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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 8 months ago

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1968 [Chapter 6: Athena, Goddess Of Wisdom]

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 5.2k

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Here at the midway point in our journey—like Dante stumbling upon the gates of the Inferno—would it be the right moment to review what’s at stake? Let’s begin.

It’s the end of August. The delegates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago officially vote to name Aemond the party’s presidential candidate. His ascension is aided by 10,000 antiwar demonstrators who flood into the city and threaten to set it ablaze if Hubert Humphrey is chosen instead. At the end—in his death rattle—Humphrey begs to be Aemond’s running mate, one last humiliation he cannot resist. Humphrey is denied. Eugene McCarthy, dignity intact, boards a commercial flight to his home state of Minnesota without looking back.

Aemond selects U.S. Ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, to be his vice president. Shriver is a Kennedy by marriage—his wife, JFK’s younger sister Eunice, just founded the Special Olympics—and has previously headed the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Peace Corps, and the Chicago Board of Education. He also served as the architect of the president’s “War on Poverty” before distancing himself from the imploding Johnson administration. Shriver is not a concession to fence-sitting moderates or Southern Dixiecrats, but an embodiment of Aemond’s commitment to unapologetic progressivism. Richard Nixon spends the weekend campaigning in his native California, a gold vein of votes like the mines settlers rushed to in 1848. George Wallace announces that he will run as an Independent. Racists everywhere rejoice.

Phase III of the Tet Offensive is underway in Vietnam; 700 American soldiers have been killed this month alone. Riots break out in military prisons where the U.S. Army is keeping their deserters. The North Vietnamese refuse to allow Pope Paul VI to visit Hanoi on a peace mission. President Johnson calls both Aemond and Nixon to personally inform them of this latest evidence of the communists’ unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. Daeron and John McCain remain in Hỏa Lò Prison. The draft swallows men like the titan Cronus devoured his own children.

In Eastern Europe, the Russians are crushing pro-democracy protests in the largest military operation since World War II as half a million troops roll into Czechoslovakia. In Caswell County, North Carolina, the last remaining segregated school district in the nation is ordered by a federal judge to integrate after years of stalling. On the Fangataufa Atoll in the South Pacific, France becomes the fifth nation to successfully explode a hydrogen bomb. In Mexico City, 300,000 students gather to protest the authoritarian regime of President Diaz Ordaz. In Guatemala, American ambassador John Gordon Mein is murdered by a Marxist guerilla organization called the Rebel Armed Forces. In Columbus, Ohio, nine guards are held hostage during a prison riot; after 30 hours, they’re rescued by a SWAT team.

The latest issue of Life magazine brings worldwide attention to catastrophic industrial pollution in the Great Lakes. The first successful multiorgan transplant is carried out at Houston Methodist Hospital. The Beatles release Hey Jude, the best-selling single of 1968 in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. NASA’s Apollo lunar landing program plans to launch a crewed shuttle next year, just in time to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s 1962 promise to put a man on the moon “before the end of the decade.” If this is successful, the United States will win the Space Race and prove the superiority of capitalism. If it fails, the martyred astronauts will join all the other ghosts of this apocalyptic age, an epoch born under bad stars.

The night sky glows with the ancient debris of the Aurigid meteor shower. From down here on Earth, Jupiter is a radiant white gleam, visible with the naked eye and admired since humans were making cave paintings and Stonehenge. But Io is a mystery. With a telescope, she becomes a dust mote entrapped by Jupiter’s gravity; to the casual observer, she doesn’t exist at all.

~~~~~~~~~~

What was it like, that very first time? It’s strange to remember. You’re both different people now.

It’s May, 1966. You and Aemond are engaged, due to be married in three short weeks, and if you get pregnant then it’s no harm, no foul. In reality, it will end up taking you over a year to conceive, but no one knows that yet; you are living in the liminal space between what you imagine your life will be and the cold blade of the truth. Aemond has brought you to Asteria for the weekend, an increasingly common occurrence. The Targaryens—minus one, that holdout prodigal son, always glowering from behind swigs of rum and clouds of smoke—have already begun to treat you like a member of the family. The flock of Alopekis yap excitedly and lick your shins. Eudoxia learns your favorite snacks so she can have them ready when you arrive.

One night Aemond takes your hand and leads you to Helaena’s garden, darkness turned to twilight in the artificial luminance of the main house. You can hear distant voices, chatter and laughter, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul spinning on the record player in the living room like a black hole, gravity that not even light can escape when it is wrenched over the event horizon.

You’re giggling as Aemond pulls you along, faster and faster, weaving through pathways lined with roses and sunflowers and butterfly bushes. Your high heels sink into soft, fertile earth; the air in your lungs is cool and infinite. “Where are we going?”

And Aemond grins back at you as he replies: “To Olympus.”

In the circle of hedges guarded by thirteen gods of stone, Aemond unzips your modest pink sundress and slips your heels off your feet, kneeling like he’s proposing to you again. When you are bare and secretless, he draws you down onto the grass and opens you, claims you, fills you to the brim as the crystalline water of the fountain patters and Zeus hurls his lightning bolts, an eternal storm, unending war. It’s intense in a way it never was with your first boyfriend, a sweet polite boy who talked about feminist theory and followed his enlightened conscience all the way to Vietnam. This isn’t just a pleasant way to pass a Friday night, something to look forward to between differential equations textbooks and calculus proofs. With Aemond it’s a ritual; it’s something so overpowering it almost scares you.

“Aphrodite,” Aemond murmurs against your throat, and when you try to get on top he stops you, pins you to the ground, thrusts hard and deep, and you try not to moan too loudly as you surrender, his weight on you like a prophesy. This is how he wants you. This is where you belong.

Has someone ever stitched you to their side, pushing the needle through your skin again and again as the fabric latticework takes shape, until their blood spills into your veins and your antibodies can no longer tell the difference? He makes you think you’ve forgotten who you were before. He makes you want to believe in things the world taught you were myths.

But that was over two years ago. Now Aemond is not your spellbinding almost-stranger of a fiancé—shrouded in just the right amount of mystery—but your husband, the father of your dead child, the presidential candidate. You miss when he was a mirage. You miss what it felt like to get high on the idea of him, each taste a hit, each touch a rush of toxins to the bloodstream.

Seven weeks after your emergency c-section, you are healing. Your belly no longer aches, your bleeding stops, you can rejoin the living in this last gasp of summer. Ludwika takes you shopping and you pick out new swimsuits; you’ve gone up a size since the baby, and it shows no signs of vanishing. In the fitting room, Ludwika chain-smokes Camel cigarettes and claps when you show her each outfit, ordering you to spin around, telling you that there’s nothing like Oleg Cassini back in Poland. You plan to buy three swimsuits. Ludwika insists you get five. She pays with Otto’s American Express.

That afternoon at home in your blue bedroom, you get changed to join the rest of the family down by the pool, your first swim since Ari was born. You choose Ludwika’s favorite: a dreamy turquoise two-piece with flowing transparent fabric that drapes your midsection. You can still see the dark vertical line of where the doctors stitched you closed. Now you and Aemond match; he got his scar on the floor of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, you earned yours at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. There are gold chains on your wrist and looped around your neck. Warm sunlight and ocean wind pours in through the open windows.

Aemond appears in the doorway and you turn to show him, proud of how you’ve pulled yourself together, how this past year hasn’t put you in an asylum. His right eye catches on your scar and stays there for a long time. Then at last he says: “You don’t have something else to wear?”

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Labor Day, and Asteria has been descended upon by guests invited to celebrate Aemond’s nomination. The dining room table is overflowing with champagne, Agiorgitiko wine, platters of mini spanakopitas, lamb gyros, pita bread with hummus and tzatziki, feta cheese and cured meats, grilled octopus, baklava, and kourabiethes. Eudoxia is rushing around sweeping up crumbs and shooing tipsy visitors away from antique vases shipped here from Greece. Aemond’s celebrity endorsers include Sammy Davis Jr., Sonny and Cher, Andy Williams, Bobby Darin, Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Claudine Longet, and a number of politicians; but the most notable attendee is President Lyndon Baines Johnson, shadowed by Secret Service agents. He won’t be making any surprise appearances on the campaign trail for Aemond—in the present political climate, he would be more of a liability than an asset—but he has travelled to Long Beach Island tonight to offer his well-wishes. From the record player thrums Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower.

When you finish getting ready and arrive downstairs, you spot Aegon: slouching in a velvet chair over a century old, hair shagging in his eyes, sipping something out of a chipped mug he clasps with both hands, flirting with a bubbly early-twenties campaign staffer. Aegon smiles and waves when he sees you. You wave back. And you think: When did he become the person I look for when I walk into a room?

Now Aemond is beside you in a blue suit—beaming, confident, his glass eye in place, a hand resting on your waist—and Aegon isn’t smiling anymore. He takes a gulp of what is almost certainly straight rum from his mug and returns his attention to the campaign staffer, his lady of the hour. You picture him undressing her on his shag carpet and feel disorienting, violent envy like a bullet.

Viserys is already fast asleep upstairs, but the rest of the family is out en masse to charm the invitees and pose for photographs. Alicent, Helaena, and Mimi—trying very hard to act sober, blinking too often—are chit-chatting with the other political wives. Otto is complaining about something to Criston; Criston is pretending to listen as he stares at Alicent. Ludwika is smoking her Camels and talking to several young journalists who are ogling her, enraptured. Fosco and Sargent Shriver are entertaining a group of guests with a boisterous, lighthearted debate on the merits of Italian versus French cuisine, though they agree that both are superior to Greek. The nannies have brought the eight children to be paraded around before bedtime. All Cosmo wants to do is clutch your hand and “help” you navigate around the living room, warning you not to step on the small, weaving Alopekis. When Mimi attempts to steal her youngest son away, he ignores her, and as she begins to make a scene you rebuke her with a harsh glare. Mimi retreats meekly. She has never argued with you, not once in over two years. You speak for Aemond, and Aemond is a god.

As the children are herded off to their beds by the nannies, Bobby Kennedy—presently serving as a New York senator despite residing primarily on his family’s compound in Massachusetts—approaches to congratulate Aemond. His wife Ethel is a tiny, nasally, scrappy but not terribly bright woman, five months pregnant with her eleventh child, and you have to get away from her like a hand pulled from a hot stove.

“You know, I was considering running,” Bobby says to Aemond, chuckling, good-natured. “But when I saw you get in the race, I thought better of it! Maybe I’ll give it a go in ’76, huh?”

“Hey, kid, what a tough year you’ve had,” Ethel tells you, patting your forearm. You can’t tear your eyes from her small belly. She has ten living children already. I couldn’t keep one. What kind of sense does that make? “We’re real sorry for your trouble, aren’t we, Bobby?”

Now he is nodding somberly. “We are. We sure are. We’ve been praying for you both.”

Aemond is thanking them, sounding touched but entirely collected. You manage some hurried response and then excuse yourself. Your hands are shaking as you cross the room, not really seeing it. You walk right into Lady Bird Johnson. She takes pity on you; she seems to perceive how rattled you are. “Oh Lyndon, look, it’s just who we were hoping to speak to! The next first lady of the United States. And how beautiful you are, just radiant. How do you keep your hair so perfect? That glamorous updo. You never have a single strand out of place.” Lady Bird lays a palm tenderly on your bare shoulder. She has an unusual, angular face, but a wise sort of compassion that only comes from suffering. Her husband is an unrepentant serial cheater. “I’ll make you a list of everything you need to know about the White House. All the quirks of the property, and the hidden gems too!”

“You’re so kind. We’ll see what happens in November…”

“Good evening, ma’am,” President Johnson says, smiling warmly. He’s an ugly man, but there’s something hypnotic that lives inside him and shines through his eyes like the blaze of a lighthouse. He pulls you in through the dark, through the storm; he promises you answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet. LBJ is 6’4 and known for bullying his political adversaries with the so-called “Johnson Treatment”; he leans in and makes rapid-fire demands until they forget he’s not allowed to hit them. “I have to tell you frankly, I don’t envy anyone who inherits that den of rattlesnakes in Washington D.C.”

“Lyndon, don’t frighten her,” Lady Bird scolds fondly.

“Everyone thinks they know what to do about Vietnam,” LBJ plods onwards. “But it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t clusterfuck. If you keep fighting, they call you a murderer. But if you pull the troops out and South Vietnam falls to the communists, every single man lost was for nothing, and you think the families will stand for that? Their kid in a body bag, or his legs blown off, or his brain scrambled? There’s no easy answer. It’s a goddamn bitch of a quagmire.”

Lady Bird offers you a sympathetic smirk. Sorry about all this unpleasantness, she means. When he gets himself worked up, I can’t stop him. But you find yourself feeling sorry for President Johnson. It will be difficult for him to learn how to fade into disgraced obscurity after once being so omnipotent, so beloved. Reinvention hurts like hell: fevers raging, bones mending, healing flesh that itches so ferociously you want to claw it off.

LBJ gives Lady Bird a look, quick but meaningful. She acquiesces. This has happened a thousand times before. “It was so nice talking to you, dear,” she tells you, then crosses the living room to pay her respects to Alicent.

The president steps closer, looming, towering. The Johnson Treatment?? you think, but no; he isn’t trying to intimidate you. He’s just curious.

“Do you know what Aemond’s plan is for ��Nam?” LBJ asks, eyes urgent, voice low. “I’m sure he has one. He’s sworn to end the draft as soon as he gets into office, but how is he going to make sure the South Vietnamese can fend off the North themselves? We’re trying to train the bastards, but if we left they’d fold in months. It would be the first war the U.S. ever lost. Does he understand that?”

“He doesn’t really discuss it with me.” That’s true; you know his policies, but only because they are a constant subject of conversation within the family, something you all breathe like oxygen.

“We can’t let Nixon win,” LBJ continues. “It’s mass suicide to leave the country in his hands. The man can’t hold his liquor anymore, getting robbed by Kennedy in ’60 broke something in him. He gets sloshed and shoves his aids around, makes up conspiracies in his head. He’s a paranoid little prick. He’ll surveille the American people. He’ll launch a nuke at Moscow.”

You honestly don’t know what he expects you to say. “I’ll pass the message along to Aemond.”

“People love you, Mrs. Targaryen.” LBJ watching you closely. “Believe it or not, they used to love me too. But I still remember how to play the game. You’re the only reason Aemond is leading the polls in Florida. You can get him other states too. Jack needed Jackie. Aemond needs you. And you’ve had tragedies, and that’s a damn shame. But don’t you miss an opportunity. You take every disappointment, every fucked up cruelty of life and find a way to make it work for you. You pin it to your chest like a goddamn medal. Every single scar makes you look more mortal to those people going to the ballot box in November. You want them to be able to see themselves in you. It helps the mansions and the millions go down smoother.”

“President Johnson!” Aegon says as he saunters over, huge mocking grin. He thumps a closed fist against the Texan’s broad chest; the Secret Service agents standing ten feet away observe this sternly. “How thoughtful of you to be here, taking time out of your busy schedule, squeezing us in between war crimes.”

“The mayor of Trenton,” LBJ jabs.

“The butcher of Saigon.”

Now the president is no longer amused. “You’ve never accomplished anything in your whole damn life, son. Your obituary will be the size of a postage stamp. I’m looking forward to reading it someday soon.” He leaves, rejoining Lady Bird at the opposite end of the room.

You frown at Aegon, disapproving. You’re dressed in a sparkling, royal blue gown that Aemond chose. “That was unnecessary.”

Aegon is wearing an ill-fitting green shirt—half the buttons undone—khaki pants, and tan moccasins. “I just did you a favor.”

“What happened to your new girlfriend? Shouldn’t she be getting railed in your basement right now? Did she have a prior commitment? Did she have a spelling test to study for? Those can be tricky, such complex words. Juvenile. Inappropriate. Infidelity.”

“You know what he brags about?” Aegon says, meaning LBJ. “That he’s fucked more women by accident than John F. Kennedy ever did on purpose.”

“That sounds…logistically challenging.”

“He’s a lech. He’s a freak. He tells everyone on Capitol Hill how big his cock is. He takes it out and swings it around during meetings.”

“And that’s all far less than admirable, but he’s not going to do something like that around me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s not an idiot,” you say impatiently. “He was perfectly civil. And I was getting interesting advice.”

Aegon rolls his eyes, exasperated. “Yeah, okay, I’m sorry I crashed your cute little pep talk with Lyndon Johnson, the most hated man on the planet.”

“I guess you can’t stop Aemond from touching me, so you have to terrorize LBJ instead.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Aegon hisses, and his venom stuns you. And now you’re both trapped: you loosed the arrow, he proved you hit the mark. He’s flushing a deep, mortified red. Your guts are twisting with remorse.

“Aegon, wait, I didn’t mean—”

He whirls and storms off, shoving his way through the crowd. People glare at him as they clutch their glasses and plates, sighing in that What else do you expect from the worthless son? sort of way. You’re still gaping blankly at the place where Aegon stood when Aemond finds you, snakes a hand around the back of your neck, and whispers through the painstakingly-arranged wisps of hair that fall around your ear: “Follow me.”

It’s not a question. It’s a command. You trail him through the living room, into the foyer, and through the front door, not knowing what he wants. Outside the moon is a sliver; the light from the main house makes the stars hard to see. “Aemond, you’ll never believe the conversation I just had with LBJ. He really unloaded, I think the stress is driving him insane. I have to tell you what he said about—”

“Later.” And this is jarring; Aemond doesn’t put anything before strategy. He grabs your hand as he turns into Helaena’s garden, and only then do you understand what he wants. Instinctively, your legs lock up and your feet stop moving. Aemond tugs you onward. He wants it to be like the very first time. He intends to start over with you, the dawning of a new age in the dead of night.

Hidden in the circle of hedges, he takes your face roughly in his hands and kisses you, drinks you down like a vampire, consumes you like wildfire. But your skull echoes with panic. I don’t want him touching me. I don’t want another child with him. “Aemond…”

He doesn’t hear you, or acts like he doesn’t, or mistakes it for a murmur of desire, or chooses to believe it is. He has you down on the grass under the vengeful gaze of Zeus, the fountain splashing, the sounds of the house a low foreign drone. He yanks off your panties, but he doesn’t want you naked like he always did before. He pushes the hem of your shimmering cobalt gown up to your hips and unbuckles his trousers. And you realize as he’s touching you, as he’s easing himself into you: He doesn’t want to have to look at my scar.

You can’t ignore him, you can’t pretend it’s not happening. He’s too big for that. It’s a biting fullness that demands to be felt. So you kiss him back, and knot your fingers in his short hair like you used to, and try to remember the things you always said to him before. And when Aemond is too absorbed to notice, you look away from him, from the statue of Zeus, and peer up into the stone face of Athena instead: the goddess who never married and who knows the answer to every question.

“I love you,” Aemond says when it’s over, marveling at the slopes of your face in the dim ethereal light. “Everything will be right again soon. Everything will be perfect.”

You conjure up a smile and nod like you believe him.

“What did LBJ say?”

“Can I tell you later tonight? After the party, maybe? I just need a few minutes.”

“Of course.” And now Aemond pretends to be patient. He buckles his belt and returns to the main house, his blood coursing with the possibilities only you can make real, his skin damp with your sweat.

For a while—ten minutes, twenty minutes—you lie there on the cool grass wondering what it was like for all those mortals and nymphs, being pinned down by Zeus and then having Hera try to kill them afterwards, raising ill-fated reviled bastards they couldn’t help but love. What is heaven if the realm of the immortals is so cruel? Why does the god of justice seem so immune to it?

When at last you rise and walk back towards the house, you find Mimi at the edge of the garden. She’s on her knees and retching into a rose bush; she’s cut her face on the thorns, but she hasn’t noticed yet. She’s groaning; she seems lost.

You reach for her, gripping her bony shoulders. “Mimi, here, let’s get you upstairs…”

“No,” she blubbers, tears streaming down her scratched cheeks. “Just go away. Leave me.”

“Mimi—”

“No!” she roars, a mournful hemorrhage as she slaps your hands until you release her.

“You don’t have to be this way,” you tell her, distraught. “You can give up drinking. We’ll help you, me and Fosco and Ludwika. You can start over. You can be healthy and present again, you can live a real life.”

Mimi stares up at you, her grey eyes glassy and bloodshot but with a vicious, piercing honesty. “My husband hates me. My kids don’t know I exist. What the hell do I have to be sober for?”

You weren’t expecting this. You don’t know what to say. “We can help make the world better.”

“The world would be better without me in it.”

Then Mimi curls up on the grass under the rose bush, and stays there until you return with Fosco to drag her upstairs to her empty bed.

~~~~~~~~~~

The next afternoon, you’re lying on a lounge chair by the pool. Tomorrow the family will leave Asteria and embark upon a vigorous campaign schedule that will continue, with very few breaks, until Election Day on Tuesday, November 5th. The children are splashing and shrieking in the pool with Fosco, but you aren’t looking at them. You’re staring across the sun-drenched emerald lawn at the Atlantic Ocean. You’re envisioning all the bones and splinters of sunken ships that must litter the silt of the abyss; you’re thinking that it’s a graveyard with no headstones, no memory. Your swimsuit is a red one-piece. Your eyes are shielded by large black Ray Bans aviator sunglasses. Your gaze flicks up to the cloudless blue sky, where all the stars and planets are invisible.

Jupiter has nearly a hundred moons; the largest four were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Europa is a smooth white cosmic marble with a crust of ice, beautiful, immaculate. Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system and the only satellite with its own magnetic field, is rumored to have a vast underground saltwater ocean that may contain life. Callisto is dark and indomitable, riddled with impact craters; because of her dynamic atmosphere and location beyond Jupiter’s radiation belts, she is considered the best location for possible future crewed missions to the Jovian system. But Io is a wasteland. She has no water and no oxygen. Her only children are 400 active volcanoes, sulfur plumes and lava flows, mountains of silicate rock higher than Mount Everest, cataclysmic earthquakes as her crust slips around on a mantle of magma. Her daily radiation levels are 36 times the lethal limit for humans. If Hades had a home in our corner of the galaxy, it would be Io. She glows ruby and gold with barren apocalyptic fury. You can feel yourself turning poisonous like she is. You can feel your skin splitting open as the lava spills out.

Aegon trots out of the house—red swim trunks, cheap red plastic sunglasses, no shirt, a beach towel slung around his neck, flip flops—and kicks your chair. “Get up. We’re going sailing.”

“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“Great, because I’m not asking you to talk. I’m telling you to get in my boat.”

You don’t reply. You don’t think you can without your voice cracking. Aegon crouches down beside your chair and pushes your sunglasses up into your Brigitte Bardot-inspired hair so he can see your face. Your eyes are pink, wet, desperately sad. Deep troubled grooves appear in his forehead as he studies you. Gently, wordlessly, he pats your cheek twice and lowers your sunglasses back over your eyes. Then he stands up again and offers you his hand.

“Let’s go,” Aegon says, softly this time. You take his hand and follow him down to the boathouse.

Five vessels are currently kept there. Aegon’s sailboat is a 25-foot Wianno Senior sloop, just roomy enough for a few passengers. He’s had it since long before you married into the Targaryen family. It is white with hand-painted gold accents; the name Sunfyre adorns the stern. He unmoors the boat, pushes it out into the open water, and raises the sails.

You glide eastbound over the glittering crests of waves, slowly at first, then faster as the sails catch the wind. Aegon has one hand on the rudder, the other grasping the ropes. And the farther you get from shore, the smaller Asteria seems, and the Targaryen family, and the presidential election, and the United States itself. Now all that exists is this boat: you, Aegon, the squawking gulls, the school of mackerel, the ocean. The sun beats down; the breeze rips strands of your hair free. The battery-powered record player is blasting White Room by Cream. When you are far enough from land that no journalists would be able to get a photo, Aegon takes two joints and his Zippo out of the pocket of his swim trunks. He puts both joints between his lips, lights them, and passes you one. Then he stretches out beside you on the deck, gazing up at the September sky.

You ask as your muscles unravel and your thoughts turn light and easy to share: “Why did you bring me out here?”

“So you can drown yourself,” Aegon says, and you both laugh. “Nah. I used to go sailing all the time when I was a teenager. It always made me feel better. It was the only place where I could really be alone.”

You consider the math. “Wow. You haven’t been a teenager since before I was in kindergarten.”

“It’s weird to think about. You don’t seem that young.”

“Thanks, I guess. You don’t seem that old.”

“Maybe we’re meeting in the middle.” He inhales deeply and then exhales in a rush of smoke. “What do you think, should I get an earring?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It might shock Otto so bad it kills him.”

“I’ll get two.” And then Aegon says: “It’s not cool for you to mock me.”

You are dismayed; you didn’t mean to hurt him. “I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. You were mocking me. You mocked me about the receipt under my ashtray, and then you mocked me again last night. I’m up for a lot of things, but I can’t handle that. Okay?”

“Okay.” You turn your head so you can see him: shaggy blonde hair, stubble, perpetual sunburn, the softness of his belly and his chest, flesh you long to vanish into like rain through parched earth. “Aegon?”

He looks over at you. “Io?”

“I don’t want Aemond to touch me either.”

He’s surprised; not by what you feel, but because you’ve said it aloud, a treason like Prometheus giving mankind the gift of fire. “What are we gonna do about it?”

If you were the goddess of wisdom, maybe you’d know.

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magapatriot64 · 8 months ago

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A brutally honest take on Ukraine from a U.S. Army Veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq that is also a Purple Heart recipient (edited):

I have never and will never support the war in Ukraine. I now understand the Military Industrial Complex and the trillions spent off of the lives of US, the people.

If you do support the war, this post is going to offend the shit out of you.

And I honestly don’t care what you think. Some of you may agree, and some of you probably truly need to hear this.

I have been shot at, blown up, returned fire, everything imaginable. War is serious shit. This is not Call of Duty, this is real fucking life. The term “War is hell”, is coined for a reason.

First: I will start with NATO and Europe.

Why the hell are we in NATO if they don’t barely lift a finger for shit? Why is America always the one that will carry the burden of these asshats. Even President Trump commented TODAY and was almost begging for an end to this. To NATO: If you want this war so badly, then grab a compass and head due East.

Second: You can say whatever you want about President Trump. You can like the man, or you can hate him. However, you cannot argue the point that none of this bullshit was going on when he was President. Just throwing that out there. This is an undeniable fact.

Third: Why is it that it took an Airman to leak classified documentation to totally disprove the efforts in Ukraine? Don’t you notice how this story has been completely wiped from the mockingbird media? They are concealing the truth as well. American taxpayers have been lied to since this began.

Fourth: Where is all of our American taxpayer money going? Let’s be honest about it. How do you “over-calculate” over $6 BILLION DOLLARS of our money for this effort? Where exactly is it going? Into Politician or Zelenskyy’s pockets? If any of us made an “accounting error” on our taxes, we would all be in prison now. This is fraud, waste and abuse putting it lightly.

Fifth: This brings me to another point. Are politicians making money off of this war effort? If so, sorry to say, but you belong in prison. Plain and simple. And that is bipartisan speaking. There are Americans working 2-4 jobs at times just to make ends meet. People are recovering from a lockdown that YOU created.

Sixth: To the Americans backing this war. Why don’t you book yourself a flight to Kyiv and partake in this fight? It’s easy as fuck to be okay with war, while you’re chilling with your Starbucks in your comfortable environment. You love to criticize our country but have never contributed a fucking thing to it.

Last: Why are we not discussing diplomacy? There have been ZERO attempts to sit down like grown fucking men and come to an agreement. None. It is all too clear that they want this war to continue.

I sure as hell don’t claim to know everything, but this bullshit has gone on long enough.

To the dickheads who will inevitably cherry-pick this tweet know this, your opinion does not matter to me. You can comment, but I won’t give you the benefit of replying. Thanks for playing.

I know this is a very long-winded post. But if you took the time to read, thank you for listening.

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haggishlyhagging · 5 months ago

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When it is asserted in Germany that in vitro fertilization and similar technologies are all about helping infertile women, German feminists impatiently brush that claim aside. They are irritated at any suggestion that they ought to take such a claim seriously. It is, they say, a "Deckmantel," which means "cloak," "disguise." In conversations with them, one hears occasional references to the political naivete of Americans who accept such a "Deckmantel" at face value.

German feminists have known all along that the stakes in this issue are high. They are particularly sensitive to the ways in which these technologies can and are beginning to be used to manufacture human beings to specifications and, in the process, to reduce women to breeders or, less elegantly, to raw material for a new manufacturing process.

Unlike U.S. feminists, they organized as a movement on the issue and began spreading their critique beyond the feminist movement.

That the stakes are indeed high became dramatically evident in December 1987.

The German equivalent of the FBI (the 'Bundeskriminalamt") staged thirty-three simultaneous raids, many of them against feminists, throughout the Federal Republic of Germany, December 18 at 4:30 p.m. A total of 430 heavily armed police burst into the workplaces of activists. Fifteen to thirty in a group, the police swept into homes in Cologne, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf. In Essen, Duisburg, Bochum, and Hamburg, the raids were directed overwhelmingly against feminist critics of genetic and reproductive technology, according to Prozessgruppe Hamburg, a watchdog group.

The targeted critics have written and spoken on such issues as in vitro fertilization, amniocentesis, sex predetermination, and genetic engineering. They have actively opposed surrogate motherhood. Many worked together in a massive coalition to stop Noel Keane's attempt to open a branch of his U.S. surrogate business, United Family International, in Frankfurt. (Keane's New York firm arranged the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogate contract.) Their campaign to stop the sale of U.S. women to European men for breeding purposes ended successfully January 6, 1988 when a West German court ordered Keane's business closed, three months after it had opened.

Grounds for the police raids? In many cases, the women were not given any. But the next day, newspapers reported that the police conducted the searches to ascertain whether any of the individuals were members of a terrorist organization. They were specifically looking for a group called Revolutionaren Zellen and its feminist wing, Rota Zora.

The police were operating under Paragraph 129a of the terrorist act, "Support or Membership in a Terrorist Organization."

The women raided were forced to undress. All "non-changeable marks" on their bodies—scars, moles, etc. —were noted down in police records. The women were fingerprinted.

Two well-known and widely respected women were arrested: Ulla Penselin, active in two groups in Hamburg, Women Against Genetic Engineering and another group critiquing population control policies; and Ingrid Strobl, a journalist for eight years with the national feminist magazine, Emma. Strobl is accused of buying a clock used in a bombing attack against Lufthansa offices in Cologne to protest the exploitation of Third World women in the sex-tourism industry. Both women were charged under the terrorist act, Paragraph 129a. Strobl remains in prison while Penselin has since been released.

In the nationwide raids, police confiscated materials from an archive on genetic and reproductive technology established by women in Essen and from private homes and apartments. They seized drafts of the women's speeches, material prepared for seminars, names and addresses of those attending seminars, published work, videos, tapes of radio programs, scientific articles, postcards, brochures and private address books.

The police raids appear to be an attempt to stop the widespread antigenetic technology movement in Germany by linking legal organizations with more militant ones, Maria Mies, author of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and professor of sociology at the Fachhochschule in Cologne, told me in a telephone interview from her home.

"No concrete accusation or crime was being investigated," she pointed out. "This means that women doing 'Aufklarungsarbeit,' that is, researching reproductive or genetic engineering or talking about it or giving seminars, are already doing enough to provide a pretext for the attorney general to launch such a police action."

Mies, an organizer of the world's first massive feminist conference against reproductive and genetic technology in Bonn in 1985, said of the police action: "We think it is an effort to criminalize and intimidate the whole protest movement of women against reproductive and genetic engineering and frighten others away from participating in order to prevent the movement from spreading even more widely."

Mies added: "We are planning another conference against reproductive and genetic engineering just to demonstrate that we are continuing our work."

-Gena Corea, “The New Reproductive Technologies” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

#gena corea #reproductive technologies #German feminism #female oppression #womens history #patriarchal state #anti ivf

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justinspoliticalcorner · 5 months ago

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Daniel Marans at HuffPost:

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) lost her Democratic primary on Tuesday, shrinking the ranks of the House’s left-wing “Squad” and delivering another major victory to the pro-Israel and business-friendly groups that backed her challenger. Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor, defeated Bush. Since Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which includes all of St. Louis and many of its northern and western suburbs, is overwhelmingly Democratic, Bell is all but assured of a seat in Congress come November.

Bell’s victory over Bush marks the second “Squad” member in recent months to fall to a challenger heavily funded by pro-Israel groups. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who, like Bush, ousted an incumbent in 2020, lost his race to Westchester County Executive George Latimer this past June. Justice Democrats, the left-wing group that backed Bush’s first successful run, cast the race as yet another referendum on the power of big money to decide elections. “This race is about the future of our democracy and the soul of our Democratic Party, frankly,” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, told HuffPost on Monday. “This is a question about whether we want to let a handful of Republican mega-donors dictate the outcome of Democratic primaries, or do we want to move forward to elect more nurses and everyday people to represent the community’s best interests.”

Bush, an ordained pastor and registered nurse, indeed faced a massive fundraising deficit. As Andrabi noted, Bell had the support of some local Republican donors — and many national megadonors from both parties, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Super PACs supporting Bell outspent those supporting Bush by a more than 3-to-1 margin. Spending by pro-Bell groups included about $8.6 million from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, $1.5 million from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s Mainstream Democrats PAC, $1.4 million from the crypto-industry-backed FairShake PAC, and nearly $500,000 from the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Bush made national waves with her July 2021 sit-in on the U.S. Capitol steps to draw attention to the expiration of the federal government’s COVID-19-era eviction moratorium. Her action got results; President Joe Biden responded by extending the policy, though the Supreme Court stopped it a few weeks later. Later that year, in a bid to shore up support for abortion rights, Bush spoke on national television — and in a House hearing — about her experience getting an abortion after being raped at age 17.

Bush’s allies — and she retains the support of many local elected officials — see her as an authentic tribune of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was born in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Unlike many other Democrats in Washington, Bush continues to embrace calls to “defund the police.” Bell, who also got his political start during the Ferguson protests and unseated a more conservative incumbent prosecutor in 2018, has, by contrast, disappointed many of his former fellow activists. They fault him for declining to prosecute Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, and for not more rapidly reducing the county’s jail and prison populations, even as he points to the creation of a conviction review unit and the expansion of drug diversion programs.

[...] Finally, Bush has been among the most outspoken critics of Israel in Congress, particularly after Israel invaded Gaza in response to Hamas’ terror attack on Oct. 7. She was not only an early advocate for a ceasefire, but has also accused Israel of genocide ― a charge that remains highly disputed. And in an interview with The New York Times out on Monday, Bush expressed ambivalence about describing Hamas as a terrorist group, though her campaign later walked it back. “Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes,” Bush told the Times. “But do I know that? Absolutely not.” Bush’s stances cost her the support of Susan Talve, a progressive St. Louis rabbi who leads the only synagogue in Bush’s district. But they also unsettled some other allies who see her national profile as a distraction from the needs of the high-poverty, majority Black district.

In the battle of activists rising from the Ferguson protests in #MO01, incumbent Rep. Cori Bush (D) goes down in defeat to AIPAC-backed St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell (D) in the Democratic Primary. Bell is favored to win this November.

#Cori Bush #Wesley Bell #AIPAC #2024 Missouri Elections #2024 US House Elections #2024 Elections #Missouri #St. Louis #Ferguson #Ferguson Missouri #Ferguson Protests #Justice Democrats #Israel/Hamas War

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reality-detective · 2 years ago

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💥💰 Revealed: The Secret Empire of the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Morgans 💰💥

Prepare to uncover the shocking truth about the world's most influential families and their iron grip on the global economy. The Federal Reserve Cartel, comprised of the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Morgans, holds unparalleled power that extends far beyond the realm of oil.

Picture this: The Four Horsemen of Banking, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, join forces with the Four Horsemen of Oil, such as Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP, and Chevron Texaco. But their domination doesn't stop there. They have extended their reach to encompass the music industry through an intricate network of private banks. These behemoths, along with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays, and other European old money giants, control the strings of the music industry, enabling them to dictate its direction and influence.

The nefarious deeds of the Rockefeller dynasty are far-reaching, starting with their military-commercialization of music in the early 1900s. They orchestrated a diabolical plan to shift the world's standard tuning of music to 440 pitch. This insidious frequency was known to provoke greater aggression, psychosocial agitation, emotional distress, and even physical illnesses. Behind the scenes, this manipulation led to financial gains for those complicit in the monopoly, including agents, agencies, and companies connected to the North American Rockefeller crime cartel and elite organizations.

Fast forward to the late 1980s, when the Rockefellers summoned the top music executives and talent to a highly secretive meeting in Los Angeles. Their sinister agenda? To usher in the era of Controlled Rap Music, tightly linked to the privatization of U.S. prisons. These privately owned prisons, operated by the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Bush family, and other influential figures, served as money laundering operations, tax exemption schemes, and pyramid scheme operations.

The Rockefellers devised a cunning plan to control the rap industry and target black communities by promoting violent music that fueled oppression and civil unrest. They brought together top executives and leading black artists, binding them with confidentiality agreements. Their objective was clear: coordinate the violence within the rap music movement, while major record labels gained exclusive rights for production and distribution across the United States. As a reward, they would receive shares and points within the private prison systems.

The Masonic plan unfolded with precision, resulting in over 1,500 private prison systems housing more than 1 million black teenagers by 1990. These vulnerable youths, expressing the generational trauma imposed upon them, unknowingly contributed to the Rockefellers' malevolent scheme. The private prison systems reaped billions annually from the government, creating a vast money laundering network through inflated products, such as ramen noodles priced 8 times higher than their actual value. The flow of hundreds of billions from government funding, pyramid schemes, and insurance companies transformed the privatization of prisons into a multi-trillion-dollar venture.

Local courts and judges mercilessly sentenced petty criminals and first-time offenders, filling the ever-expanding private prisons. As a result, the United States now holds the dubious record for the highest number of incarcerated individuals in the world, with an unprecedented number of prisons. This was not an accident—it was a meticulously orchestrated plan by the Rockefellers.

But their influence doesn't end there. These silent thieves also manipulate elections, ensuring their grip on power remains unbroken.

Unmasking the true face of those who control the world, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers find themselves in the crosshairs of military alliance operations aimed at dismantling the Rothschilds' deep state power in Europe, the UK, Russia, and China.

Are you connecting the DOTS? 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourself #educate yourselves #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourself #think for yourselves #think about it #do your homework #do your own research #do some research #do your research #question everything #ask yourself questions #connecting dots

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dalekofchaos · 3 months ago

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Israel reaps what they sow

Kamala calling Iran a "destabilizing force in the Middle East" is fucking laughable.

While the U.S have bombed Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Not to mention what Hillary and Obama did to fucking Libya.

And the U.S funded and armed Israel's genocide of Palestine.

This wasn't an unprovoked attack. This wasn't "unfair" to Israel. This was exactly what they deserved. Turns out there are consequences for bombing and trying to invade your neighbors. How about that? Turns out if you fuck around, you find out.

Israel bombed Gaza for a year, starves civilians and destroys infrastructure amounting to genocide, ethnic cleansing in West Bank, bombs Iranian consulate, carries out assassination in Iran, bombs Syria and Yemen, bombs and invades Lebanon.

You cannot seriously tell me that after bombing 4 countries while carrying out an ethnic cleansing, that Israel is the victim.

You reap what you fucking sow.

"We pray for Israel" "We stand with Israel"

No. I stand with Palestine. I stand with Lebanon. I stand with Israel's victims. Victims, that YOU helped kill. Fuck Joe Biden and fuck Kamala Harris.

All of this was predictable and preventable. The Biden admin made an active choice to allow it to escalate to this point. His legacy and her eventual legacy is genocide and pointless war. This is what he will be remembered for. A war with Iran for the sole sake of protecting Israel's right to wipe Gaza from the map and massacre Palestinians.

All you had to do was stop arming them. Stop funding them and learn to say no to that fucking genocidal dipshit Netanyahu. If fucking Ronald Reagan and Bush told Israel when enough was fucking enough, what does that say about you?

You don't get to play victim when you bomb schools. You don't get to play victim when you bomb Mosques, Churches, Synagogues, hospitals, homes, refugee camps and the birthplace of JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ON CHRISTMAS DAY and have the fucking gall and the fucking nerve to say YOU'RE the victim.

Fuck Israel....FUCK ISRAEL! Fuck Netanyahu. Fuck Trump. Fuck Biden. Fuck Kamala Harris and fuck America for constantly funding and arming these murderous genocidal fucks and for letting them plunge the world in a war that they cannot hope of escaping.

I am tired of the rich and powerful, the people who are in charge playing god. I am tired of seeing mutilated children, dead families, pieces of human remains being pulled out of the rubble. I am tired of a genocide being funded instead of actually HELPING the American people.

Infrastructure is failing on purpose. Healthcare is shitty on purpose. Schools are prisons with little learning/socialization on purpose. Industries are deregulated on purpose. Cop cities are being built on purpose. But boy do we have enough fucking money to fund a genocide and fund the police to brutalize us! Why is our government spending more to make war overseas than to help our own people?

What has Israel ever done for America in return? How much foreign aid do you think they'll us for the Hurricane Helene victims? I don't think I've ever seen or heard America's "greatest ally" ever helping us in return for us funding their war crimes.

I am tired of paying for Israel's war, greed and genocide.

When President Joe Biden was asked if there’s any more resources that the federal government could be providing hurricane victims, he said:

“No. We’ve given them … a significant amount even though they didn’t — hadn’t — asked for it.”

BULLSHIT! They gave Israel $8.7 billion while saying hurricane victims have enough money. Why is it whenever Americans are in dire need of aid and help, OUR OWN FUCKING GOVERNMENT WOULD RATHER WE FUCKING SUFFER THAN GIVE US THE MONEY WE NEED AND GIVE THAT FUCKING MONEY TO FUCKING ISRAEL???? They value Israel’s continued destruction of Palestine over their own people and I am fucking sick of this shit.

Everything that's happening now is a direct result of the Biden-Harris administration's refusal to cut off weapons to Israel as they were flattening Gaza. Now they're about to start a full-blown regional war because Kamala Harris and Joe Biden refused to rein them in.

Failures.

Fuck every one of these genocidal maniacs and I hope they all get what's coming to them. You reap what you sow.

#Free Palestine #Palestine #Lebanon #Iran #Anti Israel #Anti Zionism #Amerikkka #Anti Biden #Anti Trump #Anti Kamala Harris

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padawan-historian · 1 year ago

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To better upRoot our miseducation about settler-colonialism, antisemitism, islamophobia, apartheid, and the growing military industrial complex, here are a few urgent and timely reading recommendations from your friendly neighborhood historian (books with ** are my padawan picks)

Books on Muslim Identities & Solidarities:

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: Twenty Years After 9/11 | Deepa Kumar **

The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims | Khaled A. Beydoun

Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims | Mitra Rastegar **

The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror | Arun Kundnani **

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza | Mosab Abu Toha **

The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine | Ben Ehrenreich

Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom | Rebecca Gould **

Books on Jewish Identities & Religious Imperialism:

Holocaust to Resistance, My Journey | Suzanne Berliner Weiss **

A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism

Ten Myths about Israel | Ilan Pappe **

Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History

Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?: Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew' | Antony Lerman **

Books on the Histories & Afterlives of Palestine:

The Palestinians | Rosemary Sayigh

The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine | Bernard Regan **

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 | Rashid Khalidi **

The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine | Salim Tamari

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine | Ilan Pappe **

Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel | Andrew Ross **

Gaza Under Hamas: From Islamic Democracy to Islamist Governance | Bjorn Brenner

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories | Ilan Pappe

The Battle for Justice in Palestine | Ali Abunimah

In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water | James Fergusson **

Books on Queer Liberation & Apartheid:

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique | Sa'ed Atshan **

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir | Samra Habib **

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times | Jasbir K. Puar

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation | Eli Clare

Books for Young Readers & Growing Families on Palestine, Apartheid, and Racism:

Young Palestinians Speak: Living Under Occupation **

You Are The Color **

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water **

A Little Piece of Ground

Wishing Upon the Same Stars **

The Shepherd's Granddaughter **

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom **

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier **

We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World **

Books for upRooting Political & Academic Imperialism

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics | Marc Lamont Hill + Mitchell Plitnick **

Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial | Saree Makdisi

The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World | Antony Loewenstein **

We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel | Eric Alterman **

Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories | Virginia Tilley

Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom | Keisha Blain

Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis | Matt Mitchelson

Books for Decolonized Scholarship & Community Building:

The Wretched of the Earth | Franz Fanon **

Necropolitics | Achille Mbembe **

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement | Angela Davis **

Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System | Nahla Abdo **

Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right | Elizabeth Fekete

The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World | Kehinde Andrews **

The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression | Tariq D. Khan

Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution | Walter Rodney

You can explore more decolonized book recs + history reads over on Neighborhood Historian or access deeper history lessons (and support these public resources + works) through my Patreon.

#books to read #solidarity with palestine against apartheid #black solidarity with palestine #free palestine #free us all #padawan historian #decolonize your bookshelf #the fire is here #our history is your history #book recommendations #resources for you #antiracist resources

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vegance · 1 year ago

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The light of a headlamp slices through the dark, illuminating hundreds of sows, side by side in crates. In the pitch black, they shriek and squirm in clanking metal cages.

In March 2017, five activists entered Circle Four Farms, an industrial pig farm in Utah owned by Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork producers in the world.

They faced the camera. They used their real names. And they posted their footage online.

They also took with them two piglets.

The animals—later named Lily and Lizzie—were sick and underweight, according to activist Wayne Hsiung. However, prosecutors argued it was stealing. The FBI raided two farm animal shelters in Utah and Colorado looking for the missing pigs, and state veterinarians cut two ear clippings from a piglet’s ear for DNA testing. Prosecutors charged all five activists with felony burglary and theft charges, but by the time of the trial in 2022, two men faced up to 10 years in prison. At one point, because of an enhancement for crimes committed against animal enterprises, the two faced a sentence of up to 60 years, according to numerous press accounts.

But in a shocking twist, the jury in Washington County, Utah, sided with the activists.

#vegan #veganism

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darkmaga-returns · 2 months ago

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President-elect Donald Trump’s likely CIA director Kash Patel has called for the urgent declassification of the Jeffrey Epstein client list and Sean “Diddy” Combs list of co-conspirators as a means of restoring trust in government.

Trump insiders including Elon Musk believe the President-elect is likely to reward long-term loyalist and New York-born attorney Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel with the role of CIA director. A former Republican House staffer, Patel served in various high-ranking staff roles in the defense and intelligence communities during Trump’s first term.

Patel has also been a vocal advocate for the political prisoners who were prosecuted over the January 6 riots.

During an interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Patel said that Trump should create a ‘declassification office’ in order to increase transparency in government and restore public trust.

In response to that proposal, social media personality ALX wrote on X that Patel ‘should be the next CIA Director under Donald Trump.’

‘Good idea,’ Musk replied to the tweet, which included a clip of Patel’s interview.

The opinion of the Tesla, X and SpaceX boss holds a lot of weight with Trump.

DailyMail report: Musk has been with the president-elect ever since Election Day on November 5. Since then the two have been seen dining, golfing and walking around Mar-a-Lago together.

And female NASCAR icon Danica Patrick is backing Patel’s bid to take helm at the CIA, writing on X: ‘Let’s go Kash!’

She also said if he does lead the U.S.’s top intelligence agency, she’d love to see Patel declassify the ‘UFO files… while you’re at it.’

Earlier this summer, Musk joked online about creating a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that would focus on slashing the D.C. bureaucracy and regulations Republicans feel hold certain industries back.

Musk first endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt against him at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in July.

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script-a-world · 5 months ago

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Submitted via Google Form:

In the rural farming communities of my world, I'm thinking about a potential plot related reason that would cause it to culturally be common to have small familes of 1-3 children. But I've noticed that across the world such communities generally welcome a whole ton of children because they work on the farm. When I remove that part... how could it affect my farming community? Technologically, these communities hover between 19-20th century tech.

Tex: Less children dying from things like starvation, illness, and untreatable injuries, and also a whole lot of self-owned, effective, easy to repair machines that can do the work of several people in a fraction of the time. The nineteenth century, or 1800s, had a lot of social upheaval and the beginnings of scientific progress in understanding what diseases were (Wikipedia). The twentieth century, or 1900s, had an exponential increase in knowledge compared to the 1800s, as well as a corresponding population boom (Wikipedia). To wit, one billion overall population was recorded in 1800 (Wikipedia).

Compared to previous centuries, those two hundred years were the most advanced in human history in terms of medical development and accessibility to education. It was, also compared to previous centuries, some of the most polluted and war-riddled that lead to new methods for the stark impoverishment of the global population. Women being strongly encouraged through many means - many less acknowledging of individual freedoms than others - to bear as many children as possible over their lifetime is due to high child mortality rates, where playing the game of statistics meant that you would possibly get a handful of children reaching adulthood that could take over the family farm (or other estate or inheritances) and ostensibly take care of their parents when life has run them over roughshod too much to work anymore. The development of pensions has done much to alleviate that societal, generational woe, and shift the perception of children in their social role from live-in workers to additional members of one’s family. This is, of course, not a uniform movement, as poverty will perpetuate the ideas of large families and responsibilities for inheritance (and thus situations such as arranged marriages, etc), which is still ongoing today in many, many parts of the world regardless of a country’s GDP. For the time period of 1800-2000, farmers having 1-3 children depends entirely on how much money they already make, have inherited themselves, and how little they can spend on producing agricultural products. This will include such “cost-cutting” measures as:

the cheapest labor available (see: immigrants, or prison workers, as seasonal labor when slavery was given a different legal definition in countries like the U.S.),

chemical agriculture,

genetically modified crops,

vehicles such as tractors, and

a lot of very good marketing

So, generally, the richer your family already was, the less you needed to have a dozen or two children born per generation to use as labor, because you could spend your plethora of money on new and cutting-edge technologies that would turn agriculture into a passive money-making business for you. This is the same for non-agricultural industries of the time, especially with the post-WWII price-fixing measures and before the introduction of modern credit cards, credit scores, etc, where money generally had more purchasing power and the average person had more disposable income that would have been otherwise allocated to things like food, medicine, replacing worn-out clothing/shoes, transportation costs, and putting a roof over one’s head.

Notably, after the mid-2000s, there has been a decrease in the average person’s disposable income, so what was true for 1800-2000 will not necessarily be broadly applicable after that period in time.

Utuabzu: One place you can look to for a real world example of this is France, which hit an average of approximately 3 children per woman in 1871, and had long had a lower birth rate than the rest of Europe. A major reason for this was the Salic inheritance system, which saw land divided equally among all sons. This was a serious disincentive for a family to have more than one son, since over time it resulted in farms that were divided into ever smaller and less viable plots. And since a daughter would require a dowry to be married, they weren’t much more desirable. So farmers in France had significant motivation to limit the number of children in their families - though as Tex mentions above, this was counterbalanced by the need to have spare kids to account for the relatively high childhood mortality rate. This resulted in the French population remaining essentially stable at around 20 million between the mid 15th (after it recovered from the Black Death) and mid 18th (when medicine started to be an actual science) Centuries, while the populations of other European regions expanded significantly.

So, it’s perfectly possible for a pre-modern largely rural society to have a low birth rate, so long as there are appropriate legal and technological conditions. Extra farm labour is great and all, but not worth it if the end result is the family being left destitute after the landholder’s death because the farm got divided into unviable fractions.

Licorice: families welcoming a whole lot of children might be overstating the case. Before reliable birth control, families endured a whole lot of children because there was no way to prevent them. It is pretty much universally true to say that wherever women have control over their own fertility, the birth rate goes down. Very few women actually want to give birth to eight or ten children over the course of their reproductive life, though there are always outliers, of course.

A woman’s control over her fertility is determined by two main factors

Access to reliable contraception

Her freedom to choose whether to use contraception

Some women may live in societies where they are allowed to make decisions about their own bodies, but don’t have access to the birth control they need; in other societies, the birth control may be available, but the woman may not be the one making the decision.

In all societies throughout history means have been devised to deal with the arrival of children who were surplus to requirements. These included

Infanticide, whether state-endorsed (e.g. in ancient Sparta) or illegal (e.g. in 19th century Europe)

Adoption

Foundlings and foundling hospitals

Selling the child into slavery

Some societies historically have set such a high premium on male children that “excess” girl children would be routinely killed at birth. Even if allowed to live, if a food insecurity situation arose, the available food would go to the brothers and the sisters would be allowed to starve. In general, societies that set a high premium on male children are those where the girl children are “given away” to another family when they marry, while the boy children are expected to take care of their parents in their old age.

Sparta is an interesting example of a patriarchal, militaristic society where it was easier for a girl child to survive than a boy child. Physically imperfect baby boys were killed, whereas physically imperfect girls were often allowed to live on the grounds that Sparta needed all the Spartan-breeding wombs it could muster.

Utuabzu has already spoken about the correlation between land available for farming and population levels. When a society over-produces children, and insufficient land is available on which these children can raise families of their own, their options included:

Migrate: the seemingly endless swathes of so-called “empty” land available in the West encouraged large families in 19th century USA. Greek cities in the 8th century sent their surplus population to establish colonies all around the Med and the Black Sea

Enter a religious order

Move to the city and take up a trade or profession

Fraternal polyandry or “wife-sharing”

Join the army

Make war on neighbouring societies to acquire their land for your own group

Human societies seem to have perpetually poised between two equally perilous situations: having too many children, and not having enough. We have been equally ingenious in devising solutions!

#google submitted #culture #reproduction

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beardedmrbean · 6 months ago

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MEXICO CITY — In a small town in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán, members of a criminal group forced residents to pay for high-cost internet service — or face death.

After these threats, residents made monthly extortion payments while simultaneously reporting the situation to authorities.

After months of investigations, officials raided three properties, finding evidence such as antennas, internet repeater equipment and connections, which were handed over to the prosecutor's office.

While it may sound surprising for Mexico's drug cartels to be involved in internet service, those who follow the criminal groups' activities aren't at all surprised.

"Drug cartels have diversified their operations since their inception," security analyst David Saucedo said. "Many of them started as criminal organizations whose main activity wasn’t drug trafficking."

Some gangs were involved in, for example, fuel theft, others were involved in vehicle theft and others specialized in robbing public transportation, Saucedo said.

“Criminal groups that joined drug trafficking already had these other activities beforehand.”

Besides the billions of dollars cartels make from the drug trafficking industry, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says the most powerful drug cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), are involved in many illegal ventures that result in profits.

“The Sinaloa Cartel is most closely identified with drug trafficking but is also engaged in extortion, the theft of petroleum and ores, weapons trafficking, migrant smuggling, and prostitution,” the 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment states.

CJNG directs the theft of fuel from pipelines, extorts agave and avocado farmers, migrants and prison officials, and taxes migrant smugglers, the report said.

"The portfolio is extensive. However, while drug trafficking is the most profitable activity, it has a longer recovery time for the investment compared to other ... criminal activities, which yield almost immediate profit," Saucedo said.

From cartels calling older Americans to offer timeshares in Mexico, leading to the loss of nearly $40 million, to cartel-backed smugglers reaping growing profits in the trafficking of migrants across the U.S-Mexico border, their criminal range is extensive.

Here are some ways where the cartels have extended their reach:

Fuel theft

Fuel theft, known as huachicoleo in Mexico, is a highly profitable activity for organized crime groups. In the first nine months of 2022, Mexico's state-owned oil company, Pemex, lost $730 million from illegal pipeline taps.

Cartels in Mexico have developed a sophisticated approach to fuel theft, which involves corruption, precision and violence.

This includes tactics such as bribing Pemex employees and local officials for information, drilling precise illegal taps into pipelines, and using modified tanker trucks to transport stolen fuel for distribution in black market networks.

Several cartels are involved in this criminal activity. For instance, the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, led by Jose Antonio Yepez, also known as El Marro, established its dominance through fuel theft before entering into drug trafficking.

Additionally, CJNG and the Gulf Cartel are also linked to fuel theft, which supports their criminal activities.

Avocados

Mexico's multibillion-dollar avocado industry, which continues to break records for exports every year, has also been one of the main targets for drug cartels.

Avocados are known as “green gold” in Mexico, and the country has become the world’s largest producer of the popular fruit.

But as growers’ fortunes have risen, they have faced increasing threats from drug cartels seeking a share of the profits.

In Michoacán, the only state authorized to export the fruit to the U.S., CJNG and local gangs demand payments from farmers, often referred to as "protection fees."

These fees can range from $135 to $500 per hectare monthly, depending on the size of the farm and the level of perceived threat.

The extortion process begins with cartels identifying and targeting profitable farms. Armed cartel members then approach the farmers, issuing threats of violence or property damage if the farmers refuse to comply.

In February 2022, the U.S. suspended avocado imports from Mexico after a U.S. official received a death threat while working in Uruapan.

The imports resumed a week later following new safety measures applied by Mexico’s government in the region.

Two years later, locals say the situation hasn’t changed much, and avocado growers continue to deal with criminal organizations in the area.

Tortillas

The average Mexican consumes about 70 kilograms of tortillas annually, according to the Mexican Agriculture Ministry. It is a staple in Mexican cuisine, which is why cartels have decided to profit from it.

Extortion from cartels affects nearly 20,000 tortillerías, directly impacting the prices paid by Mexicans.

According to the National Tortilla Council, in an interview with The Washington Post, out of more than 130,000 tortillerías in the country, between 14 to 15% percent suffer from extortion.

Homero López García, the organization's president, told El Sol de México that establishments must pay between $135 and $190 weekly to multiple criminal groups to continue operating.

"Well, look, nothing surprises me anymore," Saucedo, the security analyst, said about cartels extorting tortillerías. "Perhaps it's a somewhat insensitive and cynical posture from me, but the truth is that I remain open to all possibilities in this regard."

Chicken

In a video posted on social media two days before Christmas 2023, an armed group was seen arriving at a poultry shop in Toluca, Mexico, kidnapping four workers and putting them into a white van.

The Mexico state prosecutor's office said the victims were retailers who were forced to buy chicken in some establishments. Likewise, they had to pay a fee of $2.50 per kilo in exchange for not getting killed by the Familia Michoacana cartel.

Authorities said as a result of their efforts to combat extortion, the criminal groups La Familia Michoacana and CJNG lost over $43 million from threatening poultry and egg vendors in municipalities of the Toluca Valley and the southern part of the state.

The state prosecutor's office said in 2023 alone, they received 4,010 complaints for this crime, of which they determined that only one in four was made in person, with the rest being indirect through phone calls, social media, and emails.

Three months later, the four workers kidnapped in December were found alive, and four perpetrators were detained, but those behind the abductions remain on the loose and the extortion of poultry vendors continues, officials said.

'Piso' fee

"They were asking me for $600 monthly for cobro de piso; we reported it, and we had to close for a month," Guillermo, a businessman in downtown Mexico City, told local media, recalling the extortion from the cartel.

The cobro de piso, which is the fee cartels charge business owners in exchange for "protection," has been the main problem for merchants in Mexico City.

"The first group of affected businesses are restaurants, followed by convenience stores in second place, and then jewelry stores in third place," said Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, president of Mexico City’s Chamber of Commerce.

In the past few years, extortions have been on the rise. Depending on the areas, some establishments would receive calls, emails, or in-person visits from armed men asking for the cartel's fee.

"They have tried several times, it's through calls," restaurant owner Israel Zavala told Mexican media. "The trust in the authorities isn't very high; complaints have been filed, but they don't proceed."

Analyst Saucedo said the problem with the metrics is that we have never had access to their accounting books.

“We will never have the total amount of the taxable fee because many do not report it to the authorities.”

In Mexico City, there are many criminal organizations involved in activities such as drug dealing, but also charging extortion fees to small business owners like tortilla shops, street vendors, and taxi drivers.

"Since Mexico City is a densely populated area, and we have a very large informal economy, many people are unfortunately susceptible to paying protection money. Consequently, it is a profitable activity for the local mafias," Saucedo said.

"Besides paying an official tax to come to work, you have to pay another one to them," Angel Campos, a vendor at a street market in Mexico City, said.

#nunyas news

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