#the one thing they do right is that a “New California Republic” exists by the time a century has passed since the Great War | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bopinion · 2 years

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2022 / 32

Aperçu of the Week:

"There are things I don't even talk about with myself."

(Konrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany)

Bad News of the Week:

The hunger crisis is currently overshadowed by many other crises. Yet it is worse than ever. One in ten people on this planet suffers from insufficient nutrition, according to the latest UN food report. However, 3.1 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet anyway - they are happy having something to eat at all. Children are the worst off: In 2020, more than one-fifth of all young children were documented to have growth disorders as a result of malnutrition. That was before the start of the current crisis apocalypse. Right now, 15,000 girls and boys die - every day!

According to the former German Minister of Development Gerd Müller a scandal. Because it costs just 50 cents a day to feed a refugee child in Africa or Yemen. But "no one gets fed by talking." Specifically, Müller proposes a UN emergency aid fund. Because international research results show: With about 40 billion euros extra per year, hunger can be defeated by 2030 - that was actually the goal of the United Nations. And that's just about as much as Elon Musk wanted to spend on Twitter. Or almost as much as the world's largest oil producer, Saudi Aramco, made profit in 2021.

So it can't be the amount. It's the lack of will on the part of the decision-makers. Stupidly, no child's life saved in the third world has an impact on the stock market price. Or on the next election forecast. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.

Good News of the Week:

"The lie as a business model" headlines an article in the Tagesschau last week about the bizarre workings of Infowars founder Alex Jones. Who has demonstrably already cost human lives with his wild conspiracy theories. For example, in 2016, a young man grabbed a gun in a Washington DC pizzeria and started shooting. Why? Because he believes that in the basement of the pizzeria children are being kept as sex slaves under the control of Hillary Clinton. "Pizzagate" was a hit on the charts of Fake news and hate speech that was and is spread by Alex Jones.

For him, 9/11 had been a kind of awakening to what the Deep State and especially the Democrats were capable of - because "with 98 percent probability" it was a "government-controlled bombing of the World Trade Center." From there on, Jones got rich. With his "info channel" and plenty of tawdry merchandise ranging from inflammatory writings to dubious vitamin pills. And it went blow by blow: Global warming is a hoax made up by the World Bank to control the world economy through a carbon tax. Michele Obama is transgender and there are so many gays because they would be affected by chemicals in the water to not be able to have children. Al-Qaeda is funded by George Soros. Elites are working worldwide to overthrow societies to install dictatorships, vulgo the "New Global World Order". Hurricane Irma was "geo-engineered" and the droughts in California would not exist. Barack Obama created the terrorist organization "Islamic State." Corona vaccines don't work. And so on.

But his top theme in different variations is always: U.S. Democrats stage attacks to declare martial law and then establish a dictature. After all, the Boston Marathon bombing had to have been faked by the FBI. The Robb Elementary School shooting was staged too. So it is only logical that Jones also claimed that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School never took place. But in doing so, he apparently miscalculated. Because brave parents were tired of being terrorized by Jones supporters after the tragic loss of their child, they should stop lying about ever having had a six-year-old son. And moved to court.

And that did its job. The jury in Texas (!) sentenced Alex Jones to $4 million in compensatory penalty - and another $45 million in "punitive damages." This is the first time Jones has been held liable for his personal info war. More important than the payments for pain and suffering, however, is the clear signal sent by this verdict: False claims about real people cause real damage. For which one will be held accountable. Pay attention, Tucker Carlson: you may be next!

Personal happy moment of the week:

I work almost exclusively in my home office. Which is good. Against Corona, against the obligation to wear pants and against lost time on the way to the office. But once a week I am in the office to meet colleagues and to focus all personal meetings on this day. And it's always Monday. Usually we say goodbye then with "See you next Monday!". But this week a colleague asked me, "Are you coming next week on Tuesday then, or not at all?". I must have looked at him questioningly, because he added: "Because Monday is a holiday...". I had completely overlooked that. This may be due to the fact that "Assumption day" is not a public holiday everywhere. But only in communities with a predominantly Catholic population. Which is the case in Munich. And who am I, would I not observe a law? Or risk my salvation? So I'm going to sleep in this Monday. And over the first coffee, think of the colleagues at other locations who don't have that day off. And of the colleague who reminded me just in time. Thank you, Patrick!

I couldn't care less...

...that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder survived a expulsion process from his Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) because he could not be proven to have "violated the party's statutes." Either way, with his clinging to buddy Vladimir Putin, whom he had once called a "flawless democrat" in office, he has disqualified himself as an elder statesman. And with the lucrative supervisory board positions at Nord Stream and Rosneft, which he owes to Vlad, he has trampled on the ideals of Willy Brandt - whose "new East politics" against the Hallstein Doctrine laid the foundation for a cold war that never got hot. Whether you have a party card or not: Gerd, you're out!

As I write this...

...I am sitting on the train to Augsburg. Germany's second oldest city - yes, it was formally founded by Roman emperor Augustus - just an hour away from Munich. My wife and I benefit from the "9-Euro-Ticket" (for a whole month of public transport, unfortunately the last time this month) and will spend a nice day with culture and sightseeing. And at an excellent burger joint, where I have already reserved a table last week to be on the safe side. Nice.

Post Scriptum:

Leaving the comfort zone. What used to be considered an art to jumping over one's own shadow, will become a duty. That's what Klaus Müller, as head of the Federal Network Agency the master of gas distribution in Germany, tells us. Who will not have enough to distribute in the coming winter. Without 20% savings in private households, it won't work. Since the alternative would be a huge loss of jobs and prosperity if industries had to shut down for lack of gas. I sincerely hope that insight and goodwill will be enough to overcome this bottleneck. And that in the process, everyone becomes a little more thoughtful about what kind of comfort really justifies what kind of dependency.

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statetalks · 3 years

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Were Democrats Or Republicans For Slavery

Presidency Of Martin Van Buren

Democrats Responsible for Slavery, Republican Party for Abolition.mp4

The Presidency of Martin Van Buren was hobbled by a long economic depression called the Panic of 1837. The presidency promoted hard money based on gold and silver, an independent federal treasury, a reduced role for the government in the economy, and a liberal policy for the sale of public lands to encourage settlement; they opposed high tariffs to encourage industry. The Jackson policies were kept, such as Indian removal and the Trail of Tears. Van Buren personally disliked slavery but he kept the slaveholder’s rights intact. Nevertheless, he was distrusted across the South.

The 1840 Democratic convention was the first at which the party adopted a platform. Delegates reaffirmed their belief that the Constitution was the primary guide for each state’s political affairs. To them, this meant that all roles of the federal government not specifically defined fell to each respective state government, including such responsibilities as debt created by local projects. Decentralized power and states’ rights pervaded each and every resolution adopted at the convention, including those on slavery, taxes, and the possibility of a central bank. Regarding slavery, the Convention adopted the following resolution:

What Happened In 1969

The war in Vietnam came to a head. The democrats under Kennedy had gotten us into the war and then after Kennedy was killed President Johnson continued and grew our presence in Vietnam.

Peoples opposition to the war became the focus of the democrat party and the emotional democrats became the protagonists for eliminating the policies that kept blacks in the back of the bus as well as free love and marijuana.

I was young at the time and this is the Democratic Party i remember which were opposed to real things. There was a war in vietnam. People were dying. There was segregation.

Republicans didnt resist outlawing segregation. The resistance was focused on the remaining segregationists in the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond a democrat from the south fillibustered the passage of the civil rights act.

In 1968 the democrats held a national convention. This convention devolved into riots and was the watershed for racism and the Democratic Party. The racists were ejected from the Democratic Party ostensibly.

Democrats today claim that in 1969 what happened is that the racists in the Democratic Party moved to the Republican Party.

There is no evidence of this. Storm Thurmond, Robert Byrd never switched parties. Robert Byrd a former KKK leader stayed a democrat until he retired from the senate in 2010. Biden called Byrd a mentor.

Biden was one of the most outspoken opponents of busing.

None of that is true.

If you arent a democrat then they dont want you in the identity group.

After The Civil War Democrats Continued To Fight Against Equality For Blacks

For 100 years the democrats staged a rear guard action seeking to keep blacks subservient and doing their bidding.

They passed laws to limit black peoples ability to vote, to sit on the front of the bus, to own land, to rent apartments, to go to the same schools and many other things.

If anyone owes black people reparations it is these democrats.

Given this history of democrats it is stunning that the Democratic Party continues to exist. Shouldnt it be disbanded? We are tearing down statues, removing names of historically racist people and institutions so why not destroy the Democratic Party? It is slavery and was the principal advocate of slavery. They also were heavily involved in passing racist laws, hanging blacks and many republicans who opposed the democrats.

Why would anyone want to be part of a party that was historically so critical and central to the whole effort to enslave and repress blacks?

People have a tendency not to be partisan and to label this as white Americans that did this but it was the Democrats. Republicans were the ones fighting it. If not for those republicans the black people in America would never have been freed or gotten voting rights or many other things that had to be fought. Many white republicans were killed by democrats even after the end of the civil war who were called sympathizers.

Again, why doesnt this basic fact that is indisputable matter?

Those blacks who could vote between 1860 and 1969 voted for republicans.

Recommended Reading: How Many Registered Democrats And Republicans Are There

Political Firsts For Women And Minorities

From its inception in 1854 to 1964, when Senate Republicans pushed hard for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against a filibuster by Senate Democrats, the GOP had a reputation for supporting blacks and minorities. In 1869, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wyoming Territory and its Republican governor John Allen Campbell made it the first jurisdiction to grant voting rights to women. In 1875, California swore in the first Hispanic governor, Republican Romualdo Pacheco. In 1916, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman in Congressand indeed the first woman in any high level government position. In 1928, New Mexico elected the first Hispanic U.S. Senator, Republican . In 1898, the first Jewish U.S. Senator elected from outside of the former Confederacy was Republican Joseph Simon of Oregon. In 1924, the first Jewish woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives was Republican Florence Kahn of California. In 1928, the Republican U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Charles Curtis of Kansas, who grew up on the Kaw Indian reservation, became the first person of significant non-European ancestry to be elected to national office, as Vice President of the United States for Herbert Hoover.

A New Political Party

After passing all these pro-slavery laws, in May 1854, a number of anti-slavery members in Congress formed a new political party to fight slavery. These anti-slavery members were from the Whigs, Free Soil advocates and Emancipationists. They wanted to gain equal rights for black Americans.

The name of that party? They called it the Republican Party. They chose this name because they wanted to return to the principles of freedom and equality. These are the principles first put forth in the documents of the republic before the pro-slavery Congressional members had misused and manipulated to their own purposes those original principles.

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The New Deal Era: 19321939

After Roosevelt took office in 1933, New Deal legislation sailed through Congress at lightning speed. In the 1934 midterm elections, ten Republican senators went down to defeat, leaving them with only 25 against 71 Democrats. The House of Representatives was also split in a similar ratio. The “Second New Deal” was heavily criticized by the Republicans in Congress, who likened it to class warfare and socialism. The volume of legislation, as well as the inability of the Republicans to block it, soon made the opposition to Roosevelt develop into bitterness and sometimes hatred for “that man in the White House. Former President Hoover became a leading orator crusading against the New Deal, hoping unrealistically to be nominated again for president.

Most major newspaper publishers favored Republican moderate Alf Landon for president. In the nation’s 15 largest cities the newspapers that editorially endorsed Landon represented 70% of the circulation. Roosevelt won 69% of the actual voters in those cities by ignoring the press and using the radio to reach voters directly.

Roosevelt carried 46 of the 48 states thanks to traditional Democrats along with newly energized labor unions, city machines and the Works Progress Administration. The realignment creating the Fifth Party System was firmly in place. Since 1928, the GOP had lost 178 House seats, 40 Senate seats and 19 governorships, though it retained a mere 89 seats in the House and 16 in the Senate.

Southernization; Oh That Sounds Fun Wait It Isnt

From the 1960s to the 2000s a southernization of the Republican party occurs. Paired with Goldwater and;Hoover states rights conservatism and along;with old Anti-Communist ideology, it was enough to completely change the political parties.

From the late 1800s to the 2000s Republican progressives moved toward the Democratic Party and Southern Conservatives moved toward the Republican party. See;the New Deal Coalition and Conservative Coalition.

The grand result is that the David Dukes of the world today fly the Confederate Battle flag and vote Republican.

This story;is a major reason why the voter map looks the way it does.

Meanwhile, while we can still see Gores and Clintons, and sometimes even a Byrd, in the modern Democratic party, those Redeemer and Redeemed liberals made a conscious choice to ally with the dominate Progressive and Neoliberal factions in this cycle.

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What Does Republican Mean

The word republicanmeans of, relating to, or of the nature of a republic. Similarly to the word democratic, the word republican also describes things that resemble or involve a particular form of government, in this case the government in question is a republic. A republic is a government system in which power rests with voting citizens who directly or indirectly choose representatives to exercise political power on their behalf.;

You may have noticed that a republic sounds a lot like a democracy. As it happens, most of the present-day democracies are also republics. However, not every republic is democratic and not every democratic country is a republic.

For example, the historical city-state of Venice had a leader known as a doge who was elected by voters. In the case of Venice, though, the voters were a small council of wealthy traders, and the doge held his position for life. Venice and other similar mercantile city-states had republican governments, but as you can see, they were definitely not democratic. At the same time, the United Kingdom is a democratic country that has a monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, and so it is not a republican country because it is not officially a republic.;

Slavery And The Emergence Of The Bipartisan System

Civil Rights and Slavery – Republican and Democrat Parties – Prager University

From 1828 to 1856 the Democrats won all but two presidential elections . During the 1840s and 50s, however, the Democratic Party, as it officially named itself in 1844, suffered serious internal strains over the issue of extending slavery to the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, wanted to allow slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, proposed that each territory should decide the question for itself through referendum. The issue split the Democrats at their 1860 presidential convention, where Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrats nominated Douglas. The 1860 election also included John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, and Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the newly established antislavery Republican Party . With the Democrats hopelessly split, Lincoln was elected president with only about 40 percent of the national vote; in contrast, Douglas and Breckinridge won 29 percent and 18 percent of the vote, respectively.

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On This Day The Republican Party Names Its First Candidates

On July 6, 1854, disgruntled voters in a new political party named its first candidates to contest the Democrats over the issue of slavery. Within six and one-half years, the newly christened Republican Party would control the White House and Congress as the Civil War began.

For a brief time in the decade before the Civil War, the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and his descendants enjoyed a period of one-party rule. The Democrats had battled the Whigs for power since 1836 and lost the presidency in 1848 to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. After Taylor died in office in 1850, it took only a few short years for the Whig Party to collapse dramatically.

There are at least three dates recognized in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, built from the ruins of the Whigs. The first is February 24, 1854, when a small group met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to discuss its opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The group called themselves Republicans in reference to Thomas Jeffersons Republican faction in the American republics early days. Another meeting was held on March 20, 1854, also in Ripon, where 53 people formally recognized the movement within Wisconsin.

On July 6, 1854, a much-bigger meeting in Jackson, Michigan was attended by about 10,000 people and is considered by many as the official start of the organized Republican Party. By the end of the gathering, the Republicans had compiled a full slate of candidates to run in Michigans elections.

Culture Conflict And Al Smith

At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, a resolution denouncing the Ku Klux Klan was introduced by Catholic and liberal forces allied with Al Smith and Oscar W. Underwood in order to embarrass the front-runner, William Gibbs McAdoo. After much debate, the resolution failed by a single vote. The KKK faded away soon after, but the deep split in the party over cultural issues, especially prohibition, facilitated Republican landslides in 1924 and 1928. However, Al Smith did build a strong Catholic base in the big cities in 1928 and Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s election as Governor of New York that year brought a new leader to center stage.

the myth of the Democratic Party masterfully re-created, a fresh awareness of the elemental differences between the parties, and ideology with which they might make sense of the two often senseless conflicts of the present, and a feeling for the importance of dynamic leadership. The book was a mirror for Democrats.

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Presidency Of Andrew Jackson

The spirit of Jacksonian democracy animated the party from the early 1830s to the 1850s, shaping the Second Party System, with the Whig Party as the main opposition. After the disappearance of the Federalists after 1815 and the Era of Good Feelings , there was a hiatus of weakly organized personal factions until about 18281832, when the modern Democratic Party emerged along with its rival, the Whigs. The new Democratic Party became a coalition of farmers, city-dwelling laborers and Irish Catholics. Both parties worked hard to build grassroots organizations and maximize the turnout of voters, which often reached 80 percent or 90 percent of eligible voters. Both parties used patronage extensively to finance their operations, which included emerging big city political machines as well as national networks of newspapers.

Behind the party platforms, acceptance speeches of candidates, editorials, pamphlets and stump speeches, there was a widespread consensus of political values among Democrats. As Mary Beth Norton explains:

The party was weakest in New England, but strong everywhere else and won most national elections thanks to strength in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the American frontier. Democrats opposed elites and aristocrats, the Bank of the United States and the whiggish modernizing programs that would build up industry at the expense of the yeoman or independent small farmer.

Why It Doesnt Make Sense To Equate Modern Democrats With The Old Southern Democrats

The Democrats, formally the;anti-Federalists,;had an;aversion to aristocracy from the late 1700s to the progressive era.

That truism;led to the southern conservatives of the solid south like;John C. Calhoun and small government liberals like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren allying;in the same party;for most of U.S. history.

However,;that changed;after Civil Rights under LBJ and the rise of Goldwater States Rights Republicans .

Today the solid south, and figures like Jeff Sessions, are in an alliance in the big tent of the Republican Party . This was as much a response to the growing progressiveness of the Democratic Party as anything.

One simple way to confirm this is to look at the factions of;Lincolns time. There were four. They;were:

The Northern liberal Whig/Republicans, The;Nativist Know-Nothing; allies of the Whig/Republicans, The Southern Democrats and their Northern allies , and The;Free Soil;;allies of the Democrats who;took a libertarian like position.

Todays Democrats are more like socially liberal Whig/Republicans , libertarians are like Free Soilers , Trumpians are like Nativist Know-Nothings , and Southern Democrats are like the modern Southern conservative Republicans.

The current parties are thus:

Social Liberals and Neoliberals vs. Social Conservatives and Neoliberal Conservatives AKA Neocons .

Clearly, the country has never been fully polarized, even at its most polarized.

Also Check: Do Republicans Want To Impeach Trump

The Second Bush Era: 20002008

George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, won the 2000 Republican presidential nomination over Arizona Senator John McCain, former Senator Elizabeth Dole and others. With his highly controversial and exceedingly narrow victory in the 2000 election against the Vice President Al Gore, the Republican Party gained control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952. However, it lost control of the Senate when Vermont Senator James Jeffords left the Republican Party to become an independent in 2001 and caucused with the Democrats.

In the wake of the on the United States in 2001, Bush gained widespread political support as he pursued the War on Terrorism that included the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. In March 2003, Bush ordered for an invasion of Iraq because of breakdown of United Nations sanctions and intelligence indicating programs to rebuild or develop new weapons of mass destruction. Bush had near-unanimous Republican support in Congress plus support from many Democratic leaders.

Bush failed to win conservative approval for Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, replacing her with Samuel Alito, whom the Senate confirmed in January 2006. Bush and McCain secured additional tax cuts and blocked moves to raise taxes. Through 2006, they strongly defended his policy in Iraq, saying the Coalition was winning. They secured the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/were-democrats-or-republicans-for-slavery/

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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The clashes in Charlottesville catalyzed the American public’s reckoning with the budding white nationalist movement, which had accelerated after Donald Trump’s election. Afterward, the wave of public shaming of the violence in Charlottesville led at least one “Unite the Right” marcher to insist his participation in the rally was misinterpreted as racist. Others who attended quickly lost their jobs after online campaigns exposed them.

But the eventual identification of the man in the white tank top and red hat shook many: He was revealed to be a 33-year-old Puerto Rican resident of Georgia, originally from the Bronx. “I’m the only brown Klans member I ever met,” Alex Michael Ramos joked in a Facebook Live video before he turned himself into police Aug. 28. The Facebook post has since been taken down.

But Ramos wasn’t the only “Unite the Right” marcher with a Hispanic background.

Christopher Rey Monzon, a 22-year-old Cuban-American, is associated with the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a neo-Confederate hate group. Monzon was arrested weeks after Charlottesville for charging at protesters in a separate Florida demonstration. And Nick Fuentes, a 19-year-old student who hosts an alt-right podcast called America First, said he had to leave Boston University in the aftermath of the Charlottesville protests after receiving death threats over his participation.

The presence of these Latino men at the largest white nationalist event in recent memory underscores the complicated racial position of Latinos in the United States. Latino white supremacy, it turns out, might not be a contradiction in terms.

Increasingly, Latinos are identifying racially as white. In fact, more than half did so in the 2010 U.S. Census. A March 2016 report from Pew Research Center found that 39% of Afro-Latinos also identified “as white alone or white in combination with another race.” With a current population of around 58 million, Latinos make up the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., just behind whites.

Another Pew Research Center study from December found that 59% of U.S. adults with Latino heritage who identify as white believe others see them as white, too. Over time, the study found, descendants of Latino immigrants stop identifying with their countries of origin and consider themselves more and more American.

Fuentes — who says he’s about 25% Mexican — identifies as white, not Latino. In an interview with Mic, Fuentes also said he believes multiculturalism threatens white national identity. Monzon, meanwhile, has called for South Florida to secede from the U.S. His ties to the League of the South are generational, as his parents have also protested with the white supremacist fringe group, according to the SPLC. In a Facebook profile the SPLC has attributed to him, Monzon goes by “Ambrosio Gonzalez,” the name of a Cuban general who fought as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War.

Ramos, however, rejects any notion that he’s racist, insisting he went to Charlottesville in defense of free speech and as a show of force against left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

During the nearly hourlong video Ramos posted to Facebook, he became agitated at users who challenged him for marching with the KKK and jumping a black man.

“Yeah, I stood side-by-side with racist people, but they weren’t racist to me,” Ramos said. “They did not call me a ‘spic,’ they did not call me a ‘fucking wetback,’ they didn’t say nothing as such. We stood for the same common goal.”

Alex Michael Ramos has been charged in connection with the beating of a black man during violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the “Unite the Right” rally Aug. 12.

Uncredited/AP

Despite his stated goals, the brutal violence in the video from that day was enough for judges in Charlottesville to twice deny Ramos bond.

“The victim was defenseless,” Judge Richard Moore of the Charlottesville General District Court said at Ramos’ bail hearing in November. “Mr. Ramos rushes into something where people are pummeling Mr. Harris. He is an unreasonable risk to others.”

Ramos is facing a malicious wounding charge and could spend up to 20 years in prison if convicted, according to local station WVIR-TV. Through his attorney, Ramos declined to be interviewed.

Other alleged perpetrators include Daniel Patrick Borden of Ohio, who was identified online and arrested in connection to Harris’ attack. Like Ramos, he was also denied bond. Authorities arrested another suspect, Arkansas man Jacob Scott Goodwin, in October and extradited him to Charlottesville the following month.

Harris himself was later forced to turn himself in when Harold Ray Crews, an attorney and resident of Walkertown, North Carolina — and the state’s chairman for League of the South — claimed Harris injured him in the same scuffle. Though Harris’ felony charge for unlawful wounding was dropped in December, “there are still misdemeanor charges pending,” according to the Root.

Fuentes is, in many ways, representative of the ideas of the so-called alt-right, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as a “loose network of racists and anti-Semites.” His Twitter feed shows equal disdain for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the South Side of Chicago, which has seen a sharp increase in gang-related murders in recent years. Though he decried Heyer’s murder at the “Unite the Right” rally during his interview with Mic, he also equated it with antifa violence.

Fuentes did acknowledge there isn’t much reconciliation between his stance on multiculturalism — simply put, it’s bad and should be avoided — and his own cultural background: His Mexican ancestors immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Intermarriage has created a “beige, rootless mass,” he said, and he rejects any notion that Latino immigrants can assimilate.

“I don’t buy the idea that if you come to a country and your kids learned the language, you’re from that country,” Fuentes said. “You have to understand that America is an exceptional nation; it’s the proposition nation. That’s why the identity question is so big here. America was obviously settled only very recently. If I moved to China and I filled out the paperwork, would that make me Chinese? Of course not. I would maybe be a part of the People’s Republic.”

“They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

Fuentes’s own standard — that learning English and settling in the U.S. does not make you American — disenfranchises himself and his parents, a fact he acknowledged. From the perspective of someone who sees the U.S. as a foundationally European nation, as Fuentes does, being anything less than white is the same as being a nonentity.

“You rob children of something very fundamental when you take away a common and coherent identity,” he said. “I look at my Eastern European people from high school and they have their food and their special clothing from their home country. But when you have race mixing, you rob them. I do pause at that. This is not an experience I wish to replicate. I don’t know if I wish I could turn back the clock and change things, but ideally there wouldn’t be mixing.”

Joanna Mendelson, senior investigative researcher and director of special projects for the ADL, sees growing anti-immigrant views from the descendants of Latino immigrants as a unique conundrum.

“It’s this idea that, ‘we did it right, we did it legally,’” Mendelson said in an interview with Mic. “They’re not just addressing illegal immigration — which would be one thing — but they’re against refugees and Muslims and legal immigration. They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

On Aug. 20, days after the Charlottesville protests, Juan Cadavid, a Colombian-born Californian who now goes by the name Johnny Benitez, led an “America First!” rally in Southern California he described as a vigil for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Dozens of supporters were drowned out by nearly 2,500 counterprotesters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In an interview with NPR in December, Benitez shared how he went from Occupy Wall Street protester and Bernie Sanders supporter to alt-right nationalist, claiming he was exiled from Occupy and called a bigot after he questioned the need for the group to support transgender people. He insisted he was not a white supremacist, but an advocate for what he called “white identity politics” — which includes embracing the 14 Words slogan used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Benitez also told NPR he pushes for a United States that is “Italo-Spanish” white, to make room for the descendants of southern Europeans (which he considers himself to be). White nationalists such as Richard Spencer have said white Latinos could theoretically be part of a white ethno-nationalist state, but they still have mixed feelings about assimilation.

“In some instances you are rejected from the host culture, made to feel not American,” Benitez said of being an immigrant in the U.S. “And if I go back, I’m definitely not Colombian. You know, I didn’t live there, you can hear that I have an American accent, things like that, when I speak Spanish.”

Benitez’s girlfriend, Irma Hinojosa, cohosts The Right View, a YouTube talk show hosted with four other women who call themselves the “Deplorable Latinas.” The show features conservative Latinas commenting on the news from a point of view that conversation about Latinos and immigration focuses on the undocumented versus those who entered the country legally. Hinojosa also has her own YouTube channel where she livestreams protests and alt-right events. She was the only woman to speak at a June “Freedom of Speech” rally featuring Spencer and other alt-right figures.

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 4 years

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just for the fuck of it!

in real life i hate ted talks, i don’t think they’re generally good scientific communication and they appeal to a narrow spectrum of white moderate liberals with liberal arts degrees, generally. the format makes me teeth hurt.

but I WILL ramble on about a topic of my choice, thank you, even though that’s just a regular fuckin’ day here on girlfriendsofthegalaxy dot tumblr dot com.

For someone who only sort of cares about her personal wardrobe, I sure do spend a lot of time thinking about fabric. I also spend a lot of time thinking about Fallout: New Vegas, so let’s combine the two.

Where the fuck are people getting their clothes, and how are they making them? The game specifically points out the outfits that are pre-War, although if those are surviving garments or new garments made in a pre-War style is not discussed. From that, I’m assuming that mostif not all clothing regular NPCs wear on the street is of post-War manufacture.

So, how the fuck are people making clothes? From what? Using what methods?

The sheer variety of clothing available points to small mechanical looms and sewing machines. Sewing machines are fairly simple machines and I’m convinced there’s a mix of surviving pre-War and post-War manufactured ones kicking around. They’ve also got a makeshift power grid, which means a decent wire-making setup, which means metal needles. Bone needles are probably more common among hand/home sewers.

Shoes are actually fairly easy- the game is lousy with giant geckos, from which you can slap onto leather and metal armor to create gecko-backed armor, which provides additional types of damage resistance. There’s a very cute poster in a fanzine about gecko hide boots. I have lifted this concept wholesale for my own fic, bc everyone walks everywhere and everyone needs good boots. Most boots in-game appear hobnailed or have some sort of traction on the bottom. I don’t think shoe leather is a problem in New Vegas, although more specialized shoes like waders and sneakers are probably much harder, since there’s no petroleum rubber (a main plot point of FO2 is that there’s very little oil and gas left) and rubber trees can only grow outside if they’re in zones 10-11, which is a chunk of California that got whacked pretty hard by the bombs. Is it possible that someone in New California has bioengineered isoprene and now they’ve got vast stocks of non-petroleum synthetic rubber? Maybe? Doesn’t really fit with the tech we see in-game. The shoe rubber we see can’t all possibly be repurposed tires.

Wool is harder but if we squint we can make it fit into existing lore without a ton of problems. The in-game large domestic meat animal, the bighorner, is a hair sheep not a wool sheep. Animal hair is useful for other things, but it’s hard to make yarn out of. There are probably fluffier breeds in higher not-desert altitudes. So we’ve got socks now, winter wear, and good blankets, and felt for hats. Various flavors of looms have existed long before the Industrial Revolution and I don’t see why they’re not in-game, or why weaving mills don’t exist in the Mojave. Knitting needles and crochet hooks are just fancy sticks, you can whittle them with a minimum of fuss.

Linen is also a little wibbly lore-wise but sort of fits- there are no flax fields in-game but flax is a very tolerant plant, so I could see regions outside the Mojave successfully growing it.

A surprising number of people wear jeans. Where the fuck is everyone getting jeans from? Cotton is not a staple crop in California today. Post-War California certainly don’t have the manpower or infrastructure for massive fields of cotton or the required processing, everyone’s a truck farmer or a Brahmin herder, to the point the NCR’s army is having extreme difficulty getting food for its troops. Is there some massive pre-War stock everyone’s been pulling from for two hundred years? Interestingly, the Legion’s armor is mostly football armor, so this does point to them having a pre-War warehouse full of the stuff somewhere.

The Brotherhood of Steel have really uniform uniforms, if that makes any sense, with less variation than the New California Republic’s standing army in (hemp?) canvas. They don’t have the tech to make new suits of power armor, although I can’t quote that bc I can’t find it again and I have no memory of where I heard it. @morrak is convinced they have the technology to make rayon (invented in the 1890s in our timeline), and I agree bc it’s a finicky multi-step process with lots of drying and waiting time and they’re all nerds stuck in a bunker although I do NOT know where they’re getting the cellulose they are in a desert and wood is at a premium.

The Raiders’ armor is mostly rags and spikes and sandals made out of old tires, which is also interesting and more of a scavenged Mad Max 2&3 vibe than the other factions, which fits their whole schtick.

This is many words and I’m reaching the end of my own attention span, I’m sure I have another couple thousand words in me about this but these are the thoughts I am dumping out of my head right now. I haven’t said a single thing about dyes and patterns and prints, for example.

#ain't that a kick in the head #ty!!!#i've probably yelled about at least some of this before #but my brain is a sieve #shiny-good-rock

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tvdas · 3 years

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Political Scientist Claes Ryn in The American Conservative

The Declaration of Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia on the possibility and the certainty of fraud. Caught with Their Hands in the Cookie Jar, by Jeremy Carl The New York Times on Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election https://www.regent.edu/misc/analyzing-american-election-integrity/ https://letsfixstuff.org/2021/10/how-the-2020-election-was-stolen/ Other sources are mentioned in this article:

Election Fraud — Reform This Thing by Tal Bachman

The time has come to completely renovate America's presidential election voting process.

No, I'm not talking about the electoral college. That can stay. Nor does this have anything to do with Biden versus Trump per se (although the ongoing dispute and understandable doubt about who actually won helps support my contention).

All it has to do with is maintaining America's status as an actual representative democracy—a republic—whose citizens determine electoral outcomes by majority votes. Per Lincoln, that was the whole point, after all: government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

For that sort of government to exist in reality, and not just in rhetoric, you need elections whose results citizens can genuinely trust. They need to be legitimate, but also, need to be seen to be legitimate.

What that means is elections characterized by simplicity, intelligibility, uniformity, and voter anonymity, as well as overall transparency, formal and multi-layered scrutability, physical security at voting stations, and real-time and post hoc verifiability of vote counting.

Put all those things together into a system, and you have election integrity. Omit one or more of those things, and you have a system which begins sliding toward unacceptable levels of error and election-changing fraud. At the point where error or fraud produces false outcomes, or can no longer produce the requisite level of confidence in reported outcomes, the system becomes incompatible with representative democracy—meaning that any representative democracy which continues to use it, is ipso facto either degenerating into a non-democratic form of government, or has already completed that transition. That would be true regardless of surface appearances, or what citizens believed.

To put it more plainly, representative democracy requires legitimate elections. As Ol' Blue Eyes once claimed about love and marriage, you can't have one without the other.

You can guess where I'm going. America has done all sorts of things right, but—as Mark Steyn has pointed out many times over the years, most recently on Tucker Carlson Tonight shortly after the election—its presidential election process ain't one of them. It violates nearly all the requirements for electoral integrity and for inspiring confidence in itself. It's no wonder that, as you read this, the president of the United States, his entire legal team, and tens of millions of citizens, believe outcome-changing fraud occurred the night of November 3rd, 2020.

What I mean to say is that even if there wasn't any fraud at all, we'd all still have lots of reasons to suspect there was. That alone is completely unacceptable.

One reason for suspicion is at least one presidential election has been rigged before—election fraud in America is nothing new.

Other reasons include the hundreds upon hundreds of people convicted of voter fraud over the past two decades (virtually all of them Democrats), large-scale electoral dysfunction in other recent races, and even a recent detailed confession from a professional East Coast election-rigger.

But more relevant are the reports of misbehavior on election night: poll watchers barred, ballots re-dated, tens of thousands of votes of mysterious provenance suddenly appearing, improbable-to-the-point-of-impossible statistical anomalies and other oddities, etc., as well as questionable recount behavior.

But the most compelling reason of all is the amply documented vulnerability to manipulation of the computerized voting machines now used so commonly. To what extent these machines were in fact manipulated, in this recent election, I can't say; but again, even if they weren't manipulated at all, their mere existence necessarily casts doubt on the integrity of any reported electoral outcome. For that reason alone, they should be discarded.

Let me just list a few indications of how lousy these machines are.

The day before the election, USA Today investigative reporter Pat Beall published a zinger of a piece detailing a number of disturbing voting machine vulnerabilities. Entitled "Will Your Ballots Be Safe? Computer Experts Sound Warnings on America's Voting Machines", Beall's piece chronicles things like spontaneous vote-switching, the instant disappearance of tens of thousands of votes, and erratic vote registering. That was days before anyone heard Sidney Powell alleging the same things.

Beall's piece is not the only credible account of vulnerabilities in voting machines. The House Administration Committee issued a report in 2018 noting some of the same problems (and, interestingly, pointed to Georgia as one state most vulnerable to computer vote-rigging). A number of other such reports have emerged in recent years, including a 2018 New York Times piece reporting the discovery of voting machines manufactured by Election Systems and Software with remote-access software secretly pre-installed, and—as if that weren't alarming enough—that the machines had a history of reporting vote counts at odds with votes actually cast.

Not that this is new material. Evidence indicating the fraud-friendly nature of computerized voting machines has been out there a long time. As far back as 1974, the US General Accounting Office was warning of serious accuracy and security problems with America's new vote-counting computers. (As for possible vote-tampering culprits, the CIA at least had the decency to admit during the 1975 Church Committee hearings it regularly tampered with vote-counting machines in foreign elections). In 1985, New York Times reporter David Burnham, in an eyebrow-raising piece, reported that the National Security Agency had begun investigating reports of vote-manipulation in voting machines used by a full third of the American electorate.

By the late 1980s, the potential for manipulating computerized voting machines had become even more undeniable—and unnerving. In a magisterial 1988 New Yorker piece on the topic, journalist Ronnie Duggar wrote:

"Some officials concerned with elections think about the unthinkable in their field; namely, the stealing of a Presidential election by computer fraud in the vote-counting in metropolitan areas of key states. Steve White, the chief assistant attorney general of California, said to me last spring in Sacramento, 'It could be done relatively easily by somebody who didn't necessarily have to be all that sophisticated. Given the importance of the national election, sooner or later it will be attempted.'"

Journalist Jonathan Vankin was another early chronicler of electoral computer fraud (taking time to revisit the topic in a 2000 piece, in which he pointed out compelling evidence of serious computer-rigging in Miami-Dade, Dallas, Orange County, and several other locations). A book-length exposé even arrived in 1992 courtesy of James and Kenneth Collier.

And yet here we are, nearly a half century after that first US General Accounting Office warning, still using the same easily manipulable computer systems, which bad actors have almost certainly manipulated before to fix election outcomes; and partly as a result, we're all still wondering if Joe Biden really got 15 million more legitimate votes than Barack Obama did—a gap which must strain the credulity of even the most partisan Democrat (not that they'd mind illicit victory). (We're also now wondering how many of the presidents over the past thirty years won their elections fair and square).

So as I say, it's no wonder that now, half the country suspects fraud; it's because fraud on a huge scale, thanks to the voting machines, remains eminently possible.

As for how to reduce the possibility of voter fraud, the steps are simple. And it's not like they're secret. Nations around the world use them. A functional, trustworthy, election system of integrity would look something like this.

First, it's run by a single-purpose, rigorously impartial, devoutly transparent federal entity overseeing federal elections (about which more below).

Yes, I know we're all sick of the federal Leviathan. I know it already has far too much power. It's just that in this case, we don't have much choice, do we? We're going on well over a century of chronic Democrat Party presidential vote-rigging; and it appears they just ran one of their classic tricks again just a few weeks ago. At some point, pro-America voters have to stop making excuses for why they shouldn't try solutions to these nation-destroying problems, and just try them.

Yes, I know this would require a constitutional amendment. But let's assume for now we could get one of those passed.

Second: The new federal entity—let's call it Elections USA—would then divide the nation into voting districts of equal size for purposes of federal election (that could occur within pre-existing congressional districts). Elections USA would then further subdivide the voting districts into smaller units. Working with the postal service, Elections USA would then draw up a list of voters in each unit and designate a voting station for residents of that particular unit.

Third: In preparation for election day, Elections USA would send out flyers informing households of where to vote. The information would also be made available on the Elections USA website.

Fourth: On election day, voters travel to their designated voting stations: an elementary or high school, a union hall, a community center, whatever.

Each voting station is watched over by police or other security guards.

As voters approach, they join a quick-moving line. At the front, they present two pieces of government issued ID, at least one with a photo. A volunteer finds the voter on her list of voters for that unit. (If they've come to the wrong polling station, they are redirected to the right polling station).

The voter then approaches the voting station in a large, open room, where another volunteer hands him a paper ballot. Picking up the provided pencil, he marks the ballot behind a screen, folds the ballot, and drops into the voting box in full view of the poll clerk and attendant witnesses sitting a few feet away—typically, a few volunteers from political parties who act as "scrutineers", or official observers and verifiers. The voter then leaves. The entire process never takes more than fifteen minutes.

Once polls close, no one is allowed to enter or leave the premises until the vote count is completed.

The poll clerk—still in full view of the scrutineers—dumps the ballots on to a table and sorts them into piles according to the candidate/party voted for. She then counts the votes for each, showing them to the scrutineers as she goes. Once the votes are counted, a supervisor is called over to the table. After verifying that the scrutineers are satisfied with the counting, and resolving any lingering concerns, the supervisor signs off on the count, and the ballots are immediately placed in a special, sealed envelope. The sealed envelope is then stamped, and cannot be opened without subsequent detection.

The ballot count numbers are then phoned into Elections USA, right then and there, again in view of the scrutineers, who verify that the numbers called in match the numbers they witnessed during the count.

Once all the numbers are called in to Elections USA—a process which never takes more than two hours—the supervisor then physically transports the sealed envelopes (each marked with information like Voting Desk #4 at Poll Station #15) to the Elections USA depot, where she hands them over.

The sealed envelopes are then transported to Elections USA employees, who will then verify, and eventually formally certify, that all the numbers called in from each desk of each polling station of each voting district in the country matches the number of actual ballots. In the unlikely event any question arises about accuracy, the ballots can be accessed and counted again.

In a simple process like this, the media will have accurate election results within two hours of the polls closing, and there is virtually no opportunity for fraud. I can attest to that, because I myself have witnessed this exact process in real life quite a few times, and am friendly with several people who volunteer as election workers on election days. What I described is how elections are conducted in Canada, but not only in Canada: an identical or similar process is used in most other English-speaking countries. A few simple security protocols—not least of which is, no computerized voting machines—and your election is as fraud-proof as this mortal realm would ever allow.

When you compare this typical voting procedure to the morass of conflicting voting regulations representing fifty states, many of which—incredibly—do not even require that the voter present identification before voting, and which are being manipulated by the very state party hacks tasked with preventing fraud, you begin to see just how desperately America needs electoral reform. Credible stories of poll watchers being denied access, for example, in any normal country, would be regarded as completely unacceptable, to the point where the votes in that area would be likely thrown out as a matter of course. And yet, that type of chicanery is now so common in the United States, most people take for granted it goes on. That's how far the window of acceptable behavior has moved.

Lastly, I point out the outrageous absurdity of Democrats screaming for four years that Russia hacked the nation's vote-counting machines in 2016, only to suddenly demand—once their salaried goons in mainstream media prematurely declared Biden the victor—that we all instantly fully accept that no hacking or vote manipulation could ever have occurred in the 2020 election...when almost all the machines remained the same.

Trump's currently demanding recounts, and that's great. But America needs more than recounts. It needs something like a constitutional amendment federalizing the federal elections and banning voting machines. It also needs an exhaustive investigation—although by whom, I don't know anymore—to identify just which bad actors have been manipulating those easily manipulable voting machines for the last forty odd years. Given the frame-up jobs we've seen the last four years, I have a few hunches about the culprits—and I don't think they were Russians.

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script-a-world · 5 years

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I hope this isn't a silly question but can beaches be in downtown areas? I personally live in a downtown area full of high rises with the harbour right in front of it. So why can't harbour be replaced with beach. Also some beach pics I find actually have lots of high rises in the backdrop, aren't those downtown areas too? Anyway both my beta and a writing friend are saying that beach in downtown makes no sense.

Synth: Downtown beaches are absolutely a thing that exist, though depending on the level of urbanization, they may not be naturally occurring ones. Last year the city I live in built a permanent beach downtown. Replaced an old docking area with gently sloping concrete slabs and dumped a whole load of sand on them. It has been very popular. IIRC Paris does something similar, trucking in huge amounts of sand to build temporary beaches in a few spots along the Seine during summertime (IDK what happens with all the sand when summer is over). If your city was carefully planned by the original builders, it’s not far-fetched at all to think they would have worked around any already existing natural beaches to preserve them for its citizens’ use.

Tex: I need to orient myself a little bit on this question, so I’m going to pull out a few definitions here.

Downtown:

Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English-speakers to refer to a city's commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart, and is often synonymous with its central business district(CBD). In British English, the term "city centre" is most often used instead. The two terms are used interchangeably in Colombia.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for "down town" or "downtown" dates to 1770, in reference to the center of Boston.[2] Some have posited that the term "downtown" was coined in New York City, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan.[3] As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement, the "up" and "down" terminology coming from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south.[3] Thus, anything north of the original town became known as "uptown" (Upper Manhattan), and was generally a residential area, while the original town – which was also New York's only major center of business at the time – became known as "downtown" (Lower Manhattan).[3]

Beach:

A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles. The particles can also be biological in origin, such as mollusc shells or coralline algae.

Some beaches have man-made infrastructure, such as lifeguard posts, changing rooms, showers, shacks and bars. They may also have hospitality venues (such as resorts, camps, hotels, and restaurants) nearby. Wild beaches, also known as undeveloped or undiscovered beaches, are not developed in this manner. Wild beaches can be appreciated for their untouched beauty and preserved nature.

Beaches typically occur in areas along the coast where wave or current action deposits and reworks sediments.

Harbour:

A harbor or harbour (see spelling differences; synonyms: wharves, haven) is a sheltered body of water where ships, boats, and barges can be docked. The term harbor is often used interchangeably with port, which is a man-made facility built for loading and unloading vessels and dropping off and picking up passengers. Ports usually include one or more harbors. Alexandria Port in Egypt is an example of a port with two harbors.

Harbors may be natural or artificial. An artificial harbor can have deliberately constructed breakwaters, sea walls, or jettys or they can be constructed by dredging, which requires maintenance by further periodic dredging. An example of an artificial harbor is Long Beach Harbor, California, United States, which was an array of salt marshes and tidal flats too shallow for modern merchant ships before it was first dredged in the early 20th century.[1] In contrast, a natural harbor is surrounded on several sides by prominences of land. Examples of natural harbors include Sydney Harbour, Australia and Trincomalee Harbour in Sri Lanka.

Since “downtown” usually means a highly-developed area, there’s a 50/50 chance that they’ll even be near a body of water - and if they are, the coastal areas are possibly also developed into harbours/wharves because water transportation of goods is economically efficient. Under these constraints, a beach would be a stretch of un- or under-developed coastline that doesn’t generate as much revenue for the taxable area it’s connected to compared to a harbour.

Frequently, beaches generate revenue under the auspices of tourism, which means that the area would be cultivated accordingly - esplanades, or promenades, are a popular choice, and often grow near a harbor as a natural extension of a money-generating area. Seaside resorts are a closely-related cousin of esplanades, and sometimes have the focus of being a retreat.

Many of the beaches I’ve been to that have high-rises in the background are either those of hotels - who might own the beach property adjacent to their building(s) - or those of businesses. Idyllic beachfront properties that have a low overall skyline can be low-populated areas (which usually mean drawing a low-income from tourism), protected areas of varying degrees, unsafe for people to play in, or are owned by people in the immediate residential areas and thus private property.

Artificially-constructed beaches, as Synth mentioned, are possible but often costly because of the amount of effort and material that needs to be brought in. Those who build such things need to consider the possible costs and revenue of a beach compared to a harbor, and whether it would be financially beneficial for the area to convert it.

Highly-developed areas like city centers carry the risk of polluting the nearby environment, as evidenced by the history of:

The Nashua River in the US

The Ganges River of the Indian subcontinent

The Citarum River in Indonesia

The Yellow River in China

The Sarno River in Italy

The Matanza River of Argentina

The Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”

The Kamilo Beach of Hawai’i

Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Bajos de Haina in the Dominican Republic

Hann Bay in Senegal

Your beta and writing friend do, unfortunately, have a point - downtown beaches are rarely a thing, and if they are then they’re not likely to be very well-maintained or aesthetically-pleasing. It is possible to have one, if they follow the model that Synth mentioned, but it’s usually expensive, time-consuming, difficult to keep sufficiently clean, and their existence needs to be balanced against the current revenue-generating area that is probably a harbour.

If the society you’re worldbuilding settles a coastal area with the intent to preserve the coast and develop it into a beach, you have a good shot of putting one into your story, but harbours are disinclined in many ways to be replaced by a beach.

Constablewrites: Our idea of the beach as a pleasant leisure destination seems to have started with the English upper classes in the 1700s, and expanded as the growth of the middle class and advances in travel technology made tourism accessible to a larger population. And the business district of a city is built on commerce, which in our world heavily involves shipping. So if the city was developed before industrialization, its planners were far more likely to look at a beach and think “what a terrible place to unload a ship, we should fix that” than “oh, how pretty, people might come here to relax.” Plus, “downtown” generally refers to an area of only a few square miles at most where real estate is in high demand, so any stretch of open land is unlikely to remain open for long.

Now, because today we do value beaches as pleasant leisure destinations, it’s entirely possible that a city might create an artificial beach along its coast. River beaches are also a thing in several European cities, and many of them are temporary summer installations made with imported sand. And though they’re unlikely to be strictly in the downtown area, you can indeed find beaches in highly urbanized areas like in Miami, Vancouver, and frankly most of Southern California but let’s specifically say Santa Monica. But a city developing organically isn’t going to have a beach unless there’s significant incentive to designate and maintain one instead of using that land for something more lucrative. And unless the city was founded and built specifically around tourism, a beach is always going to be in addition to a city’s harbor, never in place of it. (Hell, even then. Cruise ships were one of the earliest and still an extremely popular method of tourism, and even if your tourists want to see the beach, they’re not getting to it without a harbor.)

Feral: Downtowns may be on waterfronts, but as previously pointed out, downtowns are generally not going to be developed on naturally occurring beaches, here being the sandy, ocean front stretches of land. Tex and Constable bring up great points about economic incentive, but also consider the physical constraints of what can be built on the beach - I think Jesus had something to say about building castles on sand, and as the son of a carpenter, I think he would know. In the States, Chicago and Charleston come to mind as being particularly relevant to your query.

Chicago is on Lake Michigan, which does have a sandy beach that is somewhat removed from downtown by various parks and smaller scale infrastructure. Downtown Charleston is a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers where they join to flow into the ocean, creating a small bay. The beaches associated with Charleston are actually on the nearby islands, not downtown Charleston, which has piers, wharfs, etc, as expected in a city founded by pirates.

A lot of the question of whether you can feasibly “build” a downtown on a beach is how built - literally - up you want it to be. The incredible innovation that went into building Chicago’s downtown, particularly its high rises and skyscrapers, is pretty well known in a general sense but you might want to look into how they were able to accomplish what they have given the very difficult topography. Charleston has no skyscrapers. In addition to the unstable, sandy soil, building in Charleston is made more unstable by being in an earthquake prone area. The big issues with downtowns being on traditional sandy beaches are the quality of the soil and bedrock and the question of erosion, which is a greater issue when dealing with ocean currents and tides.

Basically, it’s not impossible for a downtown area to have a beach, but given the issues that beaches present to building a downtown and the economic influences of why there would or would not be a beach, it’s unlikely without a lot of story behind it. And as you’re writing a story… that might be worthwhile to you. Or it might be a distraction from the story you really want to tell.

#pylons #beaches #Anonymous

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tessatechaitea · 4 years

Text

Black Canary: New Wings #2

"How about a photo-realistic view of Downtown Seattle and then I'll just scribble in some mountains up top?" -- Dick. "Please add some Black Canary Colorforms too." -- Editorial.

Even after giving Issue #1 an "A" rating, I still can't believe this issue is going to be anything but boring. Just look at this fucking cover! This is the kind of image a D-list publishing house puts on the cover of a biographical comic book about David Faustino. Did editors at DC think highlighting the city of Seattle in 1991 was going to move units? It's not even recognizable as Seattle! Okay, okay, you fucking Seattlites. Great, you recognized your city instantly! I guess this fucking comic book was for you then, you know-it-all twats. For the rest of us, we need the Space Needle front and center, not washed out in the pink morass over Black Canary's shoulder! You never see an artist for DC drawing an image of Paris without the Eiffel Tower. I mean, maybe not never, exactly. Sometimes they'll throw in the Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre or Notre Dame. But that's kind of the point! All Seattle has is the Space Needle! I'm not shitting on Seattle for that. I live in Portland and what the fuck do we have? A big pink corporate office building?! Oh, sure, we have some spectacular bridges! I forgot about those! Portland is better than Seattle when it comes to recognizable architecture. Although we don't have a troll sucking off a VW Bug under any of our bridges or a huge black cock jutting out of downtown (Big Pink is the best we can muster). I don't really care which city has better architecture! I can't stand people who feel pride for living in a specific city and then try to emulate the stereotypical person who lives in that city. If you're wondering who the fuck would do that, just watch any local newscaster in any city and watch how they try so fucking hard to be representative of the stereotypes of people who live there. Local news stations should stop airing promos that say shit like "First. Live. Local." Instead, they should just say, "We have no dignity. But we have the news! Although, to be fair, half of it is composed of viral videos everybody but our oldest of olds audience has seen." Another reason this cover sucks is that it declares the title of this chapter is "Home is Where Ya' Live." Is that some sage Midwestern non-wisdom that people spout in reply to some other person moaning about some problem? Like how when somebody in Lincoln, Nebraska is all, "I was shot in the leg on my way to Runza's!" And then somebody else is all, "It builds character." In California, we didn't have sayings like that. If somebody said, "I was shot in the leg on my way to Taco Bravo!", you would reply, "Dude! That's gnarly!" And they'd go, "I know, right?!" And then you'd be all, "Like, is this going to affect our, like, trip to the beach?" And they'd be all, "Nah brah! I'mma go, like, run some water on it! Good as new, dude!" And you'd say, "Tubular! Gonna go get my board! Catch ya later!" This is because nothing in California builds character. You just start off as a goofy, one-dimensional caricature of a human being and stick with it until you, like, die.

No white male has ever been called uppity and we all know why.

"Uppity" is a great word by which to judge somebody's character. I mean to say, if somebody actually calls somebody else "uppity," you now know way more than that person wanted you to know about what kind of person they are. Especially telling is if somebody doesn't understand why you're judging them for calling somebody "uppity." I stopped associating with way more people than I would have thought possible when they sided against Colin Kaepernick. Maybe they didn't use the word "uppity" exactly but they sure weren't hiding their feeling that some people should keep in a specific place and be grateful for what they've been allowed to have, so to speak. Unfortunately for them, my sister and my dad fell into that camp. Obviously they thought they claimed their dislike for Kaepernick was that he wasn't supporting the troops. But we all know how flimsy that bit of moral legerdemain really is. It takes an awful lot of mental contortion to simply disregard Kaepernick's stated protest of police violence against the black community and decide to believe right wing media that has a vested interest in a continued police state backed by corporate money. The whole "I'm a patriot so I find unpatriotic acts disgusting!" is the worst shell game every invented. All those fuckers who constantly thank members of the military for protecting their freedoms support Trump and Republicans who are fucking our freedoms in the ass (non-consensually! I support somebody fucking my freedom in the ass if my freedom feels like getting fucked in the ass tonight). I would thank a member of the military for protecting my freedom if they were ever fucking used to actually protect our freedoms. As a democracy (Don't you fucking representative republic me, you asshole), it's up to us to protect our freedoms and a good percentage of us are failing spectacularly at that job. Gan isn't just battling the small time crack dealers in his neighborhood. He's got his sights on Senator Garrenger as well.

Gan doesn't realize the opposite is also true.

Senator Garrenger is a white supremacist working with white supremacists to do white supremacy. Some of us have been fighting this shit for a long time. The problem is far more of us have been pretending it wasn't a real thing for even longer. "White supremacist Neo-Nazis infiltrating our police forces? Get out of here! You sound ridiculous!" was probably a thing said a lot in the last forty years. And yet even now that conservatives have found that they don't need to resort to dog whistles because saying the thing out loud that used to cause political backlash doesn't even cause a ripple of concern now. We have learned that a large percentage of our country doesn't give a shit if you're a racist, misogynist asshole as long as you say three things over and over again: "God Bless America," "Owning a gun is a God-given right," and "Abortions are evil." Tick off those boxes and you can dispense with all the dog whistling and just say the racist shit on national television. Dinah begins to dig up dirt on Senator Garrenger so that Black Canary has an iron clad excuse to punch him in the face. Her and Gan decide to work together to stop him and clean up the California drugs in their neighborhood. Not that they believe the two problems are actually the same problem! Not yet anyway! Dinah suspects it but Gan thinks she's seeing conspiracy where there isn't any. Dinah has more experience with how comic books work which is why she sees the entire forest already and it's only the beginning of Issue #2. Gan takes his show to the streets in front of a crack house to shame them out of the neighborhood. He doesn't realize it's run by the Senator's son who murders three of his "coworkers" to make his escape when the cops show. Gan is shot in the shoulder by the white supremacist assassin while Black Canary rushes in to help. A crack addict is blamed for the murders but Black Canary listens to his chaotic rambling, leading her to discover a shell left by the Neo-Nazi assassin. Black Canary: New Wings #2 Rating: B+. All the action is basically the last half of the comic book as a seasoned reader of comic books might expect. If a writer front loads the story with people discussing actual issues, the reader is going to get antsy for some mindless violence! Too bad for some readers the violence in this was't mindless but caused by truly awful people. People think the attitude of Comicsgate is a new thing but if you read the letters pages from the past, you'll see they existed back then as well. A lot of readers didn't want to be reminded that maybe the way they think and the things they believe put them in the realm of the "bad guy." So a comic book where the villain robs the bank or attacks Batman for the hell of it is okay because that reader would never rob a bank or attack Batman. But if you make the bad guy a senator who believes foreigners are stealing the jobs of good white Americans and maybe flooding their neighborhoods with drugs as a good way to fight against their "intrusion" into "white America," some of your readers are going to look up from the comic book and say aloud to nobody, "Hey!" And since most of them aren't in touch with their feelings or have ever really done a good, close examination of their self, they don't know how to deal with hurt feelings in any way but to be angry. It's easier to be angry at the person calling some white people racist than to have a good long think about why you might be upset about somebody pointing out racism.

#Black Canary #New Wings #DC #DC Comics #Sarah Byam #Trevor Von Eeden #Dick Giordano

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militant-holy-knight · 4 years

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Since the founding of Iran's Islamic Republic in the wake of the 1979 revolution, the government in Tehran has smothered the country's rich, diverse, and ancient culture beneath a theocratic dictatorship. The regime is openly contemptuous of Iran's history, its ethnic and religious minorities, and its secular-minded citizens. It enforces its own rigid Islamic values in a variety of ways, from requiring women to cover their hair to imposing religious principles in schools. Repression has resulted in various social issues among Iran's youth, such as drugs and prostitution. As a result, nostalgia for the Persian Empire's pre-Islamic past legacy is steadily rising, especially among Iranian exiles and their children in the United States. Washington would be well advised to take note of it and understand what it may portend for the future.

Islamic Conquest

The early Islamic conquerors of the seventh century spread Islam and the Arabic language throughout the Persian Empire and attempted a wholesale replacement of the indigenous culture. Over time, most of the country's population converted to Islam, but Persia's historical and cultural legacy proved resilient. This fact was so central that when Col. Reza Khan established a new dynasty in 1925, he linked his family to Persia's pre-Islamic history by adopting the ancient Persian surname Pahlavi for the dynasty. Reza's son and heir, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, occasioned the October 1971 celebration of his fifty-second birthday, probably the biggest birthday extravaganza in modern times, to coincide with the supposed 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the first Persian empire in the sixth century B.C.E. by the Achaemenids.

That changed in 1979 when the Islamic Republic founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini recast Iran as a full-fledged theocracy with a "guardian jurist" (vali-ye faqih) as its supreme leader; spurned Iranian nationalism in favor of a world conquering Islamist vision; and dissociated itself from Iran's pre-Islamic past, for instance, by Arabizing many Tehran street names from their classical Persian.

The Islamization of Iranian politics and society stirred discontent among the country's minority groups, which viewed the regime's policy as designed to suppress their identities, not least given Islamic law's institutionalized discrimination against religious minorities. Sidelined and marginalized, they have been officially referred to as aqaliyat (minorities) and excluded as the "stranger" or the "other" (gheyr-e khodi).

Many Iranian dissidents—both active and passive, at home and abroad—have responded to this diminished status with a revived Persian pride based on nostalgia for the pre-Islamic culture of classical Persia. Exiled Iranian journalist Amir Taheri and University of Montana professor Mehrdad Kia find evidence of such pride in the desire for purification of the Persian language, the emphasis on Zoroastrian culture over Arab and Islamic culture, and a revulsion against the theocratic government.As University of Toronto professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi explains,

The refashioning of Iran and a rescripting of "the people" and "the nation" in Iranian political and historical discourses was to take place through a selective remembrance of things pre-Islamic and a disassociation of Iran from Islam.

Many Iranian nationalists and scholars hope to de-Arabize the Persian language to distinguish their ancient culture from the Islamic one imposed by the government. Writes historian Kia:

The dominance of the Shi'ite clergy led some nationalist intellectuals to believe that the cultural hegemony of Shi'ite Islam must be challenged and replaced only by a new form of identity which emphasized Iran's pre-Islamic history and culture as well as the Persian language and its rich literary heritage.

This scope of pre-Islamic pride has been established via "a linguistic nationalism that became part of a programmatic plan to "purify" Persian of Turkish and Arabic contamination." Its proponents call for a complete return to the Persian language as it existed before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors.

Pictured are some of the twenty-four Baha'is arrested by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry in a raid on a religious gathering in Shiraz, 2018. Such experiences of non-Muslim minority groups have prompted a longing for Iran's earlier culture in response to the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

The experiences of non-Muslim minority groups and the suppression of pre-Islamic sentiment have encouraged some nationalists to rebel with unmistakable love for Iran's earlier culture. This nationalistic pride has arisen in Iran primarily in response to the establishment of the Islamic Republic rather than in opposition to Islam itself. "Much of this longing for the purity of ancient Persian culture," writes Taheri, "has arisen with the societal dislike of the contemporary Iranian religious regime as well as the regime's very aversion toward such pre-Islamic identity."

Roya Hakakian's memoir, Journey from the Land of No, is the personal account of a young Persian, Jewish girl caught in the middle of the Islamic Revolution. She describes how many Iranian Jews yearn for a suppressed and more inclusive Persian culture. "Instead of their given Hebrew names, they went by Persian names, borrowing heroic titles from old myths, like Rostam or Zaal." She explains further, "With more than two thousand years of history in Iran ... Jews were right at home exactly where they were, as they would be nowhere else."

The Iranian-American Narrative in California

California is home to the largest population of Iranians and Iranian-Americans in the United States. If a mainstream Iranian-American narrative exists anywhere, it will be found here.

This author interviewed five University of California-Berkeley students regarding their views of the Islamic Republic of Iran, U.S. foreign policy in Iran, and their identification or lack thereof with Iran's pre-Islamic culture. These interviews provide an in-depth look at the opinions of several individual students along with a broader survey of Iranian-Americans in California, discussed below. The surveyed students are first generation, U.S.-born Iranians and are the most likely to represent the views of future Iranian-American politicians and organizers of Iranian-American lobbies. Understanding what they think and why could help reveal where their loyalties lie, a common concern regarding influential figures with dual citizenships and backgrounds.

Interviews

Three University of California-Berkeley students—Shahrzad Makaremi, Tina Noohi, and Taraneh Harirchi—were asked the same questions used in a wider survey of Iranian-American college students throughout California.

Makaremi is one of the founding members and leaders of the UC Berkeley Iranian Students' Cultural Organization (ISCO). Hailing from a Muslim background, Makaremi's family left Iran for the United States to pursue better educational and professional opportunities. When asked whether she identifies more closely with the contemporary culture of Iran or with the pre-Islamic culture of ancient Persia and how she views current foreign involvement in Iran, Makaremi appeared perplexed:

I have a lot of interest in the pre-Islamic culture of Iran. It's quite romanticized, but still very important. Still, it is very difficult to separate Islam from Persia because the Islamic conquests happened so long ago. Radical pre-Islamic pride is misleading, since Islam and Persia influenced each other so much. ... Although I am not strongly averse to the Islamic Republic myself, I would say that it has turned off many Iranian and Iranian-American people to the Islamic nature of today's Iranian government. As far as foreign activity in Iran, such as sanctions, it hurts the people just as much as the government does.

Overall, Makaremi believes that several problems face Iran today and that the regime is not necessarily the worst of them. She does not seem to harbor much opposition to the Islamist regime and does not dislike it strongly enough to favor pre-Islamic Iran.

Zoroastrians celebrate the end of winter by kindling bonfires in temples scattered across Iran. Scholars believe that the teachings of Zoroastrianism predate other monotheistic religions. In recent years, some 4,000 people have joined the festival in Cham, Iran.

The third respondent and student cultural leader, Taraneh Harirchi, shares her classmates' perspectives regarding cultural identity, the current Iranian leadership, and international involvement in Iranian affairs. Harirchi does not belong to a religious minority, and she identifies more with pre-Islamic Persian culture despite her family's Muslim background:

Even though I am technically Muslim, I identify more with the classical Zoroastrian culture of the ancient Persian Empire because I am extremely proud of my culture and not necessarily my "religion." Both my family and I practice all the traditional Persian holidays, and it is taken very seriously especially around New Year's time. My family and I never go to mosque or acknowledge any of the martyrs like some religious Iranians do.

On the government and international sanctions, Harirchi said:

For me, the religion largely represents the government, not the Iranian people. As far as sanctions, I believe that they're very dangerous and only hurt the Iranian people. Foreign involvement is obviously the most debilitating risk to Iran right now.

All three student leaders emphasize their cultural identities over their religious ones. The separation of culture from religion among Iranian-Americans appears to originate from a broadly negative view of the Islamic Republic. However Harirchi, like her two peers, does not view the government as more detrimental than foreign involvement.

The interviewees perceive pre-Islamic culture as important but do not necessarily oppose the regime because of it. One even viewed it as "romanticized." Still, all state that the Islamic Republic creates problems for Iranian society, from cultural suppression to limitations on education. It is clear from these students' responses that they do, indeed, oppose the regime.

Statewide California Survey

Reza Pahlavi, crown prince of Iran, speaking at Arizona State University in Tempe. Iranian-Americans back Washington's support for the exiled crown prince by a two-to-one margin.

While the interviews provide some personal details from student activists at a particular university, a survey conducted at the same time used the same questions to gather more data about Iranian-American views of the regime and the extent of opposition to it; U.S. intervention; and pre-Islamic Persian pride. Respondents were polled anonymously from the campuses of University of California, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, and Santa Barbara; University of Southern California; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; San Jose State University; Mission College, and West Valley College.

Seventeen out of twenty-five (68%) expressed pre-Islamic pride and cultural nostalgia in opposition to the Islamic Republic while only five out of twenty-five (20%) identified more with the contemporary Islamic culture of Iran, were not averse to the regime, and considered U.S. involvement to be the biggest threat to Iranian society. Another two participants (8%) favored neither pre-Islamic nor contemporary Iranian culture due to a lack of knowledge while only one (4%) felt pride for both pre-Islamic and contemporary Iranian culture and expressed a strong interest in Iran's ancient history as well as its current political situation.

As expected given Taheri's analysis of minority oppression and the Middle East Institute's Hossein Godazgar's description of the downplaying of Iran's pre-Islamic history by the regime's Islamist educational system, students who identify more with pre-Islamic classical Persian culture also oppose the regime. These students are mainly inspired by the plight of their parents, who fled religious oppression in search of a freer and better future elsewhere. The majority considers U.S. intervention a lesser evil than the regime itself and regards their cultural nostalgia as part of their broader feelings of dissent.

In 2018, the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian-Americans released an annual survey measuring opposition to the Islamic Republic. It found that by an eight-to-one margin, respondents oppose U.S. support for the Islamist-socialist People's Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK) party as a legitimate opposition force in Iran while backing Washington's support for exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi by a two-to-one margin. Opposition by Iranian-Americans to Islamic groups is primarily anti-theocratic. And since Pahlavi states on his social media channels that he supports a secular democracy in Iran, widespread support for him is indicative of the secular route many Iranian-Americans would like to see their ancestral homeland take. Pahlavi's enthusiasm for Iran's pre-Islamic Persian history also echoes the cultural nostalgia felt by many Iranian-American civilians.

Pre-Islamic Persian Pride

Additional data published in an article by Nilou Mostofi in The Sociological Quarterly sheds light on the Iranian-American diaspora's feelings of kinship with Iran, their views of the Islamic Republic, and how many choose to identify with their heritage. The majority of Iranian immigrants, especially in southern California, left Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution. They tend to be secular and "anti-Islamic," and most emphasize their pre-Islamic roots by identifying as Persian. Like the students interviewed and surveyed earlier, they left Iran for the United States hoping for better opportunities, professional careers, and education. Estimates place the number of Iranians living in Southern California at 300,000-500,000, with some 87,000 people of Iranian ancestry living in Los Angeles alone.

According to an analysis by Radio Payam, Persian Jewish immigrants in the United States identify with Iran's classical Zoroastrian culture more than with Iran's contemporary Islamic culture:

Not identifying themselves with the current Iran—stigmatized by fundamentalism and terrorism—Iranian [web]sites attempt to [re]construct a Persian profile by using tokens, symbols, and signs from the pre-Islamic cultural heritage.

This response is common among Iranians living outside Iran, especially among Iranian minorities.

Conclusion

Following its progression from Iran, pre-Islamic Persian pride in California seems to have merged with American democratic ideals to pit most young Iranian-Americans against the Islamic Republic and some against foreign involvement in the region. And while not all Iranian-Americans necessarily wish for the complete return to pre-Islamic Persian culture, they are proving loyal to both Iran (though not the Islamist regime) and the United States. Indeed, politically active Iranian-Americans who oppose both the Islamic Republic and foreign interference could promote the withdrawal of all financial support from the regime, so as to force it to reform, while supporting the development of a strong, independent Iranian society that will be less dependent on foreign aid.

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phroyd · 5 years

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Trump Moves To Create and Sustain an Imperial Presidency. There are no longer three Branches of Government. - Phroyd

William Barr, the attorney general, came face to face this week with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, at the Capitol in Washington. Shaking her hand, Barr was said to have joked:“Madam Speaker, did you bring your handcuffs?”

The remark, at a ceremony honouring fallen law enforcement officers, was a riposte to Pelosi’s quip a week earlier that if all members of the Trump administration were arrested, the jail in the Capitol basement would be overcrowded. (There is in fact no such jail.)

But it was also indicative of how Barr, and his paymaster in the White House, are perceived to be laughing in the face of congressional oversight and the rule of law. Indeed, following the sporting maxim that attack is the best form of defence, Trump had adopted the language of a tinpot dictator, denouncing the Russia investigation as a failed “coup”, branding his pursuers as traitors and threatening to lock them up.

“My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on,” he tweeted at 7.11am on Friday. “Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!”

He’s attempting to create a counter-narrative based on conspiracy theories in which the FBI is cast as the villain

The intention, critics argue, is to turn the tables and delegitimise the case laid out against him in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference, or at least crank up a giant fog machine that leaves the electorate weary and confused. But one side-effect could be a slide into an imperial presidency.

“Investigate the investigators!” has been the battle cry of Trump, Republicans and media allies ever since Barr produced a four-page summary of Mueller’s report that misleadingly implied Trump had been completely cleared of collusion and obstruction of justice. In fact the report documented numerous contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials and identified 11 instances in which Trump or his campaign attempted to illegally impede the investigation.

On 25 March, the day after Barr’s letter was released, the Fox News host Sean Hannity bristled with self-righteous indignation and thirsted for vengeance.

“This must be a day of reckoning for the media, for the deep state, for people who abuse power, and they did it so blatantly in this country,” he told viewers in a furious 25-minute monologue. “If we do not get this right, if we do not hold these people accountable, I promise you, with all the love I can muster for this country and our future for our kids and grandkids, we will lose the greatest country God has ever given man. We will lose it.”

That set the template for Trump, a regular viewer. Having spent two years trying to discredit Mueller’s work as a witch-hunt and hoax, he stepped up demands for an investigation into its origins and pushed the claim that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “He’s attempting to create a counter-narrative based on conspiracy theories in which the FBI chiefly is cast as the villain of the deep state. It’s what is known as chaff. It’s to throw people off of the actual object itself and distract them from his well-documented crimes of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report.”

Trump is backed by Republicans, eager to grab ammunition that comes to hand. They have falsely claimed the investigation was triggered by a dossierfrom the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which included reference to a so-called “pee tape” in Moscow, and cited anti-Trump text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to allege inherent bias.

But it is Barr who has emerged as the president’s most indispensable ally, his improbable Darth Vader. Testifying on Capitol Hill earlier this month, the attorney general used the incendiary word “spying” to describe FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign, a term later rejected by the FBI director, Christopher Wray.

Barr has asked John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to examine whether the FBI erred in seeking a special federal court warrant to conduct surveillance on the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. An investigation into the legality of the warrant is already under way, led by the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who is due to release his findings in coming weeks.

Barr is also working with Wray, the CIA director, Gina Haspel, and the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, to review intelligence-gathering techniques used to investigate the Trump campaign. In the meantime, ever loyal to Trump, Barr continues to defy Congress’s demands for the release of the unredacted Mueller report and underlying materials.

Democrats sense a crude ploy by Trump to deflect and distract, parry and prevaricate. Congressman Jared Huffman of California said: “It’s a smokescreen, obviously an attempt to change the subject like everything else he does. I almost don’t want to dignify it because it’s so preposterous that any time someone investigates Donald Trump or disagrees with Donald Trump they are being treasonous or they need to be locked up.

“This is a slippery slope to a banana republic if this is where we’re heading. And I think most Americans get that. You just don’t call for your political enemies to be investigated and jailed in the United States.”

Huffman called for an impeachment process and hearings.

“If [Richard] Nixon was the imperial presidency, this is the imperial presidency on steroids without any sideboards or adult supervision of any kind,” he said. “It’s a real crisis. I still believe we’re going to get through it because I think the institutions and the fabric of this country are still rooted in the rule of law and democracy and checks and balances, but we’re being tested like never before and I would be lying if I said I didn’t worry about it.”

‘Trumpification of the DoJ’

One of the rich ironies of Republican claims of bias in the FBI is that during the election the agency kept its Trump investigation secret but talked openly about its scrutiny of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The then director, James Comey, held an extraordinary press conference in which he branded Clinton’s handling of emails as secretary of state as “extremely careless”. Eleven days before the election, Comey announced the FBI was reviewing more Clinton messages. Many Democrats have still not forgiven him.

Barr says Trump’s campaign was ‘spied’ upon. Trump claims treason. Both are incendiary. Neither is true

Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, tweeted on Friday: “Barr says Trump’s campaign was ‘spied’ upon. Trump claims treason. Both are incendiary. Neither is true. Barr suggests a finger was put on the scale to affect the election. But the Trump probe was kept secret; the Clinton one wasn’t. It’s the Trumpification of the DoJ.”

Matthew Miller, former director of the office of public affairs for the justice department, said: “There are a few galling things. First, it would have been crazy for the FBI not to investigate [Trump’s] campaign given what Mueller found. Second, it would have been very easy for the FBI to stop Trump becoming president if that was their intention by leaking what they found. Third, the FBI publicly criticised his opponent: the FBI did have an impact but it was to hurt Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump!”

Miller, now a partner at Vianovo and justice and security analyst for MSNBC, added: “It’s a brazenly cynical strategy by the president and his allies. He hasn’t had a great explanation for what he did so what he’s done for two years is attack the investigation.

“The notion has existed since Watergate that there should be a separation between the White House and Department of Justice. It’s been erased. It’s just gone. It will probably come back when there’s a Democratic president, because they tend to be more sensitive to elite opinion, but the next Republican president will [not] see any reason to restore it.”

Just as the justice department is succumbing to Trump, so Congress is also struggling to maintain its status as a co-equal branch of government. The White House continues to stonewall House subpoenas for documents and hearings, not only regarding the Mueller report but Trump’s tax returns and other matters. The Democratic-led House judiciary committee has voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress but the party is divided over whether to impeach his boss.

Max Bergmann, a former state department official, said: “We’re seeing an effort by the president to neutralise this as an issue for the 2020 election. He sees a gap because the Democrats have shown reticence in their willingness to prosecute the case against him. We have a situation where there is a vacuum and Trump sees an opportunity to attack the investigation, partly because Democrats aren’t using the results of it to attack him.

“The problem with not using the levers of congressional power is that it lends credence to the arguments Trump has been making. In the public’s mind, it might seem that because Trump is not being impeached, maybe he was exonerated. What is amazing about the Republican side is the ability to manufacture outrage over nothing; they eat, sleep and breathe scandal politics. Democrats are terrified of it and and run from it, even when it’s the biggest political scandal in American history. The inaction over the last four weeks has been unconscionable.”

‘We’ve crossed a Rubicon’

It was perhaps no coincidence that Trump hosted Viktor Orbán, strongman leader of Hungary, at the White House this week.

Bergmann, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think-tank in Washington, and director of the Moscow Project, charting Trump’s involvement in Russian attacks on US democracy, said: “We’ve crossed a Rubicon. For the past two years, Trump has not been able to use the justice department to seek revenge against his opponents and as a political tool.

“Now he and his team have learned, and Trump has appointed someone in Barr who is a Washington insider, knows the justice department and is able to operate as the president’s hatchet man. For the past two years, we’ve said the institutions have held. Now we’re at a critical pivot where Trump has learned how to use the institutions to his advantage.

“It’s a dark turn. With the decline of our institutions, the decline of our moral authority, Trump is trying to turn the the moniker of an ‘imperial presidency’ into an autocratic presidency along the lines of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher for the future of American democracy in 2020.”

Phroyd

#donald trump #trump administration #us politics #us news #trump-russia investigation

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listoriented · 5 years

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Californium

: do androids dream of electronic games?

List Oriented: Hi, Elvin. Thanks so much for doing this.

Elvin Green: Hey there. It's my absolute pleasure.

LO: How are you?

Green: Just perfect.

LO: Great, great. Well, let's get to it. How about you start by telling us a bit about yourself.

Green: Sure. Well, my name is Elvin Green. You might know me as the protagonist of the game 'Californium'. In fact that's the only way you'd know me, as it's the limit of my existence.

LO: Haha, cool. We just played Californium, actually.

Green: Did you?

LO: Sure did, I promise. It's quite a game.

Green: Okay.

LO: But I'm wondering, I mean. It's framed around you being this science fiction writer, right? It starts and you - or I suppose us, playing as you - are writing a document and we're interrupted to find your wife has left. All around the apartment are signs that things are sort of falling apart in your life. Your daughter died. Bills are unpaid, I don't remember the other details.

Green: Yeah. It's California, 1968.

LO: But then you...I mean we, start seeing things? The TV does something weird, and a disembodied voice starts talking to us, and it becomes a hidden object game where we have to walk up and down this small section of Californian street and find and open these tears in reality or something, which are signalled to us by world-objects moving around and exposing these mysterious theta symbols.

Green: Something like that, yeah. There’s an English narrator who talks to me. It’s unclear if it’s the TV who is doing the talking.

LO: But then...well without spoiling too much, can you tell us a bit about what happens next?

Green: Sure. Well, once we've found enough of these tears, or rifts, or whatever you want to call them, we go to a whole other reality. The second time it's still California, but it's an alternative timeline where California is this autocratic republic, and I'm this propaganda writer. The third setting is ostensibly on Mars, where I'm a ruler served by an underclass of sentient automatons who are in the process of rising up and deposing us. It's still the same street layout though.

LO: Why do you think that is?

Green: Well it's meant to be just another version of reality, isn't it? So even though it's 'Mars', it's still gotta be linked to the previous realities somehow.

LO: That doesn't really answer the question.

Green: Oh come on. You've played the game - what do you think?

LO: Well I guess it's just reinforcing the interpretation that these different realities are all interior to you, Elvin Green, rather than actual rifts in a reality.

Green: Yes, well. We're set up for these possibilities, right? It's established that I'm a writer, that I'm having trouble writing the next book, so one suggestion might be that this is all representative of the imaginative process, that each new reality is a story I'm creating in my mind, and that I'm reusing people and things from my surroundings as props for these different worlds.

LO: Right. But in the first section there are these hints at alcohol and drugs, this back story of turmoil and grief, that maybe what follows is a kind of psychosis. One of the people you talk to mentions a drug called, what was it, “Crystal 8″? And he describes the effect as like going into another reality, which is then what you do.

Green: Sure. It's giving you options. Possibilities of how to read it. It's not going to force anything down your throat.

LO: Can you tell us what happens to you, more definitively?

Green: No.

LO: Okay. Well, how about your estranged wife, Thea? We begin with her simply up and leaving you, or so we're told. We're relayed this by the people in the neighbourhood, the guy on the street, the owner of the diner and such. In the second reality she's a captured terrorist that you're expected to testify against. In the third we're told that she's waiting at our final destination to eliminate us, but she never shows.

Green: What are you asking?

LO: Why does she never show?

Green: Think about it. I'm a writer, you're seeing this whole world - these whole worlds, through my eyes. Her character can only exist in relation to how I portray her, my damaged relationship with her.

LO: That's a bit, uh -

Green: But that's the game's whole point. All these characters are just stand-in's, creations, effluvia. This is all strongly implied by the final section where I walk through all the deconstructed scenery, and the NPCs stop turning towards me, and you can see from behind how they're just another asset, just another used cut-out. This is the game showing you how games too are just another constructed, uncertain reality.

LO: I think you're -

Green: An uncertain reality where interpretation relies entirely on the position of the perceiver. You're going to take away from it what you bring to it.

LO: Uhm, okay. But then we get to the end and the achievement unlocked is titled "Who Are You Elvin Green?"

Green: What of it?

LO: Who are you Elvin Green?

Green: Oh. I mean, really, that's up to your interpretation. Obviously. On one hand I'm Elvin Green, the sci-fi writer, or the propagandist, or the ruler of Mars or some shit. One of the above, all of the above. But also I'm you, aren't I? The player. The writer, the blogger, the interpreter.

LO: Yeah...

Green: Isn’t that what you want? To make this about you.

LO: I suppose.

Green: Oh but I'm also Philip K. Dick.

LO: What?

Green: Yeah. Wait, you didn't know that?

LO: Oh...uh...

Green: Like, this game is based on several Philip K Dick works. It's not a secret or anything. And biographical facets of his life, like, his drug taking, his failed marriages, his ideas about other realities...

LO: Oh wow okay. Look, this is embarrassing, but I haven't actually read any Philip K Dick.

Green: Really? Yeah, that is embarrassing. You're an embarrassment.

LO: Sorry.

Green: I mean, the game would probably make more sense if you had. Or at least, it would strike a more familiar resonance. Have you at least seen Blade Runner?

LO: Yeah I've seen Blade Runner. I guess the third reality reminded me of Blade Runner, with the uh...the simulants. On Mars.

Green: Actually that bit is based on an entirely different book, lol.

LO: Look, I really need to wrap this up, so just one more question.

Green: Okay.

LO: The title of the game is Californium. I'd assumed this was a sort of portmanteau suggesting, like, California-terrarium, the idea of a contained version of something, referring to the boxed nature of level design perhaps. But when I looked it up, it seems that Californium is also the name of a heavy radioactive element that was discovered by Scientists in Berkeley, in 1950.

Green: Sure.

LO: Which is interesting because the game - or at least the first reality of the game - is set in Berkeley, just eighteen years after the discovery.

Green: Okay.

LO: But, like, what's the link? Between the events of the game and the element with 98 protons? Is there one? Did I miss something?

Green: I dunno, man. Play it again. Think for yourself. Read some PKD. Or ask the developers. Why would I know why they called it that?

LO: Right. Well thanks again for your time, Elvin.

Green: Take care.

*Californium was co-developed by Darjeeling [official site] and Nova Productions [no site found]. It was released in February 2016.

up next is Call of Juarez: Gunslinger.

#game73 #californium #hidden object games #walking simulator #philip k dick #darjeeling productions #nova productions #arte france

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campchest7-blog · 5 years

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Do you know the Illuminati Membership rights Requirements?

For those that believe in the Illuminati and masons order and even may just want to know some basic specifications before subscribing to up, we will see how. However we need to communicate about this class referred to as the Illuminati, I'm definitely not sampling into whether it is actual or fake, or even whether or not they really do give riches or maybe not. I'll try to found the facts and let you decide on your own personal. What is this party? The Illuminati and freemasons is matching to many conspiracy theorists is a secret cult that believes in dominating the entire world, certainly not just the fact that they want to control everything that happens within the world, as outlined by them they are all above several areas of existence which include yet not limited to be able to politics, sports, enjoyment and others. This is so why they may afford to give would be preferred associates untold riches. Nonetheless can be this really the case? The very fact: According to Wikipedia, the on the internet encyclopedia, this Illuminati is often a name given to several groups equally real and fake, Wikipedia goes ahead to explain to you the origin involving the Illuminati, it stated the idea started via Bavaria in Europe these folks were launched on 1 May 1776, their main objectives was to set people free via superstitions, religious influence inside the area of general population life and abuse of presidency power. They were progressively growing to be influential, trying to be able to inspire and make the individuals do their bidding, ultimately, the Bavarian california king got to outlaw their routines, the King felt threatened so the king restricted these individuals. Some say this built Illuminati go up until now hidden, they swore that many people won't be humiliated at any time again, so they attempt to control the world by simply recruiting people to become in a position of power. Whether this is usually true or definitely not one particular thing is selected, the particular Illuminati successfully masterminded french revolution which lasted by 1789 to 1799, which will led to French using typically the republic form involving governance within the old monarchy technique. Using the success connected with the French wave, the Illuminati tried this throughout various countries with distinct degrees of success. At this time Presently, the Illuminati is usually being considered the fastest means to get dollars and power, effortless of which numerous powerful politicians, Marketers, entertainers especially music designer are part of this brotherhood. Advantages of getting started the Masons and illuminati There happen to be advantages people declare one will get if that will man or woman becomes a new member, including such - Electric power -- Fame/Power - Riches/money/properties -Traveling The above several things are what exactly several people believe they are going to have when they join right up. Adequate money to invest, enough recognition that a single will be confirmed like Michel Jackson, elected such as Obama and surpass within sports like C. Cr7. When it comes to be able to joining up, there are several techniques somebody can link up, in accordance to conspiracy theorists. Quite a few say you should allow the trick cult to come to you some others point out no, you should check out them. let me get in touch with people who say you need to enable those to come to help you group A, and people that say go to, these individuals group N. Regarding the class that says you should permit Masons and illuminati agents to come for you to an individual, they furthermore state you must by way of your behavior entice them to a person. Such actions are rapid Using their signs: Building sure you use their particular symbols daily. this is going to really indicate that a person are part of them all. This particular calls for you understand some of such signs. Engaging in activities they like: Such activities could be within form involving moral and bodily assistance to any cause you perceive to be from Illuminati and masons. For how to join illuminati , the particular Illuminati center principle will be founded on the idea associated with changing the word order, when you are a revolutionist, they are really bound to just like you. This group tells whatever you do, that could attract them do that, there may be the catch you must definitely not go severe with whichever activities employ in. You also should not harm anybody physically. The particular challenge with the viewpoint regarding group A is that one may never understand if he or your woman is doing all the stuff accurately, more important, anybody can never ever know whether they is going to notice and when just he or she may be accepted to the participant. There is no sort out responses. Enter group M, individuals who say you have to go to them. They will say before you can certainly sick them out as well as their providers you have to prepare your mind by means of Having some sort of sturdy cardiovascular: Yes is necessary a strong cardiovascular system to get you to cope, along with their pursuits specially when it comes sacrifices. -- You must consider: Immediately after verifying facts and this fiction that you are still convinced that this is usually true then you can after that go on and seek them out. The thing is how does one particular really find them outside even if this is true? A good Google search will throw up a lot of ways to link up, this 'ways' usually needs money. So how truly does one avoid scammers and sign up for for real? After excavating online coupled together with some research I identified out that there will be just a couple of details regarding how one can sign up to the particular Illuminati. Whether they job I'm certainly not sure.

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shadowsong26fic · 6 years

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Coming Attractions!

Because I skipped the last two months, lol...

I mean, this one is not necessarily “coming this month,” since I’ll be travelling for a couple weeks in the middle of the month! So I’ll have time to write, but possibly not brain, and I’m not 100% sure what my internet access will be like, so I’m tentatively saying there will be no posts between the 10th and the 24th/25th. If everything goes to plan, though, I’ll build up some backlog of stuff in the evenings and be able to post a bunch when I get back. But we shall see!

Okay, ever on we go...

Precipice:

So, I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point in the year, lol. This arc has been...hm...not really flowing as much as some of the earlier ones did? I think at least in part because Fluff Is Hard, so that half is taking a long, long time for me to get out. And Saw can be difficult, so that half is also fairly slow-going, too. Arc Seven (which takes place three years later) should go faster. Leia has a Key Milestone to meet, Infernalis has things to do, and there’s a Spoiler that sets up a major plot thread for arcs 8-14.

Which, as a head’s up, will most likely be split off into a separate fic. Which I think I’ve mentioned before, but just to be clear. Partly for length, partly for timing--there’s going to be a fairly long timeskip of six years--partly for subject matter/format because there’s a key Moment that happens in Arc Eight (working title Escalation). Right now, the plan is to title this second chunk Protectors, but I might use Precipice II or something instead, haven’t decided.

So, anyway, fun stuff in the pipeline here! I might do another bonus fic or two at some point. I’m guessing Arc Six will be about twelve chapters in total? Depends on how quickly I wrap up the Saw & Ahsoka & Rex storyline.

Oh! Before I switch topics--on the subject of the bonus fics, having read Thrawn: Alliances...there’s definitely one I want to write, with Padme and Thrawn. But, due to potential spoilers, it’ll be a while. Which...I guess I should remind y’all that I tend to work in a blended/tiered canon, drawing on both Legends and canon content as seems appropriate. Also, I locked my official canon before seeing Rebels, which is why Ahsoka and Rex have pretty significantly different backstories. I draw stuff in from later-released contact as it suits me/the story, if it does not completely contradict what I’ve established for the AU.

(Incidentally, as for drawing in Rebels content/characters, I’m still going back and forth on how much of that I wanna do. As I think I’ve mentioned before, the timeskip between Part 7 and Part 8 includes the entire run of the show, and I already had Thrawn worked into a later storyline, plus Rebels would pretty significantly diverge starting with the end of S1/beginning of S2 anyway, so...there it is. There is something I’m leaning towards using Kallus and Zeb for, in around part 13/14, but we shall see.)

AU Outlines:

Let’s Go Steal a Crossover will materialize at some point, I swear.

Also The Mask of Zorro/California Gold Rush AU Fusion No One One Person Asked For. Which is a very long title but pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. I should rewatch that movie at some point. Not just for this, but because I love it.

Also, having read Alliances, for somewhat spoilery reasons the Pellaeon AU is back in my head with a vengeance. (I mean. Not that it ever really left because it’s a fun and somewhat self-indulgent one I pick at pretty frequently.) Anyway, I probably will write that one up at some point, but holding off for a suitable spoiler moratorium ‘cause some of the stuff that came up in the novel will/should be referenced. (...this AU, for those of you who don’t know, is the one where Gilad Pellaeon impulsively kidnaps a fourteen-year-old, one thing leads to another, and now Thrawn is working with the Rebels.)

Also also, at some point I should update Ventress and Her Tiny Time-Travelling Conscience. Because Past!Obi-Wan, Padme, and Palpatine should probably all weigh in on what’s going down...

Other Existing Fic:

Fingers crossed for Distaff and/or Auxiliaries. Because I am very fond of them, I just haven’t had much juice flowing for them lately, sadly.

Also, eventually The Caladrius? I think/hope?

New Projects:

There are THREE of them! :D Because I clearly don’t have enough going on, lol.

First one is Our Faces Like a Mirror (working title); AKA the first big chunk of a potentially massive “shadowsong accidentally fell in love with Bo-Katan and now feels compelled to tell her story” project. This one covering from the backstory civil war until she leaves to join Death Watch. Don’t want to say too much more, since it might be my BB project for next year.

Second is Bail Unfucks the Timeline (which lacks a working title). It’s pretty much an expansion of the AU Outline version. There’s quite a bit of negative space/gaps to fill in, so we’ll see when this comes in. (It also might be a BB project, IDK.)

Third is Untitled ObiAniDala AU Extravaganza. Based on a prompt from @obianidalasuggestion.

Timeline/dummy summary because I are Clever.

In another galaxy, this would be the year the Clone Wars began.

In this one, it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Republic.

I’m still poking around at worldbuilding for now. Figuring out where Obi-Wan has been for the past twenty-five years since Bail helped him escape the Temple (and making this suitably distinct from Kanan’s backstory); working out Padme’s timeline; having fun with tiny Anakin and Ahsoka; debating whether to adjust Palpatine’s age for credibility, or have the subplot of him overthrowing Plagueis in the background...

Now, courtship narratives aren’t really my strong suit so I have no idea on timing for this one, either, but I’m having fun building it and it will come eventually.

(Also, it occurred to me--and this isn’t the direction I’m going with it--but this prompt also lends itself to a Dark Trio OT3 fic. Where Obi-Wan the Sith apprentice and Padme the clever politician are plotting to overthrow their mutual Master and rule together, or have already done so, and then Anakin falls into their laps, so to speak...again, not going there because while I definitely enjoy reading Empress Amidala AUs (and occasionally Sith Obi-Wan AUs), I am not at all confident in my ability to write one, and besides I’m having way more fun worldbuilding the other one. Just...IDK sharing as an example of how my brain tends to go off on Tangents, which is why I have many AUs of my own AUs and sometimes updates are slow, lol...)

Original Fiction:

With the help of some challenges on the origfic community I post to, I actually got some stuff done this month! Hopefully will keep doing stuff because I’ve missed by origfic characters the past year or so...

Anyway, that’s what’s coming! What have y’all been up to lately?

#coming attractions #shadowsong26fic #shadowsong writes star wars #shadowsong writes original fic

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kalehiggins-blog · 6 years

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aloha (NICO TORTORELLA)! oh, i’m so sorry. it’s actually (KALE HIGGINS). the (TWENTY EIGHT) year old is a (MASSUESE) at the mahina resort. (THEY) identify as (NON BINARY), and also is considered to be (ABSENTMINDED) & (COMPASSIONATE). lately, they have been caught listening to (CONNECTION+ONE REPUBLIC) on repeat and is usually labelled as (THE HEDONIST) because (THEY ARE ALWAYS CHASING PLEASURE IN ALL ITS VARIOUS FORMS WITH LITTLE INHIBITION). - (mandy, 31, she/her, est)

Mandy here...I’m sorry not sorry for destroying your lives with this gorgeous face all over the dash. Relax and let me massage your soul with my chill child Kale.

So Kale grew up with super hippy parents. Hence the name. For the first 12 years of their life they lived in an RV and traveled all over the midwest.

And then their dad passed away and their mom stopped being so adventurous. She remarried a nice but super boring guy and expected kale to just adapt to the new lifestyle. Suffice it to say kale tried not to be a dick about it but they moved out as soon as they were 18.

It took them a looong time of cycling through hobbies and jobs (legit Kale has had like 10 jobs) to find massage school and boy oh boy if a job centered around touch wasn't the PERFECT job for them. Kale worked out of California till about 5 years ago when a friend told them about the resort.

In terms of personality Kale is all about touch and pleasure and affection. They are super tactile, super easy to turn on, suuuper into friends with benefits, could spend 4 hours just touching someone and not talking. Loves the beach, the feel of sand on bare feet, getting caught in thunderstorms, any activities that involve working with their hands.

They are horrifically allergic to bees and strawberries and carry an epipen on them at all times.

CONNECTION IDEAS

We put the FRIEND in friends with benefits: LISTEN OKAY, for Kale sex and friendship goes hand in hand. It just does. Friendship is a kind of love and all love should lead to pleasure ja feel? That being said Kale loves super super chill fwb dynamics. The kind of dynamics where one week they may hook up every night and that’s normal and natural and fine. And then at other times they may go two months without anything more than platonic interactions and that’s normal and natural and fine. Their connection fluctuates and shifts but it’s always there, it always exists, and Kale is dedicated af to it. THEY NEED LIKE INFINITY OF THIS DYNAMIC OKAY, THE MORE THE MERRIER.

Don’t I know you?: Kale went through a brief stint as a stripper in Cali. If a character stopped through that state at some point we could do a supppper fun “I know you from somewhere but I can’t put my finger on it” thing.

Exes: If it’s not clear, Kale doesn’t do well in traditionally monogamous relationships. He will definitely have collected a few exes over the past few years. Some may have ended amicably but the love cooled off or the person just wasn’t into a sexually open relationship. Some of them could have ended really brutally with a lot of jealousy if the person was hoping that Kale would cease their nsfw activities with their fwbs. I’d even love a dynamic where they tried to date and the chemistry wasn’t quite right for that but they have hella good sexual chemistry so they still hook up occasionally.

Shopping Buddy: Kale is tactile af and looooooves aesthetically pleasing fabrics. They loooooove shopping and definitely need a go to buddy that can handle two hours of squealing over satin bedsheets and super soft cotton shirts.

Platonic Safety Net: Someone Kale is very close with but they don’t have sexual chemistry. This means they are a safety net of sorts, because Kale never has to worry that the boundaries of their dynamic might be shifting or that feelings are getting hurt. When Kale is tired or overwhelmed they seek out this person for a night out or a night in and bare their soul or just simply de-stress.

Number one client: Kale is a masseuse and this person is their number one client, like the spa knows them by name and they show up multiple times a week. This could just be because they are a ball of stress and Kale helps them breathe and lets them talk out their troubles and they’re like gossiping buddies. Or ya know, they could be the number one client because they keep coming back for the nsfw special, either or both all of the above? I legit just want Kale constantly raising their eyebrow like “weren’t you just here yesterday?”

Romance: Kale loves love. Friendship love is heaven to them but romantic love is GODLY. There’s nothing like clicking with another person so profoundly that you just feel understood all the way down to your bones. All of Kale’s romances definitely start out as fwb and work their way up from there. Kale is not shy when they feel romantic potential with a person, they will let them know, and then depending on the other person’s feels/experience with sexually open relationships they may have some shit to work out. Either way it ends up being a delicious slow burn.

#mahinaintro

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deathnotee18 · 6 years

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The Reflection That Mechanics Have On The Theme and Setting

This paper will discuss the Bethesda video game, Fallout New Vegas, analysing how mechanics relate to themes and settings. While thinking how mechanics can affect the players experience in the game, and how some mechanics impact on players choices in the game. This essay will argue that Fallout New Vegas makes relationships between its themes setting and mechanics, which relates to its player experience and how the player can play the game. This information will be shown from talking about mechanics in Fallout and the change they have on gameplay experience with links that are shown between the theme and setting. While understanding the theories of survival of the harsh USA in the future.

In Fallout New Vegas users are thrown into a world destroyed plagued with danger trying to survive. After humans come out of the underground vaults humans kept prisoners for years, of USA is different. Called the new California Republic with a large city called New Vegas based in Las Vegas. Users start to see that the game world is more advanced than the modern age. The first visual reminder the player is shown of this is the advance gadget, the pip-boy. The pip-boy is a handy piece of technology, given to those who went into underground vaults for protection from nuclear bombs being dropped between the USA and China. Being a radio, inventory, state checker, limb repair and a map, the pip-boy has features that users can use throughout their experience in Fallout. Listening to the radio as players explore the wasteland becomes a great way for NPCs and creatures to hear the player, making combat more direct then avoidable which makes players inject a syringe to repair the body if bones are broken when injured. Healing only with one injection to a body part shows how vast in the future Fallout is set. Fallout being such a dangerous world, without the player having the advanced technology to use players would struggle. The player can see the advancement in technology and can realise the danger of this. Players need to use this technology to become a threat to survivors of the wasteland and be able to defeat freakish monsters with no negotiation and defend themselves against NPCs.

Although the pip boy has a lot of features there is one mechanic players use all the time for any NPC or enemy that appears. This is called V.A.T.S the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. This system helps players see the critical places to hurt enemies in battle. The main areas of choice are the legs arms torso and head. Each limb has a crippling point, if players hurt one area enough enemies can slow down or become less of a threat. V.A.T.S also tell players the chance of hitting a shot from any distance where the user can see the enemy. Nacke, and Lindley (2010, p. 2) states that in FPS games players are put straight into a form of action. Only seeing hands and a weapon the player turns into the game character in a FPS game. Since players feel they are taking actions directly in the virtual world. Players become so involved that their decisions in the real world would reflect into the game (Nacke, and Lindley 2010, p. 2). So, players become fast to react to a situation and decide the best thing to do in the player’s choice. It gives players time to choose what they want to do in the game when acting. But gives time for players to experience better ways of handling a situation and the back and forwards fighting that can arise from it. This allows players to use different weapons to deal with enemies which can also form players preferred play styles. Having V.A.T.S in use on the pip boy, gives players advantages in battle and makes for great experiences. It helps the player aim well and gives better chances of surviving fights. While also helping analyse the battlefield and who’s closest to death this adds more strategic thinking when executing combat this wouldn’t be able to happen without the elite technology which is the pip boy. It really does show how far in the future the game is set analysing an NPC seeing any exploits players can take which would be a real turntable in combat. The player fights for their life trying to survive the obstacles in the wasteland. Survival is the key idea in fallout a changed world has changed the people and how NPCs react to the new environment. But a mechanic player decides to obey or disobey is Karma.

Karma is known for its relentless acts on people, Good deeds repay others with good things. Bad deeds repay people with bad things. What goes around comes around. But in fallout new Vegas the karma system is used in many areas that can impact the player in most situations. In Fallout, karma is the tide between good and evil. Players will encounter a character called Bennie when starting fallout. This character is an individual who shoots the player character in the head for being in the bad business. Saying "it was rigged from the start". This gives players a lot to question, developing a strong hate for Benny. But how the player decides to act on this can change the game through karma. Karma is developed from what players decide to do in the game world and impacts different ways the game world can treat users. Being nice to people allows for good karma to be awarded to users, but can lead to having enemies and being shunned by a certain group in the wasteland. Each action has a consequence and players are faced with this risk. Although Karma shows players who dislike or likes the user karma can adapt to how far anyone would go to survive.

People in the wasteland changed from the times of civilized life. Humans live new lives trying to piece together old life’s they once had. The wasteland being such a dangerous place filled with threats humans would have to adapt to this new environment. According to Mobbs, who cites Charles Darwin stating, “Charles Darwin declared that organisms unable to adapt to the demands of their environment will fail to pass on their genes and consequently fall as casualties in the “war of nature” (Mobbs, Hegan, Dalgleish, Silston and Prevost 2015, p. 1). Without humans adapting to the new world they now live in, it can result in problematic fatalities. Without humans adapting to this environment it would remove the source of human existence. Humans would need to find a way to survive this wrecking on their world without it would lead to unavoidable extinction. Ways humans have adapted is through technology, the pip-boy shows this advance growth in development healing insane damage during combat while also using drugs to endure the body’s senses. But humans have also trained their minds to deal with the tragedy of life and understanding being physically ready for the wasteland. Resources are limited and having the need to stay in shape to stay at the top of the food chain.

Mobbs suggests that humans have the relentless pressure to outsmart predators while balancing their own internal stability, balancing needs for resources. This threat optimizes survival action which allows for humans to decide the non-threatening and threatening endangerments. Humans being very smart creatures over the years have built up a lot of intelligent survival mechanisms, this promotes adaptions to change and effective paths to avoid natural danger. This allows players to make choice of the best way to survive. This could be avoiding some conflict situations deciding who to be friends with and using what the player finds to give better chances of winning a fight. While also prioritising the needs when coming to what resource is running low and what the player needs gather, this can be ammunition or first aid. This makes sure player have a better chance surviving when going against new threats new ways to deal with the threats and choices. However, although players need to go against foes and take risks to survive longer going against these threats can still end the life of the player which makes survival choices much more important than surviving day by day. Humans would need to be better at making the right choice instead of being good at fighting. Humans in New Vegas have gone under immense adaption to be able to start a fresh life in a new environment which is alien to anyone. Without this adaption most humans would face immense shock and denial, leading to suicide or abnormal behaviour. So, humans would have needed to go under a lot of physical and mental configures in the body to live in such a destroyed world without becoming depressed of loss. This also relates back to Darwin’s theories of passing on genes, when humans have next of kin their minds will be guided better towards how to live in the wasteland being healthier and mentally ready. Although humans in the wasteland can go crazy becoming a serious threat to players. This can be using drugs and killing people protecting themselves or stealing items. However, although it’s a free for all in the wasteland life still goes on within the game world. Adapted to this new land of USA and players showing ways to deal with the hardships of the wasteland.

Karma for players could be law, the world of fallout no longer having any law officials like police officers around to protect the people has caused chaos. Leading to the current time where players and NPCs kill to survive and cannot always rely on others. Karma is a good way to remind players of the sins they have committed if the world was structured correctly and society wasn’t broken. Players defend themselves when attacked which is in the game and in life a real reason to hurt another. However, when hurting those doing nothing to the player bad karma is given and reminds the player that they have just committed a crime. Although some areas in fallout are protected by groups but only a small population not the entirety of the land. Players can see when bad deeds have affected their gameplay experience. Players can see when committing crimes in an area those crimes were committed to have titled the player merciful thug no longer greeting the player into this area instead must fight their way in. Players who have helped people in the game world which lead for the player to gain a reputation of being able to overcome obstacles gaining a nicer title which is accepted. The folk of that living space have accepted the player for helpful nature.

In conclusion, Fallout has a great way of showing players how the core mechanics can relate to its theme and settings, building up a new experience for players. Showing the game's theme in every choice the player could make while seeing the advancement in technology that visually shows players that the world is no longer the modern USA but set further in the future. Fallout also shows how players are controlling the situations in the game and forming the path for the game. Allowing players to play Fallout their own way building an experience with everything players do and the choices in line for players making learning curves with careful thinking.

Bibliography

Obsidian Entertainment, (2003). Fallout New Vegas [Video Game]. California, United States: Bethesda Softworks.

Mobbs, D. Hagan, C. C. Dalgleish, T. Silston, B. & Prévost, C. (2015). The ecology of human fear: survival optimization and the nervous system. Frontiers in neuroscience, 1, 22. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.00055/full

Nacke, L. E. & Lindley, C. A. (2010). Affective ludology, flow and immersion in a first-person shooter. Measurement of player experience. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.0248.pdf

#fallout new vegas #first person shooter #role playing game #voilence

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stickypo · 3 years

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Is the struggle of white people hopeless?

America has changed a lot even before Donald Trump. Already today, there are more non-white children than white ones. With the current vector of development of events, it is not possible to turn back time.

In 1858, a then rather unknown politician named Abraham Lincoln and a man named Stephen Douglas engaged in a series of speech battles in Illinois. Both wanted to represent their state in the Senate - and their debates were conducted on a hot issue that was worrying all of America at that time: slavery. Douglas, a Democrat, was in favor, and Republican Abraham Lincoln was against.

From today's perspective, it is striking that Lincoln stated during this debate that he does not believe in racial equality and does not want blacks and whites to end up being politically or socially equal. He was not going to interfere with the rights of individual states to continue to keep slaves on their territory. Abraham Lincoln claimed that his only concern was to prevent the further spread of slavery in the West. For the first time, Lincoln stated that he considers the idea that blacks and whites can marry and have children together as disgusting as any other person in the United States.

All these protests were useless: Stephen Douglas won the election anyway. Lincoln, however, became so famous thanks to these public debates that three years later he was elected president of the United States as the candidate of the Republican Party. Most of the slave-owning states of the South found this so unbearable that they broke away from the Union and started a civil war - the bloodiest conflict in American history, in which more than 750,000 people died.

The North won this war. Slavery in the southern states was frozen; those slaves who were left to themselves and did not die of hunger, dragged out a miserable existence. But after the departure of the Union troops, the Southerners began to restore the slave system. To the surprise of many, the results of the American Civil War led to the adoption of more thoughtful racial laws, the development of which can be traced after the end of World War I: Such laws were designed to prevent Jews, Gypsies and immigrants from Southern Europe from settling in the United States - all of them were considered inferior. And Asians were undesirable in any case.

These racial laws were repealed in 1965 under President Johnson. Around the same time, the Congress in Washington abolished the rules of apartheid that had previously been in effect in states such as Mississippi and Alabama, passing the "Civil Rights Act". However, until 1967, there were still laws prohibiting blacks and whites from living together under the same roof.

You need to keep this story in mind to understand with what incredulous surprise an American of the XIX century would look at today's United States. America was a republic, of course; the Americans did not tolerate any king over them and insisted on their freedoms. The United States, without a doubt, was a country created by a white man and for him. Even John F. Kennedy , the first Catholic president, had to swear during the election campaign that the Constitution was more important to him than the Pope.

A white American who came out into the open after one of the speech battles between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas and was brought into our time by a mystical wind would cease to understand this world. And not only because there are planes, microwave ovens and smartphones in this world. Our white American could look, for example, at Georgia. He will see that a black woman is running for governor there - if she wins the election, she will become the first black woman governor in the history of the United States. Of course, his jaw will drop, if only because Stacey Abrams is a graduate of the elite Yale University: what - is a black woman allowed to study?

And even if a guest from the past supported the abolition of slavery, he probably would have thought that giving blacks the right to vote, as well as the right to stand for election, was too radical a step. If you present this time traveler with statistics showing that 17% of all American couples today are interracial-and this curve continues to grow rapidly - he will probably faint.

You can also point him to Nikki Haley, whose parents immigrated from India - and then reveal to him that Nikki Haley is an anti-immigration advocate. Perhaps he could ask: "If this is what a woman working for an anti-immigration policy looks like, then what does a woman who is pro-immigration look like?". In this case, you could point to the name "Kamala Harris". Kamala Harris is a senator from the state of California, where she was the attorney general and implemented criminal justice reforms. In addition, she was quite a likely candidate for the post of president of the United States.

And we haven't said a word about many politicians who openly admit that they are gay or lesbian. After all, until the end of the 1960s, the police treated homosexuals in the United States with about the same tenderness as in the Eastern Bloc countries. However, today in California there is a "beautiful" town of Palm Springs (near Los Angeles), where a city council was recently elected, in which there is not a single person who is not gay, lesbian or transgender. By the way, by all accounts, this city council is doing an excellent job.

In conclusion, we will present our visitor with two simple statistical calculations. The first confirms that in 2016, more non-white children were already born in the United States than white ones. In other words, white supremacy in America can now only be represented as minority rule. Secondly, we will inform our guest about the results of the new survey. According to these data, three-quarters of all Americans consider immigration a good thing. Seeing this, our visitor would probably have gone completely crazy.

Source: https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/a…

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