#and not have a sufficient pension

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

Is it true that in germany, people who dont have kids have to pay a specific tax, and people who have kids are exempt from It?

If its true is the tax applied for single people or just couples who live together?

its not really my topic of expertise but from my understanding we have six tax classes, if you are not married and dont have kids you get put in the class with the highest taxes. so its not a special tax its just a higher percentage. if you have kids and are not married i think you are in a different class with lower taxes than unmarried childless persons. married people do in fact have tax advantages but dont ask me how that works exactly… overall german social politics are very conservative, they are clearly aiming at fostering traditional families where the parents are married and the mother does not work or only parttime. this is a bit off topic but related, single mothers are among the groups most at risk of poverty, and even though fathers can take paid time off after the birth of a child, on average women leave the workforce for around eight years while men do so for two or three months on average. so overall i would say its mostly married men who profit…

[majimassqueaktoy]

Just thinking. Trying to maybe write later...

[dostoyevsky-official]

this a view of someone who's ignored european developments since 2007, opting for a rosy, outdated view of european politics, i.e. the exact type of american committing the exact type of mistake i'm warning about.

to address this point by point: not only has inflation been a global issue, but the US has consistently enjoyed the lowest inflation of any developed economy. american CPI has remained below the british, polish, and eurozone average numbers. european economies have to deal with fallout from the russian invasion of ukraine that the us can ignore: notably, in energy prices, as the US became self-sufficient in energy (and never imported any from russia to begin with, something squeezing the german economy). america is also not hosting millions of ukrainian refugees.

when discussing european instutions—and "europe" in general—one has to be more specific. do you mean the overarching institutions of the EU, criticized for a democratic deficit that many have pinpointed as one source for euro-skepticism and the rise of the far right? the EU Council, widely ignored and headed by charles michel, an incompetent, blatant nepobaby appointment whom everyone grinds their teeth over? the EU parliament, recently filled with a fresh batch of far-right hooligans, which functions more or less as a rubber stamp for the commission? the EU commission itself, headed by VdL, the latest in a string of failed local politician commissioners (who remembers the alcoholic swindler juncker?) masquerading as technocrats? the ECB, which smothers the monetary (and through the maastricht criteria, the fiscal) policy of eurozone members, thereby fueling resentment, far-right movements, and economic disparity? and all of this held hostage by the veto of one orban or fico, —or the german supreme court, when it decides it's had enough with public investment. those institutions, which remain so opaque that even educated americans—and europeans—aren't entirely aware of their function?

or do we mean the institutions of individual countries, ranging from undemocratic autocracies like hungary to the fief of the jupiter king, who called elections in june, lost them, refused to nominate a prime minister from the winning coalition, didn't name any for over a month, and then appointed a rightwing politician from a party that scored dead last, sidestepping his own centrist party? the UK, where sir keir is handing out five years in jail time to climate protesters, raising tuition fees, relying on private investment companies, and through rachel reeves' plan to fix the alleged budget hole left by hunt before further investment, again enacting austerity? this is all front-page headline news from the last half year.

european countries indeed have cheaper healthcare costs, better pensions, and other public goods that the united states does not. when considering "quality of life," remember, however, that most european countries have unemployment rates considered astronomic in america, especially for under-35s:

to focus again and again on european social democracy is to ignore that it has been steadily eroded since the end of the cold war and especially since the great recession by neoliberal political forces that crush the left and open the door for the far right. in the most blatant example, beside's macron's legislative politricks, the IMF-ECB-EC troika cut off euro cash liquidity flow to greece when syriza was trying to undo austerity under varoufakis. the greek collapse consigned a generation to economic failure, killed seniors, and curtailed possibilities for the youth. this erosion happened even in the nordic model, long imagined by americans as nothing short of a utopia:

In part due to the scrapping of wealth and inheritance taxes and a lower corporate tax than both the U.S. and European averages, Sweden has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world today: on a level with Bahrain and Oman, and worse than the United States. Perhaps most dispiriting for Sanders, Sweden also now hosts the highest proportion of billionaires per capita in the world. Many of the country’s trademark social services are now provided by private firms. Its private schools even benefit from the same level of state subsidy as public schools—a voucher system far more radical than anything in the United States and that Democratic politicians would be crucified for advocating. Both here and there, right-leaning commentators in 2020 decried Sanders’s portrait as little more than what Johan Norberg, Swedish author of The Capitalist Manifesto, has called a 1970s “pipedream.” On this, Swedish observers on the left gloomily agree: despite official rhetoric, the “Nordic welfare model” is now more nostalgic myth than reality. (x)

to problematize further, there's an unadressed first world perspective: who's getting the good quality of life, why are the main economies of the EU so wealthy, and how does the EU continue to enrich itself? there are certainly many living outdoors today, drowning in the mediterranean, or dying of exposure in białowieża. fortress europe is a crime against humanity—and it doesn't beat back the far right. it weakens civic and human rights, undermines legal oversight, and criminalizes humanitarian engagement, allowing an authoritarian creep.

you shouldn't understand the political and the historical as a snapshot in time, but as a moving train. this is the state of europe today. all of the above is necessarily a simplification and an abbreviation, but there's a trajectory you can begin to trace out: given all of the above, where do you think europe is headed?

[saintmeghanmarkle]

Comment in the Standard: How dare Montecito millionaire Prince Harry demand our tax money to cover his legal costs

This subject matter cannot be covered too much for my taste.

Emphasis and comments by me:

Prince Harry’s latest court defeat in his rightly unsuccessful bid to overturn the decision to refuse him guaranteed Met police protection after he pulled out of royal duties might seem like a trivial battle over legal fees.

But in fact the duke’s failed attempt to pass 50 to 60 per cent of the costs incurred by the Home Office in fighting his unmerited claim tells us much about the preening prince and his selfish disregard for virtually anyone other than himself, his equally self-obsessed wife, Meghan Markle, and his children. [No one else matters of course. It is all about them.]

That’s because when the Duke of Sussex, as he still wants to be called despite ditching his royal role, wasted yet more of the High Court’s time in arguing for the taxpayer to fund at least half of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that the Home Office was forced to spend on the case, what he was really doing was trying to pass on a large chunk of the bill to ordinary taxpayers. [Sponging off others is quite on brand.

That’s right: instead of having the decency to accept that he’d have to pay up when he lost, the Montecito multimillionaire, for whom the legal expenses will be loose change, wanted taxes paid by everyone ranging from people on the minimum wage to bus drivers, cleaners and pensioners to cover his costs. It’s frankly contemptible. [Does he think it is his birthright to have the peasants pay for his temper tantrums?]

It's notable too that yesterday’s costs order by the High Court judge, Sir Peter Lane, reveals that Harry, who is so protective of his own privacy (when it suits him), managed to breach a confidentiality agreement made as part of the litigation by emailing “certain information” that was meant to be secret to one his lawyers and the MP Johnny Mercer. The prince might have apologised for the error, but the costs order refers to the “seriousness of the breach” and it was at best a sloppy mistake that added to the Home Office costs that he was trying to avoid. [What were you up to Harold?]

Harry’s whole case was, of course, misconceived from the start and it’s worth recapping why.

He asserted that the decision in 2020 by security experts on the Government’s Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, known as Ravec, that he should no longer receive publicly-funded police protection in Britain because of his move abroad should be overturned.

The supposed reasons were that the committee had allegedly failed to take into account the impact of a successful attack on the prince and had also acted unreasonably, unfairly and with a lack of transparency.

It was nonsense for the prince to think that he knew better than a panel of experts informed by the latest security advice from the police and intelligence agencies. [This man has a very high opinion of himself.] The High Court unsurprisingly dismissed Harry’s claim on all grounds, finding that there was no reason to overturn the Ravec panel’s decision. It had in fact left open the possibility of occasional police protection for the prince when in Britain, if there was evidence in future of a sufficient threat to his safety.

An attempt by the prince to persuade the courts that a later offer by him to pay for police protection should have been accepted was also rebuffed. Yet another judge dragged into Harry’s interminable litigation ruled it would be wrong to allow the wealthy to receive a service from the limited pool of specialist Met protection officers that a less affluent person could not afford.

That too was the correct and inevitable decision. Police protection officers are highly skilled specialists, trained at significant public expense, who exist only in restricted numbers and who are required to safeguard those facing the highest risks such as working royals, Cabinet ministers and prime ministers current and former, not others like Harry wanting the comfort blanket of protection they don’t need.

In short, every argument put forward by Harry was flawed and rejected by the courts. It’s a sign of his delusion that even the succession of earlier rebuffs from the judiciary didn’t stop him basing his attempt to get off a big chunk of the Home Office’s costs in fighting the litigation on the fantasy claim that he’d achieved “partial success” in his legal action. [He learns nothing from his experiences.]

Maybe that was how Harry viewed it. After he all, he told the world in his biography Spare that “there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts”.

But it simply wasn’t true, as yesterday’s High Court costs order reminded him.

It pointed out that Harry had “comprehensively lost” and that there was “no merit” in his claim of partial victory with his judicial review argument failing “on all of the pleaded grounds.” [Harold is a big loser.]

It was the obvious outcome from the start and the claim should never have been brought. His inevitable defeat was deserved and now it’s time for the penny-pinching prince to pay up.

👉 How dare Montecito millionaire Prince Harry demand our tax money to cover his legal costs | Evening Standard (archive.ph)

post link

author: Von_und_zu_

submitted: April 17, 2024 at 10:53AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

[titoist]

in podgorica, they have these electrified benches. they charge your phone, when you put it down on the thing. the charger symbol. on the bench.

i thought about how things like this might condition a person to think of the internet & electronic devices not as a discrete modality of interfacing with a network but as an abstract field of matter that encompasses the globe flawlessly. which you might happen to bump into accidentally, inevitably, anywhere. on a park bench, for example. podgorica, it wants you to notice, is a very cosmopolitan city with modernity & QR codes on statues and the word 'european' stamped as a prefix on every sign. everything costs at least 5 euros. i felt very little. i felt nowhere at all. podgorica is a city without any history, basically, it is a testament to human will that it was built at all, a planned miracle. it grows off of the mountains & hills like a kind of concrete tumor. so much music everywhere, so much plastic. it got me to thinking about Niš and Aleksinac and Crna Trava and all of the places i know as home that are dying all of the time. being killed, decimated by an evil that gestates not in people (though individuals can serve to articulate it's manifestations to such an extent that they become sufficient representatives of it's logic) but in systems, crawls up your spine from the cracks in sidewalks. it felt less like a city and more like a resort town for german pensioners. today if it were isolated it could never be anything nearing self-sufficient. it's economy is based on smuggling cigarettes into germany. suddenly i understand the emotions behind the petulant misdirected nationalism of montenegrin serbs; if i was witness to such a blatant artificial division being used to justify the creation of what amounts to an opportunistic shell company of a country, i would be tearing my hair out. it made me start thinking about how Crna Trava's genocide is reaching such a feverish pitch that i can look at the census data of individual villages and deduce exactly which people i remember from childhood have died in destitution and there was so much cigarette smoke i felt my lungs bleeding and voices were yelling but i never saw anyone. everyone here is something and everyone outside is nothing, everyone who won't ever manage to crawl their way here will continue to never be something, anything

electric benches

[tsaomengde]

“The Mission”

A short story about love, time travel, healing, spaceplanes, and making the world a better place, even when no one will ever know.

---

After the TAG forces shot me out of my cockpit in low orbit, I floated there for about six hours.  Something – probably debris from my fighter – had hit me in the back, hard, and I couldn’t feel anything below my waist.  My suit’s maneuvering jets let me correct the initial nauseating spin I was thrown into, but they didn’t have sufficient thrust to get me out of my unstable, highly eccentric orbit.  

My suit told me I had about eight or nine trips around Titan before my periapsis wobbled low enough into the atmosphere that drag would bring me down below escape velocity.  At that point, gravity would catch up with me, I would fall, and I would crash into the surface and die.  The suit had an emergency beacon, but no built-in communications beyond that.  I was alone in the silent dark.

I sped around the moon at a little less than ten thousand kilometers per hour.  The view of Saturn, for the parts of the orbit where it wasn’t eclipsed by Titan, was gorgeous.  That was a small comfort, as my brain endlessly analyzed the ways I could go.  A bit of debris from the battle could kill me outright at these speeds, or it could puncture the suit on a glancing hit and it would be a toss-up whether I would die of suffocation or extreme cold.  My oxygen meter also claimed I had about three hours of air left, which meant I would probably be unconscious or dead by the time I actually hit the ground.  And, of course, there was the matter of my probably-broken spine.  I suspected I was bleeding internally from that.

Later, when I woke up in a hospital bed on the Agamemnon, they told me that the TAG brass had transmitted a formal surrender eighty-seven seconds after my fighter had exploded.  I was officially the last casualty of the Earth-Titan war.

They fitted me with prosthetics so I could still walk, but as the physical therapist with the cute dimples explained to me, there was some kind of incompatibility with my chromosomal something-or-other that meant I couldn’t use them at a hundred percent, which meant I didn’t qualify for combat.  My spine, which had indeed been broken, was too damaged to repair with conventional methods.  That left experimental regenerative genetic surgery, which was more expensive than the navy was willing to shell out for.

So, at thirty-one, after thirteen years in the navy, I got out with an honorable discharge, a pension that was decent enough but far from what it would take to fix my spine, a chromium heart for my injury, and enough PTSD to fuck me over for the rest of my life.

--- 

“I don’t care about my legs,” I said to Kate, the first time we ever met.  We picked a bar about halfway between us for our first meeting. She had a gin gimlet with cucumber simple syrup.  I had an old fashioned.  “They get me from point A to point B just fine.  I just miss flying.”

“Were you good at it?” she asked, blue eyes very wide.

“I certainly thought so. But then some TAG dipshit blew me out of my fighter above Titan and ended my career, so maybe I was less good than I thought.”

“You can’t fly for one of the intrasolar shipping companies?” she asked.  “Or transport?”

I gave her a patient smile. “Do you know what a pilot actually does aboard one of those big fusion torchships?”

“No, actually.”

“They point the nose where the destination is going to be, fire the engine for half the trip, then flip the ship around and fire the engine for the other half.  There’s nothing to that.  I miss flying.”

She nodded sympathetically. “I understand.”  I could tell she didn’t, not really, but that she wanted to.

I moved in with her a few months later.  Part of me wondered if it was a good idea, moving so fast, but I was two years from Titan and still waking up screaming in the middle of the night, convinced I was back in my suit, in the dark above the moon.  The greater part of me, the selfish part, was happy that someone was there to touch me, to talk to me, to root me back in myself and pull me back to earth from up there in the black.

In that sense, Kate could have been anyone.  I never thought of her as replaceable, but there was always a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that I was definitely getting more from the relationship than she was.  I voiced this to her once, and she told me I was being silly, and that she loved me, and that was all she needed.

So when she first approached me with her idea for the Mission, I like to think it was that part of me, the part that wanted to be more for her, that moved me to say yes to what was honestly an idiotic idea.  Not the part that missed flying.  Just selfless altruism and desire to help the woman I loved.

I like to think that a lot.

---

We cracked time travel about a decade after I was born.  Much to our collective disappointment as a species, it was not the fun kind of time travel that lets you go back in time and kill Hitler.  

Kate, as she told me once we were living together, was part of a DOD think tank tasked with finding some kind of use for the technology.  After a lot of experimentation, they came up with what Kate called the Four Rules.

1.      It’s time travel, not space travel.  If you want to meet Julius Caesar, you had best make sure you’re in Europe when you travel back.

2.      It only works by going back.  There is no forward travel because the future hasn’t happened yet. The only exception is returning to your point of origin.

3.      If you actually do meet Julius Caesar, it’s because your meeting him will not change history in any measurable way.  If you try to go back in time to change something significant, it simply doesn’t work.  The little box makes the noise, it uses up a lot of energy, and then nothing happens.

4.      The corollary rule to number three, then, is that when you travel back in time, whatever you do end up doing has already happened.

I asked Kate what this meant about determinism versus free will, and she primly replied that she was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher.  The DOD was not known for employing philosophers and paying them the kind of money they were paying her.

---

The Mission’s personnel consisted of four people.  Myself, the heroic pilot.  Kate, the brains behind the time travel stuff and the one who came up with the Mission to begin with.  Leon, the aerospace engineer slash DOD contractor.  And Ash, the director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We would go over to Ash’s place, have dinner, and conspire.

Over one such dinner – mac and cheese with broccoli, I remember it vividly for no adequate reason – we discussed the logistical difficulties involved.

“We can’t use anything from the last century,” Leon was saying around a mouthful of mac.  “All the guidance systems on those ships are keyed into the orbital satellite network.  There’s nothing like that at the target time.  We need a craft that can achieve orbit, rendezvous, and de-orbit in a single stage, without remote guidance.”

I nodded.  “That means we need a spaceplane.  Not just a fighter, but an actual spaceplane.”

Ash chewed over the problem as well as their food.  “There might be an SR-75 in decent enough shape we could appropriate from the displays at the museum.  The hardest part will be bribing the transport operators to take it to home base instead of, you know, a navy cache where highly dangerous military surplus equipment is supposed to go.”

I raised an eyebrow at them. “That’s going to be the hardest part? What about getting the parts to get it into decent working condition, or the fuel?”

Leon waved a hand dismissively.  “Do you know how many spare parts I have lying around at work?  How many millions of tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen are stored in poorly-guarded places that I have access to?”

“No.  I’m guessing the answer to both is ‘more than the general public would be comfortable knowing about.’”

“Exactly.”

I looked at Kate.  “Is the magic box going to be able to send a whole spaceplane back, kitty?”

She wrinkled her nose at me for using her pet name in front of our friends, but let it go for the moment. “The magic box can send anything back given enough juice.”

“Okay, but is the shitty little battery at home base going to be able to give it enough?”

“Probably.  If we strip everything nonessential out of the spaceplane, get the mass down as much as possible.  I need to know the exact mass of the plane, plus us, when it’s ready for travel.”  Kate shrugged.  “If it won’t be enough, we can always add to our list of capital offenses and steal a torchship, then use its fusion reactor for the power.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.  “Last resort.”

---

“I don’t really understand why we’re doing this,” I told her one night, in the silence following her helping me out of another flashback.

She shifted a little in bed so she could look me in the eye.  “You said you were on board.”

“I am.  I’d do anything you asked, kitty, you know that. And obviously I’m excited to get to fly again.  But nothing we’re going to do is actually going to matter.  That’s one of the four rules, right?”

With a little shrug, she began running her fingers through my hair, which I’d stopped bothering to keep short after I was discharged years ago.  It was pretty long by now.  “It’ll matter to us, won’t it?  And to her?”

“I mean, sure, but the risk-reward ratio is way off.  You and Leon and Ash could all lose your jobs, we could get prosecuted by the Justice Department –”

“Vee, why did you sign up to be a pilot?”

I stopped.  “I mean, I always wanted to fly.”

“Yes, but what was the reason you put on your application?  And the reason you told me on our first date when we were still trying to look really good and put together for one another?”

That took me back, and I snorted gently.  “To make the world a better place.”

“Exactly.  Does there have to be a minimum threshold of goodness increase in order for an altruistic act to be worthwhile?”

I weighed that particular bit of moral utilitarianism in my mind before I committed to an answer.  “No.”

“So, that’s why we’re doing this.  To make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest margin.”

I gently snaked a hand out from under the comforter to lightly boop her on the nose.  “And the real reason, since we’re not on our first date and this isn’t an application you’re filling out?”

She stuck her tongue out at me.  “I know how much you want to fly again.  And I want to see my magic box used for something other than letting rich assholes reenact Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ without any of the nuance or lessons learned.”

“Dinosaur leather shoes is not the outcome you probably had in mind,” I agreed.  The time-travel hunting industry generated billions for the government every year now.

We fell asleep that night, and the next morning, we took a magtrain to Vegas, and from there we went to home base.

---

Home base was an abandoned aircraft hangar in the middle of the Nevada desert.  Leon had said something about centuries-old top-secret aircraft testing, when we first conceived of the Mission, and lo and behold, there was a facility with room for a spaceplane.  We spent far too much money on the highest-capacity quantum battery civilians could buy, hooked it into the Vegas grid, and watched it take eight weeks to charge.

It had also cost far too much money to bribe the transport operators to bring the SR-75 here, but the deed was done and they hadn’t sold us out so far.  They probably assumed we were aviation junkies.  What domestic terrorists would bother stealing a hundred-year-old spaceplane when there were far cheaper and more effective ways to kill people, these days?

Kate, Leon, Ash, and I sat at a small table in a corner of the hangar, drinking coffee and going over the ascent profile.  Ash’s part was done, having delivered the goods, but they wanted to be here for everything, and I certainly respected that.  The spaceplane took up the majority of the hangar space, a sleek black dagger with barely a suggestion of wings to either side.  The underside was dominated by a pair of huge jet intakes, and the rear of the plane sported three engine nozzles, the center much larger than either of the ones flanking it.  A gracefully curved tail fin slightly forward of the engines completed the vessel’s profile.

“The plane looks like it’s in good condition,” Leon was saying.  “I’ve sourced the fuels we need.  The main problem is going to be the timing, not the equipment.”

“How so?” Kate asked.

I spoke up.  “The SR-75 should theoretically be able to hit escape velocity just on the air-breathing engine mode, but the target has an extremely elliptical orbit, and we’re launching much closer to the equator, so we’ll have to adjust our inclination, too.  That means either a lot of burns with the rocket fuel mode once we’re in vacuum, or a very steep climb to orbit.  That pronounced an angle of attack might affect the engines’ ability to get enough air to achieve escape velocity.”

Kate blinked.  “Still not seeing how that affects the timing.”

I pulled out my personal comm, laid it on the table, and put it in draw mode, so I could trace pictures on its screen with the tip of my finger.  I drew a little ball, the Earth, and traced a messy, elliptical orbit around it. I indicated the very top of the orbit, where the line peaked like a mountain summit.  “We have about a thirty-minute window to achieve rendezvous with the target.  We need to rendezvous at or near its apoapsis, here, where its orbital speed is lowest and matching relative velocity will be easiest.”

I loved Kate, but it was endlessly amusing to me how she could understand quantum and temporal physics and articulate mathematical concepts I could never grasp in a million years, yet still not understand basic orbital mechanics.  She gave me a blank look, then just said, “And that’s hard?”

“Yes.  It is very hard, kitty.  We are trying to hit a target the size of, roughly, a bullet train car, except the target is going twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour.  We need to come alongside it, match velocity with it, perform our docking maneuver, and then decouple.  And the parameters of the Mission mean that there is exactly one half-hour window we can do this in if we’re going to avoid violating rule three.”

“I think the best solution is going to be adding some external rocket fuel tanks,” Leon said.  “Not much, since we have to think about flight performance and transit mass for the magic box, but even a few hundred extra meters per second of delta-vee might make the difference in your ability to match orbits with the target.”

“Agreed.  Just make sure the Goddamn things aren’t going to come loose at Mach fuck-you.”

Leon grinned at me.  “I love your optimism, Vee.”

---

Unlike with most modern fighters, and indeed with even-older jet aircraft, the SR-75 did not have a fully enclosed cockpit.  The pilot sat in a big swiveling chair in front of the instrument panel, and the main cabin of the craft was accessible from there.  It was a spaceplane, and therefore supposed to be able to perform orbital docking maneuvers exactly like the one we were about to attempt, which necessitated the crew being able to actually get up and access the docking port without going fully extravehicular.

Kate sat behind me in a second chair that Leon bolted in there for her.  She had the magic box in her lap, hooked up by a pair of very fat and long yellow wires to the bulk of the quantum battery, which squatted heavily just slightly off-center in the SR-75’s main cabin.  (“Gotta keep that center of mass where it’s supposed to be,” Leon had said.)  She was doing something with the box’s controls, squinting at the small readout which displayed some kind of complicated waveform.

“I’ll initiate the breach when we get to fifteen thousand meters,” she told me.  “It wouldn’t do for anyone to actually see us at the target time, because then it just wouldn’t work, but I would rather not get shot down by our modern-day autonomous airspace defenses.”

“Sounds good,” I told her. “Hey.  Kate.”

“Yes, Vee?”

I craned my neck around as best I could while strapped into the pilot’s seat.  “I love you, kitty.”

Her cheeks darkened a little and she smiled.  “I love you too.”

I keyed in the ignition sequence and the SR-75 roared to life.  Leon and Ash, both standing a safe distance away outside the hangar so their eardrums didn’t rupture, started waving and giving us thumbs-ups.  I gave them a thumbs-up in return, projecting more confidence than I actually felt, and brought the throttle up just a little.

The spaceplane practically leapt out of the hangar.  Ruggedized, smart landing gear wheels hit the Nevada desert ground like it was perfectly maintained asphalt.  Within twenty seconds I pulled back on the yoke and the SR-75 was in the air, starting a steep climb.  I opened the throttle up the entire way and was slammed into my seat with the gee-force.

“JESUS CHRIST WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE!” Kate screamed.

I glanced over my shoulder at her.  “You okay, kitty?”

She was clutching at her chest, magic box forgotten, and for a long, terrible moment I thought she was having some kind of heart attack.  But then she nodded, looking pasty.  “I just got taken by surprise,” she shouted over the roar of the engines.  “Sorry!”

“Okay!”  I returned my attention to the instrument panel.  We were already moving at a good clip, and the altimeter was increasing fast enough that even the digital display was having trouble keeping up.  For a long, pure moment, I just relaxed into my seat, hands on the yoke, feeling the currents of air spiraling around the ship.  Now, more than ever before my prosthetics, it felt like an extension of myself.  I was flying again.

“We’re at fifteen thousand meters!” I told her.

Kate pressed a button on the magic box.  Everything blurred like someone just messed with the focus on a camera, except the camera was my brain.  When it re-focused, we were still in the plane, climbing toward space at an impressive clip, but all of the global positioning systems were dead.  There were no satellites to receive data from, not in this era.  However, we had accounted for this; the SR-75 had its own onboard suite of computers dedicated specifically to calculating orbital information.

It was at this point that things began to go wrong.  I felt a sharp tug on the yoke.  Swearing to myself, I corrected, keeping the plane on course, and keyed a status readout. The SR-75’s onboard systems insisted that nothing was wrong, but that the plane was experiencing significant and unexpected drag.

It hit me.  “Fuck me!” I snarled.  “Leon’s fucking external fuel tanks!  I told him they needed to be secure!”

“What’s going on?” Kate asked.

“One of the external fuel tanks Leon spit-soldered onto this Goddamn thing has come loose, and the drag is killing our velocity,” I told her.  “I need to get it off of us, now.”

My gaze was fixed on my instruments, so I couldn’t see the horror in her big blue eyes, but I could hear it loud and clear in her voice.  “How?”

“Shearing force.  Hold on, this is going to fucking suck.”

I stomped down on one of the SR-75’s rudder pedals with my right foot, the motion almost as smooth as it used to be even with the prosthetic, and spun the plane in a sharp, hard three-hundred-sixty-degree roll.  I nearly blacked out, and I know Kate did for a few seconds, since she didn’t go through flight training.  But there was a sudden, violent wrenching feeling that went through the yoke into my arms, and afterward the drag was gone.

“Did it work?” Kate asked blearily.

“Yup.  And apparently an external fuel canister from several hundred years in the future crashing in the Nevada desert doesn’t fuck up the timeline, since we’re here at all.”

“Are we still going to be able to make it?”

I eyeballed the delta-vee readouts on the navigation display.  The lost fuel tank didn’t exactly have a ton in it, and of course, the reduced mass of the ship now that it was gone meant the net loss was slightly ameliorated. But even so, the situation was grim.

“Well, yes and no,” I told her.

“That is never the answer anybody wants to hear, Vee.”

“I should, should, still be able to match velocity with the target and achieve rendezvous. But our margins are basically nil now. If I don’t do this perfectly, we’re going to miss completely.”

I felt her reach out and place a hand on my shoulder, give it a squeeze.  “You can do this, Vee.  I know you can.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I told her, and was surprised to hear that it didn’t come out sarcastic.

The ascent became a delicate balance.  I was trying to hit escape velocity while still using the air-breathing mode of the engines, which was incredibly efficient compared to the rocket fuel.  But as I got higher, the engines needed to work harder to ram enough air in to function, which meant my thrust decreased.  Without the global positioning system to feed me flight info, I needed to do it all by feel and eyeballing the orbital information given to me by the onboard computers.

I trimmed a couple degrees off my angle of attack, trying to find the sweet spot between still gaining altitude and not starving the engines of air in the increasingly-barren stratosphere. The SR-75 shuddered, engines straining, and began to threaten me with a stall.  I swept my gaze across my instruments.  “Fuck,” I muttered, and switched the engines to rocket mode.

Instantly, we were slammed back into our seats again as our thrust suddenly increased dramatically. I glanced at our projected apoapsis, counted to three, then shut the engines down.

In the sudden silence in the absence of the engines’ roar, Kate asked, “Did we do it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Goddammit, Vee!”

I looked over my shoulder at her and gave her my most reassuring grin.  “Sorry, couldn’t help it.  The drag from the fuel tank breaking loose meant that we lost velocity, which meant we took longer to get to the speed we were needing, and the spin I had to put the plane through shifted our course a little bit.  Our inclination is about five degrees off of where it should be.”

“Okay.  What does all that mean?”

“We are going as fast as we need to be, but we’re not in the place we need to be going that fast.  I’m going to need to do correction burns at certain points in our ascent.  We can still make our rendezvous, but we won’t have the fuel to do a proper deceleration burn. I’m going to have to perform emergency aerobraking.”

“In English, Vee!”

“On our way back down I am going to use the atmosphere to slow us down the old-fashioned way.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Is this plane designed for that?”

“Probably.”  I shrugged.  “Assuming we don’t burn up, I’ll be able to switch the engines back to air-breathing at a certain altitude and land without the need for lithobraking.”

I could see her trace the Latin roots of litho and arrive at the gallows-humor definition of the word.  She went even paler than before.  “Certainly hope so.”

I let my grin fade as we continued to coast on our momentum, rising inexorably up through the mesosphere into the thermosphere, our speed gradually slowing as we crested toward the very top of our parabolic arc.  At key points, I reoriented the SR-75’s nose, now using chemical thrusters to maneuver the craft in the absence of air for the control surfaces to manipulate, and fired the engines in rocket mode, tweaking our orbital inclination until it matched that of the target.

The computers suggested to me, at that point, that we would be able to achieve equal relative velocity, and it would leave us with enough delta-vee to then de-orbit ourselves. We would not be stuck in orbit forever until we died.  I blinked hard, banishing the memory of Titan as it suddenly threatened to overwhelm me, and repeated the affirmations Kate taught me.  I am not there anymore.  I am here, now.  I am safe.

Safe was, of course, a relative term in the vacuum of space, going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.  But Kate took my hand from behind and gave it a squeeze, and I was good again.

“We’re going to do a long burn once we’re within ten kilometers,” I told Kate.  “That’ll bring our relative velocity to zero.  From there we just point our nose at the target, fire the engines for half a second, get as close as we can until we’re either about to hit or miss, fire them again to bring ourselves back to zero relative velocity, and then we do that over and over until we’re close enough to dock.”

“I don’t need to know all the mechanics,” Kate replied, and I could see she was fighting to keep her teeth from chattering.  The environmental controls were working just fine, so it was fear she was dealing with, not cold.  “I just trust you, Vee.  Make it happen.”

I suited action to words. It took ten long, arduous minutes, and by the end of it we were very short on time to actually execute the retrieval, but I successfully brought the SR-75’s docking port, which sat on the dorsal surface of the spaceplane, in contact with the target’s own.

Not that they were remotely designed to be compatible, being hundreds of years apart in origin, but fortunately the SR-75 had the advantage of smart materials incorporated into its construction.  Its port sealed itself tight around the target’s, flashing a green light and hissing open to reveal the shiny metal surface of the target.

Kate was already out of her seat, plasma torch in hand, and the acrid smell of it hit my nostrils as she ignited it and started cutting through the ancient hull like butter.  It was joined less than a minute later by new smells: faint traces of iodine and ethanol, urine, feces, and a wet, animal musk.

And, of course, I heard barking.

“Got her!” Kate called to me.  “She’s in pretty rough shape, but she’s alive!”

“Strap back in, and get her secured too,” I told her.  “We’ve passed apoapsis and I need to fire the engines right now for the Oberth effect or we’re going to be stuck in orbit forever.”

I keyed in the command for the docking port to close on our end and release.  The leftover atmosphere inside the target puffed out of it in sudden decompression, pushing our two crafts apart, but not hard enough to seriously perturb either of our orbits.  That was the engines’ job, and I brought them to life as soon as we were clear.

They sputtered out as they burned the last of the rocket fuel.  I looked at our orbital readout.  “Ah, shit,” I muttered.  “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

---

We all but rammed into the atmosphere with the entire length of the plane.  The yoke bucked in my hand and the instrumentation suggested to me that I was a fucking moron that had doomed us all, but with polite numbers instead of those exact words.  I kept an iron grip on the yoke, worked the rudders with both my leaden feet to keep us perpendicular to our approach vector so we would generate more drag and thus lose more speed, and prayed to every God I could think of.  Behind me, Kate’s teeth were audibly chattering, but she managed to avoid screaming again, and the dog was remarkably quiet.

The interior of the SR-75 got incredibly hot, naturally.  The instrument panel helpfully informed me that it was almost fifty-five degrees Celsius inside, and that was with the life-support system working as hard as it possibly could to cool it.  The one saving grace we had was that the spaceplane’s designers had anticipated the need for this kind of extreme aerobraking, and the skin of the craft was designed to tolerate it – in theory.  I sweated, and I panted, and I watched our velocity slowly decrease until we were no longer going to boomerang back up out of the atmosphere.

Then I pointed the plane’s nose down, let gravity take over, and switched the engines back into air-breathing mode.

They decided they did not want to start.

“Well, we’re fucked,” I laughed.

“This is a plane, right?” Kate asked through clenched teeth.  “Aerodynamic?  You can fly it without the engines, right?”

“Well, glide, yes. Fall slowly, yes.  Land… maybe.”

I let us half-glide, half-fall until we were back in the troposphere.  “Magic box time,” I told Kate.

Everything unfocused again, and when I was able to see once more, my global positioning displays were back online.  They told me that, if I did nothing, we were going to crash into the ocean just off the coast of Hokkaido.

I tried the engines again. Still nothing.  The reentry had fried them, as far as I could tell.

I started the plane’s nose trending up again, trying to bring us out of the dive and into a climb. The control surfaces bucked and the plane fought me.

“I’m sorry, Vee,” Kate said.

“Don’t start,” I told her. “We’re not dead yet.”

“I couldn’t go back and save you from what happened at Titan.  I thought, if I could save Laika, maybe –”

“I know exactly what you were thinking, kitty.”  I looked back at her, and the scared-looking mutt buckled into her lap.  “It’s okay.”

“I just – when I read about how she died, all alone, in that terrible little capsule –”

“I said don’t start, Kate. I said it’s okay and I meant it.”

She kept going like she hadn’t heard me.  “She was supposed to have enough food and oxygen for a week.  But the satellite was rushed, and the temperature control system failed.  So when she was –”

“FUCK me!” I shouted.

That finally got through to her.  “What?!”

“Temperature control.” I quickly hit a series of switches. “The jet intakes were superheated by our reentry.  When you switch the engines to rocket fuel mode, they have shutters at the front that close so you don’t get trace amounts of gaseous oxygen mixing with the liquid fuel. Those shutters are probably half-melted shut.”

“And?”

“There’s an emergency release that just drops them completely.”  I pressed the button, felt the SR-75 shudder as explosive bolts fired and it shed hundreds of pounds of metal.  “Okay. Now –”

I was cut off as the sudden force of the engines firing slammed me hard into my seat.  The plane began to corkscrew wildly as the engines put out differing amounts of thrust for the first few moments until the oxygen feeds equalized.  Clearly one of the intakes had had less of its shutters blown off than the other, and the plane had needed some time to adjust.

Kate coughed.  “The engines?  They’re working?  We’re not going to die?”

“Oh, we’re still going to die,” I told her.  “Eventually, of old age.  But probably not today.”

She smacked the back of my head.  “Jackass.”

---

The vet gave us a very suspicious stare as we paid our bill and accepted Laika’s carrier back from his nurse.  “I have never seen an animal in that kind of shape before,” he said.  “Malnourished, half-dead from heat exhaustion, matted shit in her fur, and primitive bio-monitoring equipment surgically grafted into parts of her. I assume you didn’t do this, since it would be colossally stupid to come into my office and ask me to fix her up if you did.”

Kate shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t us.  She’s a stray.  Found her while we were out on a trip.  We felt so bad for the poor thing that we brought her back with us.”

Somewhat mollified, the vet nodded.  “Well, make sure to give her the antibiotics for the rest of the week, and call me if there’s anything else she needs.”

We stepped outside, and I opened the carrier to let Laika out.  She staggered out, still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and I got her leash onto her without too much trouble.

“You know,” I said to Kate, “when we first shacked up, I said I didn’t want any pets.”

She grinned at me.  “For someone who was so against the idea, you went very far out of your way to get me one anyway.”

---

About six months after we brought Laika home, a very humorless man in a snazzy uniform, accompanied by many more humorless men in uniform with large guns, came and visited our house. The humorless man in charge sat and chatted with us for a while, and Laika sat in his lap and let him give her pets.

Nothing else ever came of the visit.

There is no neat bow to tie on this story, unfortunately.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night, though not quite as often. That probably has more to do with the passage of time and a lot of therapy than pulling a time-travel dog rescue, though.  The only point to any of it is that we spent a lot of taxpayer money (since Kate, Leon, and Ash are all paid by the government) and risked our lives to make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest possible margin.  

And perhaps having read about it will have made your world a little better too.

[chaotic-would-you-rathers]

Would You Rather...

A: Be Recruited to a newly formed magical girl team at the end of its first story arc as the final member, your salary will be £20/hr (or equivalent), for 35-45 work hours a week, in which time it will be your responsibility to patrol and fight villains of the week and assorted monsters (with additional hazard pay for the risk of death and injury involved), full medical and dental coverage is provided, as well as full parental leave and 20 paid leave per year, a pension plan of 15% your annual salary/year is also provided. Your employer will supply your magical transformation item, and replace it free of charge and you will be given a choice of one powerset/outfit (from the list under keep reading) HOWEVER, you are contractually obligated to continue this job until the age of 80 or otherwise your death, and you will be required to come into work in the case of sudden villain/monster attack, even outside of work hours on holidays or parental leave. B: Become a freelance, solo magical girl who has a secure source of donations easily accessible by the public, you still have to save the city from monsters, but are responsible for your own time management and reputation/income, you will know how to make your own transformation item by the same process as if it were a normal nonmagical object, but it becomes a magical transformation item when you complete it. You will be given a choice of one powerset/outfit (from the list under keep reading), you will also soon encounter a friendly rival freelance magical girl (with a powerset of your choosing and a personality you can learn to get along with but not currently)

Magical Girl Powersets: Set 1: Powerful pyrokinesis & related fire powers + Super Strength & Durability sufficient to easily lift and throw cars and withstand being hit with one, outfit is a sparkly red dress with fire related accessories, weapon is a huge red flaming greatsword, you will look as normal when transformed but with bright red hair, eyes and tattoos, others will be magically unable to recognize you when transformed (unless they see you transform at least once etc), transformation item is a red hairclip with a crystalline heart-shaped jewel Set 2: Ability to create magical barriers and shields, levitation and super durability sufficient to be bulletproof and unharmed even by buildings being thrown at you, barriers can also be made sharp with which to cut things, outfit is a frilly green dress & green ribbons/etc, you will look as normal when transformed but with bright green eyes and different hair colour at random, others will be magically unable to recognize you when transformed (unless they see you transform at least once etc), transformation item is a small green shield-shaped pendant, weapon is a massive green greatshield Set 3: Supersonic speed and durability sufficient to withstand this + weak electrokinesis & levitation + thought speed acceleration such to control your direction at full speed etc, weapon is a electric blue spear, outfit is an electric blue tracksuit + trainers and tinted visor & ribbons, you will look as normal when transformed but with long bright blue twin-tails (like Hatsune Miku) and electric blue eyes, others will be magically unable to recognize you when transformed (unless they see you transform at least once etc), transformation item is a cobalt blue lightning bolt shaped necklace. Set 4: Shadow Controlling + teleporting between shadows within 100m (via sinking into and out of them) + Levitation + Summoning demonic minions out of shadows + weak electrokinesis + pyrokinesis (except the lightning and fire is black) + creating weaker shadowy duplicates of yourself + minor super strength speed & durability sufficient to throw cars with great effort and only take minor injuries from being hit with them + run at 35mph, weapon is giant black greataxe, outfit is full black gothic funeral garb, transformation item is an onyx skull-shaped ring, you will look as normal when transformed but with long silky black hair reminiscent of the mythical princess Kaguya, eyes that are entirely black except from the iris, which is bright white, and a height of 8ft, others will be magically unable to recognize you when transformed (unless they see you transform at least once etc) Set 5: Extremely powerful telekinesis sufficient to hurl around buildings with ease + levitation + 1000x thought acceleration, outfit is a reflective white dress with lots of frills & ribbons + silver accessories. Weapon is a silver revolver with infinite ammunition, transformation item is a silver bangle with a white rose motif, others will be magically unable to recognize you when transformed (unless they see you transform at least once etc), you will look as normal when transformed but albino, (unless you are already, in which case you look as normal)

[todaysdocument]

Senate Report 1619 to Accompany a Bill Granting a Pension to Harriet Tubman Davis

Record Group 233: Records of the U.S. House of RepresentativesSeries: Accompanying PapersFile Unit: Accompanying Papers of the 55th Congress

55th Congress, 3d Session. Senate Report No. 1619. HARRIET TUBMAN DAVIS. FEBRUARY 7, 1899. - Ordered to be printed. Mr. SHOUP, from the Committee on Pensions, submitted the following REPORT. [To accompany H. R. 4982.] The Committee on Pensions, to whom was referred the bill (H. R. 4892) granting a pension to Harriet Tubman Davis, have examined the same and report: The report of the Committee on Invalid Pensions of the House of Representatives is as follows: The effect of this bill is to increase from $8 to $25 per month the pension of the beneficiary, Harriet T. Davis, of Auburn, N. Y. Mrs. Davis is the widow of Nelson Davis, who served under the name of Nelson Charles as a private in Company G, Eighth United States Colored Infantry, from September 25, 1863, to November 10, 1865, and was honorably discharged. She also served long and faithfully as an army nurse. Soldier died October 14, 1888, and the widow filed a claim as such July 24, 1890, under the act of June 27, 1890, and is now pensioned under said act at $8 per month. It is not shown that the soldier's death was due to his military service. It is shown, however, by evidence filed with this committee, that the claimant was sent to the front by Governor Andrew, and acted as a nurse, cook in hospital, and spy during nearly the whole period of the war. The following is a copy of the letter from Secretary Seward: WASHINGTON, D. C., July 25, 1865. MY DEAR SIR: Harriet Tubman, a colored woman, has been nursing our soldiers during nearly all the war. She believes she has claims for faithful service to the command in South Carolina with which you are connected, and she believes you would be disposed to see her claim justly settled. I have known her long as a noble high spirit, as true as seldom dwells in the human form. I commend her, therefore, to your kind attention. Faithfully, your friend, WILLIAM H. SEWARD. Major-General HUNTER. Gen. Rufus Saxton, in a letter referring to Mrs. Tubman, says: "She was employed by General Hunter, and I think both by General Stephens and Sherman, and is as deserving of a pension from the Government for her service as any other of its faithful servants." In a letter to Brigadier-General Gilmore, from Headquarters Colored Brigade, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, July 6, 1863, Col. James Montgomery, commanding brigade, said: "I would respectfully recommend to your attention Mrs. Harriet Tubman, a most remarkable women, invaluable as a scout."2 HARRIET TUBMAN DAVIS. These testimonials sufficiently show the character and value of the service rendered by Mrs, Davis during the war. She now is about 75 years of age, physically broken down, and poor. This woman has a double claim on the Government. She went into the field and hospitals and cared for the sick and wounded. She saved lives. In her old age and poverty a pension of $25 per month is none too much. The bill is reported back with the recommendation that it pass. The papers in this case show that a claim for this woman was once presented to the House of Representatives and referred to the Committee on War Claims. Manifestly that would be the better way to reimburse her for her alleged services to the Government, but her advanced years and necessitous condition lead your committee to give the matter consideration. There is, however, a strong objection to the bill in its present form. The number of nurses on the pension roll at a rate higher than $12 per month is very few indeed, and there are no valid reasons why this claimant should receive a pension of $25 per month as a nurse, thus opening a new avenue for pension increases. She is now drawing pension at the rate of $8 per month as the widow of a soldier, and in view of her personal services to the Government Congress is amply justified in increasing that pension. [full transcription at link]

[tenebriskukris]

Oshi No Ko Chapter 160 - My Thoughts/Analysis

This was simultaneously a very satisfying and unsatisfying chapter at the same time. I feel like that’s a large issue with the series at large, in fact. High highs and low lows. As always, spoilers for Oshi No Ko Ch160 below.

We’re back with Hikaru and Aqua’s conversation—and a small flashback to Akane grilling Nino on her own relationship with Hikaru. Hikaru mentions that pushing someone off in this panel—then immediately backtracking to say he didn’t do any of that. Really bro? I’m not sure if Yura’s corpse has been found yet or if Nino spilled the information that Hikaru had a hand in her death there but I find that strange. 

All he did was talk about Ai. He wouldn’t let us forget about her. He thought that was enough for us to break. It’s incredible how bad this makes Nino and Ryosuke look. The two of them weren’t contractually obligated to be around Hikaru for any period of time—and because of his manipulations the two of them got their hands dirty.

Perhaps I should be a bit more sympathetic to them considering that Hikaru already had a pension for manipulation even at a young age and I’m well aware that cutting toxic friends out of your circle is a chore and a half but considering that Nino was still being manipulated by Hikaru and was an almost thirty year old woman when she was aware of that sort of manipulation from him in the first place—and don’t even get me started on the fact that she was working with him during the movie arc. 

Hikaru asked Ryosuke to deliver a bouquet and then leaked Ai’s address? There is absolutely no way that could’ve backfired on him in the slightest. Please note the sarcasm there. If Ryosuke had been caught by the police instead of hanging himself and he spilled that info to them then Hikaru would be in some real deep trouble. Did he not think that would backfire at all??? There was absolutely no way for him to be sure that Ryosuke would hang himself or get caught by the police or that he or Nino wouldn’t be connected to Ai’s murder. It’s just—absolutely stupid. Ruins the suspension of disbelief.

I do have a small nitpick on this mess though. Aqua says that Hikaru tried to kill Ruby—using Nino as a proxy—but how is he sure about that exactly? Nino might have squealed everything she knows about Hikaru to Akane and that information was delivered to Aqua after the fact since Nino’s capture likely happens chronologically before this encounter but that bit is not communicated properly to the viewer in an easy to digest manner so it feels like we’re just taking Aqua at his word here. It’s such a small thing but honestly there’s bigger fish to fry with this chapter.

These few pages of Hikaru explaining himself are, to me, a load of shite. We’ve already been clued in to the fact that this man is a grade-A liar so I’m not sure how inclined I am to believe him here. I make it a point to never take what any character says at face value unless there’s sufficient reason to prove otherwise—but from both how Nino’s telling the story and the logical inconsistency that Hikaru gave Ryosuke, a stalker with an obsession for Ai, her address—well. There’s more than enough evidence to call bull on this entire spiel—and Aqua does that too.

Ah yes, Nino wanting to kill Ruby and Hikaru not doing anything to prevent it. That is also a bit of a red flag there. Hikaru definitely was aware of Nino wanting to kill Ruby—and he didn’t even report Nino to the police or contacted Aqua or anything. He just let it happen, and in doing so helped kill Ruby by inaction. It does nag at me slightly considering that Hikaru told Nino that they should turn themselves in to the police, but I’m not sure whether to brush that off as bad fucking writing, which would be par for the course with the manga, or more of Hikaru’s manipulations.

Actually now that I think about it, Hikaru calling Nino during that one scene a few chapters back is a massive error on Hikaru’s part. It’s an easily accessible link to the police to link Nino and Hikaru if Nino was ever taken in. If Nino suspected that Hikaru was manipulating Ryosuke and her into trying to kill Ai and or Ruby, and the only reason she didn’t go to the police herself to tell them that both of them were also responsible was that she herself would be implicated in that same murder, if she got caught by anyone after stabbing Ruby it would be game over with Hikaru. Nino could squeal that she had a hand in Ai’s death as well as Hikaru’s part in all of these murders—since they were working together somewhat—and then that’d be game over for Hikaru. The Japanese conviction rate of close to a hundred percent strikes again.

And then there’s the full page panel of Hikaru with black star eyes and grinning like a horror monster. Cute and all, but it’s all style with little substance. I’d prefer a well written antagonist rather than one with a brilliant design but falls flat. There’s a reason I don’t dabble in criticizing the art in the manga, and it’s not because I’m no artist—any concept can perform well as long as its foundations are steady. As much as I love some of the art in this manga, it’s extraneous in terms of the story at large. While, sure, the manga’s art is notable at times, no amount of pretty art can make a pile of shit stop smelling like a pile of shit.

You tortured the hearts of others on purpose and stoked the flames of madness of those who were weak. Considering that Nino had already been captured and also assuming that Akane had conveyed all of this to Aqua beforehand it’s not much of a wonder that Aqua is coming to these conclusions. Unfortunately the manga just fucking refuses to show us how Aqua came to this conclusion and instead tells it to us as though the readers were children.

The question of whether or not Nino is slandering Hikaru like this did cross my mind—but she really isn’t smart enough for something like that in my opinion—otherwise she would’ve found a way to dispose of Ruby without putting herself at risk or made sure that it actually was Ruby who she was trying to stab. Nino fully intended to go down with the ship when she attempted to stab Ruby in broad daylight like this. Not to mention my previous assessment that Hikaru stood by and let Nino try and kill Ruby in the first place still holds weight, so I don’t think what she’s saying is false—at least not without any other evidence.

I see, you’re the same. You have the same eyes as me. And that shot with both of them with black star eyes…Quite impressive ambience. I mentioned before about how I don’t criticize the art of the manga, but this is one of those moments where there’s plenty of style to highlight the substance of the panel. Well done.

Oh, we’re getting a bit of explanation about the eyes. I don’t have the exact interview on me at the moment but I recall the authors saying that the stars in people’s eyes just aren’t visible and are instead just a metaphor or something along those lines—point is, Hikaru and Aqua can’t see the black stars in each other’s eyes. But with his pension for manipulation I don’t think it’s a stretch for Hikaru to shoot in the dark in order to get under Aqua’s skin here. 

Is Hikaru really going on this “we’re not so different” bit? That’s cool and all but usually the villain follows up on this by tempting the hero or trying to break them by talking but this just falls oh so very flat when you think about it for more than two seconds. What is the point that he’s trying to make here? That Aqua and him are the same? Okay, cool. But that’s not right at all. Everything Aqua’s done for revenge has been morally dubious at times as he’d been playing the industry game, but that’s egregious compared to, y’know, the actual literal murder that Hikaru has enabled through his manipulations. It’s not a competition.

It’s true that we’re ugly beings that manipulate people’s hearts, deceive them, and make us obey them for our own sake. That’s more than a bit of hatred towards yourself and Hikaru in your words there, Aqua. I’d even argue that that sort of shine is exactly what a performer needs to evoke emotions in their fans—it’s merely a matter of using that kind of pull responsibly.

Ruby is different. Even now, she’s singing of love. That’s certainly some bias that he has for her, gotta say. Ruby’s black star arc comes to mind as a time when Ruby was manipulating people to avenge Goro but saying that Ruby’s an exception is a bit of a stretch. Though—considering how much Aqua cares for Ruby I’m more than sure that his feelings are coloring his words right here—it’s very in character.

And another few panels detailing how Aqua sees the star eyes and about how these eyes are supposed to convey love…it’s interesting. I’m quite sure we already know for a fact that the eyes are supposed to represent talent or something of the sort from an official interview, but it’s nice to see that the star eyes are used here as a vehicle to display how Aqua views that kind of pull and influence in respects to all the Hoshinos. And that one panel of Ai holding baby Aqua and Ruby…damn. Never forget what we lost.

AQUA WITH DOUBLE STAR EYES??? AFTER HE TALKS ABOUT RUBY LIKE THAT??????? Welp, that’s game. GG WP. 

Well that was certainly A Chapter. With some of the Aqua-Hikaru confrontation out of the way I think it’s time to rip out this chapter’s guts.

As a single chapter—I think this chapter did well enough to stand on its own merits. As a part of a greater whole? It misses the mark quite badly in terms of pacing. The aftermath of the Nino confrontation and just what exactly she said and the question of how that was relayed to Aqua are questions that aren’t really necessary for the manga to flow together coherently, but when the manga tries to answer them so opaquely and in the middle of the Aqua-Hikaru confrontation it messes with the atmosphere and the pacing of what should be the main event.

What’s annoying is that this is an issue that could be easily solved by restructuring the order of events. Just focus on the Nino aftermath and squeeze all the info out of her for a chapter and end it off with Akane telling Aqua all of this over the phone before meeting Hikaru. Simple, efficient, and it doesn’t break too much with the timeline. 

One question that I still have to pose is why. Why the hell did Hikaru try to kill Ruby using Nino as a proxy? Obviously doing nothing is easier than doing something since he mainly kills through via proxy and if he didn’t do anything to stop Nino he knew she would make a move on Ruby, but the question of why is still hidden. While I’m now relatively confident that his prior reasons for killing Ai that he’d explained in his previous confrontations with Aqua are bullshit, that still leaves his reasoning for orchestrating their deaths unknown. Perhaps we’ll get a peek in his head before the end? 

In regards to the Nino-Hikaru antagonist fake out—I’m still on the fence on it. I’d been meaning to give my own take on it as soon as this confrontation was dealt with, but I need to see how Hikaru is dealt with before I give my honest opinion on the matter, but I’m not liking what the authors are giving us so far.

Now then—the final panel. This is the nail in the coffin for everyone that isn’t Ruby for the Aquabowl. The last chapter showing that Aqua wasn’t even at Kana’s graduation concert for Kana herself is telling enough, but this final scene showing him with both star eyes about to kill his father for Ruby’s sake is—well. If it was Akane or Kana that Aqua mentioned in this scene then you’d be sure that it’d be a downright slam dunk confirmation towards who would be the winning girl by the fandom but because Ruby’s entire admission in the Aquabowl is controversial as all hell it’s less interpreted in the manner. Bit of a double standard there in my opinion, but I’m sure we’ll be getting more content for us Ruby fans to chomp on. 

In any case, I suspect the manga will be wrapping up soon. With Aqua’s revenge against Hikaru almost certainly coming to pass within the next chapter or so I don’t expect there’s any other plot points that the manga will go out of its way to detail going forward. A quick look at the current chapters in each volume of the manga tells me that the end of this current volume is on the horizon. Perhaps one more volume and another ten-ish chapters to wrap everything up, but truthfully I wouldn’t be surprised if the manga ended with this volume. It wouldn’t be the first time this manga has neglected good writing to finish the story faster.

[xenostalgic]

Toads (Philip Larkin)

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison – Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits: Lecturers, lispers, Losels, loblolly-men, louts – They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes With fires in a bucket, Eat windfalls and tinned sardines – They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet, Their unspeakable wives Are skinny as whippets – and yet No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough To shout Stuff your pension! But I know, all too well, that's the stuff That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney My way to getting The fame and the girl and the money All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other One's spiritual truth; But I do say it's hard to lose either, When you have both.

[archduchessofnowhere]

In addition to the many agendas he had to deal with day in and day out for Elisabeth, Bayer [her secretary] of course also administered the most important task the empress had to perform beyond representation: charity. From time immemorial, the wife of the sovereign took on the task of being charitable and giving alms, donations and gifts to the needy. In the mid-19th century, municipalities and churches were responsible for social policies in the modern sense. In case of difficulties, one turned directly to the sovereign. As in how much the state and the imperial house still went hand in hand in this context can be seen in Elisabeth's secretariat: of the 100,000 ducats that Elisabeth received annually from the court treasury, a large part was immediately forwarded to various charitable organisations. From today's point of view, the Ministry of Finance could have forwarded the aid money directly to the recipients, but in those days the thinking was different: it was not the anonymous state that was responsible for the charity, but the imperial house itself. The needy thus did not turn to an official, but to the emperor. It is therefore not surprising that Elisabeth's largest outgoings were always for charitable purposes.

Most of the money went to established aid institutions. Shortly after taking office, Leopold Bayer informed the minister of the interior that the governors of the individual crown lands were to make the payments. The entire spectrum of charitable institutions was considered: orphanages, kindergartens, associations for the blind, educational institutions, boarding houses, pension institutions, schools, hospitals, homes for the poor and infirm, as well as churches and parishes. The most frequent entries in the books, however, are charges recorded as “to the poor in Vienna” or “to the poor in the provinces”. These were not subsidies, but classic alms distributed on a large scale in the name of the empress.

In addition to charities, individuals who approached Sisi as supplicants also received financial assistance. In general, requests for support, especially from the very poor, were accepted without difficulty. However, before any amount was granted to them, supplicants were checked. The secretariat or the office of the court grand master [Oberhofmeister] then asked the authorities for information on their material situation and reputation.

These were mostly widows and orphans. They asked the empress for financial help for various reasons: because they could not live on their pension, because their salary was not sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living, because they could not work because of a relative in need of care, or because they themselves were chronically ill. From the notes in Bayer's file and his correspondence with the court grand master, it is clear that all pleas were presented to Elisabeth.

In addition to the poor, members of the lower nobility in distress and so-called “high-ranking women” were the second large group who turned to the empress for help. Here the story was always the same: the ladies were unmarried or widowed and therefore without a supporter, a situation in which even women of the lower nobility and non-wealthy could easily fall into. The donations Elisabeth made to them were as varied as the fates of the applicants. The empress paid the impoverished Marie d'Ellevaux a hundred guilders so that she could travel to Vienna to visit her daughter who was about to give birth; the daughters of the second lieutenants in a precarious situation, on the other hand, she usually gave twenty guilders.

Winkelhofer, Martina (2022). Sissi. La vera storia. Il camino della giovane imperatrice (Translation done by DeepL. Please keep in mind that in a machine translation a lot of nuance may/will be lost)

[kaelio]

also the reason i made the pension post is the same reason i make a lot of posts on the same theme. stop romanticizing the past. everyone who is trying to convince you the past was great is snowing you ass, and i'm serious. it doesn't matter if it's Rome or 1950 or the Victorian age. peasants didn't have "more leisure time", the hours described were the hours they worked for the lord before their self-sufficiency, survival labor. corsets fucked up your body so bad you can see it on the bones of deceased, upper-class women from that period. in dickensian times the poor paid to lean on a rope overnight to sleep in a big communal room and that's how they could "afford rent"

[darkmaga-returns]

Seniors across America are facing a financial crunch as inflation eats away at their retirement savings, forcing many to postpone retirement. Rising prices and poor returns on traditional retirement investments have left those on fixed incomes struggling to make ends meet.

Key Facts:

– Inflation has reduced the purchasing power of retirement savings by about 20% in less than four years. – Many would-be retirees now need to work an extra six years on average before they can retire. – Bonds, commonly used by seniors for safer investments, have suffered their worst four-year performance in a century. – The average 401(k) balance increased by over $11,000 but is effectively worth $12,000 less due to higher prices. – Pension plans are paying out more due to cost-of-living adjustments while facing asset shortfalls.

The Rest of The Story:

Over the past four years, inflation has significantly impacted Americans, especially seniors nearing retirement.

While the stock market showed a 45% increase from early 2021 to late 2023, nearly half of that gain was due to inflation boosting stock prices rather than real growth.

Seniors typically shift their investments from stocks to bonds as they age, seeking stability.

Unfortunately, bonds have taken a hit, experiencing their worst performance in at least a hundred years due to rapid inflation and rising interest rates.

The devaluation of the dollar means that retirement savings don’t stretch as far as they used to. Someone who planned to retire with $1 million now needs almost $1.2 million to maintain the same standard of living.

Pension plans are also in trouble, paying out more without sufficient assets to cover the increased costs, which could lead to insolvency.

These financial challenges are causing many seniors to rethink their retirement plans.

With their nest eggs shrinking in real value, they face the tough decision of working longer to rebuild their savings or risk outliving their funds.

[une-sanz-pluis]

It must surely be assumed that the scheme to consign Thomas to obscurity originated with the Prince and the Beauforts. It was hardly conceivable that Arundel - the only other councillor present with sufficient personal standing to put forward such a proposal — would have had a hand in anything so obviously at odds with the king's policy and inclinations. The fact that the matter had reached the point of serious discussion, and was entered on the record of the Council's proceedings, in spite of the presence of the man who might be regarded as responsible for upholding the king's interests at the meeting, was almost certainly an indication of the growing assertiveness of Arundel's political rivals. The precise implications of the suggestions are a matter for speculation, but it is difficult to interpret them as other than a personal attack on Thomas and, indirectly, on his father. At the very least, the proponents of the scheme were implying that they wished to relieve Thomas of a responsibility which he was unfitted to bear and to provide him with a pension for doing nothing in the hope that he would do just that. If Thomas had already demonstrated that his sympathies lay with his father and Arundel against the pretensions of the Prince and the Beauforts, the suggestions must have been openly hostile, designed to deprive Thomas of an office which carried with it the implication that he was actively serving the king and the country, and to expel him from his father's company to diminish his involvement in factional politics. There may also have been the incidental motive that the transfer to Ireland of Sir John Stanley, who was steward of the king's household, might be a small step in clearing the way for a Council which was favourably disposed towards Arundel's opponents. Nothing was done to implement the proposals, doubtless because the Prince failed to convince his father and brother of their merits, but ill-feeling and tension can only have been aroused.

Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (The Boydell Press 1987)

[udonlawyers]

Retirement Visa in Thailand

Dreaming of a serene retirement in a tropical paradise? Thailand, with its stunning beaches, vibrant culture, and affordable cost of living, has become a popular destination for retirees worldwide. To make your dream a reality, you'll need to secure a Thai Retirement Visa.

Eligibility and Requirements

To qualify for a Thai Retirement Visa, you must meet the following criteria:

Age: You must be at least 50 years old.

Financial Stability: You must demonstrate sufficient financial means to support yourself during your stay in Thailand. This can be achieved through:

Bank Deposit: Maintaining a minimum deposit of 800,000 Thai Baht in a Thai bank account for at least three months prior to application.

Monthly Income: Proving a monthly income of at least 65,000 Thai Baht.

Combination: A combination of a bank deposit and monthly income totaling at least 800,000 Thai Baht per year.

Visa Application Process

Gather Required Documents:

Passport valid for at least six months

Recent passport-sized photos

Proof of financial stability (bank statements, pension documents, etc.)

Medical certificate

Proof of accommodation in Thailand (rental agreement, hotel booking, or invitation letter from a Thai resident)

Submit Application:

Apply at the nearest Thai embassy or consulate in your home country.

The processing time for a Thai Retirement Visa can vary, so it's advisable to apply well in advance of your planned arrival date.

Benefits of a Thai Retirement Visa

Extended Stay: A Thai Retirement Visa allows you to stay in Thailand for up to one year at a time.

Multiple Entry: You can enter and exit Thailand multiple times within the visa's validity period.

Work Restrictions: While you cannot engage in full-time employment, you may be allowed to volunteer or work part-time with specific permissions.

Important Considerations

Visa Renewal: To continue your stay in Thailand beyond the initial one-year period, you'll need to renew your Retirement Visa annually.

Healthcare: While Thailand offers affordable healthcare options, it's recommended to have comprehensive health insurance to cover potential medical expenses.

Cultural Adjustment: Be prepared to adapt to a different culture and lifestyle.

By meeting the eligibility requirements and following the application process, you can embark on a fulfilling retirement in Thailand. Remember to consult with immigration authorities or a visa consultant for the most up-to-date information and assistance.

[beardedmrbean]

Helsingin Sanomat follows up on its reporting covering the country's demographic challenges as people have fewer children.

Today one in five women aged 40-49 are childless, while for men in the same age group, the figure is 30 percent.

The lower the level of education, the more common childlessness is, according to HS. The paper points out that nowadays having a child is increasingly perceived as an extra burden complicating life.

Juhana Brotherus, an economist at business lobby Suomen Yrittäjät, said falling fertility rates will inevitably impact the pension system.

While people are good at optimising their short-term opportunity costs, they don't always succeed in long-term planning, Brotherus explained, referencing economic theory.

"We know how to optimise a 30-year-old's lifestyle, but not whether it would be nice to have children and grandchildren in retirement," he said.

Colonial laws threat to Sámi

Sámi people would like an overhaul of Finnish law to support traditional Sámi reindeer husbandry, reports Hufvudstadsbladet.

Anne-Maria Magga, a reindeer herder and researcher, says that current laws prevent cross-border reindeer migrations, which are the traditional method Sámi herders use to avoid overgrazing.

Over the past centuries countries closed their borders to herders.

"The Sámi have been subjected to persecution and colonialism, and Finnish people are not sufficiently aware of it. They do not understand how much the Sámi people and individual families have already lost," Magga said.

In Sweden and Norway, there are laws securing the Sámi's exclusive right to reindeer husbandry.

Magga tells HBL that the absence of similar laws in Finland to recognise the Siida system of managing reindeer husbandry on a geographical basis threatens the Sámi community's ability to maintain its culture.

Public greetings

What happens when an Americanised Finn starts greeting strangers in the street like in the US where public greetings are the norm?

Thirty-year-old Aurora Pärssinen lives in Los Angeles where strangers often exchange hellos as they pass by one another.

As the sleet fell in Finland however, Pärssinen began routinely greeting people walking towards her.

"I got all sorts of reactions. About half of the people greeted me back, smiled or nodded. The rest didn't react at all, looked away or gave me a strange look," Aurora said, laughing.

IS followed Pärssinen down the street to document her greeting venture. Older ladies were most likely to respond to her greeting, whereas younger passerbys seemed to be too busy to deal with unexpected human interactions.

One English-speaking person waved hello despite being on the phone.

Johanna Isosävi, an academic specialised in Finnish manners, said greeting customs in the Nordic country are rooted in century-old norms.

"We believe that it's polite to respect another person's personal space. For us it's perfectly acceptable for a person to be left alone and walk around in their own thoughts without paying too much attention to their surroundings. This is not the case in many other countries," she explained.