#also i might end up ignoring the results of this poll but at the moment i cant decide so i need help lmao

[remix-of-your-guts]

alright folks time for the official poll...

which setting should i do for my karl marx/friedrich engels crack fic (reply or reblog with the number of your vote)

1. modern day college au

2. time travelers au

3. try to make it match history when it comes to setting

also add a ^ if i should add mild smut for an extra layer of chaos (id put it in a separate chapter with a warning so yall can skip if u want dont worry) and add a % if you think i should keep it completely PG

#no matter what it will be enemies to lovers somewhat slow burn dont worry #and theyll probably have to share a bed at one point #also i might end up ignoring the results of this poll but at the moment i cant decide so i need help lmao #communist crack

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 313: Deku VS Lady Nagant

Previously on BnHA: Hawks’s super-hot badass murder senpai Lady Nagant showed up to fire a cupid’s arrow into my heart, and a bunch of literal bullets into my son. Deku was all “oh shit it’s Hawks’s super-hot badass murder senpai, what do I do, let me think back to Hawks’s advice for a sec.” Flashback!Hawks was all “anyway Deku so if my super-hot badass murder senpai ever shows up you’re basically screwed so you’d better abscond the fuck out of there.” Present!Deku was all “lol idek why I flashed back to that conversation since I’m just going to do the exact opposite of what Hawks said” and charged directly toward Nagant because WHY NOT. Overhaul was all “waah I need to get back to my boss who I put in a coma out of love” and Nagant was all “jesus christ why did I even bring you here” and had a flashback to AFO who was all “ILU NAGANT IMMA GIVE YOU AN EXTRA QUIRK SO PLEASE CAPTURE DEKU FOR ME PLEASE AND THANKS” and yeah. Shit is all over the place right now and I love it.

Today on BnHA: All Might gets attacked by a pair of discount assassins and is all “Call an ambulance! ...BUT NOT FOR ME” and it’s really badass but also I really wish he would stop tempting fate like this. Lady Nagant is all “[casually flies around town shooting shit]” and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t read an entire chapter of just that. Deku is all, “[gets shot (≥_<)]” and releases a giant Smokescreen which prompts En to show up. En is all, “( •᷄⌓•᷅ ) (⌣̀ Δ⌣́) ( •̀_•́ )σ (¬､¬) (눈_눈)” which I consider to be a high point of both the chapter and of my life. The chapter ends with Deku using the Third’s quirk to launch a bunch of random objects at Nagant so that he can jump up and grab her arm all sneaky-like, and I’m sure this is going to prompt another week’s worth of discourse that I don’t care about at all, but fuck it, I’m having a good time.

OH WE’RE CUTTING BACK TO ALL MIGHT WELL THAT’S NICE I GUESS. CONGRATS ON NOT BEING DEAD

you named your car??

you named it Hercules??

I love you so much??

please marry me you giant fucking dork???

lmao speaking of huge fucking dorks

who the fuck are you clowns. la dee da we’re gonna murder All Might with our synchronized spear attack!! I mean... they’re clearly trying their best... maybe I should just be nice and politely hype them up like All Might is so clearly trying to do

like okay, but we all agree that this is actually the least intimidating attack any of us has ever seen, right?? these guys zipped up their hoodies all serious-like and are trying to attack All Might and Hercules with their Walmart tiki torches, but just, no?? right?? like the only way this could possibly be effective is if they were trying to kill All Might with secondhand embarrassment

“those are assassins” this is a VERY generous assessment, All Might

OH MY GOD THE TIKI TORCHES ACTUALLY KILLED THE FUCK OUT OF HERCULES

[slaps roof of car] this baby can fit so many weaponized festive backyard lighting solutions in it

and yet, even after watching this with my own two eyes, I still can’t take these dudes seriously. idek what it is. anyways r.i.p. Hercules, I loved you a lot but I guess you weren’t actually a very good armored car were you

omg they didn’t know it was All Might??

okay 1) for a moment there I was like “oh hey maybe they’re not so bad after all” but then a moment later it was like “ah nope, they are.” like, that was an interesting .06 second emotional journey there. anyways 2) All Might you have my permission to kick their asses for this disrespect, and 3) anyone else all of a sudden getting “wouldn’t this be an interesting time for Stain to suddenly show up” vibes?? no?? just me???

(ETA: hmm tbh I’ve still got those vibes and they haven’t gone away lol. Stain?? you out there buddy?? do you want to be cool for just once in your life. ball’s in your court pal.)

OH SNAP ALL MIGHT ARE YOU REALLY GONNA DO IT ARE YOU GONNA KICK THEIR ASSES

PROTECTIVE DAD MODE ACTIVATED?? BECAUSE YOU KNOW I’M HERE FOR THAT SHIT, SO YEAH, FEEL FREE

omg he’s shouting at them about how much Deku has suffered lmao and they’re just like falling over from being scolded

so they have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about though, right? “SIR THIS IS A WENDY’S” well whatever, you killed his pet car so he’s in a bad mood now

OH MY GOD

LIKE, JUST SO WE’RE ALL CLEAR, THESE FOUR PAGES SO FAR HAVE MADE ALMOST ZERO SENSE. LIKE MAYBE 2% SENSE TOPS. BUT ASK ME IF I CARE. GO AHEAD AND ASK. I SAID GO AHEAD, IT’S OKAY. ...NO I DON’T CARE AT ALL THANK YOU FOR ASKING

(ETA: also, the more I look at this panel, the more I’m just like, why the hell would you phrase it like that though, sob. way to doubly tempt fate?? are you trying to give Horikoshi a challenge??)

and now back to Deku who is randomly bouncing around the city and narrating it to himself just in case he was confused about why he was doing this

who are you talking to Deku. but thanks we appreciate it

man you gotta love that overconfidence. the smartest guy in the world warned you away from this lady, so SURE, LET’S RUN RIGHT UP TO HER. “I APPRECIATE YOUR INPUT, FLASHBACK!HAWKS, BUT I’LL TAKE IT FROM HERE” well okay then!!

I think it would be funny if RHA.com put little Buzzfeed-style polls in between the chapter pages so they could survey people at random intervals as they read their way through the chapter. like, you finish this page and then there’s a little poll there asking “do you think Deku’s plan of catching up to Lady Nagant and finding out where Shigaraki is will work?”, and you click “no” just like everyone else and then nod as the results show that 97% of your fellow readers also picked “no”, and you chuckle to yourself wondering how many of the 3% accidentally clicked on the wrong option by mistake, and then you keep on reading

ANYWAY, SO

HOW’S THAT PLAN WORKING OUT FOR YOU SO FAR DEKU. nice kick, though!!

omggggggg

ouch

update: Deku’s plan not really working out. sources tell me my boy has been fucking shot. this is an ongoing story and we will keep you posted with the latest developments as they come in

wait what

feel free to explain to the rest of us what all of this “UNLESS...” and “THAT POSSIBILITY...” shit means anytime, Deku

oh lol did he realize she could fly??

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE, CNN’s John King reports that Deku is still fucked. eyewitness reports now coming in that Nagant is doing no-look shots and basically not even giving a fuck. sources described her mannerisms and expression as “sexy, but in like an effortless sort of way.” we will continue to bring you the latest

so now there’s basically an entire page of Deku being all “ah fuck so she’s basically closing in and she could already hit me with impossible accuracy even from Far Away, so if that’s the case then her being Up Close is probably going to be even worse!” making good use of that Big Hero Brain there, Deku

so now what, you’re doing some kind of spiraling kick thing?? how is that going to help

oh lol he’s using Smokescreen to create some cover. aww, good for you Deku you named one of your Smokescreen attacks

OH NO LADY DON’T TELL ME AFO DIDN’T EVEN FILL YOU IN ON THE BASICS

seriously, AFO?? you basically told her what Deku’s exact strategy was going to be but then couldn’t be assed to drop that little, small, barely notable piece of knowledge that Deku is rocking multiple quirks?? is it supposed to be a secret or something?? you dropped the ball here man

damn this is getting intense now

(ETA: the way En is poking Deku’s head in that first panel is fucking sending me, I love this guy so much omg.)

well then what are you planning, Deku?? I’m actually really curious!! I am genuinely starting to be invested in this fight scene not only in the “wanting to see who wins and how that impacts the plot” sense, but also in the “wanting to see how it happens because the choreography and strategy is actually pretty cool” sense, which honestly hasn’t happened for quite a while now! this is fun

anyway so what’s up Deku, are you going to use another quirk?? I’ve been speculating that he hasn’t actually unlocked the last two yet (since Two and Three didn’t exactly seem convinced when we last saw them), but maybe I’m about to be proven wrong

(ETA: well he clearly has Three’s obviously, but Two’s is still MIA, and that’s the one I am of course the most curious about. that’s the one we’re all curious about, let’s be real.)

OH SNAP???

AHHHH I’M HYPED LOL. ANOTHER SHINY NEW QUIRK LOL SHOULD I PUT UP THE USUAL DISCOURSE DISCLAIMER

(ETA: so yeah, after thinking on it, I’m not gonna say “please no Deku discourse on my blog” this week, but I probably will ignore any discourse that does come my way though, just because I don’t have much interest in getting involved in what would probably be a pretty repetitive discussion. like, I can just sum up my opinions (which is what they are) here instead. in fact here they are lol:

1) I like the SIXQUIRKS and I like seeing Deku be a badass.

2) I also don’t think Deku is too OP. more like he’s exactly as OP as he needs to be at the moment, given that we’re approaching the end of the series. I expect the other kids will also be pretty damn OP when we see them fight again. we’re just at that point now where they’re all badasses (as well they should be; they’ve grown a lot and they deserve it). it’s just that Deku’s the one we’re getting to see right now.

3) of course I miss Kacchan and the others, but for me this vibes much closer to the MVA arc where even though I missed them, I was still having a blast (as opposed to the dark days of the Basement arc where I was pretty much losing it lol). like, even though Kacchan’s my favorite, I still love Deku a lot and this arc has been amazing for him getting to shine on his own (for like the first time, really).

4) y’all know I love the OFA plot and I’ve never been shy about that lol. I like all of the Vestiges a lot. Banjou and his over the top personality; En and his “guy you thought would be serious and :| all the time but is actually hyper-animated and ALL OVER THE PLACE” energy; Shiro who actually is a :| sort of guy lol; Three who I still expect will be fleshed out in a more detailed flashback at some point; and of course Two, who, well. you know what I think about him lol. Bakuverse is still on the table and I’m still hyped. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we still have yet to see Two actually talk to Deku (as opposed to talking to the other Vestiges while Deku is distracted). did he lend him his power yet?? or is he still holding out?? either way it’s definitely going to be a Big Thing when it finally happens and I can’t wait to see it.

5) Lady Nagant is Everything and just because Deku grabbed her arm doesn’t mean the fight is over yet lol. Overhaul hasn’t come into play yet either. not to mention that even if the fight is over, the “where do we go from here” part still has me excited either way. her connection to Hawks and the HPSC is very intriguing and we’ve barely touched on that as of yet; she definitely has more of a role to play in this.

6) last but not least, I feel like every week the discussion is all about how much focus Deku’s getting, and how OP he is or isn’t, and OFA this and OFA that, but meanwhile I’m actually so invested in the character development here though?? the way Deku has distanced himself from everyone (except for the Vestiges, because of course they’re already dead so it’s not like they can die again lol)?? the way he’s pushing himself far too hard and we can see the shadows in and under his eyes, and the fact that he never smiles, and even All Might has remarked on how he isn’t taking care of himself at all?? the fact that he’s so single-mindedly obsessed with focused on stopping AFO?? the fact that he’s still the same sweet old Deku despite everything and was so kind to that fox lady with the umbrella, but there was also something so sad about that scene because it felt like a reminder of the type of hero that he wants to be, but that he’s not allowed to be right now?? because the stakes are too high and the world is falling apart?? and he feels like he’s the only one who can do something about it?? and that he has to be?? and that he is putting so much pressure on himself right now, and it’s absolutely too much pressure for any one person to bear, and I feel like no one is fucking talking about this lol goddammit.

anyway so yeah. I have feels about this, and every week that slow-burn angst is getting more and more intense behind the scenes, and I feel like it’s all going to hit a breaking point eventually. sooner rather than later. it really feels like a mirror of Katsuki’s post-Kamino arc. where all that angst was just churning below the surface for like twenty chapters and then it finally was like “okay it’s time” and it all came bursting out and we got the best five chapters of the fucking series (in my admittedly biased estimation lol).

basically, I know that most of fandom is billing this as either the “villain hunt” arc or the “solo Deku SIXQUIRKS fighting arc” or whatever. but for me, it’s always been and still is the Deku Angst arc lol. the cool fights are a sexy bonus (the worldbuilding less so because even though it’s interesting to see society at such a low point, it’s also very depressing and gets old pretty fast), but for me the thing that’s really keeping me engaged chapter after chapter is seeing Deku like we’ve never seen him before. seeing him all quiet and withdrawn and brooding and focused on AFO, AFO, AFO, and seeing that “he just doesn’t take himself into account” mentality taken to extremes. I am invested in that. I’m soaking up that angst each and every week, and I’m invested in seeing what comes of it. it’s a big picture thing. week to week this arc might just seem like a bunch of villain fight scenes, sure. but Deku’s emotional journey is the thread that’s going to carry this arc through from beginning to end, and for that I’m willing to be patient.

anyway that turned into a BIG OL’ RANT there but yeah! so those are my thoughts on the disk horse as it currently stands. and like I said, I’m open to discussion, but tbh I will probably just wind up repeating these same talking points endlessly so just a fair warning lol.)

anyway so Three says Deku has yet to use his quirk at ALL but now he’s trying to combine it with another quirk?? damn. also please check out En’s face here you guys

En launching a sneak attack up my favorite character list by the sheer power of his expressions alone. he really knows how to make the most of his screentime

OH DAMN DEKU

at this point the 3% from that hypothetical poll earlier are starting to feel prettttty damn smug, I’ll bet. well shit

what in the fuck

?? so like releasing his chi or whatnot?? isn’t that basically just like base OFA all over again?? also Deku did you seriously just apologize to Gran’s cape

update: Nagant has turned her eyeball into a gun

hm. hmmmmmmm. ...okay yep, still somehow sexy

anyway so she’s just floating up there building suspense, as one does. lord I sure hope she has good reflexes because something tells me she’s going to need them

OH SNAP HE THREW GRAN’S CAPE AS A DECOY WHAAAAT OKAY THAT’S SOME SMART SHIT DEKU

LOL SHE’S MAD NOW

JESUS CHRIST SHE JUST NEVER TAKES A GODDAMN BREAK FROM BEING AWESOME HUH

DEKU ARE YOU JUST THROWING EVERY DAMN THING IN YOUR INVENTORY

but without the cape and the hood how will you continue to look like an enigmatic badass. you really can’t. which means we might finally be moving on from the wandering nomad part of this arc, stay tuned

LOL YOU MANIAC

I hope he went full Kacchan with the dialogue there. his face sure looks like it lol. popped out of a building all mad fdskljlkj omg

well this was fun, shit. I still have basically no idea what Three’s quirk does though lol. like, can he use it to charge up objects with kinetic energy or something?? but then what was all of that talk about combining it with one of the other quirks?? or was that just because he was using Smokescreen at the same time??

(ETA: having seen and read an additional half-dozen explanations of Three’s quirk, I can say with confidence that I still have basically no idea what it is or does.)

anyway so!! Deku is a badasssssss but something tells me not to count Nagant out just yet even so. also I really enjoy seeing Deku flip out on people like he doesn’t have a fucking hole in his torso because it reminds me of A CERTAIN SOMEONE and I always love to see him channeling that feral energy; I feel like it’s been a while

anyways good luck to you both!! I truly wish that both of you could win. but if not, then maybe you can at least become friends instead. you have so much in common, you both can fly and have multiple quirks and you’re both badasses, and plus it would just be really funny to see the look on Hawks’s face lmao

#bnha 313 #midoriya izuku #lady nagant #bnha meta #deku meta #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha

[azucanela]

chapter ii

pairing: bakugou katsuki x fem!reader

warnings: cursing. mentions of a bomb.

word count: 3k

summary: the internet is enamored with the idea of y/n l/n and bakugou katsuki, two renowned pro heroes, dating. the first issue? the pair rarely interacts. the second issue? apparently, they hate each other, not that anyone knows about that bit. of course, after one night of many mistakes, the whole world knows.

series masterlist

THE MEETING WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL. AT ALL. Or at least, that’s how it seemed in Y/N’s eyes. Seeing as the only thing that had come out of it was… spending more time with Bakugou. Which was the opposite of what she wanted to do at the moment seeing as she despised him. Y/N actually had a feeling that any further interactions with Bakugou would only end in more chaos. So, Y/N decided she would set to work, as she would any other day. 

Ignore the problem until it goes away, right?

Slipping on her hero costume feels like a chore, pulling the gloves of her suit on with a grimace. They only served as a reminder of her inability to fully control her ability— though Y/N was known as someone with some of the most impressive quirk control. There was always that underlying feeling, of course that feeling never belonged to her. It had always been hard, shutting out the emotions of others, Y/N had found that those who feel the most strongly were the ones she would avoid.

Clearly she had failed.

Regardless, those emotions tended to be distracting as she went about her day. Y/N had learnt to ignore them, to block them out for periods of time, but in a career like hers it was unavoidable. The pain, the rage, the panic, the pure feeling of fear. It could get overwhelming and that often put her at a disadvantage. Emotions were viewed as a weakness, and oftentimes allowing your emotions to get the best of you resulted in unnecessary deaths. But allowing the emotions of others to do so? 

It got even worse when she actually activated her quirk to its fullest extent.  With a single touch, she could utilize the abilities of a person— all their abilities. When it came to quirks, if you controlled your quirk well, so could she. Otherwise, she would adapt the skills of a person, their intelligence, their athleticism, even their hobbies. Y/N could even the fact that she’d made it through UA to this ability. After all, she’d never been athletic, but her classmates had been. 

But her setback had always been a pain, especially in battle, Y/N felt the pain of whoever’s quirk she mimicked. If they were shot, Y/N felt it as if she had been shot as well. She’d never experienced someone dying on her. Nor did she want to. But Y/N was capable of holding as many quirks and capabilities as she could handle— and pain added up very quickly. 

It had been worse when she was younger, but Y/N had grown during her time at UA, and now she was capable of ignoring the emotions of others to an extent, and her pain tolerance had grown exponentially. 

Y/N was grateful for her success, for the agency she’d been working at. She was not grateful for the looks she got on the way there, Y/N could feel the whispers of those who watched her enter as they walked past. Though she could only hope her own staff had more respect for her. 

Her lips pressed together into a tight lipped smile as she entered, and Y/N found herself bracing for whatever could greet her. And to her delight, it appeared that everything was normal. Save for Lorelai’s presence by the entrance, her phone in hand. As though she had known Y/N had entered, the girl in question looks up from her phone before Y/N even has the chance to speak.

“We need to go over our plan, Y/N.”

In response, Y/N waves her off, continuing down the corridor. She smiles to those who greet her, mumbling back to them as Lorelai follows her. “Actually, I need to plan my first patrol of the morning.” She says, looking back to her friend momentarily.

“Then I’ll plan. And my plan includes a real nice fake dating scheme, kinda like those movies.”

Almost instantly Y/N turns around, glaring at Lorelai— who simply offers her a smile in response, clearly pleased with herself as she begins to move alongside Y/N rather than behind her. Y/N had no doubt that they would plan a fake dating scheme if it came down to it, unless she got involved that is. “So?”

“Well, the fake dating scheme was an actual option but you clearly don't like that.” Lorelai mumbles out in response, now holding a tablet as she guides them into a room. “Aside from that, basic press events together,” Lorelai looks up from her tablet pointedly, “where you actually look like you’re enjoying yourself, should amend the situation easily enough.”

Y/N raised a brow, taking a step around the long meeting table where those who worked at Hawk’s agency would soon congregate for their weekly assignments, “a little too easy if you ask me.” She looks to Lorelai, “Bakugou agreed to this?”

“I’m sure his PR team will convince him.” Came her response, shrugging as she took a seat on the table and crossed her legs. “We can do a public statement but there’s no real reason for making this a bigger thing than it already is. It would only end badly.” 

With a frown, Y/N’s eyes drift back towards the window. They’re still on the first floor so it’s not like she’s seeing much, but it’s almost astonishing, how there are people just… going about their days without a single fear in the world. All Might’s downfall had eradicated the mindset but on days like these it felt as though not a single thing had changed. As though there weren’t still dozens of underground organizations planning horrid things, and there weren’t hero agencies like her own devising ways to stop them.

Hero Society was a fragile, and corrupt thing. 

Y/N had watched as they threw children into every battle, she remembered when she’d been forced to do such things herself. She had watched her comrades, her friends, nearly die for a cause they were too young to comprehend. And she watched as civilians criticized them for not doing enough. Why did her publicity even matter? Shouldn’t that be the least of her concerns? Y/N found it funny that she needed to do well in polls to do her job well. It was the only real way to guarantee access to certain information that low ranked heroes didn’t get. 

With a sigh,Y/N turns back, brows furrowed, “so when does this start?”

Placing the tablet beside her on the table, Lorelai rests her palms against it and leans back against them, “next week probably. Haru still needs to work out the details with the rest of the PR team and Bakugou.” 

A small laugh escapes Y/N as she mumbles out, “it takes a whole team to keep that man from ruining himself.”

“Most Pro Heroes have a PR team, Y/N. You’re one of few exceptions.” Lorelai corrects, looking to her. It was true, Y/N was aware that more popular heroes often had teams of people coordinating their social media, schedules, public outings, and more. 

Y/N tilts her head at Lorelai, “why is that?” 

Lorelai raises a brow at her friend’s words, “what, you want to get rid of me?”

Y/N laughs once more, shaking her head, “no… it’s just—” She turns to face her friend, “when I hired you I couldn’t really afford anyone else. Now I can. But you do all the work by yourself.” Biting her lip, Y/N asks, “why is that? I could get you an assistant or something, easily.”

“Well you aren’t exactly the most problematic,” Lorelai responds, offering her a small smile.

Nodding, Y/N pulls out a chair at the head of the table, taking a seat, “but you also have plenty of other clients—”

The door opens, drawing their attention to the person who stands there, one of many heroes who worked at the agency., Pro Hero Telen, a simple hero name with an equally simple quirk. But his ability had saved them numerous times in battle. He pauses as he enters, “is it— is it not time for the briefing? Have I interrupted something? I apologize I can—” 

He moves to shut the door but Lorelai simply hops off the table, collecting her tablet as she heads to the door and rests a hand on his shoulder, “don’t worry— we’re done here, right Y/N?” Y/N simply nods, and Lorelai offers her a smile, “be careful today.” She mumbles out, before turning back to Telen. Y/N doesn’t know what she says, but he pales and nods before entering. Shortly after, everyone else seems to file inside, and Y/N finds herself sighing as she spins around in her chair as she waits. 

It would be a long day. A very, very, long day. 

BAKUGOU WAS TIRED. He really was. Working at Endeavor’s Agency meant long hours, endless paperwork, constant cases. And right now he was assigned to the current big thing; the Stain copycat that had yet to be caught. Unfortunately, this guy didn’t seem to be an amateur like the rest. Of course, whoever it was, they’d primarily been attacking minor Pro Heroes, until recently. 

Slowly working their way up the food chain of heroes until they ended up coming across someone who was relevant. It was inevitable, at one point whoever it was, they’d bite more than they can chew. Trying to take on a hero that surpassed their skills, whatever those skills may be— or they would slip up. Leaving behind some sort of evidence that would result in their capture. 

The only issue was, there was no telling where or when this would be. How many would have to die before they were caught? Bakugou didn’t necessarily want to know, and it was his job to make sure no one ever knew how many. 

A job he was failing. Alongside Deku, who had also been assigned to the case, it was a curious partnership but he had no choice to make it work. And his publicist had insisted that any presence with a hero like him would be good publicity. After all, most of the public knew about their little rivalry so it would make him seem diplomatic in a way. But Deku was…

“So… the gala, huh.”

Well, he was Deku.

“Shut up.” 

Thankfully, they hadn’t run into any reporters, though he was sure someone had caught pictures of them on duty together. Which was bound to end either ridiculously well for him, or incredibly poorly. It was always hit or miss with the press and Bakugou despised the entire aspect of the job. It was the one thing he could admit he was bad at. He wasn’t the most approachable, meaning it was rare for reporters to approach him in the first place due to his renowned temper.

The pair was making their way through the streets of the city, patrol was normal but they were currently on their way to the police station. They were supposed to be collaborating with the police to handle this copycat, and for some reason Deku was… panicked. It was subtle but the guy had been practically sweating bullets since Endeavor told them they’d need to work with the police. 

If Bakugou was honest this whole job was busy work. Why else would Endeavor’s agency be working on it? The Number One hero had to have better things to do. Maybe this was a punishment for what happened on the last mission they went on.

Bakugou frowns at the thought, electing to push those thoughts to the back of his mind as they come to stand in front of the Police Station. He finds himself bringing a hand to rub his temple. It was definitely going to be a long day. And he hadn’t even spoken to Haru about how the meeting with Lorelai went yet. Not that he wanted to know at this point, Bakugou had a feeling he wouldn’t be satisfied with any solution they proposed.

He really didn’t feel like dealing with any of this. So, Bakugou finds himself thinking that it might be time to use all those vacation days he’d been holding onto since he’d started working with Endeavor. They were piling up after all.

With a huff, he and Deku make their way up the steps up the police station, and Bakugou pushes the door open. It’s busy inside, as expected. A bustling atmosphere that reeks of blood, sweat, and tears, literally. There are some people seated, likely waiting to be processed, they’re handcuffed and Bakugou is fairly sure he recognizes one of them. Not that he has the time to dwell on it as they move through the police station.

One of the officers makes their way towards them, “you’re the heroes Endeavor’s agency sent?” He asks, looking to Deku, brow raised. “Welcome back.” 

Bakugou looks at Izuku incredulously as they begin to follow the man through the mess of a building, “the hell is that supposed to mean?” He hisses, but Izuku’s face has already flushed as he covers it with his hands, shaking his head.

“It was one time, how do all of you know about it!” Izuku cried out, and Bakugou finds himself glaring at his partner for the day, even without context.

The officer simply laughs, waving him off as they make their way into a room. There stands the police chief, Kenji Tsuragamae, and a few others seated at some of the many seats in the room, in front of white board that seems to be more of a mess than those around them. They look tired, exhausted even. 

Tsuragamae seems to notice their presence, clapping to garner the attention of the few inside the room, “everyone, please welcome the Pro Heroes from Endeavor’s agency. They’ll be assisting us with this case moving forwards.”

The officers seem rather unimpressed, and since Izuku still seems rather embarrassed for some reason, Bakugou finds himself stepping forwards, “what’s going on?”

With a sigh, he goes to answer. But he doesn’t get the chance as an explosion sounds and the building shakes. A siren goes off above them and suddenly the sprinklers began shooting out water as a woman entered, “sir! There’s been an explosion.”

Bakugou fights the urge to say, no shit, as he and Izuku exchange looks, “is it an attack?”

“On the police? That’s bold.” The officer from earlier comments as they all rise from their seats. But the fear in the room is abundantly evident as they all await her response, anticipation amongst them all. Because who would do such a thing, and so strategically placed on the day

The woman only shakes her head, and this time a man appears beside her, based on the way he’s dressed— Bakugou would have to guess he’s a plumber of some sort, but the man simply explains, “we think it’s an issue with the boiler room.” 

Bakugou finds himself rolling his eyes, “then why are you still here?” He turns to the rest of the room, “get on with the briefing and get the damn plumber down there.” He grumbles out, before taking a seat once more and redirecting his attention back to the chief, gesturing for him to carry on with his presentation. All the while Izuku is apologizing rather profusely for his attitude.

Now, crime had worsened exponentially after All Might’s downfall. It’s not that other heroes were suddenly less capable, although some were discouraged by the fall of the greatest hero. It’s just that All Might was a symbol. Even years after the fact, Bakugou could still see it. Things had changed. Although in recent times, crime had lessened thanks to the work of today’s Pro Heroes, there were still… issues.

Many had gone the vigilante route as a result of the League of Villains and Stain— and speaking of Stain, there had been several copycats over the years, people who agreed with his ideals and his actions. Which is what brought them here. The issue at hand was this most recent copycat was… decent. Most of the time it was amateurs who didn’t plan that far ahead, quick and easy to catch with minimal casualties, if any. 

Essentially, the police had nothing on him. Just a list of his victims and what they had in common. They were underground heroes, like that of his own teacher from UA, but something about them seemed off, different from what they’d seen in other copycats in the past. They weren’t like the flashy heroes you would find, the ones who seemed… fake. The ones most targeted because they fit Stain’s idea of a false hero.

And even then, there was no being sure which were the victims of this copycat and which were that of others. As the anniversary of Stain’s capture grew closer, more attacks were popping up. 

Shaking away these thoughts, Bakugou grimaces. All he had gotten from that briefing was that they knew nothing, had done nothing, and were going nowhere. Which wasn’t necessarily encouraging. So far, there were four confirmed victims of the copycat, and three additional deaths that were viewed as possible victims of the copycat. Technically, one of the copycats, but that wasn’t something he necessarily wanted to think about. 

Yeah, he would definitely be taking those vacation days.

#this is not the end series #bakugou x reader #bakugo x reader #bakugou katsuki x reader #bakugo katsuki x reader #katsuki x reader #katsuki bakugo x reader #katsuki bakugou x reader #bakugo x you #bakugou x you #katsuki x you #katsuki bakugo x you #bakugou katsuki x you #katsuki bakugou x you #bakugo katsuki x you #bnha x reader #mha x reader #bnha x you #mha x you

[bigskydreaming]

Couldn't the thing with Jason thinking Dick is infallible from Truth and Justice story come from how he is compared to his brother from Bruce. Even when he was Robin with Dick and Bruce fighting, he was told that Dick was better by Bruce. Then he comes back and is a cautionary tale of what not to and how not to be while Dick and Bruce are now getting along.

I mean yeah, you could go with that take, but I’m always gonna argue that even that is more fanon based than anything else, at least before this issue. We’ve seen a lot of that take in the past already, but truth is, there really isn’t that much basis in older stories for Bruce comparing Jason to Dick. And like I’ve expanded on in the past, younger Jason looked UP to Dick, he certainly didn’t resent him. 

With this being true even when he first came back - Dick was the only one he didn’t target at ALL during Under the Red Hood, and when he did finally meet up with Dick a year later, during the Brothers in Blood arc, it was more to fuck with him than any attempt to take things out on him. Like, that arc gets a lot of shit and deservedly so, but I really do wish more people would at least takeaway from it the fact that in it, JASON referenced still thinking of Dick as family. Which just doesn’t mesh up with all the ‘they barely knew each other/they resented each other’ takes.

Pretty much all the times I can think of when Jason was compared to Dick pre ADITF, it was actually not at all what its usually represented as by most fandom takes, such as the time Jason teamed up with the Titans. For pretty much Jason’s entire tenure as Robin up until the Felipe Garzonas arc, Jason was actually portrayed as perfectly secure in his position of Robin and wasn’t threatened by anyone else’s perception of him at all. Even the arc where he loses it on Two-Face has been kinda amplified to make more of it than it was, like.....Bruce was worried about the anger he expressed there, but that was more out of concern FOR Jason and it wasn’t the “Jason was on the verge of getting fired as Robin all along” kinda narrative we tend to see referenced. 

Jason was only made out to be the angry Robin or the less competent Robin or whatever AFTER his death, which is all kinds of shitty, but like......there’s no real basis for any kind of extended history where Jason resentfully suffered under his big brother’s shadow while Robin. The angry/less competent Robin stuff was all DC retroactively railroading him after the fact to justify their choice to kill him off (which was still their choice no matter the existence of a poll), and its the narrative most people have run with because it amplifies Jason’s existence as the misunderstood and unfairly judged underdog of the family.

Now to be 100% clear, as I’ve said in the past.....there is absolutely no reason you CAN’T go with this take if you don’t want to. Nobody has to abide by canon, or a particular canon and I’ll never argue otherwise. My main point has always just been that the thing about fanfic is that its a transformative process, it enables fans to take canon and transform it into something else.....but here’s the thing....those transformations ALWAYS happen with INTENT. People are deliberate in how and in what ways they transform canon, even if they’re not always CONSCIOUS of that deliberation.....it still exists. None of these transformations just happen, they happen for a reason. Because fans want an end result that’s different from what we saw in canon.

So my thing is always just.....yes, transform canon as you like, for whatever reason. But don’t pretend that those reasons don’t exist, and understand that when people look at a canon to fanon transformation that really only results in one major difference.......they’re gonna assume that this difference, achieving this difference, was for whatever reason, the POINT of the transformation.

And here’s where I also want to express something else: my take has never been that most of fandom just hates Dick Grayson. That they’re consciously, deliberately out to smear him or make him look bad. I think there’s a lot of elements in play with how I perceive fandom’s interactions with him compared to other characters, but more often than not, I think one of the bigger issues with how his character is TRANSFORMED from canon to fanon, is just.......he’s collateral damage. I don’t think in most cases the point is even to make actual transformations of his character or characterization......its to apply these things to people he’s in scene WITH......and he just ends up transformed as well, by proximity.

Take a look at some examples:

1) Dick firing Tim

Except as we’ve gone over multiple times, Dick didn’t actually FIRE Tim. He didn’t neglect him, he didn’t turn his back on him, he could have handled that situation differently, sure, but he had none of the ill intent people assign to him when they typically ramp up how bad this period was for Tim. Dick actually called him his equal, begged him to stay, said he was too GOOD to be Dick’s junior partner........but this is not at all how this moment in canon is generally viewed by a lot of fandom. He comes off looking a TON worse, like he just chose Damian over Tim and discarded Tim first chance he got, he didn’t care how Tim was affected, he kicked Tim out of the manor and out of Gotham.

But the thing is.....I’d argue that none of this TRANSFORMATION from canon really had anything to do with Dick. I don’t actually think that tons of fans were just waiting in the wings for the perfect opportunity to make a villain out of Dick and just seized upon this moment as the perfect opportunity. I think it was just all about Tim. It was about accentuating his misery, his aloneness, heightening the whump factor of his character and amplifying the feelings of insecurity, rejection and alienation he was feeling and that people related to.

What happened to Dick’s character in most peoples’ eyes as a result of this transformation, was the symptom, not the point. It was the collateral damage, not the aim.

2) Bruce firing Dick

In contrast, we have more than one canon interpretation of Bruce firing Dick as Robin, with this leading directly into Dick leaving the manor at a fairly young age, keeping his distance from Bruce until he finds out about Jason, Bruce giving Robin to Jason without acknowledging or apologizing for the fact that he was giving away the identity that someone else had crafted and poured their heart and soul into, not him.......but this isn’t how a lot of fandom outside of Dick stans and people who are specifically predisposed towards Bad Dad Bruce like to treat that part of canon.

Here, the transformation is the reverse from what happened with Tim and Dick. Here, the feelings of rejection and alienation and insecurity Dick realistically would have felt during that time are overlooked and even outright invalidated by TRANSFORMING the canon so that actually, this period of extended estrangement is completely disconnected from any version of events where Bruce fired Dick, which he did not do here. And in fact, Dick gave up Robin, he and Bruce had a falling out, and this was mutual and two-sided and thus Dick’s refusal to come home earlier and reconcile with Bruce was not actually him standing up for himself and refusing to settle for being taken for granted and dismissed when convenient but rather just Dick being immature, stubborn and a little spoiled.

But again.....I don’t think that’s the aim so much as a byproduct of the intended end result. Once more, I think that had very little to do with Dick himself, wasn’t about making him look bad specifically....but rather, it was about making Bruce look better. It was transforming the thing he had done in canon which was so hard to defend, ie ignore all of Dick’s feelings on the matter much in the way people accuse Dick of ignoring Tim’s later, and passively rejecting him and refusing to be the first to reach out unlike Dick who actively sought after Tim when he left. Those moments in canon definitively make Bruce look pretty bad, and are hard to reconcile with Good Parent Bruce Wayne, so that is what people are trying to transform. Once again, the way it makes Dick look in contrast is just a symptom.

The further examples are honestly pretty endless.

The aftermath of Forever Evil and Spyral is ignored, transforming Dick into the true villain of that period not because people just want an excuse to hate him, but because they don’t want to or can’t reconcile what Bruce actually did in order to get Dick to act so out of character, or they want to justify Jason and Tim and others’ anger at Dick later rather than have them appear to be inconsiderate assholes just piling on a guy who just had the worst year of his life to date.

The instances of Bruce outright abusing Dick after Jason’s death and at other times like Night of the Owls are ignored, transforming Dick into an impetuous, overly aggressive asshole who isn’t reacting to Bruce’s initial aggression, but rather just popping off the handle because he isn’t being received or treated just the way he likes.

Dick reaching out to Jason and making an offer to be there for him as Robin and later times they interact in Titans as well as any actual bond they build, even if mostly just hinted at off the page....all ignored in favor of transforming Dick into this bitter, jealous jerk who can’t see past his own feelings long enough to realize he’s taking things out on an innocent kid who doesn’t deserve this, even though that’s exactly what he realized and motivated his actual actions towards Jason in canon. And again, its not so much about making Dick worse, its about overlooking the WHYS of Dick’s hurt, turning the focus from what was done to him that justifies him being upset in the first place, to some greater mistreatment he enacts on Jason and thus drowns out any sympathy that people might otherwise have for Dick.

Dick’s periods of brainwashing like under the Church of Blood being overwritten or ignored in order to transform his deliberately out of character attitudes towards his friends and teammates there into just normal outbursts that were part of his characterization rather than signs that something was abnormally wrong with him. Thus turning everyone else’s treatment of him during that time period into again just their part of a two-way street and nothing they had to feel bad about rather than acknowledge that he’d literally not been in full control of himself while they had no such excuse for their behavior.

To be clear.....this kind of thing is NOT limited to just Dick. It tends to happen any time people want to transform a canon event into something more one-sided, to accentuate a particular character’s position as the victim or the misunderstood or neglected party.....or to turn a one-way street into a mutual antagonism, to lessen a particular character’s culpability in some argument or feud. You can absolutely find examples of this same effect applying to every other character in the Batfam as well.

But the reason it happens so often with Dick, and thus every instance of it happening tends to be amplified by the sheer volume of similar situations......is because of convenience. Because ironically, the reason Dick so often looks so bad in fanon’s eyes when it comes to his treatment of his family....is BECAUSE of how Dick is so much more integrated into every one of his family’s lives (and his friends’) than pretty much any other character. He’s the collateral damage to other characters being deliberately transformed in some way purely because he’s the one who almost always is THERE to some degree. Because there’s no one else in the scene that’s being transformed.

And so to bring it all back to your question......I think you absolutely can go with that take. There’s an argument to be made for it, especially now given that this canon issue has actually established a precedent for Jason feeling that way rather than fanon just running with the idea because it makes Jason more maligned. Its still not something that’s ever going to interest me though, even if I can see the reasoning for it, because its not just the fact that this particular dynamic between Dick and Jason has played out thousands of times before in fic, as I said yesterday. Its also because like I laid out here......my bigger issue is that take has absolutely NOTHING to do with Dick himself, says nothing about his character, but his character is inevitably the one who will suffer fallout from that particular take. That dynamic, as you described it, makes sense.....but its entirely, 100% on Bruce or others for raising those comparisons, not because of anything Dick did to Jason himself.....and thus it makes Jason’s dynamic towards Dick MORE a product of other peoples’ reactions and attitudes towards him and his brother respectively.

And that dynamic IS perfectly understandable and valid. But even if its slightly different this time because of more of a canon basis, it still for me falls into the same pattern of Dick being collateral damage to something that’s largely focused on another character entirely, with him and how he’s impacted by extension being kinda an afterthought. 

*Shrugs* And that’s just......a story I’ve read so many many times before, I’m just never gonna be all that engaged by it. 

[thanksjro]

Dark Cybertron Chapter 1: Welcome to Comic Event Hell

You know what readers love? When the stories they’ve gotten invested in over the course of a couple years get interrupted for some pseudo-crossover bullshit.

And you know what writers love? When the story they’ve been crafting over the course of a couple years get interrupted for some pseudo-crossover bullshit.

Did I say love?

Because I didn’t mean it.

“Dark Cybertron” was penned by John Barber and James Roberts, with collaboration with comic writer and artist Phil Jimenez, and was published from early November, 2013 to late March, 2014. Atilio Rojo, James Raiz, and Livio Ramondelli did the art, each responsible for scenes in specific locations, with Robert Gill filling in as needed. Alex Milne, Andrew Griffith, and Brendan Cahill would also contribute pencils to the first issue and the back half of the series. It was a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the franchise, and the second birthday of Phase Two... which went on for over four months, but never mind that!

Both "Dark Cybertron” and its preliminary materials were made to go alongside the Transformers: Generations toy-line, each issue being included as a toy pack-in with whatever character was being featured… or, at least, that was the plan. Sometimes it didn’t work out. Regardless, this storyline was created to sell toys directly, as opposed to the MTMTE/RID series being made to sell toys more through the power of suggestion. It’s a small distinction, but important, because it will help explain any lack of soul one may perceive while they read “Dark Cybertron”.

“But Hannz!” you cry out, reaching to grab me by the throat and shake me like a rag doll, because to you I’m merely a faceless voice on the internet. “Surely by calling this specific storyline soulless, you’re completely ignoring the very nature of this franchise that you’re almost uncomfortably invested in!”

To which I’ll say this: look, I’m pretty realistic about where my giant space robots came from; Transformers as a franchise would not exist the way it does without Ronald Reagan introducing the Free Market to literal children and fucking up how we interact with media for the rest of time. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that rings especially true when I’ve got a Spinister on my bookshelf staring me down as I write this, that was likely made out of plastics which either involved blood oil or unethical labor practices, if not both.

However!

The choices of a company to have their comic license holders to cook up an entire plot that derails what they’ve already got planned out for toy tie-in comics is a completely different animal than what IDW had had going on up to this point. Phase Two had been about exploring different ideas that hadn’t been able to be explored during the war, and seeing what happens when you take away a third of the logline for Transformers G1 as a whole. Being a part of a brand of toys was almost inconsequential to how the stories were being told; even the Spotlights, which were also toy tie-in comics, had plenty of charm to them, if only because there weren’t quite as many constraints placed on the writers, and they were stand-alone issues.

Of course, being tie-in comics isn’t the only reason that “Dark Cybertron” is a bit of a slog, considering everything IDW itself was trying to get done within this storyline, but we’ll cover the publishing company’s/Simon Furman’s/Transformers’ tumultuous relationship with the concept of gender identity and expression later on, when it becomes relevant to the story proper. This point also ties into the interesting origin of Windblade, who we’ll meet in a few issues, and what happens when you let your fanbase have a taste of power and forget that people might like to see themselves represented in the media they consume.

“Dark Cybertron” is what ended up making me stop reading MTMTE the first time I tried it in 2015. A big part of it was because it forced the reader to need so much information from RID and even events prior to Phase Two, it wasn’t very fun to try to parse what was going on, on top of the writing beginning to flag because of obvious constraints to what Barber and Roberts could actually do, both within their deadlines and the rules put in place by their higher ups for the event.

 “Dark Cybertron” is the result of the sort of executive meddling that kills reader enjoyment by requiring writers to cram their two worlds together as quickly as possible, without the option to go for nuance because there simply isn’t time. The reason we have four separate artists for the front half of this story is because Milne and Griffith didn’t have time to draw both their current workload and “Dark Cybertron” at the same time... but sales probably went up due to the nature of how the story was published, so I’m sure they didn’t really see a problem with it.

That’s a general “they”, not a Milne and Griffith “they”.

In short, we’ve got license contract obligations, fan-poll obligations, and gender stuff fighting for space within the next 12 issues, which will be published in the span of roughly four months. Things are probably going to be a little bloated and sloppy.

Regardless of any of these points, this is what we’ve got. It’s not like it’s all bad- “Dark Cybertron” has the benefit of being written by two people who had been working closely before it had even been conceptualized. Barber was the senior editor for MTMTE, and IDW as a whole until he left in 2016. It also isn’t a proper crossover- y’know, where two completely separate titles get mashed together for a bit. MTMTE and RID exist in the same universe, just have their own things going on, so a decent amount of things still carry over without you needing to have read every single thing in both. The writing, while not quite up to par with pieces that had more creative freedom and breathing room between scenes, is still recognizable as being Barber and Roberts’. Their voices are still here, they’re just strained under the weight of everything that has to be said inside of 12 issues.

With all THAT out of the way, let’s dive in to Dark Dawn: Dark Cybertron Chapter 1.

We get a quick rundown of the most basic information you’ll need for this entire story to make sense, as we reintroduce the fact that Shockwave is an ecoterrorist with more agendas than a daily planner factory on meth, and also that he grows magic crystals. I don’t care what he says, the Ores are fucking space-magic. If you don’t want to read through all of RID for everything else, please see Robots in Disguise (2012), #1-22- A Recap, For Reference Purposes.  We also get a quick rundown of the Lost Lighters’ deal, as Swerve potentially has a meta-episode.

Be careful what you fucking wish for, bucko.

Our story proper starts with a flashback to the shittiest road trip Cyclonus ever went on, as the Ark 1 finds itself at the edge of a mysterious portal. This is likely why he wasn’t super thrilled when the portal to Luna 1 showed up- portals are probably a touchy subject for him.

Jhiaxus doesn’t know what this portal is- surely this means that science has failed us, and it’s time to call in the religious crowd to try and suss out what’s going on here.

It’s moments like this that make me wonder what exactly happened in the Dead Universe that made Cyclonus’ cheek meat just pack up and leave.

Now, we know that Cyclonus is correct here, because we as readers have more knowledge than the characters at this point, but Jhiaxus tries to write off this theory as hogwash, because he is a man of rationality and science. This is a slight removal from his character in the present, whose most notable traits seem to be a lack of ethics and screaming.

Everyone here seems to be slightly different from their current iterations, actually; Galvatron doesn’t say a word as he steps between Jhiaxus and Cyclonus, only using his body to communicate that the scientist might want to back off. Cyclonus himself is certainly the wordiest we’ve ever seen him to be, droning on through his actual thought process before he comes to a conclusion on what exactly they’ve found. Compare this to the Cyclonus of today, who only deigns to grace everyone with his voice if they outright threaten him, have something he wants, or are Tailgate. If he were to ever pull this verbal meandering on board the Lost Light, people would probably assume he’s having a stroke.

Nova Prime- you remember him, don’t you?- gives not a fuck about the Dead Universe, only what it means for him personally. And what it means for him is more locations to subjugate, because he is cartoonishly evil. His character is the least removed from his present-day iteration out of everyone. He tells the crew they’ll be getting a little closer, only for the portal to do the work for them, by way of dark energy tentacles.

Wow, the pilot for the Ark 1 really is just straight-up named Butt, isn’t he? And what the fuck is that face you’re making, Cyclonus? Are you- oh my god, are you emoting? Oh my god, he’s emoting.

As the Ark 1 is pulled to its doom, Jhiaxus makes a quick phone call to Shockwave to tell him he’s his favorite, and to keep up the good work.

In the present, Shockwave reflects on just how friggin’ long this whole ordeal has taken. Fortunately, Waspinator and the Titan are almost here, and he can hardly wait.

Not, uh, that he’s got emotions or anything. It’s been established that he doesn’t have those anymore. Is impatience an emotion? Does that count?

Shockwave seems like he’d be really frustrating to write for.

Anyway, the Titan shows up, the Ore inside him and the Ore in the underground Crystal City combine, and the Titan starts screaming because everything hurts. Shockwave’s about as thrilled as he can be about the situation, given his lack of emotions.

Above Crystal City, we finally get back to that nonsense about the early sunrise, as someone- maybe Starscream, given the color of the narration box- waxes poetic on the planet of Cybertron, wartorn and wild in its rebirth, ruled by paranoia that has nothing to bounce off of, and so creates its own walls.

Then we get a detailed shot of Rattrap’s mug, and the moment is broken.

Rattrap’s character is a lot of fun in everything he gets tossed into, but you’re a goddamn liar if you think he’s pretty to look at. You are lying to yourself, and I won’t apologize for saying it.

Starscream walks out of his room in his hot new body, feeling fine and ready to take on the world. We’ll check in on him later in the day to see how that positive mentality is working out for him.

So, the sun hasn’t moved, and it’s way too early for the sun to even be up right now. That’s weird. Because I guess he didn’t know how the sun works, Starscream’s only just realized that this is perhaps a problem. He does some computer work and realizes that this is indeed a very bad thing, and asks that Rattrap call the Autobots. Not the ones who fucked off into the wilderness, the other ones. The gay, space ones.

Up in space, Orion Pax and his pals have found themselves in dire straits, the collapsing Gorlam Prime sucking their ship back down as the Death Ore consumes everything.

That’s not how engines work! And I think it really says something about the “Prelude” issues that I completely forgot why Wheelie was down an arm for a solid five seconds.

It turns out that Orion was the narrator the entire time, which I should have known- since when is the once and future Optimus Prime not the primary voice in any media he appears in?

It’s looking rough for the fellas, but luckily we’ve got to get the plot rolling, so the Lost Light VZZZZTs into existence and picks up the Skyroller to place it gently into its belly.

Orion isn’t exactly jazzed about the fact that Rodimus didn’t listen to what he told him, not even bothering to thank the guy for saving his life. I say y’all keep going on your Thunderclash Quest and leave this ungrateful loser behind. No space yachting for you, Orion.

The rest of the Pax Posse enter the Lost Light proper, and Hardhead reveals that he nearly joined the Quest, before he saw who all would be coming with, while Garnak has a tearful reunion with Rodimus. The fact that he’s calling him Sir- which I don’t recall him doing in Transformers (2009), at least not in a way that seems reminiscent of an unfortunate Antebellum Period Romance- feels rather weird, but I’m glad someone’s fucking happy to see Rodimus at least. Ultra Magnus asks Orion if he’ll be assuming command of the vessel, as Rodimus tries not to look horrified by the thought alone, but fortunately Orion’s not going to pull his “I’m Optimus Prime and I Can Do What I Want” Card just yet.

Smash cut to the bridge, as Rodimus tries to make himself sound competent, when Starscream calls. Orion doesn’t like that Starscream has their number, Perceptor almost reveals the fact that this ship technically doesn’t belong to a faction, likely due to being purchased after the war, and Cyclonus gets brought in for his professional opinion.

As it turns out, that early sunrise isn’t a sunrise at all, but a portal to the Dead Universe. This is a problem, because the Dead Universe really sucks, and you don’t want to go there, especially if you enjoy being alive. Orion seems more concerned about the fact that Starscream is ruling the planet, and Bumblebee is nowhere to be found.

Speaking of Bumblebee, he and all his camp buddies are psyching themselves up for a confrontation.

Swoop, please, this is hardly the time for crudeness.

The Dinobots, sick of Bumblebee’s dithering about, decide they’re going to fight the fucking sun and gear up. Prowl, though generally disliking their brand of problem-solving, does share his begrudging respect of their can-do attitude.

Their can-do attitude over fighting the fucking sun.

Then an earthquake happens and the ground rips open to reveal that Titan that Waspinator showed up with.

Shockwave takes over the narration at this point, and we get artsy, as we see events that haven’t transpired yet over musings on the nature of... time? Maybe? It would be in line with Roberts’ go-to topics, but honestly the whole thing’s kind of vague so I couldn’t give you a solid answer. Shockwave gets awfully introspective for a guy who shouldn’t care, I know that much. The point is, he is inevitable and is super good at logic and science.

Also, Nova Prime and Galvatron are back, which is cool, I guess. Not sure where Galvatron had gotten to exactly after the events of “Chaos”, but he’s back now, so it doesn’t matter too terribly much. Shockwave serves them, which we’ll probably get an explanation for at some point.

God, you can practically taste the desperation to pin all these plot points together before the entire thing implodes on itself.

#transformers #jro #dark cybertron #issue 1 #maccadam #Hannzreads #overthinking about robots #incoming analysis #text post #long post #comic script writing

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 1, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

This morning, conservative pundit William Kristol wrote in The Bulwark what a number of us have been saying for a while now, and it dovetails cleanly with the current Republican attempt to suppress voting.

Kristol warns that our democracy is in crisis. For the first time in our history, we have failed to have a peaceful transfer of power. The Republican Party launched a coup—which fortunately failed—and “now claims that the current administration is illegitimately elected, the result of massive, coordinated fraud. The logical extension of this position would seem to be that the American constitutional order deserving of our allegiance no longer exists.”

“So,” he notes, “we are at the edge of crisis, having repulsed one attempted authoritarian power grab and bracing for another.”

Claims that American democracy is on the ropes in the face of an authoritarian power grab raise accusations of partisanship… but in this case, the person making the claim is a conservative, who goes on to urge conservatives to join behind President Joe Biden to try to save democracy. Kristol warns that “a dangerous, anti-democratic faction” of the Republican Party “is not committed in any serious way to the truth, the rule of law, or the basic foundations of our liberal democracy.”

Kristol’s call is notable both because of his position on the right and because he warns that we are absolutely not in a moment of business-as-usual. Perhaps because it is impossible to imagine, we seem largely to have normalized that the former president of the United States refused to accept his loss in the 2020 election and enlisted a mob to try to overturn the results. Along with his supporters, he continues to insist that he won that election and that President Joe Biden is an illegitimate usurper.

This big lie threatens the survival of our democracy.

At the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference this weekend in Orlando, Florida, Trump supporters doubled down on the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election. From a stage shaped like a piece of Nazi insignia, speakers raged that they were victims of “cancel culture” on the part of Big Tech and the left, which are allegedly trying to silence them. To restore fairness, they want to stop “voter fraud” and restore “election integrity,” and they want to force social media giants to let them say whatever they want on social media.

In the Washington Post, commentator Jennifer Rubin said the modern conservatives at CPAC had no policy but revenge, “resentment, cult worship and racism,” and no political goal but voter suppression. It is “the only means by which they seek to capture power in an increasingly diverse America,” she notes. A poll showed that “election integrity” was the issue most important to CPAC attendees, with 62% of them choosing it over “constitutional rights” (which got only 48%).

Trump himself packaged this lie in words that sounded much like the things he said before the January 6 insurrection. He claimed that he had won the election, that the election was “rigged,” and that it was “undeniable” that the rules of the election were “illegally changed”—although none of his many court challenges stuck. He attacked the Supreme Court in language that echoed the attacks on his vice president, Mike Pence, that had rioters searching him out to kill him. “They didn’t have the guts or the courage to make the right decision,” Trump said of the justices.

The purpose of this big lie is not only to reinforce Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, but also to delegitimize the Democratic victory. If Democrats cheat, it makes sense to prevent “voter fraud” by making it harder to vote. “We must pass comprehensive election reforms, and we must do it now,” Trump said.

Republican reforms, though, mean voter suppression. Currently, Republican legislators in 43 states have introduced more than 250 bills to restrict voting. They want to cut back early voting and restrict mail-in voting, limit citizen-led ballot initiatives, and continue to gerrymander congressional districts. Arizona is trying to make it possible for state legislatures, rather than voters, to choose the state’s presidential electors. Rather than try to draw voters to their party’s candidates by moderating their stances, they are trying to win power by keeping people from voting.

I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this is. We have gone down this road before in America, in the South after 1876. The outcome was the end of democracy in the region and the establishment of a single, dominant party for generations. In those decades, a small body of men ruled their region without oversight and openly mocked the idea of justice before the law. A member of the jury that took only 67 minutes to acquit Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for murdering 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 famously said, “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.” White men dominated women and their Black and Brown neighbors, but their gains were largely psychological, as the one-party system created instability that slowed down economic investment, while leaders ignored education and infrastructure.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a lawsuit concerning Arizona election laws. The case is from 2016, when Democrats argued that two Arizona voting laws discriminated against Hispanic, Black, and Indigenous voters in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits laws that hamper voting on the basis of race. The laws called for ballots cast in the wrong precinct to be thrown away and allowed only election officials, letter carriers, household family members, or caregivers to return someone else’s mail-in ballot. A violation could bring a $150,000 fine. The court’s decision in this case will have big implications for the legitimacy of the restrictions Republican legislatures are trying to enact now.

Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to shore up voting rights with H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2021. This sweeping measure would make it easier to vote, curtail gerrymandering, make elections more secure, and reform the campaign finance system.

They are also proposing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, H.R. 4, which would restore the parts of the Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court gutted in 2013 in the Shelby v. Holder decision, limiting changes to election laws that disproportionately affect people of color. After Shelby v. Holder, a number of states immediately enacted sweeping voter suppression laws that disproportionately hit minorities, the elderly, and the young, all populations perceived to vote Democratic.

Neither of these bills will pass the Senate unless the Democrats modify the filibuster rule, which permits Republicans to stop legislation unless it can muster not just a majority, but a supermajority of 60 votes.

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of Judge Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland is noted for supervising the prosecution of the men who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1995, hoping to topple the federal government. In his opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary committee last week, Garland vowed that, if confirmed, he “will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6—a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.” He promised that he would follow where the investigation led, even if it went “upstream” to those who might not have been in the Capitol, but who nevertheless were participants in the insurrection.

The vote to move Garland’s nomination to the full Senate was 15 to 7, with Ben Sasse (R-NE), Mike Lee (R-UT), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tom Cotton (R-AR), John Kennedy (R-LA), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) all voting no.

With the exception of Sasse, all those voting no have signed on to the big lie.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Political 911 #insurrection #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From an American #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #voting rights

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Colorado Snowstorm Knocks Out Power to Thousands and Snarls Travel (NYT) A snowstorm sweeping through Colorado and Wyoming on Sunday was expected to bring as much as four feet of snow to some parts of the region, and has left nearly 30,000 people without power in Colorado. The storm brought heavy, wet snow and downed trees and power lines. More than 20,000 customers near Greeley, Colo., about 50 miles north of Denver, were without power on Sunday, according to Xcel Energy. More than 2,500 people around Fort Collins, about 1,500 near Loveland and about 3,000 people in the Denver suburbs were also without power. A blizzard warning was in effect on Sunday for Colorado’s Front Range, an area that includes the Interstate 25 corridor from south of Denver up through Cheyenne, Wyo. The National Weather Service warned that an additional two to six inches of snow and wind gusts as high as 45 miles per hour could create “nearly impossible travel conditions.”

Florida’s pandemic response gets a second look from the national media (Axios) After a solid year of living with a pandemic, the national press is beginning to ask the question that even Democrats have been quietly pondering in the Sunshine State: Was Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response right for Florida? More than 32,000 Floridians have died, but our death rate is no worse than the national average—and better than some states with tighter restrictions. On Sunday’s front page, the New York Times explored the positives—from the booming real-estate market to Florida’s low unemployment rate—of an early reopening: “Much of the state has a boomtown feel,” writes Patricia Mazzei, “a sense of making up for months of lost time.” The Times notes that Florida’s unemployment rate is 5.1%, compared to 9.3% in California, 8.7% in New York and 6.9% in Texas. “That debate about reopening schools? It came and went months ago. Children have been in classrooms since the fall.” The closer you are to either loss or to the fullness of life will likely determine how you feel about the state’s response.

Quaking in their beds, sleepless Icelanders await volcanic eruption (Reuters) Icelanders are yearning for some undisturbed shut-eye after tremors from tens of thousands of earthquakes have rattled their sleep for weeks in what scientists call an unprecedented seismic event, which might well end in a spectacular volcanic eruption. “At the moment we’re feeling it constantly. It’s like you’re walking over a fragile suspension bridge,” Rannveig Gudmundsdottir, a lifelong resident in the town of Grindavik, told Reuters. Grindavik lies in the southern part of the Reykjanes Peninsula, a volcanic and seismic hot spot, where more than 40,000 earthquakes have occurred since Feb. 24. Located between the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates, Iceland frequently experiences earthquakes as the plates slowly drift in opposite directions at a pace of around 2 centimetres each year. “Everyone here is so tired,” Gudmundsdottir, a 5th grade school teacher, said. “When I go to bed at night, all I think about is: Am I going to get any sleep tonight?” Authorities in Iceland warned of an imminent volcanic eruption on the peninsula in early March, but said they did not expect it to disturb international air traffic or damage critical infrastructure nearby.

Vigil To Reclaim The Streets From Vigilance (CNN) Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, disappeared on March 3 while walking home from a friend’s home in London’s southern neighborhood of Clapham. Her body was found inside a builder’s bag in a wooded area. A 48-year-old police officer has been charged with kidnapping and killing her. On Saturday, thousands of people gathered in Clapham Common to pay tribute to Everard despite planned nationwide vigils having been canceled due to pandemic restrictions. As darkness fell, police officers began grabbing women in the crowd and making arrests. Videos posted on social media showed officers violently dragging some female protesters away and throwing others to the ground and handcuffing them. Women’s rights activists in the UK are reeling from the Metropolitan Police’s heavy-handed approach. There’s also been political fallout, with a member of Parliament reading out the names of 118 women murdered last year. In a new poll, over 70% of UK women said they had been sexually harassed in public spaces. The figure rose to 97% among women aged 18-24. 45% said they didn’t believe reporting the incidents to officials would change anything.

Dutch police break up thousands of anti-lockdown protesters (The Hill) Police in the Netherlands dispersed thousands of anti-lockdown protesters outside the Hague on Sunday, one day before national elections begin in the country. Reuters reports that police used batons and water cannons to disperse the crowd who authorities said were ignoring social distancing rules as well as warnings from authorities. Many of those gathered in the crowd held up yellow umbrellas and signs in opposition that read “Love, freedom, stop dictatorship,” according to Reuters. The country has been under an intense lockdown since January, Reuters notes, with gatherings of more than two people banned and the first night-time curfew issued since World War II. When the lockdown was extended, it sparked several days of rioting across the country. According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Netherlands has confirmed over 1.1 million coronavirus cases and more than 16,000 related deaths.

Spain to launch trial of four-day working week (The Guardian) Spain could become one of the first countries in the world to trial the four-day working week after the government agreed to launch a modest pilot project for companies interested in the idea. Earlier this year, the small leftwing Spanish party Más País announced that the government had accepted its proposal to test out the idea. From New Zealand to Germany, the idea has been steadily gaining ground globally. Hailed by its proponents as a means to increase productivity, improve the mental health of workers and fight climate change, the proposal has taken on new significance as the pandemic sharpens issues around wellbeing, burnout and work-life balance. Leftwing parties in Spain—where a 44-day strike in Barcelona in 1919 resulted in the country becoming one of the first in western Europe to adopt the eight-hour workday—have seized on the idea. “Spain is one of the countries where workers put in more hours than the European average. But we’re not among the most productive countries,” said Iñigo Errejón of Más País. “I maintain that working more hours does not mean working better.”

Major European nations suspend use of AstraZeneca vaccine (AP) A cascading number of European countries—including Germany, France, Italy and Spain—suspended use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine Monday over reports of dangerous blood clots in some recipients, though the company and international regulators say there is no evidence the shot is to blame. AstraZeneca’s formula is one of three vaccines in use on the continent. But the escalating concern is another setback for the European Union’s vaccination drive, which has been plagued by shortages and other hurdles. The EU’s drug regulatory agency called a meeting for Thursday to review experts’ findings on the AstraZeneca shot and decide whether action needs to be taken.

Myanmar junta orders martial law in 6 Yangon townships (AP) Myanmar’s ruling junta has declared martial law in six townships in the country’s largest city, as security forces killed dozens of protesters over the weekend in an increasingly lethal crackdown on resistance to last month’s military coup. At least 38 people were killed Sunday and dozens were injured in one of the deadliest days of the crackdown on anti-coup protesters, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, or AAPP, an independent group tracking the toll of the violence. Several estimates from other sources gave higher figures.

Flights canceled during China’s worst sandstorm in a decade (AP) China’s capital and a wide swath of the country’s north were enveloped Monday in the worst sandstorm in a decade, forcing the cancelation of hundreds of flights. Skyscrapers in the center of Beijing appeared to drop from sight amid the dust and sand. Traffic was snarled and more than 400 flights out of the capital’s two main airports were canceled amid high winds and low visibility. The National Meteorological Center said Monday’s storm had developed in the Gobi Desert in the Inner Mongolia Region, where schools had been advised to close and bus service added to reduce residents’ exposure to the harsh conditions. The National Meteorological Center forecasted the sand and dust would affect 12 provinces and regions from Xinjiang in the far northwest to Heilongjiang in the northeast and the eastern coastal port city of Tianjin.

Taiwan’s boom (NYT) Taiwan, home to 24 million people, has seen fewer than 1,000 cases of Covid-19 and just 10 coronavirus-related deaths. Prior to 2020, lots of Taiwanese and dual nationals moved abroad and only came back for a visit. After the pandemic hit, Taiwan closed its borders to almost all foreign visitors. Protocols put in place include temperature checks, hand-sanitizing, mask-wearing (except in schools), rigorous contact tracing, and strict quarantines for incoming travelers. Taiwanese nationals returned, and about 270,000 more stayed than left. As a result, the island is experiencing a real economic boom. Exports have been rising for eight months, fueled by shipments of electronics and surging demand for semiconductor chips. Domestic tourism is exploding. The economy grew more than 5% in the fourth quarter compared with the same time period in 2019. And every day restaurants, bars, aFor Law Enforcementnd cafes are packed, office buildings hum, and schools are filled with laughing, unmasked children. “We just feel very lucky and definitely a little guilty,” said a product manager for a Bay Area tech company who returned to Taipei with his wife and young son last May. “We feel like we are the ones who benefited from the pandemic.”

United States and Iran warily circle each other over reactivating nuclear deal (Washington Post) The United States is willing to sit down with Iran “tomorrow” and jointly agree to full compliance with the nuclear accord they and five other world powers signed in 2015, according to a senior Biden administration official. Iran has made equally clear it shares the goal of going back to the terms of the original agreement, before President Donald Trump pulled out of it. But nearly two months into Biden’s presidency, with Iran’s own contentious presidential election approaching in June, the two sides have been unable even to talk to each other about what both say they want. Iran wants all Trump sanctions lifted and an immediate influx of cash from the release of blocked international loans and frozen funds, along with foreign investment and removal of bans on oil sales. It seeks assurances that the next U.S. administration won’t jettison the deal again. For its part, the Biden administration wants a reactivated deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, to serve as a “platform” to renegotiate its sunset provisions—the future dates when certain provisions are set to expire. It wants to move quickly to discussions about its other problems with Iran, including Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its use of proxy forces in Iraq, Syria and beyond, and human rights abuses. Both sides continue to wait for the other to prove its good faith with “you, first” rhetoric.

‘Republic of Queues’: 10 years on, Syria is a hungry nation (AP) The lines stretch for miles outside gas stations in Syrian cities, with an average wait of five hours to fill up a tank. At bakeries, people push and shove during long, chaotic waits for their turn to collect the quota of two bread packs a day per family. On the streets in the capital of Damascus, beggars accost motorists and passers-by, pleading for food or money. Medicines, baby milk and diapers can hardly be found. As Syria marks the 10th anniversary Monday of the start of its uprising-turned-civil war, President Bashar Assad may still be in power, propped up by Russia and Iran. But millions of people are being pushed deeper into poverty, and a majority of households can hardly scrape together enough to secure their next meal. “Life here is a portrait of everyday humiliation and suffering,” said one woman in Damascus. Her husband lost his job at an electronics store last month, and now the family is drawing on meager savings that are evaporating fast. With two kids and an elderly father to care for, she said life had become unbearably difficult and she is gripped by anxiety for the future. Until recently, she could smuggle in her father’s medicines from Lebanon, but now Lebanon has its own meltdown and shortages.

#headlines #news

[napoleoninrags]

MY PLAN FOR HOW TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE AN ELECTION, TRUMP IS REMOVED, AND THE REPUBLICANS ARE GONE FOR GOOD

by Michael Moore

TRUMP HAS DECLARED WAR ON US AND OUR DEMOCRACY.

IT’S TIME FOR US TO PUT OUR LIVES ON THE LINE, IF NECESSARY, AND TO MAKE HIM THE LAST REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT OF OUR UNITED STATES.

Trump, right now, tonight, is up to some very nasty, scary stuff — stuff we can’t even imagine — and of course we can’t imagine it because we don’t think like Trump. Our brains are wired for love, empathy, solidarity, compassion, freedom, person, woman, man, camera, TV.

You know like I know that Trump has a devious, wicked plan to destroy this Election. We need to declare, immediately, that it is he and the Republican Party who have to go, for the sake of this country’s existence, they must be crushed and removed.

Trump actually has an arsenal of plans already in action to ensure he never leaves office. He has them all in high gear — some visible, some not. If you could see them all you’d be so stunned, you’d have to immediately convince yourself that there’s no way he can pull this off.

We are all caught in Trump’s Matrix, a mad web, the work of a psychopath-in-chief with tricks so devious that fascists of old, if alive today, would marvel at what Trump has accomplished.

For the next 11 weeks — and then for the 12 weeks between the Election and the Inauguration — Trump is planning nothing but anarchy, chaos, a call to arms of his angry white male followers and the complete destruction of our democracy. You think I’m kidding? You think I’m overstating the case? Do you want to take the risk that I might not be wrong? Most of you understandably chose not to listen to me four years ago when I warned you Trump was going to win the Presidency by taking Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. May I please ask that you now give me your serious attention for what I am about to say — because if I’m right again this time, there won’t be a next time. There will be nothing left for me to warn you about. There probably won’t be much left of me.

Here’s how Trump plans to end our right to choose the next President and Congress. It will happen fast. I am also laying out here a battle plan for us to defeat this takeover of our democracy. We must act now.

HERE ARE TRUMP’S 5 PLANS ALREADY IN MOTION:



PLAN #1: Create Chaos. Instill Fear. Fire Up the Base with Racist Vigor. Pandemonium Ensues.

CHECK. DONE.

PLAN #2: Suppress the Vote

•Dismantle the Post Office.

•Create 4-Hour-Long Lines by Drastically Reducing Number of Polling Locations.

•Throw Black and Brown Voters Off the Rolls.

•Stop Those Who’ve Served Time from Voting.

•Place 50,000 “Poll Watchers” at Voting Sites Around the Country to Intimidate Voters.

VOTER SUPPRESSION IN ACTION AS WE SPEAK.

PLAN #3: Postpone the Election. Place the blame on a “legitimate” national tragedy or emergency — massive deaths from the pandemic, a terrorist attack, an assassination, a deadly hurricane, a civil war in the streets, one or both Presidential candidates falling ill to Covid-19 — anything that reasonable people, even people who are opposed to Trump, will agree that “we just can’t hold an election right now! We just need to postpone it for a couple days, a couple weeks (a couple months... a couple years...)” Or perhaps he’ll just cancel the Election outright and see if he can get away with it.

TRUMP READY TO PULL THE TRIGGER.

PLAN #4: His September Surprise.

His October Surprise.

His November Surprise.

His January Surprise.

You think you can guess what it will be, but trust me, it’ll be far worse. We need to be ready. Stay on high alert, my friends. Millions of us will need to act on a moment’s notice. It’s the grim reaper of Democracy at our doorstep. We made the mistake of letting Trump get this far — why wouldn’t he now think he can get away with everything??

THE SURPRISE IS UNKNOWN. THAT’S WHY IT’S A SURPRISE.

PLAN #5: He Will Not Leave.

When Trump loses, he will declare the Election invalid, rigged, stolen — and he will refuse to step down.

So, what will we do then?

HERE IS OUR BATTLE PLAN TO REMOVE TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS:

1. Do Not Wait — Biden/Harris Should Start Running the Country Now.

We simply don’t have time to wait until January 20, 2021. Nearly 200,000 of us have already died from Trump’s reckless incompetence with the coronavirus. By Election Day it’s possible another 100,000 to 200,000 of us will have needlessly died. A total of 400,000 dead? That’s the equivalent of one hundred and thirty-three 9/11s! Or 532 planes being flown into 532 buildings. If something that horrific ever happened, and the President not only didn’t do anything about it, but tried to pretend it wasn’t all that bad - “it is what it is” - he would be run out of the White House by an angry mob of millions of Americans, lucky not to have his head put on a spike on the Key Bridge over the Potomac.

It doesn’t have to come to that. Biden and Harris should present to America a simple nationwide plan to end the pandemic — and then act on it immediately.

They should call a meeting of all the Governors and ask them what help do they need — and then find a way to get them that help, going around Trump and just making it happen. They should ask industry, in lieu of campaign contributions, to produce hundreds of millions of instant-result tests. They should call their Heads of State friends overseas and ask them to send all the PPE they can spare. They should get 250 million Americans to take the “Face Mask Pledge.” And they should promise the scientists in our top universities all the money and help they need once they’re in office. Ignore Trump. Treat him as if he’s irrelevant and get the job done.

2. The Republican Party Must Be Crushed and Destroyed. Trump Must Become the Last Republican President.

In the Michigan county where I live, the August primary this month set a record turnout for a presidential-year primary. In fact, more people this year voted by mail-in ballot than ALL those who voted in 2016 — by mail-in AND in-person combined. This is a highly encouraging sign for what we now need to do:

• We must create an historic massive turnout between now and November 3rd — a tsunami of voters the likes of which have never been seen, and may never be seen again. In 2016, 66 million Americans voted for Hillary Clinton. This time, though, we have to WALLOP Trump with an electoral concussion, a blow so profound he won’t know what hit him. This must be a defeat so crushing, so humiliating, a whooping of such epic proportions that he will be forced to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with his tail between his legs on January 20th. This mammoth landslide must not only ensure that no president ever behaves this way again, we need to see to it that Trump is the last Republican president. The Election Day Uprising must put an end to this party of Trump enablers and traitors. They had a choice. They chose Trump over Democracy. They chose Putin and Netanyahu over fair elections and freedom for all. They chose the 1% over the 160 million working Americans. They chose the NRA over the massacred children of Sandy Hook. They chose to rig our elections, our textbooks, our economy. Democrats helped them along the way, and we’ll take the stick to them and fix that. The Republicans, though, chose to let hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens perish from Covid-19 because loyalty to Party and to Trump was greater than their duty to the American people. For that alone, the Republican Party must be put out of business for good. Vote out every last one of them. Conservatives will have to form a new party, much like when the Whigs were sent packing in the 1800s. The Republicans must pay for their crimes.

• We must flip the Senate —- and not just by the three seats we need for control. We should shock the pundit class and, as the Republican Party is reduced to ashes, grab a solid 55+ seat majority. Colorado, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and even Kansas, South Carolina and, yes, Texas (a state that is now 57% non-white) — are all possible Democratic Senate wins. Think about spending a weekend or a week helping out in one of these states. The Republicans will wish they had managed this pandemic better and had everyone busy back at work by now. All this “free time” should make for their undoing.

• Finally, we have to vote the local Republicans out of office, too. State Houses and Senates will be drawing the electoral map for the next ten years. We can’t let the cheating Republicans do this again. Do what you can to elect Dems in your state and local elections. The punishment of the Republican Party — a certified terrorist organization for having helped kill at least 200,000 Americans — is an imperative.

3. Who Would Be Willing To, If Need Be, Put Their Life on the Line To Ensure This Election Is Held and EVERYONE Gets to Vote? I Would. Would You?

These steps must be taken immediately:

• The Secret Service, the FBI, the Capitol Police and the Joint Chiefs of Staff must be called before Congress and swear under oath that they will guarantee that the election will be held, they will enforce the Constitution they swore to uphold, and if he’s defeated but refuses to leave, they will escort the former President of the United States out of the White House.

• Biden and Harris must put Trump on notice that if he does one more thing to interfere with the Election or issues one more threat to suppress the vote, they will turn him and his crime family over to the new Justice Department for prosecution.

• Every single one of us must be strong in our publicly-stated resolve that there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON ON EARTH TO POSTPONE OR CANCEL THE ELECTION. That’s our unmovable and intractable position. No national tragedy, disease, threat or the melting of all of Greenland will cause us not to vote on or before November 3rd. Even if, God forbid, either candidate passes in their sleep between now and Election Day, the Election will continue — and the winner’s VP - or Nancy Pelosi - will become President on Inauguration Day.

• Let’s all pledge that, if Trump tries to cancel the election or if he refuses to accept its results, millions of us will go to DC and encircle the White House, a thousand deep, until he backs down, resigns or is removed.

• And, if you can, quietly make this commitment to yourself: “There are only a very few things I’d be willing to give my life for. This is one of them.” I know. That’s dark. And heavy. And awfully sad because it shouldn’t have come to this. But if we can’t even say that, then what good are we? If we aren’t willing to make that sacrifice, then America is already over and we might as well just fold our tent and see if Canada will take the non-racist, non-homophobic, non war-mongering ones of us who have manners and get satire.

4. Become an Election Defender.

Each of you should form an urgent action group - a rapid response team - in your neighborhood or town and do the following:

• Hold a daily protest at your local post office

• Picket the home of your local Postmaster (he/she may be on your side, so bring them some baked goods)

• Chain yourself to a local blue USPS dropbox if you can find one. Or chain it to something that won’t move.

• Sign up with the city clerk to be a poll worker on Election Day - especially if you’re young. Because of the pandemic, polls will be very short of poll workers. If you’re told they have enough help, then call the local Democratic Party and offer to be a “poll watcher”, the group of people from each party who get to oversee the voting to make sure there are no irregularities.

• Demand your city create more voting locations. Convince owners of arenas, theaters, ball parks, malls - places with large open spaces - to offer their facilities as polling places so that everyone gets a chance to vote.

• Canvas your neighborhoods over the next month to get people to fill out the form you’ll have them sign to get a mail-in ballot — and if they want to vote in person, let them know when the first day is so they can do that. Make a list of who needs a Covid-safe ride. The earlier the better!

5. The Uprising We’re In Is Only Getting Bigger. The People Will Now Call the Shots.

Why wait for the politicians to fix the mess of a country we’re in when they helped orchestrate the mess in the first place? Why don’t we just declare how we want to live — a new way to govern and function as a country — and we will finally fulfill the promise of the American Dream that has never been realized. Life, liberty, true equality, a sharing of the wealth, being good citizens of this world and kind stewards of a fragile Earth.

What have we learned from this pandemic? What we already knew: That employer-based health insurance can evaporate in an instant. Health care is a human right.

That being told “we can’t afford that!” (free college, free child care, free medical care - the things most advanced nations have) is total BS — the government CAN afford anything we decide we need!

We’ve learned that teachers, nurses, the mailwoman, farm workers, mass transit drivers and the minimum wage workers stocking the grocery shelves at 3 in the morning are our most important citizens and they need the respect and income they deserve immediately. 74% of the country now believes a guaranteed annual income is a great idea — fifty percentage points higher than when Andrew Yang proposed it 7 months ago!

We’ve learned to slow down, consume less — and that is what may be the path to saving the planet (when the 4% of its inhabitants [US] is no longer sucking up 25% of its resources and hoarding more than half its wealth).

We’re about to go elect more women than ever before — a time to turn the reins over to the gender that stands a better chance of getting us through the deadly viruses of Covid, Capitalism and Republicans(R.I.P.).

None of this will be launched by politicians. It will only come about through you and me taking action as part of the largest protest movement in our history — still growing, still going strong! — to end the racism, the abuse of the police state, the disgusting income inequality and the hateful misogyny that is going to come to an end in our lifetime.

America, post-pandemic, must become a very different place. Let’s make this happen. Doing the above will be the best cure for the trauma of these past four years.

Commit to being the change.

Organize your friends and family today.

Make your plan to campaign in a swing state Sept. or Oct.

VOTE AS EARLY AS YOU CAN—and take 5 people along with you!

We can do this. Trump - we’re coming for you. I’ll be in the first U-Haul truck that pulls up to your door.

[theunvanquishedzims]

Calming my post-election anxiety with sweet sweet logic

So Trump is a wannabe dictator with crazy screaming fans who are headed toward violent armed meltdowns. What’s to stop him from going full dictator and refusing to leave office?

I’m glad you asked!

You see, the major difference between wannabe dictators and actual dictators is ALLIES. Dictators are surrounded with tight security, aided by the military, cheered on by media that they control, and are either helped, encouraged, or just ignored by other countries with the power to stop them.

Trump has charged the Secret Service money for the privilege of protecting him and his family since day one. You remember the first year, when his wife and son refused to move to the White House so the Secret Service had to RENT FLOORS in TRUMP’S BUILDING to be close to them? And how his extended family went globetrotting and the Secret Service had to accompany them? And when Trump himself insisted on hosting people at his golf club, he made the Secret Service RENT GOLF CARTS from TRUMP’S CLUB to follow him while he went golfing?

The end result was that halfway through the first year of his presidency, the Secret Service could not pay their own wages. Because half their yearly budget had gone straight to Trump’s pockets. And that’s just financially. I think we all remember how the White House came down with Covid and Trump still insisted on Secret Service agents driving him around to wave at people. He has not been kind to the people who are sworn to protect him. These people have had a front-row seat to his circus since 2016. When the time comes from Trump to leave the White House and Biden to take over, I doubt they’ll betray the country out of loyalty to Trump. If anything, they’ll be the ones to drag him out.

As for the military, Trump insulted and fired four generals from his administration staff. He said on multiple occasions that soldiers who get captured or killed are suckers and losers. He refused to visit a cemetery to honor the dead because it was raining. He tries to pander to the military by massive increases in defense spending, but that money goes to capitalists who make weapons and war technology, not the soldiers or veterans. (He also hypocritically accused military officials of being in bed with those same companies.) In a poll of 1000 service members 50% said they disliked Trump. Overall, he doesn’t act like a leader, and the way he skirts responsibility (like taking charge during the pandemic) doesn’t appeal to a group that functions on trust in their leadership.

A proper dictator would have spent the last four years cozying up to his generals and making sure they knew the financial and social benefits of answering to him personally, not the office of the President. And while Trump did adhere to the adage “find a foreign foe” to unite people against, he badly misjudged what most US citizens consider “foreign.” He hasn’t found a villain that we would root for the military taking down, and the people he targets (Latinx, Blacks, immigrants, and people in countries our military has already devastated) are not a minority he can turn the majority of the country against, especially with how many of the former two serve in the military themselves. When the time comes for him to leave office, the military might be the first to cut ties with the wannabe Dictator-in-Chief.

Now, the media. They’ve been treating him like a joke candidate since day one, but after he was actually elected and took office they’ve started to take him more seriously. He’s gotten his catchphrase “fake news!” to catch on, but that doesn’t change the fact that under his administration news reporters have been harassed, illegally arrested, and generally poorly treated by Trump, especially if they’re women. He’s trashed talked everyone, with Fox News being the last bastion of semi-legitimate news that openly supports him (and their credibility has taken a big hit over it.)

Despite this support, in recently months Trump has been increasingly dumping on Fox, even throwing the mediator they provided for the debate under the bus, and risking alienating them in the process. If his supporters listen to him and start considering Fox part of Big Fake News, it might possibly be the death of Fox, leaving most of his supporters adrift and isolated from their source of right-wing news, and sending the more extreme fringes into the arms of conspiracy theory websites. (I’m not saying this is bad, being cut off from Fox and its toxic stream of “information” can actually help rehabilitate the right.)

Honestly, I don’t think Trump ever had a shot at controlling the media like a dictator would, mainly because of social media. He’s in love with attention, and Twitter has provided him a nonstop stream of it. No other President has threatened, insulted, promoted, or hinted at war over social media the way Trump has, and he gets so much direct feedback and interaction with the public and the world as a result. He could have leveraged that by buying the company (through a shell corporation, obviously) and setting it up as The One True Source of Information, manipulating public perception of him and his administration by keeping a tight grip on what information he let out.

But he’s just. Not. That. Clever. He blurts out everything that crosses his mind, leaving his administration to play clean-up on his messes, put out fires he keeps pouring gasoline on, and claim he’s joking when everyone knows he’s testing the limits on what he can get away with saying. He took advantage of the direct communication with legions of supporters, but seemed to forget that his detractors had equal access and would absolutely call him out on things he definitely said, it’s right there on his Twitter account, they have the Tweet pulled up on their phone right now. Instead of operating a single state-run media outlet while crushing all free press and limiting internet access like other dictators, he’s mooned the world’s cameras and acted surprised when they put his saggy butt on tv. “Fake news! That’s not my butt! THIS is my butt! [image attached]” he tweets. “Twitter is so biased, they haven’t censored any of Sleepy Joe’s photos!” he later tweets.

And lastly. The key to a dictatorship’s success. To prevent outside intervention, the country a dictator runs must be unimportant and ignored, wealthy and well-connected, or scary and well-armed. Minor warlords are the former, Putin is the latter, Trump might have weaseled his way into being the middle. But at the end of the day, America’s whole thing is new leadership every four years. It was revolutionary to replace a lineage of kings and queens stretching generations with a non-royal elected leader who only held office for four to eight years, but we’ve stuck to that for 200 years and everyone’s used to it by now. It would take a charismatic and powerful person to move the American people towards abolishing such a basic tenant of our democracy, and despite the mob mentality that lead a small portion of his supporters to chant “sixteen more years!” in the heat of the moment, Trump is not that charismatic. He’s not that smart. He’s not that well-connected. He’s not that savvy. He’s not that good at politics. And he’s not that powerful.

(I was going to say something here about him being the laughingstock of the world’s leaders and shouldn’t expect any outsiders to help him stay in power, especially since his tax returns came out and showed he owes people a ton of money that he doesn’t have, but this post is long enough so let’s cut to the chase.)

Trump is a greedy, small-minded man that has clung to power by appealing to the worst in humanity and scraping away at the best. But he hasn’t succeeded. He’s a sad old man who will say anything to be loved, and I don’t think he even knows what love is, so he’ll settle for attention. He doesn’t have money, he doesn’t have an army, and the only allies he has are using him as a political pawn to further their own interests. They will cut him loose the minute he stops being useful.

Now, the bad part: crazy screaming fans. Fringe groups on the internet. Mobs chanting “sixteen more years!” Men with guns and bombs and kidnapping plots, men trying to get into voting centers to destroy the election, men driving trucks with black flags that say FUCK YOUR FEELINGS, TRUMP 2020 (available on Amazon for $11.99, I wish I was joking.) I have no idea how many people in this country genuinely love Trump. It is hopefully significantly less than voted for him. There are some big issues in this country that are make-or-break, and unfortunately by reason of running Republican Trump has aligned himself with some of them.

There are people who hate everything about Trump, but he put a pro-life judge on the Supreme Court so they’re voting for him. There are people who are uncomfortable with Trump, but they’ve forgiven their grandpa for saying worse at Thanksgiving dinner, so they’ll vote for him. There are people who don’t know a single thing about Donald Trump, but they see (Republican) next to his name on the ballot, so they vote for him. None of that means those people will side with him if he tries to make a move towards dictatorship.

Now there are people who love Trump. They’ve heard and seen the vile things he’s said and done, and are genuinely okay with it, because they are full of hate and rage and want to change the world to put themselves on top. I do not know how many of these people there are. I know they exist all over the country, not just in red states. I know some of them have guns and want a reason to use them, because they’ve been talking about it for decades. I don’t know if we can trust the police to side with us over them if fights start breaking out. (And I pray pray PRAY people de-escalate any fights, because monkey see monkey do, and one news report of a MAGA extremist shooting someone can inspire a hundred copycats can lead to full-on civil war like we've never seen.) I know we need to be careful the next few months, to take care of ourselves and watch out for the more vulnerable in our communities.

And above all, I know this: Trump is not going to keep this country. He got it through trickery and deceit and foreign influence and national indifference and people not taking him seriously. We’ve learned. We’ve grown. We’re taking him seriously now, and we will not let him take what we’ve already told him he can’t have. The election is over. He’s a loser. He’d better start packing his bags. Because he’s not staying in office.

#politics #long post #best case scenario: he tries to rehabilitate his rep as a man of the people #by pushing massive amounts of money into direct stimulus #funds it by cutting the military budget in half #everyone gets several thousand dollars next month #he screws over every white collar criminal he ever had help from #exposes a lot of corruption and behind-the-scenes stuff #and pardons every convict in jail on weed charges #''he really drained the swamp'' everyone says admiringly #''only took him four years and an impeachment'' #then he gets convicted of crimes and runs away to Russia #where he's found dead in a snowbank #because PUTIN IS NOT YOUR FRIEND YOU USELESS LUMP #Melina inherits everything and never sets foot in the US again #the Obamas send her a gift basket every Christmas #at least one of his kids runs for president #and gets laughed out of the party #the kid in question might be Ivanka who gets a concerning amount of radfem votes #it's definitely not Barron though #(watch me eat those words in 21 years)

[dorovahkiin]

SnK Chapter 130: My personal thoughts (SPOILERS)

This chapter was wild - and not surprising at the same time 👀.

- As expected, Annie would break down when finding out about Odiha plan and her father's possible death. It was nice seeing this desperate, emotional side of her since she barely shows it

- Snk-polls' judgement "Annie becoming human" is trash. Annie has been human before

- Annie says she wants to leave, but I'm sure she won't, would be a waste of character after being gone for so long. I think she is either gonna change her mind or (more probable) someone is gonna convince her to stay

- Seems like we won't get Annie vs. Mikasa fight

- Now let's switch to Eren POV. I don't even know where to start... I understood it as almost all (future) flashbacks in this chapter happened when Eren kissed Historia's hand

- All the memories on page 6 are very significant. I think Grisha looking wtf on page 6 is pretty much the moment of the final panel. Dude has the same hair and shirt

- Page 7 could be a tumblr post alone... Eren implies he all wanted this, which is really important to keep in mind!

- Almost all memories on page 7 are future memories in S3 Eren's POV. I don't know how Eren saw Falco. However, I want to focus on the tiny Bertholdt panel on the right which seems to be a past memory:

- It's Bert from Dina's POV as she ignores him to enter Shiganshina immediately (Chapter 96). Why the heck does Eren see this memory?

- There is the theory Eren controlled Dina to ignore Bert and to head directly to his house to kill Carla. To trigger his motivation and the whole plot ("I wanted this all"). By that, it would be a future memory again because he'd manipulate it in the future

- I believe this is absolutely possible. Eren forced Grisha to kill innocent children after all. And even if he loves his mom, I think he is definitely capable of killing her if it serves his grand goal. I wouldn't be surprised if he also manipulated more events

- Imo the story would already be great without this plot twist (if it's true), but if people need it to understand Eren's character I support the theory

- Eren's toxic understanding of freedom is the most important thing to him. He cares about his friends, yes, but freedom is more important. That's why I think he mainly does the rumbling for his philosophy, not for his friends ("I wanted all this")

- This whole chapter was about Eren dehumanising which supports the last point. Calling his enemies "animals" was a peak (No, it was NOT a mistranslation)

- The last pages of kid Eren wanting to destroy titans and adult Eren wanting to destroy the "animals" was a nice parallel which also supports Eren dehumanising. Is dehumanising the right word after all? He was like this all along, "born this way" 🤔

- Since he first claimed to sympathise with his enemies and now calling them animals, I wouldn't be surprised if he'll change his mind about his friends and Eldians either. It would be wtf af if he wanted to eventually kill them either in order to end the cycle of hatred (because Eldians still fight each other). That would be a total peak of Eren dehumanising and I would love that plot twist. Just a wild guess

- Now let's turn to the Hisu flashbacks. I made a whole post about that alone. To summarise it:

- Imo the arrangement of Hisu flashbacks are not in the right chronological order, they are also interrupted by other flashbacks

- I think the last Hisu flashback of the chapter (which fitted perfectly to the Zeke scene THEME-WISE) is chronologically the first moment of the EH scene. So it would be like:

1) Well Eren, what do you think about me having a baby? (follow up of 107 when Kiyomi presented the 50 years plan)

2) This leads to the 50 years plan and MPs talk between Eren and Historia

3) Eren says he doesn't like it and tells her his alternative plan and it stops at Hisu's reaction after "You're the worst"

- This makes much more sense imo, Hisu wouldn't suggest a baby right after this manipulating line of Eren (Yes, I think it's disgusting manipulation, he twisted her words she said back in the cave scene) she first has to emotionally collect herself before proposing something like that out of nowhere

- E + H = Y is still the biggest bs this fandom has ever produced imo

- Hisu is obviously manipulated by Eren, it reminds me of Ymir being manipulated by the first King and her environment. Hisu not exposing Eren's genocide plan has the same reason why Ymir never rebelled against her trash husband, although it destroyed her. This kind of manipulation happens a lot in real life too

- Yes, I still think Historia is against genocide. And I believe she HAS a good heart, she is NOT an evil bitch. Her official stats say Altruism 10/10 after all

- However, even if Eren manipulated her, he still cares for her (though his freedom philosophy is more important again)

- We learn this when love Guru Zeke tells him Mikasa's protectiveness is the result of love, not nonexistent Ackerbond (112 You fcking liar Eren!) and Eren thinks about Historia while Zeke talks about Mikasa

- He notices he is also protective of Historia and might like her in whatever way (He didn't notice before, Zeke just made it clear to him, so another reason why Eren is not the father, especially not in a romantic way)

- Adding the baby flashback during Zeke talk about protecting was perfect theme-wise because Eren wants to protect Historia especially FROM getting pregnant by force as he stated it many times before

- Eren says he has only 4 more years to live, implying he is not interested in a relationship or family. This is another big point why Eren is not the father and I already mentioned that point in November

- Everyone says this chapter confirmed Eren is the hooded figure, but for me it was the confirmation he was not. I don't understand how people constantly miss those points:

- Eren's jacket is FULLY inked, the HF's jacket is not. It's a completely different jacket

- Why would Eren hood himself in the first place at Hisu's farm? He's been there many times before, was never hooded, nor is he hooded in 130

- Furthermore they are outside where everyone can spot them and Eren was not even hooded. It doesn't make fcking sense!

- People literally call me "high" for this take and of course I might be wrong but yes, I still think the hodded figure is Levi

- Yes, I also still believe in fake pregnancy and the hooded figure scene plays a huge part in that. I made a super long post about it in November

- Even if I am wrong and Farmer-kun is the dad (it's definitely NOT Eren), it won't play any importance in the story, the "who's the father" shit distract people too much from the real relevant questions regarding the plot

- Character of this month: Eren and him being more obvious about his true nature

- My rating: 10/10

- Predictions for next chapter: Alliance again, full talking chapter, maybe also a POV switch to Zeke, Floch, Annie's dad or even Historia if we're lucky

- I know a lot of people will hate me for my thoughts on 130, but I'm fine with that

#snk 130 #snk chapter 130 #eren #eren yeager #historia #historia reiss #zeke #zeke yeager #annie #annie leonhardt #snk #snk manga #shingeki no kyojin #bertholdt hoover #rumbling

[chiseler]

"¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!”

Lolita Lebrón

Amid all the righteous shrieking and arm-flapping that accompanied the coverage of the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of yahoos and half-wits, commentator after commentator proclaimed such an assault on the sanctity of The People’s House was unprecedented, at least since the torching of the Capitol building during the War of 1812. If your limiting the parameters to “A mob of yahoos and half-wits spurred on by clumsy bald-faced lies and ridiculous conspiracy theories stormed the Capitol building, convinced they’d be able to overturn the results of a presidential election by making a terrible mess,” then yes, sure, I can’t think of a comparable example in our history. If, however, these commentators are speaking in more general terms about violent, politically-motivated attacks inside the American International Pictures logo, then I’m afraid, yet again, a brief history lesson is in order. Let’s work our way backwards from January 6th.

In a strange and eerie precedent, if on a smaller scale, on the afternoon of July 24th, 1998, Russell E. Weston Jr. stormed through the Capitol’s document door, an entrance generally reserved for elected officials and their staffs. According to interviews after the fact, Weston was a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds who was convinced America was about to be besieged both by a strange new disease and an army of cannibals, and wanted our nation’s leaders to know about it.

Jacob Chestnut, Jr.

When Weston zipped through the metal detector just inside the entrance, the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver he was carrying set off the alarm. After Capitol police officer Jacob Chestnut, Jr. asked him to kindly back up and go through the machine again, Westin drew his revolver and shot Chestnut in the head, killing him. He then took off down the hall, ducking into what turned out to be a suite of offices occupied by senior Republican congressmen. At that particular moment, it was also occupied by plainclothes special agent John Gibson, who’d drawn security detail that day. Weston promptly shot Gibson as well, but before he died, Gibson returned fire, shooting Weston four times. Weston survived, and is presently still being held in an institute for the criminally insane.

Fifteen years earlier, on November 7th, 1983, members of a third-rate radical group calling themselves The Armed Resistance Unit (ARU) planted a bomb on the second floor of the Senate Wing. When it went off around midnight, no one was hurt, but the blast did cause an estimated $250,000 in damage. A communique released by the ARU said the bombing was in response to American military action in Grenada and Lebanon. Thirteen years before that, on March 1st, 1971, The Weathermen, in what would soon be recognized as their standard m.o., planted a bomb in one of the Capitol’s many bathrooms. Again it was timed to go off in the middle of the night. No one was hurt, but the next day a few people were inconvenienced. In taking credit for the bombing, The Weathermen claimed it was in response to the continued U.S. bombing of Laos. Or maybe just Laotian bathrooms—amid all the hippie lingo and Marxist doggerel, it was hard to tell.

But those were all small potatoes, tepid attacks waged by crazy people driven by delusional fantasies and supposed revolutionary groups who had no clear idea what a real revolution entailed. But exactly seventeen years before the Weathermen, in essence, flushed an M-80 down a congressional toilet and called it a mighty blow against U.S. imperialism, it was a different story, which may explain why it’s so forgotten today.

In order to fully understand the events of March 1st, 1954, we need to step back a ways, to the end of the Spanish-American War.

As part of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which brought the war to its end, Spain handed control of Puerto Rico over to the U.S.. There was just one problem with this. A year earlier, in the 1897 Carta de Autonomía, Spain had already granted Puerto Rico independence from colonial rule, meaning come the end of their scuffle with the States, Spain was no longer in any position to be handing Puerto Rico over to anyone.

Well, everyone seemed to overlook this little technicality, and Puerto Rico became an American commonwealth.

In 1950, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act, which declared the U.S. would continue to provide security for Puerto Rico and handle any international treaties that might involve them.  At the same time, the people of Puerto Rico would be free to elect their own government, so long as the U.S. approved of their choices. While Puerto Ricans would be considered U.S. citizens, they would not be allowed to vote for president, nor would they have any representatives in Congress.

This did not sit especially well with the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which had been pushing for Puerto Rican sovereignty since its formation in 1922.

The ruling (and U.S.-backed) People’s Democratic Party, however, gave the passage of the Congressional act a big thumb’s up. In response, the Nationalists, still calling for the recognition of the 1897 Carta de Autonomía, launched a sloppy and bloody revolt in cities across Puerto Rico. The uprising was quickly squashed with a little help from the PDP’s friends to the North, who provided both manpower and military hardware.

Two Puerto Rican nationals living in New York at the time, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, had a better idea. Down in Washington, with the White House undergoing renovations, Harry Truman had taken up temporary residence in Blair House, the presidential guest house. He was a sitting duck, they figured. Freedom-loving people around the world may have been able to ignore a little three-day skirmish in their homeland, but they wouldn’t be able to ignore the assassination of a U.S. president.

The pair armed themselves and took a train down to Washington. Once they arrived at Blair House, apparently convinced they’d simply be able to kick in the front door and shoot Truman, Torresola and Collazo were surprised to find the place guarded by dozens of secret service agents, city cops, and White House security officers. In the brief gun battle that ensued, Torresola was killed, as was one of the cops. Collazo was taken into custody and later sentenced to death. Two years later in 1952, Truman commuted his sentence to life in prison.

Also in 1952, gleaning that the natives were getting restless, Truman decided it might be wise to appease them by offering a simple vote on the matter. So later that year, the people of Puerto Rico, given the chance to put a free and open democracy into action, went to the polls, where they were freely and openly allowed to choose between the kind of limited autonomy they presently experienced, or complete U.S. control. The fact that “independence” was not among the choices offered was lost on nobody, especially the Nationalists, who for the most part skipped the vote. Those who did vote overwhelmingly chose to stick with limited autonomy.

A radical wing of the Nationalist Party, enraged by the scam of a so-called referendum, began hatching a plan to call attention to the struggles of the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Initially, the four-person team—Lolita Lebrón, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irvin Flores Rodríguez—decided to launch a series of violent attacks around Washington, coinciding with the opening of the Interamerican Conference in Caracas on March first, 1954. As the date approached, however, Lolita Lebrón, self-appointed leader of the group, decided splitting up to try and hit several targets at once around Washington was maybe not the wisest move. They’d get better results if they concentrated their efforts on a single target—namely the U.S. Congress.  

So on the morning of March 1st, like Torresola and Collazo before them, Lebrón met the other three at Grand Central Station. Armed with semiautomatic pistols, they boarded a train for Washington. Upon arriving, they marched straight to the Capitol building and found themselves seats at the back of one of the visitors galleries overlooking the House floor.

Down on the floor, Congress was debating whether or not to continue allowing Mexican immigrants to work as migrant laborers on American soil. Upon Lebrón’s signal, a cry of "¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!,” the four stood, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, pulled their guns and began firing.

After she was arrested, Lebrón insisted she’d only fired hers at the ceiling, saying, "I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico.” The other three, however, apparently hadn’t been paying attention during the planning sessions, and began shooting at Congress members. Cordero’s gun jammed, but Miranda more than picked up the slack, firing an estimated 30 rounds into the panicking Congressmen below. Three Democrats and two Republicans were struck, one seriously, but all five survived. All four Nationalists were arrested at the scene.

In June, after a 12-day trial in federal court on attempted murder and weapons charges, the four were found guilty, though Lebrón was found guilty of the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Although the prosecution had been pushing for the death penalty given the crime involved an attack on the very heart of American democracy, the judge instead handed down consecutive prison terms, fifty years for Lebrón and seventy-five years each for the other three.

In October, they were brought back to court to face further federal conspiracy charges. They were found guilty once again, and the judge tacked another six years onto their sentences. The four were then split up and sent to four different federal prisons.

Two decades after the attack on Congress, the next generation of radical Puerto Rican nationals calling themselves FALN, still fighting for Puerto Rican sovereignty, began a bombing campaign across the U.S.. It’s estimated they detonated over 130 bombs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities, most notably the 1975 lunch time bombing of the historic Fraunces Tavern in the Financial District, which killed four Wall Street types.

In 1978, as the bloody, decade-long FALN bombing campaign rolled on, Figueroa Cordero was released from prison after serving 23 years of his 81-year sentence. The next year, then-President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentences of the other three. Some say it was part of a prisoner exchange deal to secure the release of several CIA agents imprisoned in Cuba, while others believe it may have been a direct response to the FALN, who, among other things, had been demanding the release of their revolutionary forbears.

Today, the Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on Congress and the FALN’s deadly decade-long bombing spree remain mostly forgotten. Meanwhile the bumbling rich-kid antics of The Weathermen and the merely bubbling antics of the Symbionese Liberation Army remain firmly entrenched in the American consciousness. The reasons for this are fairly simple and merely part of a long pattern. Groups like The Weathermen and the SLA may not have had any clear plans, may not have been driven by any personal injustices, and may not have accomplished much save for the kidnapping of one rich white girl, but they had great p.r.. They were (mostly) white, they were photogenic, and they didn’t really bother anyone. The four Puerto Rican Nationalists, the FALN and other forgotten groups like the Black Liberation Army were motivated by personal injustices. Their anger was justified, they did some real damage, and that made them a dangerous threat to those in power. They were also, y’know, a bunch of dirty Hispanics and Blacks, so better to just bury the issue. Who cares?

by Jim Knipfel

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

the voting ends today but the fight almost certainly does not

Republicans are filing increasingly desperate and ridiculous lawsuits trying – emphasis on TRYING – to have votes thrown out because they’re big old losers who know they can’t win legitimately.

If you’re the kind of person who can get into the weeds of federal court filings on elections, you probably already have your hair on fire. If you’re not, I don’t recommend picking up the habit right now. It’s just going to make your head swim. These are so incoherent and meritless that even our corrupt federal judiciary and plenty of conservative state judges have frequently brushed them off. I get the sense that Trump’s lawyers are more hoping to win those cases than trying to win them. What they seem to be trying to do with these lawsuits is some mix of the following dishonest things:

depress turnout by making people feel like he can just have their votes thrown out so why bother;

set something, anything, up on track for the Supreme Court, which Trumpworld is (not unreasonably) confident they have sufficiently corrupted;

create a general sense that there’s some authority other than the voters who get to decide this election.

That is what makes me think Trump’s plan to barricade himself in the White House and tweet out a declaration of victory the first moment Fox News reports a good exit poll for him is only mostly about his pathetic need to self-soothe with an autocratic display. He’s also making one last go-for-broke play for the public narrative. He thinks – again, not unreasonably – that if he says he won, then he’ll get a bunch of “Trump Declares Victory” headlines and chyrons, which puts a thumb on the scale in terms of how people frame any resulting developments in their own minds. It’s not a good strategy, it’s more of a hail Mary, but it’s the only potentially helpful option he’s left for himself.

All of this has, once again, summoned the specter of the 2000 election.

We can’t look one day into the future. But we might be able to prepare ourselves for it if we look about twenty years into the past.

There’s kind of a fable that’s built up around the 2000 Florida recount that Republicans were just tougher and savvier and wanted it more, while Democrats clumsily Ned Starked everything up. It’s important to reject that premise as fundamentally abhorrent. In a functioning democracy, campaign strategy is irrelevant after Election Day, because voters are in charge. The Gore campaign, to its credit, was buying into the basic premise of democracy, and had therefore planned their campaign around trying to win an election fair and square. When you punish or condemn people for that, you are ceding ground to the fascists and agreeing to fight on their terms.

The Bush campaign was just fundamentally not operating from the premise of democracy, but from the premise that elections are merely a weak opening bid from the electorate. Before anyone even knew there would be a recount, they had already gamed out a scenario where they could win even if they lost. The contingency they’d planned for, that struck them as most likely, was actually that Gore would win the Electoral College but Bush would win the popular vote. They planned out a whole pressure campaign to create enough of an uproar to give some friendly Republican state legislatures somewhere just enough of an excuse to award electors to Bush even if their constituents had voted for Gore. That wasn’t the scenario they ended up facing, of course. But when you do those kind of war games, you have to think about what your opponent would do, which means the Bush team was ready to hit the ground running with a whole bunch of things they had been expecting Gore’s campaign to do. The core point of whatever they were going to do was always to create an excuse for the nuclear option of having Republican state legislators send Republican electors to install George W. Bush no matter what their voters wanted.

One major difference between then and now is that generation of Republicans knew what they were doing was abnormal and wrong, so they kept it under wraps. Now they’re so high on their own supply that they brag about it to The Atlantic, because they genuinely don’t realize that people will object and try to stop them if they give up the element of surprise.

In 2000, the nuclear option of state legislatures just ignoring their voters to install Bush was not something the Gore campaign could have reasonably foreseen, and even if they did have an in-house psychic to warn them about it, it’s not something they could have realistically stopped except by winning with the biggest margin possible, which they were already trying to do. In 2020, Republicans are basically trying to run the same play, but against Democrats who very much are as prepared as they could possibly be, and by “Democrats,” I mean Democrats at every level. Inside the campaign, Biden campaign senior adviser Ron Klain ran Gore’s recount effort in Florida, and is therefore the last person to have any illusions about the opposition. Their lawyers are fucking beasts. Outside the campaign, Democratic voters have already voted, dragged their friends out to vote, and are amped for whatever fight tomorrow brings.

And, unlike 2000, any formal government processes are going to have to go through House Speaker Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, and honey, she is not having it. Remember, Pelosi has already thwarted not one but two Trump regime connivances to steal elections. In 2018, she successfully deterred any attempt to undermine Democrats’ midterm victory. And with her crisp, digestible, precision strike impeachment strategy, she neutered the HUNTERGAZI plot that Trump had every intention of using to sabotage the election this year. (God only knows what other schemes she headed off by making an example out of the pressure campaign against Zelensky. Any foreign leader or official who might have been tempted to cave under similar pressure by Trump got put on notice that trying to appease him quietly was not going to make their lives any less complicated.) No wonder she felt emboldened to tell the Trumpist wing of the Supreme Court to sit their asses down if they know what’s good for them.

What Democrats – and other small-d democrats and progressives – can do, we’re doing. You need to take heart from that, and brace yourself for a couple of stressful weeks.

Unfortunately, we can’t control everything. We can’t control what Trump will do to seize the narrative, and we can’t do much about how the press responds. And again, I’d point back to 2000 as a cautionary tale. Did you know that most of the networks actually called the race right, and they did it pretty fast? It’s true! Early-ish that night, they called Florida for Gore. And, as a subsequent investigation showed, Gore got more votes in Florida! But the ballot count was tighter than it should have been – a lot of registered voters who were likely to have preferred Gore were kicked off the rolls in a racist purge – so they did a reasonable thing and retracted the initial analysis to say the state was too close to call.

I did say most of the networks. I’ll give you one guess which was the outlier. John Ellis – head of the decision desk (ie, the decision of when to call a race for one candidate or the other) at Fox News and first cousin of candidate George Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush – somehow knew something about the Florida vote count that the Associated Press didn’t. Late that night, as Gore’s numbers were actually ticking up, Ellis called Florida for Bush. (I might’ve been more circumspect making those implications five years ago, but these people have forcefully rejected the benefit of the doubt.) The other networks, embarrassed by the earlier retraction and exhausted after a long night, leapt after Ellis like lemmings in five minutes flat.

This created a narrative that seamlessly dovetailed with the Bush campaign’s evolving strategy: a Bush win was a fait accompli, so why was sore loser Gore insisting on this recount, wasn’t it taking way too long? Of course, the truth was that nobody actually wins an election before the votes are counted, so if Bush really wanted to get this over with, why was he so resistant to having so many votes counted even once?

Because, of course, while Bush’s top campaign people were out in front of the press loftily insisting that this recount was an irrelevant waste of the country’s time and attention, Republican lawyers were down in Florida doing everything they could to run out the clock. Deadline after deadline loomed and then passed with a bunch of Federalist Society hacks badgering and haggling over every single ballot. Said Federalist Society hacks included John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

So legal correspondents and voting rights advocates, unfortunately, aren’t crazy to have their hair on fire about the Supreme Court once again doing what happened next in 2000: the court ordered all the counts to stop until arguments that it scheduled for the day before an arbitrary deadline. Then they handed down a decision that even they knew was so incoherent and indefensible that they said it wasn’t supposed to be used as precedent in any other case, even though the Supreme Court’s job for over two hundred years had been to hand down rulings that lower courts could use as precedent.

(Seriously. Guys. If Doc Brown ever tosses you the keys to his DeLorean, your mission is to go back to 1999 and run Chief Justice Rehnquist over with it. Then – and this is important – back up and run over him again. Twice. Then you can go buy stock in Google or feed Trump to zombie vampire bats or hit up a Borders or whatever.)

If you’re not really familiar with this story, you’re saying “wait, what? Why did people stand for this bullshit?” FAIR QUESTION. There are a lot of reasons, though no excuses. One reason that’s been previously underrated, I guess, is that Bush hadn’t spent the week before the election running around telling everyone who would listen that “what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna make ourselves a huge pain in the ass while people are trying to count votes, and then we’re gonna whine about, ‘why is it taking so long to count all these votes?’ Heh heh heh.”

If he had … well, I’m pretty sure at least 538 Floridians would have been alarmed enough to make a better choice than they ultimately did.

I always want to be able to share an action item. This time, I can’t. (Unless you can vote but haven’t yet, in which case, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ON TUMBLR, GET YOUR ASS IN LINE AND STAY THERE.) I don’t know what the world is going to look like six hours from now. It’s entirely possible that there’s a Biden blowout big enough that Trump just gives up and flees the country. But assume we’re not going to get to take the easy way out of this. Get organized and stay fired up. WE RIDE AT DAWN, unless Florida and/or Texas breaks our way by 10:30, in which case, WE DRINK AT 10:31.

#2020 election #2000 election

[ohshcscenerios]

Find Me

Chapter Nineteen - Choose Your Own Adventure

Previous Poll Result: Read the paper

The drive back to the Ootori mansion was painfully silent. No one dared to speak, not when they couldn’t conjure the right words to express their grief. Words were lost to them. Nothing said could calm the burning anguish quietly ravaging them. The loss of their friend would take a life time to heal from; forever an open wound needing compassionate understanding. 

This evening would forever be stained with blood. 

Kyoya fixed his gaze outside the dark window and watched the treeline silhouette against a starry sky. The dark scenery was soothing on his teary eyes. He had pulled out the folded paper but didn’t open it yet. Instead he thumbed the slick paper absentmindedly. 

Tamaki used his jacket sleeve to wipe his eyes and glanced to Kyoya, noticing he hadn’t opened the folded paper yet. 

“Kyoya, when are you going to read that?” He asked quietly. Since they drove away from the cursed scene he had been watching Kyoya fiddle with the paper undecisively. Tamaki was heartbroken, wretched with sorrow, but he was also curious as to what remained secret. 

Ritsu had said it might involve Haruhi. If they could somehow save her from Kaoru’s terrible fate then they needed to act quickly. 

Kyoya looked down at the paper and quietly took a deep breath, “What if she’s dead.” He said defeatedly without looking away from his hands. “They murdered her father. They murdered Kaoru-” His friend’s name nearly caught in his throat, choking his sad voice.

Tamaki twisted in his seat to face his friend, “You can’t think like that. You spoke to her yesterday. She was alive yesterday.”

“So was Kaoru!” Kyoya barked back, not bothering to wipe the tears slipping from beneath his glasses. 

Mitsukuni turned around in his seat to address his friends inthe backseat, resting his forearm on the center console, “We know you’re scared Kyo-chan, and that’s alright. It’s okay to worry about the ones we love, but if Haru-chan is alive we have to do everything we can to find her. Right now that means reading that paper.” 

Tamaki gently touched Kyoya’s shoulder and nodded in agreement, “It might also tell us who murdered Kaoru. Come on, you can’t ignore this.” 

Kyoya knew they were right. Part of him was selfishly content with not knowing the truth hidden within the paper, able to live in ignorant bliss, but another part of him - a stronger part - demanded justice. The truth would be painful and although he wasn’t sure if he could handle anymore blows he needed to be strong. 

This was no longer just about Haruhi, as much as he hated to admit it. Now it involved them all. Their lives were now in question.

Kyoya slowly unfolded the paper and took out his cellphone to use as a light. The writing inside wasn’t necessarily writing but newspaper clippings glued together; a typical criminal touch. Unfortunately it did mask their identity well. Without handwriting to data-match they were once again at the mercy of their inscriptions. 

Thank you for your honorable sacrifice. Your death has commenced Japan’s purification. Those who cannot be sacrificed must serve a different purpose, one to profit Japan. Thankfully you didn’t suffer such fate. Sleep well and know you have been spared.

Kyoya read the message twice over before he succumbed to his anger, crushing the paper in his fist. Tamaki read over his shoulder but remained silent, wracking his mind to make sense of the printed nonsense. 

Kyoya darkly chuckled, “They said Kaoru was spared. His death was more in mercy than what they had in store for him.” He lightly shook his head as the corners of his lips perked up, unable to believe the evil he had just read. 

Mitsukuni tightened his fist as his eyes shadowed over, “His death was considered a mercy...?”

Kyoya nodded as his dark smile turned into a deep frown, “Those bastards.” He crumbled up the paper and viciously threw it down at his feet. “Those bastards!” 

Tamaki had to wrap his arms around Kyoya’s body to keep him still. Kyoya fought against him, demanding to be let go, but after a violent moment he finally settled down and allowed his friend to hold him. Salty tears streaked their flushed cheeks. They knew the paper wouldn’t be easy to read but they weren’t expecting this. 

After a long moment of sniffling silence Takashi finally spoke, “If they considered Kaoru’s death as mercy then what do they have planned for Haruhi?”

Kyoya’s eyes widened in horror at his friend’s words. If killing Kaoru was considered kind in comparison to what they’ve planned for others, what did that mean for Haruhi? Kyoya prayed for Haruhi to be spared their deadly motives but he never thought to question why they were keeping her alive.

He didn’t want to think of the sinister possibilities, not right now. His mental health couldn’t handle it. He was nearing his wit’s end as it was. He needed to calm down before he could revisit this train of thought. 

Takashi looked in the rear view mirror suspiciously, narrowing his eyes at something behind them. Mitsukuni noticed the change in his cousin’s demeanor and asked, “What’s wrong Takashi?” 

Takashi nodded towards something behind them, “Since we’ve entered downtown Tokyo two cars seem to be following us.” 

Tamaki was about to look behind him when Mitsukuni scolded, “Don’t look back. Don’t let them know we noticed them.”

Tamaki nodded and turned to face forward. 

Kyoya gritted his teeth and rubbed his throbbing right temple, “Are you sure they’re following us?”

Takashi nodded, “I took an unnecessary route back to your mansion and even drove through an alleyway. They’re following us.”

He cautiously watched the road ahead while checking the rear view mirror. He purposely twisted throughout downtown Tokyo to see if they’d follow and sure enough, they did. He had to keep a straight route now or else they’d figure out he was testing him. 

He checked the mirror again and saw one of the cars were picking up speed, quickly catching up to them. Takashi took a deep breath and remained calm, trying not to show any signs of alarm. If they continued to appear unaware it would benefit them until the last critical moment. 

The first car pulled up beside them in the other lane and kept pace with them. Kyoya curiously watched them through his window. There was no doubt whoever drove the other car was with the kidnappers but why they were driving alongside them didn’t make sense. 

The car’s back window slowly rolled down and Kyoya watched in horror as something metallic pointed at him.

“They’re going to shoot!”

CHOOSE NOW! (Click to Vote)

I’m sorry this update is so late. I caught up on a lot of sleep today and slept most of the day. 

Next update should be around 11:00am (ETS). Poll will end on hour prior.

#ouran high school host club #ohshc #choose your own adventure #find me #haruhi fujioka #Kyoya Ootori #tamaki suoh #hikaru hitachiin #kaoru hitachiin #mitsukuni haninozuka #takashi morinozuka #poll #vote

[funkymbtifiction]

9 fixes

I don’t know how I ever thought I was 1 fixed. The more I think about having a 9 fix, the more obvious it is to me that has always been one of my ‘coping’ strategies –numb myself to everything, ignore my anger and deny its existence to others (poll my friends, ask if they have ever sent me an angry e-mail, and how I responded; they will say with a vacant detachment and a ‘I’m not mad…’ assurance). Even people on various forums I hung around in said I was almost “immune” to the drama and would actively refuse to participate in it. I would ignore it completely, not respond to direct accusations, use passive-aggressive gifs to communicate my annoyance with them all, or leave the thread.

The other day, an acquaintance hit me with something via text that made me mad (because it put me on the emotional spot) and all I did was calmly text her back and ask her a rational question. I kept a polite, friendly tone in the conversation, even though I was beyond pissed at her behavior.

It also explains, even more than a 7 wing, how I am totally “fine” with having no answers. I have never known a 1-fixed 6 alive who can argue both sides, reach a conclusion of “Huh, there is no strong / moral / right answer here… oh well” and not go home frustrated. But I am fine with ambiguity in things, I have this passive “eh, it’ll be fine” 9ish sense of “well, whatever happens… happens” (I rarely try and control what happens, since I know that is futile), and even though I have Frequent Strong Opinions, I never really try and impose them on other people as an adult (as a kid, sure). I have major nitpicks with certain attitudes in every single tag I have been in here on tumblr, but have never said a word or told random strangers “off” en masse, however tempted I have been. (I have, however, blocked tons of random people around here because I get sick of seeing them harassing OTHERS in the tag. I see a hate post shaming other people for their opinions or ships? BLOCKED.)

It’s kind of funny, though. I had to recognize 9 fixes in others before I could see my own. They also had mistyped as 1 fixers, but I would routinely point out their passivity in imposing their views, their general attitude of tolerance even if they disagreed with something, their sense of calm indifference, their unwillingness to openly confront people despite their core, etc. And then, reading more about 9s and seeing 9s in action, I started recognizing some of those traits in myself.

I tell you this, perhaps to help someone else recognize their own 9-fix but also to encourage you in realizing the Enneagram is a process. It is about the end result, not how fast you get there. It can take as long as it needs to, and you have to give it enough time to start opening that window into yourself. You cannot become self-aware overnight, but once you find enough self-awareness to figure out your core, and you start seeing your own coping mechanisms… the other ones start standing out to you. The door into Self opens a little at a time.

You have to see traits in others and then notice that sometimes, the things that irk or draw you in the most, are things you both share. Hypocritically, a 9 fixer might get annoyed if someone does not stand up for themselves, but may refuse to stand up for their own self, and not realize their judgment against that other person is actually anger at their own repression. Or a 6 fixer might find someone else’s anxieties or “waffling” in indecision lame, because deep down, they also waffle and are scared. We often point out and attack what we most hate in our own self or what most scares us, and deep down, that’s what E-types are about.

The Enneagram isn’t a fun number to stick in your profile; it’s a door into your unconscious mind and once you enter it, you will get to truly, deeply know yourself on a level in which you have no excuses anymore. You know why you’re doing what you are doing, in the moment you are doing it. For some, that will be a tremendous relief and for others, a terrifying experience. Because once you no longer have excuses, you have no choice but to start working on your issues and being brutally honest with yourself and your loved ones. In fact, how you start to GROW through your number is having friends / loved ones who KNOW about your number’s tricks and can actively call you out when you use them. (Hey 9, I see you stomping around upstairs and taking forever to get dressed, even though you know I am waiting for you -- what are you mad at me about? Hey 7, I see you are already looking for a way out of this relationship; that’s your coping mechanism, so shall we talk about this? Hey 6, I sense your anxiety escalating about change, shall we discuss all the positive changes you have been through in the past? Etc).

You have to work at it, you have to shut out outside things and look inward, and you have to above all, GIVE IT TIME and DO IT YOURSELF. I cannot tell you who you are. Your friends cannot tell you who you are. Who you are, you will learn for yourself, once you have shed all your pride and are willing to see your naked inner self. Once you are willing to be whatever number you happen to be, even if you “do not like it.” Even if you think it’s lame. Even if it hurts. Even if it makes you feel ashamed. There was no way in hell I wanted to be a 9 fixer. My ego would not allow it. But it’s who I am and have always been. My ego about my gut fix had to die before I could figure out what it was and admit it to myself.

I still have ego issues to work through in being sure of my heart fix, but that too will come in time. I’ve cracked open two doors now. It’s only a matter of time.

There is something nice about it, though. With self-understanding comes the desire and ability to change. To understand what frustrates you and why, and to see what lies on the other side of self-development. And that’s beautiful.

- ENFP Mod

#question #enneagram #enneagram 9

[currantlee]

German Postillon articles about the US Election translated

@theeeveetamer sent me this post in which someone translated German Postillon headlines about the US Election. Der Postillon is a German satire website disguised as a newspaper, kind of the German equivalent to The Onion.

So, I translated one of the articles for her and it was really, really fun. So I thought I might do more and share it on my blog so hopefully more people can have a laugh!

But first of all...

Gotta keep the American Spirit on this blog everyone!

Before I continue though: Please keep in mind that the Postillon is a satire website! None of the news in this post are actually true, it’s just meant to have a good laugh. I am repeating this again: none of these are actually real! I also want to make clear that none of those were written by me, I merely translated them! Credit to all the original texts and pictures goes to the Postillon. Except for the American flag. Credit to flickr for that one.

Anyways, let’s go and hopefully have some laughs.

Experts are certain that Donald Trump is going to win the Election because 2020 has been a shitty year so far anyways

Washington D.C. – Joe Biden hopes to put an end to Trump’s presidency after four years: he is clearly ahead in the polls on this Election Day. Despite that, most experts are sure that Trump will win – because so far, 2020 has been a shitty year anyways!

“If you look at the average of the national polls, Joe Biden is currently more than 8% ahead of Trump,” politic scientist Marianne Waters from the renowned Princeton University explains. “This means that his lead is way greater than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Under normal circumstances, you’d say that he’s already won the Election.”

She pauses for a second. “But now, please think about what a fucked up mess of a year 2020 has been so far! And then, think again about whether or not the American people are that fucked up in their brains to elect this human catastrophic failure for four more years! We’re talking about a year in which a global pandemic is going rampant across the planet anyways, we’re seeing islamistic and nazi terror attacks at the daily and entire havens are exploding ‘completely by accident’! Is there anybody who seriously believes in a sensible result of this election?!”

At least, scientists aren’t fully ruling out the possibility of Biden winning the Election. However, because this is 2020, the chance of an asteroid hitting the earth five minutes after this has happened is nothing but small.

– Der Postillon, 3rd of November 2020 (Original title: Experten sicher, dass Trump gewinnen wird, weil 2020 eh schon ein Scheißjahr ist). Translated by Seaberry Siren

“Oh Shit!”  – Putin completely forgot to manipulate the US Election

Moskow – How can one be so scatterbrained! Wladimir Putin just realized to his very own horror that he completely forgot to manipulate the US Election. Now, his candidate Donald Trump is in trouble.

“Bljad! {T/N: Russian for “crap”} I knew I forgot something really important!”, Putin says. “But due to all the inner politics, the corona virus and all the other countries our hackers need to manipulate elections in, I totally forgot about the United States! This is just great!”

He turns to his assistant. “Dima! USA! Can we turn something around there? ... No? ... Really?! And if we deliver arms to the... How are those guys called again... Proud Boys? WHAT?! They already have enough of those?!? Oh well.”

However, in the end, Putin puts up with the situation after all: “Ah, we’ll see. Maybe everything will turn out fine one way or another.” He turns to his assistant again: “Dima, make an appointment with Donald Trump jr. as soon as possible! I heard he is is just as dumb as his father and has political ambitions as well. We’ll survive Biden until 2024.”

– Der Postillon, 4th of November 2020 (Original title: “Ach Kacke!” – Putin hat völlig vergessen, US-Wahlen zu manipulieren). Translated by Seaberry Siren with help from Theeeveetamer

Employees of the Oval Office try to stop Trump from tweeting “CIVIL WAR!!!! Kill all Democrats!”

Washington D.C. – While votes are still being counted all over the USA, dramatic scenes start to unfold in the White House. Currently multiple employees are trying to prevent President Donald Trump from grabbing his smartphone in order to tweet the words “CIVIL WAR!!!! Kill all Democrats!”.

“No Mr. President!”, an assistant shouts as she holds Trump’s arm. “Don’t do this! I have a family! I don’t want a civil war! Jack, restrain him, damnit! Anna, don’t stand there and stare so stupidly, help us! Ian, put his smartphone as far away as you can!”

In the meantime, countless citizens of the USA are wondering why Trump didn’t tweet anything for more than seven hours.

“Leave me alone!”, Trump cries as he desperately tries to reach his smartphone. “They want to steal my election by letting every vote count! Even those of the Democrats! I WANT TO SEE BLOOD!!!”

Meanwhile, outside of the White House, more and more people are speculating that Trump could accept a possible loss due to his silence on Twitter.

– Der Postillon, 4th of November 2020 (Original title: Mitarbeiter versuchen Trump davon abzuhalten, "CIVIL WAR!!!! Kill all Democrats!" zu twittern). Translated by Seaberry Siren

Not that as well! Half-Blind 100-year-old man who counts all the votes by his own dies of old age

Harrisburg – Oh no! Everything is going to take even longer now! James Reed, the 100-year-old man tasked with counting all the votes of the US Election surprisingly just died.

“Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to task one man of his age with the counting of millions of votes,” the chief of the Electoral Office stated. “Unfortunately, he was the only one with a license for this important job.”

After the closing of the polling stations, Reed, who was responsible for counting the votes since the 1970s, traveled from state to state in order to count all the votes.

“He took his job very seriously. He’d often take 20 minutes in order to count a single vote,” an election assistant recalls as tears of gried run over her cheeks. “But just after he counted 92% of the votes at Michigan, he suddenly fell from his chair.”

The doctor who was called immediately could only confirm the death of the 100-year-old man.

The worst part is that Reed didn’t get to name a successor before his passing. This is why the authorities are desperately searching for a new person able to lift sheets of paper, read printed letters, ánd count one by one at the same time. Due to the American education system, this is going to be a challenge {T/N: Germans throwing a bit of shade here when their own education system isn’t something to be proud on either}.

– Der Postillon, 4th of November 2020 (Original title: Auch das noch! Halbblinder 100-Jähriger, der allein alle US-Stimmen auszählt, an Altersschwäche gestorben). Translated by Seaberry Siren

US Election: Trump lies way out in front

Washington D.C. – A good chunk of the votes of the US Election have been counted by now and there seems to be a trend: Donald Trump clearly lies way out in front! As expected, the President of the United States is taking the lead in the traditionally Republican states. But even in the Swing States, he already sees himself as the winner, even if it’s only with very little sanity.

“Trump clearly lies way out in front,” the politics expert Dean Jefferson affirms. “As in: he stands in front of an audience and lies their heads off!”

Many didn’t expect that Trump could lie way out in front this comfortably at this point of the cote count. Other less optimistic individuals had predicted a neck-and-airhead race {T/N: in German that’s Kopf-an-Hohlkopf-Rennen, literally head-on-airhead race} from the beginning.

– Der Postillon, 5th of November 2020 (Original title: US-Wahl: Trump lügt vorne). Translated by Seaberry Siren

Damned mess of a US Election STILL isn’t over!

Washington D.C. – FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE!!! At some point, enough is enough, isn’t it? The damned mess of a US Election STILL isn’t over after three days of counting the votes because the people in some Federal States apparently can’t manage to count the ballots!

Seriously: can they even count at all? Didn’t they know that the voters like to turn their ballots in with a vote on them and that you have to count these votes in order to determine a winner?!?

An average election of the Federal Congress {T/N: they mean the German Federal Congress, also known as the Bundestag} is finished, predicted and decided one second after closing the polling stations {T/N: Yes, German elections are that boring}. An official end result is provided in the next morning at the latest! How in the world can the Americans be trundle as fuck like this?!?

Suggestion: we ignore the entire shitshow over there for the next few weeks until those idiots have punched their faces in and once the victor is clear, there is one short headline: “Winner of the US Election: [insert winner’s name here]”. Then this whole crap would... WHAT?? Biden takes the lead at Georgia by 900 votes? Wowowowow! Just a moment please, I’ll have a look at the livetracker. Did CNN already comment on this? Nate Silver already tweeted as well... This has to be it for Biden! Now it can’t take much longer!

OH MY GOD, HOW EXITING!!!

– Der Postillon, 6th of November 2020 (Original title: Verdammte Drecks-US-Wahl immer noch nicht zu Ende!). Translated by Seaberry Siren

“If I can’t have it, then nobody will!” – Trump sets the White House on fire

Washington D.C. – A victory of Joe Biden in the US election is becoming more and more likely. But the answer to the question whether the Democrat is really going to move into the White House could be decided by a completely different factor than the votes – because apparently, Donald Trump is trying to burn the White House down now.

“If I can't have it, then nobody will!”, the US President says as he spreads gasoline at strategic points while he starts laughing manically: “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”

Shortly after, the Oval Office is up in flames. “Let’s see how Sleepy Joe will rule from a burned-down ruin!”, Trump exclaims with a shrill voice as he adds more fuel to the fire. “AHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Burn, my little fire, burn!”

Directly before publishing this article, Trump realized that this wasn’t the best idea as he cut off his own escape route with the last bits of the fuel. “Oh! So this wasn’t very clever... IVANKAAAAAAA!! The Democrats set me on fire! Rescue the best president of all time!!!”

– Der Postillon, 6th of November 2020 (Original title: “Wenn ich es nicht haben kann, soll es keiner haben! – Trump setzt Weißes Haus in Brand). Translated by Seaberry Siren

"Enough!” – The Queen reclaims the United States for the British Empire

London – She’s got enough of this nonsense! Queen Elizabeth II. announced the return of the United States to the British Empire. A new, freshly assigned gouverneur will arrive in Washington shortly and take over the government business.

“We have been watching this unworthy ham without doing anything for far too long,” the Queen declared in a fiery speech. “It is time to return the colony where it belongs: into the lap of the United Kingdom. The experiment is hereby ended.”

Shortly after, the British Navy occupied important havens at the East Coast. On friday afternoon, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and Miami had already been seized.

Apparently months of the global pandemic, national economic instability and a tiring election campaign did the trick: a wide range of the US population greeted the British soldiers euphorically and vowed to be loyal to the British Crown. “Long live the Queen!”-chants echoed through the streets.

Washington D.C. is still in the hands of the rebels lead by Donald Trump. However, observers believe that the British troops will seize the capital next week. According to the Queen’s orders, Trump will be put into chains and brought to Great Britain by ship in order to spend the rest of his days in the Tower of London by water and bread.

– Der Postillon, 6th of November 2020 (Original title: “Jetzt reicht’s!” – Queen unterstellt USA wieder der Britischen Krone). Translated by Seaberry Siren

#Politics #Satire #Translation #US Election 2020 #USA #Donald Trump #Joe Biden #Wladimir Putin #Queen Elizabeth II. #German #German Humor #Humor #SeaSi translates

[arcticdementor]

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.

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In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, “Send in the troops.”

I’m no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore’s documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it’s not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet’s ouster.

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As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.

Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.

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The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.

It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.

The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told audiences Hillary Clinton’s small crowds were a “wholly intentional” campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary’s troubled campaign, on the grounds that doing otherwise might “help Trump” (or, worse, be perceived that way).

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All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.

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Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I’m tired and racist.

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Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd’s Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for “forgiveness… for years and years of racism” are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in “African kente cloth scarves”?

There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.

On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: “What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” When Bender, who is white, answered, “I know that comes from a place of privilege,” questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one’s home, or that one shouldn’t ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.

The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.

It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, “why the presumption of innocence is so important,” she said). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh’s appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.

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The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.

For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).

Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?

#matt taibbi #journalism in action #new progressive orthodoxy #unofficial official religion #great awokening #purging the heretics and unbelievers #freeze peach is not just an ice cream flavor