are showing for themselves, the problem is, is there's this increase in Delta variant, right?

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

But what about Biden packing the Supreme Court, an issue that he failed and refused to comment on prior to his election or that but appears to be at least as far as I've read, that that's his intention at this point. You're going to put a number of other justices on there to essentially totally unbalance the design of the whole system that forefathers have.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, here's the obligation of the people that the forefathers expressed. You have an obligation to stand up and do what's right. If the people, if the elected individuals, which don't, the government does not tell the citizens what to do. The citizens tell the government what to do. The elected officials are elected and put there by the people. The government doesn't put the people here. The people have a right to tell this government what it can and cannot do.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And that's one of the reasons why you want to silence the scientists and the doctors. If you can coerce them, so they will not talk to the people, if you will separate the people, if you will quarantine the people. We've never quarantined the healthy before. In the history of mankind, you don't quarantine the healthy. You quarantine the sick, which, gosh, my parents did that, right? “You're sick, you're staying home from school, you're not spreading this to others,” right? That's what common sense intelligent people do. If you're sick, you don't go out in society and cough and sneeze on people. You're not going to get better as a result, you're only going to make other people sick, but you don't quarantine the healthy.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

There's also data that shows that natural immunity provides the memory cells to this virus just like it does anything else and it provides it independent upon how severe the infection was. All these vaccines do and they're drug vaccine biologics. They're designed to elicit an immune response, okay? And they're playing this game. All they do, and people don't understand this either, they do not prevent you from getting infected and they do not prevent you from spreading the infection. What they do is because you've been exposed to it, in this case, the spike protein, you will form an immune response to it. And then when you become infected, for real, it will shorten the amount of time it takes you to respond to it, so your symptoms will be less.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well guess what? Advil, Motrin, Aleve, ibuprofen, aspirin, all do the same thing and it didn't cost us billions and trillions of dollars to do and it didn't violate your rights. You get to go decide if you want to take those medications or not. So, a lot of-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Even though they may be associated with some risk. I mean, there's many professionals-

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, look.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

-who are now recommending anti-inflammatories in COVID.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, that's-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

I mean, with the exception of severe disease and you have drugs like budesonide and methylprednisolone.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, there's- so you could- yeah, you could use [crosstalk 00:47:32]. Dr. Joseph Mercola:

But, let's get back to your original argument because it's really good. You laid a strong argument, legal case for not having mandatory vaccinations, even though it appears that large segments of the population are undergoing that right now. So, even though you've laid out the case, how do we prevent this? Is there a revolution coming up or is it legal suits that need to be followed? What's the process?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, so more than one thing, obviously. On the website, on FlemingMethod.com, you can go, there are exemptions. I've already put together a format exemption that covers medical, legal, religious and constitutional rights that people have. You're welcome to go there. Download the PDF. Add your medical information in there, your name, the people involved and send it into the people. That's first step. Okay? Taking action, not roll it-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Where do they send this form? Where do they send the form to?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, they send it to whoever is mandating that they take the vaccine, right?

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Okay. Giving them notice.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, if your employers do – huh?

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Even in most, even federal employees can do that?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And this is where I got to the place that the President would have to actually issue a waiver on what the Supreme Court has already done under Doe v. Rumsfeld. And doing so then violates the Constitution, which makes it an impeachable offense because he's violated his oath. So that's one thing. The second thing is for people to-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Before a second thing, is that Doe v. Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I think so, yeah.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, yeah. Interesting.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I'd have to go back and look at it. I'm not [crosstalk 00:44:03]. Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, it sounds like it.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

It had to do with the administration of the investigational drugs to military personnel.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, it probably was. All right. Sorry for the interruption.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah. No, that's all right.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

He was Secretary of Defense, so.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

The other thing is to take legal action. So, I'm working with a number of attorneys to file suits in this country. I will also tell you that I am one of the experts in the International Court and Italian courts right now for suits being filed for crimes against humanity. So, the bottom line answer to this is going to be everybody deciding that they need to take action and they need to be held accountable. Yes, this may mean you lose your job.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Okay, so they can fire you for this?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, look. The Founding Fathers knew this. If you read through the Declaration of Independence they dedicated their lives, their prosperity, their sacred honor to each other. And every one of them was gone after by the system, by the king, but they stayed with it because they did what was right. And you have to look at this, at this point in time and say what type of world are you leaving your children and your grandchildren? This is never about you. This is never about me. This is about the children and the grandchildren. And whatever we leave them, they're going to essentially be stuck with it. If we abandon them and the founding fathers did not abandon us, then we are responsible for allowing this to happen. It's on us, so there's no easy way.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I mean, putting this book out, “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?” I'm not going to get pats on the back. The U.S. federal government is not going to say, "Richard, that was a good thing for you to do. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for being an honest, upstanding scientist, physician, attorney." They're not going to do that. I don't expect them to do that because you know what? These people committed crimes and criminals, real, real honest to God criminals don't want you to know what they've done. If you want to know if somebody is a criminal and I'd check to see whether they tell you about what's happened and if they do, they're probably not a criminal, right? Criminals hide stuff. These people have been hiding stuff for decades and they don't want you to know about it, and they don't want you to talk about it.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

You're going to have to accept responsibility that if you're a student, you may not go to that college you wanted to go to because they've decided they want to force things on you. I did a presentation in Fort Worth, a little bit more than a week ago here now. And this mother, so I was done and I was leaving, and I had security around me and I can see this woman in the back of my eye running down the street after me. And I thought, I don't think she's here to attack me. And I could see, she was, so I stopped.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

She ran up to me and she said, "I just I have to tell you, my son just gave up a $200,000 sports scholarship to attend the four-year college that he’d always wanted to go to." And they were going to go to an in-state college, which wasn't going to be nearly the glamour, and he was given up $200,000, right? But they made that decision. They made the decision. This comes with hard

questions that really kind of shakes the core of us, but it also answers that question to that sign that I'm sure you've seen copies of as well as I have. If you ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany? Today, you know.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

That's right. So, I want to go a little deeper in the legal proceedings that you're participating in or planning on overseas in Italy and in the U.S. and give us an update on what they can be. And I think you mentioned the bioweapons treaty. I think that was authored by Francis Boyle, who I've interviewed a few times already last year. He was my first insights. I mean, we kind of blew the whistle on gain-of-function in February of 2020, which was early on, or definitely early on. But he authored that specifically, the penalty is not death interestingly, if you violate that treaty. It's a lifetime imprisonment, because he's not a fan of the death penalty.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

But is that the primary treaty that you're going to be looking at or is it the Nuremberg or the Helsinki? And what is the plan and where are we at and what are your projections as to the timing on it?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, so to answer the latter part, the time plan is for anybody who's been an attorney or I guess, gone to court, where the answer it's always up to the judges how long they want to take.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

You have that nice little privilege. So, it's actually all of the above. It has to do with the Biological Weapons Convention treaty. It has to do with the Nuremberg Code. It has to do with the Declaration of Helsinki. It has to do with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as any other statutes that come up.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

But what you do initially is you file cases in the International Criminal Court (ICC). And the United States seems to think that just because it didn't ratify the ICC that U.S. citizens cannot be held accountable, and that would be incorrect. Although it's a nice fantasy if you're living in that world, and you think that's what's going to protect you.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

The court then and there's several cases that have already been filed with the ICC. The court gets to decide then what it wants to do if it wants to launch an investigation, and at this stage of the process, these people are referred to as perpetrators. Not exactly a very nice term when you think about it. And the goal would be to get the ICC to do their responsibility and recognize their place in history because-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

And what does the ICC stand for?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

International Criminal Court. It's in the Hague.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

And you do believe that they are impartial and objective, or have they been corrupted like much of the other judicial systems?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I believe that there have still, look, if they're totally corrupt then there's not much we can do about that, from that point of view, okay? But that doesn't mean you've never seen me if you knew me as an individual, you realize I don't roll over on anything. This is where I proudly recognize my Viking blood heritage, bloodline and Vikings just don't roll over for you. I don't think any Viking ever rolled over for anybody. And I'm certainly not going to be the first one bloodline to do so.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, it doesn't really matter how long this takes or to whom this has to go, but I'm a firm believer that there are enough good, honest people on this planet that if the people communicate and work together, the tide on this can and will be turned. There's a group of Italian physicians that are meeting next week that I did a recording earlier for today. That has been sent to them, so they have enough time to put subtitles in Italian on the bottom of it. And it's a group of Italian physicians who feel like they're going up against this massive part of the Italian government and being coerced in the same way that we feel in this country.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

And I'll tell you that this is the same story all over the world. All the people that I talked to in the different countries that I've been working with have the same feeling. They're coerced. Their citizens are being bribed, which, as a side note, anytime the government has to bribe the people to do it, you have to say, "If it was really a good idea-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

They'd pay for it.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

"-why would you have to bribe me? I wouldn't be lining up for it." I'm the ultimate, I think, research scientist. After 53 years, I really feel very strongly about being a scientist-physician. And I am incredibly offended when Anthony Fauci says he is science because he's not. I mean, I've met some of the very best people in science. I've been privileged to be trained by some of the very best people in the history of science and hopefully, would do them honor in the end.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

But the perspective that a scientist has to manipulate and bribe real science. If these things, if these drug vaccines actually worked and there was scientific evidence, I'd be on here telling you to take it. What you're hearing me tell you is, "Don't take it." These things are biological weapons. They're nothing more than a genetic code of a biological weapon that was made, that was paid for, and put together by nefarious people.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Just curious, prior to COVID, were you a believer in vaccines? And were you up-to-date on your immunizations?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah, I'm not anti-vax.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

That's what I thought. And you've gotten them?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah. Many of them. I mean, I don't get influenza vaccines, because-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

It doesn't make sense.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Look, I mean, it changes year after year after year. I get exposed to people. I do what I did as a kid and then I develop my immune response to it, T-cells and antibodies and memory cells, and I'm good to go, okay. You know what I mean? I mean, my patients in hospitals have shared some of the worst diseases with me and pneumonias that I could ever not want to have gotten, but I survived it and, and moved forward because okay, functional immune system. I understand other people have immune problems and need to be cautious in other ways and should be so. But these vaccines are not doing anything for those individuals as well. No, I'm not anti-vaccine. I'm anti- stupid.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Okay. Good way to be. Well, it's interesting because Robert Malone, obviously the co-founder of the mRNA platform technology and Peter McCullough were both – I mean, Malone was vaccinologist and he reached a different conclusion on this, this whole process of what they're doing, so. And you're in his camp. So, you've done a great job by putting this all together. So, you're a wealth of information, and I'm just so excited that you're leading the charge to fight this thing in legal terms. How many other attorneys are joining you in this process?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

So, because of the fact that I'm the expert witness for the ICC, I cannot be the attorney filing the case. You can't be the attorney and the expert witness. It just turns out I'm one of the expert

witnesses, so there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 attorneys and possibly, a seventh attorney. So, there are currently six countries coalescing for a joint case that they'll be able to tell more about. The Italians have their own case. I know that I've been working with several attorneys in the U.S. to try to get cases going on in this country.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I've been very successful in getting a lot of exemptions for people using the form that I put on FlemingMethod.com. But there's only one of me, and I can't do this for all of you, so I put this exemption on there with bold font that says, "Insert your material here."

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, yeah, great. Well, that's a great service, because a lot of people will use it. But ultimately, they may have to accept the consequences that they may have to decide not to attend the scholastic institution, which could be a blessing in disguise, even that one student who had denied or not accepted his $200,000 scholarship. I mean, it may have been an institution that could have ruined them for life. You don't know, especially what they're teaching in colleges nowadays. It's just, it's not the same when we went to school. It really wasn't.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Dramatically changed, dramatically changed.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

If you look at the funding of this vaccine, and this virus and the people blocking the drugs. And you ask the question, “Who's giving a lot of money to these universities?” Many times it's the same people. So, why would you want to go to a university that is being funded by people who are trying to manipulate you? And if they're manipulating you, they're manipulating your family, too. So, I realized that the kids going to university are in their 20s, but they're adults. And they care about their parents, they care about their siblings, they care about their grandparents and other people who are close to them and family and friends. And I don't think they want to see their friends manipulated any more than anyone else.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

One of the things I do want to make a comment on now is for the people that have not been vaccinated. When you're looking at the people that have been vaccinated, step back for just a moment and recognize that many of those people got vaccinated because they were told that this was the only way to protect the people that they loved. And what we need to do is have the intelligence and the compassion necessary to look at those individuals and say, "I got it. No judgment." If there's a shedding problem or something like that that you're dealing with, there are treatments that are available that you can look at. I put those on the website, too.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

But you come together, support those people because they were just doing what they thought was right. And for many of them, they are so scared, and they have been made so scared. By the way, what type of country, what type of world, but what type of country spends so much effort frightening the blazes out of its citizens? That says something.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Well, fear is one of the most absolutely powerful and motivating triggers for the limbic system, and it is absolutely essential if they're going to implement this strategy.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah. Amazing.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

It's the most critical part of the propaganda campaign, is fear. There's no question about it.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah. So it's no surprise, and I hold no judgment against those individuals either because this is, as I said, it's likely, it probably, it is the most effective propaganda campaign in the history of humanity. And it's hard to blame someone when they're under that type of assault. I mean, an individual isn't enlightened enough to seek informed opinions elsewhere and they're just listening to the media. And the people they trust and the politicians and public health officials, they're going to get a consistent message that convinces them that they need to get this. And how could you argue with that? I mean, that's a rational choice, so.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Yeah. The next time somebody tries to force you or your friends to get vaccinated, I would like your listeners to go to the website and tell them to pull out the EUA documents, and have the people read those EUA documents and prove that there's a benefit to these vaccines. And then, I want them to go to the book, “Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?” And I want them to read the truth about where this came from.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah. Well, the book,” Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?” But I think even more importantly, because, I've always, I've written a large number of books now. And it was always, before I wrote my first one, I was always reluctant to do it because I had the website and it says, "I don't want to write a book because it's out of date so soon." I mean, but by the time you've written and published it, I mean, things have changed so pretty dramatically in many cases.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

So, I think, in your case, I mean, it's great to have that as a resource and documentation of the fraud that's been going on. But your website is phenomenal, especially providing this form for people to at least have a hope of getting an exemption from these mandatory vaccines that are being forced upon them. So, thank you for doing that.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah. And it's FlemingMethod.com?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Right. F-L-E-M-I-N-G M-E-T-H-O-D, no space in between dot-com, so just one M in Fleming, no stuttering.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, yeah. There you go. It's good. It's very good. All right. Any last words?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I'm sorry? You cut out for a moment.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

I'm sorry. Any last words that you'd like to share or comments?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

No, I think-

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Reinforce something?

Dr. Richard Fleming:

I think there's a lot of people that are very concerned that things have gone south, so to speak. And I'm actually encouraged. One of the things that I've noticed about being here in Dallas and in Texas, is that common sense has not died. And it may be that it's our most useful treatment for SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. And the vaccines and everything going on is the common sense that people want. I know that this is, sometimes people think of it as a complex topic, because people weren't aware of viruses really that much before all of this happened. But what I've repeatedly gotten from people is don't dumb it down.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

It's not a matter of turning people into Ph.D.s, MDs or whatever, it's a matter of just being truthful and honest with them. And people have a real good capacity, when they get away from

all the nonsense happening to look at the truth and realize it's the truth and to listen to nonsense being thrown at them and realize that it's just garbage and manipulation. So, common sense is a real useful tool for everybody to have. That and compassion. Real compassion, not this fake- pretend compassion that people talk so much about.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, but unfortunately, it's a bit of a challenge to exercise common sense when you've been inundated with propaganda and it's actively engaged and responding to the fear of this constant pressure. And then compounded with in many communities being forced into isolation, which is another strategy for propaganda. They isolate people. And so it's not for the fear of contagion. This was done intentionally to amplify the propaganda impact.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

People from talking to each other, stop them exchanging ideas. Everybody knows that we used to, now I'm saying like, it's something that won't happen again, but it will. We used to frequently sit down and have conversations with families and friends where you'd argue back and forth and you discuss things. And I can't be the only person that would walk away from a conversation and go, "Well, I hadn't really thought about that. Let me think about that" because that's kind of a different point of view. But that exchange stopped when they quarantined people, when they isolated us, and then they put us in our homes. And they controlled what you could see on the Internet and on television, that stopped.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

Well, we've come far enough back out of it, that that exchange has started again, and people have had to fight, literally fight to get that information out. But it's that sharing of information and knowledge that is so critical to turning this around, and actually bringing all of this nonsense under control. Not just the virus, but the manipulation of people that has been going on and the lies and the deceit and the abuse of power and they used their money to do it. They used our lives to do it. They used our livelihoods to do it.

Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Yeah. Well, it's probably one, probably, I believe it is that the most significant challenge on almost every one of us will face. It was forced upon us and requires a response one way or the other. And we're deeply appreciative of the work that you're committing to this to help those of us who aren't as skilled as you in these areas to compile the resources to address this in some way. So, thank you so much for what you've done.

Dr. Richard Fleming:

My pleasure. Thank you.

[scoutshonor56]

COP NATION

“Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do…”

 As I’ve watched our country being torn apart these last three weeks, I’ve been tempted to voice an opinion, but I thought I would let things simmer and roil a while before setting my thoughts to words – see how events evolved.  What has become obvious is that what we have are two separate issues, albeit both intrinsically woven together, joined at the waist: Racism, and what America calls “law and order”; specifically, those who are tasked to uphold this social contract, the police. Those sworn to protect and serve.

 Well, like America’s fixation with guns, I have also written about race many times – so many times that I’ve given up writing about either years ago; there is simply nothing more to be said, nor has anything significantly changed. So instead, I’m going to put out there some observations and insights about law enforcement here in America.  I draw upon mainly two sources: Last Monday’s (June 8) John Oliver show, and a recent post in the social platform, Medium: Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop.

 A quick addendum about the Medium piece: some may question it’s validity and alleged source, as is wise today – there is a huge, digital quagmire of untruths and bullshit floating around the mass communications world, where anyone is free to write anything and instantly put it out there. I myself am a stickler for checking sources and facts before voicing an opinion.  That being said, I choose not to waste time digging and poking around on this one for the simple reason that it’s irrelevant; in my 64 years I’ve seen it all happen – a lot.  From the war protests and race riots of the 60’s, to the beating and drowning of Joe Campos Torres by the Houston police my first year down here (‘77), to the fatal shooting of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas during a “no knock” botched drug raid January 18th of last year - yes, just like the one that lead to the death of EMT worker, Breonna Taylor, of Kentucky, who was shot eight times, in her home, just last March 13.  

 Also, a lot of the material touched on in this ex-cop confession is mirrored in the Oliver show.  For instance, you might ask yourself, “Is there really such a thing as a ‘killologist’ who regularly trains our police force?”

 Why yes little Sarah, there is indeed, and you can see him on the Oliver show!

 I encourage you to read the post in Medium (it’s lengthy, but if anything, at least read the closing suggestions) and watch the Oliver show, and then ask yourself: Why does America far and away lead the civilized world in police use of firearms, death by firearms, and imprisonment of its citizens?  What are we, as a society, doing wrong or differently?

 How did a simple case of an Atlanta black man, Rayshard Brooks, inebriated and asleep at a Wendy’s drive thru, result in his shooting death just days ago?  By the way officer Rolfe, bravo sir, bravo!  Job well done – so how does it feel to take a human life, shooting him twice in the back for the offense of being drunk and resisting arrest?  Hey, here’s a crazy thought, a wild reimagining: Considering America is now a tinderbox just waiting for a spark over policing methods, how do you think this would have played out if you and your partner, after finding Mr. Brooks too inebriated to drive, said “You know anyone you could call to take you home?  You can park your car right over there, come pick it up in the morning…”  

 The days of dismissing these incidents as “a few bad apples” are long gone; thanks to today’s technology, everyday citizens (not to mention the ubiquitous security cameras that are everywhere) now have the power to record with a handheld phone; anywhere, anytime, and it has become increasingly obvious that no, the problem runs deeper - right to the core of police culture and training.  A culture that recently got Tulsa Police Department  Maj.  Travis Yates in hot water when during a recent podcast he said that systemic racism “just doesn’t exist”, and further suggested research shows the police are shooting African Americans “24% less than we probably ought to be.”

 Uhhhh -  wow…

 Maybe it’s time to look at this nationwide problem from a totally different perspective; maybe we continue to put Band-Aids and cosmetic patches on something that needs to be addressed before the bleeding even starts.  The cause, and not the symptoms.  

Yet, once again we assuredly will see some tepid policy changes, banning chokeholds, mandated race relations seminars, increased accountability and monitoring, policy reviews, blah, blah, blah – as we’ve seen it all before, for decades (Hey, remember Rodney King?), and in the end nothing changes.  If these methods were effective, why are these incidents only increasing in frequency? I join the many who have seen enough; who feel America needs to erase the board and start this equation over, or this bloody ugliness will continue, and only get worse.  For an expansion on this, read an excellent recent editorial written by Mariame Kaba, featured in the NY Times.

 Unfortunately, the Dems have come up with a reasonable start, but decided to call the initiative “Defunding the Police”.  Really?  That’s the best you can do?  Something that anyone could easily interpret as “let’s starve the cops financially!” Until what – they die on the vine?

 No.  But let’s take a look at what this financial restructuring really means, and start with the fact that the police force militia (which it has now become) is amply funded.  This is because every politician, be they a Democrat or Republican, loves running on a “law and order” platform – it’s an easy grab line.  Who doesn’t support law and order in our society?  And if it means the police want something from a military garage sale, like a Humvee, an assault vehicle, military grade ordinance and all kinds of fun urban warfare toys?  No problem!  

 Jeez, why does America accept this as necessary? Because our culture, out TV shows, our movies, are saturated with the fairytale myth of “they’re out there everywhere, the ‘bad guys’, and the only thing protecting the sheep from the wolves are the police!”  We glorify and promote the idea of our security and protection depends on a steely-eyed squad who are not afraid to use a gun; from the days of the old west, to organized crime during prohibition, to Nixon in 1971 making drug abuse “public enemy #1”, declaring war on the scourge of violent drug dealers that overtook our streets and enslaved our children!  

 Which, I might add, has proven a laughable failure by any and all standards, and has cost the U.S. over a TRILLION dollars since 1971, while glutting our jails to overflowing with non-violent offenders and ruining countless families.

 Watch a cop show (or movie) and see how long it takes before the guns come out to finalize justice, to provide closure and a happy ending. Justice ends with the scum bleeding out on the sidewalk.  “COPS”!? Are you fucking kidding me?  I didn’t even know it was still on the air – 31 years…  Oh, we feel so safe and secure in our homes as we watch the shirtless rabble led off in handcuffs to the squad car!  

Who watches a show filled with actual arrests for entertainment?  

 Meanwhile, let’s leave fantasy land and take a look at the real world: Did you know the vast majority of police action is what they call “reactive”?  Meaning responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, dealing with the homeless, domestic disputes, and other noncriminal, societal issues.  Most cops make one felony arrest a year – one.  And here lies the nut of the problem: armed police being called out mostly to deal with issues such as these.  

 Things that should, and could, be handled by trained professionals in these fields, not some cop who got 1,000 hours of training at the academy, little of it having to do with these issues.  And I say this in defense of the police, and this is what “defunding” really means.  They shouldn’t have to deal with these problems, and most are ill equipped to do so – they’re cops!  If all you have is a hammer (club and gun), and you were trained to be a carpenter, everything gets treated like a nail.  This is ridiculous that our police are expected to wear so many hats and are so over extended.  Free them up to deal with actual criminal issues.  If one of the other scenarios turns violent or threatening, then call the police.

 Why does America find this concept so alien – so non-applicable here in the USA?  What, are our citizens somehow different than in the rest of the world?

 Bottom line, these are problems that exist because of the anemic funding in areas such as education, housing, and our shameful, for profit healthcare system that leaves millions uninsured and one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.  The positively obscene gap of income inequality that grows ever larger.  The false promises of politicians.  America is increasingly angry and frustrated with a government that is structured to favor the rich.  So yes, let’s try diverting some of police funding and instead put it into social programs involved with education, housing, mental health, etc.  These areas and the lack of funding are the seed, and then the root of most of society’s ills today – and yes, that often grow into crime and violence.  Often these are people that we’ve let fall thru the cracks, who didn’t get the same chance, the same opportunities; and who need a little help.

 Pay the police a better wage, attract and demand a more educated and diverse pool of applicants, and free them up to do what they are ideally supposed to do – PROTECT AND SERVE THE COMMUNITY.  They shouldn’t be seen as our enemy, nor should we be theirs.

 “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time – you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks…You have to put them in jail for ten years and you’ll never see this stuff again.”   

- Trump addressing governors during a video conference call, June 1

[soberjetsfans-blog]

Does AA Work, Really?

by Bill S on March 14, 2020

“My toast is burnt. Dang toaster is broken and doesn't work”. OK, maybe this is a bad analogy. Go with me for a bit...Maybe the toaster actually is broken. But another thought is maybe it’s just time to do a quick check. Did I have the setting correct? To be fair my toaster is kind of plain, it has 1 dial. Goes from 1 to 7. I generally just keep it in the middle, which I have always assumed was the setting for perfect crisp…. But did I check? No of course not. I just plug it in, throw in some bread and patiently (most of the time) wait for my perfect toast.  When was the last time I cleaned the toaster? How old is it? When was the last time any maintenance was performed on it? Can you actually perform maintenance on a toaster? WOW. that was a lot of effort and time spent on burnt toast. I will just throw this in the garbage and order a new one. Which I am assuming is what most rational individuals would do.  It is unfortunately what we have grown accustomed to doing with most things in our life that are no longer working the way we expect them too. We toss it aside, say “It doesn't work” and get something new and shiny. 

And there it is. I got ya. Hopefully. The analogy that I was working towards was that we are quick to toss out what we perceive isn't working and just move on to the next thing. Cars, clothes, jobs, relationships and even TOASTERS all go in this same category. Now the items on this list are without question important. What I want to bring light to is the idea surrounding recovery and all the new shiny options that are available if something doesn't work we want it too we just toss it aside and move on to the next.

It has taken me awhile to get here but what I want to dissect (the same way I did with the toaster) is if AA works and if not, should we just toss it and find a new shiny thing.  Like does AA work, really?  My hunch is there are a few ways to look at this. And yes I am crazy so a few quick google and amazon searches found no less than 1000 different types of toasters.  But how many views on whether AA works? Try it. Google “does AA work”. Now, I am not one to tell anyone how to spend their time so feel free to scour all of the information and report back. From my eye it appears to be far more opinions of AA working or not as there are toasters for sale. 

OK, now that everyone has had a chance to google the info, what did you find? Did you see advertisements for treatment centers? New medications? Articles and publications stating why or why not it doesn't work. Which one is right? Exactly. A Lot of opinions. 

Here’s mine……. AA founded in 1935 and is accredited to Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith as the architects. Bill was a stock broker, Dr Bob was a, well, a doctor. A couple of very smart men who had careers figured out, just not life. What they decided they must do is toss aside the life they were living and find a new shiny one… {see what I did there?}. What they had found had worked for them and countless others so they decided that they wanted to codify the information and write a book. The sales of the book, or so they thought would help the budding entrepreneurs create a new life. With some meaning and purpose.  It took a few years to get the book written, bound and on the shelves of the local book stores. Soon copies were being bought and sold all over the country and eventually the world. They had hit oil. 

  I was fortunate enough to eventually obtain a copy of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous.   At the time, the beginning of my story was a lot different than that of a Doctor or stock broker.  And for a while I didn't follow along with what they had written. I just kind of flung the book around like a trophy. Leaving it out so family members could see. “Atta boy” is the reaction I was going for. In reality, I was sucked into the idea that the instructions, which is what the book details, would enter my psyche through osmosis. I mean I carried it everywhere. I left it on the coffee table every time I had guests over. It must be working.   

I also bought into the idea that if I attended AA meetings I would catch what others claimed to have. The members of the meetings often spoke very eloquently of the program and the “rules”. I heard things like “Change nothing the first year”, “no relationships” “Take it slow”. I always thought, wow, these folks really have this process down. I was lucky enough to be observant of actions. Some of the bleeding deacons, as I affectionately called them were not exactly living the way they were stating I should. What the? Who was right? Should I just buy into the idea of “do as I say, not as I do” am move on? Or should I toss it to the side and find something new and shiny? (gotcha again!).

As I watched members of the “program” come in and out, each time claiming “this is it”, “this time I am working the steps” “this time I am reaching out more”. Not 100% sure when it happened for me, but it happened. It was an epiphany of sorts that If I listened to what was said I may be able to actually hear the message and I wouldn't have to come back in again making any new proclamations or promises.  I started slow. At celebration meetings, where members would get medallions for different lengths of sobriety I started to hear recurring themes.  And I was almost shocked when those themes almost contradicted the original rules I had picked up on. They would often be heard saying “ I changed everything” “I developed meaningful relationships” “I jumped into the work, got a sponsor and did the steps”. The message was clear. The program itself was not in the room, as crazy as that sounds. It was in the instructions.  

As this all unfolded for me, I watched hundreds. Not an exaggeration. Literally hundreds of members come in and be gone. Come in and have stories of heartbreak and disaster. I thought many many times that AA doesn’t work.  I thought about finding that shiny new thing that so many talk about. I googled ways out. From this research I had educated myself enough about the history of AA to know that I wasn't alone. The founder Bill Wilson himself worked hard at finding another way. Stories and folklore  will show you that Bill had tried LSD to create mind control to remove obsessions.  He tried Vitamin B as an alternative to better health.  Maybe he too thought this was just one big confusing mess. Take this story as an example, how many normal people do you know that put this much thought into a toaster not working? Ya, me either…..

Luckily, in my research there was another point of view that I found. Dr. Bob’s. His philosophy was to keep this thing simple. The instructions were clear. “Follow along thoroughly, as rarely have we seen a person fail”. If you are a member that phrase may sound familiar to you. Dr Bob had a theory that members of the Alcoholics Anonymous program need to follow the instructions set forth in the book. It was our responsibility to other members to hold each other accountable. To tell the truth {Dr Bob and the old timers}. What a novel concept. Tell the truth and hold others accountable. Will that work, really?

So who was right? Bill or Dr Bob? My opinion, and we talked about the value of those… is that they are both equally right if we follow the instructions. A friend of mine showed me a preamble that was used in the 1940’s. A line from there was recovery altering for me. It said “we can agree or we can disagree but we shouldn’t say anything that can't be reconciled from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous”.  So what about those rules that I heard. And still hear. “No changes, no relationships, take your time, meeting makers make it” (there's more… insert your own ) are they found in the book? Surprisingly NO. they are not. Those are opinions.  The book actually contradicts most if not all of those. 

What I have found is that if we a follow the instructions it may actually work. As the text of the book says “rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path”. I was and still am amazed at what is written and what most members share. Again, if we listen to the message we will hear the good and bad. Listen to opinions and understand that's what they are, but be crazy and defiant enough to research the facts.  If we keep it simple enough and just follow along to the actual instructions, it works, really!

[knights-of-221b-privet-drive]

I was tagged some time ago by @photosynthesizingparkhyungsik and I found some time so here!

THE LAST …

1. drink: water

2. phone call: my mum

3. text message: the bus company to pay my entrance thing lol, and before that: my dad

4. song you listened to: Defying gravity from Wicked

5. time you cried: from sadness: when I heard my mum/ people from my mums side had tried to take me and my sisters from my dad; from happiness: when I got the results of my exam

 HAVE YOU EVER …

6. dated someone twice: no

7. been cheated on: no

8. kissed someone and regretted it: no

9. lost someone special: from dying only some family that I didn’t really know well, so it wasn’t really special, but I once had a really good friend and we kinda grew apart, so that counts I think

10. been depressed: no

11. gotten drunk and thrown up: no, I don’t really drink alcohol (only once in a while a regular mojito but not enough to even get intoxicated)

 LIST THREE FAVOURITE COLOURS (12, 13, 14):

Uuh, the pink of a sunset

The white-blue of winter

The yellow-green when the sun shines through a fresh leaf

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU …

15. made new friends: yes! I went to uni and made one friend and she introduced me to some other people and I think I can call them friends too, and some people of the group I had exercises and practica with are kinda cool too

16. fallen out of love: no

17. laughed until you cried: yeah haha, I laugh a lot, so that happens sometimes

18. found out someone was talking about you: No I don’t think so (at least not in a bad way)

19. met someone who changed you: I think people always influence you so yeah, but I don’t think I changed drastically because of someon

20. found out who your true friends are: goh a bit, though I kinda knew it already

21. kissed someone on your facebook list: no

 GENERAL STUFF

22. how many of your facebook tumblr friends do you know in real life: For Tumblr: If you count just anyone I’ve met in real life: about 7, if you mean ‘have seen more than one time’: 5 I think ; and from facebook I think I know like everyone because I don’t take requests from people I don’t recognise

23. do you have any pets: we have 2 chickens at my dad’s, and we kinda have a cat at my mum’s but we don’t see him a lot anymore :/ the cats in the neighbourhood kinda go everywhere haha

24. do you want to change your name: not really

25. what did you do for your last birthday: do the dishes lol, it was a concert and a eating thing for band, but I had a lot of fun!

26. what time did you wake up: around 10 actually! But it was kinda late yesterday/this morning cause I watched the first episode of star trek tng, but it was a double episode so yeah, sad

27. what were you doing at midnight last night: watching tng haha

28. name something you cannot wait for: going on Erasmus, going to space (though yeah, that’s a dream), earn money, move out

29. when was the last time you saw your mom: like 10 minutes ago when I went to eat rhubarb crumble she made!

30. what is one thing you wish you could change about your life: that my parents never divorced

31. what are you listening to right now: Wicked (the musical)

32. have you ever talked to a person named tom: I don’t think so actually, I could forget someone, but I can’t remember I did

33. something that is getting on your nerves: politics, tumblr’s ‘why isn’t anyone reblogging this’/ ‘Because this is a (insert minority) person no one will reblog this’ like shut up, and also hot weather

34. most visited website: Tumblr, Facebook, Toledo, Wikipedia and Netflix probably

35. elementary school: was catholic, I always had nice teachers, they always sought stuff to keep me busy if I was bored (I wasn’t a lot, but I got to do extra maths exercises etc, also a presentation about space eeey), it had a nice environment with lots of green and a pond where we had to run around during cross-country (?), competing with other schools. Also we had a department for children who had dyslexia/had trouble learning/… (but like for when they couldn’t keep up with other kids you know what I mean?). And also a high school for them, but wtf some of those kids were such assholes, I remember they often smoked, sometimes spit on us while we were on our playground,… I have feared them my whole time there lol. Don’t get me wrong, there were some nice people too, but yeah

36. high school: also catholic lol, it was in a awesome castle, also in a green environment ‘in the middle of nowhere’ (Belgium style :p ), but quite a good education imo, is kinda known as an elite school lol, we only had ‘high studies’: languages/maths/sciences (like not art/care/metal…) so everyone who couldn’t keep up had to go to another school which kinda created the ‘elite’ thing I think. Also because it was not really near a city you had a different kind of people etc

37. college: KU Leuven! (also catholic haha, and I’m not even religious lol) no but it’s a great uni, and indeed ranked as best uni in Belgium I think! And since I study bio-engineering (so science) we’re on Arenberg, and it’s also a rather green and relatively calm environment (it’s a bit outside the city)

38. hair color: brownish

39. long or short hair: short! (still weird to say lol)

40. do you have a crush on someone: on some fictional characters haha, currently especially Jim Kirk eeey

41. what do you like about yourself: my humour I guess, that I can make a bit of music, that I don’t give up too easily

42. piercings: no, I don’t like needles haha

43. blood type: O- I think (I’m sure of ‘O’ haha)

44. nickname: Kaatje, zus, Katie (mostly used by my parents)

45. relationship status: very single

46. zodiac sign: libra

47. pronouns: she/her

48. favorite tv show: Star Trek!

49. tattoos: no, like I said, needles…

50. righty or lefty: Righty

 FIRST …

51. surgery: last year I think, my wisdom teeth got removed

52. piercing: yeah never

53. best friend: the son of friends of my parents, we went alternately to eachother’s after school so we didn’t have to go to day care (?), and we became best friends (everyone thought we were siblings and later a couple haha, but then we grew apart during high school :/ now we only do small talk

54. sport: athletics

55. vacation: I think probably the Alps in France, we always went to the same place, and it was amazing (wow last year we went to the Provence, and we made a stop because my brothers couldn’t handle the long trip in one ride, and we went to a restaurant to eat, and my dad had invited the couple that exploited that chambre d’hôtes and I cried, it had been so long!)

56. pair of sneakers: Kickers I think haha

 right now …

57. eating: nothing

58. drinking: nothing, I’m about to drink some water

59. i’m about to: after this I’m gonna watch another episode of tng probably haha, and maybe playing a bit piano too

60. listening to: Wicked

61. waiting for: nothing really much actually, maybe graduation and moving out

62. do you want kids: no, probably not

63. do you want to get married: goh, idk, not for the sake of getting married, but maybe if it’s handy

64: what career do you want:  in general: where I go to work without having to complain everyday about how work sucks More detailed dream career: I’d like to do some research first, then, when candidacies for the esa astronaut class open I will apply, then go to space and do some research too, and then maybe teaching biology to high school

 WHICH IS BETTER …

65. hugs or kisses: as far as I know hugs, though with the right person I think kisses could be even better because it’s more intimate

66. lips or eyes: eyes

67. shorter or taller: rather taller, but doesn’t matter that much

68. older or younger: no opinion actually

70. nice arms or nice stomach: goh, maybe arms? idk

71. sensitive or loud: rather sensitive I think?

72. hook up or relationship: relationship

73. troublemaker or hesitant: hesitant

 HAVE YOU EVER …

74. kissed a stranger: no

75. drank hard liquor: is rhum hard liquor? But only in mojito lol, oh and once some sips of whiskey-cola I think

76. lost glasses/lenses: yeah, kinda, when we went swimming with school I had dry eyes after it and was constantly rubbing my eyes and they fell out (the lenses haha)

77. turned someone down: uhm, not for a relationship, I haven’t had someone for that haha, but I did turn some kids down for a dance when I was like 11

78. had sex on the first date: noo haha, you need to date first haha (but I don’t think I would have sex on my first date unless I know that person already good)

79. broken someone’s heart: maybe I think

80. had your heart broken: kinda

81. been arrested: haha, no

82. cried when someone died: yes

83. fallen for a friend: if I fall in love, I almost always fall for people I know pretty good, so yes, actually three times, but I always think about it a lot, and I think it’s mostly just a crush

 DO YOU BELIEVE IN …

84. yourself: actually most of the time yes, though of course I doubt myself often

85. miracles: goh, some things are just too coincidental you kow? But I don’t really believe in: ‘if I think about this or that, it will happen’

86. love at first sight: I think for love you need to know a person, you can’t fall in love with someone you don’t know imo

87. santa claus: Here in Belgium it’s just buying eachother presents, but yeah I did believe in Sinterklaas until I was 9 or so

88. kiss on the first date: yes, especially if you’ve known eachother before that, but I think if the date’s long enough you can get to know a person well enough

89. angels: not in the religious sense

OTHER …

90. current best friends name: Sarah!

91. eye color: blueish grey

92. favorite movie: probably pride and prejudice (2005) I think?

I tag @fvfvxcvxcv, @thefirebreathingbitchqueen, @channybatch, @mats-bloody-hat, of course only if you want to!

[faces-in-unexpected-places]

Do You Have the Time? Episode 009: Research Dinner Party Part 2

“Hello, my name is Leopold Looney, and I was looking to place an order for three products,” he paused, “Yes, I would like nine-hundred grams of aluminum powder. And, one kilogram of iron (III) oxide… and can I also have two orders of your three meter long magnesium strips.”

“He sounds like he’s in a drive-through,” Madison whispered. The other two shushed her.

The lab group switched from blank to ecstatic faces as they listened to Leopold speaking to the sales associate.

“Billing address? Yeah, that would be 314 Liberty Drive in Curiesville, Indiana. The Centre for the Advancement of Technology and Science… yes, I will be paying from the Dr. Looney budget. And, how long is shipping?” He listened with a smile, then flinched and grimaced, “Goodness, really? Okay, we’ll make it work.”

The three of them waited while Leopold finished giving the sales associate the payment information. Jeremy glanced between Leslie and his sister with hesitation. The two of them appeared excited. He didn’t feel that he could join them because Leopold’s opinion of the experiment was unclear to him.

“No, thank you very much,” he grinned, “Yes, have a nice day, as well. Okay, goodbye.”

He hung up and looked to address his team.

“So, we’ve got those materials on the way. The problem is that, well, the company seems to have opened up another branch across the country, while the one closest to us was shut down. Bottom line… it will take longer than usual to ship here while they are still getting the branch secured. About three weeks.”

“Damn,” Madison said, “That sucks.”

Leopold chuckled.

“Yes, Madison, it does in fact, suck.”

“I suppose the bright side is that we’re unable to use the lab right now anyway, so if they came tomorrow, we’d probably still be stuck,” Jeremy offered his input.

“That is a good observation,” Leopold replied, “So, since we’ve taken care of that… what else do you guys want to do? Does anybody have any concerns, or…”

“Uhh,” Jeremy and Madison both murmured.

“Oh, okay, yes? Concerns and questions? Jeremy, why don’t you go first,” he gestured with a relaxed smile.

“Thank you. I’m a bit confused. Are we going to try to create the cosmic rings? Loops? Or…” he glanced at Leslie, looking for a suggestion, “Cosmic… circles?”

“Cosmic loops sounds good,” she said.

“Right, okay” Jeremy nodded at her, then focused back on Leopold, “Are we going to try the cosmic loop hypothesis?” he asked.

“Ah, I see,” he replied with a laugh, “Well, boy, here it is…”

The colour drained from Jeremy’s face. He was humiliated. His younger sister was able to come up with a better idea than him, and she barely had an education in science. Dread overcame him at the thought of being rejected in front of everyone at the dinner table. Even Madison said that he answered all questions to the best of his ability, how could it not be good enough.

“I debated you on your points, and you held your ground under some tough questioning. I wouldn’t allow you to convince me of something unless you had all your facts straight. But, most importantly,” he paused, “You eventually told me that you didn’t know all the answers.”

Jeremy tilted his head and frowned. Leslie rolled her eyes with a half-smile, and looked away. A quiet laugh erupted from Leopold when he noticed and pointed to her.

“She knows how this goes,” he said.

“How what goes—” Jeremy stammered, “What do you mean?”

“Nobody has all the answers, Jeremy,” Leopold replied, “Not even me. And I’ve been around for a long time.”

“You can say that again,” Madison interjected.

“Hush,” Jeremy said.

“The point is…” Leo started again, “You didn’t bullshit me.”

“Whoa,” Madison said.

“You answered to the best of your ability, and it was well thought out. I love that. But you also recognised your limits. You don’t know how this will turn out, or even if this experiment will work. But you didn’t try making anything up. Too many people nowadays try to fluff up their ideas by skewing the content, but you didn’t. Even if it meant risking the approval of the project because you can’t guarantee someone something that they want. That’s how it should be. Research is searching for the answer, whether you achieve it or not. Even if you don’t, it doesn’t make you a failure. Research is not being paid to engineer a product for sale so somebody else can profit from it.”

Jeremy frowned. He couldn’t tell if this was a good or bad thing.

“So… what are you trying to say?”

Leopold laughed.

“What I mean to say is, congratulations, boy. Of course we’re going to pursue your project.”

Jeremy was awestruck. And happy. He hardly knew how to process it all. A silly grin spread from ear to ear. Leslie pridefully gleamed at him with her chin resting in her hand, and her elbow on the table.

“Wow,” he sighed, “Thank you, Leopold. Those are… very kind words for you to say.”

“You earned it.”

“Congrats, Jeremy,” Leslie whispered with a nudge to him, “Speaking from experience… there’s more where that came from.”

“Thanks,” he said, softly. He then glanced back to Leopold, “Leslie contributed to this just as much as I did, though. I just did more talking today,” he noted. 

“I’ve presented plenty of ideas to Leopold before,” Leslie said to him, “I thought you should get to do it, instead.” 

“Of course; as always Leslie, wonderful job. You two are brilliant scientists in my book,” Leopold said.

“Didn’t think I’d be considered a scientist this early into my graduate degree,” Jeremy chuckled.

“Oh, who gives a damn about degrees,” Leopold waved away.

“Well, employers, for one,” Jeremy laughed.

“Leopold, you and I both have PhDs. Jeremy is pursuing one, and Madison is starting her Bachelor’s. Is this the right audience for statements like that?” Leslie joked.

“Sure it is, Leslie! The employers care because they want you to know how much money they have to pay you, and how much you can make them. All proficient scientists should earn their degrees because you get your experience, and that’s how you establish your credibility. But getting a degree alone doesn’t mean that someone is a true scientist — just that they did the bare minimum required to be officially recognised as a someone who can do science-based work.”

“Damn, Leo, laying down a lot of truth tonight, huh?"

“Only my opinion. Of course, everyone is entitled to what they choose to think,” he shrugged.

“Well, either way, I’m happy that we were able to agree on so many things to move plans ahead tonight!” Leslie changed the subject.

“So,” Leopold said and turned to Madison, “you sounded like you had a concern, Madison. Want to put it out into the open?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, no problem,” she croaked and twiddled her thumbs, “So, not to sound like a total dunce, but… I don’t really get any of what you guys talked about for the past half-hour. Can someone explain it in, like… ya know, simpler terms,” she said with a jesting tone. Leopold looked to Jeremy and Leslie and gestured to her.

“You two have been fostering the foundation of this idea for a while… why don’t you two do the honours?”

Jeremy sighed. Leslie noticed and took the lead of the conversation.

“Well, Madison, before we do that, why don’t you try explaining to us what you think is going on. That way, we can get an idea of what you know, and what you might need help with understanding.”

“Yeah, okay, good idea, Les. So like, you’re going to use my chemical reaction thing to generate a lot of heat energy. And then you’re going to take all that heat and turn it into these strings of energy somehow,” she said.

“Yes, that’s the basic idea so far,” Leslie encouraged.

“And we talked about that whole distance and displacement thing earlier, making time warp more when displacement, on the bottom of the fraction, is much smaller than distance which is on the top of the fraction.”

Leslie smiled and nodded.

“But then like, Jeremy started talking about making circles or loops or whatever and I kinda got lost.”

“That’s okay. What confused you?”

“Well, like, so, you and Jeremy just kinda proved that by making loops of energy, displacement would be zero, right?”

“Yes, that’s right!”

“Are you guys still using that whole distance divided by displacement equals the distortion coefficient equation thing? The one from the other scientific paper?” Madison continued.

“Ohhh,” Jeremy said, “I know why she’s confused.”

“Yeah, because you can’t divide by zero!” Madison blurted out.

Jeremy faced Leslie.

“She’s in trigonometry right now.”

“Oh, dear, no wonder it’s confusing,” Leslie replied, “So, Madison, you haven’t taken calculus yet, right?”

“Uhh, no. I thought that was only for the really smart people,” she said.

“No, it’s actually a freshman level class,” Jeremy clarified, “Calculus I is, anyway. There is a whole lot of other, more theoretical math classes above calculus. But you probably won’t need those.”

“Thank God,” she sighed.

“So in calculus,” Leslie began, “when we have a variable, like X, in the denominator, and it is equal to zero, we do this thing called ‘taking the limit as X approaches zero.’”

“‘The limit does not exist,’” Madison quoted with a bright smile.

“Yes, you’ve made another pop-culture reference, actually in benefit to the situation. Congratulation,” Jeremy said.

“So we substitute numbers in the denominator getting closer and closer to zero, but we never actually get there,” Leslie explained.

“Oh, like because you can always have a smaller decimal? Like, numbers can get smaller forever, just add more zeros after the decimal point?” Madison said.

“Yes, exactly like that! The smaller that number is in the denominator, the larger the overall fraction will be. And so when we say that displacement in the cosmic loop will be zero—”

“You mean it’s approaching zero!” Madison interrupted.

“Yes!” Leslie cheered, “Good job, honey! So when the fraction keeps increasing because the denominator keeps getting closer to zero, we say that the limit is infinity.”

“Ohhhh, damn, so you guys will be making, like, infinite time ripples with cosmic loops?”

“Yes, that is the idea. Cosmic loops will give us the most space-time distortion, and therefore, the most potential for time travel.”

“Oh my God! Jeremy! You guys are literally shifting your time machine into maximum overdrive™! Right?! You guys are like Plankton and the time machine is like his machine. And you’re stealing the time travel secret recipe from time travel Mr. Krabs!” she shouted.

Jeremy pinched the bridge of his nose during her rambling with his eyes strained shut.

“Volume, Madison.”

“What is a Mr. Krabs?” Leopold asked.

“What’s the secret recipe?” Leslie added.

“Nothing,” Jeremy projected his irritated tone of voice, “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it. Yes, Madison, it’s like that, okay? You’re really dating this whole documentary that you’re making.”

“Oh shit, you’re right. I wanted this movie to be… timeless!” she wheezed and slapped her knee.

Leslie held her laughter back. Jeremy buried his face in his arms on the table and moaned.

“Oh, like you aren’t the absolute black belt master of pun-making,” she rolled her eyes at him, then glanced at Leslie and Leo, “Literally, if speaking in tongues is a spiritual gift, then speaking in puns was Jeremy’s gift.”

“Stop,” he said from the depths of his sweater sleeves.

“With everything that we’ve discussed today, I think we all should take a well-deserved break,” Leopold suggested, “Experiment planned, materials ordered, food eaten, I think it’s time to give the hard work a rest.”

“But we still need to figure out how we’re going to manipulate the energy into strings,” Jeremy objected from his sleeves, still.

“We’ll figure it out,” Leo replied.

“We also need to decide what materials we’ll need to build the reactor for the thermite reaction. We’ll need blueprints, and test runs, and—”

“We will figure it out,” Leopold stressed, “Goodness, you guys never rest. Let’s quit while we are ahead because if we do this any longer, we’ll tire ourselves out,” he sighed.

“Just so I have this straight,” Madison said, “cosmic loops of energy distort space time the most compared to anything else you can do with the cosmic strings and that’s why we’re using them.”

“That’s taking a lot of liberties, but if that’s what you take away from all of this, then sure, honey. That’s what we decided,” Leslie affirmed.

After considering the pros and cons, Leslie and Jeremy agreed to retire the subject for the night. The natural question that everyone was asking themselves was “what now?” Though it was 21:12, none of Leslie’s guests appeared to be concerned with leaving. She supposed it made sense, what with not having a place to go in to work the next day. Everyone exchanged looks before Leopold broke the silence.

“Despite research being very fulfilling, I wouldn’t mind having some real fun. Something of a game? Leslie?” he merrily asked.

“Oh, yes! A-absolutely! I would be happy to set up a game for us to unwind! Jeremy? Madison? Do you guys want…”

“Sure. Sounds like… good,,” Jeremy awkwardly replied.

“Hell yeah, Les, you know I’m always down for foolin’ around!” Madison exclaimed.

Leslie gleamed at the overwhelmingly positive response to her party. She felt like she truly pulled it off. Everyone was happy in their own way. There was not much left to do but enjoy the rest of her festivity. There were many choices for the end-of-the-night game, but the most agreed-upon activity was a card game called Hot Seat. Leslie organised her friends’ seating arrangements and explained the rules. She pulled one of the dining room chairs up to her coffee table and sat closest to the front door. Madison, still filming the party, had occupied the couch with Leopold. Jeremy sat cross-legged on the ottoman next to Leslie. The rules were explained as Leslie shuffled the deck of cards.

The person to start the game would draw three cards from the deck. Each card had a personal question written on it. The person who drew the card would write down their answer. At the same time, the other three would write down an answer that they thought the first person would say, trying to impersonate the first person. After all four answers were read aloud by the one who drew the card, the other three would need to guess which answer was actually written by them. By guessing correctly and writing similar answers to the first player, the other players displayed their knowledge of their friends.

Everyone seemed to follow the instructions well enough, so Leslie placed the deck on the coffee table. Each person received a small note pad to write their answers on. Leopold volunteered to go first to break the ice. He drew a card and read it to his friends with a surprised cough.

“What is the most embarrassing thing I’ve Googled?” he read out loud. The other three laughed to themselves, thinking of what they were going to write.

“Judging by this question, Leslie… I’m assuming that the other cards are just as likely to make a spectacle, aren’t they?” Leo examined his card.

“Some are not as bad as this one,” she said, “… but most of them are worse.”

Jeremy shuddered.

Leopold squinted while he wrote his answer down. The living room was filled only by the sound of Leslie’s quiet music and ambient sound effects. She was really beginning to appreciate the value of such a simple device in the context of her party. It saved them all from a few awkward silences. Everyone put pieces of paper in a pile on the table. Leopold collected them. He glanced them over before reading them. He giggled as his eyes scanned the pages.

“Okay, what is the most embarrassing thing I’ve Googled,” he restated, “One, I always get scared when the toast pops out of my toaster, even though I know I’m toasting something. Two, can you wear a neck tie and a bow tie at the same time? Three, What is Waldo hiding from? Or four… it just says ‘who’s there’,” Leopold held back his laughter by forcing a frown, “That’s… foreboding,” he commented.

“Wow, you guys,” Leslie said, “these are really good!”

“So do we want to go clockwise?” Leo asked. Everyone agreed.

“Okay…” Jeremy thought aloud, “I think you wrote the neck tie one.”

“Fair enough. Leslie?”

“Hmmm…” she said and rubbed her chin, “I’ll guess… the toaster one.”

“And you Madison?” he smirked.

“I think it’s the who’s there one… that’s weird. I feel like you would do something cryptic like that.”

Leopold’s gaze skipped around the room. He leaned back into the couch but misjudged how soft it was. His body was partially stuck in the cushions. With a burst of laughter he fought his way back out of Leslie’s couch and sat himself on the floor between the couch and the table. 

“This is better. Okay. Well… I wrote the toaster one.”

“Yes!” Leslie squealed, “So now, I keep the card with the question on it. And whoever collects the most cards at the end, wins.”

Leopold slid his card across the table into her hands.

“So, I wrote the Waldo one,” Madison said.

“Mine was the neck tie answer,” Leslie responded.

Everyone’s head turned to stare at Jeremy because he wrote ‘who’s there’. A minute without speech.

“What? I just thought maybe he would look up something kind of obscure. Obviously I’m not in the minority since Madison picked my answer,” he justified.

She nodded, “He’s got a point, actually.”

“It’s your turn to draw a card now, Jeremy,” Leslie said.

He reluctantly drew his card, then snorted.

“Oh, great. What would I trade a kidney for?” he shrugged and set the card down. Moments later, he held all four answers in his hand.

“Okay, time for the results and discussion,” he joked. Only Leslie and Leopold laughed. “So, something I would trade one of my kidneys for: another robot. God, this is hard. Okay. Next, One of Isaac Newton’s kidneys. Peace. And lastly, A think-tank with all my scientific inspirations… Wow. What a collection of answers,” he said, looking to Leslie to start.

“I think you said peace,” she said.

“Okay. Next?”

“Yeah, it’s gotta be the think-tank. You couldn’t be more Jeremy if you tried. Right Leo?”

“…I also think it’s the think-tank one.”

Jeremy hummed and looked at Leslie.

“It was peace,” he said and gave his card to her.

“Yay!” she gleamed.

“This isn’t fair! Leslie is all people-intuitive!” Madison playfully protested.

“I was actually the one who wrote about the think-tank, too,” Leslie revealed.

“Oof…” Leopold said and hung his head.

“Oh my GOD!” Madison exclaimed, “You know how to sound more like Jeremy than Jeremy does!”

“She really got us good, Madison. I said Newton’s kidney, so I assume you said another robot?” Leo chuckled.

As the others bantered and fought, Jeremy glanced down at his phone. He discretely sent IO a message during the game to keep tabs on the lab situation. Leslie tilted her head as she watched him withdraw.

[JEREMY_IO_CONVERSATION_START_21:44] JB: How’s the robotics lab? IO: hey jeremy! its alright.

JB: Anybody give you trouble?

IO: no not really. i found a place to stay out of the way. andre is pretty nice

JB: That’s good. How about Sophia?

IO: shes fine. i cant get a read on her?

JB: Yeah, me neither.

IO: she seems… kinda nice? to andre i mean. and even you, sorta IO: i mean you guys had a weird back-and-forth earlier but she hasn’t said anything bad about you

JB: I have a weird idea that she had fun fighting. But maybe she hasn’t said anything about me because you’re there.

IO: i thought so too but she mentioned leopold a lot

JB: Anything specific?

IO: not really. seems like she and andre just have a lot of inside jokes about him. just like, making fun of him. IO: it makes me sad to listen to it

JB: I’m sorry little guy. JB: Anything about when we’ll be able to move back into the lab?

IO: no

JB: If she’s anything, it’s unconstructive, huh.

IO: yeah. what are you doing rn?

JB: Leslie invited everyone over for dinner to finish lab business. We made a lot of headway, and then Leopold suggested we play a game to relax.

IO: OH! thats cool, who won?

JB: We’re still playing, so I’m not sure. But I think Leslie is winning right now.

IO: pfff, jeremy, what are you texting me for!

JB: To check in. I thought that was obvious.

IO: omg it is. but im fine! and you can check in later too! you should go have more fun with them! IO: or… are you having fun?

JB: Yes, it’s nice.

IO: then go! ill be okay. andre and sophia left a long time ago anyway. it’s late!

JB: Oh, that’s right.

IO: lmao you guys probably worked later than they did!

JB: Want me to come visit soon?

IO: yeah! the visits will be nice until we get the lab back.

JB: Okay, sounds good.

IO: okay now go have fun!

JB: Alright. Talk soon.

IO: <3

[JEREMY_IO_CONVERSATION_END_21:51] He put his phone back in his pocket and pushed the pencil to his notepad. Madison intently scribbled on her paper, eagerly waiting to beat Leslie in the next round. Everybody tossed their cards into the pile and Leslie shuffled them up. She smiled when she noticed Jeremy focused back to the group.

“Here we go, everybody,” Leslie took a deep breath, “What is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had? First: all food in the world was humanoid and the only way we could eat to survive was to politely convince the self-aware food to let us eat them. Second: Everything around me was white, except for a single red-wine stain. I cleaned it up, but every time I turned my back, it would reappear. I went through the cycle hundreds of times before I woke up in a cold sweat. Third: My life was entirely the same except I was a sloth so I did everything very slowly. But for some reason, everyone kept telling me I needed to slow down and relax. And fourth: The stars and moon fell out of the night sky and I spent the whole night climbing trees to put them back in the sky.”

Leslie gestured towards Madison who was first to guess for the round.

“Hmm… It’s either the wine stain or the stars and moon one. I’ll say stars and moon just because it sounds kinda whimsical,” Madison said.

“I’ll go with the wine stain one,” Leo added, “It’s very you.”

“I think it’s the wine stain one, too,” Jeremy said.

“Oh come on, guys!” Madison whined.

“It was the wine stain one!” she exclaimed with a laugh.

Jeremy and Leopold grinned at each other. Madison perished.

“Who keeps the card if we both got it right?” Jeremy asked.

“Oh… uh, good question,” Leslie said.

“Let’s just keep a tally,” Leo suggested. Jeremy agreed.

The three revealed their entries to the pile. Madison wrote the self-aware food story. Supposedly a dream that she had had. Jeremy wrote the stars and moon dream and Leo claimed the sloth dream. Madison ruminated in the fact that she confused Jeremy and Leslie during her guess. In time, they moved on to Madison’s card. She zealously drew her card and blurted the text out:

“Of all the people in the room, who do you feel more comfortable with naked?”

“Okay, I quit,” Jeremy said.

“Oh, look at the time!” Leslie glanced around and turned beet red.

“Welp… it’s about time I hit the dusty trail,” Leo said and stretched his arms.

“Oh, COME ON, you guys! You can’t quit right when it gets good!”

“Goodbye,” Jeremy said and left the living room for his backpack near the dining table.

“Let me help with that!” Leslie chased after him.

“I didn’t even WIN ONE ROUND” Madison despaired.

“Ehh, looks like Leslie won then,” Leo said, “Good game everyone!”

“You cowards! Come back here and FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED.”

[03–26–2018; 22:25_Research_Video_Log_003_END]

[March 26th, 2018, 22:45]

Sophia sat hunched over her computer on the work desk near her living room. Her home was dark; only lit by the blue light emitting from her screen. She scrolled through the rough draft of Andre’s research paper. He had asked her to proofread it before they finished their work in the lab for the day. She glanced at her phone that sat on the desk nearby. It was still soundless and dark. But it was time. The call should have come through already. Sophia exhaled and opened up her email. Maybe answering some messages for a few minutes would prove productive while she waited. Mostly, there were messages from other departments sending in their abstracts for the conference in a few months. She wasn’t in the mood to read through them.

She sighed and rested her chin in her hands, elbows on the desk. She stared at the computer screen, then peaked at the phone. Her attention bounced between the two a few times. A sigh crept out of her throat and she resistantly rose from her chair. Before leaving for another activity, her phone lit up and vibrated. There was a wave of urgency that swept over her. Sophia planted herself back into the chair and answered the call.

“Hello?”

“Xuan,” the voice said. It was a deep and crackly voice. It rumbled but it did not bellow. A low-volumed but sturdy and assured voice.

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t call,” she said.

“Something else needed my attention.”

“Of course,” she accepted.

“Did you do it today?” he asked with expectation.

“Yes, I did.”

“And how did it go?”

“Very well,” she said, “I got all of them out of the lab, indefinitely.”

“Did they suspect anything?”

“I doubt it. Even if they did, they can’t prove that I did anything.”

“Good. Keep it that way. How long will they be without the lab?” he questioned. “I don’t know. I stalled them for a few days, at least; I’m still currently working on a future strategy.”

“Okay. Figure it out. Keep them out of there for as long as possible,” he ordered.

“I will.”

“How did Leopold react?”

“He looked pretty defeated. Didn’t fight it for very long, if at all,” she said with a laugh, “It felt great to finally give him what he has coming to him. Leslie was torn up about it, too.”

“She’s still with him?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what she sees in him or that lab,” she rolled her eyes, “But if she wants to partner with him, then she can take the fall too, for all I care. “Misery loves company,” the man said, “What’s this I hear about some new members of the lab?”

“Just one,” Sophia confirmed, “He’s doing his PhD work in Leopold’s lab. He’s not a problem. The other one is just his loud-mouthed sister who hangs around for attention. I’m holding the boy’s robot in our lab while theirs is shutdown. Keeps us in control.”

“Good work, Xuan. Make sure you have a good story for them, if they start asking questions about the alleged gas leak. They believe you now, which is good, but if they find out that it was staged, then I won’t be able to protect you. They could file reports for a change in management.”

“I’m on top of it. Trust me, there is no way Leopold is presenting at the conference, or getting funding for anything for the rest of his life,” she assured. “It’s about time,” he scoffed, “That crook has skated by with too much luck for too long.”

“I agree. He’s overdue to have his tower knocked down.”

“I will check in with you again soon. Next week or the one after. Keep them distracted and that lab as empty as you can.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Good.”

Click.

[shinssoliloquy]

I just keep on yapping.

Lately I started to wonder what made me so into speaking off the cuff in the first place. Was it being told that I was one of the more coherent speakers in first grade, somehow stopping me from ever failing that grade in the first place. Whenever I think back on that time I start to realize how much of an incoherent fuck face I was. But it wasn’t my fault being the only person who could speak fluent English in my old elementary school. I even passed that kindergarten just by my knowledge of English alone. That kind of cemented my need to prove my intelligence by the verbosity of my own words, Kind of an unneeded sentiment and it can easily disprove itself just by sheer glass ceiling I can reach by just proving my worth by words alone. It can mean nothing and do nothing but I still talk, I still yap. Do I like typing? A symptom of undiagnosed autism and a need to just want to do stuff with my hands. I just cannot stop yapping my yap it seems. I also really like the word Yap.

Back in Middle school we were tasked to write two big essays for my social studies class. They one essay was talking about class differences from the angle of the poor and one was talking about how to find a way to quell the unease of the public. I was just finished reading watchmen at this time and I was also really into the USSR. This went as well as you’d expect. I suggested Ozymandias’ plan unironically and I don’t know if my teacher knew about the comic or was just reading one of his students unironically suggesting genocide in order to resolve peaceful relations with other countries, but that was basically what I submitted and It ended up the best one and almost the top essay of my grade at the time, It would’ve been almost perfect if I didn’t treat my paper like shit too but, it happens. My other essay had me basically dictate the entirety of the rise of the soviet union. Talking about the bourgeoisie and how these revolutions dictated the course of political discourse for centuries. it ended up being 20 pages long, and was showcased by my teacher too at the time. I was basically known as that guy who could write essays for you for basically free and was already overworked at the age of 12. Pretty awful time to be alive but at the same time maybe I was at fault for thinking I was such a genius. I’ve literally just plagiarized plots to already existing stories. I was basically a writing youtube pooper with how I used this to fit in my own narrative at the time, There’s probably a literary term or smart alec term for this kind of taking and stretching but I do not have time or care enough to look it up, Writing youtube pooper just sounds good in my head.

I’d go to my social studies teachers office and see my essay plastered alongside some of her other favorite essays, Probably taken off by now in due part by other better writers taking my place, But I’ve always felt at the time that that was I was destined to do. To go on long monologues about whatever political inclination or alignment I’ve had at the time. I even would’ve made a podcast If I knew what those were at the ripe age of 12, even continuing till the riper age of 22.

My friends would obviously know about my proclivity to yapping incoherently at moments at a time, Some are even quick to call me out on it. But some of the best moments I’ve had with friends is just being able to go on long tangents together about whatever discussion or debate we’d be having at the time. It developed my mind in the process and my writing skills since they’ve been stunted at age 13-16. Regardless though people still label me as tl;dr or the guy that just writes long paragraphs about the texture of mustard for example. Or why it’s ok to dip your bread in mountain dew. All conversations for some reason I’ve had or was really proactive in my defense at the time.

I almost forgot one other essay I had to write for English class, We were supposed to detail a problem we have with current culture and I decided to list my disdain for music cliques and trends. Particularly with current pop music at the time, I remember during this same day we had to commemorate 9/11 too, Which was interesting. I listed some of my old favorites, I listened to old school hiphop at the time So I’ve talked about how Biggie and Nas type people aren’t writing the same sort of lyrics with deepness and meaning that I for sure was the arbiter of, at age 11. Needless to say it was an embarrassing display but I still got an Okay grade for that, people just don’t have standards or my teacher was just surprised to see a kid verbosely talk about music he doesn’t listen too.

So all of that to say, Why do I enjoy talking. An antiquated sense of ego or I just like typing words and putting my thoughts out there, Wow why not just write a book then. Well This is a precursor to that, practice for when I actually tackle big buff novellas. I have had a bad habit of speaking off the cuff and which Is why I’ve asked myself that in the first place. Eventually I need to learn to keep my thoughts concise and vigilant, properly enunciate my words in text form for people to consume in a safe and ordinary manner but my ideas are still there. Whether those ideas are good enough to he talked about in the first place has yet to surface. I don’t know myself, and I’m the one writing these damn blogs!

Basically, I’m a charlaten, a fraud, pseud, a nitwit, a buffon but I’m more than happy to have people develop themselves and have my words affect them in the process, Just yet to see when that’ll suffice. But I probably shouldn’t put much weight on what words have on people rather than actions. I’d just be repeating myself from when I was 12 am I not.

I don’t think I’ve ever said if I still agree with some of my old essays. Well it’s a this and that, I can’t deny I still carry some of the opinions I’ve had as a baby just more well educated and well researched now. But still not as reactionary as I was back then, I can’t say I did or didn’t change at all. But maybe critiquing my writing when I was a toddler isn’t necessarily a next best step either

[fox-household]

D&D Shenanigans #1

So here’s this thing that regrettably took ages, my apologies, just wanted to write some fluff and it took me ages to get through, not sure why I found it so hard. But yet it was still enjoyable. Hope this thing is enjoyable to you to. Doubt I’ll be doing one again for a while, even when we get the others in. I’ll put character sheets down at a later time when I get around to it. Have a good day. P.S: Because I did like half of it on my phone the formatting on the start looks very, very different. Instead of changing it, I’m going to keep both formats in and I want an actual opinion on which you think reads better because I think I’ve seen people use the first one before, so please let me know if you will. 

Sci and Asgore both stopped dead in their tracks as they walked into what had been the dining room, not expecting to find the table they were used to eating on to be so different. The table in question was now covered in a purple tablecloth that reached to the floor, the edge of it having rune symbols sown into them with gold thread, the same had been done to the very centre of the cloth with a larger circle like symbol. Alphys was sitting at the end of the table, peering at them from under an emerald cloak that matched her eyes. In front of her on the table also stood a Dungeon Master’s screen that hid her notes and dice from sight, on it was an illustration of a group of adventurers surrounded by undead spirits of various descriptions. Alphys’ expression turned worried as the other two remained in the same position for a long while, taking it all in. “Wh-why’re you l-looking at m-me like th-that, I j-just wanted to p-put some effort into y-your first s-session”, her face portrayed a combination of worry and defensiveness.

“Nah Al, we’re just impressed with what you got here, I mean did you have all this just stored away out the back somewhere?”, he chuckled lightly as he tried to quell her worries.

Both of them went ahead to the table each taking a seat to the side of the table, opposite to each other.

“I uh didn’t have th- this the entire t-time, only g-got it d-done a few days ago.”, she gripped part of the table cloth and held it up a little before dropping it.

Asgore started to grin as he gave a suspicious gaze, “But what about that cloak, did you only just get that?”

“I uh umm”, embarrassed she looked down and turned lightly red before looking back up again, “um yeah, I m-may have h-had th-this for a little b-bit.... stop giving me that l-look, th-this is l-like the only opportunity I g-get to use it ok?”

“I’m not judging you, just very curious hehe, you’re not embarrassed around us are you?”

“N-no just.... lets j-just get started”.

Alphys cleared her throat as she appeared to be looking down at her notes from behind the board, “So umm d-do we want to introduce o-our character... who w-would like to g-go first?”

Asgore gleamed and stood up in a dramatic fashion, “I’ll go first if that’s alright”

“Of c-course it is, f-fire away”.

With a smug smile he started to tell his narrative, “I’m a Goliath Paladin who comes from a family steeped in Royal heritage and blood. After all my training I decided to leave home to try and live my life as much as I can before my responsibilities keep me there for the rest of my days. So here I am, travelling and going on wild adventures”.

“W-would you l-like to say your characters s-strengths and w-weaknesses?”

“But you helped me make it, you know them already”.

“Y-Yes but for Sci’s sake”.

He let out a sigh, “Ummm he’s real strong and takes a lot to keep down, apparently has a lot of charm and.... isn’t the smartest supposedly.... like that?”

She gave a reassuring nod, “P-Perfect, also last thing, d-did you end up d-deciding on a n-name for him?”

“Oh yes, his name is Asgore Dreemur”, he gave a confident thumbs up in exclamation.

Alphys looked a tiny bit confused, “Y-you’re using your own n-name?!”

“I sure am, I figured that if I need to get into perspective for my character, I should make him similar to me in all ways, including my name. So then I can give you the most accurate of representations.”

She nodded, thinking over it for a moment before returning a smile back to the confident goat, “Well that sounds wonderful, I’m glad you’re really thinking about how you’ll put more effort into this.”

Quickly Sci interjected with a hurried sentence, “I uh think I’ll go by Sci then. I think it’ll fit in much better and make things easier on everyone”.

She gave him a curious look, “Really? Y-you know it’s fine either w-way?”

“Yes I know, but I’m Sci”

“What name did you have p-planned?”

Sci scratched the back of his head and gave a slightly nervous smile, “Oh umm... it’s silly really but... Balthazar Hallowwind”

Alphys covered her mouth as small giggle sounds came from within before finally bursting out laughing, grinning ear to ear as slowly she started to struggle for breath.

Sci started to look annoyed, “Is it really that bad?”

“B-bad? N-no not at a-all, j-just it’s heh so f-fantasy and a b-bit cliche in a good, loveable way. It’s uh j-just very you, I l-love it, I promise, I’m n-not trying to m-make fun of you... would you l-like to t-tell us about... Sci?”, she let out a long exhale while wiping a few tears from her eyes as she gave a kind look towards him.

The skeleton took a deep breath and started to smile, cliche or not he supposed it at least made her happy, “Well Sci here is a Half Elf Wizard that is with Asgore to explore the world as studying everything up close is the best kind of research, the most valuable discoveries are the stuff that you can do first hand. He comes from a middle class family in the city and was eventually sent away to magic boarding school where he was supposed to learn the tools of the trade so to speak after finding out about his natural knack for it all, when it came to his strong studying skills and general intellect, but eventually the books weren’t enough and now he’s broken free from those chains of simple, tertiary education to learn about things on his own terms. His intelligence is very high and his very good dexterity allows him to be a very nimble fellow. How ever he lacks quite a bit in strength, a tad in constitution as well as having basic charisma. Will that do Al?”

“Yes th-thank you. F-finally I’ll introduce m-my character-“

“But wait, aren’t you the dungeon master?”, Sci inquisitively questioned

“Well yes, b-but I um wanted to h-have a character too, plus also th-the party needs a h-healer and it’s easier to b-balance with th-three people as opposed to two”.

“Oh ok, continue then”

With a grin that wasn’t all to dissimilar to Asgore’s previous, she giggled, “Alright, my character was meant to be the l-like the m-middle ground wh-when it came to names, I was going t-to call her Phys, but you c-can do whatever”, she looked down at her notes for a moment before continuing, “I’m a Gnome C-Cleric that l-lacks the a-ability to s-speak, a mute I g-guess you’d c-call her. She serves the god Omoikane-

“Hey wait a seco-“, Sci tried to interject, but Al didn’t give him a chance to continue.

“- and servants of th-this god wish to h-help and provide good c-counsel and h-help for all. Phys here i-is with your party b-because sh-she believes she can s-spread her g-guidance and h-help further in a t-team than all by herself. Phys is h-high in Charisma especially when it c-comes to performance. Her main weakness is a lack of Dexterity m-making her quite clumsy and not v-very nimble.”

After a short pause to just make sure she was done, Asgore encouragingly exclaimed, “Wow she seems really cool, Phys is a welcome addition.”

“Wait so we’re using her character’s name?”

“Y-you want t-to change y-your mind Sci?”

He tensed up slightly and shook his head, “N-no of course not, my name is fine.”

Alphys rubbed her hands together with a giddy gleam in her eye. “A-Alright, a-are we a-all good to g-get started?” The nods from the other two was all she needed.

This tale of adventure, danger and general hijinks takes place in the land of Grangelow, to be more specific it starts in the city of Filota, the third biggest city in the country. Sci and Asgore both met first in the city during a nighttime card game at a pub, both of you realising you had similar goals you decided to team up so there would be a higher chance of you two being hired as ready to go adventurers. Unfortunately you’d both been running into a problem, the fact that you chose one of the busiest cities in the land did mean more potential customers, but also much more competition, lots of it having much more experience and reputation than you, some even being part of prestigious guilds and the like. One night you thought you’d caught a lucky break when a Gnome Cleric by the name of Phys asked to hire you which of course you accepted, unfortunately your hopes were dashed when it turned out she thought she needed to pay people to be her friend so she could create a party... as well as she was going to run out of gold in a very short amount of time. Taking pity on her and deciding that maybe having a bigger group would make people consider you, she was allowed to join the group. So now the three of you have spent the last few days, wandering, asking, investigating and even begging to strangers for a job all while the gold between us all slowly dwindled. If nothing changed you were going to have to sell your equipment and head home in shame, but then one fateful night it all did indeed change.

“S-so what is i-it that you two w-want to do?” Alphys softly spoke in her shy tone.

“Oh where are we exactly?”, Sci returned with a question as he pondered scenarios in his head.

“Th-the tavern if y-you want? Unless y-you have any b-better suggestions”.

Asgore hit the table with both of his hands in an enthusiastic manner, “Asgore is going to do a drinking contest, that’s what happens in taverns all the time in the stories and we might even be able to make some money from it”, a small prideful smile showed up at his idea.

“O-oh y-yeah, that’s actually a g-good idea, b-but you’ll have to r-roll against your o-opponent.”

“Oh which die is it?”

“The D20, t-the ‘really big one’ as you call it”, she said as she passed Asgore a red and gold dice she had spare.

Quickly he rolled it, putting almost enough power for it to bounce off the table, but to everyone’s relief it stopped at the edge, a result being shown on top.

“8? Is that a good one? Is that a win”, he said, putting on a hopeful smile.

“J-just g-give me a second...”, the sound of a dice rolling behind the DM screen could be heard, “...o-oh d-dear... y-your opponent g-got a umm 20”. The lizard monster sighed and briefly face palmed.

Asgore’s positivity dropped as even he was looking worried, “Wh-what does that mean? Is that really bad?”

“L-let me describe it f-for you”.

Asgore was having another one of his drinking competitions in an attempt to gain coin and most importantly, bragging rights. So far overtime he’d been very successful and many a person feel to intoxication before him. The unfortunate thing for him was that his reputation was growing and Asgore was soon face to face with a well known drinking champion, a bulky looking Dwarf that held a fire in his eyes that looked to be able to burn through stone. When the two of you locked eyes and got served multiple tankards of Mead, the duel went underway. Drink after drink disappeared down your gullets, a mighty battle it was. But as with all great fights, one must fall. Asgore, barely able to even see the world straight went to grab his last tankard, before the world went black and the Goliath collapsed to the floor in defeat. The dwarf took his spoils and left, but not before giving a respectful farewell to the non-hearing loser.

“Oh umm well crap... that’s not good is it?” The prince sighed, his mood deflating.

“Umm y-yeah, n-not really, I-I’ll just h-have you b-blackout for a l-little bit maybe?”, Alphys winced at the unexpected turn of events.

“Yeah that’s fine, I’ll wait then I guess”.

She sighed, “D-don’t worry, y-you’ll be back into it b-before you know it... So what’s Sci d-doing? Hopefully n-nothing quite as... d-disabling?”.

Sci crossed his arms, “Well I suppose I’ll just be sitting at a table across the room, having decided to not get involved in such a racket. Drinking a beer of some sort and reading over my spell book.”

“Y-Yeah, yeah, that’s p-perfect, ummm let me j-just... aaaannnd....”.

Cool air rushed into the tavern as a tall man walked in, his form mostly hidden by a long, raggedy brown cloak, though a black goatee could be seen on his chin. Closing the door behind him, he stood still and seemingly surveyed the situation in the room before without any hesitation moving to the table of Sci, and sitting opposite to him.

The man spoke in a rough, deep voice as he stared at the Wizard with a serious gaze, looking up and down him, looking at his fairly civilian clothes as well as the equipment on him that was showing. “Excuse me, but you wouldn’t happen to be an adventurer of some sort? Couldn’t help but notice your book of uh magic stuff there.”

Sci gave a questioning look as he closed the book, “Ummm yes, I am an adventurer... why do you ask?”.

“Well you see, I need some help with a uh, problem and honestly a lot of people have turned me down, saying my pay was to low or that they had better things to do, I just really, really need someone’s help.”

Phys came over to the table and sat next to Sci, putting her arms crossed over on the table and rested her head on it as she listened to the two of them.

The man glanced over at her cautiously, “She one of yours?”

“Yep, Phys, myself annnnd Asgore over there knocked out on the ground make up our little party.”

Phys sat up with a smile and offered her small hand to him, the man returning with quite a reluctant handshake.

“That’s good, three of you will just be perfect for the job”.

The scepticism in his voice rose as he kept examining the expression of the man, trying to work out what it was he wanted, “You haven’t told us anything about the so called job, if we’re going to accept it, we want some info.”

The cloaked figure cleared his throat rather harshly, “Yes, yes of course, well you see. At my lowly home, in a room out the back, there has been a slight outbreak of... demons. Not very mighty ones as they’ve been locked in, but I fear what else may spawn in there if nothing is done about it.”

The half elf squinted with an expression of confusion and worry, “That’s a bit of an intense thing for people to ignore. Do we even know how to deal with demons?”

“W-wait a second, c-can you b-both show me y-your character sheets?”, she said with another one of those worried looks.

Both of them obliged of course, handing her the piece of paper. Adjusting her glasses slightly she read over them around a few times before passing them back, her face not showing any signs of improvement.

“What’s the matter? Something wrong?”, Asgore questioned.

With her hands over her face she sighed, “No one h-here knows s-sign language, she c-can’t properly communicate”

Phys gave Sci a light hit to the back of his head, waiting to get his attention before pushing a brown coin pouch over to him. With two fingers she just opened it to reveal empty space, no shiny coins, no cash whatsoever.

He hesitated before nodding, “Guess we don’t have much of a choice”, he muttered. Now bringing his attention back to fellow across to him, he smiled. “After some careful consideration we have decided to take on your job and eradicate the demons plaguing your house... how much pay are we talking?”

“25gp... ok yeah I’m sorry it’s all I have, I’m desperate ok... maybe I can pay you back some other way?’’

The other two could only assume looking at their winces and hesitation would only demoralise the man further. Yet despite accepting the job previously and even that last reaction, he didn’t seem any happier or sadder. If anything he remained with a fairly consistent tone.

Continuing with this tone, she spoke as he stood up, “Thank you kind people, well I’ll be waiting for you back at my home, third house down on Crane Road. Come when you can please”.

Without properly acknowledging any farewell from the pair, the man left through the door.

Sci smiled, “Well hey, we’ve got our first job right? There’s hope yet”.

Phys nodded with a gleeful grin and offered him a high five which the other obliged with a loud, air-cracking smack. However the two of them came to the realisation that the last third of the party had to be dealt with. They approached Asgore who was on the floor unconscious and tried shaking him a little, but he wouldn’t budge. The Gnome pointed to the unconscious party member and pointed outside, Sci taking it as needing to move him outside. While Phys moved out of the room, Sci attempted to move the Goliath which proved almost impossible for him with his size and heavy armour along with the wizard’s feeble strength. However the with the help of the most certainly stronger bartender, they managed to get him out in the night time air, leaning against the front of the building. Moments later Phys came around with a very large water bucket and chucked it over Asgore without so much as a warning. 

Asgore woke up and got to his feet at the speed of a bullet, looking between the duo, ‘’Wh-what’s going on? What did I miss, where am I’’?  ‘’You lost, your drinking streak is over.’’ Sci proclaimed with a shake of his head’’.  The Paladin sighed, ‘’God d-‘’  ‘’But more importantly we have a job, we might actually get paid’’.  Phys proceeded to point to the sky excitedly while also brandishing an empty coin purse in her hand.  ‘’Whoa really? YES, finally, thank my lord’’, the disappointment was automatically replaced with cheer, ‘’C’mon, where the hell are we going? Let’s get started I’m ready to go’’.  Though after a couple of steps Asgore felt himself stagger slightly, Phys suddenly jumping in front of him with her hands on his chest to stop him from falling forwards. Sci pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, ‘’Let’s just make our way there slowly… we really don’t want to be dragging you across the streets.’’ 

(Format changes now)

A mere fifteen minutes later the trio arrived at a rundown house in an admittedly cheaper part of the city, it was hard to believe anything was happening here except for shady dealings, let alone some small, inexpiable demon outbreak in a house. Asgore had managed to make his way there slowly while trying to hide how sick he really was feeling, Sci walked behind them, seemingly trying to stuff some spare food he took from their last meal at the tavern into his bag with which the others assumed he was desperately starving, while Phys stayed next to the Paladin just in case he was going to fall over. Sci decided he was going to take the lead and walked straight up to the door, putting on a smile as he knocked. With some loud, rushed footsteps, the man they’d met at the tavern opened the door with a relieved face. ‘’Oh thank goodness, I’m so glad you could make it, please waste no time, come in quickly, let’s get this over and done with’’, with a concerning amount of alarm he moved behind the group and outright pushed them into the building. The door entered into a small, dimly lit hallway, all the doors around it were closed except one. They proceeded through, heavily led by the very owner, to the door that was open. They entered a normal sized bedroom, though it lacked any furniture to identify it as such. The other peculiar feature it possessed was the one window in the room being completely barred off with iron. ‘’Wait? What type of room is this? What do you use it for?’’, Sci questioned as he turned around to a rather troublesome sight. Behind the trio, the man quickly stepped out of the room and slammed the door, the sound of a key locking them in filling the party with dread. ‘’Haha yes, look Boss, I did it all by myself, I fucking told you I would!’’, he exclaimed loudly and excitedly. ‘’Hey what hell is the meaning of this?’’, Asgore tried to open the door in a futile effort to escape before simply and angrily punching the wooden door, causing it to shake. Outside the room, other doors could be heard being opened, undoubtedly the other rooms in the hallway, and footsteps came their way. Phys made small noise as she approached the door, putting her hand at a mid-portion of the door where a slot was, not to dissimilar to a mail slot on a front door except a little bigger. Pulling it she opened the slot to see a small group of men in leather armour, they looked ready for a fight. One individual from the group approached the one that lead them here and put an arm around him, ‘’And so you did Reggie, very nice. Three in one go isn’t to bad, seems like they have some valuables, that plate armour might go for a good amount, I’m proud’’. ‘’Thank you, sir, I did my best’’. Asgore punched the door again, albeit weaker as a light headed feeling started to interfere with his senses, ‘’Wh-what is going on? What the hell do you guys want?’’. The leader of the group approached the door, yet not so close as to risk anyone reaching through the slot, ‘’To put it simply, us folks here need to eat, to eat we need money, to get money we sell valuables. We find gullible folks like you, adventurers who aren’t worth a damn, wait for them to starve, then while weakened we’re gonna kill you, sell your stuff and repeat, honestly a lot quicker and easier than hostage taking I tell ya’’. He gave off a very punchable toothy grin at the Cleric watching him at the slot. ‘’Though I’m not wasting anymore time, I was having a nice dinner. Reggie, you don’t have to worry about guard duty tonight as appreciation, Daryl, you’re up.’’ The one called Daryl sighed, ‘’C’mon Boss, I was having dinner to, it’s not like they’re going to get out of there, we don’t really need to guard.’’ ‘’Shut the fuck up Daryl, we’ll bring your dinner out to you, but you ain’t getting out of this, don’t say another word.’’ He sighed once more, ‘’Yes Boss’’.

Around half an hour had passed since the incident, nobody else from the gang was heard from since the man guarding was given keys and food, the other three were in the middle of the room, trying to figure out their plan. The door had been shaken and attacked to read avail; it was obviously reinforced. The window didn’t appear to be any solution either, the bars stopped anyone from leaving, although the window was smashed. But despite many minutes of yelling for help, nobody heard, or nobody cared. ‘’I’m guessing nobody knows anything about lockpicking here? Too much to ask?’’, Sci stated, his gaze intensely focused on the floor as he tried to think of something, though it was weird that he seemed to be tightly hugging his bag. Phys and Asgore shook their head. ‘’Wish smashing it open was an option, wouldn’t have made things so complicated, is there really no magic you can pull Sci?’’. ‘’Nothing that’s destructive enough that won’t risk setting the place on fire… while we’re trapped in here… starting to think I shouldn’t have focused so much on destructive spells.’’ Asgore sighed before looking back over towards Phys, ‘’Anything?’’ Phys had for the last while been staying near the slot, checking every now and then to see if the guard had come any closer, hoping that maybe if he got close enough they could reach the key, yet while he was sleeping on the job, he definitely wasn’t that stupid. So, the only answer she had was to shake her head back at Asgore. ‘’Damn, it only appears that slot is the only way anything gets in or out, but even Phys isn’t that small.’’ Sci’s eyes widened, ‘’Small, small, small… that’s it. Why was I so focussed on getting past the door? We just need to circumvent it’’. Phys scurried back over to where the other two were sitting, putting a finger to her cheek, a common sign that she wanted to ask a question. Asgore helped by actually voicing it, ‘’I thought you didn’t have anything? Are you seriously telling me that you could’ve got us out of here earlier?’’ The wizard looked nervous, ‘’Oh uh y-yeah maybe, I just don’t really like showing him to strangers, also he gets kinda shy to those he hasn’t met… I’m usually pretty hesitant to bring him out.’’ ‘’You keep saying him, whose him?’’ ‘’Oh my familiar… come on out Newton’’, Sci opened the bag that he was hugging, some movement could be seen coming from within. He laid it down slowly and gently called for him. ‘’Don’t worry, they’re good, just hop out, we need your help’’. Slowly and cautiously, a small, brown weasel walked out of the bag, keeping his eyes locked on Phys and Asgore, then suddenly making a small squeaking-like noise before climbing up onto Sci’s shoulder. ‘’So uh yeah, this is Newton, he might be able to grab the key’’. It was as if their entire dangerous situation had disappeared for a few moments, Asgore had a massive grin on his face and Phys was trying to contain her excitement as she bounced up and down, the urge to just grab and hug the adorable thing being hard to suppress. ‘’So, you’ve been hiding him from us this entire time?’’, The goliath questioned. Sci stood up and walked towards the door with Newton in tow, ‘’As I said he’s bad with strangers’’. The weasel was trying to retract as much as it could into a small ball as they got the door, the three of them crouching down next to the slot. ‘’Ok Newton, I’m going to ask you to do something very scary, but I need you to trust me…’’, he opened the slot and showed the outside to the familiar, ‘’…you see that key? I need you to grab it and bring it here’’. Newton started to shiver and even shake its head lightly. ‘’No, no, no it’s going to be fine, trust me, he’s even sleeping see? No one will see you except us and these two are our friends.’’ He visibly started to calm down yet seemed reluctant. ‘’I’ll make sure to feed you lots and lots, I promise. You’ll have a feast next time we can afford one.’’ Without further ado the weasel jumped from Sci’s shoulder at the open slot and dropped, hitting the floor with a soft thud on the other side. Slowly it approached the sleeping guard, sitting against the wall. Newton got slower and more unsure as it grew closer to the man, the shiny key just almost being paw’s reach. But suddenly the man moved slowly and caused the familiar to skitter back in fear. Luckily it was just the man falling over on its side, he was still asleep. It looked back at Sci to see him nodding, giving a thumbs up to try and give his friend reassurance. With that slight comfort it began its approach once more, slowly and steadily heading to shiny key on his waist. As it finally got close enough, without any hesitation it quickly snatched the ring the key was on with its mouth, causing metal to make contact the floor in a surprisingly loud clang. This caused the man to stir and slowly sit up, groaning. ‘’Uggh, was I sleeping again? Damn it I just… what?’’, his eyes locked with the weasel who was frozen in fear, watching with small black eyes. The guard noticed the key and put two and two together, ‘’Hey wait a minute, that’s not yours you damn rodent’’. He quickly stood up and Newton bolted to the door, climbed up the door and burst through the slot of like a rocket. Once he dropped the key at their feet, he sprinted straight back into Sci’s bag.

The man ran straight for the door just as he heard the unlocking sound, using his body as a barrier, ‘’Oh no you don’t you little shits… GUYS WE HAVE A SITUATION”, he yelled out to the rest of the house. After a few moments of successfully holding door closed from some resistance, the pushing stopped. Confusion appeared on his face as he wondered what they were up to, before being blasted into the wall as a massive plate armoured Goliath rammed the door after an across room sprint, the man was knocked out almost instantly. After picking up all their stuff, they swiftly exited the room at the exact same time the other four members of the gang entered the hallway. ‘’So, you little shits think you’re tough do y- AGGHGGGH’’. He started to scream as a firebolt from Sci smacked into the side of the leader’s face. ‘’AGGHGGUGGUUUU WHAT THE HELL DID I SAY ABOUT TRYING TO TAKE A WIZARD REGGIE?!’’ ‘’I’m so sorry, I didn’t know, he doesn’t even look like one’’ ‘’OH I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU SORRY, AFTER WE CALL THESE BASTARDS’’.

Asgore readied his glaive and went first, rushing at one of the random men and swung it from the side, causing a huge cut into the man’s side, the blood gushing out only confirmed more the decisiveness of the strike as he fell to the ground. The other three suddenly looked pissed and went after Asgore, pulling out their own short swords. Two of them swung overhead which he caught with his long weapon, but the third one went for a stab right into his gut, the only stopped the Goliath from taking a critical blow was more fire heading to the leader, the pain causing his stab to only graze it’s target. Deflecting off the two individuals he went for another slash at the two that they nimble dodged away from. Phys used their distraction to summon a Sacred Flame on one of them, the fiery radiance burning the man enough to cause him to fall to the ground, presumably dead. Only two remained, one heading one wishing to avenge his friend ran at Phys with the sword raised above his head, swing at the gnome before finding it blocked by a small shimmering field surrounding her, Shield of Faith managing to stop the blow. He barely had anytime to voice surprise before Asgore hit him over the back of his head, taking him out instantly. ‘’I’M SO SICK OF YOUR BLOODY FIRE’’, The leader of the group, covered in burns went straight for the source of his misfortune, his sword stabbing right through his right shoulder, causing the wizard to yell out in pain.   Sci used this pain to fuel his anger and cast his own spell, ‘’If you’re done with fire, then how about let the chill of the grave help you out.’’ A ghostly skeletal hand appears and grabs at the leader, gaining a grip on him as cold started to move through his body, the life seemed to drain from his face before finally, he to hit the floor along with the rest of his men.

Sci held his shoulder, wincing at the pain and blood coming from the wound. Phys quickly ran over and shoved the wizard’s hands away, replacing them with her own as she pumped her healing magic into him, closing the wound, the only trace left being his ripped clothes. ‘’Oh thanks, I guess we can rely on you for that huh?’’ Phys gave him a salute with a massive grin, before pointing at the men. She pointed at them and brought both her wrists together. ‘’What? Are you on about?’’, Sci looked confused and Asgore didn’t seem to get it either. Phys pouted before continuing, she kept her previous position while walking around very slowly on a hunched over, sad posture. After looking over at their faces and still seeing that they didn’t get it. Next she pointed at the men once more, before putting her hands in front of her face, as if she was holding something vertically, shaking them a little in feigned frustration. ‘’Oh wait, wait, she’s holding bars, iron bars, she’s talking about jail… she wants us to put these guys in jail, maybe she’s saying we get the guards over here?’’ It looked like a light bulb went off in Asgore’s head as he explained his theory, a grin appearing as Phys’ nod showed he was correct. Sci nodded, ‘’Oh yeah, I’m sure they’d appreciate that… just wait, I think this might be an opportunity for us’’. He moved over to the bodies on the floor and searched them, over all managing to pull out about four small pouches of gold. ‘’Look at this, we’re gonna be set, we can actually afford a proper meal and keep on going.’’ ‘’We’re not out of the game yet, it’s a sign I tell you, we’re meant to keep on going, home will have to wait forever’’. Phys gave an excited fist pump of excitement; her eyes showed determination and resolve. ‘’Well we better get moving, take to long to report this and people might think we’re the shifty ones.’’, Sci shrugged and started walking to the front door, ‘’How about we celebrate the success of our first job with lots and lots of food tomorrow?’’ Asgore stretched his back with an affirmative nod, ‘’Sounds like a great plan, drinks on me?’’ The trio laughed as they left the building and headed out into the night.

So, after this incident, the guards came and arrested most of the gang that you reported, some appeared to not be dead and managed to escape, an investigation is in progress. They thanked you for your service and rewarded you with even more gold, this group has apparently been a pain for a long time that they’d been trying to find. After that you all head back to the tavern and the next day is spent relaxing and enjoying your new found riches. Though as much as enjoying your current victory is sweet, you look to the future and wonder what other adventure and glory may be awaiting for you to come along. 

‘’Oh, was that all?’’, Asgore spoke first, his expression neutral along with his tone. ‘’G-gosh s-sorry, did I-I d-disappoint you th-that badly?’’ ‘’Huh? Oh god no, it was really fun, I was just hoping there was going to be more honestly, I really enjoyed it’’, the goat child gave an encouraging smile. ‘’Don’t stress Al, it wasn’t half bad, we both enjoyed it’’, Sci said, leaning back in a relaxing manner. ‘’T-thank g-goodness, th-thank you so s-so much, I’ll t-try to m-make it more e-exciting next time, I only d-did a little bit so you guys c-could get a t-taste.’’ ‘’Well consider this entrée excellent, though I don’t think we’ll be fully satisfied until we move on to mains’’. ‘’Heck yeah, we need to make sure we do this again, maybe we could make it like a thing you know? Every once and a while? Please Al?’’, Asgore grinned and gave a glance to Sci. ‘’Well I’m not going to complain about it, that’s for sure.’’, he spoke with an amused tone. ‘’R-really? Y-you want t-to do it th-that much? Gosh w-wow… th-that means so m-much to me…’’, the lizard monster turned red as she was flushed with embarrassment. Taking a few moments to calm down before speaking. ‘’A-alright, I’ll m-make sure to c-come up with the b-best stories and w-worlds for you all, y-you can c-count on me, I guarantee it, we’ll h-have the best c-campaign ever.’’ The other two seemed appreciative and after a few moments of silence, Asgore got up from the table, ‘’Well I’m hungry after all that, I’m going to go get something, thanks again Al.’’ Sci stood up as well, ‘’I think I should probably go get some of my work done as well, thank you as well’’. After both of them left, Al just looked down at her notes and smirked evilly, ‘’N-now j-just what will I h-have to d-do first, so m-many ideas to throw in one w-world’’.

[jeroldlockettus]

In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast)

The British cycling outfit Team Sky used a strategy of “marginal gains” to win four Tours de France since their founding. (Photo: Jaguar MENA/flckr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for the next moonshot, we shouldn’t ignore the power of incrementalism.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

*      *      *

Our previous episode of Freakonomics Radio was called “In Praise of Maintenance (Rebroadcast).” We asked if our cultural obsession with innovation has led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of. We talked about sewers:

Ed GLAESER: Certainly, Rome understood that engineering and infrastructure was a huge part of making its city function.

About bridges:

Larry SUMMERS: It’s a remarkable and not a very happy tale.

We talked about housework:

Ruth SCHWARTZ COWAN: They’re doing almost as much unpaid maintenance work as they are paid work.

And we talked about the nuts and bolts of the digital economy:

Martin CASADO: I mean, all of that is infrastructure.

We wound up talking about a pet project of mine — which is trying to digitally archive all my work and personal files:

Chris LACINACK: So this is about maintenance. It’s losing the 200 pounds and then staying that weight.

This project was daunting — until someone helped me frame it differently:

LACINAK: It’s all about prioritization, one step at a time.

One step at a time. Increment by increment. It got me to thinking about the value of incrementalism in a moonshot world. It got me to thinking that incrementalism is to the moonshot, what maintenance is to innovation. And so, this week on Freakonomics Radio: “In Praise of  Incrementalism.” Or, if that’s too wonky for you, how about this: What do the Italian Renaissance, the Tour de France, and the civil-rights movement have in common?

Linda HIRSHMAN: We all like a dramatic story. But things don’t happen out of the blue, and it’s so interesting to get a true picture of why change happens, rather than this sort of phony all of a sudden picture.

*      *      *

Ed Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard. I wanted to ask him about my “incrementalism” idea.

DUBNER: So my argument here is that generally we are encouraged and trained, really, to look for big-bang successes, in all realms — education, health care, politics, you name it — and while I understand the impulse to find these magic bullets — it’s exciting, it’s sexy, it’s all those things — it strikes me that much progress if not most throughout history has really been a series of incremental gains. What’s your take on that?

GLAESER: Oh, I think almost surely that’s true. I like these examples from the arts you can really see each innovation in each painting and each step along the way. If you think about the glory of the Italian Renaissance, it’s a piecemeal process. Brunelleschi first puts together the mathematics of linear perspective, of making two-dimensional spaces seem three-dimensional — Donatello, his friend, puts it in low-relief sculpture. It moves to Masaccio, who finally puts it into a painting in Brancacci Chapel, St. Peter finding the coin in the belly of a fish. Fra’ Filippo Lippi takes up the ball. Botticelli takes up the ball, each person incrementally improving on the last person. Each person exploring the implications of this new idea. It’s not that Da Vinci comes along and then all of a sudden the world is different. It’s that he’s built on a century of incrementalists, some of whom are pretty big incrementalists but incrementalists nonetheless, who are really creating this revolution.

Glaeser is plainly an erudite fellow, especially for an economist. But just so you don’t think he spends all his time thinking about Renaissance art and ignoring his own discipline – well, we talked about that too.

GLAESER: Within the field of economics, there are larger or smaller parts of those increments, but we’re a field that builds on itself, and it’s sort of a striking fact that within economics, that the Nobel Prize doesn’t really give awards for single papers, so much as it does for a series of contributions by a particular person. And that’s surely as it should be, because there’s rarely true that one paper on itself is so revolutionary that it changes things. It’s more that people build on things. It often takes dozens of extra ones to figure out what it means, and what it what it implies for the wider world.

DUBNER: So plainly you appreciate incrementalism in your own field, and in other fields. Do you feel that puts you a little bit in the minority? Do you feel that our culture and political and social culture is always looking for some version of the moon shot?

GLAESER: I don’t know. I mean, I think this is more a Silicon Valley thing than a Cambridge thing. I think maybe I believe in incrementalism because I’m so painfully aware of the very incremental nature of my own contributions. But it’s certainly true that in the political sphere we are always looking for big bang solutions. We’re looking for a leader who will make everything right by coming around the corner, and inevitably we’re incredibly disappointed that somehow or other this new leader didn’t magically change everything. The more that you just think that the right answer is just to elect one person who will magically fix anything, the less that you actually pay attention to what really matters, which is the nit and grit of everyday decision-making, of everyday governance.

DUBNER: So civil-rights reform strikes me as one where incrementally, there have been massive improvements, and yet it seems as though the appetite for an overnight solution to every civil-rights issue is expected. And when that doesn’t happen, there’s massive hue and cry — even though, overall, the trend has been moving in the right direction. You see that as well, or do you think I’m wrong on that?

GLAESER: No, no I agree totally with that. And it required people who — the NAACP for example, which worked for decades before the Civil Rights Act to move the ball forward. Often in ways that were important, but seem today quite modest. I mean fighting up to the Supreme Court. Fighting the attempts to zone by race, for example, which it did in the teens. Right? You know, American segregation would’ve been even worse if cities could explicitly zoned by race, but they couldn’t. Fighting restrictive covenants as it did in the 40’s. Fighting segregation in American schools as it did in the 50’s. Decade by decade, increment by increment. And once we start thinking that there’s a silver bullet, we lose that, we lose the fact that we need to be working day by day, over decades, to affect change.

MUSIC: Lucy Bland, “Backseat” (from The Ruiner)

So let’s take a look at a recent story that’s been decades in the making.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states; no longer may this liberty be denied to them.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage. “Marriage,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion, “is a keystone of the Nation’s social order … There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle.”

JUSTICE KENNEDY:The challenged laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage cannot stand under the Constitution.

In 2001, the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. The margin was 57 percent against to 35 percent in favor. But by 2015, those numbers had practically flipped. Which would seem to indicate a rather sudden shift.

Linda HIRSHMAN: People often say to me, “Wow, gay marriage. It succeeded so quickly!” They say that all the time. We all like a dramatic story. But things don’t happen out of the blue, and it’s so interesting to get a true picture of why change happens, rather than this sort of phony, all-of-a-sudden picture.

That’s Linda Hirshman. She’s a legal scholar who used to practice labor law – she argued two cases before the Supreme Court and briefed and managed a third. She’s also the author of several books, including Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. The revolution, Hirshman argues, was incremental.

HIRSHMAN: It wasn’t the explosion that the popular narrative makes it out to be.

So, to understand how we got here:

PAMELA BROWN: A historic day here at the Supreme Court, Jay. You can probably hear gay-rights advocates to my right cheering this decision.

You have to go back to a time when life for gay men and women in America was very different.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: There’s another group about which I hesitate to talk, but I think the picture isn’t complete unless we do.

HIRSHMAN: It got very bad during the Joseph McCarthy period.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: This unusual State Department affliction, homosexuals…

HIRSHMAN: The sort of Red Scare stuff that went on in America started in World War II. And right after WWII, it really ramped up, and the government used the fact that people were gay as evidence that they were subversive. And they fired them if they worked for the government, so it was a very dark period in gay history.

One of those people was Frank Kameny. He was a Ph.D. astronomer from Harvard.

HIRSHMAN: He was hoping to become an astronaut.

Kameny worked with the Army Map Service of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

HIRSHMAN: And they caught him in a bathroom in San Francisco and they fired him.

This was in 1957.

HIRSHMAN: And he said, “That’s unconstitutional. You can’t fire me just because I’m gay.” And he sued the United States.

Kameny lost, and appealed. He lost again on appeal. In 1961, Kameny petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, but was turned down.

HIRSHMAN: It was too soon. But things in America were starting to break up. And just at that moment, Frank Kameny had the courage to resist.

The civil-rights movement was growing – sit-ins, Freedom Rides, eventually the March on Washington, D.C., in 1963. Frank Kameny wanted to do something similar for gays and lesbians. There was a gay-rights group, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, called the Mattachine Society. The name came from mattachino – Italian for a court jester who spoke truth to power. Kameny started a Washington chapter of the Mattachine Society, and he organized protests outside the White House and other federal buildings.

FRANK KAMENY: Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit, as an individual.

That’s Kameny speaking outside the State Department in 1965. At the time, the State Department argued that gay men and women were national-security risks because they could be easily blackmailed.

KAMENY: Certainly some homosexuals are poor risks. This is no excuse for penalizing all homosexuals.

Their protests were ineffective. Here’s then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Dean RUSK: Well, I understand that we’re being picketed by a group of homosexuals. [Laughter] The policy of the department is that we do not employ homosexuals knowingly. And if we discover homosexuals in our department, we discharge them.

From the tone of Rusk’s voice, you get a sense of just how much stigma was attached to homosexuality. You have to remember – being gay at the time could not only get you fired; it could also land you in jail. Nearly every state at the time had sodomy laws. Was there at least some support from the medical community? Hardly:

Charles SOCARIDES: Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions.

That’s Charles Socarides, a psychiatry professor, interviewed for a 1967 CBS News report called “The Homosexual.”

SOCARIDES: The fact that somebody’s homosexual — a true, obligatory homosexual — automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long in my opinion.

HIRSHMAN: Kameny had figured out as soon as he got active that there could be no equality for gay and lesbian people while they were classified as crazy.

Indeed, Socarides’s view was hardly a marginal one. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The Mattachine Society and other groups set out to change that classification.

HIRSHMAN: And they went about it in a very incrementalist way. They went to the people in the American Psychiatric Association who were studying the question of the diagnoses. They’re a medical association, so they had scholars who were studying it. So the gay organizers approached the scholars and said, “You’re wrong. You’ve got to do real research into this.”

It helped, perhaps, that Frank Kameny was himself a scientist. Hirshman says he could spot flaws in the scholarship about homosexuality. For instance, most of the studies relied solely on gay psychiatric patients.

HIRSHMAN: I mean once somebody is going to the psychiatrist to be helped, he’s part of a population that’s not representative of the whole gay population, right? He’s already in need of psychiatric help or he wouldn’t be there in the first place. You have to look at a representative sample of the whole population and see if they seem to be in distress, which they did not, except from the persecution of course. And to see if they were functioning according to the other indices of good mental health. And they were. The numbers were overwhelming, once the psychiatrists stopped looking at their own patients.

Homosexuality was finally removed from the list of mental illnesses in 1973.

HIRSHMAN: To their credit, these doctors, at the end of the day confronted with the science, did change their position. I interviewed, before he died, the psychiatrist who was in charge of the A.P.A. at the time and he said it was the greatest accomplishment of his life. 

So that was progress. But consensual sex between two people of the same gender was still illegal in most states, and those laws gave the police enormous power over gays and lesbians.

MARTIN BOYCE: They were always on the lookout for us. They tormented us. They just didn’t leave us alone.

That’s Martin Boyce, a longtime New Yorker who participated in the famous Stonewall riots in 1969.

BOYCE: The amount of people that had trouble with the police or were sent to some sort of institution or were brutalized one way or another, with the police not intervening or being on the side of the brutalizer, was growing. I don’t think any of us did not know someone who really, really suffered real consequences. If not ourselves, then somebody.

The riots were set off by a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. In retrospect, the riots were a turning point in the gay-rights movement. But it would take a long time to gather enough momentum to challenge the legal system.

HIRSHMAN: Quietly during those years in various states and around the country, state courts and state legislators had been decriminalizing sodomy. So gays were now not crazy, and they then attacked the premise that their behavior was criminal. And they were succeeding pretty well.

But many states still had sodomy laws. The movement’s ultimate goal was to take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which could invalidate all the state laws at once. In 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the American Civil Liberties Union thought it found a perfect test case in Michael Hardwick, a gay man who’d been arrested for sodomy in Georgia.

HIRSHMAN: In the gay legal bureaucracy, it was felt they reasonably could expect now to get a national judgment that criminalizing gay sex, as opposed to not gay sex, which is not criminal, was a violation of the equal-protection clause.

The ACLU did take the case, known as Bowers v. Hardwick, to the Supreme Court. And …

HIRSHMAN: They lost it, 5-4.

The majority ruled that the right to engage in sodomy was not constitutionally protected. Linda Hirshman says it was a devastating defeat for the gay community.

HIRSHMAN: The opinion is reprehensible and they were already suffering from AIDS.

But, she says, it also made gay-rights advocates even more determined.

HIRSHMAN: Sometimes a defeat like that is so insulting that it radicalizes the community.

By now, the right to marry was becoming another significant plank in the gay-rights platform. Here, from back in 1974, is Frank Kameny talking about it on PBS:

KAMENY: Exercise by homosexual couples of the right to marry detracts not one iota from the rights of heterosexual couples to marry. Homosexual marriages interfere with no one individually. And such marriages impair or interfere with no societal interests.

The question was how the goal of gay marriage could be achieved through the courts. Hirshman says that one source of inspiration was found in the African-American leadership, particularly the NAACP, that pursued civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and 60s.

HIRSHMAN: They followed an incremental pattern more cleanly than any other social movement because the NAACP controlled it.

Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the first black Supreme Court Justice, was head of the NAACP’s legal strategy. In that capacity, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which in 1954 desegregated public schools.

HIRSHMAN: The closest that we’ve come in American social history to having a dictator is Thurgood Marshall. The Inc. fund, the NAACP legal-defense fund, controlled the money that you needed to spend to prove a school desegregation case. And accordingly, they got to say in what order that very fundamental question of school desegregation was presented to the Supreme Court. So they challenged, for instance, a law school that segregated its one black law student out from the class of white law students by roping him off. I mean they didn’t tie him up, but so important was the maintenance of racial caste. And it’s hard for a Supreme Court in the 50’s to look at that and say, “Oh, that’s okay.” So in fact the court said it was unconstitutional. Okay now, if it’s unconstitutional to segregate a state law school, why isn’t it unconstitutional to segregate state colleges? And from there to the grade schools, which was the socially the most explosive decision.

The gay-rights movement had no dictator, like Thurgood Marshall. Nor was there a single, dominant organization like the NAACP. But, Linda Hirshman says, there was a consensus beginning to form among activists that the gay-marriage fight would be the hardest one to win. Which meant continuing to focus on the sodomy laws – and fighting anti-gay discrimination in the labor and housing markets and elsewhere.

HIRSHMAN: They very smartly went back to the drawing board with the sodomy laws. And kept getting them struck down by state courts and reformed and reversed in state legislatures until it was an outlier in America to make sodomy criminal.

Finally, in a 2003 case called Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, thus invalidating all remaining sodomy laws.

BOYCE: And that I think was the most important decision of them all.

That again is Martin Boyce, veteran of the Stonewall riots.

BOYCE: I mean once that happened, then it was going to be a matter of time. I don’t know how much time. It could have been many more years of incrementalism. But I knew it was going to happen.

“It” being the legal right for same-sex marriage. Gay-rights advocates won the legal battle in a number of states – Massachusetts was first, in 2004 – although they subsequently had to fight off a proposed federal amendment to the Constitution that would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. They kept working to shift public opinion. In 2012, President Obama, who had previously opposed same-sex marriage, changed his position:

Barack OBAMA: At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

The same-sex marriage movement, as triumphant as it was, in some ways came out of order. There were other, perhaps more fundamental goals to still accomplish — for instance, winning nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community throughout the U.S. Still, as Linda Hirshman points out, the marriage movement did work, and it worked because of the incremental steps that added up to victory. Hirshman has written a number of books on social movements. We asked if she had any advice for one social movement: Black Lives Matter.

HIRSHMAN: I have lessons that I think any future movement can learn from the gay-rights movement, and they are as follows: Put your own interest first. Do not take up every conceivable progressive issue that somebody in your movement thinks is interesting. At the beginning, new movements don’t have a lot of spare capital and they need to spend it on their issues and the things that will keep them together rather than fragment them. The gay movement did that. Two, take the moral high ground. The AIDS epidemic forced the gay movement to take the moral high ground, and they did it beautifully and then they used it in the marriage fight perfectly. And the third lesson is have weekly meetings. I am not convinced that social media is a substitute for the kind of social, deep rich social contacts that emerge from physical proximity to one another. The next steps that Black Lives Matter can take are reasonable ones for them to take next, okay? The availability of technology in the form of video cameras and phone cameras empowers them to take bolder action than they would be able to take without the technology. So their next steps look about right to me. They’re bold, but they are in a sense incremental. I mean saying, “Don’t shoot me while I’ve got my hands in the air” does not strike me as a radical position. They then have to move to much more profound issues like the organization of the police force and their training and the way that people use local taxes against communities of color like in Ferguson. Those are bigger bites, but it’s time I think for those to be addressed as well.

MUSIC: Andrea Wittgens and Sugartown, “Alibi Was Just An Afterthought” (from Alibi)

*      *      *

MUSIC: Nicholas Pesci, “Feeling Quirky”

Let me ask you a question: where do you get your financial advice?

Jim CRAMER: Let me tell you how I see it.

Maybe you tune in Jim Cramer to see where the market’s headed?

CRAMER: Crystal-clear short-term signal [Sell! Sell! Sell!] to sell the automakers for the moment.

Or maybe you follow a different money guru.

CLIP: Squawk Box! Weekdays at 6am on CNBC!

Mike SANTOLI: We know why these stocks look cheap.

PRESENTER: Dan, walk over to the smart board.

David LAIBSON: It depresses me that so many people giving so much bad advice have such a big audience and get paid for it.

That’s David Laibson.

LAIBSON: I’m a behavioral economist at Harvard University.

Laibson’s done a lot of amazing research over the years – really amazing, you should look it up – mainly focused on how people make decisions. And how a lot of those decisions are suboptimal – and what should be done about that. Consider saving for retirement. A lot of people don’t follow the incremental approach.

LAIBSON: They love to hear the get-rich-quick story, and people dispensing those stories get big audiences. And some of them even have good historical track records and they get even bigger audiences, until of course they get a bad track record. It’s very easy to get sucked into a false prophet, and there’s so many of them in the financial-services industry.

In study after study, the data overwhelmingly show that individual investors are no good at picking stocks.

LAIBSON: Even the pros are no good at that game. The ability of a mutual fund that does well in one year to do well in the next year is close to perfect chance. So you’re just making a mistake. It’s a very natural mistake. I understand the mistake, because we all look out at the world and say, “Hey, I can see good companies and bad companies.” The problem is that that goodness and badness is already priced in. So you’re not the first one to figure out that Amazon’s a good company. You’re not the first one to notice that this car maker is starting to make bad products and no one is buying their vehicles. Everyone is seeing what you’re seeing. All that information is priced in already. You don’t have an advantage in playing the market.

So what’s a better way to think about saving for retirement?

LAIBSON: One has the impression that it’s impossible to save enough for retirement — and to a certain extent, it is impossible if you start at age 50. But if you start early in life, and every year, you contribute let’s say 10 percent of your income, and maybe there’s an employer match, so now we’re up to maybe 15 percent, and you invest that savings in a diversified mutual fund, stocks and bonds, and you have low fees, and you keep going at that year in and year out, and you don’t decumulate prematurely — it’s amazing how that process produces millions of dollars of retirement savings. So it’s kind of hard to imagine how you go from what seems like a little bit of money each year to being a millionaire but that’s exactly the way it works when you work out the math.

DUBNER: So what you’re describing is not at all a secret to anyone who’s ever read any basic personal-finance or investing book. And yet, as we know, there are a lot of people who don’t follow that. Talk to me for a minute about what we know about the people who have the ability and the resources, the income to accomplish exactly that plan but don’t do it. Is it just too boring, is it too much work, is spending here and now just too exciting to divert that saving today?

LAIBSON: It’s a lot of elements. One element is investing is complicated. So one of the ways that success is achieved is by employers auto-enrolling their employees in these plans and then auto-escalating their savings rates. Also the employer picks a good default investment fund, again diversified, stocks and bonds, mostly stocks when young, moving more and more to bonds as you age. Low fees. Passive investments, so rather than having active management, which is costly, you have passive investments that implies lower fees. And when the employer puts all those pieces in place, people go with the flow. They don’t opt out. They don’t say no. In fact, they say, “Thank you so much. I’m so glad you did this for me.” But if all those pieces aren’t there, we go off the rails. So our employer may not offer such a plan. That’s a problem for approximately half of the private-sector workforce. There are so many ways in which, unless the right conditions are there, we end up doing what comes natural, which is postponing saving or, even if we save, decumulating. That’s another big risk factor. Maybe I’m at a firm for 10 years; I’ve now accumulated a considerable pool of funds. I leave that firm to go to another firm. Rather than rolling the money over to an IRA or leaving the money in the original employer’s plan, I take that savings as a distribution and now I’m spending that money. So in fact, rather than building the beginning of the snowball that’s going to roll into something enormous, I’ve made my savings vanish and I start again from zero at the next firm. So there’s a lot of ways in which, even though we know we should save for retirement, we fail unless the right conditions exist for us to succeed. It’s those workers who accept those defaults and who take advantage of these modern retirement savings systems, employer-based retirement savings systems, who end up thriving in retirement.

One more conversation today, before we wrap things up, on incrementalism.

DUBNER: Shall I call you Sir Brailsford, Sir Dave, how does that work?

Dave BRAILSFORD: No, no. It was a nice thing to happen at the time but in reality gets you an upgrade on flights and a few hotels rooms but that’s about it really. So let’s stick to “Dave.”

Dave Brailsford was knighted for helping turn Great Britain into a perennial titan in the sport of cycling.

BRAILSFORD: Prior to the year 2000, Great Britain was a nation that only won one gold medal in 76 years of trying.

In Rio, in 2016? Team GB won 12 cycling medals, including 6 gold. At the 2012 Games, in London? Eight gold medals. Brailsford was the performance director of the British Cycling team from 2003 until 2014. In 2009, he helped found the professional cycling outfit Team Sky. The stated goal of Team Sky at the time was to have a British winner of the Tour de France within five years. In fact, Team Sky won two Tours within its first five years, and then two more in 2015 and 2016. Brailsford grew up in Wales, the son of a mountain climber. He wanted to be a professional cyclist, maybe even win the Tour de France himself.

BRAILSFORD: So I decided to pack my bags, rucksack, bike in a box and saved all my money, took enough and went to France.

He found a team willing to take him on – perhaps out of pity, he says now.

BRAILSFORD: I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to make it as a top-level professional cyclist. So I thought, Well if I can’t win the Tour de France myself then maybe the future lies in helping other people do that.

So Brailsford returned to the U.K. and went to university. He studied sport science and psychology, then got an M.B.A. He first started working for British Cycling back in 1997. Over the years, he developed a strategy based on a principle called “marginal gains.”

BRAILSFORD: Physics and cycling go hand in hand. It’s a sport that lends itself nicely to physics, data collection, measurement, power and speed. And so, we could collect lots of data and analyze performance and we could feed that back to riders. And then we could work with them on small, very small, minor tweaks, minor changes that probably felt relatively insignificant at the time, but over time, would stick.

DUBNER: Give me a for-instance. Is it something like posture, it is something like pacing, is it mental?

BRAILSFORD: Yeah, positional. You know, across the whole continuum of sport, of the performance. Some of it could be the position of the bike, the position of the head. We fight against the wind in cycling all the time. It’s the biggest thing that slows us down. And just literally dropping the head between the shoulders, dropping it down just a centimeter will improve the aerodynamics and for the same power, you’ll go a little bit further. And the more you can think about holding that position and being cognizant of that position whilst you’re riding at your limit, it makes a difference.

But the marginal-gains approach went well beyond aerodynamics. The idea was to produce at least a one-percent improvement in every facet of the enterprise. From the mechanical – like installing a tire perfectly straight on the rim. To the physiological – like managing the riders’ nutrition and choosing the best massage gel.

BRAILSFORD: We’d look at hand-washing, for example, an area where we’d go to the Olympic Games and we’d be in great form and then we’d be terrified of the riders getting ill or catching a bug. So we started to think about, Wow, how are you going to optimize or reduce the chances of us getting an illness within the team in the Olympic Village for example, and then for that to run through the team and create havoc. So we got a surgeon in who showed everybody how to wash their hands properly. We had people who cleaned all the handles, cleaned the lifts buttons, we obviously encouraged people not to shake hands and be very mindful of this and use hand gels all the time. And I mean, it’s common practice now but when we were starting out, there were small little things that, we’d think, Is that going win us a medal? Well, no, it’s not. But is it going to contribute to it? Yeah, potentially.

DUBNER: How did you first come to embrace the notion that marginal gains could be fruitful? How did you go about learning or deciding which areas to apply it to?

BRAILSFORD: It wasn’t something overnight, like I just woke up morning and thought, “Okay, well, we’ll do it like this. We’re human beings.” And when someone says, I’d like a perfect performance, that is daunting. So I thought, let’s break our performance to all of its component parts, map them all out, and then let’s have a look and see is ­­it is possible to progress in each one of the areas? And can we be bothered to do it? Because it takes a lot of work and energy. And then you’ve got something that people are in control of and they feel empowered to move forward. So, yeah, they’ll say, “I might not be able to see how I’m going to get to top of that massive mountain over there, but boy I tell you what, I can improve a small amount in my nutrition, in my diet, I can move my weight program forward, I can get another five minutes sleep a night, I can do all the recovery protocols as necessary.” You know, and on and on it goes. Now, there’s a big psychological component of this where there’s a team and support team — if everyone buys into that philosophy, you’re creating a culture which is actually moving forward and is actually kind of building a little bit of momentum. Now there’s no denying, there’s no point to doing anything in the periphery unless the absolute critical elements, which are going to account for 40 or 50 percent of the performance, are in place.

DUBNER: What are you talking about when you talk about that 40 or 50 percent baseline? Is that talent, is that riders who are very, very good already?

BRAILSFORD: So, you have to have a hunger and a willingness. And it’s not so much a hunger of wanting to be an Olympic champion. It’s a hunger towards, “I can break down what it would take to get from where I am now to be an Olympic champion and I can see the sacrifices, I can see the suffering, and doing all of that work.” So, that’s for me what we mark down as a “hunger index.” We then look at the talent obviously, and then you have barriers. So, remove the barriers and that will then equal success.

DUBNER: I’m guessing back when you were trying to break into cycling yourself, there was probably no such thing as a “hunger index” there. I’m guessing, if there had been — what do you think your hunger index was back then, Dave?

BRAILSFORD: Very high. I’m a trier, there’s no doubt about that. I think that’s something that’s just set I guess, maybe part of my psychology, my personality.

DUBNER: Well, being the son of a mountain climber probably doesn’t hurt, huh?

BRAILSFORD: No, that’s right, that’s right. You know the one thing he always used to tell me was, “You’ve got to be professional,” always “you’ve got to be professional, professional, professional.” And I used to roll my eyes every time he said it, like, “Come on Dad, shut up.” And then somewhere down the line, it seems to have stuck.

MUSIC: Paul Avgerinos, “Playful Light Delight”

Team Sky, the professional cycling team that Brailsford now runs, competes in big-time races like the Tour de France, where you cover more than 2,000 miles over three weeks. Which means a new day, a new hotel, and a new bed. And, again, Brailsford saw an opportunity for a marginal gain.

BRAILSFORD: The hotel is given to you by the organization, you can’t change it, you don’t know what the mattress is going to be like, you don’t know what the room is going to be like. So we have a forward team that go into the hotels and they have a room protocol. Basically, they lift the bed up, they Hoover under the bed, they clean the room, they have antibacterial protocol which cleans all the room including the television, remote control, the tap handles, etc. We take the shower head off and clean the shower. And then they have their own mattresses, their own pillows specifically for each rider. And so they can sleep in the same posture every night. Now is that going to win you the Tour de France? Probably not, but it can contribute.

DUBNER: Let me ask you: your teams have been phenomenally successful. To what extent do you believe that the marginal gains approach is actually responsible? I get the sense from previous interviews that you think that maybe too much has been made of the marginal-gains business.

BRAILSFORD: I think it gave us a methodology, it gave us an approach which allowed the support staff and the riders, to be of a certain mindset and approach things in a certain way. And there’s no doubt about it, it was like a contagious enthusiasm, if you’d like. I think equally, at times, it’s too simplistic, just to say, “Well, all we have to do is adopt this marginal-gains approach,” and I think people misunderstood the concept of marginal gains being the latest bit of technology or improvement to the bike or aerodynamics, etc. I think what they missed was the whole tacit psychological component, which created a culture and a mindset within a group which allowed the whole group to buy in to something, to have a collective approach where hundredths of a second could be the difference between winning and losing.

DUBNER: Now, of course even casual cycling fans, they know that Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times, vehemently denied doping for many years until he eventually admitted it; and that many, many cyclists have doped, which really put a huge stain on the sport. So how does a group of cyclist as dominant as yours, with both Team Sky and Team GB, expect all of us to believe that there’s no doping going on?

BRAILSFORD: It’s a very good question. And I don’t think given the past that we can expect everybody to just believe everything that they see. And I think they’re right to question. There were questions asked in the past, and people trusted Lance and it came as a big blow and big shock to a lot of people. And I think that would inevitably lead to a level of suspicion and a lack of trust that was going to be a hangover from that period. So I fully understand why people do question us. And I think our job then is to try and be as transparent and open as possible about what we do and how we do it. And also over time, I think people will see that we are doing it the right way. We are doing it clean and like I say, we just have to be accepting of the situation we find ourselves in and be patient and tolerant and transparent.

Not long after this interview with Brailsford, he and Team Sky found themselves in a situation. Computer hackers released Team Sky documents showing that its two star riders of the past several years – Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins, both of whom have won the Tour de France — that they used banned substances under what’s known as a therapeutic use exemption, or a T.U.E. A T.U.E. allows a rider to use an otherwise off-limits drug for legitimate medical reasons. In Wiggins’s case, for instance, in order to treat his pollen allergies before the Tour in 2011 and 2012, he injected a banned corticosteroid called triamcinolone, which some say acts as a performance enhancer.

There’s no evidence that Wiggins or anyone else on Team Sky broke the rules – it was, after all, a therapeutic use exemption. Which is supposed to be kept confidential. But when it wasn’t kept confidential, and when you run a team that’s been hugely successful, and when you’ve been touting something called “marginal gains” as a key component of that success – well, people will talk, especially in Britain, where cycling is a national obsession.

Here’s the Sunday Times sportswriter David Walsh talking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

David WALSH: The problem that Team Sky have got with this is not only the act itself, which is at the very least highly questionable, but they’re the team that set themselves up as whiter than white. They’re the team that set themselves up as totally transparent. They have been anything but transparent in their response to this. They have basically refused to go into any detail about how this was authorized and they’re basically sticking to the line: it was approved by the authorities and therefore it was technically legal. And for lots of people that’s not good enough, because ethics still matter in sport. Morals still matter.

MUSIC: Judson Lee Music, “Stars Falling”

In a report earlier this year, the U.K.’s government committee on sport came down hard on Brailsford and Team Sky. “How can David Brailsford,” the report read, “ensure that his team is performing to his requirements if he does not know and cannot tell what drugs the doctors are giving the riders? Brailsford must take responsibility for these failures, the regime under which Team Sky riders trained and competed, and the damaging skepticism about the legitimacy of his team’s performance and accomplishments.” Team Sky and Braillsford continue to refute any claims that they knowingly broke any anti-doping regulations.

It’s impossible to say, at this moment, the degree to which Team Sky may have broken or stretched the rules — or the extent to which their success will be downgraded if they are found to have broken the rules. Just as progress in civil rights and investing and cycling itself is an incremental exercise, so too is the revelation of truth. What I do think we can agree on is this: if you want to accomplish something, especially something large and meaningful, it pays to at least think hard about an incremental approach.

Let’s say you weigh 30 pounds more than you should. And you decide to lose it. What’s your expectation – that you can lose it all in just a few weeks, even just a few months? That’s ridiculous. Do you know how long it took you to put on those 30 pounds? A long time! It’s a lot of work to put on 30 extra pounds – well, not work, it’s actually quite fun, eating all that delicious food. But still, it took a lot of nachos and rice bowls and sugary drinks to put on 30 extra pounds. Go to the supermarket and look at a five-pound bag of potatoes. Now look at six of them – that’s how much you’ve accumulated, over time. So you know what? It’s going to take some time to decumulate. Little by little. Choice by choice. Increment by increment. If you expect otherwise – well, your expectations are likely to be dashed. By lowering your expectations, you can actually raise your chances of success.

So … good luck — whether your goal is losing weight or saving money or contributing to a social movement. As always, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know how it’s going. We’re at radio@freakonomics.com.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Werth. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Greg Rosalsky, Max Miller, Harry Huggins, and Andy Meisenheimer; we had help this week from Louis Mitchell. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics, Harvard.

Chris Lacinak, founder and president, AVPreserve.

Linda Hirshman, legal scholar and author.

David Laibson, professor of economics, Harvard.

Dave Brailsford, cycling performance director (Team Sky and Team Great Britain).

RESOURCES

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, by Ed Glaeser.

“Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” by the Pew Research Center.

“Frank Kameny — Astronomer, Activist, and Organizer.”

Additional music scoring by Jay Cowit

The post In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

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