#cause for the next five years (if not ten) politicians would have to try real fucking hard to get their bigot laws passed

[black-rose-writings]

I thought these people were all pro free speech. That offended people should just grow a thicker skin, snowflake.

But I guess not.

The bill's author made sure everyone understood that it's not just about journalists, it's about everyone, even on social media.

A Florida Republican introduced a bill that would make it easier for religious people to sue those who call them out as homophobic or transphobic, a bill built on a suggestion from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

State Rep. Alex Andrade (R) filed H.B. 991 on Tuesday. The bill would make it easier to sue journalists, publications, or social media users for defamation if they accuse someone of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. The bill specifically says that publications can’t use truth as a defense when it comes to reporting on people’s anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments by citing the person’s “constitutionally protected religious expression or beliefs” or “a plaintiff’s scientific beliefs.”

[jiskblr]

Blauprinz and his crew

My blood parents I never knew. Berliners, probably, but they left me in an anarchist-affiliated charity orphanage in Potsdam before I was six months old, so all I know for sure is that they named me Artur. I was adopted fairly late as these things go, about five, by the people who I consider my parents: Jurgen and Verena Carolingt. They could have had blood children, but chose to adopt, and frequently. When I was twelve I had five foster-sibs, but they slowed down after that; I only have two more sibs from the next decade, and they were adopted as the eldest four of us moved out. That's not counting Leo, who was their second fosterling; he was a real hellraiser and chafed at the academic's morality they tried to enforce, so he ran away to join a street gang. I got back in touch with him years later; for all that he left, he was as angry as me about - but that's getting ahead of myself.

My parents were academics, professors at Viadrina Universitat in Frankfurt-Oder, but in their more subtle way raised hell just as much as Leo. They grew up during the first partition, Da in East Germany and Ma in West Berlin, and they both hated the idea of hiding what they believed to cater to the powerful. They didn't budge in their convictions that everyone deserved a chance or that their conclusions deserved to be followed to their end. They believed in equality and metahuman rights, even when that was fairly unpopular, and they lived it. I'm a norm as were they, but my sibs are an even split of norms and orks plus one dwarf. They didn't adopt elves, who got snapped up more easily by more prejudiced parents, nor trolls, who posed logistical hurdles they didn't think they could deal with. (They felt bad about leaving out trolls, though, and donated generously to several charities for them. I do too, now, in their memory.) They budged just as little in their research, not even to stay quiet about it. When their research topics - applied sociology and economics of magic, for Da and Ma, respectively - developed from postulates to specific, inconvenient predictions and prescriptions for the practical world which got the corps to lean on their deans to quiet them down or kick them out, even so they stuck to their guns.

That pressure started to build around when I turned 18, and got worse as I went through my degree. When it all went to hell, I was a post-doc in applied modern theology - university-speak for 'shaman-ology' - and Zanne was a thesis candidate in high-energy experimental thaumics - studying when magic goes 'boom'. Gabi had given academia a serious try but it wasn't for her, so she'd become a net security wageslave in Potsdam - though honestly she'd be happier as a SINless decker. Fritz and Deb were undergrads at Viadrina, and Jost, Lotte, and Sascha were still young and at home. I don't understand what exactly was enraging the powers that be about their research; I think Mother had published something demonstrating that the publicly-known processes for producing refined orichalcite should produce a far lower market price, indicating that there was a covert cartel, and Father had models indicating that parts of the Eurowars didn't fit naturally with the known social dynamics pre-bellum, indicating deliberate provocation by some powerful force. True or not, either might have been the provocation. There had been escalating threats, but I wasn't living there, so I didn't hear about that; later, when I researched the background, I learned there’d been a fire started in the garage, broken windows, a chemical warfare agent left hissing in Dad's office after hours. But the first I heard of it was when I was back home, a week in late April, for Easter and Mother's birthday.

When some fucking Johnson carpet-firebombed the entire fucking house.

I don't know if they knew we'd be there. They had to know there were innocent children, there; Jost and Sascha weren't even ten yet. My parents died in the first few seconds, their corpses vaporized. Lotte was hugging Mother, so she was, too, and Fritz was just far enough away to leave dental records. Jost was less lucky; he roasted, but not quickly, and survived three hours before he died in agony. Deb lost a leg and an eye and as far as I know the pain's never stopped. Sascha was in the other room and got out, with severe scarring but none disabling. Zanne as well. Gabi wasn't there; the bosses wouldn't give her time off, and I'm not sure if that was a mercy or a curse. I was next to Father, and as far as the records know, I flash-fried like Lotte. But I'm a shaman of the Dragonslayer, and the fire washed over me. I tried to shield Dad with my body, but my totem isn't a protector; it preserved me, and much better than it would most of its shamans, but that didn't extend to him. I tried to help Jost when I realized he'd lived, but he told me to run and get revenge. I didn't realized Zanne or Sascha made it until much later; Zanne had hit her head and went unconscious quickly, and Sascha's response to pain always was to freeze up. But I kept it together enough to get to the basement, and there was ductwork Zanne had discovered years earlier and shown me, which connected it to three doors down. She'd also shown me the nearest part of the Berlin Underground - we snuck out through that ductwork - which had an ork gang she'd run with sometimes, so I thanked her memory about a hundred times that night. The gang leader by then, Ratbite, turned out to be one of the toughs she'd run with, and recognized me. I wasn't shy about using her memory to get a favor, and traded my shamanic skills - and some medical assistance - to get help going completely dark, wiping me from the databases so I could go truly SINless. He was pretty pissed when he found out she wasn't dead, but by then the favor was spent, and when she went dark as well she did him a couple favors and he mostly forgave me and accepted my excuse that I'd thought I was telling him the truth.

The official story was that the firebombs were thrown by a human-supremacist policlub, Nationale Aktion I believe, who objected to our outspokenly mixed-race family. This was bullshit, but plausible enough bullshit that the department heads and local politicians could easily pretend to believe it and be seen to Do Something in response, without that Something doing anything to harm corporate interests. Sascha I think believes that story, or prefers to act like he does. Deb, Gabi, and Zanne, though, didn't. And Zanne was good at causing explosions, but terrible at keeping her temper in check. She retaliated, with prejudice. Headline-making prejudice, which is how I and my temporary friend Ratbite learned she was alive. She had a big bounty for a couple years, but some anarchists gave her shelter before the corps reacted, and from there she became a runner as well. She didn't know I'd survived, though she did suspect, so I found her first, and joined the crew she ran with at the time. After that one came apart, the two of us have assembled all our future crews together. Well, mostly me, I'm the Face, but she still has better ties in anarchist and goblinoid circles; there's a lot of orks and trolls who won't trust a smoothskin, even one like me with an established rep.

Our vengeance is still a work in progress. The men who carried out the hit were deniable contractors, corp security from a minor place. They went down in an op our second year running, and the company got enough blowback from that job that it folded a year later. Finding out who gave the order is not quite done, but we've narrowed the field. I've got a solid network, and, well, my surviving siblings aren't any happier about it than me. Sascha pushed back when Zanne tried to contact him; I think he wants to put it behind him. Deb's a professor herself now, but she hasn't given up on justice, and Gabi-. She works for the corps, and counter to the ork stereotype is a very cold person in most ways; rationally, I know that gave me reasonable cause to doubt her. But after we finally made contact, we found her heart was cold, but a cold-burning hatred. A grudge aged like wine, but still so raw and deep that it feels unthinkable she could have made any other choice. Even the idea that she might have sided with her bosses over her family feels completely embarrassing to have considered. And Leo, like I said earlier, was almost as mad; he left home, but he still loved them for giving him a home to run from. (I hadn't realized, but he sent them gifts every Christmas, mostly hand-made, from the first year he'd left right through their deaths - he didn't learn about their deaths until he tried to deliver their gifts that year.) He's a complete ork stereotype, though, his anger is intense and searing. He'll let it go for months and then find something that reminds him again and smash up some corp's office, mostly at random. I try to give him more productive outlets when I can, but he refuses to go professional runner so he's probably going to end up landing in an early grave with his gang despite my best efforts. Not that we're really close, but I've lost too much family to let my crazy ex-brother join them.

[twilightofthe]

So...about that Obitine Anidala rant. Also, you said something about how Sidious and Obi-Wan are foils. I would love it if you elaborate. (Also, I love your blog.)

Awwwww thank you anon!  I just be yelling on here!

*wheezes* okie doke!  Tho I stress that this won’t exactly be a rant because I adore Obitine and Anidala and rant kinda implies aggression towards them, this is more of just a long-ass ramble because while I love them, I don’t always love the way canon portrays them in the narrative, particularly in relationship to each other, because I often do not feel that what the show is trying to push us to think about them is accurate to how they actually act and come across.  Notably, the show attempts to draw comparisons to the two relationships that really don’t exist below surface level similarities.  Again, these are my own personal opinions, and in fact, I welcome discussion!  I truly do!  Please politely debate me on this if you disagree!

(god dammit it got long again, so long I’ll actually put ur Sidious and Obi Wan as foils part in a separate post)

I’ll get to why exactly the show compares the relationships very strangely in a moment, but first we gotta explore the reason why it does this in the first place, which is that the Clone Wars show has decided to make Obi Wan and Anakin narrative foils to one another.  Narrative foils, by the literary definition, are two characters that contrast one another.  They don’t have to be the protagonist and the antagonist, these characters can be on the same side, basically the thing is that they have “opposite” personalities where if one character is hot, the other is cold, if one character chooses to go right, the other will go left.  It’s usually used to show one character’s qualities as more favorable for the situation as opposed to anyone else’s.

TCW does this whenever they possibly can with Anakin and Obi Wan.  I get its reasoning behind it.  I do.  The reasoning is that while Anakin is supposed to be a main character, he makes questionable decisions quite often and for the kiddies watching, those decisions must be seen as Bad even if the hero does it, so they have Obi Wan, the unquestionable good guy, encounter the exact same scenarios Anakin makes his questionable decisions in, and then has Obi Wan make the Right(TM) decision to teach the kids a valuable lesson.  They turn Obi Wan into the voice of reason for the entire show, which turns basically almost everything Obi Wan and Anakin do into a constant competition in the narrative in a way the movies do not do (and I’ll get to the movies later).  I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, making them foils, but it’s definitely more of a show-only thing and it does it quite, quite often.

So yeah, TCW likes to compare Obi Wan and Anakin to the point that sometimes they try and use Obi Wan to diminish Anakin’s genuine trauma and struggles by going “well why didn’t you do it like THIS?” and I think that writing parallel plotlines for the purpose of shaming/criticism is kinda ://////, but that’s another rant for another day that again, if y’all wanna hear about, lmk

Anyway, the need to compare them absolutely made its way into their romantic relationships as well, as they acknowledge the similarities in the show, and Filoni and the crew explicitly compare the two relationships in interviews.

Basically my problem with how they try and draw said parallels can be boiled down to one quote by Filoni that a cursory Google search could not find but I know exists so y’all can take my word or not, that went along the lines of “Obi Wan and Satine are like Anakin and Padmé but better because they know how to stay unattached and let each other go.  They’re a success story.”  I disagreed with this quote so much it inspired me to write a whole-ass fic about it (Mutuals update: yes, it is coming soon, Darth Maul is just himself and therefore an utter pain in the ass to do a POV on and is fighting me like the bitchass he is)

My thesis that I will be arguing today is that while TCW tried to create Obitine as an Anidala parallel, they’re really not similar in the way the writers think they are.  Obitine is not a success story to Anidala, they’re a goddamn tragedy too; the real parallel to Anidala is that Obitine also ended in death and tears despite��making all the “right” decisions instead of all the “wrong” ones, and that is what is sad about them.

Like, on the surface level?  Yeah, the crew-intended parallels are there.  A fancy politician and a Jedi get together after the Jedi is assigned as the politician’s bodyguard.  The first time they see each other in over a decade the guy’s first words are basically “damn girl you’re still hot”, there is Conflict(TM) and the choice to try and be together or stay yearningly apart because they are Forbidden(TM) to be together, and ultimately a Sith Lord fucks them both over because he’s obsessed with the Jedi and uses Politician Lady to his advantage, finds and exploits a vulnerability of hers, destroys her life’s work, and then lets her die to make Jedi Man sad.  The difference is all that one pair said “yeah we aren’t gonna break the rules to be together” and the other said “fuck it yeah we are, let’s do this”

But beneath all of that, they real similarities are different and not at all focused on by the narrative.  Obi Wan and Anakin are extremely different people, as are Padmé and Satine, so their relationship dynamics together will not be the same.  You want to try and compare Obi Wan and Anakin and then compare Satine and Padmé like the crew attempts to, and you can’t, they have the same job but not nearly the same life.  Namely, the funny coincidence is that Obi Wan and Padmé are much more similar in personality, while Anakin and Satine are also much more similar in personality, so the first time they meet again, it’s both Anakin and Satine as the one who’s been pining for over a decade and the one more actively pursuing the relationship, while Obi Wan and Padmé who are more like “uh, hi, wow, you’re hot and this is a Problem because I have a job to do pls don’t look at me like that but also I will Cause Problems On Purpose and flirt with you anyway because I can’t help it”.  I get the Corruption TCW ep with Sati and Pads was mostly intended just to help Satine pass the Bechdel test and also show how similar the two leading lady love interests are, but it was a genuinely creative episode that actually ended up showing how much Satine and Padmé compliment each other instead of mirroring each other, much like Obi Wan and Anakin do.

And, onto my next point, despite the character parallels being wrong, the parallels in the relationship are different too.  Like I said, the parallel isn’t that Obi Wan and Satine aren’t attached like Anakin and Padmé are.  The parallel is that Obitine is actively running from what that attachment means instead of embracing it like Anidala is.  The show would argue that since they try to avoid it, that they are able to live without one another, means they aren’t attached like the Jedi define it, but I argue that they definitely still are attached to a degree because they cannot give each other up.  They held torches for each other from a timerange of 15 YEARS.  Yes I know they spent an entire year together at a young and emotionally volatile point in their lives, but I stand that NO ONE is that hung up on their ex for that long unless there is some serious emotions involved.  Anakin was hung up on Padmé for ten years, and that was because Palpatine was constantly bolstering those affections and reminding him of Padmé.  Obes and Sati both-- or at least Satine, the show always makes Obi Wan’s feelings for Satine in return much more vague --held on to their feelings for five years longer without the influence of a Sith Lord.

And the thing is, they know it.  Obi Wan and Satine are both fully aware that they haven’t been able to shake each other off like they should and that that is a Problem, that’s why they’re both a mite venomous with each other beneath the flirting at first, they’re both extremely frustrated with themselves for not being able to get over this thing they have, and frustrated with the other for being there as an active temptation.

And yet, they still are attached to each other.  They try to avoid it, they definitely try, and that’s what makes them different from Anidala, but they are definitely still attached.  You can see it in Obi Wan’s actions in Voyage of Temptation when Merrik is threatening to blow the ship, the way he hesitates in attacking him because that would be “striking an unarmed man”.  Obi Wan Kenobi does not prefer violence, no, but he has never hesitated to cut a bitch before if it’s for the good of the many.  This is the man who stabbed someone with a fork and threatened to eat him just to maintain his cover as a dangerous criminal.  This is the guy who had no problem killing Zam Wessel for information to protect Padmé.  This is a pragmatist who prefers peaceful solutions, but he does not hesitate if he feels it is a justified offense.  But this time, when an entire shipful of people is at risk, Obi Wan hesitates.  Because he doesn’t want to upset Satine.  Because he’s probably thinking on how she told him that if he had killed the last terrorist they encountered, she wouldn’t speak to him, how she had criticized every time he used violence to escape Death Watch before.  He hesitates because he’s putting her happiness, just for a second, over the sake of duty.  Do I think that if Anakin hadn’t shown up to save their moral compasses, Obi Wan would have eventually taken out Merrik?  Absolutely; hell, I honestly think Satine might have done it.

But the matter was, Merrik could have pressed the kill switch any second of Obi Wan’s hesitation, and Obi Wan knew that, and was hesitating anyway.

I am calling this attachment solely because if the situation was reversed, if this was Anakin and Padmé in this situation, with Anakin not taking out a dangerous criminal because he doesn’t want to upset Padmé (lol ignoring the fact that Pads 1000% would have shot that bitch, and even if she didn’t, Anakin would because he is perfectly fine with hurting his loved ones’ feelings if he feels it’ll keep them safe), god, the narrative would have eaten Anakin alive.  

No, I won’t take criticism.  I know how the show handles the Anidala dynamic.  It would have shown Obi Wan popping up to take out the baddie as him doing the right thing and saving the day, and then Anakin would have been shamed for letting his feelings for his wife get in the way of protecting a shipful of people.  THAT would be the Vader foreshadowing, none of this “only a cold-blooded killer” shit, no way would they ever stick that label on Obi Wan.

So yeah, I’m going off of the fact that if that would have been classified as attachment for Anidala-- which, it would, then. it counts for Obitine.

And then Obi Wan and Satine continue to be hung up on each other for the rest of the eps they’re in, Satine saying in words multiple times how much she loves and cares about him and wishes things could be different, and Obi Wan performing it in actions, risking his own neck and political standing to help her even when she’s a fugitive, probably personally putting in to send his own grandpadawan to help her later.  Right up to the time when Satine decides that she is going to call Obi Wan when she is deposed.  Not the Senate.  Not any powerful politician friends.  Not even the Jedi Order or the Council as a whole.  She calls and addresses her distress call to Obi Wan alone.  And Obi Wan, as now revealed to us by TCW S7, defies Council orders and breaks a century old neutrality treaty to try and bust her, a convicted murderer in the eyes of the Republic and Mandalore, out.  He didn’t even know Maul had her.  Just knew she was in danger and came running to her aid.  He risks starting a potential war to come save her.  They acted so in love that Vizsla was able to guess from being around them for like five seconds, and was able to tell Maul exactly who he would need to bait Obi Wan.

That is where the attachment comes from.  It’s the fact that Obi Wan and Satine tried so, so hard to give each other up and do the right thing, but when it came down to it, they couldn’t lose the other one so they put them first when logically they shouldn’t.  And thus, Satine ended up dead.

Now I know most people will argue with me that actually Filoni means that since they didn’t stay together after the year on the run, THAT is what makes them able to give each other up, and also the fact that Obi Wan didn’t go dark side and murder everyone when Satine died.

But I still think that at least the murder front is a fairly low bar to cross, and anyway, that just because they could live without each other didn’t mean they weren’t still attached.  Anakin and Padmé were apart for 10 years and then even after that, they were apart almost constantly during the war.  Just because they could live apart or even past the other’s death didn’t mean they weren’t attached, as they both still had not let the other go mentally and also broke rules to try and ensure the other would not die, even if the rules said they should let it happen.

So yeah, that’s my big theory.  We can’t compare Obitine with Anidala by saying Obitine was a success story, we compare them by acknowledging that both struggled with attachments and letting the other go, but Obitine at least tried to the bitter end to do the right thing while Anidala didn’t really bother, and both ended up with dead women and broken men regardless, and that is the true sad parallel to me.

[bopinion]

2021 / 33

Aperçu of the Week:

"You must not believe everything you think!"

(Heinz Erhardt, German humorist of the 1950s)

Bad News of the Week:

Joe Biden currently faces as much criticism for developments in Afghanistan as any other leader in the Western "alliance against terror." One could have assessed the strength of the Taliban just as well as the weakness of the Afghan government and its army trained and equipped by the West. The estimates of the intelligence services should have been questioned, diplomats should have been listened to better. The predicament of the so-called "local forces" could have been avoided. This is obviously confusing cause and effect.

It was the Republican George W. Bush (or rather the hawks around Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) who started the so-called "war on terror", first in Afghanistan, and invented the carte blanche of pre-emptive strikes with the Bush Doctrine ("National Security Strategy"). For those interested in the background, Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" is highly recommended. And it was Republican Donald J. Trump who signed the virtually unconditional troop withdrawal agreement with the Taliban last year, which is now being executed according to plan. To now blame the current administration for the development is ridiculous.

Equally ridiculous is the current pretense that the Afghanistan campaign was a success. After all, its objective was to dry up the retreats of Al-Qaeda and, above all, to kill Osama bin Laden. Fun facts on the side: none (!) of the 19 attackers of 9/11 came from Afghanistan, Iraq or the African Horn, but 15 (!) from Saudi Arabia, like bin Laden himself. But especially for the Bush family the Sunni fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia have always been untouchable. And where was bin Laden finally caught and killed? In Abbottabad. And that is not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan.

According to Time the rise on Taliban would have been impossible "without Pakistan's shelter and support". Associated Press writes about the role of Islamabad that it "does permit the Taliban leadership on its territory and its wounded warriors receive treatment in Pakistani hospitals. Their children are in school in Pakistan and some among them own property. Some among Pakistan's politicians have rebranded the insurgents as 'the new, civilized Taliban.'" To understand the complex relationship between the two states, it helps to look at the history books. Spoiler alert: it's not the U.S. that's to blame, but the British.

The hereditary enmity - yes, you can call it that by now - is based on the so-called "Durand line." The British colonel who gave it its name drew a border line between the two states, which had strategic reasons but completely ignored ethnic regionality. Thus, the West's ignorance of the cultural distinctiveness of this region already has a long history. The Durand Line cut right through the tribal areas of the Pashtuns. After the Pashtuns proclaimed "their" state Afghanistan, this border was of course never officially recognized. And independence or affiliation efforts of the cut Pashtuns, often on the brink of civil war, were actively supported. In turn, Pakistan has been trying to destabilize the Afghan state with political and economic measures for almost 70 years.

What do we learn from this? It has never worked when a Western power has tried to impose its values on a colonial people, ignoring their culture and history. Not with the British in Central Asia, not with the French in Indochina, not with the Americans in Korea or Vietnam. Or before that the Spanish in South America or practically all Europeans in Africa. So have we learned that by now? I'm afraid not...

Good News of the Week:

During the lockdowns, there was a real boom in Germany to get pets. The cat was supposed to replace the missing social contacts, the dog to guarantee the possibility to leave the domestic quarantine. So not the best conditions to ensure the welfare of the creatures - pets are not toys!

The thematically responsible cabinet member, Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner, now wants to counteract with new animal welfare regulations. Thus for example the chain keeping of dogs is to be forbidden, they must get daily at least one hour free run and also the puppy raising is to become more kind-fair. And also in the zoo specialized trade more expert knowledge becomes obligatory, in order to prevent among other things that domestic animals are given into a care, which could not be animal appropriate.

In the wake of recent developments such as the ban on chick shredding, the requirement for more species-appropriate housing with more space for cows and "employment material" for pigs, and the ban on imports of wild birds, this gives me hope. Of course, these are all just (too) small steps, but at least they are going in the right direction.

Sidenote: Tonight my son gets a "vacation dog" for two weeks once again. So the requirement "at least one hour of exercise in the fresh air per day" will not only apply to the dog Tzela, but also to the prospective professional gamer... ;-)

Personal happy moment of the week:

I could listen to music all the time. And of course, in a family household, I can't ruthlessly "acoustically dominate" everyone all the time. And I like good sound quality - so 5.1 surround sound for Netflix, DAB in the car and HomePods in the living room are a must. In addition, the increasingly digitalized communication in the home office with web conferences and Teams meetings demands a good headset. The solution for everything is - of course - good headphones. So last year I did a test run for several weeks with a pair of cheap Bluetooth headphones to see if I could live well with a permanent Mickey Mouse on my head. It made sense before investing, because after all, there were more and more rumors last year that Apple would eventually merge its experiences with AirPods and Beats by Dr. Dre into its own high-end headphones.

And then they really came on the market: the AirPods Max. When I finally went to order them as a birthday present to myself, my ears were shaking: more than three months of delivery time? OMG... No wonder that in that time span (and at my age) I had at some point forgotten that yes, there was still something in the pipeline. Until I finally got them last Thursday. And they also fully met my expectations. Now I'm happy, my roommates have their peace and everyone else has something to laugh about when I'm out and about with "Apple's purse" (because that's exactly what they look like in their Smart case).

I couldn't care less...

...that possible coalition partners of the German government after the elections at the end of September are already bickering about the typical German topic "speed limit on highways". As a driver of an electric car, I hardly ever drive faster than 100 km/h anyway. I prefer to stay in the right lane "attached to" a bus with cruise control and distance radar and ride towards my exit in a relaxed manner. And the famous, equally typical German driving pleasure? I get it from the barely comparable acceleration power - with which I can overtake practically everywhere and also make most of the big gasoline-powered cars look stupid at the traffic lights. Nice!

As I write this...

...I run every ten minutes first to the basement and then upstairs to the office. In the former, the freezer is defrosting and I have to constantly wipe up the new puddle of ice water from the floor. And in the second, the system update is running on the Mac and I have to keep clicking "Okay" - or read for what feels like the seventeenth time that the next step will take "about five more minutes". Every third time I go over to the neighbors, whose cat I'm taking care of for the weekend, to see if the madam has deigned to show her face, so that I can let her into the garden. Presumably the activity rings on the Apple Watch tonight will let me know I've had an athletic day.... ;-)

[chimchimsauce]

Sanctuary (6)

Summary: YN is a young girl, bright and ambitious, but due to her busy schedule, she’s been unable to make any real friends. When an ad for Saint Mary’s Sanctuary catches her attention, she never expected her life to be changed by a certain hybrid named Jimin.

Tags: @feed-my-geek-soul @raspberryhaterade @dinorahrodriguez @loriosborne @majestikblue @younginfluencernut-blog @jiminotopia @yady24 @amoretti-rossetti  @j-hofe7 @scared-money @alina-foxy @catwhipes @cloudyfelix @justfollowbacon @chims-kookies @hoodiebangtan @xanny91 @catarina-catycaty @lewd-lemon @yaseminflames @lulanii @jeonsdear @omgsasusakulover @let-fred-live @perfectlyfangirling @daddyjoonie @meganleafmusic

If you’d like to be added to the tag list, comment below!

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

YN ignores all of Taehyung’s calls, refusing to answer them. A part of her thinks she’s being a bit petty, but the larger part sparks in fury every time she even thinks about what happened at Saint Mary’s.

She’s only known Jimin for about a week and during that week she’s come to care for him, but his behavior was both uncalled for and frightening. The short interaction raised several red flags in her mind, causing her to want to avoid him and the Sanctuary altogether.

By Wednesday, she’s made up her mind. All the drama of Saint Mary’s isn’t worth it.

And Jimin seems to be unhealthily attached to her. Sticking around will only make it worse, right? It’ll be best just to quit cold turkey.

Determined, YN pulls out her phone and blocks both Taehyung’s and Saint Mary’s number, feeling bittersweet about it.

She hopes that nothing bad happens to Jimin because of her, but she doesn��t think Saint Mary’s is that type of place.

Another busy work week passes, keeping YN from having any thoughts of Jimin, Saint Mary’s, or Taehyung. As a matter of fact, she’s filed the entire strange encounter up to a weird but finished memory, one she’ll tell her future children about. She thinks everything is. Her blatant ignoring should have made that clear.

So why is there an all too familiar blonde headed hybrid lurking outside her door?

YN slows, trying to figure out what she should do.

On one hand, she’s never seen the wolf outside the walls of Saint Mary’s. He looks so different, the birds chirping in the air and him leaning against her wall. He almost takes her breath away, dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt, and a pair of laced-up black converse.

But on the other hand . . .

“I can smell you, you know,” he says, not glancing up even once.

“What are you doing here? How do you know where I live? It’s not okay just to show up at people’s houses, Jimin,” YN says, not moving any closer.

The wolf finally looks up at her.

“I needed to see you - to explain myself and to apologize. I was majorly out of hand,”

YN shakes her head.

“An apology doesn’t do anything. I want you to leave and never come near me again. I can’t be around someone like you,”

Jimin flinches slightly.

“Please just listen to me. Just let me explain myself. If you still want me to disappear, I’ll do it. I’ll leave you and never come near you again,” His voice trembles.

“If you’re going to talk, do it there. Don’t come any closer to me,”

“Okay,” he says, wetting his lips a bit, “I . . . well, I snuck out. Taehyung helped me. Lent me some of his clothes. I don’t like that I smell like him,”

“You couldn’t just leave? Why’d you have to sneak out?”

“You do realize that I’m a glorified pet, right YN? Nothing I’ve ever done has been because I wanted to do it. Saint Mary’s has given me the most freedom I’ve ever had, and even then I can only go to certain places at certain times. Hell, I can’t even sleep as long or as short as I’d like. We have bedtimes. I’m twenty - four. Twenty - four,”

Frustration rolls off of Jimin in waves, YN feeling pity beginning to bloom in her chest.

“But I’m not trying to be ungrateful to Saint Mary’s. The Sanctuary is a wonderful place with kind people, the kindest I’ve ever known . . . but I’m there for a reason. Every hybrid is . . .”

He seems to struggle with his next words.

“When I was born, I was taken from my mother almost immediately. Hybrids may not be human, but the bond we form between those we love is just as strong, if not stronger. So, to prevent problems in the future, children are taken away. We stay with a human nanny until we mature. I was eight years old when I left mine, a cold woman who never once said or did a kind thing to or for me. After that. we’re supposed to go to school. We don’t learn what human did. I couldn’t even read. Instead, hybrids get behavioral training until they can be sold to the highest bidder,”

“I thought you couldn’t be adopted until you turned twenty - one?”

He just laughs.

“As if the breeders cared about that little law. But no one really goes to their masters until fourteen or so. But not me. I never went to the behavioral school. At eight, one of the biggest politicians bought me for his daughter, who was ten at the time. It started off pretty great. The politician and his wife were both major assholes, but the girl was an angel. Truly. She taught me things, treated me like a friend instead of a pet. But . . .”

Jimin pauses abruptly, hands clenching and unclenching repeatedly.

“But she began to change at sixteen. At first, it was small changes, her no longer sneaking me dessert from the kitchen. But it spiraled. By the time she turned eighteen, she wouldn't even look at me anymore. Pretended I didn’t exist. Would brush past me, act like she couldn’t even see me. I started acting out, misbehaving and getting in trouble, enduring horrible punishments from her family all to regain her attention. I even ran away one day but came back just six hours and YN . . .”

Indescribable emotion clogs up his throat.

“There was another hybrid. I wasn’t even gone a whole day and they had adopted a new hybrid, a bunny. Her face was all lit up and happy. All I could do was watch from outside the windows as they all cooed and fawned over him. I knew it was over for me. They’d thrown the few things I owned out all over the front lawn, all of it ruined, Shredded, burned, soaked . . .”

He trembles, wrapping his arms around himself.

Unintentionally, YN had taken steps toward him, getting close enough to see the fresh set of tears gathered in his eyes. Jimin wipes them away angrily.

“I had nowhere to go. No clothes, no food, no money. You’ve got to understand, YN. She was my world. My entire universe. The only thing I had ever known. And it was all taken away from me. I was thrown away like trash,”

YN feels her heart shatter.

“I found out later that it was because she’d been ashamed that I’m a wolf. All of her friends had cute hybrids. Bunnies and kitties and hamsters. Docile creatures. She began to resent what I was,” Jimin says bitterly.

“The next years were the worst of my life. Shortly after I’d been abandoned, desperate, I signed a contract with an underground club. A strip joint for people too poor to afford a hybrid of their own. I did what I had to do. At first, it wasn’t so bad. I just bussed tables, cleaned up after shows. Took the hits when someone got too drunk and angry. But at the end of the day, I had food, even if it was always scraps from the day’s buffet, stale and cold. At least I had a place to sleep, even if I had to sleep with one eye open. I could never go anywhere, do anything. I spent two years there until the owner wanted to add me to the show. Life had taken everything from me. My family, my home, my independence. The only thing I had left was myself. But if I stayed, if I did what they wanted me to, I would have nothing. Be nothing. So I ran. Lived in the streets and picked up odd jobs when I could. I didn’t have an identity, so I never had the chance to do anything or make anything of myself. Hybrids aren’t people. Human enough to be used to feed someone’s desires, but not human enough to have a life in anything other than subservience. That’s what I did for the next five years. Took jobs from people who didn’t ask questions. Made enough to buy enough food to keep living and slept in whatever abandoned building I could find. This year, I managed to find a stable job working at a gas station. But one day, some teenagers thought it would be fun to break-in to rob the place,”

His eyes are hard.

“Hybrid or not, I can’t do anything against a crowd or eight people armed with blunt objects. So when they ran away because sirens could be heard in the air, I lay there, preparing to bleed out,”

Jimin looks up into the sky.

“I thought, ‘This is it. This is how I die. Live a pathetic life, die a pathetic death.’. But apparently, one of the EMTs figured out I was a hybrid when she took my vitals and I got courted off to Saint Mary’s,”

“And then,” he begins, looking at me like I held all the secrets to the universe, “I met you. You, who somehow smelled like home. Not a physical place, but the comfort and familiarity of home. And I just had to see you again. Meet you again. And when I did, you weren’t afraid of me. You didn’t treat me like the dirt under your shoes. You joked and laughed and cared. And I had to see you again and again and again. Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,”

He’s crying now, they both are.

“And I’m sorry how I acted. I never meant to yell at you or make you feel bad. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just -,” his voice cracks into an ugly sob, “I understand if you don’t want anything to do with me. I wouldn’t either -”

The hybrid doesn’t get to utter another word before a pair of arms are wrapped around him like a vice. Instantly, his nostrils are flooded with her scent, Jimin burying his face in her neck.

Chapter 7

[eirianerisdar]

Hey, I recently discovered your blog and I just wanted to say that love your fanfics! Your writing is beautiful. If you're taking requests, would you mind writing something to show the bond between Anakin and Obi-Wan, you know, the famous Kenobi and Skywalker duo and your take on how the Galaxy viewed them?

Sorry this is so late, anon! This fits into @finish-the-clone-wars’s 25/7 Writing Wednesday prompt let me convince you. I wanted some good third-person perspective so this is a companion fic to A Face in the Crowd.

This fic is also cross-posted to FFN.

For the Brother I Did Not Deserve

Generals.

Jedi.

Heroes.

At the height of the Clone Wars, Skywalkerand Kenobi were household names across the galaxy.

Adults spoke of them in cafés and bars as Generals Skywalker and Kenobi, trackingthe progress of the Open-Circle Fleet across the Outer Rim sieges by war-reelsand holonet news. Senators and aides alike called them Masters, as politicians have called the Jedi for ten thousand yearsand more, since the Jedi Order first swore their service to the Republic.

But the young knew them as heroes. 

Siblings squabbled over which would win ina full-out duel, Obi-Wan’s devastating calm against Anakin’s fiery resolve;friendships were formed and broken over the keenness of Anakin’s sword-hand andthe steadiness of Obi-Wan’s voice. And yet these petty arguments bonded all theyounglings the galaxy over; there was no skirmish, battle, or campaign thatcould not be won if Obi-Wan and Anakin were there. The fact that they were twomen in an army of millions did not matter. As far as any youngling whoseparents supported the Republic was concerned, the war was already good as won.Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker would see to it.

It was in such a spirit that Yorrick gavehis all in a terrific (and oft-repeated) argument with his best friend, Meron.

 “General Skywalker leveled an entirebattalion’s worth of super battle droids last week on Malastare!” Meron yelledas he flailed around Yorrick’s room, nearly knocking over Yorrick’sneatly-stacked collection of Kenobi collectible info-cards as he did so.

“So?” Yorrick interjected from where he satprimly on the edge of his bed, crossing his arms as Meron turned to glare athim. “General Kenobi would have talked his way out of needing to fight them atall. He did as much before.”

“An entire. Battalion,” Meronhalf-shrieked, eyes aglow and looking every inch of his current eight years.

Yorrick rolled his eyes. They might be thesame age, but there were times where Meron’s excitement over GeneralSkywalker’s latest exploits only manifested itself in long, ramblingconversations where Meron’s utter hero-worship surged like the waves ofCoruscant’s Western Sea, beside which Yorrick’s family had a summer home,courtesy of his father’s position in Galactic government.

It wasn’t as though Yorrick didn’t admireGeneral Kenobi as much as his best friend did Skywalker – it was just thatYorrick thought it best to express said admiration in quietly collecting Kenobimemorabilia and keeping up with the holonet news on the Open Circle fleet,instead. He may have sent a fewletters here and there, but he had never received a reply, nor had he expectedone. General Kenobi had a war to fight.

Meron, on the other hand, loved nothingmore than to recount for the billionth time the moment where his heroacknowledged him.

“–I didn’t think he’d actually salute back, you know, since my father and I were so farback from the parade line and there was so much noise going on–”

“I know, Meron,” Yorrick said, a faintsmile curving his lips despite himself as he watched his friend’s face light upat the memory. “He saw you, and he returned your salute. Congratulations. I alsoseem to recall you telling me that you forgot to lower your hand until basicallyall of the 501st had passed by.”

Face flaming red, Meron punched himgood-naturedly on the shoulder. “I’ll convince you Anakin’s better even if it’sthe last thing I do,” he mumbled.

“That’ll take some convincing, “ Yorrickgrinned. “But go on. I dare you.”

“I’m going home in a week. I’ll have youconvinced before then.”

“I’m sure the Alderaani Royal Academy willbe very happy to take you off ourhands,” Yorrick said, dryly.

That earned him another punch.

But Meron’s next words wereuncharacteristically quiet. “My father said you could visit in the winter. Youwill, won’t you?”

A pause.

“That’ll depend on my father,” Yorrick said, earnestly, “but I’ll fight both him and the RCA for it.”

Meron scoffed. “The Republic CoruscantiAcademy’s filled with spoilt brats with their noses in the air.”

“And what does that make us?” Yorrickpointed out. “Alderaani Royal isn’t that much better.”

“Spoilt brats with our noses completelylevel.”

“Oh, shut up,” Yorrick said, smiling.

Meron waved goodbye a week later, nothaving convinced Yorrick in the slightest but glad to call it a ceasefire. “Maythe Force be with you!” they yelled at each other, as was their custom. It madethem sound cool, like the Jedi Generals they loved so much. Meron as Anakin,and Yorrick as Obi-Wan – brothers in all but blood.

The Siege of Coruscant began a monthafterwards.

And another week after that, Yorrick’sworld fell apart with a single announcement from the newly instated Emperor.

Red-eyed and sleep-deprived, Yorrick wentto school two days later to find that it had been renamed the Royal ImperialAcademy overnight, and that there was a new uniform waiting for him, grey andhigh-collared and stamped with the Imperial crest over the left breast,claiming his heart.

He came home in his new uniform, enduredhis parents’ proud fawning over how dashing it made him look, and stood in hisroom alone staring at the Open Circle posters still plastered over the walls,the imitation lightsaber in its brackets reverently hung over his desk, therows of real flimsi books on Jedi and Republic history, and the packet ofStewjon tea he had begged his father to order for him just last month sittingbefore them, still unopened.

He’d been taught how to hold a blaster forthe first time that day; the first lesson in a new mandatory courseacademy-wide.

The Emperor had said General Kenobi was atraitor, as was the rest of the Jedi. An Order now eliminated utterly andcompletely, in a heroic effort by the GAR that once served them.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was dead.

Yorrick crossed to the comm at his desk. Ithad been there, undisturbed, for two days now; the light blinking at its edgeshowed that there was at least one missed message there waiting for hisresponse, but only now did he sit at his desk and flick it open. 

>

Yorrick buried his face in his elbow for amoment, and sighed.

Then he keyed in his friend’s comm code.

The comm channel fizzed to life, andMeron’s voice issued from it, warped with static and yet clear as the day heleft over a month ago. 

“Blastit, Yorrick! It’s been two whole days–”

“I know,” Yorrick said, quietly. “Ijust…haven’t been feeling that good.”

A pause. 

“Iknow,” – and there was a telltale tremor in Meron’svoice not caused by static or interference – “I can’t believe it, either.”

Yorrick’s eyes prickled with tears – thefirst since he heard the news. “How…how could they betray us like this?”

“Right?I don’t know how Chancellor Palpatine could have done this!”

Now that caused Yorrick to sit up, and to stare at the comm in his hand.

“What…what are you talking about?” hewhispered.

“TheChancellor,” Meron said, with a note of confusionin his voice. “You don’t believethat…that drivel he said about the Jedi, do you?”

“Drivel?” Yorrick said, slowly. “That’s nota word you would use. I would, butnot you. Who’s been talking to you?” A feeling was building in his chest. A scream.

“That’snot the point,” Meron retorted, after a tellingpause. “You don’t seriously believe theJedi betrayed the Republic?”

“I…” Yorrick began, and faltered. “I don’tknow what to believe.”

“Yorrick,this is Anakin Skywalker,” – Meron’s voicequavered, and then steadied with determination – “and Obi-Wan Kenobi we’re talking about.”

Hearing the name set something off withinYorrick’s chest. Perhaps it had been there since two days ago, or longer, but he had read about the five stages of grief before, but for the moment, he waswell past denial and fully into anger.

“I know!” he yelled, and cared not that hisvoice cracked dangerously on the word. “What do you think I’ve been doing these two days? I’ve been thinking. That’sall I’ve been doing. I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. I went to school todayand everything’s the same but also different and we’re not allowed to talkabout the Jedi any more, and the teacher played this audio recording from theEmperor’s office that showed the Jedi trying to assassinate him,” – Meronyelped at this but Yorrick plowed on, relentless – “and then,” he shouted, asthe tears spilled over his cheeks and scalded invisible scars down to his chin,“I come back home, and I look at my walls, and I realise that I’ve got enoughillegal posters and things here to warrant my arrest. Do you understand me, Meron?!”

A long, long silence.

“I do,” Meron said, quietly. “But audiofiles can be edited, you know that. And you knew Obi-Wan Kenobi as well as Iknew Anakin Skywalker.”

Yorrick barked a bitter laugh through histears.

“Did I, really?” he murmured. “And didyou?”

“Yorrick–”

“The Chancellor was crying for help,”Yorrick was sobbing, now. “And General Windu just told him not to resist hisown murder. Treason. What am Isupposed to say to that?”

“TheJedi didn’t do this,” Meron said, helplessly. “I can’t tell you how I know. But I do.”

That did it. “You don’t know that because you’re not a blasted Jedi, Meron!”Yorrick shouted. “And neither am I! We never were, Meron, and be glad weweren’t, or we’d have betrayed the Republic and been executed like all thosetraitors deserved.”

Meron was silent for a long, ugly moment.

And then: “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Yorrick said, wiping his nose onthe pristine sleeve of his new uniform.

“Yorrick,I don’t want this.” Meron sounded far, far olderthan his years. “But I see I can’t convince you.”

“I don’t, either,” Yorrick said,straightening although he knew the other boy could not see it – reaching forhis uniform cap as though it would lend him strength. He placed it on his head,and felt steadier than he did a moment before. “But this is how it is.”

Meron’s breath was loud through the channelstatic. “Fine,” he said, and therewas such a wealth of control in that word that Yorrick felt for a moment ashamed.“We’ll talk later. May the F–”

Meron cut himself off with a sharp inhale.

Yorrick stared at the comm. The words oftheir familiar greeting and farewell echoed through him. He let them go.

“Goodbye, Meron,” he said instead.

“Goodbye,” Meron said, and as the comm channel collapsed, it caught thebeginnings of a sob.

Yorrick stood, and placed the comm back onhis desk.

And then he crossed to the nearest posteron the wall, grasped its edge with the sleek leather of his new uniform gloves,and tore it down, uncaring of how it split neatly in the middle, dividing theopen circle insignia upon it exactly in two – a rending that left a chasmbetween them.

Yorrick repeated the motion again andagain, broke the lightsaber on the wall over his knee, hurled the bag of teainto the growing pile of discarded objects and stared, narrow-eyed when itsplit open on the broken wing of a shattered Jedi Starbird.

His father, when he found out, praised himfor his initiative and helped him carry it all out to the trash compactor, asteady hand on his shoulder as they watched each box go in.

Time passed.

Meron’s comm number faded in his memories.

Yorrick redecorated his room in pale greyand black, opting for the bare minimum of decoration except the six-spoked-wheelof the Imperial Crest painted on one wall.

And then he focused on his studies to theexclusion of all else.

Utter conviction.

At fifteen, he was an Imperial Cadet. 

At eighteen, he accepted a commission fromthe Imperial Navy as an Ensign.

And at twenty-eight, he was a Commander. Ayoung one, at that, and his meteoric rise to that rank did not go unnoticed.

Being on the same ship as Darth Vader wasas terrifying as scuttlebutt told, but Yorrick employed good sense and stayedsilent unless he was called upon, whereupon he did every task assigned to himin as quiet and efficient a manner as possible.

He got quite good at ignoring the twist ofguilt in his gut.

And then, of course, came the Death Star.

Something stirred in the depths ofYorrick’s memory when he heard of the superweapon, of course. Somethingconnected to the mind of an eight-year-old child, who loved a hero for hisability to talk his way out of a conflict without a single drop of blood spilt;but by that point in time he had learnt to treat his Orders as though he were adroid and nothing else. It protected his neck, and by extension, his parents.

And so Yorrick was on the Death Star whenthe Princess Leia was brought in, and he was a shadow at the rear of the bridgewhen Tarkin gave the order to fire on Alderaan. 

Millions of voices, silenced in a matter ofmoments.

Meron’s family home, where he and Yorrickused to play hide-and-seek amongst the gardens.

Meron. 

The name chipped at the walls around hisheart, and threatened to unbalance him. 

Yorrick returned to his cabin and threw up.

And then he stood up, and carried on.

And then the call came in that there wereintruders on the station, and he ran to his post, well-heeled Imperial Navyboots clacking on the durasteel floors, and as he ran, a sound drifted towardshim; a familiar noise of plasma meeting plasma, the scream of kyber crystalsand Force-borne blades.

That sound used to signify hope – hope thatObi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker had won yet another campaign, the sound oftheir lightsabers a victory cry in war reel after war reel.

Yorrick rounded the corner to the hangar,and gaped as Vader’s lightsaber locked with that of the old man in anunmistakably Jedi cloak. 

“Kenobi!” Vader roared.

And with that single word, Yorrick’s world collapsedagain.

This Obi-Wan Kenobi was not theblade-dancing hero of his childhood memories; this man’s arms shook with theeffort of deflecting Vader’s powerful strikes, and his beard and hair werewhite where they once had been russet.

And yet- 

He was still every inch the Master;commander of a situation where there should have been no hope. Not for him.

A young, golden-haired boy darted into thehangar, closely followed by the princess, a man who had the look of ascoundrel, and a Wookiee.

Obi-Wan glanced at them, then back atVader, and his lips curved in the sly smile Yorrick remembered so well – thesmile that said you’re beaten, evenif nothing seemed to be working in his favour.

The smile of calm in the face of whatshould be an inescapable storm.

Yorrick had always understood it. Now itfelt utterly wrong that he should be on the other side of it; part of thatstorm, about to be destroyed by something he did not understand.

It felt horribly like guilt, and the denialof a truth that he had suppressed for too long.

Obi-Wan withdrew his lightsaber and raisedit in a salute, still smiling–

–Yorrick threw out a hand before he knew whathe was doing, mouth open in denial–

–andVader cut down Obi-Wan Kenobi.

But in the ringing emptiness of the momentsafter it happened, Yorrick’s shout lodged in his throat as he realised thatthere was no body.

Only a cloak. 

“No!” The boy with the golden hairscreamed. He drew his blaster and fired uselessly at Vader, even as hiscompanions yelled at him to join them on the ramp of battered transport.

They were only metres away.

Yorrick should probably have drawn hisweapon to stop them. He didn’t.

He turned, instead, as what seemed to be anentire battalion of stormtroopers raced past him; as he heard the firing of thetransport’s repulsors, over the lash of blaster-fire.

Yorrick found his way to the nearestseparate hangar, climbed into a shuttle with nothing on his person but hisuniform and his regulation blaster, and set off. It helped that in the chaos,he managed to get to hyperspace with only a few scanting brushes with the DeathStar’s turbolasers.

And then – when the star-studded expanse ofspace beyond the viewport morphed into the blue-white streaks of hyperspace –only then, did Yorrick allow himself to weep.

Months later – after a long circle of theOuter Rim and a delicate situation involving many repeated yellings of “Don’t shoot! I’m a defector! A defector!”Yorrick found himself, at last, on a Rebel base, having gone through a verygrueling interrogation courtesy of Crix Madine.

At least he’d proven his loyalty wasgenuine.

He asked around if anyone had heard of aMeron Junshi. It was the barest sliver of hope, but the last time they spokewhen they were both children Meron had seemed on a one-track road to theRebellion even if Yorrick had not known enough to suspect then.

“Junshi? That’s an Alderaani name,” onepilot said. “I think you’d be better off finding–”

“Junshi. Meron Junshi,” a clear, soft voicesaid behind him.

Yorrick turned, and his eyes widened.

Princess Leia smiled at him. “And as I keeptelling every new recruit, I don’t bite.” She led him to a quieter corner, andher face grew gently serious. “How did you know Meron?”

Did.

Past tense. 

He watched her watch him take the news. 

“He was by best friend,” he eventuallysaid, although it felt like a lie, now, after twenty years of silence. “He was a brother to me, and I–”

Her brown eyes softened further. “You’reYorrick. He spoke of you often.”

All the breath left Yorrick at once. Tearsstarted at the corners of his eyes. “I owed him an apology. Now I won’t have achance to say it.”

“I’m sorry,” Leia murmured. “He died on theTantive IV – my ship. He died protecting me and the plans I held for the DeathStar.”

In a way it made sense. Meron had spent somuch of his childhood in hero-worship of Anakin Skywalker that it was fittingthat he should die as a hero. Yorrick had loved him so much as a brother, likeObi-Wan did Anakin – but Obi-Wan had never spoken it out loud, either. Yorrickknew it with utter certainty.

How deluded Yorrick had been, to throw itall away on a lie.

Yorrick dashed away the tears. “We wereclosest during the Clone Wars. His role model was Anakin Skywalker. Mine wasObi-Wan Kenobi.”

Leia smiled at that. “As half theyounglings in the galaxy did, it would seem.”

Yorrick laughed. It was a weak, feeblething from too many years of disuse, but it would do.

Leia took his elbow in a soft grasp. “Ithink you should meet someone.”

Yorrick allowed her to lead him intoanother room, where the blond-haired young man whom Yorrick had also seen onthe Death Star was sat, tinkering with a pile of mechanical scraps.

“Yorrick Calder,” Leia said, “allow me tointroduce Luke Skywalker.”

Skywalker.

Luke extended a hand with a blinding smile– the same smile Yorrick recalled from the war-reels, two decades before. 

Yorrick shook Luke Skywalker’s hand, andfelt a weight lift off his chest as he did so.

And for the first time in twenty years, he was convinced that there was something to hope for.

END

This is a companion fic to A Face in the Crowd; read that if you want to hear Meron’s perspective.

This is also cross-posted to FFN.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND LEAD

It's not just startups, and in their own blog posts. Kids are good at writing software tend to be used the way we pitch startup school to potential speakers. And as any politician could tell you that taste is just personal preference is a good tool if you want to, which means working on the product after a funding round finally closes, it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.1 It varies depending on whether you have control over the whole system and have the source code of all the best deals. On the web, Google at year 1 is the limit that such tricks will approach. In more recent times indecent, improper, and unamerican have been. What struck me at the time they expended on this doomed company. The only external test is time.

Buildings to be constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale.2 We didn't know anything about marketing, or hiring, or organization. His skills are simply much more valuable. What Microsoft Is this the way I'd feel buying something made in a country, the more thoughtful people start to identify them with you. They could evolve into ads.3 I was delighted. Not well, perhaps, but the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, because all it does is break ties: applicants are bucketed by ability, and legacy status is only used to decide between the applicants in the bucket by immigration standards, but would represent a huge increase in productivity. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. The mistake investors make is not to make fundraising too complicated, but if there had been some way just to work super hard and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much. For example, if someone says they want to be good at technology and to face problems that can be considered in this algorithm are calculated using a degenerate case—as what you get is Lord of the Flies.4

We were just able to develop software in: Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate similar line/hour productivity, including all VCs I know, the term copyright colony was first used for backers of Broadway plays, but now a third type has appeared halfway between them: the so-called real world this need is a browser connected to the rise of startups. Startups often pay investors who will try to seem more or less independently of the stock market crash does seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general observations that would cause someone who understood them to do?5 How did Apple get into this fix? The disadvantage is that it has to convince instead of commanding. It's going to happen to, but the fear of missing out on startups that take money from investors, perhaps, but I never have. 5 million. Better check. But they've been trained to do for the next generation of kids.6 Ten years ago that was true. And yet all the adults claim to like what you learn via users anyway. Authenticity is one of the few, artificial, easy tests they've faced in life so far may have given the impression that math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense. All our ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice.

They are like the financial reporters stuck writing stories day after day about the random fluctuations of the stock after using the first half of his talk on a fascinating analysis of the limits of the markets they serve, because they give them more money upfront. When one person is in charge he can take risks that a committee would never agree on. People in past times were much like us. This could explain why hipness seems particularly admired in London: it's version 2 of the traditional English delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand. From either direction we get to the point here, vice versa. Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be exceptional. It's great if by lead they mean they'll invest unilaterally, and in most of them, because I worked at a regular nine to five job, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple minutes.

The IBM 704 CPU was about the death of our first cat. 01 graham 0. In a startup, by turning their comments into bets: if you actually start the company, its revenues go away, and the latter because, as investors have learned, founders tend to be the next Microsoft unless some other company to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale. If anyone wants to take on the hardest problem you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken. Delight You should take more than you think.7 The B-list actors might be almost as charismatic, but when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them to move to Albuquerque just because there are no external checks at all. Starting a company changes people. So one way to do it.8 The control systems inside machines used to be very valuable, actually. 76% of the company's stock. I don't see how we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our ability to do a deal in 24 hours if they need to mull something over, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software.

When I said at the start is to recruit users manually and give them a lot, and that will get last place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't.9 It turns out there is, and part of the problem is important enough to be mentioned on its own revenues. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, just try to hit it every week. If we improve your outcome by more than 6. I suspect the statements that make people mad are the ones that win.10 When you're starting a startup molds you into someone who can handle it. Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Why wait for further funding rounds to jack up a startup's price?11 Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it's good enough to accept, and give them an overwhelmingly good experience—and the main reason large organizations have so many choices.12 And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think of companies like Apple or Google have offices there, but these are likely to soon. And in the process of innovation.

If doctors did the same work, except with bosses. But the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there will be other equally broken-seeming ideas in the imprecise half. Number 6 is starting to be VC territory. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. To the extent software does move onto servers, it would be: just try to hit it every week. Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you do you may have found something surprisingly valuable. The puffed-up companies that went public during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based software. It seemed odd that the outliers at the two ends of the spectrum, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will probably raise a series A is clearly heard-of. 7602. You could probably do it. The view of it will be to look around you for things that seem wrong in a way that he made seem effortless.

Notes

Perhaps the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could to help the company than you expect. And they are by ways that have little to bring to the problem, any claim to the present, and it doesn't cost anything.

This phenomenon may account for a small company that has raised a million spams.

Interestingly, the owner has already told you an asking price. Foster, Richard. But this is certainly not impossible for a solution.

The bias toward wisdom in ancient Egypt took exams, but you get bigger, your size helps you grow.

That sort of pious crap you were doing Bayesian filtering in a band, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than to read this essay wrote: One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start a startup or going to get kids into better colleges, I had a demonstration of the movie, but in practice signalling hasn't been much of the market. Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost that none who read this essay I'm talking mainly about software startups are often unknowns. Some of the Times vary so much on luck. I've observed; but it doesn't cost anything.

Seneca Ep.

Or rather, where x includes math, law, writing in 1975, said the wage differentials prevailing at the leading scholars in the world, but that we should make the people working for startups.

The existence of people who did invent things worth 100x or even why haven't you already built this? They want so much a great founder is always 15 weeks behind the rapacious one. Obvious is an interesting trap founders fall into a pattern, as I know of no counterexamples, though sloppier language than I'd use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the original text would in itself deserving. If we had to bounce back.

The obvious choice for your side project. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the size of the venture business barely existed when they want you. Even the desire to get going, and logic. 54 million, and logic.

The real problem is not a problem can be fooled. Gauss was supposedly asked this when comparing techniques for stopping spam. But it wouldn't be irrational. Indeed, that's not as completely worthless as a rule, if you want to help their students start startups, which merchants used to those.

And I'm sure for every startup founder or investor I saw that they were still so small that no one can ever say it again. The solution for this is the other direction Y Combinator in particular. Why Are We Getting a Divorce? Some are merely ugly ducklings in the U.

But in most high schools. Founders rightly dislike the sort of community. Is this unfair? Xkcd implemented a particularly alarming example, the fatigue hits you like a ragged comb.

Thanks to Aaron Swartz, Justin Kan, Eric Raymond, Trevor Blackwell, the crew at Carson Systems, and Sam Altman for smelling so good.

[crispychrissy]

Identity Crisis

Summary: When an Alpha demon has to posses an Omega meat suit for a mission from Crowley, things get a little awkward.  Characters: Richard Baker (demon!OMC), Derek (demon!OMC), Crowley Word Count: 1956 Warnings: ABO Dynamics, sexual content (no smut), language A/N: This fic comes from a 3am giggly conversation between me and @saxxxology (who is also my beta). Imagine an Alpha demon having to possess an Omega and she goes into heat, and he’s all confused. I think I woke up my neighbors with how loud I was laughing. Enjoy!

Richard Baker. A single bachelor of twenty-eight with a successful job, and of course, he was a handsome Alpha to boot. He prided himself on being available for any Omega that would need him during their heat… but there was one thing he never had.

Love.

Sure, hearing an Omega whimper below him, begging for his knot, that was great, but he never heard anyone tell him they loved him. Not even his parents. His father, a lawyer, and his mother, a politician, he was never raised in a home where felt loved. When he presented as an Alpha, he slept around constantly, clinging to the frail overnight relationships he formed with whatever woman would share his bed. They only loved what he could provide to them: A strong body and an Alpha cock.

That’s why he found himself at three in the morning in the middle of nowhere burying a small box at a crossroads. Of course he didn’t believe the so-called witch that sold him the ingredients… but he was desperate.

He couldn’t believe that a demon actually showed, let alone made a deal with him. Ten years to be loved like he knew he should be by the woman of his dreams. Ten years to show how much love he could actually return.

The second he sealed the deal with that kiss was the moment he knew he was going to live to regret it, even though the promise of a gorgeous Omega lay in wait on his return home.

So here he was, thirteen years later, standing in the throne room of Crowley, the King of Hell, and waiting to be assigned his next task. He was wearing his favorite meat suit, a comatose and brain dead Alpha who had the plug pulled after suffocating when a two-hundred-pound barbell landed on his chest while he was working out alone. Not having another person constantly fighting against the possession was always nice, and his old body had worn out long ago, when he was still on the Rack.

Soon after that, he met another demon named Derek, and they quickly became friends, or as close to friends as demons could be. They were constantly assigned to the same tasks due to their efficiency and the strengths of their Alpha suits.

“Alright, next!” Crowley spat, lethargically waving his hand while he thumbed through a folder.

“Richard and Derek, sir. Awaiting instruction.” Richard said, a smile on his face and his hands clasped behind him.

“Right, whatever,” Crowley said dismissively. “I have a task for you both, but Richard, you need to be in a new meat suit. I had one brought up from the vegetable garden.”

“The vegetable garden, sir?” Richard asked, a confused look on his face.

“Not literal vegetables, you walnut.” Crowley rolled his eyes and huffed a chuckle, “the stock pile of meat suits I have that are comatose, brain dead, or otherwise incapacitated. The ‘vegetables.’”

“Oh, right, sir. Of course,” Richard smiled as a small female body was wheeled into the room.

She was tiny, probably barely five foot three inches tall, with long blonde hair. She was wearing a surprisingly clean pair of skin tight jeans and a light blue button down. She was attractive, Richard couldn’t deny that, but he was confused as to why he needed a female meat suit.

“A woman?” He asked.

“Yes. You two are going to be posing as house hunting newlyweds to find me an empty house big enough for a new base for a cell of demons… and two Alpha males obviously wouldn’t work.” Crowley said.

Richard raised an eyebrow. “So, wait… she’s-”

“An Omega, yes.” Crowley finished his sentence and looked up at him. “Will that be a problem?”

“No, sir. I just, I’ve had the same meat suit for a long time, it’s going to be new territory for me is all. No problem.” Richard smiled and tilted his head back, opening his mouth. A large plume of smoke billowed out of the mouth of his Alpha meat suit and wisped through the air and then down the throat of the unconscious Omega.

He, or rather, she blinked her eyes open and stretched. Richard heard a few joints in her arms pop as he reached above him and then stood from the wheelchair. Everything seemed so much bigger from down there, and he was taken aback by just how tiny this Omega was compared to his normal Alpha meat suit.

“Well, how does it look on me?” Richard asked, spinning in a circle with his arms out.

“Not gonna lie, dude. You look pretty hot,” Derek confessed with a laugh. “Might have to get a female demon into her once you’re done so I can give her a proper knot.”

“Not if I get to her first, asshole,” Richard said. He tried to laugh but it came out as a soft giggle. He tilted his head to the side for a moment and wondered out loud, “Wait, if I have sex with an old meat suit, would that be considered masturbation?”

“I don’t think so, because you’re not in her while you’re fucking her… right?” Derek said, walking over to where Richard was standing. “And if she’s dead, that’s something completely different.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Richard took a deep breath and found himself surrounded by an enticing smell of pine trees and citrus. “Man, your cologne is strong.”

“Gentlemen, enough with the useless banter. You have your assignment,” Crowley waved his hand, “Go.”

Both Richard and Derek nodded and disappeared from the room, reappearing in a small suburb outside Bloomington, Illinois. There were rows and rows of cookie cutter houses lining the street on each side, and they landed between two of them on the right side of the street. Each of them slipped on their respective wedding bands.

Richard groaned as they peeked their heads out. “I don’t see why I have to be the chick. I mean, why couldn’t I have been a Beta or something at the very least?”

“Whatever, dude. You’re not the one that has to deal with your scent right under my nose for the entire day. You smell like fresh cookies and fruit.” Derek grumbled. “And I mean that in the least homo way possible.” They stepped out onto the street and began walking towards a group of cars and people down the road.

The moment they got within line of sight of the group of people on the sidewalk, Derek slipped his arm around Richard and pulled him close to him.

Richard flinched and tried to pull away. “Dude, what the fuck?”

“We’re newlyweds, dude. Just fucking deal with it so we can get this done.” Derek tightened his arm around him and flipped on a fake smile.

A heavyset woman with poofed up red hair sauntered over to the two of them with a giant smile on her crimson lips. “Hello friends! Looking for a new home?”

Derek nodded and offered his hand. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Derek Smith. This is my wife Ric… uh, Rebecca.”

Richard offered his hand as well and the woman shook it vigorously. “What a lovely Omega you have here, Derek.”

Her eyes studied Richard’s neck and her brow furrowed in confusion when she realized there was no claim mark. She opened her mouth to comment, but swallowed the thought and replaced it with another huge smile.

“Come on! Let me get you a brochure,” the woman said as she turned and began to walk back toward the crowd of people. “All the houses on this street are for sale except for this one right here.”

Richard nodded in understanding and began to absentmindedly flip through the brochure. He felt a strange cramp spasm in his lower stomach, causing him to purse his lips and take a deep breath.

“You okay?” Derek asked, raising an eyebrow and looking down at Richard. He couldn’t help it when he took in a deep breath, surrounded by a renewed Omega scent that was beginning to affect him.

“Yeah… just felt weird. Like I gotta take a shit, but different. I don’t know. It’s nothing.” Richard shook his head and involuntarily stepped closer to Derek.

“Miss?” Derek said to the real estate woman, causing her to spin around. “My wife and I are just going to look around at the homes and let you know if we spot something we like. We definitely are going to pick one in this development, though.”

The woman smiled another huge smile and nodded. “You two kids have fun! I’ll be flitting about.”

Derek spun around, pulling Richard with him, and began to march down the sidewalk toward one of the houses on the left. They quickly bounded up the walkway and Derek threw open the door, slamming it closed once both of them were inside.

“Okay, what the fuck is going on? You smell… you smell amazing,” Derek all but growled.

“I don’t know what’s going on! It feels like I’m being stabbed in the stomach and like I got swamp ass, but it’s in the front,” Richard yelled back.

“Dude,” Derek’s eyes went wide and he began to laugh. “I think you’re in heat!”

“I’m what?!” Richard began to panic. “Is that why I feel all sweaty and wet?”

“You’re in heat! That’s why you smell so good and you’re covered in slick, not sweat,” Derek said between gasps as he bent over and continued laughing. “Jesus, I woulda thought you’d get something right about Omega anatomy.”

“It’s not fucking funny, asshole!” Richard hissed. “This feels so weird. I need to get out of this body and get into a Beta or something.”

“You can’t. Crowley will kill you if we go back without completing our mission.”

“But it’s so sticky, Derek!” Richard whined and spread his legs further apart.

“Do you need an Alpha to take care of you, Omega?” Derek purred, trying to suppress his smile.

Richard couldn’t suppress the whimper that escaped his throat, nor could he stop the throbbing between his legs. He found himself feeling empty, wanting something to fill him up. He rapidly shook his head looked up at Derek with wide eyes.

“You smell so good… wait, does this make me gay?” Richard choked out.

“I… maybe? It doesn’t make me gay, though, because your body is definitely female,” Derek said, running his eyes up and down the Omega body in front of him.

“That’s it. I’m done, I’ll send Katrina. She was an Omega when she was alive and she owes me a favor,” Richard stepped back and pressed his index finger into Derek’s chest “You are such an asshole.”

“I was only offering to-” Derek began to say right as Richard smoked out of the Omega’s body and disappeared out the back window of the house, leaving the empty body to collapse with a sickening thud on the floor.

“-help you with the problem.”

Less than ten minutes later, another plume of black smoke wormed its way into the house through the back window and down the throat of the Omega lying unconscious on the floor. Once all the smoke was down her throat, she stood up and opened her eyes.

“Hey Katrina. Been a while,” Derek purred, stalking closer to her.

“Hola, baby. It’s been too long,” she pressed her legs together and moaned softly, running her hands up and down her new body. “This one is in heat… she wants it bad.”

“Mhm. Come here, babe. Let’s break in the bedroom of this house, shall we?” Derek stepped forward and scooped her up in his arms and began to walk toward the other end of the house toward the bedroom.

Tags: @katymacsupernatural @your-modern-shakespeare @wh1sp3r1ng-impala @wheresthekillswitch @holyfuckloueh @just-another-busy-fangirl @growningupgeek @kittenofdoomage @sofreddie

ABO Tags: @kawaiilivkitty

[didanawisgi]

Why does anyone need a high-capacity magazine?

By Mark Almonte

This article focuses on pistols with high-capacity magazines (a magazine that holds more than ten bullets).  The same arguments in my recent article on assault weapons could apply to high-capacity magazines for rifles.

There are several reasons for civilians to own high-capacity magazines: the right to possess the necessary means to effectively defend themselves, misconception of bullet stopping power and shooting accuracy, and the issue of multiple attackers.  Additionally, on a net balance, there are benefits to the community when law-abiding citizens own guns with high-capacity magazines.

William Levinson at American Thinker smartly posed the question, "Do you believe that all human beings have a natural and inherent right to defend themselves from violent attack?"

All of us would agree that in a civilized society, people have a right to self-defense.  The next logical progression is that the right to self-defense implies a right to the necessary means to effectively defend oneself.

Jeffrey Snyder at the Cato Institute points out that victims don't choose where and when they will be attacked.  It is the criminal who decides.  The criminal will wait until the victim is most vunerable, until he is alone, or when the police are gone.  He will try to have every advantage over the victim, whether it be an armed advantage, strength, or outnumbering his prey.  Mr. Snyder states, "The encounter will not be on equal terms; the fight will not be 'fair.'"

In order for a victim to stop a violent attack, he or she will need to successfully balance the playing field.  The victim must have the means necessary to effectively save his or her life; otherwise the right to self-defense is worthless.

Currently, national politicians have determined that a ten-round (bullet) limit per magazine is sufficient for civilian self-defense.  The politicians have come to this conclusion without any evidence or research to substantiate their claim.  Shouldn't we be concerned with how many rounds it takes to stop an attacker?  And why?

First we should address some common fallacies about bullet stopping power.  The only gunshot wound that can reliably cause immediate incapacitation is a hit to the brain or upper spinal cord.  Even after being shot through the heart, a suspect still has enough oxygen in his blood to shoot back for 15 seconds.  Additionally, bullets do not have the energy to knock down humans.  If that were the case, then the energy traveling in the opposite direction (the recoil) would knock down the shooter as well.  An FBI report on handgun wounds provides an interesting example:

A ten pound weight equals the impact of a 9mm bullet when dropped from a height of 0.72 inches ... and equals the impact of a .45 when dropped from 1.37 inches[.]

The FBI report mentions a number of reasons why suspects are able to take multiple bullet hits and fight on.  Some examples include adrenalin, extreme anger, painkillers, and stimulants (cocaine, crack, meth, etc.).  All of these examples can keep a suspect from feeling pain or even realizing he's been shot.  The following is a real-life example of the realities of a gunfight:

In 1986, in Miami, FBI agents were involved in a shootout.  Despite being shot six times, Suspect Michael Platt was still able to gun down two FBI agents and injure three others.  Platt was hit by four more gunshots, but he continued to be a threat by pointing a gun at responding officers.  It wasn't until bullet number twelve struck Platt in the chest that he was incapacitated.  Similar examples of suspects being shot five to six times without being incapacitated occurred in Philadelphia and Georgia.  In a self-defense situation, you may have to inflict half a dozen or more gunshot wounds on your attacker in order to neutralize the threat.  That's assuming that you are able to land half-a-dozen hits on your target.

Bullet stopping power is one issue, but the other side of the coin is accuracy.  Shooting a moving target is not easy.  Shooting a moving target that's shooting back at you is even harder.

According to an NYPD report, there were 16 officer-involved shootings in 2005 where the suspect shot at police officers.  The NYPD officers hit their targets 8% of the time.  The officers fired an average 17.3 rounds to stop the threat.  One factor that certainly contributed to the low percentage of hits is that in 70% of the gunfights, the suspect shot first.  Otherstudies have officer-involved shootings at a 51% hit rate, but they don't include officer-involved shootings that have no hits, and they don't isolate gunfights, where the suspect is shooting at the officer.

Another consideration is a situation involving multiple attackers.  Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck conducted a detailed survey on incidents of firearms being used for self-defense (defensive gun uses).  Kleck found that in 53% of annual defensive gun uses in the United States, the victims faced multiple attackers.  All of the concerns regarding stopping power and accuracy are now magnified when multiple attackers are involved.  However many rounds were needed to stop one attacker will have to be doubled for two attackers.

Most states already allow citizens to own high-capacity magazines.  Economist John Lott found in an eighteen-year period that only 23 handgun murders in the U.S. were committed by citizens who had a permit to carry a concealed firearm (conceal carry permit holders).  That's a little over one per year.  He also found that in one month from December 14, 2008 to January 11, 2009, ten conceal carry permit holders stopped violent crimes.  Gary Kleck's survey (which encompasses all defensive gun uses -- not just those with conceal carry permits) produced a national estimate close to 400,000 lives saved by defensive gun use per year.  Kleck notes:

As a point of comparison, the largest number of deaths involving guns, including homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths in any one year in U.S. history was 38,323 in 1991.

Not only are there benefits to the community in lives saved, but Kleck's survey showed that women accounted for 46% of all defensive gun uses.  High-capacity magazines are a benefit to women because they help equalize self-defense situations for women.  Females already face physical limitations against male attackers.  Limiting their magazine capacity only helps the criminal.

We've seen that it's not uncommon for suspects to still be a threat after being shot half a dozen times.  Factor in that trained police officers operating under the stress of gunfire are landing roughly only one in ten shots.  Statistically, low-light shootings at night or indoors with poor lighting bring down the hit percentages.  Compound that with the possibility of multiple attackers and any reasonable person would conclude that limiting a civilian to ten rounds is not nearly enough for self-protection.  The NYPD, LAPD, and the LASD don't limit their officers to ten-round magazines.  They all issue 15-round magazines, except for the LASD, which now issues 17-round magazines.

If a law-abiding citizen, who's cleared a background check and received firearms training, can be trusted with one bullet, why can't he or she be trusted with a hundred bullets?  Is the first bullet any less deadly then the 99th?

This article focuses on pistols with high-capacity magazines (a magazine that holds more than ten bullets).  The same arguments in my recent article on assault weapons could apply to high-capacity magazines for rifles.

There are several reasons for civilians to own high-capacity magazines: the right to possess the necessary means to effectively defend themselves, misconception of bullet stopping power and shooting accuracy, and the issue of multiple attackers.  Additionally, on a net balance, there are benefits to the community when law-abiding citizens own guns with high-capacity magazines.

William Levinson at American Thinker smartly posed the question, "Do you believe that all human beings have a natural and inherent right to defend themselves from violent attack?"

All of us would agree that in a civilized society, people have a right to self-defense.  The next logical progression is that the right to self-defense implies a right to the necessary means to effectively defend oneself.

Jeffrey Snyder at the Cato Institute points out that victims don't choose where and when they will be attacked.  It is the criminal who decides.  The criminal will wait until the victim is most vunerable, until he is alone, or when the police are gone.  He will try to have every advantage over the victim, whether it be an armed advantage, strength, or outnumbering his prey.  Mr. Snyder states, "The encounter will not be on equal terms; the fight will not be 'fair.'"

In order for a victim to stop a violent attack, he or she will need to successfully balance the playing field.  The victim must have the means necessary to effectively save his or her life; otherwise the right to self-defense is worthless.

Currently, national politicians have determined that a ten-round (bullet) limit per magazine is sufficient for civilian self-defense.  The politicians have come to this conclusion without any evidence or research to substantiate their claim.  Shouldn't we be concerned with how many rounds it takes to stop an attacker?  And why?

First we should address some common fallacies about bullet stopping power.  The only gunshot wound that can reliably cause immediate incapacitation is a hit to the brain or upper spinal cord.  Even after being shot through the heart, a suspect still has enough oxygen in his blood to shoot back for 15 seconds.  Additionally, bullets do not have the energy to knock down humans.  If that were the case, then the energy traveling in the opposite direction (the recoil) would knock down the shooter as well.  An FBI report on handgun wounds provides an interesting example:

A ten pound weight equals the impact of a 9mm bullet when dropped from a height of 0.72 inches ... and equals the impact of a .45 when dropped from 1.37 inches[.]

The FBI report mentions a number of reasons why suspects are able to take multiple bullet hits and fight on.  Some examples include adrenalin, extreme anger, painkillers, and stimulants (cocaine, crack, meth, etc.).  All of these examples can keep a suspect from feeling pain or even realizing he's been shot.  The following is a real-life example of the realities of a gunfight:

In 1986, in Miami, FBI agents were involved in a shootout.  Despite being shot six times, Suspect Michael Platt was still able to gun down two FBI agents and injure three others.  Platt was hit by four more gunshots, but he continued to be a threat by pointing a gun at responding officers.  It wasn't until bullet number twelve struck Platt in the chest that he was incapacitated.  Similar examples of suspects being shot five to six times without being incapacitated occurred in Philadelphia and Georgia.  In a self-defense situation, you may have to inflict half a dozen or more gunshot wounds on your attacker in order to neutralize the threat.  That's assuming that you are able to land half-a-dozen hits on your target.

Bullet stopping power is one issue, but the other side of the coin is accuracy.  Shooting a moving target is not easy.  Shooting a moving target that's shooting back at you is even harder.

According to an NYPD report, there were 16 officer-involved shootings in 2005 where the suspect shot at police officers.  The NYPD officers hit their targets 8% of the time.  The officers fired an average 17.3 rounds to stop the threat.  One factor that certainly contributed to the low percentage of hits is that in 70% of the gunfights, the suspect shot first.  Otherstudies have officer-involved shootings at a 51% hit rate, but they don't include officer-involved shootings that have no hits, and they don't isolate gunfights, where the suspect is shooting at the officer.

Another consideration is a situation involving multiple attackers.  Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck conducted a detailed survey on incidents of firearms being used for self-defense (defensive gun uses).  Kleck found that in 53% of annual defensive gun uses in the United States, the victims faced multiple attackers.  All of the concerns regarding stopping power and accuracy are now magnified when multiple attackers are involved.  However many rounds were needed to stop one attacker will have to be doubled for two attackers.

Most states already allow citizens to own high-capacity magazines.  Economist John Lott found in an eighteen-year period that only 23 handgun murders in the U.S. were committed by citizens who had a permit to carry a concealed firearm (conceal carry permit holders).  That's a little over one per year.  He also found that in one month from December 14, 2008 to January 11, 2009, ten conceal carry permit holders stopped violent crimes.  Gary Kleck's survey (which encompasses all defensive gun uses -- not just those with conceal carry permits) produced a national estimate close to 400,000 lives saved by defensive gun use per year.  Kleck notes:

As a point of comparison, the largest number of deaths involving guns, including homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths in any one year in U.S. history was 38,323 in 1991.

Not only are there benefits to the community in lives saved, but Kleck's survey showed that women accounted for 46% of all defensive gun uses.  High-capacity magazines are a benefit to women because they help equalize self-defense situations for women.  Females already face physical limitations against male attackers.  Limiting their magazine capacity only helps the criminal.

We've seen that it's not uncommon for suspects to still be a threat after being shot half a dozen times.  Factor in that trained police officers operating under the stress of gunfire are landing roughly only one in ten shots.  Statistically, low-light shootings at night or indoors with poor lighting bring down the hit percentages.  Compound that with the possibility of multiple attackers and any reasonable person would conclude that limiting a civilian to ten rounds is not nearly enough for self-protection.  The NYPD, LAPD, and the LASD don't limit their officers to ten-round magazines.  They all issue 15-round magazines, except for the LASD, which now issues 17-round magazines.

If a law-abiding citizen, who's cleared a background check and received firearms training, can be trusted with one bullet, why can't he or she be trusted with a hundred bullets?  Is the first bullet any less deadly then the 99th?

Read more:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/03/why_does_anyone_need_a_high-capacity_magazine.html#ixzz58YBszC3K

[sj4iy]

Translation: “Owari no Seraph: Guren Ichinose, the Catastrope at 16″ Chapter 03 Summary (Spoilers!!)

Here’s your chapter summary.  Forgive any typos or translation errors, I type as I read (also autocorrect often changes japanese spellings without my permission).  Of course, spoilers ahead.  

Chapter 03:

The Hyakuya church is a magic organization of large scale said to prop up the dark side of the country.  They had a skirmish with the Hiiragi organization, but after WWII, the Hyakuya Church received support from America and carried the seat of the country’s key magical organization. Many politicians received assistance and they ruled the country from the shadows.

The assassin explains that his organization wants to crush the Hiiragi clan and offers their power to Guren.  He replies that he’s not interested, because he’s always been interested in first place and if he teams up with them, it’ll be their first place and not his.  He wonders why they are trying to mix him up in it but tells the assassin to disappear or he’ll make him disappear and grabs his sword.  The assassin finds it amusing but Guren says “I’ll win” and that any opponent that he’s shown his real power to has died.  “But I’ll wait five seconds” and “When you return, tell your superior that Ichinose didn’t change sides”.  Then he starts counting down.  The assassin says that his appearance (yousu) is different from earlier, and asks if he’s bluffing…but Guren keeps counting down.  The assassin finally leaves.  The girls find Guren and tell him it’s a problem if he goes off alone and he tries to tell them he was going to the training room.  They respond that since it’s not finished he should rest, and he says “You’re right, I am a little tired today.  What about the curry?” and Sayuri panics that it’s still on the heat and runs off.  Guren remarks that she’s the same as ever.

At school they are doing training drills and Guren is knocked to the ground by Norito Goshi.  Norito complains “Geez, I can’t train against such a weak opponent” as the other kids suck up to him. Mito Juujou walks up and asks him if it doesn’t bother him that people are saying such things about him, but he plays dumb and says that he could never win against the eldest son of the Goshi clan.  Mito gets angry and calls the Goshi clan second rate, which prompts Norito and Mito to argue until they start fighting.  One of the students asks the teacher about it but the teacher tells everyone to watch the fight and study it.  Just then Shinya walks up and congratulates him on his performance getting hit and says he can’t learn Guren’s level like that.  Guren calls him a stalker and Shinya says “I’m interested in the real power of my future friend who will destroy the Hiiragi clan” but Guren says “I’m won’t be your friend.”  Shinya asks him to be his partner and show him his real power.  He starts giving off massive amounts of power and says “By the way, I’m going full throttle.  No matter how strong you are, it’s impossible to go easy on me.”  Guren tries to give him the “there’s no way I can fight you” excuse but Shinya moves to hit him.  Guren thinks “Aah, shit…can’t be helped” and takes the punch…which sends him flying.  Shinya is surprised and says “No waaay, he’s that stubborn?”  Guren lands with a crash and Mito runs to check on him.  Shinya says “Or he’s really that weak?”  Guren is in bad shape and Mito says “Sensei, Ichinose-kun is spitting up blood!?”  Everyone starts making comments about how strong the Hiiragi clan is and how it’s absurd for the Ichinose clan to fight with their social standing, but Mito and Norito see that Guren is actually hurt bad.  Guren himself thinks “I allowed the hit at an angle that my organs wouldn’t get hurt even if my ribs were fractured…at least, I was supposed to.  I actually messed up…a little bit…” as Norito tells them to take him to the infirmary.

Guren wakes up in a hospital bed with bandages around his chest.  He takes some of them off to see the nasty wound on his chest, just as Mahiru stands in the doorway.  She says “Don’t take your bandages off yourself.”  He’s surprised to see her, and says “It’s been a long time” (using polite speech).  This surprises her and she says “it’s become like that”.  She comes into the room next to his bed and he says “Your father will become angry if you get too close to someone like me.”  She says she’s different from the old days, and that she decides for herself.  She asks him if there’s nothing he wants to say even though it’s been so long, and he says “There’s nothing I am able to say”.  Her hand twitches at this, and she asks him how his wound is, and he says it’s not a problem.  She then says that she’s heard that his ‘value’ is very poor and he responds that if there are reports of it, it must be true.  He then says “Mahiru-sama, you’ve become strong and beautiful in the past ten years.”  She blushes and smiles, and says she’s happy he called her pretty.  Then he very bluntly asks her what she wants with him which takes her by surprise.  She says that when she heard he was hurt, but he replies “I’m sorry to have caused you worry, but it’s no longer a problem.  Is there anything else you need?”  She angrily replies “There isn’t” and takes her leave.  He says “Oh, I forgot to mention…” and she stops…but then he goes on with “I heard from Shinya-sama that you are engaged.  Congratulations.”  She says “Thank you” and angrily walks out of the door.  He watches her leave and grabs his head in anger, saying “…shit, I’m such a bastard.”

Back at school, the technique selection exams (not exactly sure how to word this in english) are starting “tomorrow”.  Shinya is happy to see Guren and says “I’m glad your injuries healed that much, wanna go home together?” but Guren tells him to “die”.  Sayuri calls out to him, but Shigure tells her not to stand out or she’ll get scolded again.  Guren thinks “A lecture later”.  Mito chastises him for having two female followers escort him, calling the Ichinose clan “cowards”.  Norito comes up to him and asks Guren to introduce him to the girls and asks him (in a whisper) which one he’s going out with.  Guren asks if he should be associating with a dirty Ichinose, and Norito responds that “beautiful women are different” and asks Guren if they sleep with him at night since they are under his control.  Mito is shocked and calls him vulgar, and Sayuri chimes in saying “That’s right, won’t you please stop this strange accusations?”  Then she states “Guren-sama still hasn’t made a move!”  Everyone is shocked, Guren face palms, and Shinya laughs, asking Guren if he can tell Mahiru about this conversation.  Guren states “I’m going home.”

On their way out, magic fills the hall.  Guren tells the ladies “don’t move, I’ll deal with it”.  Guren is suddenly kicked back into the wall, and the guy who did it says “Ah, sorry, my foot slipped.”  Shigure goes after the guy but a girl catches her fist and introduces the guy as Seishirou Hiiragi, and says that trying to lay a hand on him is certain death.  Seishirou replies “It’s fine, Yumi, the Ichinose morons can’t understand human speech.  Hitting these kinds of animals is just training.”  Shigure goes to block his swing but he laughs and says “too late”.  Guren thinks “dammit” but Shinya grabs Seishirou’s arm before he can hit her.  Shinya says “If rumor got around about you hitting an Ichinose woman it would hurt your family name.”  Seishirou says “Who asked for the adopted child’s opinion” and when Shinya says “I’m sorry, but” Seishirou hits him in the face.  Shinya is silent, and Seishirou laughs and says “Good judgement.”  He goes on to say that Shinya could never win against him, and Shinya’s judgement is why his father chose him for Mahiru.  Seishirou says that he came to check out Ichinose in the second fight of the exam tomorrow, but “he was nothing but a rat, after all.”  Shinya says he was also suspicious of Guren’s ability at first, but that he was nothing special after all.  “Even though his friend was about to get hit, he’s just garbage who didn’t act.  Someone from a degenerate, second-rate family after all.”  Seishirou laughs and calls all Ichinose people “garbage” and walks off with Yumi.  Norito calls him garbage that can’t protect women and Mito asks him again if he can stand them saying things like that about him and he replies that he can’t go against people of the Hiiragi clan. Mito yells “If they told you to die would you?!” and stomps off.  The rest of the students walking around laugh at him, and Shinya says “You really are a boring guy.  I expected a little more from you.”  Guren says “…don’t make up expectations on your own” and Shinya walks off.

Shigure apologizes for being so weak, and Sayari asks if it’s really necessary to endure all of this.  He tells them “Sorry”, and Shigure tells Sayuri that she feels the same way about their precious master being continually mocked but tells her to endure it. “Our master, who is suffering more than us, isn’t crying.”  Sayuri cheers up and says “Ah, that’s right!  That means tonight for sure we’ll sleep with him…” and he hits smacks her on the head and says “we’re going home.”  He starts thinking about how Seishirou and Mahiru are in the same grade, so they must have different mothers and wonders how much of his power he should show here.

Guren’s waiting outside a market when he sees a little boy with the assassin from before.  The little boy is called him “Saitou-san” and asking if it’s really okay to buy as much candy as he wants.  “Everyone at the orphanage will be happy no matter what I buy, right?”  The assassin asks him if he can buy it himself, and he replies that he’s 8, so of course he can and runs inside.  Guren says “Saitou?  Didn’t you tell me that your name was Kijima?”  The assassin replies “I don’t have a real name” but asks him to call him Saitou in front of Mika (Mikaela).  Guren asks him what he’s using the child for, because the Hyakuya sect is famous for human experimentation.  The assassin says that the Hyakuya church has seriously thought about how to keep the country on the right path, and that Japan will be destroyed if it continues like that.  “It will be caught up in The Final Horn”.  Guren asks if he thought he could convince him to join by using eschatology, but the assassin says this isn’t that kind of conversation.  “A virus will spread” he says, “and makes this world uninhabitable for humans.  This conversation is about war.  God isn’t spreading this virus, humans are…by the name of ‘Hiiragi’”.  The ‘Mikado no Oni” are recklessly trying to steal the seat of power from the Hyakuya church and trying to use forbidden magic.  Then the assassin says, almost jovially, “We are desperately working to stop that.  See?  Our interests align, do they not?  Before the world ends, won’t you join us to destroy the Hiiragi clan?  The war between the Hyakuya church and Hiiragi clan begins in ten days.”

Guren asks if he has until then to choose, and the assassin replies that he needs his answer right away.  Guren says “In that case, my answer is no.  I don’t get involved with people who can’t talk straight with me.”  The assassin says “that’s too bad” just as Mika comes out carrying a lot of groceries and asking for help.  Mika sees Guren and asks the assassin “Who is that guy with the mean look in his eyes?”  and the assassin replies “Who knows?  Probably a degenerate”.  Mika says “Whoa, scary” and Guren has a disgruntled look on his face.  They walk away and Guren thinks that the war starts in ten days and might even destroy Japan.  “How will we conduct ourselves until then?  No…how will we come out on top during the confusion?

That’s all for this month.  Wow, Guren was a complete ass in this chapter.  Nice to see Mika, although a bit creeped out by the situation, as well.  Next chapter will be out on 9/6 (Wednesday).

[think32blog]

Paul Gosling @ MacGill Summer School 23 July 19

A few days ago I discussed Northern Ireland and the prospects for Irish reunification on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. In it, I described Northern Ireland as a failed state. This upset a few people – so I’m happy to instead describe it as a dysfunctional society. That seems uncontentious to me.

Let’s look at the evidence. Mostly that’s the S’s.

Stormont. We haven’t had a government for two and a half years. When we did, they didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done, or the willingness to enter into effective partnership.

Segregation. We educate most of our kids in a segregated system, failing to teach them how to live together. Public service duplication costs £1bn, maybe £1.5bn a year.

Subvention. That service duplication and segregated structure feeds into a financially wasteful system. According to the UK Treasury, the annual subsidy from UK taxpayers is around £10bn a year – more than the UK’s cost of being in the EU. Tell that to the English nationalists who voted for Brexit and you can see the political tensions that are awaiting. If you strip out the contributions to debt interest, the armed forces and some other non-NI costs the subvention is probably around £5bn, which is still a lot of money.

Security – in other words, paramilitary crime. Lyra McKee was killed a five minute walk from my house, which has made this feel very personal.

Schools. I keep hearing that Northern Ireland has the best schooling system. But the people who say that are middle class parents, mostly in Belfast and County Down, whose kids go to elite grammar schools. But it’s not what parents say in Creggan or loyalist East Belfast. We have a crisis of boys leaving school without basic life skills or minimum qualifications. It is another sign of division at the heart of Northern Ireland society. That is a division of class, through school selection.

Skills. We need to improve vocational training to promote aspiration across society. The lack of graduate qualifications is another real problem. A few years ago I did some research and it seemed that Derry had the lowest proportion of graduates in its labour market of any city in the EU. Northern Ireland has the UK’s smallest HE sector: a third of our undergraduates study elsewhere and most don’t return. This is understood by Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, who a few days ago called for the expansion of Northern Ireland’s university sector to strengthen skills and productivity. He understands: Northern Ireland’s own politicians apparently don’t.

Infrastructure. Our infrastructure is dodgy and much of it barely works. It can take two and a half hours to travel the 70 miles between Derry and Belfast. It can take five hours to travel from Derry to Dublin, which is 123 miles as the crow flies. When I lived in Leicester I could travel the hundred miles to London in an hour by train.

Productivity. Northern Ireland has the UK’s joint lowest productivity. Derry has Northern Ireland’s lowest productivity: the result of insufficient skills, too few graduates, weak infrastructure and the resulting lack of inward investment, both private and public.

The NHS is great, but it is struggling in Northern Ireland because reform is taking too long without ministers in place. We have long waiting lists, long waiting times, even to see a GP.

This is a dysfunctional society. And this is without discussing how we deal collectively with the trauma and injuries from the past.

Another topic makes matters even worse – Brexit. The UK Treasury believes that over a 15 year period a no deal Brexit would leave Northern Ireland’s economy 12% smaller than without leaving the EU. People in the agri-food sector with its cross-border production processes are terrified of a no deal Brexit – some of those businesses would close. More than 40,000 jobs in Northern Ireland are at risk from Brexit.

Let us remember a couple of points here. Firstly, a Brexit referendum slogan was to take back control of our borders – the challenge is how that demand can be reconciled with having an open border in Ireland, an open border between the UK and the EU.

Secondly, there are four possible approaches to the Irish border – I won’t say solutions, but different approaches.

One is that the UK stays within the Customs Union and Single Market, accepting EU regulations and abandoning the idea of its own free trade deals. The next is that Northern Ireland is a half way house, staying within the UK (at least for now), but within the EU in terms of the Customs Union and Single Market. That would create a border in the Irish Sea, but would still allow trade between Northern Ireland and GB. The third is a controlled border in Ireland, for goods rather than people. The fourth relies on a technological solution which does not yet exist, may never exist, and is unlikely to ever be entirely effective.

A fifth option exists in the imagination of some Brexiteers – Irexit, that Ireland leaves the Customs Union and Single Market, or that it accepts borders between Ireland and the rest of the EU. I won’t give that suggestion any credibility.

All these options have difficulties. But the key point for the economy of Northern Ireland is that it needs continued open trading with both GB and the Republic. Otherwise the economy will be damaged, income will go down, jobs lost. As this happens, if it happens, more attitudes in Northern Ireland will change, with less satisfaction about being in the UK. And at the same time, the English nationalism that stoked up Brexit will become ever more restless about the subsidies from England to the devolved nations. The pressures on the UK will grow, as Theresa May and others have warned.

Meanwhile, we also have demographic changes within Northern Ireland. Unionists are no longer in a majority politically, in employment, or in the population. Another segment of the population has emerged, who do not identify with either tradition. Perhaps people like me and my family. And we can guess that younger people will be less identifying with one tradition, more drawn to the socially liberal attitudes that have emerged in the Republic. Things, socially, are changing in Northern Ireland, but without a government and Assembly to reflect this.

Occasionally I’m told I don’t have the right to discuss these things. Despite having living in Northern Ireland for 20 years and bringing up three kids in Northern Ireland. Not that any republican or Irish nationalist has ever said that to me.

But how about another ‘S’ – a solution.

The Irish Republic is economically successful and socially liberal. My kind of country. It is increasingly attractive to some of the liberal unionists I talk with, such as those who run their own businesses that depend on cross-border relationships.

But calling for a border poll today, in my opinion, is politically, strategically, not intelligent. Ireland has its own challenges – housing, health, and not least the debt it is carrying from bailing out the banks. Reunification is, though, the most sensible approach as far as I am concerned over the medium term. The question is how we get there. I suggest, we have to start by making Northern Ireland work better. Both unionists and republicans need to recognise that they have a common cause – to make Northern Ireland a better and more successful place. They actually both have selfish and strategic interests to do so.

I don’t believe the Republic is in a position today to cover the fiscal deficit of Northern Ireland. Nor do I believe that unionists should be relaxed about the continuing willingness of English nationalists to cover the subvention. Political representatives of both the main traditions need to recognise that the future of their positions requires them to make Northern Ireland work. We need a government in Northern Ireland committed to reform of our health service and schools system, investing in skills and infrastructure. A government that is determined to tackle social deprivation, inequality, poverty, creating jobs, expanding the economy.

In the short term, there is an obvious approach to be taken – which is to copy the measures the Republic has taken to turnaround its economy. This is not just about tax rates, but more importantly by investing in skills and infrastructure. It is also about even greater integration of the all-island economy – despite the challenges presented to this by Brexit.

As it happens, I believe the UK government has a moral duty to Northern Ireland which it has ducked. People expected the Good Friday Agreement to provide a peace dividend, yet it hasn’t. The gap between the employment rate in Britain and Northern Ireland hasn’t closed. There remains serious poverty and economic inactivity in many working class areas of Northern Ireland. The suicide rate has actually increased. I believe the UK government should recognise both its responsibility and its failure by investing directly into Northern Ireland infrastructure, above and beyond the city deals it has agreed with Belfast and Derry.

The Republic also needs to change. This is not just because we need to persuade unionists to consider the future – Northern Ireland cannot be simply ‘bolted on’ to the Republic. There is widespread resistance in Northern Ireland, including in nationalist and republican communities, to the idea of joining an insurance-based healthcare system. Ireland’s move to reform healthcare, Sláintecare, backed by increased all-island health provision is important to win support for unification. But this, too, cannot happen quickly. Sláintecare is a ten year programme that is behind schedule.

So my proposal is to learn from Brexit and not try to do such an immense project too quickly. A ten year timeframe might be realistic for the transition. But first we need to prepare for the border poll – though we might want to change the words. Many unionists are very sensitive and will resist any terminology that they feel is closely associated with Sinn Fein. Let’s not lose the objective because of the words we use. And if that means talking of ‘dysfunctional society’ rather than ‘failed state’ I will buy into that. And if it also means discussion of ‘A New Union of Ireland’ then fine, but let’s also discuss what that means.

It requires a conversation led by civil society, in which civic nationalism and civic unionism – and civic neutrals – come together and discuss and prove they can do so rationally and objectively. Irish unity cannot be achieved if the cause is associated, or claimed, by just one party.

A timeframe of not less than two years to prepare for a referendum, in which we put together what the new nation would be called and the detail of what it looks like, seems sensible to me. Colin Harvey has suggested 22nd May, 2023. I wouldn’t argue against that.

But I don’t think that we should pretend that changing the constitutional status of Northern Ireland is like an on/off switch, or replacing a piece of furniture.

Northern Ireland is dysfunctional and we need to make it functional. That is not simple or quick. We need a programme for economic and social recovery, along with reconciliation. We need reform. And realistically we need the financial subsidy from the UK government to be tapered off, rather than simply switched off. That would create a long term saving for UK taxpayers, while also continuing to support the very many people in Northern Ireland who regard themselves as British nationals. (And who will continue to be British nationals, if they so wish.)

Perhaps this is simply too big a task and we should abandon it as impossible. But I don’t think so.

In my life we have had the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Yugoslavia, reunification of Germany, the evolution of the Coal and Steel Community into the European Union, Brexit, the return of Hong Kong to China. These are big changes. Some have involved terrible events – giving us a warning about the need to plan and manage change.

For us, surely the starting point is for the Irish government to have a plan. Enda Kenny’s government deserves enormous credit for planning for the eventuality of a Brexit leave vote, when the government of David Cameron failed to do so. Let us call on the government of Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney to show equal foresight by planning for what A New Union of Ireland might look like and how we arrive there.

This plan needs to consider whether there must be a new constitution, a new name, a bonding around a new sense of shared identity. We clearly need a better sub-regional economic framework for the new union of Ireland, along with an integrated, free at point of delivery health service and a housing system that works for the entire population.

Among the constitutional questions is the role of Stormont – whether it should continue and if so, whether the other provinces should have their own regional government, despite having shown no signs of wanting one. And we need a careful examination of the fiscal implications of reunification.

Not all events are foreseeable. But those events that can be foreseen should be planned for, to enable them to be managed. It starts with a conversation about the future – and that conversation has begun.

Paul Gosling

• This is the text of a speech given to the MacGill Summer School at Glenties on 23rd July 2019.

[shadowsong26fic]

The Rabbit Hole AU

So, I babbled at my wonderful roommate nightlightflame (who is so much fun to bounce ideas off of omg) and decided I had to write this one up.

This is, essentially, an exercise in the Greek mythological concept of fate/destiny. Some things are Meant To Be.

...but how we get there, and what shape it takes when we arrive, well, that’s a different story.

And so, I present to you: the Rabbit Hole AU, aka Temple-Raised Palpatine.

So, Palpatine is identified as Force-sensitive as a tiny. (Which, how this was avoided in canon, IDK; his explanation in Plagueis makes little sense to me. As nightlightflame pointed out, the Son was probably involved)

Which means this is probably the Father going “hey, you see this kid over there? The kid who is clearly meant to be a Sith Lord? Let’s give him to the other guys and watch what happens.”

Anyway, Palps is identified and his father does the Right and Proper Thing and signs custody over to the Jedi Order.

For the purposes of this fic, I’m adjusting a couple things. Namely, Palpatine is five years older than his probable canon/Legends age, and Qui-Gon is approximately five years younger than his probable age.

They grow up together.

They’re friends.

(or, well, as close as Sheev can get to such things. He is still Palpatine, after all. But more on that later)

I’m going to skip over the next few years for the purposes of this outline, because they mostly deal with Qui-Gon and Palps being friends, and Qui-Gon occasionally functioning as Sheev’s external conscience, and Sheev occasionally poking at Qui-Gon until he at least acknowledges that the bigger picture exists.

And then they’re old enough to be taken as Padawans.

(this is where the fun begins)

How ‘bout some role-reversal? :D

This is the main reason why I fudged the ages.

Because given canon ages, it’s vanishingly unlikely that Dooku would take Palpatine on, particularly since this would have to happen IMMEDIATELY after Qui-Gon’s trials.

So, they’re the same age.

I’m not entirely sure who would train Qui-Gon.

Maybe Yoda?

Probably Yoda.

The only other timeline-appropriate Jedi I can think of is Jocasta Nu maybe? How old is she?

Or, wait, isn’t Plo Koon a long-lived species?

...I don’t think I want Plo Koon though, for reasons that will probably become clear later.

Dooku ably shepherds Palps through what is bound to be a fairly volatile adolescence. Palpatine develops into a shrewd, silver-tongued, and occasionally somewhat ruthless Knight. He takes his Trials at about 20/22, does remarkably well. Dooku is very proud.

Qui-Gon probably graduates around the same time, and they occasionally work together and maintain their friendship.

And then Xanatos happens.

Qui-Gon may, sadly, be backed into a corner where he has to straight-up kill Xanatos right at this point. I haven’t decided yet.

Qui-Gon, I think, straight-up leaves the Order afterwards.

MEANWHILE

Plagueis finds himself lacking in apprentice/partner candidates. He’s working to build up to the Clone Wars, because that was always the plan.

He focuses on the actual broad logistics for the time being, building the armies, etc., all while keeping an eye on several up-and-coming politicians on a variety of worlds, spinning his web.

(This will be important later.)

Some years later, Palpatine is in the Temple between missions, and idly observing a class of senior Initiates.

He sees one boy at the end of a row and deep from the bottom of his ice-cold heart comes a resounding cry of mine.

He is slightly concerned by this. Partly because he’s not overly fond of children and hasn’t ever really liked the idea of raising one (especially after what happened to poor Qui-Gon and Xanatos), but partly because...uh...

Look, Sheev knows he’s not like the others--he’s cold, calculating, finds it extremely difficult to find the empathy and compassion expected of a Jedi.

He can fake it well enough, and he’s built himself a rigid set of rules for his own behavior with Dooku’s help (which mostly but not entirely line up with the official Code), but he knows that there’s something atypical with his approach. Especially among the Jedi.

He goes to his former Master with his concerns.

Dooku’s advice boils down to, “it’s probably a very strong signal from the Force. The way it was phrased/the way you perceived it does cause some concern. Meditate for a while, speak with the boy, speak with his other instructors. Don’t rush this decision, but don’t discount the idea because of your initial reaction.”

This is very wise advice and Palpatine follows it.

Long story short, Palpatine takes Obi-Wan as his apprentice.

They are an incredible team, guys. Seriously, just think of the possibilities.

I don’t want to say much about the actual adventures they have, because that takes work I haven’t yet put into this AU, but I do need to mention Mandalore. And Satine.

Palpatine was going to recommend Obi-Wan for his Trials at that point. Then he decided “....I’ll give him a year or two to restabilize and then recommend him.”

When the time is right, he tells Obi-Wan, “when we get back to the Temple, I’m recommending you for your Trials.”

Obi-Wan: thank you, Master. I won’t fail or let you down.

Palpatine: I know. If I thought you would, I wouldn’t recommend you.

then they smile at each other because this is How They Do.

Obi-Wan, of course, passes with flying colors.

They continue getting teamed up, much like Obi-Wan and Anakin do in canon, because they work so well together.

(Also, Obi-Wan is pretty good at helping Sheev supplement his rules with Actual Decent Humanity)

Side note: Palps butts heads with the Council just as much as Qui-Gon does. But where Qui-Gon hears them out and then goes and does whatever the hell he wants to do anyway, Sheev, on the other hand, tends to hear the Council out, patiently discuss the issue, and then politely accept their judgment and withdraw. Five minutes later, the Council realizes that he just talked them into authorizing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they wanted him to do.

Ten years later, Obi-Wan starts utilizing that same skill.

Yoda has several drinks and deeply, deeply regrets authorizing this partnership.

But doesn’t split them up because, again, super-effective and they make up for each other’s emotional weaknesses.

Qui-Gon, meanwhile, has somehow come in contact with Plagueis.

Exactly how, I’m not sure.

Now, he’s not a good candidate for the political face Plagueis needs, but he would make a decent Sith Lord.

So, he becomes the Apprentice.

He needs a Sith Name.

Any ideas?

We are now up to approximately the point where Episode I happens.

Plaugeis, as mentioned above, has been keeping an eye on several up-and-coming politicians. And his puppet King on Naboo, Veruna, is beginning to try and cut his strings.

We can’t have that.

But there is this bright, charming, idealistic, ambitious young girl.

(If only, Plagueis thinks, she were Force-sensitive)

As it is, he can split those responsibilities--this young lady, in time, can be the public face of things on the Republic side of the coming War, and Qui-Gon can assist him with those parts of his plan that require Force use.

He has another candidate in mind to run the political wing of the Separatist movement--a certain brilliant, passionate, stubborn, idealistic Duchess...

But more on her later. Let us return to Naboo.

Plaguis makes contact with the young Padme Naberrie, and encourages her to put herself forward as an alternative to Veruna’s corruption.

(From here, in time, it will be child’s play to get her into the Senate and persuade her that his way is the best to counteract the corruption in the Republic as a whole).

The planet is blockaded.

Master Palpatine and Knight Kenobi are sent to negotiate.

This first part goes much as in canon, only with Plagueis, rather than Sidious, pulling the strings.

They are still forced to take refuge on Tatooine for repairs.

Palpatine identifies the boy immediately of course. And promptly claims him for the Order. He can work out the logistics later.

Of course, he doesn’t want to lose the child. But he also doesn’t really relish the thought of raising another one.

So, naturally, he goes to Obi-Wan. “This boy is powerful, and this boy is fragile. The Sith are extinct, but the Jedi are not the only power in this universe. We cannot allow him to be manipulated by the wrong people.”

“So, instead, we manipulate him ourselves?”

“Precisely.”

Obi-Wan agrees in principle, but is a little hesitant about taking the child as an apprentice. “Master, I’m still relatively inexperienced. I’m not sure I’m ready to take on any Padawan, let alone one who will need special attention.”

Palpatine gives Obi-Wan the same advice Dooku gave him--sit with the boy, speak with him, don’t make this decision lightly or in haste. And, if Obi-Wan says no, resolves to train the boy himself. Because without one of them advocating for him--insisting--the Council will never admit him into the Order. He’s too old.

Obi-Wan follows his Master’s advice. And deep from the bottom of his warm, kind heart comes a resounding cry of mine.

Maul is probably still involved here, because I don’t think I want to drop the Qui-bomb this early. He probably gets very dead (like, for real, actual, permadead this time) because Palps and Obi-Wan together? Ahahahaha, good luck.

Qui-Gon is keenly distressed by the death of his apprentice. (Especially after Xanatos. Who he has personally killed by now, if not when things first went wrong). And then to learn it was at the hands of his one-time best friend?

Ten years pass.

Anakin trains as a Jedi. Obi-Wan and Palpatine still frequently work together, now with their tiny tagalong.

Padme finishes her term as Queen of Naboo and enters the Senate, still receiving counsel and training from Plagueis.

Finis Valorum’s term ends as scheduled. Bail Antilles is elected to replace him, replaced in his seat by Bail Organa.

And then, under the charismatic leadership of the Duchess of Mandalore, a secessionist movement begins to take shape.

Obi-Wan feels slightly conflicted. They have a reasonable point, and he can’t help but remember Satine--but his loyalty is to the Republic, to his Order, to his Master and to his Padawan. Mostly to those last.

He discusses his concerns with Palpatine, who agrees, but maintains that the chaos of factioning would be worse than the corruption Satine and her Separatists are protesting.

Anakin has no opinion. Anakin, much to his Masters’ despair, has a tin ear for politics, and will simply follow wherever they lead him.

(he’s a little better than in canon, because Palpatine, rather than aggravating his issues, is trying to ameliorate them, but some things can’t be helped.)

And then comes an attempt on Senator Amidala’s life.

(”You may need the sympathy vote to help you become Chancellor after we remove Antilles. Even your unimpeachable reputation as the Steel Flower of Naboo might not outweigh your youth and inexperience.”)

Anakin and Obi-Wan are assigned to protect her, as in canon.

Padme: ‘oh no he’s hot’

Padme: ‘kriffing hell.’

Padme: ‘my Plans for the Republic do not allow for pretty, dumb, pretty Jedi boys.’

Anakin: ::awkward attempts at flirting::

Padme: ‘WHY IS THAT ENDEARING.’

Padme: ‘kriffing hell.’

Obi-Wan: ::headwalls::

I’m not sure where Palpatine is. Possibly involved with some other investigation--while he and Obi-Wan mostly work together, sometimes only one of them is called for, and if he was on a solo mission he probably wouldn’t have been recalled.

Anyway, a poison dart still leads Obi-Wan to Kamino, and Geonosis.

Padme and Anakin still go to rescue him.

(They still make a detour to Tatooine.)

(Palpatine doesn’t really care about Shmi, sadly, so would make no efforts to free her. Obi-Wan and Anakin would probably handle it about the same as they do in canon, until it’s too late.)

(Palpatine senses what’s going on and extracts himself from his other mission immediately to go see to his flailing child, and guide him back from the brink. Because he knows what that’s like; who better to help?)

(But by the time he arrives, they’ve already left the planet.)

(He reaches Geonosis around the same time Mace’s team does.)

Geonosis is probably where I drop the Qui-bomb, actually. Mostly as muscle backing Satine--an ex-Jedi supports the Separatists!

Obi-Wan is Very Conflicted on seeing his former lover.

Satine has a Moment herself. Not enough to challenge her convictions--nothing short of actually exposing her patrons for what they are will do that--but it gives her pause.

Satine is taken out of the arena to safety.

Qui-Gon leaves as well.

Anakin and Obi-Wan pursue.

Anakin still rushes in. Anakin still loses his arm.

Palpatine is caught up in the thick of the battle, not there for his children when they need him.

(He regrets this intensely later. Not nearly so much as Qui-Gon will, of course. Friends they may have been, once upon a time, but no one harms Sheev Palpatine’s children. No. One.)

Padme requests that Anakin escort her back to Naboo. He is all too eager to agree.

His masters, who are neither stupid nor blind, meet each other’s eyes and sigh.

Palpatine: well, this is probably for the best. They’ll spend a week or so in bed, and he’ll get this infatuation out of his system.

Obi-Wan: I’m...I’m not so sure it’ll work that way, Master.

Palpatine: Five credits says I’m right.

Anakin returns to his Masters some days later and, having a different relationship with them than in canon, immediately confesses all.

(Obi-Wan discreetly holds out a hand for his credits. Palpatine, equally discreet, passes them over.)

Padme returns to the Senate and gives a stirring and passionate speech about what she witnessed at Geonosis.

Another of Plagueis’ patsies follows up by accusing Antilles of underestimating and mishandling the Separatist threat, and proceeds to call for a no-confidence vote.

The newly minted wartime Chancellor Amidala hides her smile and promises to guide them safely and surely through these troubled times.

The War begins, with Plagueis pulling strings behind both Padme and Satine.

Anakin is quickly Knighted.

Obi-Wan, while still recommending him, does see that Anakin still has trouble letting go. Especially after what happened to his mother. He consults with Palpatine, who agrees.

The Battle of Christophsis happens.

A tiny teenaged Togruta turns up, announcing she’s been assigned to Anakin.

(Some time later, deep from the bottom of his wildfire heart comes a resounding cry of mine.)

The War continues. Padme gradually accumulates power.

Palpatine begins investigating some things that don’t quite add up--it starts with tracking his obsession with Qui-Gon (he knows it’s not Jedilike, he knows it violates the Code, it comes perilously close to violating his internal rules, but that was his child.)

Things come to a head...I’m not sure exactly when.

Possible point #1: The Second Battle of Geonosis, where Anakin nearly loses Ahsoka.

Possible point #2: After the children get back from Mortis, and tell Palpatine what happened.

(This would, of course, be slightly different than in canon, but I haven’t quite worked out the details)

Possible point #3: After Umbara.

Possible point #4: After Kadavo.

(This one is less likely, because while Palpatine strenuously objects to the idea of sending his younger son there, he would acknowledge that time is a factor and there was no other team close enough.)

Anyway, at one of those four points, Palpatine is completely Done with the situation. He is taking his children and his clones and they are leaving. They are taking a third option. They are not Sith, but they are not Jedi anymore, either--what they are is a family, with an army, and a singular goal: to see peace restored to the galaxy and protect what is theirs.

Padme: what

Satine: what

Plagueis: WHAT

Palpatine, his children, and their armies form a third faction in the War. Their intent is to basically make both the Separatists and the Republic sit down, shut up, and stabilize.

They go to Padme, and lay out everything they think they know. Mostly at Anakin’s insistance, because he can’t leave his wife.

Padme hears them out, thinks back over everything she’s done with Plagueis, everything he’s asked her to do, every word he’s whispered in her ear, and says, “I’ll help you.”

They try to reach out to Satine, too, but they have no real ties in Separatist space, so it’s taking them longer.

With their generation’s most brilliant tactical mind running their offenses, they quickly make strides and gain ground. Which is nice, because it gives Padme cover to communicate with them--it’s only proper, after all, that the Chancellor should attempt to negotiate, now that the war has grown infinitely more complicated.

(She plays her part with Plagueis perfectly, of course.)

I admit, the ‘how’ of the next part is a liiiiiittle shaky, but it all basically ends with Palpatine murdering Qui-Gon in the face (with extreme prejudice), Anakin (probably with Obi-Wan’s help) killing Plagueis (this may or may not result in Anakin losing another limb or three on Mustafar because why not), and Ahsoka (with help from the clones; she’s their favorite) ending Grievous. Their faction has now won the Clone War.

The Separatists may need some mopping up, I need to work out exactly what would happen with Satine and all.

Padme graciously steps down, and Palpatine is installed as Chancellor for Life.

He does not take the title of Emperor, but that is in effect what he is now.

His sons, his daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter are at his side.

Obi-Wan does most of the day-to-day running of things--he’s very good at it, after all, and Palpatine would rather concentrate on larger problems. Handling any lingering issues with the Separatists, and one never knows what one might find outside the Republic’s borders...

Padme assists--her political acumen and strength of will are a terrible thing to waste, after all.

Anakin is happy and stable; a loving husband and father, and, together with Ahsoka, ensures that justice and stability actually exist in Palpatine’s realm.

So, to make a (very) long story short...remember what I said at the beginning, about Greek concepts of Fate?

The Clone War still ends with Palpatine ruling the Galaxy.

Anakin is still his right hand; his enforcer.

But how we got there...well, that’s the story, isn’t it?

[cartoonessays]

Pissing People Off as a Political Ideology

I may not show it very much on this blog, but I have a sense of humor.  As a matter of fact, my sense of humor is often very dark.  A couple of examples of dark sense of humor were in the short animated films I created for my undergraduate and graduate degrees in college.  One of those films was about an old tiger in a zoo bitterly retelling the story of her tumultuous life and the other was about an artist’s dive into madness through his dogged attempts to impress a critic with his painting.

I got interested in dark comedy in my early to mid teens.  Around this time, I started watching South Park, I rediscovered Family Guy when it began airing again on Adult Swim, The Boondocks TV series premiered, and I started to get interested in stand-up comedians.  Some of my favorite comedians became, but aren’t limited to, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Sam Kinison, and Rodney Dangerfield.

Some of the examples I’ve brought up have found humor in subjects like murder, suicide, dismemberment, rape, bigotry, psychological abuse, addiction, etc.  Who in God’s name would look at subjects like these and find something to laugh about?

Without getting into comedy’s history or Aristotle’s definitions of it, one would have to understand where this kind of sense of humor comes from.

Most often, people that find a lot of humor in really dark subject matter funny have created that ability to laugh about it from some sort of personal pain, tragedy, or disillusionment.  This personal pain or tragedy could be direct or fairly indirect.  In the case of my short films in college, the comedy of the undergrad film manifested from the various horrific things done to tigers that have critically endangered their population and the comedy of the grad film manifested from a painfully arduous semester I had just gotten to the end of capped off by a demoralizing graduate review.  The latter is obviously very directly personal and the former isn’t so direct.  I have no personal relationship to tigers and I’ve never even been to any of the countries they live in.  The personal part is that the tiger’s near extinction forces the part of me that wants to believe that the world is a just place to confront the bitter reality.

This type of comedy is often, if not always transgressive, especially when it is aimed at other people.  South Park is particularly known for this, which has the reputation of taking comedic jabs at everything.  The show became famous, or rather infamous for its philosophy that no cow is too sacred to tip over.  South Park relishes in ruffling feathers and making monocles drop into martinis.  The next few generations of comedians would follow South Park’s example.  Many current-day comedians still do.

There is a dark, well darker side to this dark comedy, especially dark comedy that transgresses against others.

The Comedian from Watchmen is… to put it lightly, a piece of work.  The book opens up with the Comedian’s grisly murder.  You feel kind of bad for him at first, but when you read on and find out who this guy was… ugh.  Some of his “highlights” include raping Silk Spectre, gleefully shooting and incinerating Vietnam protesters, and killing a Vietnamese woman he impregnated after she caught him attempting to abandon her.  The Comedian is driven by greed and a love for violence.  He calls himself the Comedian because he portrays himself as what he considers a mockery of society, which he thinks is inherently barbaric.

I bring up the Comedian because he’s a cartoonishly exaggerated version of a type of transgressive behavior that is unhealthy.  Too often with too many people, whatever personal pain or disillusionment they are dealing with manifest in antisocial or harmful actions towards others.  And too often, these harmful transgressions get passed off as entertainment, usually by people who are hacks, irresponsible, or just don’t know any better.  There are productive ways of dealing with that inner turmoil and there are destructive ways of dealing with it.

Getting back to South Park, the reason it was so good and the reason it has lasted for twenty years is that it always had a very thorough understanding of comedy and a sharp execution of it.  It always had more going on with it beyond all of its vulgarity at the surface.

I know I’ve been talking about this in my past few posts, but it bears repeating.  Once something has been co-opted by the market, it is cynically sold back to us consumers as a watered down project.  South Park has been monumentally successful and influential as a bold and edgy cartoon, so the market responded to it by co-opting its edgy and incendiary veneer without doing the hard part and recreating the quality.

Which brings me to… ugggghh, this.

First of all, Milo Yiannopoulos is not brave, daring, original, or some kind of crusader for true comedy or free speech, regardless of what useful idiots like Bill Maher, Dave Rubin, or any of his right-wing sycophants tell you.  He saw an emerging market he could seize on, learned how to market himself on social media platforms, and all the other big media figures propping him up are simply trying to cash in on his market too.  All he has done is found a new way to market the polemicist theatrics that propelled Ann Coulter to fame fifteen years ago and Rush Limbaugh to fame twenty five years ago.

The conservative politics of these three pundits is based less of beliefs and conviction and more on a puerile glee in mocking liberals.  They relish in scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to get their point across, whether by encouraging racist and misogynistic harassment of Leslie Jones, indirectly calling John Edwards a “faggot”, or suggesting advocates for contraception mandates film themselves having sex and posting the films online for men to watch.  A political ideology based simply on pissing other people off is superficial and stupid.  There is no moral basis for such an ideology; it’s completely reactionary.  Figures like Milo, Limbaugh, and Coulter dress their bankrupt ideology and some kind of brash but righteous “tell it like it is” conservatism and convince their audiences to adopt this ideology so they could cultivate a zealous fan base that will purchase whatever crap they hock at them.

Milo revealed on a podcast that he was sexually abused by a grown man when he was a teenager.  He has also been upfront about his own self-loathing of his homosexuality.  He has said that his sense of humor and extreme persona is a cathartic way of dealing with his issues.  That makes sense to me.  However, I don’t shed any tears for the guy because he reminds me of the Comedian, except without the killing.  Having a dark sense of humor is one thing, but when you use it for what Milo has used it for, it goes beyond you finding a cathartic release.  Milo profited and elevated himself off of pretentiously framing his racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic transgressions as grade-A comedy/some kind of free speech martyrdom, not considering for a goddamn second any of the people he stepped on to elevate himself.  He doesn’t even care about any of his fans or sycophants either.  If at any point he decided it would be in his best financial interest to stop pandering to bigoted crowds, he would do it at the drop of a hat and mock all the people he used to appeal to.

He doesn’t care about anything or anyone but himself.  He’s a nihilist.

I’m more concerned about the people Milo appeals to, especially because so many of his fans are teenage boys and young adult men.  Whatever frame of mind or sense of disillusionment that makes Milo or people like him appealing to someone is very real.  Our country’s economic prospects haven’t been very good for most of the populace for almost ten years.  Our collective understanding of mental health is still insufficient as ever and the availability of resources for everyone is even worse.  The rigid gender roles enforced on all boys to live up to plant a seed of anxiety in them that grows as they get older, especially in their interactions with the opposite sex.  All of that in itself is a desolate enough existence to breed nihilism.  People like Milo seize on those feeling of powerlessness and isolation and perverts it even further by twisting those feelings into anger and apathy towards others not like them.  They learn whatever is going wrong with their lives is because feminism, “social justice warriors”, or political correctness keeps impinging on their lives.  By the time they get to this point, the psychological ramifications of rape matter less to them than their #triggered jokes.  Anybody with a different experience or point of view from them is just a “snowflake” or a “cuck”.  Aspiring for an egalitarian society is less important than “shitposting” for the “keks”.

And unlike Milo, the large majority of these nihilist men polemicists like him breed won’t become rich and influential.  But they will still find themselves angry and disillusioned.  What do they do then?  Some of them might be convinced to support politicians that won’t do anything for them because they can at least stick it to those “SJWs”.  Some of them might find themselves enticed by Nazism, white nationalism, or fascism.

A few of them might want to do more for the cause than “shitpost” online.

Further info:

Thomas Frank “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

Frank does not specifically talk about Milo and his crowd, but the parallels between them and who he does talk about are unmistakable.

[thespecialrelationship-phff]

Prologue

AN: Morning everyone! I’m so excited to pick up this story again! If you read Version 1 this prologue will be very familiar. I would still recommend you read it again (there’s some minor changes and it’s been sooo long) Thank you for your patience and Enjoy!

November 6 2012

The ballroom at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel was full of people, everyone was chatting, eating and most importantly drinking.  All around red, white and blue balloons and lights decorated the art deco space. The music played softly considering most people had their eyes affixed to any of the many television screens.  

Bum badum dun da dun

The tune has the group turning to the screens. All conversations cease as the announcer addresses the viewers across the nation.  ''And we have another important race update, we at CNN are comfortable announcing that North Carolina's electoral votes will go to Senator Bee…''

The assembled group groans, drowning out the rest of the announcement. North Carolina was a state that could have gone either way.  Senator Randolph's supporters wanted that victory. Now though they watch the margin between the two candidates shrink even more. The night was getting late, millions of votes had been cast and the United States still didn’t have a clear president elect.

Up a few floors three suites were home base for the Randolph campaign team.  The mood was much more serious in these rooms.  Interns and advisors were on computers, cell phones and tablets trying to determine how the night was going to end. And in the middle of it all sat Senator Alexander Jefferson Randolph V.  He was seated, jacket off, bourbon in hand. ''Dammit.''

''Alex, we predicted this loss in North Carolina. We built the loss into the model.''  The middle-aged campaign manager, Steven Jenkins chimes in.  The rather short man stands in the center of the chaos.  His jacket and tie long since discarded. He looks haggard, circles under his eyes, pale face. The man had been working for over a year and a half for this night and he looks like it.

''Sure, but I want to win. I want it to be over.'' The candidate grumbles, sounding much more like a disgruntled toddler than an Ivy League educated politician.

Even though the same age as his campaign manager Alexander Jefferson Randolph looked a good ten years younger. The presidential candidate had been described as a man with the personality of Teddy Roosevelt, the charisma of John Kennedy and the statesmanship of George Washington. Indeed, looking at Alexander Randolph inspired all sorts of feelings usually awe. He was a tall man with an upright, confident posture, strong jawline and sharp gray eyes that could convey every emotion in his political tool belt. In most men, this combination could be toxic, but Alexander Randolph was a man hell-bent on doing good.  He, if the American people chose him tonight, could be one of the great presidents.

''Fox News wants a statement.'' An intern chimes in.

''Here's one: fuck off.'' Alexander takes a sip of his bourbon, eyes trained on the television.

Steve swears, glaring at his longtime friend.  He raises his voice to address the intern.  ''I don't need to tell you not to say that right Amanda?'' He pats his friend on the shoulder. ''We're getting close. We're going to win this thing.''

The Senator nods, staring into space.  ''What's left?''

Steve rattles off states most of them clear victors either way, if the polling stayed true. Alexander nods thoughtfully, ''It will come down to Ohio.''  The age-old battleground. The state has a 96% success rate in determining the future president. This year would be no different.

''Looks that way.''

The door to the bedroom swings open, a young woman steps out in a dark blue dress.  The a-line ensemble flatters her small waist while minimizing her generous bust line, before poofing out, the sleeveless look highlighting her toned arms. And her legs looked impossibly long in the nude stilettos. ''We knew it was coming down to Ohio.'' She remarks, not missing a single beat.

Per usual the room stops to look at the young woman. Her intelligent brown eyes scan the room before she smiles exposing perfectly straight teeth behind red, but not too red, lips.  If her father was a combination of three great men than she was perfect mixture of female icons.  Over the past year the tabloids had hailed her sex appeal similar to Marilyn Munroe.  Fashion editors praised her Grace Kelly like poise.  And those shrewd enough recognized a political mind akin to Hillary Clinton underneath it all. Margaret Kennedy Penelope Frances Drayton Randolph was a woman who knew her worth and she never squandered an opportunity to use the currency.  She smiles sweetly at the room, ''Carry on.''

''Kennedy,'' Senator Randolph stands to greet his daughter. He quickly kisses her cheek.  The bond between father and daughter was almost palpable. A sure way to fall out of the good graces of Alexander Randolph was to insult his baby girl, even if she wasn’t much of a baby anymore.  ''You look beautiful.''

''Thanks dad,'' She presses a hand to his forehead. ''You feel flushed, lay off the bourbon.''

''Sometimes you forget who the father is in this relationship.'' He scowls.

''I would never,'' she laughs. And then turns to Steve. ''Mr. Jenkins.''

''Miss Randolph, I'm glad you and Miss Dupree could decide on an appropriate outfit.''

She smiles coolly, ''It was a negotiation equal to the Great Compromise.  The more conservative dress was a deal if I got to choose to the shoes and accessories.''

Steve looks at aforementioned shoes and notices the long lean legs, at least the American public won't need to worry about a frumpy first lady. ''Democracy personified.''

''Indeed.''

Daughter and campaign manager respected each other, they did, but that didn’t mean they liked one another. The two were the closest people on this earth to Alex and that caused more tension than comradery.

Kennedy barely contains her eye roll. On the most important night of her father's life she had to spend three hours deciding on an ''appropriate'' outfit. It was degrading not to mention a complete waste of time.

She sits down next to her father they watch as expert after expert speak trying to fill the time. The pundits talking circles around one another. It's cleverly packaged bullshit, everyone in the hotel suite knows it. States are called one after the other but no real surprises. It's getting tenser as the time passes. Finally Kennedy breaks down to order a glass of wine, maybe it will settle the nerves. She glances at her father.  He has begun to pace now. His lead is by no means comfortable and Kennedy knows her father hates that. The race needed to be called quickly or he was going to run a hole into the carpet. And wouldn’t that be a story?

''Sir? Your brother is on the phone.''

''Ignore it.''

Time continues to pass.

Bum badum dun da dun

''This has to be it.'' Steve exclaims.

The room crowds around the television, aides, interns, advisors, security, everyone silent. Kennedy is perched on the arm of the chair next to her father. She watches eyes wide.

''At this time we can predict that Ohio-'' Senator Randolph squeezes his daughter's hand. ''Will go to Senator Randolph…''

The room erupts into cheers. Kennedy leaps up and yells.  Her father crushes her in a hug, ''We got Ohio! We got Ohio!''

The father-daughter pair are holding onto each other tightly screaming, laughing crying. When they break apart Alexander pushes his hair back into place, ''Now we still have to wait for-''

He's interrupted by the television.

''We are now calling the presidential race for Senator Randolph of Pennsylvania.''

The room is silent for a moment and then everyone is chanting Rand-olph Rand-olph Rand-olph. Father and daughter hug once again. ''Congratulations Mr. President.''

Alexander smiles, ''You too First Lady.''  He crushes his daughter tightly into his side.

''Sir, I hate to interrupt but let's go over that victory speech.''

And the presumptive president-elect is torn away from his daughter. She sits and sips some champagne that has magically materialized. A few of the interns stop by to say congratulations, no doubt to start currying final bits of favor. Kennedy smiles graciously, not believing that it's all really over.

''We're going downstairs in five, last checks people.''

A team surrounds Kennedy, ''Miss Randolph, let's just make sure everything is all in order.''

''Thank you.'' The young woman holds her hands together tightly. ''And thank you for all the help on the campaign trail.''

''My pleasure,'' the woman steps away looking at her hard work. ''It was a pleasure working with an intelligent, stylish young woman.  You're going to do great things.''

Tears spring to her eyes unsolicited.  The young woman has to blink them away quickly. Before Kennedy can express anymore thanks she's whisked out to the hall. She stands next to her father surrounded by security as they walk to the elevator. Steve is going over something about the speech. Kennedy assumes all she has to do is smile and wave for now.

When they reach the elevator Alexander, Kennedy and a few secret service members step in. The door closes.  The odd group rides in silence as the elevator goes down. The silence is off-putting.  It seems like just moments ago she was surrounded by noise and friendly faces. It was the first moment that the woman realized everything has changed. Kennedy reaches out to her father, enjoying the strength of just a simple touch.

On the ballroom floor they walk towards what they know is a crowded room. As they approach the chanting only seems to get louder.

Rand-olph! Rand-olph! Rand-olph!

''Can we hold for a moment?'' Alexander asks. The group immediately stops. The future president smiles effortlessly. ''Well that was easy.''

''You are the president-elect.'' Kennedy replies with a wink.

A flush passes over his face for a moment as if his future finally sunk in.   He was the most powerful man in the world.  ''Right. I just want to take a moment before any more crazy happens to us. I want to take a moment to say thank you for all your help and sacrifices so far.''

Kennedy smiles, touched that her dad is taking this moment of all of them to say thank you.  And if the campaign hadn’t been so grueling she would say the thanks wasn’t necessary.  However, having your dad run for president in one of the most exhaustive things in the world, so Kennedy accepts the appreciation. ''We talked about this a long time ago.  It was more than worth it for this.'' She pokes her dad in the chest. ''You're going to do great things, I wasn’t going to stand in the way.''

''I'm blessed with a great daughter.''

''She's pretty cool, I guess.''

The pair laugh.

''It's me and you kid.'' Alexander turns serious for a second. ''First Lady Margaret Kennedy Penelope Frances Drayton Randolph and-''

''President Alexander Jefferson Randolph.'' She finishes with a smile.

''Just like peanut butter and jelly.''

''Or Batman and Robin.''

''Jack and Jill.'' They start advancing again.

''Abercrombie and Fitch?'' The father-daughter duo start laughing.

''Zig and Zag.''

The two are smiling as they walk on stage to greet the crowd of supporters.

Kennedy stands, smiles and waves as she watches her father finally take hold of his destiny.

People Magazine December 2012

GETTING TO KNOW OUR FIRST LADY

Believe it or not First Lady, Margaret Kennedy Penelope Frances Drayton Randolph (or simply Margaret Kennedy Randolph) is not the youngest First Lady on the books. No, at the age of 25 she's the fifth youngest and not the first daughter of a president either. The beautiful, educated Miss Randolph is sure to bring a vitality and life to the White House. We've followed her extensively on the campaign trail, not a perfectly coiffed blonde hair out of sight. And now as an official American institution we can only hope for more fashion moments.

Over the course of eight months of campaigning Margaret, has become an instant American celebrity. She is a bonafide A-lister with brains and a political position to boot. You can bet great things are in store for Miss Randolph…

Glamour Magazine May 2013

Happy Birthday Kennedy!

As we wish a very happy 26th birthday to our favorite First Lady let's revisit the best moments from her first months in the White House.

At the Inauguration she rocked a deep purple high-neck dress with lace details, paired with a chic long gray trench coat. Even in the gusty January wind she remained dignified and solemn.

During her father's first state of the union she wined and dined on both sides of the aisles in a tea-length cream creation.  Allegedly she even shifted some support to a strong education bill that needed a few extra votes.

German counselor Angela Merkel visited and was apparently enchanted by the intelligent and vibrant First Lady.  They discussed the importance of heritage and the difficulties with remember and honoring dark pasts.

And last night she celebrated her 26th birthday with school children in D.C. Metro.  They made her a papercrown and she shared cupcakes. The Frist Lady spent the day experiencing and learning new education initiatives…

New York Times: First Lady Margaret Kennedy Establishes Women Health Initiative

Seated in the Blue Room, the young Margaret Kennedy Randolph looks at home in winter white. The long flared pants and tight sweater somehow look demure among the Federal style furniture. She sips on a cup of tea while explaining why this cause is close to her heart. ''Women are 50% of the population, and have our own unique set of health issues. It's not too much to ask for that support and knowledge. Sometimes women feel nervous to ask questions they feel alone.  I know I have had.'' Of course Margaret’s mother, the late Margaret Frances Astor Drayton Randolph, passed away due to complications from childbirth.

''I just want women to have the access to things they need and feel comfortable about it.''

This marks the First Lady's first official and potentially politically charged initiative. She has played hostess and glamour girl for a year.  Is it time for Margaret to showcase that world class education we've heard so much about?  Speaking from her home in the White House it's hard not to take her plan seriously or understand the passion behind it…

Editorial 2014

The First Lady does not, I repeat does not hold an official public office. She was not elected and does not represent the people of this great nation. As such the First Lady should refrain from creating what are obviously politically driven missions and initiatives. We appreciate that Miss Randolph is an educated woman but should refrain from using the power of the White House for a politically charged agenda. Stick to planning tea parties Miss Randolph…

Good Housekeeping July 2014

Miss Randolph Decorates the White House for Independence Day!

Stars and stripes with a sophisticated twist would be the appropriate way to describe the décor the First Lady has chosen. The entire executive mansion seems to be oozing confidence and poise with the Randolphs at the helm. When we discussed the logistics of throwing a July 4th cookout for the President and other high ranking officials the always composed Kennedy giggled. ''What could possibly beat hotdogs and hamburgers?''

Yes, the sophisticated, educated Margaret Randolph is choosing to host regular everyday American food to the dignitaries gathered in the capital. She's even managed to make patriotic clothing fashionable. We sit in the rose garden, in the June heat as Margaret smiles for the camera. Her red and white striped dress alludes to the toned body underneath while a jean jacket completes the casual look.  Her blonde hair catches the sunlight and nothing has been quite so patriotic…

Us Weekly October 2014

First Lady finds Halloween Love!

Boo! There might be a new man in the First Lady's life. Margaret was pictured at a Halloween party over the weekend in Georgetown. Apparently she was the guest of the basketball star, Jeremy McDaniel of the Washington Wizards. The two were dressed in corresponding costumes, Kennedy as a basketball player and Jeremy as a cheerleader. Guests say the two were close and cozy all night…

Vogue Spring 2015

First Lady in our Hearts

We followed Margaret Randolph around for a week and were justifiably impressed. For an entire week we saw her jetset around the eastern United States for engagements, for charity dinners, sport matches, school concerts, art shows, and hospital visits. It's honestly a sight to behold. Wherever she goes she is beloved. The people are always out with smiles to match hers. They bring flowers and notes, hoping to achieve one of those exclusive selfies. Margaret radiates confidence and warmth while somehow remaining just a step above us normal humans.

Maybe it's her fashion sense. She features new, up-and-coming designers from various regions, students and master designers alike…

Time December 2015

Person of the Year: Margaret Kennedy Penelope Frances Drayton Randolph, First Lady of the United States of America

The decision for the person of the year for 2015 was simple and quite possibly one of our most unanimous decisions. In the three years that Margaret Randolph has been in the spotlight she has met and risen above expectations. She is a credit to her father the President as well as our Country. She works tirelessly for the well-being of women, the education of children, arts and cultures.  Miss Randolph does her work with true passion and conviction all the while with a smile.

Foreign dignitaries remark favorably upon events and dinners hosted under helm. They mention the civility, gentility and even fun they have at the Randolph White House. Margaret, has improved the United States’ standing abroad a true challenge for someone who is technically still considered a private citizen.

It’s difficult to explain the power of Miss Randolph.  She does not give interviews, press conferences. She does not sit down with Oprah or Ellen and yet she is revered, admired.  Margaret is potentially the greatest diplomatic force this country has even though most people have never heard her voice.

The world waits anxiously for Margaret to make her first appearance abroad, no doubt that is in store for 2016.

As her father gears up for re-election it seems that Margaret has recommitted herself to her causes as well as adding more. She is truly a humanitarian, a global effort in change and a fine, fine example of how much a person can make a difference.

                                                     Chapter 1

[andrewdburton]

Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative

When Kim and I go to bed each night, we spend time casually browsing Reddit on our iPads. It's fun. Mostly.

She and I enjoy sharing funny animal videos with each other (from subreddits like /r/animalsbeinggenisuses, /r/happycowgifs, and /r/petthedamndog). Kim dives deep into /r/mapporn and /r/documentaries. I read about comics and computer games and financial independence.

But here's the thing. After browsing Reddit for thirty minutes or an hour, I'm left feeling unsatisfied. In fact, I'm often in a bad mood. After browsing Reddit, I have a negative attitude. My view of the world has deteriorated. Why? Because for all the fun and interesting things on Reddit, it's also filled with a bunch of crap.

You see, I also subscribe to /r/idiotsincars and /r/publicfreakout and /r/choosingbeggars — and dozens more like these. These subreddits highlight the worst in human behavior. And while viewing one or two posts from forums like these can be entertaining and/or interesting, consuming mass quantities of this stuff leaves me feeling dirty. (Plus, there's the Reddit comments which tend to be juvenile, dogmatic, and myopic. Reddit comments are so bad that Kim refuses to read them.)

It's taken a while, but I've come to believe that Reddit — or the way that I use Reddit, anyhow — is a net negative in my life. It causes more harm than good.

I've been thinking about his concept a lot lately. Behind the scenes, I've been making many small, subtle changes to my environment and daily routine. My aim is to decrease my depression and anxiety by removing people, things, and experiences that are net negatives and replacing them with people, things, and experiences that are net positives.

What Do I Mean by “Net Negative”?

What do I mean by this? What do I mean by “net negative” and “net positive”?

These concepts are simple to understand when we're talking about things are easily quantifiable. In sports, for instance, you can crunch numbers to determine whether an individual player helps or hurts her team when she's on the field. In personal finance, you can track stats in order to see which habits increase your net worth and which cause it to drop. The same is true with fitness or any other activity that can be measured.

But how do you measure Reddit? How can I quantify its effect on my life?

The fundamental problem, of course, is that in most cases we don't have a way to quantify this stuff. How can you tell whether a hobby is a net negative or a net positive? How do you quantify the good and the bad of social media? Of computer games? Of your career? Of your relationships?

You can't.

This isn't a scientific process with actual measurable metrics. When evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of the things in your life, you have to use intuition. You have to guess.

Still, I think most of the time — if we're honest with ourselves — we can tell whether something is helping or hindering us. Does browsing Reddit make me a better person? Does it make me feel better? Does it keep me better informed? No, not really. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. I may not be able to prove this with numbers (or any other objective measure) but I can sense it. So can you.

Nothing is All Good or All Bad

There's another problem that arises when trying to evaluate whether something is harmful or beneficial to your well-being. Few things are 100% good or 100% bad. Most have a mix of positive and negative elements.

Yes, owning a dog is a pain in the ass — but having a canine companion also brings a great deal of joy. For me, the pros outweigh the cons.

Watching television is a mindless passive activity. It can be a complete waste of time. That said, TV can also be an entertaining escape — or a great source of information. Plus, TV can provide a shared experience that sparks conversation with family and friends.

Even politicians that I find frustrating aren't completely misguided; even the worst elected official does some good. (And conversely, even the best representative does things I disagree with.)

As I said, few things are 100% good or 100% bad.

If we could quantify the people and objects and experiences in your life, most would probably have “scores” close to zero — close to “break even” — but a few of these scores would be extremely positive or extremely negative.

Looking at my life, some of my habits and possessions are clearly detrimental. Others are clearly beneficial. In many cases, it's easy to identify what should stay and what should go. Candy and potato chips? Talk radio? News media? These are all clearly negative and have no place in my life. Exercise? Time with friends? Reading? The music of Taylor Swift? These are all clearly positive and I want more of them.

The challenge comes when something is a net negative — but it also comes with some positive aspect that fills a fundamental need. In cases like this, it's tough to figure out what to do.

Alcohol as Net Negative

Take alcohol, for instance.

There is no doubt that alcohol relaxes me. By two o'clock every afternoon, I've become tense and anxious. I can eliminate this anxiety by drinking a couple of beers. For a long time, that's what I did. That's a positive side of consuming beer.

But while drinking alcohol provides some small short-term benefits, the long-term downsides have become too great for me.

Alcohol quells the immediate anxiety…but induces more long-term generalized anxiety. It makes me fat. It interferes with my ability to get things done. It damages my liver. And so on.

Ultimately, I decided that if I were to quantify alcohol's effects on my life, the negatives would far outweigh the positives, so I've given it up for now. (I stopped drinking on Independence Day and my goal is to go a year without alcohol. Or a year drinking as little of the stuff as possible.)

But what about pot? Marijuana is legal here in Oregon. During my fifty years on Earth, I've had some exposure to pot but not a lot. (Mostly I've used it as a sleep aid.) Over the past two months, though, I've been experimenting with it as a replacement for alcohol, and I can see that it does offer some advantages. But I've come to believe that pot too is a net negative for me.

No, pot doesn't contain calories. No, it doesn't give me a hangover the next day. No, it doesn't cost an arm an a leg. But pot does make me dumb — both in the present and the future. It saps my motivation. And there doesn't seem to be a middle ground with it. I can drink a couple of beers and enjoy a gentle, pleasant buzz. When I consume pot, it's all or nothing and I don't like that.

Worse, sometimes pot makes me paranoid. When that happens, it sucks. Plus, just as alcohol helps with short-term anxiety while exacerbating long-term anxiety, pot seems to help with short-term depression while increasing long-term depression. Yikes!

So, I think my experiment with marijuana has nearly run its course. Next, I'm going to play with mindfulness and meditation as a way to manage depression and anxiety.

Re-Thinking Social Media

It's tougher to evaluate things like social media.

For more than a decade now, I've been active on Facebook. I like what Facebook used to be. It was a way for me to stay connected with my friends, to see updates on their kids and pets and travel and careers. More to the point, it was (and is) a way for me to share what's going on in my life. (The real reason my personal blog died? Facebook. I use my Facebook feed as a personal blog.)

Over the past five years, however, the platform has changed. People increasingly use Facebook as a place to espouse their political beliefs. (Why? Why? Why? Why? Has anyone ever been swayed by a political post on Facebook? Ever?) Ads on the platform are invasive and annoying. And the Facebook algorithms seem hell-bent on showing me posts from the same people over and over and over again. (YouTube does the same thing and it drives me nuts.)

Just as I'm considering altering my relationship with Reddit and with alcohol, I'm also considering a change to how I use Facebook because more and more, I feel like it's a net negative in my life. And the more time that passes, the greater a net negative Facebook becomes.

To me, it's easier to evaluate Twitter. Twitter is a huge net negative. There's no room for nuance on Twitter. There's too much noise. The platform is filled with all of the bad things about social media (brigading, bullying, jumping to conclusions, etc.) and none of the good things. So, I mostly avoid the place.

For somebody like me, someone who believes that people are generally good and that the world is a complicated place filled with nuance, social media is deeply problematic. It's not inherently bad — I can envision useful, productive social-media platforms — but the way the major players have opted to implement their functionality fosters groupthink, negativity, and the spread of misinformation.

There's another huge problem with social media, including Reddit. It's killing my attention span. Pre-Facebook — meaning before I joined in October 2007 — I engaged in a lot of activities that required deep focus. I read novels and non-fiction for pleasure. I wrote long articles. I created websites and even wrote rudimentary computer programs to improve my life.

Today, my attention span is practically zero. It's tough for me to sit through a 23-minute sitcom let alone an entire movie. I can muster the focus to read a blog post, but an entire book? Well, that's difficult. If I do sit down to read a book, I become restless after only ten or twenty minutes. I have no patience.

I believe this problem is directly tied to how much time I spend on social media. Social media has conditioned me to have a short attention span, and that's a huge negative in my life. I crave the capacity to dive deep once more.

Keeping the Net Positives

As long-time readers know, I'm a fan of the KonMari method of cleaning and organizing. Marie Kondo argues that you should buy, own, and keep only those things that “spark joy” in your life. Each of your possessions should be a treasure.

What she's really asking people to do is to examine their belongings to determine whether they're net positives or net negatives. A shirt that “sparks joy” — such as Jerry Seinfeld's “Golden Boy”, say — is a net positive in your life, and you should keep it.

What I've been doing for the past couple of months is evaluating everything in my life to find what sparks joy and, conversely, what deepens despair. I want more of the former and less of the latter. (Plenty of things are neutral, of course. My toothbrush neither sparks joy nor deepens despair but it is something I choose to keep.)

Here are some of the strategies I'm employing during this process:

Develop awareness of how people, things, and experiences affect me. I write a lot about mindful spending. Too many people spend without thinking. I want them to be more deliberate about how they use their money. Well, the same idea applies to how we use our time and our energy. I want to pay attention to which of my habits make me feel good and which make feel bad. I want to notice which of my possessions make my life better and which make it worse.

Change my relationship with the problematic items and behaviors. Is it possible to reduce or minimize the negative elements and/or increase the positive elements? Reddit is a great example. If some subreddits bring joy to my life and others make me feel bad, then the obvious solution is to stop reading the forums that contribute to the negative energy. On Facebook, I could stop following the folks who insist on using it as a platform for espousing political beliefs and/or complaining.

Seek a replacement that sparks joy instead of deepening despair. I use alcohol as a maladaptive coping mechanism to deal with anxiety and depression. I tried to replace beer with pot, but that presented its own set of problems. Next, I'm going to try to explore meditation. If that doesn't work, I'll continue searching for something that will help — without bringing on a bunch of baggage.

Accentuate the positive! There's so much that I love about my life but too often I get distracted by the bad stuff. That's dumb. My thought is that if I can devote more time and attention to the good stuff, that'll naturally crowd out the negative. Right? Right?

Will I resume drinking alcohol? Will I ditch Facebook? Reddit? What role do computer games have in my life? How much time should I devote to reading? To television? To exercise? To blogging?

Over the next few months, I'll try to answer these questions (and more!) as I explore which aspects of my life are net negatives and which are net positives. Fortunately, most of this process is fun. I enjoy it. The tough part comes when I have to decide how to address the things that are both good and bad. Then the decisions become much more difficult…

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/net-negatives/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[thisdaynews]

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-massacre-that-spawned-the-alt-right/

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

“Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the morning sun.

The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they were descending on Greensboro, a city where sit-ins helped launch the civil rights movement in 1960, to ignite another revolution. They danced to a guitar player singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set to build the Party.” Their children dressed in tan military shirts and red berets. They even brought an effigy of a Klansman, dressed in a white sheet and hood, which kids from the neighborhood joined in punching.

Story Continued Below

The communists planned to begin their march at noon, moving from the housing project to a local shopping center. But just after 11:20, a caravan filled with real Klansmen and Nazis surprised them, snaking through the neighborhood’s narrow byways. As the protesters stood their ground, a man in a white T-shirt leaned out the passenger window of a canary-yellow pickup truck, and yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ‘em!” The station wagon behind him carried four Nazis. Seven more vehicles followed, carrying nearly 30 more men, including an Imperial Wizard of the Klan.

What happened next took just 88 seconds, but still reverberates 40 years later. In a confrontation where white supremacists began firing pistols, rifles and shotguns, and with television cameras rolling but police nowhere to be found, five communists were shot dead in broad daylight. Ten others were injured, some left to lie bleeding in the streets.

But that November morning became momentous for more than the grotesque video footage that still lives on the Internet: The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.

Before Greensboro, America’s most lurid extremistslargely operated in separate, mutually distrustful spheres. Greensboro was the place where the farthest-right groups of white supremacy learned to kill together. After November 3, 1979, it was suddenly possible to imagine Confederate flags flying alongside swastikas in Charlottesville. Or a teenager like Dylann Roof hoarding Nazi drawings as well as a Klan hood in his bedroom while he plotted mass murder.

Today, white nationalism is closer to the mainstream of American politics than ever before. The far right’s fears about “replacement” of the white race and outsider “invasions” have become standard tropes at conservative media outlets, and its anger is routinely stoked by the president of the United States. At the same time, right-wing violence is on the rise: Far-right terrorists accounted for the overwhelming majority of extremist murders in the U.S. last year, according to a January report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism, anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then could imagine.

***

Segregationists of the Greatest Generation,who fought German soldiers on the battlefields of World War II, would have thought it beyond preposterous for the Klan and Nazis to make common cause. Adolf Hitler drew inspiration from Jim Crow, but American southerners strongly supported going to war against Nazi Germany. In 1946, a list of American Nazi Party members, obtained by the U.S. Army, showed that just two percent lived in the South. Nazis were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government, as part of their program of genocidal fascism. Through the 1950s, most neo-Confederates considered themselves patriotic Americans and had faith in the U.S. political system, even as they believed in and practiced white supremacy.

But many southern traditionalists experienced the upheavals of the next two decades as a series of betrayals. By the mid-1970s, federal courts had embraced civil rights, and civic and business leaders were dismantling legal segregation. Manufacturing, textile and tobacco jobs were vanishing. Politicians on the cosmopolitan left and corporate right were abandoning blue-collar voters. Vietnam veterans were coming home unappreciated and embittered. In addition, the FBI, after years of pursuing black nationalists, began infiltrating and undermining local Ku Klux Klans through a program, largely forgotten today, called COINTELPRO-White Hate. To be sure, only a small fraction of angry southerners turned to terror groups. But the Klan’s membership grew in the ’70s, and so did its public support. Gallup reported in 1979 that 11 percent of white Americans viewed the KKK favorably, up from just six percent in 1965. And with that rebound came something more: Those who were susceptible to recruitment were far more likely than their parents or grandparents to see the U.S. government itself as an alien force bent on destroying the white way of life.

Meanwhile,American Nazis were expanding their public presence. Some younger would-be fuhrers began trading armbands for sport coats and toning down their rhetoric in media appearances in order to seem more palatable.Other Nazi leaders, like William Pierce, head of the white separatist National Alliance, started looking for partners and muscle, hoping to turn far-right fanatics from vigilantes to insurrectionists. In 1978, Pierce publishedThe Turner Diaries, a futurist fantasy-cum-blueprint for all-out race war. In Pierce’s novel, oppressed whites join forces to create an underground organization that bombs New York and murders thousands of black and Jewish people, among many other horrific acts; the book’s protagonist ultimately flies a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon.The Turner Diarieswas a huge hit with the far right, and has influenced a wide spectrum of racists—and inspired notorious hate crimes—ever since.

It wasn’t just avowed racists who gravitated to new extremes. In the weird, unusually rootless time between Watergate and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America’s faith in public institutions collapsed, cynicism soared and belief in a wide range of conspiracy theories and cults, from UFOs to the Unification Church, sprouted in popularity. But those rooted in racial resentment took hold in especially bitter soil. White supremacists of all stripes came to believe they faced annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the home front. The country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of the ultra-right.

***

The story of the Greensboro Massacrereally begins with an episode that occurred in the summer of 1979, in a tiny, working-class city 60 miles to the southwest, called China Grove.

Klan leaders in North Carolina had spent the first half of the year stepping up their recruitment efforts by appealing to the heritage of white supremacy. The Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, staged a historical exhibit at the Forsyth County Library—and in an early sign of what was to come, a group of Nazis showed up to ogle the items on view, surprising the media.

On July 8, the same North Carolina Klan faction tried to screenThe Birth of a Nation,the 1915 racist epic that depicts heroic figures in white hoods trying to beat back the scourge of Reconstruction at the turn of the century, at the China Grove Community Center. But before they could show the movie, more than a hundred protesters, led by communists from Durham and Greensboro, marched on the building, chanting “Death to the Klan!” and “Decease the rotten beast.” Many carried pipes and chains.

The Grand Dragon of the Federated Knights, a pot-bellied mason named Joe Grady, stood on the porch outside the building with some 20 men in robes and white-power t-shirts, rifles drawn, while members of the China Grove police force struggled to create a human buffer. Grady’s men were eager to fire on the crowd, but a policeman who walked up to him whispered that if they did, the officers trying to keep the peace were the ones who would get hurt. Grady reluctantly agreed to move into the musty bingo hall, where women and children who had been watching the approaching crowdwere hiding. Once the Klansmen retreated, a cheer rose up from the protesters, who burned a pair of Confederate flags.

Afterwards, once the crowd was gone and the screening cancelled, Grady re-emerged to face the news cameras. Grabbing a shred of burned flag, he vowed, “There will be revenge for this.” But while Grady put on a brave face for the remaining television cameras, in the eyes of his hooded peers, he had committed a cardinal sin. He had allowed himself to look weak.

By that point, the Klan’s resurgence was already triggering confrontations around the country. In Decatur, Alabama, in May 1979, more than a hundred armed Klansmen blocked a civil rights march. Later, that August, rock-throwing protesters pelted Klansmen at an anti-immigration meeting in Castro Valley, California. None of those episodes led to lethal retaliatory violence, however. China Grove was different because it got the attention of a young Nazi named Harold Covington.

Born about 20 miles east of Greensboro, Covington had attended an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, where he proudly called himself the “school fascist.” Jowly and glib, Covington traveled to South Africa where he built a minor reputation as a soldier-for-hire who’d taken up arms to defend apartheid. By the time he resettled in North Carolina and launched a losing but surprisingly well-run campaign for Raleigh city council, Covington had become an articulate, publicity-seeking ideologue, with a sideline writing campy novels—a kind of L. Ron Hubbard of the racist resistance.

With a sense of himself as a global figure, Covington regarded most Klansmen he met as boorish. The backlash to China Grove convinced him they were also in disarray.And Covington saw no one in the back-country klaverns of North Carolina capable of stepping into the void. Long before he would become a YouTube provocateur by posting white-power videos online, Covington decided to herd them into a single white-power army himself.

In a preview of 8Chan, the message-board website that would become a haven for white nationalists in the 2010s, he began bringing together various strains of supremacists, or as he put it, “normalizing relations.” His early attempts didn’t go well. The few Klan members he was able to woo were largely fabulists who made up stories to make themselves seem more violent than they really were. Deciding he needed to get a better cut, Covington organized a racist retreat on September 22 at a borrowed farm outside Louisburg, about 30 miles northeast of Raleigh, and sent word through the bars, garages and diners where “his people” hung out that they were all invited.

With the media dutifully attending what promised to be a freakshow, no detail was too small for Covington to stage-manage. Kids milled around a barbecue pit where a whole hog roasted, while parents doused a huge cross in kerosene. Nazis wore uniforms budgeted at $25 for tailored pants, $10 for boots and $2 for arm bands. The sound system alternated bluegrass tunes and “The Ride of the Valkyries.” A cute blonde in a “White Power” t-shirt sauntered with a Doberman and a rifle for photographers. In a crib, a baby wore a small shirt that read “Future Klansman.” For extra inspiration, a noose hung from a tree.

Late in the afternoon, a caravan of 20 Klansmen pulled into the farm led by a gaunt mechanic with a plunging jawline named Virgil Griffin. Griffin carried the title of Imperial Wizard of a backwoods klavern known as the Invisible Empire in Mount Holly, close to the South Carolina border. But he was also something of a joke on the national stage. His rallies, unlike Covington’s barbecue, were often threadbare affairs that dissolved into chaos. At one event, he’d been shouted down by protesters singing the theme song from “The Mickey Mouse Club,” according to an account from a community journalist, Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered radical politics around Greensboro.

If Covington looked in the mirror and saw a worldwide revolutionary, Griffin viewed himself as a backwoods patriot. After the China Grove debacle, he concluded that local Klans needed better leadership and more action, and believed he could provide both. Covington was only too happy to help feed such ambitions, elaborately making the Imperial Wizard feel like an honored guest among the other extremists—who also included the Klansmen who had peeled off from the Grady’s Federated Knights after China Grove, and a Nazi-curious crew from Winston-Salem.

The extremists nattered about where to buy guns and how to deal with the summer heat—Klan robes were sweatier than Nazi uniforms. And they found common ground.

“You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” a Klansman told the Associated Press, which published a report about the event called “North Carolina United Racist Front Forms.” Then he added: “But people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get together.”

***

What Virgil Griffin didn’t knowwas that one of his closest allies was keeping the cops informed about this new alliance.

Unlike the years after 9/11 when American law enforcement took its focus off white nationalism to fight Islamist terror, the 1960s and ’70s were a period of robust intelligence-gathering in the supremacist underground. One of North Carolina’s most charismatic Klansmen, a car salesman named Bob Jones who recruited 12,000 members to his state chapter, was undone by an aide whose information led to him being dragged before Congress and held in contempt. In the case of Griffin, law enforcement’s material came from a chain-smoking handyman named Eddie Dawson.

Born in New Jersey, Dawson cut an odd figure for a Southern Klansman. He spoke with a twitchy northern accent and had an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood actor William Holden. Having drifted down to Greensboro in the early ’60s—a time when black activists were staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters—he managed to get invited to a meeting of the Klan, and quickly established himself as an enthusiastic recruit. In one career-building episode, he took an armed joy ride through a poor black neighborhood that he peppered with rifle fire.

Dawson, however, blamed the KKK for letting him get sentenced to nine months in jail after he was convicted of assault with intent to kill for the joy ride. He was still bitter when an FBI agent approached him at a coffee shop after he got out in 1969, and offered to pay him $25 every time he told the Bureau about a Klan meeting. Dawson shook hands on the deal.

His time with the FBI ended the way most of his relationships did—unhappily. But Dawson resumed his double life a few weeks after Covington’s barbecue, when leaflets began appearing around Greensboro that announced a “Death to the Klan” march. The posters were the work of a group called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), which was filled with professionals who had elite-school degrees, identified as Maoists, and used revolutionary rhetoric to match. They had attempted to organize local textile workers, then tried direct action by taking part in the anti-KKK protest at China Grove. Now, they were itching for another, more visible confrontation with the Klan.

The leftists had plausible reasons for choosing to organize and demonstrate in North Carolina. At the end of the ’70s, the state ranked 49th in the U.S. in blue-collar wages and dead last in the percentage of workers who were unionized. But neither Duke educations nor medical training nor Maoist ideology prepared them to comprehend the culture of electricians, loggers or sheet-metal workers—jobs held by some of the men who would ride the caravan into Greensboro—beyond seeing them as either recruitable proletarians or irredeemable racists. The communists used language even more incendiary than the words on their flyers. On October 11, for instance, they issued a press release saying the KKK “must be physically beaten back, eradicated, exterminated, wiped off the face of the earth.” And they took exactly the wrong message from China Grove: that the Klan would be too cowardly to mount any resistance to them.

Instead, WVO’s leaflet lit a flame under Griffin and the Klan. It also alarmed the police in Greensboro. Soon, a detective who knew Dawson’s FBI past was talking with him about disrupting local meetings of communists, which made perfect sense. After all, the KKK rated communists about the same as black people. But Dawson had another angle, too: He could help the police investigate the Klan. With a highly-developed sense of grievance that often left him feeling under-appreciated and under-used, he saw a chance to become the one who was pulling the strings—both as an informant and as an instigator—as confrontations heated up.

On Saturday, October 20, when Griffin marched his Invisible Empire through the fairgrounds in Lincoln County, about 100 miles southwest of Greensboro, and told a crowd of 150 that if they cared about their children, they would “kill a hundred niggers and leave them dead in the street.” At a members-only meeting afterward, he introduced Dawson to talk about the planned WVO march. Towering over the 5-foot-6 Griffin, Dawson started out by warning that the communists were recruiting busloads of black college students to flood into Greensboro. Asked whether it would be a good idea to bring guns, he demurred. “I’m not your father,” he replied. “But if you carry a gun, you better have damned bond money.”

The vote among those in the audience was unanimous: They’d go to Greensboro to make their presence felt. The following weekend, as word spread, white supremacist groups met in at least three different locations around North Carolina and agreed to head there, too.

Dawson earned $50 by telling the Greensboro PD about the October 20 meeting. And he let them know Griffin was planning to come to town and looking for allies. But Dawson neglected to mention his own starring role, or the fact he subsequently drove around Morningside Homes in his Cadillac late at night, pasting leaflets over the “Death to the Klan!” posters. His replacements featured a dark figure hanging from a noose and the phrase, “It’s time for some old-fashioned American Justice.”

The Nazi camp, meanwhile, was getting just as frothy. At a November 1 event that Covington staged for the media in the garage of a sheet-metal worker named Roland Wayne Wood, a dozen of his recruits mugged through a made-for-TV roast of the disgraced China Grove wizard, Joe Grady.

Once the cameras departed, the united racists got down to the business of how they planned to crash the communists’ party in Greensboro. One suggested throwing eggs. Another went further, saying he had a pipe bomb that would be effective if thrown into a crowd. At 11:00 p.m., the group gathered around a television to watch themselves on the local news, only to become infuriated when a press conference held by the WVO’s members got more airtime. As the screen showed one of the march leaders calling the KKK “scum,” Jerry Paul Smith, the Klansman with the pipe bomb, took his gun and pointed it at the TV.

Police reports would later quote Wood as saying that he heard Smith mutter, “Kill the communist.”

***

On the morning of November 3,Dawson called his Greensboro Police contact to say that three dozen supremacists from around the state, including Virgil Griffin, were assembling at a house owned by one of Dawson’s Klan pals, a few miles from the Morningside Homes march site.

A little later, Dawson called again to warn that the place was chock full of firearms. But that information never made its way to the shift commander, who wrapped up a daily briefing at about 10:30 that morning by reminding his men the parade permit listed a start time of noon. The officers could get breakfast, he said, so long as they were on the route by 11:30.

As the Klansmen and Nazis made their way along Interstate 85 into Greensboro, a Greensboro Police detective spotted the caravan and called in to ask if tactical units were in place. His supervisor, showing no special concern, replied that there was still “another fourteen minutes by my watch” for breakfast.

The leftists planned to line up their crew at 11:00, then begin marching at noon. But at 11:22, a frightening transmission came over a CB radio: Klansmen were talking about closing in. Before the protesters could react, cars with Confederate-flag license plates began approaching. There were no cops in sight.

Dawson, who was leading the convoy, would later tell police and reporters that he merely wanted to put a scare into the Maoists before driving on to the spot at the shopping center where the march would end. It was Dawson who yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ’em!”

But then Griffin’s white LTD screeched and swerved, nearly hitting a marcher. The caravan came to a stop. The communists went from singing to swinging, banging their placards on the cars. Members of the convoy poured out, punching through the melee, grabbing weapons. Dawson told his driver to get the hell out of there—and since they were in the first car of the caravan, they were able to split.

The WVO had packed a few weapons, but were seriously outgunned. One of the WVO leaders, a physician named Jim Waller, lunged for a 12-gauge shotgun he’d stashed in a car, but a Klansman flew toward him before he could fire. The two rolled in the grass, fighting nose-to-nose over the weapon until others started piling on top of them and the pump mechanism snapped. Waller screamed as the pump-action crushed the bones in his shooting hand.

Amidst the chaos, other white supremacists lined up their shots. A Nazi named Jack Fowler opened the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane and, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, handed out rifles and shotguns. David Matthews, from Griffin’s Klan, stood behind the door of a van and nailed his first target, a bookish pediatrician named Mike Nathan. Then Matthews took down an organizer named Jim Wrenn, who was crawling on his belly. Bill Sampson, a former Harvard Divinity student, tried to give Wrenn rifle cover but took two fatal shots in the heart.

Roland Wayne Wood observed Waller writhing from his crushed hand. Coolly aiming his shotgun, the Nazi delivered a blast into the physician’s right side. Matthews, the Klan member, finished the job with another blast into Waller’s back.

The convoy sped away, with Matthews’ van the last to leave the scene. Climbing aboard, Matthews let the rest of squad know: “I got three of ’em.” Moments later, police intercepted the van, but didn’t get to Morningside Homes until the shooting was over.

***

Eighty-eight seconds of gunfirein Greensboro marked the worst violence in the South since the 1960s. And for the men who shot their enemies dead, November 3, 1979, was just the beginning of a new era of notoriety and collaboration. The botched trials and political response that followed ensured that white nationalism would grow to become more dangerous than ever today.

The legal system took three whacks at the Greensboro conspirators. First, police rounded up 14 Klansmen and Nazis, and the state of North Carolina charged most of them with first-degree murder and felony riot. Prosecutors lined up eyewitnesses, videotapes, weapons and FBI ballistics analysis. But they couldn’t convince the surviving revolutionaries—who were stubbornly convinced the cops had conspired to leave them unprotected—to cooperate.

At trial, the Klansmen and Nazis wrapped themselves in the American flag and argued self-defense. “They acted like men to aid someone in distress,” Wood’s lawyer claimed. “They would not have been worthy of anyone’s respect if they had done otherwise.” He added that his client just wanted to sing, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis not guilty. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore, one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.”

The U.S. Justice Department then charged nine Klansmen and Nazis, this time including Griffin and Dawson, with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the Greensboro victims. In April 1984, the federal jury, also all-white, refused to conclude the defendants had violated the law by acting out of racial rather than political hatred. It too delivered not-guilty verdicts across the board.

Finally, the victims filed a $48-million lawsuit against 87 defendants, including the city of Greensboro, the state of North Carolina, the Justice Department and the FBI. Wood, now on trial for the third time, felt confident enough to give a Nazi salute when sworn to testify.

In June 1985, the civil jury delivered a landmark yet twisted verdict: They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who wasn’t a WVO member at the time of the shootings. To avoid appeals, the city of Greensboro settled for $351,000, sending a check to Nathan’s widow, who split it among the survivors.

Strike three.

The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood they were free. Free not just to stay out of prison, or to keep burning rags and kvetching about the price of jackboots. Free to work together to stockpile weapons, terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and including murder—so long as their opponents were communists.

“The Klan and Nazis felt emboldened,” says Patricia Clark, a veteran Klan watcher who served on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which local citizens set up in the mid-2000s to investigate the massacre. “They thought they won the fight.”

By 1980, membership in Klan-Nazi fusion groups began to outnumber that of old-school Klans. And as horizons of hate broadened and merged, alliances deepened around the country. As just one example, four months after Greensboro, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied in the city of Oceanside and beat counter-protesters with baseball bats. The marchers brayed a version of “Sixteen Tons,” the old coal-mining song. Their rewritten lyrics celebrated the Greensboro killings and ended, “If the Nazis don’t get you, a Klansman will.”

The increasing unity of far-right factions was more than tactical. By transfusing “blood and soil” into American racism, it led to what historian John Drabble called in a 2007 study “the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan.” That was bad news for hustlers like Eddie Dawson. Dawson managed to dodge Klan retribution for informing. But he soon found it much harder to profit from playing different extremists against one another. Greensboro turned Dawson into a relic—and the hardening ideology of right-wing terror networks that followed made them harder for the FBI to penetrate.

Meanwhile, new doors swung wide open for fanatics like Frazier Glenn Miller, a Covington acolyte and former Green Beret who rode in the Greensboro caravan. Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. And by merging Klan and Nazi symbolism while instilling paramilitary discipline in his followers, he quickly built the strongest white-power group in the state.

As an emboldened white-power movement spread, Miller connected its dots. The Greensboro veteran held public marches, harassed local black residents and amassed huge caches of explosives. In 1987, he issued a revolutionary “Declaration of War” filled with calls for assassinations. He coordinated with The Order, a violent extremist group inspired byThe Turner Diaries. And he sought allies through voluminous racist literature and eventually on the Internet, where he extolled the mass shooting by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. Miller returned to racist murder in 2014, when he targeted a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas, and killed three people. That landed him on death row, where he sits today.

Greensboro’s aftershocks held their most important lessons for mainstream opportunists. By the end of the 1970s, southern nationalists had spent more than a decade trying to re-code their racism to make it more palatable. As master political consultant Lee Atwater put it: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights.”

Republican politicians soon realized they could go even farther. After Greensboro, it became clear that, as historian Kathleen Belew has written, extremists “increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial violence.” And by targeting the far right’s dual paranoias—federal authority and socialism—GOP operatives were able to harness its nativism while hanging onto the votes of establishment conservatives.

Over the next 30 years, Republicans racked up spectacular gains in state legislative seats, governorships and U.S. Senate elections across the South by hammering cultural issues that the far right recognized as approving winks. A decade after Greensboro, establishment candidates were already posing in front of rebel flags and openly courting “white heritage” groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The GOP advanced most in counties where the Klan had been active in the ’60s, according to a 2014 study by political scientists from Notre Dame, Brandeis and Yale.

During the administration of President Barack Obama, the new generation of conservative politicians had the extremists’ backs. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report forecasting a rise in racist violence. Republicans objected so vociferously that DHS rescinded the projection and silenced its domestic terrorism unit. Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas, said it was “dangerous” to track homegrown violence.

By that point it was hard to tell who was co-opting whom on the right. Republicans were playing to the fringe without worrying where their most incitable elements might channel their anger.

And you know what happened next: Jonah turned the whale inside out. Donald Trump’s bald invocations of racial and working-class grievances made him a hero to the ultras; “MAGA” is the most common word in Twitter user profiles among members of the alt-right, according to a study by J.M Berger of the research network VOX-Pol. From Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso, right-wing attacks have surged. The latest evidence: The FBI made almost 100 arrests related to domestic terrorism by July of this year, more than in all of 2018, according to agency director Christopher Wray, who told Congress the majority of cases involved “white supremacist violence.”

In Greensboro, private citizens tried to find a way forward by empaneling a Truth & Reconciliation Commission—the first in U.S. history. But today’s political landscape, where the language and resentments of white nationalism have taken deeper root than ever, raises the question: What happens when there is no reconciliation in truth?

Twenty-six years after the massacre, Virgil Griffin surprised everyone at the Greensboro Commission by showing up and taking questions.

Asked why no Klansman was killed in the shootings, he answered: “Maybe God guided the bullets.”

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