#and totally opaque if you live elsewhere

[loversfms]

[ … ] ❀ you’re not from around here , are you? i figured because you totally just missed apollo fairbanks walking by. don’t tell me you don’t know who he is ? they kind of look like charles melton and i could be wrong but i think that they might be thirty years old right now. they’ve been living in palmview for the last one year. and i don’t know if anyone has ever told them this before but they kind of remind me of anthony bridgerton from bridgerton. if you stick around the town long enough you might catch them in action working as a dance teacher / professional dancer. you see this town isn’t really that big of a place, some folks like to call them the opaque of palmview! they took a liking to the name too after a while, go figure. oh crap, they must have heard me yapping. they’re coming this way. i got to warn you though, rumor has it they can pretty arrogant at times. i wouldn’t take it too seriously though, from the times i’ve spoken to them they seemed pretty dutiful to me. we see each other all the time since they live in that two bedroom apartment beside me over in mango bay. i better leave you to it. it was nice meeting you!

STATS:

full name :       apollo christopher fairbanks nickname(s) :       n / a birthplace :       seattle, washington date of birth :       07 / 31 / 1994 parentage :       song na-ri & christopher fairbanks sibling(s) :       ____ fairbanks (25) , alanna fairbanks (23) , angelina fairbanks (20) relationship status :       single gender identity :       cis man ( he/him ) sexual orientation :       heterosexual faceclaim :       charles melton

BACKGROUND: (tw: emotional abuse)

song na-ri was a highly appraised ballerina with lots of promise. she was paving the way for asian / korean dancers in an anglo - centric setting, while also doing something she loved. there was nothing she was more passionate about than ballet. which is why it was such a shock to everyone when she got pregnant at twenty - two.

there  was only one thing that could take na-ri’s mind off of dance, and that was the one and only CHRISTOPHER FAIRBANKS. only two years older and not into ballet whatsoever, na-ri saw something in him she had never found elsewhere.

na-ri was twenty - three when she gave birth to her son. the second she laid eyes on him, she could see the resemblance to christopher. the name APOLLO came quickly to her. the god of music and dance.

unfortunately, christopher was not there for the birth of his son. na-ri wanted to make it work, but christopher insisted he had his whole life ahead of him. he couldn’t be tied down to a family this early in life.

growing up, apollo was never in control of anything in his life. living with just his mother, it only made sense he became a MOMMA’S BOY. however, this was only the start of his troubles.

as soon as apollo could walk, his mother tried to teach him beginner ballet moves. the attention span of a toddler is not great, so it wasn’t a perfect plan. still, she persisted. she wanted apollo to be ahead of the game when she finally was able to enroll him in proper classes at the age of four.

as a child, apollo would do anything to spend time with his mother and make her happy. she always promised a break after practicing dance for hours, and they would do something he wanted during that break. unfortunately, those breaks never came and the training had to come to an end when apollo would get upset or antsy.

when you’re five, there’s no real pressure to do anything. it was just annoying to dedicate so much time to something he had no interest in. however, when you’re seven and your mother starts telling you she threw her whole career away just to have you… there’s a bit more pressure to continue dancing .

it was a sentiment he heard his whole life. ❝ GETTING PREGNANT WITH YOU RUINED MY CAREER. I GAVE UP MY CAREER TO RAISE YOU. I LOST THE BEST MAN BECAUSE I DECIDED TO KEEP YOU. ❞ apollo no longer felt like an individual, but more like a puppet or a pawn in a game he was unaware he was playing. his mother had planned his whole life, and there was nothing he could do about it.

funnily enough, apollo was not an only child. his father made three appearances in his life, each ending up bringing apollo a sister about a year later. being the oldest and only boy still brought immense pressure into his life. he was now forced to dance for hours and hours on end, as well as tend to his little sisters due to his mother’s exhaustion after his ballet classes.

when he was ten, his mother began insisting they dance together. he didn’t mind it too much, in fact, he kind of thought it was fun. it was hard for his mother to criticize his movements if she was too focused on her own.

this continued for a few years, but apollo grew more and more tired of it as the years went on. plus, if anyone caught wind of it, it would be absolutely EMBARRASSING.

at the age of fifteen, apollo finally put his foot down. he’d never stood up to his mother before, and he was definitely trembling at the mere thought of it. he knew how much his dancing meant to his mother, so he promised to continue under one condition. NO MORE DANCING TOGETHER.

na-ri tried to pull her usual i gave everything up for you, the least you could do is allow me to dance. still, he refused to back down. she could dance all she wants, just not with him. or he’d be prepared to throw it all away. it was a long argument, but eventually his mother backed down. she couldn’t risk him throwing in the towel.

life for apollo could be lonely. he would talk to people at school sometimes, but nothing ever came from it. it wasn't like he had time to see them outside of school hours. besides, he couldn't imagine what the public perception would be if they found out he was a male ballet dancer.

he had friends he made in ballet, but there was always a bitter taste to them. could they be great people? sure. but apollo met them through the hobby he was slowly growing to despise.

besides that, apollo had grown quite an ego when it came to dancing, which could make him hard to be around. his mother was practically a prodigy who put all her time and energy into him. and, although he didn't enjoy ballet, he was damn good at it.

apollo begrudgingly continued dance. not for his mom ( he moved out the moment he turned eighteen ) but because he had nothing else to show for himself. he never did well academically, because his mother always taught him to put schoolwork on the backburner. college didn’t seem like an option because of that. the only way he knew how to stay afloat was to continue with dance.

the few relationships he's been in have all been with other dancers, and have all been pretty surface level. an inability to open up on his emotions made for a very bad conversationalist and he often couldn't step outside of his own head enough to see what his partner may need.

he's been bouncing around dance companies across the country since he turned eighteen. sometimes he'll take a side gig as a dance teacher if he thinks he'll stay in town for more than one season. he can't help it -- when he's teaching a class of young ballerinas, all he can see are his three younger sisters as children.

HEADCANONS / TIDBITS:

knows how to be a gentleman and can go through the motions. hold a door open, pull a chair out, "yes ma'am," "yes sir."

perfect posture

thinks he's too good for a lot of things ( he is not )

thinks he's god's gift to this world and to ballet so he's kind of annoying about it

doesn't talk about ballet so if you aren't connected to him thru it or haven't seen him on any promotional stuff he's probably just very vague about his job lmfao

very season 1 anthony bridgerton the annoying version

vulnerability ahhhhh scary

a real health loser ... gym frequenter ... eats well ... booooo

will secretly partake in a cigarette from time to time but never too frequently because he needs his lungs

©

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Been thinking about the dome episode of S6 and what would have happened if the dome hadn't been the result of the Superfriends and had just... happened. Maybe it's a plan from some villain we don't know yet, or another plan of Lex's, but basically my idea is about exploring what would happen if the Superfriends were caught inside the dome with Lex (we're ignoring Nyxly, this is an AU, independent of the actual season), and only Lena is left outside of it.

The dome is either opaque or illusionary, preventing each side from seeing through to the other. It completely isolates those on the inside-- no telephone lines, no internet/wifi, no broadcast/radio waves. Nothing. It's also impenetrable: nothing gets in, nothing gets out, no matter what either side tries to do to breach it.

I think I would prefer it if the plan wasn't Lex's, and a bunch of domes just randomly appear elsewhere across the globe. National City is just one of many, but it has one thing the rest of the world does not.

It has Lena Luthor.

It has a Lena Luthor whose friends are trapped and alone with her sociopathic brother.

With Lex out of play, Lena is left to focus all of LuthorCorp's resources on breaching the dome. She coordinates with other leading minds across the world to study and experiment with the dome, trying to determine how it was formed, how it's maintaining itself, and how they can breach it.

It's a long, difficult process, even with so much of the world's brainpower dedicated to the project. It's completely alien, something no one has ever seen before. Human minds work with alien ones, initiating a peace between species like never before.

It takes years for Lena's team to crack it-- for Lena herself to crack the final puzzle that allows them to manufacture a means to disrupt and neutralize the dome's effects. All told, more than five years have passed. Five years of questions, of anguish, of families divided and lives disrupted. Five years of not knowing.

When the dome comes down, no one knows what to expect. They hope for the best, but brace for the worst.

Lena is on the ground deploying the apparatus that takes down the dome. She's there when it flickers, as though short circuiting, then disappears completely. The military forces on standby wait for her to confirm it's totally neutralized. But before Lena can nod a confirmation, a familiar figure appears at the edge of the dome's perimeter.

Lena's too far back to see the figure's face, but she sees the familiar red and blue, and she feels the weight of the last five years lift off her shoulders. She strides forward, leaving the troops behind as she answers the tug of her heart.

She watches Kara hesitantly edge the toe of her boot across the scorched earth boundary left behind by the field that had separated them. When nothing happens, Kara's beaming smile is wide enough to nearly blind Lena.

Soon Kara closes the distance between them, her stride long and confident. Her head is high with an authority she wears as naturally as her cape. It's an authority that Lena reflects back at her.

They meet as equals halfway between dome and military, eyes locked.

Camera crews embedded with the military forces catch the moment live, and the world watches as Luthor and Super regard each other for a long moment. Then, Lena's hand reaches out, and Supergirl grips it tightly in a handshake that transcends the need for words.

It says thank you.

It says welcome home.

Their reunion doesn't last long. Supergirl soon leaves to keep her people calm and contained. And they are her people, those under the dome. Cut off from the rest of the world, they had turned to their hero, and their hero had stepped up. Just as Lena had led the world's response to the domes, Kara had led those trapped with her, not unlike a mayor. She had helped keep order, peace. She had directed the allocation of resources, arranged housing, contrived the means of producing their own food and water.

Kara emerges from the dome not just a hero, but a leader.

In the weeks that follow, Lena and Kara help mitigate the worst of the chaos. Part of Lena's endeavor to bring down the domes was to prepare for what would be needed after they succeeded. She arranged for aid, determined how best to efficiently take a census of those inside the domes and begin the process of reintegrating them with their families and previous lives. She ensured help would be provided for those without jobs, without homes.

Progress slow, but progress is made, somehow balancing those who wish to return to their lives outside the dome, and those who wish to stay where they've been for the past five years. Some of them have started families. Some of them find a simpler life more fulfilling than the grind of their previous daily lives.

During the day, Lena and Kara work hard to create the best of both worlds. The nights though... the nights are theirs. Their nights are spent in low light, ensconced in the small house Kara has shared with Alex for the past five years. Together, they slowly catch each other up on what they've missed.

Superman has left to live on Argo for good.

Lex is dead, vanquished by Supergirl not long after the dome appeared.

There are lots of changes. Lena has small wrinkles around her eyes, and thin lines of gray in her dark hair. Kara's look is different as well-- short hair and a sleeveless suit that does wonders for her muscular arms (which haven't lost a shred of definition).

To the rest of the world, they present a united front, paragons of the reacclimation movement. Alone, they are still united, but in a different way.

What the cameras don't see is the way they embrace each other, their arms clutching so tight it almost hurts, their faces buried in each other's shoulder. No one sees the way their frames shake with tears, overcome by five years of emotions kept hidden.

No one but them sees the moment they confess their feelings, less than a month after the dome comes down. Only their friends see the way they remain in contact, holding hands or bumping shoulders. Only their friends bear witness to the quiet ceremony, years later, that binds them in matrimony.

The next time National City erects a statue in Supergirl's honor, she isn't alone. This time, Lena's likeness is cast with hers, their momentous handshake preserved for all posterity.

[cescalr]

Why Is Draco Malfoy So Underrated?

A repost of a Quora answer because Quora hates me for some reason

@vivithefolle​ i take little convincing here I go -

SO!

You. Yeah, you. You, nebulous quora questioner, you think Malfoy is underrated, do you? Well I, CescaLR, am here to set the record straight. The following is the answer I posted to Quora, that was flagged with ‘answer may need improvement’, which means some asshole was trawling the answers to the question posted and didn’t like mine so they had the moderators hide it because said person doesn’t like differing opinions. This post is thereby an archive, so if my answer is never again allowed to see the light of day on Quora, at least my maths is visible elsewhere. 

Hopefully, this entertains you, tumblr user reading this post. Also, as fair warning, if you do like Draco Malfoy and somehow stumbled across this post, I recommend skipping it. 

Why is Draco Malfoy so underrated?

Fleur Lee-Ranger

Author of 857406 words of fanfiction and counting.

ANSWER:

HAHAHAHA.

Ha.

Ha.

hah…..

For god’s sake, I hope you’re not serious.

Let’s look at YouTube, first:

Does 2.2 million f*cking views on a woobie Draco edit seem like he’s underrated to you? Any character that gets 2.2 million views on an edit that interprets the character in a sympathetic, caring light…. Jesus Christ. They’re not underrated.

You could make a clear argument for them being overrated, by matter of fact!

The first result is his entire life story, and a redemption of the Malfoy family as a whole, and it’s… super popular!

look at that! 70k likes versus 1.7k dislikes. Let’s use my favourite maths thing once again: Ratios!!

(I hate ratios. The things I do to prove a point, eh?)

This video has 5201431 million views. It has around 70k likes, 1.1k dislikes. We’ll round 5201431, as 70k and 1.1k are both rounded numbers and I can’t be bothered to deal with numbers that are too complicated right now, it’s nearly nine pm. 5201431 -> 5.2 million. It’s the rounded number YouTube itself uses on the search page - check the first image if you don’t believe me, and since YouTube thinks that’s good enough, so will we.

5200000 : 70000 : 1100

52000 : 700 : 11

Divide all by 11 (and round awkward numbers, because we’re already dealing in rounded numbers anyway, which is kind of bad practice, but it’ll do for this context):

4,727 : 64 : 1

As I’ve proven before (not on Quora, you can probably find it in the comments of one of my fanfictions, I’ll end up moving it over here one day when I find the right question), fandom content engagement rates are always pretty bad. But honestly? every four thousand or so views, you get 64 likes, compared to just one dislike. That’s great! That’s incredible! I’d kill for those kinds of ratings!!

(Draco’d probably wimp out, though. hehe. Jokes, jokes.)

As for his woobie video:

2.3m : 152k : 715

2300000 : 153000 : 715

Nice, don’t need to remove any superfluous zeroes. Bad, for… well, your hypothesis, to put it nicely, since that means there are only seven hundred and fifteen goddamn dislikes on this video, what the f*ck, why do so many people like this b*stard child.

Ahem. Sorry, that’s rude to illegitimate children like myself. There is nothing wrong with having unmarried parents.

…Anyway, lets slim down that ratio:

3217 : 214 : 1

Holy sh*t. I would do more than kill for this ratio. Oh my god.

That’s some great engagement there. So many likes! Clearly, Draco dearie is a very popular boy! He’d love that. I hate this on principle. God am I glad 13 year old me didn’t really use YouTube (I watched gaming content and little else, didn’t even find fandom content until 2015) or I’d have contributed one of those likes, probably.

Oh wait, no! Never mind! I can’t have contributed one of those likes, because this f*cking video was posted last year!!!!!

LAST GODDAMN YEAR!!!!

Do you understand that? Do you - do you have any idea how - just how difficult it is to get that many views that quickly and with that good an engagement???? Do you???????? It has been, get this, seven, seven whole f*cking months, Less time than it takes to make a baby, and this f*cking video has 2,265,900!!! million!!!! views!!!! With a ratio of 214 likes to one goddamn dislike.

oh my god.

oh my god

oh my god

I’m having a minor mental breakdown. Jesus f*cking H Christ on a goddamn bike.

Look at these comments! Look at how many likes they have!! Oh my god!!!! Draco Malfoy might just be one of the most beloved characters ever to get this sort of reaction, for hell’s sake!

I don’t know what kind of dunderhead you are to not notice how f*cking popular this jackass little b*stard boy is, but god, the whiny little sh*t has more fans than oh, I don’t know. Someone really popular. Tom Holland? I don’t know celebrities. Sorry.

But my point is, for god’s sake, Malfoy isn’t underrated. I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under, my friend, but that sheer idolisation you so crave of your wimpy f*cking husband is right there in front of you! Just search his name, and you’ll see it front and goddamn centre. Those of us that don’t worship the ground he walks on are generally much more background.

For god’s sake, he’s a trope namer.

Draco In Leather Pants.

How much more evidence do you need than that?

Of course, I could be jumping the gun. You could be a fan of his that is frustrated by the fanon interpretation of his character. ‘Why is he reduced to a bad boy with a heart of gold when actually he’s a more complicated asshole with sh*tty morality and no backbone that gives a whole ass damn about his family but not much else?’ Good question! Blame Cassie Claire, though I suppose that’s my go-to for most things.

Seriously though; Draco Malfoy is not even remotely overrated. He’s a whiny, terrible, useless waste of space in the books; and in fandom, he’s transformed into a cool, collected, redeemable or outright good person who’s smart and talented and like, super hot you guys, doesn’t he look cute with Hermione/Harry/Insert Author’s Projected Character Here?!!!!

Also: Y’all are f*cking creeps for this shit:

THAT’S A SCENE FROM WHEN THE KID IS TWELVE, FOR GOD’S SAKE. I’m not even joking, half of you are nonces and I want nothing to do with you! ‘hot draco malfoy edits’ HE’S TWELVE

HE’S TWELVE

HE’S TWELVE.

Hot take time:

Draco Malfoy is overhyped, overrated, and oversexualised and I want all of this to stop, because you’re doing it to Tom Felton, when he was a child. A child! That’s creepy! Please do not make hot edits of children, thank you!!!!!

Someone call the police. I’m done with this f*cking fandom, oh my god.

(Also, if you think I edited that in like some sick weirdo might do, just go find that video and give it a watch. I wouldn’t if I were you, I’d believe me, because watching that video probably puts you on a watchlist somewhere.

It should.)

Okay. Deep breaths. It’s been a few months, this answer was flagged with the wonderfully opaque ‘this answer may need improvement’, and I’m back to refine this. I’m not taking anything out, but I’m adding some extra investigation. For posterity’s sake; the original answer only contained YouTube analysis. Let’s look through Archive Of Our Own, shall we?

As I showed in my answer re: the well-liked-ness of Lilly and Hermione, this is the number of total fics within the HP tag.

This is the number of tags when ‘Draco Malfoy’ is added to the ‘included characters’ filter.

So, in terms of ‘fandom work presence’ (AO3 is mostly fanfic, but it is not all fanfic, there are a few vids and some art on there, too) Malfoy’s ratio is thus:

254603:65469

3.8889… : 1

4 : 1

So, rounding up, for every four works on AO3, there is one that includes Draco dearie. Good lord, he’s pervasive, isn’t he? Can’t turn a corner in the fandom without seeing his pasty ferret face plastered all over the walls… lovely.

Now, once again - that wasn’t the best ratio. I didn’t remove bashing, for example, so not all those works will be positive (as in, since you think he’s underrated, that means - I assume - you think people don’t like him enough) so let’s go the long mile:

I will find a ratio for Mr Malfoy Jr’s fans, versus his haters, in terms of - how many fics bash Malfoy, and how many greatly enjoy his existence?

Add the bashing tag, and now let’s see how many fics there are with a) Draco in it, and b) Draco Bashing:

hahahhahagag;k;asdkf

Oh no!

Oh my god I dodn’t…. one second… give me just one second….

Right. Laughing fit over, okay. 17.

So, 65469 works with Draco present, 17 of which don’t like him overmuch, and 65452 like him just fine/present him as he appears in canon! Awesome. Of course, people who present him as he is in canon may not like him the way you want him to, so, not awesome? Hmm. I’m not sure how to filter for that. I suppose you wouldn’t want people who write him OOC, though, because that’s not rating him properly, is it? Should we add OOC to the bashing, to get people who don’t appreciate his… many positive character traits… to the extent that you would like?

Yes, I think we should.

Now, there’s no tag for ‘OOC Draco Malfoy’, because that would make my life too easy. And, I’m not going through 151 works to figure out which ones have Draco being the one OOC. If they’ve written one person OOC, and they’re self-aware enough to tag it, then I’m going to meanly assume they’ve written Draco OOC as well. When one person’s out of whack, I’ve found everyone else is, too, so I’m not just doing this to be a dick, I promise, it’s for a real, good, understandable reason, one that is not only because I really don’t want to have to do any maths more complicated than basic ratios.

So. 151 OOC works, 17 bashing works. 168 works of not properly appreciated Draco Malfoy, coming up, which takes our 65469 Draco works down to… 65301.

Well, that’s a lot, still.

So, there’s still some tags to remove, like Evil, and Abusive, and all that lark. I’ll go do that quickly, and come back with the maths.

(okay, but I do have to show this:)

(fourteen works in the ‘Evil’ draco tag?? are you serious???)

(oh and you can’t filter by Abusive Draco Malfoy, like that’s not a tag, so I can’t exclude it, but it really adds to the general atmosphere of ‘Draco Malfoy? Yeah he’s cool I like him’ that this fandom has going on, doesn’t it?)

Alright so! We really only could take away those 14 works. Okay.

By the way, just so you know - I didn’t exclude tags like ‘Death Eater Draco Malfoy’ and ‘Bully Draco Malfoy’ (if the latter even exists), because those are things that happen in canon, and when I think of a character as being ‘underrated’ I include not acknowledging their canon actions, the bad and the good. A character is only as good as their complexities run deep.

So.

For the ratio, I guess;

65469 : 151 : 17 : 14

4,676.3571… : 10.7857… : 1.2142… : 1

4,676 : 11 : 1 : 1

…

Hmm.

For every 4 thousand 6 hundred fics Draco appears in, 11 of them have OOC tagged, 1 of them has Draco Bashing tagged, and 1 of them has Evil Draco tagged. That is…

That is unfathomably good. I’m really, genuinely having a hard time picturing it. I really, honestly, don’t think there’s been a character as unquestionably overrated as Draco Malfoy in all of fandom, because, good lord, look at that ratio! People love the guy!

Let’s see the good draco malfoy tag, shall we?

Now, to be fair, most people don’t bother tagging any of this sort of thing, usually, so that’s a minor flaw in my ratio-ing. We can’t actually know exactly how many works laud Malfoy, or hate him, or feel ambivalent, because people don’t tag their shit properly. But I’m hoping this helps, at least a little. Anyway, 905! That’s a few. Not many, but certainly more than Evil or Bashing or even OOC.

65469 : 905 : 151 : 17 : 14

4,676.3571… : 64.6428 : 10.7857… : 1.2142… : 1

4,676 : 65 : 11 : 1 : 1

Yep. That’s not bad, not bad at all.

So. Most people seem to like him, if we’re honest. As I pointed out above, he’s a trope namer. If you didn’t click on the link for Draco In Leather Pants, here’s a brief summary from the TV Tropes page:

[ Transcription:

Sometimes, a fanwork will portray a villainous character in a more positive light. It can be done out of sympathy for the character, for shipping reasons, as a part of a role-reversal story, several of the aforementioned or for the variety of other reasons.

The common subjects of this treatment are characters who are wicked in a classy or cool way. A physically attractive villain is much more likely to be subject to this trope than a physically ugly one; Beauty = Goodness, after all, and shallow as it may be, it seems that, for some fans, this is the case even when the character's beauty only extends to their appearance. All Girls Want Bad Boys may be a factor with male villains getting a female fandom that views them through this lens. A badass villain will naturally be preferred by many of these over meeker heroic characters at times, as well. Ugly Cute villains also get this pretty easily. ]

So! There’s that. He named a trope all about appreciating a character perhaps (usually definitely) more than they deserve, so I wouldn’t call him ‘underrated’ by most general definitions of the word:

People seem to mostly believe him to be quite good, actually! Certainly enough to write about him a lot, to draw him a lot, to edit him a lot, to theorise about him a lot, to ship him with the main character so much that the 99th filter ever on AO3 was Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter.

Hey, actually, that’s a good idea! Which filter id is Draco Malfoy?

Now, if I’m not mistaken, it’s been a while since I had to do this -

Draco Malfoy was the 1589th tag canonised in the tag system of AO3. Let’s check the Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter tag (which I know for certain was 99) to make sure:

And lo and behold, I was right. That’s mad. That’s mad!!!!

Ooh, I’ve found a fun trick

To change which rss feed you’re looking at, copy the https:// link up to .atom in the speech marks, and change the highlighted number. That shows you what uses that tag_ids: - in this case, 93 is Draco himself. The 93rd tag, dedicated to Draco Malfoy. Good lord, that’s insane! I guess there really weren’t many other things to prioritize at the time, but that’s still silly to me.

Fluff and Angst appears to be the fiftieth tag canonised, for comparison. Sometimes when you replace the rss feed’s ‘tag’ in the address bar it takes you to the tag’s page instead of the feed, because that tag doesn’t have an rss feed. The more you know!

Anyway, back on track: I think all of that, rss feeds, youtube analytics, fandom presence, all kind of proves my point:

Draco Malfoy is not underrated. He is, arguably, overrated as a character, but unarguably very popular within the greater Harry Potter fandom. Unpopular characters don’t tend to get paired with the lead, at the very least - and you can’t turn around in the Harry Potter fandom without seeing Drarry somewhere, can you?

[bellamioneandotherscribbles]

Bellamione; Corpse Bride AU 

We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light We dare be brave And suddenly we see That love costs all we are And will ever be Yet it is only love Which sets us free.

~Maya Angelou

Once upon a time,

There was a young girl, so bright both in intelligence and kindness, that she illuminated every room that she entered. Casting it in shining beams of golden light. But underneath the surface of charm and delight was someone who had suffered through loss and grief their entire life. Every day, the enchanting witch struggled to grapple with why she was even bothering to get out of bed that morning. When she had so few left whom she could trust. Confide in. Those left, who she feigned the best of interest were only her friends when she was useful, helpful, kind. But outside of their adventures, they were embarrassed to be seen with her. Sitting at the end of the breakfast table. When she did try to speak, she was often talked over by someone more outspoken. She knew that if she were to disappear that nobody would notice.

Nobody except maybe her professors. Who constantly would shower her with praise and approval at her unbelievable gifts. Her insights and incredible work-ethic. The way that she applied herself to her studies, and took to each subject with the goal of having total mastery. She was a prodigy. And it was what she lived for every day, to learn and to use what she studied to benefit her fellow witches and wizards. To hopefully someday, save their lives.

But again, that little voice in the back of her mind would snide. What was the point? It wasn’t like it really mattered in the end. She did not matter.

Summer vacations were the most difficult time of year, as the busy shuffle, non-stop animation of school life was brought to a stagnating halt. Silence. The lively sounds to nothing but her distant relatives stepping on the creaky hardwood floor below her.  

She indulged in her studies as much as possible but there was only so much she could fill her mind with before her concentration would waver. And she was left to be maddened by the slow tick tock of the clock. Minutes felt like hours. And days felt like years. There was no escape.

One afternoon, she relinquished herself from the home that had become her prison. Going by train to a cemetery that was overcast with dark skies. But she found the shadows that loomed over her to be actually good company. As opposed to a threatening presence in the back of her aching heart.

After spending a good hour, crying albeit softly in front of her parent’s memorial. She began to walk the grounds. A humid summer. Dark clouds created a most pleasant mist all around. A fog almost. Across a clearing, away from the cemetery there was a rotting chain link fence where from behind wild, feral dogs barked madly. Their growls, barks carried through the field of dead. Sounding like a melody to Hermione’s ears.

Walking upward to a tall hill that overlooked the entire cemetery. There at the center was a large black olive that had arms which outstretched into the clouds. Weary from her hour long commute there and then hours of walking, she sat and resting at the foot of the tree. Breathing in the air of death and nature with a sigh of relief. The grass heavy with the smell of cold rain. 

When she saw out of the corner of her eye, an outline of a figure. Causing her to jump back. Before standing on shaking legs again to investigate. Circling the tree until the skinny shadow of a person came into full view. They weren’t dead, for the gentle rise and fall of their chest. But their blue skin and their ribcage protruding through their chest showed that they weren’t alive either.

Her petal pink lips parted at the sight of them. Despite having no life, no pull to this earth, she felt the strongest gravitation toward this woman. With their long tresses of ebony curls, eyelashes that fluttered against her sharp cheekbones. She wore a white satin gown that had long since gone tattered and gray. The once voluminous skirts beginning to tear from it’s seams. A veil worn in her hair that had grown cobwebs pinned by wilted, black roses.

As if sensing her presence, the woman lifted her head and opened her eyes that were opaque. Her endless black orbs staring into their golden-speckled brown ones for a small eternity.

“Who are you?” The goddess of the non-living finally asked. The bride to Hades. Persephone.

“My name is Hermione, and you?”

“Bellatrix, Bellatrix Black.” They said with an aristocratic tilt of their head, before extending their skeletal hand out to shake their warm one.

“A pleasure” Hermione said with a genuine smile. “Mind if I sit beside you?” She asked.

Bellatrix shrugged. “I don’t see why not. But surely you don’t want to spend all day in a creepy place like this?”

“You would be surprised.”

They fell into a companionable silence until Hermione finally asked. “So… why are you here? Instead of you know…”

“In Hell?”

“Yeah…”

“I’m waiting for my groom to show up.”

“I’m sorry?” Hermione asked, taken aback. For some reason feeling a pang of disappointment.

“I’ve been waiting for my beloved, to-be husband for over seventy years. I stayed waiting at the church hill over there. Rain, snow. He told me to wait. Promised me that he would show up. Not to stray elsewhere, that he would be there.”

If Hermione didn’t know better, she’d think those were tears accenting her voice. Maybe she was crying. Maybe she couldn’t because she was dead. Hermione didn’t know. But she still reached to affectionately hold their hand, although she didn’t reject the touch, Bellatrix scoffed.

“I’m not looking for pity. He’ll show up, he said that he would.”

Hermione didn’t say anything to that, just continued to hold their hand until the sun was beginning to set over the horizon. As the young witch got up to leave, she saw the woman’s lifeless eyes take an even more haunted look. Accentuated by the darkening surroundings.

“I’ll come back.”

“Okay.”

Hermione could have sworn she saw them smile. But it might have just been a trick of the moonlight.

--------

The young witch continued to visit the forgotten bride nearly every day of Summer. Forgoing eating, studying, every aspect of living apart from sleep and continuing to love this woman. They talked about anything and everything, they read books together. And shared dark secrets that would never leave from under the black olive tree where they were shared.

Still Hermione longed for the day that Bellatrix would finally recognize her undying love for them. How she’d been completely enamored with her, body and soul since the day she laid eyes on them. That she would follow her into hell if she asked. She would burn a thousand times, just to have this ethereal goddess by her side.

Of course, she knew full and well that this day may never arrive.

The bride had devoted herself to the heartless fiancé, who stole her heart and never returned it. He took advantage of her, took her soul and laid her body bare to a starving death. Hermione would never understand it, ever. How you could knowingly hurt someone, intentionally. Watch as you break them apart and tear at the very seams that are holding their fragile body together. How you can watch them sob and beg for relief that only you can provide. Only to laugh and snide at their pathetic cries.

But oh, what Hermione would give to have her accept her love. They would embrace, touch hands in the most magical and electrifying of way. They would kiss each other, the taste of their cold lips against her own. She would kiss them as if their mouths were of tea and wine and she was a woman of unquenchable thirst drinking from them with unheeded affections. They would make love, passionate and all-consuming as the fires of hell themselves. And then lay intertwined under the cool of night.

As days went on however, as she laid beside the ebony-haired woman, so close yet so far. She became too weak to even imagine such things. How could she for as long as she had denied herself food. Her pale flesh was as ghostly as the whites of her eyes. The shadowed divots of her ribs and collarbones. Soon made her look not much more alive than the woman beside her. She felt like fine china, a simple rattle away from shattering beneath Bellatrix’s uncertain touch.

Soon the fallen angels laid dead, side by side. Each dying only to be with the love of their life. A burning, all-consuming desire that fueled the bride but now a corpse. Still ethereal and divine. Who lost their fight and will to survive.   A desperate longing that would never be satisfied. Choosing to love is a most certain death, but without it, you will never even survive the night.  

“Because more than God himself; I love his fair angels” ~Marina Tsevetaeva 

[litheammunition]

Brexit: An Unwinnable War

How do you stage a coup? You start a war. You fan its flames, until it grows out of control. You make it so that it’s impossible for the moderates to win, showing them as out of their depth, needing a stronger, unconventional hand to sort the mess out. Then you step in, and find that you can get away with breaking all the rules...

Act 1 - Project Fear

The spark was the slow part. There had always been rumblings of discontent around the UK’s place in Europe, dating right back to our accession to the European Community in 1972, and intensifying since the project formally became a political European Union in 1993. 

There had been a referendum in 1975, won by a 67.2% vote to remain, but the question was raised again after the 1993 Maastricht Treaty. No referendum was needed for the government to sign up, but neighbours Ireland and France held one to confirm the decision, and many in the UK thought they deserved the same. That year saw the birth of a number of protest parties, the most successful of which, UKIP, continues to pressure for ‘Brexit’ today.

After years of pressure from UKIP and the sizable Eurosceptic wing of his own Conservative party, Prime Minister David Cameron finally gave into their demands. In 2016, a referendum was held, with one simple question: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? No details were provided as to what the latter option would look like. That was down to the campaigns to provide.

It turned out that it was actually many options hidden within one. Every leaver had their own idea of what shape Brexit would come in. Many talked about the Norway model, a country with full access to single market, but which is obliged to make a financial contribution, accept most EU laws, and which has free movement with the rest of the EU. Others suggested a Swiss model, part of the EFTA but not the EEA, making a smaller financial contribution to access specific areas of trade, and again with free movement. 

Still others spoke about Turkey, with no membership of the EEA/EFTA but its own customs union with the EU, to avoid the need to impose tariffs on exports. They were a dozen combinations available. What was certain was that there would be some sort of deal, and it would be quick and painless to negotiate. What was clear was that “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market” as Daniel Hannan, known as the Godfather of Brexit and a major push behind it, had said the year before. I have saved a full raft of quotes from other Leave leaders for Act 2, below.

On 26 June, senior Leave campaigner and PM hopeful Boris Johnson wrote an article confirming that the UK would remain part of the single market. In government and parliament, discussing how to implement Brexit, the main debate was between full access to the single market or only a customs union. There was no mention of crashing out with no deal. There was certaintly no mention that, in August 2019, over three years after the debate, we would be no closer to a resolution.

The Leave campaign seemed happier telling voters what the former option on the ballot would look like. The electorate might have thought they already knew what staying in the EU would look like, seeing as it was just the continuation of a fairly agreeable status quo, but they were corrected with a spate of glossy leaflets from the multiple Leave campaigns, and the same talking points brought up in every interview.

One colourful infographic, common across the material, tried to spread fear that the entirety of Turkey’s 76 million population was about to move in next door. The truth is that Turkey is nowhere near joining the EU, and that the UK has a veto (i.e. even if they tried to join, we alone could stop them). Turkey cannot join the EU unless the UK wants it to. But if you say “Turkey is joining the EU”, or treat it as a done deal, and slap FACT on it, people will get shocked. If you highlight it in orange and red with a big red arrow of Turkish people swarming into the UK, people will be worried. That’s what you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s true.

I use the term ‘swarming’ advisably, because although it’s a despicable way to describe to human beings, dehumanising them to insects, vermin, it’s the term that David Cameron used in July 2015, shortly after plans for the referendum were confirmed. As shown in other Leave material, such as the UKIP poster above that has been frequently compared to the Nazi propaganda below it, this debate was consistently coded with xenophobia and racism, an attempt to win by appealing to voter’s fears of mass immigration, the need to secure our borders, even though this was a picture of refugees moving approximately one thousand miles away and several countries away from the UK. 

If there was any doubt over the racial intention, the original photograph for this poster is below. It has a prominent white face at the front. Now note the way the original has been cropped and where the single opaque box of text has been placed, with everything else transparent. Note which one individual has been covered up, with all of the others put on show.

Even if they weren’t abhorrent, the claims around immigration are also not true. The UK already has control of its own borders. Whilst some other EU countries like France and Germany have chosen (of their own will), to have open borders with each other, in a region called the Schengen Area, the UK had the free choice not to be a part of this. This means that the UK has full border checks on every individual entering the country. The UK’s agreement with the other EU countries is that nationals of those countries (not refugees from the Middle East passing through) can stay here on a three month visa, but after that it’s our choice.

In addition, that agreement has always been subject to ‘grounds of public policy, public security or public health’, which effectively means that the UK can choose not to let in any individual they don’t want to. The UK has specific power to expel any EU citizen who they believe poses ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’, and the country they came from has to accept them back.

In short, the UK only needs to accept productive members of society. Indeed, all research (including by the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility) has shown that immigrants make a net contribution to the country’s economy, and many industries are dependent on migrant workers. The campaign to ‘end uncontrolled immigration from the EU’ or ‘protect our security - open borders gives criminals and terrorists an easy route into the UK’ is therefore another straight-up lie designed to leverage people���s base xenophobic fears. 

The frequently repeated idea that the NHS and UK benefits system are being exploited by migrants is also fake. Not only do migrants pay £78,000 more into the UK government over their lifetime than they take out over their lifetimes, but the NHS specifically depends on immigration: 37% of doctors qualified overseas. The problem with long NHS waiting times is not because the system is overcrowded, but because it is understaffed, and immigrants are the solution rather than the problem. But this is a government policy problem, and for too long they have found it easier to blame the people coming here to help. 

Before the referendum, David Cameron had also secured the UK further powers in restricting benefits paid to migrants, a massive compromise from EU principles of fairness which would have given the UK privileged status amongst member states. There would be a 4 year break before benefits had to be paid to EU citizens working in the UK, with tax credits phased in over the same period. EU migrants without a job would be restricted to claiming jobseeker’s allowance for 3 months, and then deported after 6 in they were still unemployed. Benefit payments would be fixed to the amounts available in their home countries, removing any incentive to come to the UK to claim them. 

This is all without even considering a fourth angle, that the freedom works both ways. Hundreds of thousands of British citizens exercise their right to visit and live in and work in the EU, just as happens the other way around. Finally, it’s worth noting that immigration from the EU makes up a minority of total migration to the UK, even with these supposed ‘open borders’, and specifically when net migration is considered. Most of the people coming for the long term do so from elsewhere in the world, where we have never had ‘open borders’ but still freely choose to let them in, suggesting that immigration numbers have always been up to the UK government and migration from EU countries will similarly continue at a similar rate no matter what the border situation is.

There were many other obvious lies at the time, such as the suggestion that the EU were in the process of building an army, a completely transparent attempt to spark fear, but they were told so often that they started to be believed. On the other side, all concerns about the risks of leaving were dismissed as Project Fear, a classic example of projecting: as the Leave campaign were in the business of fearmongering, it helped distract from that by accusing their opponents of the same at every opportunity.

Project Fear became a term used to silence all dissent as part of some elitist conspiracy. Some experts said that Brexit will cost the economy? Project Fear. Since the referendum the value of the pound has dropped off the charts, the UK has experienced negative growth at a time of economic success for its neighbours, and Sony, Dyson, Flybmi, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Moneygram, Philips, P&O, Airbus, Barclays, Hitachi, JPMorgan, Citibank and other firms have announced they are closing their UK operations and moving to Ireland or the Netherlands or other countries who still have trade links with the EU. Brexit hasn’t even hit its hardest yet, and it had already cost the economy £66 billion by April this year, about £1,000 per person. It turns out that the experts were exactly right.

Project Fear said that leaving threatened a break up of the UK. “If we vote to leave then I think the union will be stronger”, Michael Gove countered in May 2016, but the referendum vote has predictably intensified movements for Scottish (and Northern Irish) independence, as well as creating an endless dispute over the Irish-UK border, reopening scars that were just started to heal. Again, it seems that the people who knew what they were talking about... actually knew what they were talking about. The Leave campaign told people to ignore these false warnings as part of elite conspiracy, writing off the expertise of academics and industry leaders as ‘this country has had enough of experts’, an unexcusable anti-intellectualism that excused all lies and criticised anyone who dared to point out the truth.

They still put their fingers in their ears now, when reminded that those warnings have virtually all come true. This weak, the government’s reports on Operation Yellowhammer were leaked, their own forecasts suggesting a massive negative hit from leaving without a deal. When Kwasi Kwarteng, Minister of State for Business and Energy, was asked about them on TV, he described his government’s own projections as scaremongering and Project Fear, confused as to which lie he was supposed to be telling. Lead Brexiteer Michael Gove came out to dismiss them as the ‘worst case scenario’, even as a Whitehall source clarified ‘this is the most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios – not the worst case’.

It isn’t the first time. Theresa May withheld projections and legal advice from voters and MPs, and her government was the first ever to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately hiding the facts to push through her votes: in contempt of democracy, in contempt of the truth, adding constitutional offences to the free-flowing lies that have been a feature throughout. Amongst all of them, perhaps the biggest lie was that Brexit was about the sovereignty of the UK parliament, taking back control from the undemocratic elites: from Theresa May and Boris Johnson we have seen two unelected Prime Ministers who have tried everything they can to circumvent British democracy, as detailed below.

[antoine-roquentin]

“This... thing, [the War on Drugs] this ain't police work... I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors... running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts... pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your f**king enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory.” -- Major "Bunny" Colvin, season three of HBO’s The Wire

I can remember both so well.

2006: my first raid in South Baghdad. 2014: watching on YouTube as a New York police officer asphyxiated -- murdered -- Eric Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner not five miles from my old apartment. Both events shocked the conscience.

It was 11 years ago next month: my first patrol of the war and we were still learning the ropes from the army unit we were replacing. Unit swaps are tricky, dangerous times. In Army lexicon, they’re known as “right-seat-left-seat rides.” Picture a car. When you’re learning to drive, you first sit in the passenger seat and observe. Only then do you occupy the driver’s seat. That was Iraq, as units like ours rotated in and out via an annual revolving door of sorts. Officers from incoming units like mine were forced to learn the terrain, identify the key powerbrokers in our assigned area, and sort out the most effective tactics in the two weeks before the experienced officers departed. It was a stressful time.

Those transition weeks consisted of daily patrols led by the officers of the departing unit. My first foray off the FOB (forward operating base) was a night patrol. The platoon I’d tagged along with was going to the house of a suspected Shiite militia leader. (Back then, we were fighting both Shiite rebels of the Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgents.) We drove to the outskirts of Baghdad, surrounded a farmhouse, and knocked on the door. An old woman let us in and a few soldiers quickly fanned out to search every room. Only women -- presumably the suspect’s mother and sisters -- were home. Through a translator, my counterpart, the other lieutenant, loudly asked the old woman where her son was hiding. Where could we find him? Had he visited the house recently? Predictably, she claimed to be clueless. After the soldiers vigorously searched (“tossed”) a few rooms and found nothing out of the norm, we prepared to leave. At that point, the lieutenant warned the woman that we’d be back -- just as had happened several times before -- until she turned in her own son.

I returned to the FOB with an uneasy feeling. I couldn’t understand what it was that we had just accomplished. How did hassling these women, storming into their home after dark and making threats, contribute to defeating the Mahdi Army or earning the loyalty and trust of Iraqi civilians? I was, of course, brand new to the war, but the incident felt totally counterproductive. Let’s assume the woman’s son was Mahdi Army to the core.  So what?  Without long-term surveillance or reliable intelligence placing him at the house, entering the premises that way and making threats could only solidify whatever aversion the family already had to the U.S. Army. And what if we had gotten it wrong? What if he was innocent and we’d potentially just helped create a whole new family of insurgents?

Though it wasn’t a thought that crossed my mind for years, those women must have felt like many African-American families living under persistent police pressure in parts of New York, Baltimore, Chicago, or elsewhere in this country.  Perhaps that sounds outlandish to more affluent whites, but it’s clear enough that some impoverished communities of color in this country do indeed see the police as their enemy.  For most military officers, it was similarly unthinkable that many embattled Iraqis could see all American military personnel in a negative light.  But from that first raid on, I knew one thing for sure: we were going to have to adjust our perceptions -- and fast. Not, of course, that we did.

Years passed.  I came home, stayed in the Army, had a kid, divorced, moved a few more times, remarried, had more kids -- my Giants even won two Super Bowls. Suddenly everyone had an iPhone, was on Facebook, or tweeting, or texting rather than calling. Somehow in those blurred years, Iraq-style police brutality and violence -- especially against poor blacks -- gradually became front-page news. One case, one shaky YouTube video followed another: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Freddie Gray, just to start a long list. So many of the clips reminded me of enemy propaganda videos from Baghdad or helmet-cam shots recorded by our troopers in combat, except that they came from New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco.

Brutal Connections

As in Baghdad, so in Baltimore. It’s connected, you see. Scholars, pundits, politicians, most of us in fact like our worlds to remain discretely and comfortably separated. That’s why so few articles, reports, or op-ed columns even think to link police violence at home to our imperial pursuits abroad or the militarization of the policing of urban America to our wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa. I mean, how many profiles of the Black Lives Matter movement even mention America’s 16-year war on terror across huge swaths of the planet? Conversely, can you remember a foreign policy piece that cited Ferguson? I doubt it.

Nonetheless, take a moment to consider the ways in which counterinsurgency abroad and urban policing at home might, in these years, have come to resemble each other and might actually be connected phenomena:

*The degradations involved: So often, both counterinsurgency and urban policing involve countless routine humiliations of a mostly innocent populace.  No matter how we’ve cloaked the terms -- “partnering,” “advising,” “assisting,” and so on -- the American military has acted like an occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan in these years.  Those thousands of ubiquitous post-invasion U.S. Army foot and vehicle patrols in both countries tended to highlight the lack of sovereignty of their peoples.  Similarly, as long ago as 1966, author James Baldwin recognized that New York City’s ghettoes resembled, in his phrase, “occupied territory.”  In that regard, matters have only worsened since.  Just ask the black community in Baltimore or for that matter Ferguson, Missouri.  It’s hard to deny America’s police are becoming progressively more defiant; just last month St. Louis cops taunted protestors by chanting “whose streets? Our streets,” at a gathering crowd.  Pardon me, but since when has it been okay for police to rule America’s streets?  Aren’t they there to protect and serve us?  Something tells me the exceedingly libertarian Founding Fathers would be appalled by such arrogance.

*The racial and ethnic stereotyping.  In Baghdad, many U.S. troops called the locals hajis, ragheads, or worse still, sandniggers.  There should be no surprise in that.  The frustrations involved in occupation duty and the fear of death inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns lead soldiers to stereotype, and sometimes even hate, the populations they’re (doctrinally) supposed to protect.  Ordinary Iraqis or Afghans became the enemy, an “other,” worthy only of racial pejoratives and (sometimes) petty cruelties.  Sound familiar?  Listen to the private conversations of America’s exasperated urban police, or the occasionally public insults they throw at the population they’re paid to “protect.”  I, for one, can’t forget the video of an infuriated white officer taunting Ferguson protestors: “Bring it on, you f**king animals!”  Or how about a white Staten Island cop caught on the phone bragging to his girlfriend about how he’d framed a young black man or, in his words, “fried another nigger.”  Dehumanization of the enemy, either at home or abroad, is as old as empire itself.

*The searches: Searches, searches, and yet more searches. Back in the day in Iraq -- I’m speaking of 2006 and 2007 -- we didn’t exactly need a search warrant to look anywhere we pleased. The Iraqi courts, police, and judicial system were then barely operational.  We searched houses, shacks, apartments, and high rises for weapons, explosives, or other “contraband.”  No family -- guilty or innocent (and they were nearly all innocent) -- was safe from the small, daily indignities of a military search.  Back here in the U.S., a similar phenomenon rules, as it has since the “war on drugs” era of the 1980s.  It’s now routine for police SWAT teams to execute rubber-stamped or “no knock” search warrants on suspected drug dealers’ homes (often only for marijuanastashes) with an aggressiveness most soldiers from our distant wars would applaud.  Then there are the millions of random, warrantless, body searches on America’s urban, often minority-laden streets.  Take New York, for example, where a discriminatory regime of “stop-and-frisk” tactics terrorized blacks and Hispanics for decades.  Millions of (mostly) minority youths were halted and searched by New York police officers who had to cite only such opaque explanations as “furtive movements,” or “fits relevant description” -- hardly explicit probable cause -- to execute such daily indignities.  As numerous studies have shown (and a judicial ruling found), such “stop-and-frisk” procedures were discriminatory and likely unconstitutional.

As in my experience in Iraq, so here on the streets of so many urban neighborhoods of color, anyone, guilty or innocent (mainly innocent) was the target of such operations.  And the connections between war abroad and policing at home run ever deeper. Consider that in Springfield, Massachusetts, police anti-gang units learned and applied literal military counterinsurgency doctrine on that city’s streets.  In post-9/11 New York City, meanwhile, the NYPD Intelligence Unit practiced religious profiling and implemented military-style surveillance to spy on its Muslim residents.  Even America’s stalwart Israeli allies -- no strangers to domestic counterinsurgency -- have gotten in on the game. That country’s Security Forces have been training American cops, despite their long record of documented human rights abuses.  How’s that for coalition warfare and bilateral cooperation?

*The equipment, the tools of the trade: Who hasn’t noticed in recent years that, thanks in part to a Pentagon program selling weaponry and equipment right off America’s battlefields, the police on our streets look ever less like kindly beat cops and ever more like Robocop or the heavily armed and protected troops of our distant wars?  Think of the sheer firepower and armor on the streets of Ferguson in those photos that shocked and discomforted so many Americans.  Or how about the aftermath of the tragic Boston Marathon Bombing? Watertown, Massachusetts, surely resembled U.S. Army-occupied Baghdad or Kabul at the height of their respective troop “surges,” as the area was locked down under curfew during the search for the bombing suspects.

Here, at least, the connection is undeniable. The military has sold hundreds of millions of dollars in excess weapons and equipment -- armored vehicles, rifles, camouflage uniforms, and even drones -- to local police departments, resulting in a revolving door of self-perpetuating urban militarism. Does Walla Walla, Washington, really need the very Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) trucks I drove around Kandahar, Afghanistan?  And in case you were worried about the ability of Madison, Indiana (pop: 12,000), to fight off rocket propelled grenades thanks to those spiffy new MRAPs, fear not, President Trump recently overturned Obama-era restrictions on advanced technology transfers to local police. Let me just add, from my own experiences in Baghdad and Kandahar, that it has to be a losing proposition to try to be a friendly beat cop and do community policing from inside an armored vehicle. Even soldiers are taught not to perform counterinsurgency that way (though we ended up doing so all the time).

*Torture: The use of torture has rarely -- except for several years at the CIA -- been official policy in these years, but it happened anyway.  (See Abu Ghraib, of course.)  It often started small as soldier -- or police -- frustration built and the usual minor torments of the locals morphed into outright abuse.  The same process seems underway here in the U.S. as well, which was why, as a 34-year old New Yorker, when I first saw the photos at Abu Ghraib, I flashed back to the way, in 1997, the police sodomized Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in my own hometown.  Younger folks might consider the far more recent case in Baltimore of Freddie Gray, brutally and undeservedly handcuffed, his pleas ignored, and then driven in the back of a police van to his death.  Furthermore, we now know about two decades worth of systematic torture of more than 100 black men by the Chicago police in order to solicit (often false) confessions.

Unwinnable Wars: At Home and Abroad

For nearly five decades, Americans have been mesmerized by the government’s declarations of “war” on crime, drugs, and -- more recently -- terror. In the name of these perpetual struggles, apathetic citizens have acquiesced in countless assaults on their liberties. Think warrantless wiretapping, the Patriot Act, and the use of a drone to execute an (admittedly deplorable) American citizen without due process. The First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments -- who needs them anyway? None of these onslaughts against the supposedly sacred Bill of Rights have ended terror attacks, prevented a raging opioid epidemic, staunched Chicago’s record murder rate, or thwarted America’s ubiquitous mass shootings, of which the Las Vegas tragedy is only the latest and most horrific example. The wars on drugs, crime, and terror -- they’re all unwinnable and tear at the core of American society. In our apathy, we are all complicit.

Like so much else in our contemporary politics, Americans divide, like clockwork, into opposing camps over police brutality, foreign wars, and America’s original sin: racism. All too often in these debates, arguments aren’t rational but emotional as people feel their way to intractable opinions.  It’s become a cultural matter, transcending traditional policy debates. Want to start a sure argument with your dad? Bring up police brutality.  I promise you it’s foolproof.

So here’s a final link between our endless war on terror and rising militarization on what is no longer called “the home front”: there’s a striking overlap between those who instinctively give the increasingly militarized police of that homeland the benefit of the doubt and those who viscerally support our wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

It may be something of a cliché that distant wars have a way of coming home, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Policing today is being Baghdadified in the United States.  Over the last 40 years, as Washington struggled to maintain its global military influence, the nation’s domestic police have progressively shifted to military-style patrol, search, and surveillance tactics, while measuringsuccess through statistical models familiar to any Pentagon staff officer.

Please understand this: for me when it comes to the police, it’s nothing personal. A couple of my uncles were New York City cops. Nearly half my family has served or still serves in the New York Fire Department.  I’m from blue-collar, civil service stock. Good guys, all. But experience tells me that they aren’t likely to see the connections I’m making between what’s happening here and what’s been happening in our distant war zones or agree with my conclusions about them. In a similar fashion, few of my peers in the military officer corps are likely to agree, or even recognize, the parallels I’ve drawn.

Of course, these days when you talk about the military and the police, you’re often talking about the very same people, since veterans from our wars are now making their way into police forces across the country, especially the highly militarized SWAT teams proliferating nationwide that use the sorts of smash-and-search tactics perfected abroad in recent years. While less than 6% of Americans are vets, some 19% of law-enforcement personnel have served in the U.S. military. In many ways it’s a natural fit, as former soldiers seamlessly slide into police life and pick up the very weaponry they once used in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere.

The widespread perpetuation of uneven policing and criminal (in)justice can be empirically shown. Consider the numerous critical Justice Department investigations of major American cities. But what concerns me in all of this is a simple enough question: What happens to the republic when the militarism that is part and parcel of our now more or less permanent state of war abroad takes over ever more of the prevailing culture of policing at home?

And here’s the inconvenient truth: despite numerous instances of brutality and murder perpetrated by the U.S. military personnel overseas -- think Haditha(the infamous retaliatory massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines), Panjwai(where a U.S. Army Sergeant left his base and methodically executed nearby Afghan villagers), and of course Abu Ghraib -- in my experience, our army is often stricter about interactions with foreign civilians than many local American police forces are when it comes to communities of color.  After all, if one of mymen strangled an Iraqi to death for breaking a minor civil law (as happened to Eric Garner), you can bet that the soldier, his sergeant, and I would have been disciplined, even if, as is so often the case, such accountability never reached the senior-officer level.

Ultimately, the irony is this: poor Eric Garner -- at least if he had run into my platoon -- would have been safer in Baghdad than on that street corner in New York. Either way, he and so many others should perhaps count as domestic casualties of my generation’s forever war.

What’s global is local. And vice versa. American society is embracing its inner empire. Eventually, its long reach may come for us all.

[decodealin]

7 Top Strategies For Choosing The Perfect Wardrobe

Possessing appropriate storage is absolutely key to turning your bedroom into a clutter-free sanctuary, along with a carefully selected wardrobe is the thing of furniture most likely to provide scope for more organized living.

Below are some top tips for your most important things to consider when putting together your apparel wish list...

Top Tip 1) Use

There are hundreds of different Wardrobe Accessories Online on the current market, from two-door, three-door, sliding, mirrored, freestanding and fitted. And that's just the frame -- after you open up the doors you will find infinite options regarding the combination and setup of hanging space, drawers, shelves and shoe racks that may be incorporated inside.

So, to start with, the very first question to ask yourself is what type of storage space do you mostly need? Hanging space for clothing, shelves for shoes, drawers for smaller clothes products, cosmetics or other Wardrobe Accessories India, or a mix?

Once you've set out exactly what your wardrobe will be used for, you can consider the functionality it needs to offer, which will help guide both the exterior and interior specification you need it to match.

Top Tip 2) Functionality

Knowing the duration of hanging space you will roughly have to have in proportion to the kind of clothing you have is important. If you are going to store long coats, evening dresses and dressing gowns in the wardrobe rather than elsewhere in the home, you'll almost certainly require accessories which optimise the entire height of the apparel, although suits, short dresses and jumpers can hang comfortably on half-height railings, which instantly doubles the amount of hanging room.

When it has to do with drawers and shelves, again think carefully about everything you will, mostly, be storing on them. Many dividers today offer super-innovative interior designs with built-in shoe racks, jewellery drawers, and adjustable cubbyholes that enhance organisation options, reduce clutter and possibly eliminate the need for additional furniture in the bedroom. And many equipments are easy to buy. Because decodeal are offers Pull Out Pantry, Pull Out Kitchen, etc.

The thickness of shelves is also a consideration -- past a certain stage, having a deeper shelf produces a black hole where clothes disappear, which means that you may struggle to find things right at the back!

Best Tip 3) Size

Consider precisely where on your bedroom the wardrobe is going to proceed, and be very sure of this; a large piece of furniture is often difficult to move around (and impossible if it's a fitted layout -- obviously!) And many rooms only have one suitable location for a product of this size, therefore it ought to match perfectly.

Most manufacturers make wardrobes to get at least 45cm of thickness, that should be enough to give you the choice to possess ample shelf, hanging and drawer space.

If your budget permits, my tip would be to go as large as possible however -- you can never have enough storage space -- but in sensible limitations, so think almost about if there'll be sufficient clearance space to easily open doors, walk around and match your additional items of furniture in comfortably.

Also go as tall as you can towards the ceiling to increase storage. This space can be useful for stashing spare bedding, seasonal or occasional things which don't need daily usage.

Best Tip 4) Forms of Clothing

As soon as you've pinpointed your performance requirements, you should begin considering the varieties of wardrobe which are available.

Fitted designs are fantastic for rooms with strange angles, awkward alcoves, or sloping ceilings; available from specialist suppliers, they are normally custom-made and much more expensive.

Free-standing wardrobes are versatile when considering design and cost; they're often available for quicker delivery and can be moved from room to room, or house to house, if needed. The Principal types to choose from are:

Two-door panel dividers: these generally follow a pretty standard design in which the inside is divided in half with one side as drawers and another with rails.

Three-door panel wardrobes: offering a bit more space, this layout comprises another compartment of railings or shelving.

Hinged doors are more common though, and imply that you could mount a mirror or additional hooks/ racks around the interior.

Doorless: a frame-stand lets you make a display as well as shop clothing. Easily collapsible and movable, standalone rails can be used in addition to a traditional wardrobe, but do appeal to quite a specific,'on-trend', flavor.

Best Tip 5) Design

As a larand dominant piece of furniture, the design of this wardrobe contributes greatly to the overall theme and taste of the bedroom.

The different styles available are endless, from timeless, versatile classics, to high-gloss, slick modern; from ornate French boudoir to minimalist Scandinavian chic.

Little touches like the grips can have an impact on the wardrobe's overall appeal; whether you go for elaborate glass knobs, slim brushed-chrome handles, cupped insets or ring pulls, and these delicate accomplices can be customisable and help to hone the overall stylistics.

Also think about if you would like to match your wardrobe with other pieces of furniture such as a bedside cupboard, chest of drawers or vanity. Should you prefer these to be matching, check if the apparel is part of a suite.

Best Tip 6) Material and Finish

The material, color and surface finish of your wardrobe is a massive contributor to its design and also the amount of practicality it can offer. There are many choices available, such as modular options which means that you can mix and match to create a bespoke look unique to you!

Strong wood: one of the most used materials, strong wood is solid and solid, with each kind bringing a different feel and effect.

MDF or particleboard: common options these days, they're cost-effective, inexpensive and reasonably durable wardrobe materials.

High gloss finish: showcasing a sleek, modern look to your room, this glistening finish is mainly available in either black, white or very light colours.

Glass and mirrors: through reflecting the light, opaque glass or mirror adds an additional dimension to the room, making a glowing impact which complements most interior décor.

Painted finish: readily available in many colours, painted wardrobes can also be treated with different distinct finishes, tailoring it to exude a rustic, refreshing, elaborate or boho look, based upon your design preference.

Top Tip 7) Practicality

As a bulky item of furniture with features that can vary greatly from product to product, there are some other logistical factors on the'ideal wardrobe checklist' that I would highly recommend considering before you make a purchase:

Double check sizes and dimensions: it's very easy to underestimate how much space a bit of furniture like this can take up, therefore check and check again when it comes to measuring measurements and the total amount of clearance space needed. Plotting the shape out on the floor with masking tape is obviously helpful as you want.

Delivery: check with the retailer if shipping costs are included, and that this includes carrying the dresses to the last destination in the area -- you do not need it left unattended when it ought to go into a third-floor bedroom! Quantify halls, stairs and doors to make certain you can fit the wardrobe through comfortably; if the space is quite limited you might have to take into account a flat package.

Meeting: wardrobes are usually heavy and bulky, so you can require assistance (and patience!) To build. Pre-assembled products will save yourself time but are usually pricier, and more challenging to manoeuvre into place.

Safety: as a tall, freestanding item, ensure that you are able to securely fasten the wardrobe to the wall or anchor it to the ground when you've got young kids who are tempted to use it as a climbing frame!

[bookwyrmling]

Those Time Forgot

As part of @wipweek Day 1: Oldest WIP, here is the next chapter of TTF.

Fandom: Prince of Tennis Characters: Echizen Ryoma, Fuji Yumiko Notes: Gen, Fantasy AU

Previous Chapters

Chapter 7

The temperature decreased rapidly once the prince escaped the boundaries of the fire’s effect, but he still had not expected the hallways to leave him shuddering as he rubbed at his goosefleshed arms.The size of the Great Hall took up much of the Keep’s first floor.  At Ryoma’s estimation, there would be little of interest to him to be found in ground floor rooms, so when he stumbled across the stairs leading up, he took them, his hand pressed hard against the rough, cold stone wall as he climbed.  There was little light here cast on the staircase with naught but a torch at each curve, spaced just close enough to not drop any part of the flight into total darkness.

But as old as they were, the stairs remained solid and even and, upon reaching the next level, the prince grabbed the torch and continued on.  A quick study of the second floor proved it to be the guard’s quarter and garderobe.  There were weapons kept here, but Ryoma trusted his own sword far greater than anything he would find here.  He knew its balance and its build, its length an extension of his own arm, giving him an awareness to the very tip as if he were noting his fingers, instead.

It was the third floor that proved to be the solar, surprisingly, rather than the top.  Ryoma found the king’s sleeping quarters easily, but the room seemed even more abandoned than most of the other locations, dust covering everything in an opaque layer of grey and time having eaten through even the rich brocade of the bedcovers now a mess on the floor from whenever the wood frame had finally eroded and the mattress’s filling decomposed.

Looking through the sleeping and living chambers, the torch placed in a bracket on a wall that lit the main room, Ryoma found little of interest save a portrait of what must have been the king, an elderly but refined gentleman with judgmental eyes.  Ryoma stared at the image, surprised at its vivid liveliness considering how far art had come even in the last century.  It felt almost as if the king was in the painting, staring him down, and Ryoma turned it back around to face the wall as it had once been.

There were two other smaller portraits he found after, one of a family: the king surrounded by what was likely his ilk: a young couple and two small boys, the older of which looked very familiar and the prince’s eyes narrowed and mouth tightened; the other of a young man, not much older than Ryoma was now, but with familiar brilliant blue eyes and dressed in royal garb.  A new king?  An heir?  If anything, it seemed the youngest of the portraits, though only because the colors were a little more vibrant, so it could not be a picture of the old king when younger—especially since the old king’s eyes had been brown.  Ryoma stared at the portrait for a long while before recognizing some small similarities between this young man and the younger child in the family portrait.  But for the younger child to have received the title rather than the elder?  Ryoma’s eyebrows knit together, but footsteps pattered on the floor behind him, tearing him from his thoughts.

Ryoma spun, hands on his sword.  That he heard footsteps told him, at the very least, it was not another ghost that he could not hit—or whatever form of apparition Kunimitsu had taken on while traveling with him in the forest since he was here in the castle in the flesh—but that also meant it was a creature of the physical realm that could attack him, as well.

It was a woman.

More likely, it was the woman.  The one he was looking for.

She was certainly what his father would consider a beauty.  With pale skin and white dress and dun hair waving past her shoulders, she appeared light itself in the darkness of the castle.  In the torchlight and flickering shadows, her body shone, ethereal and insubstantial as a moonbeam and yet she was still clearly physically present.

She was closer than he had thought, her light body and bare feet apparently helping her to move with less noise than most, and Ryoma frowned at her smile and the way it hid her eyes.  Something about her presence made him believe they would hold that same glowing, jewelled quality his now did.

They remained shuttered behind demure eyelids, however, and, instead, she spoke: “I’m glad to see you safely here, good Prince.”  Ryoma decided he should probably say something in reply, but all he could think of was that he was disappointed she was not a pile of bleached bones as he had originally thought to find—if he had indeed found anything—when he was first sent on this quest.

A disappointment, but that did not mean he would not do what he had to.

Her eyes opened to blue the depth of a clear spring and aquamarine and the prince suddenly remembered where he had seen this form bathed in light before.  “The nixe,” he mentioned and the princess’s laughter swelled like bells though she silenced herself just as quickly.

“You remember me,” she cooed, “Good.  It was for such a short time...Though, as I told you then: I’m not a nixe.  I hope you believe me now.”  The smile was back once more—the one that hid her eyes and seemed far too relaxed given the situation, but Ryoma sighed and released his sword as it appeared the woman had no interest in attacking.  He had seen her eyes and knew the truth of what they spoke of now, after all, and faie and faie-touched, as Ryoma now knew, could at least be trusted not to lie.  She was not a nixe.

But that did beg the question: “If you had told me who you were before, we could have run then.”  So why had she not?

“I wasn’t physically there,” she chuckled, “It would have made it a little hard for me.”

It was a simple answer, but one the prince could not understand.  “You filled my canteen,” he argued, brows knit together in confusion as he realized Momo must have been the one to move his boots from the fire that night.  That had been done in his sleep, but only earlier that day he had taken his canteen from her directly—and nearly dropped it when she had pulled her hand away faster than he had realized she would.  But logic stated that, as they had physically interacted, she should have been physically there, unlike Kunimitsu who must have been using similar magic yet appeared a ghost.

“I have a strong connection to that pond which, along with its highly magical source gives me greater control and power in its vicinity,” the woman explained as she walked past the prince and to the portrait of the heir he had let slam back into place leaning against the wall.  Her fingers brushed against it picking up smears of the heavy dust coating its surface and she frowned in annoyance before brushing it away and turning back to send a wry smile at the prince’s disbelieving expression.

“Is it so impossible to believe,” she continued, drawing near, “that I wanted to meet the one who had come to save me?” A cold, thin hand, promising delicacy that would break on contact but with long, manicured nails hinting danger to those who earned its wrath, caressed the prince’s cheek as fathomless blue eyes stared into his, leaving a smear of ash on ivory in its wake.  “To see what he was like?” Fingernails brushed against his jaw and a bucket of ice ran down his spine, numbing his fingers and making it hard to breathe.  “I was very happy with what I saw and I am glad beyond words that it is you who has come to rescue me.”

Ryoma took a step back and the woman’s hand fell back to her side once more.

“It shouldn’t be so much of a surprise,” she explained, returning to the earlier topic of her physical presence at the pond, “the dragon did the same during your travels, did he not?”

“My sword went right through him when we first met,” the prince deadpanned, pointing out the major differences in his experiences between the two, “and I could see through him.”

It was not the bell laugh, but a deeper, throatier chuckle that the woman released this time.  Ryoma stared at its sound, finding it to be one of true amusement, especially in comparison to her earlier peals.  “That must have been quite the sight to see,” she said from behind her hand, risen to cover her mouth, but he could see the wry grin in her eyes all the same.  Just as he saw it fade into remnants when she dropped her hand and the polite smile was back in place, “but it would be expected from him—a dragon whose strength lies elsewhere.”

His eyebrows furrowed at what she said.  “Is he truly a dragon, then?” Ryoma asked, having heard her use the term twice now.  While Kunimitsu had confirmed there was a woman confined by a creature of great power, and even admitted to being the dragon of lore himself, Ryoma had simply believed him to be a sorcerer and the story had simply flagrated over time—or, quite possibly, the title was simply due to the snake he had barely defeated guarding the door.  “With his form, I thought—”

“That is not a question I can answer.”

The air felt heavier with those words and that tone and there was no smile—polite or otherwise—to be found on the woman’s lips or in her eyes.  Instead, each edge of her face seemed set to cut and her gaze was as sharp as his blade’s.  “A dragon in human form or a human in dragon form...I don’t think even he knows which is true anymore,” she explained in a slow staccato.  Her eyes glowed and the prince found it hard to breathe.  “He likely considers himself both and neither and I do not doubt he questions the very truth of his existence,” her eyes dropped and her hair fell over her shoulder to block her face.  Ryoma’s eyes fell, then, too.  He could finally breathe again: a rattled inhale and steadying exhale.

“You know him well, then?”

“I do,” the woman’s polite smile returned and her bell-laughter that spoke of women at court and spiders spinning silken webs.  “How long do you think I have been locked away here with him?” she queried, “I had to have someone to talk to in order to pass the time.”

But he was the one holding her captive.  “You get along with him?” the prince asked.

“Well, he is a bit dull, and far too serious, but there is a lot of history between us,” she admitted with a shake of her head, “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to leave.  We have both been stuck here for too long and, until he is killed, this farce will only continue.”

“But you can end this,” she continued, reaching into a bag at her side, “You can release us and this land from our curse.”  The woman brandished a wooden box carved with ancient glyphs and mistletoe and sealed with red string she quickly loosed and let fall away.  “That sword of yours, it won’t do any good against him,” she said pointedly before removing the lead and holding out the box, “Use this.”

Within the box lay a piece of leather and, once unwrapped, within the leather lay a dagger.  A full tang blade sat housed in a whitethorn handle with blackthorn crossguards and inlay.  In the torchlight, the white wood shone a dull and grainy ivory like bone while the black reminded the prince of rotted flesh clinging to an abandoned kill—strips even the carrion would no longer eat—and it turned his stomach.  Ryoma threw the leather covering back over and looked away.

“It’s too small,” he refused, feeling something crawling under his skin at the thought of touching the blade, “There’s no way a dagger is going to help when a sword won’t.”

“It’s cold iron,” the woman responded, replacing the lid and holding it out, “All you have to do is aim it at his heart.”

Ryoma again refused the offer and while the lid’s replacement took away the feel of ice in his veins and needles pricking at his skin, the trepidation of the weapon’s use remained.  “Why can’t we just leave now?” he pressed.  They could sneak away while the dragon, Kunimitsu, was elsewhere and be gone from the castle grounds and into the forest within minutes.  He was only a ghost there and if he did follow it could only be by foot in those woods.  He would not catch up.

“Because I cannot,” the woman declared as she pressed the box into his hands, “In his watch’s vigilance, he has used his very life as a seal on these lands.  So long as he lives, I cannot leave.”

When she released her hold, Ryoma nearly dropped the box, his grip tightening and pressing the item against his body as it began to fall.  It was in reflex, though, and the shock on the prince’s face was due not to his possession of the dagger he had been refusing, but due to the woman’s words themselves.  “Why would a dragon tie his own life to a seal?”

“To keep me inside, of course.”

“But why?”  Dragons were notably selfish creatures with an insatiable appetite for treasure.  Their hordes were told to grow large enough to feed an entire kingdom for ten years and they were jealous of that which they held, prepared to defend it against any intruders.  And yet, Ryoma had heard of very few dragons that put their own lives down for their hordes.  Treasure could be replaced and hordes could be replenished; life could not.  And yet this dragon gave warning to Ryoma who had encroached on his territory and even now offered him safe passage out.  He did not seem to hide any treasure, either, from the prince’s quick survey of the castle so far, and, by this woman’s claim, she and she alone was what he was hoarding.

Why?

“He loved me too much.”

It was a straightforward answer and the mark of the faie the woman held within her eyes told him this, too, could not be a lie, and yet the prince bit at the inside of his cheek as his brows furrowed.

“Do you doubt dragons have the capability to love?”

The prince did not doubt that dragons had the ability to covet or desire, but love?  Could such a selfish creature exhibit such a selfless emotion?  Or, if a dragon could exhibit it, was love as selfless an ideal as it was made out to be?  His father’s actions and the existence of his half-brother, a bastard with no right to the throne despite his greater number of years, would suggest as much and yet love was something Ryoma had given little thought to outside of that for his horse or that which his mother showed him.  The woman smiled at his confusion.  “If anything,” she explained, “dragons love too fiercely and too loyally.”

It fit, the prince decided as he thought on the dragon they now spoke of.  Kunimitsu had displayed patience, forethought and mercy and yet his protectiveness of his territory and, more importantly, this woman, drove him to fight and to kill for its sanctity.  “But I will be trapped here forever with him if you do not slay him,” the woman continued, pressing her hands against his and shoving the corner of the box into his gut as a reminder of its presence.  Ryoma looked down at it and frowned, still unwilling to take it, but the flash of a hand against his lips and a secretive smile on pink lips silenced him.

“I leave this to you, strong prince.”

She backed away, out of the torch’s light and into shadows, her moonlight skin and white dress glowing in the intermittent flicker and Ryoma remembered the most important question he had yet to ask.

“Your name?”

The woman paused, half-turned away from him, before smiling back at him.  As if she had been waiting for the question all along, she laughed that bells and spider laugh and replied, “Call me Yumiko.”

Even though he had been staring right at her, the prince would not be able to say just when the shadows had swallowed her whole.  With her departure, the room suddenly felt warmer, however, save for the box he now held in his hands.

[tmmsradio-blog]

Sergei Millian, identified as an unwitting source for the Steele dossier, sought proximity to Trump’s world in 2016

Will TRUMP EVEN LAST 90 More days in office?

Congressional Democrats plan to renew efforts to interview the Belarus-born businessman, who has largely disappeared from public view. By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger February 7 at 5:00 AM Around the time of President Trump’s inauguration, two of his supporters met to toast the new administration at the Russia House, a Washington restaurant known among Russian diplomats and emigres for its vodka and caviar. The Dupont Circle spot was suggested by Sergei Millian, according to onetime Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who said he met with the Belarus-born businessman there. The get-together followed months of outreach Millian had made to the young aide — including offering him a lucrative consulting contract to work simultaneously for Trump and an unidentified Russian, which Papadopoulos said he rebuffed. FBI agents later pressed Papadopoulos about his relationship with Millian, Papadopoulos’s lawyers have said. The interactions between the two men — the extent of which have not been reported previously — show how Millian, a self-described real estate developer who served as an unwitting source of information for former British spy Christopher Steele, was in closer proximity to Trump’s world than previously known. As he was working to build a relationship with Papadopoulos in 2016, Millian also offered to serve as a conduit to the Trump campaign for a Belarusan author in Florida with connections to the Russian government, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post. The author, Mikhail Morgulis, who said he never ended up hearing from anyone in the campaign, later claimed that he rallied Russian Americans to back Trump. The new details deepen the persistent mystery surrounding Millian, two years after he was identified as one of the unnamed sources in a campaign dossier Steele compiled for Democrats about Trump’s ties to Russia. At the time, little was known about Millian’s connection to the New York developer, other than the fact that he said he had sold units at a Trump property in Florida years ago. Millian, who has denied being a source for the dossier, has largely disappeared from public view, despite efforts by congressional investigators to interview him — taking with him potential answers about the president’s links to Russia and some of the dossier’s still-unproved claims. The House and Senate intelligence committees have tried to interview Millian, according to people familiar with the panels’ work. Millian did not respond to the Senate committee, one person said. In a report issued last year, House Democrats said that Millian was unwilling to appear before their panel without being granted immunity and they called on Republicans to subpoena him. Now back in majority control, House Democrats said they plan to renew efforts to obtain his testimony. Meet Sergei Millian, a.k.a., 'Source D' Businessman Sergei Millian is said to be the man behind one of the most salacious claims in the dossier on President Trump's involvement with Russia (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) “Sergei Millian remains someone of deep interest to our investigation,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, citing Millian’s “opaque business and personal history” and interactions with Papadopoulos. It is unknown whether Millian has been interviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment. Millian, whose social media posts in recent months have included images recycled from years-old events, did not respond to requests for comment. His exact role in Trump’s world remains elusive. Was he a business associate with an insider’s perspective on the candidate’s business adventures in Moscow? A self-promoting braggart spinning false tales? A Russian intelligence operative? Papadopoulos said he thinks Millian was working with the FBI to target the Trump campaign. But two people familiar with the FBI’s Russia investigation said that Millian was not working with the bureau during his interactions with Papadopoulos. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment. An acquaintance of Millian who exchanges texts with him and thinks he has been unfairly targeted by the media says he thinks Millian lives in New York, but is not sure. “One time he sent me a photo. He was in Europe somewhere. He was on some bridge,” said Jeff Jetton, a Washington restaurateur and writer who befriended Millian shortly after his role in the dossier became public. “I don’t really question him about where he is. He doesn’t question me about where I am. I don’t really care.” A meeting at a horse track Millian, now 40, came to Steele’s attention after the firm Fusion GPS hired the former British intelligence officer in June 2016 to research Trump’s business history in Russia on behalf of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Born in Belarus and given the name Siarhei Kukuts, Millian went to college in Minsk, where a Russian-language version of his biography that he posted online said he trained to be a military translator. He moved to Atlanta in the early 2000s, changed his name to Sergei Millian, and began working in real estate and professional translating, according to friends at the time and his biography. There, he founded a trade group called the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA, which gave him a platform to interact with business and government leaders in the United States and Russia. It also boosted Millian’s profile. In 2011, he was invited to take part in a Russian government-backed effort to bring American entrepreneurs on visits to Moscow. The Post has previously reported that the FBI later investigated the trips as possible influence operations linked to Russian intelligence, although Millian was never implicated. In his organization’s literature and elsewhere, Millian boasted of a relationship with Trump, saying that he had been engaged to sell apartments to rich Russians in the Trump Hollywood condo building in Florida. On Facebook and in literature for his Russian chamber of commerce, he posted a photo of himself with Trump, snapped at a horse track in Miami in 2007 after he said “mutual associates” introduced them. It is unclear whether they met on any other occasion. But in April 2016, Millian gave the Russian state-operated news organization RIA Novosti an eyebrow-raising interview. He claimed that after meeting Trump in Miami he went to New York and met Trump’s “right-hand man” — his personal lawyer Michael Cohen — and then signed a contract to sell Trump units in Florida.

Michael Cohen, a former lawyer to President Trump, leaves federal court in New York on Aug. 21. (Kevin Hagen/Associated Press) “You can say that I was their exclusive broker,” he said, speaking in Russian. “Back then, in2007-2008, Russians by the dozens were buying apartments in Trump’s buildings in the USA.” Asked in the Russian interview how often he spoke to Trump or his associates, Millian responded: “The last time was several days ago.” In an interview in 2016 with ABC News, Millian claimed to have high-level contacts in the Russian government. He said he was “absolutely not” affiliated with Russian intelligence. Cohen has denied meeting Millian and extending him a contract to sell Trump-branded condos. He said in a 2017 interview with The Post that Millian was a fraud who had no substantive connection to Trump or his company, and that the Miami photo was no different from hundreds that Trump took with fans each year. “He is a total phony,” Cohen said at the time. “Anything coming out of this individual’s mouth is inaccurate and purely part of some deranged interest in having his name in the newspaper.” Last year, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the campaign, as well as to bank fraud and to campaign finance violations. As part of his plea deal, he agreed to provide information to Mueller. Cohen’s spokesman, Lanny Davis, declined to comment about Millian. The Post has previously reported that in his research reports, Steele described Millian — who was identified in one report as “Source D” and in another as “Source E” — as a “close associate of Trump” who had given a “compatriot” information in Source: Sergei Millian, identified as an unwitting source for the Steele dossier, sought proximity to Trump’s world in 2016 Read the full article

[spamzineglasgow]

(SPAM Cuts) ‘Circuitous’ by Samantha Walton

In the first SPAM Cut of 2019, Fred Carter explores the Anthropocenic poetics of bodily trauma, personism and scale shift in Samantha Walton’s poem ‘Circuitous’, which you can read for free here.

> ‘The poem was a zippy discourse circus,’ says Rachel Blau DuPlessis, as she recalls buying Frank O’Hara’s Second Avenue at Shakespeare & Co, Paris, 1964. ‘Being inside’ the poem, she writes,

was like living in an alternative mind, inventing elaborated, baroque-ish narrative skits […] a show-offy zeal that took place as language urgency […] “unreadable” and totally syntactic.

Picking up Samantha Walton’s Self Heal in Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh, at the tail end of a less-electric year, the collected work instantly brought to mind DuPlessis’s breathless, effervescent recollection of O’Hara.

> As a collection, Self Heal has a comparable sense of dizzy-carousel, shape-shifting discursive spectacle. Facetiously intimate, formally vernacular, metrically dextrous, and avidly accessible all at once, the poems live in an extended state of language urgency. Walton’s ‘Circuitous’ – which thrums with acute details, astute colloquialisms, and cute lyricisms – knowingly channels O’Hara’s distinctive, ironised chatter:

Sunlight is streaming through the antique glaze

                  & My love for you is galling        you state, over lemon polenta cake        I’m paraphrasing now, but it’s something like,                   I am a bore-hole, & must be plumbed for minerals                  & despised

Yet here the lyric pivots, takes a turn into a world of higher stakes. Personal exchange and relative affluence are plunged into a vaster domain of longer-lasting extractive harm, registering the material consequences ‘deferred for modernity’s sake’. This unsettling volta also marks a scalar shift into planetary and geologic terms:

      Why not just say – the water born from the rock is cool       but you have been raped by industry       & in many ways unnaturally encased?

In a deft rhetorical manoeuvre, the personist register slips into an apostrophic address to mineralogical resources. As Margaret Ronda puts it in her recent Remainders, lyric poetry in the thick of climate collapse often invests ‘apostrophe and prosopopoeia with new proportions’ in knee-jerk response to the emergent scalar derangements of environmental devastation.

> Throughout ‘Circuitous,’ however, this pervasive background of precarity, catastrophe, and epochal change threatens to soak into every fibre and rhetorical device. Colliding bodily trauma with biophysical and technological environments, recursive ‘injuries beep down the blackened feeding tube’; the current digital currency of ‘data’ is never quite cleansed of this material damage, indelibly marked by its ‘clarty’ origins. Rephrasing Marx rephrasing Augier: data, too, comes dripping with blood and dirt.

> Harm, thought of at the scale of the planet and of global capital, appears as a familiar and constant pressure on the terms of personal harm that exemplify the expressivist lyric. In ‘Circuitous,’ ‘nerve-ache’ nestles next to ‘flood’ while another poem in Self Heal complains, plaintively and wryly in equal measure, ‘I can’t love under these conditions’. Personism and introspection constantly threaten to topple over into reflections of environmental damage and exploitation. Still, extracting a handful of demonstrative citations that point to catastrophe scarcely does justice to the persistent sprezzatura and elastic linguistic flourish with which Walton’s poetry handles such terms.

> ‘Circuitous’ forces together disparate discourses with unnerving prosodic ease, far removed from the anxiety, opaque allusion, and syntactic disjuncture that has come to be associated with the contemporary ‘negative’ lyric. Elsewhere in the collection, ‘Poem for You’ yearns to write ‘with a point of reference […] which is you, not the rhetorical you’; frankly ‘tired of problematising’ the lyric self. On balance, Walton’s work seems to levy the complicity of late capitalist catastrophic harm at the feet of personal lyric and ‘innovative’ diffractive tactics alike.

> There’s nothing intrinsically defunct, these poems seem to suggest, about the lyric mode. Indeed, on re-reading, ‘Circuitous’ appears to tap into a lyric tradition that stretches far further back than 1960. The sunlight ‘streaming through the antique glaze’ refracts the ‘unruly sunne’ that once called ‘through windowes, and through curtaines’ to remind Donne’s speaker of a world beyond the private; a reminder that the O’Hara, too, saw himself writing personal poetry in the metaphysical tradition. In this sense, Walton sets out a series of ‘discordia concors’ in 17thcentury manner, yoking together discordant scales and affective registers; ‘the restive galaxy pushing on a string’ is pure Donne, ‘& thick-haunched bee’ pure Marvell.

> While the poem shuttles between the personal and the planetary, the private and the political, Walton appears equally as comfortable raiding the metaphysics for formal flourishes as the ‘linguistic turn’ that succeeded the New American poets. Still, the closing lines of poem return circuitously to O’Hara, echoing the light and economical metrical tread of Lunch Poems:

      We pay up                  & the soles of I touch with my feet which                  correspond to the street       really are responsible for the global tarnishing &       prophetic rumblings of the tectonic plates beneath

Here, the poem comes to a close with an exhilarating scalar expansion, via the contemporary conceit of the ‘carbon footprint,’ from the individual step to the ‘prophetic rumblings’ of the Anthropocene. As the speaker turns to pay the bill for polenta cake, the lyric recognises the geologic agency of human activity. From the ‘solid ground’ of the opening line ‘Circuitous’ completes its circular movement to find only instability in ‘tectonic plates beneath’. Yet the thrill of ‘Circuitous’ – of Self Heal as a whole – is its affirmation of self; of carelessness; of love, despite complicity in acts of ‘global tarnishing’.

> Tired of problematising, ‘Circuitous’ is refreshingly un-hung-up on overworked critiques of lyric, offering instead a ‘baroque-ish’ alternative of versification at its most diverse, its most urgent, and at its fullest stretch. As DuPlessis wrote of reading Second Avenue in 1964:

No crises of judgment in relation to decisions. No angst! Just an insistence on scale that here seemed out of proportion to the casual intensity.

~

Text: Fred Carter

Image: Maria Sledmere

[shysweetthing]

Hi! Just wanted to say I tried your katsudon recipe and it was amazing!! Sadly we were so excited to try it we forgot to take pictures. It was my first time deep frying so it took a while to get the hang of it. Sadly the only part that didn't work out was the onsen egg... :( the onsen egg wasn't cooked through so I awkwardly microwaved it. (Note to anyone who is trying this recipe, you should crack the onsen egg into a bowl before pouring on the katsudon in case it was near raw like mine)

Me: You have a lot to do, definitely do all of it today and don’t procrastinate.Me to me: Answer this ask with way too much information about eggs and hand-draw graphics even though you can’t draw.

Oh, thank you so much! I’m glad it mostly worked for you.

Confession:I have actually never tried the recipe for onsen eggs because of my aforementioned ridiculous kitchen gadgetry, and so that part was kind of a…guess? On my part? The author of that blog has never lead me astray before. :(

THAT BEING SAID possibly you might have noticed that I have Thoughts About Eggs and Cooking, and I’m very sorry but I’m going to add them here, for no other reason than because I’m going to link this ask to the original recipe. So let me just preface it by saying that I’m not trying to say anything about where YOU land on the egg continuum, but I have Egg Thoughts and they ended up slipping out because I talk very excitedly about things that excite me. I’m very sorry. It’s a personal failing and I’ll try to do better.

Egg cookery is a continuum–think of it like meat, with temperatures ranging going from raw to well-done. I tried to write about this using words and then decided to draw a picture instead even though I cannot Art.

“Cooked through” means different things to different people. To a first approximation, various egg proteins denature (which kinda means cook for purposes of these discussions) at different temperatures. A hard-cooked egg has more kinds of protein denatured than a soft boiled egg which has more protein denatured an egg 65 that cooked for 45 minutes. Denaturing bacterial proteins usually kills them, which is why cooking generally makes food safer.

(Food snob sidenote: For sheer food snobbery, the less you can do to the egg, the better it will taste. The yellow range on the above graphic is my preferred egg-temperature range. One of the things I read about katsudon actually suggested that some people do not cook the egg at all, because the Japanese, like many, many other cultures, do not see raw egg as inherently gross. Americans don’t either, as long as that raw egg is in cookie dough.)

(Sidenote, because what is an overly excited answer to an ask without an irrelevant sidenote: I’m not trying to assume you’re from the US, but I’m throwing this out for other readers who are. There’s a reason for these cultural egg distinctions, and in part it’s a food safety issue. Here in the US, we are really, really weird about eggs–we raise our chickens in tiny boxes, which means the eggs we get are more likely to be contaminated by bacteria. Our regulations require that we power wash eggs, which strips the eggs of a protective coating, meaning that they are even more likely to be contaminated. This is why, in the US, eggs are sold refrigerated when they are by biological necessity shelf-stable for weeks. (Second parenthetical pause–for many non-Americans, that will look like a weird statement. Yes, if you’re in America and you want to buy eggs, you need to get them from the refrigerated section of the store, usually near dairy. If you’re not in the US and you’re looking for eggs, they’re usually not refrigerated. Don’t be me, wandering aimlessly through a store looking piteously for eggs near milk.) For all these reasons, eggs are a much more dangerous proposition in the US than elsewhere. These strong safety norms regarding eggs tend to be passed down culturally as “ew, that’s gross” but neither the safety issues nor the attitudes that result from them are universal.)

For bacterial purposes, eggs from “gloop” on up are “cooked.” But living in a country where you’re more likely to get sick from uncooked eggs means that we pass on pretty strong norms of egg cookery. I know people who won’t eat scrambled eggs that are even slightly soft, so making scrambled eggs in a bain marie is completely out for them (even though they are delicious that way and 100% safe). 

An ideal onsen egg is cooked in that the white of the egg is translucent white instead of clear, but it will by no means be firm, and the white will not be totally opaque. It will be gloopy as hell. Expect a consistency similar to vanilla pudding. To some people. this will come across as “not cooked.” 

It is, for safety purposes, cooked (unless you are pregnant or have lowered immunity for some other reason, in which case definitely trust a doctor or something over me).

There are people who hate gloop in eggs, and if you are one of those people, this recipe is definitely not for you.

[preciousmetals0]

Telegram Attacks Apple, Musk on Crypto, WEF Debrief: Hodler’s Digest, Jan 20–26

Telegram Attacks Apple, Musk on Crypto, WEF Debrief: Hodler’s Digest, Jan 20–26:

Coming every Sunday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

World Economic Forum debuts framework for central bank digital currency

It was a c-c-c-cold week in Davos, but Cointelegraph’s reporters wrapped up warm to bring you all the news from the World Economic Forum. One particularly big announcement saw the WEF unveil a central bank digital currency policymaker toolkit. The framework, created in tandem with central banks, is designed to help policymakers understand whether deploying a CBDC would be advantageous. In other developments, a global consortium has been formed to focus on developing interoperable, transparent and inclusive policy approaches to regulating digital currencies. At the start of the week, the European Union and five major central banks — the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland — announced they were planning to team up on their research for CBDCs.

WEF: Facebook’s Libra pushed world to reconsider USD as global reserve currency

Elsewhere in the snowy hills of Davos, global economists begrudgingly admitted that Libra had played an instrumental role in getting the world to evaluate CBDCs — and to challenge the U.S. dollar’s role as an anchor currency. On a panel exploring the issue, Brazil’s Economy Minister Paulo Guedes said new technologies like blockchain are paving the way for future currencies to be digital. Others, such as the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath, cautioned that the dollar still remains attractive because it “provides the best stability and safety.” David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s Calibra wallet, was speaking at another WEF panel. He questioned whether “wholesale” CBDCs would solve any problems in the global economy, and argued that a retail-focused approach is the best way to tackle an “unacceptable” situation where 1.7 billion people are unbanked and another 1 billion underserved. Whether Libra will be that solution remains to be seen.

WEF: Ripple CEO hints at IPO, says more crypto firms will go public in 2020

And we’ve just got time for one final morsel of gossip from Davos. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has predicted that initial public offerings will become more prevalent in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space in 2020 — and he hinted his company would be among those seeking a public flotation. “We’re not going to be the first and we’re not going to be the last, but I expect us to be on the leading side,” he said. Such a move could be instrumental in building confidence with mainstream investors and secure a pivot away from controversial initial coin offerings, which have seen young startups suffer often expensive run-ins with regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tether launches gold-backed stablecoin and begins trading on Bitfinex

Of course, plenty of news has been happening away from Davos. Tether has announced it is now supporting a gold-backed stablecoin, where one token represents ownership of a troy ounce of physical gold. The funds are said to be backed by physical gold held in a “Switzerland vault” — and the product is available as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as a TRC-20 token on Tron. Plans for commodity-backed Tethers have been in place for some time, but the company has often been criticized for its opaque approach to reserve management. A high-profile class-action lawsuit recently accused the company of market manipulation in 2017. Tether reserves were also allegedly used to cover a liquidity shortfall.

Elon Musk reveals his true opinion on Bitcoin and crypto

Tesla’s CEO may be constantly cryptic on his attitudes toward crypto, but this week, we got a little insight into Elon Musk’s thinking. On a podcast, the billionaire said he’s “neither here nor there on Bitcoin,” acknowledged Satoshi’s white paper was “pretty clever,” and warned his stance on cryptocurrencies often “gets the crypto people angry.” Musk added: “You must have a legal to illegal bridge. So, where I see crypto is effectively as a replacement for cash. I do not see crypto being the primary database [for transactions].” Musk has been known to write short tweets about crypto that were widely interpreted as jokes. Last year, he unexpectedly declared himself as the new CEO of Dogecoin — a gesture that helped the joke coin clock short-lived gains of 35%.

Winners and Losers

At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $8,450.74, Ether at $163.88 and XRP at $0.22. The total market cap is at $233,388,704,913.

Among the biggest 1,000 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Polybius, Prometheus and Eureka Coin. The top three altcoin losers of the week are Q DAO Governance, OVCODE and CannabisCoin.

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.

Most Memorable Quotations

“I think there’s a lot of things that are illegal that shouldn’t be illegal. I think that sometimes governments just have too many laws about the missions that they should have, and shouldn’t have so many things that are illegal.”

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO

“So then there is the new technology, the digital, the blockchain. […] The Libra episode is just evoking a future digital currency.”

Paulo Guedes, Brazil’s economy minister

“When we started this journey almost six months ago, the whole idea was not around a certain way of doing things, but more around ‘let’s come together and try to figure out how we solve a problem that is unacceptable’ — 1.7 billion people who are currently unbanked, another billion underserved.”

David Marcus, Calibra CEO

“Given the critical roles central banks play in the global economy, any central bank digital currency implementation, including potentially with blockchain technology, will have a profound impact domestically and internationally.”

Sheila Warren, World Economic Forum head of blockchain

“In the next 12 months, you’ll see IPOs in the crypto/blockchain space. We’re not going to be the first and we’re not going to be the last, but I expect us to be on the leading side… it’s a natural evolution for our company.”

Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple CEO

“My #Bitcoin mystery is solved. I mistook my pin for my password. When Blockchain updated their app I got logged out. I [tried] logging back in using my pin, which was the only ‘password’ I had ever known or used. I also never had a copy of my seed phrase. Honest but costly mistake!”

Peter Schiff, crypto skeptic and gold bug

“iCloud is now officially a surveillance tool. Apps that are relying on it to store your private messages (such as WhatsApp) are part of the problem.”

Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and CEO

FUD of the Week

Greece extradites alleged launderer of $4 billion in BTC, Alexander Vinnik, to France

A Russian national accused of heading a group that laundered $4 billion in Bitcoin has been extradited from Greece to France. Alexander Vinnik formerly operated the now-shuttered exchange BTC-e and is believed to have a direct relationship to the infamous hack of Mt. Gox. The case has risked triggering a diplomatic row, with Russia filing several requests to bring him under its jurisdiction. Lawyers writing on behalf of Vinnik’s young children had submitted a complaint to a Greek court at the start of the week in an attempt to prevent the extradition. Reports now suggest that Vinnik is being held at a hospital in Paris. His legal representative Zoe Konstantopoulou said: “In every way the government is trying to scare him, terrorize him, in a moment of great agony, while his health has worsened.”

India’s central bank says it hasn’t banned crypto

The Reserve Bank of India has said restrictions on regulated entities offering crypto assets do not equate to an overall ban. In a document submitted to the country’s supreme court back in September, which has now been made public, the institution said: “The RBI has not prohibited VCs (virtual currencies) in the country. The RBI has directed the entities regulated by it to not provide services to those persons or entities dealing in or settling VCs.” All of this comes as a landmark case against the RBI concludes its second week. Hearings are set to resume on Jan. 28.

Peter Schiff bungled wallet password, solving “Bitcoin mystery”

Long-running crypto skeptic and gold bug Peter Schiff is likely to be even more skeptical after losing access to his funds. At first, he believed his wallet was corrupted — but he later found out that he mistook his PIN for his password, and he was unable to log in after an app update because he had never taken a copy of his seed phrase. Many in the crypto community have criticized Schiff for making a rookie mistake, with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao quipping: “I can’t believe I am about to say this, but maybe ‘stay in fiat?’” In recent days, CZ has said that keeping assets on an exchange is often safer than keeping the keys themselves — but those who have fallen victims to hacks on these platforms may not be so quick to agree.

Telegram CEO: Apple’s iCloud is “now officially a surveillance tool”

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, has claimed that Apple’s cloud service iCloud is “now officially a surveillance tool.” His stinging rebuke followed reports that the tech giant dropped plans for end-to-end encryption on iCloud two years ago — apparently following complaints from the FBI. This ultimately means that backed-up texts from iMessage, WhatsApp and other encrypted services remain available to Apple employees and authorities. Telegram has been positioning itself as a global fighter for privacy — and in 2018, it refused to give Russian authorities the encryption keys to user accounts, prompting as-of-yet unfulfilled threats that the app would be blocked “in the near future.”

Best Cointelegraph Features

SEC goes head-to-head with Telegram, makes a guinea pig of TON

The Chamber of Digital Commerce submitted a legal document to the court overseeing the hearing between Telegram and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Shiraz Jagati looks at what it says.

Effect of CME futures options on BTC price depends on halving

CME Group has launched new Bitcoin options — further uplifting the institutional infrastructure supporting the asset class. Joseph Young writes that it’s a net positive for the crypto community, and the upcoming “halving” could make things more interesting.

Adam Back on Satoshi emails, privacy concerns and Bitcoin’s early days

Cassio Gusson has caught up with Adam Back to discuss the early years of Bitcoin, his emails with Satoshi Nakamoto and privacy — 11 years after BTC’s release.

[goldira01]

Coming every Sunday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

World Economic Forum debuts framework for central bank digital currency

It was a c-c-c-cold week in Davos, but Cointelegraph’s reporters wrapped up warm to bring you all the news from the World Economic Forum. One particularly big announcement saw the WEF unveil a central bank digital currency policymaker toolkit. The framework, created in tandem with central banks, is designed to help policymakers understand whether deploying a CBDC would be advantageous. In other developments, a global consortium has been formed to focus on developing interoperable, transparent and inclusive policy approaches to regulating digital currencies. At the start of the week, the European Union and five major central banks — the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland — announced they were planning to team up on their research for CBDCs.

WEF: Facebook’s Libra pushed world to reconsider USD as global reserve currency

Elsewhere in the snowy hills of Davos, global economists begrudgingly admitted that Libra had played an instrumental role in getting the world to evaluate CBDCs — and to challenge the U.S. dollar’s role as an anchor currency. On a panel exploring the issue, Brazil’s Economy Minister Paulo Guedes said new technologies like blockchain are paving the way for future currencies to be digital. Others, such as the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath, cautioned that the dollar still remains attractive because it “provides the best stability and safety.” David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s Calibra wallet, was speaking at another WEF panel. He questioned whether “wholesale” CBDCs would solve any problems in the global economy, and argued that a retail-focused approach is the best way to tackle an “unacceptable” situation where 1.7 billion people are unbanked and another 1 billion underserved. Whether Libra will be that solution remains to be seen.

WEF: Ripple CEO hints at IPO, says more crypto firms will go public in 2020

And we’ve just got time for one final morsel of gossip from Davos. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has predicted that initial public offerings will become more prevalent in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space in 2020 — and he hinted his company would be among those seeking a public flotation. “We’re not going to be the first and we’re not going to be the last, but I expect us to be on the leading side,” he said. Such a move could be instrumental in building confidence with mainstream investors and secure a pivot away from controversial initial coin offerings, which have seen young startups suffer often expensive run-ins with regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tether launches gold-backed stablecoin and begins trading on Bitfinex

Of course, plenty of news has been happening away from Davos. Tether has announced it is now supporting a gold-backed stablecoin, where one token represents ownership of a troy ounce of physical gold. The funds are said to be backed by physical gold held in a “Switzerland vault” — and the product is available as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as a TRC-20 token on Tron. Plans for commodity-backed Tethers have been in place for some time, but the company has often been criticized for its opaque approach to reserve management. A high-profile class-action lawsuit recently accused the company of market manipulation in 2017. Tether reserves were also allegedly used to cover a liquidity shortfall.

Elon Musk reveals his true opinion on Bitcoin and crypto

Tesla’s CEO may be constantly cryptic on his attitudes toward crypto, but this week, we got a little insight into Elon Musk’s thinking. On a podcast, the billionaire said he’s “neither here nor there on Bitcoin,” acknowledged Satoshi’s white paper was “pretty clever,” and warned his stance on cryptocurrencies often “gets the crypto people angry.” Musk added: “You must have a legal to illegal bridge. So, where I see crypto is effectively as a replacement for cash. I do not see crypto being the primary database [for transactions].” Musk has been known to write short tweets about crypto that were widely interpreted as jokes. Last year, he unexpectedly declared himself as the new CEO of Dogecoin — a gesture that helped the joke coin clock short-lived gains of 35%.

Winners and Losers

At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $8,450.74, Ether at $163.88 and XRP at $0.22. The total market cap is at $233,388,704,913.

Among the biggest 1,000 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Polybius, Prometheus and Eureka Coin. The top three altcoin losers of the week are Q DAO Governance, OVCODE and CannabisCoin.

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s market analysis.

Most Memorable Quotations

“I think there’s a lot of things that are illegal that shouldn’t be illegal. I think that sometimes governments just have too many laws about the missions that they should have, and shouldn’t have so many things that are illegal.”

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO

“So then there is the new technology, the digital, the blockchain. […] The Libra episode is just evoking a future digital currency.”

Paulo Guedes, Brazil’s economy minister

“When we started this journey almost six months ago, the whole idea was not around a certain way of doing things, but more around ‘let’s come together and try to figure out how we solve a problem that is unacceptable’ — 1.7 billion people who are currently unbanked, another billion underserved.”

David Marcus, Calibra CEO

“Given the critical roles central banks play in the global economy, any central bank digital currency implementation, including potentially with blockchain technology, will have a profound impact domestically and internationally.”

Sheila Warren, World Economic Forum head of blockchain

“In the next 12 months, you’ll see IPOs in the crypto/blockchain space. We’re not going to be the first and we’re not going to be the last, but I expect us to be on the leading side… it’s a natural evolution for our company.”

Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple CEO

“My #Bitcoin mystery is solved. I mistook my pin for my password. When Blockchain updated their app I got logged out. I [tried] logging back in using my pin, which was the only ‘password’ I had ever known or used. I also never had a copy of my seed phrase. Honest but costly mistake!”

Peter Schiff, crypto skeptic and gold bug

“iCloud is now officially a surveillance tool. Apps that are relying on it to store your private messages (such as WhatsApp) are part of the problem.”

Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and CEO

FUD of the Week

Greece extradites alleged launderer of $4 billion in BTC, Alexander Vinnik, to France

A Russian national accused of heading a group that laundered $4 billion in Bitcoin has been extradited from Greece to France. Alexander Vinnik formerly operated the now-shuttered exchange BTC-e and is believed to have a direct relationship to the infamous hack of Mt. Gox. The case has risked triggering a diplomatic row, with Russia filing several requests to bring him under its jurisdiction. Lawyers writing on behalf of Vinnik’s young children had submitted a complaint to a Greek court at the start of the week in an attempt to prevent the extradition. Reports now suggest that Vinnik is being held at a hospital in Paris. His legal representative Zoe Konstantopoulou said: “In every way the government is trying to scare him, terrorize him, in a moment of great agony, while his health has worsened.”

India’s central bank says it hasn’t banned crypto

The Reserve Bank of India has said restrictions on regulated entities offering crypto assets do not equate to an overall ban. In a document submitted to the country’s supreme court back in September, which has now been made public, the institution said: “The RBI has not prohibited VCs (virtual currencies) in the country. The RBI has directed the entities regulated by it to not provide services to those persons or entities dealing in or settling VCs.” All of this comes as a landmark case against the RBI concludes its second week. Hearings are set to resume on Jan. 28.

Peter Schiff bungled wallet password, solving “Bitcoin mystery”

Long-running crypto skeptic and gold bug Peter Schiff is likely to be even more skeptical after losing access to his funds. At first, he believed his wallet was corrupted — but he later found out that he mistook his PIN for his password, and he was unable to log in after an app update because he had never taken a copy of his seed phrase. Many in the crypto community have criticized Schiff for making a rookie mistake, with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao quipping: “I can’t believe I am about to say this, but maybe ‘stay in fiat?’” In recent days, CZ has said that keeping assets on an exchange is often safer than keeping the keys themselves — but those who have fallen victims to hacks on these platforms may not be so quick to agree.

Telegram CEO: Apple’s iCloud is “now officially a surveillance tool”

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, has claimed that Apple’s cloud service iCloud is “now officially a surveillance tool.” His stinging rebuke followed reports that the tech giant dropped plans for end-to-end encryption on iCloud two years ago — apparently following complaints from the FBI. This ultimately means that backed-up texts from iMessage, WhatsApp and other encrypted services remain available to Apple employees and authorities. Telegram has been positioning itself as a global fighter for privacy — and in 2018, it refused to give Russian authorities the encryption keys to user accounts, prompting as-of-yet unfulfilled threats that the app would be blocked “in the near future.”

Best Cointelegraph Features

SEC goes head-to-head with Telegram, makes a guinea pig of TON

The Chamber of Digital Commerce submitted a legal document to the court overseeing the hearing between Telegram and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Shiraz Jagati looks at what it says.

Effect of CME futures options on BTC price depends on halving

CME Group has launched new Bitcoin options — further uplifting the institutional infrastructure supporting the asset class. Joseph Young writes that it’s a net positive for the crypto community, and the upcoming “halving” could make things more interesting.

Adam Back on Satoshi emails, privacy concerns and Bitcoin’s early days

Cassio Gusson has caught up with Adam Back to discuss the early years of Bitcoin, his emails with Satoshi Nakamoto and privacy — 11 years after BTC’s release.

[alanajacksontx]

How to check your Domain Authority: 4 tools to use

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that serves as a handy heuristic in the SEO industry. Put simply, it provides insight into how likely a site is to rank for specific keywords, based on the SEO authority it holds. There are numerous tools that can help us arrive at these useful scores.

Below, we round up some of the most accurate and intuitive ways to see a site’s SEO equity.

In an often opaque industry, with few insights into how Google’s algorithms really work for organic search, the lure of a metric like Domain Authority is self-evident.

It provides a glimpse into the SEO “strength” of a website, in a similar fashion to the now obsolete PageRank toolbar. Google still makes use of some variation of the PR algorithm internally, but its scores are no longer visible to the public and were never particularly helpful.

If anything, they encouraged some negative attempts to “game” Google’s rankings through link acquisition.

However, many SEOs make use of Domain Authority to sense-check the quality of their inbound links and to understand how these are affecting their own’s site’s SEO health.

What is Domain Authority?

“Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well awebsite will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc. — into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time.” – Moz.

Ultimately, this is a representative model of how Google decides which pages should rank for each query, and in what order they should rank.

As is the case with the term ‘relevance’, authority covers a very broad area of assessment that is open to interpretation. Domain Authority aims to cut through that ambiguity by providing a metric that can compare the SEO strength of different websites based on a consistent methodology.

Although marketers are aware that DA has intrinsic limitations as a metric, it is at least a barometer of whether our SEO efforts are gaining traction or not. As such, it serves an important purpose.

When prospecting for new links, for example, it is helpful to check the DA of external sites before contacting the site about a potential partnership. Combined with a range of other metrics – both qualitative and quantitative – Domain Authority can therefore guide brands towards more effective SEO decisions.

‘Domain Authority’ was devised by Moz and they have naturally taken ownership of this name. Their suite of tools (some of which are discussed in this article) will reveal the authority of particular domains, but dozens of other free tools use Moz’s API to show these scores too.

However, a couple of other SEO software packages provide a slightly different view on a domain’s SEO strength.

Moz’s scores are based on the links contained within its own index, which is undoubtedly smaller than Google’s index of URLs.

Other SEO software companies, such as Majestic and Ahrefs, have their own index of URLs. These indexes will largely overlap with each other, but there are still questions to pose to your chosen provider:

Index size: How many URLs are contained within the software’s index?

Frequency of index crawling: How often is the index refreshed?

Live links: Are there common instances of ‘false positives’, where inactive links are reported with 200 status codes?

Correlation with actual rankings: Simply, does a higher domain score equate to better rankings?

The importance of these questions, and the resultant significance of their answers, will depend on a brand’s context. Nonetheless, these are points worth considering when assessing the scores your site receives.

Each of the main players in this space has subtle distinctions within its methodology, which will be important for most SEOs.

We will begin our round-up with the Moz tools (some of them free) that will show the Domain Authority for any site, before looking at a couple of alternatives that provide a valuable reference point.

Moz (MozBar, Open Site Explorer)

It should be clear that Moz is the major contender when it comes to checking a domain’s SEO authority. We included MozBar on our list of the best Google Chrome extensions for SEO and it deserves its place in this list, too.

MozBar will highlight the Domain Authority of any site a user is browsing, along with the Page Authority (PA) of that particular URL. As the name suggest, PA applies a similar methodology to DA, but localized to a particular URL rather than a domain.

This is also available in search results pages, making it possible to see whether a site’s Domain or Page Authority correlates with higher rankings for particular queries.

As such, these two metrics in combination are a great starting point for investigations into the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a domain.

Marketers should be aware, however, that these scores do fluctuate.

That should be viewed as a positive, as the scores are an increasingly accurate reflection of how Google is evaluating sites. Moz employs machine learning algorithms to re-calibrate the authority scores based on link activity across its index, but also the impact that certain types of link have.

We can consider this an attempt to peg the Moz index to that of Google, and we know the latter is tweaked thousands of times a year.

Therefore, we should be careful about the causal links we infer from DA scores.

When tracking Domain Authority, always benchmark against similar sites to avoid viewing this as an absolute indication of how well you are performing. By viewing it as a relative metric instead, we can gain a healthier insight into whether our strategy is working.

This is where another Moz-owned tool, Open Site Explorer, proves its worth. Open Site Explorer uses a range of proprietary Moz metrics to highlight the areas in which specific sites under- or over-perform. the side by side comparisons it creates are an intuitive way to spot strengths and weaknesses in a site’s link profile on a broader scale.

Moz’s Domain Authority is undoubtedly useful – especially when used as an entry point into deeper investigation. MozBar and Open Site Explorer provide access to this metric for all marketers, so they should be viewed as the go-to resources for anyone seeking a check on their site’s SEO ranking potential.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs boasts an index of over 12 trillion links and data on 200 million root domains, making it an invaluable repository for SEOs wanting to understand their site’s SEO performance.

The two metrics that matter within the scope of this article are URL Rating (UR) and Domain Rating (DR).

We can consider these Ahrefs’ equivalents to Page Authority and Domain Authority, respectively, at least in terms of their purpose.

The latter is defined by Ahrefs as “a proprietary metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).”

It appears frequently within the software interface, in examples like the one in the screenshot below:

So, why would you use the Ahrefs DR score over Moz’s DA calculation? Their definitions do seem strikingly similar, after all.

As always, the detail is critical. If we refer back to our initial points for consideration, it becomes possible to compare Ahrefs with Moz:

Index size

Frequency of index crawling

Live links

Correlation with actual rankings

Both Moz and Ahrefs have invested significantly in improving the size, quality and freshness of their link data. Some SEOs have a preference for one over the other, and their scores do vary significantly on occasion.

Those that prefer Ahrefs typically do so for the freshness of its index and DR’s correlation with actual rankings.

The clarity of the Ahrefs methodology is also very welcome, right down to the number of links typically required to reach a specific DR score.

To put things simply, we calculate the DR of a given website the following way:

Look at how many unique domains have at least 1 dofollow link to the target website;

Take into account the DR values of those linking domains;

Take into account how many unique domains each of those websites link to;

Apply some math and coding magic to calculate “raw” DR scores;

Plot these scores on a 0–100 scale (which is dynamic in nature and will “stretch” over time).

DR 0–20: 20 ref.domains

DR 20–40: 603 ref.domains

DR 40–60: 4,212 ref.domains

DR 60–80: 25,638 ref.domains

DR 80–100: 335,717 ref.domains

Ahrefs requires a monthly licence to access its data; for those that do sign up, it provides a very useful sanity check for the domain strength scores seen elsewhere.

Majestic

Majestic is marketed as “The planet’s largest link index database” and it remains a trusted component of any SEO toolbox for the thorough nature of its backlink data.

Offering two index options (Fresh and Historic), it also allows marketers to different views of how their domain is performing. As with Moz and Ahrefs, Majestic’s scores for site strength are calculated almost exclusively based on the quality and quantity of inbound links.

Opting for the Historic Index will see Majestic scour the billions of URLs it has crawled within the last 5 years, while the Fresh Index is updated multiple times per day.

This software takes a slightly different tack in relation to the labeling of its domain metrics, which are known as Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

These are interrelated metrics that combine to form the set of Majestic Flow Metrics. These are very insightful because of the immediate score they provide (ranging from a low of 0 to a high of 100), and also for the opportunities to dig further into the backlink data.

One favorite feature of Majestic is the ability to analyze historical backlink acquisition trends, both in terms of links gained and links lost. As such, Majestic’s domain strength metrics provide actionable insight that can be used to shape strategy immediately. For example, the loss of a lot of links on a particular date may provide an opportunity to reach out to webmasters and try to regain that equity.

Majestic also comes with a handy toolbar that overlays domain metrics on the site a user is browsing. Although an apples to apples comparison between Majestic and Moz or Majestic and Ahrefs, in relation to the efficacy of their domain authority rankings, would be difficult, this would also be to miss the point.

All of these tools are aiming to mimic the functioning of Google as accurately as they can; taken together they form a more rounded picture.

In summary

Given the ongoing significance not only of backlinks, but also the potential of unlinked mentions to boost performance, search marketers are quite rightly looking to Domain Authority to assess their SEO potential.

The core elements of a successful, customer-centric remain the same as they always were; higher scores, from whichever domain metrics one chooses to monitor, should be seen as a natural by-product of a strategy that fulfils the modern consumer’s needs.

from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/09/how-to-check-your-domain-authority-4-tools-to-use/ from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/170683534020

[sheilalmartinia]

How to check your Domain Authority: 4 tools to use

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that serves as a handy heuristic in the SEO industry. Put simply, it provides insight into how likely a site is to rank for specific keywords, based on the SEO authority it holds. There are numerous tools that can help us arrive at these useful scores.

Below, we round up some of the most accurate and intuitive ways to see a site’s SEO equity.

In an often opaque industry, with few insights into how Google’s algorithms really work for organic search, the lure of a metric like Domain Authority is self-evident.

It provides a glimpse into the SEO “strength” of a website, in a similar fashion to the now obsolete PageRank toolbar. Google still makes use of some variation of the PR algorithm internally, but its scores are no longer visible to the public and were never particularly helpful.

If anything, they encouraged some negative attempts to “game” Google’s rankings through link acquisition.

However, many SEOs make use of Domain Authority to sense-check the quality of their inbound links and to understand how these are affecting their own’s site’s SEO health.

What is Domain Authority?

“Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc. — into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time.” – Moz.

Ultimately, this is a representative model of how Google decides which pages should rank for each query, and in what order they should rank.

As is the case with the term ‘relevance’, authority covers a very broad area of assessment that is open to interpretation. Domain Authority aims to cut through that ambiguity by providing a metric that can compare the SEO strength of different websites based on a consistent methodology.

Although marketers are aware that DA has intrinsic limitations as a metric, it is at least a barometer of whether our SEO efforts are gaining traction or not. As such, it serves an important purpose.

When prospecting for new links, for example, it is helpful to check the DA of external sites before contacting the site about a potential partnership. Combined with a range of other metrics – both qualitative and quantitative – Domain Authority can therefore guide brands towards more effective SEO decisions.

‘Domain Authority’ was devised by Moz and they have naturally taken ownership of this name. Their suite of tools (some of which are discussed in this article) will reveal the authority of particular domains, but dozens of other free tools use Moz’s API to show these scores too.

However, a couple of other SEO software packages provide a slightly different view on a domain’s SEO strength.

Moz’s scores are based on the links contained within its own index, which is undoubtedly smaller than Google’s index of URLs.

Other SEO software companies, such as Majestic and Ahrefs, have their own index of URLs. These indexes will largely overlap with each other, but there are still questions to pose to your chosen provider:

Index size: How many URLs are contained within the software’s index?

Frequency of index crawling: How often is the index refreshed?

Live links: Are there common instances of ‘false positives’, where inactive links are reported with 200 status codes?

Correlation with actual rankings: Simply, does a higher domain score equate to better rankings?

The importance of these questions, and the resultant significance of their answers, will depend on a brand’s context. Nonetheless, these are points worth considering when assessing the scores your site receives.

Each of the main players in this space has subtle distinctions within its methodology, which will be important for most SEOs.

We will begin our round-up with the Moz tools (some of them free) that will show the Domain Authority for any site, before looking at a couple of alternatives that provide a valuable reference point.

Moz (MozBar, Open Site Explorer)

It should be clear that Moz is the major contender when it comes to checking a domain’s SEO authority. We included MozBar on our list of the best Google Chrome extensions for SEO and it deserves its place in this list, too.

MozBar will highlight the Domain Authority of any site a user is browsing, along with the Page Authority (PA) of that particular URL. As the name suggest, PA applies a similar methodology to DA, but localized to a particular URL rather than a domain.

This is also available in search results pages, making it possible to see whether a site’s Domain or Page Authority correlates with higher rankings for particular queries.

As such, these two metrics in combination are a great starting point for investigations into the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a domain.

Marketers should be aware, however, that these scores do fluctuate.

That should be viewed as a positive, as the scores are an increasingly accurate reflection of how Google is evaluating sites. Moz employs machine learning algorithms to re-calibrate the authority scores based on link activity across its index, but also the impact that certain types of link have.

We can consider this an attempt to peg the Moz index to that of Google, and we know the latter is tweaked thousands of times a year.

Therefore, we should be careful about the causal links we infer from DA scores.

When tracking Domain Authority, always benchmark against similar sites to avoid viewing this as an absolute indication of how well you are performing. By viewing it as a relative metric instead, we can gain a healthier insight into whether our strategy is working.

This is where another Moz-owned tool, Open Site Explorer, proves its worth. Open Site Explorer uses a range of proprietary Moz metrics to highlight the areas in which specific sites under- or over-perform. the side by side comparisons it creates are an intuitive way to spot strengths and weaknesses in a site’s link profile on a broader scale.

Moz’s Domain Authority is undoubtedly useful – especially when used as an entry point into deeper investigation. MozBar and Open Site Explorer provide access to this metric for all marketers, so they should be viewed as the go-to resources for anyone seeking a check on their site’s SEO ranking potential.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs boasts an index of over 12 trillion links and data on 200 million root domains, making it an invaluable repository for SEOs wanting to understand their site’s SEO performance.

The two metrics that matter within the scope of this article are URL Rating (UR) and Domain Rating (DR).

We can consider these Ahrefs’ equivalents to Page Authority and Domain Authority, respectively, at least in terms of their purpose.

The latter is defined by Ahrefs as “a proprietary metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).”

It appears frequently within the software interface, in examples like the one in the screenshot below:

So, why would you use the Ahrefs DR score over Moz’s DA calculation? Their definitions do seem strikingly similar, after all.

As always, the detail is critical. If we refer back to our initial points for consideration, it becomes possible to compare Ahrefs with Moz:

Index size

Frequency of index crawling

Live links

Correlation with actual rankings

Both Moz and Ahrefs have invested significantly in improving the size, quality and freshness of their link data. Some SEOs have a preference for one over the other, and their scores do vary significantly on occasion.

Those that prefer Ahrefs typically do so for the freshness of its index and DR’s correlation with actual rankings.

The clarity of the Ahrefs methodology is also very welcome, right down to the number of links typically required to reach a specific DR score.

To put things simply, we calculate the DR of a given website the following way:

Look at how many unique domains have at least 1 dofollow link to the target website;

Take into account the DR values of those linking domains;

Take into account how many unique domains each of those websites link to;

Apply some math and coding magic to calculate “raw” DR scores;

Plot these scores on a 0–100 scale (which is dynamic in nature and will “stretch” over time).

DR 0–20: 20 ref.domains

DR 20–40: 603 ref.domains

DR 40–60: 4,212 ref.domains

DR 60–80: 25,638 ref.domains

DR 80–100: 335,717 ref.domains

Ahrefs requires a monthly licence to access its data; for those that do sign up, it provides a very useful sanity check for the domain strength scores seen elsewhere.

Majestic

Majestic is marketed as “The planet’s largest link index database” and it remains a trusted component of any SEO toolbox for the thorough nature of its backlink data.

Offering two index options (Fresh and Historic), it also allows marketers to different views of how their domain is performing. As with Moz and Ahrefs, Majestic’s scores for site strength are calculated almost exclusively based on the quality and quantity of inbound links.

Opting for the Historic Index will see Majestic scour the billions of URLs it has crawled within the last 5 years, while the Fresh Index is updated multiple times per day.

This software takes a slightly different tack in relation to the labeling of its domain metrics, which are known as Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

These are interrelated metrics that combine to form the set of Majestic Flow Metrics. These are very insightful because of the immediate score they provide (ranging from a low of 0 to a high of 100), and also for the opportunities to dig further into the backlink data.

One favorite feature of Majestic is the ability to analyze historical backlink acquisition trends, both in terms of links gained and links lost. As such, Majestic’s domain strength metrics provide actionable insight that can be used to shape strategy immediately. For example, the loss of a lot of links on a particular date may provide an opportunity to reach out to webmasters and try to regain that equity.

Majestic also comes with a handy toolbar that overlays domain metrics on the site a user is browsing. Although an apples to apples comparison between Majestic and Moz or Majestic and Ahrefs, in relation to the efficacy of their domain authority rankings, would be difficult, this would also be to miss the point.

All of these tools are aiming to mimic the functioning of Google as accurately as they can; taken together they form a more rounded picture.

In summary

Given the ongoing significance not only of backlinks, but also the potential of unlinked mentions to boost performance, search marketers are quite rightly looking to Domain Authority to assess their SEO potential.

The core elements of a successful, customer-centric remain the same as they always were; higher scores, from whichever domain metrics one chooses to monitor, should be seen as a natural by-product of a strategy that fulfils the modern consumer’s needs.

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/09/how-to-check-your-domain-authority-4-tools-to-use/

[muzaffar1969]

http://ift.tt/2qdzXvr

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs. Cox, who is now working as a battery-test engineer and about to buy her first home, was unaware who was behind the company that had put her through such an ordeal. When I told her of Kushner’s involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.

  Very few of the complex residents I met, even ones who had been pursued at length in court by JK2 Westminster, had any idea that their rent and late fees were going to the family company of the president’s son-in-law. “That Jared Kushner?” Danny Jackson, a plumber in his 15th year living at Harbor Point Estates, exclaimed. “Oh, my God. And I thought he was the good one.”

  At the Carroll Park complex, I met Mike McHargue, a private investigator, and his girlfriend, Patricia Howell. “They’re nothing but slumlords,” Howell told me of Westminster Management. “They take everyone’s money.” When I asked if they knew who was behind the company, they said they did not. “Oh, really?” Howell said when I mentioned Kushner’s name. “Oh, really. And I’m a Trump supporter.”

  From The New York Times Magazine article: Jared Kushner’s Other Real Estate Empire

Yesterday, The New York Times Magazine published a deeply disturbing story about a Kushner family real estate subsidiary with a consistent pattern of aggressive and questionable collection practices aimed at lower income people who can’t defend themselves properly.

Excerpts from the piece are below, but it should really be read in full.

Warren sent a letter reporting the problem to the complex’s property manager, a company called Sawyer Realty Holdings. When there was no response, she decided to move out. In January 2010, she submitted the requisite form giving two months’ notice that she was transferring her Section 8 voucher — the federal low-income subsidy that helped her pay the rent — elsewhere. The complex’s on-site manager signed the form a week later, checking the line that read “The tenant gave notice in accordance with the lease.”

    So Warren was startled in January 2013, three years later, when she received a summons from a private process server informing her that she was being sued for $3,014.08 by the owner of Cove Village. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland District Court, was doubly bewildering. It claimed she owed the money for having left in advance of her lease’s expiration, though she had received written permission to leave. And the company suing her was not Sawyer, but one whose name she didn’t recognize: JK2 Westminster L.L.C.

    Warren was raising three children alone while taking classes for a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, and she disregarded the summons at first. But JK2 Westminster’s lawyers persisted; two more summonses followed. In April 2014, she appeared without a lawyer at a district-court hearing. She told the judge about the approval for her move, but she did not have a copy of the form the manager had signed. The judge ruled against Warren, awarding JK2 Westminster the full sum it was seeking, plus court costs, attorney’s fees and interest that brought the judgment to nearly $5,000. There was no way Warren, who was working as a home health aide, was going to be able to pay such a sum. “I was so desperate,” she said.

      If the case was confounding to Warren, it was not unique. Hundreds like it have been filed over the last five years by JK2 Westminster and affiliated businesses in the state of Maryland alone, where the company owns some 8,000 apartments and townhouses. Nor was JK2 Westminster quite as anonymous as its opaque name suggested. It was a subsidiary of a large New York real estate firm called Kushner Companies, which was led by a young man whose initials happened to be J.K.: Jared Kushner.

    In August 2012, a Kushner-led investment group bought 5,500 multifamily units in the Baltimore area with $371 million in financing from Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage lender — another considerable bargain. Two years later, Kushner Companies picked up three more complexes in the Baltimore area for $37.9 million. Today, Westminster Management, Kushner Companies’ property-management arm, lists 34 complexes under its control in Maryland, Ohio and New Jersey, with a total of close to 20,000 units.

  Kushner’s largest concentration of multifamily units is in the Baltimore area, where the company controls 15 complexes in all — which, if you assume three residents per unit, could be home to more than 20,000 people. All but two of the complexes are in suburban Baltimore County, but they are only “suburban” in the most literal sense. They sit along arterial shopping strips or highways, yet they are easy to miss — the Highland Village complex, for example, is beside the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but the tall sound barriers dividing it from the six-lane highway render its more than 1,000 units invisible to the thousands traveling that route every day.

  At the time of the 2012 Baltimore purchase, Kushner raved about the promise of the low-end multifamily market. “It’s proven over the last few years to be the most resilient asset class, and at the end of the day, it’s a very stable asset class,” he told Multifamily Executive. He said things were proceeding well in the Midwestern complexes he purchased a year earlier. “It was a lot of construction and a lot of evictions,” he said. “But the communities now look great, and the outcome has been phenomenal.”

Awesome!

Meanwhile, back to Warren…

Kamiia Warren still had not paid the $4,984.37 judgment against her by late 2014. Three days before Christmas that year, JK2 Westminster filed a request to garnish her wages from her in-home elder-care job. Five days earlier, Warren had gone to court to fill out a handwritten motion saying she had proof that she was given permission to leave Cove Village in 2010 — she had finally managed to get a copy from the housing department. “Please give me the opportunity to plead my case,” she wrote. But she did not attach a copy of the form to her motion, not realizing it was necessary, so a judge denied it on Jan. 9, on the grounds that there was “no evidence submitted.”

  The garnishing started that month. Warren was in the midst of leaving her job, but JK2 Westminster garnished her bank account too. After her account was zeroed out, a loss of about $900, she borrowed money from her mother to buy food for her children and pay her bills. That February — five years after she left Cove Village — Warren returned to court, this time with the housing form in hand, asking the judge to halt garnishment. “I am a single mom of three and my bank account was wiped clean by the plaintiff,” she pleaded in another handwritten request. “I cannot take care of my kids when they snatch all of my money out of my account. I do not feel I owe this money. Please have mercy on my family and I.” She told me that when she called the law office representing JK2 Westminster that same day from the courthouse to discuss the case, one of the lawyers told her: “This is not going to go away. You will pay us.”

  The judge denied Warren’s request without explanation. And JK2 Westminster kept pressing for the rest of the money, sending out one process server after another to present Warren with legal papers. Finally, in January 2016, the court sent notice of a $4,615 lien against Warren — a legal claim against her for the remaining judgment. Warren began to cry as she recounted the episode to me. She said the lien has greatly complicated her hopes of taking out a loan to start her own small assisted-living center. She had gone a couple of years without a bank account, for fear of further garnishing. “It was just pure greed,” she said. “It was unnecessary.” I asked why she hadn’t pushed harder against the judgment once she had the necessary evidence in hand. “They know how to work this stuff,” she replied. “They know what to do, and here I am, I don’t know anything about the law. I would have to hire a lawyer or something, and I really can’t afford that. I really don’t know my rights. I don’t know all the court lingo. I knew that up against them I would lose.”

  A search for “JK2 Westminster” in the database of Maryland’s District Court system brings back 548 cases in which it is the plaintiff — and that does not include hundreds of other cases that have been filed in the name of the company’s individual complexes.

  In the cases that Tapper has brought to court on behalf of JK2 Westminster and individual Kushner-controlled companies, there is a clear pattern of Kushner Companies’ pursuing tenants over virtually any unpaid rent or broken lease — even in the numerous cases where the facts appear to be on the tenants’ side. Not only does the company file cases against them, it pursues the cases for as long as it takes to collect from the overmatched defendants — often several years. The court docket of JK2 Westminster’s case against Warren, for instance, spans more than three years and 112 actions — for a sum that amounts to maybe two days’ worth of billings for the average corporate-law-firm associate, from a woman who never even rented from JK2 Westminster. The pursuit is all the more remarkable given how transient the company’s prey tends to be. Hounding former tenants for money means paying to send out process servers who often report back that they were unable to locate the target. This does not deter Kushner Companies’ lawyers. They send the servers back out again a few months later.

  In March 2009, Joan Beverly, a probation agent, signed the lease for her daughter, Lennettea, for a unit at Dutch Village, a complex on the northern edge of Baltimore. Lennettea moved out a year later, several months before her lease was up. Kushner Companies bought Dutch Village more than two years later. In December 2012, JK2 Westminster filed suit in Baltimore County District Court against Beverly, seeking $3,810.16 — several months of rent it said it was owed, plus about $1,000 in repair costs, including $10 for “failure to return laundry room card.”

  That February, Lennettea filed a written court notice explaining that her mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, was “in terminal hospice care and is not eligible to work.” She added by way of supporting evidence a letter from the hospice provider to Joan Beverly’s bank, explaining her and her husband’s late mortgage payments on their home: “There has been added financial stress because Mrs. Beverly is very ill at this time.” But JK2 Westminster persisted in seeking a hearing on the suit. In March, a district court judge found in favor of the company — a total judgment against Joan of more than $5,500.

  Joan died two weeks later. Her husband, Tyrone Beverly, a retired longshoreman, requested that the judgment against his deceased wife be removed but was denied. The case remains open in the court database. Tyrone, who was married to Joan for 32 years, told me that he had assumed the judgment had been dismissed and was unaware that it was still listed as awaiting payment. “They just didn’t treat us fair,” he said.

  Over all, about nine out of every 10 cases brought by JK2 Westminster that I surveyed resulted in judgments against the defendants, who often did not appear in person for the hearings — and if they did, almost never had legal representation. How could it possibly be worth Kushner Companies’ while to pursue hundreds of people so aggressively over a few thousand dollars here and there? After all, the pursuit itself cost money. And it wasn’t happening just in Baltimore — Doug Wilkins, a lawyer in Toledo who has represented some of the complexes bought there by Kushner, told me the company is seeking far more monetary judgments than did previous owners.

  Matthew Hertz, whose Bethesda, Md., firm represents landlords and tenants in similar cases, explained to me that there is a logic behind such aggressive tactics. The costs of the pursuit are not as high as you might imagine, he said — people are not that hard to find in the age of cellphones and easily accessible databases. “If I give my process server a name and phone number, it’s generally enough to trace you,” he said. “If I have a date of birth and Social Security number, it’s even easier.” The legal costs can be billed to the defendant as attorney’s fees, if the terms of the lease allow. And garnishing wages is relatively easy to do by court order, assuming the defendant has wages to garnish.

  The Highland Village complex, along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, is one of Kushner Companies’ largest, a vast maze of lanes and courts lined with rows of short brick-and-siding-fronted homes. Like the other Kushner complexes I visited in Baltimore’s southern and eastern suburbs, it is situated in what was once a predominantly white working-class community, within reasonable commuting distance of the harbor and industrial plants, now defunct, like Bethlehem Steel. In recent decades, many black transplants from the city and Hispanic immigrants have arrived as well, and Highland Village is an unusually integrated place.

  The complex, like the others I saw, seemed designed to preclude neighborliness — most of the townhouses lack even the barest stoop to sit out on, and at least one complex has signs forbidding ball-playing (“violators will be prosecuted”). At another complex, kids had drawn a rectangle on the side of a storage shed in lieu of a hoop for their basketball game. The only meeting points at many of the complexes are the metal mailbox stands, the Dumpsters and the laundry room. And the only thing that united many of the residents I spoke to, it seemed, was resentment of their landlord.

  They complained about Westminster Management’s aggressive rent-collection practices, which many told me exceeded what they had experienced under the previous owners. Rent is marked officially late, they said, if it arrives after 4:30 p.m. on the fifth day of the month. But Westminster recently made paying the rent much more of a challenge. Last fall, it sent notice to residents saying that they could no longer pay by money order (on which many residents, who lack checking accounts, had relied) at the complex’s rental office and would instead need to go to a Walmart or Ace Cash Express and use an assigned “WIPS card” — a plastic card linked to the resident’s account — to pay their rent there. That method carries a $3.50 fee for every payment, and getting to the Walmart or Ace is difficult for the many residents without cars.

  The worst troubles may have been those described in a 2013 court case involving Jasmine Cox’s unit at Cove Village. They began with the bedroom ceiling, which started leaking one day. Then maggots started coming out of the living-room carpet. Then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink. “It sounded like someone turned a pool upside down,” Cox told me. “I heard the water hitting the floor and I panicked. I got out of bed and the sink is black and gray, it’s pooling out of the sink and the house smells terrible.”

  Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs. Cox, who is now working as a battery-test engineer and about to buy her first home, was unaware who was behind the company that had put her through such an ordeal. When I told her of Kushner’s involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.

  Very few of the complex residents I met, even ones who had been pursued at length in court by JK2 Westminster, had any idea that their rent and late fees were going to the family company of the president’s son-in-law. “That Jared Kushner?” Danny Jackson, a plumber in his 15th year living at Harbor Point Estates, exclaimed. “Oh, my God. And I thought he was the good one.”

  At the Carroll Park complex, I met Mike McHargue, a private investigator, and his girlfriend, Patricia Howell. “They’re nothing but slumlords,” Howell told me of Westminster Management. “They take everyone’s money.” When I asked if they knew who was behind the company, they said they did not. “Oh, really?” Howell said when I mentioned Kushner’s name. “Oh, really. And I’m a Trump supporter.”

  Jared Kushner stepped down as chief executive of Kushner Companies in January. But he remains a stakeholder in the company — his share of company-related trusts is estimated to be worth at least $600 million — and the company says it has no intention of selling off its multifamily holdings. (JK2 Westminster was formally dissolved in December, but Kushner Companies still owns the complexes through other entities; lawsuits against tenants are now typically filed in the names of the complexes themselves.) Because Kushner retains his interest in the complexes, the White House told The Baltimore Sun in February that he would recuse himself from any policy decisions about Section 8 funding, as many of his tenants rely on it for their rent. But even as Kushner now busies himself with his ever-expanding White House portfolio, his company is carrying on its vigorous efforts in court.

On a related note, here’s an article I published earlier this month: Kushner Companies Seen Hawking Shady U.S. Visa Buying Residency Program to Wealthy Chinese

May 25, 2017 at 09:01AM http://ift.tt/2qYLUCg from Tyler Durden http://ift.tt/2qYLUCg