#and i hope would give the agency her immunization records

[merriclo]

this is primarily a silly hypothetical but do you think Akutagawa ever dropped off/handed over Kyouka’s important paperwork.

in all likelihood, it was probably Kōyō who did it, and probably alongside the files detailing Kyouka’s past, but the idea that Akutagawa just. like. mailed the ADA her paperwork is so funny to me

it’d be so silly if, in the middle of their first mission together, Atsushi’s just like. “hey by the way. about that package you sent the agency.”

“yes. Kyouka-chan’s important paperwork. i ensured that everything was included. her birth certificate, immunization records, et cetera. why, is anything missing?”

“no. it’s all there. thanks.”

and then they’re immediately back at each other’s throats

[temperancejones]

Some Kind of Curse - Chapter Two

The three walk in silence for a few moments. Governor Jameson is trying to think of a good way to start the conversation, and Steve is worried about his hat flying away too, so he takes it off his head and tucks it under his arm, mimicking his sister’s previous actions.

“I just wanted to start off again, by saying how sorry I am for your loss, Commanders. Your father was a great man, and I had the pleasure to know him personally. He death shocked us all; he loved this island so much and did such a great job protecting it.” Governor Jameson begins, which makes Steve and Kris’ heart rates pick up, like it does every time someone mentions their father’s murder. Every time, they can hear the gunshot that killed him, and it sends a shiver down their spines. It makes Kris feel nauseous when she thinks about it.

Steve clears his throat. “Thank you, Ma’am. But with all due respect, why are we here? Is this about the investigation into Hesse’s whereabouts?” he asks with a hint of annoyance to his voice. Steve was never really one to deal with politicians- he never has had the patience for them and their constant lies. Kris is the one who has an unlimited amount of patience, and has no problem dealing with politicians and higher-ups, so maybe, he thinks, he should let her deal with the governor. “Ma’am, we are forbidden to investigate this, I’m sure you understand why.” Kris cuts in before the Governor can reply to Steve. The governor cannot know that they are planning to catch Hesse. Hell, nobody can know, because Steve and Kris don’t want to take anyone else down with them when they inevitably get court martialed.

The governor nods. “I know. HPD is working non-stop to try and track down Hesse.” She tells the twins, hoping not to get them riled up.

Steve lets out a short puff of air. “No offence, Ma’am, but you aren’t going to catch Hesse with traffic stops and roadblocks. He is a terrorist wanted all over the world, it’s going to be nearly impossible to catch him.” Steve states, and stops in place. Kris does too. The governor notices and stops in front of them.

“I know, and that’s why I asked to meet with you two here today. Your father’s murder was a wake-up call to me and every law enforcement agency in Hawaii, which is why I’m putting together a special investigations taskforce… and I want you two to run it.” Governor Jameson explains, which reels Steve and Kris back a little bit.

Why the hell would she want them, out of all the people on the island, to run the taskforce? Doesn’t she know that they aren’t cops? They don’t really abide by civilian rules in the navy, so it would most likely be a mess the moment it started, Steve immediately thinks, scoffing quietly. “You don’t even know us.” He replies to the Governor.

She crosses her arms and tucks her hair behind her ears. “I know your resumes. Kristine McGarrett; the first female Navy SEAL, a double major in political sciences and operations research with minors in Japanese and Arabic. NCAA all-star for volleyball and Track at the Academy, sharing top of the class with her brother, Steven McGarrett, who double majored in military history and operations research with minors in Japanese and Arabic as well, and was an NCAA all-star in football and track. Five years naval intelligence, six years with the SEALs… your superiors say that you two are the best unit they have ever seen.” The governor justifies, which makes Kris chuckle a little bit. At least the governor came to their meeting prepared.

“That is correct, Ma’am. But we cannot risk everything to track down one man. If you’ll excuse us, we have to make arrangements for our father’s funeral now. Please excuse us.” Kris bluffs, then her and Steve put their caps back on and prepare to get as far away from the Governor as possible before she finds out their ulterior motive to coming back home. They manage to get a few steps away before the governor calls out after them.

“I can help you find this son of a bitch! With full immunity and means. And, you won’t face any disciplinary action from your superiors. Your taskforce will have blanket authority to go after guy like Hesse and get them the hell off of my island.” Governor Jameson offers, which makes the twins stop in their tracks. Steve and Kris look at each other briefly, and then turn to the Governor to hear her out once again. She walks towards them and stops a few feet in front of them before she speaks again. “Your rules, my backing, no red tape. And I promise both of you, what you see with me is what you get.” The governor offers. This taskforce would be the opportunity of a lifetime, But Steve and Kris both know that it would come with huge ramifications. Running the taskforce would mean no more Navy for them, which is something they aren’t sure they want to give up yet. A big decision and career change like this is something that needs to be well thought out and planned in advance, not made on a whim like this. Kris doesn’t really know how to politely say this to the governor, so she just stays silent, giving Steve the opportunity to act like a robot and hopefully get the governor to leave them be and Hunt down Hesse on their own.

Steve steps a little closer to the governor, getting kind of close to her face. “Here’s what I see. There’s an election coming up, and you’re looking to win again. What’s better than having two kids of a fallen cop be the faces of your election campaign as they avenge their father’s death and take down criminals on the island. Thanks, but we’ll pass.” Steve tells her off, scowling a little bit. Kris supresses a smile at her brother’s fake hostility towards the governor, but deep down, she knows he’s right in a way. Governor Jameson would get great PR for having an elite taskforce under her watch, but now is not the time for it. Steve and Kris need to hunt down Hesse and then get back to the Navy, where they can hopefully put Hawaii, the island that has caused them nothing but pain, behind them.

Governor Jameson nods in defeat. “okay. Well, at least think about it, please. Here’s my personal number, please don’t hesitate to call if you need anything while you two are here, or if you change your minds.” She offers and digs a card out of her coat pocket. She hands it to Steve, and then heads back to her security detail and gets back into her car. Once her car is out of sight, Kris turns to Steve.

“Thanks. I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t bullshit my way out of that one, but you were on the nose with the profile you made for her.” Kris admits to her brother, patting him on the back. He smiles a bit and tucks the card into the inner pocket of his coat. Steve nods along.

“That’s a hell of an offer, though. I think it’s a good thing to fall back on if we need to. She could save our asses, that’s for sure. And hey, even if we do get stuck with running the taskforce here, I’m sure it wouldn’t be any different than us switching gears and going into another division in the Navy,” Steve suggests. Kris shrugs. Steve does have a point… if need be, they can hunker down and work here (legally) to take down Hesse once and for all if they need to.

“I just don’t know if I’m ready to give up the Navy yet…. But maybe we shouldn’t have turned her down. It is an amazing opportunity.” Kris admits, chuckling a little bit. Steve shrugs. “I dunno either, sis. I guess we just need to see how our own investigation goes first. And plus, a little change has never really hurt us.” He smiles, and claps his sister on the back gently, making sure he doesn’t aggravate her shoulder.

She smiles and points at him. “No, no. Don’t you forget about that time you signed up for that fucking posting on the enterprise so you could try and hook up with a certain someone… and then dragged me into that mess too. That was the worst six months of my life, and you didn’t even get any, you fool.” Kris jokes, jabbing a little bit at Steve, who was fresh out of the academy then, and so in love with a certain ensign named Catherine Rollins. But that’s a story for another time.

Steve grins and begins to walk back towards their loaner car so they can head to HPD and arrange the funeral for their father. Kris jogs to catch up with him and begins to talk about how amazing immunity and means would be for once, when someone calls out to them, making them turn to the voice that distracted them.

“She’s a smart lady that one!” A man in a teal polo and khaki shorts says to them from a far, which makes Steve and Kris walk towards him out of curiosity. Kris quickly recognizes him, as does Steve, but they can’t quite place who he is… it’s been so long since they have seen anyone from here, so it’s proving to be a little difficult to put a name to his face.

The mystery man grins and walks closer to them. “You better!” he says, still smiling. He stops in front of them and finally introduces himself. “Chin-Ho Kelly!” He announces, which immediately makes Kris and Steve smile. Chin-Ho Kelly was just a rookie for HPD when Kris last saw him. Chin-Ho was being trained by her father, and he attended every football game of Steve’s with Kris and her father, no matter what. If Kris can remember correctly, Chin was once a great football player too.

When chin says his name, Steve immediately knows who he is too. Chin-Ho was his dad’s last rookie, and one hell of a quarterback for Kukui High School back in the day. “Chin-Ho Kelly, Kukui High School!” Steve grins and shakes hands with Chin. “You were a great quarterback!” Steve jokes, already knowing what Chin’s reply is going to be. “That’s very kind of you to say, considering you were the one that broke all my records,” Chin winks at Steve, and then turns to Kris and smiles.

“So good to see you again, Chin. At least we can see one friendly face while were back here!” Kris says happily and shakes hands with Chin as well. Chin shares his condolences with the twins, and Chin offers to walk them over to their car. Thankfully, Steve is the first one to break the silence that overcomes them all rather quickly. “if I can remember correctly, you were our father’s rookie the last time we saw you. Looks like you’ve moved on to greener pastures now,” Steve says to Chin, which makes him chuckle a bit. Kris quickly recognizes that this is a bit of a sore spot for chin, just based on how he reacted to that statement.

“well, let’s just say that Honolulu PD and I had a disagreement over my job description.” Chin sighs.

“Sorry to hear that, Chin. Our father always spoke very highly of you.” Kris admits to Chin. It was true, though. John McGarrett loved his new rookie and saw that he had a lot of potential. He also knew that Chin was destined for great things, such as rising through the ranks of HPD, not working security at Pearl Harbour’s gift shop.

“Thank you. Your father understood. He was very good to me after I was let go. We went out for coffee once a week, usually, just to check in on one another. He was a good friend to me, and I know that cost him something…If only there was a way that I could pay him back for all that he has done for me.” Chin explains, and then stops in his tracks, and turns to look at the twins.

“but now that you two are here, maybe you can do something.” Chin begins.

Kris furrows her brows, trying to figure out what Chin means. Steve tilts his head and straight up asks him what he means. Chin sighs a little bit. “The chief of police put a haole on your father’s case. Word is he’s fresh off the mainland, only been here six months… which means he has no clue how this island works.” Chin tells them in confidence, of course.

This makes Kris’ mind run a mile a minute. Steve thanks him for the information, and continues talking to him, while Kris switches to autopilot for the duration of their walk, trying to understand what this could mean for them. If there’s a mainlander working on their father’s murder, then his case will never be solved, and Hesse will never really be caught. This is going to make Steve and Kris’s solo investigation really hard now, too, because they won’t have any information from HPD to help them too. Maybe they do need to take the governor’s offer and run the taskforce, just so they can have complete control over their father’s case and make sure Hesse is caught. Lord knows a haole fresh from the mainland won’t be able to do it, so they will have to.

Without even realizing it, Kris is back in the passenger seat of the car and buckled in as Steve pulls out of the parking lot of Pearl Harbour. Steve notices Kris’ snap back to reality and looks over at her. “what were you thinking about?” He asks as he merges back onto the highway so they can head to HPD and talk about their father’s funeral.

Kris takes off her hat and takes a deep breath. “I think we need to take the governors offer. The haole won’t be able to crack dad’s case… he was rooted to this island and respected by everyone. If any locals know anything about the case, they won’t be telling it to this new guy. Especially if he wears a suit and tie.” Kris explains to Steve, who is quite focused on the traffic in front of him. Steve grips the steering wheel tighter and looks over at Kris once he stops at a light.

“This is the only time I’m gonna ask this but are you sure about this? Like one hundred percent, we have to do this, this is the only way, sure?” Steve asks, now rubbing his chin in deep thought. Kris nods. “The haole is going to fuck us over. He’s either going to withhold information and do everything by the books or get ignored by everyone on the island. We’ll need that information that he might have.”

“And if we take the job running the taskforce, we will have jurisdiction, and be able to practically subpoena him for the information.” Steve finishes for Kris and continues to drive when the light turns green. Kris nods at him in reply.

“So, should we call the governor? How are we going to get this to work? Hesse is probably working on an escape plan, and we need to get everything sorted out with the Navy,” Kris begins to worry, but Steve just chuckles.

“I’m sure the governor can help us out. She wouldn’t want us to take down Hesse for her if she couldn’t get us to do it right away. Let’s lead her on for a little bit and go through with our original plan. Let’s go to the house tomorrow, and see where that takes us, okay?” Steve tells Kris before she blows up with worry. Kris never likes to go into things without a perfect plan, so she tends to get a little stressed out when things are improvised along the way. That’s why she’s the brains out of the twins, and Steve’s the brawn; Steve is ready to go into any situation, guns ablaze at any time, plan or no plan. Kris agrees to this, and then begins to mentally prepare for what they have to do at HPD to prepare for their father’s funeral. Their time at HPD won’t be pleasant, that’s for sure.

Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/233640136-some-kind-of-curse-hawaii-five-0

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25176232/chapters/61405462#workskin

[dalekofchaos]

The Fireflies’ vaccine wouldn’t have worked or why Joel did the right thing

In the last part of The Last of Us, Joel kills all the fireflies and saves Ellie but by doing so he may have doomed humanity by ending the possibility of a cure being made, making the ending bittersweet and morally ambiguous. The thing is, Joel didn't really do anything wrong, and saving Ellie was the right choice, here are my reasons:

The doctors would remove Ellie's brain to try to create a vaccine, but that's not how vaccines works, a vaccine is a tamed version of a pathogen that "teaches" your body to defend against it, to do a vaccine you need to use the pathogen in small quantities or a modified version of it, Ellie is immune to it, you don't create vaccines from the immune system, that's called a serum, and it works differently, a serum is used when someone comes in contact with a disease and it contains a series of antibodies that fight the infection, but it doesn't make anyone immune. So what they were trying to do was pointless;

Even if the doctors know what they were doing, it was a wild shot a with no guarantee that it would work;

Even if a vaccine was successfully made they wouldn't save the world, the world was destroyed 20 years ago, society collapsed and was rebuilt again on a new way, and everyone already new how to deal with it, also the greatest threat were not even the cordyceps fungus anymore, it was the infected (that the vaccine couldn't do nothing about) and the crooked humans that walked the earth. Besides that, the fireflies had no way to distribute the vaccine worldwide, not even in a national level.

If you listen to the tapes in the Colorado segment, it pretty much confirms that Ellie is not unique and they wouldn’t be able to make a vaccine anyway. The doctor has practically lost his mind and Ellie is just his white whale. Ellie was not the first subject and she most likely wouldn’t have been the last. 

The doctor pretty much went against the common ethical code of all medical practitioners just for a CHANCE at a vaccine/cure.  

And wouldn't it take a lot of time to study her? A day to do all the tests is outright impossible. Just look at the corona vaccine. With all the tech the world has the biotechnologists are going to take more than a year to make a vac.

Vaccines for Fungal infections are nearly impossible and are a logistical nightmare.Even in today’s world,they can only be treated with antibiotics and anti-fungal medicine. They didn’t even bother with thoroughly researching Ellie’s blood and trying to extract the fungal specimen without killing her. The tests were blood samples and samples from the area where she was bit and then only cutting her brain open as THE LAST POSSIBLE USE for her, then when their step 1 was "lol just kill this incredibly rare specimen" I was shocked.

BTW, PS4 version actually removed a piece of paper that's available in all the other forms of the game. What is this piece of paper? Just the one that describes how they've tried this process dozens of times before and how they've NEVER gotten any useful info.

The Fireflies are terrorists. The Fireflies are terrorists, and not even competent ones. Here we go. We first hear of the Fireflies in credits, where they are taking credit for attacking the Federal Disaster Response Agency. Not a good start.The next time we start to see hints of them is through graffiti in the quarantine zone. What does this graffiti say? Fireflies will take it all back. That sounds great! Burn it all down. ...oh. That’s, uh, a little less great. Fucking die, pig. Um… Uh, that’s uh, not a great look here guys.And that goes on and on. The graffiti does not exactly inspire. All it does is get angry.Next time we see them, it’s when they literally bomb a checkpoint and supply truck, then begin firing wildly all over the place. This is straight terrorism. They don’t care if there is collateral damage, in fact, Joel gets injured in this scene.Then we meet Marlene, the so-called Queen Firefly. Injured and on the run, the military is slowly wiping them out. This leads to a line of dialogue that is absolutely hilarious. Marlene starts to preach about “We’ve been quiet. Been planning on leaving the city, but they need a scapegoat. They’ve been trying to rile us up. We’re trying to defend ourselves”Those are big words from someone who just bombed a checkpoint.This clearly shows us that Marlene cannot be trusted as a narrator. She has an agenda and is lying to Joel and possibly herself. And that despite how effective guerrilla tactics usually are, her group is still managing to get absolutely devastated. They are failing so badly that they have to recruit smugglers just to try to get Ellie out of the city.So begins the trek showing dead Fireflies at every turn. Downtown subway station? Dead Fireflies. The Capitol building? Dead Fireflies. Pittsburgh? Oh, let’s talk about Pittsburgh.Pittsburgh is a monument to Firefly failure. Pittsburgh was originally another Quarantine zone held together by FEDRA. So what happened here? Well, times got hard, and the Fireflies instigated a civil war or insurrection. This fighting lasted for months, with Fireflies lynching soldiers that they caught alone, burning soldiers alive after dousing them in gasoline, and FEDRA retaliating by executing Fireflies. FEDRA finally gave up and retreated from Pittsburgh, putting the Fireflies in control- and then it all fell apart. The people of Pittsburgh discover that the Fireflies had planned to move right into the space FEDRA had previously occupied. And so, after this was discovered, the Fireflies were driven out just like FEDRA had been. Only much faster, and with less fight. And now Pittsburgh is nothing but anarchy. People gunned down in the streets for nothing. Rooms full of bodies, clothes and shoes. Almost looks like after images of Dachau. Bravo, Fireflies. Excellent revolution.Next up, we meet Tommy, Joel’s brother, and disenfranchised Firefly. He worked for them for years, going all the way to Colorado for them. Somewhere along the way, he lost faith in them and left their cause. He doesn’t specify exactly why, but it seems he might have lost faith in their methods.Then we come to the University. This is where we really discover how incompetent the Fireflies actually are. One of the first notes you see at University is about a guy who is angry he got yelled at for falling asleep on guard duty. Real professionals. This same note indicates that while they’re still getting some supplies, it’s not enough for what’s needed, with gasoline being particularly short. The next note comes from a recording, telling us that they’re losing more guards, with the doctor clearly concerned about how much equipment and data will be lost if they have to move. The doctor even calls the Fireflies incompetent in this note. And then we have this genius.. That’s right. Bitten by his own lab monkey. Because he just had to set it free, rather than putting it down humanely. Brilliant work sir. Brilliant. He kills himself before turning though, but not before informing us that they hadn’t accomplished anything for over five years. And even that small breakthrough was ultimately a failure. And now the entire lab is compromised, and abandoned.And then there’s a long break from Fireflies until Salt Lake. Ellie, having just gone underwater, isn’t breathing. Joel attempts to perform CPR on her when our hero Firefly shows up, and knocks Joel unconscious. Ah, violence. The first solution. Willing to forgive it, since it strongly mirrors the scene with Sarah, only the Firefly is in the soldier’s shoes this time. But still. Military was gentler.And now for the hospital. The final failure of the Fireflies. This is where so many people are convinced that Joel screws the world by preventing a vaccine. But somehow, I just don’t think so. This is one last desperate bid by the Fireflies for control. How do they intend to do this? Comprehensive bloodwork? No. Vigorous testing with laboratory animals, like, oh, maybe monkeys? No, someone let all their monkeys go. Crack open her head and hope for the best? Hell yeah! Does the fact that they’ve lost their biologist concern them? Nah, it’ll be fine! Does the fact that this is the only time they’ve seen immunity to this degree even give them pause? Pfft, crack her open! Does the fact that there has never been a successful vaccine against fungus give them pause? PASS THAT SCALPEL! No need to think this over, let’s blow our whole load on this once in a lifetime lucky strike as fast as possible. No, I’ve never heard the story about the goose who laid the golden eggs, tell it to me after I finish butchering surgery. Even if we make this vaccine, how will we deploy it? You're thinking too hard, hand me the saw!This is just bad science. Done by bad scientists. Cheered on by fools. Fools who wanted to murder Joel after he made that long trip.And for people who insist on government and democracy, it’s funny how they didn’t risk telling Ellie their “plan” and just sedated her and rushed her to the table.

Even by SOME MIRACLE they managed to make a vaccine, the world ain't gonna automatically return to what it was. It's a dog eat dog world and that is the new normal. Infected, cannibals, more psychos like David and raiders are still there and it ain't going away soon or maybe ever. On top of that, mass production and distribution of a vaccine is an absolute logistical nightmare in a post apocalyptic world- they simply don't have enough resources for that. And who's to say The Fireflies wouldn't use it to as a bargaining tool to put everyone, willing or not, under their new rule? And even given all that, they debated killing Joel after he delivered Ellie. He did the job and the payment he received was getting knocked out and being marched outside of the safe zone AT GUNPOINT WITHOUT HIS WEAPONS AND SUPPLIES! The Fireflies broke their deal and fucked Joel over. Joel had ever right to kill them and save Ellie.

So I believe what Joel did in the end was the right thing, the fireflies was an extremist group that was willing to do anything not to save the world, but to prove their point, even kill an innocent girl under a delusional precept. 

[bnhaimaginesandocs]

OK!! So I’ve been getting a lot of requests about my OCs and I decided I was gonna go ahead and start sharing them!! This is my Main OC, Ruby Sorin!! I also gave her some headcanons about her family and herself below and I hope you guys like her!!! Also here you go @just-maria

Also If you like them please let me know!!! It’s gonna be a long post ya’ll so General Headcanons are under the cut!!

TW: Mentions of Parental death briefly.

FAMILY HEADCANONS

Ruby is actually not from Japan; She is from Romania. But her father, who is one of the top support engineers in the country was offered his dream position to work with Tea Idaten as their main support engineer and he took it. Moving his youngest children with him at around the end of their middle school year (so about 14/15) and encouraged them to enroll in UA.

Their mother, Alessia Castillo-Sorin, passed away when Ruby and her triplets were around 8. She passed from ovarian cancer.

Before she passed, she was a retired side kick from one of the top hero agencies in Romania; her hero name was Shimmer.

Her father, Marcus Sorin, is Quirkless; As is her Three eldest brothers; Dimitri, Jullian and Luciano. 

She has 7 brothers. Only five of them are biological, her brothers Henric and Alfonso are adopted.

She’s the only girl in her family.

Her family is extremely tight knit and they all try to keep in contact with one another at least once a day. They have a family group chat. It gets a little difficult with the time zone differences but they make it work.

Most of her older brothers live in Romania still; some are scattered across Europe. Her second oldest brother; Luciano is a tattoo artist in Barcelona. The oldest twins; Dimitri and Jullian, are detectives in Bucharest who work along Henric and Alfonso’s hero agency.

Ruby is 1/3 of the Sorin Triplets. Her other Triplets are Lance and Leon; Leon is in Class 1-B and Lance is in the support course. The three of them are triple trouble and are extremely close with one another.

Her brothers visit Japan as often as possible to see their youngest siblings. There was at one point in time when they all showed up to the dorms to surprise the triplets. Their tears could have rivaled Izuku’s.

She grew up in a Pagan household!! She can read tarot cards insanely well and it’s something that’s helped her come up with her hero name. 

Out of all the older siblings; Ruby is closest to Luciano and Dimitri.

QUIRK HEADCANONS

Her Quirk is called Shine!! It was her mother’s quirk and she was so happy when she got it. Basically with Shine she can manipulate the light particles around her’s and other’s body! (so long as she is touching them; like holding onto their hand and it has to be skin on skin or it won’t work with another person.) due to this; Ruby’s skin seems to always have a luminescent glow around her skin that she can amp up or tone down. Her brothers like to call her a walking flashlight. 

With her quirk she can move faster than the average person, traveling at short, instantaneous bursts. She can only do this around 10-12 times. And it can only be to a predetermined location. It has been theorized by her and others that she could travel at the speed of light but she refuses to entertain the idea as it could rip apart every atom in her body.

She can also shoot light in concentrated beams from any point in her body. Mainly her hands and feet. She calls it her Lumi-Shoot. 

Her hero name is The Scarlet Witch; mainly because when she uses her lumi shot, it looks almost scarlet in color. Also because of her hair.

Due to her quirk’s main thing of being blinding enemies doesn’t mean Ruby is immune to the effects of the brightness; She actually has to have custom contacts made to help protect her eyes along with her contacts.

Out of all of her brothers; she was the only one to fully inherit her mothers’ quirk. Her brother Lance can only illuminate his hands which is useful for working support; Her brother Leon however inherited their maternal grandmother’s quirk which is manipulating water.

She considered using her mom’s hero name but decided against it. Opting to make her own.

GENERAL HEADCANONS

Ruby’s birthday is May 25th, making her and her brothers Gemini.

She Placed in the top 30 of her entrance exam. 

Her hair is extremely curly and unruly; she has a lot of trouble taming it and it sometimes looks like a “lion’s mane” as her brothers call it.

She is Bisexual and not scared to admit it. Her first crush when she came to UA was Uraraka; she literally couldn’t speak to her with out blushing and it was adorable. Her brothers didn’t let her live it down for a month.

She’s a naturally sweet and very warm person; the kind that you look at and think “oh they can’t possibly have a mean bone in their body” but actually Ruby is extremely sassy and sarcastic; she just tends to keep it to herself and her close friends more often than not. She finds it hilarious when people realize she isn’t as innocent as she seems. 

Also growing up with 7 brothers she learned how to stand up for herself pretty early on so she doesn’t take shit from anyone.

Her favorite colors are Green, Red and Blue. Specifically Emerald, Wine Red and Cobalt Blue.

Her nicknames from her family are Little Lion and Sunshine.

She has a little black cat named Salem and she loves him more than life itself. He moves into the dorms with her and becomes something of Class 1-A’s Mascot along with Koda’s bunny. 

She has Anxiety, Depression and PTSD (the last one mainly from the training camp incident where she was seriously injured); she’s on medication for anxiety and depression but meets with a counselor every other week for therapy.

She reads tarot cards on the side to make some pocket money, but she always gives them for free to her classmates. 

She’s Hellenistic Pagan specifically; a fact she somewhat keeps to herself, but will gladly discuss her religion with anyone if they broach the subject first. Her deities are Aphrodite, Persephone and Hades. She’s even let some people in the class see the altar she has set up in her room when they move into the dorms.

Her favorite teachers are Midnight, Eraserhead and Present Mic in that order. She loves Midnights confidence and fun loving attitude. With Mic it’s because he always makes an effort to help her. And with Eraserhead; it’s because he’s saved her life and also because she can tell he cares deeply for his students.

She’s typically with her brother’s most lunch periods in the support room since Lance is a workaholic and doesn’t know when to stop and take a break. 

Ruby actually gets along pretty well with the Bakusquad and the Dekusquad. Although she’s seen hanging out with the Bakusquad more often than not since she’s super close with Mina.

Her and Mina get along like a house on fire. And when those two are together they’re bound to get in trouble. She also gets along well with Aoyama, finding him to be smarter and more insightful than people really give him credit for. 

She has a small crush on Shinsou

And on Kaminari.

She’s having a dilemma someone help her. 

She and Kaminari also get along super well and she finds him to be hilarious. He also has the same taste in books as her. 

She finds Bakugou more funny than anything else and just laughs at him when he threatens to blow her up. She’s spent years dealing with Jullian, Bakugou is nothing.

She also likes Tokoyami a lot; she finds him to be intriguing.

She has a box full of Polaroid pictures that she took when everyone moved into the dorms and she typically takes a lot of them still. She also owns a record player with a crap ton of records she got from her mom and dad.

She loves vintage things and punk things so her wardrobe can go from cottage core to punk/emo there is no in between.

Her room is very cozy and always smelling of whatever incense she burned that day; most of the time it’s peach and sage. She also has a ton of fairy lights hanging around the room and it’s always just very soothing. She also has a lot of candles. Like a lot. She has a problem.

She smells like pomegranate a lot of the time due to her body spray and sometime really warm like sunlight. 

She’s scary good at Hero History and Hero Law. But she sucks absolute ass at Math.

I’ll add more to her soon!

PEOPLE I SHIP HER WITH

I typically ship her with Denki or Shinsou; Sometimes even as a poly ship.

But i’m open to shipping her with just about everyone.

But Mainly Denki and Shinsou. Because I just think they would be adorable together you know? Purple Emo Boy dating not one bu two Balls of Sunshine? Yes please. Sign me UP!

[fiadhaisteach]

New York Times: text under cut

What Lockdown 2.0 Looks Like: Harsher Rules, Deeper Confusion    

By Damien Cave

_________________________________________________________

Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, is becoming a case study in handling a second wave of infections. There are lots of unanswered questions.

Credit...William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne, is grappling with a spiraling coronavirus outbreak that has led to a lockdown with some of the toughest restrictions in the world — offering a preview of what many urban dwellers elsewhere could confront in coming weeks and months.

The new lockdown is the product of early success; the country thought it had the virus beat in June. But there was a breakdown in the quarantine program for hotels. Returning travelers passed the virus to hotel security guards in Melbourne, who carried the contagion home.

Even after masks became mandatory in the city two weeks ago, the spread continued. And now, as officials try to break the chain of infections, Melbourne is being reshaped by sweeping enforcement and fine print. A confounding matrix of hefty fines for disobedience to the lockdown and minor exceptions for everything from romantic partners to home building has led to silenced streets and endless versions of the question: So, wait, can I ____?

Restaurant owners are wondering about food delivery after an 8 p.m. curfew began on Sunday night. Teenagers are asking if their boyfriends and girlfriends count as essential partners. Can animal shelter volunteers walk dogs at night? Are house cleaners essential for those struggling with their mental health? Can people who have been tested exercise outside?

“This is such a weird, scary, bizarro time that we live in,” said Tessethia Von Tessle Roberts, 25, a student in Melbourne who admits to having hit a breaking point a few days ago, when her washing machine broke.

“Our health care workers are hustling around the clock to keep us alive,” she said. “Our politicians are as scared as we are, but they have to pretend like they have a better idea than we do of what’s going to happen next.”

Pandemic lockdowns, never easy, are getting ever more confusing and contentious as they evolve in the face of second and third rounds of outbreaks that have exhausted both officials and residents. With success against the virus as fleeting as the breeze, the new waves of restrictions feel to many like a bombing raid that just won’t end.

For some places, risk calculations can change overnight. In Hong Kong, officials banned daytime dining in restaurants last month, only to reverse themselves a day later after an outcry. Schools in some cities are opening and closing like screen doors in summer.

In many areas where the virus has retreated and then resurged, the future looks like a long, complicated haul. Leaders are reaching for their own metaphors to try to explain it.

Image

Credit...William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has compared his opening and shutting of businesses to a

“dimmer switch.”

Dan Andrews, the premier in Victoria, the state of which Melbourne is the capital, has repeatedly referred to “pilot light mode” for industries like construction and meatpacking, which have been ordered to temporarily reduce their work forces.

Whatever the metaphor, the situation is bleak.

In Melbourne, a city of five million that is considered a capital of food and culture, the pandemic has come raging back even after a so-called Stage 3 lockdown began in early July — until recently the highest level of restrictions.

Officials have been flummoxed at every turn by the persistent complacency of just enough people to let the virus thrive and multiply.

Traffic data showed people driving more in July than they had during the first Stage 3 lockdown, in March and April. Even worse, almost nine out of 10 people with Covid-19 had not been tested or isolated when they first felt sick, Mr. Andrews, the state’s top leader, said in late July. And 53 percent had not quarantined while waiting for their test results.

“That means people have felt unwell and just gone about their business,” Mr. Andrews said.

Sounding the alarm, he made face masks mandatory the next day, on July 22.

Still, infections have continued to rise. They peaked at 753 new cases on July 30, and have hovered around 500 a day ever since, with the death toll in Victoria now standing at 147, after 11 deaths were recorded on Monday.

Those figures, while far less troublesome than those in the United States, have paved the way for a Stage 4 lockdown — what officials are calling a “shock and awe” attack on the virus — that will last at least six weeks.

Image

Credit...Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

Overwhelming force, with precision, seems to be the goal. The chief modelers of the pandemic response in Australia have found that the virus can be suppressed only if more than 70 percent of the population abides by social distancing guidelines and other public health rules.

Mr. Andrews said the new restrictions would take 250,000 more people out of their routines, in the hopes of reaching the necessary threshold.

So retail stores will be closed. Schools will return to at-home instruction. Restaurants will be takeout or delivery only. Child-care centers will be available only for permitted workers.

Those restrictions are already well understood. The rules requiring more explanation are tied to the curfew and industries that have to cut back.

Large-scale construction projects of more than three stories, for example, will have to reduce their on-site work force by 75 percent, and workers will not be able to work at more than one location. Small-scale construction cannot have more than five workers.

All of which sounds clear. But does a bathroom renovation, for example, amount to home building in an apartment with one bathroom? And what about fixing things that break, like Ms. Von Tessle Roberts’s washing machine?

Some businesses, like cleaning services, are already emailing customers to say they think they can do some work, for people who pay through welfare or who need help for mental health reasons. But, like many others, they are still seeking official clarification.

Image

Credit...David Crosling/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Andrews, a Labor politician sometimes described as awkward and paternal, has become the dad everyone needs answers from. He now oversees, under the lockdown rules, what may be the country’s most intrusive bureaucracy since its days as a penal colony.

The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated August 4, 2020

I have antibodies. Am I now immune?

I’m a small-business owner. Can I get relief?

What are my rights if I am worried about going back to work?

Should I refinance my mortgage?

What is school going to look like in September?

As of right now, that seems likely, for at least several months. There have been frightening accounts of people suffering what seems to be a second bout of Covid-19. But experts say these patients may have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies, which are protective proteins made in response to an infection. These antibodies may last in the body only two to three months, which may seem worrisome, but that’s perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. It may be possible to get the coronavirus again, but it’s highly unlikely that it would be possible in a short window of time from initial infection or make people sicker the second time.

The stimulus bills enacted in March offer help for the millions of American small businesses. Those eligible for aid are businesses and nonprofit organizations with fewer than 500 workers, including sole proprietorships, independent contractors and freelancers. Some larger companies in some industries are also eligible. The help being offered, which is being managed by the Small Business Administration, includes the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. But lots of folks have not yet seen payouts. Even those who have received help are confused: The rules are draconian, and some are stuck sitting on money they don’t know how to use. Many small-business owners are getting less than they expected or not hearing anything at all.

Employers have to provide a safe workplace with policies that protect everyone equally. And if one of your co-workers tests positive for the coronavirus, the C.D.C. has said that employers should tell their employees -- without giving you the sick employee’s name -- that they may have been exposed to the virus.

It could be a good idea, because mortgage rates have never been lower. Refinancing requests have pushed mortgage applications to some of the highest levels since 2008, so be prepared to get in line. But defaults are also up, so if you’re thinking about buying a home, be aware that some lenders have tightened their standards.

It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.

On Tuesday, he answered questions from reporters about dog-walking (allowed after curfew, sort of, only near home) and other subjects of great confusion at a news conference in Melbourne.

Thanking those who complied with the new rules and scolding those who did not, he announced that no one in self-isolation would now be allowed to exercise outdoors. A door-knocking campaign to check in on 3,000 people who had Covid-19 found that 800 of them were not at home.

All 800 have been referred to the Victoria police for investigation. The fine for violators going forward, he said, will be 4,957 Australian dollars, $3,532.

Working, even legally, will also become trickier. Other than, say, hospital workers with formal identification, everyone traveling for a job deemed essential during the lockdown must carry a formal document — a work permit signed by the employer and employee.

For Cara Devine, who works at a wine store that closes at 8 p.m., that means carrying a government form with her everywhere, and hoping that the police recognize her task as essential when she heads home after the curfew. But she also worried about the Uber drivers who take her back and forth.

Image

Credit...William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Even before the newest restrictions, I’ve had two Uber drivers being really late picking up from the shop because they got stopped by the police, taking about an hour out of their work time,” she said.

The police are already confronting opposition. On at least four occasions in the last week, they reported having to smash the windows of cars and pull people out after they refused to provide a name and address at a police checkpoint. The Victoria police commissioner, Shane Patton, said a 38-year-old woman had also been charged with assault after attacking a police officer who had stopped her for not wearing a face mask.

Some criminologists are questioning whether the harsher enforcement will help. Mostly, though, Melburnians are just trying to endure.

Walking to get groceries, Peter Barnes, 56, said he welcomed the stricter rules, though he admitted his city was starting to feel like George Orwell’s “1984,” with the heavy hand of the state around every corner.

Those focused solely on the economics, he said, should remember the obvious: “You can’t hire a corpse. Very bad employment prospects for people who are dead.”

By Monday night, the city seemed to be in listening mode. The streets were emptying out, silent in hibernation.

“It’s like a Sunday in the 1950s,” said Mark Rubbo, the owner of Readings, Melbourne’s largest independent bookstore. He also noted that people were stocking up again on books through online orders, with a memoir called “The Happiest Man on Earth,” about a Holocaust survivor, becoming a runaway hit.

Ms. Von Tessle Roberts has found another solution, perhaps just as likely to grow in popularity: Stand on your front porch and scream. That’s the name she has given to an event she posted on Facebook, set for Friday at 7 p.m. By Tuesday afternoon, 70,000 people had expressed an interest in joining her collective shout in anguish.

“Yelling is great,” she said. “It’s less dehydrating than crying.”

Image

Credit...Erik Anderson/EPA, via Shutterstock

_________________________________________________________

Besha Rodell and Yan Zhuang contributed reporting from Melbourne, and Livia Albeck-Ripka from Cairns, Australia.

Thanks for reading The Times.

Expand your horizons with a Times subscription.

Thanks for reading The Times.

[beatricethecat2]

if/then (2.0) - 21

NOTE: Read chapter 20 first, posted right before this one as I’m posting two chapters today.

////////////////

Myka nurses a top-shelf scotch as she stares out into Cardiff Bay, thankful the hotel bar's deserted at this late hour. Several boats glide silently by then disappear, docking near twinkling lights beyond her view. Are their crews winding down from a jam-packed day like hers? If so, she hopes theirs was less taxing interpersonally.

Her latest sale was rather tenuous, having dragged on for months beforehand. The museum was selling; then they weren't, then they were, to the point where it was hard to keep track. But Myka, ever vigilant with correspondence, managed to convince the assistant director to convince the director she was the one to sell to, should they sell. Though having to go that extra mile isn't a one-off occurance as Los Angeles doesn't hold the weight of New York.

After several phone conversations, they agreed to an in-person showing, but not until after the holidays. So here she is, in Cardiff, three months into the New Year, having taken the train in from London after an early morning work appointment there.

Upon arrival, she was whisked away to an unexpectedly late lunch with the assistant director, the director, and several key museum administrators. Which was fine overall, but she'd liked to have known earlier, so she could have prepared on the train. She was given a tour of their modern and contemporary wings afterward, then paraded around the inner workings of their offices.

The staff all had stars in their eyes when greeted by the assistant director. He was a relatively new hire, earnest and knowledgeable, but straight out of a PHD program. She saw right through the tours; they were meant to impress her, to compensate for his lack of real-world experience. She acted impressed, so this sale could finally be over.

He instantly took a shine to her, which, honestly, happened way too often. If she had a dollar for every dude that came on to her, she'd buy a nice bottle of whiskey to drown them out. But part of the business was finding an "in" with clients, so she didn't read too much into it. She'd let it run its course to get what she came for but keep her distance. But then the invitation to tonight's museum fundraiser threw her for a loop.

Did he think she was interested in him, for real? He was handsome enough, but just a kid, so maybe he didn't know the rules yet. She'd invested so much time negotiating; it'd be a shame to lose the acquisition now. So she agreed to his plus one but left early and sent all the right signals. After Luiza, she treated everyone with due diligence, right from day one.

She swirls her scotch in her tumbler then swallows a generous swig. Thoughts of Luiza are still fraught with guilt. Last fall was a hell of a rollercoaster ride.

Luiza's advances marked the expiration of Myka's scorned lover schtick as if the headcanon she'd so careful parked in was towed away overnight. By morning, the entire block was filled with cast trailers and a film crew. The only clue to where she was moved was a flimsy list pinned to a pole. When she found her new location, the surrounding neighborhood was unrecognizable. Familiarizing herself with the new landscape took time.

“I was chapado. We both were," Luiza had pleaded, and added, in her defense, that her friends had egged her on. She was disappointed Myka didn't feel the same way she did, but admitted her follow-through could have been better. And if Myka'd found someone she cared for…well, good for her. She hoped they could still be friends.

Myka couldn't decide, in her bleary, hungover state, if Luiza was sorry or faking it. In fact, she'd hoped Luiza would be gone, too embarrassed to face her actions. But there she was, being an adult, or, desperately hanging on to her mark. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" was all she could think of, so she agreed to keep Luiza around.

Luiza stayed one more night before taking off for a two-month residency, because what more could she glean from her, anyway? Myka played the friend she was before but was on pins and needles the entire time. The minute Luiza left town, she found a payphone and called the number Morgana gave her. She arranged for a meeting as soon as physically possible.

It became clear, once she met the woman, it wouldn't have been a stretch to fake-date her. Morgana clearly knew how to twist reality efficiently. But now, much to her horror, the woman said she should follow the Abigail angle. In the meantime, she'd get in touch with Morgana and arrange for a sweep of her apartment. Morgana would look into Luiza's intentions as well.

A light, blinking rapidly, draws her out of her thoughts, its origin, a vessel built for pleasure rather than commerce. The sight of revelers on the deck sends a shiver up her spine; it must be colder on the water than on the dock. Then again, they're probably immune to the chilly weather if alcohol is powering their party. She downs the last of her drink, and as it burns down her throat, signals for another.

Is it a holiday here? She'd heard something about a St. David's day, but she's not sure that's today. Holidays aren't her favorite thing lately as her last few holidays sucked.

Thanksgiving was awful, to say the least. Abigail came to visit, but Luiza did too, as she'd insisted on meeting Abigail in the flesh. How could she say no without raising suspicions? She had no choice but to acquiesce.

With no word from Morgana, she'd become increasingly paranoid, merely a vessel following a strict set of rules. She cursed Helena for disappearing, leaving her pining away, worried sick, upping the stakes so high she had to abandon all autonomy. But then again, if Helena hadn't intervened, she'd probably be incarcerated, her career ruined for good. Her whole world was collapsing in on her, her agency stripped of meaning. How did Morgana do this every day without it crushing her soul?

But Thanksgiving, wow, that was a trial by fire. Both Luiza and Abigail took her aside, acknowledging what a hard day it was for her considering the events of last year. As the day progressed, Luiza pushed her towards Abigail while Abigail pushed her towards Luiza. She ran out for more wine to get a breather, her apartment too small to contain their competing personalities.

But the real slog came after Luiza left LA when she had to broach the subject of a fake relationship with Abigail. She needed somewhere they wouldn't be overheard, so she suggested going on a hike. She picked Mount Hollywood as it was easy to get to and packed with tourists. Rather ironically, when they arrived, it was partially closed due to a movie shoot.

"I need to tell you something," Myka said, pressing against the fence, scanning the vast valley radiating out from Dante's View. "Luiza's spying on me."

Abigail's laugh, nearly a bark, came out so loud, the couple next to them moved farther away. "If you don't want to date her, that's fine, but Myka, really."

"I'm not sure who she's working for, but it's someone looking for Helena."

"You can't be serious."

"I am."

"She's your friend!"

"I'm not so sure." Myka looked around, too many people milling about snapping photos. "Let's walk and talk, and I'll explain. And, I, um...I have a huge favor to ask."

She'd flip-flopped over how to handle this, but decided on a modified version of the truth. She sweated bullets laying out her evidence, then introducing the fake relationship idea. She needed an alibi until she figured out what was going on and asked Abigail if she'd be willing to help. Abigail listened carefully, prodding for details like only a therapist would then went silent as they circled back toward the observatory.

"I think she's only information gathering, but still, I'm kinda scared," Myka said.

"I'm speechless," Abigail said. "I can't believe you're still cleaning up Helena's mess."

"It's my fault. I should have figured this out earlier."

"Why? You're just living your life."

"But, I was part of that mess."

"Not on purpose."

“True.” False

"On the off chance you're right, I'll play along. But we better lay out some ground rules, or this could get ugly." Abigail slipped an arm through Myka's as they walked back to the bus stop. They laughed out loud as they plotted out a plan.

Claudia, in the meantime, dug as deep as she could. From her end, Luiza was clean. But Myka kept her guard up; with zero word from Morgana, something was not quite right. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she would, eventually.

Christmas came and went without a word from Helena. She checked her phone obsessively while at her parents, but no call came.

But then a miracle happened. At the gate for her flight to visit Claudia and Abigail for New Year's, someone sat next to her and bent down, fiddling with their bag.

"Excuse me," a woman's voice asked as she sat back up. She held out a piece of paper. "Is this yours?"

"I don't …oh!" Myka replied, recognizing the woman. She took the slip of paper and read it over its contents. It was a receipt with a number scribbled in the margin.

"For next time," Morgana said, telescoping her luggage handle out as she stood. "And for the record, you have an admirer, nothing more."

"Really? That's—"

The loudspeaker crackled to life, announcing boarding for Group A.

"After takeoff, check your bag, but not a moment before." Morgana's smile was the kind a stranger might give you at the airport. But Myka saw a genuine smile hidden underneath. It was oddly reassuring.

"Happy New Year," Morgana said, and then walked off, promptly disappearing into the crowd.

Group C was called eminently, and Myka boarded the plane. As she settled into her seat, she peeked into her bag; nestled next to her laptop was an envelope that previously wasn't present. Probably information about Luiza to ease her mind, or so she hoped, as her mind needed easing. Luiza having genuine feelings for her, and not being a spy was hard to grasp. She was under so much pressure, she had to judge her harshly, right? And with Abigail, how was she going to explain that Luiza was no longer a threat? The guilt bearing down on her was making her queasy.

The minute the seatbelt sign went off, she fished the envelope out of her bag. She opened it carefully and slid out a card. A Christmas card, to be exact, one adorned with a half-wreath of various evergreens and "Merry Christmas" spelled out in Celtic Languages: Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish, and Welsh.

"Wishing you the happiest of Christmases and best of luck in the New Year," the flowing, handwritten script read upon opening. "All the best to your family and friends. We've been hoping for snow so we may go sledding, but thus far, a White Christmas eludes us. We wish you were here to celebrate. Sending all our love."

Then printed below, "What's green, covered in tinsel and goes 'ribbit ribbit'?" Blocky letters were accompanied by a cartoonish drawing of a frog on a lily pad, the word "ribbit" projecting from its mouth, with tinsel and mistletoe added in the appropriate colors. She turned the card over for the answer, and there in sparkly red and green bubble letters read, "A Mistle-toad!"

A Christmas cracker joke, she was sure of it. The card wasn’t signed, but it had to be from Helena and Christina. Her hands trembled as she read their messages over and over—

"So sorry to disturb, Ms. Bering, but this came for you earlier at the front desk." The bartender slides a manila envelope toward her.

"Thanks." She turns it over, looking for signs of who it was from. Hopefully, not one last attempt by the assistant director to woo her. She finishes her drink as she reads over the papers. It looks like she's staying on to check out a potential purchase.

She's been rerouted like this before to view items in people's homes, even more since a man in New York found a Schiele in a thrift store. While it's rarely lead to anything exceptional, the thrill of the chase is ever-present. She skims over the info as she walks toward her room.

"Ang-har-ad," she mouths out loud as the name's unfamiliar to her. She hunkers down in a comfy chair and types it into a search engine. Several Angharad Llewellyns pop up, but the one she's visiting isn't listed. She checks the pronunciation, Ang-HAH-rad or Ann-HARAD. Not that different than how it's spelled, in the land where W's can be vowels.

The town she's visiting is only an hour north of Cardiff, but the landscape changes radically. She knows this for a fact because after receiving Helena's card, she became obsessed with the area. Thoughts of snow led her to remember a quip Helena threw out once about "stealing off to the Black Mountains" with Christina. At the time, she thought it was a joke, but every quip was a clue in hindsight.

"The Black Mountains have the feel of a landscape only partially tamed by human habitation," one guidebook said. "Tiny villages, isolated churches, and enchanting lanes are folded into an undulating green landscape." But not as isolated as Guernsey or the Hebrides. The more she researched, the more likely they seemed.

First off, there was a sprawling food festival in Abergavenny, which from their site, was very much up Christina's alley. Plus a huge music festival in the heart of the mountains that Helena would certainly want to attend. And although she doesn't see Christina as a nature girl, she'd want to summit a mountain nicknamed "The Cat's Back." Plus Cardiff and Bristol were only a day trip way. Tiny villages maybe, but with vibrant life surrounding them.

She and Claudia scoured social media, hoping to find Helena and Christina unknowingly caught in someone's event photos. And if they had gone sledding, maybe there was a glimpse of them in the background of someone's videos. Plus Christina had to be in a school trip picture somewhere; now they could narrow their search. Helena and Christina couldn't be entirely invisible; she and Claudia just had to think out of the box.

----------

If her travel wasn't prearranged, she'd have taken a route north through Pontypridd, but her train takes her north-east through the aging steel town of Newport. It then snakes mildly north-west following a deep, sloping valley, past towns full of undulating brick row houses, into increasingly rising hills. She disembarks at Ebbw Vale Town where a cab is waiting for her. The row houses vanish the second the road enters Brecon Beacons Park where a vista of verdant but barren green hills fills her view. As they drive ever higher, fluffy sheep stare out from the side of the road. All of her research suddenly comes to life.

It feels as if she was lost in an alien landscape when houses begin to appear again. Clumps of trees dot the land, itself marked off in squares, the telltale signs of farms crisscrossing the hills. The driver turns sharply, then sharply again, and the road becomes buried in trenches of hedgerows. It's frustrating to be blinded, but they slow and stop at a junction where a sign points toward towns like Bwlch, Aberhonddu, and Crughywel. There's even a small sign advertising the inn where she's staying. Minutes later, they're there, though "there" isn't near much of anything. The road barely fits two lanes and is filled with residential houses.

The cabbie carries her suitcase in and exchanges few words with a flannel-clad, grey-haired woman behind the bar. The Welsh language is an unfamiliar sound, but from their tone, they seem friendly. He tips his hat to her as he makes his way back to his car.

"Welcome to the Red Lion! You must be our last minute booking," the woman says, tapping and scrolling on a tablet computer. "My-ka Bering?"

"Myka. Yes."

"Three nights is it?"

"I guess? I didn't make the reservation." Work must really want this item, as its usually only one or two.

"Not here for the mountain walks, are you, love?"

Myka glances at her low heels; they wouldn't make it far on a hiking trail. Nor would the formal clothes she's wearing. The look on the woman's face says she's thinking the same thing. "I'm meeting a client at Harry's Garage. How can I get there from here?"

"Harry know you're coming?" The woman asks, her tone suddenly wary.

"I think so? I just got rerouted from Cardiff."

"That accent Canadian?"

"No, American."

"Ah, American." The woman smiles. "Harry's just down the road, past the church, round the corner to your left. Could walk it in a flash, but in those shoes, I'd stick to the road. Been raining cyllyll a ffyrcs, mud's nearly drowning us all."

"Um…ok?" Whatever that meant, she's definitely not dressed right for this excursion.

"Might want to be off before the next gale blows through. Leave your bag. I'll drop it in your room."

"Thanks." Myka takes her key and slips it into her jacket pocket then grabs her tote with the envelope. "Which way's the church?"

"Right on your way out, then left at the phone box."

Myka exits the inn and stands amongst the picnic benches, gaining her bearings in the pub garden. A light, misty drizzle falls, not hard enough to warrant an umbrella, but dampening none the less. It must be ever-present in this part of the world. The locals probably barely notice it.

She sets off to the right, past several houses, the older ones situated at odd angles to the road. The church appears soon after, sporting a weather-worn graveyard as picturesque as they come. It reminds her of a passage from a Henry James book on travel, one she bought for a quarter at a library sale.

"The church I speak of was a beautiful specimen of it's kind—intensely aged, variously patched, but still solid and useful, with no touch of restoration," he wrote. "I say the roads were empty, but they were peopled with the big primroses I just now spoke of—primroses of the size of ripe apples and yet, in spite of their rank growth, of as pale and tender a yellow as if their gold had been diluted by silver."

The flowers blooming here could very well be primroses. She strays from the road toward a monument to take a closer look. But the minute she steps off the path, her shoe sinks into the ground. "Stick to the road," she mutters as she yanks her shoe out and tries to shake off the wet residue.

She continues on, passing even more houses and takes a left at a fork, where a red phone box is standing guard. A long, stone wall fills one side of the road, but as it comes to an end, a fading sign advertising Harry's Garage hangs from a pole. An arrow points toward a driveway, which she follows to a matching stone building. A bell dings as she enters a dim, window lit room where a man, probably in his sixties, sits at a wooden counter. He's surrounded by paperwork, some clipped together, others lying loose and is completely absorbed in a newspaper.

"More Brexit nonsense," he mumbles, not looking up from the page.

"Pardon me?"

"Say the Prime Minister's meant to visit the Vale of Glamorgan. She can shove right off," he grunts, folding his paper and setting it aside. "What can I do for you, love?"

"I'm here to see Angharad Llewellyn." She stresses the middle syllable as she learned online.

"Come to see Harry, then?" he asks.

"If Angharad is Harry, then yes?" Woman garage owner? In the middle of nowhere? This should be interesting.

"She expecting you?"

"I think so? My job made the appointment. I have these papers." Myka digs around in her bag and pulls out the envelope.

"What's that accent, love?"

"American."

"Ah, American. Yes." He nods to himself as if ticking off a choice on a list in his head.

"Harry's round back, but keep to the wall. Those shoes won't survive the muck." He looks down at her shoes then points with his thumb to a corridor behind him.

"Thank you," Myka says and walks behind him, into the corridor. It leads to a door, which she opens tentatively, then steps out onto a concrete landing. It overlooks a muddy lot littered with partially dismantled cars, tractors, and motorcycles, with a shed towards the back with an overhang. In front sits a vehicle with its hood propped open. She makes her way along the wall as instructed, but even then, her heels sink into the earth.

As she approaches the aging Land Rover, she sees a slight figure bent over the motor, dressed in brown coveralls, the peak of a fluorescent orange hat visible over the chassis. To gain solid footing, she steps up onto the concrete. She's now behind the woman, but the woman seems unaware of her approaching. She moves closer; the woman's perched on a wooden crate sunk into the mud, yanking something out from deep within the engine. She contemplates waiting until she's done, but doesn't know how long that might be. Plus, she doesn't want to scare her when she turns around.

"Angharad?" Myka says. She waits a few moments but gets no response.

"Angharad," she repeats, louder, more directional. There's the sound of a ratchet in action, but no other movement otherwise.

"Harry?" she tries, stepping closer this time. The woman seems to sink further into the car.

"Harry!" she yells, stepping forward, but looses her footing, toppling off the patio and into the mud. She grabs hold of the thing closest to her, which happens to be Harry's coveralls. Harry's head shoots up, and with a thud, the hood's knocked off of its support.

"Bollocks!" Harry cries as the hood clamps down on her, the car nearly swallowing her whole. Myka swiftly lifts the hood back up and reseats it on its pole. She helps Harry slide out of the engine cavity settle onto the crate again.

"I'm so sorry! Are you ok?"

With arm gripping her midriff, Harry leans forward over the engine, breathing heavily as if catching her breath.

"I called your name, but you didn't hear me," Myka says. She tries to move back to the concrete, but her foot is now stuck in the mud. "I didn't want to scare you."

"You failed," Harry grumbles, popping a set of earbuds out of her ears, gasping as their eyes meet. Myka's hand flies up to her chest, and she topples backward, her stuck shoe twisting as she grabs at the car chassis to stay standing. Helena flies off the crate, jumping behind her, her strong arms circling Myka's waist. She pushes her upright, her entire body pressing against Myka's, heart beating so wildly it's as if it's pumping directly into Myka's veins.

-TBC-

NOTE: cyllyll a ffyrcs = knives ansd forks, a Welsh idiom like raining cats and dogs. An even better one is "hen wragedd a ffyn" - old ladies and sticks.

[ilikeoldchangke]

Good citizen centre

This is a work of fiction

All good citizens should be taken care off.

........................................................................

I walked into the large imposing lobby in the spanking new building in the middle of marina bay with the card clutched tightly in my hand.

Aside from the single security guard shaking dry his umbrella at the lobby, there was no one else in sight.

He looked at me and I showed him what I have on my hand.

He immediately gave me a wide smile and gestured to the self service kiosk in front of me.

I keyed in my ID number and verified my identity with a facial scan. As I waited for my data to be generated, I was seething with anger. In fact, I was trying hard not to curse out loud.

I wanted to scream in the quiet lobby but I know I must control myself.

I am a good citizen.

The kiosk, as if sensing my short fuse, immediately displayed my full name with my particulars on screen.

The kiosk directed me to lift number 2 and I walked over to the lift lobby.

Lift 2 opened as if it was waiting for me to get near.

The moment I got in, it closed with the top floor button lit up.

37th floor.

I’m about to enter a newly set up government agency.

Ministry of anger management.

Yes, you read that right.

With the fast pace of life in Singapore, you need a whole new ministry to manage people’s anger and resentment, but this is no ordinary ministry.

This is no ordinary building.

It’s one reserved for good citizens.

Good model citizens who behave.

The government understands that everyone gets angry from time to time.

However they want to better manage the population by managing their anger.

Good citizens like me gets special treatment.

Good rationale and level headed citizens like me gets extra attention and perks.

If not for my flawless records, I would now have been even to get a lift sent down to me.

And to have the lift take me up to the highest floor, it’s the greatest honor a model citizen can ask for.

When the lift door open I could see a customer service officer waiting for me.

Dressed in formal black pant suit with a white inner blouse, the lady introduced herself an Felicia.

Felicia : Hi there Mr James….. my name is Felicia, I will be attending to you today… please follow me….

I followed Felicia and appraised her body from behind.

She’s pretty, with a nice perky butt.

I would fuck her but that’s not why I’m here today.

I’m here because I’m fucking angry.

I’m fucking pissed and angry with the government.

And I want my voice heard and issues addressed.

Entering a sound proof room, Felicia sat down behind her terminal and asked me what can she do for me that day.

Felicia : I can tell from your body language you are fuming Mr James…. May I know the cause of your anger …. So I can better address your needs…..

I could no longer hold it in and I exploded right there and there in the room.

James : yes !!!! FUCK YOU…. FUCK YOU… FUCK ALL OF YOU !!!AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I screamed and kicked the chair in front of me while Felicia remained calm as if she had seen it all before.

James : why do you make it so hard for singles like me to get my own flat !!!!! fuck !!!!why !!!!

Felicia nodded with genuine empathy.

James : I’m already 35 !!!!.... I want my own place to live !!!! and how many fucking times you want to fucking make me ballot for a place to call my own….!!! And even then… it’s a small fucking place !!!!.....how to live in such a pigeon hole !!!!! FUCK YOU UNDERSTAND !!!!!FUCK YOU !!!! AHHHHH….

I lifted the chair and slammed it against the wall. Knocking 2 wheels off the chair and denting the wall.

Part of me is glad that my good citizen status enjoyed immunity once I’m inside these walls.

I kicked the wall, threw my body against the door and I hammered my fist on the table that Felicia is using, causing her stationary to bounce about.

This is so unfair.

I tried to get a small place to call my own for more than 4 times through the balloting system. Each time I was rejected because the number of applicants is too many.

I tried to get my flat from the open market but my high income restricted me only to bank loans and not the subsidised loans the government is offering.

I tried appealing to the PHB , Public housing board and they bounced me from one officer to another.

James : you know the feeling of being passed around from one officer to another…. ??? FUCK!!!!! You know the feeling of being on the phone and listening to recorded messages, asking you to press one for English…. Press 2 for Chinese…..PRESS YOUR FUCKING CUNT I’M TELLING YOU….!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!

I was perspiring badly by then while Felicia remained calm as ever.

I was given a few moments to calm down and Felicia opened her drawer to give me a bottle of water.

James : thank you…

Felicia : please drink Mr James… and allow me to help understand your problem….. Housing issue has always been at the heart of this government and…

I could feel Felicia about to cough up another line of well rehearsed line so I took it out.

I took the card out.

That treasure of a card.

The card given to good citizens.

Felicia paused mid sentence and her entire demeanour changed.

Felicia : May I have a look at that card Mr James….

I handed it over and she scanned the QR code beside my face and ID details.

Felicia : Please face the camera Mr James…. For authentication…

3 seconds later Felicia looked at me with the widest smile her face could muster.

Felicia : Congrats Mr James… you are a model good citizen….. and as you know… the criteria for getting a good citizen card is really tough…..

James : Yes I am aware…

Felicia : As a reward for being a law abiding citizen, paying your taxes on time, voting for the ruling party and being pro government for the past 5 years…. You have been awarded the good citizen card….. can I confirm you would like to use it now…. ?

James : yes… I want to fucking use it now….

Felicia : very well….

Felicia started typing on her keyboard as I sipped the water from the bottle she offered me.

Felicia : Alright Mr James… I can see you are in the queue for the new  construct to order ( CTO ) flats that will be launching at the waterfront site in the new southern waterfront ….

James : yes.. it’s my 5th attempt !!!

Felicia : well… I’m pleased to inform you that you will be getting a single digit queue number for this application…

James : what… really ?

Felicia : yes… and despite your high income threshold…. You are eligible for a subsidised government loan for the entire purchase sum….

James : are you serious !??

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

Felicia smiled.

Felicia : yes I am…..

James : wow….

Felicia : It’s the least we can do for our good citizens…..

James : I’m…. I’m speechless…..

Felicia continued typing on the terminal before going on.

Felicia : I can see your pent up anger and frustration stems primarily from dealing with the public housing board PHB……

James : well… i….

Felicia : as such… I believe we need to address the root cause of your anger…. So that once that is resolved…. You can continue in your role as a model and good citizen of the country…..

James : ermm… wow… yeah…. How do you propose….

Felicia typed away on the terminal before turning the screen to face me.

Felicia : I’ve isolated 276 female staff from PHB that works in the balloting, customer service and loan disbursement department….these are the staff currently not having their menstruation period….. May I know your race preference…. ?

My heart started beating faster.

I don’t believe this.

It was a rumour.

A quiet rumour in the web that on one can verify but it’s happening to me.

There were rumours online that says the new ministry would do everything to satisfy the citizens needs and manage their anger.

It’s happening right in front of me.

Felicia : Mr James ?.... race preference… ?

James : Chi…. Chinese….

The screen refreshed itself and the number of candidates got lesser.

Felicia continued without batting her eyelid.

Felicia  : marital status…. Married or single… your preference….

I was trying not to shake in the broken chair.

James :married…

Felicia : age range….

James : 24- 32

Felicia : ahhh…. Young Milf in the making….. hold on….

When the screen refreshed itself again, I was presented with the pictures of 18 girls. From frontline staff to senior executives, they were all employees of PHB.

Felicia : may I suggest filtering down to those recently…. Married…

I looked at Felicia who maintained expressionless.

I nodded.

The candidates reduced to 6.

Felicia : Mr James… you are now looking at the staff in PHB, all married within the past 2 years, within the age range and race preference….

I was nursing a full hard on by then as I look at the 6 pictures of the PHB staff smiling at me.

3 are pretty average, 1 is totally out but 2 are pretty much my cup of tea.

James : can…. Can….. can I look at these 2…. ?

Felicia : of course….

Felicia called up the social media profile of both girls and I could see the 1st one was a bit big bone and her complexion isn’t really good. The 2nd girl however was perfect.

She’s sweet looking and petite.

I like petite girls.

Felicia : seems like you have made your choice Mr James….

James : yes… yes… this.. this 1….

Felicia brought up the full profile of the girl of my choice.

Felicia : Elena Qiu… recently married… about 6 months ago… a pretty new staff at PHB…. Less than 3 years…. She’s pretty… good choice….

I could not stop looking at Elena.

I could feel precum leaking from my cock.

Felicia : I will make the necessary arrangements….. for tomorrow…. And Mr James…. I sincerely hope your anger will subside after this….

James : of… of… of course…

Felicia : It is the government’s wish for all our model citizens to be happy…..

I nodded eagerly.

Felicia : I would like to remind you that Elena will not be a willing participant even though she is required to by contract….. she might get a little resistant…. Base on the aptitude test we administered during recruitment….

James : oh…

Felicia : as such… we will be giving her something to calm her down…. No she won’t be a dead fish…. She is still conscious and aware of what is going on…. She can still fight but… with say 50% of the strength and intensity… that should make the session enjoyable for you I think…

James : that… that sounds good….

Felicia : Elena will be asked to attend an offsite meeting tomorrow…and she will be delivered to you…. And to appease your pent up anger and frustration, I shall make a note for her to be formally dressed with heels and her PHB staff pass…..would that be ok ?

James : yes… perfect…

Felicia stood up and shook my hand.

Felicia : I hope you would not remain angry with the government after this…. And continue to be a good, model citizen for the rest of your countrymen….

I was shown the way down to the ground floor where a concierge handed me an envelope with a hotel key card of a 5 star hotel in town.

Concierge : Mr James….. I am pleased to inform you that Elena from PHB has confirmed her attendance to the meeting tomorrow…. May your anger be appeased after your meeting….

I nodded, speechless and unsure of what to say.  

Concierge : Have a good day….and remember… the government needs good citizens like you…. For us to thrive and prosper….

I dug into the envelope and there were several print out photos.

Photos of the PHB staff I’m going to meet tomorrow.

Photos of Elena.

…………………………………………..

10500+ words

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[tinyshe]

“Around the world,  reports are pouring in of people dying shortly after receiving the COVID-19  vaccine. In many cases, they die suddenly within hours of getting the shot. In   others, death occurs within the span of a couple of weeks.

“One notable case  is baseball legend Hank Aaron, 86, who died January 22, 2021, 17 days after  publicly getting vaccinated for COVID-19.1,2 He said at the time that he hoped other Blacks would follow his lead and  get their vaccines too.

“According to news  reports, he died “peacefully in his sleep” and no cause of death had been  announced. Aaron was famous for being the home-run king of baseball, and broke  Babe Ruth’s record when he hit homerun No. 715; he had hit 755 by the time he  retired from the sport.

29 Dead in Norway

“In related news,  Norway has recorded 29 senior citizen deaths in the wake of their vaccination  push.3 Most were over the age of 75. A total of 42,000 Norwegians had by that time  received the vaccine.

“While health  officials initially downplayed any connection to the vaccine, a report in  Bloomberg suggests the Norwegian Medicines Agency are now reconsidering. At the  time of the deaths, the Pfizer  vaccine was the only COVID-19 vaccine available in Norway, so “all deaths  are thus linked to this vaccine,” the agency told Bloomberg.4

“’There are 13 deaths that have been assessed,  and we are aware of another 16 deaths that are currently being assessed,’ the  agency said. All the reported deaths related to ‘elderly people with serious   basic disorders,’ it said.

‘Most people have experienced the expected side  effects of the vaccine, such as nausea and vomiting, fever, local reactions at  the injection site, and worsening of their underlying condition’ …

“The findings have prompted  Norway to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines may be too risky for the very old and  terminally ill, the most cautious statement yet from a European health  authority.

The Norwegian Institute of  Public Health judges that ‘for those with the most severe frailty, even  relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences. For those  who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine  may be marginal or irrelevant.’”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious  Diseases, commented that the deaths have to be “put into context with the  population they occurred in.”5

In other words,  they were old and old people die. It’s hypocrisy at its finest. When seniors  die before vaccination, it’s due to COVID-19 and something must be done to  prevent it, but when they die after vaccination, they die of natural causes and  no preventive action is necessary.

The World Health  Organization added that since there was “no certain connection” of the vaccines  to Norway’s deaths, there is no reason to discontinue giving it to senior  citizens.

Questionable Coincidences

Interestingly,  several areas have reported that deaths are rapidly increasing AFTER  vaccination programs are implemented. The news stories don’t actually say it  straight out, but if you look at dates given, it raises questions. One such  example is what’s happening in Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain, which  has a population of 34,000.

The area rolled  out its vaccination program on January 9, 2021, using the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.  By January 17, 2021, 5,847  doses had been administered (about 17% of the population), according to a  report by MedicalXpress.6

The curious thing about it is that the area’s  first recorded death from COVID-19 didn’t occur until mid-November 2020. By  January 6, three days before the vaccination program began, the total  COVID-19-related death toll reportedly stood at 10.

Then, by January 17, the total death toll had suddenly skyrocketed   to 45. In other words, 35 people died in the first eight days of the   vaccination program. Most were in their 80s and 90s.

Chief  Minister Fabian Picardo said, "This is now the worst loss of life of  Gibraltarians in over 100 years. Even in war, we have never lost so many in  such a short time."7 None of the deaths are being blamed on the vaccine, however. Instead, they’re loosely  blaming them on the new variant of SARS-CoV-2.

Vaccine Rollout Coincides With Outbreak

Other  areas are also reporting “outbreaks” of COVID-19, resulting in increased death  tolls, after the rollout of vaccinations. Case in point: In Auburn, New York, a COVID-19 outbreak began  December 21, 2020, in a Cayuga County nursing home.8,9 Before this outbreak, no one in the nursing home had died from COVID-19.

The next day,  December 22, they started vaccinating residents and staff. The first death was  reported December 29, 2020. Between December 22, 2020, and January 9, 2021, 193  residents (80%) received the vaccine, as did 113 staff members.

As of January 9,  2021, 137 residents had been infected and 24 had died. Forty-seven staff  members had also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and one was on life-support.

Considering we’re  also seeing cases in which healthy young and middle-aged individuals die within  days of receiving the vaccine, it’s not inconceivable that the vaccine might  have something to do with these dramatic rises in deaths among the elderly in  various parts of the world. In fact, I’d expect it.

You can rest  assured, however, that the public health authorities and media will not report these  observations. Anything that conflicts with vaccine safety and effectiveness  will be intentionally and universally buried. This is precisely their modus  operandi of the past three decades, so it’s really up to each individual to do  their own research.

Massive Amounts of Serious Side Effects Emerging

While  the global  vaccine campaign is less than a month old in most places, reports of serious  side effects have already started pouring in. Many are sharing their  personal experiences on social media networks. Disturbingly, many are having   their stories censored as misleading or false. Videos, in particular, tend to  be taken down.

Aside  from sudden death within hours or days,10,11,12,13,14 examples of side effects among survivors of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA  vaccines include:

Persistent malaise15,16 and extreme exhaustion17

Severe allergic, including anaphylactic reactions18,19,20    

Multisystem inflammatory  syndrome21

Chronic seizures and convulsions22,23

Paralysis,24 including Bell’s Palsy25

To get a feel for what’s really happening, check out prezi.com, where someone has started  collecting stories from various social media posts. It’s a rather shocking  compilation that is well worth sharing with family and friends who are still on  the fence about getting the vaccine.

Many say they  “feel weird” and that they “don’t feel like myself.” Dizziness, racing heart  and extreme high blood pressure seem to be a common complaint, as is severe,  chronic seemingly “unbreakable” headache that does not respond to medication.  Many describe the pain they feel in their body as “being run over by a bus” or  “being beaten with a bat.”

Some report  swollen and painful lymph nodes, severe muscle pain and gastrointestinal  issues. Symptoms mimicking stroke are being reported, even though CT scans show  nothing of concern. One such report is from a 19-year-old girl. Several report  lethal heart attacks claiming the lives of someone they love.

Psychological  effects are also starting to creep in. One woman who is on chemotherapy reports  “mood changes with intermittent periods of elation and mild euphoria.” Bouts of  anxiety, depression, brain fog, confusion and dissociation are also being  reported, as is an inability to sleep.

One person  reports having lost “the voice in my head,” which I suspect is the ability to  hear yourself think. Another reports losing the ability to formulate words  about half an hour after getting the first dose of vaccine, and a third reports  “struggling for lost words.” Loss of taste and/or smell are also being  reported, as well as taste alterations. Several say they have developed a  metallic taste since their vaccination.

One pregnant  woman reported spontaneous rupture of the amniotic sac resulting in premature  delivery. Another woman’s baby was found to have no heartbeat two days after  her vaccination and was delivered stillborn. Several describe effects  suggesting vascular problems, such as skin blotchiness and fingers turning  blue.

We see mass cell activation syndromes. The clinical symptoms are  going to be the inflammatory diseases. We hear everybody calling it ‘long haul  COVID’ — the extreme, profound, crippling fatigue, the inability to produce  energy from your mitochondria. It's not long haul COVID. It's exactly what it  always was — myalgic encephalomyelitis, inflammation of the brain and the   spinal cord. ~ Judy Mikovits Ph.D.

While people are  hoping and praying their side effects will be temporary, a significant portion  say they’re still struggling with the effects one or two weeks after their  shot. Time will tell whether they turn out to be permanent, but considering the  fact that the mRNA vaccines reprogram your DNA, there’s certainly the  possibility that they might be long-lasting.

Side Effects Were Predictable

I recently interviewed cellular and molecular biologist Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., about the mechanics of COVID-19 mRNA  vaccines, which are in actuality gene therapy. They’re not conventional  vaccines. Compare the summary of reported side effects in the section above to  the longer-term side effects she suspects will become commonplace, based on the  mechanics and biological effects of these gene therapy “vaccines”:

Migraines

Involuntary muscle movements,    tics and spasms

Parkinson’s disease

Microvascular disorders

Cancers

Severe pain syndromes

Bladder problems

Kidney disease

Psychological disorders such    as psychosis and autism spectrum

Neurodegenerative diseases

Sleep disorders

Infertility and other    reproductive problems

The underlying causes, according to Mikovits, are  neuroinflammation and dysregulation of the immune system and endocannabinoid  system.

“It's the brain on fire,” she  says. “You're going to see ticks, you're  going to see Parkinsonian disease, you're going to see ALS, you're going to see  things like this developing at extremely rapid rates, and it's inflammation of  the brain.

We see mass cell activation syndromes. The clinical symptoms are going to be the inflammatory diseases. We hear everybody calling it ‘long haul  COVID’ — the extreme, profound, crippling fatigue, the inability to produce  energy from your mitochondria.

It's not long haul COVID. It's exactly what it always was —   myalgic encephalomyelitis, inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord. What  they're intentionally doing is killing off [certain] populations.”

Discrepancies in Moderna’s FDA Report

According to a  recent report by The Defender,26 there are significant discrepancies in the data Moderna submitted to the U.S.  Food and Drug Administration:

“Moderna’s reported death rate for its COVID vaccine, based on   clinical trials, is 5.41 times greater than Pfizer’s. Yet neither are   representative of national death rates — that’s a red flag …

The Moderna vaccine arm  death rate of 0.36 deaths/100K/day) is 5.14 times higher than Pfizer’s (0.07  deaths/100K/day). This large discrepancy deserves notice and requires explanation.

If Moderna’s on-vaccine  death rate is so far below the national death rate and also simultaneously more  than five times greater than Pfizer’s on-vaccine death rate, then Pfizer’s  study sample appears even less representative of the entire population. This, too,  requires due consideration …

When comparing [Moderna’s] study-wide number of  deaths per day per 100K for the study to that of the entire U.S. population  from 2019, I was shocked: the national number of deaths per day per 100K is  2.44.

Moderna’s screening process and exclusion  criteria in the trial led to evidence that the general population is dying at a  rate 6.3 times greater than the death rate in the Moderna trial — which means   the Moderna study, including its estimated efficacy rate and the vaccine’s  alleged safety profile — cannot possibly be relevant to most of the U.S.  population.

The super-healthy cohorts studied by Moderna are  in no way representative of the U.S. population. Most deaths from COVID-19   involve pre-existing health conditions of the types excluded from both Pfizer  and Moderna trials …

Those enrolling in the post-market surveillance  studies deserve to know the abject absence of any relevant information on  efficacy and risk for them. In their zeal to help humanity, or to help  themselves, these people may very well be walking into a situation that will  cause autoimmunity due to pathogenic priming,  potentially leading to disease enhancement should they become infected  following vaccination.”

Why Is Moderna’s Gene Therapy Deadlier Than Pfizer’s?

What might  account for Moderna’s gene therapy “vaccine” causing more than five times more  deaths than Pfizer’s? One possibility raised in The Defender’s article is that  they failed to “screen out unsafe epitopes to  reduce autoimmunity due to homology between parts of the viral protein and the  human proteome.”

According to a  2020 paper27 in the Journal of Translational Autoimmunity, “Pathogenic priming likely  contributes to serious and critical illness and mortality in COVID-19 via  autoimmunity,” noting that the same may apply post-vaccination.

As  explained in this paper, all but one of SARS-CoV-2 immunogenic epitopes are  similar to human proteins. Epitopes28 are sites on the virus that allow antibodies or cell receptors in your immune  system to recognize it.

This  is why epitopes are also referred to as “antigenic determinants,” as they are  the parts that are recognized by an antibody, B-cell receptor or T-cell  receptor. Most antigens — substances that bind specifically to an antibody or a  T-cell receptor — have several different epitopes, which allow it to be  recognized by several different antibodies.

According to the author, some epitopes can cause “autoimmunological pathogenic  priming due to prior infection or following exposure to SARS-CoV-2 … following  vaccination.”

In  other words, if you’ve had the infection once, and get reinfected (either by  SARS-CoV-2 or a sufficiently similar coronavirus), the second bout has a great  potential to be more severe than the first. Similarly, if you get vaccinated  and are then infected with SARS-CoV-2, your infection may be more severe than  had you not been vaccinated.

For  this reason, “these epitopes should be excluded from vaccines under development  to minimize autoimmunity due to risk of pathogenic priming,” the paper warns.  The abstract lays out the basics of the pathogenic priming process.29 As noted in The Defender:30

"Thus, concern over vaccine-induced pathogenic priming is not   zero, but it may be less than COVID-19  vaccines that  use more than one SARS-CoV-2 protein. However, the hyper-focused IgG response  to the fewer antigens could cause hyperimmunization, a condition considered   ripe for off-target autoimmunity attacks."

Are Lethal Effects Being Hidden?

The Defender  points out that vaccine trials never use inert placebos. Instead, many use  another vaccine. By doing so, they effectively hide side effects. In the case  of Moderna, a total of 13 people died in the trial, seven in the vaccine group  and eight in the placebo group. One severe adverse event in the placebo group,  however, was relabeled as a death, and one death in the vaccine group was   relabeled as a severe adverse event.

In the vaccine  group, deaths were listed as cardio-respiratory   arrest, heart attack, multisystem organ failure, head injury and suicide. None of the deaths were  linked to the vaccine.

However, as noted in The Defender, heart attacks  can involve autoimmunity and have been seen in post-vaccinations before.   Multisystem organ failure is also “consistent with autoimmunity against ubiquitously expressed proteins as a result of vaccination.”

“The suicide cannot be ruled  out as not due the vaccine, either,” The Defender writes, noting it could be  related to “autoimmunity against oxytocin or serotonin receptors,” which might  result in “devastating depression.”

Indeed, prezi.com includes a number of reports of people saying  they’ve experienced anxiety and depression following their vaccination.  Depression is also a possible outcome of neuroinflammation, as noted by  Mikovits.

Do a Risk-Benefit Analysis Before Making Up Your Mind

While both Pfizer and Moderna report low rates of side effects — Moderna’s  being just 0.5% — the rates of side effects in the real world appear to be  extraordinarily high. Data are still hard to come by, but if we go by initial  data reported by the U.S.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,31 we end up with a side effect rate in the real world of 2.79%.

By December 18, 2020, 112,807  Americans had received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Of those, 3,150  suffered one or more “health impact events,” defined as being “unable to  perform normal daily activities, unable to work, required care from doctor or  health care professional.” If you divide the number of reported side effects  with the number that received the vaccine, you get a side effect rate of 2.79%.

If you then extrapolate that to  the total U.S. population of 328.2 million, we may be looking at 9,156,780  Americans suffering vaccine injuries if everyone gets vaccinated.

[to see full article with tables/graphs and other information not picked up in a cut and paste please go here]

[theyearofnoclothes]

day three hundred and eight - change might come

Today is election day in the US, and the day covid cases are set to hit 9.5 million. 232,000 Americans have died, which is far more than the number of votes that electorally decided the last election (as a reminder, Hillary Clinton received 2.86 million more popular votes than Trump). For the first time, I’ve found myself wondering about how one cross-references voter rolls with death notices.

I do not know what is going to happen tonight or in the coming days and weeks. It seems extremely likely that Biden will win the popular vote, but we know that means nothing. It means even less in an election where one party is doing everything it can to prevent from voting, or throw out the votes of, as many people as possible.

Four years ago, I put on my interpretation of a pants suit and went to work brimming with enthusiasm over what the future would hold, playing “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” on repeat (judge away). I ended that day by crawling into bed fully clothed after Wisconsin was called for Trump and sobbing myself to sleep. So many of us knew that a Trump presidency was dangerous to the country; it’s hard to know if things went better or worse than planned.

Going into today, the notion that civil war was a natural outcome of the last four years had reached the mainstream. In preparation, businesses boarded up their windows, tech companies drew up elaborate contingency plans, and thousands of people purchased guns. Provoking civil war is something white supremacists have dreamed about, and it is terrifying that the once fringe goal of “accelerationism” may have been manifested by the highest office of the country. But here we are.

This post has clearly not been about clothes yet, and I’ll sort of get there, but I wanted to reflect on the fact that we have become so divided that people voted today thinking there was a possibility they could be murdered for it. We have divided neighborhoods, divided states, divided families. We have completely different news sources, and completely different realities, depending on which box we tick on a ballot. I can’t fully bring myself to say there are fine people on both sides, BUT WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE SIDES.

I get that there is and always will be policy disagreements, and that’s great! But damn does it feel like we completely jumped the shark from debating points to denying humanity. The funniest thing is, the people who fuck us over the most are the ones egging us on against each other - there’s a reason we all know the phrase “divide and conquer,” even if we’ve never thought about what it means.

My “enemies” are those who actively seek to hurt me, by denying me agency over my body, by stripping away my civil rights, by poisoning my environment, by bankrupting my friends and family to give their donors a break, by killing my neighbors through state-sanctioned violence. My neighbors are not the problem.

How this gets sloppily back to clothes is, I recently read an article about how Anna Wintour is navigating a post-George Floyd world (for the record, I hate that phrasing). The gist is that, though Vogue was outwardly posturing about supporting Black lives, dedicating its coveted September issue to a celebration of Black culture and pledging change, employees were coming forward with stories of being sidelined, tokenized, or witness to blatant racism. White folks have dominated both the pages of Vogue and its hallways, and even just this year the first Black editor of British Vogue was racially profiled while entering the London office, being told by a security guard to “use the loading bay.”

That Vogue, and by extension, Anna Wintour, have failed to create a magazine that reflects reality or its readership is not exactly news. I only bring the story as an example of a pattern: A wildly powerful person doing whatever it takes to stay powerful.

Anna Wintour did not suddenly realize that Black lives matter when she saw (or didn’t see) George Floyd get lynched. She did realize that Black lives matter to many when she saw the reaction to the lynching. Whether she herself believes it is, to some extent, irrelevant: She will say she believes it, and put it in her magazine, because it will sell magazines. So too of all the fucked up shit Trump says. Give the people the illusion that you’re giving them what they want, if you will.

In the racial profiling incident, the security guard was fired. But did the security guard create the culture that says a Black man entering a fashion magazine could only be there doing menial work? It’s of course entirely possible that the security guard was a raging racist, but he didn’t invent racism - powerful people did. In the case where a militia aka armed gang plotted to kidnap a sitting governor, the men doing the specific plotting were arrested. But did those men invent a world where the President of the United States uses the threat of locking up those who disagree with him as a literal rallying cry? 

I am definitely not defending those men and am glad they were arrested, my point is only that the people who face consequences are rarely the ones behind the curtain. I can’t think of a recent case where a liberal person was punished for carrying out the agenda of someone more powerful, but I guess that’s my bias showing. Liberals are certainly not immune from doing terrible things.

Anyways. Today I wore my RBG face mask and put on “Power To The People.” We’re probably not headed for a French Revolution, and I really don’t think bloodshed is the answer, but it would be nice if in this election we rejected authoritarianism, one of the grossest displays of the powerful doing powerful people shit, and instead chose government by the people for the people. It’s a long shot, but not an impossibility for a country founded on the rejection of tyranny. Here’s hoping we can collectively look up instead of sideways when defining what tyranny is.

[dhofberg]

Status quo: Chaos

It has been hard to write this week. Kind of exhausted emotionally. Story after story of victims of torture in prisons in Syria, Iran, Sudan. An African woman victim of sex trafficking in Turkey. Muslim women thrown out by husbands who chose another wife. People whose loved ones died in bombings in Syria, and some who have no way of knowing what happened to their families since they left.

For the most part, besides these horrendous stories, and some of the truly broken bodies ( knife wounds, electrical shock injury, etc), many of the refugees we see in the clinic every day are young healthy adults. But they are traumatized by what happened before and terrified, or at best anxious about what will become of them now.

At the Interagency meetings, we hear that there is a clear smoother process. Arrive in Lesvos, get taken by UNHCR, or whatever group meets their boat to Moría Camp (Detention Center). Then they are held for some time, up to 3 days according to Greek agency, but up to ten by other reports. During this time a migrant has an initial registration that will then qualify them to begin application for asylum in Greece. They are given a type of number or card called AMKA that allows them to access medical services, medications and some monthly amount of money, about EU90.

The Greek Agency, if I understand correctly, that is in charge of the health and protection of refugees is called KEELPO (Hellenic Center For Disease Control and Prevention). They are providing services for refugees in Moria and in Kara Tepe the second largest camp for more vulnerable people, women with small children people with disabilities. I believe they contract with, or partner with ERCI a Greek NGO that provides emergency response and will soon be taking over the medical clinic at Moria from the Dutch NGO BRF (Boat Refugee Foundation). So it does seem that now that EU is giving money to Greece for refugee care, there will be less money and less responsibility allocated to other NGOs. Sounds almost like a good thing.

But apparently there are so few people working to process the asylum applications, many people have been stranded for months in Lesvos, and also in other parts of Greece. They have the ability to process about ten people a day, so prioritizing vulnerable refugees is important. If they arrive and it is known they have urgent medical needs, perhaps this happens.

In reality many fall through the cracks for one reason or another. Misunderstandings about appointment times happen. Translation not always available or optimal. Not enough psychologists, psychiatrists, to care for all those with trauma (MSF has essentially stopped doing any strictly medical care in favor of doing only psychological evaluation and treatment for victims of torture and other abuse).

So if the Greek organization could really handle all this, I believe they would throw out all the NGOs. We are sitting at the table with them listening to the description of what sounds like a viable system, knowing that what we are seeing each day at One Happy Family, the community center for the refugees where Doc Mobile has their clinic, somehow does not reflect what we are hearing. Today we learned that children are vaccinated in the first few days when they arrive. I had been wondering about this and so I asked. I did not have one parent of a child tell me theirs had been immunized. Apparently WHO was here on the Island at some point and issued the yellow immunization cards we used to use in the US before electronic records. I have not seen one of those, but I will begin asking. And I learned that everyone gets a Mantoux ( the kind of TB test you had when you were in grade school if you are over 50).

There is one midwife in each of the camps, and there is some contraceptive offered " if it is requested". There is one gynecologist at IKA, the radiology and laboratory and clinic in town. He is French, and though he has a good reputation,he is a man, and many Muslim women don't want to be seen by a male provider.

The Health Care Working Group meeting I attended today is not the place to bring up specific case, just general disposition of various types of health problems. So who do I talk to about the woman I saw in her seventh month of pregnancy with twins, a referral to the hospital, but she has never been there? No one has anything like prenatal vitamins. What about if if I see a woman with first trimester bleeding and I don't know her blood type? The answer from ERCI is that all referrals even to the hospital go through KEELPNO . But they admit it can take a month to get an appointment to have blood drawn.

They are " planning " to have a Family Planning program at the camp when they get the space to do it. But it will only provide STI prevention education and Family Planning education.

There are many people trying to help, small groups like Doc Mobile, independent volunteers who live here. But just navigating the chaos is a lot. And for many volunteers here for a few weeks or months, the learning curve is steep, and then the next wave must start again. Just as well I guess, because my sense is, much of it will have changed again in a month anyway.

Thanks to the Kempsons and their Hope Project ( small local refugee help project), Doc Mobile has moved into the clinic building at One Happy Family. I imagine it will continue for a while, as they are filled to capacity every day for the hours we are there. Much of what we will be doing is trying to explain the process to patients with the help of our (refugee) translators, letting them know where they can access services, filling in the gaps, triaging more urgent cases, treating children and babies and adults for Respiratory infections , referring people to MSF, helping the refugees to navigate the chaos.

Now I feel maybe a bit more exhausted.

[ettadunham]

Day 24 - Bad Dreams

Guys!!! It’s Bad Dreams time on Fringe September.

This episode is an emotional rollercoaster - and by that I mean that it’s devastating from start to finish. It’s also just REALLY well done, acted and written.

And it presents Olivia to us as a possible perpetrator, which adds an added layer of emotion and drama to an already intriguing plot.

You see, she keeps having these restless nights, until one night she dreams about pushing a woman in front of the train. And then wakes and sees the incident on the news.

So naturally she starts investigating. Peter thinks that it’s an insane idea to even consider that she could’ve killed someone while being asleep hundreds of miles away, but Walter indulges her with his own theories. Teleportation? Astral projection? Who knows, anything is possible on this show.

Olivia also describes details to Peter about the crime scene before getting there. Specifically a red balloon still being stuck on the ceiling. But when they watch the recording, there’s no one seen pushing the woman in front of the train.

But it still doesn’t add up. The balloon is there for one, but the woman in question was also with her baby! They were at the circus before! It’s all so heartbreaking, and it’s highlighted even more when they question the husband who can’t wrap his head around the tragedy himself.

The team reconvenes after that, still trying to make sense of it all. Walter starts pushing Olivia. Why would she want to kill that woman? Why did she kill that woman? Olivia can’t find any answer, and Peter is just done with this craziness. He still refuses to even entertain the possibility that Olivia somehow caused all this.

But Walter’s answer to that is a rather interesting one:

“I'm surprised at you, Peter. Agent Dunham is your friend. You trust her. she says she killed that girl. Are you presumptuous to believe her only when she says what you want to hear? Your mother was a bit like that.“

The last part of that quote perhaps holds a glimpse to pre-brain surgery Walter, but there is a bigger truth to this. Peter not believing that Olivia would be responsible for something like this feels more like something he does for himself. He doesn’t want to consider the possibility because it doesn’t sit right with HIM. So maybe Walter is right - in order to assure Olivia’s peace of mind, for HER sake, they need to consider the possibility of her being the killer, and then try to figure out the WHYs. Especially since Olivia is already blaming herself, regardless of what Peter believes.

It of course escalates further when there’s another case the following night. A woman stabs her husband multiple times, seemingly out of the blue. When Peter and Olivia question the woman, she can’t explain her reasons either. She says that suddenly she was sure that he was going to leave her, that she got so angry, but then those feelings disappeared as soon as they arrived. And now she has to live with the consequences of these actions, and watch on as her husband dies from the injuries she caused.

Olivia at this point is overwhelmed. With guilt, and just by watching these people dealing with tragedies that they can’t find reasons or explanations for. She’s desperate, she tries telling the woman that maybe someone compelled her to do all that, asking her if it felt like that someone was in her mind... But what good does it do at this point? The damage has already been done, and they can’t prove that it was anyone else committing the crime. They don’t even KNOW that at this point.

Olivia’s emotions are running at an all time high, and she finally snaps at the restaurant manager who’s not being very forthcoming to them with information. She pushes him into a table, demanding to know if SHE was there, if she sat at the table she remembers from her dream... But it wasn’t her. It was some guy with a scar on his face.

And that finally provides a break in this investigation. Because Olivia remembers someone fitting that description from the tape of the subway station.

The problem is that while trying to find him in the database, they also draw Broyles’ attention to them. You see, Broyles didn’t yet know about Olivia’s dreams, or about the nature of her interest in those cases. And she didn’t tell him, because her being involved would’ve meant that she couldn’t technically investigate this case herself. He let her go after the suicide case not asking any questions, because she earned that much of his trust, but now that she’s using agency resources, he has to know what’s going on.

“These things that we see every day, these things that we investigate -- they're happening to me” - Olivia tells him. And Broyles is reluctant, because Olivia is already under investigation by Harris, she walks on a thin ice as it is. But eventually he lets her do it, opening a case officially on the subject they found during their database search - Nick Lane.

But as they look up Nick Lane, instead of finding a perpetrator who as Walter’s theory suggested, is killing people with their thoughts, they realize that Nick himself is a possible victim. He used to be a voluntary resident at a psychiatric facility, where they were treating his suicidal tendencies. His doctor also described him as “bright”, emotionally speaking, someone who could light up a room or suck everyone into a black hole of despair depending on his mood.

It is however his delusions that offer the final piece to the puzzle - the ones that sounded eerily similar to the ZFT manifesto.

Oh yeah, and he was also from Jacksonville. And is about the same age as Olivia.

Olivia at that point has already made the connection, so she decides it’s time to confront Walter. She asks him about Cortexiphan, if it was possible that Nick was affecting people with his emotions due to being treated with the drug as a child. And Walter not only confirms that theory, but also offers an explanation to Olivia’s involvement, laying all her fears out in the open. He says that when he and Belly would experiment on children they would often put them in pairs. And that he believes that that’s the source of their connection.

Peter once again is trying to shut it all down - he doesn’t want to consider the option that Olivia was experimented as a kid by Walter’s old colleague (*cough* or Walter himself *cough*)... and Olivia hasn’t told him or Walter about what she found out at the end of 1x14. That there WAS a Cortexiphan trial in Jacksonville that she could’ve been a part of.

Olivia’s reveal of “I might have been” is a favorite of mine when it comes to Anna’s deliveries. There’s both a nonchalantness and a dramatic edge that’s uniquely Olivia Dunham.

But now Walter knows how to find Nick! He puts Olivia under REM state, so she could describe to them where Nick is and what he’s doing... And apparently Nick right now decided to go to a strip club. And have sex with a dancer. So we all witness Olivia making out with said dancer lady, and we also got a rare moment of levity as the team one by one realizes what Olivia’s physical reactions mean at one point. (”OH.” “Oooh.” “Oh.”)

In any case, after it happens, Nick is once again consumed by self-loathing. And... IT IS ACTUALLY REALLY CREEPY AND RAPEY WHEN YOU CONSIDER. Nick’s sexual excitement affected the dancer, that’s WHY she had sex with him in the first place. And now his self-hatred is causing her to end her own life.

Olivia struggles to stay under after that, but Peter helps her calm down enough for her to see Nick’s address. So that’s where they go.

Nick’s wall is full of conspiracy theory newspaper cut-outs - revolving around secret drug trials and whatnots. We also see “what was written will come to pass” written there, confirming that Jones and his organization got to him, and they were the ones who activated his latent abilities.

But Nick is not there anymore, and it’s not that hard to find him either. He apparently decided to end it all. (Maybe he wasn’t even fully aware or sure that he was the one who caused all those deaths around him until the dancer - who knows.) So he’s going up to a rooftop to jump... But his mood also affected dozens of people on the way, so they’re all there, at the edge of the building, ready to jump with him. And they can’t send up anyone, because they just get affected by his mood and join the group as well.

So instead Olivia goes up alone, hoping that her connection to Nick and the Cortexiphan in her own blood would make her immune. And it does. And what happens next is an unexpected reunion between the two.

Because you see, Nick remembers. He remembers the trials, and he remembers Olivia. And he hoped that she could be able to hear him.

He recites the ZFT manifesto to her, but with an earnest desperation. He has been waiting for the call all his life, for his life to gain meaning, but it never came. And when Jones approached him, he jumped at the opportunity to fulfill his destiny... But instead what he’s got is a trail of dead in his wake.

“Sometimes what we wake up, it can’t be put back to sleep.” - And then he gives his gun to Olivia, asking her to shoot him. Because he “just wants to stop hurting people”.

“Please. We weren’t meant for this” - he tells Olivia.

But Olivia refuses to kill him, instead shooting him in the leg, and the pain reverberates among the group, who fall to the ground with Nick, preventing them all from jumping. Nick’s last words are full of foreboding (”You’ll wish you had. You’ll wish you’d kill me.”), but it’s not a threat. At this point it’s obvious that Nick genuinely wanted this all to stop, that none of the deaths he caused were his intention.

And that’s the tragedy of it all. Because there are no real perpetrators in this episode, no bad guys. Only victims. There is of course Jones and his associates, but they don’t actually appear in the episode, and all they did here was to bring forward Nick’s abilities that he’s already had in him.

So isn’t the real villain William Bell and his drug trials then? Except it’s not presented to us in such a simple manner either.After we see the harrowing images of Olivia and Broyles visiting Nick in his drug-induced coma state, we get yet another scene. Of Walter watching an old tape with a little girl called Olive, who it seems like just set fire to an entire room previously. It becomes apparent early on that it’s a tape of Olivia’s Cortexiphan experiments... but then we hear another voice in the recording beside Bell. WALTER.

THIS IS WHERE WE LEARN THAT WALTER WAS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE CORTEXIPHAN TRIALS DESPITE HIS PREVIOUS STATEMENTS IN THE EPISODE ABOUT HOW HE WAS AGAINST THEM.

So yeah, this episode isn’t an emotional rollercoaster after all. It’s a one-way trip to the darkest pits of despair.

Parts of this story are reminiscent of the Kilgrave one in Jessica Jones, except here the perpetrator is someone who actually has no control over his actions. Surely, one could question if Nick could’ve done more or less, and what happened with the dancer is especially murky, but above all, he’s a victim in all this. One who couldn’t help the fact that he was suffering from depression, or that it was affecting others in such extreme ways.

Bad Dreams is an episode that will leave an impression on all who watched it. It’s definitely my own personal favorite of the s1 roster.

This was a long as analysis, but let’s also talk about the stuff not mentioned:

When describing the effects of Cortexiphan, Walter mentions the possibility of travelling between worlds.

The lines about how Cortexiphan worked are also ones that come back later in different forms. (”Perception is the key to transformation.“ “Reality is both subjective and malleable. If you can dream a better world, you can make a better world.”)

“Astral” “Astrid.” “....projection” - aka the one time Walter didn’t actually butcher Astrid’s name.

Another episode with Ella and Rachel! Also: GRUESOME.

The episode parallels Nick’s and Olivia’s morning routine, showing us how Olivia has unintentionally been following the ZFT guidelines that Nick lived by.

[itsfinancethings]

New story in Politics from Time: ‘Zero Recourse’: Frontline Workers Say Republicans’ Proposed Liability Shields Threaten Their Safety

Like millions of American workers, Mercedes Taylor, an overnight security guard at Houston’s William P. Hobby International Airport, has been forced amid the worsening pandemic to make a grim calculation. As a 69-year-old asthmatic with high blood pressure, Taylor is susceptible to complications from COVID-19, but her need for a paycheck outweighs her concerns for her health.

It’s a frustrating position to be in, Taylor says. While the airport has provided workers with masks and hand sanitizer, she says management has not been forthcoming when employees test positive. “It alarms me that they don’t feel the need to tell you, ‘You might want to go get tested, you may have been exposed,'” she said. Her frustration increased this week when she learned that Congressional Republicans’ new COVID relief bill includes a proposal that would shield nearly all public and private organizations—including her airport—from legal liability if workers got sick on the job.

“We’re getting $12 an hour. We have no sick days,” Taylor says. “For them to be concerned about the liability of employers and them not being sued versus the employees who have been consistently showing for work and providing a service? I’m very disappointed.”

The Republicans’ 65-page proposal, introduced by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, and backed by the White House, would shield all corporations, schools, healthcare organizations, non-profits and religious institutions from most COVID-19-related lawsuits. Under the proposed language, corporations and organizations that are following any form of public health guidelines could not be held liable if a worker contracted COVID-19 on the job. If the legislation passes as it’s written, a worker who wants to sue for a coronavirus-related death or injury must prove that the organization in question engaged in “willful misconduct or gross negligence.” These terms would retroactively apply from December 2019 through October 2024.

Democrats and labor advocates argue that by making the standard of proof so high, the Republicans’ bill grants “blanket immunity” to public and private organizations, all but eliminating their responsibility for their workers’ safety. “It would essentially make it impossible to sue for a COVID-related injury,” says David Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May.

“The goal here is to completely insulate businesses, schools, universities, anyone who is a service provider from any immunity at all. It sends a signal to the American people [that] we don’t care about your health,” he added. “If you get hurt from someone else you have no recourse. Zero recourse.”

McConnell and Cornyn say that’s not a fair characterization of the proposed law. “It will not ban coronavirus lawsuits, and it will not give anyone a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor on Monday. “What it will do, though, is put safeguards in place that will prevent opportunistic lawsuits from harming the workers and institutions we are depending on to see us through this crisis.”

McConnell says liability shields are crucial to the U.S. economic recovery and warns of the prospect of “a second pandemic of opportunistic litigation enrich trial lawyers at the expense of Main Street and medical professionals.” “No bill will be put on the Senate floor that does not have liability protection,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Big business lobbyists have been pushing for strong liability protections for months. The Chamber of Commerce spent $12.3 million lobbying Congress and the White House between April and June in part on liability protections, disclosure records show. Smithfield Foods, a defendant in one coronavirus-related lawsuit, paid a top lobbying firm, Holland & Knight, LLP, $230,000 to lobby for liability provisions. The American Medical Association, the physicians’ powerful lobbying arm, spent over $10 million to push for the shields. Trade associations representing real estate developers and airlines both spent more than $1.5 million.

Daniel Auble, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending, says lobbying disclosure forms have shown “considerably more attention being paid to ‘liability’ and ‘tort reform.’ In 2019, according to data Auble provided to TIME, 145 firms were hired to lobby for liability protections. By 2020, that number had increased to 291.

“We started hearing from our members, across all industries, of all different sizes, that one of the things they were anticipating was the potential for, from their perspective, very frivolous lawsuits,” says Neil Bradley, an executive vice president who oversees policy at the Chamber of Commerce. “We’re constantly learning about new and better ways to prevent the spread of the disease. That creates an opening for a lot of folks who want to argue that an employer should have done more than what they did, which has a chilling effect on your ability to reopen.”

It’s not yet clear what version of a COVID relief bill Congress will pass. Any bill will require bipartisan support to get to the President’s desk, and Democrats widely oppose the Republicans’ liability measures. The version of a relief bill that House Democrats passed in May does not include liability protections at all. It instead requires the federal agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to set a national standard for workplace protection from the virus based on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Democrats say that the Republican proposal goes too far and that a viable package must include protections for workers. “We want to make sure regulations – OSHA regulations or others – are followed and are sufficient to protect patients, customers, employees, and others who are utilizing services or public accommodations, that people are making sure that they make every effort available to them to protect people in this environment,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Wednesday. “That will be the context in which we have discussions on liability.”

As millions of frontline workers like Taylor have continued to go to work despite the pandemic, a handful of COVID-related court cases have cropped up. In April, an anonymous worker in a Smithfield Foods meat processing plant in Missouri sued the company in federal court, alleging that it was failing to provide protective equipment and enforce social distancing policies. In May and June, McDonald’s workers filed lawsuits in Illinois and California making similar allegations. In June, Amazon employees at fulfillment centers in New York and California filed two separate lawsuits, both alleging the company’s work conditions were causing them to spread the virus to their families and communities.

Chiyomi Brent, a California Amazon employee who filed one of the lawsuits, said on a July 20 press call that she only went to the courts after she had raised concerns with her manager and filed a complaint with the California division of OSHA that went unheeded. “Without the ability to file a lawsuit, Amazon would be able to get away with its actions, and more Americans would needlessly get sick, or even worse, die,” she said. “It is my hope that workers in every industry will be safer because of my lawsuit.”

But litigation like this isn’t very common, in part because it’s often costly for everyone involved, and in part because it’s hard for workers to win. (The case against Smithfield Foods was dismissed in May, with the judge ruling the matter fell under the jurisdiction of OSHA). American Association for Justice (AAJ), a trade group for trial lawyers that opposes the liability shield legislation, analyzed a database of the more than 3,400 coronavirus-related lawsuits compiled by the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth. It found that just 161 were for wrongful death or injury from the virus.

AAJ executives say the cases filed against corporations like Amazon and McDonald’s were critical in shaping the national conversation about the rights of frontline workers. “Senator McConnell is seeking to cut off one of the only tools Americans have to keep themselves safe,” says Julia Duncan, Senior Director of Government Affairs for the organization. “Just the filing of these cases can protect hundreds of thousands of workers.”

Taylor, who says she has no intention to sue her employer, argues that’s not the point. The real issue, she says, is that at a time of great peril, workers’ protections should not be rolled-back.

“I just think they can do better,” Taylor says of Congress. “I don’t mind working, I don’t mind rolling up my sleeves, but it’s a little bit annoying when I don’t feel like I’m being regarded.”

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[bates--boy]

The drive to Stockholm is a little over three hours. On the morning of, Peter had decided to go two hours early to beat traffic and have enough time to go through the initial processes, for any quick meetings and the piles of paperwork. Meaning a time frame of 3-5 hours for the pills to work and continue working, depending on if he’ll be seen immediately or have to wait those harrowing two hours.

In any case, he was prepared. Inside the briefcase sitting on the passenger seat, he had a folder stuffed thick with files next to him. Pay stubs, work records, therapy records, immunizations, every form of identification ranging from his dual citizenship in Sweden and Finland to, hidden away from eyes that are not meant to know his kind existed, the documents of his connection to the actual representation of Sweden. 

He felt a little silly pulling the “My Daddy is Sweden” card for this process, not unlike the spoiled rich kid greasing his way to the top role in the school play with Daddy’s cash, but he could be forgiven for using every advantage he had for this. 

Still, all this preparation had not stopped him from slapping his fingers against his steering wheel with a nervous, grating patter patter patter. In fact, it may have worsened his anxiety. It was like how he had spent not just all this morning, not all last night, but all week assorting his attire over and over, cycling through his shirts and pants and blazers and ties and loafers and hair ties and hair cut choices and, dear god, he wanted to scream because nothing in his closet was right. At least the tie he picked wasn’t a clip-on, so there was no chance of it falling off his collar should he fiddle with it or wring it when his nerves became too much. 

Again, the pill, the thing that was supposed to keep him calm, give him balance, steer him straight if at least just for today. It probably would work better if he had eaten something better than a couple granola bars. The sugary, syrup-filled granola bars, the ones that can make his jittery in the blink of an eye oh, god, he’d already messed up--

He inhaled deeply through his nose, filled his chest to swelling, and eased the breath out through his mouth. No, no, he was not going to spiral, not now, when he was on a mission.

And like in every movie, a mission required music, so when the road was mostly bare, Peter connected his phone to his car radio through the bluetooth, going straight to the indie rock and pop channel on his music app. Okay, cheery music, distracting music, mood-boosting music. Next step: motivational speeches.

“Okay, Peter…” he said, eyes straight on the road. “It’s all simple. Just go in, sign some papers, get the stamp of approval, leave, and wait. You got this. You’ve been good… mostly good… not in too deep of trouble for the past year. Your therapist would agree. Your fathers would agree… I think. Anyways, you’re giving a kid a home. You’re in a good place, and it’s time you share that goodness with someone who needs it…”

This was how it went, with intermissions of Peter singing along to whichever one of his jams blasted on the radio, until he reached the sprawling and towering behemoth of the Stockholm city hall. Finding parking was a hell and process in itself. It had been a while since he was in this particular city hall, so he had to ask for directions over and over after he checked in at one of the receptionist desks. Along the way, he had to switch the briefcase from one hand to another, constantly wiping his palms on his pants, as he bounced on his toes whenever he was required to stand still, like having the security guard pass her scanner over his body or those elevator rides.

Peter finally reached the floor -- Social Welfare Services -- and strolled to the room specifically for the Child Welfare. Going in, Peter passed a row of seated and waiting clients, smiling at the few who didn’t look like they’ll bite anyone’s head off if they had to wait five more minutes. He went to one of the windows, where a man wheeled  away from a printer and back to his desk.

“Hello! I’m Peter Kirkland, and I’m here for an appointment about a foster care request.”

The secretary checked his computer and slowly nodded. “Ah… yep, there you are. We’ll get to you in a few minutes, so in the meantime…” he reached into a drawer and pulled out a stack of forms to clip onto a board. He handed the files over with a pen. “I’ll need you to fill this out. Do you have the necessary files with you?”

Peter took the clipboard with one hand, and lifted his briefcase with the other as a reply. 

“Okay, good. You can just have a seat.”

Nodding, Peter carried the items over to an empty seat. He used his briefcase as a sturdy writing surface so he wouldn’t have to bother hunching over the low table in front of him. He happened to glance up from his work, meeting eyes with a woman who was scrolling through her phone. He pointed to his clipboard. “I’m going to be a foster father!” he cheered softly.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right…”

He blinked, shrugging and returning to his task. She most definitely had been longer than an hour. 

--

“Mr. Kirkland?”

Peter turned his gaze up from his phone to the door beside the window. The secretary held it open and nodded his head inside. “We’re ready to see you.”

It was lucky that his legs had almost fallen asleep while he sat in the waiting area, otherwise he’d have bounced out of his seat in his glee and surely put off the worker. Briefcase in hand, he followed the secretary down a couple hallways to a large, oak door. The secretary poked his head. “Sir? Peter Kirkland is here for you.”

The secretary ushered Peter in and closed the door behind him. The man behind the desk -- his plaque read “Andrew Holm” -- rose from his seat and reached out a hand. “Hello, welcome.”

Peter thanked him and shook his hand, then they both seated themselves. Andrew started sifting through the paper, lingering on the question and pre-review sections. This made Peter start fiddling with the tail of his tie.

“Well, I have to say, Mr. Kirkland, your answers for the questionnaire were quite… interesting.”

Peter swallowed, hoping Andrew didn’t hear the thick, dry lump. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing--

“Especially the fact you shared about being adopted, yourself. Personally, over half the answers you gave would have my approval to put you into the system already, but, you know, there’s a whole process we have to go through, a lot of paperwork, home visits and such. And speaking of the process, do you have the files we need for your application? The financial reports, the citizenship certificate…?”

“Oh, yes, I do!” Peter dug into his briefcase and handed over the folder kept inside. 

Andrew laid it flat open to sift through the documents to find what he needed. He collected the items he needed, application included, stacked them, and put them into the scanner printer. While the desk machine hummed to life, Andrew turned an orb with a glass eye -- a camera, Peter realized -- to his client.

“Now,” Andrew said, his focus on the computer to power up and connect the camera, “today will be the first step, which is the application and a pre-screening. There will be a few more screenings after this, and will include a tour of your place of residence. You have signed your consent to that, but I would like a recording stating that you, Peter Kirkland, consent to a home tour.”

“I consent to a home tour, yes.”

“Great.” Andrew turned his full attention to Peter, pen and notebook ready. “Now…”

--

Peter could tell that Andrew had tried to make this first step as calming and easy as possible, to invite honesty and promote relaxation. Still, Peter just… he flubbed. He knew he flubbed; he knew his mouth was running faster than his brain realized, that he had been oversharing, that his hands were flying here and there, and he narrowly missed hitting the computer monitor and the tiny and adorable succulent. In the lull in which Andrew explained some things for him, such as a training period so he’d receive a fostering license and what steps he’d need to take with his therapist to be better prepared mentally for parenthood, Peter had prayed that the pill would work already.

He wished he could tell Andrew, without inciting awkwardness, that he was sorry, that it wasn’t that Peter was so uncomfortable and scared and he’s in a panicky fit, it was just that his stomach was fluttering with joy and excitement, and he had in fact talked himself out of panicking and it was the sugar. It was the sugar from the granola bars he had this morning.

Andrew placed the documents, and a carbon copy of Peter’s application, into the folder and handed it back to the man. “Alright, we’re done for the day.”

“Really?” Peter asked. It’s been an hour, already? The buzz in his head made it feel so much quicker than that. 

Andrew nodded, typing away on his computer. “Mhm, what comes next is that home screening I’ve told you about, then we send your application out to our sister branches in the nearby counties, then the training and licensing, then, when it’s all said and done, you’ll meet your foster child and have everything finalized in the courthouse.”

You’ll meet your foster child. Peter inhaled slowly and deeply, chuckling softly. “Wow, that’s great! Do you know when I’ll hear from the agencies?”

“Well, usually, this process can take anywhere from six months to a year.”

Six months to a year. “...Oh. Ah, I can’t wait!” Peter raised a fist and shook it in half-hearted excitement. 

“Hm. In the meantime, we’ll need regular, monthly reports or any updates to sudden changes in your life.” Andrew removed a business card from his clip and handed it over. “Here is a number or email to reach me or this department. We’ll have a social worker sent to you in a month. It was nice meeting you, sir.”

Six months to a year. Six months to a year. That felt like a heavy stone in Peter’s stomach, making the walk back to his car slower. He made it to the car park, got into his seat, buckled in, and let his head fall heavily against his steering wheel, the horn blaring loud and scaring the passersby.

What was supposed to do for a year?

[teeky185]

‘The House of Representatives . . . shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”It’s right there in black-and-white: In article I, section 2, clause 5, our Constitution vests the entirety of the power to call for removal of the president of the United States in a single body — the House.Not in the Speaker of the House. In the House of Representatives. The institution, not one of its members.To be sure, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a very powerful government official: second in the line of succession to the presidency; arguably, the most powerful member of Congress. She wields decisive influence on the business of her chamber. She even has the power to induce the House to vote on whether to conduct an impeachment inquiry.But she does not have the power to impeach on her own.In the end, Speaker Pelosi is just one member, a representative elected biannually by one district (in her case, the 12th district of California, centered in San Francisco and not particularly representative of the nation at large). Sure, she enjoys primus inter pares status because she is chosen by a majority of the House’s 435 members. But like each of those other members, her vote counts as just one — in a body that generally requires 218 votes to get the important things done.She is the Speaker. She is not the House. She does not have the authority to call for the president’s removal. She can argue for it, like the other members. She can vote on it, like the other members. But she cannot do it by herself. Only the House, acting as an institution, can do that.The House acts by voting. It has never voted to conduct an inquiry into whether President Trump should be impeached. Consequently, there is no House impeachment inquiry. There is a partisan exhibition of synchronized dyspepsia.This exhibition includes strident letters from a cabal of committee chairs, all Democrats, falsely claiming that a refusal by Trump-administration officials to comply with their demands for information and testimony “shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.”In point of fact, the House has no impeachment inquiry; congressional Democrats have an impeachment political campaign.Under federal law, the offense of obstructing Congress applies when “any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House.” Again, neither the House nor any of its committees has voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry. There is no formal impeachment proceeding to obstruct. Furthermore, the letters in question are not actually demands carrying the compulsory force of law; technically, they are just informal requests. No one is required to comply with a mere request, and refusing to do so is not evidence of anything, let alone obstruction.The House has issued some subpoenas. For example, the House Oversight Committee has just directed a subpoena to the White House, addressed to chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, reportedly demanding the production of a vast array of records (documents, communications, etc.) pertaining to the president’s conduct of relations with Ukraine.Typical of the Democrats’ legerdemain in this matter, the Oversight Committee has not voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry, nor did it vote to issue subpoenas (as, by contrast, the Oversight Committee voted to subpoena the White House just a few weeks ago for records germane to a suspected violation of federal recordkeeping laws). Instead, Chairman Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) strategically waited until the House closed for a two-week recess; then issued a memo on Wednesday, absurdly claiming that there was too much urgency to wait so a vote could be taken; then issued the subpoena late Friday, thus ensuring that no Republican could object and no Democrat would be forced to go on record supporting impeachment, which much of the public strongly opposes. Under House rules, the Oversight chairman has been delegated unilateral authority to issue subpoenas, so the subpoena is valid, but it is also pure gamesmanship.So is the explanation for the subpoena — offered in a letter that Chairman Cummings jointly signed with Chairmen Adam Schiff and Eliot Engel, respectively of the Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. After a couple of pages of throat-clearing about the purported “impeachment inquiry,” the chairmen observe that, even without such an inquiry, the Oversight Committee has its own independent authority to conduct oversight investigations and issue subpoenas. In other words, information is actually being demanded under Congress’s routine authority to scrutinize executive activities. There would be nothing extraordinary about it . . . except that senior Democrats have decided to hang an “impeachment” sign on the exercise, hoping you won’t notice that the House has not voted to explore impeachment, and that its Democratic leaders are going out of their way to avoid such a vote.In their letter, Cummings, Schiff, and Engel give Mulvaney the Democrats now standard admonition about obstruction. It is nonsense. Even when a formal House committee proceeding is underway, such that the obstruction statute could clearly apply, there is no legal presumption that the recipient’s refusal to comply with a subpoena is evidence of obstruction.Obstruction happens when there is tampering with documents or witnesses. Presumptively, a person who refuses to comply with a lawful document demand is not tampering with the documents; to the contrary, the subpoena recipient is asserting a legal claim of privilege that excuses compliance. If I am a lawyer, for example, and a congressional committee subpoenas notes from my meeting with a client, my refusal to surrender the notes is not an obstruction of the House’s investigation. It is an assertion that the attorney–client privilege justifies my withholding of confidential communications. If I am right about that, the legal wrong is Congress’s issuance of a subpoena, not my refusal to honor it.But am I right about it? We won’t know until we go to court and sort it out. Until a subpoena is litigated, it is scurrilous to claim, as Democrats do, that noncompliance with it amounts to felony obstruction. And equally scurrilous is the Democratic chairmen’s extortionate claim that noncompliance creates “an adverse inference” against the president and his chief-of-staff. If a prosecutor claimed that a suspect’s refusal to answer questions created an adverse inference of guilt, Democrats would likely have the prosecutor brought up on disciplinary charges for flouting the Fifth Amendment. There is no adverse inference drawn against a person who, in good faith reliance on a lawful privilege that plausibly applies, refuses to comply with a government demand.Congressional Democrats are well aware of this. What do you suppose would happen if the Justice Department or a litigant in a civil case decided to issue a grand-jury or trial subpoena to a member of Congress, or a House staffer? Actually, you need not suppose, because the House has elaborate rules for this situation (they’ve been in place for years, with each new Congress essentially reaffirming them — see, e.g., here, pp. 5–6). The House prescribes a thorough review, with paramount consideration of all “the privileges and rights of the House” to withhold information from the executive branch, the grand jury, the courts, and the public. The demand is examined so that the House may make its own determination of whether the information sought is relevant and material to the investigation or proceeding in question (i.e., do they really need this information? Is the demand overly broad and intrusive?). And most significantly, the House weighs its constitutional immunity, particularly under the Speech or Debate Clause, to refuse compliance even if the evidence in question is critical. As any lawmaker will tell you, when the House relies on its privileges to tell an investigator to go pound sand, that is not obstruction; it’s the law.So, too, for the president. The conduct of foreign relations is a near-plenary power of the chief executive. We are not talking here about oversight of executive agencies created by Congress. The committees are aiming their subpoena demands at the place where the president’s constitutional power and privileges are at their most formidable. Of course the White House is not going to start surrendering records just because Chairman Cummings wrote a subpoena. This is going to be a protracted court battle, not because anyone is obstructing but because both sides have legitimate interests to protect.Now, let’s be clear about something.None of us should object in principle to the Democrats’ position that they are entitled to explore whether the president should be impeached. I do not agree that President Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. But to the extent Democrats do, or at least say they do, they have the authority to make that case to the country.In 2014, I wrote a book called Faithless Execution, which explored the case for impeaching President Obama. Naturally, I was castigated in Democratic (and many Republican) circles for having the temerity to mention the I-word in connection with The One. But that was to be expected — which, essentially, was my point.The Framers designed impeachment as a political remedy, not a legal one. I argued not that President Obama was a bad person but that he was behaving as the kind of chief executive the Framers feared — i.e., defying, in several ways, the separation-of-powers structure of the Constitution. Nevertheless, because impeachment is political, it is not enough to have acts that arguably qualify as impeachable abuses of power; there must also be a public consensus that gives Congress the political will to remove the president from power.That will does not spontaneously appear. It is up to Congress to build a political case that convinces Americans. It must be a strong case that cuts across partisan lines, because impeaching a president is a profound challenge to national cohesion, and because the two-thirds’ supermajority vote required in the Senate for removal ensures that impeachment is reserved for only truly egregious misconduct.Therefore, if lawmakers have a genuine belief that the president should be removed, it is their obligation to make that political case to the public, and they must have the opportunity to do so. I concluded that it would be foolish to attempt to impeach Obama absent public support for his removal. If you’re really worried about abuse of power, an unsuccessful impeachment attempt is apt to encourage more of it. My point, though, was to stress how essential impeachment was in the Framers’ design — “indispensable,” as Madison put it. If congressional Republicans believed it would be too politically damaging to try to build the case for impeachment, that was a rational choice, but one that had real downsides — namely, if there is no credible threat of impeachment, a president has no incentive to modify his behavior; the president is free to ignore laws and constitutional restraints, limited only by his own sense of political vulnerability.While I don’t share their conclusions, I have a grudging admiration for the Democrats’ willingness to do what Republicans would not: Make the public case that a president they see as deeply objectionable should be ousted. Making the case does not oblige congressional Democrats to vote on articles of impeachment; they are entitled to explore whether there should be articles of impeachment.But the question is: Do the Democrats have a good-faith belief that President Trump has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors, or are they engaged in a political stunt, the objectives of which are to appease irrational elements of their base and to batter Trump for 2020 election purposes?If they have a good-faith belief that the president’s impeachment must be considered, they owe it to the country to vote on conducting an impeachment inquiry, rather than continue dodging accountability. Indeed, if Democrats really believe what they say — if they really believe there have been appalling abuses of power, rather than mere missteps or political disputes — then they should be proud to vote on it.Only the House can impeach the president. If there is to be an inquiry about invoking this most solemn and consequential of the House’s powers, the House must vote to conduct it. It is not for the Speaker and her adjutants to decree that there is an inquiry. If the inquiry is to be legitimate, the House as a whole must decide to conduct it.Members of the House are the representatives of the sovereign — the People. In November 2020, the People are scheduled to vote on whether Donald Trump should keep his job. If Democrats, who control the House, truly believe the president has committed impeachable offenses and is so unfit for his duties that we can’t wait just 13 months for the sovereign to render that verdict, then they should vote to conduct an impeachment inquiry. If they are afraid to vote on it, then they shouldn’t be doing it. And, as their committee chairmen are fond of saying, we should draw a negative inference against them.

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[bloggerofworld]

If the House Won’t Vote, Impeachment Inquiry Is Just a Democratic Stunt

‘The House of Representatives . . . shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”It’s right there in black-and-white: In article I, section 2, clause 5, our Constitution vests the entirety of the power to call for removal of the president of the United States in a single body — the House.Not in the Speaker of the House. In the House of Representatives. The institution, not one of its members.To be sure, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a very powerful government official: second in the line of succession to the presidency; arguably, the most powerful member of Congress. She wields decisive influence on the business of her chamber. She even has the power to induce the House to vote on whether to conduct an impeachment inquiry.But she does not have the power to impeach on her own.In the end, Speaker Pelosi is just one member, a representative elected biannually by one district (in her case, the 12th district of California, centered in San Francisco and not particularly representative of the nation at large). Sure, she enjoys primus inter pares status because she is chosen by a majority of the House’s 435 members. But like each of those other members, her vote counts as just one — in a body that generally requires 218 votes to get the important things done.She is the Speaker. She is not the House. She does not have the authority to call for the president’s removal. She can argue for it, like the other members. She can vote on it, like the other members. But she cannot do it by herself. Only the House, acting as an institution, can do that.The House acts by voting. It has never voted to conduct an inquiry into whether President Trump should be impeached. Consequently, there is no House impeachment inquiry. There is a partisan exhibition of synchronized dyspepsia.This exhibition includes strident letters from a cabal of committee chairs, all Democrats, falsely claiming that a refusal by Trump-administration officials to comply with their demands for information and testimony “shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.”In point of fact, the House has no impeachment inquiry; congressional Democrats have an impeachment political campaign.Under federal law, the offense of obstructing Congress applies when “any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House.” Again, neither the House nor any of its committees has voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry. There is no formal impeachment proceeding to obstruct. Furthermore, the letters in question are not actually demands carrying the compulsory force of law; technically, they are just informal requests. No one is required to comply with a mere request, and refusing to do so is not evidence of anything, let alone obstruction.The House has issued some subpoenas. For example, the House Oversight Committee has just directed a subpoena to the White House, addressed to chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, reportedly demanding the production of a vast array of records (documents, communications, etc.) pertaining to the president’s conduct of relations with Ukraine.Typical of the Democrats’ legerdemain in this matter, the Oversight Committee has not voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry, nor did it vote to issue subpoenas (as, by contrast, the Oversight Committee voted to subpoena the White House just a few weeks ago for records germane to a suspected violation of federal recordkeeping laws). Instead, Chairman Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) strategically waited until the House closed for a two-week recess; then issued a memo on Wednesday, absurdly claiming that there was too much urgency to wait so a vote could be taken; then issued the subpoena late Friday, thus ensuring that no Republican could object and no Democrat would be forced to go on record supporting impeachment, which much of the public strongly opposes. Under House rules, the Oversight chairman has been delegated unilateral authority to issue subpoenas, so the subpoena is valid, but it is also pure gamesmanship.So is the explanation for the subpoena — offered in a letter that Chairman Cummings jointly signed with Chairmen Adam Schiff and Eliot Engel, respectively of the Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. After a couple of pages of throat-clearing about the purported “impeachment inquiry,” the chairmen observe that, even without such an inquiry, the Oversight Committee has its own independent authority to conduct oversight investigations and issue subpoenas. In other words, information is actually being demanded under Congress’s routine authority to scrutinize executive activities. There would be nothing extraordinary about it . . . except that senior Democrats have decided to hang an “impeachment” sign on the exercise, hoping you won’t notice that the House has not voted to explore impeachment, and that its Democratic leaders are going out of their way to avoid such a vote.In their letter, Cummings, Schiff, and Engel give Mulvaney the Democrats now standard admonition about obstruction. It is nonsense. Even when a formal House committee proceeding is underway, such that the obstruction statute could clearly apply, there is no legal presumption that the recipient’s refusal to comply with a subpoena is evidence of obstruction.Obstruction happens when there is tampering with documents or witnesses. Presumptively, a person who refuses to comply with a lawful document demand is not tampering with the documents; to the contrary, the subpoena recipient is asserting a legal claim of privilege that excuses compliance. If I am a lawyer, for example, and a congressional committee subpoenas notes from my meeting with a client, my refusal to surrender the notes is not an obstruction of the House’s investigation. It is an assertion that the attorney–client privilege justifies my withholding of confidential communications. If I am right about that, the legal wrong is Congress’s issuance of a subpoena, not my refusal to honor it.But am I right about it? We won’t know until we go to court and sort it out. Until a subpoena is litigated, it is scurrilous to claim, as Democrats do, that noncompliance with it amounts to felony obstruction. And equally scurrilous is the Democratic chairmen’s extortionate claim that noncompliance creates “an adverse inference” against the president and his chief-of-staff. If a prosecutor claimed that a suspect’s refusal to answer questions created an adverse inference of guilt, Democrats would likely have the prosecutor brought up on disciplinary charges for flouting the Fifth Amendment. There is no adverse inference drawn against a person who, in good faith reliance on a lawful privilege that plausibly applies, refuses to comply with a government demand.Congressional Democrats are well aware of this. What do you suppose would happen if the Justice Department or a litigant in a civil case decided to issue a grand-jury or trial subpoena to a member of Congress, or a House staffer? Actually, you need not suppose, because the House has elaborate rules for this situation (they’ve been in place for years, with each new Congress essentially reaffirming them — see, e.g., here, pp. 5–6). The House prescribes a thorough review, with paramount consideration of all “the privileges and rights of the House” to withhold information from the executive branch, the grand jury, the courts, and the public. The demand is examined so that the House may make its own determination of whether the information sought is relevant and material to the investigation or proceeding in question (i.e., do they really need this information? Is the demand overly broad and intrusive?). And most significantly, the House weighs its constitutional immunity, particularly under the Speech or Debate Clause, to refuse compliance even if the evidence in question is critical. As any lawmaker will tell you, when the House relies on its privileges to tell an investigator to go pound sand, that is not obstruction; it’s the law.So, too, for the president. The conduct of foreign relations is a near-plenary power of the chief executive. We are not talking here about oversight of executive agencies created by Congress. The committees are aiming their subpoena demands at the place where the president’s constitutional power and privileges are at their most formidable. Of course the White House is not going to start surrendering records just because Chairman Cummings wrote a subpoena. This is going to be a protracted court battle, not because anyone is obstructing but because both sides have legitimate interests to protect.Now, let’s be clear about something.None of us should object in principle to the Democrats’ position that they are entitled to explore whether the president should be impeached. I do not agree that President Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. But to the extent Democrats do, or at least say they do, they have the authority to make that case to the country.In 2014, I wrote a book called Faithless Execution, which explored the case for impeaching President Obama. Naturally, I was castigated in Democratic (and many Republican) circles for having the temerity to mention the I-word in connection with The One. But that was to be expected — which, essentially, was my point.The Framers designed impeachment as a political remedy, not a legal one. I argued not that President Obama was a bad person but that he was behaving as the kind of chief executive the Framers feared — i.e., defying, in several ways, the separation-of-powers structure of the Constitution. Nevertheless, because impeachment is political, it is not enough to have acts that arguably qualify as impeachable abuses of power; there must also be a public consensus that gives Congress the political will to remove the president from power.That will does not spontaneously appear. It is up to Congress to build a political case that convinces Americans. It must be a strong case that cuts across partisan lines, because impeaching a president is a profound challenge to national cohesion, and because the two-thirds’ supermajority vote required in the Senate for removal ensures that impeachment is reserved for only truly egregious misconduct.Therefore, if lawmakers have a genuine belief that the president should be removed, it is their obligation to make that political case to the public, and they must have the opportunity to do so. I concluded that it would be foolish to attempt to impeach Obama absent public support for his removal. If you’re really worried about abuse of power, an unsuccessful impeachment attempt is apt to encourage more of it. My point, though, was to stress how essential impeachment was in the Framers’ design — “indispensable,” as Madison put it. If congressional Republicans believed it would be too politically damaging to try to build the case for impeachment, that was a rational choice, but one that had real downsides — namely, if there is no credible threat of impeachment, a president has no incentive to modify his behavior; the president is free to ignore laws and constitutional restraints, limited only by his own sense of political vulnerability.While I don’t share their conclusions, I have a grudging admiration for the Democrats’ willingness to do what Republicans would not: Make the public case that a president they see as deeply objectionable should be ousted. Making the case does not oblige congressional Democrats to vote on articles of impeachment; they are entitled to explore whether there should be articles of impeachment.But the question is: Do the Democrats have a good-faith belief that President Trump has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors, or are they engaged in a political stunt, the objectives of which are to appease irrational elements of their base and to batter Trump for 2020 election purposes?If they have a good-faith belief that the president’s impeachment must be considered, they owe it to the country to vote on conducting an impeachment inquiry, rather than continue dodging accountability. Indeed, if Democrats really believe what they say — if they really believe there have been appalling abuses of power, rather than mere missteps or political disputes — then they should be proud to vote on it.Only the House can impeach the president. If there is to be an inquiry about invoking this most solemn and consequential of the House’s powers, the House must vote to conduct it. It is not for the Speaker and her adjutants to decree that there is an inquiry. If the inquiry is to be legitimate, the House as a whole must decide to conduct it.Members of the House are the representatives of the sovereign — the People. In November 2020, the People are scheduled to vote on whether Donald Trump should keep his job. If Democrats, who control the House, truly believe the president has committed impeachable offenses and is so unfit for his duties that we can’t wait just 13 months for the sovereign to render that verdict, then they should vote to conduct an impeachment inquiry. If they are afraid to vote on it, then they shouldn’t be doing it. And, as their committee chairmen are fond of saying, we should draw a negative inference against them.

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[worldnews-blog]

‘The House of Representatives . . . shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”It’s right there in black-and-white: In article I, section 2, clause 5, our Constitution vests the entirety of the power to call for removal of the president of the United States in a single body — the House.Not in the Speaker of the House. In the House of Representatives. The institution, not one of its members.To be sure, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a very powerful government official: second in the line of succession to the presidency; arguably, the most powerful member of Congress. She wields decisive influence on the business of her chamber. She even has the power to induce the House to vote on whether to conduct an impeachment inquiry.But she does not have the power to impeach on her own.In the end, Speaker Pelosi is just one member, a representative elected biannually by one district (in her case, the 12th district of California, centered in San Francisco and not particularly representative of the nation at large). Sure, she enjoys primus inter pares status because she is chosen by a majority of the House’s 435 members. But like each of those other members, her vote counts as just one — in a body that generally requires 218 votes to get the important things done.She is the Speaker. She is not the House. She does not have the authority to call for the president’s removal. She can argue for it, like the other members. She can vote on it, like the other members. But she cannot do it by herself. Only the House, acting as an institution, can do that.The House acts by voting. It has never voted to conduct an inquiry into whether President Trump should be impeached. Consequently, there is no House impeachment inquiry. There is a partisan exhibition of synchronized dyspepsia.This exhibition includes strident letters from a cabal of committee chairs, all Democrats, falsely claiming that a refusal by Trump-administration officials to comply with their demands for information and testimony “shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.”In point of fact, the House has no impeachment inquiry; congressional Democrats have an impeachment political campaign.Under federal law, the offense of obstructing Congress applies when “any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House.” Again, neither the House nor any of its committees has voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry. There is no formal impeachment proceeding to obstruct. Furthermore, the letters in question are not actually demands carrying the compulsory force of law; technically, they are just informal requests. No one is required to comply with a mere request, and refusing to do so is not evidence of anything, let alone obstruction.The House has issued some subpoenas. For example, the House Oversight Committee has just directed a subpoena to the White House, addressed to chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, reportedly demanding the production of a vast array of records (documents, communications, etc.) pertaining to the president’s conduct of relations with Ukraine.Typical of the Democrats’ legerdemain in this matter, the Oversight Committee has not voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry, nor did it vote to issue subpoenas (as, by contrast, the Oversight Committee voted to subpoena the White House just a few weeks ago for records germane to a suspected violation of federal recordkeeping laws). Instead, Chairman Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) strategically waited until the House closed for a two-week recess; then issued a memo on Wednesday, absurdly claiming that there was too much urgency to wait so a vote could be taken; then issued the subpoena late Friday, thus ensuring that no Republican could object and no Democrat would be forced to go on record supporting impeachment, which much of the public strongly opposes. Under House rules, the Oversight chairman has been delegated unilateral authority to issue subpoenas, so the subpoena is valid, but it is also pure gamesmanship.So is the explanation for the subpoena — offered in a letter that Chairman Cummings jointly signed with Chairmen Adam Schiff and Eliot Engel, respectively of the Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. After a couple of pages of throat-clearing about the purported “impeachment inquiry,” the chairmen observe that, even without such an inquiry, the Oversight Committee has its own independent authority to conduct oversight investigations and issue subpoenas. In other words, information is actually being demanded under Congress’s routine authority to scrutinize executive activities. There would be nothing extraordinary about it . . . except that senior Democrats have decided to hang an “impeachment” sign on the exercise, hoping you won’t notice that the House has not voted to explore impeachment, and that its Democratic leaders are going out of their way to avoid such a vote.In their letter, Cummings, Schiff, and Engel give Mulvaney the Democrats now standard admonition about obstruction. It is nonsense. Even when a formal House committee proceeding is underway, such that the obstruction statute could clearly apply, there is no legal presumption that the recipient’s refusal to comply with a subpoena is evidence of obstruction.Obstruction happens when there is tampering with documents or witnesses. Presumptively, a person who refuses to comply with a lawful document demand is not tampering with the documents; to the contrary, the subpoena recipient is asserting a legal claim of privilege that excuses compliance. If I am a lawyer, for example, and a congressional committee subpoenas notes from my meeting with a client, my refusal to surrender the notes is not an obstruction of the House’s investigation. It is an assertion that the attorney–client privilege justifies my withholding of confidential communications. If I am right about that, the legal wrong is Congress’s issuance of a subpoena, not my refusal to honor it.But am I right about it? We won’t know until we go to court and sort it out. Until a subpoena is litigated, it is scurrilous to claim, as Democrats do, that noncompliance with it amounts to felony obstruction. And equally scurrilous is the Democratic chairmen’s extortionate claim that noncompliance creates “an adverse inference” against the president and his chief-of-staff. If a prosecutor claimed that a suspect’s refusal to answer questions created an adverse inference of guilt, Democrats would likely have the prosecutor brought up on disciplinary charges for flouting the Fifth Amendment. There is no adverse inference drawn against a person who, in good faith reliance on a lawful privilege that plausibly applies, refuses to comply with a government demand.Congressional Democrats are well aware of this. What do you suppose would happen if the Justice Department or a litigant in a civil case decided to issue a grand-jury or trial subpoena to a member of Congress, or a House staffer? Actually, you need not suppose, because the House has elaborate rules for this situation (they’ve been in place for years, with each new Congress essentially reaffirming them — see, e.g., here, pp. 5–6). The House prescribes a thorough review, with paramount consideration of all “the privileges and rights of the House” to withhold information from the executive branch, the grand jury, the courts, and the public. The demand is examined so that the House may make its own determination of whether the information sought is relevant and material to the investigation or proceeding in question (i.e., do they really need this information? Is the demand overly broad and intrusive?). And most significantly, the House weighs its constitutional immunity, particularly under the Speech or Debate Clause, to refuse compliance even if the evidence in question is critical. As any lawmaker will tell you, when the House relies on its privileges to tell an investigator to go pound sand, that is not obstruction; it’s the law.So, too, for the president. The conduct of foreign relations is a near-plenary power of the chief executive. We are not talking here about oversight of executive agencies created by Congress. The committees are aiming their subpoena demands at the place where the president’s constitutional power and privileges are at their most formidable. Of course the White House is not going to start surrendering records just because Chairman Cummings wrote a subpoena. This is going to be a protracted court battle, not because anyone is obstructing but because both sides have legitimate interests to protect.Now, let’s be clear about something.None of us should object in principle to the Democrats’ position that they are entitled to explore whether the president should be impeached. I do not agree that President Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. But to the extent Democrats do, or at least say they do, they have the authority to make that case to the country.In 2014, I wrote a book called Faithless Execution, which explored the case for impeaching President Obama. Naturally, I was castigated in Democratic (and many Republican) circles for having the temerity to mention the I-word in connection with The One. But that was to be expected — which, essentially, was my point.The Framers designed impeachment as a political remedy, not a legal one. I argued not that President Obama was a bad person but that he was behaving as the kind of chief executive the Framers feared — i.e., defying, in several ways, the separation-of-powers structure of the Constitution. Nevertheless, because impeachment is political, it is not enough to have acts that arguably qualify as impeachable abuses of power; there must also be a public consensus that gives Congress the political will to remove the president from power.That will does not spontaneously appear. It is up to Congress to build a political case that convinces Americans. It must be a strong case that cuts across partisan lines, because impeaching a president is a profound challenge to national cohesion, and because the two-thirds’ supermajority vote required in the Senate for removal ensures that impeachment is reserved for only truly egregious misconduct.Therefore, if lawmakers have a genuine belief that the president should be removed, it is their obligation to make that political case to the public, and they must have the opportunity to do so. I concluded that it would be foolish to attempt to impeach Obama absent public support for his removal. If you’re really worried about abuse of power, an unsuccessful impeachment attempt is apt to encourage more of it. My point, though, was to stress how essential impeachment was in the Framers’ design — “indispensable,” as Madison put it. If congressional Republicans believed it would be too politically damaging to try to build the case for impeachment, that was a rational choice, but one that had real downsides — namely, if there is no credible threat of impeachment, a president has no incentive to modify his behavior; the president is free to ignore laws and constitutional restraints, limited only by his own sense of political vulnerability.While I don’t share their conclusions, I have a grudging admiration for the Democrats’ willingness to do what Republicans would not: Make the public case that a president they see as deeply objectionable should be ousted. Making the case does not oblige congressional Democrats to vote on articles of impeachment; they are entitled to explore whether there should be articles of impeachment.But the question is: Do the Democrats have a good-faith belief that President Trump has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors, or are they engaged in a political stunt, the objectives of which are to appease irrational elements of their base and to batter Trump for 2020 election purposes?If they have a good-faith belief that the president’s impeachment must be considered, they owe it to the country to vote on conducting an impeachment inquiry, rather than continue dodging accountability. Indeed, if Democrats really believe what they say — if they really believe there have been appalling abuses of power, rather than mere missteps or political disputes — then they should be proud to vote on it.Only the House can impeach the president. If there is to be an inquiry about invoking this most solemn and consequential of the House’s powers, the House must vote to conduct it. It is not for the Speaker and her adjutants to decree that there is an inquiry. If the inquiry is to be legitimate, the House as a whole must decide to conduct it.Members of the House are the representatives of the sovereign — the People. In November 2020, the People are scheduled to vote on whether Donald Trump should keep his job. If Democrats, who control the House, truly believe the president has committed impeachable offenses and is so unfit for his duties that we can’t wait just 13 months for the sovereign to render that verdict, then they should vote to conduct an impeachment inquiry. If they are afraid to vote on it, then they shouldn’t be doing it. And, as their committee chairmen are fond of saying, we should draw a negative inference against them.

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