#but the solution is not to treat every single person outside of your department like a simpleton who you must tolerate

[thepoisonroom]

you've heard of "see how your date treats service workers" now get ready for "see how your classmate/professor treats the librarians"

[girlactionfigure]

“I give my child in your care, raise my child as if it were yours.”

These words were written by the mother of a six year old Jewish girl Rami, who was smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto in Nazi occupied Warsaw, Poland, during the Second World War. Little Rami was placed into foster care with her mother’s Polish friends on the Aryan side of the city and, unlike her mother, ultimately survived the war. The person who was instrumental in making Rami’s survival possible was a woman named Irena Sendler, a social worker and Polish resistance operative who helped save 2,500 Jewish children like Rami during the Holocaust.

Beginnings

Irena was born in 1910 in Warsaw into a Roman Catholic family. Her father, Stanislaw Krzyzanowski was a physician and a researcher in infectious diseases. He was a humanitarian and an idealist, who helped found the Polish Socialist Party. He believed in democracy, equal rights, universal health care, and an end to child labor, and was even expelled from university in Poland for leading strikes and protests advocating for those goals.

When Irena was two, the family moved outside of Warsaw, to the village of Otwock, where Stanislaw set up his practice for the treatment of tuberculosis. The village was fifty percent Jewish, and that percentage included the poorest of residents. Unlike other doctors in the area, Stanislaw treated everyone, the rich and poor alike, despite the poor not being able to pay. “If someone else is drowning, you have to give a hand,” he would often say.

Irena grew up in close contact with the Jewish villagers. She played with their children, and by age six even spoke fluent Yiddish. At home Irena’s family life was warm and nurturing. Stanislaw loved his little girl very much and hugged and kissed her so often that Irena’s aunts would warn him not to spoil her. “We don’t know what her life will be like,” he’d reply. “Maybe my hugs will be her best memory.”

In 1916 an epidemic of typhoid fever swept through the village and Stanislaw chose to be on the front lines. Typhoid, a bacterial disease spread through food, water, and close contact with infected persons, was especially prevalent in poor communities with bad sanitation. Unlike other well off villagers who isolated themselves to avoid contact with the sick, Stanislaw continued caring for patients and later that year succumbed to the disease himself. He died shortly after.

But Stanislaw’s spirit lived on in his daughter, and as Irena matured she resembled her father more and more in her beliefs and actions. She majored in social welfare at the University of Warsaw, and interned in charitable welfare clinics where the poor could get a free education and legal assistance. She also started becoming more politically involved, joining the Polish Socialist Party that her father helped start and beginning to engage in protests and activism herself.

In 1935 anti-Semitic sentiment was on the rise in Poland, and at Polish universities an informal rule nicknamed the “bench ghetto” was introduced. “A rule was established at the University segregating the Catholics from the Jewish students,” Irena recalled. “The Catholics were to sit on the chairs to the right and Jews on the chairs to the left. I always sat with Jews and, therefore, I was beaten by anti-Semites together with Jewish students.”

Later, like her father, Irena was suspended from university for boycotting the labeling of campus identity cards with the word “Aryan” to differentiate non-Jewish students from Jewish ones. “I was taught since my earliest years that people are either good or bad. Their race, nationality, and religion do not matter — what matters is the person.”

The War

On September 1, 1939, after the signing of a non-aggression pact between themselves, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. The country was split in half, with the eastern side going to Soviet Union and the western to the Nazis. Warsaw fell to the Nazis.

Overnight Jews became second class citizens in Warsaw. They couldn’t hold state or government positions, couldn’t own businesses, they had to register ownership of property, and lost access to their bank accounts.

Barred from offering social services to the Jewish population officially, Irena with a few friends began to circumvent the rules by faking paperwork in order to do so. This was the beginning of Irena’s resistance operations. Soon Irena and her resistance cell were providing money, food, and clothing to thousands of Jews in Warsaw.

A year after the invasion, moving forward with their ultimate goal of Jewish genocide, the Nazis established a ghetto for Warsaw’s Jews. 350,000 Jews, nearly 30% of the city’s entire population, were imprisoned in a 1.3 square mile ghetto. The ghetto was surrounded by a ten foot tall brick wall crowned with ribbons of barbed wire.

Irena sprang into action looking for blank documents that could give Aryan identities to Jewish friends destined for the ghetto. And once the ghettoization of Jews was complete, she continued helping in any way she could.

Life in the ghetto was miserable. The Nazis rationed roughly 200 calories of food per person per day. Death by starvation was common. Sanitation was terrible with refuse and human corpses littering the streets. There was a shortage of soap, clothing, and the means to heat living spaces. Many people froze to death. Disease was everywhere, including tuberculosis, dysentery, spotted fever, and typhoid fever, the same disease that claimed Irena’s father’s life.

But Irena was undaunted. Because of her work with Warsaw’s Department of Health and Social Services, she received a pass from the Epidemic Control Department that allowed her official passage in and out of the ghetto. She immediately began making daily visits, sometimes multiple per day, to smuggle food, money, and doses of typhus vaccine into the ghetto. She would hide items in the false bottom of her bag, or in small pockets sewn into a padded bra. Many women had their bras altered with padding and pockets. “It was a joke in wartime Warsaw that women’s breasts had grown dramatically everywhere in the city since the arrival of the Germans.”

Children

Sometimes Irena would smuggle candy or dolls for the ghetto’s children. Children were particularly vulnerable in the ghetto, succumbing faster to malnutrition, freezing, and to more varied diseases than adults. Some families facing starvation relied on their children to obtain food by smuggling it from the Aryan side of the city. Other families sent children across the wall hoping they would fare better as orphans on the Aryan side than inside the ghetto. In the beginning of 1942, about 4,000 children lived on the streets of the Aryan side. 2,000 of them were Jewish.

That year, fearing Nazi soldiers’ contamination with typhus and other diseases from children living on the street, the chief of the Nazi police ordered for Warsaw’s social services to get all homeless children on the Aryan side of the city off the streets and into orphanages and other local institutions. The roundups yielded a number of Jewish children, many of whom Irena and her network helped disappear into private homes and orphanages under false Polish identities. But there were thirty two Jewish kids that could not be placed, and so, in order to save them from execution, Irena had to smuggle them back into the ghetto. Knowing what was awaiting them there, Irena was devastated at not having an alternative solution. She vowed to never again return a single child to the ghetto, and started, along with her associates, an operation to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto and to provide them with false Polish identities and caring homes on the Aryan side of the city.

The price for helping a Jewish child in wartime Warsaw was execution, and Irena and her core group of twenty to twenty five mostly women operatives, risked their lives daily to save each and every child. Children were smuggled out of the ghetto in a variety of ways. There were secret routes to the Aryan side of the city via sewers and underground corridors. Children were able to get across by sneaking through an old courthouse and a Catholic church that stood on the border of the ghetto. Irena’s epidemic control pass allowed her to officially bring a child out of the ghetto for treatment if they were ill with tuberculosis. Children with or without the disease were brought out this way. Some kids were hidden in ambulances, under floorboards or dirty rags, or in coffins along with dead bodies. The Nazis were terrified of disease and performed only cursory checks before waving ambulances through. The youngest, including babies, had to be sedated with tranquilizers and hidden in trucks in toolboxes, in sacks masquerading as laundry or potatoes, or under vegetable boxes. Some were left in briefcases on early morning streetcars that ran in and out of the ghetto and later picked up by a friend.

Once out of the ghetto, children had to take on new identities in order to integrate into Polish society. Sometimes documents were faked, other times legitimate blanks could be found. If children looked too Jewish, they had makeovers to make them look more Polish. Sometimes it was as easy as dying a child’s hair, other times Jewish boys had to become girls in order to prevent the Nazi authorities from checking for circumcisions.

Escaped children went on to live in homes of friends, in convents, in group homes, orphanages, or religious institutions, and Irena kept a list of each and every child placed with the hope of reuniting them with families after the war. She encoded and recorded only the most essential information such as names, addresses, and an account of any money that parents gave to help with caretaking on cigarette paper that nightly she prepared to throw out of her kitchen window in case the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, ever came looking for her. Eventually, when it became too dangerous to keep the list at home, she buried it in glass bottles under an apple tree in a friend’s garden.

By this time Irena was already having nightmares on a regular basis. Not only did she worry about the children who would certainly be killed if they were ever discovered, she also worried about the families that were risking their lives to hide them. On top of everything, Irena was the sole person who knew the detailed histories of all the smuggled children. If anything were to happen to her, that information would be irretrievable.

Capture

In the fall of 1943, the Gestapo found and arrested a woman who ran a laundrette that the resistance used as a drop-off point for messages and packages. Charged with conspiring with the resistance, the woman was tortured and ultimately broke, giving up names of resistance operatives. One of those names was Irena Sendler’s. Days after, the Gestapo pounded on Irena’s door in the middle of the night. She was arrested, beaten, interrogated, and sent to Pawiak, a secret prison for intelligentsia and those politically involved. Most prisoners interned at Pawiak never left alive.

The Gestapo repeatedly tortured Irena for information, breaking her legs and feet, and permanently scarring her body. Despite the agony, Irena never said a word. She knew what divulging information would mean, a death sentence for thousands of children, friends and families. As luck would have it, the Gestapo thought they had captured only a fringe resistance operative, not the head of children’s division of the resistance movement, which meant Irena received no special treatment. Certainly if they realized who they were dealing with, they would have taken extra measures.

Irena lived at the prison for four months until her execution date was set for January 20, 1944. During the days, when she was not being tortured for information, Irena worked as a washerwoman cleaning soiled Nazi underwear. One day, when the Nazis found the laundry work not to their satisfaction, they lined up all the washerwomen against a wall and shot in the head every other one. Irena was one of the ones who survived.

On the morning of January 20th, a Nazi officer came to take Irena to the courtyard where she was to be shot. She was led down a corridor, but instead of being taken into the waiting room where she was to await her execution, the officer led her out of the prison and into the street. He released her and told her to run. As Irena later found out her friends in the resistance had bribed the Nazi with what today amounts to $100,000 to secure her escape.

End of the war and legacy

Once free, Irena went into hiding, and soon resumed her operations with the resistance. She continued rising in ranks until she was running meetings and setting agendas. In the summer of 1944, with the Soviets advancing, and the Nazis retreating, the Polish resistance army attempted to liberate Warsaw. They fought for two months, but were ultimately defeated by the Nazis. In response to the uprising, Heinrich Himmler, a most high ranking SS officer and the person responsible for forming and operating Nazi death camps, gave the order to kill all Polish residents of Warsaw and to level the entire city. “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth…,” he ordered. “No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” Ultimately more than 400,000 people were killed and eighty percent of Warsaw was destroyed by the retreating Nazi army. Irena miraculously survived the destruction.

After the Nazis were driven out of Warsaw, Irena and a friend went to dig up the list of children they had hidden in bottles. They searched and searched for the tree under which the list was buried, but found only rubble. Irena then set out, along with her friends, to recreate the list from memory. She continued working for decades helping reunite children with their families, and even adopted two orphaned Jewish girls herself.

Irena lived until 98, and passed away in Warsaw in 2008. Until the very end of her life she felt that she did not do enough to help children during the war.

Five years before her death Irena received Poland’s highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle, but she never enjoyed being called a hero.

“Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes… Indeed, that term irritates me greatly.” 

“Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.”

The children Irena saved during the war continued to call and visit her until the end of her life.

Historical Snapshots

[goldeneyedgirl]

Who’s ur favorite and least favorite twilight character and why?

LOL, oh man. Prepare for Discourse, Anon. 

My favourite character is Alice (that might be very obvious). I think she was wasted in Twilight, and that she has so much potential. 

She has no recollection of being human. She is a totally blank slate with a gift that is essentially an extra sense or limb. Like, this girl cannot be ‘okay’. I believe in my heart of hearts that Alice functions differently to other people. I mean, I infer from canon that her visions taught her everything that she needed to know - from how to feed, to how to convince Jasper, to how to join the Cullens. She’s going to get the wrong answer? She’ll change what she says!

And that is utterly fucking terrifying - especially if she was aware and doing it intentionally. But I do not think she is, in that sense. I just don’t think she would have any idea of how to live without her visions showing her what to do next. Alice is a hostage to her own gift, and always has been. 

Even her interactions with Bella and Edward in canon are really uncanny, like she’s playing a role - which is more reflective of SMeyer’s piss-poor writing ability than any sort of intention - but indicative that Alice is Not Okay, and kind of explains a lot about how the Cullen family is portrayed. 

A lot of what I love about Alice, and her relationship with Jasper, are things I’ve absorbed from fan-content - what we can infer from the information we’ve been given. Her conviction about her and Jasper, to me, is beautiful and both terribly childlike, and something someone who has suffered deeply would absolutely cling to as a lifeline. The idea that Jasper isn’t just her husband, but her very best friend and confidant as well, paints such a lovely picture of the symbiosis they have. I think that, whilst it’s normally Poised, Confident Alice to Rescue Struggling Depressed Jasper portrayed in fandom, that there is a distinctive possibility that two individuals who were both fucked over in the gift department and were holding onto reality by a strand found each other and rescued each other might be closer to the truth.

I also LOVE fashion, so I kind of get Alice on that level; and I treat Alice - when I write her - as someone with mental illness (like myself) because I find that very satisfying to write, and to explore. I can PROJECT, which is super fun.

Jasper’s a close second because holy moly, he has so much potential from a fic-writing perspective? This is a man who was not a good person as a human - like, there are Varying Reasons he would join the Confederate Army and be proud of being a Major, but that’s a TOTALLY different piece of discourse so we’ll put a pin in that because statistically, it meant he was a racist fighting for racist ideals. And THEN he is changed into a vampire and joins the Southern Wars, falling further into evil as far as violence, hate, and senseless death goes. 

Like this man was a full monster.

And it was eating him alive.

So he just walked away. Alice did not save him. Peter did not save him. Jasper walked away. Peter gave him the opportunity to do so. Alice offered him goals and a way to improve who he is. There’s nothing he can do about the evil he sowed, the legacy he has created. And he has to live with that every single day for eternity. Has to deal with the burn of his thirst, exacberated by years of gorging on human blood, every single day. There is no solution to/for Jasper. It’s one hell or another. And that is so much fun from a fic-writing perspective. 

Plus his dynamic with Maria is so crazy fun - Mother? Lover? General? What does ‘good terms’ even mean? I assume it’s code for ‘cold war’ or ‘not actively seeking the other’s destruction’, but who knows. I love that. 

Jessamine is also super fun and beloved by me, but that’s because she’s either Jasper-derivitive or my particular portrayal of a separate character, so she doesn’t count. 

As for my least favourite, that honour goes to Edward. Full disclosure, I have not read Midnight Sun, only skimmed parts, because the only thing worse than that would be reading EdBella fic. 

I think he’s an arrogant, misogynistic, controlling little brat, honestly. He’s above the rules and the laws when it suits him - at the cost to everyone - and he condemns Rosalie and Jasper so quickly and thoroughly with very little in-text justification. 

He says that Rosalie is vain - well, Captain Dipshit, maybe after being violently and fatally gang-raped by a group including her fiance Rosalie might deal with a lot of body issues - and copes with them the best way she can. Maybe after being raised with a priority of being beautiful above all else, and then harmed in such a grotesque way because of her beauty, and then becoming more beautiful might fuck with your mental health a little, Eddie.

Edward has a bad habit of classifying women in absolutes like Madonna/Whore, depending on his personal beliefs - which, as a frozen 17 year old from the 1900s, is fairly goddamn dubious. Rosalie and Tanya are both ‘bad’, Esme, Alice, and Bella are all ‘good’. But there are no women that Edward fully ‘trusts’ or allows to ‘win’/direct him. He prizes Bella because of her unreadable mind - she is a puzzle and something to possess. They are never partners. Edward uses Alice, Who Tries Her Very Best, as a weapon against Bella multiple times. I often wonder if it isn’t Edward who encourages Alice, off-page/off-screen, to play dress-ups, to make Bella into what Edward expects in a wife. 

Edward is over-indulged by both Esme and Carlisle; honestly, with his gift, I wouldn’t be surprised if he manipulates the family into their slightly toxic dynamic (it’s hard to tell because of SMeyer’s obvious bias, and the perspective of the novels) because it benefits him so much. It puts him second only to Carlisle - Jasper cannot be trusted despite his comprehensive understanding of vampires, especially when it comes to turf battles, and Emmett’s just a frat boy. Or is this the portrait Edward has painted so he gets to be #1 Son?

Edward is the goddamn architect of every disaster the Cullens face because what he wants is dangerous and illegal. Without Edward’s Volterra Tantrum, Aro never would have challenged the Cullens in Breaking Dawn. Victoria’s attack would have been neutralised before the Cullens even got wind of it. Bella never would have gone cliff-diving or solo-hiking if Edward hadn’t dumped her in the cruelest way possible. 

I honestly, truly believe that Edward shouldn’t have had a mate, let alone a wife and child. 

Also, movie!Edward looked like he needed a fucking shower and a flea dip in nearly every scene. 

Bella’s a close second because I have known girls like Bella and fuck me, they are deeply unpleasant to be friends with. She fucks over EVERYONE in pursuit of Edward. I understand that she doesn’t have the same interests as Alice, but not once just she make a suggestion for an alternative activity or a compromise (and that could be Bad Writing again, because Bella appears to have very few hobbies beyond ‘reading’ but it’s what we’re working with). 

In fact, I would argue that Alice tries her very best to be Bella’s friend, but it’s a futile attempt - Bella tolerates Alice because of Alice’s proximity to Edward. If Alice had been a human student at Forks High, you can bet that Bella would have dumped her as fast as possible. Bella has very few moments where she’s positive about the people around her outside of the Cullens (by association with Edward) or Jacob. Charlie gets mostly pity. Everyone else is looked upon with disapproval and judgement (which, again, reflects toxic writing tropes.) 

And Bella martyrs herself at every opportunity. There’s a lot of discourse where Bella’s neglectful childhood is examined, but Bella fucking lunges into the ‘victim’ role at every possibility. And ultimately, I really don’t see Bella maturing or learning anything at all through the series. It’s always about what she wants, above everything else. She succeeds because she and Edward are incredibly selfish individuals who are enabled by the parental figures around them. 

Second runner-up is Carlisle. 

[maggyme13]

The last Mission (11/11)

AN: HERE WE ARE AGAIN for the last time of this story.

First I own you a reason for the long wait: just after the last chapter, both my sister and best friend became pregnant. Call me crazy, but I feared to jinx it if I continued this story. So I waited until both babies were born and a few months old.

So here we are and I hope you like it.

Wordcount: around 1800

Warnings: mention of misscarriage, asshole general, cursing

Masterlist

TLM-Masterlist

Part 10

Plumbs.

It all started with plumbs and a trip to the market. It ended with them sitting in some prison-cell- interrogation-room- thing.

Obviously it was quickly prepared to keep him and if they would get enough energy they would be able to get out easily.

That much they knew.

What they did not know was what had happened to you. With the last time they had seen you was when Bucky had returned from the market and found Captain America in their hideout.

It was then that the soldier had taken over who tried to lead him away from you to later return to in safety.

Unfortunately it would not come to that: after an hours long chase they were caught and locked away.

Then, two days ago they had been moved and were now locked away in Berlin, Germany. If he was able to trust his knowledge and memories.

At one point well armed men had entered the room that held his glass-cell to give him food and water using a tube for him to drink the soup out.

They were treated better than the soldier had ever been by Hydra when he had been locked away. Apart from the occasional food they were left alone with no word ever spoken to them.

It was irritating and antagonizing.

Just like the rest of the time, they were musing about what might have happened to the two of you, when five well armed men entered. He recognized the patches to belong to the German police special force GSG9. They were followed by a General of the United States and some spec ops guarding him.

“Mr Barnes. This Gentleman wants to ask you a few questions.”, one of the police officers spoke and they nodded in understanding.

Doesn´t look like they like the General much.

“Well, you probably wonder why you are here. Well, we arrested you for the attack on the UN that resulted in a few important people deaths; but unfortunately you have an Alibi. Even though I am not trusting the words of your little whore much. But the Germans do-”

Anger started to burn in their veins. His opponent was speaking about you, that meant he must have met you; spoken to you. And they did not like it one bit.

“- Because of that they are thinking about releasing you. I say it is because they feel guilty. Who wouldn´t after not being able to save a baby.”

A Baby? Their eyebrows rose- First in shock, then confusion.

“Well, I would not in this case. The child of a monster can only turn out as one as well. And it is not like anyone would be loving it, right? You are unable to feel positive things and she will only treat it out of fear.”

Until that moment, Bucky and the Soldier had been coexisting inside the body and mind ; now Bucky stepped back on his own and handed his half of the reigns over to the soldier.

With their combined anger the soldier was able to break out of his restrains within seconds. Much to the surprise of the General and his guards.

Just as quick as the soldier had freed himself, his fist connected with the Generals nose breaking it and the surrounding bones upon impact. His security detail regained their bearings to late and were knocked out quicker than they were able to reach for their guns.

With his new goal in the back of his mind, the soldier made his way over the bodies of the detail (stealing their guns on the way) and dragging the generals body behind him. Now he had to find you and become sure about your condition.

Using one of the stolen guns, he shot the lock to his cell open and stepped outside with the general as his shield.

Outside, he was greeted by the German police officers with their guns drawn and pointing at them.

“Drop him and your weapon!”, the leader ordered once. Twice. Three times in total until he did as he was told. With a loud crack the head of the hostage connected with the floor, cutting the tension for a second.

He knew, unlike their American counterparts, German police officers were taught to shoot as a last resort and as long as he wouldn´t shoot at them, they would not do so as well. So he kept his weapon aimed at them.

“Why don´t we calm down and lower our weapons? If you do that we can arrange for you to speak to Ms (y/n). That is what you want, right? But first you need to lower your weapon and let us take you into custody-”

“SHUT UP!”, the soldier growled, “What did he mean you were not able to save a baby?”

He underlined his question with a kick to the knock out general´s gut.

“Sir, we can talk about-”

“Answer my question.”, he demanded again adjusting his weapon. The soldier knew he was skilled enough to kill or injure at least two of the officers before they would be able to kill him. And he hoped they knew so as well and would disregard their training and answer his demands.

“Due to an incredible unfortunate accident Ms (y/n) had a miscarriage. I am deeply sorry.”

Acting on pure instinct and anger, he was about to take the shot, when the sound of naked feet on tiles caught his attention. And there you were. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw you running towards him. Your hair dripping wet and only a towel around your body.

“I was just taking a shower.”, you told him and a short gush of relieve float down his spine. Taking your appearance as a distraction, the police changed their positions, catching the soldiers attention.

Not wanting to lose you as well, he skillfully moved you behind his body to shield you from any bullet that might come their way.

“Sir, please lower you weapon.”, the leader called out again, “Sir, we have proof that you are innocent of the crime they say you committed. Lower your weapon and we can talk about it. No harm will come to you or Ms (y/n).”

“Soldier.”, you hummed, “They treated me well. Made sure I had food and medical care. Can we take their offer? I am getting cold with only the towel and my wet hair… please?”

Slowly he lowered his weapon and swirled it around so he was griping the muzzle before placing it on the floor and kicking it towards the police.

“If you lie. I will kill every single one of you.”, he promised.

“We know. We will lower our weapons now as well. Ms, do you know the way back to the room you were in first?”

You nodded a yes.

“Then please lead the way, we will be following you. Helmholz has already organized a change of clean clothing for you.”

“Come.”, you whispered and did as told, the soldier hesitantly doing so as well.

Back in ´your´ room, you quickly got changed in the offered clothing and took a seat on the bench again while the soldier was pacing the room like a caged lion.

“I am sorry,”, you finally hummed, stopping him dead in his tracks.

“No. We should be sorry. We failed in protecting you. We caused this. We-”

“To be honest, the General you knocked out caused this whole dilemma.”, Tony Stark piped up from the door, “Easy Iron fist, I am here to offer a peace-treaty. You see. We have evidences that you are in fact innocent of placing that bomb. And that you were controlled by Hydra. We believe you know a lot about them and their plans and so on, and on and on. Because of that I want to offer you a deal: the two of you return with me to the USA and stay at the Avengers-compound where you will get treated for any injuries , be it mentally or physically, and be rehabilitated as much as possible. And with the two of you, I don´t mean Mr Split Personality here, but the two people staring at me right now.”

“Thank you but no thank you. I would rather end up in Jail than to live in the same house as the two people who got me into this situation in the first place.”, you growled, having no desire to have to see Captain spangled latex and the black bitch more than needed.

“Understandable. I am sure we can find a solution to that problem. But can I say that at Steven felt horrible and was trying to find you ever since?”

“Doesn´t change the fact that they made me go to that heli-carrier and didn´t allow me to get my ass out of there once they had what they wanted.”

The billionaire had nothing to answer to that.

“She decides.”, the soldier rumbled and you sighted.

“The compound is huge, I am sure I can find an area suiting your demands. FRIDAY, can you check for me?”

“There three apartments that are at the far east and north of the compound that have their own entrances and can be locked off the rest of the compound.”

“Thank you. FRIDAY.”

“My pleasure Boss.”

“Your call Ms. I will personally make sure that neither of the two will bother you. I will even make sure you have a job. You were a secretary before right? I know someone who could need a new one.”

“Fine.”- Back into lock- down I guess. Not that I am already used to it by now. And it really would be best for Bucky, and the soldier as well. Why did I had to take that damn job in the first place. Screw you benefits!

“Awesome. I will get everything ready and we will depart as soon as possible. Why don´t you order food on my tab.” And with that he was gone.

______

Three month had gone by since then and you had started to feel comfortable in the apartment you were living in now. There had been a small , very small funeral for your dead boy, where only the Soldier/ Bucky had been present and Wanda, who turned out to become a wonderful friend of yours.

Once you crossed path with the Black widow and to the surprise of the two of you, you broke her nose with a punch to the face. Both of you were shocked, but you could not see her reaction, because as soon as your fist had connected with her nose, the soldier had taken over control, thrown you over his shoulder and walked away into a different direction than you first had been on. Captain America was different, Wanda had shown you proof that he had really been trying, with an endless number  of sleepless nights to find you, and so you had had decided to at least give him a chance.

Now only time would tell your future and what it brought for you. One thing you new though. I would not be boring.

AN 2.0: 

Thank you all for reading :)

~MaggY

Taglists:

Permanent:

@jadepc@pacifyhxlsey

@thankyoukarenclifford

@thankyouforanonymity  @punkrockhufflefluff

@scarletraine

@ambrosialyn

 @markusstraya

@graveyard-groupie

@buckycaptspideypool

 @markusstrayya @randomgirlkensy @the-soulofdevil

MCU:

@yknott81    @banner-and-bucky-are-life @forext20 @dyanlzbb  @so-finster-die-nacht @emmii4 @caplansteverogers @bitchwhytho @ladyofmyst   @jilldsumner @momc95 @appreciating-fanfics

Last Mission:

@eyesfixedonthesun22 @sherrybaby14 @lazilysuperbbucky  @lizblinder @queen-aerie @demonlover87 @simplyhemmings-blog  @darkficsyouneveraskedfor @lulasdaughter @lilly-evans-and-the-kpop ​ @past-perfect-future-tense

[norabrice1701]

An Offer Received - Part III.1

A Jaguar Villain Tom Hiddleston Character (Thomas Conrad) fanfic

Pairing: Thomas Conrad x Fem!reader

Summary: Part III.1 & III.2 - You spring Mr. Conrad’s trap and he has you. You’re his.

Rating: Part III.1 & III.2 -  Explicit sexual content NSFW smut (please be ye warned and do not proceed if not your cuppa), controlling behavior, threats of violence, f-bombs, scalpel violence, Dark!Conrad

Previously: Part II - 5 Weeks

A/N: Part III is long, but hopefully worth it. So, here’s the first part with the second part up next. And please - unless you 100% consent up front to a relationship like this, this fic should not be relationship goals. Also, I went with Secretary Ross’ title from the MCU but this fic is still meant to be non-nation specific.

GIF credit to the original poster via the Tumblr search!

Part III.1 - 5 Months

It didn’t make sense. Month after month, update after update. Across all the divisions, all the departments - one eyesore project initiative sat apart from the rest. Operation ‘Blue Sea’.

You may have only had this position for five months, but you knew a hemorrhaging wound when you saw one. How could anyone with any business sense see the amount of money spent on this project without adding a single dollar to the company’s bottom line? You had to know more.

Operation ‘Blue Sea’ – a government defense contract funded as an exploratory effort to develop an advanced warfare submarine prototype, the details of which were highly classified. Even the project location had been redacted. Scanning the record of invoices, it was easy to see the last one that the government had paid...was over four years ago.

You squinted at your laptop. If the last payment from the government had been over four years ago, then who funded the project now? Who paid these additional millions of investment? You clicked on the latest invoice, scanning for the initials of the person who approved the payment. Also redacted.

It didn’t look good, but you hoped there was an explanation. Perhaps the answers hid in the redacted text. Perhaps the project was being used as an internal improvement opportunity. But what could possibly be the benefit to the company at large? And why hide it in a scrapped submarine project?

You had no choice but to take it to Conrad. Either you needed a higher security clearance for the redacted information or needed his agreement to close the project, cutting off the mystery source of money. You found an opening on his calendar and set the meeting.

The passing hours gave you time to think, to strategize. To firm up your proposed solution. Obviously, it made the most sense to shut the project down. To stop the cash flow and dig to the bottom of what those funds were really being used for. You could only hope that you hadn’t stumbled onto an embezzlement scheme. Or maybe Conrad would reward you for such a discovery. That seemed unlikely, though. Your boss kept a tight watch on his company, so it stood to reason he knew that Operation ‘Blue Sea’ was ongoing.

A paranoid part of you hoped that you hadn’t accidentally stumbled onto something worse…something that Conrad didn’t want you to know. The implications were too sickening to linger on, so you focused back on your inbox.

At the appointed meeting time, you knocked on his door. He bid you entry and you sat in the chair opposite his desk. Now that winter’s chill had settled in, he was never seen in his shirtsleeves. Absently, it made you wonder if he was cold-natured. Would his fingers be chilly to the touch? Or warmed by the steaming cup of tea that rested at his elbow?

You didn’t bother with pleasantries. You knew they didn’t matter to him. “Sir, I took a deeper look at the divisional financial updates, and specifically wanted to discuss Operation ‘Blue Sea’.” You ran through your findings on the end of official cash flow and the start of the mystery source. “This project is guzzling money without a known source, and hasn’t produced any measurable output since the government pulled out four years ago. With your permission, sir, I propose to shut it down. To find out where the funneled cash has been used – hopefully we’re not looking at an embezzlement scandal – and take the next actions appropriately.”

He sat, largely unmoving, as you laid out the details and your proposal. His eyes had barely skimmed the project file printouts that you laid before him. If anything, he looked a curious mix of proud and disappointed. Nothing about his calm reaction – or lack of reaction – set you at ease.

Suddenly, he blinked rapidly with a dismissive sigh as he reached for his tea. “I had suspected something was afoot in my company. It took you a little longer than I anticipated, but it’s of little consequence.”

What did he mean by that? Surely, he didn’t move you into this position to uncover rotten apples in the company’s barrel. This hadn’t exactly been hidden, but maybe Conrad was just too busy to be bothered by the details. But that thought didn’t sit well with you, either – he was the very definition of attention to detail.

You moistened your lips, unsure. “Forgive me, sir, but you seem–.”

“I’ll have your clearance level upgraded on Monday to begin your investigation in full.” His teacup clinked softly against the saucer. “I expect you to keep all discussions of Operation ‘Blue Sea’ confidential between us, and discuss it with no one outside the confines of this office.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.” You knew what was at stake with this investigation. Maybe he did, too, given how quickly he acquiesced to secure higher credentials for you to access redacted information. Your brain wanted to question it, but maybe, you’d just take the easy victory.

His fingers flew over the keyboard of his laptop, unbothered as you sat there in silence. You debated finding something to say. But he wasn’t a man for small talk and he obviously didn’t want to talk about the situation around Operation ‘Blue Sea’. Which also didn’t make sense to you – what CEO wouldn’t be immediately concerned with the future of his company if he found out about a potentially illegal scheme happening right under his nose?

His voice carried quietly over the tapping of keys. “You made decisions about the trajectory of my company long before you were officially empowered to do so. It shouldn’t surprise you that you’re in this position to broaden that scope of responsibility and align us for every future success.” His gaze lifted from the laptop, eyes glittering with an unnerving, mischievous intent. “Your discovery is deserving of a treat, wouldn’t you say?”

Nothing about this felt right. You shook you heard, unsure. “I - it’s the job, sir - just doing what you asked. I suppose...it’s your decision if that’s worthy of a treat.”

The corner of his mouth lifted with silent approval as his sharp mind worked behind those mesmerizing, icy eyes. “Tell me,” he spoke softly at last, “are you free this evening?”

This evening? Friday night? Your brow pinched in confusion. “Sir, tonight’s the Secretary’s holiday benefit, and you’re attend -.”

“Yes, I’m aware of my plans tonight. I asked about you.”

“Me?” Your eyes widened and you fought back a guffaw. “Me, no. No, I’m not attending.”

“Then let’s remedy that, shall we?” He reached for his phone that rested on his desktop.

“Sir, I - I couldn’t possibly. And you…,” you swallowed, unsure to continue but unwilling to back down, “your valet sent a note - you’re set to take Galinda Barrett.”

“Yes, the fashion photographer turned Pulitzer Prize winner,” he glanced up with a wry look, “I don’t think she’ll be too brokenhearted.”

Shit, what else could you say? You glanced at your LOKI smartwatch, noting the time. The gala started at 8:30 and it was past 3:30 now...how could you possibly even have a suitable dress for such a formal occasion?

He looked back to his phone, fingers flying over the smooth surface. “Take the rest of the afternoon off. Go straight to Pierre & Sons, a reliable clothier. Ask for Jean-Louis, he’ll know to expect your arrival. From there, they’ll advise your next stop.”

“Sir, that’s really...very generous of you, but there’s no need. I…,” you paused, unable to believe it, your stomach twisting, “I can’t let you stand up Galinda.”

He paused from his phone, pinning you with the full weight of his stare. “Do you remember what I told you from the very beginning?”

You wracked your brain, trying to recall. He’d imparted so many expectations, but then you remembered - that first meeting, when he first offered you a chair. You could hear his elegant voice reciting the same syllables, and you knew you were sunk. “Yes, sir,” you nodded slowly, “when you make an offer, you expect it to be received.”

He nodded, approval lurking in his piercing gaze. Approval and something darker, something possessive. “Very good. Now from glancing at your watch, you must know time is of the essence. I shall see you at 8:05 tonight.”

You recognized a dismissal when you heard it, still stunned at the turn in conversation. You wondered what would have happened if you still refused. But as you pushed through his office double doors, back out into the main area with your desk – you realized that no one ever said no to Thomas Conrad. He always had an answer and never gave anyone the opportunity.

At least this was just one night, one black-tie holiday charity function. He was officially attending on the corporation’s behalf, so at least it wasn’t a personal social engagement. But still…the sense of uneasy dread lingered in your gut as you queued up directions to Pierre & Sons.

The drive went quick. Sure, your Audi was nowhere near the same caliber as his Jag, but you still enjoyed driving it. Far more practical and within your budget. Once parked, you took the three steps up to the clean, whitewashed brick storefront. A soft bell chimed on your entrance as you were hit with the pleasant smell of cinnamon and clove. Holiday carols played in elegant string arrangements as a kind-faced man greeted you from behind the main counter. “Good afternoon, ma’am. How may I help you?”

“Good afternoon. I have an appointment, I think. Mr. Conrad said to ask for Jean-Louis. I’m –.”

Your name sounded over your shoulder and you couldn’t help but turn. A tall man, impeccably dressed in bold patterns that should have clashed but didn’t, stood in the awning of a doorway, sizing you from head to toe. “Yes, I knew it was you!” His smile grew, wide and proud. “You match Mr. Conrad’s description perfectly. Come along, vites, vites,” he motioned you into the room, “Mr. Conrad made clear that we’re on a limited schedule. And there’s so much to do!”

The hours rushed by in a whirlwind of fabric, makeup and hairspray. Admittedly, it was all rather decadent. The corset was equal parts luxurious and stiff against your torso, cinched with laces and hooked in place to curve your hips and breasts into just the right shape without suffocating you. Silken panties covered more than you expected but still left you feeling virtually naked under your dress of such a fine fabric and cut, in a color that perfectly complimented your skin tone. Where you had been concerned about makeup hiding your face, it simply enhanced your natural features. Soft highlights drew focus to your eyes, and you lips looked lush. The deceptively simple up-do showed off the slope of your neck down to the dress’ flattering neckline.

Looking in the mirror for the final time, the dress hugged the shape of the corset without revealing what lay beneath, and you couldn’t deny the obvious truth. You looked beautiful. Strangely enough and more importantly, you actually felt beautiful.

Jean-Louis smiled approvingly. “That’s why I do this job,” he said, “for that smile right there. The one that knows what it is to be beautiful.”

He reached to the clothes rack for a long, black garment. The fabric was velvet, rich and heavy as it slid against your skin, covering up your elegant gown. Of course, the long velvet coat – more of a cape with sleeves – fit you eerily just as well as the dress. He smiled in approval. “A finishing touch. Can’t have you wearing just any old coat - it’s already cold out, and he did say it was going to be windy.”

Windy?

Before you could question it further, he shooed you from the room. As you emerged into the shop front, you were startled that night had fallen. Your watch was somewhere in the garment bag that Jean-Louis had shoved your workwear into, along with your phone - you had no clue of the time.

A nondescript man in a nondescript black suit lingered near the door, inclining his head on your approach, wishing you a good evening by name.

You eyed him warily, already suspecting the creepy truth. “Good evening. I’m assuming Mr. Conrad sent you?”

“Indeed, miss. He knew you would be in need of a driver to escort you.”

“A driver? No, I have my car…I can drive.” Fortunately, the heels you wore were relatively sensible. As tall as you already were, you couldn’t stand taller than Mr. Conrad.

“We’ll be taking your car, miss.” He held out a hand in silent query.

You’d tolerated it all afternoon, but this was the last straw. There would be words with Mr. Conrad tonight. But you knew better than to shoot the messenger, so you yielded your car key.

It felt surreal to ride in the backseat of your own vehicle with a glorified chauffeur at the wheel. You watched the city streets blur by, noting that you were most certainly not heading to your apartment. Instead, the driver glided to a stop in front of a sleek, modern building that stretched high to the sky. There was no obvious sign announcing what this building was – but the lack of signage told you plenty. Only the super wealthy and powerful didn’t announce where they lived. And now…now you stood at the base of what could only be Conrad’s apartment building.

The driver ushered you forward, and the doorman opened the door. “Good evening,” again another greeting by your name, “Mr. Conrad is expecting you.”

You glared around the modern, elegant, empty lobby as frustration consumed you. Were you supposed to find him? Was he coming down to you? No one told you anything but seemed to know everything. You hated feeling at a disadvantage, and you certainly were.

You knew just what Mr. Conrad wanted you to know. And nothing more.

Nothing helped your sense of irritation, not even when he finally came around the corner. Of course, he looked killer in a bespoke tuxedo that fit his frame like a second skin. If possible, his hair looked more elegantly styled and he moved with such effortless, commanding grace. The sight of him also did nothing to ease the heat that danced along your skin ever since you first slipped into the silky undergarments.

His eyes traveled up and down the length of your body, not even trying to hide his assessment. At last those clear eyes found yours, an undercurrent of satisfied amusement lurking in their depths. “If you weren’t scowling so intently, I’d dare say you look absolutely stunning.”

“I don’t relish the compliment, Mr. Conrad.” You snapped, at the end of your rope. “You sent a driver to the clothier. I’ll have you know that I am perfectly capable of driving my own car – you can’t just -.” Your words stalled as he stepped closer, leveraging his handsome, intimidating height.

He purred, low and dangerous. “Can’t just…what?”

That horrible, distracting, intoxicating cologne surrounded you, threatening your concentration. God, why did he have to smell so good?

“Can’t just…,” you licked you lips, meeting his gaze, “can’t just control me like that.”

His lips merely curled in an answering smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “You haven’t had control since you first set foot in my office, darling. So, don’t delude yourself into thinking that you have it now. You’ve merely had the illusion that I wanted you to have - but starting tonight, all that changes.”

You took an instinctive step back but a strong, solid hand pressed to the small of your back, keeping you close to him. Every fight or flight instinct kicked into high gear as his other arm bracketed your shoulders. You were trapped in what would effectively look like a harmless lovers’ embrace.

But there was nothing harmless about the razor sharp gleam of his eyes. “You see, I need to recruit someone of your determined drive, your sharp focus. I’d rather you be a willing participant – it makes things so much easier, and in your unique case, would prove particularly pleasurable.”

“I…I don’t understand,” you glared back at him, stiffening at the tone of his voice, “recruit me? I already work for you.”

He chuckled again, another dark, sinister sound. “If only ‘twere so. Now come along, darling; we mustn’t be late.”

“I won’t go anywhere with you.” This was going nowhere good, and you struggled to break free, to pull back. But he held you fast, pivoting to guide you towards the elevator in slow, forced steps with deceptive strength. If the doormen noticed your struggles, they paid no obvious attention or took action to intervene.

Fear sank in your stomach as you realized you were powerless. If Conrad had somehow bought those men off, anticipating your reaction…then, maybe you were just fucked.

“I do wish you would calm down,” he said smoothly, unruffled by your protest, “please accept my assurance that I mean you no harm.”

“Then, won’t you just tell me what you want. And why!”

“Not here.” His tone brokered no argument as the elevator chimed low.

He led you forward into the brass and mirrored elevator interior. Reaching around you, he pushed a button simply labeled ‘T’, and the elevator started upwards, floors ticking by.

You swallowed, the heat from his hand still on your back seeping through the velvet coat to your dress. “Where are we going?”

“To the benefit, of course.”

“Then, shouldn’t we be going down?” You’d just assumed that the Jag would make another appearance, instead of ascending to…wherever you were going.

The elevator chimed your arrival and the doors slid open. Windows surrounded the elevator lobby, and you could see the shining lights of the city beyond the building’s rooftop. You could also see the glass doors leading to a set of steps up to a helipad. A helipad with a black, sleek, waiting helicopter.

You forced another hard swallow, your heart racing. Just where exactly was this benefit?

“Come along,” he guided you forward with the strength of his body, “we’ve already dallied too long.”

The cold air bit at your skin as you navigated through the glass doors and up to the helipad. The blades spun at low speed, whipping your dress and coat about your feet as you moved forward in his embrace. There would be no chance for escape once confined in the cabin with him. But, surely, with the crowded benefit, you would at least be safe until the return trip.

Right?

The cabin door slid closed behind him and the whirring rotor noise receded to a dull roar in the background. Of course, the interior was lovely - cream-colored leather, posh wood finishes, even a fringed table lamp between the two cushy seats.

Tense silence stretched as the helicopter lifted away. Your hands gripped the armrests, part never having flown in a helicopter before, part in adrenaline-fueled frustration.

A million things ran through your mind. Things you wanted to say. Things you wanted to yell. Foul names you wanted to call him. But reason stilled your tongue as the city lights flew by. This was his domain and upsetting him further, well…that certainly couldn’t bode well for you.

“Do you recall our conversation on the way to dinner some months ago?” He sounded eerily calm, pensive. “The society that rots around us?”

How could you not? “Yes."  You weren’t sure what brought about the abrupt change in conversation, but you had acknowledged the idea at the time. "There was...a surprising amount of truth to it.”

“Too much truth, in fact. Too much truth to let it run unchecked any longer.”

A shudder ran down your spine and you couldn’t stop from glancing over at him with wide, concerned eyes. “Just…what do you mean by that?”

He stared out the window, eyes focused and calculating as he surveyed the world below. Like a king on high. An emperor of his domain. The thought roiled in your gut. Who…who was this man?

He turned from the window, the picture of clam, steady control. “They say the world has only known five great, influential empires in the entire history of civilization. A rather shocking fact, especially considering the ingenuity and connectivity of the modern world. Thus, the irony – at a time when the world is more connected than ever, it stands the most disjointed.”

The implication didn’t make sense as you blinked, trying to understand. “So, what…? You…you’re going to…unify everyone?”

“Not just unify.” His face hardened with a razor sharp edge. “A world where borders, race, genders are no longer definitions or limits. A world where only the capacity of one’s mind and the will to succeed determine your destiny. A truly free world.”

“But that’s insane!”

“Is it?” He chuckled, dark and chilling. “What’s insane is continuing to let the old guard run unchallenged. Perpetuating old ideologies because they’re too myopic to glimpse beyond their own so-called-grandeur to what the world could be.”

“But you couldn’t possibly….,” you scrambled to verbalize your thoughts, “to be clear, you are talking about...overthrowing the global order. World fucking domination, right? Like…like you’re a Bond villain!”

He sneered. “They lack true vision and conviction. You’re pardoned this once, but do not draw that comparison again.”

Your eyes widened in absurd disbelief. Either he was certifiably insane, or this was some elaborate hoax. It had to be. Sure, there was nothing playful about the man who was your boss, but…. The more you studied him, the more you came to the sinking realization.

He meant it. He meant every word.

You gulped hard, thinking back to his previous words. “You…you said you wanted to ‘recruit’ me.”

“That I did.”

“Recruit me in your quest for world domination?”

“If you must phrase it so dramatically.”

You nearly barked a laugh. “This makes no sense.”

He sighed, annoyance flashing in his gaze. “You’re an intelligent woman. Certainly ambitious, with a keen eye for detail. And rest assured, world domination starts with attention to detail.”

“You can’t possibly expect me to….” You trailed off, the thought playing out in your mind. He didn’t actually expect you to say yes, did he? To go along with his crazy scheme? But fear suddenly crawled down your spine at what he would do if you refused.

He hummed softly, a disconcerting sound. “Did you know the average cruising altitude of this helicopter is 2,500 feet?”

You drew a sharp inhale, pitifully reaching for the armrest of your chair as if it would save you. But of course that had to be the alternative…he couldn’t afford to let you live if you refused him. You knew far too much now.

He slid out of his seat with silent ease, dropping to a knee on the cabin floor in front of you. His scent flooded your senses, hands warm and gentle as they cupped your jaw. He raised your head until all you could see were two pools of spellbinding, icy blue. “Punishment only comes with misdeed; cruelty only with cause. Until you give me a cause, you have nothing to fear from me. It’s as true now as it was on the ground.”

Your heart threatened to burst in your chest. “How...how can you expect me to stand by and watch such...destruction?”

“What makes you think you’ll be watching?” His thumb caressed your cheek, his face cracking in a mocking, pitying smile. “My dear, you’ve already been helping.”

Your stomach dropped to your feet. How was that possible? You’d only been doing your job - you’d only been doing...exactly what he asked. The realization seized you, eyes widening. “You’re hiding it in LOKI. Whatever your plan, your scheme is...you’re running it through the company.” You instantly recalled the meeting earlier today and the last piece fell into place. “Operation 'Blue Sea'."

He leaned forward, soft lips pressing to your forehead. A blessing. A benediction. A mollification.  

Your breath caught at the gentle sensation as his kiss fell to your cheek. The tip of your nose. Nothing about his touch should ignite your blood given the circumstances, but heat pooled low in your core all the same. Your heart raced, anticipating his next touch...you moistened your lips without thinking, leaning into his touch.

He pulled back ever so slightly, breath ghosting your lips. “You know, I do think something is missing. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Your brow furrowed, taken aback at the statement and his intimate presence. “Missing…?”

His hands fell away from your face and you shivered from the chill. You didn’t realize just how warm his touch was in comparison to the cabin air. He reached into his jacket, extracting a long, slim velvet case. He pulled the lid open and your eyes widened to take in the sheer amount of diamonds.

He rumbled his approval of your reaction. “When Jean-Louis notified me of your gown’s neckline, I couldn’t resist.” Balancing the case on his bent knee, he pulled the necklace free, the layers of diamonds swinging and glittering in the light.

You didn’t dare move, too stunned at the gesture, at what must be an exorbitant price tag, at what was so clearly a statement of possession as he fastened the necklace around your neck. The metal was chilly against your skin and the weight undeniable Your hand rose to caress the tiered necklace, brushing over the immaculate stones.

His eyes darkened with smoldering satisfaction, the smuggest of closed-mouthed grins on his handsome face. God, you wanted to slap him. You wanted to kiss him.

He rose, settling back into his seat, smoothing out his jacket. “I do hope you’ll enjoy yourself tonight, and put all of this conversation from your mind.” The helicopter started to descend. “This is my treat for you, after all.”

What was there for you to say? You couldn’t very well say anything to anyone at the benefit. There was absolutely no proof, and if he was hiding in plain sight in such a large corporation, then clearly...clearly you weren’t the only recruit to his crusade. You glanced over at him as the helicopter touched down gently. “Tell me one thing, though.”

He looked over, arching an elegant brow.

You swallowed hard, nodding at the sprawling mansion outside the window. “How many of the people here are also your ‘recruits’?”

His smile widened, mischievous and cold. “More than you’d think.”

Up Next: Part III.2 - 5 Months 

[lalainajanes]

How about a drabble with klaus and Caroline having a one night stand and then an awkward meeting the day later?

+ “I listened to a podcast recently with an interview with a host at a restaurant who sometimes offered to seat two single parties together bc they only had one table so maybe accidental date bc only one table?” from @thetourguidebarbie

+ omg i'm sorry to hear about your annoying day :( fluffy prompt: "well this is awkward...."! from an Anon.

Good Meddling 

Caroline’s never really had an issue with Mondays. She likes weekends, of course, free time. But she also likes a fresh start, the opportunity to tackle new challenges. She’s usually cheerier than her coworkers at the start of the week, breezes into the office and leads the chorus of ‘good mornings!’ and idle chit chat as computers are turned on and coffee cups are filled.

She’d gotten a couple of side-eyes this morning, the thunderclouds over her head obvious even to those she’s not close with. A few people had asked what was wrong, had backed off when Caroline had made vague excuses of feeling like she was coming down with something.

Kat’s away for the week, visiting her family in Bulgaria, so Caroline couldn’t even really vent, or even assign blame. Her issue is 97% Katherine’s fault. Caroline will own the remaining 3% for taking Kat’s terrible advice.

She’d have been better off staying in on Saturday night, gorging on Haagen Daas and binging whatever Netflix show had to hottest people on the cover image.

No, Caroline had gone out. Had worn a dress slightly too nice for the casual bar (two neighborhoods over, Kat had stressed the importance of venturing outside her home turf) she’d found. She’d settled on a stool, had been prepared to enact step two of the plan (find the most attractive person in the place, offer to buy them a drink) only to be distracted by the bartender.

Klaus.

In her defense, he’d been very pleasing to the eye. The ear too, when he’d spoken. In hindsight he’d probably been a little too pleasing to her brain. Kat’s plan had stressed that she’d needed to listen to her body, find someone who made her a little sweaty and a lot excited. Caroline had been amused when the bartender had deftly deflected the attention of a few bridesmaids, annoyed when he’d insisted on making her a drink better than the vodka water she’d ordered. Grudgingly impressed when the concoction he’d place in front of her had been amazing.

They’d chatted about her job, he’d explained that he juggled a few things – bartending, commissioned illustrations and his own paintings. They’d talked about where they’d come from and Caroline had asked him a million questions. She’d always wanted to go to New Orleans, and hadn’t yet made it to the UK. Mostly because she’s a workaholic and the idea of taking more than a week off gives her hives.

She probably should have paid more attention to Kat’s rules. “Don’t talk to the dude you’re going to get under” had been number one had been heavily implied. Kat had been lecturing her over their lunch hour and Caroline had nodded and hummed at appropriate intervals but she’d thought the conversation kind of dumb. She’d humored Katherine, has found that’s usually the wisest course of action. Kat hadn’t listened when Caroline had pointed out that she didn’t need to get over her ex (she’d done that ages ago, thank you). She’s just a little bitter that he’s getting married and she hasn’t even really liked someone since him.

She’d only vented about it because her mom’s birthday’s coming up. Caroline’s heading back to Mystic Falls for the weekend and people are definitely going to comment, to look for her reactions and whisper behind her back.

She’d been super glad to leave that aspect of small town life behind when she’d escaped for college, Caroline’s never even considered going back.

Sunday morning she’d taken advantage of the anonymity of a big city, had slipped from Klaus the bartender’s apartment when the sun had barely been out, hadn’t garnered more than a raised brow or two in her borrowed (okay stolen) clothes while she’d waited for her Uber to arrive.

Caroline had regretted not leaving her number as soon as the door to his place had closed behind her. Had even checked the doorknob to see if she could sneak back in. It had been locked and she’d told herself she’d been silly to feel disappointed. Getting attached was beside the point of the exercise. Besides, weren’t relationships grown from one night stands bound to fail? There’s probably a study.

Or maybe just a Cosmo article.

Either way, Caroline’s only option had been to leave, to never return to Klaus’ bar (or anything in it’s vicinity). She’d treated herself to a shower and a bath when she’d gotten home, had broken out her fancy special occasion bath oil and drowsed the morning away in the tub.

Her mood had remained subdued, she’d chalked it up to sleep deprivation and had tucked herself into bed at 9:00 PM.

She’d been super productive at work, had avoided breaks and her coworkers, and plowed through both her urgent to do list and her secondary things to get ahead list.

Caroline decides to treat herself to something excessively carb-y for dinner as a reward.

The best all day breakfast place she knows is just on the cusp of the mental no-fly zone she’d enacted around Klaus’ bar. She and the girls do brunch there nearly every week, and Caroline attacks a pile of peanut butter stuffed waffles (liberally drizzled with chocolate sauce and caramelized bananas) once a month when her uterus demands it. It’s always packed so reservations are a must for a group but, if she’s alone, she can usually slip into a place at the counter.

Her heart sinks a little when she walks in and spots the wall of people perched on the stools she’d been hoping to grab. The hostess smiles sympathetically when she sees Caroline. Her name’s April and she’s a gem, soft spoken but ruthlessly efficient – something Caroline respects. “Bad day?” she asks.

Caroline sighs, slumps slightly, her spine twinging in protest. She’s been tense all day and now that she’s surrounded by amazing smells – bacon and syrup and a hint of bitter coffee - her stomach’s growling. “Bad day, bad weekend. Any idea how long the wait will be?”

April looks down, brows furrowing as she puzzles over the seating chart. She turns from Caroline, rising up on her tiptoes. “You know what? Give me one second.”

She turns before Caroline can reply, slipping through tables and between people deftly until she’d out of sight. Caroline drums her fingers on the hostesses station, considers getting her order to go. Her food won’t be quite as good once she’s gotten back to her apartment but maybe she’d now just doomed to dissatisfaction and regrettable decisions.

April returns before Caroline can dwell any further on that bit of depressingness her brain had cooked up. April’s smiling and Caroline straightens, a tiny bit of hope kindling. She’s due for a turn of her luck, isn’t she?

“Okay, so. Slightly unconventional solution. A guy showed up about ten minutes ago, nabbed the last two-top. He’s a regular, a recent one, a good tipper. Kind of particular about his order, gets a little ornery when small children start wailing but he’s friendly enough.”

Caroline has no idea where this is going and she tries not to urge April to get to the point. Being snippy isn’t going to get a plate of comfort food in front of her faster. “Okay?”

“I asked if he’d mind if someone shared his table. He seems a little preoccupied today so I figured he won’t mind if you’re not up for small talk. And bonus, he’s really nice to look at. Like, distractingly so.”

She hesitates, so not in the mood for company. Or another hot guy, if she’s being honest. The last one’s proving to be annoyingly hard to shake.

“Excuse me,” a voice calls from behind and Caroline steps forward automatically as a waiter squeezes by, a tray heavy with food balanced expertly. Her eyes linger on the food.

When Caroline turns back around April’s got a menu tucked under her arm. She grins, tips her head to the left, “Come on. It’s right this way.”

* * * * *

“Hi, thank you so…”

Words fail her. Something that’s never happened in all of Caroline’s twenty seven years.

Klaus seems just as shell shocked to find her sitting across from him, his eyes wide and his cup frozen halfway between the table and his mouth.

What are the freaking odds?

The guy who’d graciously agreed to let her share his table had been seated with his back to the restaurant, Caroline had noted that his hair was a bit of a mess, dark blonde and curling at the ends, that his shirt was a plain grey. No bells had rung but then she hadn’t really spent much time looking at Klaus from behind.

She’d caught a glimpse after the first round, when he’d left the bed to dispose of the condom and grab them some water. He’d been naked though, and unashamed about it. Caroline had been distracted.

Klaus recovers first, setting his cup down carefully, his hand lingering around the rim as he twists it. He glances quickly at April, who’s set down Caroline’s menu and is watching them curiously. “It’s not a problem. May I ask your name, love?”

Caroline’s eyes narrow instinctively – had he forgotten her name?! Super insulting but if that’s the case she’s going to be able to stop second guessing her decision to leave his place without waking him real quick.

It’s the teeniest silver lining but Caroline will take what she can get.

“Caroline. And thank you, is what I meant to say.”

“Not a problem,” he murmurs, his head dipping until his eyes focus on the menu in front of him.

“What can I get you to drink, Caroline?” April asks. She tips her head in Klaus’ direction when Caroline meets her eyes, her eyebrows rising and falling suggestively.

Why does everyone seem to think she needs help in this department?

“Hot chocolate please. With whipped cream.” It’s a shame this place isn’t licensed, she could really go with a heavy pour of bourbon in her drink.

April scribbles on her pad, smiles brightly. “Be back in a couple of minutes!”

She bustles away and Caroline busies herself with unbuttoning her jacket, unwinding her scarf. Tucking her purse under the table, between her feet. She draws the process out as long as she can, far longer than is reasonable, and sneaks a glance at Klaus when she’s done.

Only to find him watching her, a challenge in his expression. “Come here often?” he asks, blandly polite as if they are, in fact, strangers.

It’s annoying.

Caroline takes a sip of her water, decides to at least attempt to diffuse the tension. “So, this is awkward. I’ll acknowledge it.”

The noise Klaus makes is too close to a scoff to be amused. “Will you? Funny, I’d have guessed you’d avoid the issue entirely. I’m surprised you’re still here. Is running away only a weekend habit?”

Oh boy. Blandly polite did not last long. His eyes are sharp, focused, his mouth set stubbornly once he’s finished speaking. Klaus is pissed.

It’s terrible but Caroline’s kind of glad.

“I’m pleased to hear that Caroline is, in fact, your name. I’ve been wondering.”

“Yep, that’s me. Caroline. Caroline Forbes, you can google me if you want. I didn’t tell you any lies on Saturday.”

It’s clear Klaus doesn’t believe her.

He shifts back in his chair, an arm coming up to rest on the table. She avoids looking at his forearm, her fingers curling into a fist in her lap as a vivid memory returns. Their last time had been lazy, Klaus pressed up behind her with the both of them just waking up. He’d curved an arm underneath Caroline, between her thighs, rubbed and teased as his movements inside of her had grown jerky. He’d come first but Caroline hadn’t minded, not when he’d been so determined to get her there too. She’d dug her nails in when it had hit her, turned her face into his pillows to muffle her moans.

She wonders if the marks are still visible on his skin.

“Will you tell me the truth if I ask you why you left?”

Caroline sucks in a breath, shocked that he’s being so direct. Maybe she shouldn’t be. He’d asked her plenty of questions over the hours they’d spent together. Mundane getting to know you things. He’d urged her to tell him what felt good, what she liked, his voice rough and his accent thick.

Her honesty had been richly rewarded. Repeatedly.

Caroline figures there’s no harm in seeing if that trend continues, “I felt like I was supposed to. I was in the hallway outside of your apartment when I realized I didn’t want to.”

She watches him absorb her answer, even if it kind of kills her. He relaxes slowly, his mouth curling into a smile that’s far more inviting. He makes her wait, takes his time taking another sip of his drink. Caroline refuses to fidget.

“Interesting,” Klaus finally drawls. His chair scrapes across the tiles as he moves closer, his knees pressing lightly against hers under the table.

She wants to laugh in relief. She steals his cup, wrinkling her nose when she finds tea, not coffee. Drinks some anyway, because it’s not in her to back down. “Just interesting?” The questions comes out flirty, probably excessively so, considering they’re in a family establishment.

Oh well. Caroline’s day is looking way up, she’d going to roll with it.

“Promising,” Klaus amends, a familiar heat creeping into his gaze. He’s looked at her the same way Saturday night, right around the time Caroline had stopped paying attention to anyone else in the bar.

April appears at their table and Caroline, plunking Caroline’s oversized mug down and beginning to rattle off the specials. April doesn’t notice Klaus’ slightly peeved glare, thankfully. Caroline nudges him sharply with her knee, shaking her head reprovingly. The poor girl really doesn’t deserve any ire. She’s just doing her job.

Besides, April’s solely responsible for this promising turn of events. Caroline will have to figure out a way to thank her.

[leviathangourmet]

Dear profs X, Y, Z,

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

A counter-narrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews.

None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. No discussion is permitted for non-black victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of non-black violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd.

For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black interracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship. Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors. And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise.

Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.

I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end. I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.

[sciforce]

How to Make Team Communication Effective When Working Remotely?

So, your team has fully moved to remote work. You are probably already used to working in your pajamas, having endless snacks and communicating with your colleagues via Slack or Zoom. And suddenly you find out that your work has become less effective. It’s all about the discipline, you think at first. And your team thinks the same. And your manager. And to get your work back under control you start inventing new means of communication, having more meetings and then a few more. When hearing others’ experience with home office, the most common complaint (apart from having children at home, of course) is spending too much time on meetings. What can we do not to feel drowning in them?

In this blog post, we offer some possibilities to consider that might make your communication less disruptive and help you focus on your work instead of distracting from it.

Strategy 1. Document more

It sounds counter-intuitive — no one likes spending time on documenting each step or filling in lists of specifications and instructions. However unpleasant the process may be, it will boost the company’s effectiveness: on-site, people come up to each other’s desks to ask questions or just listen to conversations. Though fast and informal, this method can lead to rumors-like communication where the truth is eventually lost. With proper documentation, the team has a single reliable source of truth for all questions.

Make documentation everyone’s responsibility

Docs as Code is the approach that is gaining momentum now. It treats documents as a part of your code, ensuring version control, cooperation with other team members — and the importance of writing documentation for everyone. Even outside IT, this approach ensures that over time, teams that own their documents grow more responsible and respectful to one another’s time, move fast by adding changes to already existing docs, and are able to communicate the knowledge effectively across teams and to newcomers.

Write handbooks

Having documentation on the project somewhere in Gitlab is good, but when you don’t have a handbook that is reliably actionable, it can feel burdensome to seek answers in a repository. Handbooks usually are more human-friendly, as people tend to trust other humans who address them directly more than abstract words written online.

Documenting all your solutions makes communication more effective for team members who join a project or conversation midstream and need to understand what steps have been taken thus far, new hires who try to catch up with the rest of the team, managers who need to track the work done, and, finally, customers who want to understand what they get.

Strategy 2. Embrace textual communication

A logical extension of documentation, text communication can feel unusual or even uncomfortable for many. In remote environments, or in teams spread across countries with different time zones, communicating through text is ideal. It prevents a vicious cycle of meetings which serve only to “bring people up to speed.” Communicating answers to problems via text makes documentation easier and more trustworthy.

Make notes

When all your meetings are moved online, it’s crucial to maintain a written account of all the words said. Try to write everything down — from meeting notes to quarterly objectives. Before meetings, the lead can create an agenda and ask participants to add items for discussion. During meetings, team members or one person in charge can write down decisions, ideas, or notes to specify who is responsible for specific tasks or to trace the chain of reasoning leading to decisions. Documenting everything makes for a stronger, more informed, more trusting, and more connected team.

Writing down things is far from exciting, but it will provide you with reference that will evolve together with your team.

Strategy 3. Switch to asynchronous communication

We all are most likely used to communicating synchronously — gathering in the same place (physical or virtual) at the same time. An asynchronous workflow allows moving forward even when other stakeholders are unavailable. Asynchronous communication, by definition, is any type of communication where one person provides information and then there is a time lag before the recipients take in the information and offer their responses. Essentially, asynchronous communication is when you send a message without expecting an immediate response. The most common example of such communication is, of course, sending an email.

The major benefit of asynchronous communication is that it relieves employees from the burden of being always online and ready to react. Constant disruption of the work with requests for immediate reaction does not allow team members to concentrate and dive into the project, increases the stress and reduces their productivity.

However, though there are many tools of asynchronous communication — Google Drive, Monday, or Asana, to name just a few, they all have one prerequisite: a standardized method of documentation. Without a corporate standard, team members will be left to determine their own methods for communicating, that will inevitably lead to chaotic document movement across teams and departments.

Strategy 4. Make meetings optional

When we all have to work from home, sitting at another meeting becomes even more frustrating than ever. The way to avoid spending time on unnecessary meetings is to make them optional to attend. It is easy to reduce the number of mandatory meetings, if every meeting has an agenda that the team can collaborate on. The simplest way is to create a Google Doc that allows the team to contribute or modify questions. When the agenda is shaped, every person can decide whether to participate, or to catch up on the outcomes afterwards.

However, it is necessary to assure that all the information will not be lost even if some team members aren’t able to join you online. For example, Loom and Zoom allow recording meetings, which is particularly useful when some of the key stakeholders are absent.

Probably, the idea of “optional meetings” is absurd to those who are used to synchronous communication, but with the team working remotely, it is handy to ask people to contribute whenever they have time — with a deadline, of course!

Strategy 5. Maintaining informal communication

When people are physically located in the same place, informal communication is natural: social connections are crucial to build trust within the organization and to encourage knowledge sharing. Moreover, if we have friends at work, we are also more satisfied with our jobs and the company. But when working remotely, it may sound intentional and fake.

Using emojis

One thing that is easily transferred from personal conversations is using emojis to express emotions. Both remote employees and managers should feel comfortable using them in everyday discourse in professional settings. When working remotely, such visual tools bring about a larger pallet of tones and emotions, creating more empathy and the feeling of human connection. On top of this, using custom emojis allows colleagues to develop their own signal language and build more ties between team members.

It goes without saying that we all have a long way to go to adapt to working from home, and the feeling of isolation from your team is only one, though crucial, side of the overall struggle we are all having. The key to quick adaptation is to adopt a strategy and to try to find order in the present-day chaos. Let’s try and clean up our communication channels — and in the next post, we’ll talk about protecting our workplace from cyberattacks.

[thesffcorner]

How to Train your Dragon 3: The Hidden World

How to Train Your Dragon 3: Hidden World is the concluding film in the Httyd series, directed by Dean DeBois. It follows Hiccup and his crew, who after the events of the previous film, have become raiders, freeing dragons from the hunters’ ships, and bringing them back to Berk. Unfortunately, their meddling becomes known to the leaders of the hunters, and they hire Grimmel, the most notorious and deadly hunter, who has single-handedly killed every single Night Fury, except Toothless. Faced with the very real possibility of war, Hiccup decides to find the Hidden World; a mystical land where all dragons come from and hide there for good; but as always things aren’t as easy as they seem.

I have some mixed opinions on this series. On the one hand, I really love the animation: it’s the best DreamWorks has ever done, and every subsequent film pushes it further and further, with this third installment being no different. However, the stories have always been a mixed bag, and unfortunately, this last film is probably the weakest to date.

Animation:

Let’s start with the positives; like I said this series is known for it’s gorgeous animation and this sequel is no different. The scenes of the dragons flying are absolutely breathtaking, and this film focuses a lot on Toothless and a light fury, who becomes his mate. The scenes of Toothless trying to woo her over are hilarious and the scenes of them getting closer and flying in the clouds are marvelous. The entire design of the Hidden World, though not entirely original was likewise gorgeous; there are so many colors, and small details that make it feel alive.

Likewise the scenes with the Vikings are also great; you really get the sense that Berk, as cool as it is, is getting overcrowded, with dragons flying everywhere. There are several smaller set pieces in Berk that have to do with the dragons and they are hilarious; this series does rely a lot on visual humor, and I think it’s the best to date. The dragon designs are likewise very creative and cool; there’s a new type of dragons this time around, and they are like a dragon version of manticores, with cool poison spitting abilities.

The part where the animation flounders are the fight scenes; for whatever reason, DreamWorks excels at character designs and facial expressions, but when it comes to the human characters fighting or even really moving, they always struggle. The few fights we get are stiff and unnatural and it’s very strange considering how good the animation is in all other departments.

Story:

This is where we run into some issues. The stories in these films have never been especially complicated; they usually make up for this by having really great character relationships and a focus on Hiccup and Toothless’ friendship which is very strong and well developed. Unfortunately this time around, it feels like DuBois either didn’t have enough time or just didn’t know what kind of story he wanted to tell, so he took the plots of film 1 and 2 and frankensteined them together in this mess.

Let’s start with the good first. Hiccup and Toothless are the backbone of this franchise, and even here their relationship was great. I loved the idea of Hiccup having to let Toothless go, him coming to terms with the fact that Toothless is after all a dragon and can’t stay with Hiccup forever. I even liked Hiccup thinking he was nothing without Toothless, even though that was a plot-point from the first film. The entire epilogue of the film was incredibly endearing and sweet, even though I didn’t like how the film came to it.

There were some jokes that landed; the scene with Ruffnut and Grimmel was funny, the bit with Gobber and the dragon that multiplies, both of the confrontations Grimmel has with Hiccup, and especially the two scenes we have with Stoic.

Unfortunately, that’s about the positives I can say. The story really isn’t very good, and it starts with the villain.

Grimmel has a cool design and F Murray Abraham does a good job with his voice, even if his accent fluctuates wildly. However his motivation is just absolutely dumb, makes no sense, and we’ve already seen it before. He wants to kill dragons because he thinks humans and dragons can’t coexist. This is a) something we already covered in the first film with Stoic’s character, and b) incongruent with the idea that Grimel is this Dr. Zaroff type character who just enjoys the hunt so much, and thinks of dragons as nothing more than animals. Why would he be so concerned about humans befriending dragons, if he thinks dragons are just prey?

He has no real backstory, and he’s in the little too little to actually be threatening. He’s built up to be this insanely smart villain, but he gets outwitted by Hiccup twice, and even the way he finds the group at the end is by a mix of complete coincidence and Ruffnut's incompetence.

Then there’s the issue of the Hidden World. First, we have never heard anything about the Hidden World before, so Hiccup growing up with this legend that Stoic was obsessed with comes out of nowhere. The idea that he can just take the entirety of Berk and hide them in the Hidden World with the dragons is also utterly ridiculous. Granted, it’s supposed to be a bad idea, and he even gets called out on it by both Astrid and Valka, but no one points out that like, how will humans live there? Also will all the humans of Berk just completely agree to disappear and never see anyone not from Berk ever? No one has friends or family outside of Berk at all? Really?

The ending also feels so rushed and kind of dumb. I get the idea that Hiccup learning to let Toothless go is in a way a grander statement on the relationship between the humans and the dragons, but… A) dragons still hunt for food on human territory; they don’t stay in the Hidden World forever, they come to the rest of the land to eat and mate, that’s how humans have come in contact with them in the first place. B) Not one person out of the few hundred people that live in Berk disagrees with this decision to simply let all of the dragons go hide? Not one? Not one dragon decides to stay behind? Toothless is just that much of an alpha that they all just unanimously agree? What about dragons that were not at the battle? Ones that are still in captivity?

It was just such a sloppy ending, and a really ‘simple’ solution in a series that prides itself on more complex ideas and problems, or at least it did in the first two movies.

Characters:

The characters also all suffer from this story and writing. First we have the supporting characters. There are simply so many of them, and none of them are really used or have any impact on the plot. With the exception of Astrid (who will get a whole section afterwards, because boy oh boy did that make me mad) and Ruffnut who gets 1 funny scene, none of the other dragon riders have anything to do. They each get a bit here or there, but it’s all humorous (a lot of it is just cringey and targeted at very small kids), and none of them get any character development. The running joke with all of them is that they are incompetent; it was the running joke in 1 and in 2 and it’s back here again. You are seriously telling me, that after 3 movies you still can’t think of anything interesting for any of these characters to do other than be annoying and incompetent?

Eret, Gobber and Valka might as well not have been in this film; they have nothing to do, and are completely wasted. Eret isn’t even used as comic relief; he does nothing the entire film, and I don’t understand why he was here.

Valka especially hurt, because the second film spent such a long time building her up as this really interesting complex character, and having this very complex and tender relationship with Hiccup, and here she has one scene with him. It was like all the meticulous character development was completely forgotten so we could have her just be the dotting mom in one scene and nothing else.

Stoic makes an appearance as a flashback, and that was the only scene that was touching in this whole film, outside of Toothless and Hiccup’s relationship.

The way Astrid’s character is treated made me mad. First she and Hiccup are forced in this really weird marriage subplot that comes out of nowhere and feels really odd to say about someone who sounds exactly the same now at age 20, as he did at age 13, like Hiccup. Then there are so many scenes where Valka is telling Astrid to go talk to Hiccup because he’ll listen to her, to make sure he’s alright, to put up with his dumb decisions and bad choices because… because why? Why can’t Astrid take the lead? Why is it Hiccup? She’s clearly more authoritative, respected and frankly just better suited to the role and the film makes no effort to disguise this or make an excuse as to why maybe Hiccup should lead other than he’s the main character. It’s kind of a bad message to send to young girl that they should just become completely subservient to the motivations and growth of their male love interest, is all I’m saying.

Then there’s Hiccup. Poor Hiccup. Though his character design changed, his character is still the same as the first film. He’s still incompetent, still insecure, still has no sway on the villagers. His character arc in the first film was realising he was worth something, and that the only way to be a leader and a Viking isn’t only what Stoic says. In the second film he learns to accept himself again, to become a leader. And now again here, he has to have Astrid tell him that he’s not a leader just because of Toothless, that he’s his own person. Like, it’s the third film, and he’s still going through the absolute same character arc. There’s no growth, no change, and it’s not fun to watch. It’s exhausting.

Conclusion:

I think this film is a pretty big letdown from the past 2 films. I don’t know what DreamWorks’ issue with third films in a series is, but this one falls into the same trap as Shrek and Kung-Fu Panda 3. It’s rushed, unoriginal and disappointing, which makes me very sad to say.

letterboxd

[twilightcookies-blog]

For Forums That Are Publicly Accessible

Some products use astronomical amounts of energy and time to produce, such as leather products. You can use the program with any doctor you choose. Many items can be ordered later by pouch. Here at the terminal, visitors and residents can buy bus and ferry transportation passes valid for one single or return trip or for one, online pharmacy three or seven days. Tweed CEO Bruce Linton wanted to be the one to make the first official legal sale of cannabis in Canadian history, at Tweed’s location on Water Street in downtown St. John’s. For example, many Blue Cross and Blue Shield associations and HMOs report only the total number of persons covered and make no distinction between individual coverage and group coverage. In the absence of leadership coming from Washington, we need to think outside the box and lead the charge ourselves to bring universal health coverage to Colorado. Provide Colorado communities latitude to experiment with solutions for treating people currently suffering from opioid addiction, and work with local police departments to adopt enforcement measures focused on harm reduction. Our outdoors has the power to transform the economies of communities across the state. We made sure we covered every single area of anabolic steroids. I kept our dog in our bedroom with closed door while we slept so we could put a few open area traps out at night. The key difference is that plans are using detailed data analysis to target those services which offer little or no clinical benefit while being careful not to reduce access to potentially beneficial services. Toll-free telephone lines are often maintained to provide information and advice to employees. We still have silos of information locked away in hospitals, offices, pharmacies, and labs. So even though we’re ahead of the pack, we still have a long way to go. Homesteading and survival online and in-person training course are typically affordable and teach even first aid novices how to deal with routine medical emergencies. Garbage is collected three times a week in most neighborhoods and garden clippings are collected weekly. 19. Electronic Medication Administration Records - Stage 2 adds a new requirement that 30% of medication orders are tracked via an EMAR. From that point forward, sponsors would then be on equal footing with the requirement simply to file monthly reports indicating their continued involvement in the platform but not being required to submit screenshots of all of the interactions. Adsorb is similar to the word adjoin; both have the Latin prefix “ad.” So the mechanism that charcoal uses to remove toxins, bacteria etc. is that it attracts these things electrostatically, safely removing them from the body. 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It refers to a satirical novel by Joseph Heller (and later a chilling movie) about flight crews operating from North Africa during World War II. He lives in a filthy apartment, has long, hippie hair, and goes drinking rather than starting his novel. However, studies have shown that revolving doors have a cooling effect in buildings when compared to the traditional swing doors. Throughout the years of Republican rule, drug company lobbyists have gotten everything they have asked for. In any case, now that Ambien has been accessible to people in general for more than 20 years, the more genuine symptoms of this drug have become exposed. My experience is that most hospitals have advanced directives recorded for less than 25% of their patients. But first we have to understand the basic truths on exercise and diabetes. Some insurers are promoting them as a way of providing the basic life insurance plan of an employee. In a dedicated phishing post, we look at the how to avoid or repair the damage done by common phishing scams, some of which are explained below. They don’t receive the item so call the seller to inquire. I don’t want you to worry about it. Update: October 30, 2018 - My seven-year-old daughter broke her arm climbing on a bounce house at the end of the summer, and I wanted to report that everything has gone as planned with Liberty so far. A bicameral Parliament consisting of a 36-member House of Representatives and a 31-member Senate. This makes the purchase of generic drugs affordable to its citizens. Our entrepreneurial spirit has pioneered massive advances in technology, manufacturing, and energy development. The tech support scam often starts as a phone call and ultimately ends up online, similar to the bank scam mentioned above. 200,000 would be needed for the claims. Descriptively, stuff them with attender overnight. In addition, the employer is unable to deduct the premiums as a business expense but does receive the death proceeds tax free.

[empmoniitor]

ACCESS MANAGEMENT: WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT | 09 BENEFITS OF IAM

The modern business conditions are entirely distinct from what was usual just 20 years ago. The world we live in is an information age. When you look around, you will find that even the basic activities are deeply integrated with technology.

Running a business is no longer about delivering quality services or products, it is also about protecting your data and implementing confidentiality. Identity and Access Management refers to the IT security discipline, framework, and solutions for handling digital individualities.

Access management systems provide an extra layer of security over your business’s network. It gives control over which groups of employees have access to which applications. IAM systems are as easy or intricate as you required them to be with customization possibilities for revealing certain files, documents, records, and more.

If your company has numerous departments with unique roles, implementing IAM services is proactive. Only employees you require can progress forward through a company portal, and they’ll be able to see only the appropriate information. In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about identity and access management. Let’s dive in!

WHAT IS IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT?

In simple words, identity and access management is a structure of business processes, policies, and technologies that aids the management of electronic or digital identities. It helps administrators to control user access to critical information within their organizations.

IAM systems include single sign-on systems, two-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication, and privileged access management. It also provides the ability to store and share appropriate data.

You can deploy IAM systems on-premises by a third-party vendor through a cloud-based subscription model or a hybrid model.

On a fundamental level, IAM includes the following components:

Employee identification in a system.

Task identification in a system and assigning tasks to employees.

Adding, removing, and updating individuals and their roles in a system.

To assign levels of access to individuals or groups of individuals.

Protecting the sensitive data within the system and securing the system itself.

The implementation of identity and access management technology

ensures the safety of your sensitive data, and it protects it from an outside party who can potentially view, steal, or manipulate sensitive business data.

HOW DO IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT WORK?

Identity and access management (IAM) ensures that the relevant people and job roles in your organization (identities) can access the tools they require to do their jobs. Identity management and access systems empower your organization to maintain employee apps without logging into each app as an administrator.

Identity management solutions generally perform two tasks:

IAM verifies that the user, software, or hardware is the same as they say they are by authenticating their credentials against a database. IAM cloud identity tools are more secure and flexible than traditional username and password solutions.

Identity access management systems grant only the appropriate level of access. Instead of a username and password allowing access to an entire software suite, IAM allows for narrow slices of access to be portioned out, i.e. editor, viewer, and commenter in a content management system.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IDENTITY MANAGEMENT AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT?

Identity management verifies your identity and stores information about you. An identity management database stores your information such as your job title and your direct reports – and authenticates that you are, indeed, the person described in the database.

Access management utilizes the stored identity to determine which software sets you’re allowed access to and what actions you can perform when you access them. For example, access management will ensure that every manager with direct reports has access to an app for timesheet approval, but not so much access that they can approve their timesheets.

BENEFITS OF IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT:

Identity and access management is the information security practice that allows users access to relevant technology resources as required. It includes three major concepts: identification, authentication, and authorization. Together, these three processes combine to ensure that specified users have the access they need to do their jobs while securing sensitive resources and information from unauthorized users.

SECURED MULTI-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION:

These include technologies like Iris Scanning, Fingerprint Sensors, Face Recognition, and much more. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) ensures that the user provides at least two sources of evidence to confirm their identity. This leads to a reduction in the risk of identity theft.

ERADICATION OF WEAK PASSWORDS:

Numerous data breaches result due to passwords that are either stolen, default, or weak. By implementing best practices in credential management, Identity and Access Management systems can effectively eradicate the possibility of a weak password being set by a user.

ADVANCED TRACKING OF MALICIOUS ACTIVITY:

State-of-the-art IAM systems offer advanced tracking of malicious behavior using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and risk-based authentication. This enables organizations to prevent online attacks and avoid financial loss.

AFFORDABLE SECURITY EXPENSES:

IAM assists in reducing the amount needed to invest in security. For example, a Cloud-based Identity and Access Management solution diminishes the requirement of an on-premise foundation.

INCREASED SECURITY MEASURES:

With the help of IAM technologies, organizations can efficiently distinguish and alleviate the risks associated with security. Such technologies allow instant access revocation to all business-critical systems for those who are in charge.

EASY DISTRIBUTION OF SECURITY POLICIES:

This particular feature of the IAM model provides a common platform to apply security policies to all organizational systems with ease.

PROFITABLE COLLABORATION WITH THE GOVERNMENT NORMS:

IAM solutions let firms display that their information is not being ill-treated. The data required for auditing gets provided by these organizations. Thus IAM solutions ensure adequate compliance of firms with government regulations. The company and the government mutually benefit due to these solutions.

IMPROVED DATA SECURITY:

Consolidating authentication and authorization functionality on a single platform provides IT professionals with a consistent method for managing user access. When a user leaves an organization, IT administrators may revoke their access to the centralized IAM solution with the confidence that this revocation will immediately take effect across all of the technology platforms integrated with that IAM platform.

ACCESS MANAGEMENT REDUCED SECURITY COSTS:

Using a single IAM platform to manage all user access allows administrators to perform their work more efficiently. A security team may have some additional upfront work integrating new systems into an IAM platform but may then dedicate time to the management of that platform, saving time and money.

MORE EFFECTIVE ACCESS TO RESOURCES:

When users receive access through a centralized platform, they benefit from the use of single sign-on (SSO) technology that limits the number of interactions they have with security systems and increases the likelihood that their legitimate attempts to access resources will succeed.

With the help of the EmpMonitor, you can monitor every activity of your employees during office hours. It will help you to measure and ensure that they meet the productivity benchmarks.

ENFORCE SECURITY AND IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY WITH EMPMONITOR:

EmpMonitor is a cloud-based automatic work time tracker app and employee monitoring system that calculates the productive and idle hours helps for measuring the productivity of your organization and employees.

EmpMonitor monitors every activity such as logging in, break time, idle time, web pages accessed, etc. All this information helps you to measure the productivity and efficiency of employees.

It provides accurate details of productive hours with just one click. It also offers an option to export the data in timesheets in the required format, which helps to minimize human error, and you can monitor every activity of your employees from a single dashboard.

EmpMonitor offers many useful tools to ensure the productivity and efficiency of your employees:

Time Tracking:

With the Help of EmpMonitor, you can track every minute of your employee’s working hours. It gives you a detailed report on how much time they have been active, idle, neutral, or offline from a single dashboard.

Productivity Tracking:

Empmonitor allows you to identify the productivity killers and provide a clear understanding of every process from end to end. You can track and measure the productivity of your employees.

Regular Screenshots:

EmpMonitor captures screenshots of your employee’s system. It keeps them in check that they are working on assigned tasks and not scrolling through cat videos.

Keystroke Logging:

Keystroke logging is one of the best ways to ensure data security. It lets you know about the words that employees type

CHECK OUR LATEST BLOGS:

How To Monitor Employee Internet Usage? Is managing remote employees more difficult than ever in this WFH culture? Why Do Corporations Need Any Kind of Tracking on Employees?

WRAPPING WORDS:

Identity and access management systems are an integral aspect of the industrial world as they contribute to efficient and secure data and resource management. They have multifarious tools and technologies that aid in the safe and controlled distribution of resources across a company network. Numerous benefits of Identity and Access Management make it a one-stop organizational solution.

With the upsurge in diverse cybercrimes, organizational security becomes exigent. Identity Access Management solves the problem at hand and also reduces the costs involved in building secured systems. It enhances productivity, making it the best option when it comes down to organizational security and management.

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

[leyahroehl]

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[sweatydazeface]

“Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries.

And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam.

These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.

I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.

I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.”

[duaneodavila]

UnitedLex Luthor

(Image via Getty)

Dan Reed is the most compelling kind of supervillain; the one who believes that he’s actually the hero. To be fair, he very well might be.

Reed is the CEO of UnitedLex, an alternative legal services provider bent on disrupting the basic fabric of the global legal market. He’s got an origin story straight out of the comic books. Reed made all the money he’ll ever need early in his career after growing and selling out of two successful companies. With his financial future secure, Reed set about dreaming up a project focused on personal meaning. His solution to this was UnitedLex, a company he believes will break the chokehold of Biglaw and democratize the legal practice.

Reed’s got the ideas, the platform, and the financial backing. UnitedLex is developing big-name clients like GE and DXC, and partnering with major firms like Latham & Watkins. Per their PR Department, they closed $1.5 billion in deals over a recent 18-month period. They have all the appearances of an industry giant in the making. So are they a force for good, or something else?

Beyond The Wall Of Biz-Speak

One could be forgiven if they read UnitedLex’s press releases for hours and still walked away with little idea of what the company actually does. According to its mission statement, UnitedLex “drives transformation” while “searching for the ‘art of the possible.’” One press release describes legal services as “one of the few remaining verticals that is early in the penetration curve of technology, consulting, and solution delivery.” But behind the wall of marketing and business clichés, there appears to be serious substance wedded to global ambition.

The basic structure of the company is threefold. First, it’s a consulting company focusing on helping in-house legal departments develop efficiencies and utilize technology. Second, it’s an engineering and technology company actively developing solutions to sell to those in-house departments. Finally, it’s a legal staffing solution. It supplies lawyers on an as-needed basis to clients ranging in experience and sophistication from highly experienced senior attorneys down to newly minted law grads working remotely out of coffee shops. Many of its attorneys are based outside the U.S. in India.

On their own, none of these concepts is particularly groundbreaking. In some ways it’s just a more focused version of the efforts the Big 4 accounting firms have been making to bring their consulting expertise into the legal space. But where the Big 4 have their hands in a lot of pots, UnitedLex is focused exclusively on the legal market.

It seems to be paying off. One of Europe’s biggest equity funds, CVC Capital Partners, announced a few months back that it was purchasing a majority share in UnitedLex, reportedly for $500 million. UnitedLex also claims to count 25 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies among their clientele, and recently inked a massive deal with Ford Motor Company to transform their IP department from a cost center into a revenue generator.

So what part of successful entrepreneur developing a tool people want qualifies him as a potential supervillain? It’s the method behind the madness — or brilliance, depending on your vantage point.

It’s All About The Labor

The unfortunate reality of the legal market is that our costs of doing business are mostly labor-related. It doesn’t cost much to rent an office, buy a computer, and get to work. Where legal departments spend their money and time is on human expertise, and that’s generally expensive.

What UnitedLex appears to be doing, better than potentially anyone, is cutting the cost of labor. For example, their “Contract Room” platform breaks major deals down into subcomponents and stages, then assigns the components out based on the expertise necessary. Whereas in a traditional law firm a single experienced attorney might oversee all aspects of a deal, at UnitedLex that experienced attorney handles the top-level negotiations, while a team of outsourced law school grads working for 1/10th the price may handle the more routine aspects of the transaction.

Clients have every reason to love this approach. It’s bottom-line and efficiency oriented, something everyone should strive to be. But do you see any human element in that interaction? This kind of model necessarily treats attorneys as cogs to be slotted in where appropriate and replaced as needed. If UnitedLex’s structure is closest to the Big 4 accounting firms, its actual practices are basically Lyft for attorneys.

This is very much by design. The democratization of the legal market Dan Reed is striving for means opening it up to the industry’s newbies and have-nots who didn’t make it into the traditional firms. UnitedLex has relationships with a number of law schools where it places simple work with newly minted grads. The grads develop practical experience and expertise they wouldn’t otherwise get, and everyone makes some money. Attorneys without experience, without clients, who otherwise would struggle to make ends meet, now have a chance to do legal work and get paid.

What Biglaw Gets Right

But does UnitedLex lift up those inexperienced attorneys and develop them, or is it simply creating a permanent servant class within the legal job market? Biglaw is rightly criticized for many, many things, but one inherent virtue of that system is that it benefits when it develops its talent pool. A firm can make a bit of money off a third-year associate billing for other attorneys. It makes a lot more when that third-year turns into a rainmaker themselves, developing their skill set and bringing in clients to match.

UnitedLex doesn’t have that same incentive. The client relationship lies with the company itself, not its staff attorneys, and it treats skill sets as ultimately fungible. A young attorney growing their skill set just means that attorney has to be staffed onto different matters, and the company needs to find someone else to handle the simpler tasks. Barring an altruistic motive to do the right thing, the company gains nothing from staff development except some administrative headache.

There’s also the problem that nobody gets rich driving a rideshare. In fact, once less apparent costs like depreciation and repairs are accounted for, many drivers are making less than minimum wage. Some outright lose money. The biggest winners of the Lyft and Uber revolution are Uber and Lyft themselves, and the public that now has access to cheap, fungible, convenient ridesharing. The drivers who generate all that benefit get just a sliver of the pie. I worry about that same dynamic transferring over to the legal market. Everyone in the UnitedLex model seems poised to win big, except the lawyers actually making it all possible.

Whose Story Is It?

It’s easy for me to air these kinds of concerns because if UnitedLex is Lyft, law firms are the traditional cab industry that Uber and Lyft have attacked. UnitedLex is a competitive threat to me, and thousands of Biglaw attorneys across the world.

Yet I don’t think my reaction is entirely based on self-interest. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the mentorship and growth opportunities that the law firm model provided me. Done right, the law firm model becomes about more than making money. It’s about passing down knowledge, skills, and an ethic to a new generation, helping people bootstrap themselves into a successful career. I struggle to see UnitedLex or any of its many competitors doing the same. While it may make its clients or shareholders wealthier, it may make our profession poorer.

Dan Reed might be the supervillain of this story. Or Biglaw might just be the henchmen the hero needs to do battle with in service of the greater good. Either way, UnitedLex is spoiling for a fight, and set to do some damage.

James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

UnitedLex Luthor republished via Above the Law

[wellesleyunderground]

Wellesley in STEM: Survival by Jenny Ross ‘00 (@DrJennyRoss)

Reposted with permission from Woman of Science

I am a woman in a male-dominated field. In my department, being cis-white male is being a part of a 67% majority when you include all lecturers. If you reduce your scope to tenure-track faculty (the upper class), cis-white male is 74% of that group. So, although I am a white woman and in the privileged class in the country, fighting every day for women and under-represented groups’ equality within my field and department has made me aware of many other people’s struggles.

I was recently talking to my unicorn friend (a black woman in my cis-white male field), and she said something extremely important that I hadn’t thought of before: When you are a minority in a field, it is hard to tell if the problems you face are normal or due to your minority status. Because it is difficult to tell, and because it can be embarrassing or difficult to ask majority-members about your problems, it is easy to conclude that your troubles all spurn from being a minority. If you chalk every problem you have up to being a woman, you quickly become labeled as a whiney minority who wants special treatment. This is a common complaint which is spurned from both your unicorn status – the fact that there is legit racism and sexism against you – and your not knowing what is “normal” for majority-people.

Another issue that minorities face is that we can become isolated. Once you are labeled a whiney minority, it can be difficult to make friends and get to know people. That can be isolating. Isolation results in marginalization. Marginalization results in more whining, and it is a vicious cycle. I have noticed that this often happens to senior women in cis-white male dominated fields, and they are written off as “crazy” (see this blog post). Further, despite the marginalized person being about as productive, funded, etc as other majority-persons in the department, their contributions don’t seem to count as much and they cannot maintain respect from their colleagues. I have noticed that the senior women who are marginalized are not asked to lead important committees in the department. Younger women are not yet qualified and that keeps the leadership within the majority group’s leadership.

When a junior woman/minority breaks through the glass ceiling, typically by being an absolute superstar who must win more awards and have more papers and grants than others, they get singled out as the unicorn who is acceptable to the majority. The majority wants diversity, so they will then overburden that “acceptable minority” with more work, service, and leadership. Simultaneously, the “regular” egalitarian-shared work load is not removed – because it wouldn’t be fair for you to do less – what you think you are so special you don’t have to pull your weight in the department? If you complain about the service load, you are risking being a whiney minority.

So, women/minority superstars end up doing a lot more work and it goes unnoticed. Further, the minority superstar must keep up their superstar research status, as they are constantly at risk of slipping into whiney minority-marginalized status if there is a dip in paper production or funding. Yet, majority-member colleagues with a dip in funding or paper output are still allowed to serve as leaders, and they are allowed to ask to be taken out of service roles that are overly burdensome without consequence. Thus, women/minorities must do more to earn the respect of their colleagues and they must do more to maintain the respect of their majority counterparts.

An additional burden of being a minority-status person in a department is the constant fight just to maintain normalcy. I have written about this previously here. Because, frankly, shit does happen and it does happen more to minority-status people. Add on top of that the fact that we can’t always tell if stuff is real or we are being too sensitive, but erring on the side of doing nothing can have serious negative impacts.

Now, these are not the only issues under-represented groups face, but these are the ones I that are often hidden or difficult to understand by majority-persons. Ultimately it comes down to cultivating the opinions of others about you. It is a PR issue. I spend a lot of energy on these PR issues. Brainpower I could be using to be smarter in my science. But, it is worth it to me to stay in the non-marginalized demographic.

The spirit of this blog is not just to explain and complain, but to come up with solutions that all parties can take back to change the situation.

Hire more minorities. OK, this is perhaps obvious. If you just hire more minority faculty, it is harder for them to be singled out in a variety of ways. They don’t feel as isolated and walking on a knife-edge. They can ask each other for advice. The majority people are also more comfortable with minority-status peers when there are more of them. Because we are not all the same (shocker!). If there is only one woman, you might be confused about how she responds to things and why she is getting upset. (I am assuming you are a nice person who wants your minority-status peer to succeed.) If there are 8 women, probably one of them can help you understand what’s going on.

Make friends. Many minority faculty feel isolated because they don’t make friends at work. Not having friends at work sucks. Even if you are a total introvert and are rejuvenated by being alone, I still advocate making friends. If you are a majority-status person, make friends with minority-status people. If you are a minority, make friends with your majority-status colleagues. It is vitally important that you have a diversity of friends (we all value diversity, right?).

You also need to have friends who have the same or similar minority-status as you, because there might be things you can’t talk about with majority people. We all need to have people we can whine and bitch to. You also need friends who are majority-status. Why? Because you need people you trust who can tell you if what you are seeing and feeling is racism/sexism or just regular old periodic suckiness of this job? You need to know how a cis-white male would deal with the same situations you are dealing with.

How do you make friends? Ask people to go to lunch. Invite them to your house for dinner. Invited them out for drinks after work. Assemble a group to see a campy movie. I know it feels weird to make friends as an adult, but you need to do it. Also, people are busy, just as you are busy as a faculty member. If you don’t get a response or get a no, you have to try again. Spending time with friends outside of work helps you realize your shared values as scientists, researchers, teachers, and even parents or members of the town. Having shared values builds trust. Trust is essential for sharing difficult or embarrassing situations where you might need help.

Have mentors. Some departments have assigned mentors and you might hit it off – that is great. Much like you should not have one set of friends, you should also not have one set of mentors. You also need to make sure your mentors are many different types of people (diversity!). You need to trust them, and that might mean being friends with them (see above). The principles of cultivating mentors is similar to friendships. The main difference is that you should come with questions and ask for help sometimes.

Ask for help. I have said this before when talking about sexist evaluations, but you will have to swallow your pride and ask for help about embarrassing situations. As I said, if you are too embarrassed to do what you have to do in order to be successful at this job, you are at risk of losing this job. You are also at risk of becoming marginalized.

Let me give you an example from a recent experience of my own. My first few students weren’t working out in the lab. The first, I fired because he wasn’t working or showing up, and I couldn’t really tolerate such work ethic in a lab at such an early stage. The second student quit because the work was much harder than anticipated. This was followed by another and another. Luckily, I recruited a good postdoc and a student from a different graduate program who could handle the work. I could have just kept quiet and hoped that my colleagues didn’t notice the number of students running through my lab. Instead, I went to my mentors to tell them what was happening and get advice on what to do. I also asked if my having no graduate students from my home department would hurt me at tenure time. By asking for help and being frank and honest, I was letting my mentors (and colleagues) know that I know my situation was not ideal, but that there were good reasons for what was happening. I also told them my solution and tried to gauge how much it would matter for my career.

Also, this is not just for women or minorities. Men who have bad teaching evaluations, overloaded service, difficulties managing your students, or other issues should also speak up and talk to your mentors. I know it is scary, but not getting tenure is scarier to me.

Identify bullish*t. When you are a woman or minority in a majority white-male-cis world,  you will get treated differently because of your status. It will happen, so how do you identify it, so that you are not complaining about something that is normal? If you are a majority-member wanting to be an ally, how can you tell if the situation you are being told about is sexism/racism? Well, you can always try to picture a majority-status person in the same situation and try to decide if it seems “weird.”

For instance, when a woman tells you that she was told she cannot go to full early because, “Why should she go before her male colleagues?” that might not seem weird because she may in fact be the only woman at the associate professor level. But, if you change that scenario, and think of the personnel committee chair asking a male associate professor, “Why should you go up for full before your female colleagues?” you realize that it is weird.