#Auto Parts Warehouse

[seoautoparts]

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[ms-demeanor]

How do I explain to a reseller that possibly the last thing that I want when browsing their private business marketplace, where I have to be assigned an account number and am required to do a certain number of sales a year, which I sometimes browse while on the phone with customers - and the phones are zoom, and are thus outputting audio on the same channel as my browser - is an auto-playing one-minute long unskippable, unmuteable ad for the product that I just searched by the manufacturer part number?

I got here by plugging in the exact part number; you do not need to advertise the product that I have just searched by exact part number. If I am here you are not going to be able to sell me the part any better than you have already done. I am either here to check what warehouses carry this, what specs the product has, or to verify a price, or to add the product to my cart because the customer has approved the purchase. NONE of those are experiences that are improved by playing a minute long video that is stills of the product combined with royalty free music and a voiceover pitching why the product is going to revolutionize my throughput and increase stability in my business.

Anyway, a thousand praises for ublock, because i found the site that was hosting these videos for the vendor and blocked it.

However, I SHOULD NOT NEED TO BLOCK ELEMENTS OF YOUR WEBSITE TO USE YOUR WEBSITE WHILE I'M ON THE PHONE WITH A CUSTOMER IF YOU HAVE VIDEOS THAT AUTOPLAY WITH AUDIO ON YOUR WEBSITE YOU ARE A JOKE AND I WILL GO OUT OF MY WAY TO BUY FROM OTHER VENDORS.

[oneknightstand-if]

One Knight Stand Update 4

Chapter 2 Part 3 - The Forest & the Warehouse

Featuring...

Merlin's Guide to Minor Neutral Parties

New text messages and phone calls from non-dead people you haven't ghosted. And maybe some not-so-living ones too.

MC may appear on TV! This might not be a good thing. And they aren't the only one, cameo appearances from a future RO

Duel of AoE spells while frolicking through the magical forest. Your past decisions totally can't bite you in the ass here.

Attempt to summon Cthulhu. Dance the macarena. Have I mentioned posterior-biting consequences here?

Also an abandoned industrial warehouse is the best place for a leisurely stopover.

Icebreaker games stop staring at the noises with mini stat boosts as prizes!

Oh yeah, RO #4 finally joins the crew.

Before you play the game with an old save, you'll want to clear your cache for the oneknightstand.co website and then check that the game's frontpage is displaying Version 0.23. Then after loading the save, check the Status Page to make sure that your stats haven't reset back to the default ?¿?¿?¿.

If your variables have reset back to the default, then unfortunately that save file has corrupted (it happens to the best of us for unfathomable reasons) and you'll have to reload another save file. It you try to play the game through a corrupted save, you'll just get a bunch of non-existent errors. Please do the entire clear cache + confirm non-corrupted save file before reporting any potential errors. Then report the errors... all the errors!

Play the Updated Beta Test

(Since there were bugs & typos still reported & fixed throughout Chapter 1 & 2, your current saves are probably going to reset to the beginning of each section of the game. If things get too wonky, you might want to try restarting from the beginning. )

Additional Word Count (Sans Code): 84,000+

Additional Word Count (With Code): 107,000+

New Total Word Count (Sans Code): 900,000+

New Total Word Count (With Code): 1,227,000+

Average Playthrough: ~70,000+ words

Note: You can view the game code on my site the same way you do on Dashingdon just add /scenes to the end of the URL.

Link to New Polls on the Update (Which don't auto close in a week like the Tumblr ones)

Next Update

Merlin's Guide to Minor Unavailable (the final part of the guide! 🥳)

The first appearance of the Free Time Hub (god help me) Featuring...

Getting romantic with Merlin

Having The Relationship Talk with Adrian

Doing stuff with RO #4 because they're totally here now

Getting help with that entire changeling, amnesiac, lucid dreamer thing

Researching suspicious things you've noticed up to this point

Boosting those stats (with the help of the ROs if you can't bear to be away from them for a few minutes)

Also quick reminder that the Alpha Build of the game on Patreon updates as I complete each section, so the first part of Merlin's Free Time section is already available.

[1-800-cuupid]

How To: Auto Height for Shoes

Haiii! As promised, here is the tutorial to make it so your custom shoes no longer require a shoe slider!

Thank you to the bestie who took the time to pick through Madlen's package file to figure out how it worked. And of course, thank you to Madlen who did the majority of the work figuring out how to make this possible in the first place!

♥ Tut below cut ♥

~~~

Set Up Your Blend File:

We're going to add a plane that will act as the mesh for the SlotRay which will allow for you to adjust the height of your shoes!

Open your blend file that contains the shoes your wish to adjust. In the 3D View, press Shift + S and in the menu, select “Cursor to Center” In the 3D View, press Shift + A and in the menu, hover over “Mesh” then add a plane.

Now size this plane down as small as you can get it. You don’t want this plane visible in game.

Double check to make sure the plane has not moved from the center!! Your sim won't be centered in game if it has! If you see that it's moved:

Press "Shift + S" and click "Cursor to Center".

Then Select your plane and press "Ctrl + Shift + Alt + C", click "Origin to 3D Cursor".

Press "Ctrl + Shift + Alt + C" again and click "Geometry to Origin".

Navigate to the “Object data” tab and under “UV Maps” add a new one then name it “uv_0”.

Next, navigate to the “Scene” tab and under “S4Studio CAS Tools” set the cut number.

Depending on how many cuts your shoes have, you’ll want to adjust this number. For example, if your shoe has 3 cuts (0000, 0001, 0002) then this plane would have a cut number of 0003. Since my boots only have one cut, I will put the number as 0001. Now select your shoes and enter Edit mode. Select a face/vertice/edge on the very bottom of your shoes. Look to the panel on the left side of the screen (if it’s not open, press “N”). Under “Transform”, note down the number next to “Z” After that, save your blend file under another name so you can distinguish which is which. I’ll name mine “Boots_3_Height Cut”

~~~

Add a New Cut to your Package File:

We're going to add an additional cut in your package file for the new plane!

Open Sims 4 Studio, make a new package file for your shoes and import them. Go to the Warehouse tab and select your LOD 0, it will be the geometry with the largest file size. Sometimes you have to close then reopen the package to see the geometry. Duplicate this geometry and in the box that pops up, change the last character of the “Group”. It can be any number or letter as long as it’s not the same as the duplicated geometry. On the duplicated geometry, note down the Group, Instance & Type values. Find the “Region Map” and next to “Entries” click “Edit Items”. Add a new entry and in the “Layer” box, type the number you used for your cut. Since I used the cut number 0001, I will type 1. Keep the “Region Type” as “Base” and move to “Models” then click “Edit Items”. Add a new Model entry and paste the Group, Instance & Type values you noted down before. Save and close each box. Find your “CAS Part”, this is your swatch.

If you have additional swatches, it is a good idea to remove them and add them back once you are finished with this process.

Scroll down until you find the “Lods”.

Click “Level: 0” and next to "LOD Models", click “Edit Items”. Add a new entry and paste the Group, Instance & Type values again. Save & close each window and return to the Warehouse.

~~~

Adjusting SlotRays:

We are now going to edit the SlotRays for the new cut which will adjust the height of the sim for your shoes!

Return to the new duplicated Geometry and in the “Data” tab, find the “SlotRay Intersections” and click “Edit Items”. Add a new entry and find the “OffsetFromIntersectionsOs” box.

You'll want to change ONLY the middle coordinate number. That will be the height of the sim.

You want to take the “Z” coordinate that you noted down from blender and replace middle coordinate number.  If the number you wrote down is negative (i.e -0.01234) make it positive (i.e 0.01234).

In the “SlotHash” box, change the value from “00000000” to “FEAE6981”. This is the hash for the b__ROOT__ bone in the Sim's Rig.

Save and close the dialogs then return to the warehouse. Next, reimport your mesh and save your package file. You can now test your shoes in game!

Please keep in mind:

You have to do this for every LOD of your mesh

You can freely replace the mesh of your shoes and adjust the height since the cut with the plane has the SlotRay data

Animations may be off since EA hasn't made the game to support taller sims

CAS windows may move slightly if your sim is using poses/animations where they are leaning to the side. This won't affect gameplay

I recommend using Helgatisha's Stand Still in CAS mod to make sure your sim is absolutely centered

Hope this helped :)

[ggomos-maribat]

10 | in which Marinette Dupain-Cheng submits her resignation

Part 10 (Last Chapter) of No Mr. Wayne You Can't Adopt Me! | Masterlist

Marinette ticked off her mental checklist. Lights? Here. Stage? Ready. Food? All served. She clenched her jaw. Bruce Wayne, her boss, the single most important person for the night?

Missing in action.

She tapped her heeled foot on the ground. It was twenty minutes already, but the entire night's schedule was officially in disarray. Sooner or later, the guests would be asking. She had relentlessly called Bruce's phone over and over again that she didn't even know how many times it was. Even Damian she called a few times yet there was no answer.

She had a guess on what the reason was, but she expected more sense from Bruce—even if it was late at night, he would not be out there fighting crime.

Soon, she waved the figurative white flag and called Alfred after sneaking off somewhere quieter.

"Where is he?" she asked. Straightforward and simple.

"I'm sorry, Miss Marinette. I understand Master Bruce has an event today but . . ." Alfred trailed off. "He is currently unavailable at the moment."

"No, Alfred. Where exactly is he?"

A long pause followed. Then the elderly man spoke again. "I'm afraid he's caught up in a situation. They went out for patrol and seemed to have underestimated their targets. They are currently in a warehouse right now."

"What?" Marinette rubbed her head. Bruce, just. . . how?! "They, as in, all of them?!"

"Yes, Miss Marinette."

"Can no one get them right now?! The event was supposed to start ages ago!"

"Master Duke, Miss Cassandra and Miss Stephanie are all out of town unfortunately." Alfred sighed. "Actually, may I trouble you to rescue them? It will be faster than calling for backup from the Justice League."

Marinette bit her lip. Kwamis. How could all of them get captured?! What's stopping me from walking out from my job right now, huh, Bruce? I could leave you to your kidnappers all night long.

"I apologize, Miss Marinette, but they cannot seem to get out themselves. I will personally make sure Master Bruce gives you a bonus within the week—"

"Okay, send me the coordinates."

Marinette changed into a dark vigilante-type outfit as fast as she could. Alfred sent an auto-driven ride to her location and she floored the pedal all the way to the warehouse. Relax, Marinette, she told herself, you asked Tam to stall the guests. If we finish this in fifteen minutes and Bruce gives some sort of half-assed excuse to the attendees, it'll be fiiiine.

She pulled down her mask when she arrived at the warehouse. Going into it, she exercised a little bit of caution. But later on, she realized that taking down the men was a piece of cake and maybe the boys just got a little but unlucky.

She slammed the doors open to one room and saw the vigilantes all tied up.

"MMmmf mmff mmm?" Batman asked, but his mouth was duct-taped.

"That's not important right now." Before Marinette cut off their binds, she threw them one by one into the car: Batman at the passenger seat and Red Hood, Red Robin, and Robin at the back.

"Who . . .?" Batman started again. The rest seemed speechless with shock (except Damian perhaps, who likely already figured her out).

"How, just how?" Marinette slammed the driver's side door loudly and twisted the ignition with her pent-up rage. "How did all of you get caught up in that?! Did you decide to play along with your kidnappers?!"

". . . Marinette?"

She huffed and drove, calculating the shortest possible route to the event venue. "Did you forget what was tonight, huh? Couldn't resist getting into your fursuit before a big launching event at WE?"

"But . . .but—"

"You literally have no excuse!" Marinette expertly swerved around cars, even nearly running a red light.

Batman reached for the car radio, which was playing a news update covering the WE event but she slapped his hand away.

"I thought I could make it in time," he helplessly explained, pulling his cowl down. "How did you know?"

"No, in case you didn't know, you're not making it in time." She instantly honked the car when another vehicle cut in in front of them. "Don't mess with me tonight, fucker!" She cried out the half-open window.

She swore she saw the boys at the back visibly gulp.

Marinette exhaled a steady breath. "Look, we'll talk about this some other time, but for now, you will go into that event, be a good CEO, and get treatment for your bruises the minute you get home, comprendre?"

"Com—comprendre . . ." Bruce repeated.

Marinette halted at the back of the venue, pulled out a formal outfit from a compartment and threw it at Bruce. Thankfully, he seemed to get the hint and bolted out of the car without complaints.

Marinette directed a glare at the boys through the rearview mirror. "Damian, switch with me. Jason, don't move and keep pressing on that wound. I'll give you first aid but we have to take you to Alfred to get that checked out."

"You got stabbed?!" Tim exclaimed.

"Um yeah." Jason sucked in a breath as Marinette hopped into the back and Damian took the wheel.

"Why didn't you tell us?!"

"You'll make a big fuss out of it." Jason rolled his eyes. "It's no big deal."

Marinette flicked his forehead while Tim helped get Jason's clothes out of the way. "It is a big deal; it looks pretty serious."

"I've had worse." Jason made a face as she treated his wound.

"Okay just because you died once already it doesn't mean you can get overconfident," Marinette sassed.

Tim stared at her with wide eyes. "How the hell did you know that?"

"I know everything." She finished off by wrapping the bandages around Jason's torso. "Sorry Dames, can you drive faster?"

With a nod, Damian sped up, replicating the rush from earlier. Jason also had his jaw hanging. "Demon spawn listens to her."

***

"How long have you known?"

They finally had the chance to sit down and talk the following day in the office. Marinette had her hands calmly folded on top of her lap, while Bruce was looking at her intently on the seat across.

"Ever since I started working for you."

Bruce blinked a few times, as if getting his identity discovered easily was news to him. Marinette continued, "You're not exactly sneaky about it, you know. It was very obvious. Who do you think was covering up for you?"

"Why didn't you tell me?" Bruce asked.

She sighed. "I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I wanted to help you from the sidelines like Alfred does and I thought you'd fire me if you knew that I knew."

By the look on his face, he was probably doing a quick flashback to all the times she messed with him as Batman. Bruce opened his mouth for a reply but she interrupted him. "And before you start suspecting me of doing anything bad, I want to let you know that you can trust me with your secret. If I had any ill intent, I would've acted on it a long time ago."

"It's—it's not that I don't trust you . . . it's—well, what made you break last night?"

Her gaze was glued to the floor. "I called Alfred and he told me where you were. I just . . . uhm, aside from the money he offered, I was really upset. The company prepared so much for the event and I put so much time making sure it was perfect. Then you don't show up."

When she looked up, the sting of guilt was evident in Bruce's eyes.

"I'm not faulting you for trying to fight crime," she added. "I just thought you'd be more responsible with your priorities."

"I'm sorry, Marinette," he said softly. "I didn't mean to disappoint you like that."

"Are you mad at me? For not telling you?"

"Mad—? I . . . I'm just surprised, really. But I should've known better. You helped us escape last night and you treated Jason's injury. I shouldn't be angry for that."

Marinette nodded slowly, satisfied with the apology. "I appreciate what you're doing for Gotham, so I'll make sure to keep you and your family's identities safe." She pulled out an envelope. "On a completely unrelated note, I think it's time I give you this."

Suffice to say, Bruce looked like he went through a storm of emotions whilst reading the piece of paper. "Your resignation letter?" He set it down. "If this is because of last night—"

"Nope, it's not because of last night." She smiled. "I just think it's time for me to look for a different career path. I do love my job right now, but I don't see myself as a PA forever."

Bruce's shoulders sagged. "Where will you go?"

"Hmm, recently Queen Industries sent me a good offer—"

"How much did Ollie offer you?" He sprung from his seat. "I'll pay ten times that!"

"Mr. Wayne," she motioned for him to sit back down. "I really do want to explore other options. I think I can get more experience with another company."

"But you'll need to leave Gotham."

She shook her head. "Mr. Queen allowed me to work remotely from Gotham. I'll be a consultant of sorts for their fashion department."

"But . . . but . . ."

"I'll be leaving in about a week. Don't worry, I'll make sure everything's in order for your next PA."

He's really sulking, Marinette observed. I feel a little bad . . .

"Any chance I can still adopt you?"

"Mr. Wayne."

"Fine." He raked a hand through his hair. "Then, will you at least join our family brunch this weekend? As a last 'thank you' to you."

Marinette thought for a moment, remembering a similar invitation from Alfred that Damian relayed earlier. "Sure, I'd love to go."

***

"Are you sure about this?"

Marinette checked her reflection on her phone. They arrived pretty early, but that meant she could help Alfred out for the food prep. Damian parked the car right in front of the manor. "Why? I already submitted my resignation."

"You were forced to quit your job because of me."

"I chose to resign not only because of you, but also because I did want to take Oliver's offer." She reached over to squeeze his hand. "If I stay as your father's assistant, there will always be a professional boundary I can't cross regardless of what's in the contract. You'll always be my boss' son, and I’ll just be your father's assistant. Without that now, I can actually act freely around you. I can even help with vigilante stuff if you need me."

He squeezed back. "Are you not worried about what people will say?"

The headlines flickered in Marinette's head: Bruce Wayne's former PA nabs the billionaire's son.

"Are you?"

"No. I couldn't care less."

"Then I'm not." She beamed. "I've already seen how harsh the media can be. If all goes to shit, we sue the hell out of them."

"Father will be devastated when he finds out."

She shrugged. "He should've seen this coming, honestly."

"Hmm."

"Why?"

"When I marry you, he will have the satisfaction of having you as his daughter however."

"M—marry?" Marinette squeaked. "You're already thinking about marriage?"

"Is that bad?"

"No . . . wait, sorry I was just caught off guard." Her chest fluttered at the thought of their future. "Of course Damian, I'd love to marry you someday."

A small smile played at Damian's lips, the subtle kind that she loved so much. "Now that you're not bound by contract, does that mean I can kiss you anytime I want?"

Marinette answered him with her lips, softly kissing him as his hand lifted to hold her cheek. They parted for a second before he started peppering kisses on the corner of her lips, on her nose and her forehead. She pressed a long kiss on his cheek in return.

"It looks like we won't need to break the news to Father anymore."

"What?"

When Marinette turned around, Bruce was just at the front steps of the manor, disheveled and clad in pajamas and an old bathrobe, plus Robin-themed fuzzy slippers. At his feet laid pieces of a shattered mug, which he had seemingly dropped out of shock.

Marinette laughed. "Oops."

She pressed the button to roll her window down and waved at the dumbstruck Bruce Wayne. "Morning, Bruce! Cute slippers!" 

End AN: That wraps up NMWYCAM! Thank you for reading, commenting and kudos-ing this fic; I didn't expect it to blow up this much😮 If you want to know about my next upcoming fic, check out this poll of mine in Tumblr🙂

[psychologeek]

Whumptober #14:

LEFT FOR DEAD | Hunting Gear | Blackmail

full fic on AO3

~

part 1 (Day 4)

It’s been a long night.

Crane is out, and even though he isn't the Joker, his toxins are more than enough reason to keep Robin far away. 

(Not like he can stop Robin—)

It's been a long night, but this is about to end. 

Maybe he got hit with some gas. But it doesn't matter. He can work through it.

(And if there's a noise of gunshots and broken pearls flickering in and out of sight,  gleaming in the corner of his eye—If there's a bleeding child by his side, asking “why didn't you save me?”

A bloody figure, always blaming: “I called you, but you never came”.

If he refuses to stop, to let go of those haunting him?

Well.

That’s between him, his mind, and the too many ghosts of his presence.)

Batman watches over his city. 

(Bruce stares towards the cemetery)

Batman is a frightening creature. A terrifying shade to his enemies.

There are gunshots in the distance, and he doesn't sigh in relief - but it is a near thing. 

There are guns, which means work that needs to be done. Which means Batman is needed, and can finally pause in hunting his ghosts.

There's a gunfight, and Batman stops it easily. But a misfired grenade still hits a car, and all of a sudden there's a ball of fire and-

(The warehouse is falling apart)

There are alarms from nearby stores and parked  cars and-

(His ears are ringing and his breath is heavy and for a few last, precious moments he still has a son).

There's a sudden weight on his side, and he instinctively adjusts his stance. “I told you to stay in, Robin.”

(“Robin! Robin, where are you?” oh god no god no please god—)

There's a weight of a child, holding him, hiding under his cape. Bruce can feel his warmth. He can hear the soft sobs, as a child who had to be too brave can finally trust. Soft hair on his neck that almost feels like fluffy curls.

(There's a phantom, the weight of a child in his hands. Wrapped in the same cape he used to find safety under. And he is stiff, and cold, and too little and too quiet and the only reason Bruce keeps walking is because he needs to go home. He needs to be Home. Alfred is going to fix it. He must.)

He adjusts his stance, as he did countless times before.

(He adjusts his grip, holding a lifeless body, too heavy for his mass.)

Then he calls the Batmobile. Keeps the child in his arms as he let the auto-driver take over.

(He calls the Batjet. He holds the body in his arms as the autopilot takes over.)

The cave is quiet when he enters, Agent A already gone to sleep.

(Alfred is waiting there, he can't remember what –)

“Are you hurt, Robin?” He asks the kid still shivering under his cape.

(“He's just asleep, Alfred. You can fix him. You can fix it. Right?”)

“B-Bruce,” the child on the gurney whispers, “Bruce”.

(The child on the gurney doesn't speak. He'll never speak again.)

There's a Robin suit on the table, right where it was left last night. The child on the gurney wears a black three-piece tailored suit.

(The child on the gurney wears a Robin suit, and his legs are visible. Every cut and burn and bruise on them. His left Fibula and half metacarpals are shattered. His fingernails are–)

“Oh,” says Bruce softly, as he realises. “You aren't real, are you?”

But the child on the gurney doesn't care that he's a ghost. And Bruce can never say no to his son.

So as a hand is raised (unbroken, though the nails  are still missing) he does what he wishes he could have: 

He washes the bloody fingers and wraps the places where the Clown-

He softly kisses every tortured finger. Every unbroken, bloody, painful nail bed. He numbs every wound, and wraps it clean.

There are clothes he keeps in the cave. He brings them.

(Even if it's not real, he won't let his ghost rest uneasily.)

He sits his son down and take off his burial clothes. Slips off the jacket. He unbottuns the white shirt, as one hand always holds his arm. 

(The T-shirt is too big for his child, making him look even more vulnerable.)

“Dad,” his son says.

That's all he says. Dad.

(Bruce wasn't Dad for eight months and fourteen days and-)

He covers his son with the boy’s favourite blanket. 

“Dad,” his dead son repeats. And doesn't let go.

(An ashamed part inside already plots how to get more of that drug.)

He undoes the batsuit quicker than he ever thought possible.

“I'm here, Jaylad,” he says softly. “I'm here, son”.

(Should he blackmail Crane for more as Wayne or as the Dark Knight?)

Bruce stays in the Batcave. He doesn't go to sleep. There's a warm body in his arms and soft snores and he can't bring himself to leave this fantasy.

He'll do anything to keep this fantasy alive, in his arms.

Bruce doesn't sleep that night. His tears are warm, and won't stop falling.

He doesn't sleep that night.

Yet, a scream wakes him after an unknown amount of time

“WHAT THE-”

Poll about the name

[simspaghetti]

The warehouse workers ask Poppy to stay late and help out with counting the loot on her very first day

I guess it's a good thing they're accepting her as part of the team, but she leaves work super stressed and exhausted!

As some stress relief, she heads around town and commits a few grand-theft-autos, she feels much better afterwards!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sam Delgado at Vox:

It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today.

It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement.

What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama?

Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members.

Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant.

The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant.

[...]

Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going?

The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members.

The UAW is leading a unionization drive at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Hope it wins. #UAWVance #UAW #1u

[a-roguish-gambit]

Turn of the century thoughts: Romy edition vol 1

So cars were hella expensive relatively speaking until Henry Ford started using assembly lines, but in the Sears and robucks catalogue you could basically buy every part to build one from scratch and have it delivered to you via mail. There were towns literally built a round a Sears warehouse, not for jobs or anything, but because you could literally buy a do it yourself kit house through sears and pick it up at a wearhouse or have it plopped down on your plot of land from the wearhouse.

Anyways, Remy figuring that out he can order every single piece and the manual for an original Ford car bit by bit for much less than an actual car and all he has to do spend a couple dollars a week to do it.

After almost a year of spending 10$ a week for parts he finally has everything and after convincing kitty to help him put it together with forge's tools in secret, a couple days before the fourth of july the following summer he's got a fully functioning car, tested and ready to go. He's read the driver's manual top to bottom, taken it for test drives, he's all set.

The following day he asks rogue if she'd attend a fireworks festival in upstate New York.

She raises an eyebrow at him. "How we gonna do that? It's half a day ride by carriage and I doubt Logan will let ya take Blackbird out."

"that be so Chere, but it a much shorter drive by car,"

"and how ya plannin on gettin ahold of one, oh prince of theives? Ah ain't doin no auto thefts."

"who said anything about stealin Chere?" He says before showing her the car he had been assembling, " this should cut it down to a few hours. Reckon you'll join Gambit now?"

She gives him a sly smile and gives him her gloves hand. "Ah reckon ah shall!"

[sailingshellsgames]

The Revamped Demo of chapters 1-7 is up! (+ chapter 8 alpha now available on patreon/ko-fi)

You can play it here! Reminder: this is a revamp so there's no new chapter, but there is new content (see below for a list of what's been changed/added/removed)

If you're interested in chapter 8's alpha, you can find it on Patreon and Ko-fi! (along with a bunch of other content)

And as always, thank you so much for playing! If you're someone who likes hugs, then I'm sending you a big one! 💞

What's new in chapters 1-7:

Additions:

General

Introduction of auto-success more.

More weird dreams + strengthening of the subplot around what MC sees in them.

Introduction of the dream journal mechanic.

More dialogue choices throughout the entire demo.

More descriptions of environments: MC's living quarters, the Den Compound, desert terrain around Leas, and city architecture.

Rearranged the stats screen and added clarity for MC's reputation among the Fey via an opposed pair bar.

General editing (word choice, etc.)

Chapter 1

MC's favored weapon can now be a bow! 🏹

Choice added to set MC's skin color.

A few more dialogue choices around MC reacting to the vision Keo has in Chapter 1.

Clearer explanation of MC agent backgrounds. Each now comes with explicit statement of what stats will be increased upon selection.

Chapter 2

Option to specify MC's tattoos. There are 4 pre-designed options, or you can design your own! (or choose no tattoos, if that's not your cup of tea). This includes the ability to add/remove/modify tattoos via the stats screen.

Chapter 3

Define how MC and Keo became friends.

Relatedly, more content setting up the fact that MC can't remember the agent found dead in the warehouse in Chapter 2.

Virano and Adaan mini-catfight (is it me, the author? am I the drama?)

Bug fix where a character already in the room would enter that room.

Chapter 4

A new dream.

Conversation around Virano's family's role in the nobility.

A little bit of Fey-weirdness around the Ashaad.

Conversation around the campfire with the team, mentions some of why Wren came to Leas.

Chapter 5

An explanation of Chapter 4's Fey weirdness that kind of just raises more questions, but does answer at least one of them.

Chapter 6:

A new dream.

Determining which of the three paths to take in the wilds is now a skill check.

General editing.

Chapter 7:

Yet another revision of the waterfall dream/flashback scene. This one's taken so long to get right, but I'm finally happy with it. Victory screech.

Moved Wren's reason for coming to Leas into the main story, so the choice option that explored that on their date now allows MC to dig in to learn a little more.

More dialogue choices in the scene where Keo's heritage is discovered during Lasan (if it didn't happen in the wilds).

Another choice in Wren's date going into the legend behind Lasan more, and a little about Wren's family.

Removals:

Keo no longer goes into seeing the magic in a vision. Removing this was part of a consolidation effort on my part. Tldr; I had too many side plots and needed to scrap some of them. Keo still has a reason for wishing to pursue the magic, if MC tries to refuse Rin. I actually like it a lot better now, which is a happy coincidence.

In Chapter 7, going to the wilds to see Keo's mother is no longer an option. Don't worry: everything I wrote for it will be used in book 2 :) But for book 1 it created a weird imbalance where the three options were so different they didn't converge well back into the main route.

Removed the ability to give Virano a sample of the magic or not. With all the other potential endgame outcomes, this got scrapped to consolidate things. I was finding it didn't really have a meaningful impact on the larger story despite reading like a major plot point, so in the bin it goes.

[reasonsforhope]

"California just cracked down on pollution from transportation in two major moves, part of an effort to improve air quality and cut carbon emissions at the same time. 

On Friday, the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved a rule that would ban the sale of diesel big rigs in the state by 2036. The mandate, which will apply to about 1.8 million trucks — including those operated by Amazon, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service —  is reportedly the first in the world to require trucks to ditch internal combustion engines. The news came one day after California became the first state to adopt standards to limit pollution from trains. 

Trucks and Diesel

The regulations are intended to improve air quality and trim carbon emissions from transportation, the source of about half the state’s greenhouse gases. Trucks and trains spew diesel exhaust, full of soot that contains more than 40 cancer-causing substances, responsible for an estimated 70 percent of Californian’s cancer risk from air pollution. 

The trucking rule requires school buses and garbage trucks to be emissions-free within four years. By 2042, all trucks will be required to be “zero-emission,” meaning there’s no pollution coming out of their tailpipes. The deadline comes sooner for drayage trucks, which transport cargo from ports and railyards to warehouses — typically short routes that require less battery range. New drayage trucks must be “zero-emission” beginning next year, with the rule applying to all drayage trucks on the road in 2035. 

Currently, medium and heavy-duty vehicles account for a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions statewide. In August, California clamped down on pollution from passenger vehicles with a plan to end the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035.

People breathing pollution from freeways and warehouse hubs have long called for stricter air standards. In the port cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles, some 6,000 trucks pass through every day, exposing residents to high levels of ozone and particulate matter, pollutants linked with a range of problems including respiratory conditions and cardiovascular disease. Long Beach residents who live the closest to ports and freeways have a life expectancy about 14 years shorter compared to people who live further away...

Trains and Locomotives

According to the new rules, the state is banning locomotive engines that are more than 23 years old by 2030. It also bans trains from idling for more than 30 minutes, provided that they are equipped with an engine that can shut off automatically.

The stage for the rule was set by a single line buried in the Biden administration’s proposed auto emissions rules, in which the Environmental Protection Agency said it was considering allowing states to regulate locomotives. Still, California’s new rules may spark a legal battle with the rail industry, which argues that the state doesn’t have the authority to make such sweeping changes.

Though railroads only account for about 2 percent of the country’s carbon emissions from transportation, switching to trains powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells would provide some benefits in the effort to tackle climate change. The public health gains would be even bigger: The California Air Resources Board estimates its new rules for trains, passed on Thursday, would lower cancer risk in neighborhoods near rail yards by more than 90 percent.

“This is an absolutely transformative rule to clean our air and mitigate climate change,” Liane Randolph, the chair of the air quality board, said ahead of the vote on the trucking rules on Friday. “We all know there’s a lot of challenges, but those challenges aren’t going to be tackled unless we move forward … if not now, when?”"

-via The Grist, 4/28/23

[kiragecko]

What does the batfamily do when they get too hot on patrol?

Dick - gets grouchy, but otherwise seems unaffected? He sweats a lot, and drinks more, and dramatically flops onto furniture when patrol is over, but that's it.

Babs - her genetics are optimized for -5 to 15℃ (20 to 60℉). She finds this VERY annoying. Dramatically swooned off a rooftop once, and got caught by a panicking 15 year old Dick. So embarrassing. The clocktower has extremely good temperature control, but she never found something that worked on patrol, and is defensive about it.

Jason - has a variety of chemical icepacks that he can fit into his suit. Which is important, because he gets dizzy FAST when he's hot. Adds electrolytes to his water, and tries to get out of the heat as quickly as he can. Doesn't patrol on really hot days.

Tim - starts mentally redesigning his costume AGAIN. When it gets really bad, he starts a list on his wrist computer of snarky comments about every piece of gear that is bothering him, and why Bruce was wrong to include it. This is set to auto update the computer, so he doesn't second guess himself once his brain is no longer melting.

Steph - buys popsicles and cheerfully complains. If it gets bad enough, she finds one of the warehouses with cooling units that blast freezing air year round, and turns into a puddle for a while.

Cass - removes parts of her costume. Fights in her bra. Raids civilians' apartments for lighter clothing. Drinks LOTS of water.

Damian - goes quiet and still. Extremely high heat tolerance, so other people usually get concerned long before it becomes a major issue.

Duke - uses his powers to create a sun-blocking shield. Hides in a corner with his little patch of darkness and lets the air cool down. Then, if that doesn't work, dramatically rips vents all over his costume and just tries not to get hit. He has pretty good heat tolerance, but when it gets over his limit, he is DONE.

Bruce - Turns on his suit's cooling system, and then dissociates from his body even more than usual. Tries to predict what Tim's comments are going to be. Makes sure the Batmobile is stocked with icepacks, popsicles, and icecream. Checks the Batmobile computer to make sure all his kids are conscious and okay. Mentally rewrites his pitch to convince his children that THEY would benefit from cooling systems, even though he still hasn't found technology that would make the added weight and bulkiness feasible for anyone but Jason.

Alfred - the one time the heating system in the Batcave broke and started pumping out constant heat (and eventually flames), he covered anything delicate and then adapted the sprinkler system into a mister (that misted AROUND his usual locations, so he stayed mostly dry). Then he fixed the heating system.

[emeraldtart]

Rogue AU

TFP AU where after the end of the series (before Predacons Rising), Starscream, KOBD, Shockwave, Soundwave and Lazerbeak decides to become Neutrals. They decided to spend the rest of their time on Earth instead of wasting it in a losing war.

They escape to big cities like Chicago or NYC, or maybe Witwicky, living in a two story house near a large warehouse where Starscream's altmode resides.

They each take part-time jobs for extra cover, and Soundwave hack the government so that in case Sector Seven is on them they'll have proof.

Starscream and Knock Out work at the same elementary school, with SS being a science teacher and KO being a drama teacher.

Breakdown has work at a nearby auto shop. He miss the Vehicons and wonders how they're doing.

Soundwave works at an IT center. His voice sounds weird due to millennia of not using it, but he's surprisingly capable in his work.

Shockwave just stays at their house. He feeds Lazerbeak and cleans up the other's altmodes. He deserves to take a break after everything.

When RID2015 starts, there are a slight panic. Just kidding, there's a lot of panic.

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

Sir Vival, the two-piece safety Hudson

Sir Vival, Walter Jerome's Hudson-based concept for the ultimate safety car, last moved under its own power sometime around when he showed the car at the New York World's Fair in 1964 or 1965. Since then, it's been split apart, reassembled, shuffled all over eastern Massachusetts, and remained hidden more or less in plain sight, but nobody's made an attempt to get it running again. That'll change now that longtime owner Ed Moore of Bellingham Auto Sales has sold Sir Vival to Jeff Lane of the Lane Motor Museum.

"It'll be the perfect fit," Lane said. "I've been pestering him about it for a while."

Moore, as we reported in November, has decided to close the doors at Bellingham, which he considers the last active Hudson dealership in the world, and has been either selling off his inventory of cars and parts or transferring portions of his lifelong collection to his house nearby.

In 1958, Worcester-based Walter Jerome decided it was about time somebody built a car designed primarily for safety and not for looks or speed. Rapidly increasing numbers of highway deaths - especially in the postwar period - led many to call for greater automotive safety as early as 1947, but the response from Detroit was tepid at best throughout the Fifties. Ford made a few gestures at improving automotive safety, including funding a study on safety cars at Cornell, but it largely fell to independents and individuals to build cars with safety features designed into the vehicle.

Jerome decided to start with a step-down Hudson - which he bought from Bellingham - and split it into two sections "to anticipate the possibility of collision from any angle." Similar to Bela Barenyi's idea for the crumple zone, Jerome intended the front section, mounted via a hinge to the rear section, to absorb a collision rather than deflect one, noting that the rigidity of typical cars was what led to injuries and deaths in collisions. To each of the two sections, Jerome added steel bumpers that acted, in his words, like a second frame, and rubber bumpers around the steel designed to redirect all but direct collisions. Yes, he built a full-size bumper car.

He didn't stop there. The driver controlled the car from a turret-mounted central driver's seat surrounded by a "full circle" windshield for greater visibility. (According to Jerome's literature, the windshield itself rotated past stationary windshield wipers as part of Jerome's quest for maximum driver visibility.) The exterior is fitted with high-visibility marker and signal lamps; the parallelogram doors are designed not to pop open in a crash; and the interior features seat belts, padding, and even a rollbar.

"It is all too obvious that Detroit has no plans to come up with anything really new," Jerome wrote. "Their 1964 cars are already on the drawing boards and spring from the same rigid frames. I hold that human life is important, far more important than Detroit's worry about the cost of retooling to produce an automobile which will save human lives. Adoption of the flexible Sir Vival design would make rigid vehicles obsolete and create a new market, almost immediately, for 65 million vehicles."

Moore and his family assisted Jerome over the years with Sir Vival, including one episode Moore recalls in which he went to Worcester to retrieve the vehicle from the fourth floor of a warehouse, where Jerome had stored it in two pieces, so it could be reassembled and transported to Jerome's house on Cape Cod. After Jerome's death in the early 1970s, the Moores took possession of Sir Vival and brought it back to Bellingham. While Moore had hoped Sir Vival would have gone to Eldon Hostetler's Hudson museum, it turned out fortuitous that he didn't donate it to Hostetler, given that the museum was closed and liquidated in 2018. Sir Vival has thus primarily sat in its pride of place in Bellingham Auto Sales's garage ever since.

"It needs gone right through," Moore said. "It's not really something I want to take home and just let it sit there. Jeff, he's the guy who'd really appreciate it. He'll build it and do it right."

Lane said he's only seen Sir Vival once in person, when he spent an entire day up at Bellingham Auto Parts four or five years ago. "I recall it as not terrible, but also not in great condition," he said. "It's not like it's been outside for 40 years, rusting away." While he won't have a more definitive plan about what to do with Sir Vival until he picks it up later this month, he said he wants to go through it mechanically without restoring the entire car, if possible.

"I'd say the closest it comes to any other vehicle in the (Lane Motor Museum's) collection is the Dymaxion," Lane said. "It's a really interesting story but it's really been pretty much hidden away from the general public."

Moore, for his part, said he'll continue selling Hudsons from his home garage even after the Bellingham Auto Sales property becomes a warehouse. "I still have my new and used car licenses," he said. "I know I can't keep them all, but I've tried."

UPDATE (6.January 2023): The Lane has started restoration on Sir Vival, according to a Facebook post from the museum. "Sir Vival has been separated into two pieces, and the automotive archaeology begins!"

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter Ten. Apocalyptic Violence

…This was a “moment of madness”—a revolutionary, romantic moment when an entire society seems to be up for grabs. In these moments, fundamental change appears irresistible; for a brief moment, “all seems possible, all within reach.” Across time, people who get caught up in moments of madness imagine that their own “radiant vision” is at hand: a workers’ paradise, a grassroots democracy, fraternité-egalité-liberté, or the Second Coming of Jesus. The utopian imagination is—suddenly, powerfully, briefly—inflamed by the immediate prospect of radical change, by visions of an apocalypse now.

—Stephen D. O’Leary describing the “Great Awakening” of the 1700s[203]

The Gilead Baptist Church outside of Detroit is on a four-lane highway called South Telegraph Road. The drive down South Telegraph Road to the church, a warehouse-like structure surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, is a depressing gauntlet of boxy, cut-rate motels with names like Melody Lane and Best Value Inn. The highway is flanked by a flat-roofed Walgreens, Blockbuster, discount liquor stores, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Bob’s Big Boy, Sunoco and Citgo gas stations, a Ford dealership, Nails USA, the Dollar Palace, Pro Quick Lube and U-Haul. The tawdry display of cheap consumer goods, emblazoned with neon, lines both sides of the road, a dirty brown strip in the middle. It is a sad reminder that something has gone terribly wrong with America, with its inhuman disregard for beauty and balance, its obsession with speed and utilitarianism, its crass commercialism and its oversized SUVs and trucks and greasy junk food. This disdain for nature, balance and harmony is part of the deadly, numbing assault against community. Ten or fiften minutes negotiating the traffic down South Telegraph Road make the bizarre attraction of the End Times—the obliteration of this world of alienation, noise and distortion—comprehensible. The manufacturing jobs in the Detroit auto plants nearby are largely gone, outsourced to other nations with cheaper labor. The paint is flaking off the cramped two-story houses that lie in grid patterns off the highway. The plagues of alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, poverty and domestic violence make the internal life here as depressing as the external one. And the congregation gathering today in this church waits for the final, welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast cleansing that will lift them up into the heavens, and leave the world they despise, the one they ruined or that was ruined for them, to be wracked by plagues and flood and fire until it, and all those they blame for the debacle of their lives, are consumed and destroyed by God. It is a theology of despair. And for many, the apocalypse can’t happen soon enough.

The guru of the End Times movement is a small, elderly, gnomelike man with his hair dyed coal black, a battery-powered earpiece and a pedantic, cold demeanor. His name is Timothy LaHaye, a Southern Baptist minister and coauthor, along with Jerry Jenkins, of the Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic thrillers that provide the graphic details of raw mayhem and cruelty that God will unleash on all nonbelievers when Christ returns and raptures Christians into heaven. Astonishingly, the novels are among the best-selling books in America with more than 62 million in print. They have been made into movies, as well as a graphic video game in which teenagers can blow away nonbelievers and the army of the Antichrist on the streets of New York City. These books have come to express, for many in the Christian Right, the yearning they feel for the Rapture, the end of history, the end of time. Once Christ returns and believers are lifted into heaven, the Earth will, they are told, enter a period of tribulation. The tribulation will lead to a final, gruesome battle between Christ and the forces of the Antichrist, with “bodies bursting open from head to toe at every word that proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord as he spoke to the captives within Jerusalem.”[204] In the novels those Christians, who hastily converted once the righteous were lifted into the clouds, have to drive carefully to avoid hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses. The soldiers in the army of the Antichrist, facing the warrior Christ, are defeated in the final moments as “their flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated.” And after pages of graphic violence, readers are told that the soldiers of the Antichrist “stood briefly as skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant and rave.”[205]

LaHaye and Jenkins had to distort the Bible to make all this fit—the Rapture, along with the graphic details of the end of the world and the fantastic time line, is never articulated in the Bible—but all this is solved by picking out obscure and highly figurative passages and turning them into fuzzy allegory to fit the apocalyptic vision. This stygian nightmare is, rather, a visceral and disturbing expression of how believers feel about themselves and the world. The horror of apocalyptic violence—the final aesthetic of the movement—at once frightens and thrills followers. It feeds fantasies of revenge and empowerment. It is an ominous reminder that failing to follow God’s commands will ensure their own eternal damnation. LaHaye has a checkered past that includes years working for the John Birch Society and many more peddling quack theories such as “temperament analysis,” which purports to be a system to identify predominant characteristics, strengths and weaknesses to help people make vocational, personal and marital decisions. He was previously known for books such as Spirit Controlled Temperament, Transformed Temperaments, The Male Temperament and Your Temperament: Discover Its Potential, all variants of astrology.[206] In short, before becoming the champion of a Christian America and the apocalypse he made his living as a fortune-teller. LaHaye has helped found and lead numerous right-wing groups, including the Council for National Policy, and he is not only the nation’s best-selling author, but also one of the dominionists’ most powerful propagandists.

LaHaye has come to the conference with his wife, Beverly, who founded Concerned Women of America, an antifeminist group with 540,000 women “who were committed to protecting the rights of the family through moral activism.”[207] They were the early pioneers in the Christian Right’s attack on the school textbook industry, helping to orchestrate a series of lawsuits against publishers who printed material they found offensive or anti-Christian. They sit together at a table to sign their books, and the line snakes down the corridor, with many people clutching multiple books for signatures. LaHaye, along with two other well-known apocalyptic preachers—including Gary Frazier, the glib, silver-tongued founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., which leads “Walking Where Jesus Walked” tours in Israel—travels the country holding daylong End Time conferences, such as today’s event at the Gilead Baptist Church. Tickets to the event in Detroit cost $20. Frazier and LaHaye also take pilgrims to visit Israel, where they stand on the hill of Megiddo—better known as Armageddon—that in the Book of Revelation is the site of the final battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist. In the lobby of the church, just outside the sanctuary, a television set on a stand continuously runs one of the tapes of a “Walking Where Jesus Walked” tour next to a table filled with Frazier’s books, CDs and DVDs.

LaHaye insists that everything in the Bible is literally true. All events in the modern world are described and represented, he says, in the Bible. All has been predicted. The Bible is primarily a book of prophecies that predict the events that will take place shortly before the worldwide cataclysm. This belief relies on a curious hybrid of allegory and literal interpretation. When Revelation 9:1–11 says that monsters will appear whose faces are “like human faces,” with “hair like women’s hair,” “teeth like lions’ teeth,” “scales like iron breastplates” and “tails like scorpions and stings,” LaHaye assures us they will appear. These monsters, which will have what look like crowns of gold on their heads, will torture unbelievers for five months, although not kill them. He quotes from some of the more disturbing passages in the Book of Revelation to remind his listeners of how terrible it will be for nonbelievers: “And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die and death will fly from them” (Revelations 9:6).

“Everything we believe is based on the principles of this book,” LaHaye tells the group from the church pulpit, holding up his Bible.

“How do we know this is a supernatural book?” LaHaye asks. “Fulfilled prophecies prove that this was not written by men,” he says. “One thousand prophecies, as the Bible tells us, five hundred of which have already been fulfilled.”

The apocalyptic fantasy calls on believers to turn their backs on the crumbling world around them. This theology of despair is empowered by widespread poverty, violent crime, incurable diseases, global warming, war in the Middle East and the threat of nuclear war. All these events presage the longed-for obliteration of the Earth and the glorious moment of Christ’s return. In this scenario, the battle at Armageddon will be unleashed from the Antichrist’s worldwide headquarters in Babylon once the Jews again have control of Israel. The war in Iraq, along with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, only brings the world one step closer to the end.

LaHaye, his head poking up from behind the wooden pulpit, tells the story of the origins of his series of apocalyptic books to those in the pews in front of him. He was on an airplane, he says, watching a pilot flirt with an attractive flight attendant. The pilot had a wedding ring. The flight attendant did not. He wondered what would happen if the Rapture happened at that moment. What would happen if hundreds of millions of saved Christians were raptured into heaven and the unsaved left behind, including those who were insufficient Christians, along with Muslims, Catholics and Jews? He convinced Jerry Jenkins, a former sportswriter, to help him set his vision down in a series of novels. He and Jenkins went on to imagine the Rapture and what would happen when it set loose the Tribulation and a worldwide war. In their vision, this war would be waged by a band of new believers, called the Tribulation Force, against Satan and the Antichrist. In the end, seas and rivers would turn to blood, searing heat would burn men alive, ugly boils would erupt on the skin of the disfavored, and 200 million ghostly, demonic warriors would sweep across the planet, exterminating one-third of the world’s population. Those who join forces with the Antichrist in the Left Behind series, true to LaHaye’s conspiracy theories, include the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, Iraq, all Muslims, the media, liberals, freethinkers and “international bankers.” The Antichrist, who heads the United Nations, eventually moves his headquarters to Babylon. These demonic forces battle the remaining Christian believers—those who converted after the Rapture took place, remnants of extremist American militia groups, who in the novels are warriors for Christ, and the 144,000 Jews who convert. This, through pages of dense, stilted and leaden prose, is what has captivated tens of millions of American readers. And LaHaye tells those in front of him that he believes that their generation may be the “terminal” generation. He warns his listeners to get right with God as fast as they can because there is not much time left.

Gary Frazier, with his thick head of silver hair, is the most engaging of the speakers. He has a soft Texas twang, at times a soaring eloquence and easy cadence. He begins by flashing a drawing of a monster, taken, he says, from a dream of Nebuchadnezzar that was interpreted for the king by Daniel in Second Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar sees in his dream a statue with a head of gold, iron teeth, bronze claws, arms and chest of silver, stomach and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay.

“‘Here’s what it means,’” Frazier quotes Daniel as saying. “‘You, Nebuchadnezzar, are the head. That’s the Babylonian Empire. You rule over the whole world, but there’ll come a second empire behind you,’ and historically, we know now as we look back, that was the Medo-Persian Empire.” Frazier explains that the stomach and thighs of bronze are the Hellenistic Empire. The two legs of iron, he says, represent the Roman Empire.

“You see what God did was in this simple dream of Daniel, God set the boundaries, the parameters, that there would never be more than four world empires in the entire history of time,” Frazier explains. “It would be the Babylonians defeated by the Medes and the Persians, who were then later defeated by the Greeks, who were defeated by Rome, but the interesting part is found in the two feet and the ten toes of part iron and part plate.”

He tells the congregation that the 10 toes stand for ethnically mixed cultures that will unite and rise up to dominate the world before the Rapture. He describes this empire as the European Union, or what he says is a revived form of the Roman Empire. This final empire will be destroyed by God to usher in the 1,000-year reign of Christ.

Frazier says the final chapter in human history started in 1948 with the foundation of the state of Israel, something predicted by the Bible. Less noticed but equally important, he tells the crowd, was the 1948 Benelux Conference that brought together Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. This too, he says, fulfilled biblical prophecy. Just as God had to restore Jews to the land of Israel before the End Times, so too did God have “to raise Europe back up in order to bring to pass this revived form of the ancient Roman Empire.”

He explains that while each of the other empires fell, Rome “has never gone away,” his voice dipping ominously. Instead of falling to an outside invader, Rome “collapsed,” “imploded,” due to its own “degradation and perversion.” “You see, there’s never been a society in the history of the world that has openly accepted and embraced homosexuality and lesbianism that has survived,” he explains, because while homosexuals and lesbians may not reproduce, “they are busy recruiting.”

“We’re seeing the shaping, the rebirthing, the revising of the ancient Roman Empire that will ultimately be the world power,” Frazier says of the European Union, the figure of the metallic man with the iron legs on the screen behind him.

He explains that Europe, because it has so few Bible-believing Christians, will not see large sections of its population lifted to heaven in the Rapture. The United States, however, will be devastated when tens of millions of its Christians disappear, including half of the military. America will suddenly become “a Third World” power, and Europe, ruled by the Antichrist, will dominate the planet.

“These prophecies were never given to scare us but to prepare us for the second coming of Jesus Christ,” he says.

The second sign of the End Times, he says, will be the rise of radical Islam. This too, he says, is predicted in the Bible.

“Now,” he says, “I realize that we’re living in a community that has a large Arab constituency. I want you to know something as I begin this portion of this particular message. Not all Muslims are terrorists. I want you to know that. But I also want you to know that to date every terrorist has been a Muslim. Hello? I want you also to know that the scripture’s clear on a couple of things, and I’m going to say some things today in the next few moments that may be construed as being intolerant. I want you to understand that. I’ve been called that on more than one occasion. And if you get mad at me about it, you’ll get over it, all right?

“In the days following 9/11,” Frazier says, “I heard our leadership say that we’re not at war with the religion of Islam, that there were Islamic radicals who had taken over the religion and they’re the ones we have a problem with. Folks, I’m here to tell you right now, I want to apologize to you on behalf of our president and our political leadership because they lied to us. We are at war with the religion of Islam, and it is not a handful of radical Islamists who are taking over the religion and hijacking it.”

He speaks about the child martyrs in the war between Iran and Iraq, in which the Iranian clerics sent young boys into the minefields to clear the way for troops and returned their remains, Frazier says, in urns to their families.

“Can you explain to me how in the West that we would understand a person who would strap dynamite upon themselves and blow themselves up along with innocent men and women and children with the promise that they would have seventy brown-haired—I mean blond-haired, blue-eyed—virgins for their unlimited sexual pleasure in this place called paradise? And the parents of that person then throw a party celebrating the destruction of their child. You want to tell me you understand that kind of mentality?

“Islam,” Frazier says dramatically, “is a satanic religion.”

He tells the crowd that his honesty and candor have brought him threats. He insists he has Muslim friends and that some Muslims who live in America love this country. But he warns about “a second kind of Muslim” who is in America for “the wrong reasons.”

These Muslims want to export their religion and achieve their goal of “world domination,” he explains.

“You show me a country that is dominated by Muslims, and I’ll show you a country where people are dying, where there are no freedoms or rights, and people being persecuted on a daily basis,” he says. “God help us if they ever were to get in control, in charge here in the United States of America.”

He warns of Muslim “sleeper cells” waiting to carry out new terrorist attacks. He illustrates his point with a hypothetical story about a Muslim doctor forced to accept a nefarious mission or receive the heads of his three children in a box.

Frazier stops, pauses and slowly scans the crowd, which sits silently, expectantly for his next sentence.

“I thank God for our men and women who are fighting over there because if they weren’t fighting there, we’d be fighting right here in the streets of America. I’m convinced of that,” he says, and the sanctuary erupts in loud applause.

Once the Antichrist takes power, the second temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt. Followers of the Antichrist will be branded on their hands and foreheads with “the mark of the Beast,” which Frazier says could well be “biochips” implanted under the skin. It will be impossible to buy and sell in the new world without this mark. Those who convert to Christ will receive “the mark of the Father” on their foreheads, but they will become outcasts and persecuted in the Antichrist’s worldwide empire. Most will be martyred and killed.

“Do you see this?” he asks. “We’re the first generation that’s ever had the possibility of this happening in our lives.

“Does that apply to you?” he asks. “Do you have to be concerned about taking the mark? Absolutely not. You can’t have but one mark. You’re safe if you already have it—the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses away my sin and yours.”

He goes on to say that the loved ones of many in this room, who are not saved, will be branded with the mark of the Beast because they will be left behind.

America, according to Frazier, LaHaye and many other leaders in the movement, is being ruled by evil, clandestine organizations that hide behind the veneer of liberal, democratic groups. These clandestine forces seek to destroy Christians. They spread their demonic, secular-humanist ideology through front groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission and “the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and news-magazines,” the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, “the left wing of the Democratic Party,” Harvard, Yale “and 2,000 other colleges and universities.”

America must repent, Frazier tells his audience. It must ask God to cleanse the moral stains that infect the nation and its godless inhabitants. The nation must swiftly dismantle the barriers between church and state and bring God back into the schools, the government, the media, the entertainment industry, the workplace, the courts and the home. Time is running out. If America, as a nation, does not get right with God very soon, it will face terrible retribution. The sins that have befallen America, the moral license, the high rates of premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, pornography, the adultery and the greed and lust that have beset the country must be stamped out. America must become submissive and heed God’s prophets or be destroyed. If the Christians in this room fail, if they do not wipe out vice, sin and corruption, if they do not establish a Christian America soon, God will begin to carry out acts of vengeance.

Frazier ends the conference with a call for those in the room to commit or recommit their souls to Christ.

“This afternoon as we bring our time together to a close, it’s not about being a Baptist; we went through that earlier. It is not about being a Methodist, or charismatic, or Assembly of God or an Episcopalian,” he says softly. “It is about knowing in your soul.”

He asks those before him if they are sure that if Christ appeared today they would go to heaven.

“I’m not trying to trick you,” he implores the bowed heads. “I’m trying to reason with you. For you see, one day the life that you and I know will be over. So I just wonder, is there a stirring in your heart? Am I speaking to you? Is He calling your name? He is. He is knocking on the door of your life? The door handle is on the other side. Where does it open? You have to open it. How do you do that? Well, the way I did it years ago was to call on the name of the Lord, and I prayed. I’m going to ask you this afternoon if there is a stirring in your heart.” He prays:

“Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I’m a sinner, and right now as an act of my own free will, I agree with You that I have sinned, and I want to ask You to forgive me of the sin that separates me from You. Come into my life; save my soul—and right now, with heads bowed and eyes closed, I just wonder if any of you have prayed that prayer. Here is what I’m going to ask you to do: Will you lift your head and look at me and make eye contact with me? I just want to see your face. No one is looking around. If you prayed that prayer, here is what I’m going to ask you to do—will you lift your head and look at me and make eye contact with me? I just want to see your face. No one is looking around. If you prayed that prayer and you really mean it then just lift your head, look at me so I can see your…God bless you, God bless you…I can’t really see the balcony because of the angle here, but if you are in the balcony will you slip your hand up for just a moment…God bless you, God bless you, yep, yeah, God bless you…you…you…and God bless you back there.”

Several people in the pews begin weeping softly.

Frazier tells them God has taken their sins away.

“And now when God looks at you, he doesn’t see your sins, your mistakes, He sees the blood of Jesus that washed your sin away,” he intones.

He invites all those who raised their hands or looked him in the eye to stand and come down to the front of the church. A couple dozen people slowly make their way past those in the pews to walk down the aisles to the front. Frazier gathers them around him in a tight circle. As the group forms, several church members wearing tags that say “counselor” silently enter the sanctuary through the double doors at the back. They wait, hands folded in front of them, to pray with the new converts, to tell them they need to come to church and to offer to help guide them toward new life.

Frazier thanks God for looking past the congregation’s sins.

He tells the small group in front of him not to go back to their friends or family, not to retrieve their belongings from the pews.

“We are going to ask you to walk right back to that door,” he says, pointing to where the counselors with the name tags are waiting to receive the group. “Would you all just step right through that door? And while they are going, folks, can we just do what the angels in heaven are doing?”

He starts to clap. The crowd follows his lead. The men and women file down the aisle as the crowd applauds, each being met by an individual counselor who takes their arm and guides them to a secluded corner in the lobby. The process begins.

What I watch reminds me of a lazy spring afternoon nearly 25 years ago, when Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of leaders in the Christian Right who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible.

Adams was not a man to use the word “fascist” lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, with dissidents such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked. The border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said that would, in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed empty platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. His long discussions with church leaders and theologians in Nazi Germany—some of whom collaborated with the regime, some of whom resisted and most of whom remained silent—were the defining experiences of his life. He was preoccupied with how liberal democracies, which could never hope to compete with the fantastic, utopian promises of personal and collective salvation offered by totalitarian movements, could resist. Adams was a close friend of the theologian Paul Tillich, a vocal opponent of the Nazis who in 1933 became the first non-Jewish professor barred from German universities and soon went into exile. Tillich, he reminded us, taught that the role of the church was in society, that the depth of its commitment and faith were measured by its engagement with politics and culture. It was this engagement that alone gave faith its vibrancy and worth. Tillich did not retreat from the looming crisis around him. He spoke out against the intolerance and hatred preached by the Nazis before they came to power. And Tillich angrily chastised those in the church who, preoccupied with narrow Christian piety, were passive. He thundered against this complacency and begged Christians to begin to “take time seriously.”

Adams had seen how the mask of religion hides irreligion. He reminded us that “our world is full to bursting with faiths, each contending for allegiance.” He told us that Hitler claimed to teach the meaning of faith. Mussolini used to shout, “Believe, follow, and act,” and told his followers that fascism, before being a party, had been a religion. Human history is not the struggle between religion and irreligion, Adams said. “It is veritably a battle of faiths, a battle of the gods who claim human allegiance.”

Democracy is not, as these Christo-fascists claim, the enemy of faith. Democracy keeps religious faith in the private sphere, ensuring that all believers have an equal measure of protection and practice mutual tolerance. Democracy sets no religious ideal. It simply ensures coexistence. It permits the individual to avoid being subsumed by the crowd—the chief goal of totalitarianism, which seeks to tell all citizens what to believe, how to behave and how to speak. The call to obliterate the public and the private wall that keeps faith the prerogative of the individual means the obliteration of democracy. Once this wall between church and state, or party and state, is torn down, there is an open and subtle warfare against love, which in an open society is another exclusive prerogative of the individual. In the totalitarian world, there are those worthy of love and those unworthy of it. In the totalitarian world, the private sphere becomes the concern of the state. This final restriction of the freedom to love—the freedom of a Christian to love a Muslim or the freedom to love those branded by the state as the enemy—heralds the death of the open society. The promises of Christian harmony, unity, happiness—in short a utopia—held forth by the dominionists have a seductive quality that will never be countered by the tepid offerings of democrats, who at best can offer citizens the opportunity to seek their own happiness and construct their own meaning.

We must, Adams also told us, watch closely what these new fascists accused their opponents of planning. For radical movements expose their own intentions and goals by tarring their enemies with their own nefarious motives. These movements assume that those they attack are, like themselves, also hiding their true agenda, also plotting to silence and eradicate opponents. This common form of “projection” was, on a smaller scale, on display during the Florida recount in 2000. The Republicans accused Al Gore of attempting to steal the election through court fiat, the very theft being secretly orchestrated by the Republicans. Richard Hofstadter was one of the first to grasp the role of projection in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.[208]

Adams, like Bonhoeffer, did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would arise from the institutional church or the liberal, secular elite. His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was withering. These institutions—self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent—were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He saw how easily the German universities had been Nazified. He told me, I suspect only half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America, “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.” He had seen academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class. Adams also reminded us that American intellectuals and industrialists openly flirted with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, appealed to many American industrialists at the time, who saw it as an effective counterweight to Roosevelt’s New Deal. In July 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. And Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here told the story of a conservative politician, “Buzz” Windrip, backed by a nationally syndicated radio host, Bishop Peter Paul Prang, who is elected president and becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime and a liberal press.

The New York Times in 1944 asked Vice President Henry Wallace to answer the questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they? The Vice President’s answers were published on April 9, 1944, as the war against the Axis powers and Japan was drawing to a close. He wrote:

The really dangerous American fascist…is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.[209]

Adams knew that resentments and bigotry lurk below the surface of all democratic societies and can be roused, under the right conditions, to promote a creed that calls for the destruction of democracy. What is evil about these systems of intolerance and persecution is not the foot soldiers who carry out the crimes, but the organization that mobilizes and unleashes these dark passions. He worried that such a movement was, late in his life, again on the march. It was more sophisticated than in the past, more cleverly packaged, and this time without serious opposition. The hatreds were again being stoked. The labor unions and progressives who had been able to battle back in the 1930s were spent forces. The despair of tens of millions of Americans, unable to find manufacturing jobs or work that offered fair wages and benefits, would lead them, he knew, into the arms of these fanatical preachers. The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement. If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children—in short, the promise of a brighter future—the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory. Adams had seen it once. He knew what it looked like. He feared it was coming again.

Toward the close of the Second World War, Adams was asked to give a lecture about the Nazi faith to a large group of U.S. Army officers preparing for service in the occupation army in Germany. He described the views expressed by the officers at the meeting as “an orgy of self-righteousness.” Bigotry, in all its forms, had to be vigorously fought. He was not going to let this opportunity escape him. Adams wrote later:

This self-righteousness, I decided, ought somehow to be checked. Otherwise I might succeed only in strengthening the morale of a bumptious hundred-percent “Americanism,” and that was not the faith we were supposed to be fighting for. Toward the end of the lecture I recapitulated the ideas of the Nazi “faith,” stressing the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Teutons and in the inferiority of other “races.” I also reminded the officers of similar attitudes to be observed in America, not only among the lunatic and subversive groups but also among respectable Americans in the army of democracy. Then I asked these Army officers to pose one or two questions to be answered by each man in his own conscience. First: “Is there any essential difference between your attitude toward the Negro and the Jew, and the Nazi attitude toward other ‘races’—not the difference in brutality but a difference in basic philosophy?” “If there is an essential difference,” I said, “then the American soldier might logically become a defender of the Four Freedoms [freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear], but if there is no essential difference between your race philosophy and that of the Nazis, a second question should be posed: “What are you fighting for?” I blush when I think of some of the responses I received. I was immediately besieged with questions like these: “Do you think we should marry the nigger?” “Aren’t Negroes a naturally indolent and dirty race?” “Haven’t you been in business, and don’t you know that every Jew is a kike?” Questions like these came back to me for over an hour. I simply repeated my question again and again: “How do you distinguish between yourself and a Nazi?” Seldom have I witnessed such agony of spirit in a public place. Many of these Americans who could not distinguish between themselves and Nazis came from “religious” homes, or they claimed to be representatives (or even leaders) of the American faith. Apparently their faith was quite different from the faith behind the Four Freedoms. On the other hand, many of them no doubt would have disclaimed possessing anything they would call faith, yet all of them, whatever their answers to these questions, spoke the faith that was in them, and for many of them it was a trust in white, gentile supremacy—faith in the blood.[210]

Adams, finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of gay and lesbian Germans of their civil rights was largely cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimized tactics, outside the law, that would soon be employed against others. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first “social deviants” singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.

Those arrayed against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them to shred the Constitution in the name of national security and strength. And those in the movement often speak about such a moment with gleeful anticipation. Howard Phillips, a right-wing strategist who helped Jerry Falwell create the Moral Majority, has warned Christians to be ready. “My friends, it is time to leave the ‘political Titanic’ on which the conservative movement has for too long booked passage,” he told the Council for National Policy. “Instead, it is our task to build an ark so that we can and will be ready to renew and restore our nation and our culture when God brings the tides to flood.”[211]

Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school. Naive attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal—its destruction.

Alvin Toffler wrote that if you don’t have a strategy you end up being part of someone else’s strategy. There are isolated groups and individuals who, at some cost, are fighting back. The nonviolent protests of the Reverend Mel White’s Soulforce outside of Christian universities and service academies that discriminate against gays and lesbians are, according to the ideas of theologians such as Adams and Tillich, acts of faith. The clergy and rabbis who have banded together in Ohio to challenge the tax-exempt status of the megachurches that promote “Christian” candidates are performing an act of faith. The rulings of independent judges—such as the Republican-appointed Judge John E. Jones III in Dover, Pennsylvania—who have prohibited the teaching of creationism in public schools because it is not science, are acts of faith. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, has called on Catholics to be prepared to defy the laws now being considered in Congress and backed by the Christian Right that make it a felony to shield or protect or offer support to illegal immigrants. Such civil disobedience would be an act of faith. The hate-crimes legislation now stalled in Congress because of bitter opposition from the Christian Right must be made law. Its passage would be an act of faith. Programs to protect or establish community, to direct federal and state assistance to those truly left behind, those trapped in America’s urban ghettos and blighted former manufacturing towns, are acts of faith. And the valiant struggle by former Vice President Al Gore and others to wake us up to the impending catastrophe that will beset us if we do not curb global warming is an act of faith. The accelerated rate of global warming could, within a decade, bring about epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves. To face this challenge, to do something about it, is to embrace a theology of hope, of life. To do nothing, to paint these ecological catastrophes as messages from an angry God rather than the folly of humankind, to believe blithely that global warming is a fiction and God alone determines human fate, is to accept this theology of despair, this radical evil. There are battles, big and small, that we can join. Many of them are being waged nearby, at our local school board. So much of maintaining a democracy is simply about showing up, and Adams felt that none of us had a right to profess our faith without this daily involvement in the life and well-being of our community, our nation and the planet Earth. “Repeatedly,” Adams told us, “I heard anti-Nazis say, ‘If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.’”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ends with Huck facing the moral dilemma we now face: whether to pay homage to a false moral code, one which has become law, or to damn ourselves in the eyes of many by opposing it. Here is Huck, faced with the choice of turning in his friend and escaped slave Jim, or living in defiance:

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote: Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn. I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had Apocalyptic Violence in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.[212]

The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil’s sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed. The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to implant by force their narrow, particular version of goodness. This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to ethnic nationalism to communism to fascism. Dreams of a universal good create hells of persecution, suffering and slaughter. No human being could ever be virtuous enough to attain such dreams, and the Earth has swallowed millions of hapless victims in the vain pursuit of a new heaven and a new Earth. Ironically, it is idealism that leads radical fundamentalists to strip human beings of their dignity and their sanctity and turn them into abstractions. Yet it is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in tiny, unheroic acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive as a community and as individual human beings. These small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to these idealists, as the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote in Life and Fate.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.[213]

Plato and Aristotle defended slavery and often attacked Athenian democracy, but this does not mean they should not be read for their deep and penetrating insights into political systems and ethics. Sigmund Freud understood little about love, viewed religion as infantile regression and viewed nearly every human motive through the lens of human sexuality, but at the same time Freud gave us one of the most powerful windows into and vocabularies for the workings of the subconscious. The Bible was written by numerous people over hundreds of years with wide and often varying concerns, some of which were and are morally indefensible. Within its pages, however, lie powerful passages that help illuminate our lives and our place before the mystery of human existence. I, too, struggle, like the writers of the Bible, to understand. I, too, often get it wrong. But it is the honesty and rigor of the search, the doubts and reverses, the mistakes and regrets, the ability to stand up again and keep trying that ultimately express faith. This humility before the unknowable, the acceptance that there is much we will never understand, makes possible self-criticism, self-awareness, self-possession and self-reflection. They make possible compassion and acts of kindness. They allow us to see ourselves in the stranger, to reach out in solidarity to those who travel with us on this dusty, brief and often lonely road of life. This honesty and humility make possible a diverse and tolerant human community. They sustain life and, in the midst of it all, impart hope.

I do not deny the right of Christian radicals to be, to believe and worship as they choose. But I will not engage in a dialogue with those who deny my right to be, who delegitimize my faith and denounce my struggle before God as worthless. All dialogue must include respect and tolerance for the beliefs, worth and dignity of others, including those outside the nation and the faith. When this respect is denied, this clash of ideologies ceases to be merely a difference of opinion and becomes a fight for survival. This movement seeks, in the name of Christianity and American democracy, to destroy that which it claims to defend. I do not believe that America will inevitably become a fascist state or that the Christian Right is the Nazi Party. But I do believe that the radical Christian Right is a sworn and potent enemy of the open society. Its ideology bears within it the tenets of a Christian fascism. In the event of a crisis, in the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster, the movement stands poised to manipulate fear and chaos ruthlessly and reshape America in ways that have not been seen since the nation’s founding. All Americans—not only those of faith—who care about our open society must learn to speak about this movement with a new vocabulary, to give up passivity, to challenge aggressively this movement’s deluded appropriation of Christianity and to do everything possible to defend tolerance. The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as “nominal Christians,” and those they brand with the curse of “secular humanist” are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.

[tia-amorosa]

🌴Lucky Palms🌴

Marisol - Saturday Night Fever (long) Part 1

It's just before 7 pm. The old warehouse, which has been converted into a discotheque/bar/arcade hall, is expecting many guests today. Clark and his band have invited virtually the whole town. Anyone who wants to come is welcome. And nobody knows how this evening will end….

"Man, don't overdo it now, Ozzy, do you hear me?"/ "Why… It's all for shit now anyway…"/ "But you're not doomed to die, now come back down and put the bottle away again. You'd better take care of the music system". Oscar received two pieces of news today that threw him off course. Not just him… but also his future wife and all his other close friends.

As no DJs were available today, the decision was made to use the Auto DJ system. Lots of music, put together on the computer and now played via USB stick. "System running"/ "I can hear that too, at least turn it down a bit so that people can still talk".

Shortly before 8 p.m., Marisol enters the hall. The music is loud, but not booming. She looks around, not too many people, but at least there's a bit going on… She was almost two hours late. But there was no need to get upset… "Hey…".

After she heard his voice and then saw him, she went to him. "Well, it's a bit lame, isn't it?"/ "yeah, but I'm sure there'll be more going on later. I didn't realize that the Super Bowl was still on TV today… Are you okay?"/ "mhm. Are the others here too?"/ "Only Oscar, the others had other plans today".

"So, are you excited about the tour yet? How many gigs do you have?"/ "um, I think 23 or so…". She raised an eyebrow with a grin. "You don't know exactly?"/ "Spike has more of an overview. Do you want a drink?"/ "hm, if there's something non-alcoholic here, you know…" She pointed to her stomach with her two index fingers. "Oh, sure, we don't want our child to become an alcoholic, right? There are non-alcoholic drinks upstairs".

After a few minutes, Vivienne, Oscar's fiancée, also arrived at the bar. "Hello you two, have you seen Oscar?". Marisol looked over at her in astonishment. "Vivienne? No, I've only just arrived…". Quark reacted a little annoyed, because things are always a little tense between him and Vivienne. "He must be buzzing around here somewhere, what are you doing here anyway, didn't you want to watch your show?"/ "You know I'm not at peace about my future husband at the moment. Well, I'll find him". After Vivienne was out of sight, Marisol turned to Clark again, "Is everything okay with them?"/ "Yes, yes… Shall we go upstairs?".

Slowly the hall filled up and people went to the bars, or to the dance floor if they felt like dancing. But the drinks here are the best in town at the moment. Clark is nervous on the one hand, but on the other, at least outwardly, calm…a few things have had to be sorted out in the last 24 hours. "hi, one orange juice with elderflower, please".

The barman looked at her, somewhat perplexed. "Elder… What?". And Clark immediately intervened. "Are you deaf? Elderflower, the syrup, is downstairs, front row, I filled it up the Bar myself…". The barman was a little piqued. "Are you the boss here?". Clark grinned a little. "Almost, so, what is it now, the lady is thirsty"/ "o.k. o.k.… what mix ratio?"/ And again Clark had to shake his head . "Haven't you studied the recipe book? Oh man, what's wrong with you?".

It took a while for the guy behind the bar to finally finish making the drink. He searched for the recipe, which was actually quite simple, for almost a minute: "I think I need to talk to your boss, apparently you've only had a crash course. Marisol looked over at him and had to laugh a little: "hnhn, hey, don't get upset, Clark, the drink tastes good, really".

Clark also had a drink made. Then they both got up and carried on talking. "And otherwise… everything okay?". Marisol took a sip from her glass. "mhm, yes… I'm just writing the last chapters of my new book" / "o.k. …. What's it about?" / "hm, about a broken family" / "Oh, o.k., and, is there a happy ending?"…

"Do you think I'm going to tell you the ending now? You should just read it when it's finished…"/ "Do you know when I last read a book? Just tell me"/ "Nope, I'll let you stew. There are definitely a lot of twists and turns in the story, it's exciting…"/ "hehe, and then you just grin like that". It was a casual conversation between the two of them. And they made jokes from time to time. And so Marisol continued in a cheerful tone. "Yes, because I'm convinced it's a good book."/ "hnhn, you know I only read the newspapers or something on my smartphone, but never a book"/ "hm, but on a long bus journey, from city to city, it certainly wouldn't be wrong…"/ "hnhn, yes, maybe. ". Clark finished his glass and placed it on the bar. "Fancy a bit of dancing?". She smiled and nodded.

Before they could even reach the stairs, they heard Vivienne shouting loudly. "Oscar! My God…" . They saw her bending over him, he seemed to be unconscious.

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What happened? We'll find out in the next part…

@cozygirlsimmer

Note: Sometimes things happen unexpectedly when I'm doing story or gamplay. And when I saw Oscar lying there on the floor, I thought to myself, that's so fitting right now! I had a similar scene in my head, but I dismissed it again. He gave me a good template, so to speak, and that's how this and the subsequent scenes in the next part were able to come about. 🙂