#and it was a political rally right she gathered people who she hoped to earn their vote

[post-futurism]

I went to a local greens rally and unfortunately this will be the first time in my life that I'm not going to vote for a greens candidate even though there is one available.

[legendsoffodlan]

Wild West AU (Yeehaw)

The town? Garreg Mach. A growing boomtown on the edge of the frontier. Life out here is tough, but the people are tougher. Between the sandstorms, the corrupt politicians and business moguls, and the weird magic shit going on behind the scenes, the people of Garreg Mach are gonna need all their wit and gumption to survive.

-

Golden Deer

Claude: A popular young lawyer, half Irish Immigrant and half Cheyenne Native American. Claude is well known as a bit of a celebrity about town, frequently challenging the government and protecting the rights of Native Americans and their claims to land. A bit ruthless and a lot charming, Claude is a leader among the townsfolk, particularly the poorer folk.

Hilda: While the Civil War ruined most southern folk, Hilda’s family made it rich by siding with the Union and fighting the Confederacy. Hilda, a southern belle who also happens to be as strong as an ox, came to Garreg Mach to get away from her overbearing brother. A rich girl, she frequently funds Claude’s efforts to protect Native and African American rights.

Lorenz: Born to an old-money New England family, Lorenz talks and acts like British nobility. He’s come to Garreg Mach to expand his family business, but he aims to do it the proper way, avoiding his father’s unsavory tactics. He pays all his employees a living wage, and insists on paid vacation and maternity leave. A reluctant ally of Claude, Lorenz truly has a heart of gold under the snobbery.

Marianne: Marianne's family worked on the Underground Railroad, shepherding slaves to freedom. That got them killed. Alone now, Marianne has come out west to try and get away from her past as the town doctor. But he inborn compassion proves too powerful for her, and she frequently finds herself fighting alongside Claude in his legal suits. She’s smart and she’s ind, but blames herself for her parents deaths.

Ignatz: The son of a merchant who hit it big during the Gold Rush, selling to miners, Ignatz has been sent out to the frontier to both expand his family business and try to make it big selling his art. Ignatz loves to paint murals upon the various buildings of Garreg Mach, bringing some much needed color and beauty to the town.

Leonie: A spitfire girl who was born and raised to ride ‘em, rope ‘em, and brand ‘em, Leonie is a cowgirl through and through. She’s been making a name for herself as a bounty hunter, bringing outlaws and the like to justice. She hates big business and “civilized softies”, but she’s got a place in her heart for her more “upper class” friends. She thinks this whole “Manifest Destiny” thing is stupid and works with Claude against heedless expansion.

Raphael: The son of Scottish immigrants, Raphael’s a big guy with a big heart and an even bigger appetite. With a sick grandpa and a little sister to look after, Raphael makes his money working as the local blacksmith and occasional head-thumper at the bar when fellas get too fresh with the dancing girls. He does his best to keep the town honest and he’s more than willing to throw down against any corrupt old men looking to take over his home.

Lysithea: Smart as a whip and just as stinging, Lysithea is a genius chemist and scientist. Diagnosed with a nasty disease early on in her life, she’s determined to make the most of the time she’s got. She bought herself an old farm which she’s converted into a “science paradise”, Lysithea is determined to make as many breakthroughs as possible, making money to leave her parents comfortable. Much to her chagrin, she finds herself sucked into Claude’s legal fights

-

Blue Lions

Dimitri: Dimitri was a boy, son of wealthy Russian immigrants, when he enlisted in the Civil War. Now traumatized and trying to move, he’s come out West to find a better life. But his wish for a quiet existence seems to be for naught, as he finds himself made Sheriff of Garreg Mach and charged with fighting criminals and the corrupt. Hoping that protecting the living will silence the screams of the dead in his head, Dimitri is determined to protect his people, no matter what form the threat takes.

Dedue: The son of an escaped slave, he and Dimitri met during the Civil War. Hoping to liberate the rest of his family, Dedue found that the slaves of the plantation his mother had fled from had been butchered by their master, whom Dedue and Dimitri killed in revenge. Disillusioned, Dedue now leads many former slaves here in Garreg Mach, helping them find their footing as farmers and ranchers. A part-time deputy for Dimitri, Dedue will let nothing stand in his way of fighting for a better future for his people.

Ingrid: A girl who disguised herself as a man to fight in the war, Ingrid is firecly loyal to Dimitri as his full-time deputy. A powerful voice of compassion and justice, Ingrid is a devotedly “by the book” woman. She’s been softened to new ideas by many of the folk in Garreg Mach, but she remains decidedly stubborn towards change. Nonetheless, you’ll never find a more devoted and steadfast soldier than Ingrid.

Sylvain: The local lothario and heartbreaker, Sylvain is the self-proclaimed “good for nothing” son of a wealthy rancher. Despite this, his kind heart frequently triumphs over his self-loathing and he stands as a permanent friend of Dimitri and enemy of the forces seeking to ruin Garreg Mach. A surprisingly good quickdraw, Sylvain also fights alongside Dedue for the rights of the African Americans in Garreg Mach.

Mercedes: The daughter of slave-owners, Mercedes ran away from that life, unwillingly leaving her brother behind. Working first on the Underground Railroad, and then as a medic during the war, Mercedes has come to Garreg Mach to devote her life to the Goddess and the less fortunate. A permanent fixture of compassion and healing, Mercedes is beloved by the everyone for her willingness to heal and work with everyone no matter their race, religion, or nationality.

Felix: The son of New England wealth, Felix is the fastest gun in the west and one of the best bounty hunters to boot. Sickened by civilization by the horrors he experienced in the war, Felix is determined to make his own way in the world as a running gun and part-time vigilante. Despite his “lone wolf” status, Felix finds himself frequently coming back to Garreg Mach and the friends he’s made there, frequently ridding with Sheriff Dimitri, grumbling all the way.

Annette: The local schoolteacher and historian, Annette is a slightly flighty girl who loves her friends, her charges, and books. Always trying her hardest, Annette is behind several charities trying to take care of veterans and former slaves, working closely with Dimitri and Dedue towards that end. She’s also a part-time singer at the local saloon, much to the town’s scandal.

Ashe: A former thief, then the adopted son of a Southern Abolitionist, Ashe lost everything during the war. Gathering up the remains of his adopted and blood-related family, he now seeks to build a new life for them in Garreg Mach. Despite trying to stay out of trouble, his strong sense of fairness and compassion frequently suck him into problems that are not his own, fighting for the weak and downtrodden. He’s one of the few people who can sometimes outdraw Felix.

-

Black Eagles

Edelgard: The mayor of Garreg Mach, Edelgard was the daughter of a powerful plantation owner before she gunned her father down and rallied her friends to take up arms against the Confederacy. Now she fights for the rights of the poor and oppressed as Mayor with the same ferocity and single-mindedness that she fought in the war. She frequently butts heads with Claude and Dimitri over methods, but she is determined to create a better future, and damn anyone who gets in her way.

Hubert: Edelgard’s closest friend and bodyguard, Hubert is also a chemist and mathematician, using his deadly intellect to devastating results. While absolutely devoted to Edelgard, Hubert is also determined to make a better future through whatever means necessary, no matter how unsavory they might be. There are rumors about what happened to Hubert’s father during the war, but nothing that could be proven.

Petra: The daughter of a Lakota Native American Chief, Petra is determined to make a better future for her tribe and fights for their rights at every turn. As such she works frequently with Claude and Edelgard to secure the rights of the Lakota. As deadly as she is beautiful, Petra makes her money by keeping the frontier safe and taking out Edelgard’s political enemies to pave the way for her people’s future.

Ferdinand: While Lorenz only acts like British nobility, Ferdinand actually is British Nobility, come across the pond to secure his family’s interests. He ended up sucked into Edelgard’s crusade and provides support and money to her designs. Despite his loud demeanor and arrogant tendencies, Ferdinand is a kind creature at heart who will always put his neck out for the little guy, much to his family’s chagrin. He’s also the owner of the local saloon, and as such everyone want to be on his good side.

Dorothea: The star-singer of the town saloon, Dorothea is the face of Edelgard’s political machine, earning support and favor with her charm and her voice. She has a love-hate relationship with her boss, Ferdinand that veers between attempted murder and true love. She spends most of her money on the poor and badly-off as she knows what its like to go without. Despite her pretty face and gentle demeanor, she’s no less vicious in her pursuit of what’s right than Edelgard.

Caspar: The former son of a plantation owner, Caspar fought alongside Edelgard against the Confederacy and his own father. Tough, brave, and true-hearted, no one knows what Caspar’s job actually is. He just seems to do a little bit of everything from manual labor to bounty-hunting. A permanent shield for “the little guy”, Caspar will never give-up the good fight. Never.

Linhardt: As smart as he is, Linhardt could take over the world if he had a mind to. Fortunately, he doesn’t. A scientist and researcher who frequently works alongside Lysithea, Linhardt seems more interested in taking naps and reading his books than anything else. Despite this, he maintains polite friendships with many of the townsfolk, including his dearest friend Caspar whom he lives with and shares a bed with. But totally just good friends!

Bernadetta: The local shut-in, Bernadetta was the victim of an abusive father and neglectful mother, who jumped at the chance to run away when Edelgard presented it. Despite her shyness and her borderline agoraphobia, Bernadetta runs a large farm outside of town, frequently hosting political get-together which she barely shows up at. Hidden reserves of courage drive her to help Petra and her people frequently providing aid whenever she can. From insider her room, of course.

[lastsonlost]

Oh my God Elon said something we don't agree with. God I hope Apple and Starbucks disagrees with you too.

Owning a Tesla, the luxurious electric car, is a major liberal status symbol. It signals nothing more than good taste — the perfect balance of wealth with care for fossil fuels. But the man behind the brand is crafting a very different persona online that may now prove to be a challenge for his fans.

Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to “take the red pill.” The comment was quickly embraced by his followers, including Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s elder daughter, who announced that she had taken the pill already.

The exchange referred to a scene from “The Matrix,” the 1999 science fiction action film. But the meaning of “red pill,” and the idea of taking it, have since percolated in online forums and become a deeply political metaphor. And with Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump, the phrase is now lodged more fully into the mainstream.

So Tesla owners are having to grapple with a car that carries a few new connotations.

“Honestly, Musk is becoming a liability and the Tesla board needs to seriously consider ousting him,” wrote Markos Moulitsas, author of “The Resistance Handbook: 45 Ways to Fight Trump.” “And I say that as a proud owner of a Tesla and a SpaceX fanatic who truly appreciates what he’s built.”

So what is the red pill?

[ I hope your fuckings Tesla explodes. You don't have to be in its but you should be forced to walk everywhere.]

In “The Matrix,” the movie’s hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.

The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie; his body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries. Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into an arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.

The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to society’s grand lies. It was embraced by the right, especially by members of its youngest cohort who organized and spent their time in online forums like Reddit and 4chan.

The truth to be woken up to varied, but it ended up usually being about gender. To be red-pilled meant you discovered that feminism was a scam that ruined the lives of boys and girls. In this view, for a male to refuse the red pill was to be weak.

Red Pill forums were often filled with deeply misogynistic and often racist diatribes. The more extreme elements splintered into groups like involuntary celibates (“incels”) or male separatists (Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOWs). Conferences like the 21 Convention and its sister convention, Make Women Great Again, sprang up to gather red-pilled men. Being red-pilled became a sort of umbrella term for all of it.

As these conversations seeped into the mainstream, pulled along by a host of other internet language from message boards to establishment Republican conversations on sites like Breitbart, the meaning broadened and got watered down. To be red-pilled can now mean being broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism.

What’s going on with Elon Musk?

Mr. Musk has been pretty wild online for years now, which has made him a major internet celebrity with devoted fans who call themselves Musketeers. There are fan pages like Musk Memes with nearly 100,000 followers, and a Reddit page with 200,000 members in constant, extremely active conversation.

Most recently, Mr. Musk has been a prominent skeptic online of the coronavirus, calling the response to it a “panic” and “dumb” and wrongly predicting close to zero new cases by the end of April. As of Tuesday, there were more than 90,000 deaths from the virus and more than 1.5 million cases in the United States alone.

The night before Tesla’s earnings were released last month, Mr. Musk tweeted an anti-lockdown rallying cry: “FREE AMERICA NOW.” He had a showdown with local lawmakers, threatening to move Tesla headquarters out of California and deciding to reopen a Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., despite the local county’s restrictions to prevent the virus from spreading.

When State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez objected on May 9 with an obscene tweet, Mr. Musk responded, “Message received.”

Defending his reopening of the Tesla factory, Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter that he would be on the factory floor and offered himself up to authorities. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he posted on May 11. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

This month, he and his girlfriend, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, had a child and named him X Æ A-12. And Mr. Musk announced that Tesla shares were too high and that he was selling almost all his possessions to the point of owning no house.

“We have a phrase, it’s E.M.M. — Elon Moves Markets,” said Bill Selesky, an analyst at Argus Research who tracks how Mr. Musk’s messages impact Tesla’s stock price. “People want to listen to him no matter what he says. He tends to be thought of as a great visionary.”

Mr. Selesky said even Mr. Musk’s detractors parsed every tweet and utterance. “Plus, if you have a Tesla, nobody can ever complain about you because you’re good for society,” he added.

This leads back to Mr. Musk’s message on Sunday, telling his followers to take the red pill.

Do ‘The Matrix’ creators like this?

No. Lilly Wachowski, a “Matrix” co-creator, told Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump in colorful language on Twitter that they could take a hike.

Is ‘red pill’ a Silicon Valley thing?

To some extent.

There has long been a strain of men’s rights activism in Silicon Valley, exemplified by James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired after writing a memo arguing that the reason there are fewer female engineers is biological differences rather than discrimination.

Mr. Damore became a folk hero for a simmering movement in the technology industry of people who thought the efforts toward 50/50 representation at tech companies were absurd. Cassie Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist, made a 2016 documentary about the Red Pill community and said it had flourished in the tech world.

But the more common phrase in Silicon Valley to signal contrarian thinking is “narrative violation,” which is often used to describe an event that cuts against the mainstream media’s consensus on a topic. The idea is that there is a story being told about the world and how it works, but that the story is too simplistic to be entirely true and an event occasionally pops up to remind people of that.

Why does any of this matter?

Few products today are as deeply entwined with a person’s brand as Tesla is with Mr. Musk, and so his comments can feel personal for Tesla drivers.

“As a Tesla owner, a 47-year-old male recovering from Covid-19, and someone very concerned simultaneously about the environment, the economy, my kids’ and my parents’ future, this ain’t great,” said Jeff Guilfoyle, a product manager at FireEye in San Diego. “This disease is no joke, and the long-term health impacts are unknown for survivors.”

Many have implored Mr. Musk online to stop.

Raja Sohail Abbas, the chief executive of an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Allentown, Pa., wrote: “I am a Tesla owner and love the company. You have to stop being an idiot about this.”

“Tesla owner and Fan here, but this was a disappointing tweet despite the frustrations of and holdups,” added Alex Goodchild, a D.J. in Brooklyn. “Words are weapons especially when used during situations like the one we’re currently experiencing. You sound just like Trump in this tweet.”

The debate has riven the Tesla community.

“The last two months, there’s been this polarization in the Elon Musk fan club,” said Paula Timothy-Mellon, a technology consultant who moderates that LinkedIn-based fan club, which has 22,000 members. “There are those who are believers in these California guidelines and there are those in favor of his push to re-open Tesla.”

“As a Tesla owner, a 47-year-old male recovering from Covid-19, and someone very concerned simultaneously about the environment, the economy, my kids’ and my parents’ future, this ain’t great,” said Jeff Guilfoyle, a product manager at FireEye in San Diego. “This disease is no joke, and the long-term health impacts are unknown for survivors.”

Many have implored Mr. Musk online to stop.

Raja Sohail Abbas, the chief executive of an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Allentown, Pa., wrote: “I am a Tesla owner and love the company. You have to stop being an idiot about this.”

“Tesla owner and Fan here, but this was a disappointing tweet despite the frustrations of and holdups,” added Alex Goodchild, a D.J. in Brooklyn. “Words are weapons especially when used during situations like the one we’re currently experiencing. You sound just like Trump in this tweet.”

The debate has riven the Tesla community.

“The last two months, there’s been this polarization in the Elon Musk fan club,” said Paula Timothy-Mellon, a technology consultant who moderates that LinkedIn-based fan club, which has 22,000 members. “There are those who are believers in these California guidelines and there are those in favor of his push to re-open Tesla.”

Driving a Tesla often carries great symbolism for the owner (and observers).

“If you own a Tesla, you feel you are directly connected to Elon Musk and people think that Tesla owners are directly connected to the politics of the C.E.O.,” said Sam Kelly, a Tesla owner and investor based in Spain who posts under the name SamTalksTesla.

He added that he did not think the red pill comment meant any big new political awakening from Mr. Musk.

Asked to explain his thinking, Mr. Musk pasted an image of the Urban Dictionary definition of red pill in an email. It read:

“‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.”

Seriously get a refund, buy a prius and

GET THE FUCKS OVER IT!

[real-jaune-isms]

RWBY Volume 7 Chapter 8 Rundown

Another fantastic chapter, and a real nail biting way to leave us hanging for an extra week of holiday hiatus. I have many thoughts about this one, lots good but some more foreboding. So, with this very late edition to my ongoing efforts to review the Volume, and a warning that I will be focusing on events one group at a time rather than cutting back and forth like the episode does, let’s begin. 

The chapter opens on Team RWBY plus Oscar gathered to look at the invitation to the dinner party Weiss is holding. According to his public statement on the news, Jacques says this is an act of kindness to soothe hostilities as he transitions into his position on the Council, but they know this is pure intimidation and Weiss even calls it a hostile takeover. The other council members have been described as scared and seemingly easy to persuade one way or the other, and if Jacques is good at anything it’s talking others into doing what he wants. So Ironwood will be on full blast here, with his rival having full control of the conversation rather than getting to open up about his actions on his terms. Weiss is still in disbelief that her father won the election at all, and they entertain the possibility that Salem’s influence had a hand in this. He’s not the type to get involved in her brand of evil, but he WILL do whatever he has to to get his way. So Ruby thinks they should do whatever they have to for the sake of proving his misdeeds. Team RWBY will go to the party and Weiss will sneak off to look around for clues of anything fishy. Afterall, no one would question why she’s walking around in her own house. Weiss looks like she doesn’t want to do that, but she will anyway. She’s a brave girl. 

We finally see an exterior shot of the Schnee Estate as the limos pull up front, and it’s just as sprawling and impressive as we had guessed. Ironwood and Winter are there with Penny of course, as are Team RWBY, JNR and Oscar came too, and even Qrow and the Ace Ops. Winter wouldn’t be caught dead smiling here though, which Ironwood cracks a joke about. The doorbell is rung and the doors open to reveal... Whitley, playing the part of gracious host with sickening false sweetness. It would seem dear Klein was fired, likely for helping Weiss escape. So that’s even more guilt for her to deal with. They all go inside, with the General, Winter, Penny, and Clover splitting off to meet with Jacques at the table proper. Qrow and Clover have a cute little exchange about wishing them good luck, before Qrow practically gets ‘nam flashbacks upon being offered a glass of wine. He heads off to patrol the grounds instead, and the remaining Ace Ops follow suit. Harriet warns the kids not to wander off or break anything and to be ready if called upon. Yang has a different set of guidelines in mind however, and Weiss heads off to go snooping... before being stopped at the stairs by Whitley who wants to brag about how he’s the heir now and she’s the runaway disgrace come crawling back. This one-sided conversation drags on for a while before JNR decide to cause a commotion to get him off Weiss’ back. Nora get a tray stacked high with food, and she and Ren “accidentally” bump into each other to send the food flying right onto Whitley... or it would have. Unfortunately a woman looking to get some hors d’oeuvres walks in front of him and gets the food all over her dress. Fortunately, she had a glass of wine and tosses it on Whitley when she freaks out over getting such a mess on her. So Whitley leaves to get cleaned up while Weiss is trying not to show any emotion that might suggest she was in on that and RBY laughs to themselves. Great job, JNR!

The General and company are greeted by Jacques himself and sit at the far side of the table from him, with two council members, Councilman Sleet and Councilwoman Camilla, sitting by the Schnee patriarch. Robyn Hill was even invited to the party, and sits halfway between the two sides in a subtle show of her allegiance being up for grabs. Jacques is playing gracious host better than even his son had, and says Robyn was invited to discuss the concerns towards the kingdom, of which they seem to have a lot. Before James can even propose a topic to start with, Jacques starts pointing venomous fingers at Penny, asking if her being there is in everyone’s best interest considering what the public believes about the recent massacre. Ironwood tries to set the record straight with what has been officially confirmed as the truth, but his words are a bit morally questionable. Oh sure, saying the footage everyone is freaked out about was doctored is fine, but he says Penny is completely under his control. That’s not how you refer to a subordinate, it’s how you talk about a machine like one of his drones. She is a living person with a soul and will of her own, you asshole. You don’t control her, you employ her. She can speak for herself and her own actions. Granted, she may not have the debating skills to keep up with a master manipulator like Jacques, but really neither does Ironwood. As a very clever podcast has pointed out, this is a job for soft skills, which Ironwood does not have a lot of practice in what with his job mostly involving ordering people to do things and making strategies for battles. The man would do quite poorly against Vizzini from the Princess Bride. Speaking of the bastard, Jacques springboards off of Ironwood’s phrasing to call into question exactly how much the General has control over. 

The scene shifts back to the kids but when we see the dinner table again it is now Councilman Sleet pointing out that they have given Ironwood free reign to act as he sees fit for the last few years but with the way things are in Atlas right now that may have to come to an end. They need him to cooperate and to feel like they can keep him from acting on any outlandish military motivated impulses that might endanger the kingdom at large. And when you think about it, this is an oddly laid out political system. There seem to only be 5 council seats in total, and it’s been established that as both general of the military and academy headmaster Ironwood holds two of those seats. The position Jacques now holds on the council is especially important since a manipulator like him could get the other two on his side to outvote anything Ironwood proposes. With all the secrets James has been keeping about who they’re really fighting and how Atlas might become the next Beacon, the council thinks there is no danger to the kingdom thus embargo is pretty much pointless and should be lifted.  After all, there is no immediate threat from another kingdom, they had no connection to the attack on Haven, and it’s been proven that the robot soldiers attacking at Beacon were hacked and thus they are not at fault. So all the embargo is doing is hurting their relations with the other kingdoms. This news is exactly what Jacques wanted to hear, since that means he can start selling Dust and earning money again. And Robyn apparently hasn’t been the biggest fan of the border closing either, since it’s been hurting the people within the kingdom every bit as much as it has hurt how the rest of the world interacts with them. The least these people deserve is an answer as to why they’re suffering. Jacques takes this opportunity to dig even deeper into Ironwood’s decision making and recent activities. If there are no leads or apprehended suspects for the warehouse rally massacre or the string of anti-Ironwood public figures murdered, the military seems quite ineffectual at keeping the people safe. Clover tries to play it professionally and say they can’t divulge the classified details of ongoing investigations like that. But their host points out there have been an awful lot of “classified” things that no one is being told about. To the surprise of a now in the know Robyn, the council has no idea what the Amity Project is for and have every reason to worry it’s a pointless waste of time and resources. As usual, the General tries to keep things vague but reassuring in saying that the Amity Project is going to help with the problems they brought up, but it’s very important that he not go into much detail about it. Jacques calls into question Ironwood’s very real problem with trusting others to know what he knows. Winter had been growing more and more agitated as accusations and doubts were thrown at the General, and at this point she SNAPS much to Robyn’s subtly smirking appreciation. Jacques Schnee can buy just about anything he could ever want in this world, but trust has to be earned. I almost wish we could look back and see her “Volume 4″, the point in her life where she broke under her father’s domineering pressure and realized she had to escape to make her own life like Weiss had. Unfortunately for her in the moment, this outburst is exactly what her Papa had been hoping for. If Mr. Schnee has to earn trust then so does Mr. Ironwood. And after everything he’s done as of late, ol’ Jimmy has burned through what trust he had without doing anything like catching the criminals plaguing the Kingdom’s streets to earn more. Winter is appalled that she has made things that much worse for her boss, and leaves for a bit to calm down. Penny comes out to find her fuming quietly in a hallway and tries to have a heart to heart. But Miss Schnee’s habit of saying exactly the wrong thing isn’t over yet as she implies that Penny is incapable of understanding how she’s feeling on account of, y’know, being a robot and not having emotions that can get the better of her like her’s did. At the very least, Winter realizes her blunder and apologizes, clarifying that this situation is bad only for her because she’s grown up here and had to deal with Jacques controlling her life for so long. Penny did not live that life and thus doesn’t know about how bad those experiences were. Winter thinks she had sounded like a petulant child back there, but Penny shows wisdom beyond her youthful innocence and thinks what Winter did was totally fine and natural, a human response. But Winter has been conditioned for so long by both her home and military life to think that speaking from the heart is a bad thing compared to staying in line that she sees this as a problem. Penny admits that Winter is right, she DOESN’T understand what Winter is so upset about. That kinda feels like a zing at the older woman’s mindset, saying her way of thinking about the contents of her heart is wrong and she should let herself be more open. And I hope Winter learns from that.

Weiss wanders the halls and passes a room where a wall is lined with many Schnee family photos. Weiss standing by her father, Whitley playing the piano, profile shots of Jacques and Willow (as her name is confirmed to be in the credits) on either side of the doorway from what we can assume by her veil was their wedding day, and Grandpa Nicholas Schnee himself in a suit of armor and a red cape. Lots of eye candy, and it lasts about 5 seconds. The other photos seem to be of places, like the entrance to the now abandoned mine and what I assume is a view of the city from a distance. Weiss gets caught off guard by a butler walking the halls whom she thanks for their hard work and walks by on her way to her father’s office. But once she gets inside and closes the door behind herself she finds a surprise waiting for her. Mama Schnee!!!! And she looks quite beautiful, in a white shirt and blue waistcoat combination with a belt just above her hips, a pencil skirt and a jeweled cravat. Her hair hangs over her left shoulder in a low ponytail that everyone has identified as the dead anime mom hair and her pale blue eyes have a few lines under them I am perfectly willing to believe are more from the stress of living with Jacques than any kind of significant aging. Now seems as good a time as any to introduce my classifications of the four absolute waifuTeam RWBY moms whom have all had at least a few seconds of on screen time. Summer is the lovable sweet mom who tucks you into bed at night and reads you a story and makes sure you get a peaceful good night’s rest. Raven is the hot mom you might want to sleep with. Kali is the spunky and flirtatious mom who might want to sleep with YOU. And Willow is the hard working mom who tries her best to keep her family together and doesn’t get enough praise for it, whom YOU want to tuck into bed and make sure she gets a peaceful good night’s sleep. She seems to be in her physical prime, though we see mentally she can’t quite compare... or can she? Some of her first lines are trying to give an excuse for why she’s not socializing at the party, blaming it on not feeling well, but here’s the saddening part. She calls it Weiss’ party. So either she’s so out of touch with the world around her that she doesn’t know who/what the party is for... or she thinks this is still the night of Weiss’ charity concert from Volume 4 and she’s missing that after party. Either option paints a despairing picture of her mental facilities. And the bottle of vodka in her hand shows right off the bat what the trouble is. Weiss seems all too used to her mom’s excuses and forgives her quickly, knowing she has no ill intent. Willow gets enough clarity and mindfulness to wonder why Weiss came to Jacques’ office when he’s elsewhere, and Weiss bluffs that she’s come to retrieve something she left in here. That seems to jog Willow’s memory that Weiss herself had left not so long ago, and the tone of voice is heart wrenching. As the same wonderful podcast I mentioned earlier points out, this realization hits her with a sense of “oh I forgot something important again...” and you can’t help but feel a little sorry for her. She’s in this deep rut of drinking to cope with her sadness, and that keeps her from being there for her children so she only grows more sad. That isn’t to say she’s helpless or dumb. Weiss admits she needs to check her father’s computer and that she has suspicions he’s done something awful, and Willow has enough wit to quip that the family has come to assume that conclusion at this point. Weiss is a bit curt and says that some of them are actually trying to do something about his ill intentions, and Willow only responds with a tighter grip on the rim of her cup and a glare before chugging vodka straight from the bottle. 

It has been brought to my attention that even the label of her vodka has a fairy tale origin, it being called Six Swans. The inspiration comes from one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, of a princess whose six brothers are cursed by a witch and turned into swans. The only way to break the curse is if she can sew six shirts out of nettles in six years without making a single noise lest her entire effort be undone, a task she dedicates her life to. A different king is taken with her beauty and takes her for his wife, though misfortune and cruelty befall her at the hands of his mother and she is accused of witchcraft. With no way of defending herself or else her still continuing efforts will be ruined, she is sentenced to burn at the stake. The night of her execution the shirts are very nearly done and she brings them with her, only for her swan brothers to come flying in since the six years are up, and get the shirts thrown onto them lifting the curse. However, she hadn’t finished one sleeve so the youngest brother is left with a swan wing for the rest of his life. The princess is now allowed to talk and defend herself and with the help of her brothers they reveal the old queen’s evil deeds and get her burned instead, but still.. that’s an imperfect happy ending if I’ve ever heard one. And it may shed a little poetic foreshadowing for what may happen with our youngest Schnee child here... maybe he won’t get out of this as unscathed as his sisters? Who knows?

Regardless, Weiss looks sad and even a little guilty when her mom starts drinking, and then Willow lets her in on a little news that would make her task a bit harder: Papa Schnee has been locking his computer as of late. But now her brilliance shines through, as Willow reveals she has set up surveillance cameras in the office and every other room of the mansion that Jacques doesn’t know about. And it’s very likely that even Watts wouldn’t know about them or to try and disable them. So as luck would have it, she has a video of Watts and Jacques meeting up to talk back in episode 4. Though Willow’s motivations for putting the cameras in aren’t that grand. She did this to keep her family safe, so they can keep track of the madman they call Father, in case Willow ever had to... well she doesn’t finish that sentence but I have a few guesses. If she wanted to escape like Weiss she could keep track of where he is so she can avoid him. If he ever started being more abusive and she needed proof to show the police. But instead of worrying Weiss with grim possibilities Mama Schnee worries herself with if Weiss has come back to stay, and she asks as much. Weiss firmly and confidently says she has not. And Willow is glad, tearfully proud that her daughter has found a life outside of her father’s tyranny. The two awkwardly avoid eye contact for a moment while the mother wipes her eyes. Willow then tells Weiss about a man coming by and hands over her own Scroll. She worries Jacques is involved in something worse than even he realizes. Not worried for him, obviously, but for everyone else who may be affected. Chief among those she worries about is Whitley, whom she prompts Weiss not to forget about. Weiss tries to argue that Whitley wants nothing to do with her... but Willow tips the whole perspective on its head. Why would he want anything to do with his sisters? They went off to academies and left him alone in the house with a diabolically controlling father and a mother too drunk and scared to stop him. It’s a little sad that she recognizes she’s part of the problem, but she isn’t wrong. She didn’t help much. We all hated Whitley so much, thinking he was a little brat who wanted to be just like his dad, but really he was just adapting to survive. The Schnees perfectly show the 4 types of fear reactions in how they handle Jacques; Weiss: Fight. Winter: Flight. Willow: Freeze. Whitley: Fawn. As Willow leaves the room, Weiss stares in curiosity at the video and wonders just who her father has gotten mixed up with.

Fittingly, we cut to Watts himself standing under an umbrella in the rain, on a rooftop in front of a holographic billboard. He’s scrolling through all the systems he can now control thanks to his deal with Jacques, and settles on the most dangerous option. With a tap of his thumb, all heating systems in Mantle shut off and the rain turns to snow. At first people seem a little entertained and delighted, a safe and surviving preschooler even calling to his mom in glee as he looks out his window. But I’m quite sure it’ll be a dangerous blizzard in no time. Watts means to freeze Mantle to death and frame it all on the “malevolent” city of Atlas that have been screwing over Mantle for a while already. 

Let it snow indeed...

[thedistantstorm]

A Steelponcho Dawning - Part 15

A Dawning romance featuring the Commander and the Clan Steward, their feelings for each other coming to a head during the first Dawning celebration following the Red War, featuring Lord Saladin, city food, smut, and a whole lot of pining. Continues from: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14.

She somehow manages to sit beside him on the transport carrier. Neither Ikora or Cayde say much, though it's questionable if that's from lack of sleep or something else. Cayde dims his optics the second they're in the air, and Ikora produces a book from out of nowhere as she pushes the Exo's head off her shoulder and against his own headrest.

Zavala is quiet, his forearm and elbow lining up against her own on the armrest between them. They both look out the window of the Hawk, Zavala closest to it, and Hawthorne in the middle, closer to Cayde. The skyline is still dark.

Saladin sits alone across from them, in the seat directly facing Hawthorne. He is somber but awake. Surprisingly, it's Zavala who dozes, uncharacteristically tired, head lulling before eventually dropping onto her shoulder with a silent thunk.

“That's unusual,” Saladin gestures toward the other Titan. His voice is loud enough to hear but not so loud that it interrupts the three Vanguard’s activities. “He must be rather tired,” he continues. “Did something happen last night?”

“Oh!” Hawthorne scrambles, “Uh, he had a late meeting with Dead Orbit, maybe that had something to do with it?”

“Perhaps.” There is a look of well-placed scrutiny on Saladin's face and it's all she can do not to blush, knowing exactly why the commander only obtained a meager three hours of sleep last night. “Keep an eye out for each other,” he counsels sagely.

She nods. Definitely avoids gulping under the intensity of his stare. Zavala's hand slides over, covers hers and squeezes, before he resettles and folds them together in his lap, bracing his arm against her more thoroughly, to keep him more comfortable as he moves his head to the headrest. Bright blue eyes blink open tiredly, once, twice, and stay closed as his breathing evens out once more. She doubts he was ever awake, fluttering eyelids or not.

“I see,” Saladin says, to no one in particular. He looks at Zavala, then at her, as she resolutely stares out the window. She's doing a decent job of hiding it, but the tiny stain of pink around the lower half of her facial tattoos doesn't care about her denial. Saladin's happy they are at least opening up about it to each other, even if it's just a little. Even if it’s subconsciously.

He had really hoped they would take his words to heart.

-/

She does not spend a great deal of time with them, once they arrive at the Farm. Still, Saladin uses the opportunity to get to know a bit more about Hawthorne from those that know her best, listening to for the conversations that happen when the refugees think he and the Vanguard are not paying attention, or the way they interact with the Guardians themselves.

The people’s response is overwhelmingly grateful. Not hero-worship grateful. Just honest and purely thankful for whatever support they’re gifted.

It’s a strange difference from what he’s noted in the City and abroad in the centuries leading up to this war. The people stand taller, proud, but not foolishly so. They carry themselves almost like the Guardians do, despite their mortality. The majority are respectful, only a handful express distrust through their body language and words. It’s refreshing. The Guardians move among the civilians like equals, brothers in arms.

And they all seem to rally around Hawthorne.

For good reason, he supposes. They seem to chatter excitedly about her return, about the help she’s working to obtain from the Factions and the Vanguard's assistance. They are concerned for their future, but they trust her. That is the consensus. They quiet immediately, however, when she approaches with a man she introduces to him as Devrim Kay.

Devrim is incredibly polite, with a curt yet charismatic demeanor, sharp eyes, and a sniper rifle slung across his back similarly to the woman that stands close beside him. It doesn’t take a sleuth to objectively reason that these two are incredibly close. And certainly not based on the gratuitous use of ‘Our Suraya,’ compliments, and her mock irritated eye rolls at said comments, either.

They find their way into the largest of the remaining barns, this one not appropriate for more occupancy than the several chickens, a horse, and a pair of bleating goats that quiet they gather around a small table.

“Well, this is familiar, isn’t it,” Cayde marvels. “I should’ve brought Colonel.”

“That would have been a horrible idea,” Ikora reminds him. “You nearly lose her every time you take her away from your workstation.

“I do not! She would’ve stayed right here in the barn while we scoped things out.” His tone petulant.

“If I remember correctly,” Zavala says, “You liked her because she was the escape artist of the group.”

Hawthorne rolls her eyes, around the same time Devrim shakes her head, and the two Lightless humans share a rueful chuckle. The Hunter Vanguard carries on a while longer, to Suraya's growing irritation.

“How have I not had to bail you out of jail recently?” Devrim asks behind his hand.

In reply, she knocks into his shoulder, hard. “The Commander keeps me in line,” She quips back.

Zavala’s eyes flash like lightning over at Devrim, who in turn looks to him with narrowed eyes and a countenance of surprise. “Is that so?”

“I mean, someone has to.” The tone of her voice is light, growing more nonchalant as she notices the gaze of the man beside her. “Though I’ve been way too busy to be causing trouble.”

That earns her a loaded glance from Zavala (who clearly disagrees with her on the causing trouble bit), but she challenges him with one of her own before some of the scouts enter the barn. The group returns to business as usual at that. Saladin absolutely hones in on the contemplative look that covets Devrim's features as he looks between the Commander and the Clan Steward, even as the man reports off the staggering losses amid the rest of the developing statistics.

Apparently he's not the only one who might be invested in this new development, Saladin thinks. Interesting.

-/

They work together quietly. She had slipped away first, always easy to lose in the tangle of people and commotion. He’d found her half an hour later, poncho discarded over a mostly broken chair, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, serving what looked to be some sort of stew to refugees and Guardians alike. He always found her in places like these, compelled to help when she can’t sit still (which was often, especially when she’s anxious). Be it in the City, the Farm, the Tower, anywhere really, Suraya was well known for finding her way to whomever needed her most.

He didn’t say a word, just strode over and offered to take the place of the person beside her - she’d clearly relieved someone so that they could partake of the meal they were serving as well. She didn’t smile at him - hardly reacted, really - but when her eyes met his, they were amused and bright.

“Shirking your responsibilities, Commander?” She asks, when the line of hungry folk dissipates a while later. The smirk blooms on her face like a sarcastic flower.

The answering eye roll he offers her is something to see. “Looking to start a fight, Hawthorne?”

Unlike the last time he’d used her surname, she laughs, thinking similarly to their very rocky beginnings. When she meets eyes and sees his tiny smirking smile, she ducks her head. “Always,” She replies, and after a fleeting moment, looks back at him so unguardedly it feels like a blow to the chest. It doesn’t last long.

A group of hunters pushes open the tarp that keeps most of the warmth inside and heads in, one of their ghosts whizzing over their heads, chattering excitedly in a combination of words and synthesized sound.

She zings around the large tent, before settling above the food, calling to her Guardian, “Look, look! The Commander and Hawthorne are serving-”

“Fizzy, no, don't - agh, come back here!” A very concerned human Hunter calls. “Uh, sorry,” He continues as he looks up at his Ghost with wide, green eyes.

Fizzy the Ghost spins the pointed cones of her shell and twitches them in a confused shrug when her partner’s eyes dart to her right in an indication for her to move and pronto.

Her guardian sighs when she does not and regards Zavala’s curious glance with a sheepish one of his own. “Sorry, sir. She’s a little excited because of the Dawning. Always likes to spread cheer and whatnot.”

“Yeah!” The ghost drops down from above everyone’s heads, spinning in a wide circle around everyone in a blur of red and green, “I just love the Dawning! And one of my Guardian's friends gave me a gift, see? They said it's an old tradition to spread holiday cheer, from before the collapse!” She comes to a halt in the space above the Titan Vanguard and the Clan Steward.

They look up.

The Hunter's feels like his stomach has just been dropped from orbit. He peeks through his hands at the Commander, terrified.

The red metallic shell of his chattery Ghost has a little piece of tape on it, strapping down a little bundle of leafy vegetation that floats below it in a well-trimmed ball.

“I apologize,” The Hunter bows. “Fizzy, you didn't wait for me to explain what that's supposed to do.”

Hawthorne is the first to recover, looking up at the Ghost with a disbelieving shake of her head. “Mistletoe can grow around here,” She admits. “Been a while since I've seen any, though.”

“I am so sorry,” The Guardian continues in earnest. “Really-”

“No harm done,” Zavala says. “Though I suspect not everyone will be thrilled about the implication of her hanging over their heads.”

At that, the little Ghost turns to the Commander, tilting down to get a good look at his face. “Commander Zavala? What are you talking about?”

“Fizzy!” The Guardian snaps nervously, “When two people stand under a sprig of mistletoe together, they're supposed to kiss.”

The Ghost twirls her shell excitedly. “That sounds lovely!” She looks at Zavala and Hawthorne as expectantly as a Ghost possibly can. “Well, go on,” She encourages.

Zavala coughs, uncomfortably. Suraya looks away.

“You can't just tell people to kiss each other!”

The rising voice of the exasperated Guardian begins to cause a bit of a scene, especially as more and more of the people eating at tables on the other end of the room begin to look their way. Suraya shifts her stance to face the Commander, eyes boring into his face to get his attention. When he looks her way, she winks.

“Alright, easy you two,” The Clan Steward says. “Like Zavala said, no harm done.” She takes a step in his direction, looking for all the world like she’s about to kiss his cheek before she reaches up and plucks the Ghost from the air with deft hands and a shift onto her tiptoes. Gently, she presses her lips against the Ghost’s top fin in what she assumes would be a kiss on the forehead or cheek for a Ghost before releasing her.

Fizzy giggles at the notion, her little body vibrating in excitement as Suraya speaks. “There. Now you get to share in the tradition, too.” Her mahogany eyes shift toward the Ghost again, a touch more serious. “Can't imagine the Fallen or Cabal will be up for this, though, so be careful out there, okay? No making your Guardian kiss everyone they come across.”

“See, see? Told you! Holiday cheer!” The Ghost says, bobbing over to her Guardian victoriously. “I did it!”

[skypalacearchitect]

Maya Brant and Marina Mattos slide a small, square notebook across the wooden table to Marina Falcão.

The three girls are sitting in Marina F.'s dining room in São Paulo, Brazil, after having class together at Colégio Oswald de Andrade, a progressive private school in the heart of the city. They’re all 14 years old, but they’ve already been friends for 12 years.

“We made this list on the bus on the way over here,” Marina M. says.

Marina F.'s smile widens as she nods in agreement at some of the reasons the other two have scribbled on several of the notebook’s lined pages why they would never vote for Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro:

“He thinks women should earn less because they get pregnant.”

“He thinks loosening gun laws will stop violence.”

“He thinks abortion should still be illegal.”

Purple-and-white stickers with the slogan #EleNão — or #NotHim — are strewn across the table. The girls have already ordered T-shirts in the same colors and emblazoned with the phrase, which has become the rallying cry for Brazilians against Bolsonaro, a candidate they equate with fascism, sexism, racism, and homophobia. Protests are set to take place across the country the next day under the banner of Women United Against Bolsonaro, and hundreds of thousands are expected to turn up in support of the movement. Marina F., Maya, and Marina M. aren’t yet old enough to cast a ballot in the Oct. 7 election — voting in Brazil is mandatory at 18 and you can choose to vote at 16 — but that won’t stop them from protesting a candidate they say infringes on their rights and the rights of others.

A Brazilian protestor with "Ele Nao" ("Not Him") written across her face.

A former army captain, Bolsonaro has been a congressman in Rio de Janeiro for almost three decades and is well known for making disparaging comments about women, black people, and members of the LGBTQ community. He once told fellow member of Congress Maria do Rosário that she was too ugly to deserve to be raped by him, a remark that led Bolsonaro to be ordered by a court to pay Rosário 10,000 reals (currently $2,500) in moral damages and apologize publicly. He has also been charged with inciting hatred, a crime in Brazil, for saying that people living in communities started by escaped slaves, called quilombos, “aren’t even good for procreating.” The father of five has said that he had four boys and then, “in a moment of weakness,” had a girl, and that he would rather have a dead son than a gay son.

But Bolsonaro’s straight talk and strong stance on combating the violence and political corruption that plague Brazil have led him to the top of the presidential polls, with 32% of the intended vote. While he likely won’t reach the 50% required to avoid a runoff, he is expected to tie at 42% in a second vote vote with Fernando Haddad, known for being the Workers’ Party’s replacement candidate for former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was barred from running because of a corruption conviction.

The Facebook group Women United Against Bolsonaro was created in late August, when it was clear the far-right candidate's lead in the polls was not wavering. More than 1 million women quickly joined the nonpartisan group, and it has steadily grown since, reaching nearly 4 million members. The idea to protest in the streets was born out of the group. Speaking to one another online about why they would never vote for Bolsonaro was a start, but it wasn't enough. The women knew they needed their voices to be heard by others so they would understand why his views were a danger to Brazil's democracy and to the rights of minority groups.

Events were created on Facebook and protests across the country were scheduled to take place during the afternoon of September 29. Marina F. and Marina M. don't have Facebook — "we share things on Instagram," Marina F. says — but they heard about the protests through Maya and their moms.

This isn't the girls' first protest. They always march together for International Women's Day and participated in a protest of sexual violence against women on public transit that led to the implementation of a new law that puts men in jail for one to five years for masturbating and ejaculating on or near women in public spaces.

But this one is particularly important to all three. They know the items Marina M. and Maya listed in the notebook are just a few of the ways their lives would be affected if the candidate they consider a threat to their rights were to become president.

#elenao - Many thousands take over Brazilian capitals to fight against a right-wing extremist candidate running for president. The elections will happen on 7th of October. “No, no, no One morning I woke up and fought against an oppressor We are women The resistance of a Brazil”

"This is a crucial time," says Marina F. "It's now or never. I used to think it wasn't possible for [Bolsonaro] to have so many supporters because his ideas and thoughts seem so crazy, but obviously there are a lot of people who think like him."

"If it happens with Trump, it could happen here," says Maya.

The next day, Marina F. and Marina M. march through the streets of São Paulo with Marina F.'s mom — an anthropologist and professor at the University of São Paulo's School of Medicine — and her colleagues and students toward the Women United Against Bolsonaro protest meeting point. It's a half-hour walk, and 50 some girls and women — their purple-and-white shirts covered in #EleNão buttons and stickers, banners in hand and faces painted — chant as they get closer to the other 150,000 protesters gathered to speak out against Bolsonaro.

The afternoon sun is high and hot as they move through the crowd in search of Maya and the other friends they've planned to meet there. When they spot Maya, the two girls wave and run up to her.

"It was amazing," Marina F. says of their pre-protest march. "We marched down the street and people were honking an cheering."

"Can you believe it? They're even protesting in Germany and England," Maya says.

The girls take photos together and then turn to their mothers, who raise their signs and smile for the camera. Traditional samba music is being played by several groups throughout the crowd, and the protest continues to be peaceful and positive as the sun starts to set. The fear that Bolsonaro supporters would show up and react in a violent way has started to subside. They had hacked the women's Facebook group several times in the lead-up to the protests, and one of the organizers of Rio de Janeiro's march was recently assaulted by two men while trying to enter her home.

"People used to be too embarrassed to say and do these [sexist] things, but they're not anymore," says Manuela Vomera, another of the girls' friends from school who has met them at the protest. "[Bolsonaro's] hate speech gives them the courage to do what they want. It's already giving them a voice and he's not even president yet."

"I just hope I can have a future with equal pay, with a career I want and with a relationship that isn't abusive," says Maya. "I want to be able to continue this legacy that other women have fought for and given us. But I know it'll get a lot worse before it gets better."

[defendourhoodz]

Blue Cat Cafe CLOSED - The Boycott On the Property Remains!

Defend Our Hoodz is proud to announce, after three years of hard-fought struggle, the boycott against Blue Cat Cafe is victorious and the gentrifying, white supremacist hub is now closed for good. A moving truck was seen removing the last of their things yesterday, Feb. 4, 2019. We're told that they've had irregular hours for months and are no longer able to pay their rent.

Now that they are shut down, we continue to uphold the boycott against the landlords, Jordan French and  Darius Fisher (also known as F&F), who violently demolished the Jumpolin Piñata store in February 2015.

Any business attempting to lease the space will face the same fierce boycott we have held against Blue Cat that has led to their closing.

From Blue Cat's opening day in October 2015, until now, we've maintained a militant boycott. The demand three years ago was to not provide F&F rent money because of their demolition of the Jumpolin pinata store. When Rebecca Gray, the owner of Blue Cat, ignored this demand, we pursued a strategy of direct action, to make Blue Cat so unprofitable that they couldn’t afford to pay F&F.

For all those who have stood with us, and seen through the lies, the distortions of gentrifiers, and even attacks from supposed community leaders about our organizing and group, we thank you immensely for your support. This victory is yours as well, especially if you have ever joined us on the picket line or spread the word about the boycott of Blue Cat Cafe.

For anyone who defends gentrification, Blue Cat Cafe, the scumbag landlords Jordan French and Darius Fisher, and ignores Blue Cat’s alliance with nazis and trump supporters, ignores their countless customer reviews of animal neglect and poor sanitation, and denies their employee testimonials of abusive management and wage theft - you stand with all of the racism and exploitation that the landlords, Blue Cat, and their white supremacist allies have carried out.

If Blue Cat Cafe and Rebecca Gray, ever deserved empathy (which they didn’t), she gave up any supposed high ground when she invited her Nazi brother and his fellow fascists to organize a picket-busting gang to attack us. Those who attack us and defend her are directly on the side of exploitation and white supremacy, and today, your side lost the battle.

Some may claim that we didn’t have anything do with their closing, and it wasn’t our tactics that won this. This is pure fantasy. Blue Cat Cafe is leaving because they couldn’t withstand the unified force of people militantly holding them accountable. We made her Gentrification project unprofitable.

The fact is, if a cat cafe were to be successful anywhere, it would be Austin, where the dominant, mostly white, liberal ruling-class is notorious for valuing animal life over Black, Chicano, Immigrant, and working class people. We are an animal-obsessed city, and for as long as Blue Cat has existed, people have used the cats as a shield for the actions of Blue Cat Cafe, F&F, and the Nazis themselves. The landlords knew what they were doing by leasing to Blue Cat - they are also in the PR game. They thought cute cats would get people to shut up.

But, it was our resolve and principled struggle against Blue Cat Cafe that has led to this outcome, not the same tired paths of those who want to surrender at the first sign of a long and difficult fight, especially one that will not build political careers or bring in non-profit funding.

Blue Cat Cafe started their first day of business crossing a community boycott against the landlords, Jordan French and Darius Fisher. Blue Cat Owner Rebecca Gray thought she knew better than the community and those saying to decrease the profit from the site after F&F violently demolished the Jumpolin Piñata Store. She was notified multiple times, asked by the Jumpolin family and the barrio not to move in, but she ignored their calls. For this, Blue Cat was picketed on its opening day, and on a regular basis ever since.

Those first pickets were tame - but Rebecca Gray consistently escalated things. Our pickets would stay on the sidewalk, but she would insert herself into our picket, bumping into us, and like a soccer player taking a dive, fake that we pushed her. She would get in people’s faces, like the entitled middle-class business owner that she is, and try to argue with us, when we had made it clear that the only thing to discuss was if she would close her business.

Our resolve caused her to grow more and more unhinged each time she encountered us. At one picket, she came out to the picket line drunk, and proceeded to roll around on the ground, making lewd gestures that disturbed those of us there.

We have known that Rebecca is a alcoholic and has multiple DWIs. While racists and ignorant people claim that working-class people in the barrio are drug-users and don’t deserve to keep their communities because they are irresponsible - the owner of Blue Cat Cafe was a dangerous alcoholic who drives with a suspended license, endangering others in the community. This is the blatant hypocrisy of gentrifiers and small business owners (of all backgrounds) who believe they are harder working or more noble than those who don’t own a business. The fact is that Rebecca needs professional help and has no place operating a small business.

Over time, numerous customer and employee reports began to emerge of animal neglect and employee mistreatment. Kittens were adopted out with diseases. Liquid Feces would be left on the floor and employees would pay for animal care out of their own pockets. Employees also reported wage theft and abusive treatment from Rebecca.

Our struggle escalated when Rebecca accused our organization of an incident that occurred in October 2016. Someone tagged the building and glued the locks shut. We don’t know who did this, yet Rebecca clearly implied it was us to the Austin-American Statesman, who never contacted us for comment.Because of this sloppy reporting, Alex Jones of Infowars himself picked up the story, and began to direct his rabid, racist Trump-loving followers to attack our organization. Rebecca did an interview with Infowars, where she referred to us as ‘hate group’ and ‘terrorists’.

From that point on, the alt-right and white supremacists made Blue Cat Cafe their own pet cause. The interviews with infowars helped fuel her gofundme, which raised over $15,000, including a $500 donation, left with a comment that said: ‘I hope these protesters die a slow horrible death’ and other violent and racist statements.

We have had regular white supremacist trolls ever since. Nazis in town for the “White Lives Matter” rally in November 2016 spoke of plans to visit the cafe and called to offer their admiration and support.But this still wasn’t the full view of her white supremacist ties. We began to notice a man lurking around our March for Jumpolin in February 2017.

Not long after, he was seen at another white supremacist event, an attack on the revolutionary May Day march, and he was identified as Paul Gray, Rebecca’s brother.And then, we came face to face with Paul when Rebecca invited him to ‘protect’ Blue Cat from our pickets. He gathered fellow Nazis, including Erik Sailors, and others who would later go to Charlottesville, and attacked our picket line on site, before we had even reached the sidewalk of Blue Cat Cafe.

While they attacked first, we and our allies defended ourselves. Erik Sailors, who has gained national notoriety since then, left the encounter with a split head, stitches, and a permanent scar of his stupidity. It has been revealed that Erik and Paul both were two Nazis who were putting up white supremacist propaganda on the Texas State campus in San Marcos in December 2017.

For being uncompromising about gentrification and Blue Cat Cafe, for fighting Nazis, we have earned the insults of people from many backgrounds. And while some may vote for Trump, and others think they’re liberal - they share one thing in common - they took the side of a gentrifier with ties to Nazis because of their own delusions of what is the ‘proper’ way to fight gentrification.

But we know they are on the wrong side of history. We stand in solidarity with militant anti-gentrification groups across the country, especially our comrades in Boyle Heights LA. They too have maintained longstanding boycotts against art galleries invading their community, and because of their resolve, have seen their movement grow, and one by one, the galleries start to fall. The forces of capitalism are beginning to fail in their strategy of using art galleries, or quirky coffee shops and cat cafes, as their forward guard of gentrification.

We know this is only the beginning. Other communities must take up the militant anti-Gentrification fight. But we know that capitalist interests will become more vindictive and more violent in protecting their investments. They will try to target leaders, and anyone affiliated with them. They have money and investments on the line.As Blue Cat Cafe demonstrated when they originally defied the boycott, the on-the-ground gentrifiers don’t think they are responsible for enabling exploiters like F&F, yet they paid rent into their pockets every month and helped shield F&F this whole time.

Now, with their space vacant, we warn anyone even considering moving into the space vacated by Blue Cat Cafe - we will go ten times harder against you than we did against Blue Cat. While Rebecca faked ignorance about the boycott, any business owner claiming the same will be exposed as complete liar.

If working-class Austinites truly want to fight gentrification, and not just feel defeated by it, they must take on the struggle of making sure that gentrifiers, developers, and other exploiters feel as uncomfortable and scared as the working-class feels in the face of gentrification.Gentrification destroys communities, leaves people homeless, leaves children traumatized, the elderly stressed and strained to survive. It is a war, and the longer that we act like it can be fought through fake peace - through going through the system that creates gentrification itself, the longer the working-class will feel defeated. But we are hopeful.

We didn’t give up on our fight, and we have won a small battle. We continue to fight new fronts, like Lou’s Bodega, or our ongoing campaign to stop the ‘Domain on Riverside’ that threatens thousands of students and workers. There are many others on the horizon, but we have been tested and will continue to grow stronger.

Join The Struggle - Fight Gentrification with Revolution!

Boycott the Landlords, Jordan French and Darius Fisher, who Demolished Jumpolin!

Destroy Profits from Violent Displacement!

Build the Militant Anti-Gentrification Movement and Fight for the Working class!

[englishstudent]

The Islamist Challenge: Stories From Home Fire

In 2017, Kamila Shamsie published Home Fire, a novel that deals with racialization from the perspective of Muslims during the rise of anti-Muslim attitudes after the attacks on 9/11. Shamsie reveals Muslim concerns and identity crises through the represented experiences of Muslim characters and literalizes the process by which the 'other' struggle to be recognized, acknowledged, and included because of the more 'legitimate' narratives of the mainstream white society. In the novel, Muslim characters who meet the standards of a 'proper' Muslim image are admitted into society, while those who do not meet the requirements of a 'proper' Muslim image are demonized and criminalized.

The author of Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit explains that oppression is best characterized as a process through which an individual becomes increasingly convinced that society can only be improved through sweeping change (Solnit 25). In a series of sharp pieces, Solnit delves at several current issues, including discrimination against women and white nationalism. The names may have changed, but for Solnit, the stories all remain the same. 

She writes:

"The common denominator of so many of the strange and cultural narratives coming our way is a set of assumptions about who matters, whose story it is, who deserves the pity and the treats and the presumptions of innocence, […] and ultimately the kingdom, the power, and the glory. […] The history of this country has been written as [the white man's story], and the news sometimes still tells it this way — one of the battles of our time is about who the story is about, who matters, and who decides" (Solnit 13).

Similarly, Shamsie makes it apparent that racism and the “Islamophobia industry” lead to oppressive behaviors that have a substantial influence on her characters' actions and those of everyday Muslims. Her novel Home Fire features Parvaiz Pasha, who embraces ISIS as a consequence of a combination of personal and political reasons, including the desire for a connection with his father, whom he never met. He is an atypical extremist, standing in stark contrast to the simple depictions by the mainstream media, which recycle clichéd pictures of terrorists as young, death-obsessed individuals with harsh temperaments. 

Parvaiz was told:

“There is a place like that we can go to now. A place where migrants coming in to join are treated like kings, given more in benefits than the locals to acknowledge all they’ve given up to reach there. A place where skin color doesn’t matter. Where schools and hospitals are free, and rich and poor have the same facilities. Where men are men. Where no one has to enter haram gambling shops to earn a living but can provide for his family with dignity. Where someone like you would find himself working in a state-of-the-art studio, living like a prince. Your own villa, your own car. Where you could speak openly about your father, with pride, not shame” (Shamsie 147).

But when Parvaiz sees the atrocities that ISIS is doing while documenting as part of their media unit, he soon realizes his mistakes and begs his sister Aneeka to find a way to bring him home. However, he is worried that if he goes, he will simply be treated as “the terrorist son of a terrorist father” (Shamsie 175). He doesn’t know how to “break out of these currents of history” (Shamsie 175). But before he can even reach the British consulate in Turkey, he is shot and killed for betraying them. 

His tale exemplifies the major theme in Shamsie's story, in which Parvaiz is confined by stereotypes. After his death, people believe that Parvaiz is a violent terrorist who does not deserve to be buried in Britain, despite his regret, and the fact that didn't support the attacks. When people like Parvaiz, who dreamt of a world of justice, discovered that the fantasy they were shown when they joined was not the world they were promised, it was simple for some, but not for others. Those who affiliated with terrorists, particularly those with no links to the powerful, suffered many challenges, sorrows, and threats by the state. Thus, Shamsie encourages readers not to judge characters like Parvaiz based on preconceptions but rather to consider the intricacies of their life.

Comparatively, In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit points out that perspectives or narratives are not universal; rather, they include gaps and voids that challenge reality and, by raising awareness about these matters, we can protect those who are victims, like Muslims, from being excluded from the narrative. 

Solnit writes:

"If power generates a cushion of obliviousness around it, those of us with power need to counter it. That means, first, treating people with respect, regardless of their status: not taking the invitation to disdain or ignore" Solnit 31). However, Solnit has hope: “This country has room for everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody" (Solnit 21).

In conclusion, I was impressed by Kamila Shamsie’s power of writing and her courage in speaking about the challenges of Muslims in our world. There is a lot more analyzed in Home Fire I wish I had space to write about, but the main takeaway, especially now with the current situation in Afghanistan, is that more than ever before, it is time to change racist ways of thinking about Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, and anyone perceived to be connected, in one way or another, to the idea of a 'Muslim terrorist threat.' However, in doing so, this novel poses a burning question: 

What privileges do you have that others do not?

Image: “Muslim and civil rights groups and their supporters gather at a rally against what they call a ‘Muslim ban’  in Washington, on Oct. 18, 2017.”

[thisdaynews]

US election results on knife-edge: Biden maintains lead as Trump unleashes legal battle.

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/us-election-results-on-knife-edge-biden-maintains-lead-as-trump-unleashes-legal-battle/

US election results on knife-edge: Biden maintains lead as Trump unleashes legal battle.

Lawsuits were launched by President Donald Trump across America yesterday, adding fresh drama to a presidential election that is already on knife edge. Lawyers were running in and out of law courts in at least five states yesterday disputing or affirming results. Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden is currently leading Trump by 264 to 214 electoral votes and is favourite to win the election. Key wins for both candidates in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona will determine the final lap of the race.

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President Trump’s moves to stop further vote counts in about four swing states however suffered a setback in Georgia and Michigan where the two court yesterday dismissed two separate law suits. In Georgia where Trump maintains a slim led against his Democrat rival, Joe Biden, the state court dismissed the lawsuit filed by Georgia Republicans to prevent the “unlawful counting of ballots received after the election” in Savannah.

They filed the lawsuit after a poll watcher for the party allegedly viewed unprocessed absentee ballots mixed in with absentee ballots that were set to be tabulated. Judge James F. Bass made the ruling orally in court Thursday morning. The state Republican party and the Trump campaign said they filed the court documents in Chatham County Superior Court on Wednesday evening after a party poll watcher “witnessed absentee ballots that had not been properly processed apparently mixed into a pile of absentee ballots that was already set to be tabulated.

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The proper chain of custody for the ballots was not followed,” they alleged according to court documents. The ballots in question were small in number: “one stack of three ballots and a second stack of fifty-three ballots, according to a copy of the filing provided by the state Republican party. In Michigan, a judge tossed a lawsuit brought by Trump’s campaign that demanded halting vote-counting in the state.

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens made the ruling during a court hearing on Thursday. She said she planned to issue a written ruling on Friday. The lawsuit claimed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, was allowing absentee ballots to be counted without teams of bipartisan observers as well as challengers.

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She was accused of undermining the “constitutional right of all Michigan voters … to participate in fair and lawful elections.” Benson, through state attorneys, denied the allegations. Much of the dispute centered on the TCF Center in Detroit where pro-Trump protesters gathered while absentee ballots were being counted. Little succor in Pennsylvania Trump’s attorneys claimed in a Pennsylvania court that one of their observers in Philadelphia wasn’t allowed close enough to ballot processing.

They lost at the entry level court, but filed an appeal and a judge weighed in Thursday morning. Trump lawyer Pam Bondi said on Fox Business Network that an appellate judge entered an order “saying that we are to be immediately let in that convention center with 6-foot distancing of all aspects of that vote counting effective immediately so we can observe these votes being counted.” Trump’s campaign aides claimed the ruling allows them to better observe the vote counting in Philadelphia, and they threatened to be on the watch for what they called improper ballots.

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“It guarantees we’re gonna be able to watch the ballots being counted,” said Trump deputy campaign manager Justin Clark. Elections officials have appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court, but they briefly paused counting in Philadelphia to reconfigure their space to comply with the order. Trump advisers scheduled the conference call to insist they have not given up in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, all states Trump needs to win if he is to retain the presidency. “We are going to keep fighting for this election,” campaign manager Bill Stepien said.

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Dozen arrested as protesters demand vote count Police arrested dozens of people in Seattle, Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon overnight during protests demanding a tally of all votes in the US election, while smaller groups backing Trump returned to tabulation sites in closely contested states to insist counting be halted. In Seattle, seven people were arrested. In Minneapolis, police arrested more than 600 demonstrators who marched onto an interstate protesting Trump’s threats to challenge the election results. In Portland, protesters smashed windows at businesses, hurled objects including fireworks at officers. Police made at least 10 arrests, according to a statement from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.

In New York, hundreds of people paraded past boarded-up luxury stores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, and in Chicago, demonstrators marched through downtown and along a street across the river from Trump Tower. Protesters also gathered in cities including Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh and San Diego. Shares jump as dollar slips The dollar slipped and tech stocks rallied further on Thursday as Democrat Joe Biden drew closer to winning the U.S. presidency while the Bank of England became the latest central bank to say it will increase stimulus. Investors leapt on the prospect of gridlock in Congress and the notion Silicon Valley will be spared greater oversight as the Democrats are unlikely to win control of the Senate.

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Tech shares in Europe jumped almost 3%[.EU], extending a rally of more than 8% this week, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq, S&P 500 and Dow industrials rose 1% or more. European stocks hit two-week highs on strong earnings reports and after the Bank of England increased its already huge bond-buying stimulus by 150 billion pounds ($195 billion), or about 50 billion pounds more than expected. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.47%, the S&P 500 gained 1.61% and the Nasdaq Composite added 1.93%. Overnight in Asia, stocks rallied 2% to reach their highest since February 2018.

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Japan’s Nikkei rose 1.7% to a more than nine-month top, South Korea gained 2.4% and Chinese blue chips added 1.3% on hopes a Biden White House would ease up on tariffs. The U.S. dollar fell to two-week lows against a basket of currencies and a seven-month low against the Japanese yen as the likelihood of a Democratic blue wave in the White House and Congress slowly vanished, snuffing any large U.S. stimulus package. Iran’s Supreme leader mocks US democracy Iran’s supreme leader has mocked the rancorous aftermath of election day in the United States, saying that the vote has exposed the reality of US democracy. “What a spectacle!” supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted late Wednesday. One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office. “His rival says Trump intends to rig the election! This is how #USElections & US democracy are.”

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The deepening polarisation of US politics since Trump’s surprise election victory four years ago has drawn expressions of concern even from Western allies, with Germany warning of a “very explosive situation” in the aftermath of the poll. Despite US allegations that Tehran sought to use social media to influence voters in the run-up to polling day, Iran’s leadership has publicly insisted it favours neither candidate, despite their sharply divergent policies towards Tehran. Trump has led a campaign of “maximum pressure” against the Islamic republic, pulling Washington out of a multilateral deal on Iran’s nuclear programme and reimposing crippling unilateral sanctions.

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Biden has signalled he is ready to rejoin the landmark nuclear agreement struck in 2015 when he served as vice president under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama. But on Tuesday, Khamenei insisted the outcome of the election would have no impact on Iranian policy. Facebook removes group calling for ‘civil war’ over election A huge viral Facebook group spreading unsubstantiated claims that there is a Democratic party plot to “steal” the election has been removed by the social media firm. Among the comments inside the group were threats of violence and calls for civil war and revolution.

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A Facebook spokesperson says it took action because of “worrying calls for violence” in the group “which was creating real-world events”. “Stop the Steal” was set up yesterday had more than 330,000 members before it was taken down. Posts called for its members to take to the streets in the event that Joe Biden is declared the next US president. Dozens of comments went much further and encouraged people to take up arms or even shoot their political opponents. Some threatened rioting and looting.

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The group taken down by Facebook was the by far the largest of a handful of “Stop the Steal” forums set up since election day. On Tuesday, a “#StoptheSteal” label gained a bit of popularity on Twitter, and included baseless and misleading claims of voter fraud and dirty tricks. Similar claims have been circulating in the Facebook group. The allegations include some of the ones we’ve debunked Facebook says it removed the group “in line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension”. It also said the group “was organised around the delegitimisation of the election process”.

SOURCES:Vanguard

[kerahlekung]

Banduan disambut cam hero hindustan dgn escort lagi...

Banduan disambut cam hero hindustan dgn escort lagi....

Apakah jadah polis pi escort Najib berkempen dalam PRK ini?? 

Speaker nak terkencing atau kencingkan pembangkang...

Lucunya parlimen Malaysia di bawah kerajaan tebuk atap. Bukan ahli parlimen tunggu speaker masuk, tapi speaker yg pergi cari dan tunggu ahli parlimen masuk. Sebab apa? Sebab ada undian dan bilangan ahli parlimen kerajaan tebuk atap tak cukup dalam parlimen. Maka, speaker seperti budak suruhan lari keluaq cari2 orang. - f/bk

Seputeh MP Teresa Kok today claimed that a minister visited Turkey from July 3 to 7 and attended Dewan Rakyat on July 13. Kok told the Dewan Rakyat that the minister in question was in charge of plantation industries and commodities.

“We know that whoever goes overseas needs to undergo quarantine for 14 days. But this minister did not comply (with the quarantine rules),” the DAP lawmaker said. She asked if the health ministry or Parliament should take action against him.

Former deputy health minister Lee Boon Chye (PH-Gopeng), who was debating on the Temporary Measures for Reducing the Impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) Bill 2020, said action should be taken if the claim was true. “There should be no double standards,” he added.- f/bk

The RM4 million rebuke...

The DAP could hardly contain its elation when it announced on Saturday that in just one week Malaysians from all walks of life had contributed almost RM4 million to the solidary fund set up to help DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng (LGE) cover his bail expenses. The whopping response by ordinary Malaysians, at a time of economic hardship no less, says a lot about the mood of the public these days. In the first place, it is a sure sign that public faith in the integrity and credibility of government institutions has hit rock bottom. Coming after the sweetheart deal involving Riza Aziz and the withdrawal of charges against former Sabah chief minister Musa Aman, the corruption charges against LGE were viewed with nothing but scepticism and contempt. And when you add to the mix the plotting that brought down the Warisan government in Sabah and attempts now underway to challenge the legality of the royal pardon that Anwar received in 2018, it is not a difficult leap to conclude that a conspiracy is afoot to castrate the opposition and keep it from challenging an already shaky government. If MCA and Gerakan were hoping for some political dividend from the corruption charges against LGE, they would, no doubt, be greatly disappointed. They tried to make an issue of the donation drive – by questioning why the DAP was appealing for public donations to help pay for LGE’s bail when the DAP secretary-general and his wife were more than capable of paying for it themselves – but it fell flat.

LGE is, of course, no pauper but the fund-raising exercise was never really about the money; it was a shrewd political move to harness public outrage over the charges, an invitation to the public to express with their cheque books their disdain for the government’s actions. And clearly, Malaysians rose to the occasion in splendid form, delivering a stunning RM4 million rebuke to the government. PN parties can fulminate all they want about the DAP’s tactics but there’s no escaping the fact that UMNO, MCA or Gerakan can never dream of raising such support from the public themselves.  Many voters would rather swallow whatever coin they have than give it to PN parties. Certainly, when UMNO stalwarts tried to raise money for former UMNO president Najib’s bail in 2018, the results were less than inspiring. Media reports indicated that about RM500,000 was raised and that too mostly from UMNO branches. Perhaps after seeing the glittering array of treasure that was taken from his home, people wisely concluded that Najib didn’t need any of their hard-earned money. No word yet on whether there were any donations from Najib’s many Saudi admirers or whether the MCA or the Gerakan themselves offered financial support to the man they were once so proud to follow. In the end, the PN government might have done the opposition a huge favour by its clumsy attempt to sideline LGE.  All it did was to make voters angry enough with PN to rally to the DAP. As the party’s publicity secretary Tony Pua said with obvious glee, “The response [to the solidarity fund] has been incredible and exceeded all expectations… [it] has certainly reinvigorated all of us at DAP.”

The same thing happened when former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad brought trumped-up sodomy charges against Anwar Ibrahim in 1998. Malaysians, instinctively recognizing that an injustice was being perpetrated, flocked to Anwar’s banner by the hundreds of thousands. It gave birth to the reformasi movement which has had such a profound impact on Malaysian politics since.

It is a reminder that in politics, perception is everything. If people perceive something is not right, they will respond appropriately. For now at least, PN may have the power but it cannot claim to have the hearts of the people. The DAP leadership, however, should not take the support of the people for granted especially when it comes to their blinkered love affair with Mahathir. Many voters have grown weary of Mahathir’s endless race-based political intrigues and schemes. They overwhelmingly hold him accountable for the collapse of the PH government and are in no mood to give him another chance. Mahathir’s continuing obsession with race came through again when he launched his new party last week. Instead of talking about building a united and democratic nation, which is what is desperately needed, he talked about the struggle for Malay dignity and Malay rights. From past experience, we know that when Malay politicians talk about fighting for Malay rights, they are invariably implying that the non-Malays have become too strong, too rich, too ungrateful or too whatever. This was the same narrative that Mahathir deployed at the Malay Dignity Congress to gather support for his plans to form a Malay unity government. No one wants to see a repeat performance. If the DAP wants to continue to enjoy the support of the people it must not fall for Mahathir’s charms again. Voters would rather the DAP (and PKR) remain in opposition and continue to fight for a more inclusive and democratic nation than be in a government led by a man they no longer trust. If the DAP is so desperate to return to power that it is willing to blindly follow Mahathir once more, it might just have to look for rich Saudi donors the next time it needs support. - Dennis Ignatius 

cheers.

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[fcllenflowers]

Characters: Jaleyn Dreemurr, Baskerville, Frisk (Steel), timeline NPCS

Words: 2109

Description: Arc progression drabble. Surface monsters are starting to push for their rights. Among their demands; freeing their kin from Underground prisons.

Trigger Warnings: fire, pyromania implied

Polished claws tapped against the hardwood. Her long fluffy ears fell over her cheeks, somewhat covering the missing fur patch on one side of her slim neck. For a goat monster, she definitely wasn’t fluffy. Her fur was rather scrawny, thin, nothing that would match the usual description of those with a royal bloodline, such as herself. Perhaps the sole indicator left behind to signify it was the way she held her chin up, proudly, over the crowd of press that’d gathered to force a word or two out of her tightly pressed lips. She didn’t want to give them what they wanted; for the press loved nothing more than controversy, she knew. Her job was to say what she’d been advised to and make a graceful exit, she was only an Ambassador despite the blood her veins carried.

In this new world, the place of monsters such as Jaleyn had been compromised. They were either forced into manual labor, slaves to their human employees, or factory workers in basements that hadn’t seen the light of day in centuries. Working rights was an unknown word to the spawn of those few that’d chosen to dwell on the surface. And Jaleyn herself sometimes questioned that choice; for maybe they’d been better off scavenging Underground, or dying alongside their relatives with honor rather than living like slaves.

The 21st century, however, brought about a big change. Monsters, whose lifespans rarely did not exceed that of a century, had the privilege of witnessing such changes happen in the shorter spans of human generations. Jaleyn had been around for the previous century, and now took advantage of the climate shifting towards the monster’s gain. The expansion of the undernet, the vast source of information and ability for monsters and humans to communicate anonymously through it had brought about a tremendous change in the perception of humans. Now a lot of them made friends online with personas they didn’t even know were actual monsters. And with time the monster culture found its long lost voice again.

Jaleyn had to be happy today. It was a big day for their kind, the day they’d speak and show their faces on television after years of lurking and hiding in the shadows. And yet, despite all the preparation and excitement...she could only feel worried.

Her instincts usually wouldn’t lie to her. It was odd to feel this way, to have such a strong intuition something would go wrong, despite the festive climate. Still, she kept her gob shut for she’d like to spare the others; her heritage graced her with a strong spirit of leadership few could hope to match.

And that wasn’t nearly the end of her praiseworthy attributes. Her calm had to be mentioned as well, for despite having an intense fear of heights, she’d managed to take the elevator all the way up to the fourth floor and stand on a pedestal that was alarmingly close to a window.

“And thus we present to you, Jaleyn Dreemurr, lead speaker on behalf of the MLM party; please, ma’am.”

The man stepped aside, allowing Jaleyn her solace on the pedestal. Her anxiety was evident in the way her long claws kept scratching the surface of the pedestal. It earned a few glares from the crowd and rally candidates standing beside her. Most of them had come there to watch, rather than participate. It wasn’t a political debate, after all, just a party presentation. She knew it was way more important than any election, however, because this event was about re-integrating monster children into human schools. And such a groundbreaking statement wouldn’t even have been possible a few years ago.

She drew in a breath and looked down to the journalists that stared blankly back at her; their eyes alone made it very obvious that they only cared for a good story -not the actual outcome of her speech. And, because Jaleyn was a monster, she was sensitive to this kind of behavior. Her magic-based body relied on emotions to function and she had a very high perception of both hers and other people’s emotional responses. Thus, the kind of apathy press people expressed hurt her deeply; yet she still found the strength to speak up in a loud voice.

“Good evening, Rainsville. We send our regards with intentions of peace. All we ask in return, is mutual understanding and respect. And who are we, you may ask.”

She mustered the strength to keep her voice steady, strong and avoid a crack. This was getting emotional already.

“We...are the villains. The fairy tale villains. The criminals, the terrifying bad wolves and closet boogeyman. We are what you scare your children with, yet we are also the ones that worked for your children’s clothing, their electricity, their food. We are the ones you never see, the ones behind the machines, the workers, the slaves. And we are here today, stepping out of the shadows to look you in the eye and say; ‘We, are not a fairy tale. We are not a book. We are real beings, with emotions. We are not your power source. We are monsters. And our lives, matter.”

There was a small, quiet cheering from the crowd in the back. Most of them were monsters and she expected that kind of response. The journalists in the front didn’t react much. Cameras moved around to show Rainsville’s mayor and PD chief clapping, seemingly moved by the speech.

She glanced to her left side. There, among the other seats one stood out, for it had no occupant. The seat was saved for the Ambassador of Monsterkind, yet only one human was allowed to occupy it. And it was empty. Jaleyn felt her SOUL writhe.

“We didn’t come here to declare war. We don’t want to steal your jobs, your homes, or your children.” She swallowed the underlying insult. It hurt so much to think a lot of the humans hearing this wouldn’t really believe her. “We are here to raise our voice against the injustice. Our only demand; is equality.”

She made another pause. There was some cheering. Jaleyn reached into the pocket of her long dress and drew out a small, black USB flash stick. She held it up for the cameras to see.

“In this drive I have stored over one thousand undernet conversations between humans and monsters. A lot of times neither party was aware of who they were addressing, because of the anonymity. Still, if we put these to display, you’ll find out yourself that a lot of beautiful friendships have blossomed in this here flashdrive. And we believe that those friendships can become reality, if we’re given a chance in the surface world again.”

Now there was some hesitance. Even though the flash-drive’s appearance gained a big applause, it seemed to tone down when the word ‘surface’ was brought up. And Jaleyn knew that, she was prepared for the consequences of those heavy words she was about to utter...

“Thus we ask the Red Soul to step forward and release our kin from the bonds bestowed on them ten thousand years ago. We ask for the Truce of the Great War to be undone and our kind freed from its eternal suffering in the Undeground prisons. Because we few of the surface have proven that we can co-exist with humans in peace, and we do not deserve to be treated as less!”

Silence.

Complete silence was spread in the audience. Absolutely no response. Even the journalists had their jaws hanging open. It was definitely a very provocative thing to say out loud like that. The mayor cleared his throat, obviously nervous. He tried to reassure himself that only the eldest generations would be aware of just how risky a statement that had been.

For the younger generations had forgotten all about SOULS and Great Wars. It’d been a piece of human history only available through special books in university libraries, lost in time, forgotten. To bring this deep wound in humanity back like that...the existence of souls, magic and their power in a world that was already moving on fast to crude technology, deprived of emotion...

Things such as Soul Traits and strong, pure emotions had no place in this new world owned by capitalism and consumption. The mayor knew this, as did the press. But because the transmission was live and Jaleyn hadn’t brought things like that up before now -she knew they wouldn’t let her speak if she did- it was too late for them. All they could do now was stand in shock.

Journalists started desperately trying to twist words around with questions. Jaleyn was about to pick one to respond to, now a lot more confident in her own words. She’d gotten past the tough part, perhaps, and now spoke more freely.

But just as the questions were bout to come raining down on her... a scream was heard from the back of the room.

With the corner of her eye she saw; a long, thick black tongue of smoke invading the room. The emergency exit light hanging over that door blinked twice and went out. Soon enough, the main entrance surrendered to smoke’s embrace as well.

Jaleyn’s blue eyes went wide with horror. Her clawed fists squeezed against the counter. The journalist crowd begun to panic, pushing, shoving each other out of the way in the despair. Glass shattered -someone broke the window. Cool air rushed inside, but she barely even felt it.

Her own people, a turtle beast and a smaller ghost monster occupying a lamp-shade at that time, were already calling for her attention. But Jaleyn’s eyes were lost in the flames emerging through both doors at the same time; that dreadful, deadly, unwelcome guest.

 Defenseless against the flame, slowly welcoming the deathly heat, all she managed was a pathetic bleat of despair. Thoughts, fast as lightning, raided her troubled mind.

In the Great War, monsters would always reign over humans the first few centuries. Monsters were equipped with powerful magic, especially Jaleyn’s ancestors; they possessed fire. Humans, naked and with their makeshift weapons, couldn’t do anything against the flame.

But then the Red Souls came along. Souls so powerful, so devious and determined they could alter an entire world just with the power of their will. And they invented the fire and granted it to the humans.

Thus the humans made better weapons, better shelter, better food. They stopped dying from things such as bad weather and raw meat, they became stronger. And finally, they won.

Seeing the flames peek through the doorways now, Jaleyn couldn’t help but think it was some kind of omen; some kind of response to her demand.

Lost in her thoughts with tears streaming down her wide eyes, she barely felt the cool skeletal fingers on her shoulder. Next thing she knew, she was outside, on the pavement, watching the building burn alongside her comrades and a tall skeleton monster in a dark grey hoodie.

Her reaction came after a few minutes, when she felt ready to speak again. But she ended up turning around to face the others and sensing the disappointment in their souls, collapsed and burst into tears. The skeleton, Baskerville his name was, approached to pull her in a tender hug with a gentle pat on the back.

“’Ey now, dun’ worry. ‘Tis gonna be alright...”

Somewhere in the distance, leaning against a roughly textured brick wall, headphone cords danced in tune with the human’s head, as it bobbed to the rhythm. Frisk smiled.

[baloneymalone]

How to go out in a warzone

So, you're privileged enough to not belong to the group of people being persecuted this protest season. Lucky you! (Every war has people like us, those who just wanna keep their head down and earn a living, those who have worked so hard to get where they are, the fear of losing it chokes their urge to voice what they believe in, they can only admire the courage of the righteous from afar.)

While you wait, you wish to see your loved ones, people you care for, people that can make you feel hopeful and less scared, but you don't wanna die in the process cause hope is wasted on corpses don't you think?

So what do you do? Do you text? Video call? Sure, they're letting us have internet, but they don't let us all have internet at the same time, cause they don't want you masturbating to propoganda do they? The powers that be totally know what's best for me.

But hugs don't feel as good on the internet do they?

Sometimes XO are just fucking letters.

So let us say you will yourself to go out, but your grandmother cries at the thought of you stepping out of the house, your father is a rational man, he sees the world outside in a temporary unrest. He reads the news. He tells me why the police simply has to beat up my friends, the police have their hands tied, the government has to beat up everyone equally, 50 people threw stones at them so they just had to thrash anyone they could get their hands on. Poor poor police, they must be so exhausted, pity the politicians, so many evil eyes upon them, do you know how hard it is to plan proxy political wars? Creating factions? Spreading misinformation?

Your father is just a man, he's scared too, he's selfish and aren't you selfish too? So you forgive him.

You must travel in the morning, daylight is necessary, you scout for protests and gatherings data on social media, you find hot spots and you find a route to avoid it. Everyone agrees upon a place and time. But what is the right place and what is the right time.

Well it must be a public space with multiple exits but it can't be too public, all gatherings of people are bad.

You may never know when which establishment is closed down, so call the place, and keep calling on your way, maybe talk to them as real people used to, you should try to gauge their socio-political leanings, and their son's leanings and their mother's maiden name, their favourite food, their worst nightmares. Don't worry, they won't feel weird. They do this conversation every day, they must assure you that you'll be okay. They must assure each and everyone of their customers, somehow, that they're not a threat. Not everyone is a threat but anyone is.

You synchronise your watches, you pack your shawls and your water bottles, you make a small first aid kit, some food in case they lock down your station, and that's it you're all set.

And then comes a rally, they walk right across your house, banging their rods on the road, trying to keep us in (or call us out depending on how drunk they are) and then you hear it. You hear their voice and you know what's gonna happen next. Your mother will tell you don't go, your sister will tell you don't go. You don't go. You can't go. You know you can't go.

Your sister isn't just working from home, she has no choice but to. The household business isn't struggling just cause of the economy, our regular clientele is just too out of shape to be chased by goons.

They think this is temporary. I can only hope it is. I know those who are getting beaten up. Those who don't have the same privilege to stay as I do. There are no safe zones for them, no places where nothing will happen. The ground under their feet is a hot spot, can't blame the ground though can we?

There is no hope. Is there?

[antoine-roquentin]

For about five years, Mic.com was a place where readers could go to get moral clarity. In the Mic universe, heroes fought for equality against villains who tried to take it away. Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman's Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We're Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”The site had an unfiltered voice that spoke on behalf of marginalized individuals. Breitbart called it “SJW Central.” “I think a lot of people in today’s day and age want to know, ‘What are we supposed to be outraged about?’” a former Mic staffer who left the site earlier this year told The Outline. “It seemed as if we were trying to position ourselves as, ‘We are the definition of woke, and this is how you break down this narrative or fight the mainstream.’”But after laying off 25 staffers last week, Mic has a new mandate: pivoting to video. According to a memo that was sent to staff, the site’s new mission is “to make Mic the leader in visual journalism.”

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry....

The site started in 2010 as PolicyMic, an evenhanded, forgettable politics website where unpaid contributors posted commentary that could be upvoted by other site members. The PolicyMic origin story was that Chris Altchek, a Goldman Sachs banker who leaned conservative, was always debating his friend Jake Horowitz, a foreign policy columnist for Change.org who leaned liberal. The two had fierce debates about the issues of the day, and they wanted to convert that spirit into a website “to help our generation talk about the issues that really matter,” Horowitz told The New York Observer. The two met in jazz band at the New York prep school Horace Mann; they started the site when they were 23, each having raised $75,000. Altchek contributed his Goldman bonus....

This Facebook-driven success was no accident. Every time Mic had a hit, it would distill that success into a formula and then replicate it until it was dead. Successful “frameworks,” or headlines, that went through this process included “Science Proves TK,” “In One Perfect Tweet TK,” “TK Reveals the One Brutal Truth About TK,” and “TK Celebrity Just Said TK Thing About TK Issue. Here’s why that’s important.” At one point, according to an early staffer who has since left, news writers had to follow a formula with bolded sections, which ensured their stories didn’t leave readers with any questions: The intro. The problem. The context. The takeaway....

In some communications, Horowitz and Altchek emerged as tone-deaf to the diverse staff they had cultivated. In 2015, when a TV news reporter and a cameraman were fatally shot in Virginia during a live broadcast, Horowitz and Altchek ordered pizza for the office and sent an email to staff letting them know that they could take time off if they felt traumatized by the news. In response, a group of employees of color wrote an email pointing out the fact that the site frequently covered shootings of black people by police and those writers had never been offered pizza or a personal day.

The leadership was excited about elevating underrepresented communities, but employees said that Mic had become a content factory. The site had “no plan” for a Trump win on election night, multiple former employees told me, and improvised by pulling queer people and people of color out of the newsroom, putting them in front of a camera, and having them talk about how they felt. In another instance, a former staffer told me about how Horowitz, who served as editor in chief of the site until mid-2015 and is now editor at large, once interrupted a reporter pitching a video about a woman building rooftop gardens in New Orleans: “‘But, is she black? Is she black?’" the former staffer recalled Horowitz asking, “as if the story would be less impactful had the woman doing the work been white or Hispanic or Martian.” When the site was pushing into original comedy, Altchek told multiple staffers that he wanted to make “the next Chappelle Show, except it’s hosted by a trans woman of color.” Multiple former employees brought up the time Altchek introduced a video about the feminist #FreeTheNipple movement at a large staff gathering with a joke implying that the video still would have been excellent even if it hadn’t included boobs: “Titties aside,” he said, it was a great piece.

Altchek’s biggest misstep, however, was a get-out-the-vote effort called #69TheVote, which launched in late 2016. The conceit was that, while 69 million baby boomers and 69 million millennials are eligible to vote, only the former actually do so. “Boomers have always been on top,” the voiceover in the announcement video says. “Sometimes it seems like they're afraid to try new positions. But we're ready to go down on history” — a voice interrupts — “ahem, in history” — “oh right….” The video was widely disavowed by staff members and lambasted by The Washington Post, Gawker, Vice, and others....

Cahill’s suggestions belied his ignorance of reporting and lack of sensitivity to social issues, according to former staffers. Cahill wanted to replicate the success of New York magazine’s cover story with photos of women who had accused Bill Cosby of rape, said the staffer who covered social justice issues, and suggested they “do a similar roundup” with survivors of sexual assault. “‘Maybe campus rape, maybe not...whatever! Just find rape victims and get them to share their stories!’” the staffer recalled in an email, mocking the tone. “I know it wasn't intended to be so… gross. But to me it demonstrated such a complete lack of understanding of how sensitive those stories are, how difficult it is to find dozens of victims willing to go on the record about the trauma they've experienced, the trust a writer has to earn, not to mention the horror of how many Cosby accusers there were… all of it. It showed me he didn't get how any of the work the reporters were doing was done, or that the reason NYMag's story did well had nothing to do with that ‘story template’ playing well.”

While Cahill was remaking the site in Google’s image, Mic hired NPR NewsExecutive Editor Madhulika Sikka to shore up its journalism cred. Sikka was brought in with the hope that serious journalism could help free Mic from its dependence on Facebook — and that her resume could offset the fact that former news director Jared Keller and former managing editor of news Chris Miles were both found to have plagiarized parts of stories. Seven months later, Sikka was out, telling Ad Age that the job “wasn't quite the right fit for me.” Meanwhile, Cahill was promoted to managing editor of editorial operations in January 2016 and then VP of content in June 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile.

During these experiments, Mic continued to bait Facebook readers into getting worked up over everything: Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, a high school teacher in Oregon who doesn’t believe in rape culture, people with bad opinions onThought Catalog, people using bad hashtags, and Zazzle.com. “Mic trafficked in outrage culture,” a former staffer who left in 2017 said. “A lot of the videos that we would publish would be like, ‘Here is this racist person doing a racist thing in this nondescript southern city somewhere.’ There wouldn’t be any reporting or story around it, just, ‘Look at this person being racist, wow what a terrible racist.’” Mic had already exhausted its outrage vocabulary by the time Trump’s election supercharged civil rights violations.

“It ratchets everything up to 11, to a point where if everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage,” the staffer who left in 2017 said. “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”

[paladin-of-nerd-fandom65]

A New Tamaran

This was idea even older than Talon!Mary Grayson and the OC of Benito Zucco. It was heavily inspired by numerous influences from TV and Rock n Roll albums. The two particular influences are Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Original Star Trek episode ‘Patterns of Force”. Another I gladly attribute to is writer George Orwell and his novella ‘1984′ from which the following scene derives from. 

The English name of Karras being ‘Cometwind’ is not my creation but that of Fanfiction.net author cartoonstar in her story ‘Teen titans Forever’. 

The character of Karras himself was created by Marv Wolfman and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. 

WARNING: The subject matter in this story contains historical and political references some might find disturbing and even offensive. It is in no way a meant to entice the political ideology within its story or promote such. There is no real agenda meant to be heard and the use of such politics are meant to narrative to the story. Viewer discretion is advised. 

As Always, I would love to thank @lightdusk, @tarisilmarwen, @fireflyxrebel, @robxstar, @nightglider124 and many others for encouraging me to write and make corrections for they are some of the best friends you can ever ask for.

 Introductions now finished, let’s begin. 

About one thousand pairs of green or purple eyes starred up onto the screen as the footage began to play. The first sight of a prosperous, happy and loyal generation of children playing or working on their tasks brought in a sense of awe and peace to the masses. The voiceover began to play…

“These are our children, these are our schools, these are our people, this is our home; this is the Planet of Tamaran.”

The images had shifted by that point into various signs of their home, from the recently built wind mills that provide their kleshu (Tamaranean for ‘Bread’) to the steel pounding factories that craft the finest weapons and building skeletons the Vega system had yet to witness, the crowd grew a sense of joy and further more pride. This gathered mass was invited and encourage visiting this rally here in the opposite side of Tamaran courtesy of this new development within the Grand Ruler’s court; a ‘party’ as they pronounce it was created from the mind of a very young and impressible Tamaranean warrior by the name of Karras. As it turns out, this young man, English translated as ‘Cometwind’, was a very close childhood friend with the ever beloved Royal Family, in particular of the Princess Koriand’r (‘Starfire’). Her knowledge of Earth culture had reached her birth planet and the young Cometwind took it upon himself to research Earth’s history, in particular military history from across various cultures in which can prove effective for Tamaran and its people against their ever present archenemies across the Vega system. By the grace of X’hal, Cometwind, who at this moment provides the voiceover for this rally, found one such culture to rally the people under…

“This home of ours is enjoying an era of peace and harmony. Security and Justice are done for all. Poor and Rich, Warrior and Shield maiden, Educated and Uneducated; this is our home which all can have their peace. This is our mother’s home and the home of their mothers. This is our Tamaran …”

At this point, the mood darkened…images were shifted to those very children at the beginning being suddenly taken from their places and into chains, the factories and mills burn to a crisp, bombs and explosions erupt, nothing was scripted, this was their reality….

“Our home is under siege, mutilated, pillaged, raped and defiled…by them. They had enslaved our children. They have destroyed our schools; they have harmed and scared our people for far too long…”

The images began to shift once more, this time to a certainly familiar, lizard like face…

“WHO are THEY?”

That lizard like face grew into thousands in a mass rally of blood and perverse orgy of their own terms… their orc like roars screeching throughout it all…with teeth stained with the crisp yellow blood of Tamaranean children…their glowing red eyes filled with such a level of depravity and malice at everything they stare…staring towards their home…

“They are the darkest and blackest souls of our galaxy. The black, murderous souls of the Gordanians are what they are. They know no meaning of the word mercy, no meaning of the word peace or harmony; instead they opt to relish and pleasure themselves in the suffering of others….OUR suffering…a suffering we will NOT PERMIT.”

“How does this suffering even begin? Certainly centuries’ worth of discontent between us and them would’ve provided enough of justification for this treachery? That is where we were wrong. The centuries’ worth was only in full bloom once SHE had her say…a say that has disgraced our kind and brought our people to the very brink of extinction and loss of all hope…”

The tone was now much noticeably angrier while a possessing a near sick level calm in projection. The image shifted once more…to a certain black haired Princess…wearing the Grand Ruler’s crown…the very crown she wore when forcing their precious Koriand’r into a disgraceful and humiliating marriage had it been for her allies…the exiled Komand’r was there on their screens now…

“SHOUT. SHOUT! SHOUT OUT HER NAME!!!” roared the voice of Cometwind himself, a youthful young man of approximately 20 Earth years of age, now appearing in front of the screen on a simple platform with a rather Earth looking uniform of dark purple and black, military combat boots, a hat of unique shape like that an Earth ship captain with an eagle gracing the top, and to finally add a black armband with a red border, centered with a white circle containing a red colored eight pointed star, The Official Emblem of all Tamaran called The Nightstar, wrapped around the upper part of his right arm.

The crowd erupts into roars and screams of hatred and spite, all with their eyes now glowing in righteous fury and hatred towards their enemy; while the names and calls varied in the end one common was used….

“TRAITOR!”

This simultaneous albeit diverse outcry from the rally continued for the next minute, growing and pile onward as the filthy image of the disgraced and traitorous Princess continued her display on the screen.  The cries grew even louder once Komand’r’s (‘Blackfire’) image was paired with the image of the horrifying and evil grins of the Gordanians who happily slaughter and/or imprison more of their beloved children. The peak had hit by the time Cometwind raises his hands high enough for all to see and the images stop. Now all the was shown was the flag of this ‘Party’, a similar design to the armband Cometwind wears, the Red Nightstar with a white background within an all black banner. The young Tamaranean man began to speak after a brief minute of utter silence.

“Beloved friends, this is our reality as I speak. Due to the aftermath of our traitor and the slow transition for the great Emperor Galfore, the war between us and them has progressed into a completely new animal. These crimes against our kind had grown on a scale only seen since our home’s founding days. We must find a way to bring our Emperor and our People the glory and respect we deserve away from our enemies. We have found that way starting to this day. On the Planet Earth, they have officially named this day with the title of April 20th, the Fuehrer’s Birthday. The Fuehrer according tot the doctrines of the studies we have learned from Earth’s history and best to our knowledge had one goal in mind: the preservation and ultimate survival of the Aryan Race, the superior human beings in an age of mutilation and disgrace not dissimilar from our own. Like the Fuehrer’s war from decades past and the effects upon his home, our war has not produced the glory and honors our warriors and shield maidens rightfully earned and especially not of the home our children must grow within in order to live happy lives. The Fuehrer attempted to bring his home all such and more but unfortunately suffered the consequences due to his mistakes and follies. We, the Imperialist Party of Great Tamaran, will not make those mistakes. Our war will be one in which all will WIN. Our cause is not for supremacy but VEGENACE AND JUSTICE. Our Tamaran shall transform into a Planet united for the good and safety of our children and with your support starting this day, our beloved Grand Ruler Galfore will have under his care and authority the greatest and most loyal citizens the Royal Family had never known. WE WILL HAVE OUR PRINCESS KORIAND’R RETURN TO OUR LOVING ARMS. WE WILL PROPSER AND SHOW THE VEGA SYSTEM WHAT TAMARAN REALLY IS. WE… WILL… NOT… SURRENDER. WE… WILL… TAKE OUR HOME BEYOND US ALL. ONE PEOPLE! ONE PLANET! ONE REICH!”

The crowd stands, their right arms raised as the Party officials instructed in their pamphlets with their fingers folded instead of the pinkie and index…the chant was heard as Cometwind began…

“SEIG!”

“HEIL!”

“SEIG!”

“HEIL!”

“SEIG!”

“HEIL!”

Even as Cometwind had stopped and simply held his hand in the Imperial greeting, the crowd’s roars of ‘Heil” meaning Victory in the Earth language of German continued with zealous fervor. Fervor he himself found rather…unnerved by. While remaining true to his word of Tamaran accepting this so called ‘Fascism’ as the Earthlings call it as a means to protect its people and children from the Gordanians that have continuously made miserable for centuries, he means for what is best and once his place on the Royal Council is secured, he hope his eventual Imperial growth doesn’t result in him taking unethical chances that mostly likely will shame his people. Personally, Karras, his Party name being Fuehrer Cometwind, hopes his rise will mean that peace he sees alongside the others in those screens are the ultimate result, without the needing of the pointless genocide his idol, the German Fuehrer, had his subjects carry out. Fuehrer Cometwind only expects the highest moral standards and civility from this otherwise blunt and uncompromising ideology he had discovered that one day his best friend Koriand’r had brought unintentionally with her Earth knowledge and probably one she had no knowledge of but one she no longer has to endure, neither should his people...not unless they can show everyone just what sort of people they dared to defile. One Earth phrase usual says ‘Pay Evil unto Evil’, and Karras accepts such a painful truth while the new 2000 members of the Imperialist Party continue their Heils for the next few seconds. A New Tamaran will rise, the Great Journey to Glory has begun and whether she knows or not, Princess Koriand’r will lead the way with Fuehrer Karras as her left hand and her beloved Robin as her right.

As stated before, no political agenda advocating this system of government is promoted here. It’s fictional and in no way is reflective of my true political stances or those who read it. Please be considerate. 

[newstfionline]

How Bangladeshis are coping with half a million new Rohingya refugees

By Max Bearak, Washington Post, September 29, 2017

The sudden arrival of half a million Rohingya Muslims has upended life in this humble village, which is now overshadowed by one of the largest concentrations of refugees in the world.

The village’s rundown school and a smattering of rice paddies sit across the road from thousands of acres of bamboo huts covered by black tarp, a safe harbor for the refugees fleeing ethnic violence in Burma. That land was once a forest where villagers picked wild fruit.

Last Saturday, the midday tea-sipping crowd hung out on the benches in front of Munwara Begum’s provisions store here. In their discussion were echoes of a conversation happening around the world about the costs of compassion toward refugees. It was one filled with conflicting emotions.

“The price of rice has doubled since they came. The price of rickshaws has doubled. Vegetables, soap, you name it, and the price has gone up,” said Begum, counting her very real grievances on her fingers. Basic economics is at work here: When demand rises sharply and supply lags in catching up, prices rise.

“And the Rohingya are rich!” she said. “They have nice phones, solar panels. The ones who’ve been here since ‘91 are in better shape than us!”

Joshimuddin, an elementary school teacher who like many here goes by one name, chimed in.

“Crime, too,” he said. “If a Rohingya beats someone or even murders them, they can just hide in the refugee camp. Then what are we supposed to do? They outnumber us.”

“It’s not like I don’t have sympathy--they had their own lives and now they have to stand in line for an hour just to use the toilet,” he continued. “But ...”

Begum completed his thought with an echo of the Burmese state line she said she had heard: “Their boys attacked the military first. What did they expect to happen?”

Eklash Mian, a sharecropper, was visibly uncomfortable. He put his arm around his young son, drew him close and said, “They are poor. They are in trouble. Let them come. We’ll get by.”

The recent arrivals are most certainly poor and in trouble. Many arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Others who had time to bring livestock or family heirlooms sold them for a pittance to the boatmen who ferried them to safety across an estuary that separates their burning villages in Burma from Bangladesh. As aid organizations struggle to cope with the sheer scale of need, thousands of Rohingya line the main road here, begging for alms.

Then again, Bangladesh is not exactly a beacon of prosperity. Nor is it a land of wide open spaces.

Bangladesh has far and away the highest population density of any sizable nation--around 3,000 people per square mile pack the alluvial plain that spans most of the country. The average Bangladeshi earns less than $1,500 a year. National highways are often pothole-strewn two-lane roads.

The overcrowding, the poverty and the underdevelopment are amplified in the country’s far southeast, where the half-million new arrivals have joined hundreds of thousands who fled earlier waves of violence. The latest exodus out of Burma began Aug. 25, when a band of Rohingya militants attacked police posts in Rakhine state, prompting a violent military crackdown in Rohingya villages.

Returning to Burma, also known as Myanmar, anytime soon is simply not in the cards for the Rohingya. Despite living in Burma for generations, they are considered Bangladeshi interlopers, not citizens, and the question of whether Burma will ever grant return to those who have no paperwork is viewed with great doubt here.

Although locals may be reluctant with their sympathy, bigger players in Bangladesh are eyeing political opportunities in this time of crisis.

Speaking to Al Jazeera last week, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina brushed aside doubts that her impoverished country could handle the influx and cast the well-being of the Rohingya as a national cause.

“Bangladesh is not a rich country, it is true. We have 160 million people in a small geographical land,” she said. “But if we can feed 160 million people, another 500 or 700,000, we can do it. We can share our food. We are ready to do it. And our people are already doing it.”

Across Bangladesh, streets and highways are lined with posters depicting Hasina wiping a tear off the cheek of a refugee child. They boldly declare: “Sheikh Hasina is the mother of humanity,” and “Where is humanity, there is Sheikh Hasina.” The opposition parties have their own versions. A hotly contested national election is just one year away.

Where politicians hope some will see compassion, others are seeing a ploy to curry support from Bangladesh’s religious right, which has come out strongly in favor of welcoming the refugees. Rohingya Muslims largely adhere to a conservative strain of Islam and speak a language similar to the dialect of Bengali prevalent in the country’s southeast. Bangladesh is 90 percent Muslim.

“Bangladesh offered land to shelter Rohingya. What if these people were Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews but not Muslims? Shelter not for humanity but for votes!” wrote Taslima Nasreen, one of Hasina’s fiercest critics who has lived in exile since 1994, when she was accused of defaming Islam.

The Islamist groups that hounded secularists such as Nasreen out of the country are the same ones spearheading the local relief effort for Rohingya refugees. The camps are full of volunteer groups from religious schools and organizations, handing out food, clothes and cash.

One in particular, Hefazat-e-Islam, has staged increasingly large rallies in Bangladesh’s two biggest cities, Dhaka and Chittagong. Tens of thousands have shown up. On Monday, Hefazat leader Junayed Babunagari issued a public statement saying the Rohingya were facing “genocide” and that if diplomacy fails to return them to their homes in Burma, Bangladesh should consider a military intervention.

Curiously, no religious or governmental organization is suggesting a path to citizenship for the Rohingya, who are expected to be here indefinitely. And government-imposed restrictions confine them to the camps near Gundum. Police checkpoints have turned back thousands seeking to move farther afield.

“The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that Muslims must help other Muslims,” said Maulana Jameel Hossein, a teacher at a madrassa who was tossing used clothing at refugees who had gathered around his organization’s truck. “The Rohingya are being attacked for no other crime than being Muslim. Until they can go back home, they will be our guests.”

Perhaps that was easy for Hossein to say. He lives in Brahmanbaria, 250 miles away from the camps that continue to grow by the day.

[the-connection]

If this longtime Republican stronghold fell to the Democrats it would be a seismic artistic switching. But insurgent nominee Beto ORourke has an uphill task

On a balmy darknes in Austin, against the backdrop of the glittering high-rises of the city's booming downtown, Beto O'Rourke is laying out his audacious plan to change the face of Texas, and America.

In front of him, parcelled into an open-air common, a largely young gathering of 40, 000 is thrumming with rarely enclose gaiety. Even in the radical bubble of Austin they have never experienced anything like this: a Democrat seriously in the running for a Senate seat, emulating to topple Ted Cruz, the Tea party freak whom even fellow Republican call " Lucifer in the flesh "~ ATAGEND.

" We are not running against anything or any registered political party ," O'Rourke tells his supporters. He swipes his arm in the air like a pumped-up revolutionary while simultaneously chasing them with a crooner's charms.

The message is relentlessly positive. The 45 -year-old has nippped Barack Obama's 2008 catchphrase" Hope and change" for darker hours, so now it becomes:" Hope over dread ".

" We are extending for each other and this country that I desire so much better ," he says, to a giant roar.

Audacious is too detached a word for O'Rourke's campaign. "Nuclear" goes closer. That a punk rocker-turned-politician who a year ago was scarcely known outside El Paso, their own borders municipality he represents in Congress, should be competitive at all in Texas is miraculous.

The state last-place encountered a Democratic US senator 25 years ago. It has filled every statewide office with Republican since 1998.

The recent ballots put the race within boundaries of error. The respected Cook Political Report astounded spectators by recently grading such elections as a "toss-up". Real Clear Politics' tracking canvas has Cruz up four stages, but it also has the contest as a toss up.

A toss-up? The ramifications flood in. Were O'Rourke to send Cruz packing it is able to hand back command of the Senate to the Democrats, with all that necessitates for Donald Trump's program- and possible impeachment.

The recent ballots introduced the scoot between O'Rourke and Senator Ted Cruz within margins of mistake. Picture: Laura Buckman/ AFP/ Getty Images

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But the reverberations would go much further than that. Texas has the second highest person in the society. With the increasing numbers of Texans projected to double to more than 50 million by 2050- visualize California and New York compounded- its once outsized influence on US culture and politics is set to explode.

Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning author, points out where reference is gratify in his hometown of Austin that any indicate of the state growing genuinely in play would be a displacement of seismic results." Formerly that happens, the whole nation's politics changes. The Republican presidential strategy could be used as deep trouble- they can't win the White House without Texas ."

Wright's book God Save Texas was published the beginning of this year when what might be called the Beto effect had yet to take off. Which is miraculous. Wright's thesis- that Texas comprises the key to the future of America, both as the beginnings of much of the rightwing tribalism that grips Washington, and as its possible medicine- is precisely what is at stake in this epic senatorial battle.

" Cruz and O'Rourke represent different eyesights for the future of the state, and the country ," Wright says." Cruz's vision is very exclusionary, cold-hearted, out of adjust with the more centrist political current that really extends through the position ."

Wright has been amazed to attend" Beto for Texas" mansions spring up in heavily republican areas such as the Dallas suburbs. That is all the more surprising sacrificed O'Rourke's background as bass participatein a punk banding and his unashamedly radical positions on universal healthcare, gun control, in-migration reform and dope legalization.

It's as if O'Rourke has taught umpteen boreholes and unleashed substitutes of pent-up political force, like geysers of black oil gushing from the Texas prairie. The coerce is evident at his downtown Austin rally.

Young beings in the crowd say they are drawn to what they see as a new wording of politics crafted by Beto( everyone uses his given name, pronounced "Bet-Oh" ). They like how he eschews focus groups and strategists, speaks his recollection and refuses to take fund from big corporate sponsors. The" Beto for Texas" campaign insignium is printed in black and white rather than Democratic off-color to signify a desire to cross boundaries.

Many at the revival, like Kaitlyn Watson, 19, are first-time voters who see in O'Rourke an fleeing from suffocating reactionary pasts. For her to vote in favour of a Democrat is an act of disobedience coming as she does from Beaumont, an intensely republican town.

In Watson's final year of high school she affixed a tweet critical of vice-president Mike Pence for being anti-gay. The tweet disappeared viral, and she was spate by castigations from her Trump-supporting schoolmates.

" Beaumont is most republican and closed-minded. I went out as soon as I could ," she says.

Watson's friend and fellow Beaumont resident, Aimee Huckeba, 20, has also been enticement for radical examines. Her educator reached recreation of her in front of classmates and other students bullied her when she spoke in government class.

Now it's payback term: she is spending her spare hours persuading young Texans to cross-file to vote for O'Rourke." This is our chance to make change ."

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Huckeba is not alone . Something is afoot in the largest territory of Texas. About 1.6 m added honours have been added to voter moves since the 2014 midterm polls, a surge that could play critically in O'Rourke's favor.

One of his capital ways is that Texas is not a republican territory or a liberal government- it is a non-voting government. Trump earned Texas by nine times in 2016, but he and Hillary Clinton were lashed by the army of Texans who bided home.

Just 43% of registered voters went to the referendums- one of the most difficult turnouts in the nation- and the percentage of young people who participated was substantially lower. If O'Rourke could tap into that possible among young, as well as low-income and Hispanic Texans who tend to lean Democratic more elect sporadically, then what seemed to be a pipe dream just a few months ago could be within his grasp.

Ted Cruz, who razzed the Tea Party curve into the Senate in 2012, is for the first time facing a viable challenge from the left. Image: Pool/ Reuters

Then there are women like Jennifer Harris, 45. She is the proud owner of a bumper sticker that predicts:" Republicans for Beto ".

Harris has been a Republican voter for 20 times, but will be voting for O'Rourke in November." Moderate, college-educated dames like me, we've had enough of the tribalism, of the policies of no that Ted Cruz represents ."

Harris has a pre-existing state ailment, and has no religion Republicans will protect her healthcare coverage. Under the influence of the Tea party, Texas has the highest number of parties without health insurance in the country- some 4.3 miliion, including 623,000 children.

She also has a 10 -year-old son, and has watched with fright as low-tax Tea Party Republican have pared investment in education down to about $9,000 per public schoolchild a year. That's 25% below the national average, in a state that hosts one in 10 of all American children.

The last straw was Ted Cruz's support of Brett Kavanaugh for the US supreme court despite sexual assault allegations against the justice, further compounded by Trump's mocking of his accuser Dr Christine Blasey Ford this week. Harris has come to believe that Cruz has put self and gathering before country.

" Republican brides are mad ," Harris said." We certainly might decide the parliamentary elections. The pendulum is likely to be swaying back ."

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The last era the pendulum swing in Texas was 30 years ago. The commonwealth was rock-solid Democratic for decades, but in the 1980 s and 1990 s it did a full fling and grew rock-solid Republican.

Two individuals did more than any others to bring about that sea change. One of them was the most celebrated Texan of them all: Lyndon Johnson, who following the assassination of John F Kennedy gave the Lone Star state on the planned with his surly Texan channels and Great Society reforms.

Johnson knew that his landmark civil right legislation proscribing discrimination and diversifying voting rights to black people would go down like a lead balloon in the then Democratic south, his house regime included. He is reported to have said " we have lost the south for a generation ".

And so it came to pass. In differentiate to Johnson's achievements- the process of developing Medicare and Medicaid and the "war on poverty"- Cruz and co have shut down the federal government, reduced public services and promoted anti-transgender bathroom proposals. Last-place time they transcended themselves by legalizing open carry of swords on Texan streets.

So how would Johnson see his beloved Texas today now that it has turned not only Republican but rabidly Tea Party? I positioned the question to his nephew Philip Bobbitt, a constitutional law academic at the University of Texas at Austin who as a young man lives in Johnson's White House.

" I don't see Lyndon wringing his hands about it ," Bobbitt says." He was a doer, a man of action. He would say,' Let's get moving! Let's get out the vote !'"

Supporter Caroline Korst stands for a photograph after awareness-raising campaigns rallying for Beto O'Rourke. Picture: Laura Buckman/ AFP/ Getty Images

That sums up Beto O'Rourke's policy towards dealing with Ted Cruz. Instead of bleating about the die of progressive politics, he is a doer. He has called all 254 counties in the district, sowing seeds of a possible Democratic reawakening as he goes.

A least positive take over the Democratic bid for rebirth is given by the second individual who did more than any other to wrest Texas into the Republican camp: Karl Rove. Rove is good known nationally for securing two presidential terms for George W Bush, but in Texas he is legendary for having given the mood a total makeover, systematically supplanting the Democratic old guard with Rove Republicans.

I ask Rove whether Beto O'Rourke could be about to do what he did, but in reverse.

" Texas could fluctuate back into the Democratic row ," he begins." But not with Beto O'Rourke. He is one of the most heedless applicants I've ever seen in "peoples lives" ."

Reckless?

" He has this habit of cuss extensively in the wrong lieu, like town hall meetings in rural areas in Texas. That might be charming in hip places in Houston, but O'Rourke says the f-word and a whole lot more in front of a bunch of churchgoers in little town ."

Rove is even more scathing about the viral video of a pronunciation in which O'Rourke said there was " good-for-nothing more American" than NFL players kneeling through "the member states national" anthem." I can think of a million stuffs more American than participate in the knee ," Rove says," like honouring the flag or wearing the uniform ."

The master strategist goes on:" Beto is a media start. Is he going to come closer than Democrat in recent scoots? Likely. Is he going to earn? I find it highly unlikely ."

That will be music to the ears of Ted Cruz, who for the first time is facing a viable challenge from the left. When Cruz rode the Tea Party gesticulate into the US Senate in 2012, his only event was internal- between the right and the far right- over who would be Republican candidate.

In effect, he was elected in the primary that time by 631,000 votes- in a state of 27 million.

Cruz, who is only two years older than O'Rourke but comes across as part of a crustier contemporary, is following the conventional safarus playbook: pumping big bucks into negative ads attacking his rival's stability. Being Cruz though- he was, after all, the politician who brought us " machine-gun bacon " - his attempts at character assassination has significantly descended flat.

Last month he warned that his contender was plotting to ban barbecue in the different regions of the mood. Less charming was the dog-whistle tweet he put out including a time of O'Rourke expressing outrage at the recent killing by a female police officer of an African American husband in his Dallas apartment.

Cruz captioned the time" In Beto O'Rourke's own texts ". The implication was clear: that there was something reprehensible about blaming the police for hitting an unarmed black being in his own home.

Some of the attacks on O'Rourke have come closer to their celebrate. This week he was forced to apologise after a review of a Broadway show he had inserted in 1991, when he was 19, was dredged up in which he said the only qualifications of the female actors were there" phenomenally vast hearts and tight rears ".

But overall O'Rourke's refusal to be sidetracked from his positive politics has worked. It's a sign of how rattled Cruz is that he has had to call in the artillery, in the shape of his arch-enemy Donald Trump.

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In the 2016 presidential primaries, Trump ridiculed him as" Lyin' Ted Cruz", shaped crude notes to his wife and proposed his father was behind the JFK assassination. Cruz dissidents are compiling the most of this awkward history. They have placed a blown-up tweet in which Trump slams Cruz for achieving "absolutely nothing" on the side of a truck which they park for maximum embarrassment in front of the Republican candidate's public appearances.

Trump will make a stump look for Cruz this month- an astonishing capitulation for the Texan granted such visceral revulsions in their past." Cruz requires Trump to come to Texas to tell all Trump boosters to vote for him, and then he necessary Trump to go away and have nothing more to do with it ," said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.

Despite the evidence of jitters on Cruz's part, it's way too early to write his political obituary. The merely voting motifs of Texas suggest the odds are stacked in the Republican's favor.

In 2004 the government reached a historic landmark when its minority populations- Hispanic, African American and Asian- outdistance the lily-white majority. Since then the Latino community has grown steadily, standing today at 40% of all Texans and in turn cringing the percentage of non-Hispanic white-hot Texans, or Anglos, to an approximately equal 42%.

That represents a fundamental demographic alter that every year performs the overwhelmingly white-hot male rightwing Republicans look more unrepresentative of the Texan people. But don't be fooled. The jolt is slow-going to filter through electorally. White Texans still account for the lion's share of those who actually turn out at the polling stations. In 2016, 9.5 million Texans voted in the presidential election, of whom 62% were Anglos.

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It doesn't take the significant efforts to find those Trump-supporting, Tea Party-friendly lily-white voters upon whom Cruz's survival depends. The minute you step out of the Austin bubble and head out into the scrubby ranchlands that border it, they are everywhere.

Drive a couple of hours south to Gonzales, a small town of 7, 000 in cattle country, and you enter another Texas. If Austin, with its shining brand-new Google skyscraper, is the face of Texas's and America's future, Gonzales is viewing firm to the past.

The town's claim to fame is that it was here that the first shot of the Texas Revolution was fuelled in 1835 after immigrants refused to hand back to Mexico a borrowed cannon. As they faced off the Mexican legion, Gonzales colonists elevated a homemade banner on which they had sketched the cannon with the words:" Come and take it ".

The refrain has been co-opted by the Tea party as a representation of Texan grit and devotion to grease-guns. Ted Cruz wore a" Come and take it" pennant pinned to his lapel when addressing the US Senate.

WR Low, 75, a retired rancher, poses at the Cow Patty, a eatery in Gonzales, Texas. Low is to report to O'Rourke. Photo: Katie Hayes Luke for the Guardian figcaption > generator >

A massive' Come and take it' pennant now flies on one side of Gonzales square. On the other side another facet of Texan history is celebrated in the form of a 30 ft article bearing the bronze of a Confederate soldier. The memorial faces north to ward off the invading- and slavery resisting- yankees.

A short-lived drive from the town hub, four cowboys are remaining in the Cow Palace diner after a long morning on horseback. Three cowboys, to be accurate. The fourth, the elder statesman of different groups, says:" I'm a cowman, I predict ."

As he munches on deep-fried steak smothered in white-hot sauce, WR Low, 75, tells me why talk of a competitive election is baloney." I don't think there's going to be a race. No one proportions that guy ," he says, referring to O'Rourke whose appoint he seems powerless, or loath, to speak.

Why not?

"' Cause he's an idiot. His platform's all mistaken. He's against officers and members of the military. He requires everybody to come across the border and get welfare ."

Low thinks that if" that guy" were elected, the cowboys' way of life would be under besiege." We are contending already in rural areas and that guy would lean everybody on aid- all we have left would flow right out of township ."

Out on his ranch, Gary Henderson, 64, is surveying his cows sheltering under mesquite and American oak. He ponders the problem with Democrats is that they repute money proliferates like needles on those trees." It has to stop somewhere- they impede contributing millionaires tax breaks ."

But Trump has just given a $30 bn tax break to souls obliging more than$ 1m a year.

" That's true, but it wasn't political ."

Did you benefit personally from Trump's tax sections?

" Not much. But at the least my taxes aren't going up ."

Gary Henderson, illustrated at his 160 acre ranch in Gonzales, is one of countless Trump partisans in Texas. Image: Katie Hayes Luke for the Guardian figcaption > root >

The adulation shown by small-town and country Texans toward Trump helps explain why Cruz so cravenly needs a helping hand from the man who humiliated him. But it should also be a alerting to Beto O'Rourke.

That foreboding is italicized back in the center of municipality, where the Latino owneds of Milupita Taco House are clearing up after lunch. Gonzales is 40% Hispanic, though you wouldn't know it. The community is virtually invisible, with most people working in meat-producing mills in the environs while those working in township remain an extremely low profile.

Sebastian Esquivel, 21, is one of the cooks in the family business. He has never had voted in favour of their own lives, and in his extended family of about 20 relatives in Gonzales- US citizens every one- he knows of but one who previously gave a ballot.

Esquivel does not recognise the names of Beto O'Rourke or Ted Cruz, and cannot identify their respective parties." To be honest, to me it doesn't really matter ," he says.

What does matter?

" My family and me. Putting nutrient on the table, paying statutes ."

That's what Beto O'Rourke is up against. Entire communities of marginalised voters have been so excluded from the political process- purposefully so, over many years- that it will take more than one luminary applicant in a single political cycles/second to designate them right.

The future of Texas, of America, is in their hands. But it's still information to them.

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