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mariacallous · 2 months

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On Saturday, Slovak voters will go to the polls in the first round of the country’s presidential election.

The event has understandably attracted little attention in the United States. Slovakia’s population is somewhere between 5 and 6 million, roughly that of Minnesota. Given Gaza, Ukraine, and rising tensions with China, a small central European country is far from the most pressing US foreign policy concern. And 2024 is a crowded year for elections: at least 64 countries, plus the European Union, are headed to the polls this year, including the United States.

But America’s own upcoming presidential election is the reason we should pay attention to Slovakia’s—and the domestic political context in which it is taking place. The Slovak presidency is largely ceremonial. But over the last year, the country’s president, Zuzana Čaputová, has helped block certain moves made by its prime minister, Robert Fico, who was returned to power in 2023 five years after resigning in disgrace. She’s refused, for example, to allow a climate change denier to be environment minister and helped stop certain changes to the criminal code reform by sending it to the country’s constitutional court. But she is not running again. Slovakia will soon have a new president, one who may be friendlier to Fico. To look at Slovak politics today is to see what happens when an emboldened aspiring autocrat returns to power, pushes out pro-Russian rhetoric, tries to win immunity for himself, and attacks the media, so that those who report on, say, corruption are seen as enemies of the people.

This could, of course, impact American foreign policy: if America’s European allies are not in lockstep on Ukraine, what does that mean for support for Ukraine in its war against Russia? But it is Slovakia’s domestic politics, inextricable from its foreign policy, where, an ocean away, Americans can find parallels to our own.

“As in many other western societies, we are deeply divided,” Miroslav Wlachovský, the country’s former minister for foreign affairs, told me over Zoom.

Slovakia has long been split between those who are more liberally minded and those with a more populist bent, a division that has become especially salient over the last decade.

In 2018, Robert Fico was forced to resign following months of anti-corruption protests — and weeks after the murder of 27-year-old investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová. He was out after six consecutive years in power, replaced by Peter Pellegrini, who was widely seen as more moderate than Fico.

In 2019, Čaputová, a progressive, pro-European environmental activist, was elected president, promising to use the position to fight corruption. In 2020, her victory was followed by a new government in parliament. They, too, spoke of anti-corruption and the rule of law.

What’s more, it looked, for a moment, like people would be held accountable. Martin Kočner, the financier and real estate tycoon who was believed to have orchestrated Kuciak’s killing, was charged with ordering the murder. (Kočner was also suspected of having ties to Fico). Fico and his close political ally and former interior minister Robert Kaliňák, in 2022, were accused of creating an organized criminal group which allegedly used classified tax information to attack political rivals. But parliament did not approve a motion to lift Fico’s immunity from prosecution while he was being investigated, as had been requested by the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Had Fico remained out of power, it is possible that other attempts to prosecute him for criminal offenses would have moved forward.

Then, last June, Čaputová —arguably the most trusted politician in the country—announced she would not seek reelection for the presidency: It was broadly understood that she did not want to spend five more years fighting with the likes of Fico, whom she sued after he called her an “American agent,” and receiving death threats from the prime minister’s supporters. Kočner had been acquitted a month earlier, though a woman believed to be his accomplice was found guilty of Kuciak’s murder. In December 2022, the government fell apart, accused of incompetence and inability to offer, and early elections were held in September of last year.

It seemed, for a moment, that the big winner might be Pellegrini, who had broken off to form his own party. Fico, however, was not new to any of this. He had been prime minister from 2006 to 2010, and again from 2012 to 2018. He knew how to play the great game of Slovak politics.

Fico is “a very skillful politician when it comes to tools he uses in politics,” said Wlachovský. “He’s also a very cynical politician when it comes to the tools he can use.” Pellegrini was caught between trying to appear moderate and trying to placate the populist, extremist portion of the population. Fico had no such qualms. He smeared his opponents as Soros stooges. He attacked the media. “He tried to paint his opponents as pro-war,” Wlachovský said of Fico, who took a decidedly pro-Russian approach in the campaign. In October, he became the country’s new prime minister.

Fico’s newest stint as prime minister has been particularly notable for three reasons, all of which may sound familiar to American readers: his pro-Russian rhetoric; his attacks on the media; and his moves against systems that could hold him or his allies accountable.

Fico has harshly criticized the West’s strategy on Ukraine, stressing that it is Moscow that needs security guarantees and has halted Slovak military assistance to Ukraine. He has accused Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala’s government of having “an interest in supporting the war” and his foreign minister, Juraj Blanár, recently met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

All of this is primarily for domestic purposes, said Wlachovský. Only 40 percent of Slovaks believe Russia is primarily responsible for the war: Fico is playing to his base. But domestic politics have foreign policy consequences, and Fico’s policies are causing strain in relations with Slovakia’s close neighbor, the Czech Republic. “I think it’s bad for the country,” said Wlachovský. “Instead of getting more support, we’re losing allies and friends or at least they become reluctant to meet with Slovak officials.”

So far, Fico’s pro-Russian bark has been more pronounced than his bite, which is to say that, thus far, the shift in policy has been largely rhetorical. Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative reporter, dubbed him, “pro-Russian in the streets and pro-Western in the meet(ing)s.” But that something begins with words doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously, said Zselyke Csaky, a fellow at European Democracy hub.

“So far it’s mostly at the level of rhetoric,” she said. But if one looks at Hungary, Viktor Orban’s “example again shows first you can start with the rhetoric. Then you may proceed to the level of actually blocking steps in the EU.”

Csaky conceded that some of what Fico was doing was “demand driven” — there has always been a portion of the Slovak population that has been more friendly toward Russia. But it’s also supply driven, she said. He is shaping public opinion and then using rhetoric justified by that opinion. And one way he is doing this is his use of media.

Fico has attacked the press for years. In 2016, he called reporters, “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes.” But in recent years—years that, to be clear, follow an unprecedented and tragic murder of a Slovak journalist—he has accelerated and intensified his assaults on the media.

“I think it’s much worse than it was in the past,” said Lukáš Diko, editor-in-chief at the Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak (ICJK). Fico and his party, Smer, have long attacked journalists, treating them almost like an opposition party. “But now it’s much more powerful,” Diko explained, “because of his influence on the social networks. What we can say, and we investigated some of the cases of attacks against journalists: When Smer or Fico or some other politician attacked a journalist, it incited hate from ordinary people.”

These are the same journalists who investigate the politicians, who uncover their alleged corruption—and who the prime minister of the country tells people not to trust. “It worked well for them,” Diko said. “People started to trust disinformation and don’t trust so much us or other normal media.”

Fico’s government is also planning a “revamp” of state broadcaster RTVS. This new RTVS would be directly under state control.

I asked Diko about independent journalism’s ability to hold the Slovakian government accountable.

“It’s a bit similar to the situation before the murder,” he told me. “At the time, investigative journalists published a lot of stories of corruption, tax evasion, other crimes that were almost never investigated” by authorities. Journalists can only inform the public. They can only tell the truth. But they cannot decide what those in power or the public at large will do with that information.

Fico’s most notable changes since returning to office, however, have been to protect himself. Old allies are back in power. Kalinak is minister of defense. Fico had considered installing Tibor Gašpar, the former head of the police who was accused of having been involved in organized crime and of illegally ordering a database search on Kuciak prior to his murder, as head of Slovak intelligence. And Fico has dismantled the Special Prosecutor’s Office—the office that had, when he was out of power, asked parliament to lift Fico’s immunity, and that indicted a Fico ally shortly before being shut down.

Still, his efforts have not been without some resistance. People have taken to the streets to protest his Russia policy; his plans to overhaul public broadcasting; and his criminal code reform. Part of that reform was ultimately blocked: Čaputová and the opposition managed to refer it to the country’s constitutional court for review. The European Union, meanwhile, is already issuing warnings to Slovakia. “It would be a mistake to push Slovakia in that basket of countries that are right on the way to authoritarianism and dictatorship without any fight,” said Wlachovský.

On the other hand, protests eventually end. Fico allies have already talked about new legislation that could preempt unfavorable rulings, while Fico himself has suggested the top judge should be ousted. And while Caputova has been something of a check, the leading candidate in the presidential race is Pellegrini—though polls suggest he is in a tight race with the more liberally minded Ivan Korcok. Were he to win, Fico would likely be still more emboldened to plow ahead.

Fico, meanwhile, is working more quickly, and more aggressively, than he did when last in power.

“Fico has learned his lesson,” said Diko. The last time he was in power, his government was more cautious. “They could have done it like Orban, but they didn’t.”

And now? “Now they do things against EU values and common sense very fast and I think it’s because they have this experience of the past.”

They learned that when power comes, it’s to be used, and used to protect oneself from the consequences of using that power. Regardless of which presidential candidate comes out ahead after the first round in Slovakia on Saturday, that’s a lesson Americans—whose former president, Donald Trump, has vowed revenge on political enemies and is reportedly looking into how to dismantle the civil service—would do well to learn, too.

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overanalyst556 · 1 year

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Official Intro.

The Cold War as we know lasted a long time from 1945 to 1991. A time when the world was split between the yoke of East and West. No Matter where you came from, You were living in two different worlds, one of freedom and one of oppression.

After the end of WW2, With the Nazis and Imperial Japan defeated, The only two powers that were in the strongest position to be superpowers were The United States of America

And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Soviet Union.

These two now knew that once the war was over, the guns would now be pointed at each other. The Cold War had begun.

For the duration of the 40s and 1950s decades just like our own timeline, The American and Soviets never fought one another, instead deciding to spread their influence on the global stage through proxy wars, Like Korea or the wars between Israeli and the Arab states.

All the while attempting to solidify their control over the spheres of influence. Thus they began the arms race with both sides developing atomic weapons. The Americans had a head start due to the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively.

For a bit, they were the sole nuclear power in the world. However, things changed in 1949 when the Soviets detonated their first Atomic bomb, The Rs. Now the balance had turned.

Mutually assured Destruction (MAD for short) became adopted by both sides as neither wanted to fight the other without getting destroyed. Yet this didn't stop the two from increasing the number of bombs and Military equipment.

The Americans, Under the administration of President Dwight D Eisenhower and Brainstormed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, adopted a massive retaliation strategy, which was to threaten severe retaliation on the Soviets, Including Nuclear weapons.

The Soviets, under the new leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, Who came to power after Stalin died, Tried to build up the nuclear forces while also pursuing Detente.

The invention of ICBMs in the late 50s as well as the production of strategic bombers like the B52 Stratofortress and the Tupolev Tu 95 And Tu 16 respectfully, Combined with repeated nuclear tests, Only escalated the tension further.

Now It's the 1960s, and the Cold War was at its hottest. The new US President, John F Kennedy is reeling back from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

The Landing, which was supposed to complete the objective of overthrowing Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Had failed miserably with all members of Brigade 2506 ( The Brigade made up of Cuban exiles) imprisoned or killed. It was a humiliation for The Kennedy administration.

The Us had once tried to place missiles in Turkey as a one-up over the Soviets in 1959, However, Turkey refused to authorize the installation of Jupiter missiles in their homeland, fearing retaliation by the Soviet Government.

Plus, The missiles would have been Obsolete by the time they were installed. They would have been useless in the event of a war. So after a lot of meetings and discussions, The US eventually decided to not put the missiles in Turkey.

Meanwhile, In Cuba, Castro slowly started to get paranoid. The Cia had first tried to assassinate him, and now they had tried to do a covert ops mission involving Cuban exiles to bring him down. For Castro, his position was in jeopardy. The Americans were proving to be the aggressor as he had believed. Thus the only way to preserve Cuban sovereignty was to have Soviet troops protecting him.

So in late 1961, He asked the Soviets to give him more Sa 2 Anti-air missiles, which generally looked like this.

The Politburo ( The Soviet equivalent to the Us Congress, although different from Congress) was At first hesitant to give the missiles to Castro and Cuba. But they knew that If they did not comply, they would risk ruining relations with Cuba and they would probably go to the Chinese Instead.

Also, Cuba was nearly 90 miles from the Us. That would serve as a perfect spot for naval bases, where the Soviets could position a fleet of ships there. they were also mostly obligated to help since Castro had come to them and requested aid. It would look bad on them if they were to abandon a fellow socialist brother country.

The Discussion between the members of the Polltiburo lasted almost the whole day. It was divided between pro-war members who wanted to send the Aa missiles to challenge the Americans and those who protested against the action, fearing war.

Eventually, a decision was made: the Soviets would send the Sa 2s plus a huge amount of guns, tanks, and aircraft to the island under a defense pact treaty. In return, the Cubans would have to pay them back in sugar exports and cotton. They presented this to the Cubans, who came to accept the deal (though there were those that protested against it)

Thus what would become known as the Cuban- Soviet Mutual Treaty of Defense and Friendship was born and put into effect on December 18th, 1961, with deliveries starting in February of 1962.

Meanwhile, Kennedy was planning another invasion of Cuba, But not with Cuban exiles. This time, It would be American boots on the ground. He began laying the groundwork for Operation Ortsac( Castro spelled backward) All the while unaware that Soviet supply ships were reaching Cuba.

The Clock ticks a second more to Midnight.

#sam talks #alternate history

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newstfionline · 3 months

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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

State Medicaid offices target dead people’s homes to recoup their health care costs (AP) As Salvatore LoGrande fought cancer and all the pain that came with it, his daughters promised to keep him in the white, pitched roof house he worked so hard to buy all those decades ago. So, Sandy LoGrande thought it was a mistake when, a year after her father’s death, Massachusetts billed her $177,000 for her father’s Medicaid expenses and threatened to sue for his home if she didn’t pay up quickly. But the bill and accompanying threat weren’t a mistake. Rather, it was part of a routine process the federal government requires of every state: to recover money from the assets of dead people who, in their final years, relied on Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded health insurance for the poorest Americans. A person’s home is typically exempt from qualifying for Medicaid. But it is subject to the estate recovery process for those who were over 55 and used Medicaid to pay for long-term care such as nursing home stays or in-home health care.

State legislators and the working class (Stateline) A new survey conducted by political science researchers at Duke and Loyola found that only 116 state legislators in the entire United States currently or most recently worked in manual labor, the service industry, clerical jobs or labor union jobs, out of around 7,400 state legislators in the entire country. That’s 1.6 percent of state legislators, compared to 50 percent of the entire working population of the country. Indeed, 10 states lack a single legislator from a working class job. Alaska has the highest percentage, with three out of 60 lawmakers, while New Hampshire has the highest total, with eight of their 420 legislators.

Trump fails to obtain bond (NYT) Donald Trump’s lawyers said he has been unable to obtain a bond to guarantee payment of a $454 million civil-fraud judgment against him. The former president tried to negotiate a deal with some of the world’s largest suretors, but the amount was so large that they wouldn’t accept real estate as collateral and would require cash to guarantee the bond, according to a New York appeals court filing. A private company like the Trump Organization would need $1 billion in cash to obtain the bond and continue operating, an amount the company doesn’t have. Trump has asked to have the bond requirement waived while he appeals, arguing that paying now would cause him irreparable harm. If the court turns down his request and he can’t get the money, the state will look to seize his assets. The judgment stems from a ruling that found Trump falsely valued parts of his real estate empire for financial gain. The judge imposed $355 million in penalties, plus interest, so the debt grows by at least $87,500 daily.

Chinese organized crime in the U.S. (ProPublica) From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity. Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview. Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials.

Protest erupts in eastern Cuba amid blackouts, food shortages (Reuters) Hundreds in Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago, engaged in a rare public protest on Sunday, according to social media and official reports, prompting Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel to call for dialogue in an “atmosphere of tranquility and peace.” Protesters in Santiago took to the streets with chants of “power and food,” according to videos posted on social media, as blackouts in places extended for 18 hours or more a day, jeopardizing frozen food and ratcheting up tensions on the island. Cuba has fallen into a near unprecedented economic crisis since the COVID-19 pandemic, with vast shortages of food, fuel and medicine stoking a record-breaking exodus that has seen upwards of 400,000 people migrate to the United States.

Haiti’s Hospitals Survived Cholera and Covid. Gangs Are Closing Them. (NYT) Taïna Cenatus, a 29-year-old culinary student in Haiti, lost her balance at school one day this month and toppled over, but it was not until she hit the ground that she realized she had been hit in the face by a stray bullet. Unlike many Haitians wounded by gunfire in the middle of a vicious gang takeover of the capital, Port-au-Prince, Ms. Cenatus was actually lucky that day—she made it to a clinic. But she is still in pain, her wound swelling, and she cannot get any relief, with more and more hospitals and clinics abandoned by staff or looted by gangs. More than half of the medical facilities in Port-au-Prince and a large rural region called Artibonite are closed or not operating at full capacity, experts said, because they are too dangerous to reach or their medicine and other supplies have been stolen.

With New Six-Year Term, Putin Cements Hold on Russian Leadership (NYT/BBC) President Vladimir V. Putin on Sunday extended his rule over Russia until 2030, using a heavily stage-managed presidential election with no real competition to portray overwhelming public support for his domestic dominance and his invasion of Ukraine. Some Russians tried to turn the undemocratic vote into a protest, forming long lines at polling stations at a predetermined time—noon—to register their discontent. At the same time, Ukraine sought to cast its own vote of sorts by firing a volley of exploding drones at Moscow and other targets. But the Kremlin brushed those challenges aside and released results after the polls closed claiming that Mr. Putin had won 87 percent of the vote—an even higher number than in the four previous elections he participated in. He described Donbas and other parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces as part of a “New Russia” during a speech in Red Square, after he claimed a landslide election win.

U.S. anticipates grim course for Ukraine if aid bill dies in Congress (Washington Post) U.S. officials foresee a range of bleak scenarios in Ukraine if the military aid President Biden has requested doesn’t materialize, including a catastrophic breakdown of Ukrainian lines in the grimmest contingency and the likelihood of massive casualties in the best. Hoping to maintain the public focus on Congress, administration officials have refused to openly address any alternate realities for Ukraine. But in private, they are fast coming to terms with the prospect that Washington’s political dysfunction may prevail, either by tanking the aid package or passing it too late to avoid disaster for the government in Kyiv.

Shock and confusion as Turkey seizes earthquake survivors’ homes (Reuters) Habip Yapar felt lucky that his home in southern Turkey withstood last year’s devastating earthquake. Then a text message appeared on his phone in October telling him the government was taking ownership of the apartment. The message sent to Yapar, 61, declared that the deeds for his property in Hatay province were being transferred to the Treasury under an amendment to an urban planning law set to affect thousands of earthquake survivors. The government said the seizures were to create “reserve building areas,” a temporary measure to expedite reconstruction. Those affected would be entitled to a property after paying towards the construction costs, it said, without providing details of the financial burden. Interviews with nearly two dozen residents, lawyers and local officials show that thousands of homeowners were blindsided by the seizure plans, with many learning on social media their properties would be affected.

‘We’re Not a Banana Republic,’ Netanyahu Says, Rejecting Criticism From U.S. (NYT) The rift over the war in Gaza between Israel and the United States, its closest ally, broadened on Sunday when Israel’s prime minister accused a top-ranking American lawmaker of treating his country like a “banana republic.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing increasing pressure to negotiate a cease-fire, lashed out at Senator Chuck Schumer over his call for elections to be held in Israel when the war winds down. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Mr. Schumer, the Senate majority leader, was trying to topple his government and said his call for an election was “totally inappropriate.” “That’s something that Israel, the Israeli public, does on its own,” he said. “We’re not a banana republic.” On Thursday, Mr. Schumer, a Democrat from New York who is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States, delivered a scathing speech on the Senate floor, accusing Mr. Netanyahu of letting his political survival supersede “the best interests of Israel” and of being “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza.” The speech was indicative of the widening gap between Israel and the United States over the war and mounting frustrations in Washington with Mr. Netanyahu’s policies.

Israel’s Military Raids Al-Shifa Hospital Again (NYT) The Israeli military said it was conducting a “high-precision” operation at Al-Shifa Hospital early on Monday morning, claiming that senior Hamas officials had regrouped in the hospital, which is Gaza’s largest. The hospital and the surrounding area house about 30,000 patients, staff and displaced civilians, and a number of people were killed, the Gaza health ministry said. Al-Shifa Hospital has been a flashpoint of the war. Israel has said that the complex in northern Gaza doubles as a secret Hamas military command center, calling it one of many examples of civilian facilities that Hamas uses to shield its activities. Hamas has denied the accusations. Israel has provided limited evidence to back up its claims about Al-Shifa, and it came under criticism from health and humanitarian organizations after storming the hospital in November.

Already fasting (BBC) When dawn broke last Monday morning, signalling the beginning of Ramadan, it brought a cruel irony for the people of Gaza. The holy month when Muslims fast during daylight had arrived during a looming famine. "The people here have already been fasting for months," said Dr Amjad Eleiwa, the deputy director of the emergency department at al-Shifa hospital, Gaza City. Under his care on Friday, 16-year-old Rafeeq Dughmoush was lying on his side, bedbound. Rafeeq's bones were showing and one of his legs had been amputated from the knee down. A colostomy bag was attached to his torso. "I am emaciated," he said, speaking slowly in order to draw breath between words. "I am so weak I cannot move my body from one side to another. My uncle has to move me." Rafeeq was already suffering from malnutrition, he said, before the strike that wounded him.

#headlines #news

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iphonegreys · 2 years

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Armie hammer screenshots

Armie hammer screenshots full#

Per the biographer, she drove a car with a homing device, used a tapped phone, and submitted to his sexual demands even when they were “extremely humiliating.” When Armand died, she learned that he had left her out of his will. The affair lasted over a decade, with Armand promising to take care of her and her children after he died, she later told Epstein. When Armand’s wife, Frances, grew suspicious, Armand had Martha legally change her name to Hilary Gibson-insisting, according to Epstein, that his mistress wear wigs, glasses, and makeup to change her appearance. Bush later pardoned him.Īrmand had multiple mistresses, including Martha Kaufman-a mother of two who divorced her husband after meeting Armand, and whom he put on Occidental’s payroll as an art consultant. He also made an illegal contribution to the Nixon reelection campaign which, “in all likelihood,” according to The New York Times, “went to help pay for the Watergate cover-up.” Though he faced a felony charge for obstructing justice, a Washington lawyer helped him plead guilty to misdemeanor charges, and H.

Armie hammer screenshots full#

Per Epstein, Armand bugged his office and home, plus his cuff links, to record decades’ worth of conversations, had a fixer, and was known to do business with a briefcase full of cash. He died in 1990.īut in 1996, Epstein’s bombshell biography exposed the late Occidental Petroleum chairman for wide-ranging grifts, including laundering money using artwork to fund Soviet espionage bribing his way into the oil business and knocking off Fabergé eggs. Bush, among other presidents) collected expensive artwork and convinced Chinese leaders to lend two pandas to Los Angeles for the city’s 1984 Olympics. and attended the inaugurations of FDR, Reagan, and George H. He had a private Boeing 727 palled around with Prince Charles and high-powered politicians (he was a close friend of Senator Al Gore Sr. That’s my family.’”Īrmand tried to distance himself from his Soviet connections, reimagining himself as a self-made industrialist-he even hired a journalist to ghostwrite a memoir, The Remarkable Life of Dr. “I started watching Succession and I had to turn it off,” says Armie’s aunt Casey Hammer, “because it was like, ‘Oh, my God. While there, he married a Russian singer named Olga and together they had a son named Julian-Armie’s grandfather.īy the 1950s, Armand had divorced Olga as well as a second wife, Angela, who had told the court that, due to his time in Russia and his medical training, “ causes him no pain to see the sufferings of others.” He moved to Los Angeles, married a wealthy woman named Frances Barrett Tolman in 1956, invested her money in the then failing Occidental Petroleum, and drove the company to incredible success. According to Epstein, Vladimir Lenin sent a message to Joseph Stalin encouraging “particular support” for Armand, telling him, “This is a small path to the American ‘business’ world and this path should be made use of in every way.” Armand moved to the Soviet Union in 1921 for about a decade to fortify family connections. With Julius in prison, his 22-year-old son, Armand Hammer (Armie’s namesake), abandoned a medical career to take over his father’s other business, Allied Drug.

#Armie hammer screenshots

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tormuse · 2 years

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My feelings about the Ukraine invasion...

I feel a need to vent about my feelings about the invasion of Ukraine a bit. Apologies for the ranting sleep-deprived wall of text.

I have a Ukrainian background on my mother's side, and while I've never been to that country, I do feel some ties to it, and for the past week+, I've been obsessively following the situation over there, while cycling through emotions of sadness, fear, and anger...

Sadness, because of the loss and destruction of so many innocent lives... fear, because of the potential for what it could mean for the world stage... and anger... because the only reason any of this is happening is Putin's God damn ego. (Excuse my language)

No one wants this invasion. Almost the whole world is against it. The Russian people are against it. Even the Russian soldiers participating in the invasion are against it. It's only happening, because Putin is an old man with delusions of bringing back the glory days of the Soviet Union, wanting to bring countries that were formerly under Soviet rule "back" into Russia.

He's (reportedly) even deluded himself into thinking that the Ukrainian people would welcome the invasion with open arms, and now that this has been shown to very, very obviously not be the case, he's still not backing out of the conflict, because of this stupid, "manly," macho attitude that withdrawing his forces would be a "sign of weakness" or whatever. He's the world's purest example of toxic masculinity... so toxic, that he'd rather kill thousands of people than admit that he made a mistake.

The fact that he expected the invasion to be welcome just goes to show how little he is aware of the history of Ukraine... how much they suffered under Soviet occupation over the decades, including Stalin's days, and how badly they want their freedom, now that they finally have it. The Ukrainian people know very well what losing this war will mean for them, and so they are willing to fight down to the last man, down to their last breath... and while they are sending an inspiring message to the world about the value of freedom, it's still quite upsetting that this is all happening in the first place.

The most ridiculous part of Putin's invasion plan is that even if he wins and gets everything he wants, he still loses. Like... what's his endgame here? At this point, if he succeeds in killing the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that will make him a martyr and make the Ukrainian people fight harder. If Putin tries to put a pro-Russia leader in Zelenskyy's place, no one in Ukraine will accept it. If his goal is to occupy Ukraine... someone needs to tell him that he does not have a force large enough to hold a country that size, and even if he did, every Russian soldier would have to be constantly looking over their shoulder, because right now, every Ukrainian civilian potentially has a gun and knows how to make molotov cocktails.

Putin simply can not win this conflict in any way he would consider meaningful, and the sooner he realizes that and withdraws his forces, the better it will be for everyone, including himself... but with his track record so far, I don't have high hopes for that, particularly with his public address yesterday, where he told the Russian public that "everything is going according to plan." Once again, his God damn ego is preventing him from admitting error.

At this point, if the invasion continues to go poorly for Putin, it would not surprise me if he just says "screw it," and decides to nuke Ukraine after all. I could totally see him doing that, since it would probably soothe his ego more than a possible withdrawl. The only other resolution I can imagine happening is if the Russian public, motivated by the desperation of the sanctions against Russia, rise up to depose Putin, but I have to imagine it would take a lot to get them to that point, so I don't know how likely that is to occur.

On the plus side, though... there is a glimmer of hope in this that comes from President Zelenskyy, who has turned out to be quite an inspirational figure, rallying his people to his cause, and even uniting the world behind him. As much as he's willing to stay and fight the Russian invaders, he still has the grace to appeal to their humanity, reaching out an olive branch to any Russian soldier willing to lay down their arms, and to call for peace and brotherhood. I can't imagine the strain that Zelenskyy must be under, and his ability to keep a cool head through this crisis is something to aspire to.

With that in mind, I think it's a good time to remind anyone who's read this far to donate to help the Ukrainian people out. Personally, I donated to the Canadian Ukrainian Foundation, since they promise humanitarian aid to families that lost their homes in the invasion. (And also, since I’m Canadian) :) Every little bit helps.

#Ukraine #Putin #Zelenskyy #Post from me

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crstapor · 3 years

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Terror White

“You’re either with us or against us.” - George W. Bush 

On January 6th, 2021, domestic terrorists invaded the Capital Building in an act of political insurrection. Their intent was to overthrow the will of the people by preventing certification of a free and fair democratic election. They did so at the behest of their political leader (who was impeached a second time for inciting this gross transgression of his oath of office), other voices in their party - the so-called GOP - and talking head agitators inhabiting the far-right media echo chamber. Nearly to a man, a woman, a they, each of these terrorists were white.

Images of ‘good old boys’ traipsing down the halls of the people’s house waving confederate battle flags, kicking feet up on the Speaker’s desk, walking off with public property or smearing their shit on the floors pervaded the internet. These images provided by the villains themselves, posted shamelessly to social media profiles.

As a result of this treasonous, insulting, juvenile, despicable, and ultimately futile effort five people died. Even still, hours after the fact, a majority of members of the so-called GOP voted in accordance with the will of these terrorists. They voted to overturn the results of a free and fair election in the world’s oldest modern democracy. They did so because they believed there were serious ‘concerns’ (‘concerns’, let’s be clear, that started with them and like the Ouroboros, ended up with the confusing, if unhygienic, phenomenon of not knowing where their mouths or assholes ended or began) with the 2020 presidential election. After over 60 court cases arguing that point only one was ruled in their favor. None of the 50 States comprising our union found any evidence of wide-spread fraud. Indeed, a federal agency tasked with monitoring election security stated unequivocally that the presidential election of 2020 was one of the most secure in a generation.

And yet? There they were. Spouting conspiracy theories, assaulting police officers (those stalwart stewards of the ‘law & order’ they otherwise claim to love), brandishing spears and bearskins, stealing mail, leaving death threats to the Vice President, fundamentally acting the fool. A bunch of bullies let out of detention with rage and rebellion on their minds.

Let me be clear: each and every one of these terrorists should be hunted down by law enforcement and charged to the fullest extent of the law. They should then be prosecuted and the judges in each and every case should show or allow no mercy. These barbarians must never be allowed to storm the gates again.

Fine.

But that’s not the really interesting question here. The far-right has been producing assholes forever (one of the few things the ‘right’ is truly consistent at). What’s actually interesting is how these insurrectionists arrived at the conclusions they did. Which is to say; how did their ‘thinking’ bring them to this point.

While it might be tempting for some on the left to see that last sentence as a joke, let’s remember we’re sitting at the adult table. These terrorists, being human, sharing our genetic code, are people - real, live, eating, shitting, fucking, anxious, sleeping, scared, afraid, terrified people - just like you and me. As much as it would be easier if we could see them as Uruk-hai instead of our brothers and sisters, sadly? That’s what they are. Family. Part of the Human Condition.

Though humans that are clearly very, very, very sick. My diagnosis? Mind Cancer. Let me explain, under the assumption my readers understand the difference between mind and brain. As such, I am not asserting that the terrorists are physically sick. From their pics and videos it’s clear many are - obesity, hypertension, anal retention - though that isn’t the point. It’s their mental programming, their minds, that have been infected. Infected with what?

Put simply? A disjointed ontological phenomenology obscured, obfuscated, and accelerated by persistently chaotic epistemological aberrations. Said plainly? Their ability to process reality has been impaired.

Why? Racial resentment, poor economic opportunities, an aversion to books and learning? Yes. All that. Plus? The internet, which has created a new Dark Ages.

Paradoxically, one built on light.

Look. Self-interested demagogues intent on self-aggrandizement are nothing new. Nor are their ability to rally or rile a downtrodden populace. Sadly, demonizing the ‘other’ is also pretty par for the course in these scenarios. An old story, all told. What’s new this time is how it happens.

In a single second - count it out! One Mississippi - a beam, or photon of light moves 186,000 miles. Roughly seven times the circumference of the Earth. The new speed of hate. The internet, that modern marvel ushering in Humanity’s first truly post-scarcity resource, is built on light. Philosophers have for millennia wed knowledge with light. And now we all (well, those of us in the post-industrial world) carry a terminal connected to this internet in our pockets. A stunning marvel of human ingenuity. One would imagine that access to such a wellspring of knowledge and information would have a truly edifying affect on the Human Condition. Perhaps, in aggregate, or retrospect, it will. At the moment?

Yeah ...

At the moment it seems that the more access to information humans have the more they double down on tribal identities, wish fulfillment, instant gratification (read: porn), perceived slights, fantasy lands, Rick Astley videos, or the jibbering incoherent rantings of simple capitalists fomenting the fragile emotional states of low information individuals who feel they have no place in this world. This is a fundamentally devastating epistemological conundrum. Why? For centuries the barrier to the future was the amount of information, knowledge, you could access or process. Yet here and now? Here and now there might be too much access. Too much information. More so, the striking fact that our ability, as a species, writ large, to process or parse this information has not kept pace with the information at hand. A sad equation that inevitably leads to moments like 01/06/21.

The Trump Terrorists of January 6th, 2021, weaponized the internet to facilitate their attempted coup. As did their ‘dear leader’ throughout his humiliating single term in office. In fact, it was the geometrical acceleration of connectivity and interconnectedness enabled via the web and its insanely capitalist platforms that allowed for their ‘movement’ to incubate and evolve. While it is true that neo-liberal policies advocating globalist economics and monetary policy are at the current root cause of most ills genuinely affecting rural, or poor, or uneducated MAGA-heads, it’s also true that apart from an Independent from Vermont no one in the political economy of the last couple decades gave much of a shit about these poor and dispossessed inheritors of old racial mythemes and toxic narratives of self-reliance. No one that is, other than their ‘dear leader’. Never mind he didn’t intend to ease their suffering in any material, or structural way. He talked about it. He tweeted about it. And then he gave them a little song and dance at the rallies. Breathtaking stuff.

However, it wasn’t just the performative act of playing ‘authoritarian’ that got them hot and bothered. No, it was at the same time the eternal need to belong to a group, the legitimate feeling of economic obsolescence, coupled with these new tools of information transmission. Tools that at once gave them powers unheralded and seemingly ensconced them in a protective shell, a perpetually larval manifestation of all their baser inclinations. A reactionary ‘safe space’ from which they could launch a thousand ships of intolerance and hate. What good is truth if you can’t weaponize it? What good are facts if you share them with everyone else?

And so we find ourselves revising Plato. There isn’t just one cave in which we are chained, kept from reality. There are multiple tunnels, alcoves, deeper caverns in which we might dwell. Furthermore, if lucky, there are different days, vistas, egresses in which we can escape from the confines of ignorance. Much like the lucky Mormons, it would seem the far-right believes there are plenty of planets in which ‘Truth’ can dwell. Never mind that multiplying ‘Truth’ in such a way doesn’t actually produce more truth.

In fact, it reduces ‘Truth’. Impoverishes it. Hollows it out.

Which is sad, really. For the major harm caused by these rebels isn’t to our democratic institutions, nor our mythological vision of our nature, nor that ever-loving economy - but to the very fabric that binds the social contract on which all the preceding rely.

That fabric being, specifically, a shared objective reality.

How can we survive if we can’t agree on basic facts? Can a multi-racial, multi-cultural, representative democracy exist when a large percentage of the comprising citizens don’t believe in, or even acknowledge, that that’s actually what’s happening? Is White Supremacy so fundamentally a part of our nation’s DNA that the country can’t exist without it? If so, for those of us who vehemently oppose White Supremacy, the question might then be: is the country worth saving?

Most versions of Western Ethics indicate that violence is not the cure. Nor do I advocate such a position. At the same time I’m deeply troubled, because due their illness these actors are neither rational or coherent. Ergo, we can’t reason with them either. So what next?

To corral the revolutionary, if inchoate, spirit of these sick, fringe minds diseased as they are by hate, grievance, and digital oubliettes would any policy proposals be acceptable? Perhaps as fantastic an idea as the images from 01/06/21, what if the Federal Government decided to halt its obsequious sycophantry to corporate America and ‘elites’ and instead actually, seriously, emphatically reinvested in the heartland, in Main Street, in the working class? Wouldn’t it be ironic if a little more socialism was truly the cure these hatemongers require?

Maybe we should step back and listen to the wisdom of George W. Bush.

Confronting what was at the time the most disheartening terror attack on the homeland, Bush made clear not all who could otherwise be lumped in with the terrorists were terrorists. In the same way that, yes, not all Trump voters are Trump Terrorists.

Even so. Bush made it clear you needed to pick a side.

With us - toward a diverse future in which the promise of the Founders is emboldened and expanded for all who live between our shores. Or against us - back to your stunted hovels and holes with all the other low information troglodytes you like to cosplay revolution with.

Choose.

It’s your call. But choose quickly, because history is watching, and only one path moves toward the future.

C. R. Stapor Longmont, CO 01/16/21

#January 6th #terrorism #domestic terrorism #the internet #social media #revolution #insurrection #01/06/21 #low information #mind cancer #George W Bush #Trump #GOP #epistemology #white #essay #philosophers on tumblr

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toscanoirriverente · 3 years

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[Arafat] The KGB's Man

By Ion Mihai Pacepa

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism" was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.

In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."

Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his -- all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.

#Ion Mihai Pacepa #PLO #Yasser Arafat #palestine #KGB #URSS #terrorism #history #Israel #antisemitism

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canaryrecords · 4 years

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"Love - the absolute circle of trustfulness - that's the secret of it all. I love the birds, the snakes, the society person, the academic, and the baby - all creatures of the universe are alike, and they will never harm you unless you fear them." -Charles Kellogg, 1915 Charles Dennison Kellogg was unlike any performer in the history of the American stage. He developed a few key obsessions - the forest, love, vibration, fire - into an irresistibly charismatic package and then sold that package in the form of himself through an uncanny use of the press, a vigorous appetite for travel, and a need to be the center of attention through a serpentine five-decade career as a pontificator and showman. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he amused and astounded heiresses and industrialists, yogis and artists, scientists and, most of all, the plain folk of most states in the union with demonstrations of his vision of a wholesome and interconnected world of all living things. His memory has largely faded, but he left behind a memoir, riddled with gaps and touched with hokum, many photographs, hundreds of press notices and reviews in newspapers, over an hour of sound recordings, at least one fragment of film, and a legacy of naturalism and invention that has entered into the lore of his native California. Kellogg was born October 2, 1868, the fourth of five children to Henry Kellogg (b. 1822 in New London, Connecticut) and Mary E. Carlisle (b. 1845 in Jefferson, New York) in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California’s Plumas County in a settlement called Spanish Ranch “nearly a hundred miles from the nearest railroad,” according to Kellogg. His father’s involvement in a nearby goldmine in the 1850s paid off, and he used his share of the profits to establish a provisions store for the area prospectors. Kellogg wrote that his mother was the only white woman in the area, and that he “lost her in infancy.” In fact, she left the family when he was about 3 years old, and his autobiography gives us an indication of the wound her abandonment left through the pains with which he purposefully wrote her out of his life’s story. (She died in Long Beach, California in 1917.) In his auto-mythology, Kellogg was as a child close to a Chinese servant named Moon and an unnamed Indian woman, who, he wrote, “taught me to fear no creature [and] taught me, too, the habit of minding my own business, letting the other fellow alone - bird, bear, snake, Indian and other humans. […] My earliest recollection is sitting with the Indians about their campfires or watching the Chinamen boil their rice between stones.” The impressions of the sounds and feelings of the wilderness in early childhood embedded themselves deeply in young Charles. He recalled it as a period of immense freedom, a world with “no doctors, missionaries, telephone, telegraph, schools, saloons, poorhouse, jail or gamblers; no police for there was no disorder. There were birds, grizzly bears, deer, wolves, foxes, skunks, badgers, mountain lions, wild cats, snakes, and all the smaller wood folk.” It was also here that before the age of six, he witnessed a wedding for the first time and learned about death and funeral rites among the Chinese. In this powerful paradise of vivid experiences, he was “lonely, but not unhappy,” spending his days “always preoccupied with birds and insects, listening to them and talking to them in their own languages.” It was between the ages of four and six that he began to experiment with his ability to imitate birds, forcing air through this nose with his mouth closed. He claimed throughout his adult life that this remarkable ability came down to an anatomical formation in his larynx similar to that of a songbird. This claim, repeated thousands of times, often backed up with the validation of unnamed doctors, was, of course, utter nonsense, but it is not clear whether he believed it, on some level, himself. It was many years after Kellogg had been sent off to live with his mother’s relatives in Syracuse, New York at the age of six or seven that Charles realized that he was in possession of a remarkable skill. In Syracuse, he learned to work with tools, to build furniture and fireplaces - skills he valued and worked into his persona as a woodsman. He attended Syracuse University and sang in the choir, aware that a relative of his father’s (by marriage) Clara Louise Kellogg, had become a famous soprano. But apart from mentions of his education in the manly, manual crafts, the period from the ages of seven to twenty-two when Kellogg became a civilized, college-educated Yankee were never mentioned in Kellogg’s stories. They didn’t serve what he was selling about himself. Almost immediately after graduation, we have the first press notice of Charles Kellogg as a performer, August 1891 at Chautauqua, New York, a hotbed of aspirational “edutainment,” where he debuted his unique bird-imitation talent. Realizing that he was on to something, he gave at least a half-dozen concerts of music with bird imitation at YMCAs, churches, and meetings around Pennsylvania and New York at the beginning and end of the year and another half-dozen in California a few months later. There were more shows in California in 1893-94, then back to Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 1896-97. All of February and March of 1898 was spent touring Pennsylvania and Ohio. January through April of 1900 was spent on the road through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, D.C., and Virginia, by which time he was claiming to have anywhere from a 9 1/2 to 12 1/2 octave vocal range. After getting married for the first time, he spent November 1900 to April 1901 touring the same states again plus Connecticut and published an article in Success magazine called “The Wickedness and Folly of Killing Birds.” In early 1902, through Horace Traubel, friend and executor of Walt Whitman, Kellogg met the naturalist John Burroughs, thirty years’ Kellogg’s senior, with whom he traveled to Jamaica during January and February. Kellogg held Burroughs (as wells as naturalist John Muir, with whom he also spent several days with at one point) in esteem and treasured the memory of their trip. Burroughs was certainly an influence on and model for Kellogg. Whether Kellogg was aware of Burrough’s fierce denunciation in a 1903 article for the Atlantic denouncing contemporary nature-writers tendencies to anthropomorphize the natural world is unclear, but it was major news among naturalists for years, ultimately drawing comment from President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1904, Kellogg and his brother bought a 45 acre plot in North Newry, Maine, where they built the Kellogg Nature Camp, a Summer vacation resort for city folk wanting to spend time in with the woods. They built cabins connected by boardwalks, a common-house with a large fireplace (a specialty of Charles’s) and powered it with a waterwheel. It is now part of a nature reserve with many of the structures they built still standing. And each year during each late Fall, Winter, and early Spring, in an ever expanding radius, Kellogg began to cover the country with shows of his knowledge of and ability to replicate bird song - Tennessee and Kentucky by 1903, Nebraska and Kansas by 1907. By that time, shows regularly lasted two hours and received glowing reviews everywhere he went. His break came at the age of 43 in 1910, by which time he had left his first wife Emily and relocated to San Francisco and had ingratiated himself within a world wealthy socialites, where he was a favorite at parties. On December 4 The Call newspaper ran a, glowing illustrated full-page article on him titled The Man Who Sings With Birds in Their Own Language, which crystalized in print the stage-show that Kellogg had been assiduously developing, year after year, for nearly two decades. "He has the uttermost faith in the power of love and kindness,” the article asserted. “’It is all love," he says. 'Anybody who goes into the woods with the spirit of love in his heart without the faintest desire for destruction or possession can make friends with the birds if he is merely tactful and patient. Birds can read the heart better than men. They know their friends and are ready to love them.' In Kellogg's mind, there is no place for fear or hatred [...] Fear creates fear. Hatred breeds hatred. Love engenders love. These are the cardinal tenants of Kellogg's creed." His count of 3,000 performances in 24 years was, like almost everything else he said, likely an exaggeration but not so far from the truth that you could discount the claim out of hand. Twenty years of stories, stage patter, and tricks caught the public imagination. Less than a month after the article appeared in San Francisco, Kellogg went to Camden, New Jersey to cut his first trial disc for Victor Records on January 24, 1911 and then another four performances on the 28th. Victor didn’t release any of them. When Kellogg went back on the road on the east coast from October to December 1911, he had a new repertoire of claims for his abilities. This is when his press notices begin to claim that his throat is abnormally formed like that of a bird’s. And that: -He’d been to Paris and Berlin and received high praise. (His sister-in-law did invite him to perform at a private salon in Paris, where he met August Rodin, but not until 1912.) -His throat had been examined at Harvard. (He had been claiming that he’d “baffled scientists” there for years, and that they’d measured his vocal range from 64 cycles a second to 49,560 cycles.) -He speaks 15 animal languages and can communicate with bears, rattlesnakes, worms (who, he said, can sing), lizards, squirrels, etc. -That a man could (theoretically) be pinned motionless to a tree with the use of sound. -And, most crucially for his career from this point forward, that he could extinguish fire with sound. In February 1912 an article making many of these claims along with his belief that “vibration will ultimately take the place of electricity as a motive force” ran in syndication across the country in advance of his having signed with the Orpheum chain of vaudeville theaters for whom he performed three shows a day (a matinee and two at night) for months across the west coast - Winnipeg, Spokane, Los Angeles, etc - from April 1912 until April of the following year and then, without his standard Summer break, for the rest of 1913 across the east coast plus Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, and Kansas. In New York City, he gave a demonstration of divination for water for another syndicated news article. He spent 1914 touring the west coast and midwest before returning to the Philadelphia area where he remarried to Sarah “Sad’i” Fuller Burchard on January 14, 1915 in Wilmington, Delaware. One month later, he went again to Camden, New Jersey in February 1915, where over two days he recorded the first four performances that were issued on discs. He was almost 47 years old and had spent the past 25 years on the road developing his act in halls, theaters, auditoriums, clubhouses, churches, tents, homes, and high schools. Kellogg’s assessment of vaudeville does not have the ring of disreputable behavior that has often been handed down through the years: “Back stage is not such a fry cry from the forest, for on these vaudeville stages I find conditions that are congenial to my own habits of the woods - conditions I do not find elsewhere in the world. In hotels, railroads, and even private homes, tobacco and other noxious odors, and not infrequently even uncleanliness such as cuspidors, are not unusual. System, punctuality and order are seldom the rule. In the forest, in all nature, punctuality, order, and system are the very breath of life. The stars, the tides, the migration of birds, the appearance of herbs, the trees, the flowers are all on time, giving that sense of harmony felt, and rejoiced in by all. Back stage, I find pure air in perfect ventilation, no tobacco, no bad odors, scrupulous cleanliness, system, order, punctuality - in a word, the perfection of organization, bringing quiet and a reposeful atmosphere in which to work.” Kellogg’s first vaudeville tour was a 1912-13 run at the west coast Orpheum chain, run by Percy Williams who was known as the first vaudeville impresario to pay high fees to the acts he wanted. The west coast Orpheum houses were run locally and, according to Joe Lurie Jr’s Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (1953), unlike many of the rowdier and down-market vaudeville theaters, “they were all fine, clean, well-appointed theaters, running clean shows, and were a credit to their towns.” Kellogg performed at shows with as many as eight other acts on the bill. The shows in Washington opened just after Bert Williams’ run and included a spoof of the domestic morality play Everywoman titled Everywife, the blackface comedy duo McIntyre and Heath, the Fearless Ce Dora (“one continuous thrill through the seven minutes which she spends revolving at railroad speed inside [a] golden globe”), and Thomas Edison’s early, abortive attempts at talking pictures. Through 1915 and 1916 Kellogg was headlining in the eastern U.S. for both Orpheum and B.F. Keith’s circuits of vaudeville houses in the eastern U.S. and Quebec as well as Majestic Theaters in the midwest and Texas, where others on the bills included dog acts, monkey acts, the Dennis Brothers’ rotating ladder act, and various acrobats, singers, and comedians. At the end of each show was Kellogg, standing in front of a painted woodland backdrop. Second on the bill for at least one of those shows was the Three Keatons, including 20 year old Buster, who was on the verge of leaving for Hollywood. Kellogg himself appeared second on the bill in late 1916 only under Nora Bayes, arguably the most popular singer in the U.S. His proclamations to the press at the time ranged from the flatly false (that he did not believe “that wild animals die unless molested by man or that they struggle with each other, because I have never seen them do either,” that he did not know his own age, that hat he spent 9 months of the year in the wilderness and came “into civilized society only when the call of a friend proves too strong to resist”) to the simply peculiar and the nearly-true (that he had “never read a book through - print disturbs me - although I believe in the teaching of the Bible as I have heard of them from others, because I have seen the proved true in my own life,” and “I have never tasted fish, flesh, or fowl, although I am not a vegetarian,” that dogs will die from long durations of discordant sounds) to the charming, bordering on visionary (“Fear - that’s what causes all sin. Fear of money, fear of getting caught, fear of wounded vanity, fear of public opinion, all all the rest,” and “I can take the recorded songs of a thousand birds and they will be harmonious. That’s because they are in tune with nature, while man and his instruments need to be attuned.”) Kellogg was an avid photographer, claiming never to take a gun (or a compass, claiming an inborn sense of direction) into the woods, but producing photographs prolifically from 1902 onward. We know that he had performed in Rochester, New York, home of the Eastman-Kodak company, by December, 1900, around the time of the introduction of the “brownie” camera - the first cheap, popular device for making photos. It is unclear whether he might at that point met Gertrude Achilles Strong (b. May 4, 1860; d. May, 1955), a recent divorcee and the daughter of Henry A. Strong, co-founder and first president of the Kodak company, or whether they met much later in the late 1910s in Hawai’i. Regardless, their meeting and relationship was pivotal for Kellogg. His first disc for Victor certainly sold very well, likely in the tens of thousands, and he claimed that he could earn $4,000 a week (a staggering $100,000 in today’s money - and more than half of the $7,000 a week that the Orpheum paid Sarah Bernhardt, their highest-paid entertainer) performing in the 1910s, and his family was relatively wealthy. But they weren’t Gertrude Achilles Strong wealthy. Almost no one was. When she died in 1955, she left behind a fortune of over nine million dollars, making her the single richest person in the history of the state of California at the time, well into the top half of the richest 1% nationally. In 1913, Kellogg bought over 88 acres in Morgan Hill, south of San Francisco, an area he dubbed “Ever Ever Land,” where he built an inventive and “environmentally responsive” open plan cabin that he called “The Mushroom.” Around 1920, Gertrude Achilles Strong bought his land and more than 500 additional surrounding acres. She built a mansion for herself there at a cost of $276,000 (four million today) as well as a house for Kellogg and his wife and put him on her permanent payroll as property manager. He built water systems for her property and built and patented a riding fruit and nut picker for the property, while he lived comfortably with his wife Sad’i and two young live-in maids for the rest of his life. Each winter from 1915 through 1919, Kellogg toured from coast to coast, stopping in Camden, New Jersey to record a few performances for Victor Records, where he cut a total of 26 performances, six of which the company the company destroyed without having issued them. On February 15 and 16, 1916, he recorded four light classical pieces, imitating birds and following along the well-known melodies, as if a bird were singing the tunes in its down language. On the 15th, Alma Gluck, a star of the Metropolitan Opera and one of the most popular sopranos in the U.S. also recorded three of her best-selling performances. Although she did not record on the 16th, and Kellogg possibly traveled more than 100 miles north to Dalton, Pennsylvania near Scranton to visit friends on the 17th when Gluck recorded “The Bird of the Wilderness,” with words by Rabindranath Tagore, he joined her again in Victor’s studio on the 18th for two bird-themed performances on which Kellogg provided bird imitations. When the single-sided 12” disc of “Listen to the Mockingbird” was released in the Spring along with a significant marketing push by Victor, its sales exceeded expectations. When “Nightingale Song” from a mid-19th century operetta called Der Vogelhandler (The Bird Seller) by the Austrian composer Carl Zeller, was released a month or two later as a less-expensive 10,” it became one of the best-selling records of the decade. Apart from the two sides recorded with Gluck, Kellogg’s recordings are evenly divided between the bird-imitation novelties with musical accompaniment (an unenduring genre that grew in popularity both on stage and on records in the early decades of the 20th century) and segments of his stage act in which he would lecture on his relationship with the wilderness with demonstrations of bird-calls interspersed. Seven of those sides remain a fascinating glimpse of Kellogg’s performing persona. The last of them, titled “Bird Chorus,” recorded without commentary on January 14, 1919 is an extraordinary and unheralded moment in the history of sound recording. Starting in January 1915 and through all of 1916, Kellogg added a section of his stage act in which he turned on “an orchestra” of six Victrolas borrowed from local dealers in each town, and played discs of his bird-imitation and then proceeded to perform with them, simulating, as one reviewer put it, “a voice from the deep forest.” For the “Bird Chorus” disc Kellogg simplified the process to a single disc of his own performing along with a live performance, ingeniously weaving two continuous sequences of songs together to give the impression of multitudes of birds singing together. It is the first instance of overdubbing. Notably lacking from Kellogg’s discography are examples of his most spectacular and longest-lasting piece from his stage act - the “Blade of Flame.” By the beginning of 1912, Kellogg introduced a gas burner on stage which produced a four-foot blue flame inside a glass tube. Kellogg told his audience that because all of nature is connected through vibration and because of the gift he possessed of a vocal range many times that of highly trained singers and larger than that of a grand piano, he could cause the “blade of flame” to dance and ultimately to extinguish it using only his voice. It was, next to his bird-imitating, his best-known and best-loved routine. He augmented it with a demonstration of the technique of building fire by wood friction (a skill he imparted to the then-nascent Boy Scouts). Naturally, his fire performances in enclosed theaters were of some concern to local fire departments, and he made it a regular public relations stop to visit fire houses in each town during the afternoons to demonstrate the act, reassuring them of his control of fire and wowing them along with the local press. The only footage apparently extant of Kellogg is one silent minute of a newsreel outtake Kellogg giving this demonstration for a group of Boston firemen on November 5, 1926. (The film, including ten precious seconds at the end of Kellogg demonstrating his bird-imitation technique facing the camera is available online at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections site.) He continued to elaborate the routine, using bowed tuning forks. In the mid-20s he arranged a series of radio broadcasts intended to demonstrate his hypothesis that vibrations broadcast at sufficient amplitude could extinguish house fires. His proposal was that in the future each house could be scientifically tuned such that fire departments would need only to broadcast the appropriate frequencies to put out the fires. The seed for the idea seems to have originated with Kellogg’s exposure to Herman Helmholtz’s book On the Sensation of Tone which had already been published in two editions in America before Kellogg began making theatrical use of its central concept, that the air around us is a medium through which vibration is transmitted in waves. Kellogg was so enamored with the idea that in May and June of 1913, Kellogg added a bit to his stage act in which he explained to the audience that mental vibrations are crucial in love and marriage and that “tuning” of a silent “mental wireless” to a compatible frequency with one’s mate was central to harmonious love. Newsprint reviews of his attempts to demonstrate this with his wife were decidedly snarky. The audience didn’t get it, and it was quickly dropped from the act. Kellogg’s greatest and most enduring “hit” as a showman was neither a stage-act nor a recording. It was a vehicle made from two large pieces. The first was a Nash Quad, a four-wheel drive truck capable of hauling four tons. The second was a 22-foot section of a fallen redwood log eleven feet in diameter. He obtained the former in early Summer 1917 from the Nash Motor Company in Kenosha, Wisconsin while they were being produced for use in the First World War. Kellogg convinced the company’s namesake president of a vision of the beauty of California’s enormous redwood forests (and, very likely, the publicity benefits of Kellogg’s scheme) and took the Quad to Bull Creek Flat in Humbolt County, where with the help of several axemen from the Pacific Lumber Company they spent months sawing off a section of a fallen tree, stripping its bark, and carving out its interior into a living quarters with beds, cabinets, kitchenette, and bathroom. Mounting it on the chassis of the Quad, he polished and varnished the whole thing a copper color and installed electric lights. By November of that year, he drove the wooden cabin-on-wheels that he dubbed the Travel-Log cross-country, stopping in Kenosha for work on the radiator and “finishing touches” (including their brand name, it seems). Using his celebrity and press-savvy, he toured the machine, giving talks on the beauty of the great redwoods and the dire need for their preservation, taking a piece of the forest to the people. In the process, he introduced America to the idea of a mobile home. It now resides in the Humbolt State Park’s visitor center, reportedly only yards from where the tree from which it was hewn grew for centuries. Kellogg recorded 11 more performances for Victor during the period 1924-26. Seven of them were discarded by the company without having been released. The remaining four were re-recordings of his first two records using the new invention of microphones. While he continued to perform, his schedule gradually slowed as he shifted his first to attention to Gertrude Achilles Strong’s property and then to a fascination with Fiji, where he first traveled in the Spring of 1925 from Hawai’i. Fixated on the idea of wooden lali slit-drums and their use in communication over distances, Kellogg arrived alone and presented himself as a naturalist to the Chief of the Native Department on the island of Suva, who showed him a the instrument and for him to visit to the island of Baqa to witness fire-walking (after Kellogg had given a demonstration of the “blade of flame” routine, having thoughtfully packed the gear needed for it, and gave a performance of “Narcissus” as a bird-imitator) in the company of a British medical doctor. Kellogg was suitably impressed and incorporated discussion of both lali drumming and fire-walking as further evidence of his central theme of the need for vibratory attunement in his subsequent performances through the 1920s and 30s. In 1929, Kellogg survived a near-fatal car crash immediately before he self-published The Nature Singer: His Book, a profusely photo-illustrated collection of impressions drawn from his life and career and a document of his own self-invention, which went through at least two printings (all of them signed; the first 1000 are numbered), wrapped in the attractive but exceedingly brittle birch parchment that he used as stationary and for press notices. That year, he also patented an automobile ignition that started with whistling. He continued to criss-cross the country, giving talks based on his experiences in nature combined with pleas for conservation. There was talk of a movie that never manifested. In 1940, he and Sad’i adopted a 9 year old girl named Shannon who had been born in Honolulu. (She subsequently married a Charles Newton, nine years her senior, in 1961, divorcing him in 1967, and died in 2007.) When in 1946 Paramahansa Yogananda published his Autobiography of a Yogi, describing his encounters with spiritual teachers and his travel in India and U.S., he briefly recounted in a footnote having seen Charles Kellogg do the “blade of flame” bit in Boston in the ‘20s. And that’s who Kellogg has been for the past century - a remarkable and unlikely figure at the intersection of science and art and showmanship and the spiritual. Charles Kellogg’s health declined through the 1940s before died of a heart attack on September 3, 1949 at the age of 80.

#CaliforniaHistory #vaudeville #78rpm #78 rpm #naturalist #whistling #birdimitation

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angelicthor · 5 years

Text

the nineties

decades dance: part 5

pairing: steve rogers x reader x bucky barnes

summary: unrequited love was painful. To have to endure it from two people was something else. Loving two super soldiers that didn’t return your feelings was agony but what if they did? Events unfold when Tony plans to throw a party for every decade Bucky and Steve missed out on.

warnings/genre: +18 only, explicit smut, attempted sexual assault

masterlist | decades dance masterlist

Your plan to throw the other’s off your track worked, after the last party it was assumed that when Steve and Bucky disappeared, it was with the girls they were seen with and Nat’s ruthless questioning had somewhat eased. The three of you were able to breathe a sigh of relief at this, your relationship remaining a secret between you for just a while longer.

You did, however, need to somewhat hide just how worried you were when Steve and Bucky had to go on a mission. This was the first time since you’d began your relationship that the boys had been away from you; you kept reminding yourself that it was only a week, that they had more experience under their belts than the rest of the Avengers combined and they would never let anything happen to each other, but it did little to diminish the nagging fear that was eating away at you.

Sensing your nerves with the boys being away, Tony decided that the Saturday they returned would be the next party, giving you the chance to relax with everyone once they came back. You enthusiastically agreed to the plan and in your next video call to the boys, you told them about the party: they promised to be back by Saturday but told you they may be a little late, and that they would have to come in their uniforms, not having time to find costumes.

The idea of Steve and Bucky in their respective uniforms had your thighs clenching together and a part of you believed they were doing this on purpose somehow, knowing the effect that the black leather of Bucky’s vest with all those goddamn straps had and what the sight of Steve’s stealth suit did to you. The slight smirk they both wore as they told you the news gave you a good enough idea of their intentions.

Saturday came and the boys had sent you a message that morning letting you know they were on their way back to which a sense of relief and glee filled you. You spent the rest of the day with Nat and Wanda, chatting and laughing between you, your excitement at the thought of your boys being back mistaken for your anticipation of the party later.

A few hours before the party, you found yourself once again getting ready with Nat and Wanda, practically buzzing with eagerness at seeing your boys again. The time you had spent apart had been filled with worry for their wellbeing, the only reprieve you got from your anxiety was when they called you, as soon as the call ended though it returned ten-fold. You just couldn’t wait for them to back with you where they belonged – if their mission away did anything, it made you release just how much they meant to you, how much you missed being next to them every day and it got you questioning whether you were ready to bring your relationship into the open.

You figured that it was something you could discuss when they got back, for now you focussed on getting ready. Your costumes for this party were far more out there then they had been for the others, but you blamed that on the fact that it was the 90’s. Looking over your reflection in the mirror, you adjusted the shirt that was tied in a bow under your breasts, the bright bra you wore peeking through the open buttons. Your skirt resting on the tops of your thighs, barely covering the plump cheeks of your ass, knee-high socks and heeled pumps completing the look. You tied your hair into pigtails, the fluffy pink ties completing your look, if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought that you had just walked out of Britney Spears’ ‘…Baby One More Time’ music video.

You turned to Wanda and Nat, admiring their outfits in turn; Wanda was wearing Belle’s iconic golden dress, her hair in the half-up bun that helped bring her look together and part of you wondered if Vision would be dressed as the Beast. You were going to need to see that. You had no idea where Nat was coming up with these ideas but you loved each one more than the last, the Black Widow herself was in front of you dressed as Ginger Spice in what has to be one of the more memorable moments of the 90’s. The tiny Union Jack dress didn’t even cover her crotch, the navy panties peeking out from under the material of her dress that you were pretty sure was actually a vest whilst red platform boots adorned her feet.

You giggled at the complete difference in their outfit choices, Nat revealing so much skin whilst Wanda looked the carbon copy of the iconic Disney princess. Nat arched a brow at you, eyes wandering over your revealing outfit as a smirk played at her lips, “Wow Y/N, who are you trying to impress?”

You blushed at her words, mind racing with thoughts about your soldiers and how they would react; how their eyes would dilate, their jaws clench, how every muscle in their body would tense as they were forced to watch you strut around all night in such attire. You had to blink away the images that conjured of what they would do when you were finally alone, realising that Nat and Wanda were staring at you expectantly.

“I’m not trying to impress anyone: w-who would I be trying to impress?” You stuttered out, trying to hide your evident nerves with a laugh, cheeks burning as a knowing smirk crossed Nat’s lips and Wanda shot you a smile that let you know she knew more than you thought she did.

Hurrying to change the subject, you linked both your arms with theirs and headed out the door, heading towards the elevator and towards the party the floor below. The doors opened and the sound of TLC immediately met your ears and as you entered the room you noticed the numerous inflatable chairs scattered around, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on every space of wall available. It was as trashy 90’s as you could get.

There were posters of Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Forrest Gump and other renowned films of the decade whilst TV stations around the room showed news clips of Bill Clinton’s presidency and Princess Diana’s death. The three of you made your rounds around the room, finding the others quickly and admiring their outfits: Tony was dressed as Austin Powers, Sam was channelling some strong Fresh Prince vibes, Vision was in fact dressed as the Beast to match Wanda (something you found adorable) and Clint was wearing Neo’s iconic black ensemble from The Matrix. All in all, everyone looked amazing but you couldn’t help notice the absence of your boys.

Seeing how your eyes roamed the room for any signs of Steve and Bucky, Tony leaned towards you, murmuring in your ear that they were only twenty minutes out when he last checked and that they had promised to come straight here when they landed. You couldn’t prevent the relieved smile that spread across your lips at the news, at this point you just wanted them back with you, everything else be damned.

Trying to occupy the time until they arrived you asked Wanda and Nat if they wanted to dance to which they hastily agreed. The dancefloor was rather full this time around, unlike the previous parties, and you could only assume that it was because the music was more familiar to those dancing on it. After a few songs, you lost Nat and Wanda in the sea of people – every now and then you’d see a flash of Nat’s read hair or the golden skirt of Wanda’s dress but you didn’t feel like pushing yourself through the mass of people and so you left the dancefloor to stand on the side, watching with a smile as everyone danced the night away.

Leaning against the wall as you watched everyone dance, your eyes kept flittering to the door, waiting for the moment Steve and Bucky would walk in and finally be home. In your distracted state, you never noticed the body creep along to your side until you felt their breath on your neck; jumping in shock, you spun around to face the intruder of your personal space and recognised him as the man you flirted with at the last party in order to make Steve and Bucky jealous. Boy oh boy did that work.

Giving him an awkward smile, you took a small step away from him to try and regain some of your boundaries and you couldn’t help but grimace when he followed your step away, pressing his body into yours.

“Hey there sexy, I lost you at the last part – glad I found you again,” His tone was smug and his smirk dripped with indecency. There was something about him that just made you feel dirty in all the wrong ways and you wanted to wash yourself of him as soon as you could.

What was his name again? Chuck? Chad? No, no - Brad! That was it!

Before you could open your mouth to kindly reject his advances, he was already speaking: “Want to dance? Pretty sure we have some unfinished business from last time.”

Ew, not in this life or the next buddy.

“No thanks, I’m actually waiting for my friends – they’ll be here any minute so-”

“Oh come on, they aren’t going begrudge me a dance – plus it’s kinda obvious what you’re after dressed like that.”

Your attempts at keeping this civil went out the window with his words, your brows raising in indignation as your eyes narrowed at the man in front of you. “Excuse me?” You spat out at him.

His hand circled your wrist with a strong grip, harshly pulling you towards the dancefloor but you managed to pull yourself out of his grasp which only served to infuriate him further, “It’s just a dance sexy, why are you being so difficult about it?”

“Because I don’t want to dance with you, now leave me alone.”

A dark look crossed his face at your rejection and a chill ran down your spine, as an Avenger you were used to being attacked by all sorts of creatures but you had a feeling what was about to happen was a whole other kind of attack from a whole other kind of monster.

Your back hit the wall as he roughly shoved you against it, his hand pinning your wrists above your head as shock flooded your system, tears pricking at your eyes as you struggled to free yourself from his iron grip. “Such a fucking slut, teasing me at the party just to fucking vanish and now, now you’re here parading yourself in this fucking get-up and saying no? No sweetheart I know what you really want and I’m going to be nice and oblige,” He snarled in your face, spit flying from his mouth as his hand creeped under your skirt, edging their way closer and closer to your panties as you squirmed under him.

Panic completely took over you, your knee coming up hard between his legs and he released your wrists with a groan. “I said let go!” You yelled at his bent over form, tears streaming down your face and the attention of the party firmly on you and Brad.

Out of the corner of your eyes you saw two figures rushing towards you whilst the red of Nat’s hair could be seen pushing her way through the people who stood frozen on the dancefloor. Your eyes, however, remained focus on the man in front of you, too afraid to let yourself let your guard down and turn away from him.

Just as he stood up, absolute rage painting his face as he took a step towards you, two very familiar bodies jumped in front of you and you had never been happier to see them. Nat was at your side a moment later, leading you away from your attacker and out of the party, you weren’t even aware you were shaking until you entered the elevator, your legs giving out as you collapsed to the ground.

Nat was beside you instantly, pulling you into her embrace as your cried into the skin of her neck, as you rubbed her hand up and down your back in a soothing manner, trying to bring you back to the present and away from the dark thoughts filling your mind of what very nearly happened to you. You felt numb as Nat hoisted you from the floor, leading you to your room and sitting you on the bed, wrapping you in her arms as she whispered comforting words to you.

You barely registered the sound of your door opening and the heavy footfalls of Steve and Bucky, only recognising their presence when they were both kneeling before you, concern swimming in their blue eyes as they locked their gaze on you. Bucky’s hand rested reassuringly on your thigh as Steve wiped away the tears that were cascading down your cheeks, you were so focused on your soldiers crotched in front of you that you never noticed Nat sneak out of the room.

“Doll,” Bucky’s voice croaked out timidly, as if he was afraid he’d startle you, “Are you ok?”

You numbly nodded your head, offering them both a watery smile as you tried to reassure them that you were ok: “I’m fine Bucky, I promise. It’s stupid, I don’t know why I’m so shaken by him.”

“It’s not stupid sweetheart,” Steve cut you off, taking on his Captain voice to try to get you to listen to him, “It’s only natural to be upset by this; he’s a fucking monster for what he tried to do to you, I’m just sorry we weren’t there to stop him but you handled it pretty well on your own – nice hit by the way beautiful.”

Steve tried to lighten the mood but you could still see the anger in his eyes at the thought of what Brad was planning on doing. You saw a similar glint in Bucky’s eyes, knowing that he was in a very dark place in his head and slid down from the bed, nestling yourself between their bodies, head buried where the shoulders were pressed against each other and wrapping your arms tightly around them, bringing them in closer to you. They immediately circled your waist with their arms, pulling you into their solid chests as you burrowed your face further into their shoulders.

You felt them press a kiss to either side of your temple, Bucky’s hand rubbing up and down your spine in an attempt to ground you whilst Steve tugged your hair free of their ties, twirling the loose strands around his fingers, knowing how much having your hair played with soothed you. You melted further into them at their actions, your breathing starting to regulate as your thoughts of Brad were overpowered with Steve and Bucky; the feeling of their strong bodies against you, their familiar scents, their relaxing touches - the fact that they were finally home with you.

You pulled away from them, kneeling in front of them, a small smile growing on your face as your gaze flittered between the two sets of gorgeous blue eyes locked on you, filled with concern and undeniable love, and you felt an overwhelming need to just be with them; to forget every single thing that was outside of your bedroom door and focus on nothing but the three of you. Now that your thoughts were no longer on the harrowing events of the party, you were overcome with relief that they were both home, safe and sound with you and you wanted nothing more than to bask in the comfort of your soldiers’ touch.

Your hand cupped at Steve’s face as you entwined your fingers with Bucky’s. “You’re home,” You voice was barely louder than a whisper, raw and vulnerable as your forgotten anxiety for them was remembered. They both seemed to understand what you meant, realising how worried you’d been for them, how terrified that they may have not come home because Bucky brought your hand up to his mouth, pressing a kiss to the back of it as Steve let out a breathless chuckle, lips curving in a gentle smile.

“We’ll always come home to you Y/N, you know that – nothing could ever keep us away from you,” Steve murmured, pulling you into his chest as his lips softly kissed the crown of your head.

“We’d cross heaven and hell for you darlin’.” The conviction in Bucky’s voice warmed your heart, providing a strange sense of reassurance that not only would they both do the impossible in order to make it home to you, but also provided comfort that the relationship between the three of you would endure whatever it was tested against.

Maybe it really was time to tell the others…

You peered up at Bucky from the corner of your eye, still buried in Steve’s chest, and the adoration in his eyes cause a blush to burn your cheeks. Leaning forward, you captured Bucky’s lips with yours in a languid kiss, completely unrushed as your tongue caressed his, burying your hand in the hair at the nape of Steve’s neck as you did.

Pulling away, Bucky rested his forehead against yours, eyes searching your own for what it is you wanted. There was a different energy between the three of you – this wasn’t like your normal trysts in the bedroom, it was lacking the burning lust that normally fuelled your every move, instead the air between you was heavy with adoration, a different kind of need filling you.

Sex with Bucky and Steve normally left you bruised, thoroughly fucked-out and completely satisfied as you would lay panting and motionless on the bed, unable to move a single muscle. It wasn’t that it was purely physical, you knew they loved you, you could feel it in their gentle caresses as they brought you back down from the euphoria they had propelled you to but the way they were both staring at you now, as if you had the andromeda galaxy captured in your sparkle of your eyes, had you knowing that something different was about to take place between the three of you.

You wanted gentle touches, soft kisses, sweet murmurs whispered in your ear as you called out their names – not their ranks – into the otherwise silent room. You wanted to feel every tender embrace, to bask in the beauty of them and only them. You wanted them to make love to you and for you to make love to them.

“I-,” You cut yourself off, voice raw as if it hadn’t been used in days, trying to figure out how exactly to tell them what you wanted, “I need you: justyou.”

Your gaze flickered between Bucky and Steve, relief flooding you as their confusion melted into understanding, a warm yearning visible in their relaxed expressions and you knew you didn’t need to try and find the words that would never truly compare to what you felt, you could simply show them instead.

Moving forward, you cupped Steve’s jaw in your hand, thumb tracing over his cheek as you delicately moulded your lips against his, Steve’s own hands gliding into your hair as you hummed into it his mouth, feeling Bucky move to kneel behind you, littering kisses along the exposed column of your neck as his hands started to roam over your body, content at simply feeling you under his sturdy hands.

You broke the kiss with Steve, head lolling back to rest on Bucky’s shoulder with a blissful sigh at the feeling of his hands reverently wandering your body; fingertips grazing the exposed skin of your thighs, lightly trailing up to your waist, the flimsy material of your skirt trapped under his hands as they travelled north only to cup your breasts through your shirt.

Breathy moans escaped your parted lips as Steve joined Bucky in his delicate assault on your neck, one hand weaving through Steve’s short blond hair as your other buried itself in Bucky’s thick chestnut locks, pressing yourself against his unwavering chest for the support you oh-so-desperately needed to stay upright.

You were hoisted from the ground by Steve, strong arms surrounding you and laying you on the bed, both of them immediately surrounding you. Two sets of hands started to tug at your clothing: Bucky slowing pulling your skirt down your legs, throwing it to the side as Steve pulled each button free on your shirt, gradually revealing your skin to their appreciative gaze. You were soon completely bare beneath them and a flash of vulnerability struck you, arms coming to cross against your chest in attempt to block their view – not that they hadn’t seen you in such a state of undress a thousand times before but the overwhelming sense of love the three of you made this far more intimate then any time before you couldn’t help but feel self-conscious.

Bucky’s hands gingerly wrapped around your wrists, prying your arms away from your chest, his eyes not once leaving yours: “You’re so beautiful babygirl,” he mumbled under his breath, lips curling in a small smile as he spotted the blush that painted your cheeks at his words.

“We’re so lucky to have you doll; never doubt that,” Steve said, voice sincere and his eyes locked on yours, not giving you any room to argue with him.

You bit your bottom lip to try and fight the cheek-splitting smile threatening to take over, sitting up on the bed as your hands started to pull at the combat suits still adorning their bodies; stripping Steve of his navy stealth suit and unbuckling the black leather that stretched across Bucky’s chest until they were both as undressed as you.

They sandwiched you between them, Steve pressed against your back as Bucky was against your front, hands roaming over your bare body as you slung one arm over Steve’s shoulder, pulling him flush against you as you writhed at the feeling of their calloused hands over your skin. Your lips once again found Bucky’s in a passionate kiss, tongues tangling as your free hand tangled itself in his hair, moaning into the embrace as Steve’s hands started to massage your breasts, fingers tugging on your already hardened nipples as his lips peppered kisses on the skin of your neck.

The feeling of their cocks hardening against your thigh sent a surge of need through you, wanting to show them both how much you loved them and to satisfy the desire that was beginning to pool in your core, wetness making itself known between your thighs. Manoeuvring out of the walls of muscle you were currently trapped between and breaking the kiss with Bucky, you kissed down his body to where his hard cock was arching against his stomach, you pumped it in your fist before you licked him from base to tip, revelling in the sharp hiss that escaped him when your tongue twirled around his head, lapping up the precum gathered there.

Not wanting to leave Steve out, your other hand came up to cup his balls, moving up to work your hand up and down his pulsing length, using the precum pooling at his tip as lube and smiling around Bucky’s cock as you heard Steve’s muttered praises nearly being drowned out by the heavy pants and low groans spilling from Bucky’s lips.

Feeling the vein on the underside of Bucky’s cock throbbing as your tongue traced it - a sign he was nearing his end - you released him with a lewd pop, moving to work Steve with your mouth, taking him deep into your throat as you bobbed your head along his aching cock. Steve’s hand cupped your jaw, thumb tracing over your cheek and feeling his heavy cock through the skin as you continued to slowly pump Bucky’s cock, his hips thrusting into your spit-slicked fist.

You pulled away panting when Steve tugged you off of him, a string of saliva and precum connecting you both as you did, Steve letting out a mangled groan as your soft lips left his sensitive cock and Bucky practically whined when your hand released him. Steve pulled you into a hungry kiss, not minding the taste of both him and Bucky that lingered on your lips before he gently pushed you back on the bed, your legs falling apart and your glistening pussy on show to their eager eyes.

They both collapsed next to you, nuzzling your neck and scattering the sensitive skin with a multitude of kisses as they both whispered sweet words into your ear.

“Sweetheart, we love you so much,” Bucky muttered against your skin, littering kisses along your collarbone as he lethargically made his way down your body, paying close attention to your breasts, suckling on your sensitive nipples before descending to your stomach, pressing kisses across your hips as he worshipped you, “So fucking beautiful.”

“You mean the absolute world to us, you know that right?” Steve questioned you, his brow furrowed as his eyes had a resolved determination lighting them; Steve needed you to know he meant the absolute truth, needed you to understand just how much you meant to both of them and you couldn’t help the smile that broke out at the thought.

“Yeah Stevie, I know.” You pulled him down to you in a tender kiss, only breaking it when you gasped at the feeling of Bucky plunging two fingers deep within you, seeking out your g-spot and easily locating it, watching in glee as your face contorted with pleasure, moans and pleas spilling from your lips as his fingers repeatedly worked you closer to the edge, the coil within your core tightening with every pass of his fingers over your special spot.

You barely registered Steve’s dark chuckle or the fact that he moved off the bed and towards the nightstand, far too focused on the pleasure Bucky was providing you, eyes screwed shut as you clawed the sheets beneath you, knuckles turning white with the strength of your grip. Your hips shot up of the bed, rolling in an attempt to pull Bucky’s digits deeper inside you and you nearly cried when his fingers slowed their assault on you, eyes opening to see what was stopping him and you gasped at the sight.

Steve was kneeling beside Bucky, lube in hand as he applied a generous amount to your ass and you moaned at the cold liquid hitting your heated skin. Steve massaged your tight hole before slowly pushing in one lube-coated finger, stretching you out before adding another; you lifted your hips off the bed to give them both more room and you couldn’t stop the wanton cries that escaped you as the both began to thrust their digits into you, preparing you for what was soon to come.

By the time they had deemed you ready, you were a panting mess on the bed, so so close to completion before they pulled away from you, helping you up to your knees on shaky legs and using Bucky for support, his strong arms wrapping around you and pulling you into his chest.

His fingers combed through your hair, pulling it away from your face as he smiled down at you, pressing a chaste kiss against your lips before he lifted your legs over his, your knees straddling his own as his cock pressed against your entrance. You wrapped your arms around Bucky’s shoulders, tangling your hands in his hair as you shared a deep kiss, his own hands landing on your hips to guide you as you lifted yourself up to slowly impale yourself on his cock.

You both groaned at the feeling of being so intimately connected, Bucky pressing his forehead against yours, eyes screwed shut as the feeling of your silken walls around his cock nearly made him cum then and there.

“Oh, fuck Bucky,” You breathlessly moaned out, rolling your hips against his in a dire need for more.

“I got you baby, fuck, so fucking perfect,” Bucky’s hands traveled the skin of your back like he was trying to feel every inch of you before they settled under your knees, lifting you up as if you weighed nothing and settling your legs over his arms until he was holding your full weight by the globes of your ass.

You couldn’t help but throw your head back and groan as Bucky man handled you, the new position pushing him further into you and giving you such a sense of fullness you felt tears prick at the corner of your eyes. Bucky’s lips caressed the skin of your neck, not kissing it but simply ghosting over it as if he was trying to memorize the feel of you, the taste, under his lips and you let out a blissful sigh at the sensual feeling.

Bucky’s hands gripped your ass, spreading your cheeks and you felt Steve’s chest press against your back, his hard cock lubed up and pressing against the ring of muscle his fingers were buried in only moments ago. Steve nibbled on your ear lobe, whispering dirty praises into it as he slowly thrust forward, “You feel so fucking good babygirl, so perfect, fucking made just for us.”

The boys gave you a moment to collect yourself, and if they were being honest, themselves too – the feeling off your tight walls surrounding their already sensitive cocks threatening to make them cum before the show even started. When you were all ready, you wrapped on arm around Bucky’s broad shoulders and the other around Steve’s back, pulling them closer to you as you rolled your hips, all three of you groaning at the feeling.

Taking your silent signal, Steve and Bucky began to gently thrust into you; Bucky’s hands keeping a firm grip on your ass as Steve’s cupped your breasts, rolling your nipples between his thumb and forefinger. Bucky kept his forehead pressed against yours, blazing eyes locked on your face, his harsh puffs of breath hitting your face as Steve buried his face in your neck, eyes screwed shut at the feeling of your tight ass surrounding his cock, muttering curses into the sweat-slick skin of your shoulder.

You could feel every thrust in and out of you, every unhurried roll of their hips and every pulse of their cocks. It was completely relaxed; no bruising grips or teeth-marks, no ranks or punishments, no games or contests. It was just the three of you basking in the love you felt for each other and the intensity of it all caused tears to slip from your eyes.

You weren’t going to last long, not with Bucky hitting your g-spot so expertly with every push of his hips into yours, and you knew they weren’t going to last much longer either.

“Fuck doll, you’re killing me, feel so fucking good around my cock,” Bucky choked out, his intense blue eyes locked on yours and you could see the lust and love there enough to make you whimper.

You could feel your orgasm encroaching, your clit throbbing with need to be touched and Steve must have sensed this as his hand crept down your body and circle the engorged nub, finally triggering your release. Your hands clawed at Bucky’s back as your body shook violently, pleasure shooting through every synapse in your body as your orgasm washed over you, threatening to pull you under in the abyss.

Your cunt clamped down on Bucky’s cock and his hips stuttered into yours a few final times before his release coated your walls, cumming with a groan as you milked him of his release. The feeling of you spasming in his arms and the sound of your high-pitched cries threw Steve over the edge too, his cock twitching as he came, hips flush against your ass, muttering curses under his breathe all the while.

When the three of you finally returned from your euphoria, Bucky and Steve tried to pull out of you as delicately as they could, knowing how sore you could be after sex and Steve stumbled into the bathroom as Bucky lowered your aching legs back to the bed. However, you didn’t have long to rest before he was swooping you into his arms again, carrying your dozing form into the bathroom after Steve where the shower was already on and warming up.

The two of them held you up, cleaning you and themselves as you barely managed to stay awake, sleep so desperately trying to take you. Their soft touches and sweet words did nothing to help the matter, feeling so content and at peace that you could have sworn you could have fallen asleep standing up given the chance.

Your eyelids grew unbelievably heavy as they dried you off and your limbs became weighed down as you fought so valiantly to stay conscious. They dressed you in one of their shirts and carried you back to bed, the three of you climbing in and you couldn’t help but sigh at the feeling of the cool sheets caressing you skin, such a contrast to the warm bodies of your super-soldiers cuddling up to you.

You knew then and there what you wanted. You wanted this; Steve and Bucky and everything that a relationship with them entailed, now and forever. And you wanted everyone to know it.

a/n: i don’t have a tag list but if you want alerts please follow @angelicthorwrites and turn on notifications

#steve rogers x reader x bucky barnes #steve x reader x bucky #bucky barnes x reader x steve rogers #bucky x reader x steve #steve x reader x bucky smut #angelicthorwrites

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militant-holy-knight · 4 years

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Ironically, it was an anti-Islamist, Kemalist Turkish general who first suggested that Turkey should align its foreign policy with the rising powers of Eurasia -- all of Europe plus Asia. It was just eight months before President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) first came to power, and since then, has remained undefeated. The U.S. at the time was busy with the final touches on the military operation that would oust Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, in March 2003.

General Tuncay Kılınç, the powerful secretary general of Turkey's National Security Council, said that Turkey should seek an alternative alliance with Russia and Iran. In November 2002, Erdoğan's AKP came to power, pledging to pursue pro-EU, pro-West, liberal governance, and wrongly accusing Kemalist ideology of being an obstacle against liberal democracy -- an incredible political story, to judge it 17 years later. Few observers back then warned that Erdoğan's pro-West façade was fake and his deep adherence to political Islam, an enemy of the Western civilization, would one day urge him to seek non-Western alliances.

Ostensibly, the S-400 vs. F-35 conflict between NATO allies Turkey and the United States is a matter of East-West military disputes, reminiscent of several others the world observed during the cold war. It is not.

It was not a coincidence that in 2009 the Turkish military became the first NATO force to have joint military drills with the Syrian army. In 2010, Turkey became the first NATO member state to have exercises with China's air force.

In 2013, Turkey selected a Chinese company to receive a multi-billion contract for the production of its first long-range air and anti-missile defense system -- a decision Ankara later scrapped.

Just like those "shocking" moves, Erdoğan's decision to deploy the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system in Turkish (NATO) territory reflects his ideological anti-Western thinking. It was not a coincidence either that Erdoğan in 2013 demanded from Russian President Vladimir Putin a seat at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian would-be replica of NATO. "Allow us into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and save us from this [EU membership] trouble," Erdoğan told Putin. Turkey became the first NATO member state to become a "dialogue partner" with the regional body -- colloquially known as the Shanghai Five -- in April 2013. The SCO's members include Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

That statement alone should have sufficed to tell Turkey's Western friends in what direction Erdoğan's Turkey was heading. Turkey's choice of a Russian-made air defense system that is primarily designated to hit NATO aerial assets is a reflection of its anticipation of an aerial military conflict with a NATO member in the future. But which one(s)? Does Erdoğan think it is likely that Turkey will engage in military confrontation over the Aegean skies with its traditional rival, Greece? Or any other European NATO member? The U.S.? Which NATO member's air force will attempt to hit Turkey with its aircraft or missiles? (The S-400 can engage targets at a rangeof up to 400km.)

As Turkey's "Western march" has come to a dramatic halt, the country has been increasingly aligning its foreign policy with the Eurasian bloc.

In simple terms, Eurasianism broadly encompasses the idea that Turkey should reorient away from the West in favor of an Eastern and Central Asian hinterland. Apparently Erdoğan's Turkey is an ideal theater: it can perform an oriental rehearsal. No doubt, the S-400 is also a sign of Erdogan's disregard for Turkey's increasingly problematic place in the Western alliance. Erdoğan's ideologues keep on portraying the U.S. as an "enemy country," and many Turks increasingly buy that line. Seven out of 10 Turks now report feeling threatened by U.S. power, an increase of 28 percentage points since 2013 -- a higher jump than in any country recently polled.

NATO is not the only Western institution showing signs of wariness in keeping Turkey at bay. Turkey has been a troubling candidate for full accession to the European Union; at the moment, membership negotiations are blocked. Turkey has completed only one of the required 31 "chapters" required for accession since it was given accession negotiations began in 2005. Political conflicts keep the procession process in deep freeze. Planned visa-liberalization talks between Ankara and Brussels are going nowhere. EU's pre-accession financial assistance for candidates hoping to become members is being significantly reduced. New funding for the next phase of the "refugee deal" is uncertain. The deal was that Turkey would keep the mainly Syrian refugees on its soil, preventing them from flooding EU countries, and the EU would grant Turkey visa-free travel rights. More importantly, in July, the EU decided to scale down the political dialogue and suspend negotiations on an aviation agreement, as a reaction to Turkey's drilling for oil and gas in contested waters of the Eastern Mediterranean.

While all this is happening, Erdoğan is trying further to establish Turkey as a reliable Eurasian partner, not just by instrumenting its rigid pro-Russian policy calculus.

In a recent visit to Beijing, Erdoğan repeated that Turkey would join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. His other words were also music to Chinese ears: Erdoğan mentioned Turkey's respect for "one China". The "One China" doctrine dictates that Chinese territory, including disputed Taiwan and Uyghur territories, are part of the People's Republic of China and cannot be divided. Erdoğan also pledged full cooperation against "terrorism" (read as full cooperation against the persecuted Uyghurs, an ethnic minority of Turkic descent in China who have been fighting for independence). According to an official Chinese report, Erdoğan, after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping -- and disappointing tens of thousands of Uyghurs still living in Turkey -- pledged further support for China's policy not to allow any anti-Chinese separatist activity to operate from Turkey.

There is no doubt that Erdoğan will now strengthen relations with China, says Uzi Rabi, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. "He knows that the Chinese have a very multi-targeted policy. They attach military help with economic interests, and Turkey will have to consider it and accept it." Closer ties between Turkey and China will harm Washington's work in its trade war with China, said Rabi. Closer ties would create new trading partners for China, thereby giving Beijing a freer hand in its trade negotiations with Washington.

How ironic it is that Erdoğan has embraced Eurasianism -- the Kemalist ideology challenging Erdoğan's reformist, fake pro-Western ideas. In less than two decades, Erdoğan has embraced it as his main anti-Western policy.

#politics

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maswartz · 4 years

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IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave.

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

#bernie sanders

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Beating The Heat Is Out Of Reach (IPCC, AP News) The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a shocker of a report Monday summarizing the latest authoritative scientific information about global warming. 234 scientists contributed to the 3,000-plus-page report. Global temperatures have already risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the 19th century, the highest in over 100,000 years. Further warming is already “locked in,” meaning even if emissions are drastically cut, some changes will be “irreversible” for centuries. Ice melt and sea-level rise are already accelerating, and wild weather events like heatwaves and storms are expected to worsen and become more frequent. Earth is warming so fast that by the 2030s, temperatures will probably exceed the Paris climate accord’s ideal goal of no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The report called it a “code red for humanity.”

Infrastructure bill approved in Senate (AP) With a robust vote after weeks of fits and starts, the Senate approved a $1 trillion infrastructure plan for states coast to coast on Tuesday, as a rare coalition of Democrats and Republicans joined together to overcome skeptics and deliver a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s agenda. “Today, we proved that democracy can still work,” Biden declared at the White House, noting that the 69-30 vote included even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The overwhelming tally provided fresh momentum for the first phase of Biden’s “Build Back Better” priorities, now heading to the House. A sizable number of lawmakers showed they were willing to set aside partisan pressures, at least for a moment, eager to send billions to their states for rebuilding roads, broadband internet, water pipes and the public works systems that underpin much of American life. The measure proposes nearly $550 billion in new spending over five years in addition to current federal authorizations for public works that will reach virtually every corner of the country. There’s money to rebuild roads and bridges, and also to shore up coastlines against climate change, protect public utility systems from cyberattacks and modernize the electric grid. Public transit gets a boost, as do airports and freight rail. Most lead drinking water pipes in America could be replaced.

COVID vaccines to be required for military under new US plan (AP) Members of the U.S. military will be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine beginning next month under a plan laid out by the Pentagon Monday and endorsed by President Joe Biden. In memos distributed to all troops, top Pentagon leaders said the vaccine is a necessary step to maintain military readiness. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the mid-September deadline could be accelerated if the vaccine receives final FDA approval or infection rates continue to rise. “I will seek the president’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September, or immediately upon” licensure by the Food and Drug Administration “whichever comes first,” Austin said in his memo, warning them to prepare for the requirement.

For first time, average pay for supermarket and restaurant workers tops $15 an hour (Washington Post) The U.S. labor market hit a new milestone recently: For the first time, average pay in restaurants and supermarkets climbed above $15 an hour. Wages have been rising rapidly as the economy reopens and businesses struggle to hire enough workers. Some of the biggest gains have gone to workers in some of the lowest-paying industries. Overall, nearly 80 percent of U.S. workers now earn at least $15 an hour, up from 60 percent in 2014. Job sites and recruiting firms say many job seekers won’t even consider jobs that pay less than $15 anymore. For years, low-paid workers fought to make at least that much. Now it has effectively become the new baseline. Economists caution that a higher average wage is not the same as a $15 minimum wage. Half of workers in these industries are still making below $15 an hour. Nonetheless, rising pay is still a game-changer for millions of workers.

Dry California tourist town to guests: ‘Please conserve’ (AP) Tourists flock by the thousands to the coastal town of Mendocino for its Victorian homes and cliff trails, but visitors this summer are also finding public portable toilets and signs on picket fences pleading: “Severe Drought. Please conserve water.” Hotels have closed their lobby bathrooms and residents have stopped watering their gardens in the foggy outpost about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of San Francisco after two years of little rain sapped many of the wells Mendocino depends on for potable water. Mendocino’s water woes were compounded in recent weeks when the city of Fort Bragg a few miles to the north—its main backup water supplier—informed officials that it, too, had a significant drop in its drinking water reserves after the Noyo River recorded its lowest flows in decades. “This is a real emergency,” said Ryan Rhoades, superintendent of the Mendocino City Community Services District, which helps manage the water in the town’s aquifer.

Nicaragua recalls four LatAm ambassadors in tit-for-tat move (Reuters) Nicaragua has recalled its ambassadors to Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica for “consultations,” the government said on Monday, deepening the Central American country’s international isolation over its crackdowns on the opposition. Mexico, Argentina and Colombia recently recalled their ambassadors to protest against moves to clamp down on the opposition in Nicaragua, while Costa Rica a few weeks ago suspended the appointment of its ambassador to the country. On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Ortega of taking new “undemocratic, authoritarian actions.” Blinken also singled out Ortega’s wife, Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo, and said the two were seeking to hold on to power “at all costs” with a strategy of disqualifying potential opposition candidates. Nicaragua is due to hold presidential elections in November in which Ortega is seeking a fourth consecutive term.

Twelve Days In Office, and Crisis Swamps Peru’s Leftist President (Bloomberg) Peru’s new president is off to a rocky start, selecting contentious ministers, alienating allies and setting the stage for a brutal face-off with congress, all within days of taking office. A rural teacher and union activist, Pedro Castillo won the election after reassurances that he’s his own man, not beholden to his party’s Marxist ideology or chief. But when he named his cabinet—including a prime minister who’s under investigation for being an alleged apologist for terrorists—analysts, opposition figures and even some who’d backed him expressed alarm, so much so that the word “impeachment” was heard more than once. “His political capital went up in smoke in 24 hours,” said Rodolfo Rojas, a partner of the Lima-based Sequoia political advisory group. “If he doesn’t change course, there’s no future for him.” Impeachment isn’t imminent, Rojas said, but a clash with congress looks likely. And while Peru has made a habit of ousting presidents, it’s rare for such a discussion to take place within days of inauguration.

French wine production set for a 30-percent drop (Washington Post) A confluence of weather woes is hurting France’s wine harvest. First, there was severe frost in the spring, which laid the foundation for disaster by damaging 30 percent of the production. Then, torrential summer rains hit western Europe in July, leaving parts of Germany and Belgium ravaged by floods, and leading to fungal attacks on grapes and their leaves in France. All of this has set France up for a wine supply drop of 24 to 30 percent this year—the lowest output since 1970, France’s farm ministry said Friday. For champagne, harvest potential has been slashed in half, some producers warned. In Italy, the world’s largest wine producer, high temperatures in the south caused an early harvest, while heavy rains in the north caused a late harvest, according to farmers association Coldiretti. Output is estimated to fall by 5 to 10 percent.

'We fought a great battle': Greece defends wildfire response (AP) As Greece’s massive wildfires were being largely tamed Tuesday, the country’s civil protection chief defended the firefighting efforts, saying every resource was thrown into the battle against what he described as the fire service’s biggest-ever challenge. Nikos Hardalias said authorities “truly did what was humanly possible” against blazes that destroyed tens of thousands of hectares (acres) of forest and hundreds of homes, killed a volunteer firefighter and forced more than 60,000 people to flee. Two other firefighters were in intensive care with severe burns. “We handled an operationally unique situation, with 586 fires in eight days during the worst weather conditions we’ve seen in 40 years,” Hardalias told a news conference. “Never was there such a combination of adverse factors in the history of the fire service.” Greece had just experienced its worst heat wave since 1987, which left its forests tinder-dry. Other nearby nations such as Turkey and Italy also faced the same searing temperatures and quickly spreading fires.

Smoke from Siberia wildfires reaches north pole in historic first (Guardian) Smoke from raging forest fires in Siberia has reached the north pole for the first time in recorded history, as a Russian monitoring institute warned the blazes were worsening. Devastating wildfires have ripped across Siberia with increasing regularity over the past few years, which Russia’s weather officials and environmentalists have linked to climate change and an underfunded forest service. One of Siberia’s hardest-hit regions this year has been Yakutia – Russia’s largest and coldest region that sits atop permafrost – which has had record high temperatures and drought. On Saturday, the US space agency Nasa said its satellite images showed wildfire smoke travelling “more than 3,000km (1,800 miles) from Yakutia to reach the north pole”, calling it “a first in recorded history”. It added that on 6 August most of Russia was covered in smoke. According to Russia’s forestry agency, this year’s fires have ravaged more than 14m hectares, making it the second-worst fire season since the turn of the century.

Lockdowns In Manila (Guardian) The more aggressive Delta variant of COVID-19 has led to record case numbers in countries across Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam have reported record cases in recent weeks. The variant was detected in the Philippines in mid-July and has spread to 13 of 17 regions. On Friday, the national capital region of Manila, with a population of almost 14 million, was placed under strict lockdown until August 20 in an attempt to slow the spread. Only authorized people, including those buying food, traveling for medical reasons, or frontline workers are allowed to go outside. The day before the lockdown went into effect, thousands rushed to vaccination centers and waited for hours hoping to get a shot. Rumors had spread that unvaccinated people wouldn’t be allowed to claim government aid or go outside.

Taliban Capture Sixth Provincial Capital (Foreign Policy) The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan continued on Monday with the capture of Aibak, the capital of Samangan province, marking the sixth provincial capital to fall to the group in less than a week. Monday’s seizure was hastened by the defection of Asif Azimi—a prominent warlord with ties to the now defunct Northern Alliance—a worrying sign of shifting allegiances due to a rapidly changing situation on the ground. As the fighting drags on, pressure is building on President Ashraf Ghani to get a handle on the situation or get out of the way. Reports in Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal paint a picture of an isolated leader whose best hope lies in rallying support from anti-Taliban groups ahead of an all-out civil war.

#headlines #news

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printedword · 4 years

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In December, a couple of months after Lt. Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis police union, stood onstage with President Donald Trump at a campaign rally and praised the “wonderful president” for “everything he’s done for law enforcement,” he received a short Facebook message from a disgruntled city resident: “Nazi piece of shit,” the man wrote to him.

Kroll fired off a reply, pointing out his family’s record as defenders of the Allied forces during both World Wars, and then launching into a series of insults: “Keep spewing uniformed [sic] shit from your computer in your moms [sic] basement, loser,” he wrote to the man, according to a report by the Minneapolis City Pages, a local newspaper. “If you hate me so much, why don’t you stop by and beat the shit out of me?…My bet is it won’t happen, because you are a cowardly cunt.”

It might not have been the response you’d expect from a public official who represents 800-plus rank-and-file police officers. But Kroll, who has led the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis for five years, has a reputation for inflammatory remarks. Now, his brash leadership and influence over the police department’s culture are in the spotlight amid protests over police violence in the city after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white officer on Monday.

Kroll, who has been accused of using excessive force and making racist remarks in the past, is standing behind his colleague as the public backlash mounts. “Now is not the time to rush to judgment and immediately condemn our officers,” he said on Tuesday, before the department fired Chauvin and three other officers who did not intervene in Floyd’s death.

The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis union became powerful in the 1970s, after one of its former leaders, Charles Stenvig, was elected mayor. Kroll became president of the union in 2015. Today, protesters and other activists in the city say the union, not the police chief, holds the most sway over officers and their behavior on patrol. “The only authority they respect is Police Federation President Bob Kroll,” Tana Hargest, a Minneapolis-based artist and activist, tweeted a day after Floyd’s death. “[T]here’s nothing our elected representatives can or will do to bring them to heel.”

Through a series of controversies over the years, Kroll has been a staunch defender of the police. In 2015, after two white officers shot 24-year-old Jamar Clark in the head, Kroll spoke on television about Clark’s “violent” criminal history; later, when the officers were cleared of wrongdoing, he referred to Black Lives Matter as a “terrorist organization,” according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

In 2007, Kroll also referred to former US Rep. Keith Ellison, who is Muslim and Black and has pushed for criminal justice reforms, as a terrorist, according to a lawsuit filed by now–Police Chief Medaria Arradondo alleging racism within the police department. The lawsuit accused Kroll of wearing a motorcycle jacket with a white-power patch sewed into the fabric, and said he had “a history of discriminatory attitudes and conduct.” He has told reporters he was part of the City Heat motorcycle club, some of whose members have been described by the Anti-Defamation League as displaying white supremacist symbols. Kroll did not respond to a request for comment but has denied the allegations in the past.

A year after Clark’s death, in 2016, Kroll again showed his disdain for protests about racial inequality. That December, four off-duty officers walked off their job working security at the Lynx basketball game after the players denounced racial profiling at a press conference and wore Black Lives Matter warmup jerseys before the game. “I commend them for it,” Kroll said of the officers.

Kroll joined the Minneapolis police department back in 1989. According to a Star Tribune investigation, he has been the subject of at least 20 internal-affairs complaints during his three decades there, though all but three were closed without discipline. As a young officer in 1994, he was suspended for five days for excessive force, according to a report by City Pages, but that decision was later reversed by the police chief. The next year, he fought a lawsuit that accused him of “beating, choking and kicking” a biracial 15-year-old boy while saying racial slurs, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported, but a federal jury cleared him of wrongdoing. In 2003, the department demoted him for three months for “code of ethics” violations.

One of the most egregious allegations took place in 2004, while Kroll was off-duty. Kroll and another officer were accused of beating a man whose backpack bumped against their car while walking out of a bar on a Friday night; when the man’s friends came to help, the officers allegedly punched and kicked them. The Civilian Review Authority, a board that investigates complaints against Minneapolis police officers, sustained the complaint against Kroll. He was suspended for 20 days. “How can he even still be on the force with behavior like this?” the assaulted man’s father told City Pages. Kroll denied wrongdoing and said the man’s friends attacked them.

“The persona of me is that I’m some big boogeyman,” he said. “I’ve been told I’m racist, and I’m violent. I’m aware of that. I’ve had more complaints than most, but I’ve had much higher contacts, and a much higher number of arrests.” He claimed he had been cleared of wrongdoing on almost every occasion.

As head of the union, Kroll has pushed for aggressive policing. Last year, Mayor Jacob Frey banned a “warrior-style” training for officers that has been linked with other officer-involved killings, including of Philando Castile in 2016 in Minnesota. As Mother Jones revealed in an investigation, the training promoted a “killology” view of law enforcement that urged officers to be prepared to use more force, not less. Kroll described the mayor’s ban as illegal and vowed to continue making the training free through the union for any officers who were interested. “It’s not about killing, it’s about surviving,” Kroll said of the training at the time.

For Kroll, Trump has been a natural ally. “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Kroll told CBS Minnesota after speaking at the president’s rally last year. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around…he decided to let cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.” Before the rally, Kroll’s union sold “Cops for Trump” T-shirts, which brought in close to $100,000, as a way to protest the mayor’s prohibition on officers wearing their uniform to political events. Kroll wore one of the red shirts to the podium as Trump introduced him as “the great gentleman on television.”

#law enforcement #policing #minneapolis #bob kroll #us politics #words

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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Bernie Sanders is considerably older and “maler” than Elizabeth Warren — and, at this point, one could even argue that he’s a smidgen to her right on economic policy. Granted, the Massachusetts senator has been less fulsome in her advocacy for Medicare For All. But Warren’s plans for taxing the one percent’s wealth, breaking up tech monopolies, putting workers on corporate boards, providing universal day care, tackling the housing crisis,and taming agribusiness add up to a vision of sweeping, social democratic change at least as ambitious as her rival from Vermont’s.

This fact, combined with Warren’s proven technocratic chops — and the profound social implications of the U.S. electing a female head of state — has led some progressives to question the rationale for Sanders’s candidacy. In response, the socialist senator’s supporters have emphasized the distinctions between the two candidates’ ideological commitments and political biographies. In their telling, Warren is a Brandesian liberal whose faith in the liberatory potential of market capitalism kept her in (the shrinking liberal wing of) the Republican Party for much of her life. Sanders, meanwhile, is a Debsian socialist whose belief in the indispensability of class struggle long confined him to the far-left fringe of American politics. In the 1980s, Warren supported Ronald Reagan’s GOP; the mayor of Burlington backed the Sandinistas.

I’ve been skeptical of the practical significance of these differences. In Donald Trump’s America, the left would seem to be light-years away from reaching a point at which the policy distinctions between Warren’s “accountable capitalism” and Bernie’s “democratic socialism” would begin to matter. Both candidates favor breaking up concentrations of corporate power, bolstering labor unions, and treating health care, housing, childcare, and higher education as social rights. And on all these fronts, both will have to settle for whatever modest, incremental advances the Jon Testers and Amy Klobuchars of the Senate are willing to countenance. Meanwhile, whatever Warren’s background, there is no question that she can be trusted to stand up to regressive corporate forces within the Democratic coalition. No one fought the party’s Goldman Sachs wing more incessantly — or effectively — during the Obama years than Warren. And if she prefers to describe her social democratic vision as capitalist out of an aversion to the phrase “socialism” — well, that’s an aversion she shares with a large majority of the American electorate. (Plus, it’s hard to see how boiling down the definition of socialism to “European levels of transfer spending and unionization” expands the Overton window in a leftist direction.) Finally, while it is quite plausible that Sanders’s brand of politics is uniquely conducive to movement-building (as his backers insist), the evidence for that claim doesn’t strike me as dispositive.

Or so I recently thought. I now believe that this analysis missed one critical point: Sanders’s socialist background and orientation might not (necessarily) render him uniquely effective at building progressive movements or advancing egalitarian change at the domestic level — but they do appear to have those effects on an international one.

Warren’s background as a Republican-voting technocrat hasn’t stopped her from mobilizing populist anger at creeping plutocracy. But it did prevent her from assembling a decades-long record of decrying American imperialism, and defending left-wing governments the world over. Sanders’s socialist background, on the other hand, led him to do precisely this. And while that record of international leftist solidarity could be a liability with the American electorate, it’s a singular asset within the global left — and in an era when the survival of decent civilization likely depends on building a powerful, transnational left-wing movement, that is no small asset.

As Politico reports:

Bernie Sanders has a base that no other 2020 candidate can claim: left-wing politicians around the globe.

From South America to Europe to the Middle East, leftist leaders are celebrating his candidacy, viewing him as an iconic democratic socialist with the potential to lead a worldwide progressive movement at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise across the map.

… Among Sanders’ admirers: Evo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia who blasted the United States last year for committing the “most egregious acts of aggression committed during the 21st century.” … Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom’s Labour Party have argued that Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn would have a “special relationship” if the two men both rose to the top of their countries … In Canada, Israel, Germany and Spain, progressive politicians have also hailed the Vermont senator on social media and in interviews, often speaking favorably of his Medicare-for-All proposal, non-interventionist foreign policy, and advocacy for the Green New Deal. Sometimes, the excitement is borderline giddy: Stefan Liebich, a Left member of the German Bundestag, recently posted a photo of himself on social media holding a Sanders figurine, adding, “#feelthebern.”

… In the eyes of progressives across the globe, left-wing populism is needed to take on right-wing authoritarians such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who recently met with President Trump.

“The far right have internationalised,” Ross Greer, a Green member of Scottish Parliament who went on the TV show “Scotland Tonight” to declare his support for Sanders, told POLITICO. “They cooperate and coordinate across borders, so if we are to defeat them, we need to do the same. Bernie gets that in a way I’ve not seen from any other presidential candidate.”

Sanders does not owe this international reverence solely to his advocacy for the global left as a young (or, more precisely, less old) activist. The Vermonter may have been conspicuously reluctant to discuss foreign policy in 2016. But this time around, he’s offered a clearer vision for what a progressive geopolitical agenda should look like than any of his competitors. With the help of his foreign-policy adviser, the one-time left-wing foreign affairs blogger Matt Duss, Sanders has woven the Trump-Russia scandal — and the president’s broader affinity for foreign dictators — into a tale about the global struggle between the forces of democracy and the “authoritarian axis.” Plutocrats the world over are using their wealth — and the retrograde politics of right-wing nationalism — to insulate their privilege from the threat of genuine democracy, no matter the dire consequences for the poor, vulnerable minority groups, or even the planet’s survival. Elizabeth Warren has struck similar notes in her public remarks on foreign policy. But Sanders has matched his lofty rhetoric with boldly progressive stances on concrete geopolitical issues to a degree that Warren has not. Sanders has established himself as the Senate’s most passionate defender of Palestinian rights(admittedly, a title somewhat akin to “the world’s largest chihuahua”), led the opposition to U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen (and has called for a broader rethinking of the U.S.-Saudi alliance), voted against increasing the Pentagon’s budget (Warren voted for it), and announced the formation of a “Progressive International” with radical Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

To be sure, Sanders’s foreign policy vision is still inchoate. On the critical questions of how the U.S. should navigate its relationship with a rising China, how it should seek to reorganize global trade and investment in a progressive direction, how it should balance its domestic interests with its obligations to developing countries — and, above all, how it should deploy its economic and diplomatic power to combat climate change — the senator has offered few details. And the utter lack of a left-wing foreign-policy infrastructure in the U.S. could make ironing out such details a difficult (and potentially, ideologically compromising) process.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #bernie sanders #elizabeth warren #progressive #progressive movement #democratic socialism #2020 election #foreign policy

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