#will this torture they call mandatory education ever be over.

[emarezi-backup]

gn i have to wake up in. 4 hours. fuck

[melissanovels]

♡ Chapter 5 of TRANSIENT TIME TRAVELLER is out! ♡

○ Read on my Website ○ Read on Tumblr (below) ○ Read on Ao3 ○ Read on Royal Road  ○

TTT  is an LGBTQ+ historical fantasy novel about Aida, a time traveller hellbent on proving the innocence of a 1,200-year-old dead queen, and Lorian, an escaped princess-turned-officer who wants to drain the royal blood from their body, & the two coming together with the help of their mischievous future selves.

♡ Reblogs are appreciated! ♡

Read Chapter 5 Below:

As Lorian walked into an empty classroom and waited for Aida and Mister Omar to leave, she pressed her back into the door and utterly lost it.

She covered her mouth with her gloved hands. She’d done it. She’d finally talked to Aida again. And she hadn’t been so crass as she’d been when they’d first met. The first time had been a complete disaster. With Aida being naked and Lorian open-mouthed staring at her, the curves of her wide hips and ass, her breasts, her face, her eyes. God help her, she’d never seen a woman’s body so openly before. All she’d wanted to do that night was slam her down into bed and do unspeakable things to her, yet what had Aida wanted? To talk about fantasy novels and a queen who’d been dead for 1,200 years. What had Lorian even said that’d led her up to Aida’s bedroom? She’d need to write it down for reference.

Despite being betrothed for more than half of her life, Lorian hadn’t a clue how courting worked. The girls she’d met in the palace were diplomatic and groomed to please her, all peachy smiles and saying whatever they needed to make her happy. She’d tried to court an Aldaían knight a few years back, but she’d only earned her name and her preference of cakes before they’d parted ways.

Aida’s attitude was so defiant, so cheeky and unbecoming that it would’ve sent Lorian’s father into hysterics. She wanted her. She wanted to crack her open and explore her mind and passions and give it back to her a ten-thousand fold.

Lorian dragged her hands down her face. Maybe she’d buy her a history book, really push more into the things she loved, or maybe a ticket to En Tempore Rose. The official one, the one that played in the Colosseum. She’d have to schedule a trip to the city center. She’d wear a cloak.

After she heard Aida run off somewhere, Lorian re-entered the library and backtracked for the books Aida had put away. They were old and leather-bound, with yellow pages that smelled of mothballs: History of Roma: From the Perspective of King Julius II to His People and Hidden Dangers of Visatorre in Roman History.

Lorian put that last one back. Aida was brave to read about history that was so rarely taught in class. Lorian had secretly read about it behind Missus’ Sharma’s back. She’d learned about the lost city-state of Siina and the belligerent queen who killed one of the dead kings, and how they killed and tortured those poor Visatorre people for sport soon afterwards as punishment. Thrown into the Colosseum with a pack of lions without any weapons with which to defend themselves. In this aisle alone, Lorian saw four other books detailing what a plight the Visatorre were to other people not blessed with the ability to travel through time.

She believed. The power to go back in time, acting as a ghost to witness history in the raw way it was intended, only to come back and harbor the pains of going backwards. She’d never understand their full pain, she could only educate herself and hope that that injustice would never happen again in her history.

After skimming through more of Aida’s books and realizing how little of it she retained, Lorian picked up the shortest read and went near the windows for light.

She got to page ten, most of which was a glorified chapter about how great the Roman kings were and are, when she heard someone call her name.

“Lorian, you fuck!”

Between the library and the writing hall was a strip of muddy grass. It was a shortcut between the buildings for her and other officers to travel. Two of them were there, calling for her: Alessio and Matteo, the two assholes she’d befriended that month.

“There he is, little bugger,” Alessio said, catching Lorian’s profile from the window. He climbed onto a rock wall to get closer. “Get out of there and come down. Lunch’s almost over!”

“Alright, alright,” she said, and slotted the book for later.

They were good boys, these two. She liked them enough to hang out with them while not on duty. They didn’t know this, and they never would, but she’d actually known them back at the palace. All officers-in-training had to go through a mandatory training program held by a Constable. Lorian had always favored officers for their rowdiness. She’d watch them work out in secret, sneak peeks at their naked bodies when they’d change. When she’d found that both Alessio and Matteo were working as security details at this academy, her decision had been made. A few faked letters of recommendation and her crafty ability to lie through her teeth and she was enrolled as an officer-in-training in a week.

They’d never known it was her as she paraded around as a young, unfavorable princess with incredibly long hair wearing the dresses she loathed, but she liked to tease them every now again with knowledge she shouldn’t have known.

“Hey, Alessio, have you ever been persuaded to eat worms?”

“Matteo, didn’t you pee yourself after seeing a real lion in captivity?”

“Have you two ever kissed on a dare?”

She’d lied to them, calling herself a good guesser.

She walked out of the library and turned the corner to find her boys, but they weren’t there. The yard was quiet; she heard the teachers writing on the chalkboard from the writing rooms.

She stilled her steps. From her knowledge, she knew nobody could truly vanish from the world for good. Something would always bring you back to where you were meant to be.

A twig snapped behind her, and she was put into a chokehold that stole away her breath. She could’ve gotten out of it easily, but she didn’t want to hurt who, from their laughing, she knew was Alessio. Alessio was a redhead with more power than Lorian believed him to have. Matteo, on the other hand, was softer, with dark, floppy hair and innocent eyes.

Laughing, Lorian took out her rapier and used the butt of the sword to knock the wind out of Alessio.

Alessio gagged and let her go. “Ow! You ass.”

“You attacked me.” She lightly kicked him for good measure. “What’re we doing now?”

“Late lunch,” Matteo said, and shared a loaf of bread. They weren’t students, but through their enlistment, they were given a dorm room that she shared with Alessio and Matteo and three simple meals ordained by their royal regimen. Sometimes, if they wooed the right girl or boy, they’d get sweets and even alcohol, something that was forbidden to officers. All three of them had already gotten drunk in that month alone.

They walked to their preferred eating space that the Academy cheekily called “The Defense Wall.” It separated the school from the villainous farmlands of lazy cows and stupid chickens. What used to be a formidable, three-meter tall fortress from a time period Aida probably knew about was now a blockage from the smelly farm animals that provided the school a portion of their eggs, milk, cheese, and occasional meat.

Lorian hopped atop an abandoned wagon of hay to scale the tall wall. Alessio followed her, and they needed to help Matteo make it due to his size. There, they shared their bread and butter and made horrible jokes for hours that, if any other officer heard them say, they would’ve had their hands whipped. Lorian had had her fair share of that back home and was keen not to get struck again for misbehaving.

As Lorian dined, Alessio asked her, “Why do you always spend your time in those libraries? You never read.”

It was true, Lorian wasn’t so much a learned soul as her mother and father pretended she was. She was a physical person who liked getting her hands dirty in order to understand something abstract. This had been her fourth trip to the library that week. The first attempt to find and talk to Aida had failed miserably and she was left hiding behind a bookshelf to spy on her. The other try and Aida hadn’t even been there. The girl kept Lorian on a leash and Lorian had no problem with that. “I do read. I know a great deal of things, much more than you do.”

“Then name two books you’ve loved over the past year. No, five authors, and no poets.”

“You try that. When’s the last time you ever picked up a book?” Lorian reached to pull on Alessio’s hair, but he jerked away and stuffed his mouth with his dry loaf end.

“That Miss spends her time there, doesn’t she?” Matteo asked. “That Aida girl.”

“The traveller?” Alessio asked. “She’s a weird one. I’ve talked with some of the girls in her class, and they say she’s really weird. I heard she’s gonna get the nix, you know?” He made a mark across his neck. “Cut out.”

“What do you mean?” Lorian asked.

“I heard it from my father, and he heard it from Constable Carmine. Word from the Lion is that he’s gonna bar those types of people from secondary education.”

Lorian’s ears heated up. “Carmine said that? And the king agreed to it? When?”

Alessio slowed his chewing at Lorian’s mention of Carmine’s name without his title. She had to stop doing that, being so informal about a man she shouldn’t have known so personally. “That’s just what I heard from my dad, so I think it’s true.”

Lorian rubbed her neck. She knew Carmine well enough to forgo titles when she’d address him in the palace, but after being promoted to Constable, she couldn’t say if this was something he’d enforce under the king’s orders or not. He’d exchange his heart for his duty.

But she wouldn’t have put this horrendous action past her father. He was the most racist, hurtful, selfish person she’d ever known, and she hated herself that parts of his speech and behaviors had sunk into her own bones. It took a great deal of unlearning to undo all of those negative stereotypes, and it took her finally leaving the house and joining the ranks to realize how real Visatorre people lived and how awful the world was to them.

“What’s to happen to her?” Matteo asked when they went silent.

“Dunno,” Alessio said. “Kick her out? There’s only a few of those people here, so it’s not like we’d notice right away.”

“But that’s not fair,” Lorian said. “She hasn’t done anything.”

“That’s not gonna stop them, you know that.”

“Then…I’ll stop them,” she promised, and tried mimicking how confident Aida sounded whenever she opened her mouth. “It’s not right. Do you know Miss Mirko uses a cane because of her illness—” She bit her cheek. “Uh, affliction. Can you imagine walking around with a cane at our age? It’s uncouth to belittle those who were born with advantages we weren’t given.”

Alessio pulled a face. “Don’t act high and mighty to me. This wasn’t my decision, I’m just the fucking messenger. And it’s not like we can change this.”

“Say I become a leading Constable, then,” Lorian argued. “I’d rewrite the rules to make them fair for everyone.”

“You wanna be a Constable?”

“Don’t you? Isn’t that the goal of being an officer, to one day be a Constable?”

“Eh, not really. Not for me, anyway. I just needed to get away from my mother, and this was the best option. To be a Constable means you have to put in ten, sometimes fifteen-hour-days and be on the king’s every beck and call. Thanks, but I’m good just being ordered around for simple things.”

“And I wanted to become stronger like my brothers are, but I don’t think I’m strong enough to do everything a Constable does,” Matteo said, and he looked across the field towards the water well. “Oh.”

Alessio and Lorian followed his intent gaze.

“Speak of the devil,” Alessio said.

Stomping down the fields, dress lifted to keep from stepping in cow droppings, was Aida on a mission. Her hands were bunched up in her dress, her teeth grit, and she was mumbling something to herself as her heels plowed through the dry mud. She’d lost her cane, shortening her steps.

Lorian brushed the crumbs off of her chest and stood up higher to better see her. She always walked with such determination, like she truly did not care how other people saw her. Lorian wanted to walk like that one day.

“Do you need a hand, Miss?” Alessio called out.

“Fuck off!” Aida yelled back.

Alessio tensed up. “What the fuck’s her problem?” he muttered.

“S-she isn’t allowed to talk to us like that,” Matteo said meekly. “What should we do?”

“We need to stop her. Hey—”

Lorian palmed Alessio’s chest, almost knocking him off completely before clutching his jacket and keeping him vertical.

“Ow! Lorian, what’s with you today?”

Lorian stared intently at Aida.

Silent tears were running down Aida’s cheeks as she walked. She wasn’t sobbing or weeping, the tears were simply there, though it was hard to tell why she was crying in the first place. It looked like she was off to kill somebody.

When she was out of sight and then some, Lorian got up, told her friends that she was thirsty, and secretly tailed Aida down her chosen path.

[canyouhearthelight]

The Miys, Ch. 73

This is, from a technical perspective, one of the most challenging chapters I have ever written.  Out of six characters mentioned in this chapter, five are based off real people, most of which have only interacted online. That meant a lot of emailing and getting second and third opinions, hashing out details...

I am inordinately proud of the result.   I think this is one of my favorite chapters to date, honestly.  I hope @charlylimph-blog​, @satan-parisienne​, and @baelpenrose​ are proud of it, too.

(P.S. Don’t forget to submit your ideas for the name of the new colony!)

The next few days were a glut of good news. I was, admittedly, riding high on the success Simon reported in regards to the Galactic Education course, which was only bolstered by Alistair’s ever-more-excited updates about what he was learning – in Simon’s section, of all places.  Reports from Grey indicated that everyone on the ship was recovering well from the medical crisis that Else inadvertently caused.  Miys was doing everything they could to make Nixe a new, upgraded tail and replacement weights before she was finally released from medical.  Else, themselves, were adjusting well to their newfound homes… likely bolstered by the borderline-competitive aquascaping that was taking place in some of the aquariums, each equipped with a modified translation implant so we could check on Else’s health.

They were a bacterium. Did they really need tiny rollercoasters that they could eat?  Someone thought so, apparently. You could even watch a live feed of it, if you wanted.

Between all the good news and the sheer amount of reading I was engrossed in regarding the personnel files, I hadn’t seen anyone outside of work or home.  Not even my family.  Tyche and Alistair at work, with occasional visits from Xiomara and Grey.  Conor and Maverick at home, talking about our days over dinner.  I made a point to check in on Derek and Sam every couple days, but trusted the rest of my family to let me know if there was something they felt the need to tell me.

Maybe that’s why it took so long.  I hadn’t even realized that three weeks had passed since the last time I saw Charly until she burst into my office, tears threatening to roll down her cheeks.  “I made it out of the room before falling apart,” she blurted out with a painful smile as those drops rolled down her cheeks.  Immediately, I bolted around my desk to the smaller woman, coaxing her to a seat to figure out what was wrong.  My protective instincts went into overdrive, forcing me to calculate just how likely I was to take Coffey in a fight.  Not likely, but he would know it happened, I decided as I took a deep breath.

“Charly, what’s wrong?”

She made three aborted attempts to tell me, sniffing back tears the entire time, before she finally broke and blurted out, “I can’t do it. Please don’t make me. This is just like the last time.  I knew I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. I just… I can’t. I know it’s mandatory, but – “

“Charly,” I repeated. “Nothing that makes you this upset is mandatory.  And you aren’t stupid, not close.  Everyone on this fucking ship is smart, including you.  So, tell me who I have to kill – or maim, I’ll settle for maiming if I have to – so we can fix this.”

After a couple of deep breaths, she nodded. “The class. I just can’t understand it… no matter how many questions I ask, no matter how much I study, it just doesn’t make sense.  Mr. Farro is right, I’m just an idiot…”

I made a cutting gesture with my hand and whistled sharply. “Mr. Farro? The teacher told you that you’re an idiot?” Every flame in every hell started boiling inside of me.  Processor two started gathering every creative torture method I had ever heard of while processors one and three focused on the woman in front of me.

She shook her head. “Not that exactly, no.  When I kept asking questions, he told me that the material is literally in my native language, so what didn’t I understand, and just kind of glared at me until I stopped asking questions, and now I’m so far behind and I’m failing and…” She dissolved into sobs again.

“Okay.” I forced myself to be calm when all I wanted to do was tear apart this… monster who made her feel this way.  How in all of creation did someone like this ever get certified to teach? How did Eino not catch this kind of thing? “I’m going to have Coffey come get you and take you home.  I’m going to stay right here until he arrives, okay?”  When she nodded, I flicked up my datapad and sent a short message to her partner that she was in my office and needed him to pick her up.

“You’re going to meet Tempest,” she whispered when I handed her a hot cocoa.  

When Coffey arrived a few minutes later, a shadow fell over his face when he heard Charly crying.  She had warned me about this… another side of him that she would only refer to as Tempest.  Seeing him now, the name was very appropriate.  “Who did this?” he asked, his voice deep enough to send shivers down my spine – and not pleasant ones. It was the voice I imagined Hades possessed.

I held my head high and tightened my arms around Charly. “Someone else.  Someone I need to deal with.  But I don’t trust anyone else to take care of her while I do that.”  Both sides of him were incredibly protective of her, with no limits to what they would do.

“Tell me,” he demanded. “I will deal with it.”

A brief flash of Coffey/Tempest standing head and shoulders over an educator flooded my mind. I shook my head. “I know what you would do, and I don’t see it ending well for anyone.  Charly needs you.  I can handle this, and I need you to make sure Charly is going to be okay until I’m done.”  Swallowing my fear, I stared him down.  Tempest could be dangerous, to anyone they didn’t consider theirs – never without a reason, but still.  I didn’t know if I fell in that category, but I knew good and damned well that Charly did.

Fortunately, she chose that moment to speak up. “Please take me home, Tempest.  I know I’ll be safe at home, with you.”

After a moment of hesitation, he nodded before coming over to pick Charly up.  Unlike the fireman’s carry that Coffey usually used in a joking manner, Tempest carried her like a kitten – a precious, fragile thing.  She moved just enough to snuggle against him, clearly protected. “You will tell me if you cannot handle this.” The last, addressed to me, was a command.

“I promise.” I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and mentally reminded myself that he posed no danger to anyone who was trying to protect Charly.  However, when a man that large is scowling at you, you sweat.

Once they left, my brain very quickly turned to the matter at hand – Arthur fucking Farro.  Even if Charly wasn’t someone I considered family, few things in my life ever enraged me like a purported educator who belittled students with questions.  I had already spent hours with Simon and Tyche, picking that subject apart and giving him advice on what to watch for. Full of piss, vinegar, and righteous indignation, I marched out of my office and straight to Xiomara’s.

When I burst in, she was clearly in the middle of a meeting, but in that moment, I didn’t care. “Xiomara, I need a witness in case I decide to do something stupid.”  Without checking to see if she followed, I turned on my heel and started my journey to the educator offices. On the way, I ran into Tyche.  My poor, unsuspecting sister was staring intently at her datapad while she tried to walk past me to her office.  I stood directly in front of her, forcing her to glance up. “Good, I need a second witness. Come on.”

“What? Wait – “ she sputtered as I heard Xiomara catch up.

“One of the educators made Charly feel like an idiot and she was crying.” With that, I resumed my pilgrimage.  I could hear Tyche swear softly behind me and start interrogating Xiomara, who knew as much as Tyche did at that point.

That’s okay, I mentally assured myself. We’re almost there.

I stopped outside the office that was ostensibly assigned to the cad I was after.  Taking a deep breath, I squared my shoulders. The moment I started to opened my mouth to request entry, strong fingers grabbed my shoulders.

I whirled, only to meet Xiomara’s eyes. “Arthur Farro is teaching Charly’s unit?” she asked, squinting at me skeptically.  When I nodded, she only turned her head slightly, still staring me down. “And you’re going to confront him.”

“What else am I supposed to – ”

An evil gleam flickered in her eye as she straightened, smoothing my shirt. “This is going to be good,” she smirked before giving me a nod to proceed.

I lifted my chin, trying to imitate Tyche’s most imperious demeanor. “Arthur Farro, this is Sophia Reid, requesting entry.”

Without a reply, the door slid open to reveal a sparsely furnished office.  A simple and practical deck sat in a far corner, two equally practical chairs across from it.  The occupant was seated with his back to the corner, facing toward the door.  I couldn’t say he was facing us, because he was absorbed in what was on his datapad.

Just as I was opening my mouth to lash out, he spoke up. “Hello, Councillors. I take it someone in my course came to you, begging to be exempted from having to actually learn how the Galactic Community functions?  Because, gods forbid I expect people to study.” With a tone that was so dry it could teach the Sahara a lesson, he glanced up and deadpanned. “Horrid of me, I know. I mean, sure. Lacking understanding of the galactic community that we just joined should cause us no shortage of issues – just look how pre-Unification Earth politics worked.  But I’m sure that’s not an important subject to stress over.”

Oh, it was on. “First of all, do not call me Councillor right now. I am not here in any official capacity.  Instead I am here for a very personal and pissed off reason.” When he started to open his mouth, I cut him off. “Charly Harper.  She is in your classes.  She also came to me today - sobbing by the way - because she felt like a failure.  A very bright, very intelligent adult woman was sobbing my office because of you,” I spat before continuing. “No student, not a single fucking one should feel that way. So-called ‘teachers’ like you make me sick, with your power trips and holier-than-thou attitude.  You are in a position to improve people, and instead you degrade them - “ I cut off when I noticed him gesturing emphatically at Xiomara, who only shrugged and shook her head.  “I am fucking talking to you, Farro.   Me, not Xiomara. She is not here to help you, she is here to keep me from doing something monumentally stupid.  If this is how you treat your classes, I’m frankly appalled that you were ever certified to teach a dog, much less a child.” I stopped, panting.

Brown eyes gazed at me with an unflinching expression. “Are you done? Feel better that you’ve lashed out at the monstrous teacher?” I opened my mouth, only for him to shake his head. “No. You said your piece, now you get to hear mine.  I am well aware that Miss Harper is intelligent - her pranks alone show me that. If you haven’t experienced them, I fervently hope you have the chance, because they are simply breathtaking in their complexity and subtlety.  However, I am therefore entirely at a loss for how she is doing so poorly in this class." He took off his glasses and rubbed his face before replacing them. "She asks questions, I do my best to answer them, even though it eats up so much class time. I have asked her to stop by my office outside of class, hoping I can take more time to ensure she understands the material… I know we are covering government right now, but still.   She has never stopped by for assistance.  I even checked that the translators were sending the material in the right language!”  His face settled into another flat stare. “So, when  you come in here and decide to attack me with all the restraint and thought of a rabid lemming, know that I am doing everything I can to try to assist her.  She’s clearly bright, so she should be able to understand the material.”

I waited three seconds, until I knew for sure he was done. At that point, I took a deep breath. “Yes, Mr. Farro, she is very intelligent.” I turned my gaze up to his face, my best imitation of Tyche’s glare clear for all to see. “Charly. Also. Has. A. Fucking. Learning. Disability,” I ground out, stepping forward with each word. When I stopped, we were glaring at each other across his desk.

Abruptly, he straightened and looked thoughtful. “Oh. Well, that explains it. I can work with that.”

“You fucking better, Farro. She may not be my blood, but she is my family.  You fuck with her, you fuck with me. Or with Tyche. Take your pick.”

He glanced over my shoulder at my sister, who was undoubtedly giving a much more murderous impression that I would ever be able to pull off.  When he looked back at me, I was treated to a scowl. “You remind me a disturbing amount of someone I knew once.  She also had a tendency to lay claim to ‘family’ that were no actual relation to her, and she was fiercely protective of them.  There were so many  times she didn’t stand up for herself when she should have, but she would have jumped into a volcano for her ‘family’.”

“Sounds like you could have learned a thing or two from her,” I tossed back at him, unwilling to flinch at the entirely-too-apt comparison. “Maybe then, she would be here instead of you.” As soon as the words left my lips, I regretted them.  I knew I had gone entirely too far, no matter what came next.

I didn’t get a chance to apologize, however.  Before I could even open my mouth, he sneered at me. “Funny. I would be more than happy to have her here instead of the less-stable discount imitation that is taking low shots and squawking at me about not knowing something no. One. Told. Me.”

“It’s in her file. Section 3, Line 5.”

“Well, that would be helpful if I had ever gotten the files.” He ground his teeth hard enough to be heard from where I stood.

I sputtered. “Wait, you never got it? Wait - Files? Plural?”

“No, Councilor Reid - “

“Sophia”

“No, Councilor Reid, I did not get any of the files for the students in any of my sections.  Otherwise, I would have read them thoroughly.  People who ignore student needs and call themselves educators are sadists with the intellect of coked-up chimps - and work about as well in a classroom”

I was at a loss for words.  It was disturbingly similar to what I had thought on my way to confront him.  Inhaling deeply, I schooled my expression and tried to regain my composure.  “Mr. Farro, I am clearly in the wrong here.  Files regarding anything that would require accommodation were sent - were supposed to be sent - to all of the teachers, two weeks before course assignments were issued.  Just in case any educators weren’t trained to accommodate. As far as what you just said - “ I looked away, ashamed. “That’s exactly why I was so angry when I came in. I didn’t know that you never received the files, so I assumed you were one of those sadists you just mentioned. I - I am so sorry for my behavior. I know I can’t make this right.” I flicked open my datapad. “But at least let me get you those student files and find out what happened.” When he nodded, I shot a message to Derek requesting the files be sent immediately to all of the educators, by Derek, no one else.  When I got the response, the words ‘rank amateur’ and ‘ignore any isolated mechanical failures in regards to’ caught my eye before I quickly dismissed the screen.  Plausible deniability was sorely underrated sometimes. Facing Farro, again, I braced myself. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I truly do regret that I didn’t ask for your side before tearing into you like that.  Even though I am not in any position to ask for favors, please just don’t take this out on Charly.  Hate me all you want, but she didn’t ask me to do this.  She just came into my office begging to drop the course.”

He stared at me for an agonizing heartbeat before relaxing and waving off my request.  My heart sank until he spoke. “I would never take someone else’s behavior out on Charly, or on any other student.” A measuring look targeted me. “You had a lot of those teachers that punished the entire class because one student wouldn’t stop being disruptive, didn’t you?”

“Something like that,” I mumbled in agreement.  More confidently, I clarified. “I think all of us have been punished entirely too many times for the mistakes of other people. Maybe some of us were lucky enough to only experience that in the After, but some of us got a taste of that as children, too.”

“You know…” he slowly ventured. “Even in the Before, that kind of behavior was beyond appalling.”

I nodded. “It was a war crime, actually.  A friend told me that once.”

He had been looking away, trying to find something, but his head abruptly snapped up. “Yes! It’s against the Geneva Convention!”

“That’s what he told me, yeah.”

Farro sat in his chair and leaned back, tilting his head to stare at the ceiling. “You know, technically, collective punishment of children isn’t a war crime.  The Geneva Convention was intended to apply to prisoners of war, not civilians in a time of peace.”

“Ah, ah!” I scolded, shaking a finger at him. The previous tension in the room bled away as we seemed to find common ground. “I grew up in the United States.  Prior to the Unification, we were always at war.  It’s part of what led to the establishment of Global Parliament.”

He smirked softly, but judging by the fact that he was looking past me, it was more at a memory than at me. “That doesn’t automatically make you a prisoner of war.”

“No, but it does mean I was a civilian of a protected class, who was denied their human rights and had collective punishment used against me in a time of war.” I crossed my arms and stuck my nose in the air, trying to keep the conversation from getting to heated again.  Slyly I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye.

“You weren’t forcibly detained.”

“Au contraire, mon frere! I was a child. I was forcibly detained at all times, one could argue.”

He shook his head while giving me a shrewd look. “That is such a technicality.  It reminds me of the time my friend - the one I mentioned - tried to argue that international diplomacy was like dating.”

I giggled, surprised by the turn of conversation, and joked, “I told a very close friend once that foreign relations at the time could be greatly improved by the proper application of pot roast.”

Farro didn’t laugh.  Instead, he looked like I had punched him in the chest. “With a chocolate pie.. for dessert…” he whispered, steadily getting paler and paler.

By this point, Xiomara’s composure had gone from one of barely-constrained mirth to one of confusion, matching Tyche. I felt my stomach try to drop out of the FTL field as the ghost of a friend long since gone started screaming in my mind.  “He said not to kick the ass of anyone I’m dating…at least not in the declaration of war sense…”

Without missing a beat, he nodded. “And you said that if ghosting them as a form of embargo doesn’t work…”

“Bring out the heavy weaponry and go for a scorched-earth breakup,” I whispered hoarsely.  There was no possibility.

As Farro and I stood there in dumbstruck silence, I heard Xiomara ask Tyche “What are they talking about?”

“I have no idea,” my sister hissed back.

“But you speak fluent Reidish!”

“That isn’t what’s happening here,” she pleaded.  When I turned to her, I saw eyes that begged for an explanation. 

All I could do was give her a pleading glance before I turned back to meet Farro’s equally stunned expression.  “Fee?” he finally asked with a querulous tone.

That was all I had to hear. “Silannod?” Behind me, there was a yelp.  No doubt, it was Tyche realizing who I was speaking to.  I tried to smile, but I knew it was watery. “I told you I would survive the apocalypse.  It wasn’t zombies, but still…” ‘Silannod’ was the online name of a very good friend of mine from Before.  We never had the chance to meet in person, but we had spent hours each day talking about writing, books we liked, politics of the time… Anything that would have been too controversial for a casual acquaintance, we discussed as fervently as if we could solve all the problems of the world.  Even Tyche had been familiar with them, and had heard me talk about our conversations.

When the world ended, I counted them among the dead.  And now, looking him in the face, it was clear that he had done the same for me.

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[newstfionline]

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Pair of studies confirm there is water on the moon (Washington Post) There is water on the moon’s surface, and ice may be widespread in its many shadows, according to a pair of studies published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research confirms long-standing theories about the existence of lunar water that could someday enable astronauts to live there for extended periods. One scientific team found the telltale sign of water molecules, perhaps bound up in glass, in a sunlit region. Another group estimated the widespread prevalence of tiny shadowed pockmarks on the lunar landscape, possible shelter for water ice over an area of 15,000 square miles. Moon water has been eyed as a potential resource by NASA, which created a program named Artemis in 2019 to send American astronauts back to the moon this decade. Launching water to space costs thousands of dollars per gallon.

Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits’ (NYT) Ohio Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors. The University of Florida’s trustees this month took the first steps toward letting the school furlough faculty. The University of California, Berkeley, has paused admissions to its Ph.D. programs in anthropology, sociology and art history. As it resurges across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls. By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit that has prompted belt tightening. Though many colleges imposed stopgap measures such as hiring freezes and early retirements to save money in the spring, the persistence of the economic downturn is taking a devastating financial toll, pushing many to lay off or furlough employees, delay graduate admissions and even cut or consolidate core programs like liberal arts departments. “We haven’t seen a budget crisis like this in a generation,” said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education who has been tracking the administrative response to the pandemic. “There’s nothing off-limits at this point.”

Thousands Forced to Evacuate From California Fires (NYT) Two firefighters were gravely injured and tens of thousands of Californians were forced to flee their homes on Monday as two new fires ripped through Orange County. About 90,800 residents in Irvine were put under mandatory evacuation orders because of the Silverado Fire and the smaller Blue Ridge Fire, said Shane Sherwood, a division chief for the Orange County Fire Authority. High winds and low humidity fueled the fires’ rapid growth. About 4,000 firefighters were fighting 22 wildfires across the state on Monday, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. As evening approached, the Silverado Fire had burned about 7,200 acres and the Blue Ridge Fire 3,000 acres. Later Monday night, the Orange County Fire Authority said that the Blue Ridge Fire had grown to 6,600 acres

Why N.Y.C.’s Economic Recovery May Lag the Rest of the Country’s (NYT) New York, whose diversified economy had fueled unparalleled job growth in recent years, is now facing a bigger challenge in recovering from the pandemic than almost any other major city in the country. More than one million residents are out of work, and the unemployment rate is nearly double the national average. The city had tried to insulate itself from major downturns by shifting from tying its fortunes to the rise and fall of Wall Street. A thriving tech sector, a booming real estate industry and waves of international tourists had helped Broadway, hotels and restaurants prosper. But now, as the virus surges again in the region, tourists are still staying away and any hope that workers would refill the city’s office towers and support its businesses before the end of the year is fading. As a result, New York’s recovery is very likely to be slow and protracted, economists said. “This is an event that struck right at the heart of New York’s comparative advantages,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, a Wall Street research firm. “Being globally oriented, being stacked up in skyscrapers and packed together in stadiums: The very thing that made New York New York was undermined by the pandemic, was upended by it.”

Asylum-Seekers Face Violent ICE Coercion (Foreign Policy) U.S. immigration officers have threatened, pepper-sprayed, beaten, and choked asylum-seekers from Cameroon to coerce them to sign their own deportation orders, the Guardian reports. A coalition of advocacy groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a complaint earlier this month describing a “pattern of coercion” by ICE agents at a Mississippi detention center that it called “tantamount to torture.” According to multiple accounts in the complaint, immigration officials used the coercive tactics to compel detainees to sign documents that would waive their rights to further immigration hearings. At least one individual was hospitalized as a result. One man, identified by the initials C.A., described how officers broke his fingers as they sought to force his fingerprint onto a document. “Officers grabbed me, forced me on the ground, and pepper-sprayed my eyes. … I was crying, ‘I can’t breathe,’ because they were forcefully on top of me pressing their body weight on top of me. My eyes were so hot. They dragged me outside by both hands,” said the individual, who was prevented from speaking to his lawyer before signing the document. C.A. was placed on a deportation flight on Oct. 13 but was one of two Cameroonians pulled off the plane moments before takeoff, as an investigation had begun into the allegations of abuse. At least 100 asylum-seekers, including many from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, were deported on the same flight. For two consecutive years, the Norwegian Refugee Council has deemed Cameroon the world’s most neglected displacement crisis due to an insurgency in the north and a brutal government crackdown on two English-speaking separatist regions. Since 2016, the two conflicts have killed over 3,000 people and displaced more than 700,000.

Belgium’s former King meets estranged daughter for first time (Reuters) Belgium’s former King Albert has met his daughter Delphine for the first time, after she won a seven-year legal battle to prove that he is her father, earning recognition as a princess. The two met Albert’s wife, Queen Paola, last Sunday at their royal residence, the Belvedere castle, in the Brussels suburb of Laeken, the royal household said on Tuesday. “This Sunday October 25, a new chapter has opened, filled with emotions, calm, understanding and also hope,” the king, the queen and Delphine said in a statement. “Our meeting took place at the Belvedere Castle, a meeting during which each of us was able to express, calmly and with empathy, our feelings and our experiences.” “After the turmoil, the wounds and the suffering, comes the time for forgiveness, healing and reconciliation. This is the path, patient and at times difficult, that we have decided to take resolutely together.” Delphine Boel, 52, a Belgian artist, fought a seven-year legal battle to prove that the former king is her father. After a DNA test confirmed that, a court granted her the title of princess earlier this month. Albert, 86, who abdicated six years ago in favour of his son Philippe, had long contested Boel’s claim.

Germany cautions Thai king (Foreign Policy) Pro-democracy protesters in Thailand marched on the German Embassy in Bangkok to deliver a letter asking German authorities to investigate whether King Maha Vajiralongkorn “has conducted Thai politics using his royal prerogative from German soil or not.” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, speaking from Berlin, said the German government was “examining” the issue “and if there are things we feel to be unlawful, then that will have immediate consequences.”

Belarus Opposition Calls General Strike, as Protesters Gird for Long Fight (NYT) When Belarusians took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in August, after Mr. Lukashenko claimed a re-election victory that was widely seen as fraudulent, many predicted that it was only a matter of days or weeks until the longtime authoritarian leader stepped down. Instead, Mr. Lukashenko and the large swath of the public that is arrayed against him have settled into a drawn-out test of wills, with their country’s future on the line. Protesters continue to turn out in the tens of thousands every Sunday, chanting “Go away!” and waving the white-red-white flag of the opposition. Mr. Lukashenko responds with waves of crackdowns by the police and, backed by Russia, appears determined to wait the protests out. “In such a tense situation, absolutely anything could turn out to be the trigger that topples the system,” said Artyom Shraibman, a Minsk-based nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It could end in the course of a week, or it might not die for a year. No revolution has ever gone according to plan.” The authorities’ use of violence to try to put down the protests appears to be escalating, further feeding the anger in Belarusian society. It was a bout of severe police violence early in the uprising that supercharged the protests.

World’s largest IPO shows power of mobile payments in China (Washington Post) Go to a store, hop in a taxi, or even stop by a street peddler’s cart in China, and you will see QR codes strung up on colorful laminated squares. These mobile payment codes are the default way money changes hands in China these days, and the reason Ant Group’s initial public offering is set to be the world’s largest. China’s Ant Group—the Alibaba spinoff behind the ubiquitous blue QR payment codes across the world’s second-largest economy—announced plans on Monday to raise more than $34 billion in a joint listing across Shanghai and Hong Kong. This would trounce last year’s listing of oil titan Saudi Aramco, the reigning IPO champion. Mobile payments have replaced cash and credit cards in China as the preferred payment method, thanks to easy-to-use apps made by Ant Group and its closest rival Tencent. Ant Group’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay are similar in spirit to wildly popular U.S. stock trading app Robinhood, in that they are user-friendly enough that anyone with a smartphone and bank account can make complicated financial transactions with a click or swipe.

China sanctions U.S. weapons manufacturers (Foreign Policy) China will impose sanctions on three U.S.-based weapons manufacturers after the U.S. State Department approved the sale of $1.8 billion worth of weapons and equipment to Taiwan last Wednesday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the sanctions were necessary “in order to uphold national interests.” It’s not yet clear what form the sanctions will take. More sanctions could soon be on the way, as the State Department approved a further $2.37 billion in weapons sales to Taiwan on Monday.

Vietnam evacuating low-lying areas as strong typhoon nears (AP) Vietnam scrambled Tuesday to evacuate more than a million people in its central lowlands as a strong typhoon approached while some regions are still dealing with the aftermath of recent killer floods, state media said. Typhoon Molave is forecast to slam into Vietnam’s south central coast with sustained winds of up to 135 kilometers (84 miles) per hour on Wednesday morning, according to the official Vietnam News Agency. The typhoon left at least 3 people dead and 13 missing and displaced more than 120,000 villagers in the Philippines before blowing toward Vietnam. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc ordered provincial authorities late Monday to prepare to evacuate about 1.3 million people in regions lying on the typhoon’s path. Phuc expressed fears that Molave, the latest disturbance to threaten Vietnam this month, could be as deadly as Typhoon Damrey, which battered the country’s central region in 2017 and left more than a hundred people dead.

Vaccines, not spy planes: U.S. misfires in Southeast Asia For months, by Zoom calls and then by jet, Indonesian ministers and officials scoured the world for access to a vaccine for the coronavirus that Southeast Asia’s biggest country is struggling to control. This month, their campaign paid off. Three Chinese companies committed 250 million doses of vaccines to the archipelago of 270 million people. A letter of intent was signed with a UK-based company for another 100 million. Absent from these pledges: the United States. Not only was it not promising any vaccine, but months earlier the United States shocked Indonesian officials by asking to land and refuel its spy planes in the territory, four senior Indonesian officials told Reuters. This would reverse a decades-long policy of strategic neutrality in the country. Washington’s campaign to buttress its influence in the region—part of its escalating global rivalry with China—has been misfiring, say government officials and analysts.

Bomb at seminary in Pakistan kills 8 students, wounds 136 (AP) A powerful bomb blast ripped through an Islamic seminary on the outskirts of the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar on Tuesday morning, killing at least eight students and wounding 136 others, police and a hospital spokesman said. The bombing happened as a prominent religious scholar during a special class was delivering a lecture about the teachings of Islam at the main hall of the Jamia Zubairia madrassa, said police officer Waqar Azim. The attack comes days after Pakistani intelligence alerted that militants could target public places and important buildings, including seminaries and mosques across Pakistan, including Peshawar.

Hopes for peace in Libya (Foreign Policy) The two main factions in Libya’s civil war agreed to a nationwide cease-fire at U.N.-backed talks in Geneva on Friday. Previous attempts to broker an end to the yearslong conflict have failed, but the new agreement has cautiously raised hopes that it will lay the groundwork for a peace deal. The cease-fire, signed by the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord and Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army, calls for all front-line forces to return to their bases and all mercenaries and foreign troops to withdraw within three months. The Libyan conflict has drawn in a multitude of international players, including Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. Their actions in the coming months could make or break the cease-fire.

[antoine-roquentin]

In the heart of the US Capitol there’s a small men’s room with an uplifting Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt quotation above the door. Making use of the facilities there after lunch in the nearby House dining room about a year ago, I found myself standing next to Trent Lott. Once a mighty power in the building as Senate Republican leader, he had been forced to resign his post following some imprudently affectionate references to his fellow Republican senator, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Now he was visiting the Capitol as a lucratively employed lobbyist.

The bathroom in which we stood, Lott remarked affably, once served a higher purpose. History had been made there. “When I first came to Washington as a junior staffer in 1968,” he explained, “this was the private hideaway office of Bill Colmer, chairman of the House Rules Committee.” Colmer, a long-serving Mississippi Democrat and Lott’s boss, was an influential figure. The committee he ruled controlled whether bills lived or died, the latter being the customary fate of proposed civil-rights legislation that reached his desk. “On Thursday nights,” Lott continued, “he and members of the leadership from both sides of the House would meet here to smoke cigars, drink cheap bourbon, play gin rummy, and discuss business. There was a chemistry, they understood each other. It was a magical thing.” He sighed wistfully at the memory of a more harmonious age, in which our elders and betters could arrange the nation’s affairs behind closed doors.

I don’t know that Joe Biden, currently leading the polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, ever frequented that particular restroom, in either its bygone or contemporary manifestation, but it could serve as a fitting shrine to all that he stands for. Biden has long served as high priest of the doctrine that our legislative problems derive merely from superficial disagreements, rather than fundamental differences over matters of principle. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” he declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. “It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies.”

Given his success in early polling, it would seem that this message resonates with many voters, at least when they are talking to pollsters. After all, according to orthodox wisdom, there is no more commendable virtue in American political custom and practice than bipartisanship. Politicians on the stump fervently assure voters that they will strive with every sinew to “work across the aisle” to deliver “commonsense solutions,” and those who express the sentiment eloquently can expect widespread approval. Barack Obama famously launched himself toward the White House with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention proclaiming that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only a “United States of America.”

By tapping into these popular tropes—“The system is broken,” “Why can’t Congress just get along?”—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare “reform,” Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.

Rather than admit this, Biden has long found it more profitable to assert that political divisions can be settled by men endowed with statesmanlike vision and goodwill—in other words, men such as himself. His frequent eulogies for public figures have tended to play heavily on this theme. Thus his memorial speech for Republican standard-bearer John McCain dwelled predictably on the cross-party nature of their relationship, beginning with his opening: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat, and I loved John McCain.” Continuing in that vein, he related how he and McCain had once been chided by their respective party leaderships for spending so much time in each other’s company on the Senate floor, and referred fondly to the days when senators Teddy Kennedy and James Eastland, the latter a die-hard racist and ruthless suppressor of civil-rights bills, would “fight like hell on civil rights and then go have lunch together, down in the Senate dining room.”

Clearly, there is merit in the ability to craft compromise between opposing viewpoints in order to produce an effective result. John Ritch, formerly a US ambassador and top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked closely with Biden for two decades, and has nothing but praise for his negotiating skills. “I’ve never seen anyone better at presiding over a group of politicians who represent conflicting egos and interests and using a combination of conciliation, humor, and muscle to cajole them into an agreed way forward,” Ritch told me recently. “Joe Biden has learned the skills to get things done in Washington. And I’ve seen him apply it equally with foreign leaders.”

The value of compromise, however, depends on what result is produced, and who benefits thereby. ­McCain’s record had at least a few commendable features, such as his opposition to torture (though never, of course, war). But it is hard to find much admirable in the character of a tireless defender of institutional racism like Strom Thurmond. Hence, Trent Lott’s words of praise—regretting that the old racist had lost when he ran as a Dixiecrat in the 1948 presidential election—had been deemed terminally unacceptable.

It fell to Biden to highlight some redeeming qualities when called on, inevitably, to deliver Thurmond’s eulogy following the latter’s death in 2003 at the age of one hundred. Biden reminisced with affection about the unlikely friendship between the deceased and himself. Despite having arrived at the Senate at age twenty-nine “emboldened, angered, and outraged about the treatment of African Americans in this country,” he said, he nevertheless found common cause on important issues with the late senator from South Carolina, who had been wont to describe civil-rights activists as “red pawns and publicity seekers.”

One such issue, as Branko Marcetic has pitilessly chronicled in Jacobin, was a shared opposition to federally mandated busing in the effort to integrate schools, an opposition Biden predicted would be ultimately adopted by liberal holdouts. “The black community justifiably is jittery,” Biden admitted to the Washington Post in 1975 with regard to his position. “I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the [Senate] floor.”

Biden was responding to criticism of legislation he had introduced that effectively barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from compelling communities to bus pupils using federal funds. This amendment was meant to be an alternative to a more extreme proposal put forward by a friend of Biden’s, hall-of-fame racist Jesse Helms (Biden had initially supported Helms’s version). Nevertheless, the Washington Post described Biden’s amendment as “denying the possibility for equal educational opportunities to minority youngsters trapped in ill-equipped inner-city schools.” Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the sole African-American senator, called Biden’s measure “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”

The ensuing legislation might also have brought to voters’ minds the name of the venerable Thurmond, Biden’s partner in this effort. Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior. The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that “through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,” Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine “no bigger than [a] quarter.” That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.

Despite pleas from the ­NAACP and the ­ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative” with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.

In subsequent years, as his crime legislation, particularly on mandatory sentences, attracted efforts at reform, Biden began expressing a certain remorse. “I am part of the problem that I have been trying to solve since then, because I think the disparity [between crack and powder cocaine sentences] is way out of line,” he declared at a Senate hearing in 2008. However, there is little indication that his words were matched by actions, especially after he moved to the vice presidency the following year. The executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Eric Sterling, who worked on the original legislation in the House as a congressional counsel, told me, “During the eight years he was vice president, I never saw him take a leadership role in the area of drug policy, never saw him get out in front on the issue like he did on same-sex marriage, for example. Biden could have taken a stronger line [with Obama] privately or publicly, and he did not.”

While many black Americans will neither forgive nor forget how they, along with relatives and friends, were accorded the lifetime stigma of a felony conviction, many other Americans are only now beginning to count the costs of these viciously repressive initiatives. As a result, criminal justice reform has emerged as a popular issue across the political spectrum, including among conservatives eager to burnish otherwise illiberal credentials. Ironically, this has led, in theory, to a modest unraveling of a portion of Biden’s bipartisan crime-fighting legacy.

Last December, as Donald Trump’s erratic regime was falling into increasing disarray, the political-media class briefly united in celebration of an exercise in bipartisanship: the First Step Act. Billed as a long overdue overhaul of the criminal justice system, the legislation received rapturous reviews for its display of cross-party cooperation, headlined by Jared Kushner’s partnership with liberal talk-show host Van Jones. In truth, this was a very modest first step. It offered the possibility of release to some 2,600 federal inmates, whose relief from excessive sentences would require the goodwill of both prosecutors and police, as well as forbidding some especially barbaric practices in federal prisons, such as the shackling of pregnant inmates. Overall, it amounted to little more than a textbook exercise in aisle bridging, a triumph of form over substance.

In the near term, it’s unlikely that there will be further bipartisan attempts to chip away at Biden’s legislative legacy, a legacy that includes an inconsistent (to put it mildly) record on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade “went too far,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” For some years his votes were consistent with that view. He supported the notorious Hyde Amendment prohibiting any and all federal funding for abortions, and fathered the “Biden Amendment” that banned the use of US foreign aid for abortion research.

As the 1980s wore on, however, and Biden’s presidential ambitions started to swell, he began to cast fewer antiabortion votes (with some exceptions), and led the potent opposition to Judge Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then came Clarence Thomas. Even before Anita Hill reluctantly surfaced with her convincing recollections of unpleasant encounters with the porn-obsessed judge, Biden was fumbling his momentous responsibility of directing the hearings. As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson report in Strange Justice, their book about the Thomas nomination battle, Biden’s questions were “sometimes so long and convoluted that Thomas would forget what the question was.” Biden prided himself on his legal scholarship, Mayer and Abramson suggest, and thus his questions were often designed “to show off [his] legal acumen rather than to elicit answers.”

More damningly, Biden not only allowed fellow committee members to mount a sustained barrage of vicious attacks on Hill: he wrapped up the hearings without calling at least two potential witnesses who could have convincingly corroborated Hill’s testimony and, by extension, indicated that the nominee had perjured himself on a sustained basis throughout the hearings. As Mayer and Abramson write, “Hill’s reputation was not foremost among the committee’s worries. The Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, appear to have been far more concerned with their own reputations,” and feared a Republican-stoked public backlash if they aired more details of Thomas’s sexual proclivities. Hill was therefore thrown to the wolves, and America was saddled with a Supreme Court justice of limited legal qualifications and extreme right-wing views (which he had taken pains to deny while under oath).

Fifteen years later, Biden would repeat this exercise in hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, yet another grim product of the Republican judicial-selection machinery. True to form, in his opening round of questions, Biden droned on for the better part of half an hour, allowing Alito barely five minutes to explain his views. As the torrent of verbiage washed over the hearing room, fellow Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy could only glower at Biden in impotent frustration.

Biden’s record on race and women did him little damage with the voters of Delaware, who regularly returned him to the Senate with comfortable margins. On race, at least, Biden affected to believe that Delawareans’ views might be closer to those of his old buddy Thurmond than those of the “Northeast liberal” he sometimes claimed to be. “You don’t know my state,” he told Fox as he geared up for his first attempt on the White House in 2006. “My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Months later, in front of a largely Republican audience in South Carolina, he joked that the only reason Delaware had fought with the North in the Civil War was “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Whether or not most Delawareans are proud of their slaveholding history, there are some causes that they, or at least the dominant power brokers in the state, hold especially dear. Foremost among them is Delaware’s status as a freewheeling tax haven. State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks, and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.

“It’s a corporate whore state, of course,” the anonymous former Biden staffer remarked to me offhandedly in a recent conversation. He stressed that in “a small state with thirty-five thousand bank employees, apart from all the lawyers and others from the financial industry,” Biden was never going to stray too far from the industry’s priorities. We were discussing bankruptcy, an issue that has highlighted Biden’s fealty to the banks. Unsurprisingly, Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools. Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.

These initiatives, however, were only precursors to the finance lobby’s magnum opus: the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This carefully crafted flail of the poor made it almost impossible for borrowers to get traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which debt forgiveness enables people to rebuild their lives and businesses. Instead, the law subjected them to the far harsher provisions of Chapter 13, effectively turning borrowers into indentured servants of institutions like the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. It made its way onto the statute books after a lopsided 74–25 vote (bipartisanship!), with Biden, naturally, voting in favor.

It was, in fact, the second version of the bill. An earlier iteration had passed Congress in 2000 with Biden’s support, but President Clinton refused to sign it at the urging of the first lady, who had been briefed on its iniquities by Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, Warren witheringly summarized Biden’s advocacy of the earlier bill in a 2002 paper:

His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.

Furthermore, she added tartly, “This important part of Senator Biden’s legislative work also appears to be missing from his Web site and publicity releases.” No doubt coincidentally, the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.

It should go without saying, then, that Biden was among the ninety senators on one of the fatal (to the rest of us) legislative gifts presented to Wall Street back in the Clinton era: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The act repealed the hallowed Depression-era Glass–Steagall legislation that severed investment banking from commercial banking, thereby permitting the combined operations to gamble with depositors’ money, and ultimately ushering in the 2008 crash. “The worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the United States Senate,” admitted Biden in December 2016, as he prepared to leave office. Seventeen years too late, he explained that the act had “allowed banks with deposits to take on risky investments, putting the whole system at risk.”

In the meantime, of course, he had been vice president of the United States for eight years, and thus in a position to address the consequences of his (and his fellow senators’) actions by using his power to press for criminal investigations. His longtime faithful aide, Ted Kaufman, in fact, had taken over his Senate seat and was urging such probes. Yet there is not the slightest sign that Biden used his influence to encourage pursuit of the financial fraudsters. As he opined in a 2018 talk at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” Characteristically, he described gross inequalities in wealth mainly as a threat to bipartisanship: “This gap is yawning, and it’s having the effect of pulling us apart. You see the politics of it.”

Biden’s rightward bipartisan inclinations are not the only source of his alleged appeal. In an imitation of Hillary Clinton’s tactics in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Biden has advertised himself as the candidate of “experience.” Indeed, in his self-estimation he is the “most qualified person in the country to be president.” It’s a claim mainly rooted in foreign policy, a field where, theoretically, partisan politics are deposited at the water’s edge and Biden’s negotiating talents and expertise are seen to their best advantage.

He boasts the same potent acquaintances with world leaders that helped earn Clinton a similar “most qualified” label on her failed presidential job application and, like her, has been a reliable hawk, not least when occupying the high-profile chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. An ardent proponent of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, an ill-conceived initiative that has served as an enduring provocation of Russian hostility toward the West, Biden voted enthusiastically to authorize Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a major proponent of Clinton’s war in Kosovo, and pushed for military intervention in Sudan.

Presumably in deference to this record, Obama entrusted his vice president with a number of foreign policy tasks over the years, beginning with “quarterbacking,” as Biden put it, US relations with Iraq. “Joe will do Iraq,” the president told his foreign policy team a few weeks after being sworn in. “He knows it, he knows the players.” It proved to be an unfortunate choice, at least for Iraqis. In 2006, the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had selected Nouri al-Maliki, a relatively obscure Shiite politician, to be the country’s prime minister. “Are you serious?” exclaimed a startled Maliki when Khalilzad informed him of the decision. But Maliki proved to be a determinedly sectarian ruler, persecuting the Sunni tribes that had switched sides to aid US forces during the so-called surge of 2007–08. In addition, he sparked widespread allegations of corruption. According to the Iraqi Commission of Integrity set up after his departure, as much as $500 billion was siphoned off from government coffers during Maliki’s eight years in power.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections, one of Maliki’s rivals, boasting a nonsectarian base of support, won the most seats, though not a majority. According to present and former Iraqi officials, Biden’s emissaries pressed hard to assemble a coalition that would reinstall Maliki as prime minister. “It was clear they were not interested in anyone else,” one Iraqi diplomat told me. “Biden himself was very scrappy—he wouldn’t listen to argument.” The consequences were, in the official’s words, “disastrous.” In keeping with the general corruption of his regime, Maliki allowed the country’s security forces to deteriorate. Command of an army division could be purchased for $2 million, whereupon the buyer might recoup his investment with exactions from the civilian population. Therefore, when the Islamic State erupted out of Syria and moved against major Iraqi cities, there were no effective defenses. With Islamic State fighters an hour’s drive from Baghdad, the United States belatedly rushed to push Maliki aside and install a more competent leader, the Shiite politician and former government minister Haider al-Abadi. (Biden’s camp disputed the Iraqi official’s assertion that the United States pressed for Maliki in 2010. “We had no brief for any individual,” said Tony Blinken, who served as Biden’s national security adviser at the time.)

Biden devotes considerable space to this episode in Promise Me, Dad, his political and personal memoir documenting the year in which his son Beau slowly succumbed to cancer. But although we learn much about Biden’s relationship with Abadi, and the key role he played in getting vital help to the beleaguered Iraqi regime, there is little indication of his past with Maliki aside from a glancing reference to “stubbornly sectarian policies.”

Promise Me, Dad also covers Biden’s involvement in the other countries allotted to him by President Obama: Ukraine, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Anyone seeking insight from the book into the recent history of these regions, or of actual US policy and actions there, should look elsewhere. He has little to say, for example, about the well-chronicled involvement of US officials in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, still less on whether he himself was involved. He records his strenuous efforts to funnel ­IMF loans to the country following anti-­corruption measures introduced by the government without noting that much of the IMF money was almost immediately stolen and spirited out of Ukraine by an oligarch close to the government. Nor, for that matter, do we learn anything about his son Hunter’s involvement in that nation’s business affairs via his position on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.

Biden’s recollections of his involvement in Central American affairs are no more forthright, and no more insightful. There is no mention of the 2009 coup in Honduras, endorsed and supported by the United States, that displaced the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, nor of that country’s subsequent descent into the rule of a corrupt oligarchy accused of ties to drug traffickers. He has nothing but warm words for Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president, who financed his 2013 election campaign with $90 million stolen from the Honduran health service and more recently defied his country’s constitution by running for a second term. Instead, we read much about Biden’s shepherding of the Hernández regime, along with its Central American neighbors El Salvador and Guatemala, into the Alliance for Prosperity, an agreement in which the signatories pledged to improve education, health care, women’s rights, justice systems, etc., in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid. In the words of Professor Dana Frank of UC Santa Cruz, the alliance “supports the very economic sectors that are actively destroying the Honduran economy and environment, like mega-dams, mining, tourism, and African palms,” reducing most of the population to poverty and spurring them to seek something better north of the border. The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the “caravan” used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections.

Biden’s claims of experience on the world stage, therefore, cannot be denied. True, the experience has been routinely disastrous for those on the receiving end, but on the other hand, that is a common fate for those subjected, under any administration, to the operations of our foreign policy apparatus.

Given Biden’s all too evident shortcomings in the fields of domestic and foreign policy, defenders inevitably retreat to the “electability” argument, which contends that he is the only Democrat on the horizon capable of beating Trump—a view that Biden, naturally, endorses. Specifically, this notion rests on the belief that Biden has unequaled appeal among the white working-class voters that many Democrats are eager to court.

To be fair, Biden has earned high ratings from the AFL-CIO thanks to his support for matters such as union organizing rights and a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, he also supported NAFTA in 1994 and permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, two votes that sounded the death knell for America’s manufacturing economy. Regardless of how justified his pro-labor reputation may be, however, it’s far from clear that the working class holds Biden in any special regard—his two presidential races imploded before any blue-collar workers had a chance to vote for him.

It is this fact that makes the electability argument so puzzling. Biden’s initial bid for the prize in 1988 famously blew up when rivals unkindly publicized his plagiarism of a stump speech given by Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party politician. (In Britain, Kinnock was known as “the Welsh Windbag,” which may have encouraged the logorrheic Biden to feel a kinship.) Biden partisans pointed out that he had cited Kinnock on previous occasions, though he didn’t always remember to do so. Either way, it was a bizarre snafu. It also emerged that Biden had been incorporating chunks of speeches from both Bobby and Jack Kennedy along with Hubert Humphrey in his remarks without attribution (although reportedly some of this was the work of speechwriter Pat Caddell).

Another gaffe helped upend Biden’s second White House bid, in 2007, when he referred to Barack Obama in patronizing terms as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” The campaign cratered at the very first hurdle, the Iowa caucuses, where Biden came in fifth, with less than 1 percent of the votes. “It was humiliating,” recalled the ex-staffer. (The “gaffes” seem to take physical form on occasion. “He has a bit of a Me Too problem,” a leading female Democratic activist and fund-raiser told me, referring to his overly tactile approach to interacting with women. “We never had a talk when he wasn’t stroking my back.” He has already faced heckling on the topic, and videos of this behavior during the course of public events and photo ops have been widely circulated.)

Further to the issue of Biden’s assurances that he is the man to beat Trump is the awkward fact that, as the former staffer told me, “he lacks the discipline to build the nuts and bolts of a modern presidential campaign.” Biden “hated having to take orders from [David] Axelrod and the other Obama people as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Campaign aides used to say to him, ‘I’ve got three words for you: Air Force Two.’” My informant stressed that Biden “sucks at fund-raising. He never had to try very hard in Delaware. Staff would do it for him.” Certainly, Biden’s current campaign funds would appear to confirm this contention. His PAC, American Possibilities, had raised only two and a half million dollars by the end of 2018, a surprisingly insignificant amount for a veteran senator and two-term vice president. Furthermore, although the PAC’s stated purpose is to “support candidates who believe in American possibilities,” less than a quarter of the money had found its way to Democratic candidates in time for the November midterms, encouraging speculation that Biden is not really that serious about the essential brass tacks of a presidential campaign—which would include building a strong base of support among Democratic officeholders.

Other organizations in the Biden universe behave similarly, expending much of their income on staff salaries and little on their ostensible function. According to an exhaustive New York Times investigation, salaries accounted for 45 percent of spending by the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children in 2016 and 2017. Similarly, three quarters of the money the Biden Cancer Initiative spent in 2017 went toward salaries and other compensation, including over half a million dollars for its president, Greg Simon, formerly the executive director of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force during the Obama Administration. Outside the inner circle of senior aides, there does not appear to be an extended Biden network among political professionals standing ready to raise money and perform other tasks necessary to a White House bid, in the way that Hillary Clinton had a network across the political world composed of people who had worked for her and her husband. “Biden doesn’t have that,” his former staffer told me, “because he’s indifferent to staff.” It’s a sentiment that’s been expressed to me by many in the election industry, including a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. “Everyone else is getting everything set up to go once the trigger is pulled,” this individual told me recently. “I myself have firm offers from the [Kamala] Harris and [Cory] Booker campaigns. The Biden people talked to me too, but they could only say, ‘If we run, we’d love to bring you into the fold.’”

At the start of the new year, Biden must have been living in the best of all possible worlds. As he engaged in well-publicized ruminations on whether or not to run, he was enjoying a high profile, with commensurate benefits of sizable book sales and hundred-thousand-dollar speaking engagements. Even more importantly, Biden found himself relevant again. “You’re either on the way up,” he likes to say, “or you’re on the way down,” which is why the temptation to reject the lessons of his two hopelessly bungled White House campaigns has been so overwhelming. Regardless of the current election cycle’s endgame, though, it’s safe to assume that his undimmed ego will never permit any reflection on whether voters who have been eagerly voting for change will ever really settle for Uncle Joe, champion of yesterday’s sordid compromises.

[crystalblueskie]

I got bored and wrote some jokes. Tell me if you like them.

So, to get started let me tell you a little something about my family. My mom is disabled and so she has a service dog named Callie Ann...that is such a country white girl name, Callie Ann, amirite? Anyways, so this dog obviously goes everywhere with us: doctors offices, grocery store, restaurants. Normal service dog stuff, you know? But for some reason, everybody stares at her like it's the weirdest thing they've ever seen. A dog wearing a vest walking around Target... I use Target because Walmart is too controversial. Walmart: EVIL!! Target: fair game. Walmart: Trump Target:...any other president. Anyways: dog wearing a vest walking around Target, a vest that blatantly say "SERVICE DOG" on it mind you and random people like to just walks up to us as we and the dog are minding our own business and ask "Is she a service dog?" *Stares bewildered* and every time I'm thinking in my head "I DON'T KNOW, WHY DON'T YOU ASK HER VEST!"..."no, no ma'am we just slapped a service dog vest on her so she can go everywhere with us. Thank you for asking. Goodbye. Have a nice day." Another thing about this dog, I love her to death I really do. It's fun we have a young dog in the house again, she loves to play with anything that squeaks or makes a weird noise, I'm getting exercise again! Yay! But my mother takes it to a WHOLE 'NOTHER LEVEL!! We'll out shopping...*whispers* at Target...and we'll walk past the dog section... I'm trying to walk past as fast as possible. My mom stops right at the mouth of the aisle and walks down it. Shit, I know how this goes. My mom and her dog happily trot down the aisle and her dog smells all of the toy until eventually she smells a toy for more than three seconds...my mom is ready. She talks in that annoying baby voice, you know the voice right? *in an annoying baby voice* "Do you like that toy? Yeah! You like that toy? You want that toy? I'm gonna get you that toy!" SHIT. Toy goes in the cart...We end up leaving the store with more dog treats and a goddamn dog toy. Ever. Single. Time. And I'm over here thinking, if I got a toy every time we left the house as a child, I would have more toys than my tiny, little, ADD-riddled brain could handle. Now a days I'm a old 24 years old. If you don't know what that means, it means I'm mentally 24 years old and physically 80 years old. I'll be walking around the house like this *walks around like an old lady holding my back* and my mom will be looking at me and ask "what the hell are you doing?" And I'll yell back to her "what does it look like? My back hurts!!" I look outside "Get the hell of my lawn, you mangy kids!!" Anyways that obviously means I am a young millennial, which basically means that I remember when Netflix was delivered to your front porch and when Blockbuster was a thing. Also, I was told I needed to go to college or I wouldn't amount to anything. Jokes on them, I still didn't amount to anything. I got a Bachelors in Individualized Studies which means I was indecisive about my major and when I graduated I got a piece of paper basically thanking me for my participation. After 5 years of college, I got a piece of paper thanking me for participating in college. Think about that. This is what happened, I was originally going to school to become a teacher, but to become a teacher you must first waste your time taking a bunch of bullshit teaching classes like "How to teach Math" and then after about 3 years you have to submit a portfolio answering questions such as "Why do you want to become a teacher?" Maybe because I need a job and I was told the only way to get one that pays well was to go to college and I like kids sometimes and I took a course in school where I was basically a teachers assistant for 2 credits a semester and this seemed like the easiest job to get at the rip old age of 18. WRONG!! I was so very wrong!! What my teachers and professors failed to tell me was that to even get accepted into my colleges teaching program is not only do we have to answer the portfolio questions is: you have to pass 2 tests. This is what the TAKS tests were really preparing me for. One test was on Math. At this point, I have not done basic Mathematics in 2 years. The other test was on English and Grammar. I have barely passed my English courses with C's my entire life. The cards were not in my favor. You get approximately 60 minutes to finish each test. They take you into this office and you get a little locker and a key in exchange for your Drivers License. You are expected to place your phone and your purse or bag in the locker. They then place you in a separate room with desks with computer lined up against the wall. And at the opposite end of the room, smack in the center is a person that is paid to sit there and make sure you don't cheat. That is their only job, to sit there and stare at you like this *stares around room* am I making you nervous? *whispers* good. Because that is exactly how I felt the entire 60 minutes. And the thing is they don't even give you scratch paper for the math portion, just a TI-84 calculator. You know the ones that cost like 250 dollars and were fucking MANDATORY in middle school? Little secret about those calculators, they have 4 games on them. Yup. Found that out really quick. I used to sit in class on my calculator and the teachers would be none the wiser as I played the same game on my expensive calculator for the whole hour. I still play on it to this day. Anywho, no scratch paper, just an expensive calculator that I can play games on but forgot how to graph on. And I don't know about you guys, but I can't do math in my head like some people, I'm not wired that way. So, I had to go up to the creepy guy paid to stare at us and ask him for scratch paper. At one point I got so involved in solving a problem that I kept getting answers that were not multiple choice options, that I ran out of time and automatic failed 8 out of about 50 questions. A month later I found out that I somehow managed to get a B on a test I didn't finish. *whispers* I'll take it. So, the first time I turned in my portfolio, I had the tests scores that they were looking for but not the detailed answers to their profound questions. I obviously did not get into the teaching education program the first time. A year later I was allowed to turn in my portfolio again. This time I got smart, I made my sister proofread and rewrite my answers for the incentive of 100 dollars of my financial aid. *whispers* I got in. Now at this point, you're probably wondering why I told you all of this and why I don't have a Bachelors in Early Childhood Education like I intended after I went through the torture of 5 years of college and my acceptance into the TEP and the answer to that is, I showed up to the TEP orientation to be told that I had to take 2 more years of teaching courses and at that point I had been in college for nearly 5 years and I was like "There is no way in Hell that I was going to graduate after nearly 7 years of college just to teach children how to count and what the primary colors are." That was probably my biggest mistake in life. Just FYI, all of your childhoods are a lie. Red and Blue are not Primary colors. Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are the true Primary colors according to the art wheel. To those of you that don't know Cyan can also be called Sky Blue and Magenta is a bright shade of Pink. We good? Good. The definition of a Primary color is a color that cannot be made by combining any two colors. They just exist in the world as is. Still good? Okay. Blue and Red by definition are not Primary colors because they can be made by combining two colors. Blue can be made by combining Cyan and Magenta. Red by combining Yellow and Magenta. They are by definition Secondary colors, colors that can be made by combining two primary colors. Look at that, you came out to have a good time and I tricked you into learning something, I am a teacher. I'm just kidding, I'm lying I didn't always know that. I always thought the Primary colors were Blue, Red, and Yellow just like all of you. I learned that how everyone learns things nowadays, YouTube. Anyways, moving on. The other day I couldn't sleep to save my soul, I had insomnia. And I noticed the weird way that I lay in my bed. It looks a little something like this. *walks over to a pillow and Petunia laying in the middle of the floor* One moment I'll be laying like this *places right foot on side of left knee* You think that ones weird wait until you see the next one. Next minute I'll turn over and be laying like this *place left foot on top of right knee* and then I'll turn over again and do this *pull legs up closer to my body and place them slightly apart* I don't know what this one is, it's like when Deadpool got ripped in half by Juggernaut in Deadpool 2, sorry spoilers. And his lower half has to regrow and he's standing there in front of the remainder of X-Force and Cable but his legs are that of a toddler. That's what this looks like to me, a grown ass person with baby legs trying to run away from something. And then I'll turn over AGAIN and do this *lays almost on front and places left foot of the side of right knee* know this one , this ones not even a sleep position, this is the fucking tree pose from my beginners yoga class. *Stands up and does the tree pose placing both palms together.* Just *hums yoga hum*. That's what that is right there. Haha. I got so bored one morning around 6 o'clock that I decided to clean the mess that was my closet. I had shoes thrown all over the floor of the closet and smack in the middle was a laundry basket that had all the clothes I had ever worn in 3 months. I opened the doors up *pretends to open doors* and I just screamed *screams* and then promptly fainted. Right in front of my closet. That is how messy it was. And the ironic part is that I have OCD. That mess was too much for my tiny, little OCD-riddled brain could handle at 6 in the morning. Which was ironic considering the fact that I had been living with it for 3 months and my OCD didn't seem to mind. But the minute my brain decided it wanted to clean that mess, suddenly my brain was overwhelmed. It took me approximately 2 hours to clean out the junk filled drawers in my dresser and put all of my spring/summer clothes away. Some of you probably noticed I said spring/summer clothes, that is because my autumn/winter clothes do not fit in my room anywhere. So they lay in a tote, a room away, until the temperature starts to drop, and then I would change them out. Men you don't realize this but every girl you know has more clothes than she can count, and some of those clothes, *whispers* she don't even wear. I have a half a closet full of skater dresses, that I wear once in a goddamn blue moon, just because I wanted to feel pretty that day. Interesting thing about switching clothes out, it's not even a new thing. Back in the 19-whatever's girls and women would have a hope chest that was filled with dresses for the spring/summer time when it was autumn/winter outside, and vise versa when it was spring/summer outside. I learned that story from my beautiful mother over there, because one day I pointed to her mothers hope chest and asked what it was used for. Interesting fact about me and my grandmother is that if you look at pictures of her when she was around the age of 13 sitting at the pool, my 13 year old self looked exactly like her, facial expression and all. My grandma unfortunately died of Breast Cancer 5 years after giving birth to my mother, her only surviving biological child. I say "biological child" because after my grandma had so many miscarriages and stillborns, she and my grandpa gave up and went to purchase a child *whipers* from Target. Haha. I'm just kidding, everyone knows that babies come from heaven and that storks carry them down in their beaks to a random families' front porch and leave the baby there to get stepped one when the Husband or Wife goes to check the mail. Probably the Wife, husbands are useless at running errands. You tell a man to go to the store to get 5 items and he comes back with 1 maybe 2 of the items that you had purposely written down on his arm so that he would remember everything. Do women have to do everything? Even figure out what's wrong with our own cars because we've been asking you to do it for 2 months and you keep saying "I'll take a look at it as soon as I have time." "As soon as you have time, bitch? That's right now!! You're sitting on the couch watching goddamned football and drinking beer. Guess what either you can record or pause your game for 15 to 30 minutes or you can sit there watching it and not have anything to eat for dinner, because I was so busy doing your "job", that I forgot to do my "job"." I put quotations around job because I don't understand why the cooking and the cleaning and the children-taking-care of has to be done solely by the woman and why yard work and fixing cars and sitting-on-there-all-day-watching-the-game-while pretending-to-take-care-of-the-children has to be done solely by a man. I don't work like that. Everyone can do any household job. For example, I have broken the side mirror of my moms car 2 times now. Do you think I was just like "Oh, well, I don't know how to fix a mirror I'll have to take it to Chris to get it fixed." Just FYI, Chris is a real person, he's my mechanic for things that I can't fix on my own. Hey, Chris! I didn't just give up, I did what every person in my generation do, I turned to YouTube and typed into the search bar "How to change the side mirror of a 2005 Ford Focus" *ding* Millions of videos pop up. I click on one, I watch it, I now know the basics for how to change a side mirror on a car, I took me exactly 5 minutes to learn it. How long did it take you Chris? Since then I have now replaced 3 of my mothers side mirrors. One on the drivers side that she did, and two on the passenger side that I did pulling in and out of the garage. Both times. YouTube has gotten ridiculous. Remember way back when when it was filled with music videos and people would post videos of them singing along to the songs. Nowadays, you can search anything on YouTube and find a video on it. For example type in "how to get mangy kids off my lawn" and you will most likely find a ridiculous video on how to keep children and dogs off your lawn. I love YouTube, I watch a lot of gaming videos, some Youtubers that I watch are Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, the GameGrumps (creators of the fabulous game DreamDaddy), The Fine Brothers or FBE, Graveyardgirl or Bunny, and Good Mythical Morning with Rhett and Link. Search any of these Youtubers and watch their videos, and you will not be disappointed. I love how there's a channel out there for any genre. Baking, Cooking, Make-up, Video Games, React Video, and ,my personal favorite, rant videos. Do you guys remember when Chris Crocker did the "Leave Britney Alone" video? He was ugly crying and I'm pretty sure wearing mascara and guy liner and he just keeps yelling into the camera for 30 seconds straight "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!! LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!! YOU *points at person* LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE AND YOU *points at a different person* LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!!" And it just goes on like that for 30 seconds of a guy ugly crying over Britney fucking Spears. You thought girls where the best ugly criers, you were wrong, it's the gays. Gays overpower all girl powers by like a 100. A girl will be like "Look at my make up isn't it nice?" And a gay guy with jump out of nowhere add flawlessly apply FaceOff quality make up and be like "you look beautiful, do you like my sexy alien?". Anyways, I just love YouTube, I could watch YouTube video of people playing scary games that look interesting to me but I'm too scared to play *whispers * all day long.

[bokatankryse]

Scott Morrison is a terrible person

“In November 2014, the Australian Human Rights Commission delivered a report to the Government which found that Morrison failed in his responsibility to act in the best interests of children in detention during his time as Minister. The overarching finding of the inquiry was that the prolonged, mandatory detention of asylum seeker children caused them significant mental and physical illness and developmental delays, in breach of Australia's international obligations.” 

(link to inquiry)

Australians, this is the man who is now running our country. He has proven again and again that he doesn’t give a shit about refugees, as well as being a generally horrible person. 

He launched the Operation Sovereign Borders/Stop the Boats policy in 2013. 

When the Gillard government decided to pay for the family members of the victims to fly to Sydney for the funerals in 2011, Scott Morrison criticised the decision, saying it was unreasonable to expect taxpayers to foot the bill for flying family members from Christmas Island to Sydney. 

When a fellow members of the coalition called him out on the heartlessness of his comments, he conceded that “timing of my comments over the last 24 hours was insensitive and was inappropriate”, but otherwise stood by them. 

Back in 2014 he had the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill  passed to give him "unprecedented, unchallengeable, and secret powers to control the lives of asylum seekers”, and make him one of the most powerful people in the Australian government.

“No other minister, not the prime minister, not the foreign minister, not the attorney-general, has the same unchecked control over the lives of other people.”

Here’s a few of the things the bill now allows the immigration minister to do:

“push any asylum seeker boat back into the sea and leave it there”

“block an asylum seeker from ever making a protection claim on the ill-defined grounds of “character” or “national interest”. [The minister’s] reasons can be secret.” 

“detain people without charge, or deport them to any country he chooses even if it is known they’ll be tortured there”

also the minister’s decisions cannot be questioned

“When he was treasurer, he addressed the House of Representatives while holding a lump of coal, stating "This is coal. Don't be afraid. Don't be scared. It won't hurt you," and accusing those concerned about the environmental impact of the coal industry of having "an ideological, pathological fear of coal."” 

He was (and presumably still is) opposed to same-sex marriage, and when replying to a statement made by Penny Wong, the first female openly LGBT Australian federal parliamentarian, about how the plebiscite would incite homophobia, compared experiencing homophobia to experiencing “bigotry” for his views. 

(which is bullshit, because he can choose his opinions, but a person can’t choose to be gay, so they are in no way comparable.)

After Australia voted yes, he tried to make an amendment to the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill to allow “parents to remove children from classes if "non-traditional" marriage is discussed”. Thankfully, he failed.

These are just some of the things he’s responsible for. Please, please don’t let yourself forget and don’t let him get away with being a terrible person. The next federal election is going to be within the next year, so, if you can, educate others so that we don’t vote the coalition into power again.

[omg-riyasharma12]

To Know About Whistleblower Policy India ?

What is Whistle Blowing? In simple words the term whistleblower means a person who exposes secret information or activity that is deemed to be illegal or unethical within an organization. Though the word ‘Whistle Blower’ is a new entry in the vocabulary of the corporates but the concept is quite old. Whistle Blowing is the act of drawing public attention to perceived wrongdoing. Who is a Whistle Blower? A person who does the act of whistle blowing is called the whistleblower. A whistleblower could be an employee, contractor or a supplier who becomes aware of any unethical practices or illegal activities. Corruption, bullying, fraud, safety violations are some of the common activities highlighted by them. A whistleblower can register a complaint with higher authorities that would trigger criminal investigations against the company. To protect whistleblowers from losing their job or being mistreated there are specific laws for example in India there is the Whistleblowers Protection Act, 2014. Most companies have a different policy which clearly state on how to report such an incident.

Type of Whistleblowers: There are two types of whistleblowers: a.     Internal whistleblowers: Those who report the misconduct, fraud or indiscipline to senior officers of the organization. b.     External whistleblowers: Who report wrongdoings to people outside the organizations? For example: Media, police, governments etc. Whistleblower and Legislation: The Whistleblower Protection Bill, 2011 had replaced the government resolution of 2004. Its main aim was to create a balance between persons making public interest disclosure and those who are honest employees. Whistle blowing has been dealt with under sections 206 to 229. Whistleblower and SEBI: SEBI stands for the Securities Exchange Board of India. In the year 2003 the SEBI had amended its principles on corporate governance. India is facing a terrible record when it comes to dealing with insider trading. To improve the rate of success, the market regulator had introduced a new tipping method. SEBI will award up to Rs. 1 crore for any information which can be provided and successful action against the people doing insider trading.  This mechanism is also popularly known as ‘corporate and confidentiality mechanism’. Under this mechanism if a person who is guilty of violating securities law assists in larger probe, his identity shall be kept confidential and he shall be given exemption from penal action. Earlier it was not compulsory for companies to necessarily have a whistle blowing policy, but after the amendment of SEBI under clause 49 which clearly asserts a mechanism for corporate governance it became quite necessary. Besides that, the company will have mandatory requirement to disclose all its reports on corporate governance. The other top mechanisms excluding whistleblowers which are required for implementing better and effective corporate governance in any organizations are: 1.     Independence of Board 2.     Role of Auditors 3.     Shareholder Activism 4.     Fast Track Redressal Forums COMPANIES ACT: The sections 206 to 229 of the Indian Companies Act, 2013 deal with the provisions related to whistle blowing. The provisions for inspection, investigation and inquiry are provided under them. Sec 208 provides for an inspector who shall inspect the records of a company and provide recommendations after the investigation. Section 210 allows the union government to conduct investigations related to the affairs of the company in the given situation: 1.     Where a report has been received by the registrar or the inspector of the company. 2.     Where a special resolution has been passed by the company to investigate the affairs of the company. 3.     In the interest of public. Section 211 of the act provides the establishment of an investigation office named SFIO (Serious Fraud Investigation Office) which shall be empowered to arrest a person who has committed any fraud in the company. Section 212 provides the procedure of investigation; it states that if the central government is of the opinion that the SFIO must investigate it can do so: a.     Upon a report received by the registrar of companies b.     Upon an intimation of a special resolution by a company when investigation is mandatory c.       In the interest of public d.     On request of any department of central or state government Thus, if we see properly the only difference between section 210 and 212 is the last clause where the SFIO may also conduct an investigation when it is requested by any department of the central or state government. Section 214 provides for the security of maximum Rs. 25,000. Section 215 specifically states that no corporate, firm, or an association can be appointed as the inspector. Section 221 of the Company Act provides for the freezing of the assets of the company on inquiry or investigation. Section 226 provides that voluntary winding up of a company etc., not to stop investigation. Section 229 provides the penalty for furnishing false statements, mutilations and destruction of documents.  A responsibility also lies over the auditors to act as whistleblowers and they have to report directly to the union government if there is any reason to believe that any fraud is committed. Hence we can observe that the provisions of the companies’ act related to whistle blowing or protection of fraud under the Indian laws are quite adequate. Advantages of Whistle Blowing: Whistle Blowing policy is advantageous and beneficial for any kind of organizations, the employees of those organizations, shareholders, societies and even the general public. Any kind of malpractice which can be harmful shall be punished duly in accordance with the law. The policies of whistle blowing would assist in removing the ambiguities and educate the employees about different wrong doing which might take place in the organization.  A living example of adopting the whistle blowing policy in India can be found by the Berger Paints company in India. It allows the registration of direct complaints in cases where there is a violation of the company’s code of conduct. Below are the advantages summarized which we find in the Whistle Blowing Policy: 1.     Unethical behavior exposed: The whistleblowerpolicy in India serves a vital function in government and business. When agencies of the government or corporation cross the ethical and legal limits it is the whistleblower who do the job of making these malpractices public knowledge and as a result of which the violators are held responsible. This also helps in restricting the organizations or the agencies to limit them. 2.      Protection to the employees: The whistleblower policy in India also provides protection to the employees who report the malpractices and violation of laws. There can be a lot of retaliation by the employer against the employee who report the malpractices. The retaliation could include a lot of things such as denial of benefits, dismissal, demotion, etc. Companies who are found to be in violation of whistleblower protection laws are liable to fine, suspension and civil lawsuits. Disadvantages of Whistle blowing: The disadvantages found by us are summarized as follows: 1.     Diminished Career: The world outside may view whistleblowers as heroes because they reveal corrupt behavior but industry insiders often consider them as disloyal or indiscreet for not keeping the secrets of the company. As the whistleblower cases bring investigations conducted by government, legal testimony etc. The attention of the media may lead to the whistleblower being blacklisted. 2.     Personal Complications: The whistleblowers often endure from their actions personal problems. Investigations and lawsuits against the company may often require them to hire lawyers in order to defend themselves. They also might receive threats from former employers. The challenges faced by the whistle blowing policy in India: Corruption: In India the corruption plays a pivotal role in causing obstacles for the successful implementation of whistle blowing mechanisms. Though the democratic system of government is followed in India but the dark network of bureaucracy prohibits genuine victims from attaining justice. Those who raise their voice against the maligned system end up being tortured or harassed. One of the biggest examples which can be given for such an incident is the case of Satyendra Dubey in 2003. In this case the engineer (satyendradubey) was charged for retaliating on corruption in a highway project. He repeatedly sent letters to the higher officials of the NHAI informing them about the financial discrepancies which resulted in his transfer to Gaya at Bihar instead of investigation and he ended up being murdered. With the help of the earlier mentioned case we can understand that a lot of people are afraid to raise their voices or blow the whistle so that they are not subject to such incident. Lack of integration of the legislation: The Companies Act 2013 along with the SEBI provide a successful mechanism for whistle blowing in the ever growing scams and scandals of the corporate. The Companies Act 2013 provides for the vigilance whereas the SEBI vide clause 49 of listing agreement mentions it as non-mandatory provision for whistle blowing. By this what we aim at meaning is there is no proper set of rules provided by our legislation specifying what should the whistle blowing policy include and exclude along with pointing out the ambiguities in it.   Ideal whistle blowing policy: When there are wrong doings in an organization and it remains in the shadow or unblown it leads to the company incurring financial losses. By the ideal whistle blowing policy we mean is a policy which is absolute and which specifies what are the protection, rights etc., of the whistleblowers. An ideal whistle blowing policy should also specify the ambiguities in the current policies which are implemented and must promote a culture of openness. The main thing which needs to be focused for a whistle blowing policy is the maintenance of anonymity so that the whistle blower feels safe and secure. Conclusion: Whistle blowing mechanism must be incorporated in order to eliminate all the scams and scandals taking place in organizations, government agencies etc. More auditors should be employed so as to strengthen the internal control systems by which the whistle blowing activities can be controlled.  Implementation and formulation of holistic laws can reduce the malpractices and corruption to a huge extent and this in turn will result to a corporate sector being free from scandals or scams. Just like a strong tree which takes a lot of time to grow tall and strong similarly this policy will not give immediate outcomes but over the years when it spreads and becomes stronger it shall prove to be a highly successful asset.

[thetravelingmama]

100 Things about your Mom.

Hi Chi. I’m back! All better and cured. I’m feeling like my old self again, energy and everything back. Like my doctor said today: if it’s working, don’t change it. That being said, let’s do something fun! I saw this weird list of questions and said: Game on!

1: What random stranger has had the biggest impact on your life? A Dad at a beach playing with his son. He made us made the decision to start a family.

2: What achievement are you proud of but most people would consider silly or weird? I refuse to “act my age”.

3: What period in history had the best fashion? The 50’s!

4: What silly or funny thing makes you afraid or creeps you out? Clowns.

5: How quickly do you jump to conclusions about people? I try not to, but the reality is that I get “vibes” from people, instantly. I’m never wrong, as much opportunities I give.

6: How would the world change if super heroes and super villains actually existed? I think heroes and villains DO exist.

7: What would be your strategy for surviving an apocalyptic epidemic? I already hoard medicine, movies and booze.

8: What is the most important change that should be made to your country’s education system? Equality, Empathy, Values and Gender Perspective are things that need to be taught. I also believe that a University Diploma should be mandatory. No school? Jail.

9: What is something you think you will regret in the future not starting now and what is something you already regret not starting sooner? I regret not becoming a Mom sooner. I’ll regret it most in the future.

10: What part of your culture are you most and least proud of?

Proud of our strength of character. Least proud of living in a status quo.

11: What's the worst and best thing about being female? Best thing is having a baby, carrying it inside your body. That experience is wonderful. The worst is definitively the inequality, how people treat you different in many ways and what they expect on how you “should behave”. I also believe there are many double standards when it comes to us.

12: If you could put your brain in a robot and live indefinitely, would you? Not for a gazillion dollars.

13: If you could replace the handshake as a greeting, what interesting new greeting would you replace it with? High fives are awesome.

14: Who’s the worst guest you’ve had in your house and what did they do? I’m glad to report that I never let people that I don’t truly trust or know at my house.

15: When does time pass fastest for you and when does it pass the slowest? Fastest: when I have a lot of work and a close deadline. Slowest: when I had to come up with advertising campaigns. I HATED starting on a presentation with all the passion in the world until I had an idea that worked. Then, it just was a breeze. Until that jackpot happens, time is torture.

16: What always sounds like a good idea at the time but rarely is? Telling someone the truth. Sometimes it just turns out that they can’t handle or understand it. Another great one? Getting drunk and knowing that no one is going to take care of the baby next morning. Huge mistake.

17: Are humans fundamentally different than animals? If so, what makes us different? We’re very much alike, I realized it after I gave birth. I just think we have the burden of emotions and logic to deal with, that’s all. I envy them: I’d love to function just on instincts!

18: What pictures or paintings have had a big impact on you? Guernica inspired me to paint. The Marilyn Diptych inspired me to design. At the Moulin Rouge is one of my favorites, just because.

19: What movie or book character are you most similar to? That’s a tough one. I identify a lot (with absolutely no clue of why) with Mia Wallace’s lust for life and her disregard for rules; Marla Singer’s I don’t care attitude and confusion. I’m also a mix of Santino and Michael Corleone when I’m either strategizing or just extremely angry.

20: You can broadcast one sentence to every TV channel and radio in the world and have it translated to each country’s language. What sentence do you say? “What doesn’t offend you might offend someone else. Calm down and let people do and say what they want.”

21: What fact are you really surprised that more people don't know about? That research does not mean that you trust instantly whatever you find online. Reliable sources exist for a reason.

22: What are you completely over and done with? Putting the well-being of others before mine.

23: What memory do you just keep going back to?

It depends on the day.

24: What’s the most immature thing someone can do? I believe that making a scene in public is just sign that you are emotionally and socially immature. From treating strangers badly for a stupid reason to arguing with your significant other in front of anybody is just a sign that you’re the problem.

25: What are you most passionate about and what do you wish you were more passionate about? Reading and writing.

26: What’s the best comeback you’ve ever heard?

“I’m growing a human inside me, what’s your excuse?” I said that. :P

27: Who haven’t you seen or talked to in a long time and hope they are doing okay? With Facebook that stopped happening years ago. I actually miss that feeling of wondering how my friends are. Although, there is one friend from college that disappeared. I sometimes wonder what happened.

28: Where is the last place you would ever go? If by last this means “and then you can die”, Tibet. I can’t fathom thinking about a place in this world not worthy about visiting.

29: What’s something that you’ve never been able to do well? Math and control myself when I am beyond furious.

30: Who is the humblest person you know?

Any person who will do something for free just to help another human being.

31: What is the silliest reason someone you've known has completely lost it? The stuff people write online.

32: What is quite possibly the most annoying thing ever? People who judge others on based on what they wear, own, drive or live in. I also am starting to despise people who post every single goddamn second on social media. My social media algebra is simple: entertain, yes; Report, no.

33: What do you wish people would stop asking you? Can I have free tickets?

34: What is the most unusual fear you have? Frogs and Roller Coasters.

35: What is your favorite TV show? Right now it’s Better Call Saul.

36: What’s the most ridiculous argument you’ve had? If it’s ridiculous, I’m totally ignoring the idea of talking about it. Silence is golden.

37: What’s the biggest lesson life has taught you? My happiness is way more important than anything else in the world.

38: What is increasingly becoming socially acceptable? Telling others how to act, talk, behave, think, write... I remember the days when people judged you in silence or behind closed doors. Thanks a lot, internet.

39: What’s the weirdest tradition your family has? It’s not a tradition per se, we just talk really loud when we’re together, and all at the same time.

40: If you could choose anyone living or dead, who would you choose to lead our country? It would be a mix of Obama, Lady Gaga, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Snowden.

41: What app on your phone do you wish you used more? Tabata.

42: Who was the most power mad person you’ve met? Insert advertising client name here.

43: What world famous monument do you have no interest in visiting? The Tower of Pisa. Next.

44: What is something that you think people are only pretending to like or are deluding themselves into liking? Wine.

45: What joke went way too far? Anything that relates to a pregnancy announcement.

46: What are some of the telltale signs that a guy is creepy? If a man tries to control how I talk, behave, dress, manage a situation or just even decides something for me. If he thinks I need his approval for anything.

47: What is your very first memory? Walking around the beach.

48: What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve said or done around someone you dated? It’s not embarrassing but it did catch me off guard: I made a point in my life to never say “I love you” to a man first until I was sure that it was going to mean something. One day, when I was starting to date your Dad, I just blurted it out. He laughed and said “You said it first!”

49: Who is your favorite actor or actress? Right now it’s Bryan Cranston.

50: What doesn’t exist but you desperately want / need it? A pill that eliminates sadness or anger instantly.

51: What are you most grateful for? My child.

52: If you could hear every time someone said something good about you or something negative about you, which would you choose? Neither. Not interested.

53: What do you wish you could re-live? Just for fun, my twenties. Had the best time.

54: What’s something that you recommend everyone trying at least once? Massages.

55: Do you prefer being warmed when you’re too cold or being cooled when you’re too hot? Warmed.

56: What sentence can you say that makes total sense now but would seem insane 20 years ago? “Do it, don’t wait.”

57: How decisive or indecisive are you? Extremely decisive. I’d rather go out in flames, always.

58: What’s something from your childhood that used to be common but now is pretty rare? I used to play outside unsupervised and came back home when I was supposed to. I also drove my grandpa’s car lots of times while sitting in his lap. Now he would get thrown in jail, I guess.

59: If you were an action figure, what accessories would you be sold with? A bottle of Vodka, books, beach items and lipstick.

60: What weird smell do you really enjoy? Gasoline and the streets of New York City.

61: What do you like that is traditionally considered masculine? Boxing, hard liquors, swearing, dark sense of humor.

62: What’s something you learned recently that you really should have already known? Expectations are resentments in the making.

63: What’s a simple mistake you made that had dramatic consequences? I should have been honest with someone without worrying about what could happen next.

64: What’s the best piece of advice someone has given you? You’re not responsible for how other people feel, it’s their problem to handle.

65: What do you think people automatically wrongly assume about you when they look at you? That I’m delicate, maybe?

66: Looking back on your life, what have you done that has given you the most satisfaction? Besides from being a Mom, having a successful company.

67: If everything was quantified, what life stats would like to see for yourself? The happy vs sad moments.

68: What do you really wish you knew when you were younger? That I am way more stronger than I thought.

69: When was the last time you laughed so hard you cried? I think it was watching Dave Chapelle or Joe Rogan on Netflix.

70: What do you wish you had more time for? Being with my child when she grows older. I hope to be alive when she gets married or has a kid.

71: When was the last time you had a gut feeling about something that turned out to be correct? How about a time your gut feeling was wrong? My gut feelings are 99% on point. Sometimes it takes a second, sometimes years. I always end up being right.

72: What’s your curiosity killed the cat story? Your Dad. I ended up married and having you!

73: What areas in your life do you have high hopes for and what are those high hopes? I hope that our child decides to run our company and makes it even more successful.

74: Who was the most spoiled person you personally have met? Met a few. No comment.

75: What makes you feel old? When people don’t know a certain band or piece of music.

76: What’s your favorite non-drug / non-alcohol high? Traveling.

77: What’s the worst thing you’ve heard one person say to another person? It’s a tie between, “Sorry, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” and “Shut up and listen”.

78: What do you love about yourself? I’m starting to love my new sense of self. It gives me meaning.

79: What gets progressively weirder the more you think about it? Society in general.

80: What have you gotten too old to put up with? Being obligated to do something.

81: What event would you like to know the whole and complete truth about? JFK’s death. I also would love to read Mueller’s unredacted report.

82: What have you recently become obsessed with? Home delivery. Hi Jeff Bezos, I paid for your electricity this month.

83: What’s the biggest waste of money you’ve seen? Anything related to spending a lot on cars or jewelry. I’d rather travel, sorry.

84: What’s surprising about you? Most people don’t know that I can’t stand chick films.

85: When you were a kid what silly thing were you deathly afraid of? Dracula. Frank Langella, you made my childhood miserable for months.

86: Besides a raise or more vacation time, what’s the best perk a company can offer employees? Time to relax and focus. In Advertising, we’re expected to produce an insane amount of creative pieces in little time. Creativity and pressure don’t go well. Also, a short amount of time during the month to do the things we can’t during the weekend.

87: Where do you like going for walks? Lower East Side or Montmartre.

88: If you found out you would inexplicably fall down dead in one year, what would you change about your life? I would travel non stop so that I could drop dead somewhere cool.

89: What movie have you seen more than seven times? It might be a tie between Pulp Fiction and the Godfather Series.

90: Most people want to be wealthy for one reason or another. Why do you would want to be wealthy? To travel.

91: What’s the best thing you could tell someone to cheer them up when they are feeling down? My grandmother used to say “Someday, when you look back at a bad moment in your life, you’re gonna laugh about it”. Wherever she is, I know she looks down and reminds me in my dreams from time to time.

92: When you were a kid, what movie did you watch over and over again? Mary Poppins... and The Godfather 1 when no one was watching.

93: What’s the worst trait a person can have? No empathy.

94: If you could know one truth about yourself, history, the world, or even the universe, what truth would you want to know? Is someone out there?

95: What’s your favorite souvenir that you have? Our cheesy “Oia” sign. It reminds me of the best honeymoon in the world.

96: What would you do if someone left a duffle bag filled with $2,000,000 on your back porch? Buy a small apartment in NYC, buy another near the beach in Rincón. Leave the rest for Mía.

97: If everything in your house had to be one color what color would you choose? Black.

98: What would your warning label say if every person was required to have one? Don’t get her angry. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.

99: What weird childhood fear do you still kind of hold on to? Big waves.

100: What’s the most polarizing question you could ask your group of friends? That’s the funny thing about us. There is not one polarizing thing we could ask each other. We talk and share EVERYTHING in our lives. The good, the bad, the disgusting, the inappropriate. Even the things we are ashamed to admit or share. That’s true friendship.

[carbonjen]

Middle school teacher!Jason has a crush on fellow elementary school teacher!Dick.

I think this prompt is absolutely adorable (and it gives me a chance to write outside being a gym teacher)

Learning the Lines of You

“Alright you guys, remember to be quiet, we don’t want to bother the middle schoolers!” 

A few kids in Jason’s class looked up from their essays at Dick Grayson’s bright voice in the hallway. Even Jason looked up and saw the line of first graders following Dick like obedient little ducklings. He looked back at his own group of kids and wondered why he hadn’t gone for elementary education. Yeah, teaching kids the books he’d loved in school had been a good idea at the time, but he should have known that not all of his students would appreciate it. 

The sound of tiny footsteps faded away and Jason was left with the sounds of his own students. The scratch of pencils and the occasional sound of an eraser, even a few exhausted sighs. They look at Jason like he’s the one that gets it easy when in reality, Jason will have to grade these essays. A few weeks ago, the Dean said something about a potential position for Jason in the upper school and Jason knows he’ll be considering it when he’s reviewing the terrible grammar in these essays. 

In the last ten minutes of class, students start to finish their essays, handing them to Jason until class ended and Jason dismissed them, collecting their papers as they left the room. A few minutes after they left, Jason collected the essays and went to the teacher’s lounge to start grading them. 

He stepped inside and among the other teachers, Dick Grayson was there looking over a pile of papers while eating something that smelled so delicious, it made Jason’s own lunch look sad. 

Dick looked up at his entrance, “Oh hi!” He smiled and it was one of the brightest things Jason had ever seen. “You’re Mr. Todd from the middle school right?”

“Jason,” he corrected as he went to the fridge debating pulling out his own lunch. He shrugged and grabbed it. “You’re in elementary,” Jason pointed out as he sat across from Grayson, setting the essays and his lunch down.  Dick looked at the papers. 

“What are those?”

“In class essays,” Jason said as he pulled out his pen. 

“Oh man, I always hated those,” Dick said. “No offense.”

“I get it,” Jason replied. “If you think writing them was bad, I promise you grading them is worse. Teaching kids how to write a thesis essay and teaching them analysis based reading in one year is kind of a lot.”

Dick nodded, “I totally get it. Elementary isn’t bad, but it’s as much babysitting as it is teaching sometimes.”

“And the kids actually like you,” Jason said. “These kids act like I’m torturing them when I ask them to read things like Treasure Island and Sherlock Holmes because they’re older and harder to understand. They also didn’t understand The Outsiders at all, they walked around wearing madras shorts calling themselves Socs for weeks afterwards.”

Dick laughed, “That’s terrible, but you have to admit the whole Soc thing is hilarious. This is Gotham Academy, not a lot of kids here relate to the Greasers.” Jason always had, but he didn’t say anything about that, he could see the understanding on Dick’s face though. 

“Hopefully they’ll do what I did,” Dick said. “They’ll pick the books up again one day and appreciate that someone tried to teach them good literature. They’ll also wonder how they didn’t understand what analysis was back then.” 

“Are you saying this from personal experience?” Jason asked, he opened his lunch box and pulled out a salad. 

“Maybe,” Dick said with a playful grin as he started eating his lunch again, it looked like a shepherd’s pie and it smelled amazing. 

Jason started grading the papers, but a few minutes later, a hand waved in front of his vision and he looked up. 

“Sorry,” Dick said. “But you looked like you were in pain and I just had to stop you.” 

“Sorry,” Jason said. “This one is just really bad.” 

Dick took the paper and looked at it, brow furrowing and a frown forming on his beautiful face. He looked pretty even when he looked upset at how bad some of these kids were at writing. 

“Oh my god,” Dick shook his head. “You are not grading all of these yourself. I’m helping you.”

“What?” Jason asked. 

“I’ll help you,” Dick said with a grin on his face. “I don’t have much grading to do and my lesson plans for the month are done. I also feel like I’m in need of a challenge so I’ll help you grade your essays.”

“When?” Jason asked. 

“What are you doing tonight?” Dick replied. 

It was a Friday and Jason was tempted to say he had plans but Dick’s offer also meant he didn’t have plans. “I was going to grade these essays,” Jason admitted. 

“Awesome,” Dick replied. “Your place or mine?”

“Mine?”

Dick slid his phone over to Jason’s. “Great, put your info in and I’ll be there at six, I’ll bring some of this shepherd’s pie too.”

Jason put his info in Dick’s phone and Dick smiled at him then his phone jingled. “Oops, I have to go pick up the kids from gym class. I’ll see you tonight!”

“Dude,” one of the high school teachers said as Dick breezed out of the room. “Grayson is totally into you.”

Jason may have freaked out a bit when he got home. He cleaned his apartment from top to bottom and worked out hard in an attempt to burn away some of his nerves because what if that high school teacher had been right and Dick was into Jason. 

He stepped out of the shower and tried to find something decent to wear, settling for jeans and a t-shirt. He didn’t want to dress too nicely in case Dick came dressed casually, but he didn’t want to wear sweats either.  

When Dick got there, Jason’s hair was still a little damp and probably looked wild from all the times he’d run his hands through it. Dick stared at him for a moment before he smiled and held up the large tupperware container he held in his hands. 

“I brought food,” he said. 

“Awesome,” Jason said. “Come in.” He showed Dick to his living room and then to the kitchen so Dick could help him heat up the food. “Do you want something to drink?”

“Sure,” Dick said. “What do you have?”

“Water, milk, juice, beer, tea, coffee, wine, and I think I have some cokes somewhere in the back of the fridge.”

“I’ll take a beer if you don’t mind,” Dick said. 

“Alright,” Jason said as he went to the fridge and pulled out two beers. He opened them up and handed one to Dick as they put the food in the microwave. 

They started eating and grading a few minutes later, laughing and complaining about the papers as they sat together on the couch. There was only one cushion of space between them, occupied by the papers they needed to grade. 

“Is this what our papers were like?” Dick asked as he shook his head at the essay in front of him. “If it is, I want to send an apology to all of my teachers because these are awful. How do you even begin to grade them?”

“You have to make a really loose rubric sometimes,” Jason said. “And then follow that. Even then, sometimes it’s still difficult.”

A few minutes, or maybe even an hour later, Dick put the essay he was working on aside. 

“Okay,” he said, taking the papers from between them and putting them on the coffee table. “Mandatory break from the torture, that means you too,” Jason willingly let Dick snatch the paper from his hand. 

“All this makes me glad I’m in elementary,” Dick said as he leaned back on the couch and took a sip from his beer. Jason watched the way his adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and he wanted nothing more than to put his mouth on the golden skin and feel how it moved under his lips. 

“Yeah,” Jason whispered, voice coming out lower than he intended. 

Dick looked at him and their eyes met, Dick’s eyes were such a rich shade of blue people would have waxed poetic about it back in the day, hell, Jason wanted to write poetry about those eyes now. 

-

“I hear Mr. Todd is in love or something,” one of the students said as she walked through the halls past Mr. Todd’s room. 

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, he’s like super smiley all the time. The only thing that sucks is that he’s not nicer or anything.”

“That sucks.”

Jason overheard the conversation from his classroom and had to bite back a laugh. A few minutes after the hallways cleared, Dick stepped into his classroom, closing the door behind him. 

“You look pleased,” Dick said as he sat down on Jason’s desk. “Did someone have really good insight today on one of your readings?”

“No,” Jason said. “But there are rumors.”

“Oh really?” Dick asked. “What kind of rumors?”

Jason stood up and placed on hand on each side of Dick, leaning in close to whisper in Dick’s ear. “Rumors that I’m in love.”

“Oh really?” Dick replied, draping his arms around Jason’s shoulders. “And are those rumors true?”

Jason moved down Dick’s jawline pressing small kisses there until he was hovering over Dick’s mouth. He looked into Dick’s eyes and they were like dancing fire, waiting for Jason to do or say something. Jason’s mouth quirked up in a small smile. 

“Yeah, I think they are.” He pressed in and kissed Dick, the two of them getting so lost in each other that they didn’t notice when the door to Jason’s classroom opened. 

Jason pulled away but it was too late. One of his students was staring at them both with wide eyes. The student stepped into the classroom and grabbed a backpack that was leaning against one of the desks, Jason and Dick watching her as she apologized profusely the entire way. 

The door shut and Jason leaned on Dick’s shoulder. “How long do you think it will be before the whole school knows.”

“I give it until the end of the day,” Dick replied. If Jason looked half as debauched as Dick did right now, he didn’t want to know what types of rumors would be going around. Dick pressed his lips against Jason’s neck and started sucking but Jason pulled away. 

“What are you doing?”

“Well we’ve got to prove the rumor is true, don’t we?”

While the word around the school wasn’t something to go by, the hickey on Jason’s neck in fifth period that definitely hadn’t been there by third period was all the confirmation the middle schoolers needed. And if Jason gave Dick a necklace of hickeys that night in return, well, no one had to know about that. 

[roosterteethinserts]

The Mad Queen And Her Mad Scientist

AN: Since it’s 2017 already I hope you all have had a good start of the year! Why not start this blog’s posts with my recent favorite, Mica! I’ll try to post bi-weekly since tests and things are increasing and I need to focus on those, but I’ll try my best. Enjoy babes xx

AU-XRay and Vav 

Pairing-Mica x reader

Word Count-1986

Warnings-mentions of homosexual relationship, mentions of kidnapping, mentions of food, lovey-dovey words at the end, 

Summary-Mica and Y/N are dating, but Y/N doesn’t know that Mica is the Mad Queen, the new villain that took the Mad King’s place when he fell out of power. Y/N is a Monarch scientist and is kidnapped by Mica’s men. The truth comes out but just before XRay and Vav try to save the day. 

The dawn of the Mad King encouraged other villians and heroes alike to start their lives, and with the fall of one villain had the chance for another one to rise. The Mad Queen as people quickly called her became the new villain, reigning the city through any sly means she can do to get anything or everything she wanted, and of course stopping Xray and Vav from foiling her plans. It seems that there wasn't much to know about her. Of course, they knew things like what her villainess outfit is and a couple facial features like the color of her skin and her hairstyle, but they couldn't get a set person that was behind all of this.

It was a simple day, and quite ordinary to say the least. I walked my way over to Monarch Labs at the beginning of the day. I always received a sweet good morning text by the time I walked through the front doors, and as if on queue the ding from my phone signalled a text from my loving girlfriend, Mica. 

Grinning, I opened it up as I mindlessly walked towards the elevators. It read 'Have a nice day, babe! I might be late for dinner, so make whatever and I can pick something up on the way home, love you x'. I replied with an okay and to have a nice day as well.

In between the hectic work of the research department in Monarch Labs, the water break gossip between the people that I knew became the idea that the Mad Queen would be making an appearance again in the city tonight. I just brushed it off since I wasn't much interested in the feud between XRay and Vav and the Mad Queen except the fact that they both had relations with Monarch Labs. The two boys had their gadgets come from Hilda, the new CEO, while the Mad Queen supposedly had her family connections to get anything she wanted, especially since the company her family owns is supposedly one of Monarch's greatest allies in the technology industry.

Sighing to myself, I saved my work for the day and said my goodbyes to the people that were still around me. They all bid me their goodnights and to have fun with the lazy day with Mica. Grabbing my purse, I left the building after washing up and putting my lab equipment away.

My phone signalled that I got another text. Curious, I pulled it out of my jacket. I grinned, seeing a cute picture of my beautiful girlfriend, all dolled up. She sent a caption with it, 'Meet me at the Italian restaurant near your work! I have reservations.'

I pouted in response. I didn't look cute enough for a date today, and she had to surprise me by being amazing? I sent out an okay and walked through the cool air to the restaurant. It was one of our favorites to go to; we even went there on our first date. Thinking about it made a smile place itself on my face.

Once I walked through the door, my eyes searched for my girlfriend. She met my eyes, and her face lit up happily when they did.

"You're here!"

A simple peck on the cheeks became our simple greeting.

I nodded my head, "Of course I did."

She gestured for me to sit and I did.

I raised an eyebrow at her, "Why did you set this up? I thought you weren't going to be home until later."

She sighed, "Well, my father wants me to go to the board meeting with Monarch tonight later and I figured that I'd treat you for making up for it ahead of time."

I nodded my head, knowing that even though she wasn't in the family business, that her parents still wanted her to go because they were busy people and this would be the 'family bonding time' that normal families would have. She didn't become the family heir to the tech company Condor Labs which is based in the west coast, hours away by plane ride, but she still was highly educated in technology and science enough to bring another perspective onto the meetings.

Although meetings late at night weren't common, they tended to be the most important ones, therefore I became the supportive girlfriend and told her to do well.

Our conversations went around smoothly, like they always do. I talked about the newest findings of my things, while she talked about her school studies. I felt myself enjoying everything about this date; from our jokes to even the delicious food. We both lost track of time.

Looking at the clock, I jumped out of my seat.

I exclaimed, "Oh babe!! You need to go to the meeting in ten minutes!"

Mica widened her eyes, "I gotta go!"

I paid for the dinner and we quickly rushed back to Monarch Labs. We both saw the usual car the Burtons take when they come here, and we knew that they were already in the building.

The ride up to the meeting's floor was mostly silent. Mica asked if she looked presentable to her parents, which I replied that she was after a quick lipstick application.

We parted when her father was in view. I gave her a quick peck on the cheek as a goodbye, watching as she walked into the meeting room. Once I knew she was in, I turned and made my leave.

In the elevator, I decided to check out the research floor to see if anyone was still working. I knew that a couple of my co-workers were still immersed into their studies when I was about to leave. As one of the lead researchers, I've come to find that I feel like the others are my children. They tend to overwork at times, and I've always had to check in with them during the end of each month since that's when we're evaluated on our work. There was still a little over a week, but it was starting to be crunch time.

The dimly lit hallway of the research floor made me squint as I walked to the main area. On the way there, I grabbed my labcoat as it is mandatory when working, and slipped it on. I buttoned the coat as I looked around for anyone in the vicinity. The whirring of the machines became the usual white noise of the office, and I could hear someone on their computer in the main area. Turning the corner I wasn't expecting who was typing away; a couple of masked criminals going through confidential Monarch files.

I stood there, stunned. One of them seemed to notice me there and they stepped closer.

The one stepped forward, "What do we do, boss?"

The second told him, "Bag her and take her to headquarters. I'm sure the Mad Queen wouldn't want a snitch."

I felt my face pale as I tried to fight back, but wasn't close enough to press the emergency button. The last thing I remembered was the sound of something dropping and a bag going over my face.

What felt like days later, the sound of someone familiar filled my head.

"Take the bag off. I need to see who this is."

Blinding light made me blink many times in order to focus on the figures that kidnapped me. I saw the two men that took me away and my girlfriend, dressed in her outfit, but a mask on her face. I widened my eyes in realization. 

It didn't occur to me that my seemingly sweet and wonderful girlfriend would ever be the Mad Queen, but she was.

She told the men, "leave us. I need to discuss things with her."

They left without another word and I just watched, confused and full of fear.

She dropped her powerful aura the moment the door closed, softening her face and walking cautiously towards me.

She gently told me, "I can explain, I promise."

Anger bubbled inside me, "Explain what? That you're the most powerful villain and you planned something that would take confidential files from Monarch? And if it wasn't me, you'd probably torture one of my co-workers to get what you wanted!?"

She fell silent over my words, trying to quickly think of something.

As she opened her mouth, an urgent knock rang throughout the room. She sighed, annoyed, and turned towards the door.

A man came into the room and uttered, "XRay and Vav are here, and they have reinforcements."

Mica sighed, "Just hold them off. I need to get Y/N out of here."

The man didn't question it as I was untied. I still felt my annoyance over her, but knew that we wouldn't be able to explain everything if we were to die.  She escorted me to the roof, where a helicopter stood. A pilot was already in, so it started. She put me in, and I stopped her, instantly feeling a sense of worry over her.

I told her, "No, what are you doing?"

She shook her head, "Just go. I started this and I need to end it. I can't do it without knowing that you're safe."

Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the familiar blue and green suits. I locked eyes with XRay and Vav, the superheroes that are enemies with Mica.

Vav proclaimed, "Stop what you're doing, Mad Queen."

XRay added, "We're here to stop you from your evil schemes!" 

Mica raised an eyebrow, "How will you do that, boys? It seems to me like I have the upper hand."  

They were stunned with a stun grenade, with just enough time for Mica to get into the helicopter and make the man fly away. The two boys came to their senses after minutes, vowing to get revenge as they watched the helicopter fly into the distance. 

I couldn't wrap my head around what just happened. Mica seemed to watch me, now unmasked, with a mix of emotions going through her mind.

We arrived at our shared apartment, and all I wanted to do was go to bed. She followed silently, knowing that I wanted to cool off a bit before we talked. I laid in bed as she did the same. I knew that guilt made her not able to sleep, but my fatigue of the day almost made it easy to do so.

In the silence she said, "I'm sorry, for everything. Even from meeting me to what just happened. I can't believe I let you be in danger."

I asked, "Why are you doing it?"

She told me, "I knew Monarch and Condor were doing shady things secretly, and it all started with me getting files from my parents a couple years ago. I didn't know it'd escalate to this extent."

She paused, "But I think I'll stop and disband everything. The hatred of their ideologies surrounding their secret projects has fueled my motivation for so long, but now I have a reason to stop."

We locked eyes and I can tell that she was speaking the truth. A small smile grew on my face.

"As long as you want to. I was going to have to force you sooner or later if you wanted to keep dating me."

She laughed, "Of course."

I teased, "If you're the Mad Queen, what does that make me?"

She grinned, "My Mad Scientist, of course."

I rolled my eyes at the nickname, wanting something more attractive to go by. She laughed at my reaction, but deep down I knew that it was a good name, even though I didn't want it. It had a nice ring to it, so who wouldn't want it? We'd be forever known as the mad couple and it did bother us. As long as we had each other, nothing else would matter.  

[witharthurkirkland]

The Siege of Paris

Summary: After a strange malfunction in the TARDIS the Doctor and Romana find themselves at the Battle of Wissembourg where they meet someone they didn’t expect. Now they’re trying to figure out why Irving Braxiatel is getting involved in the Franco-Prussian War.

Note: there are probably historical inaccuracies. I tried my best and I apologize for any mistakes.

Here you can read it all in one spot.

Part 1 is here

Part 2 is here

And now for the last part.

Braxiatel and the Doctor ended up with the rest of the army, retreating to Metz. Everyone was exhausted. The French were losing and no one could understand why. Braxiatel explained some of it to the Doctor in a voice just loud enough to be heard only by his brother:

“The Prussians are outmanoeuvering the French and the French command keeps making mistakes. They don’t react correctly to the situations they’re thrown into. They could’ve won already, but instead they’re losing.” He looked around casually, making sure they were out of earshot of others. “Everyone expects this to be a long war, but it will end early next year.”

The Doctor nodded absent-mindedly. This was turning into an educational trip. He kept thinking of Romana, wondering where she was. She would’ve benefitted from this history lesson.

When the Prussian army besieged the French the two Time Lords were starting to seriously feel the effects of the war. Disease was rife among the soldiers on both sides. Provisions ceased and the French army was starved.

Braxiatel sat next to the Doctor, his hand on his stomach. “What I wouldn’t give for a clean pair of socks right now!”

The Doctor grinned. “Or a bag of jelly babies. They don’t have them in this time period, you know.”

“Yes, even your terrible jelly babies, or those mostly green apples we found.”

A soldier next to them started to mutter something about his mother.

The Doctor turned away and didn’t look at Braxiatel at the same time as his brother pretended to be interested in his shoes.

They’d run out of their usual distractions. The Doctor had lost his yo-yo during one of the attacks. All he had in his pockets were bits of string. He fidgeted with his scarf, a dark expression on his face. Even the soldiers who’d made jokes about his scarf no longer found it amusing.

“You know I met Napoleon once…” the Doctor began.

“…and you impersonated him,” Braxiatel continued for him.

“I wasn’t going to usurp him…”

“…just use it as a way to get out of a difficult situation,” Braxiatel completed the story and sighed. “Why is this so familiar? I’m sure Benny would know…”

“Benny? Benny…” the Doctor tried to think of someone famous with that name, but the physical strain he’d suffered was equal to the mental strain. It was making it hard to remember things. “Bernadette… Bernie… Bernhardt…”

“Don’t bother,” Braxiatel said quietly.

“I don’t think I ever met Sarah Bernhardt.”

“What about Bernie-Bernard Bernadette? The painter from the 35th century?”

“Or his brother the composer?” the Doctor smiled as bits of a memory came to him. That had been a good day. At least, until the Zygons attacked…

It was quiet for several minutes and then Braxiatel noticed that his brother had nodded off. The Doctor’s head dropped down to one side and Braxiatel moved over so that the Doctor could use his shoulder as a pillow.

He should have persuaded the Doctor to leave the moment he and Romana had walked into his tent. He should have concocted a story of some kind. The Doctor was having a hard time not fighting. Everyone seemed so intent on giving him weapons and ordering he use them. It was almost a miracle that he’d gone on this long without a court martial, or whatever it was that humans did to soldiers that refused to kill the enemy.

But, of course, that wasn’t Braxiatel’s main concern. He was more worried about Romana. He closed his eyes and saw the Lady President on her first day in office in those long-forgotten days when Braxiatel was her advisor, trusted, respected and, well…

When he had a home…

Few things really moved Irving Braxiatel, but the thought of home was certainly one of them.

“How do you do it?” he whispered. “How do you flit about with no fixed abode, Doctor?”

The Doctor continued to sleep.

***

The siege ended in another loss for the French and another victory for the Prussians. Hungrier than ever the army retreated to Sedan where they were captured and Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner.

Now Braxiatel and the Doctor were prisoners too, unable to escape the French army’s fate.

“At least we have food now,” the Doctor pointed out, grinning.

“If you can call that food,” Braxiatel sighed. “When I get off this dreadful planet the first thing I will do is visit the Harmony and Redemption.”

“I haven’t heard of that one. Where is it?”

Braxiatel smiled. “It’s a restaurant on a spaceship. They don’t let everyone make a reservation.”

The Doctor considered this. “Sounds like one of those places that only serve food to owners of galaxies, or at least 5 planets… maybe 10 moons.”

“That’s part of the requirements, certainly,” Braxiatel agreed. He wasn’t going to add that not only was it mandatory to own planets, but also to have destroyed a few. And he was certainly not going to mention the fact that there was a special table reserved just for him for all perpetuity. And the next thing that he wouldn’t add would be how he thrice met two of his other selves at said table.

“When do you want to escape?” the Doctor asked casually.

Braxiatel shook his head sadly. “No point in wasting our energy, Doctor. They will let everyone go soon.”

“Really? Will we have to promise not to fight them anymore and behave ourselves?”

“I’d like to see them try to make us give a promise like that.”

The Doctor reclined in the grass and whistled quietly.

“It is my imagination, or has your mood improved since we’ve been captured?”

“Well – really,” the Doctor protested, unable to keep a straight face, “you know how it is…”

“Indeed, I do.”

***

There were no interrogations, no tortures. There was only the capitulation, followed by the army’s release. The soldiers left in low spirits despite all of this. They had lost. All that remained was for the Prussians to take Paris and the war was over.

A week later Braxiatel and the Doctor had rooms in the finest hotel in Paris. And several days after that the Prussian army encircled Paris.

The capital of France was under siege.

***

“I still can’t find Romana,” the Doctor told Braxiatel one evening, walking into their rooms and collapsing into a chair. “It’s possible she isn’t in Paris after all.”

“She’ll find us,” Braxiatel said confidently. He shuffled through the papers on his desk. “I have people out there looking for her.”

The Doctor shifted impatiently in his seat.

“I know how much you hate staying in one place for a long time, Doctor. Why don’t you go back to your TARDIS and bring it here? I can give you the exact coordinates of this room.”

“I know the exact coordinates of this room!” the Doctor protested. “And I’d rather go back with Romana.”

“I’ll wait here in case she’s in Paris.”

The Doctor grumbled something under his breath.

“It will be a hard and dangerous journey,” Braxiatel said. “It’s a good thing you’re not in uniform anymore, but a change of clothes won’t be enough.”

On their second day in Paris the Doctor had managed to find something very similar to his usual clothes, but in purple and burgundy tones.

The Doctor rose to his feet. “What about you?”

“I’ll get by somehow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, Doctor.”

The Doctor shrugged. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

The next day was completely Doctor-less.

So was the week that followed.

***

“Good morning!”

Braxiatel lowered his newspaper and looked up to see Romana standing in front of him. He rose to his feet. “Good morning!”

“Where is the Doctor?”

“He went to get his TARDIS.”

“Which means he could be anywhere right now.”

“Possibly. Would you like some breakfast, Lady Romana?”

“Yes, please.”

Braxiatel called the waiter over and let Romana order breakfast. He waited for her to eat a bit before asking. “Where have you been all of this time? The Doctor and I were very worried.”

“Trying to find you,” she replied. “I assumed you would both come here and thought it would be easier to search through Paris than all of France.”

“You disappeared the morning of the battle.” Braxiatel poured Romana more tea and she thanked him with a nod of her head.

Romana ate quietly for several minutes and then said, “I was taking a walk when a group of soldiers ambushed me. Then they decided to let me go on the grounds that women can’t make proper prisoners.” She shook her head in disapproval. “By the time I got back your camp had been attacked. Most of the soldiers were dead, so I made my way to Paris. I only arrived this morning.”

Braxiatel noticed that she was still in her uniform. “I’ll get you a change of clothes. We have a big selection to choose from.”

“Why? These are quite comfortable. They do need a wash and I’d like a bath myself.”

“In that case, I’ll get the maid to fetch you some water.” Braxiatel waited for a moment and then asked, “How did you know to look here?”

“I didn’t. I simply asked for the address of the fanciest hotel.”

***

The two weeks that followed were spent in luxury, considering that the city was under siege and that food was running out at a catastrophic rate. The food shortage wasn’t the only cause of the fights in the street and it seemed as if everyone suddenly developed a political opinion. It was hard to say which of the two was the greater cause of rising tension.

“No! No! I tell you I have nothing! Nothing!” the chef stormed out into the dining hall and threw his hat on the ground. “What do you want me to do? What? I am a cook, not a miracle-maker! I can’t make something out of nothing!”

The guests of the hotel all stared at him in surprise.

Braxiatel folded his newspaper calmly and said, “Since hunting is out of the question, maybe we should consider the animals in the zoo?”

A silence followed those words and then someone asked, “Can we do that?”

“I don’t see why not,” someone else put in.

In the argument that followed Romana watched Braxiatel, trying to guess what he was thinking.

He noticed the attention she was giving him and smiled, “I can’t let you starve, my dear Romana.”

Romana smiled back.

***

“Now that the zoo is empty,” Romana said to Braxiatel one morning, “do you think they’ll start eating people soon?”

“Probably,” Braxiatel said. He stood by the window, looking out. The weather was bleak, they sky grey and cold. Occasionally snowflakes would fall from the sky. The streets were quiet, as if everyone was suddenly too frightened to come out.

“We could build a beacon,” Romana said, “and make something for the TARDIS to home in on.”

“That would be tricky. They’ve barely discovered electricity in this time period.”

“But not impossible. I think we can find what we need, if we look hard enough.”

“Then why not? It will give us something to do.” Braxiatel turned around to face Romana.

She smiled and he returned the gesture. It was cold. They were starving. The Doctor was who-knew-where. They were marooned on a primitive planet, but Romana was smiling and – for a moment – that was enough for Braxiatel.

He dropped down to his knees by her seat. “Can I just say it’s been an honour to suffer by your side, my lady? One sight of your smile is enough to sustain me. It’s better than the biggest meal you can imagine, than –”

“Braxiatel, thank you. I think we should go now while it’s still light outside.”

“Yes, of course.”

***

It took them weeks to find all of the necessary components. One morning their work was interrupted by a happy announcement.

“The siege is over!” the manager of the hotel told the guests he had assembled.

“Finally!” several people exclaimed.

“Does that mean France lost?” Romana asked and got several angry looks.

“The treaty is yet to be signed,” the hotel’s manager said indignantly, “but we will have food now.”

Romana smiled. “That’s good news, surely?”

With food in the city the unrest only increased and dissatisfied talk about the government could be heard everywhere. Romana paid no attention to them, focusing instead on her task. Braxiatel followed the developments closely. Several times a day someone would come to bring him the latest news.

“Why do you care?” Romana asked. “Surely, it’s more important to leave as quickly as possible and not waste time following the latest developments?”

“My dear Romana, any day now the situation might become very dangerous for us. The others might view us as aristocracy. They might decide the hotel is a symbol of imperialism, for example, and burn it down with everyone inside it.”

Romana looked at him in alarm. “Surely not!”

“I wish that I was just exaggerating, but who knows where events may lead?”

Romana sighed and stood up. “I always thought politics was so tedious – you have to constantly stay on top of events.”

Braxiatel smiled. “And you never considered going into politics yourself?”

“Of course not! I don’t care about Earth politics!”

“What about… Gallifrey?”

Romana gave him a surprised look. “What can a Time Lord from the house of Heartshaven possibly hope to achieve?”

“What would the Doctor say if he heard you now I wonder?”

 ***

It was getting dangerously close and he decided not to risk it. Making sure that Romana was busy with the beacon (he’d exaggerated its urgency to her the night before and saw her attack the problem with more energy), he took care of the Hotel de Ville and moved on to the Tuileries Palace. The operation demanded care and attention, as well as time.

As he placed the last device in place he heard someone walk up the staircase. He slipped into one of the shadows in the room and waited to see who it was.

“It’s me, Braxiatel. I know what you’re doing, so there’s no point in hiding it now.”

Braxiatel sighed at the sound of the familiar voice and stepped out of his hiding spot.

“Romana? What brings you here? Are you as interested as me in French architecture?”

“I doubt many people are as interested as you are, Braxiatel.”

“What can I say? I am forever fascinated by art.”

“And that’s what brought you here, isn’t it?” Romana stepped closer. “1871, Paris, France, Earth. Except you accidentally arrived early. Did your TARDIS malfunction?”

Braxiatel opened his mouth to protest and sighed. “Yes. It was damaged when I fled.”

“Fled from where? No, don’t tell me. You’re from Gallifrey’s future. The Doctor and I worked that out. What do you want with the Tuileries Palace? Will you add it to the Braxiatel Collection?”

“On May 23rd twelve men will come here and burn it down. Look at it, Romana. Isn’t it beautiful? How can someone destroy something so incredible? Just because it’s a symbol of something they hate it will be wiped from the streets of Paris. They will argue afterwards about restoring it, but it will never be the same.” He shook his head sadly. “The aim of the Braxiatel Collection is to preserve art and that’s what I plan to do here. The Web of Time will remain intact. I’m only transporting the interior to my TARDIS. As far as humans are concerned the building and its interior will remain lost forever.”

Romana took another step towards Braxiatel. “Why didn’t you tell us? Didn’t you think the Doctor would approve?” She hesitated. “Or were you afraid that I wouldn’t approve for some reason? What are you keeping from me, Braxiatel?”

“As the owner of the Braxiatel Collection my primary role is to guard the Collection and acquire more artworks for it. As a Time Lord my primary role is the safety of Gallifrey and the integrity of the Web of Time.” He stepped up to Romana. “I’m so sorry, Lady Romana.”

“What does that mean?” She turned around, as if expecting something to spring from the shadows.

“Top marks,” anther voice said and two figures emerged from the shadows on either side of Romana.

“Well, I did say she is very clever,” the other of the two newcomers said.

“Braxiatel? There are two more of you here?” She shot him an angry look. “So much for the Laws of Time!”

“Hello, Romana. It’s a pleasure to see you again,” one of them said.

“You brought your future self?”

The three figures chuckled. “Oh no, not future.”

“What a shame that our time together will be so brief. This time.”

“Are you threatening me?” Romana demanded.

“Romana,” the first Braxiatel said, stepping towards her, “the Doctor’s TARDIS has been acting up again. He decided to work on some repairs and you left him to it. You searched the Library for something to read and, finding nothing, decided that it was a good idea to take a break. After all, the Doctor is always landing himself and you in trouble. Who knows when you’ll get another chance to relax?” He spoke slowly and moved closer to her with each sentence.

Romana backed away from him. “I-I know… I know what you’re trying to do… It won’t…”

Braxiatel took one of her hands and rubbed his thumb over her fingers. “You just had a very pleasant dream about a restaurant in Paris that you visited with the Doctor in the 1980s. You had very delicious dessert. You never visited France in 1870 or 1871 and you never met… Irving Braxiatel. When you wake up you might suggest you visit a nice restaurant somewhere.”

Romana’s eyelids dropped and she fell slowly, straight into Braxiatel’s outstretched arms.

“Sleep well, Madame President.”

The other two Braxiatels stood next to him. One said, “Take her back. We’ll finish here.”

“Someone is coming,” the second one grabbed the first one’s arm and pulled them both out of sight.

A groaning, wheezing noise broke the brief silence that followed and a blue police box from 1960s Great Britain appeared next to Braxiatel and Romana.

The door swung open and the Doctor poked his head out. “Hell, Brax! I told you I knew the right coordinates!” He took in his surroundings. “Did you redecorate while I was gone? I can’t say I like it!”

“Doctor,” Braxiatel stood up, still holding Romana. “We –”

Something fell out of Romana’s pocket and hit the floor with a loud clatter. Braxiatel and the Doctor both stared down at it in surprise.

It was the homing beacon and it was activated.

“Ah,” the Doctor said.

“I’m afraid Romana had a little accident,” Braxiatel said. “She won’t remember anything that happened, not even meeting me. It’s a burden I’ll have to live with.”

The Doctor stared at Braxiatel, trying to see past the polite smile, to understand what his brother could possibly be hiding.

“She doesn’t remember me when we meet on Gallifrey,” Braxiatel added.

“Maybe you didn’t make a big enough impression,” the Doctor joked, but his expression was cold. “What are you doing here, Braxiatel? What do you care about Earth, or France, or the 19th century?”

“My TARDIS had a malfunction. Something threw it off course and into this time. Based on my instruments, it collided with something in the Vortex. Something that wasn’t shielded properly.” Braxiatel waited for the Doctor to say something.

“Oh, you know… all kinds of things travel in the Vortex. You need to be careful and experienced like me to avoid them.”

“Do you know how to tell if a TARDIS’s shield is functioning properly? There is a little lightbulb that glows green.”

A guilty look appeared on the Doctor’s face. “… Not purple?”

“No. That means your shield is misaligned.”

“I need to go! Just remembered a pressing appointment!” The Doctor took Romana from Braxiatel and carried her into the TARDIS, shouting, “See you later, Brax!” over his shoulder.

With a thud and wheezing noise the TARDIS vanished.

“Oh, Doctor,” Braxiatel said, “when will you stop being so predictable?”

[teeky185]

(Bloomberg) -- The world’s 1.8 billion Muslims look to one country above all others.As the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia is a symbol of purity for many who direct their prayers toward Mecca wherever they are in the world.The latest in a series of liberalizing reforms attributed to the modernizing influence of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman runs counter to that reputation for religious conservatism.As they awoke to the news on Friday that women from outside the kingdom would no longer be required to wear the flowing abaya that’s been mandatory for decades, Muslims in Asia broadly welcomed the shift. But many also expressed misgivings about the overall direction of the lodestar of the Islamic world, and wondered just how far the changes would go.“I view Saudi Arabia as the most sacred place for a Muslim,” said Amirah Fikri, 30, an administrator in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, who called the kingdom “an example of a Muslim country in the eyes of the world.”While reforms such as allowing women to drive and to travel without a guardian’s approval are positive, some things “are better left unchanged,” she said. The risk is of “harming the purity of Saudi when new, non-Islamic practices start to spread in the holy place.”Khashoggi MurderThe Saudi bid to appeal to tourists with a relaxed dress code for foreign women and the promise of easier access to the country is aimed at diversifying the economy away from its overwhelming reliance on oil. But it also serves to present a softer image of the kingdom to the west at a time when its reputation is distinctly mixed.The crown prince was excoriated internationally over the gruesome murder in Turkey last year of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and his prosecution of a bloody war in Yemen resulting in famine and thousands of civilian casualties prompted Germany and other countries to halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.At home, the kingdom’s extensive use of the death penalty, torture, arbitrary detentions of rights activists and “severely restricted” freedoms are among the issues cited by Amnesty International in its overview of Saudi Arabia. “Despite limited reforms, including allowing women to drive, women faced systematic discrimination in law and practice and were inadequately protected against sexual and other violence,” Amnesty says.Yet that evidence of the country’s deeply conservative nature and its rigid interpretation of Islam helps to give a sense of the potential for domestic resistance to any kind of modernizing reform -- and the risks to the crown prince in pursuing change.“Tourism of course will help the economy, but if it involves anything that goes against our religious beliefs then it will not be accepted,” said Sultan, a 33-year-old resident of Riyadh, who only gave his first name. “Our religion is more important than anything.” Foreign tourists will “import their culture” and “over time, these ethics and values will be stripped away from our conservative society.”Necessary ChangeYet for many in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, Saudi Arabia has no choice but to open up.“Change is a necessity,” said Nasaruddin Umar, Grand Imam of Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta. “There will be pressure from the traditional clerics group in the country. But I see what MBS is doing as a smart move because he does so in a measured way.”Didik Saputra, a 32-year-old high school teacher from Depok in West Java, one of the most conservative Muslim provinces in Indonesia, spoke while on a visit to the country’s largest mosque in central Jakarta during its renovation and expansion.“Saudi Arabia must accept changes without totally eliminating the old customs and practices,” he said over the noise of construction workers. “I agree with MBS that Saudi Arabia must be progressive and promote modernization of Islam. That would be good as it will also improve the image of Islam in the world.”Beliefs and CultureThe threat of liberalization jeopardizing Saudi Arabia’s global standing among devout Muslims is a proposition dismissed by Ahmed Al-Khateeb, chairman of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage and a key adviser to the crown prince. Saudi Arabia is any case no stranger to foreign visitors, he said.“We don’t expect this to affect Saudi Arabia’s image as the host for the Muslim world,” he told Bloomberg Television in Riyadh on Thursday. “The Muslim world knows that Saudi Arabia follows rules and has beliefs and culture.”Saudi Arabia has suffered far worse damage to its reputation in the recent past. It’s less than two decades since the kingdom almost became an international pariah after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national, claimed the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.The country’s post-World War II alliance with the U.S. survived the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by bin Laden. Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia as the destination for his first overseas trip as president, and was quick to rally to its side after this month’s attacks on Saudi oil installations widely attributed to regional rival Iran. However, that dependence on the U.S., more than Saudi Arabia’s reform efforts, is regarded with suspicion by some Muslims.“Saudi has lost her nobility ever since they chose to be in bed with the United States to fund extremist groups and create violent conflicts in their neighboring Arab countries,” said Fatin Mohd Husni, 29, a teacher in Malaysia. “So I see these reforms as neither diminishing nor harming the purity of Saudi, because there’s nothing so pure about the Saudi administration to begin with.”Drawing a LineIn India, with some 200 million Muslims, men heading out of Friday prayers at the Jama Masjid adjacent to Parliament House in New Delhi welcomed Saudi Arabia’s move to open up.“Muslims across the world should support Saudi Arabia’s decision,” said Fazle Mobin Siddique, 45, secretary at the Diamond Charitable and Educational Trust in the central-Indian city of Nagpur. “This is a progressive step for Islam. Excessive restrictions on women and the moral police needed to go.”For Tauqueer Khan, 40, a government consultant, Saudi Arabia’s reforms are an effort to counter the stigma of being “synonymous with backwardness, extremism, radicalism and terrorism” and show the world it too can change with time.“These changes up to a certain level is OK,” he said. “But if they go beyond these and open up a pub with liquor, it will not acceptable at all. The Muslim world looks on Saudi as the guardian of Islam. If they go beyond a certain level, obviously, the Muslim community will not like that.’’\--With assistance from Donna Abu-Nasr, Sarah Algethami and Bibhudatta Pradhan.To contact the reporters on this story: Anisah Shukry in Kuala Lumpur at ashukry2@bloomberg.net;Arys Aditya in Jakarta at aaditya5@bloomberg.net;Archana Chaudhary in New Delhi at achaudhary2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net, Mark WilliamsFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/the-anglozionist-empire/

The AngloZionist Empire: a hyperpower with microbrains and no cred left

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

Last week saw what was supposed to be a hyperpower point fingers for its embarrassing defeat not only at Venezuela, which successfully defeated Uncle Shmuel’s coup plans, but also at a list of other countries including Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.  It’s is rather pathetic and, frankly, bordering on the comically ridiculous.

Uncle Shmuel clearly did not appreciate being the laughingstock of the planet.

Eviction notice of the USSS

And as Uncle Shmuel always does, he decided to flex some muscle and show the world “who is boss” by…

… blockading the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC.

But even that was too much for the MAGA Admin, so they also denied doing so (how lame is that!?)

Which did not prevent US activists of entering the embassy (legally, they were invited in and confirm it all).

Now the US Secret Service wants to evict the people inside the building.

So much for the CIA’s beloved “plausible deniability” which now has morphed into “comical deniability”.

If you think that all this sounds incredibly amateurish and stupid – you are 100% correct.

In the wonderful words of Sergei Lavrov, the US diplomats have “lost the taste for diplomacy“.

But that was not all.

In an act of incredible courage the USA, which was told (by the Israelis, of course!), that the Iranians were about to attack “somewhere”, so Uncle Shmuel sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Middle-East.  In a “daring” operation, the brilliant USAF pilots B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf to “send a message” to the “Mollahs”: don’t f*ck with us or else…

The “Mollahs” apparently were unimpressed as they simply declared that “the US carriers were not a threat, only a target“.

The AngloZionists apparently have also executed a false flag operation to get a pretext to strike Iran, but so far this seems to have gotten rather little traction in the region (so far – this might change).

Lavrov reacting to the latest US threats

Now let’s leave this “Kindergarten level of operations” and try to make some sense from this nonsense.

First, while the American can pour scorn on the Iranians, call them ragheads, terrorists, Mollahs, sand-niggers or confuse them with Iraqis or even think that Iranian are Arabs (as, apparently, are the Turks, at least by the US common standard of ignorance), but the truth is that the Iranians are world-class and most sophisticated players, especially their superbanalytical community.  They fully understand that a  B-52 anywhere near the Iranian airspace is a sitting duck and that if the Americans were planning to strike Iran, they would pull their aircraft carrier far away from any possible Iranian strikes. As for the B-52, they have long range cruise missiles and they don’t need to get near Iran to deliver their payloads.

In fact, I think that the proper way to really make the Iranians believe that Uncle Shmuel means business would be to flush any and all US ships out of the Persian Gulf, to position the B-52s in Diego Garcia and to place the carriers as far away as possible to still be able to support a missile/bomb attack on Iranian targets.  And you can bet that the Iranians keep very close tabs on exactly what CENTCOM aircraft are deployed and where.  To attack Iran the US would need to achieve a specific concentration of forces and support elements which are all trackable by the Iranians.  My guess is that the Iranians already have a full list of all CENTCOM officers down to the colonel level (and possibly even lower for airmen) and that they already know exactly which individual USAF/USN aircraft are ready to strike.  One could be excused to think that this is difficult to do, but in reality it is not.  I have personally seen it done.

Second, the Americans know that the Iranians know that (well, maybe not Mr MAGA, but folks at the DIA, ONI, NSA, etc. do know that).  So all this sabre-rattling is designed to show that Mr MAGA has tons of hair on his chest, it’s all for internal US consumption.  As for the Iranians, they have already heard any and all imaginable US threats, they have been attacked many times by both the USA and Israel (directly or by proxy), and they have been preparing for a US attack ever since the glorious days of Operation Eagle Claw: they are as ready as they can be, you can take that to the bank.  Finally, the terrorist attack by the USN on a civilian Iranian airliner certainly convinced the Iranians that the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire lack even basic decency, nevermind honor.  Nevermind the use of chemical warfare by Iraq against Iran with chemicals helpfully provided by various US and EU companies (with the full blessing of their governments).  No – the Iranians truly have no illusions whatsoever about what the Shaytân-e Bozorg is capable of in his rage.

Third, “attacking embassies” is a glaring admission of terminal weakness.  That was true for the seizure of Russian consular buildings, and this is true for the Venezuelan embassy.  In the real (supra-Kindergarten) world when country A has a beef with country B, it does not vent its frustration against its embassy.  Such actions are not only an admission of weakness, but also a sign of a fundamental lack of civilization.

[Sidebar: this issue is crucial to the understanding of the United States.  The US is an extremely developed country, but not a civilized one.  Oscar Wilde (and George Clemanceau) had it right: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between“.  There are signs of that everywhere in the USA: from the feudal labor laws, to the lack of universal healthcare, to absolutely ridiculous mandatory criminal sentences (the Soviet Penal Code under Stalin was MUCH more reasonable and civilized than the current US laws!), to the death penalty, to the socially accepted torture in GITMO and elsewhere, to racial tensions, the disgusting “food” constituting the typical “SAD” diet, to the completely barbaric “war on drugs”, to the world record of incarcerations, to an immense epidemic of sexual assaults and rapes (1/5 of all women in the USA!), homosexuality accepted as a “normal and positive variation of human sexuality“, 98 percent of men reported internet porn use in the last six months, … – you can continue that list ad nauseam.  Please don’t misunderstand me – there are as many kind, intelligent, decent, honorable, educated, compassionate people in the USA as anywhere else.  This is not about the people living in the USA: it is about the kind of society these people are living in.  In fact, I would argue the truism that US Americans are the first victims of the lack of civilization of their own society!  Finally, a lack of civilization is not always a bad thing, and sometimes it can make a society much more dynamic, more flexible, more innovative too.  But yeah, mostly it sucks…]

By the way, the USA is hardly unique in having had degenerate imbeciles in power.  Does anybody remember what Chernenko looked like when he became the Secretary General of the CPSU?  What about folks like Jean-Bédel Bokassa or Mikheil Saakashvili (this latter case is especially distressing since it happened in a country with a truly ancient and extremely rich culture!).  And while we can dislike folks like George Bush Senior or James Baker – these were superbly educated and extremely intelligent people.  Compare them to such psychopathic ignoramuses like Pompeo, Bolton or Trump himself!

So this latest US “attack” on the Venezuela is truly a most telling symptom of the wholesale collapse of US power and of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and lack of civilization of the Neocon ruling elites.

The big question is obvious: will they attack Venezuela or Iran next?

NYT’s so-called “anti-Semitic” cartoon. Pretty accurate if you ask me!

In the very first article I ever wrote for my blog, as far back as 2007, I predicted that the US would attack Iran.  I still believe that the Israelis will never cease to try to get the US to do their dirty work for them (and let the goyim pay the price!).  What I am not sure about is whether the Israelis truly will have the power to push the USA into such a suicidal war (remember, if Iran cannot “win” against the USA, neither can the USA “win” against Iran – thus Iran will win simply by surviving and not caving in – which they will and they won’t).  The good news is that US power has been in sharp (and accelerating!) decline at least since Clinton and his gang.  I would even add that the last two idi*ts (Obama and Trump) did more damage to the US power than all their predecessors combined.  The bad news is that the collective IQ of US leaders has been falling even faster than US power.  We can hope that the first will hit zero long before the second, but there is no guarantee.

Truly, nobody knows if the US will or will not attack Iran and/or Venezuela next.  The Neocons sure want that, but whether they will make it happen this time around or not depends on so many variables that even the folks in the White House and the Pentagon probably don’t really know what will happen next.

What is certain is that the US reputation worldwide is basically roadkill.  The fact that most folks inside the USA are never told about that does not make it less real.  The Obama-Trump tag team has truly inflicted irreparable damage on the reputation of the USA (in both cases because they were hopelessly infected and corrupted by the Neocons).  The current US leaders appear to understand that, at least to some degree, this is why they are mostly lashing out at “easy” targets like free speech (on the Internet and elsewhere), Assange, the Venezuelan Embassy, etc.  The real danger comes from either one of two factors:

The Neocons will feel humiliated by the fact that all their threats are only met with indifference, disgust or laughter

The Neocons will feel buoyed by the fact that nothing terrible happened (so far) when they attacked a defenseless target

Either way, in both cases the outcome is the same: each “click!” brings us closer to the inevitable “bang!”.

By the way, I think I should also mention here that the current state of advanced paranoia in which the likes of Pompeo point their fingers left and right are also signs of terminal weakness: these are not so much ways to credibly explain the constant and systematic failures of the Israelis and the Americans to get anything actually done as they are a way to distract away from the real reasons for the current extreme weakness of the AngloZionists.

2006 The people of Lebanon celebrate the victory which turned the tide of AngloZionist imperialism

I concluded my last article by speaking of the terrified Venezuelans who refused to be afraid.  I will conclude this one by pointing at the first instance when a (comparatively) small adversary completely refused to be frightened even while it was the object of a truly terrifying attack: Hezbollah in 2006.  Even though they were outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded by the Israelis, the members of the Resistance in Lebanon simply refused to be afraid and, having lost the fear too which so many Arabs did succumb to before 2006, they proceeded to give the Israelis (fully backed by the USA) the worst and most humiliating thrashing in their country’s (admittedly short) history.

I urge you to read al-Sayyid Hassan’s famous “Divine Victory” speech (you can still find the English language transcript hereand here) – it is one of the most important speeches of the 20th century! – and pay attention to these words (emphasis added):

We feel that we won; Lebanon won; Palestine won; the Arab nation won, and every oppressed, aggrieved person in this world also won.  Our victory is not the victory of a party. I repeat what I said in Bint Jubayl on 25 May 2000: It is not the victory of a party or a community; rather it is a victory for true Lebanon, the true Lebanese people, and every free person in the world.  Don’t distort this big historic victory. Do not contain it in party, sectarian, communal, or regional cans. This victory is too big to be comprehended by us. The next weeks, months, and years will confirm this.

And, indeed, the next weeks, months and years have very much confirmed that!

Any US attack on Iran will have pretty similar results, but on a much, much bigger scale.

And the Iranians know that.  As do many in the Pentagon (the CIA and the White House are probably beyond hopeless by now).

Conclusion: good news and bad news

Finally some meaningful discussions between the two nuclear superpowers!

The good news first: Pompeo and Lavrov had what seems to be a meaningful dialog.  That is very, very good, even if totally insufficient.  They have also announced that they want to create study groups to improve the (currently dismal) relations between the two countries.  That is even better news (if that really happens).  Listening to Pompeo and Lavrov, I got a feeling that the Americans are slowly coming to the realization that they have an overwhelming need to re-establish a meaningful dialog with the other nuclear superpower.  Good.  But there is also bad news.

The rumor that the strategic geniuses surrounding Trump are now considering sending 120,000 troops to the Middle-East is really very bad news.  If this just stays a rumor, then it will be the usual hot air out of DC, along the lines of Trump’s “very powerful armada” sent to scare the DPRK (it failed).  The difference here is simple: sending carriers to the Middle-East is pure PR.  But sending carriers AND 120,000 troops completely changes that and now this threat, if executed, will become very real.  No, I don’t think that the US will attempt to invade Iran, but 120,000 is pretty close to what would be needed to try to re-open the Strait of Hormuz (assuming the Iranians close it) while protecting all the (pretty much defenseless) CENTCOM facilities and forces in the region.  Under this scenario, the trip of Pompeo to Russia might have a much more ominous reason: to explain to the Russians what the US is up to and to provide security guarantees that this entire operation is not aimed at Russian forces.  IF the US really plans to attack Iran, then it would make perfect sense for Pompeo to talk to Lavrov and open channels of communications between the two militaries to agree on “deconfliction” procedures.  Regardless of whether the Russians accept such deconfliction measures or not (my guess is that they definitely would), such a trip is a “must” when deploying large forces so near to Russian military forces.

So far Trump has denied this report – but we all know that he suffers from the “John Kerry syndrome”: he wants better relations with Russia only until the Neocons tell him not to. Then he makes a 180 and declares the polar opposite of what he just said.

Still, there are now rumors that Trump is getting fed up with Bolton (who, truth be told, totally FUBARed the Venezuelan situation!).

As for the Iraqis, they have already told the US to forget using Iraqi territory for any attack.  This reminds me of how the Brazilians told the US that Brazil would not allow its territory to be used for any attacks.  This is becoming a pattern.  Good.

Frankly, while an AngloZionist attack on Iran is always and by definition possible, I can’t imagine the folks at the Pentagon having the stomach for that.  In a recent article Eric Margolis outlined what the rationale for such an attack might be (check out his full article here).  Notice this sentence: “The Pentagon’s original plan to punish Iran called for some 2,300 air strikes on Day 1 alone“.  Can they really do that?  Yes, absolutely.  But imagine the consequences!  Margolis speaks of “punishing” Iran. 2,300 Air strikes in one day is not something I would call a “punishment”.  That is a full scale attack on Iran which, in turns, means that the Iranians will have exactly *ZERO* reasons to hold back in any way.  If the AngloZionists attack Iran with 2,300 air strikes on Day 1, then you can be sure that on Day2 all hell will break loose all over the Middle-East and the AngloZionists will have absolutely *NO* means of stopping it.

This will be a real bloodbath and nobody will have any idea as to how to stop it.

And you can be darn sure that the Iranians will show much more staying power than the imperialists, if only because they will be fighting in defense of their country, their faith, their liberty, their friends and their families. To expect the Iranians to cave in or surrender in any way would be the most stupid notion anybody could entertain.

Could they really be THAT stupid in Washington DC?

I don’t know.

But what I do know is this: any such attack will be extremely costly and very, very dangerous.  Obviously, the Neocons don’t give a rats ass about costs, financial or human.  They just want war, war, war and more war (remember McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb – bomb, bomb Iran“?).  But the Neocons are only a tiny fraction of the US ruling elites (even if the most powerful one) and my hope is that the sane elements will prevail (which, indeed, they have so far).

As for right now, we are still okay.  But if the US actually start sending large forces to the Middle-East, then all bets are off.

The Saker

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…

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The Rot in Academia

“Unlimited tolerance is a paradox. We don’t have to tolerate the intolerant.”-Lindsay Briggs

The hostility toward the notion of individual liberty and freedom of speech is evident everywhere you look these days, perhaps no more apparently than on college campuses. With alarming regularity, from moral panics to “anti-fascist” riots to professors with ties to ISIS, it has been incident after incident illustrating how deeply corrupted academia has become. From the lunacy of a Vanderbilt professor blaming 9/11 on racism, slavery, and the Navajo genocide to a Diablo Valley College professor smashing someone’s head with a bike lock, the modern academy—with its Cult-Marx professoriate, bloated bureaucracies that ensure “compliance” with the ruthless efficiency of the NKVD, and SJW student-activists—is no longer the bastion of open inquiry and debate it was intended to be. George Waldner, president emeritus of York College, stated:

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In the last five years, we’ve certainly had an increasing number of free speech confrontations on many campuses across the country. Halloween costumes at Yale, the ‘Trump’ chalkings at Emory University …There have probably been 30 or 40 of these [incidents] in the last five years.

“All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” ~George Ciccarillo-Maher

I would venture it’s been many more than that, especially if you include the on-campus hate crime hoaxes. A university education looks ever-more like a combination of a Soviet re-education camp and a day-care. The student body seems to be regressing to a median age of about five, Marx’s dictums spoon-fed to them by doughy professional axe-grinders, agitators, and grievance-mongers. If sticks and stones break their bones, then words are what really hurt. As Jim Goad wrote in The Redneck Manifesto:

HATE SPEECH is the most Orwellian concept to emerge from the twentieth-century twilight. It is especially deceptive because it hides behind a Happy Face mask. Most people want to be on the side of love, right? Like all dangerous ideas, the notion of hate speech sounds good until dismantled piece by piece. The first problem is with the term’s vagueness. Hate speech, apparently, has become anything they hate. Through relentless exposure to well-meaning, soft-suds imagery, otherwise intelligent people have been brainwashed to believe that “hate” is a satisfactory explanation for any human action. Reducing complex sociopolitical struggles to a matter of “hate” is as simplistic as blaming it on “sin,” but they fall for it.

And boy are they falling for it. The omnipresence of “hate” appears to be the main preoccupation of the professoriate and the administrative commissars, and is certainly one of the central fixtures of campus life. Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams took to his Twitter account to use the hashtag #LetThemFuckingDie in reference to white males; similarly, former Drexel professor George Ciccarillo-Maher opined that, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” Texas A&M professor Tommy Curry advocated violence against whites as a corrective measure to perceived racism in a podcast interview back in 2012. Now-terminated Essex County College professor Lisa Durden taunted whites on Tucker Carlson when the host pressed her on her support for racially-exclusionary events:

“Boo-hoo-hoo, you white people are just angry you couldn’t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration.”

University of Delaware anthropology professor Kathy Dettwyler declared on Facebook that Otto Warmbier “got exactly what he deserved” when he was tortured to death by North Korea because he was “typical of a mind-set of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueless males.” According to Boston University professor Saida Grundy, “White masculinity isn’t a problem for America’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for America’s colleges.” John Griffin of the Art Institute of Washington believes that Republicans “should be lined up and shot. That’s not hyperbole.” Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar gloated over the death of Barbara Bush on Twitter (sic):

“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. I’m happy the witch is dead. Can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have. Byyyeeeeeeee.”

Kevin Allred, formerly of Rutgers University, had the following to say on Twitter: “Will the Second Amendment be as cool when I buy a gun and start shooting at random white people or no …?” Another Boston University professor, Kyna Hamill, published a paper condemning “Jingle Bells” for its “racist history” as a jingle in blackface. Sarah Bond of the University of Iowa lamented the fact that sculptures from the classical world are now primarily associated with white marble. Princeton University Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor made the deeply revealing and insightful comments during her commencement address at Hampshire College that Donald Trump is a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.”

As Middlebury, Yale, Evergreen State, and Berkeley have shown, the students are just as eager to get in on the action. Lucía Martínez Valdivia, a mixed-race “queer” assistant professor of English at Reed College, had a lecture about Sappho disrupted by students protesting the college’s mandatory humanities class as “white supremacist.” Just when you think the Left cannot get any more preposterous, there you go—protesting a queer, mixed-race woman’s lecture on a queer female poet. The protesters also indicted Aristotle and Plato for good measure. Martínez Valdivia states:

Nuance and careful reasoning are not the tools of the oppressor, meant to deceive and gaslight and undermine and distract. On the contrary: These tools can help prove what those who use them think — or even what they feel — to be true. They make arguments more, not less, convincing, using objective evidence to make a point rather than relying on the persuasive power of a subjective feeling…Ultimately, this is a call for empathy, for stretching our imaginations to try to inhabit and understand positions that aren’t ours and the points of view of people who aren’t us. A grounding in the study of the humanities can help students encounter ideas with care and…realizing — and accepting — that no person, no text, no class, is without flaws. The things we study are, after all, products of human hands.

She’s absolutely correct, but the un-reasoning Left refuses to consider what is actually a very insightful commentary on the nature of creation so fundamental to the arts, and on the beauty and tragedy of a fatally-flawed humanity. This idea that empathy does not need to be divorced from logic and reason—that it is in fact inextricably intertwined and that rationality and critical thinking aren’t “tools of white supremacy” but are instead universally applicable and vital to processing the world and the people in it in all their dimensionality—is increasingly becoming antithetical to the deeply sentimental worldview of the Left wing, where the Western logos itself has become the enemy of emotive, panicked hysteria masquerading as a coherent set of principles. In this infantile worldview of good-and-bad, “hate,” as the Jim Goad quote discusses, is a sufficient explanation for people’s motivations, and for anything that falls outside the ideological confines of Leftist “thought.”

One thing is clear—dissent will not be tolerated. Will Creeley, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), expresses concern that the:

“U.S. Supreme Court’s stark warning in Sweezy v. New Hampshire will prove prophetic: ‘Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.’”

Though he is dead wrong about group identity and has of late turned into a bit of a Zionist shill, Dr. Jordan Peterson is a very astute observer of the Cultural Marxism that has taken firm hold of the university campuses in North America and beyond. Peterson refers to the Leftist buzzwords of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusivity” as the Unholy Trinity, and I might be so presumptuous as to add a fourth: trauma. This is the lynchpin of the push for safe spaces, the conflation of speech with violence, and the drive to dis-invite and de-platform speakers who run afoul of the egalitarians. Nevertheless, these poisonous ideas have seeped deep into the fabric of academia, where they are not only perpetuated and remain unchallenged, but spread into our society’s daily discourse as a direct result of sustained attempts at indoctrination in the academy, and increasingly even earlier in K-12.

The reason things seem to be deteriorating on campus has everything to do with its closed environment, where dissenting opinions are discouraged and forced out, and mutually reinforcing viewpoints are encouraged and advanced. Essentially you then have an echo chamber environment where bad or at least faulty ideas are perpetuated and due to viewpoint uniformity (and hostility to different perspectives) the ideas and suppositions advanced in the academy are never challenged, and in the rare instances where dissenting evidence emerges from the university setting (such as Dr. Richard Lynn’s IQ research), the data is suppressed and the individual responsible is punished or marginalized in some way. Political orientation is a pretty good proxy for worldview; for all of the talk of diversity, in this crucial area it is sorely lacking. From a 2016 survey, we see that liberal professors in New England outnumber conservatives 28-to-1. From a study conducted by UCLA published in 2012, we can see the growing uniformity among the professoriate nation-wide is approaching a totality of the profession:

CHART

By 2014, a mere 10% of professors identified as conservative. They remain largely confined to business and the hard sciences. In a sample of fifty-one of the top sixty liberal arts colleges studied by the National Association of Scholars’ Mitchell Langbert this year, 39% of faculties had zero Republicans, and out of a pool of nearly 8,700 professors, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans ten-to-one.

As uniform in their beliefs as professors generally are, John Wilson, an editor of the AAUP’s “Academe” blog, believes that it is the administrators who are really the problem as the architects and enforcers of the censorship and speech codes that are so prevalent on college campuses. As one example of the blood-engorged ticks that are collegiate bureaucracies/administrations, the University of Michigan has ninety-three full-time diversity and equity staff, twenty-six of whom earn six figures, while nationally 49% of college classes are taught by adjunct (part-time) professors with no semester-to-semester guarantee of classes and no benefits (to their credit Ann Arbor only has 17% of its classes taught by adjuncts). Jon Marcus from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting illuminates:

The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures. The disproportionate increase in the number of university staffers who neither teach nor conduct research has continued unabated in more recent years. From 1987 until 2011-12…universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average of 87 every working day, according to the analysis of federal figures…“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.” Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants…Since 1987, universities have also started or expanded departments devoted to marketing, diversity, disability, sustainability, security, environmental health, recruiting, technology, and fundraising, and added new majors and graduate and athletics programs, satellite campuses, and conference centers… “It’s almost Orwellian,” said [economist Richard] Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you started with.”

All of this should rightly beg the question of what purpose all of this administrative bloat serves. It certainly isn’t to benefit the quality of the education students receive, and it only adds to the onerous costs of attaining a college degree. The aforementioned AAUP is responsible for the 1915 document that still stands as the golden standard of the mission statement of what a university’s actual purpose should be:

To promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge;

To provide general instruction to the students; and

To develop experts for various branches of the public service.

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Nowhere is there an imperative to produce “professional activists” or advocate for that most nebulous of terms: social justice. Public service in this context is to contribute to society in a productive and meaningful way, be it as an engineer, a rocket scientist, or a teacher. Instead, students learn the wonders of communism (according to a 2017 survey, 44% of Millennials surveyed preferred to live under a socialist system), whites learn to hate themselves, and everyone else learns to hate them. A recent event at The College of William & Mary sponsored by the ACLU entitled “Students and the First Amendment” was shut down due to Black Lives Matter protesters, who exercised the “heckler’s veto” and asserted, among the usual tripe, that “Liberalism is White Supremacy.” Where else can you go from there? What common ground can there be when the Left is saying its own professed values of pluralism and tolerance are white supremacy?

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2KzaJOd via IFTTT

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New Post has been published on https://www.stl.news/case-of-shackled-kids-revives-home-school-regulation-debate/76303/

Case of shackled kids revives home-school regulation debate

January 28, 2018(AP)(STL.News)— Just over a week after California officials found 13 siblings allegedly held captive and younger children apparently not missed by schools because they were being home-schooled, home-schooling advocates say they are bracing for calls for stricter oversight of the practice.

The advocates say they were horrified by accusations that the children’s parents kept them shackled in a filthy home in the Southern California city of Ferris, and some said they support mandatory medical visits or regular academic assessments of home-schooled children.

But others contend moves to step up home-schooling controls in the name of exposing child abuse earlier could lead to overregulation and intrusion that punishes parents.

“Right now the biggest threat is that lawmakers might make a decision based on the emotion of the moment, rather than looking at the empirical evidence,” said Scott Woodruff, senior counsel with the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association. He said national organizations that track risk factors for child abuse, including the U.S. Commission to Eliminate Child Neglect and Fatalities, don’t list home-schooling among them.

One California lawmaker has floated the idea of requiring annual walk-throughs of home schools by state or county officials because of the case and “a number of legislators have expressed interest in doing something,” the HomeSchool Association of California said in a statement.

“We can’t prevent evil,” the association said, “and trying to prevent it by taking away the freedom of law-abiding people is not a price our society should pay.”

In Watertown, Connecticut, Chemay Morales-James home-schools her 4- and 6-year-old children because she wasn’t comfortable with her local school options and says she worries that “things are going to change now.”

She rejected the notion that home-schooling hurts children’s socialization and said many home-schooled children, like hers, spend most of their time out and about in their communities.

“I’m hoping this is one of those things where it’s hot for the moment and then it dies down,” Morales-James said.

Disputes over the right level of home-schooling regulation have simmered for years as the number of home-schooled children in the U.S. skyrocketed from about 15,000 in the 1970s to about 2 million today.

The practice was first driven largely by families’ preferences to include religious teaching at home along with standard education. It gained wider acceptance as parents dissatisfied with neighborhood schools turned to it to customize their children’s education and nurture family bonds.

In the absence of federal guidelines, oversight varies widely by state. Alaska and Idaho have virtually no regulations, while New York and Pennsylvania families must submit annual instruction plans to school districts, administer standardized tests taken by public school students statewide and provide academic progress reports.

California treats home schools like other private schools and requires registration. Private schools are subject to annual fire inspections but no agency regulates or oversees them.

The Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education lobbies for mandatory medical visits or academic assessments that would ensure home-schooled children are seen by someone trained to recognize abuse. Less than half of the U.S. states now require academic assessments, the Education Commission of the States said in a 2015 report on home-school regulations.

“There’s no better way to isolate your child if you are an abusive parent than to home-school,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the coalition, which maintains a database of home-school abuse cases.

In recent years, the trend in state laws has been toward loosening government oversight of home-schooling, said Joseph Murray, a Vanderbilt University education professor who has researched home-schooling. West Virginia, for example, in 2016 reduced the number of annual assessments parents must submit to the district, and Arkansas eliminated an academic assessment requirement in 2015.

“There are states now where you don’t really have to do anything. You don’t even have to notify anybody that you’re home-schooling,” Murphy said.

Recent efforts to put more controls on home-schooling at the state legislative level have largely failed. State senate leaders declined to consider a 2017 Kentucky bill introduced after an 8-year-old home-schooled girl was tortured by her father and his live-in girlfriend that would have barred families with histories of child abuse from home-schooling.

After two home-schooled children were found dead in a Detroit freezer, a 2015 Michigan bill would have required documented meetings with a teacher, doctor or clergy. The bill stalled in a legislative committee.

In Iowa, a bill requiring quarterly checks of home-school students was introduced in 2017 after a home-schooled teen starved to death. It, too, remained in committee.

And in Kansas, a grandmother unsuccessfully pleaded for stricter home-school control in 2015 after her 7-year-old home-schooled grandson was starved and killed by his father, who fed his body to pigs.

In the California case, authorities have said the 13 children of David and Louise Turpin — ranging in age from 2 and 29 — were rescued Jan. 14 from a home that looked well-kept on the outside. But authorities say children were kept chained to beds for months and some were so malnourished their growth was stunted. The parents have pleaded not guilty to torture, abuse and other charges.

State Assemblyman Jose Medina, a Democrat who represents the area, said he is “extremely concerned about the lack of oversight the state of California currently has in monitoring private and home schools.” He said he is considering proposing legislation mandating annual walk-througs of home-schooling residences “to ascertain the safety and well-being of the students.”

Morales-James, the Connecticut mother, said part of her decision with her husband to home-school her children came about because she is of Puerto Rican descent and her husband is a black Trinidadian and that they feared their kids could face racism and marginalization. She was concerned that regulations could lead to more restrictions that would threaten her home-schooling option.

Alarmed by some of the anti-home-schooling commentary in recent days, Morales-James noted traditional schools have had their share of abuse scandals.

“Do we have to shut down public or private schools or increase regulations?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a huge debate over that.”

By CAROLYN THOMPSON by Associated Press, published on STL.NEWS by St. Louis Media, LLC (US)