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holyfiremilkshake · 2 years

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Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul DUMPS his semiconductor shares following outrage as former Dallas Federal Reserve President say couple has been trading based off 'inside information'

'Has your husband ever made a stock purchase or sale based on information he's received from you?' a reported asked the speaker in her weekly briefing last week. 'No,' she scoffed. 'Absolutely not.' Pelosi then walked away from the podium.The Pelosis are one of the wealthiest couples in Congress and Paul Pelosi has been dubbed one of the most prolific stock traders of all time. The speaker's office frequently notes that Nancy herself does not own any stock.For months there has been broad bipartisan consensus behind banning individual stock trades for members and their spouses. Lawmakers in both parties have put forth a slew of bills since Pelosi first expressed a cool openness to such a ban in February, not one of which has made it to the floor. Last Wednesday Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a letter asking Democrats to hold a hearing on banning stock trading.'This issue of whether and how Members of Congress engage in various financial transactions deserves scrutiny by the Committee,' Hawley wrote to Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.'In 2020 Speaker Pelosi and her husband outperformed the S&P 500 by a whopping 14.3 percent,' Hawley said. Ninety percent of actively managed investment funds fail to beat the market, according to a report. After initial resistance, Pelosi changed tune in February and said she would get behind a stock ban if it was not just aimed at Congress but all of government. 'It has to be government-wide,' the California Democrat told reporters. 'The judiciary has no reporting. The Supreme Court has no disclosure. It has no reporting of stock transactions, and it makes important decisions every day.' +5View gallery'Has your husband ever made a stock purchase or sale based on information he's received from you?' a reported asked the speaker in her weekly briefing last week. 'No,' she scoffed. 'Absolutely not,' Pelosi said It was not resounding support, but it was a change of tune from three months earlier when Pelosi was actively against cutting off her husband and the rest of Congress' stock trading power. 'We're a free market economy. '[Lawmakers] should be able to participate in that,' she said in December. Despite broad support, some Democrats lay blame at leadership for stopping such bills from even getting a vote. 'The people who control the calendar don't want to bring it to the floor,' said Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., a moderate who authored a bipartisan proposal to force members to put their assets in a blind trust. 'The people who control committees of jurisdiction don't want to bring it to the floor.'Paul Pelosi, owner of Financial Leasing Services, has amassed a personal fortune of around $135 million. In 2021, the House Speaker is ranked as the 14th wealthiest member of Congress with an estimated net worth of at least $46,123,051, according to Insider. Paul Pelosi's lucrative stock trades have prompted social investing app Iris allows users to track the couple's trades and be notified every time Paul makes a purchase so that they can do the same. And popular Twitter account @NancyTracker, which tracked Pelosi's investments, was banned from the social media network.The 2012 STOCK Act bans members of Congress from using 'any nonpublic information derived from the individual's position ... or gained from performance of the individual's duties, for personal benefit.'

But on Tuesday, the day before the Senate passed the CHIPS bill, Paul Pelosi sold 25,000 shares of Nvidia at an average price of $165.05 with a total loss of $341,365, according to a periodic transaction report released Tuesday.

Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill said in a statement: 'Mr. Pelosi bought options to buy stock in this company more than a year ago and exercised them on June 17, 2022.'

'As always, he does not discuss these matters with the Speaker until trades have been made and required disclosures must be prepared and filed. Mr. Pelosi decided to sell the shares at a loss rather than allow the misinformation in the press regarding this trade to continue,' he added.

The Senate passed the CHIPS bill Wednesday and the House is expected to pass it on Thursday.

Former Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher said Thursday on CNBC Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband 'appear' to have taken advantage of insider information with Paul's many lucrative stock trades.

Responding to news that Democrats would soon release the framework for a long-awaited stock pan proposal, Fisher said on CNBC's Squawk Box: 'Clearly people have taken advantage of insider information forever. I'm not against their tapping that down. I'm sorry to see that Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi and others appear - all appearance right now we don't know the facts - to have taken advantage of insider information.'

'Something needs to be done.'

Former Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher said Thursday on CNBC that and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband 'appear' to have taken advantage of insider information with Paul's many lucrative stock trades

The stock ban framework would force members of Congress, their spouses and senior staff to place assets in either a qualified blind trust or completely sell them off. Lawmakers, spouses and staff would still be able to hold mutual funds.

Leadership's goal is to get the legislation through the House in September, according to Punchbowl News.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who as head of the House Administration Committee has been tasked with reviewing the different proposals, told DailyMail.com on Friday the framework would be out 'in the coming weeks.'

The framework would force members of Congress, their spouses and senior staff to place assets in either a qualified blind trust or completely sell them off

Lawmakers, spouses and staff would still be able to hold mutual funds

Leadership's goal is to get the legislation through the House in September

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul purchased over $1 million in shares of semiconductor firm Nvidia ahead of a vote on the CHIPS bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul dumped his stock in semiconductor firm Nvidia amid backlash just before the Senate passed the CHIPS bill to drum up domestic semiconductor chip production, according to a periodic report released Tuesday.On June 17 Paul Pelosi exercised call options to buy 20,000 shares worth between $1 million and $5 million, ahead of the vote on the CHIPS plus bill which would inject $52 billion into the semiconductor market. The move drew bipartisan backlash and renewed calls for a congressional stock ban.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11058953/Nancy-Paul-appear-taken-advantage-inside-information-ex-Dallas-Fed-President-says.html

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omgstupendousbouquetbasement · 2 years

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Public Hearings to Detail the 2021 Riot at US Capitol

Nearly a year and a half ago, a mob of about 2,000 supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in a destructive rampage, trying to block lawmakers from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election. Starting Thursday night, Americans will get a first-hand accounting of how the attack on January 6, 2021, unfolded. Witnesses will testify before a congressional investigative committee about the planning of the insurrection, Trump’s role in promoting the mayhem, how he tried to thwart election results to claim another four-year term, and what he was doing at the White House during the rampage that was televised across the globe. It was a seminal moment in America, an attack on the seat of American democracy. The Capitol is often seen around the world as the symbol of a freely elected representative form of government and the place where the power of the presidency is peacefully passed from one president to the next. In the first of at least six days of hearings this month, some of them televised in prime time, witnesses are expected to tell the U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6 attack how Trump acolytes supported the insurrection in a futile attempt to keep him in power. The committee is planning a combination of live testimony from key Trump administration insiders; videotaped interviews with others, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom were White House advisers — and previously undisclosed video of the hours of chaos inside the Capitol building. Committee investigators have interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses linked to the riot and Trump’s effort to upend the election results. Among them is Cassidy Hutchinson, a top assistant to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who reconstructed details of White House meetings and discussions for the committee. But other possible witnesses, including Meadows, other key Trump aides and five Republican congressmen with links to Trump have all refused to testify. Short of a late-minute change of mind, they are likely to succeed in stonewalling the committee’s efforts to have them appear. Meadows initially provided House investigators with voluminous records before refusing to testify. Two former Trump advisers, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, have been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee, but the Justice Department decided to not bring contempt charges against Meadows and another former Trump aide, Dan Scavino, who also refused to testify. To this day, Trump claims he was cheated out of re-election by fraudulent vote counts in several closely contested states, although recount after recount showed minimal irregularities — not enough to upend the national outcome. Trump has lost five dozen court suits contesting the vote. He has derided the congressional investigation. The nine-member committee — seven Democrats and two Republicans who turned against the former president — is expected to call witnesses to describe Trump’s efforts to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the national results, which would have thrown the outcome of the election into legal chaos. But Pence refused Trump’s overtures, saying his role as presiding officer over certification of the votes from all 50 states was merely administrative and that he had no power to overturn the official count. As it turned out, the unofficial results ahead of the official certification proved to be the same as when the state counts were tallied in the early hours of January 7, 2021: a 306-232 Biden victory in the Electoral College. U.S. presidents are chosen by the Electoral College, a system of counting states’ electoral votes based on the popular vote outcome in each state. The number of electoral votes is based on a state’s population and its total number of senators and representatives in Congress. As the hearings start, one of the Republicans on the committee, Representative Liz Cheney, told CBS News on Sunday, "People must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don't defend it." ‘Fight like hell’ Just ahead of the official certification of his electoral loss, Trump staged a rally near the White House, telling thousands of supporters to head to the Capitol to “stop the steal” and “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden’s win. About 2,000 of his supporters stormed into the U.S. Capitol, smashing windows and doors, ransacking offices and scuffling with police, injuring 140 of them. Five people died that day or in the immediate aftermath. One protester was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer during the riot. To this point, at least 861 people have been charged with criminal offenses committed at the Capitol. Many have faced minor trespassing charges, while others have been charged with assaulting police, damaging parts of the Capitol and ransacking congressional offices. At least 306 of those arrested have pleaded guilty, with many sentenced to a few weeks in jail. Some who faced assault charges have been sentenced to more than four years. The rest of the cases remain unresolved as investigators pore through vast video footage of the mayhem to identify the rioters. Trump says he supports those charged in the attack on the Capitol and has said if he runs for the presidency in 2024 and wins, “we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly." from Blogger https://ift.tt/LqoOtaz via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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marauderssequels · 4 years

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new quarantine project

(TLDR available at the bottom of this post)

look we got really fuckin screwed with the cursed child thing and then fantastic beasts imo, like I do like the fantastic beasts series but we have been waiting for more marauders content for decades now. so I’ve decided that fuck it, there’s no reason we can’t create it ourselves. we’ve been doing a hell of a job so far on fanfics and headcanons and fanart and every other form of media; why not the full seven book series we deserve?

at this point, it might be a fair judgement that the fandom has done more to build upon the world of the marauders and their relationships than the original series laid the grounds for. more canon content has been produced by rowling since then, but I believe a lot of our imaginings have been shaped by the many ideas that we as a community have come up with. that’s why I’d like to involve the entire hp community in creating this series (essentially crowdsourcing creativity/ideas). seven books for the marauders prequel story is a lot of ground to cover, and while I have a few ideas, I want the final product to truly reflect all the love and originality we’ve been pouring into this series for years.

I won’t disregard canon entirely, as I’ll be drawing on the characters from the marauders era as well as additional details rowling has provided. however, one definite way this series will break some established rules is in its diversity. we deserved to see more characters of color, more lgbtq+ relationships and characters, more fat characters, more disabled characters- we deserved to see everyone represented. this time around, I will do my best to ensure we will.

for one thing, wolfstar (the romantic pairing of remus and sirius) will be prevalent. so much of the fan content created for the marauders era includes this pairing, and while not everyone will agree with its inclusion, I do think there are many members of the community who will appreciate it. I would love any other suggestions for more pairings, whether they be platonic or romantic, lgbtq+ or straight.

really, any and all suggestions are so welcome. right now, my plan is to scroll as far down the hp headcanons and hp meta tags as possible to gather inspiration, as well as dive into the canon material rowling has published and make a list of characters before piecing together a general storyline and establishing character arcs. I’ll post an outline when I think I’ve gathered enough sources and inspiration, but please: at any time, even months down the road from this post, do not be afraid to send in ideas/headcanons. the world of harry potter leaves so much room to be expanded on and explored, there’s always room for more.

it’s also my intention to make at least one (if not more) of the main four characters trans (that being remus, sirius, peter, and james). they all hold great potential as trans characters (trans wolfstar? two teenagers navigating their way through life, romance, and gender, supporting each other through everything? discovering themselves and accepting each other? trying to find fashion that appeals to their taste in the seventies?? things to consider...)

obviously this will take an effect on the story as a whole, and nothing is set in stone quite yet. I do love the idea of gender non-conforming sirius, so whether or not that ends up translating to a nonbinary, agender, or even genderfluid sirius is also up in the air. he’s always hated convention and tradition, and I see no reason for him to not live as authentically as possible once he’s given up on his family. there’s a huge opportunity in his narrative for themes of freedom and self-love, especially as he’s canonically coming from an already unsupportive family.

ideas like these and more will, ultimately, be decided on through community polls and voting. whatever we create, it will be created together. I feel that there’s room here for everyone’s ideas and voices to be heard and respected, so (for example) even if we don’t see trans wolfstar, that doesn’t mean we won’t see two trans partners somewhere else in the story.

the headcanon of desi harry is also popular enough for me to comfortably suggest that james be indian, or at least of some south asian descent. a poll to decide on his ethnicity is currently up, as his heritage and culture will be a large part of his backstory and perspective.

with the overview of my general starting ideas out of the way, please send in any opinions or ideas you have for the series and share this post with anyone you think might want to be involved in the project or who might have ideas of their own. reblogs will help spread the word about this project and get as many creative minds involved as possible! sending me posts, art, or links to fanfic and other materials are also welcome, as well as private messages. I’m also open to including storylines from existing fanfictions, as long as the author is open to including their work and ideas. the series will not be sold or commercialized in any way, but will be free for all to read with the release of each new segment of the story.

thank you so much for reading, polls are now available!

some disclaimers: this is not for profit, nor is it intended to infringe upon the work of j.k. rowling. I won’t be claiming to own these characters, settings, or any ideas or concepts in the harry potter universe. the works created are protected under fair use.

TLDR: this is an idea for a new series of marauders books, following james potter, remus lupin, sirius black, and peter pettigrew. this idea is best supported by sending in suggestions, headcanons, and other ideas, as well as taking the polls and sharing this post. involving other writers and creatives is a large goal for this project!

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whatevergreen · 3 years

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"When Reverend Christopher Rush laid the cornerstone of the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1853, he placed in it a time capsule, a box that contained a bible, a hymn book, and copies of two New York papers, The Tribune and The Sun. These were mementos for future New Yorkers.

Rush, who escaped slavery and became the second ordained bishop of the AME Zion Church, also delivered the church’s first sermon. He read in part from the First Epistle of Peter, an address to the oppressed and persecuted, assuring the congregation that “although now for a little while you may have to suffer through various trials,” salvation would reward those who kept the faith.

But even as he counseled hope, the church was doomed. What Rush didn’t know was that the land where the Church would stand, part of a thriving African American community, had been condemned two weeks before as part of the plan to create New York’s Central Park.

The community, called Seneca Village, began in 1825 and eventually spanned from 82nd Street to 89th Street along what is now the western edge of Central Park. By the time it was finally razed in 1857, it had become a refuge for African Americans. Though most were nominally free (the last slave wasn’t emancipated until 1827) life was far from pleasant. The population of African Americans living in New York City tripled between abolition and complete emancipation and the migrants were derided in the press. Mordecai Noah, founder of The New York Enquirer, was especially well-known for his attacks on African Americans, fuming at one point that “the free negroes of this city are a nuisance incomparably greater than a million slaves.”

Most landowners at the time refused to sell to African Americans. A white couple who lived in what was then a distant northern outpost of Manhattan was an exception, subdividing and selling off their land first to Epiphany Davis and Andrew Williams, two prominent members of the The New York African Society for Mutual Relief, and then to the AME Zion Church. More members of the African Society, whose purpose was in part to build black communities, followed suit and purchased land too. Slowly, houses were built. Some of them were rather grand, two-story affairs, with barns and stables, and some were modest shacks. The area was eventually anchored by three churches and a school."

"Owning land in Seneca Village meant more than finding a refuge from the slums and violence of Manhattan proper. Buying property meant voting rights (at least for men), as laws in New York at the time required that all voters own at least $250 worth of real estate. Seneca Village probably had a more radical purpose, too, as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Prominent abolitionists such as Albro Lyons, later recognized as a conductor on the railroad, owned land and lived there. In fact, the African Society so instrumental in founding the village was reputed to have a hidden basement for hiding runaway slaves. And the name of the village itself may have come from a philosophy tract called Seneca’s Morals, a book that was popular with abolitionist activists.

As Seneca Village was building up, however, support for Central Park grew, driven by some of the same pressures that created the African American enclave. The tip of the island of Manhattan was overflowing with people. The slums were spilling over as more and more immigrants arrived, especially after the Irish potato famine started in 1845. None of these conditions appealed to well-off New Yorkers, who had already started migrating further uptown, or out of town, by the 1840s. Already, the Lennox family and other wealthy New York names owned swaths of land in the vicinity of the proposed park. Real estate developers easily foresaw the demand for an exclusive neighborhood bordering parklands.

More than three-fourths of the children who lived in Seneca Village attended Colored School №3 in the church basement. Half of the African Americans who lived there owned their own property, a rate five times higher than the city average. And while the village remained mostly black, immigrant whites had started to live in the area as well. They shared resources ranging from a church (All Angels Episcopal), to a midwife (an Irish immigrant who served the entire town).

But in 1857, it was all torn down.

Even as the church was being built on 86th street, then painstakingly painted white, the original settlers fought for their lands in court. Andrew Williams was paid nearly what his land was worth, after filing an affidavit with the state Supreme Court. Epiphany Davis was not as fortunate, losing hundred of dollars.

By 1871, Seneca Village had largely been forgotten. That year, The New York Herald reported that laborers creating a new entrance to the park at 85th Street and 8th Avenue had discovered a coffin, “enclosing the body of a Negro, decomposed beyond recognition.” The discovery was a mystery, the paper reported, because “these lands were dug up five years ago, when the trees were planted there, and no such coffins were there at the time.” That’s unlikely, as the site was the graveyard of the AME Zion church.

Researchers from Columbia, CUNY, and the New York Historical Society have been working on excavating the site of Seneca Village since the early 2000s. The work has been slow, with excavation starting in 2011.

The only official artifact that remains intact on the site is a commemorative plaque, dedicated in 2001 to the lost village."

Above: the only visible remnants of the village buildings

#seneca village #central park #nyc #lost #manhattan

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dduane · 4 years

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As an author of science fiction and fantasy, what exactly is the difference between the Hugo award and the Nebula award and which gives an author more clout among other authors?

Mmmmm, tricky. There’s no easy answer, as it (a) depends on the author who’s receiving the award and (b) the author who’s reacting to it.

(Disclaimer here: though I’ve never been nominated for either of these awards, I’ve walked both sides of this divide over time. I have both assisted in running Hugo award ceremonies [as ToastMrs. in Glasgow some years back to @petermorwood’s ToastMr.] and have presented Hugos to other people [did that just last year in Dublin], and have collected them on behalf of still others. [We had to pry Ron Moore’s Hugo for STAR TREK: GENERATIONS out of Peter’s Mum’s grip more than once, as she’d started really enjoying being press-photographed with it.] I’ve also run a Nebula banquet once, and as a result really wanted to ask the banquet manager of the Beverly Hilton to marry me after he made it plain he’d do whatever was necessary to make sure late arrivals at the banquet were FED. Gods bless that man, wherever he may now be. ...The entree was prime rib, too. Really nice prime rib.)

Anyway. I’d say there’s a general sense that the Hugo is viewed as a bit of a popular / populist award, being voted on by members of each year’s World Science Fiction Convention; a voting pool that numbers, oh, between 5000-10000. I’d say, depending on the size of the voting conventions; whereas the Nebula would be seen (correctly) as one given by writers (specifically active members of SFWA) to writers -- a voting pool of about 2000 or so. ...At least theoretically this would seem to be an indicator that the Nebula should be an award that concentrates more on the quality of the work itself, as opposed to the work’s popularity. (And it’s a bit of a diagnostic here that when some naughty people decided to try to suborn one of the awards’ nominations/voting processes in their clique’s favor, a few years back, it was the Hugo they went after, not the Nebula.*)

...Please note that the above is a horrendous simplification of the whole issue, for purposes of brevity. If you put ten SF/fantasy writers in a room and got them talking about this issue, you’d quickly have eighteen opinions and either a potential fistfight or a potential cocktail party, not to mention several hours’ worth of horror stories on both sides of the discussion.

Leaving aside the question of the effect of publishers’ lobbying for works by their authors who’re up for either award -- perfectly legal, just as it would be for Oscars or the Golden Globes -- there would be a perception that to receive a Nebula means your work is being honored on its literary (or screen) merits by your peers; and a Hugo means your work is being honored (for a possibly different but still-valid set of merits) by the Fan in the Street.

Which leaves us with the questions: (a) What if you don’t much like your peers? (b) What if you don’t much like the Fan in the Street?

If (as I know at least some writers think) SFWA is a hotbed of snotty stuck-up self-entitled gatekeepers who don’t recognize real talent when they see it, then being given a Nebula -- if you should win one -- has a good chance of really curdling your milk. Because you’re either going to wonder what’s been wrong with your perceptions (and who likes sitting home going “Wow, I was really wrong about that, how long have I been such a maroooooon?”**), or you’re going to suspect that this is actually some kind of subtle plot to embarrass you, and that even though they were all probably bribed to give you this thing, those cooler-than-thou SOBs are all secretly sniggering at you behind your back. And you will be inclined to view the award itself as pretty much worthless, and any recipients of it -- who didn’t have the guts to reject it, and improved sales of their book-or-whatever be damned -- as sellouts and betrayers of True Art.

Or, if (as I know at least some writers think) the Hugo voting pool is a crowd of unperceptive couch-potato proles mindlessly swayed by the Opinions of the Great Unwashed Popular-Culture-Loving Public and by Big Media plastering the online world with ads for their bought-out SF/Fantasy Product -- or if you think the Hugo voting pool is secretly controlled and manipulated by a bunch of hidebound oldfen and their craven lickspittle stooges and flunkies -- or both... Well, then, if someone gives you a Hugo, you’re likely to want to invite whoever gave you the worthless thing to insert its shiny pointiness (individually or in the corporate sense) where the Sun don’t shine. Repeatedly. And you will be inclined to view the award itself as pretty much worthless, and any recipients of it... Well, you see where this is going.

The problem, I guess, is that “authors” are no more homogeneous a group than any other. What one writer thinks of as being cloutworthy may strike another as garbage: both in terms of a given work, and the award for it. Or someone may think (about a given work) that it was terrific, but had no business winning a given award. ...Or, alternately, not winning it. Multiply that variability of opinion by sort of 2000 people, for SFWA, and you can see the difficulty. And in or out of SFWA, writers -- the same as fans -- are entirely capable of careful analytical thought about what’s right about a given work and what’s wrong with it, and equally capable -- with reason, or without it -- of flinging that analysis aside in a fit of kneejerks and furious flails. SF/fantasy writers are all the cats you could ever want to herd, but more so. SF/fantasy fans are the same again, and many, many more cats in a much bigger herd.

I think what’s wisest to concentrate on here is one’s own attitude to either award... which at least is something you have some control over. Because whatever you think people were thinking about you before you got nominated -- odds are they’re thinking it even more now, in new and different ways. Worrying about whether other authors are impressed by your award history (or not impressed enough by it because maybe you won the wrong awards) will just take one’s mind off the Work. Which would not be good, for at the end of the day, it’s the Work that counts, and the priceless intimacy of speaking directly into someone else’s brain... which is what writing lets you do. I think there’s more value in concentrating on that and letting the awards fall where they may.

...Now, it has to be said: If I were up for / won a Nebula (which frankly I don’t see happening) I would nonetheless be happy to accept it, as most of the SFWA members I know are good people who take their nomination/voting responsibilities seriously. If I were up for / won a Hugo (which, who knows, could happen some day; stranger things have occurred) I would be delighted to accept it, as I have a lot of good memories surrounding the award proper and the people involved with it, and would be proud to have one of my own.

And in both cases there’s routinely some good effect on one’s career, or bits of one’s career, in being able to put “Winner of the Nebula Award 20XX” or “Hugo Award Winner 20XX” on the cover. Sales go up a little. Do they stay that way? Who knows. Predicting anything in the future, even for an SF writer, is dodgier work than usual at the moment. As the Magic 8-Ball says, “ANSWER HAZY: ASK AGAIN LATER.”

Anyway. Regarding this author: what gives another writer clout with me is knowing that someone has done / is doing good work, the best they can under whatever circumstances are besetting them this week, this month, this year; someone who has their own voice and cultivates it to be the best writer’s voice it can; someone who’s true to the vision in their head, and works steadily to make it better. Someone who (after the award cycle for a year ends) makes me look at what they’re doing and -- if their talent wasn’t acknowledged -- makes me say, “Dammit, they wuz robbed”, and go out and encourage other people to buy their stuff regardless of the covers not saying “Hugo Winner...” or “Nebula Winner” afterwards. Because good sales figures will get you through times of no awards better than Hugos and Nebulas will get you through bad sales. :)

HTH.

(Afterthought: I really need to post the Cat Herding Commercial again. “And if you look at his face... he’s just about ripped to shreds!”)

*This may also have been because the members of that clique had a vanishingly-small-indeed-approaching-zero chance of subverting the Nebula nominations-and-voting process, as the vast majority of the nominators would simply have laughed them out of the room for being really terrible writers. (IMO.) ...But I digress.

**And more to the point, how often does it happen? Present events alone should be an indicator of how very desperately most people want to avoid acknowledging they’ve been horribly, blatantly WRONG about something, and what lengths they’ll go to in order to convince themselves that they’re really right... But I digress.

#Hugo awards #Nebula awards #SFWA #WSFS

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 25, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Both Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio told television hosts today that they expect an infrastructure deal on the $579 billion bill this week. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said that he will delay the Senate’s upcoming recess until this bipartisan bill and another, larger bill that focuses on human infrastructure are passed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says she will not hold a vote on the smaller infrastructure bill until the larger bill, which is a priority for Democrats, passes the Senate.

There are a lot of moving pieces in this infrastructure bill that have more to do with politics than with infrastructure.

First, what is holding up the bill in the Senate is a disagreement about the proper ratio of funding for roads and public transportation. When Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, starting the creation of 41,000 miles of interstate highways, lawmakers thought that gasoline taxes would pay for the construction and upkeep of the highways. Congress raised the gas tax four times, in 1959, 1983, 1990, and 1993. But, beginning in 2008, as fuel efficiency went up, the gas tax no longer covered expenses. Congress made up shortfalls with money from general funds.

In 1983, in order to gain support for an increase of $.05 in the gas tax from lawmakers from the Northeast who wanted money for mass transit, Congress agreed to establish a separate fund for public transportation that would get one out of every five cents collected from the gas tax. This 80% to 20% ratio has lasted ever since.

Now, Republican negotiators are demanding less money for public transportation and more for roads, sparking outrage from Democrats who note that a bipartisan agreement has stood for almost 40 years and that changing the ratio between public transportation and roads will move us backward. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2019, fossil fuels used in transportation produced 29% of U.S. greenhouse gases.

Portman, the lead Republican negotiator, says that Republicans have made a “generous offer” and that it will provide a “significant increase” in transit money. "Democrats, frankly, are not being reasonable in their requests right now,” he said.

Republicans want to deliver money to rural areas where people depend on driving, even though there are far more people who live in areas that benefit from public transportation. Rural areas, of course, are far more likely than urban areas to be full of Republican voters.

Democrats in the House are eager to address climate change. On July 21, Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and 30 Democratic members of the committee wrote to Pelosi and Schumer to urge them to include instead the terms of the INVEST in America Act the House passed on a bipartisan basis earlier this month. That bill offered a forward-looking transportation package that expanded public transportation even as it called for road and bridge repair. “We can’t afford to lock in failed highway-centric policies for another five years,” they wrote.

But there is a larger story behind this transportation bill than the attempt of Republicans to change a longstanding formula to keep themselves in power. Republicans who are not openly tying themselves to the former president want to pass this measure because they know it is popular and they do not want Democrats to pass another popular law alone, as they did with the American Rescue Plan when Republicans refused to participate.

Democratic leadership wants to work with those Republicans to pass a bipartisan bill because it will help to drive a wedge though the Republican Party, offering an exit ramp for those who would like to leave behind the increasing extremism of the Trump Republicans.

Trump Republicans are, indeed, becoming more extreme as the House’s select committee on January 6 takes shape. After the Senate rejected a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection, House Speaker Pelosi and the House voted to establish a select committee. Its structure was based on one of the many committees established by the Republican-controlled House to investigate the attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. It permitted the minority to name 5 members, to be approved by the Speaker.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tried to undercut the committee by appointing three members who had challenged the counting of the certified votes on January 6, including Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was at a December meeting with Trump and other lawmakers when they discussed protesting the vote count on January 6, and Jim Banks (R-IN), who attacked the committee, saying: “Make no mistake, Nancy Pelosi created this committee solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left’s authoritarian agenda.” When Pelosi rejected Jordan and Banks, McCarthy pulled all five of his appointees.

But Pelosi had already established the committee’s bipartisanship when she appointed Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), a staunch Republican who voted with Trump more than 90% of the time but who openly blamed him for the January 6 insurrection. Today, Pelosi added Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) to the committee as well.

Kinzinger is an Iraq War veteran who was one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January. "Let me be clear, I'm a Republican dedicated to conservative values, but I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution—and while this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer," Kinzinger said in a statement.

McCarthy promptly tweeted that the committee had no credibility because Pelosi had “structured the select committee to satisfy her political objectives.”

McCarthy is scrambling, not least because he will almost certainly become a witness for the committee.

But there is more. With Trump out of office, pressure is ramping up on those who advanced his agenda. News broke on Thursday that the FBI had received more than 4500 tips about Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination proceeding for confirmation to the Supreme Court, and had forwarded the most “relevant” of those to the White House lawyers, who buried them, enabling the extremist Kavanaugh to squeak into a lifetime appointment to the court.

In Georgia, law enforcement officers indicted 87 people in what they are calling the largest gang bust ever in the state. Seventy-seven are part of the “Ghostface Gangsters” gang of white supremacists whose network stretched from Georgia to South Carolina to Tennessee. “The gang’s culture, structure, leadership, chain of command, and all involved in the furtherance of this ongoing criminal enterprise have been charged,” law enforcement officers said.

Meanwhile, vaccinated Americans are becoming increasingly angry at the unvaccinated Trump supporters who are keeping the nation from achieving herd immunity from the coronavirus. Some Republicans are starting to call for their supporters to get vaccinated.

As pressure mounts, McCarthy is not the only one who has signed onto the post–January 6 Trump party who is ramping up his rhetoric. This weekend, when presented with a gun, Trump’s disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn told the crowd, “Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, D.C.”

Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has been linked to the planning for the January 6 insurrection, suggested at an Arizona rally for the former president last night that the rioters were peaceful and that the real criminals were “insiders from the FBI and DOJ.” It seems likely he is hoping to discredit those organizations before more information comes out.

At the same rally, the former president spoke for almost two hours, reiterating his lie that he won the 2020 election and suggesting he would be reinstated into the White House before the next election. (He was weirdly fixated on routers.) He blamed Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Kavanaugh for his loss of the White House, and praised his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

“The radical left Democrat communist party rigged and stole the election,” he said.

A final note tonight: We lost a great American, Bob Moses, today. I don’t want to tack him on to tonight’s letter; he deserves his own. So hold this space. Until then, Rest in Power, Dr. Moses.

—-

Notes:

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45350.pdf

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

https://transportation.house.gov/news/press-releases/chair-defazio-leads-30-transportation-and-infrastructure-committee-members-in-urging-congressional-leadership-to-include-transformational-policies-from-the-invest-in-america-act-in-infrastructure-legislation

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/transit-money-emerges-last-major-obstacle-bipartisan-senate-infrastructure-deal-n1274788

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senators-hopeful-bipartisan-infrastructure-spending-bill-could-land-monday-n1274960

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/25/1020464213/nancy-pelosi-adam-kinzinger-january-6-committee

Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowskiMichael Flynn is presented with a rifle as a gift in Yuba, CA, and says that now “maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, DC.” 609 Retweets1,212 Likes

July 25th 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/13/ali-alexander-capitol-biggs-gosar/

Aaron Rupar @atruparRep. Paul Gosar turns reality on its head by portraying January 6 as a mostly peaceful affair, then pushes an absurd conspiracy theory that the real criminals on that day were "insiders from the FBI and DOJ" 1,182 Retweets4,650 Likes

July 24th 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/us/politics/kavanaugh-fbi-investigation.html

https://www.wrdw.com/2021/07/22/georgia-gov-kemp-will-visit-augusta-discuss-large-scale-gang-bust/

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/24/trump-election-claims-rally-500719

https://www.wrdw.com/2021/07/23/87-locals-charged-biggest-gang-bust-state-history/

Aaron Rupar @atruparTrump has been speaking for more than 90 minutes now. He's currently goading his audience into booing the US women's soccer team. 735 Retweets3,061 Likes

July 25th 2021

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #history #infrastructure #corrupt Gop #criminal GOP #January 6 2021 #capital insurrection

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gravitascivics · 3 years

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CARLYLE AND COLERIDGE

In the attempt to describe how Romanticism affected American political views in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds, this blog next looks at two British writers who had significant influence on those Americans. They were Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first is primarily remembered as an influential historian and essayist and the second as a poet.

Carlyle’s writing has been judged as reflecting a recurring balance between the Romantic thrust for both emotions, such as a love for freedom, and what was known to be historical and political fact. But within that general aim, he was drawn to the heroic struggle. This admiration for struggle, per se, seemed to take priority over any of the issues that such struggles represented.

In that, the “great man” seemed to be his main topic for analysis. One of his most famous pieces betrays this emphasis, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. That was a book that shared a series of lectures about how important heroic leadership was to history.[1] One can sense in Carlyle an anti-democratic bent and that his ideas – not necessarily his writings – lent to the march toward dictatorial leadership in the twentieth century.

Along with this level of hero-worshipping, he also promoted a nationalism. He is thought of as a strong protagonist of Anglo-Saxonism – Carlyle saw the Anglo-Saxon “race” as being superior to all others. “Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the first notable Englishman to enunciate a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and, as he told [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, among the members of this select race he counted the Americans.”[2]

Apparently, this sense of kinship, albeit reserved (Americans were seen as formless in their Saxon character), served to solidify whatever affinity he and Emerson shared. Carlyle’s nationalism had some complexity in that it ascribed a role to the Norman invaders of the eleventh century. The Normans added order to the English national structure in Carlyle’s thesis.

Added to his unfortunate – in that they were anti-democratic – views was his antisemitism. He refused to support the extension of the franchise to Jews in 1848. He argued that Jews were two-faced in seeking the vote when their true homeland was Palestine where they should go. Of course, he also expressed common stereotypical attributes to Jews, such as being excessively materialistic and using their wealth to lead to corrupt practices. To varying degrees, his thoughts and biases had their effects on those Americans who extended him credulity.

As for Coleridge, he is most known for his literary masterpieces. The titles, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are well entrenched in the British literary canon. He left readers a timeless instruction that when they are reading literature, to engage in a “suspension of disbelief.” Considered by current biographers as a bipolar person, he suffered from recurring physical challenges which originated with a serious case of rheumatic fever and other diseases as a child.

Unfortunately, during his time he was treated with laudanum which led to a lifelong addiction to opium. All of this, it is believed, set the stage for his constant suffering from anxiety and depression. This fits convincingly with his best-known metaphor, the albatross around the neck featured in the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

He also knew and had an effect on Emerson, the American essayist. Along with many early supporters of the French Revolution who would eventually become a critic of that disruption. Eventually, he became politically a conservative more in the line of thoughts expressed by Edmund Burke. Today, he is credited with influencing John Stuart Mill. His political thinking centered on three themes. They are:

1. “The idea” or function of institutions as opposed to shortcomings being central to how institutions should be judged.[3]

2. Social stability or “Permanence” as Coleridge stated this concern in that what he emphasized was community and national education.[4]

3. British history depicted as organic, natural growth with an emphasis on common law as exemplifying this growth.[5]

In these studies, Coleridge took on an internal – inside the social matrix – vantage point instead of an external, unfamiliar, objective view.[6]

As one can see with these two British writers, Emerson, in America, takes on a central role in the popularization of Romantic sentiments. As in Europe, it was a many-sided belief system and highly individualistic although through various angles. Also mimicking the Romantics from across the ocean, Americans had intense levels of moral excitement, support for individualism, and the promotion for the importance of intuitive thinking or perception. They also adopted that Romantic attraction to nature as a source of goodness while seeing society as the source of corruption.

Within these broader themes, American Romantics sought a bit of freedom from strict religious dogma and practices as it reinvigorated their rebellious spirit from the previous generation. They tended to reject Calvinistic beliefs in predestination and a more liberalized view of what humans’ relationship to God should be.

For example, people could and should have less restrictive religious sanctions put on them. All of this was philosophically in tune with the transcendentalism the last posting reviewed. In that, reason is at least diminished, and intuitiveness enhanced. Also, customs and traditions came under scrutiny as their value was questioned relative to the more modern conditions of those days.

Generally, on the political front, Romanticism encouraged Americans to spur a level of concern for the poor and those considered oppressed. This was further emphasized by expounding ideals supporting freedom – extending to the relief of exploited people – and the promotion of social progress along equalitarian grounds. And here one finds its most pro-federation message. That is, it prized the federalist sense of civic responsibility for fellow-citizens and that was even extended, among many transcendentalists, to the slave population.

Now, this story is ready to focus on Emerson, the topic of the next posting. He was not the ideal Romantic, but he employed many of their assumptions. If he accomplished anything along Romantic lines, he gave definitional substance to individual integrity, a central concern of federation theory.

[1] Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche, with Notes on Other Hero-Worshippers of Modern Times (London, UK: Robert Hale, 1969).

[2] Robert Frankel, Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890-1950 (Studies in American Thought and Culture) (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 54.

[3] Andy Hamilton, “Coleridge, Mill, and Conservatism: Contemplation of an Idea,” in Coleridge and Contemplation, ed. by Peter Cheyne (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 143 (source did not have total pages).

[4] Alan Ryan, J S Mill (London, UK: Routledge, 1974).

[5] Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004).

[6] John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today (London, UK: Routledge, 2006).

#Thomas Carlyle #Samuel Taylor Coleridge #Transcendentalism #Romanticism #civics education #American history #social studies #federation theory

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scrapironflotilla · 4 years

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Anzac is so much more than Gallipoli

Another Anzac day has come around and with the lock-downs and global pandemic it seemed like it would be different. But having a listen to the news or a quick scroll through the other blue hellsite, F*c*b**k, it looks like this Anzac Day is more similar than different. The reverence, the mystique and the myths are all still there, with a massive dose of social media self indulgence. So I’ll probably stay away from that today and instead talk about some history.

I don’t have a favourite aspect of the Anzac legend. I don’t think I even can. The very concept of the Anzac Legend bothers me. This is our recent history. Its members, who have all died, are still within living memory of many millions of people. The events are so well documented that we can follow some of them minute by minute in the diaries, letters and reports created by the participants. I understand the desire to turn these stories into legend and myth, especially in a country like Australia after the war and certainly in the last decades of the 20th century.

I understand how the virtues and values of the AIF made for such fertile imaginative ground in an inter-war world. The romance of war, lost on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, was much harder to destroy far away in the colonies, where people experienced little hardship compared to those on the continent.

I understand how and why the AIF became a legend. But I don’t think I can believe in it.

But what does it matter if I believe in it or not? It’s important to tens of millions of Australians and the government tightly controls public commemoration and the Anzac brand. The military indoctrinates its members with to strive for an unattainable Anzac perfection. A newly minted army officer once told me that during his training his instructors had screamed at these cadets, ranting at them about how unworthy they were, how they could never live up to the Anzac reputation and how they could never lead a digger.

It draws hundreds of thousands every 25 April to dawn memorial services across the world, in events whose gravitas and sombre communion even I can’t deny. It’s this secular religion that makes the legend a reality that we have to contend with. The history may vary widely from the myth, but the myth is potent enough and popular enough to be able to divorce itself from the past. “The AIF”, historian Peter Stanley points out, “has become revered as [our] romantic nationalist mystique”.

The last two or three decades has seen a steady dismantling of the Anzac legend, at least in academic circles. All its basic tenets of natural fighting prowess, mate-ship, equality and the rest have been questioned, criticised and reassessed. But this new understanding hasn’t moved far beyond academia. The short spike in Anzac TV series during the centenary showed the same romantic tragedy and nationalist triumphalism. Popular histories from the 50s and 60s were reprinted and a new slew of books turn up on shelves, from children’s books to all kinds of history and dozens of romance novels. The legend remains deeply entrenched in the Australian imagination. Little in the popular realm even attempts to challenge it in light of new understanding. Even for those in academia the revision of that history has produced harsh reaction from the right, I’m exactly one of those “cadre of academics” associated with those elite, Canberra institutions, that noted crank Bendle talks about there. But that’s the strength of this legend. Its followers take any attempt to examine it and broaden it as denigration. Lest anyone think I’m exaggerating here, just have a look at what happened to ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied after she tweeted the words “LEST.WE.FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine...)” on Anzac Day 2017. She was attacked by the press and government ministers and bombarded with rape and death threats. There’s no doubt much of the faux outrage was inspired by racism and misogyny, but you don’t even need to attack Anzac, but merely recognise that Australia’s history is less than perfect, to be met with a violent, histrionic reaction.

To imagine that the Anzacs were perfect, individually and as a whole, is wilful delusion. They were men and as such fallible. It is no dishonour or disrespect to recognise their humanity in all its complexities. We must know and understand their failures, their embarrassments and their crimes (for they are many and varied) to better place their successes, victories and virtues. To deify them and to force them to represent only what was best, without recognising the fullness of their character, good and bad, robs them of the complexity of their own stories. It robs them of their humanity and us of our history. But while I struggle with the Anzac Legend, I also think there are some little stories that deserve better recognition.

The Anzac mythology upholds a very particular character as representative of the AIF, but little about this legend is uniquely Australian. The language used to express the values, that of the larrikin, the digger and above all else mateship, may be particularly Australian but the values are not. Irreverence and camaraderie are close to universal.

These aren’t values to be denigrated in any way. But they’re representative of most militaries in war. But the AIF did have a character unique to the Australian experience. Much is made of the fact that the AIF was an entirely volunteer organisation. From a population of fewer than five million more than 330,000 men and women served in its ranks between 1914 and 1918. Conscription was put to the people in referenda twice and twice it was defeated. People joined the AIF for the duration of the war. Few pursued careers in the military and although many had prior service it was in the militia, the part time army.

The ranks were filled from the cities, the suburbs and the bush by civilians. Even the officer corps was fleshed out by the professional and middle classes of lawyers, bankers, teachers and the like. These men saw themselves not as regular soldiers, but as civilians in uniform. They saw their role as merely a job, not a calling. They were there to fight the war, to defeat Germany, or the Ottomans, and to go home and back to the farm or the factory.

Australia had one of the strongest trade union and labour movement in the world in the early 20th century. It was the first country to vote a labour government into office and ideas of unionism, collective bargaining and fair work practices were strong in the minds of many working Australians. The language they used and the tactics they employed to deal with the discipline and hierarchy of the military demonstrates just how powerful these beliefs were. Soldiers routinely referred to their officers as their boss, refused orders they thought were unfair and protested their ill treatment by military authorities. They released soldiers imprisoned under field punishment, refused to salute officers and rejected the distinction between officers and other ranks imposed by the British army. They went into clubs, restaurants and hotels set aside of officers, believing strongly that they had the right to drink or eat where they chose.

They took strike action when they felt too much was asked of them, when they were refused rest or when they felt hard done by. When battalions were to be broken up due to lack of replacements in 1918, they mutinied. Refusing orders to disband, they ‘counted out’ senior officers sent to negotiate with them. Counting out consisted of soldiers on parade counting down from ten to one, before shouting a final obscenity at the officer concerned. It was a powerful form of insubordination that humiliated officers when it occurred.

In autumn 1918, after months without leave, Australian battalions took to strike action when they were ordered back into battle. After being promised a fortnight’s rest they were ordered back to the front for an offensive after just a few days. Unhappy troops - veterans, mostly - refused to move. The battalions were well understrength after months of fighting and the men felt they had been lied to, that they had sacrificed enough and that they were being overused. The soldiers took action in the way they knew how. They shot no officers and destroyed no property. For men used to fighting for their rights in the workplace it was natural that they would turn to collective action in trade union style.

(Ex-union organiser and Labor prime minister Billy Hughes, seen here with some of his beloved men. Hughes was a favourite of the Australian troops who dubbed him ‘the Little Digger’)

And so it was in the 15th Brigade, under the command of Harold Elliot. Called Pompey by him men he was a courageous and fatherly figure, both liked and respected by the men under his command. It was his unique character that allowed Pompey to negotiate with his men, although rant and then plead were the words used by diarists, and convince them to follow his orders. Other officers, less well known and less admired by their men failed in similar efforts.

The civilian attitudes made them difficult soldiers to discipline. The standard punishment of the army, called ‘field punishment’ was particularly odious to Australians. Field punishment consisted of being bound to an object, a post or a wagon or gun carriage in the open for a number of hours. Due to the danger of artillery this punishment was not just humiliating but also potentially fatal. Diaries and letters from soldiers are full of stories about field punishment. They usually tell of Australian troops coming across British soldiers undergoing field punishment and freeing them, fighting with guards and military police.

There was a powerful resistance to the dehumanising and anti-individualising aspect of military discipline and authority. The AIF by and large saw themselves as civilians first and soldiers second. They understood the need for discipline and obedience and as more than one Australian noted “we have discipline where it matters”, on the battlefield. But the trappings of military culture and authority were repellent to the Australian working man. Strict obedience to hierarchy and the seemingly pointless requirements of military discipline were not only alien to Australians but went against their own values. Mutual respect was the key to the AIF as most of its officers discovered.

This side of the AIF, the strength of its civilian values is one that ought be remembered and celebrated in Anzac. The ideas from the labour and union movements, the fair go and mutual respect deserve a place alongside mateship and the larrikin as part of Anzac. The men who fought for the eight-hour work day and living wages were the same men who filled the ranks of the AIF and who fill Australian cemeteries in Europe and Turkey.

This is a part of the Anzac story that deserves a better place in our telling of it.

#anzac day #anzac #australian army #wwi #ww1

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astrophysicist-guitar-god · 3 years

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Ranker.com

The Best Singing Drummers

by Adam Tyler, Updated July 22, 2020 - 41.3k votes - 8.1k voters - 155.0k views - 50 items

List Rules: Rank the list based on their singing prowess, not their drumming skills.

Prepare to be impressed by this list of drummers who also sing. These musicians are both notable as capable drummers and as vocalists. Many of them performed in both roles in a single band, including Ringo Starr (who did vocals and drums on The Beatles' "Octopus Garden" and "Yellow Submarine," among others) and Karen Carpenter. Other singing drummers became notable for their vocal skills only after parting ways with their former band, as is the case with Dave Grohl. Initially known primarily as the drummers for iconic grunge band Nirvana, he stepped out from behind the drum kit to serve as the frontman and lead singer for his follow-up project, Foo Fighters.

Drummers are often the least visible, famous members of a large, popular rock band, making the number of great percussionists who have proven themselves to be great singers rather low. (The number dwindled even further on April 19, 2012, when the world lost the legendary Band drummer Levon Helm.) Vote for your favorite drummer/vocalists, and if you can think of any that haven't made the cut, add them at the bottom of the page.

Ranked list.

1. Karen Carpenter

2. Phil Collins

3. Don Henley

4. Dave Grohl

5. Levon Helm

7. Peter Gabriel

8. Ringo Starr

9. Roger Taylor [A different user added this Roger Taylor with the following description: Roger Taylor is an English fiction and non-fiction author. He was born in Heywood, Lancashire, and now lives in the Wirral. He is a chartered civil and structural engineer, a pistol, rifle...-- obviously the wrong Roger Taylor. The same user also added Roger Taylor of DuranDuran, most likely the RT they’d intended to add the first time around. He appears further down the list.]

10. Micky Dolenz

6. Roger Meddows Taylor

Genre: Rock music, Heavy metal & Pop rock; Nationality: United Kingdom. Albums: I Wanna Testify, Surrender, Electric Fire, Fun in Space, Happiness? Roger Meddows Taylor (born 26 July 1949) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, best known as the drummer for the rock band Queen. As a drummer, Taylor was recognised...(Link to Roger’s wikipedia page given here.)

He’s also ranked on the following Ranker.com lists:

#2 of 12 - Every Member of Queen, Ranked Best to Worst

#9 of 50 - The Greatest Rock Songwriters of All Time

#37 of 77 - The Best Metal Drummers of All Time

#108 of 532 - The Best Drummers Of All Time

#138 of 213 - The Best Singers of All Time

#659 of 816 - These Poetic Geniuses Wrote Your Favorite Songs of All Time

#Roger Taylor #my little drummer love #top singing drummers #ranked list #6/50 #Queen #Queen: Academia

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phroyd · 5 years

Link

Vice President Mike Pence was about to finish a routine joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw last week, when he got two astutely specific questions about his meeting the previous day with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

“Number one, did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of [U.S. security assistance] has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?” Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin asked.

Pence answered the first question directly: “Well, on the first question, the answer is no.” His response to the second question was more interesting. He essentially demurred. But to decode the significance of Pence’s reply, it’s important to understand the recent history of Ukraine and U.S. policy toward the country. From there, we can unpack what’s at the bottom of the Trump-Giuliani efforts.

Those efforts yesterday became the focus of a new joint investigation by three House committees – Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight and Reform. In letters to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seeking “any and all” related records and a list of personnel involved, the three Democratic committee chairs outlined a litany of meetings, phone calls, tweets and other threats, including the withholding of the $250 million of security aid the reporter had referenced in the question to Pence.

“President Trump and his personal attorney appear to have increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and its justice system in service of President Trump’s reelection campaign, and the White House and the State Department may be abetting this scheme,” the chairmen wrote.

The Biden “Connection”

The reporter’s questions to Pence struck at the heart of a controversy roiling U.S.-Ukraine relations since even before Zelenskyy’s election win in April. Starting at least late last year, President Donald Trump and his personal attorney and advisor, Rudy Giuliani, have agitated for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden, the current frontrunner in the Democratic presidential race and the candidate they apparently think could be Trump’s biggest rival for a second term.

Trump and Giuliani allege, contrary to evidence, that Biden improperly pressured the Ukrainian government in 2016 to fire then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in the midst of a corruption investigation of one of Ukraine’s biggest gas companies, Burisma Group. Biden’s youngest son, Hunter, was serving on the company’s board at the time.

But the prosecutor, in fact, was the target of pressure by Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and a host of international supporters of Ukraine, who argued he should be fired for failing to pursue major cases of corruption. And it was the widely known and publicly espoused position of the U.S. government, across a half dozen agencies, that the prosecutor’s ouster was among crucial anti-corruption measures that the Ukrainian government needed to take to move forward economically and politically. As President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine, Biden dutifully relayed those messages at every opportunity.

Yet Trump and Giuliani have turned that real-life scenario on its head, falsely alleging that Biden sought to corruptly influence a Ukrainian prosecutor’s decisions in his son’s favor. The Trump camp’s steady volley of tweets, interviews and supportive articles by pro-Trump authors echoes the persistent Republican accusations against Hillary Clinton related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on Benghazi, Libya, when she was Secretary of State.

At the very least, because of the complexity of the issue and the again-distant locale, the hammering on the Bidens’ roles in Ukraine could at least serve up enough disinformation to confuse American voters about what really is true. The anti-Biden campaign may be designed in no small part to make voters believe that, as disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev has said of current-day Russian propaganda, “nothing is true and everything is possible.”

Prosecutors General Ousted in Anti-Corruption Drive

Ukraine’s latest popular uprising in late 2013 and early 2014, called the “Revolution of Dignity” or the “Maidan Revolution” after the square in central Kyiv where protesters set up camp for months, ultimately forced out the corrupt and inept government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s previous political consulting and lobbying work for Yanukovych, an acolyte of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and for Kremlin-connected oligarchs expanded the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia and helped fuel Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Manafort was sentenced in March to 7 ½ years in federal prison for charges unrelated to the election interference but including tax fraud, failing to properly disclose his foreign lobbying work, and obstructing justice by encouraging others to lie to cover his misdeeds.

The 2013-2014 Maidan demonstrations against Yanukovych’s government had been triggered specifically by his decision to renege on an association agreement with the European Union and make a deal with Moscow instead. Ukrainians demanded a European future, not one akin to already-backsliding Russia.

The U.S. government, European leaders and officials of the International Monetary Fund quickly joined Ukrainian reform advocates in pressing the new government of Yanukovych’s successor, Petro Poroshenko, to make sweeping changes, especially in anti-corruption measures. Advocates often referred to the urgency as the country’s “other war” after the military battles it was waging against Russia’s incursions in the east.

But Poroshenko made only slow, reluctant changes that didn’t come close to achieving the kind of clean system of governance and enterprise that Ukraine’s economy needed to attract serious foreign investment.

The most promising anti-corruption development under Poroshenko was the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), an independent agency established at the urging of the United States and the European Union to investigate and prosecute graft. But the bureau’s work was severely hampered by pressure from Poroshenko, his supporters in Parliament, corrupt elements of the security services and the courts, and, most important to the Trump-Giuliani allegations against Joe Biden, from the country’s Prosecutor General.

The Prosecutor General during much of the time Biden was pressing the Ukrainian government to step up anti-corruption efforts was Shokin, appointed by Poroshenko in February 2015.

“Shokin has stood out as the most obvious obstacle to judicial reform,” Swedish economist Anders Åslund of the Atlantic Council wrote in March 2016, when Shokin finally was forced to resign after a vote of no confidence in Parliament. “Most strikingly, Shokin failed to prosecute any single prominent member of the Yanukovych regime. Nor did he prosecute anyone in the current government.”

Shokin has since made comments to journalists that have helped fuel Giuliani’s and Trump’s conspiracy theory about Biden, telling the Washington Post this July that a potential investigation of Burisma and Hunter Biden were “the only motives for organizing my resignation.” Considering the no-confidence vote in Parliament was supported by an overwhelming 289 members, including most of Poroshenko’s party, that seems a far-fetched claim.

In May of this year, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg News that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens. What’s more, another former official, Vitaliy Kasko, said Shokin had opened an investigation of Burisma, but that it was long dormant by the time Biden and the U.S. government pushed for anti-corruption measures in Ukraine, including the ouster of Shokin.

Lutsenko also contradicted a claim by Trump supporters that Lutsenko was investigating Burisma. Lutsenko explained to Bloomberg News that he was conducting an unrelated investigation of a different company involving transactions that occurred months before Hunter Biden even joined Burisma’s board in 2014.

“Biden was definitely not involved,” Lutsenko said. “We do not have any grounds to think that there was any wrongdoing starting from 2014.”

New, Powerful Mandate

With his brand new party sweeping the parliamentary elections in Ukraine this July, Zelenskyy has a powerful-enough electoral mandate to “truly clean out the [Prosecutor] General’s Office in ways that could establish it as a model of jurisprudence and not politics,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst during a July 29 discussion at the Atlantic Council. “He could begin a similar process, though it would be harder, with the courts.”

Overhauling the Prosecutor General’s Office and an economic-crimes unit in the security services, and abolishing immunity from prosecution for members of Parliament, are critical steps to advance Ukraine’s economic growth, said Åslund, the economist, at the same event. “It was wonderful to see all these awful, crooked businessmen now being kicked out of the Parliament, which means that they no longer have immunity. They can be sued, and they can be prosecuted.”

Similar reforms are needed in the gas industry, defense manufacturing and customs. While the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) does an admirable job in its counterintelligence mission against external threats and in the war against Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine, the department that handles economic crimes is “a giant monster,” said Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Adrian Karatnycky. The SBU has 30,000 employees, compared with Britain’s MI-5, which has 4,000, though admittedly not at war, he said.

And Zelenskyy, a former television satirist who played an unexpected president but now is in the position for real, is making quick progress with his party’s unprecedented parliamentary majority.

In a breathtaking move this past week, Parliament voted to take the step that Åslund and so many others had recommended – it stripped itself of immunity from prosecution, meeting a major demand of anti-corruption campaigners. The government is launching a long-awaited anti-corruption court that was established because regular courts are too corrupt or inefficient to handle such cases. Zelenskyy also named respected former Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius to chair the supervisory board of UkrOboronProm, the state-run defense-manufacturing behemoth, and ordered a comprehensive audit of the conglomerate. And Zelenskyy has put in place a new prosecutor general to replace Lutsenko, who himself had been criticized for moving too slowly on anti-corruption investigations.

Enter Team Trump’s Backchannel

Despite such sweeping changes that the United States has urged for so many years, Ukraine’s new, reform-minded government now finds itself getting the cold shoulder from its onetime partner. The Trump-Giuliani campaign against Biden includes hardball tactics that put Ukraine’s new, reform-minded government in a particularly tight spot.

In May, Giuliani — who himself has had business interests in Ukraine – planned a trip to Kyiv to pressure President-elect Zelenskyy to investigate the Bidens’ roles in Ukraine. After a public uproar over the impropriety of a key advisor to Trump seeking a foreign government’s help against a potential election opponent, Giuliani canceled the trip.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Network, which broke the original “Panama Papers” stories, reported that two Soviet-born Florida businessmen Giuliani has publicly identified as his clients, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are “at the center of Giuliani’s back-channel diplomacy.”

“Since late 2018, the men have introduced Giuliani to three current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors to discuss the politically damaging information” about Biden, OCCRP reported with BuzzFeed. “The effort has involved meetings in at least five countries, stretching from Washington, D.C. to the Israeli office of a Ukrainian oligarch accused of a multi-billion-dollar fraud, and to the halls of the French Senate.” (Yes, that’s billion with a b, not million.)

The Ukrainian oligarch is Ihor Kolomoisky, who reportedly is close to Zelenskyy and whose television channel hosted the former comedian’s hit show. Their links and Zelenskyy’s hiring of Kolomoisky’s personal lawyer as head of the new presidential administration is giving anti-corruption advocates pause about Zelenskyy’s intentions in office, but so far the new president has taken promising steps. Furthermore, Kolomoisky told OCCRP that Parnas and Fruman wanted him to help set up a meeting between Zelenskyy and Giuliani, but that he (Kolomoisky) angrily rejected the overture and the implication that he was a go-between for Zelenskyy.

Giuliani also continues to tweet regularly, and recently resumed his pressure on the new Ukrainian government via telephone calls and a meeting with a Zelenskyy aid. He also met in New York in late July with Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, whom he has known since at least 2008 and who is engaged in a power struggle with Zelenskyy over his dual-hatted position in Kyiv. (Voters select the mayor, but Klitschko also has served as head of the city administration, a position appointed by the president. On Sept. 4, Zelenskyy stripped Klitschko of that authority, apparently in a move to restore checks-and-balances in the capital.)

Withholding Aid – Extortion?

Trump is exerting his own pressure from the Oval Office. Despite a July 25 telephone call with Zelenskyy, in which the two heads of state reportedly agreed to a White House visit, no such trip has been scheduled.

And late last month, Trump ordered his administration to review $250 million in U.S. security assistance that helps Ukraine’s military stave off the Russian-backed forces fighting for secession in the country’s east. Politico reported that the aid includes “money for weapons, training, equipment and intelligence support,” and that the U.S. Defense Department continues to support the spending as necessary to keep Russia’s incursions in check. CNN confirmed that “the Pentagon has already recommended to the White House that the hold on military assistance to Ukraine be lifted.” On Sept. 3, Republican senators joined Democrats in a letter calling for the administration to release the funding.

But the previous day, Pence had suggested in his remarks in Warsaw that such a turnabout might be a long way off, suddenly calling on European nations to provide more assistance. It’s an argument that could find receptive ears among American voters long-inclined to question U.S. spending on foreign aid.

“The simple fact is that the United States has carried the load on most of the security investments in Ukraine,” Pence said. “And we have been proud to do that, but we believe it’s time for our European partners to step forward and make additional investments to stand with the people of Ukraine as they assert their territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

With the drama over assistance to Ukraine unfolding alongside Trump and Giuliani’s months-long drumbeat for an investigation into Biden’s role there, the clear impression is that the United States is extorting a partner country for political gain.

Asked directly about such a scenario in Warsaw, Pence didn’t deny it. In fact, his wording could be seen as an implied confirmation.

After answering a simple “no” to the question of whether he and Zelenskyy discussed Biden, Pence continued, almost as a caveat to the denial and with repeated references back to Trump: “But we … discussed America’s support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the president will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail. The president asked me to meet with President Zelenskyy and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas. And we did that.”

“The United States has stood strong with Ukraine and we will continue to stand strong with Ukraine for its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Pence said. “But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”

So, after years of U.S. support to strengthen Ukraine as a potential democratic example in the former Soviet Union, that country finally has a president and a majority of members in Parliament who seem serious about tackling corruption. Is the U.S. president really sending a signal now that he will turn his back on Ukraine because its new leaders refuse an American invitation to corruption?

Phroyd

#volodymyr zelenskyy #trump #biden

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fruitful-blogger · 6 years

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Flipping the Script

Check it out on AO3!

Part Two!

High School is hard enough for a goth kid, but Roman wasn’t one to let it get him down. After all, he had some great friends, including the smartest kid in the school, Patton, the star of the men’s Tennis team and teen heartthrob, Logan, and the most popular prep and student council member, Virgil, at his side.

A High School AU with a twist – based on a Discord Conversation.

Roman Prince was looking over his chipped nail polish with a frown. He had wanted to repaint them the night before, but he had been out of his preferred nail polish for the day – the silver and black combo that would have really brought out today’s outfit. His black and red hair was ever messy as a black leather jacket hung around his arms and shoulders, underneath a black t-shirt with spider-web design across the fabric. His ripped jeans were always on point, and his black convers were polished, if a bit distracting with the blood red shoe laces. His black and red back pack hung over his back as his headphones strung up through his pocket of his jacket to his ears, though he’d muted the music (he didn’t want to talk to anyone, really). While his nails were messy, his eye make-up was always on point, dark wings accentuating his eyes and a thin palour of lipstick to bring out his natural red tones.

Even though he was a goth, a Prince has got to slay – as a dark prince, he thought double of that.

Roman frowned at his cuticle again as he contemplated ditching first period to go to the drug store and get another bottle of his nail polish. It was only the first day, after all, and it was going to be boring anyway…

“I see that look on your face, Princey, and whatever you are thinking, don’t.” Roman snapped up as he looked to the person who had addressed him. The boy before him was dressed like he’d walked out of a fashion magazine – crisp dark jeans nicely ironed, paired with a wine colored polo and purple-tinted suit jacket, all pulled together with his black and purple back pack and his loafers. His hair was messy in a way that seemed effortless even though he’d probably taken an hour this morning to perfect it.

Most people would think that drama goth Roman Prince and Student Council Treasurer Virgil Smythe would NEVER, in a million years, interact – and they would have been right freshman year. The two boys had butted heads so many times that year, as the goth vs preps went, but all it took was the spring play of Aladdin to make them friends. Now that they were Juniors, Virgil was easily one of Roman’s best friends, and the prep would say the same of the goth.

“I don’t know what you are talking about, Peter Prep.” Roman grinned as he pulled out his headphones. “I was just contemplating how BORING the first day would be and…”

“And you can’t skip.” Virgil pointed as he nodded his head. The two began to walk around the school. It was still early in the day, and there were a few students there early with the teachers. Roman really hadn’t any reason to be there, but Virgil had just gotten out of a meeting with the other class reps. “So, the reps are talking already about the themes for Homecoming. It was a long-ass debate even though we aren’t voting on anything for a few weeks. And, man, the freshmen? Those adorable mofos have no idea.”

Roman snorted in response as they rounded the school wall. A faint “THWAP THWAP” was heard now as they approached their destination. “Honestly, those fuckers have no idea. I mean, fuck, remember freshman year? You thought you were the shit.”

“Oh like you’re one to talk, Prince.”

“Careful, Prepington the third, sounds like you’re jelly.” Roman gestured to all of himself. “Although, anyone would love to be me.”

“SUUUURREEE.” Virgil smirked. “So what WERE you planning?”

“Nail polish run.” Roman noted as Virgil lifted an eyebrow. “What?”

“Sorry, I just half expected you to try something like last year.”

“In my defense, this school needs more blacks and reds. It’s so… pastel.” The goth made a face. “ SO overdone. You should put that into the bureaucratic mess we call a student council. More darks, more individuality!”

“Yes, because we need more anarchy.”

“Exactly!”

“Hello!” A third voice cut in.

Virgil and Roman looked up as they reached the small set of bleachers. At one of the top rows, surrounded by several books, was their resident genius and all around nerd, Patton Thompson. Patton had his usual light blue polo on with his pressed pants and simple shoes, a cardigan and matching tie with his outfit to pull the whole nerd look together. The goth and prep jogged up to meet him on the bench. Sure enough, he had a textbook on his lap, AP Biology, and he was already half way through it.

“Hey Pat.” Roman greeted as he added a hug, the smaller nerd returning it even as he scrambled to get his books. “Uhg, what are you doing studying? It’s the first day!”

“But it’s so INTERESTING!” Patton threw as he clutched a book to his chest. “We’re going to be learning about CRISPR soon enough, which would allow us to theoretically hack the human genome and eliminate disease! It does so by using the DNA’s own infrastructure to turn off genes that could potentially be harmful to humans, though there are fears of it causing more harm than good because it can accidentally delete more than just a single base pair.” The boy grinned. “But we won’t get too into that until Christmas.”

“Patton, I was about to have a heart attack.” Virgil sighed as he sat on the bench next to Patton, butting shoulders with the blue boy. “I only read chapter one like Dr. Spencer wanted us to. You had me thinking we were gonna have a test on this tomorrow.”

The nerd smiled back as Roman sat to the other side of Virgil, the opposite of Patton having a pile of books stacked there. “Sorry, you know how I am.”

“And we love you for it.” Roman returned. “Especially because I suck at science and you are my saving grace.”

Patton giggled as Virgil used their height to look out. They were stationed on the bleachers near their school’s tennis courts. While it was technically girls’ season, they weren’t to have practice until after school. Instead, the tennis storage unit was open and in the first court was a male figure, rushing back and forth as a ball dispenser sent out dozens of balls at him. The figure was a blur of navy blue, white, and silver – the school’s colors on a uniform, no doubt – as he expertly returned every shot.

“How long has Roger Feder-Nerd been out here, Smart Cookie?” Roman asked to Patton.

The nerd shrugged. “Logan’s been here longer then I have. I came early to go to the library, and he was already here when I pulled up.”

“Jeez.” Virgil sighed as he stood, cupping his hands to his face. “LOGAN CROFTER PLEASE GET OFF THE COURT!”

The figure paused, looking in their direction even as he deflected a ball. It somehow still went over, though it was no winning shot. “WHEN DID YOU GUYS GET HERE?” He yelled back as he deflected another ball. “WHAT TIME IS IT?”

“TIME TO GET CLEANED UP, LO!” Roman added.

The ball machine seemed to agree as it finally ran out of balls. Logan was sweating but easily jogged around the net to turn it off. Off to the side, a few girls oogled at the school’s star athlete. Logan stopped by his bag to throw his sports glasses in, instead replacing them with a simple wire pair. He dabbed his face with his shirt, causing the females to swoon at his abs.

Roman bit his lips, wanting to badly to tell them off, especially since they had no chance.

Roman and Patton were the only two in the school to now that Logan and Virgil were gay. While the latter two were more out about their sexualities – Roman would fight the man however he could, and Patton had, logically, figured that it was just a part of their brain chemistry and therefore was not a big deal. They didn’t shout it from the rooftops, but, if someone asked, they’d be honest.

Virgil and Logan, on the other hand, had a harder time with it. Logan being the star athlete weighed on him, there being a certain expectation for them. While he himself had figured out his sexuality back in middle school, he hadn’t felt comfortable with anyone to tell them. It was only after freshman year when he’d become part of the group that he came out to them on accident. With an accidental pun (Logan HATED puns, but Patton had lost it).

Virgil was another story. He’d let them know that, at the surface level, his parents were at least a bit homophobic, weather they acknowledged their homophobia or not. It also didn’t help that he was raised in, well, a more upper middle class society, so everyone tended to be more on the conservative side of things. While he knew his parents loved him, he was scared shitless to ever tell them or anyone else. He’d had a break down about it one day, when it was just him and Patton, and he’d finally told someone that he had never felt that way for a girl but he probably had a crush on a guy in their grade. Patton, Roman, and Logan were all supportive of him, though, and he came to them when his internal anxiety just got to be too much.

While the kid seemed mostly together with a pretty ideal life, he was still a ball of anxiety under the surface. He was thankful, though, that he had friends like these to help him out.

Virgil, in fact, was already up and jogging down to the court. He grabbed a second basket that stood nearby and began to help Logan clean, the two chatting. Virgil, like Logan, had grown up playing tennis, but the purple-wearing boy was on the JV team as opposed to varsity. The two had, however, become friends because of tennis and were the only freshman boys on JV all those years back (Logan, had, of course, been bumped to varsity sophomore year).

Roman leaned back in his seat as he heard Patton’s many pens scratch the paper (his notes had a whole color coding system that Roman couldn’t hope to learn). More cars began to pull into the parking lot as the goth took in the day. It was chilly but sunny, and, while he loved his dark room and ambient light, he could appreciate sweater weather.

“Are you two to join us?” Roman cracked an eye as Virgil and Logan approached, Logan with his tennis bag and back pack. Logan had spoken.

“Give me a sec, kiddos!” Patton called as he scrambled to get his books into his backpack. He had so many, though, that there was no way the boy was getting them all into one bag.

Roman stood, cracking his back as he grabbed both his and the abandoned purple bag left by Virgil. “Need help, Padre?”

“Nah, I got it!” The small boy added as he huffed a few books into his arms. “I’ll drop a few at my locker while Lo gets cleaned up.”

“Indeed, I should make my way to the changing room before class.” Logan added as he overheard. The two boys skipped down the steps before all four headed to the school. “Although I need to see the physical therapist again. My wrist is feeling odd the last week.” He noted as he played with his right wrist. “My serve is off by a few degrees.”

“Well, from what I saw, you sure were SERVING up some ACE shots!” Patton giggled as Logan tried to hide a smirk.

“Why am I friends with you?”

“Because you love me?”

“Debatable.”

“Because I make cookies for the tennis bake sale?”

“Ah, yes, there it is.” Logan and Patton shared a snigger at the comment.

Virgil snatched his backpack from Roman as the two followed. “So, a little birdie told me that someone MIGHT try out for the hero this semester…” Virgil grinned to Roman. “What, done playing the villains?”

Roman loved the stage, but he almost always tried out for the villain. He thought they were constantly underrated and pegged as evil when, in retrospect, they would be more morally grey characters. “Well… depends on if the play I want comes to fruition! You see, I think I can convince Larry to let us do Nightmare Before Christmas, and you KNOW I know all the Jack Skellington parts.”

Virgil belted out a laugh. “Really? Because I thought you were just reading off cue cards every time I came over for movie night.”

“Blah blah blah that’s all I hear from you.” He threw with a wave of his hand. The two were left bickering all the way into the school.

It was just the beginning of another year at North Hamilton High.

#Sanders Sides #Roman Sanders #Virgil Sanders #Logan Sanders #Patton Sanders #Flipped Script AU #High School AU #Role Swap AU #Human AU #Discord Chat

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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Having conquered the e-commerce world, Amazon has begun throwing its weight around in politics. Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of some $140 billion, is building a small palace in Washington, D.C., and has increased the money Amazon spends on lobbying fivefold in five years. Local politicians, eager for a piece of Bezos’s largesse, have taken notice. When Amazon announced plans for a second headquarters in some lucky U.S. (or Canadian) city, metropolises across the country offered themselves up, sparking a tax-incentives arms race. The mayor of Kansas City tried to stand out by buying and reviewing 1,000 products on Amazon; the city of Birmingham installed sculpture-size Amazon boxes around town, as well as giant versions of Amazon’s popular Dash buttons, which it has used to send Amazon hundreds of tweets, including this one: “Amazon, we got a 100% match on Bumble. Wanna go on a date?” But while other cities continued to grovel, Amazon found itself engaged in a pitched political battle with its hometown: Seattle.

The issue was a $275-per-employee tax on large employers in the city, passed last month to help alleviate the city’s spiraling homelessness crisis. Seattle, like other cities that have experienced a tech boom, has seen skyrocketing housing and rental prices, driven by the influx of highly paid tech workers. The tax would have targeted businesses making at least $20 million in gross revenue, beginning in January, with the goal of raising some $50 million annually to help keep people off the streets.

This, as it turns out, was a bridge too far for Amazon, Seattle’s biggest employer, which has a market value of some $800 billion. Amazon and other major employers in the city vocally opposed the tax. While Amazon typically stays quiet when it comes to Seattle politics, the company played hardball with the city council, saying that while the council considered the tax, it would temporarily pause construction on a high-rise near its headquarters in protest. “I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by city council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sublease all space in our recently leased Rainier Square building,” Amazon Vice President Drew Herdener told The Seattle Times in May. “Our firm was notified late in the day yesterday to pause the project pending the resolution of the head-tax issue that the city council is currently deliberating, so we are suspending our work immediately on the project based on that direction,” architect Peter Krech at Graphite Design Group, which designed Amazon’s Block 18 tower in downtown Seattle, told the Times, seeming to confirm that whether Amazon was for real or merely playing hardball, it had halted construction. “We remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here,” Amazon's Herdener commented last month after the tax passed. A group of businesses calling themselves the “No Tax on Jobs” campaign began gathering signatures in a bid to put a repeal referendum on the ballot this November.

On Monday, Seattle caved. “It is clear that the ordinance will lead to a prolonged, expensive political fight over the next five months that will do nothing to tackle our urgent housing and homelessness crisis,” Mayor Jenny Durkan and seven city council members said in a statement announcing plans to repeal the tax.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #vanity fair #amazon #jeff bezos #seattle #money in politics #poverty

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Republicans Are Still Running For President

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-still-running-for-president/

What Republicans Are Still Running For President

What Is A Voter

Republican Lawmakers Are Terrified Of Trump Running For President Again

The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which took effect January 1, 2011, created voter-nominated offices. The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act does not apply to candidates running for U.S. President, county central committees, or local offices.

Most of the offices that were previously known as partisan are now known as voter-nominated offices. Voter-nominated offices are state constitutional offices, state legislative offices, and U.S. congressional offices. The only partisan offices now are the offices of U.S. President and county central committee.

Withdrew Before The Primaries

The following individuals participated in at least one authorized presidential debate but withdrew from the race before the Iowa caucuses on February 1, 2016. They are listed in order of exit, starting with the most recent.

Name

The following notable individuals filed as candidates with FEC by November 2015.

Name

Additionally, Peter Messina was on the ballot in Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Idaho.Tim Cook was on the ballot in Louisiana, New Hampshire and Arizona. Walter Iwachiw was on the ballot in Florida and New Hampshire.

Death Threats And Conspiracy Theories: Why 2020 Won’t End For Election Officials

Kelley said members of his staff have been followed and videotaped while picking up ballots from drop boxes in recent weeks.

“I’ve been doing this almost 18 years, and I would say the end of ’19 leading into ’20 and then all the way up to today has been the most stressful period of my career,” Kelley said.

Up until now, the fraud claims have been mostly isolated to national campaigns and the occasional statewide race.

But Jamie Shew, who oversees elections in Douglas County, Kan., said he worries the tactic could trickle down to local races, where margins are often extremely thin.

“Even in candidates were going to ‘there was fraud’ rather than it was a bad campaign,” Shew said. But “2020 took it to a whole new level. And I don’t think that’s going to go away.”

In Douglas County last year, for instance, a County Commission race was decided by just three votes. Both candidates running accepted the results after a hand recount, but Shew said he worries next time, they might not be so lucky.