#defense communication market 2022

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Subprime gadgets

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS SUNDAY in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

The promise of feudal security: "Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren't tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm":

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.

That's the promise, here's the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.

Apple does this all the time: "click this box and we will use our control over our platform to stop Facebook from spying on you" (Ios as fortress). "No matter what box you click, we will spy on you and because we control which apps you can install, we can stop you from blocking our spying" (Ios as prison):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

But it's not just Apple – any corporation that arrogates to itself the right to override your own choices about your technology will eventually yield to temptation, using that veto to help itself at your expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Once the corporation puts the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, they're begging their KPI-obsessed managers to take it down and shoot you in the head with it in anticipation of of their annual Act Three performance review:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

One particularly pernicious form of control is "trusted computing" and its handmaiden, "remote attestation." Broadly, this is when a device is designed to gather information about how it is configured and to send verifiable testaments about that configuration to third parties, even if you want to lie to those people:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

New HP printers are designed to continuously monitor how you use them – and data-mine the documents you print for marketing data. You have to hand over a credit-card in order to use them, and HP reserves the right to fine you if your printer is unreachable, which would frustrate their ability to spy on you and charge you rent:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

Under normal circumstances, this technological attack would prompt a defense, like an aftermarket mod that prevents your printer's computer from monitoring you. This is "adversarial interoperability," a once-common technological move:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

An adversarial interoperator seeking to protect HP printer users from HP could gin up fake telemetry to send to HP, so they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd seized the means of computation, triggering fines charged to your credit card.

Enter remote attestation: if HP can create a sealed "trusted platform module" or a (less reliable) "secure enclave" that gathers and cryptographically signs information about which software your printer is running, HP can detect when you have modified it. They can force your printer to rat you out – to spill your secrets to your enemy.

Remote attestation is already a reliable feature of mobile platforms, allowing agencies and corporations whose services you use to make sure that you're perfectly defenseless – not blocking ads or tracking, or doing anything else that shifts power from them to you – before they agree to communicate with your device.

What's more, these "trusted computing" systems aren't just technological impediments to your digital wellbeing – they also carry the force of law. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, these snitch-chips are "an effective means of access control" which means that anyone who helps you bypass them faces a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.

Feudal security builds fortresses out of trusted computing and remote attestation and promises to use them to defend you from marauders. Remote attestation lets them determine whether your device has been compromised by someone seeking to harm you – it gives them a reliable testament about your device's configuration even if your device has been poisoned by bandits:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The fact that you can't override your computer's remote attestations means that you can't be tricked into doing so. That's a part of your computer that belongs to the manufacturer, not you, and it only takes orders from its owner. So long as the benevolent dictator remains benevolent, this is a protective against your own lapses, follies and missteps. But if the corporate warlord turns bandit, this makes you powerless to stop them from devouring you whole.

With that out of the way, let's talk about debt.

Debt is a normal feature of any economy, but today's debt plays a different role from the normal debt that characterized life before wages stagnated and inequality skyrocketed. 40 years ago, neoliberalism – with its assaults on unions and regulations – kicked off a multigenerational process of taking wealth away from working people to make the rich richer.

Have you ever watched a genius pickpocket like Apollo Robbins work? When Robins lifts your wristwatch, he curls his fingers around your wrist, expertly adding pressure to simulate the effect of a watchband, even as he takes away your watch. Then, he gradually releases his grip, so slowly that you don't even notice:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ppqjya/apollo_robbins_a_master_pickpocket_effortlessly/

For the wealthy to successfully impoverish the rest of us, they had to provide something that made us feel like we were still doing OK, even as they stole our wages, our savings, and our futures. So, even as they shipped our jobs overseas in search of weak environmental laws and weaker labor protection, they shared some of the savings with us, letting us buy more with less. But if your wages keep stagnating, it doesn't matter how cheap a big-screen TV gets, because you're tapped out.

So in tandem with cheap goods from overseas sweatshops, we got easy credit: access to debt. As wages fell, debt rose up to fill the gap. For a while, it's felt OK. Your wages might be falling off, the cost of health care and university might be skyrocketing, but everything was getting cheaper, it was so easy to borrow, and your principal asset – your family home – was going up in value, too.

This period was a "bezzle," John Kenneth Galbraith's name for "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." It's the moment after Apollo Robbins has your watch but before you notice it's gone. In that moment, both you and Robbins feel like you have a watch – the world's supply of watch-derived happiness actually goes up for a moment.

There's a natural limit to debt-fueled consumption: as Michael Hudson says, "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Once the debtor owes more than they can pay back – or even service – creditors become less willing to advance credit to them. Worse, they start to demand the right to liquidate the debtor's assets. That can trigger some pretty intense political instability, especially when the only substantial asset most debtors own is the roof over their heads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

"Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," but that doesn't stop creditors from trying to get blood from our stones. As more of us became bankrupt, the bankruptcy system was gutted, turned into a punitive measure designed to terrorize people into continuing to pay down their debts long past the point where they can reasonably do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

Enter "subprime" – loans advanced to people who stand no meaningful chance of every paying them back. We all remember the subprime housing bubble, in which complex and deceptive mortgages were extended to borrowers on the promise that they could either flip or remortgage their house before the subprime mortgages detonated when their "teaser rates" expired and the price of staying in your home doubled or tripled.

Subprime housing loans were extended on the belief that people would meekly render themselves homeless once the music stopped, forfeiting all the money they'd plowed into their homes because the contract said they had to. For a brief minute there, it looked like there would be a rebellion against mass foreclosure, but then Obama and Timothy Geithner decreed that millions of Americans would have to lose their homes to "foam the runways" for the banks:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

That's one way to run a subprime shop: offer predatory loans to people who can't afford them and then confiscate their assets when they – inevitably – fail to pay their debts off.

But there's another form of subprime, familiar to loan sharks through the ages: lend money at punitive interest rates, such that the borrower can never repay the debt, and then terrorize the borrower into making payments for as long as possible. Do this right and the borrower will pay you several times the value of the loan, and still owe you a bundle. If the borrower ever earns anything, you'll have a claim on it. Think of Americans who borrowed $79,000 to go to university, paid back $190,000 and still owe $236,000:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

This kind of loan-sharking is profitable, but labor-intensive. It requires that the debtor make payments they fundamentally can't afford. The usurer needs to get their straw right down into the very bottom of the borrower's milkshake and suck up every drop. You need to convince the debtor to sell their wedding ring, then dip into their kid's college fund, then steal their father's coin collection, and, then break into cars to steal the stereos. It takes a lot of person-to-person work to keep your sucker sufficiently motivated to do all that.

This is where digital meets subprime. There's $1T worth of subprime car-loans in America. These are pure predation: the lender sells a beater to a mark, offering a low down-payment loan with a low initial interest rate. The borrower makes payments at that rate for a couple of months, but then the rate blows up to more than they can afford.

Trusted computing makes this marginal racket into a serious industry. First, there's the ability of the car to narc you out to the repo man by reporting on its location. Tesla does one better: if you get behind in your payments, your Tesla immobilizes itself and phones home, waits for the repo man to come to the parking lot, then it backs itself out of the spot while honking its horn and flashing its lights:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

That immobilization trick shows how a canny subprime car-lender can combine the two kinds of subprime: they can secure the loan against an asset (the car), but also coerce borrowers into prioritizing repayment over other necessities of life. After your car immobilizes itself, you just might decide to call the dealership and put down your credit card, even if that means not being able to afford groceries or child support or rent.

One thing we can say about digital tools: they're flexible. Any sadistic motivational technique a lender can dream up, a computerized device can execute. The subprime car market relies on a spectrum of coercive tactics: cars that immobilize themselves, sure, but how about cars that turn on their speakers to max and blare a continuous recording telling you that you're a deadbeat and demanding payment?

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

The more a subprime lender can rely on a gadget to torment you on their behalf, the more loans they can issue. Here, at last, is a form of automation-driven mass unemployment: normally, an economy that has been fully captured by wealthy oligarchs needs squadrons of cruel arm-breakers to convince the plebs to prioritize debt service over survival. The infinitely flexible, tireless digital arm-breakers enabled by trusted computing have deprived all of those skilled torturers of their rightful employment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

The world leader in trusted computing isn't cars, though – it's phones. Long before anyone figured out how to make a car take orders from its manufacturer over the objections of its driver, Apple and Google were inventing "curating computing" whose app stores determined which software you could run and how you could run it.

Back in 2021, Indian subprime lenders hit on the strategy of securing their loans by loading borrowers' phones up with digital arm-breaking software:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

The software would gather statistics on your app usage. When you missed a payment, the phone would block you from accessing your most frequently used app. If that didn't motivate you to pay, you'd lose your second-most favorite app, then your third, fourth, etc.

This kind of digital arm-breaking is only possible if your phone is designed to prioritize remote instructions – from the manufacturer and its app makers – over your own. It also only works if the digital arm-breaking company can confirm that you haven't jailbroken your phone, which might allow you to send fake data back saying that your apps have been disabled, while you continue to use those apps. In other words, this kind of digital sadism only works if you've got trusted computing and remote attestation.

Enter "Device Lock Controller," an app that comes pre-installed on some Google Pixel phones. To quote from the app's description: "Device Lock Controller enables device management for credit providers. Your provider can remotely restrict access to your device if you don't make payments":

https://lemmy.world/post/13359866

Google's pitch to Android users is that their "walled garden" is a fortress that keeps people who want to do bad things to you from reaching you. But they're pre-installing software that turns the fortress into a prison that you can't escape if they decide to let someone come after you.

There's a certain kind of economist who looks at these forms of automated, fine-grained punishments and sees nothing but a tool for producing an "efficient market" in debt. For them, the ability to automate arm-breaking results in loans being offered to good, hardworking people who would otherwise be deprived of credit, because lenders will judge that these borrowers can be "incentivized" into continuing payments even to the point of total destitution.

This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It's a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a "natural" state: "how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Image: Oatsy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[soon-palestine]

Workers said Project Nimbus is the kind of lucrative contract that neglects ethical guardrails that outspoken members of Google’s workforce have demanded in recent years. “I am very worried that Google has no scruples if they’re going to work with the Israeli government,” said Joshua Marxen, a Google Cloud software engineer who helped to organize the protest. “Google has given us no reason to trust them.” The Tuesday protest represents continuing tension between Google’s workforce and its senior management over how the company’s technology is used. In recent years Google workers have objected to military contracts, challenging Google’s work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its role in a defense program building artificial intelligence tools used to refine drone strikes. Workers have alleged that the company has cracked down on information-sharing, siloed controversial projects and enforced a workplace culture that increasingly punishes them for speaking out.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Tuesday protest and workers’ concerns over Project Nimbus. The Israeli Finance Ministry announced its contract with Google and Amazon in April 2021 as a project “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.” Google has largely refused to release details of the contract, the specific capabilities Israel will receive, or how they will be used. In July 2022, the Intercept reported that training documents for Israeli government personnel indicate Google is providing software that the company claims can recognize people, gauge emotional states from facial expressions and track objects in video footage. Google Cloud spokesperson Atle Erlingsson told Wired in September 2022 that the company proudly supports Israel’s government and said critics had misrepresented Project Nimbus. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads,” he told Wired. Erlingsson, however, acknowledged that the contract will provide Israel’s military access to Google technology. Former Google worker Ariel Koren, who has long been publicly critical of Project Nimbus, said “it adds insult to injury for Palestinian activists and Palestinians generally” that Google Cloud’s profitability milestone coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Nakba — which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians following creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

In March 2022, The Times reported allegations by Koren — at the time a product marketing manager at Google for Education — that Google had retaliated against her for criticizing the contract, issuing a directive that she move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose her job. Google told The Times that it investigated the incident and found no evidence of retaliation. When Koren resigned from Google in August 2022 she published a memo explaining reasons for her departure, writing that “Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights.” Koren said Google’s apathy makes her and others believe more vigorous protest actions are justified. “This is a concrete disruption that is sending a clear message to Google: We won’t allow for business as usual, so long as you continue to profit off of a nefarious contract that expands Israeli apartheid.” Mohammad Khatami, a YouTube software engineer based in New York, participated in a small protest of Project Nimbus at a July Amazon Web Services conference in Manhattan. Khatami said major layoffs at Google announced in January pushed him to get more involved in the Alphabet Workers Union, which provides resources to Khatami and other union members in an anti-military working group — though the union has not taken a formal stance on Project Nimbus. “Greed and corporate interests were being put ahead of workers and I think the layoffs just illustrated that for me very clearly,” Khatami said.

[doll-elvis]

I'm not being defensive so pls don't take it that way, but you said that Priscilla's story has been depicted many times in media. But I only remember the Elvis and Me tv movie?

hi and don’t worry, I don’t take any issue with this question, thank you for the ask!!

and I’m sorry I know there has been so much discourse about the upcoming movie and we are all tired of it but I thought I would answer this ask just to clarify my thoughts

and yes “Elvis and Me” is the only film based solely on her biography from 1985 but her general story has been depicted in the 1979 film “Elvis”, in the 1993 tv movie “Elvis and the Colonel”, in the 2005 mini series “Elvis” and briefly in the 2022 film “Elvis” (I only named these because they were the ones I have personally watched but I’m sure there have been more)

of course these films and series were mainly focused on Elvis and so Priscilla was a somewhat minor character but they all showed the significant moments of Elvis’ and Priscilla’s relationships: how they met, how they got married etc. etc.

And while this upcoming film is being marketed as being a “untold perspective” Priscilla actually sold the rights of her book to Coppola for the film, so from my understanding, Coppola is using scenes and dialogue from the book for the screenplay. So I just don’t see a scenario where this movie shows anything we don’t already know, which is why I don’t think this film needed to be made

And from what I have seen within the Elvis communities on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram, the only people celebrating this film being made are the Priscilla “stans”, which is a community that has grown exponentially since the Elvis 2022 film and I think that has to do with how the film depicted her

I was briefly apart of the E community from 2016 to 2018 and from what I remember there were like 5 accounts at most that were dedicated to Priscilla (on Instagram) and now there are many new accounts who are solely Priscilla fans who are very passionate about defending her and making her out to be a saint and Elvis out to be the one to blame when in reality the situation was not that black and white. Priscilla isn’t a saint, Elvis wasn’t a saint, Priscilla isn’t the villain and Elvis wasn’t the villain, I don’t know why that is something that is so hard to grasp for some people

I don’t hate Priscilla and I don’t love her either, I try to be both neutral and sympathetic towards all of the people in his life, because I find it unfair to judge them for what they did, because like Elvis said, we have never walked in their shoes. But I find it so frustrating when some of the Priscilla stans will defend everything she does because “she was a fourteen year old girl that fell in love”. I just find it weird to infantilize a grown woman, because no one is calling her out for what she did when she was fourteen, I think people take more issue with some of the things she did post 1977 and even while Elvis was living. Like suing him after the divorce for more money when she knew his financial situation was dire and exposing Lisa Marie to Scientology at a young age which I believe ultimately put a rift in their relationship for sometime before they became close again

And so it seems most Elvis fans are either dreading this movie or not sure what to think yet. So just speaking from the point of view of someone who is solely an Elvis fan, I’m just not excited for this film like the way I was excited for the 2022 film and I’m tired of all these new projects being announced because they are trying to cash in on the hype that the Elvis film created. When I was a fan around 2016 we were living off bread crumbs, and the only thing to look forward to was Elvis week tbh, but now that there are so many things being announced I can’t even be excited about them because im far more worried about how Elvis will be depicted 🤧

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Freddie deBoer

Published: Apr 29, 2022

Marianne Eloise wants the world to know that she does not “have a regular brain at all”. That’s her declaration, on the very first page of her new memoir, Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking. The book catalogues her experience of a dizzying variety of psychiatric conditions: OCD, anxiety, autism, ADHD, alcohol abuse, seasonal affective disorder, an eating disorder, night terrors, depression. By her own telling, Eloise has suffered a great deal from these ailments; I believe her, and wish better for her. But she would prefer we not think of them as ailments at all. And that combination of self-pity and self-aggrandisement is emblematic of our contemporary understanding of mental health.

Eloise is a champion of neurodivergence, an omnibus term that’s recently ballooned in popularity, which can include autism, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or indeed any other psychiatric condition that’s hot right now. The term is designed for making sweeping pronouncements. Forget the fact that, say, autism and schizophrenia are so different that they have at times been described as opposite conditions. Forget the fact that saying you’re neurodivergent has as much medical meaning as saying you have a disorder of the body. The idea is that there’s a group of people whose brain chemistry differs, in some beautiful way, from some Platonic norm. And it’s an idea that’s taken on great symbolic power in contemporary liberal culture.

There is, for example, a thriving ADHD community on TikTok and Tumblr: people who view their attentional difficulties not as an annoyance to be managed with medical treatment but as an adorable character trait that makes them sharper and more interesting than others around them. (They still demand extra time to take tests, naturally.) It’s also easy to come across social media users who declare how proud they are to be autistic; I’m glad they’re proud, but their repetitive insistence makes me wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince, us or them.

Darker, there’s the world of “DID TikTok”. DID, dissociative identity disorder, is a profoundly controversial condition, once known as multiple personality disorder. Many serious experts question whether it exists at all; at the very least it’s incredibly rare. And yet thousands of adolescents have diagnosed themselves with the condition, and happily perform their various personalities for their social media followers, typically in ways that defy all established psychological understandings of the disorder.

Against this backdrop, Eloise is a marketing department’s dream come true: hers is a story of the young, beautiful, dysfunctional — and successful. Eloise is the perfect 21st-century woman, from a certain internet-enabled philosophy of human affairs. She is an admirer of witchcraft and believes that women have a mythical connection to water. She does a lot of drugs and becomes bisexual. She uses Tumblr and travels the world, vacationing in Lisbon and the south of France, and moves to Los Angeles to be an actor, taking care to embed that period of her life in a self-defensive patina of irony. She lives an enviable life of obvious socioeconomic privilege, which she does not have time to recognise, as she’s too busy cataloging her psychiatric maladies.

She crams them into every last anecdote: apparently nothing happens to her that she does not ultimately attribute to those maladies. Eloise’s love of swimming as a child is, for instance, laboriously explained in terms of her neurodivergence. I’m talking thousands of words. It seems never to have occurred to her that a love of swimming is not exactly rare among children, or that she doesn’t have to justify her joy at being in the ocean by making it “deeper”. Again and again, she holds perfectly mundane attitudes and behaviours up to the reader and says “Isn’t this special?”

The label of neurodivergence is so vague and capacious, pretty much anything can be pulled into its orbit and made “diverse”. There’s a meme that crops upon Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter that starts with “the neurodivergent urge to…” and is immediately followed by, well, just about anything a person does. Common examples include the neurodivergent urge not to reply to an email or to order food in rather than cooking what’s in the fridge.

Take Eloise’s nightmares. She has, at times in her life, suffered from debilitatingly bad dreams that made sleep a constant source of fear and pain. This sounds like an awful condition, and she deserves sympathy. But she gives the game away when she writes: “Maybe my relationship with dreaming wasn’t like everyone else’s.” Not like everyone else’s, no. But certainly like that of many people who suffer from recurring and terrifying nightmares. Eloise writes that, according to the Mayo Clinic, nightmare disorder “only affects around 4-5% of adults, which shocked me: did adults really not have nightmares?” It’s as if she genuinely does not know the difference between 4% and zero.

It is perhaps comforting to see every last detail of one’s life as the product of some uncontrollable force. “I am this way because I was born this way,” Eloise writes, in a remarkably bald denial of personal responsibility. As a pawn of the various interior forces that do combat in her brain, she is adamant that there is nothing wrong with her, that her suffering is all in service to some deeper way to live, and that she is proud of the very conditions she asks us to treat as a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card for her behaviour.

The implication is that the neurodivergent might just be better than other people. As with introverts, social media users have developed a discourse around neurodivergence that is nakedly self-celebratory, a bragger’s genre. Eloise has clearly endured a great deal of hardship, but like her culture she seems to feel that this hardship can only be given meaning by being woven into a journey of self-actualisation. Eloise writes that her life is “underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession”. Can you imagine a sadder statement: an adult telling you that there is nothing to distinguish her or give her value but her psychiatric conditions, conditions she shares with millions of others?

Diagnosis is the Holy Grail of the neurodivergence narrative. Eloise fixates on hers and its quasi-mystical powers. No reader could doubt that her problems are real, but she seems to have treated getting diagnoses like a consumer on Amazon. She states flat out, on several occasions, that she went shopping for an autism diagnosis, went to doctors with the express intent of wringing one out of them. There was a time when self-diagnosis was understood to be unhealthy, and perhaps embarrassing, but this is a brave new world we’re living in now.

Once enough people insist on mental illnesses as upbeat and fashionable lifestyle brands, then any of us who oppose it are guilty of the most grave sin of all, the sin of perpetuating stigma. It’s stigma to call autism a disorder, despite the fact that it renders some completely nonverbal and unable to care for themselves; it’s stigma to suggest that someone with ADHD bears any responsibility at all for problems at school or work; it’s stigma to speak the plain fact that people with psychotic disorders sometimes commit acts of violence under the influence of their conditions. It’s stigma, in other words, to treat those of us with mental illnesses as anything else than wayward children.

Stigma, that cartoon monster, has never been in the top 100 of my problems in 20 years of managing a psychotic disorder, but never mind; stigma is the ox to be gored in contemporary pop culture, and so we must fixate on it to the point that we sideline the health, safety and treatment of those with mental disorders.

What I find tragic about those who buy into the neurodivergence narrative is that they become their illnesses. And yes, there are alternatives. Eloise and people like her seem never to consider one of the possible ways that they could have dealt with their myriad disorders: to suffer. Only to suffer. To suffer, and to feel no pressure to make suffering an identity, to not feel compelled to wrap suffering up in an Instagram-friendly manner. To accept that there is no sense in which her pain makes her deeper or more real or more beautiful than others, that in fact the pain of mental illness reliably makes us more selfish, more self-pitying, more destructive, and more pathetic. To understand that and to accept it and to quietly go about life trying to maintain peace and dignity is, I think, the best possible path for those with mental illness to walk.

But in this culture, all must be monetised, all must be aspirational, anything can be marketed. Eloise lacks the self-awareness to ask whether there’s something exploitative and ugly about turning psychological illness into fodder for soap opera and motivational posters. Again and again in this book, Eloise gins up the kind of statement on mental health that you might find in an Instagram meme, wedges it awkwardly into some prosaic story about her youth, and then skips away. At one point she mocks “Airbnb-style Live Laugh Love signage”, and I could only think, you’re writing a book filled with it.

The most real, most human, most honest, and most humane part of Eloise’s book is something she wrote in a journal in 2009, when she was a teenager:

I fear my mind, as one single assembly by one fireman on fire safety in primary school caused this deep-seated fear. That shows the true extent of my mind’s power over me. Although these things are unlikely to happen, just yet, I fear every one of them one day. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that is a problem. But I want, so badly, to get better.

This is what it’s actually like to have a mental illness: no desire to justify or celebrate or honor the disease, only the desire to be rid of it. But the modern conception of neurodivergence (and disability activism generally) wants to have it both ways. Sometimes, people would prefer for you to think of their conditions as debilitating hindrances for which they may demand special dispensation. And sometimes they would like them to be seen as positive personality quirks that make them unique.

It is hard to witness the damage that has been done to this young woman, by a culture that insists she views her suffering as part of a beautiful journey. Today’s activists never seem to consider that there is something between terrible stigma and witless celebration, that we are not in fact bound to either ignore mental illness or treat it as an identity.

Were we wiser and more serious, we might be able to see psychiatric disorders as both natural and lamentable, as beyond the control of the individual but still within their responsibility. We would have sympathy for those who suffer from them, but recognise that sympathy only accrues to those whose conditions are unfortunate, unhealthy. We might be honest and say that, yes, it’s bad to be afflicted with psychiatric disorders.

We might, then, have the courage to say that mental illness sucks, that there’s nothing good about it, that the efforts to bend it into some superpower of greater creativity or deeper living is sour grapes from those who can’t escape. We might help people like Eloise, rather than celebrating them as self-actualised girlbosses. We might have the wisdom to ease her suffering, while we patiently tell her that there’s nothing beautiful about it.

==

Somewhere along the way we overshot “destigmatize” and ended up at “celebrate” and “reward.”

Not everything needs to be completely destigmatized.

[beatrice-otter]

Fic: Goodfellow (Rivers of London)

Title: Goodfellow Author: Beatrice Otter Fandom: Rivers of London Characters: Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale Additional tags: casefic, organized crime Written for: Galadriel1010  in Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2022 (fffx ) Betaed by: mysteryfail Length: 13,211 words Summary: There had been thefts at three successive Goblin Markets, and one incident of serious vandalism, before Robin Goodfellow had deigned to call in the munificent arm of the law. Authors Note: Yes, the title of the fic is a play on Goodfellas. No, this story has nothing to do with that movie, but I couldn't resist. On AO3. On Dreamwidth. On Pillowfort. There had been thefts at three successive Goblin Markets, and one incident of serious vandalism, before Robin Goodfellow had deigned to call in the munificent arm of the law—in this case, the Special Assessment Unit, colloquially known as the Folly, and disparagingly called the Isaacs by the demi-monde. Which just goes to show that after over a century of alternating condescension, neglect, and active persecution, it takes more than a few years of community-focused policing to change community perception. Even when that policing is being done by a handsome and charismatic DC such as myself.

When Goodfellow had called us in, I took Constable Danni Wickford with me. She'd been a great help to Nightingale and Sahra when I'd been out on paternity leave but was quite happy to be demoted back to Falcon Four.

"So … you don't have any CCTV at all?" she asked Robin Goodfellow in some disbelief. "Not even over the entrances and exits?"

He shrugged. "Besides the practical challenges of setting a system up and tearing it down every time we move, our clientele—both the stallholders and the shoppers—are a bit more protective of their privacy than the average punter at a Marks and Spencer. We're a tight-knit bunch; we keep an eye on things, and that's always been sufficient."

"But not this time," I said. Most of police work is asking variations on the same obvious questions over and over again until you're sure—really sure—that you've gotten every last bit of information out of whoever you're talking to.

Robin Goodfellow shook his head. "It's not any of the usual troublemakers. And believe me, we've checked."

"Can you give us the list of usual troublemakers, so we can double-check?" I asked.

Robin Goodfellow hesitated. "It's not that I don't trust you, Grant," he said. "But my clientele are not very trusting people. And they wouldn't like knowing I'd given the Isaacs a list of names—even of the sort of shits nobody likes—and told them they were trouble."

We went around on that for a bit, but he didn't budge and I didn't like to push him too hard. Not when it was still so rare for anyone in the demimonde to voluntarily ask for our help. Besides, the demimonde was used to handling things internally—Goodfellow hadn't gotten to be where he was without knowing how to handle the usual troublemakers. Chances were, he was right and this wasn't anybody on his list. "How about a list of stallholders we can talk with, to see if they spotted anything?"

"I can do that," he said. "Not all of them will talk to you, though."

"We'll be polite," I assured him.

"Do you have any special anti-theft measures in place, either on the market as a whole or on specific booths?" Danni asked.

"Couple of booths have glass cases for the special stuff," Robin Goodfellow said.

"But no magical defenses?" Danni persisted. "Nothing that might provide any evidence for our investigation?"

"I've given you all I know," he said. Which wasn't an answer, but that was all we were going to get out of him.

…

…

"Not much to go on, is it?" Danni said as we drove back to the Folly to start our investigations. She was studying the list of names Robin Goodfellow had given us as I drove. "A list of what was stolen, and from whom, and when. A list of stallholders, some of whom won't talk to us. A list of damage done to the stalls—no forensics for that—and to the building. Which at least got reported."

I had never enquired too deeply into whether or not the market had official permission to use the buildings it popped up in, because if the answer was 'no' there wasn't much I or the Folly could do about it. They didn't exactly let us know in advance where they were going to be, and until very recently we hadn't even known for sure the name of the person running them. But after every one I knew the location of, I'd checked with the local nick to see if any damage had been reported, and none had until the last one. At which time, they'd cleaned up all their stuff and removed it, and the contractors working on the building had called it in the next day.

Apparently, it was the custom of the market to set up the stalls and make any needed site modifications the night before, so that all that needed to be done the morning of would be to cart in the merchandise before opening. While a number of stalls had been demolished, and some random damage done to the building and the scaffolding around it, no merchandise had been stolen at that time.

Danni continued. "But forensics didn't find anything. No CCTV, no fingerprints or mysterious fibres or blood spatter, nothing."

And, since it was an active construction site and we hadn't gotten called in until almost a week later, the chances of there being any useful vestigium left was very small. I sighed. "Maybe we'll get lucky," I said. "We'll both be at the next one, and hopefully we'll catch whoever it is in the act."

"If they don't get spooked off at the sight of a couple of coppers," Danni pointed out.

"That's still a win," I said. "And maybe we'll get really lucky and the thief'll be stupid enough to try and sell some of it to the wrong person in the Hanging Tree or one of the other demi-monde hangouts."

The demi-monde wasn't that big, and the thefts were hot gossip, which was part of why Robin Goodfellow had called us in—he needed to be seen to be doing something. While some of the stolen items were valuable, that was only true if the thief could offload them onto someone who knew and cared what they were. For example, the costume jewelry imbued with vestigia would look like ordinary stuff you could get cheap in any department store. If you didn't know what vestigia was, you wouldn't attribute your sense of peace and stillness to the jewelry, and so you wouldn't be interested in paying a premium price for it. There were only so many places you could reliably find people who would know that … and everybody in those places would not only know you were trying to flog stolen goods, they'd know who those goods had been stolen from.

"You think someone'll call us to report someone selling stolen goods?" Danni asked, skeptically. "Is the demi-monde so much more law-abiding than everyone else?"

"I think there are just as many people willing to buy things that fell off the back of a lorry in the demi-monde as there are anywhere else," I said. "But it makes a difference when that lorry is filled with stuff owned by people you know, instead of some faceless international corporation. And no, I doubt they'll call us. But they might call Robin Goodfellow, and he'll pass it on to us."

"He didn't seem to want to involve the police, he might not," Danni said. "He could try to handle things himself."

I shook my head. "I doubt it. He wants to establish a permanent, larger site for the Goblin Fair of London, remember, and that would be much harder without the Folly's good will."

…

…

Back at the Folly's coach house/tech cave, we fed the information into HOLMES, got an operation formally started, and (pending Nightingale's approval) I actioned Danni to interview the stallholders from the market. It was lovely to have someone junior to me to fob some of the drudgery off on. Then we headed into the Folly itself to brief Nightingale over tea.

"Do you think they do have any sort of magic defenses?" I asked Nightingale. "He didn't answer that question."

"It's possible, but I doubt it," Nightingale said. "Though he might like to imply they exist, when he can."

"If they'd had something like the Folly's wards, they would have tripped when Lesley and I and Varvara were throwing around spells that one time," I said. "But what about anti-theft systems specifically?"

Nightingale took a bite out of an avocado-and-egg sandwich and chewed contemplatively. "I shouldn't think so," he said. "Or rather, anything you could do magically in that area would be easier to do technologically. I understand that putting tags on merchandise that will sound an alarm if they leave the store is quite simple, whereas achieving the same effect with a spell would be … rather complicated, if it were possible at all. Particularly given that one would wish to ensure that the merchandise, and only the merchandise, was affected, and that it was easily reversible when an item was purchased. And several of the stolen items—the jewelry, for example—might be negatively affected by the added vestigia."

"Electronic anti-theft measures work as long as nobody sands the chips," Danni pointed out. "Somebody does a big spell, and they're just so much expensive junk."

"It would tip everyone off that something was going down," I pointed out. "Even if you didn't have anything monitoring the security system set to alert you if it went down, and if the spell had a small enough physical effect to go unnoticed by the average person, most people in the demi-monde know the feel of magic being done. Goblin market's always crowded. Somebody would notice and spread the alarm. It'd be easier not to bother disabling it, just grab the stuff and run."

Nightingale nodded. "Very true, Peter. And, of course, there might be other effects achievable by the Genius Loci and any fae who might be among the stallholders, but I confess I can't think of anything plausible."

"I can't see Mama Thames or her daughters wanting to work anti-shrinkage for anybody," I said, "and I can't see Robin Goodfellow allowing it—it'd turn his fair into a River thing too quickly."

We talked the situation over a bit more, but no further insights sprang up between us. Danni went off to interview the stallholders, I added the dates for the next several markets on the Folly calendar and actioned myself to get the layouts from Robin Goodfellow so we could figure out where to station Danni and me for maximum effectiveness. (Nightingale, as someone with a reputation sufficient to merit a definite article in conversation when referred to in the third person, was a bit overkill and wouldn't be joining us).

Then I got in a couple of hours' practice on the current formae I was working on, and after that I spent a few hours slogging through the paperwork.

I once naively believed that when the briefing documents and Basic Falcon Management Course were written and comments from the various stakeholders had been addressed, that would be the end of it and I could go back to only the ordinary mountain of paperwork required of the average Detective Constable. But it had only been the beginning; and while Nightingale did as much of it as he could, his facility with Modern Metropolitan Police Bureaucratese was far worse than his Latin, and honestly it was easier for the two of us to brainstorm and plan together and me to write it up than it was for him to write it up and me to add the Bureaucratese later.

"Besides," he said with a smile when officially delegating such things to me, "it will be very good experience for you, preparation for when you are the official head of the Special Assessment Unit."

All things considered, I probably would have ended up doing less paperwork if I'd gone to the Case Progression Unit after my probation.

But it would have been far less interesting paperwork.

…

…

The next day, while Danni was working on the Goblin Market case, I got a call from the Right Honourable Caroline Linden-Limmer, on behalf of her girlfriend Grand Master Grace Yutani of the Sons (and, apparently, Daughters) of Wayland.

"Grace wants to talk with you," Caroline said. "Directly."

"She is welcome to come visit any time," I said, which was true both socially and professionally. Grace and Caroline had come to Bev and my place to meet the twins, and to give me a magic-proof phone case. I'd had a lot of fun testing that; it wasn't 100% fool-proof, but it could handle most spells even at close range, which was a definite improvement.

On the professional level, we were in the delicate process of re-building the organizational ties destroyed by (on the one side) the mass death and retirement of the Folly's membership after the War, and (on the other side) the resentment and suspicion caused by the destruction of the Sons of Wayland's headquarters. The Sons of Wayland were Newtonian practitioners, and some of their sons had gone to Casterbrook. After the war, they'd trained their own people their own way. If we were expanding the Folly and reopening Casterbrook as a training center, it would be much more efficient to work together.

"We're a bit busy right now," Caroline said. "Besides, for this we need you here. We had a break-in."

"Another one?" I said. "Not Lesley again, I hope?"

"No," Caroline said. "This wasn't out at the house you visited, which holds the Archives and the Grand Master's residence. The main headquarters, with the public forges and classrooms and offices and meeting space, is in the Northern Quarter. And the thief didn't get into the forges themselves, which have tighter security. But they got all the computer equipment and projectors from the office and classrooms, and some of the student projects that were lying around."

If they had computers in their classrooms, their ability to shield technology from magic must be a lot better than what was in the phone case. It probably had something to do with not needing to size it down to fit in your pocket. Not for the first time I wondered how they did it; Nightingale and I had spent a lot of time studying it, and the most we'd figured out was that it didn't have any relation to Foxglove's magic dampening field.

"So, will you come?" Caroline asked.

"It sounds like a mundane break-in, to me," I said. "Have you reported it to your local police?"

"Yes," Caroline said. "But they aren't hopeful we'll get any of it back."

"Was there any magical component to the theft?" I asked. "Did they use any spells, or target anything obviously magical?"

"No," Caroline said. There was a pause, and I guessed she was communicating with Grace. "They did try and force the door to the forges, both the outside door to the loading dock, and the inner door from the reception area. Just with a crowbar, nothing fancy."

"What's the cover story?" I asked. "I assume they don't have a fancy plaque saying 'Sons of Wayland, magical smiths, call us for all your enchanted metalwork needs.'" I'd looked them up in HOLMES, of course, as well as on Google and Facebook, but they didn't do business as the Sons of Wayland, and neither Grace Yutani nor Caroline Linden-Limmer had official ownership of or control over any metal-related businesses, at least on paper.

"You can look up Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy online," Caroline said. "They do custom blacksmithing, whitesmithing, and other metal work. In addition to teaching their own apprentices they have a partnership with the Wilkinson Welding Academy, and sometimes make specialized equipment for the University of Manchester."

I almost asked what her mum thought about her dating a woman who taught welding, but didn't. Besides, I bet I knew. Would the magic be enough to make up for the blue-collar work? My mum wouldn't think so, and she wasn't a Viscountess. Now, my mum didn't look down on working people, but she'd still rather I married up. She loved that Bev was not only a river goddess, but also a uni student (although Mum would have preferred her to study engineering, law, or medicine). Somehow I doubted Lady Helena Louise Linden-Limmer would be less snobby than my mum.

"So everyone in the neighborhood would know they have stores of metal and welding equipment and tools in the workshop area," I said, keeping myself on topic.

"Yes," Caroline said.

"And you've told all this to the Manchester police?"

"Yes."

"Was there anything sensitive on those computers beyond normal business data?"

There was another pause, while Caroline asked Grace, and I thought about how I could adjust my schedule to start learning British Sign Language. It should be easier than Latin or Greek, and also something I could have conversations in, not just read. Where I was going to get the time I didn't know.

"There's PowerPoints and other class materials for teaching the academic part of Newtonian magic," Caroline said at last. "But you still need a teacher to demonstrate the formae for you. The business data is more critical; besides things like banking information and client information, they've got the whole membership list for the Wayland Group, both active and retired."

Which meant that whoever had stolen those computers now knew more about the Sons of Wayland—or the Wayland Group, if that was what they were calling themselves now—than either Nightingale or I did. "You've contacted everyone on that list and told them what happened?"

"We have, and there haven't been any attacks on our members, or targeted thefts, that we know of," Caroline said. "Look, can you just come up here? We'd rather have your personal attention in person."

"Is there anything your local police haven't noticed or followed up on that they should?"

"No."

"Well, the first step for us will be to contact the Greater Manchester Police and get copies of their forensics reports," I said. "See if we can spot anything they missed. There almost certainly won't be; they're very good and they know their manor better than I do. But it'll stop us from duplicating their work."

"And then, when their reports tell you nothing?" Caroline said.

"I'll talk to Nightingale about coming up in person," I said, "but I doubt we'll be able to do anything more than your local police will. Less, probably, because if it was just a standard break-in by someone looking for computers or whatever, they're the ones who are going to know where to look for the goods when they get fenced."

"And if it is somehow targeted?" Caroline asked.

"If you give me the compromised information, I'll put flags out for Wayland's members and clients. If anything does happen, we'll find out when the other shoe drops," I said. "And then we'll have more to go on and a better chance at finding them. We are taking this seriously, Caroline," I assured her. "It's just that your bog-standard Breaking-and-Entering is the hardest crime to solve if the criminals are even halfway competent. If they wear gloves so they don't leave fingerprints and a hoodie to make them hard to identify on CCTV, chances are they're not going to get caught unless we catch them trying to flog their ill-gotten gains." This was something I hadn't had to explain since I was a lowly probationary PC, working the streets of London with Lesley, dealing with street crime and petty theft. Most crimes were solved because there was a connection between the victim and the perpetrator. When there wasn't a connection to find, and little physical evidence either, there was only so much to investigate.

I paused to see if Caroline had anything to say, but she didn't.

"You know your community better than I do," I said. "The Manchester police know the local fences and criminal habits better than I do. And you and Grace are top practitioners. Nightingale will probably want to go up and check things out, especially if Grace says she'll give him a tour of the forges while he's up there, either at the main offices or her personal setup. But the people on the spot are the ones most likely to notice a problem, and that's you guys."

"Let me talk to Grace," Caroline said.

While I waited for her to come back to the phone, I googled Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy and found a webpage that looked like it hadn't been redesigned in the last decade. There were examples of their work, and a page with the classes they offered (everything from basic welding to blacksmithing to jewelry making), but there wasn't an "about us" page.

But I thought I knew where they had gotten the name from anyway. Wayland was a mythological smith who popped up in stories from Finland to Germany to England; he learned his craft from dwarves and made weapons and armor for everyone from Beowulf to Charlemagne. Along the way, he wreaked bloody vengeance on everyone who tried to cheat him or control him. And Wade was his father. The perfect name to choose if you wanted to honor your heritage, but also not be noticed by people looking for your old name.

I should have been searching for groups with "Wade" in their name, not just Wayland, once we'd learned the Sons of Wayland had gone into hiding instead of disbanding after the war the way the Folly had. But I'd gone on paternity leave almost immediately, and hadn't been back from it that long. And maybe it was better that they'd come to us, and told us the name they were using these days, instead of me hunting them down.

Once Caroline had rung off, I called DC Eileen Monkfish from Manchester, who'd been the one escorting us about when we were investigating the case with Francisca the Angel of Death/Inquisition brainwashing victim.

"Hello, Peter," she said. "What can I do for you?"

"There was a break-in at Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy yesterday," I said. "It's probably just an ordinary break-in, but Wade's is a subsidiary of the IronFast Trust, who are part of our stakeholder community. They asked me to take a look at it."

"One of your lot?" Eileen said. "Any chance of magic rings or people appearing naked out of nowhere?"

"Shouldn't be," I said. "My contact said there was no sign of anything pointing to Falcon involvement, and she'd know."

"All right," Eileen said. "I can get you added to the case on HOLMES, if that's all you need. As long as you don't go around stepping on my peoples' toes, that is."

"My governor or I might pop up to Manchester to see the people at Wade's," I said, "but that'll be community engagement, not serious investigation. We'll let you know if we find anything."

"That's all right then," she said.

…

…

Nightingale, Danni, and I met together over tea in the lobby. We started with Danni filling us in about what she'd learned from the stallholders, which was nothing much.

"I did have a thought about the vandalism, though," Danni said when she finished her summary. "Are we sure it's connected to the market? People do sometimes vandalize construction zones and whatnot just for a lark. And once they were in, the easiest things to smash would be the stalls and things."

"I'd expect more graffiti, in that case," I said. "And theft of building materials and tools left lying around. There were some, I think."

"There were indeed," Nightingale said, proving he'd read the report. "While the thefts and the vandalism may be separate, we have very little evidence either way. Unless either of you has a suggestion, I would suggest leaving the issue to the Kingston CID."

That being settled, I shared what Caroline had told me about the theft at Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy, along with what I'd gotten from HOLMES.

"Well!" Nightingale said. "It would be rude to turn down an invitation, though I don't see that we could do anything they or their local constabulary could not."

"That's my thought, too," I said. "But if we swing it right, you'll get a tour of the forge, and maybe even a copy of their training materials along with the membership list."

"That would certainly make our trouble in traveling up there worthwhile," Nightingale allowed. "And I suppose that it would be worthwhile to show the flag and prove our attentiveness to their concerns, given … well." He stirred his tea and took a sip with great deliberation.

Nightingale had been hurt that the Sons of Wayland had mistrusted the Folly (and him, by extension) so little they'd let everyone think they were destroyed with their headquarters. He'd covered it with a Stiff Upper Lip and a few dryly put out words, but I could tell it bothered him. Between his hurt and Grace's mistrust, we hadn't actually been able to set up a formal meeting on terms that were acceptable to both parties, yet. There were too many implications to either of them hosting the other at a formal first meeting.

In the bad old days, the Grand Master had called upon the Master of the Folly at the Folly's convenience, and after he left, some corners of the Folly would occasionally ring with laughter at the Sons of Wayland's hubris in calling their leader the Grand Master. The true gentleman went to Oxford or London or became County Practitioners. The Sons of Wayland worked with their hands and the sweat of their brow, and (despite some of them having gone to Casterbrook alongside the future gentleman wizards) they were socially a cut below, and the Folly had made sure they knew it. The Grand Master had had little say in whether wizards would sit out the Second World War as they had the First, but his order had provided men and materiel regardless.

If they'd been listened to instead of condescended to, perhaps they wouldn't have been so quick to jump in a hole and pull it in after themselves when their headquarters were bombed out. And they'd certainly be less cautious about talking with us now.

Grace and Caroline had come down to visit when the babies were born, of course, but so far no amount of negotiation had resulted in an official first meeting for Grace and Nightingale that both parties found acceptable. When the Master of the Folly invited the Grand Master of the Sons of Wayland to visit the Folly, Grace hadn't exactly refused, but she had countered with an offer to come visit them on their manor, in Manchester, in such a way that it implied that Nightingale was the petitioner and she the superior. Which was just not on. Nightingale would be happy to accept her as an equal, but balked at being condescended to himself, particularly when (as he saw it) the Sons of Wayland's paranoia was what had broken the relationship to begin with.

Nightingale had thanked them for the invitation and expressed an interest in seeing the forge and possibly even Grace at work, having studied with the Sons of Wayland in his youth, but found various excuses for why he couldn't possibly accept the invitation.

I'd had thoughts about opening up Ambrose Hall at Casterbrook for a formal dinner as a compromise, but so far nothing had come of it. It wasn't quite as fraught as mediating the peace between Mama Thames and Father Thames had been, but that experience was proving useful.

This, on the other hand, was perfect. They had called us for help. Nightingale could go as part of his duties as a policeman, and the disadvantage of the formal meeting being on Wayland's turf was cancelled out by his being the expert called in to solve a problem they couldn't. And then once they'd formally met and sounded each other out, future meetings would hopefully be much less fraught.

"Do you want to go yourself?" I asked. "Or you could send me, or we could even go together."

"The two of you is a bit overkill, isn't it?" Danni asked. She was looking through her notes in between bites of a cucumber sandwich.

I shrugged. "Sending either of us is overkill, at the moment. Hell, sending you would be overkill, if the thefts were all we cared about. The relationship between us and them is still a bit delicate. It never hurts to build up good will."

"Besides," Nightingale told her, "While the Folly is, at present, almost totally ensconced inside the Metropolitan Police, that is historically an anomaly. There are many things that are Folly business that are not police business, just as there are many things that are police business but not Folly business." He turned to me. "I've nothing scheduled in the next day or so. I don't know that both of us need to go, but I've no objection to your company, if you feel it's worth leaving Beverly and the twins overnight."

"Or we could make a day trip of it," I said. "Go up in the morning, come back late afternoon." I made a face—that was a lot of time in a train for one day. But I'd rather that than be away from the girls for a night, and Bev would definitely prefer it. I was torn. I wanted to see their main facility, and see if I could get access to their training materials, or at least get it on the agenda for future meetings.

"That would be less disruptive for us," Nightingale said. "Danni's seminars would not need to be postponed."

"Fair enough," I said, though I'd just as soon postpone the training sessions; I knew the material, I just had never appreciated how much work it took to organize a class or tutoring session. At least Danni was better-behaved than I was, and didn't drag us off topic with interesting questions, the way I still tended to do with Nightingale.

"You said their business name is Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy?" Danni said. She was frowning at her notes.

"That's right," I said."

"One of the stallholders from the Goblin Market sells jewelry that he called 'Wade's Wear,'" she said. "Nice stuff, much more expensive than the costume pieces that got stolen. He had it in a case, so the thief couldn't just grab it when his back was turned. He'd have had to smash the case to get any of it, and then they could have caught him."

"Goblin markets are always packed," I said. "Nobody could make a quick exit without throwing around a few fireballs or something to clear the way."

"I had been wondering what the Sons of Wayland—or Wayland Group, if they prefer that—was doing with their wares," Nightingale said. "The Folly had been their only customer, and they didn't have the kind of property or investments to allow them to live on interest as the Folly has done. There is ordinary metalworking, of course, but where's the fun in that? If they've been selling jewelry and other trinkets to the demi-monde, that would give them a market for their particular skills."

"They can't have been selling directly to the markets and fairs for long, though," I protested. "Otherwise Robin Goodfellow would have known more about them. He knew occasional pieces were popping up, but someone with a regular supply to sell is more than that."

"It could be recent," Nightingale said. "Friendly contact with you encouraging friendly relations with others in the wider community. Or it could be that Goodfellow lied."

"Possible," I said. "And it's always possible that Wade's Wear stuff has been at previous markets, and people whisked it out of sight when the Isaacs showed up. I certainly wouldn't put it past, say, Artemis Vance, purveyor of genuine charms, cantrips, and spells, to have the good stuff but lie about it. But I wouldn't think Goodfellow would lie at the same time he was trying to negotiate an agreement he needed. If he or his family got a reputation for lying in the middle of a deal, it wouldn't be good for business."

"True," Nightingale said, "but one can't rule it out. That is something else we should inquire after: how long have they been selling their wares to people in the demimonde."

I thought about what sorts of things they'd be interested in making, and what would sell, and what items I'd seen at previous Goblin markets might have been of Wade manufacture. There wasn't much; from what I'd seen, the market tended more towards pottery and clothing and books than metal, things that were easier to make yourself without specialized equipment or a formal workshop.

Something else occurred to me. "Hold on, do you think there's a connection between the thefts in London and the break-in in Manchester? If the thief wanted Wade's wear, and couldn't steal it from the market, maybe he tried his luck from the source?"

"Awful lot of trouble," Danni said. "And the cost of the train ticket or petrol. It'd be much easier—and maybe even cheaper—to just buy it."

"Not when you take into account the other things stolen from Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy," I said. "That could offset the cost and hassle of the trip."

"Whoever it was didn't get into the forge," Nightingale pointed out, "and unless the student pieces Ms. Linden-Limmer mentioned were jewelry, he wasn't successful in his aims. If that was his aim, he didn't succeed, and may well try again."

"If the Wade's Wear jewelry was his aim, why come back to the market three times with the same strategy?" I asked. "Once he saw it wouldn't work, you'd think he'd have either tried to steal from the market a different way, or go directly to Manchester then, instead of waiting around repeating himself."

"He may not have known where the jewelry came from," Danni pointed out. "And had to come back and hang around the booth to find out, and just decided he might as well add to his haul."

"Chances are that all this is merely a coincidence," Nightingale said. "However, it should be investigated nonetheless. Danni, would you contact the jewelry merchant again and ask if they remember anyone hanging about their booth or particularly interested in the Wade's Wear?"

Danni made a note, and then shared the rest of the findings from her interviews. There wasn't much more than Goodfellow had given us to begin with, but the first rule of policing is to always double-check everything.

In the end Nightingale decided to make a day trip of it, and there really wasn't any need for both of us to come along. Which meant I had to give him a crash course in modern police procedures for handling a break-in like this. Even if Manchester had done the actual footwork, it would be good if he knew at least what not to do if he found any evidence to collect. "But you will ask about their training materials, right?" I asked, after the briefing was done.

"Yes," Nightingale said. "Actually, since they've clearly got a great deal more experience with training practitioners than I have—albeit to very different ends—I'll be sounding them out about the possibility of supplying instructors for Casterbrook, when we open up Ambrose Hall."

"That'd be good," I said. "Maximum collegiality, lots of different perspectives on magic and training … wonder if we could get the New York Library to send us someone, too?"

"I should think it quite unlikely, given their attitude towards our relations with the demi-monde," Nightingale said, "but there's no harm in asking."

"Future training plans aside," I said, dreading the amount of paperwork and administration that would be necessary to set up a new training center, "getting them to supply teaching staff is a long-term goal requiring a lot of negotiation. Getting a copy of the powerpoints they use should be fairly simple and easy."

"Why are you so interested in that?" Nightingale said. "I've heard you grumble about powerpoint use often enough."

Which was true, usually after having to sit through a particularly boring police refresher training course, or wrestle with the program myself to make up slides for Danni and whoever came after her. "They're going to be in English," I said. "I highly doubt they're making all their apprentices slog through learning Latin before they start serious training in enchanting items. If they use the Principia, it will be in translation—and who knows, they might just have written their own textbooks to replace it."

"While future students of Casterbrook would no doubt thank them for it," Nightingale said, "it would not remove the need for you to continue your Latin mastery. Still, I will make sure to ask."

…

…

Nightingale departed early in the morning before I'd even left Bev and the twins. This left Danni and myself to rattle around the Folly without him. No new information had come in on either the thefts or the vandalism, and so it started out as a quiet day. I gave her a lecture in the morning, then she studied the briefing material while I practiced the latest formae Nightingale had taught me. That afternoon, we got a call-out to check and see if some weird graffiti near the site of a gang fight was anything, and by this time Danni was proficient enough at sensing vestigia that she could handle it by herself.

Which mean that when the call came in from Woodwose Tavern, a drinking establishment frequented by the demi-monde where they asked even fewer questions than most, I was the only one at the Folly to take the call.

"Special Assessment Unit, this is Detective Constable Peter Grant," I said into the old bakelite phone. We kept them around because, being purely from several generations before the advent of computer chips, we didn't have to worry about them.

"Oooh, the Starling himself, what an honor," said the voice on the telephone. It was a throaty, husky voice that sounded like the speaker had been a chain smoker for fifty years, and could have belonged equally plausibly to a man or a woman. "You're looking for the scrote who stole shit from the market, yeah? He came in here bold as brass not an hour ago, trying to sell me some of it, as if I wouldn't notice it came from my mate's booth."

"Thank you for the tip," I said. "Is he still there?"

"Nah, he didn't stick around once I said I wasn't going to buy anything on the spot. But I did make out like I was interested, so he gave me his name and number if I changed my mind."

Got you, I thought, and asked for their name, address, and every detail they could remember. Pat Fernsby was a regular at Woodwose and friends with several of the stallholders who frequented the Goblin Fair. He happily told me all he knew about the boorish American calling himself Mike Santini—which wasn't much. But it did include a cell phone, which turned out to be a burner phone purchased with cash a week earlier from a store without a working CCTV.

"I understand Robin Goodfellow has a history of taking care of matters like these himself," I said, once I'd asked every question twice and was satisfied I'd gotten every bit of information possible. "Thank you for calling us."

"Yeah, well, Goodfellow is a fucking prick," Fernsby said. "Thinks the fact that he owns the fair means he should own everything else, too. Besides, he's the one called you in first. Look, do you have anything else you need? Things are going to start picking up in here, soon."

Once he'd rung off, I called Nightingale and filled him in.

"Do you want to handle the arrest yourself, or turn it over to the local constabulary?" Nightingale asked.

"Operational details are not supposed to be handled by the officer in charge of the intelligence in question," I said. "To prevent corruption on both sides. We don't usually follow that because we can't—we're not large enough—but I'd rather follow procedure when we can."

"Agreed," Nightingale said. "Besides, we'd have to turn him over to them anyway, unless we wanted to open up our own custody suites, and we have no indication he is a practitioner of any sort."

"Kingston nick will be happier with us if they're the ones to do the collar and it goes on their books as a case closed," I said.

"I do want you to sit in on the interrogation, at least," Nightingale said. "See what brought him here, and how he chose to target the market. I don't like that Americans keep popping up."

"We do seem to be getting a lot of trouble from that part of the world lately," I said. When I stopped to think about it, Brian Packard may have been given his enchanted ring in Manchester, but he hadn't decided to hire Lesley to steal the rest of them (and the lamp) until he'd lived in America for years. Terrence Skinner wasn't American originally, either, but that's where his company and the work with the Rose jars had gotten their start, and the New York Librarians hadn't exactly been a model of helpfulness. Then there was the Virginia Company, who had interfered in our investigation of Martin Chorley. "It's all these foreigners stirring up trouble," I said, ironically. "I'll be sure to ask. And also see if he has any connection to the break-in at the Wayland headquarters."

…

…

The Goblin Market had been in Kingston when the vandalism had occurred, so they were the ones it had gotten reported to, and they were the ones who'd opened the investigation. Danni had come to us from Kingston CID, so she knew everyone there, including DC Kernshaw, who was handling the case. Danni had filled her in, and entered the list of stolen items into HOLMES, the computer system that correlated every bit of data from every police investigation in the country. She'd also noted the possible connection to the Manchester break-in. So Kernshaw already knew there was a Folly connection when I called her up and told her I'd gotten a lead from an informant.

"And you have no reason to believe the suspect is dangerous?" Kernshaw said with what I felt was unwarranted suspicion. "No flaming spear or anything? Can't melt your face off?"

"Nothing like that," I said. "As far as we know, he has no more powers or weapons than your average thief."

"How about the stolen goods?" Kernshaw persisted. "Anything there that could bring down a building or something?"

"Course not," I said. "It's just stuff he nicked from a market."

"A market run by and for the type of people who need your particular … policing skills," Kernshaw said. "And you're sure none of it is Falcon material?"

"Well, some of the jewelry is," I said, "but it's not dangerous. If you wore it, it would give you a mild feeling of peace and goodwill, or happiness, or enthusiasm, depending on which particular piece you were wearing. But they're not strong enough for most people to notice consciously if you're not paying attention, and certainly not strong enough to cause an altered state or anything."

"Do we need to take any special precautions when handling it?"

"Nah," I said. "Just standard procedures for handling stolen goods is fine."

"All right," she said, and I was a little hurt at how dubious she sounded. The Folly's cases weren't that bad, or, at least, not many of them were; but then again, the quiet, ordinary cases didn't often result in other nicks being called in to help, and also weren't as interesting to gossip about over a pint.

"We'll pick him up," she said. "Will you want to sit in on the interview?"

"I would, yeah," I said. "We want to know how he knew where the market was going to be, and also, he's a person of interest in another theft up in Manchester."

She sighed. "Do I want to know what sort of Harry Potter shit they have going on up in Manchester?"

"I'll send you the Manchester Police reports," I said. "No Falcon-related material got stolen, just a bunch of computers and things like that from a business that is part of our community. Could be totally a coincidence that they got robbed within a couple of weeks of when the goblin market here got targeted."

"Well, we'll check it out," Kernshaw said.

…

…

The operation itself was simple enough, though I wasn't involved in it. Kernshaw contacted Fernsby, and had him pass her name on to Mike Santini as a possible buyer. Kernshaw met Santini, verified he had the goods, and then arrested him.

He'd been in a holding cell at Kingston CID for a few hours by the time I arrived to discuss interrogation strategies with Kernshaw. "I've checked with my contact in America, and they've got no record of Santini in connection with any magical crime," I told her. Agent Reynolds of the FBI hadn't been able to dig anything substantial up on him. "But that's not saying much; their magical community is fragmented and very isolationist, and there are major players they barely know exist. What he does have is a string of arrests—and a few convictions—for minor crimes. Petty theft, vandalism, that sort of thing. He got out of prison after a short stint for possession of stolen goods, hopped a plane, and came here."

"So, he hasn't learned anything, and is trying to start fresh here as a young criminal on the make," Kernshaw said.

"Exactly," I said. "But if he's so new here, how did he know to target the goblin market, of all places? Most Londoners don't know about it, and not all of those who do have the connections to find out where it is and how to get in."

"Well, we'll see what we get out of him," Kernshaw said.

…

…

"We didn't get much out of him," I told Nightingale when he got home. "Not even where he stashed the rest of it. The problem with career criminals is that they know enough to keep their mouths shut, instead of telling us what we want to know. It's very inconsiderate of them."

"It couldn't have helped that you had very little leverage," Nightingale said. "His crime was not serious enough that he would feel the need to bargain it down with any information he might have had. Still, you should be satisfied that the case is closed."

"I know," I said. "I still think there has to be more to it. It just feels … incomplete. Too many loose ends."

"It's certainly possible that there is more to uncover," Nightingale said with an elegant shrug. "But all too often, police work is not like a novel—things do not wrap up neatly into a tidy conclusion. There are always loose ends. Talk to Agent Reynolds, and see if she can find any more background information on him, perhaps a connection to the American demimonde. And when you inform Goodfellow of the arrest, see if he's still willing to have you or Danni patrol the next market. Just don't be surprised if there's truly nothing more to uncover."

…

…

"Well, I haven't found any evidence of contact with magical groups on this side of the pond," Agent Reynolds told me. "But I contacted a friend in the New York office, and apparently Mike Santini spent some time trying to get in bed with the Luccheses."

"And who are they when they're at home?" I asked.

"They're one of the Five Families," Reynolds said, sounding surprised. "The biggest and longest-lasting Mafia families in New York. His older brother Chris was a member of the Tanglewood Boys in the 1990s, they were a feeder group for the Luccheses, but he never made it up into the main gang. Mike apparently idolized his older brother and watched The Godfather too many times, but by the time he got old enough things were coming apart at the seams. A lot of the Lucchese leadership got arrested and convicted and thrown in jail one after the other around the turn of the millennium, with several of them turning informant for lighter sentences. They had to keep restructuring things and were barely keeping their head above water and wondering who to trust. Not exactly a good time for someone new to join up. He hung around for a while with some of their lower-level associates. Nothing ever came of it."

"If he wants to join the mafia, why come here?" I asked. "We've got crime syndicates, of course, but nothing with the glamour of the mafia. He's got no connections here."

"Except whatever connections he has that got him the location of several successive goblin markets," Reynolds said.

"Except that."

"Have you considered asking the Librarians?" Reynolds asked. "They're based in New York, after all, and they definitely know the magical community there better than I would."

"I thought about it," I said. "But Mrs. Chin and I didn't exactly part on good terms. She's not going to tell me just because I ask. And given the Librarians' views on the demimonde, I doubt she'd approve of me investigating crimes against them. This isn't an important case, and there's probably nothing to find. I'd rather not rub her nose in our working relationships with the magical community if I don't have to—it'll just make it harder to work with her down the line if something important happens where I really need information from her. At this point, it's mostly just my curiosity."

"Fair enough," Reynolds said.

…

…

When I called Goodfellow and asked where we could meet, he directed me to Shurgard Self Storage in Wandsworth, where the Back of the Lorry Deliveries van was parked. I wasn't sure whether that meant he didn't trust me to know where his home base was or if he truly did work from the van even when the market wasn't operating. It was outfitted comfortably enough, but surely it would get cold and damp during the winter.

To get to the storage place, I drove the ASBO south on the A3205 until I turned off onto a narrow road with the back gardens of the working-class terraces of Wandsworth on one side and industrial buildings on the other. Then I crossed a bridge over the narrow course of the River Wandle, and wound through the alleys back to where Goodfellow's van was parked.

The transit's door was closed, but the mahogany steps were out and at my knock he called for me to come in. Goodfellow was sitting at his desk with his left arm in a sling and bruises up the side of his face. "What happened?" I asked.

"Hit and run," he said. "I was walking on Middlesex Street near the Petticoat Lane Market, and next thing I know I'm in fucking agony, lying in the street with some kid in a hoodie telling me he got a picture of the car what done it."

"Did it show the number plate?" I asked, reaching for my notebook.

"Nah, that'd have been too easy," Goodfellow said. "I already reported it to the City of London Police, and they say there's no way to find whoever it is."

The City of London Police and the Met didn't always work together very well, or very quickly, and I didn't have the sort of contacts there that I had in my fellow Met nicks. But the details would still be on HOLMES for me to check. "Unfortunately, they're probably right," I said. "If it wasn't caught on CCTV, and nobody at the scene got the plate number…" I shook my head. "Well. Sometimes something will come up, but not often."

"What good are you, then?" he asked. He leaned back in his chair, and though he winced at the pain, his gaze was direct.

I shifted under the weight of it. "We did catch the guy who robbed the market," I said. "He tried to sell it on to the wrong person."

"Yeah?" Goodfellow looked off to the side. "What's his name?"

"Mike Santini," I said. "An American. He's got a long list of convictions and suspected crimes—robbery, assault, things like that. Does the name ring a bell?"

"No," Goodfellow said. He swiveled his chair and reached for a ledger from the shelves. It was a modern one, not so fancy as the ledgers on the top shelves, but still very good quality. "How long's he been in the country?"

"Not long. A few months, that's all."

Goodfellow nodded as he flipped through the ledger, stopping occasionally to run his finger down a column of names. "If I've encountered him, he was using a different name," he said. "And I think I'd remember an American. He stayed out of my way. Was he working with anyone?"

"If he is, he hasn't said." I shrugged. "He hasn't told us anything, really. I don't know how he found out what the Goblin Market even is, much less where it would be. Or where the rest of the stuff he took is."

"That is the question, isn't it," Goodfellow said. He shifted in his chair. "What's going to happen to him?"

"He'll be tried for theft," I said. "There's not much chance he'll get out of it, unless he's got a really good lawyer and an even better story for how he got ahold of stolen property. There's no evidence linking him to the vandalism, and the total monetary value of the thefts was low, so it won't be a long sentence. Then he'll get put on a plane back to the States and we never see him again."

"Never see him again," Goodfellow repeated. "That sounds lovely. I am beyond ready for this whole thing to be over."

There was something in his tone that caught my ear. He knew something he hadn't told me.

Goodfellow reached in his back pocket and pulled out a phone, unlocking it with a PIN. No protective Wayland case, no aftermarket hard off/on switch modded in, just your bog standard smartphone. Either he didn't use magic and didn't spend enough time around practitioners to care, or he had magic the way the Rivers had magic and didn't need to worry because he wouldn't blow out the chips.

"A few hours after I got out of hospital after I got run over, I got a message on my voicemail." Goodfellow hit play, and a tinny voice with an American accent filled the van.

"Mister Goodfellow, my name is Drew Johnson, and my phone number is 020 7946 0867. I called you a week ago and you didn't respond. Maybe you didn't get the message. I have an import-export business and a security contracting business. I'm sorry to hear about your recent injury and the problems you've been having at your fairs. Now that you're preparing to take the next step to a larger and more permanent establishment, I think you might be happier and safer with someone to take care of your security needs. Your business is so important to the community. It would be a shame if your problems got worse. Call me. 020 7946 0867."

"He sounds like someone from a gangster film," I said, incredulously. And what did he think was going to happen when London's underworld got word there was an American trying to run a protection racket on their turf? If Goodfellow had called the Brindles or the Walkers or the Hunt Crime Syndicate for protection against the interloper, Johnson would have been found floating face down in the Thames in short order, unless he had either a lot more magical powers or a lot more muscle than he had shown so far.

"I know," Goodfellow said. "He doesn't actually say anything overtly threatening or illegal in this one, or the first one—I deleted that one, didn't think anything about it at the time."

"No, but if you play that to a jury, all of them have seen gangster films, too," I said. "If there's even a shred of hard evidence, they hear that voicemail, and the Crown Prosecutor isn't going to have to paint them a picture of what it means."

"What happens now?" Goodfellow said.

"Now, I call in my governor, and DC Kernshaw out at Kingston," I said. "We'll want to move quickly, in case he doesn't know we've already nicked Santini. We'll track down whatever properties he has and get warrants to search them, and if there's any evidence at all, Johnson will be arrested and charged with theft at least. Possibly assault, as well, if we can track down the car; that'll be much easier with a name to start with." And I'd have to call Agent Reynolds again, and definitely the Librarians, to dig up what they could on Johnson.

"You're not going to ask me to wear a wire?" Goodfellow said.

I stopped going over my internal list of all the things to do next, and smiled at him. "No, Mister Goodfellow, if you record someone without telling them in advance, it's usually not admissible in court. You don't have to worry, we'll take care of him without needing you to do anything except testify when the time comes."

"And will it go to court? Most crimes involving the demimonde don't." He sounded neutral, and his face was carefully blank. I couldn't tell if he wanted it to be kept quiet, or not.

"At this point, none of the crimes he's committed have been caused by magic, none of the evidence requires knowledge of magic to interpret, and all of the victims can pass for an ordinary human," I said. "So there's no problem trying the case in public." I sighed. "But you're right, a lot of crimes by or against people in the demimonde can't go to court without … a lot of things being public. There's no way you could keep a jury quiet, if there was real, verifiable magic involved."

"A lot of people would get hurt, if everyone knew about people like us," Goodfellow said. "We couldn't just live our lives like we've been doing all this time. I can imagine what the Daily Mail would have to say."

I winced. "So can I," I said. It was something I'd never really thought about, before the twins were born. If magic became public, if people knew about river spirits and fae and all the rest, things would change. And the Folly had the weight of a government institution headed by a white man to protect it. The Folly's problem would be all the people who thought magic was cool and wanted in, just like I had.

But the rest. Black goddesses? People who'd lived underground for over a century? All the others? The gutter press would have a field day, and there would be everything from racist hate to hysteria about the glamour to voyeuristic interest, as if they were zoo animals. Bev was a goddess; she could handle herself. Taiwo and Kehinde were just kids. And most members of the demimonde were just ordinary people, when it came right down to it, but that wouldn't matter to the paparazzi.

"On the other hand," Goodfellow said, "the old way of handling things—where the Folly ignored the small problems and killed the big ones—that was a terrible way of doing business. Lot of good people were hurt."

"We don't do that anymore," I said.

"I know," Goodfellow said. "Would've been much easier (and safer) to kill that Angel of the Inquisition than capture her."

I wondered exactly what the demimonde knew about that case, and whether their source was Bev or Molly or someone else.

"I'm just saying," Goodfellow continued, "that we need a proper way of handling things when there's a crime where you can't hide the magic, or the nature of the people involved."

"I know, and we're working on it," I said. Slowly. Step one had been figuring out how to hold magical people and practitioners who didn't want to be held. Figuring out what to do when someone we arrested refused a plea bargain and wanted things to go to trial … nobody had any workable ideas for that, yet. "If you have any suggestions, we'll take them under advisement."

"Fair enough," he said.

…

…

My first call was to Nightingale, who'd arrived back at the Folly. He listened quietly. "Well, that's unexpected," he said when I had finished. "But it is gratifying to have our suspicions confirmed. I shall set Danni to tracing this Johnson fellow, and call Kingston to coordinate the investigation."

My second call was to Agent Reynolds, who assured me that she'd see what she could find about Drew Johnson and let me know.

My third call was to Mrs. Patricia Higgins of the militant magical wing of the New York Public Library. I was pretty sure that whatever she thought about "shades," she wouldn't approve of a protection racket, either. And she was a librarian: she probably liked sharing information.

I was mistaken on both counts. "What will you give me in return for the information you want?" she asked.

"I already sent you everything we found out about that magic lamp and those rings," I said. Which wasn't quite true—I hadn't told them the Wayland Group was still active—but then, that wasn't my secret to share, and it wasn't as if their survival was pertinent to the enchanted objects in question.

"It was very interesting, but hardly makes up for your treatment of us and your lies when we were trying to obtain the Mary Engine," she replied tartly.

I sighed. "What do you want?"

"Information," she said, and we set to haggling, eventually settling on a future gift of information of similar value and type.

"The only good thing the Five Families ever did was work to keep the shades in line," she said. "Angry spirits being bad for business. Quiet watering holes for people like that keeps them away from places they might harm the general public. It significantly lightens the load on the Librarians, having a large segment of the shades of New York City under the Five Families' protection—and thus control. Part of the reason we've been spread so thin in the last two decades is the decline of the Mafia thanks to FBI diligence."

"I see," I said. We didn't have time to unpack all the problems I had with that attitude, and it wouldn't help me get the information I needed, anyway. "Do the Mafia have a magical wing, too?"

"Not really," Mrs. Chin said. "Some of them have folk rituals from Sicily, that sort of thing; nothing fancy, but enough to harden them against the glamour or let them know when an intruder has been in their places. And making saints' medals into enchanted amulets for protection is quite common."

"Do they work?" I asked.

"Sometimes," she said.

Neither of the names I had rang a bell, and she didn't want to look them up for me, but the background was useful.

My fourth call was to Caroline Linden-Limmer. "Have you found anything?"

"Maybe," I said. "That is, we've found something, I'm just not sure it's connected with your thefts." I explained about Santini's arrest, and the threatening voicemail Johnson had left for Goodfellow.

"A protection racket?" she said, bewildered. "Like in a crime movie?"

"He literally used the phrase 'it would be a shame if something happened to you,'" I said. "If the break-in was him or Santini—or both—then he's going to try to set himself up as protection for the Wayland Group. And the first thing to do is make you feel like you need protection."

"And he has the Wayland and Ironfast Trust member rolls, from the computers," she said grimly.

"Exactly," I said. "Now, he may have other things besides assaulting people in mind; be on the lookout for sabotage and vandalism, too."

"Of course," Caroline said. "Thank you for the warning, I'll pass it along to Grace and her people."

…

…

It had been decided that investigating Drew Johnson was not important enough to justify overtime; if he got spooked by Santini's arrest and left the country, he would be out of our hair. If he went to ground, he wouldn't be a direct threat any longer, and as an American he would stand out. People would remember him, and he probably wouldn't have enough working knowledge of the UK and Europe to slip through the cracks.

So Danni and I headed for Kingston bright and early the next morning.

"Ah, Grant!" DC Kernshaw said as we entered the bullpen. "A second case practically gift-wrapped to help my clear-up rate. People tell filthy lies about you, you know. Is there any weird shit we need to know about?"

"Not that I know of," I said. It was still the middle of the night for Kim Reynolds, and she hadn't sent me anything overnight. "But there is a chance Johnson also has connections to the American Mafia." I explained what Mrs. Chin had told me last night.

"Funny," Kernshaw said. "I'd have thought a Mafia protection racket would be bloodier to start up. Either that or The Godfather lied to me. Or maybe the Italian-American mob is just less bloodthirsty than the gangs here in London."

I shrugged. "Maybe they're starting small. No point in killing someone to intimidate the rest if the rest don't know you yet."

"True," Kernshaw said. "And guns are harder to get here—that hit-and-run could've killed someone, if Goodfellow had hit his head wrong or something."

The voicemail by itself wasn't enough to make an arrest on, and given the relatively low level of injury, property damage, and theft so far, the case wasn't important enough to spend a lot of man-hours on. So Danni started tracking down any vehicles Johnson or Santini might have had access to, and Kernshaw and I looked for property records. It was the sort of low-level background work that the Murder Squad had lowly PCs to handle. But on a case this small, it was just the three of us.

If Johnson had been here long enough to establish significant aliases or contacts in the criminal underworld, any warehouses full of stolen goods would be tied up in shell companies and fake owners and people paid cash under the table to rent out space and look the other way. But he'd only arrived in the UK this year.

"He's got a whole industrial building rented in his own name off the A40 near Park Royal," Kernshaw said. "Probably for his official business."

"Maybe not," I said. "Looks like he's still in the process of getting permits and things like that. Why bother with the expense and trouble of renting space if he's not using it yet?"

"True," Kernshaw said. "Doubt the recording will be enough for a warrant to search it, though, unless we turn up something else."

"How long do you think it will take to get the warrant, once we find something?" I asked. I hadn't ever actually investigated this sort of case before. I'd done my fair share of nicking people for pickpocketing and the like when I was on probation, and then with the Folly we were either working big murder investigations with Belgravia or our own cases.

"About three weeks, or thereabouts," she said absently, taking a sip of her coffee. "Maybe four."

"Three weeks?" I said incredulously.

She looked up at me, both eyebrows raised. "Yeah?"

"Things work a little quicker on a murder case," I said.

"Wouldn't know," she said. "Haven't gotten to work on anything that big yet, have I. But surely you do stuff besides murder cases."

"Yeah," I said. "But if there's enough Falcon-related material involved, we have an agreement—it doesn't go through the main court system with the rest of the warrant requests."

"Must be nice," she said. "If we get enough evidence for a search warrant, is this case Falcon enough to go through that route?"

"Probably," I said, and we got back to the paperwork.

…

…

That evening, Reynolds called over Skype. "How's your investigation going?"

I shrugged. "Nothing much so far. He hasn't been here long enough to get into trouble, or make contacts. On the one hand, there's not much to sort through, which is nice. On the other, there's not as much time for him to have slipped up. And it's possible there's nothing there, and the threatening voicemail isn't actually him trying to set up a protection racket."

"I don't have a smoking gun for you, either," Reynolds said. "He was an associate of the Luccheses for a while, in the Bronx faction. Came up through the Tanglewood Boys, and according to my friend in the New York office of the FBI, there was some sort of rumor that he had some special skill, and resented the fact that he was never going to be made."

"Made?" I asked. At her surprised look, I shrugged. "Hey, I haven't watched The Godfather in years."

"The Mafia has a strict hierarchy," Reynolds said. "At the bottom level are associates, the grunts. Above that are the soldiers, the made men—the ones who are trusted to be reliable and loyal. Above that you have the bosses. Associates are the ones who get the worst jobs, and if they get caught the family really isn't going to care because they're disposable. The soldiers, though, the made men—they're still not the ones making the decisions, but they've got job security and influence within the family, and the chance of advancement, and the family takes care of them in a way they don't take care of associates. There's a lot of prestige to it. And in the Italian gangs like the Luccheses, you have to be Italian to be made."

"And Johnson isn't Italian," I said. "So it didn't matter what skills he had."

"Pretty much," she said. "Wanna bet those special skills are some sort of magic use?"

"No bet," I said. I shared what Mrs. Chin had told me, and we speculated about Johnson's history and plans for a bit, and then I signed off.

…

…

The next day, I drove out the A40 to the Victoria Industrial Estate instead of to Kingston. It was a row of industrial buildings, modern, with brown brick up to eye level and gray siding above, and just a bit of a peak to the roof of each section to break up the lines. None of the buildings were particularly large, and the parking lots in front of them had rows of trees to delineate the space. It was surprisingly pleasing to look at for an industrial park.

Johnson's warehouse was flanked on one side by an audio-visual supply company, and on the other by an airline catering company. The caterers didn't have a working CCTV, but the AV place had quite good coverage, and they cheerfully handed over a thumb drive with the last month's worth of recordings.

I took the thumb drive back to the tech cave at the Folly and settled in to see if I could spot Santini in them, either bringing stuff in or taking it out. The angle wasn't good enough to cover the door to Johnson's building, but it got a large chunk of his parking lot. I thought about turning the footage over to Danni, but she was still looking for the car, and thought she might have a lead. I couldn't even split the footage with Kernshaw, because she had other cases to work on.

I sighed and dove in.

There wasn't much activity in the corner of the screen that showed Johnson's parking lot, so I could fast forward through most of it. There was still a lot. Johnson showed up a couple of times, which wasn't surprising; he was the one who'd rented it. He was driving his own car, a white Volkswagon Golf, and not the black Vauxhall Corsa that had been used to assault Goodfellow with. Still, I made a note of every time he appeared.

Given how little activity there was, and the fact that only one camera was actually relevant, it didn't take that long to find what I was looking for: a basic white panel van, driven by Mark Santini, parked in front of Johnson's building the day after Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy was robbed.

"That should be enough for a warrant," Nightingale said when I showed it to him.

"Yeah," I said. "We should use the Folly's contacts to get it, though; DC Kernshaw says it'll be at least three weeks to get it if it has to go through normal channels."

"I'll see to it," Nightingale said.

Which is how, two days later, I went back to the Victoria Industrial Estate with Danni and a small forensics team out of Kingston CID.

The space was mostly empty, but there were two tables along the wall piled with items matching the description of things stolen from the Goblin Market, and in a box under them were two desktop towers, without monitors or keyboards—those would probably have been easier to sell. "We suspect Johnson and Santini were involved in a theft of computers up in Manchester," I told the forensics techs. "You'll want to see if those are from Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy."

"Right," one of them nodded.

"Definitely the things we're looking for," Danni said, holding a gloved hand over one of the ceramic masks to feel the vestigia from it.

"I'm calling Nightingale," I said, pulling out my phone in the magic-resistant case that still made me smile to look at. I hit the speed dial for Nightingale.

"Nightingale," he answered.

"Yeah, it's me," I said. "There's a pile of stuff here that matches the description of stolen goods from the Goblin Fair, and two computers that might be from the Manchester break-in."

"Excellent," Nightingale said. "The next step should be to arrest Johnson, yes?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'll call Kernshaw, have her pick him up."

…

…

Johnson proved to be no more talkative than Santini had been, but it didn't matter. He owned the building the stolen goods were found in, some of the stolen jewelry pieces were found in his apartment when we searched it, along with a burner phone with a number of calls and texts to Santini on them. The computers were indeed from Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy, so that got added to the list of charges. We never did find the car that hit Goodfellow, or any evidence tying either American to the hit and run, but the evidence on the thefts was enough for a conviction on that count.

Besides my testimony, the Folly also contributed magic-proof cuffs so that the Americans could be transported without risk of Johnson using magic to escape. If he had any; that was just a guess, because we'd still never seen him use it.

"I don't understand why they were so obvious about it," I said to Nightingale as the case wended its way slowly through the courts. "Surely they could have found some place less noticeable to stash the stuff than a building with Johnson's name on it. A storage locker takes a lot less paperwork, too."

Nightingale shrugged. "Perhaps it was taking longer to get their front business set up than they thought, and they were short of cash. And I doubt they were expecting the thefts to get reported to the police at all, much less for us to care. The demi-monde has historically taken care of such matters themselves, and given what we know of the situation in America that is even more likely to be the case there."

"Yeah, but they're both career criminals," I said. "Part of the mafia! They have experience."

"Neither were high-level enough to plan crimes in America, from what Reynolds has told us," Nightingale pointed out. "And they're used to corruption on the part of the police, and the magical law enforcement tacitly approving of them."

I shook my head. "It just seems ironic. Johnson gets fed up because he thinks his skills as a practitioner—"

"We still don't know for sure he is a practitioner of any sort," Nightingale pointed out.

"—his skills at whatever aren't getting enough power in America, so he comes here to try and build an operation here," I said. "Only, he doesn't cover his tracks at all, so he gets caught right away. He doesn't even get a chance to use his special skills."

"How embarrassing for him," Nightingale said with a wry grin. "If only all our cases were as easily solved."

"Yeah, I like the stupid criminals best," I said.

"Indeed," Nightingale said. "Have the loose ends been tied up to your satisfaction?"

I sighed and sat back in my chair. "I suppose. It still feels … unsatisfying. Most of it wasn't anything I did; I didn't crack the case or outsmart them or anything. I just got lucky. Santini tried to sell the stuff on to the wrong person, and Johnson was so thick he stored the stolen goods in a building he rented in his own name."

"I believe most policing is like that," Nightingale said. "And besides, you underestimate your contributions in the long run. Without your community policing and the trust you have built with the demimonde, we would never have known that the thefts occurred in the first place. Even if we had been notified of the theft, we certainly would not have been the first choice to handle things when the thief tried to sell his ill-gotten gains to someone who didn't approve of the thefts."

"Yeah, but Fernsby only called me instead of Goodfellow because he's got some sort of beef with Goodfellow," I pointed out.

"That still doesn't mean he would have called me about it," Nightingale said. "He could have ignored the whole thing, or spread Santini's name around the demimonde as a known thief to be wary of. He could have handled it in any number of ways that did not involve the Folly or the Metropolitan Police. I know, because that's what the demimonde has done up until now. Santini and Johnson have been arrested and will be tried, instead of being beat to a pulp and dropped in an alley. And it is your work up to this point that allowed for that."

"That's kind of you to say," I said.

"It's the truth," Nightingale said. "If it were on my account, it would have happened long since. You've done good work, Peter, on this case in particular and in all the things you have done since joining the Folly that laid the groundwork for it."

"Thank you," I said. "I hope all our cases are this easy."

"I quite agree." Nightingale smiled. "But please don't jinx us, Peter."

[delormad20]

Animals

Snow monkeys, also called Japanese macaques, are a terrestrial Old World monkey species native to Japan (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Macaca_fuscata.html.)

They communicate by vocalization. There are six types of vocalizations, including peaceful, defensive, aggressive, and warning vocalizations, which signal their mood (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Macaca_fuscata.html.)

Snow monkeys often take baths in natural hot springs to keep warm during the winter (https://www.japan.travel/en/itineraries/snow-monkeys-and-hot-springs-in-nagano/.)

They live in social groups and are known for their complex social hierarchies (https://wpsu.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nat14.sci.lifsci.hierarchy/the-social-hierarchy-of-snow-monkeys/.)

Snow monkeys are omnivores and have a varied diet that includes fruits, leaves, insects, and small vertebrates (https://www.snowmonkeyresorts.com/smr/snowmonkeypark/snow-monkeys-food/.)

Now, let us talk about the technological and consumerist elements to this piece.

The Toshiba laptop. Founded in 1965 in Japan, Toshiba has grown its company worldwide yet employs just 6,600 people today (https://www.toshiba.com/tai/about_us.jsp.)

Electrical outlet and wires. Harvery Hubbell invented the first electrical plug, but it seems unclear as to when our modern-day outlets were normalized in households (https://illumin.usc.edu/a-powerful-history-the-modern-electrical-outlet/.)

Mercedes-Benz. This is the 2002 SL, paired with the slogan "Style. Unlike any other." A fun fact about MB is that the Weeknd paired up with the company to promote their first electric car, the EQC (https://www.carscoops.com/2019/12/mercedes-and-the-weeknd-team-up-for-what-may-be-the-no-1-car-ad-of-the-year/).

The computer. As of today, Lenovo is the largest computer manufacturing company, with ~24% market share of PC vendors (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-01-11-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-declined-28-percent-in-fourth-quarter-of-2022-and-16-percent-for-the-year.)

Domo. He became an icon in American media around 2002. The writer in this TIME article likened him to Harrison Ford, "if Harrison Ford were a small, feral Teletubby" (https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1002529,00.html.)

Attendance Prompt:

The Secret Lives of Color - Rosso Corsa

“In honor of their victory their car's original hue became Italy's national racing color and later the one adopted by Enzo Ferrari for his cars: rosso corsa, racing red" (p. 149).

This passage taught me how Ferrari contributed to "racing red" becoming Italy's national racing color. I am fascinated with racing and cars, but I hadn't known the historical significance and cultural influence that went along with Ferrari. The iconic racing red color that many people associate with fast cars all stemmed from him. The influence of Ferrari and his red car is an interesting piece of automotive and art history.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump's White House blocked dozens of federal agencies from creating new government websites aimed at aiding homeless people, fighting human trafficking, and helping people vote, according to records obtained by Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The requests for new websites came from agencies small and large at a time when Trump had grown openly hostile toward his own administration, often deriding the federal government's executive branch as an out-of-control "deep state" conspiring to undermine him.

The Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Central Intelligence Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency are among the more than two-dozen agencies that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rebuffed.

Proposed websites that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rejected include HumanTrafficking.gov (Department of State); ReportFraud.gov (Federal Trade Commission); Telehealth.gov (Department of Health and Human Services), FindShelters.gov (Department of Housing and Urban Development), and FiscalData.gov (Department of the Treasury), according to federal records.

Such custom ".gov" website domains enhance government agencies' ability to effectively provide and market services to an American public that's all but universally connected to the internet.

Without them, agencies can still create new sections on their primary websites, but with long and unmemorable subdomain names replete with slashes and hyphens — not exactly prime fodder for a billboard or public service announcement.

The documents obtained by Insider listed no reasons for why the Office of Management and Budget rejected or accepted an agency's ".gov" website domain request.

Neither did the Office of Management and Budget, whose spokesperson, Isabel Aldunate, declined to answer Insider's questions.

Representatives for Trump, who this week officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign, did not reply to several messages.

MAJOR DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRUMP AND BIDEN

The Trump White House's practice of regularly blocking and slow-walking federal agencies' website requests stands in stark contrast to that of President Joe Biden's White House, which has approved almost every request it's received, federal records indicate.

Of the 105 ".gov" websites requests Trump's Office of Management and Budget considered between July 2018 and the day Trump left office on January 20, 2021, it accepted 60, denied 44, and left one pending — a 41.9% rejection rate, according to the records obtained by Insider.

Of the 95 ".gov" website requests Biden's Office of Management and Budget considered between January 21, 2021, and September 9, 2022, it accepted 85, denied four, and recorded six requests voluntarily withdrawn — a 4.2% rejection rate.

Insider asked more than a dozen federal agencies that had their custom .gov website domain requests rejected by the Trump White House to explain what happened.

Some declined to comment, including officials at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Labor. Others did not respond to inquiries, including the Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For those who did comment, they offered limited insight into why they sought new .gov websites or why the Trump White House denied their requests.

Housing and Urban Development, for one, told Insider in a statement that it asked to establish FindShelters.gov in late 2019 "for the creation of a new tool that would provide information about housing, shelter, healthcare and clothing resources in communities across the country."

After two months in limbo, the Trump White House denied the agency's request. It now provides such information on its main agency website, with resources concentrated at a URL of https://www.hud.gov/homelessness_resources.

HUD's understanding of why its request was denied: "There has been a federal-wide ongoing effort to limit and reduce the number of federal public-facing websites. The effort was started to reduce cost and redundancy."

On December 23, 2019, the CIA asked Trump's White House to approve the website domain DataTransport.gov. A week later, the Office of Management and Budget rejected the request.

"The domain was registered to support the IC's data services program," a source familiar with the matter said of the CIA's request, with "IC" standing for "intelligence community." The source offered no additional details.

In March 2019, the generally apolitical Peace Corps asked Trump's Office of Management and Budget to green-light PeaceCorpsCN.gov — a website referencing its operation in China. Office of Management and Budget officials rejected the request on an unspecified date.

"Per compliance with Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 18-01, the domain was requested at the time to enhance email and web security," Peace Corps spokesman Troy Blackwell wrote in an email.

By early 2020, the Peace Corps had begun the process of leaving China — one of Trump's favorite targets and topics. The Peace Corps has not re-upped its PeaceCorpsCN.gov website request since.

"After Peace Corps closed the China post, we no longer needed the domain," Blackwell said.

BLOCK AND DELAY

In at least one case, Trump's White House denied a website request — the United States Agency for International Development-sponsored ProsperAfrica.gov — that Biden's White House later approved.

The ProsperAfrica.gov website now details efforts by the United States Agency for International Development to mobilize "services and resources from across the US government to empower businesses and investors with market insights, deal support, and financing opportunities" on the African continent.

And of the custom website domains Trump's Office of Management and Budget did OK, approval often took weeks or months instead of the days or hours typical for Biden's Office of Management and Budget.

One particularly testy delay came during the summer of 2020, when the Election Assistance Commission sought approval to create HelpAmericaVote.gov and use it to recruit and coordinate an army of new poll workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which by then had sidelined tens of thousands of older election volunteers unable or unwilling to staff in-person voting sites.

An unexpectedly long delay ensued. Finally, the Office of Management and Budget sunk the Election Assistance Commission's HelpAmericaVote.gov website, arguing in an email obtained by Insider that the election agency's request "did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site." The decision arrived as Trump's assertions that US elections were "rigged" and fraudulent had grown louder and evermore detached from reality.

Then-Election Assistance Commission Executive Director Mona Harrington frantically appealed for reconsideration.

"This is really negatively impacting our progress at this point," she wrote Justin Grimes, then an official in the Office of Management and Budget's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer. "Please advise, we desperately need the domain."

Several days later, the Office of Management and Budget reversed its decision, and HelpAmericaVote.gov would go live in mid-August 2020, just in time for National Poll Worker Recruitment Day on September 1. About 100,000 people visited the site that day, the Election Assistance Commission said.

In a statement to Insider at the time, Trump's Office of Management and Budget said it rejected the Election Assistance Commission's request for HelpAmericaVote.gov "because the information provided did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site based on existing requirements. OMB worked with EAC given the importance of the topic to improve the justification which led to approval."

Trump's Office of Management and Budget did approve a few custom web domains quickly.

Among those granted the swiftest approval: TrumpLibrary.gov, TrumpWhiteHouse.gov, and FlyHealthy.gov.

Curiously, the General Services Administration on October 8, 2020, proposed creating BuildBackBetter.gov, which Trump's Office of Management and Budget approved the same day, according to federal records.

At that juncture, Biden has already made "build back better" a cornerstone plank of his 2020 presidential campaign platform. Trump's administration did not appear to use the BuildBackBetter.gov domain for any material purpose. But in mid-November 2020, then President-elect Biden began using it as part of his official presidential transition web presence, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

AN OPAQUE APPROVAL PROCESS

Trump in 2018 tapped the White House's Office of Management and Budget to serve as the national gatekeeper for new federal government websites — a role previously filled by the General Services Administration.

In a statement to Insider last year, the General Services Administration said the Office of Management and Budget decided in February 2018 to "perform the adjudication of all new federal executive branch .gov domain requests to limit the proliferation of executive branch stand-alone .gov websites/domains and infrastructure."

The office immediately took a hard line on agencies' website requests, denying as many as it accepted during the second half of 2018, according to federal records.

But the decisions were made out of public view.

In January 2021, Insider filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Office of Management and Budget for records related to .gov website domains that federal government agencies had petitioned to create. Insider also asked for records indicating whether the Office of Management and Budget approved or denied the agencies' requests to create .gov websites.

In March 2021, Office Management and Budget officials denied Insider's FOIA request, stating that "no responsive records were located."

Insider formally appealed that decision. In late October, about 19 months later, Office of Management and Budget officials acknowledged that records Insider requested did indeed exist.

Officials then agreed to release a summary of .gov website requests the Office of Management and Budget had approved and rejected, although it did not immediately provide other requested records, such as documents explaining why officials approved or denied a particular website.

The data include eight recently requested websites that are listed as "pending." Seven come from the Department of Education and appear to pertain to student debt relief, a top Biden administration priority, and feature URLs such as StudentDebtRelief.gov and GetStudentLoanRelief.gov.

The websites were not yet functional as of mid-November.

[cubeghost]

While Palestine Action US is targeting Elbit systems to protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Elbit’s tools of occupation are also being deployed in the US. As Antony Loewenstein documents in his book, The Palestine Laboratory, Israeli defense contractors test their wares on Palestinians and then export their tools of surveillance and warfare around the world. Loewenstein highlights the connection between so-called border security in the US and the oppression of Palestinians, writing, “Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US–Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants.” In her book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Harsha Walia describes how US Customs Enforcement officials impose the violence of bordering on Tohono O’odham lands, along the US Southern border. Walia wrote, “US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has contracted Israel’s largest private arms company, Elbit Systems, to construct ten surveillance towers, making Tohono O’odham one of the most militarized communities in the US.”  In 2017, members of the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network (TOHRN), went to Palestine on a visit organized by the Palestinian group Stop the Wall. TOHRN member Amy Jaun told Antony Loewenstein that it was a relief to talk “with people who understand our fears … who are dealing with militarization and technology.” In 2022, after years of resistance from Tohono O’odham organizers, the construction of the contested surveillance towers was completed. As Will Parrish reported in The Intercept in 2019, each tower is outfitted with thermal sensors, high-definition cameras with night vision, and ground-sweeping radar. As Parrish noted, “The system will store an archive with the ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an ability known as ‘wide-area persistent surveillance.’” The  Tohono O’odham’s struggle against the construction of Elbit’s towers is just one example of how the company is exporting Israel’s tools of bordering and occupation. In The Palestine Laboratory, Loewenstein describes an event at the Paris Air Show in 2009, where Elbit screened drone footage for “an elite audience of global buyers.” The footage showcased the assassination of a Palestinian. A subsequent investigation by Andrew Feinstein, a global expert on the arms industry, who observed the sales video pitch in Paris, revealed that innocent Palestinians, including women and children, were killed during the drone attack that Elbit showcased at the Paris Air Show. Feinstein told Loewenstein, “This was my introduction to the Israeli arms industry and the way it markets itself. No other arms-producing country would dare show actual footage like that.” As evidenced by the construction of surveillance towers in Tohono O’odham lands, Elbit’s work extends beyond the bounds of war, but the lines between war-making, surveillance and what governments call “security” are murky, at best. When tools of war and subjugation are tested on a captive population, and marketed on the basis of how effectively those people are killed, how do we expect those tools to be deployed globally? 

[usafphantom2]

USAF retires the first E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft while going to E-7

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 04/0823 - 21:00

The aviators of the 552th Air Control Wing met this week to say goodbye to the E-3 "0560" aircraft, during an event commemorating the rich history of the aircraft on March 31.

The "0560" aircraft is the first E-3 Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning Air Control System) aircraft to retire from the fleet this year. As part of the Fiscal Year 2023 President's Budget Request, the Air Force Department announced its intention to retire 13 AWACS E-3 aircraft and redirect funding to acquire and field a replacement.

"Although some may see divestment as the end of an era, the retirement of this aircraft marks the beginning of the modernization of the 552a," said Colonel Keven Coyle, commander of the 552a ACW. "Despite the reduction of the fleet, the mission will remain the same, providing worldwide management, as well as command and control operations as needed."

The final destination of the "0560" aircraft will be the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Base. AMARG, America's air power reservoir, is a unique specialized facility within the Air Force Support Center, providing aircraft preservation and storage, parts recovery, preparation for disposal, aircraft regeneration for flight status and depot maintenance for America's military services, U.S. government agencies and allied governments.

By retiring the E-3, the 552a can focus on prioritizing the integrity of the remaining fleet. The divestment of part of the fleet will improve sustainability by adding high demand and low availability parts back to the supply chain, providing a temporary improvement in aircraft availability.

Looking to the future, the U.S. Air Force considered and evaluated appropriate replacements of the E-3 AWACS to align with operational needs. On April 26, 2022, the U.S. Air Force announced its intention to replace a part of the AWACS aircraft with the E-7A aircraft. The Boeing E-7A is the only platform capable of meeting the tactical battle management, command and control requirements of the Department of Defense and target indicator capabilities in aerial motion.

"After extensive research and market analysis, it was determined that the E-7 is the most compatible to meet our requirements," said Coyle. “The aircraft will not only provide modernization, but will also establish a trilateral information and crew exchange program with the Royal Australian Air Force and the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force, which already operate on E-7.”

The first E-3 AWACS arrived in Tinker on March 23, 1977. Since then, most aircraft have been housed and sustained on this base. Although the replacement strategy at the base for the E-7 has not yet been finalized, the existing infrastructure will be considered as a replacement and the support options will be evaluated. The E-3 AWACS community values the long-standing relationship between Tinker Air Base and Oklahoma.

Tags: Military AviationE-3 SentryUSAF - United States Air Force / U.S. Air Force

Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work throughout the world of aviation.

Related news

MILITARY

Easter in the Falklands/Malvinas with the Royal Air Force

04/09/23 - 2:30 PM

MILITARY

China intends to turn "elderly" jets into combat drones

09/04/2023 - 12:19

MILITARY

Embraer will start assembling the Gripen fighters at the end of April

09/04/2023 - 10:01

AW119Kx of the PRF flying over Brasilia.

LAAD

Leonardo arrives at LAAD with multi-domain platforms and technologies to meet all kinds of operational needs

09/04/2023 - 09:40

MILITARY

Russia is believed to have sabotaged the Slovak MiG-29s supplied to Ukraine

08/04/2023 - 21:33

HELICOPTERS

IMAGES: USMC's new CH-53K heavy helicopter ends the second round of tests at sea

08/04/2023 - 14:00

homeMain PageEditorialsINFORMATIONeventsCooperateSpecialitiesadvertiseabout

Cavok Brazil - Web Creation Tchê Digital

Commercial

Executive

Helicopters

HISTORY

Military

Brazilian Air Force

Space

Specialities

Cavok Brazil - Web Creation Tchê Digital

[newengen]

To Ban, or Not to Ban: Our Take on How Marketers Should Be Thinking About TikTok

The Latest TikTok News

Tensions between TikTok and the U.S. government came to a head this month after the Biden administration threatened to ban the app should the company refuse to divest from its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance. The escalation comes amidst warnings from U.S. lawmakers that China’s investment in TikTok poses a threat to national security and opens the door for the Chinese government to influence content moderation on the platform.

To top it all off, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced Congress last Thursday and attempted to reassure U.S. lawmakers that the company has implemented measures to address their concerns. Central to Chew’s defense was TikTok’s plan to roll out what it calls “Project Texas” - a $1.5 billion project to migrate American user data to Texas-based Oracle. In another key moment, Chew rebutted accusations that TikTok’s algorithm has adverse effects on kids by pointing to steps the company has taken to protect its younger users.

A Marketing Perspective

Apart from the political drama, TikTok also made headlines this month after its announcement that 150 million American users are on the platform. The app’s popularity and influence are undeniable, and marketers are uniquely aware of this: there’s an appetite for short-form video that won’t be curbed by a TikTok ban. An eMarketer survey from November 2022 found that 63% of TikTok users would move to another platform, with Instagram being the favored alternative. And these platforms are already evolving their video capabilities to meet consumer demand - Instagram introduced 90-second videos last year, and Meta recently followed suit.

So, What Does TikTok Have to Say About All of This?

In response to last Thursday’s hearing, TikTok circulated a Myth vs. Fact Sheet, which counters what the company calls inaccuracies surrounding its ownership, content moderation, and data security. A few notable examples, transcribed directly from the document, include:

“Myth: TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is Chinese-owned.*

Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company's founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity.”

*Despite TikTok’s attempt at myth-busting ByteDance’s association with the Chinese government, it has been reported that "golden shares" give the Chinese government the ability to appoint a seat on the company's board.

“Myth: TikTok manipulates content in a way that benefits the Chinese government or harms American interests.

Fact: TikTok is an entertainment app. The content on TikTok is generated by our community. TikTok does not permit any government to influence or change its recommendation model.

Myth: TikTok collects a significant amount of sensitive data on its users.

Fact: TikTok's privacy policy fully describes the data the company collects. There have been many inaccurate claims about our policies and practices that have gone unaddressed by the media. To be clear, the current versions of the TikTok app do NOT:

*Monitor keystrokes or content of what people type when they use our in-app browser on third-party websites;

Collect precise or approximate GPS location in the U.S.;

Use face or voice prints to identify individuals.

In line with industry practices and as explained in our privacy policy, we collect information to help the app function, operate securely, and improve the user experience. We constantly update our app and encourage users to download the most current version of TikTok.”

*This talking point conveniently omits what happens off the app via TikTok browser trackers, or “pixels.” But more on that in a minute.

Formalities aside, TikTok knows that the best way to reach an audience is, well, through TikTok. Ahead of his testimony on March 23rd, Chew appeared on TikTok’s verified account to address his upcoming congressional hearing and remind users of what’s at stake - that a ban could “take TikTok away” from 150 million users, 5 million business accounts, and 7,000 U.S.-based TikTok employees.

Creators Sounding the Alarm

TikTok has found support from its creators, who have taken to the platform to sound the alarm about what a ban, in the form of the S. 686 RESTRICT Act, would mean. One example comes from creator @sayheyjames, who recently published a video that generated 12.2 million video views and 2 million likes in the span of a week. In this video, he calls out elements of the bill that he says will “fundamentally change” how we use the internet, like the proposed legal consequences of using VPNs to access banned apps and the ban on hardware manufactured by “foreign adversaries” (including China, Russia, and Iran).

There are countless examples of this type of content, with trending hashtags like #tiktokban accumulating 2 billion views. Given how much creators have to lose in this debate, it’s no surprise that they’re leveraging the platform to create a sense of urgency around the issue.

Making Sense of it All

It’s near impossible to predict what happens next because there’s no playbook on how to best navigate the aftermath of a ban on a platform like TikTok. Kevin Goodwin, VP of Performance Marketing at New Engen, offers some perspective:

“Precedent matters. We have zero precedent for a nationwide ban of such a popular technology and entertainment platform. Since we’ve never seen it happen before, all marketers are skeptical that TikTok will be the first to pay the price. Take Meta and Google for example - they consistently face legislative pressure for specific products and ways of working (albeit on a smaller scale), yet have never been materially impacted in their ability to provide products to users and advertisers.”

On top of the legal and political complexities of a theoretical TikTok ban, the cultural and economic implications are massive. New Engen VP of Performance Marketing, Adam Telian, puts it plainly,

TikTok has done an amazing job of creating demand for a specific type of content which, it seems, a good portion of the world can’t get enough of. Our position is that, even if TikTok gets banned, the format and the attention it demands isn’t going anywhere.

Another key piece of the equation is TikTok creators, who help differentiate the platform from other major social media players. This is why New Engen leaders are asking, “what will happen with creators?” Many creators are already operating cross-platform, but those with an outsized presence on TikTok are at risk of losing potency in their existing brand partnerships. It will be incumbent on brands to diversify their influencer partnerships and plan accordingly for a creator migration to Reels, Shorts, and Triller (or maybe a resurrected Vine) in the wake of a TikTok ban.

“Once we figure out where the creators are moving,” Adam Telian says, “it will be up to the platform to prove they can retain user attention, and deliver the same results and consistent innovation we've seen from TikTok.”

Actions for Marketers (Whether You’re on TikTok Yet or Not)

For the time being, there are several actions marketers can take to leverage TikTok as it exists today.

New Engen Clients Operating on TikTok

These clients are embracing a business-as-usual approach to their TikTok strategy, but they’re also prepared to be agile and flexible as the situation unfolds. Kevin Goodwin explains, “We continue to recommend brands take a diversified channel strategy and approach to short-form video to hedge any extreme risk. We want to avoid the rare scenario where the government bans TikTok and one of our clients suddenly has 50%+ of their revenue at risk.”

In practice, this means incorporating Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts into short-form video strategies, and, as mentioned above, ensuring that content creator programs aren’t over-dependent on the TikTok app and its toolset.

New Engen Clients Not Yet on TikTok

We are advising clients who are not yet on TikTok to move forward with their investment. “Even if TikTok does get banned,” Adam Telian explains, “clients can be using this time to refine their creative approach and learn how to unlock meaningful performance that should translate to whichever platform fills the vacuum created by a ban. And if it doesn’t get banned, then they’re ahead of where they would be if they chose to wait for the dust to settle."

New Engen Clients Concerned About Data Privacy

Anna Otieno, Head of Research & Insights at New Engen, reminds us, “Privacy and security are the top concerns right now, particularly for companies and government institutions. As we head into a world of cookie-less advertising and first-party data, control is key.” She notes that, regarding TikTok, “It’s been confirmed that the app - like Google and Meta - gathers information about people as they move around the internet. TikTok partners with companies that embed tiny website trackers “pixels” to better measure and target ads - usually without user notification.”

With this in mind, some New Engen clients have chosen to refrain from implementing TikTok’s tracking pixel. This allows brands to maintain their presence on the platform without compromising their first-party data.

It’s important to note, however, that creators tend to have a difference of opinion on this front. Anna Otieno tells us that, "While privacy and security are important to TikTok users, content creators are less concerned given the tradeoff. In fact, most social media users know that their data is tracked and shared to make sure ‘the algorithm is working.’ TikTok’s remixed creator fund, known as the Creativity Program Beta, aims to help creators “generate higher revenue potential.” What’s the price of opportunity and revenue? Data."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia

Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its “recycling” bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn’t an aberration: it’s how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

Plastic recycling’s origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon’s scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective (#ExxonKnew about this, too). Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed “anti-littering” campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples’ laziness.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

Remember the campaign where an Italian guy dressed like a Native American shed a single tear as he contemplated plastic litter? Funded by the plastic industry, as a way of shifting blame for plastic waste from the wealthy, powerful corporations who lied about plastics recycling to the individuals who believed their lies:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html

When I was a kid in Ontario, we had centralized, regulated, reusable bottle depots — beer and soda bottles came in standard sizes, differentiated by paper labels that could be pressure-washed off. When you were done with your bottle, you returned it for a deposit and it got washed and returned to bottlers to be refilled again and again and again.

After intense lobbying from soda companies, brewers and the plastic industry, that program was replaced with curbside “blue boxes” that promised to recycle our plastic waste. 90% of the plastics created has never been — and will never be — recycled. Today, the plastic industry plans on tripling the amount of single-use plastic in use worldwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

You know those ads from companies like Bluetriton (formerly “Nestle Waters”) that promise that your single-use plastic bottles are “100% recyclable…and can be used for new bottles and all sorts of new, reusable things?”

Bluetriton is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you’re familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead. When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their “recyclable” water-bottles, their defense was that these were “non-actionable puffery.” According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as “a guardian of sustainable resources” and “a company who, at its core, cares about water,” it was being “vague and hyperbolic.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

With this high standard for plastic recycling, Dow’s Singapore scam shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it seems to have surprised the government of Singapore. Writing for Reuters, Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell describe how they caught Dow red-handed:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

The method is actually pretty straightforward: Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow’s collection bins, and then followed them. The shoes were passed onto Dow’s subcontractor, Yok Impex Pte Ltd, who sent them hopping from island to island throughout Indonesia, until they ended up in junk-markets.

Not all the shoes, though — one pair was simply moved from Dow’s collection bin to a donation bin at a Singaporean community center. Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility. So much for Dow’s slogan: “Others see an old shoe. We see the future.”

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn’t explain why its “recycling” program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing. Dow promised to cancel its deal with Yok Impex, but Yok Impex’s accountant told Reuters that the deal would be remain in place until the end of the contract. Yok Impex, meanwhile, shifted the blame to the low-waged women who sort through the clothing donations it takes in from across Singapore.

Indonesia bans bulk imports of used clothes, on the grounds that used clothes are unhygenic, displace the local textiles industry, and shipments contain high volumes of waste that ends up in Indonesian incinerators, landfills and rivers.

In other words, Singaporeans thought they were saving the planet by putting their shoes in Dow bins, but they were really sending those shoes on a long journey to an unlicensed dump. Dow enlisted schoolchildren in used-shoe collection drives, making upbeat videos that featured students like Zhang Youjia boasting that they “contributed 15 pairs of shoes.”

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow’s “breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel” in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

Also in 2021, in India, a Dow program to “use high-tech machinery to transform the [plastic from the Ganges] into clean fuel” was revealed to have ceased operations — but was still collecting plastic and promising that it was all being turned into fuel:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-insight-idUSKBN29N024

Dow operates a nearly identical “shoe recycling” program in neighboring Malaysia, and did not return Reuters’ requests for comment as to whether the shoes collected for “recycling” in the far more populous nation were also being illegally dumped offshore.

The global business lobby loves the idea of “personal responsibility” and its evil twin, “caveat emptor.” Its pet economists worship the idea of “revealed preferences,” claiming that when we use plastic, we may claim that we don’t want to have our bodies poisoned with immortal, toxic microplastics, that we don’t want our land and waters despoiled — but we actually love it, because otherwise we’d “vote with our wallets” for something else.

The obvious advantage of telling people to vote with their wallets is that the less money you have in your wallet, the fewer votes you get. Companies like Dow have used their access to the capital markets (a fancy phrase for “rich people”) to gobble up their competitors, eliminating “wasteful competition” and piling up massive profits. Those profits are laundered into policy — like replacing Ontario’s zero-waste refillable bottle system with a “recycling” system that sent plastics to the ends of the Earth to be set on fire or buried or dumped in the sea.

The ruling class’s pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it “regulatory capture.” Now, when you hear “regulatory capture,” you might think about companies that get so big that they are able to boss governments around, with the obvious answer that companies need to be regulated before they get too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

But that’s not how elite economists talk about regulatory capture: for them, capture starts with the very existence of regulators. For them, any government agency that proposes to protect the public from corporate fraud and murder inevitably becomes an agent of the corporations it is supposed to rein in, so the only answer is to eliminate regulators altogether:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

This nihilism lets rich people blame the rest of us for their sins: “if you didn’t want your children to roast or freeze to death in the climate emergency, you should have sold your car and used the subway (that we bribed your city not to build).”

Nihilism is contagious. Think of the music industry: before Napster, 80% of the music ever recorded was not for sale, banished to the scrapheap of history and the vaults of record companies who paid farcically low sums to their artists.

During the File Sharing Wars, listeners were excoriated for failing to pay for music — much of which wasn’t for sale in the first place. But today, fans overwhelmingly pay for Spotify, a streaming service that notoriously pays musicians infinitesimal sums for their work.

Spotify is a creature of the Big Three labels — Sony, Universal and Warner — who own 70% of all the world’s recorded music copyrights and 65% of all the world’s music publishing. The rock-bottom per-stream prices that Spotify pays were set by the Big Three. Why would the labels want less money from Spotify?

Simple: as co-owners of Spotify, they make more money when Spotify pays less for music. Musicians have a claim on the money they take out of Spotify as royalties — but dividends, buybacks and capital gains from Spotify are the labels’ to use as they see fit. They can share that bounty with some artists, all artists, or no artists.

Not only that, but the Big Three’s deal with Spotify includes a “most favored nation” clause, which means that the independent artists who aren’t under Sony/UMG/Warner’s thumb have to take the rock-bottom rate the Big Three insisted on — likewise the small labels who compete with the Big Three. The difference is that none of these artists and small labels have massive portfolios of Spotify stock, nor do they get free advertising on Spotify, or free inclusion on hot Spotify playlists, or monthly minimum payouts from Spotify.

The idea that we shop at the wrong kind of monopolist in the wrong way is a recipe for absolute despair. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to music with the Big Tech-owned monopoly service (Youtube) or the Big Content-owned monopoly service (Spotify). The money you hand over to these giant companies goes to artists the same way that the sneakers you put in a Dow collection bin goes to a recycling plant.

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn’t exist and will never exist — imagine if we’d spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break ’Em Up, Zephyr Teachout’s outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for “consumerism” as a theory of change. She writes that if you’re on your way to a protest against a new Amazon warehouse but you never make it because you waste too much time looking for a mom-and-pop stationers to sell you a marker to write your protest sign, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

The problem isn’t that you shop the wrong way. Yes, by all means, support the creators and producers you care about in the way that they prefer, but keep your eye on the prize. Structural problems don’t have individual solutions. The problem isn’t that you have chosen single-use plastics — it’s that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics. The problem isn’t that you’ve bought a subscription to the wrong music streaming service — it’s that labels have been allowed to buy all their competitors, creators’ unions have been smashed and degraded, and giant accounting scams by big companies generate minuscule fines.

The good news is that after 40 years of despair inducing regulatory nihilism and “vote with your wallet” talk, we’re finally paying attention to systemic problems, with a new generation of trustbusting radicals working around the world to end corporate impunity.

Dow is a repeat offender. A repeat, repeat offender. Chrissakes, they’re the linear descendants of Union Carbide, the company that poisoned Bhopal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

They shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, let alone a “recycling” program. The same goes for Big Tech and Big Content company and the markets for creative labor. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated their unfitness, their habitual deception and immorality. These companies have captured their regulators, repeatedly, so we need better regulators — and weaker companies.

The thing I love about Teachout’s book is that it talks about what we should be demanding from our governments — it’s a manifesto for a movement against corporate power, not a movement for “responsible consumerism.” That was the template that Rebecca Giblin and I followed when we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about the brutal, corrupt creative labor market:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

We have a chapter on Spotify (multiple chapters, in fact!). For our audiobook, we made that chapter a “Spotify Exclusive” — it’s the only part of the book you can get on Spotify, and it’s free:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Next Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A woman kneeling to tie her running shoe. She stands on a background of plastic waste. In the top right corner is the logo for Dow chemicals. Below it is the Dow slogan, 'Others see an old shoe. We see the future.']

[beardedmrbean]

All the newspapers cover the death of a Finnish volunteer in Ukraine, but Helsingin Sanomat was first with the news after speaking with Tiina Soini from the Nordic Combat Medics' group, which is active in Ukraine.

The paper reported that a man aged under 30 has died in eastern Ukraine, after travelling from Finland and serving for more than a year in a combat medics' unit and as a soldier at the front.

The man had arrived in Ukraine soon after the Russian assault began in February 2022, and was one of the longest-serving Finnish volunteers in the conflict.

He had served with a unit of Finns evacuating soldiers and civilians from the hottest conflict zones, and had been in Bakhmut when fighting there was at its fiercest.

His family have requested his identity not to be published, and asked for privacy while they grieve.

Pekka's presidential pace-setting

Ilta-Sanomat has another poll on next year's presidential election, and it is good news for the early front-runner, Pekka Haavisto (Green).

The election will go to a second round, unless one candidate secures more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. IS asked respondents about several different second-round matchups, and found that Haavisto won against all his likely opponents.

Bank of Finland governor Olli Rehn (Cen) and foreign policy expert Mika Aaltola did best in the poll, both securing the support of 35 percent of respondents. Neither has declared their candidacy yet.

Finns Party figurehead Jussi Halla-aho (25 percent) did slightly better than outgoing SDP Prime Minister Sanna Marin (24 percent).

Haavisto was preferred by more than fifty percent of respondents in all possible matchups except that with political newcomer Aaltola, in which the split was 49-35.

IS also has a story on Aaltola's latest column in the Apu magazine, which suggests Finland needs a "defensive corridor" along the eastern border. This would not just be a fence, according to Aaltola, but a zone where the economy and vitality of communities close to Russia was maintained and improved.

Improved economies and infrastructure would offer another level of defence against Russia, after the collapse of cross-border trade and tourism left many places in eastern Finland struggling financially.

Investing in those areas, along with Åland and northern Finland, was a national security issue, according to Aaltola.

Tampere housing glut

Aamulehti has a look at the housing market and, for sellers, it's not great news. Last year the Oikotie website had some 40 percent more properties for sale in April this year than April the year before.

New-build properties are especially common at the moment, according to AL. Some 15 of those properties had asking prices of more than a million euros, and according to building trade figures, the supply of new apartments has now clearly outstripped demand.

The supply is expected to continue to grow this year, before declining next year as projects are finished. Few new constructions are starting in the city.

Smaller apartments are the most difficult to sell at the moment, as investors have largely withdrawn from the market and are unlikely to return while interest rates remain above the 2-2.5 percent mark.

[imladybbq]

Valorant: Prepare for Battle 

Electronic sports, or e-sports, are organized online games in which teams or professional players compete against one another in a variety of online games. E-sports, like traditional sports, feature passionate players who put in a lot of practice, engage in competitions, and compete for glory, popularity, and cash prizes (Taylor 2018 p. 1). Over the years, esports has grown a significant popularity among many people, creating a global community of fans. There are various genres of e-sports games that you can find, such as first-person shooters, multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), real-time strategy games (RTS), sports simulators, combat games, and more. Personally, I am not a big fan of gaming, nor am I a gamer person. However, Valorant is perhaps one of the games that I truly enjoy playing. I got into it during the lockdown period when my friends insisted to try it, and I have been hooked ever since. It is a free first-person shooter (FPS) game released in June 2020, developed by an established gaming company called Riot Games.

What is Valorant All About? 

The game is super hectic with numerous elements, which involve complex strategic elements, and a unique blending of skills and gunplay (IGN 2022). Due to this, it has captured the attention of millions of gamers worldwide. The gameplay is super exhilarating and skill-based, with an emphasis on strategy and teamwork. Each team of 5 players will get a chance to be in both attacking and defending teams, and each round demands strategic planning, communication, and execution (IGN 2022). Hence, it creates a dynamic and captivating gameplay by integrating tactical gunplay of classic shooters with unique character skills. 

What makes Valorant stands out the most is that the players get to pick a character through the agent system. Each agent has special skills or power abilities that players can strategically use to their advantage to accomplish particular goals or assist other agents (IGN 2022). The game provides a large range of agents with a multitude of team formations and abilities, from aggressive explosives and surveillance tools to defensive smokes and healing abilities. Next, there is also a range of game modes that players can choose from, from competitive to casual mode (IGN 2022), which can cater to the player’s mood.  

A list of some of the agents from Valorant, where each has its own power and abilities.

Reaching Worldwide 

This game has built an incredibly active and enthusiastic community that is still continuously expanding. Being a free-to-play game, Valorant is easily accessible, which contributes to its increasing popularity. Players from various backgrounds can take part, regardless of their financial limitations. Furthermore, the game's multicultural cast of agents includes individuals from different cultures promoting inclusivity and representation in gaming. 

Other than that, the game also gains popularity with the help of live-streaming websites, such as Twitch and YouTube. These platforms offer viewers a simple and quick way to watch live games and tournaments, as well as a tool for players to broadcast their gameplay. Both players and viewers are able to communicate directly through live streaming, which promoted interaction and a sense of community. Plus, many players also use these platforms to educate others on gameplay through tutorials and gaming hacks. This typically emphasizes strategic planning on using the agent’s abilities to the fullest potential.  

Valorant Going Professional 

Thanks to the accessibility of live-streaming platforms, it creates a global audience, which attracts media, marketers and sponsors to organize and invest in professional e-sports tournaments (Taylor 2018). Since its debut, Valorant has quickly made a name for itself as a dominant e-sport. As a result, they have established a competitive ecosystem through The Valorant Champions Tour, a worldwide tournament series that features the greatest teams in the world competing with each other. This drives millions of people to watch live e-gaming events (Taylor 2018), and they have audience numbers that are comparable to those of traditional sporting events.

I believe Valorant has successfully built its identity in the market due to its creative marketing efforts to pique interest among gamers globally. The developer, Riot Games, started with captivating teaser campaigns through the storytelling of the world of Valorant. Hence, the gaming community became hyped up with speculation and discussion in response to these advertising tactics, which in turn instil eagerness among the viewers.  

On top of that, I believe one of their strongest marketing plans is their effort towards community participation. They actively take into account players’ feedback and incorporate it into their game design. They encourage people to share their ideas and opinions based on their gaming experience, which notably improves their platform. This allows their community to feel heard and appreciated, hence promoting a sense of community and involvement. For this reason, they foster loyalty among players due to the community-centric approach, drawing in both amateur and professional gamers. 

Overall, with its captivating gameplay, complex strategic elements, and vibrant e-sports community, Valorant has completely changed the competitive gaming landscape. The unique game design incorporating tactical gunplay, distinctive agent powers, and community collaboration built an engaging experience that appeals to both competitive and casual players. We can see that Valorant has clearly made a lasting impression on the gaming industry with its continuously expanding community and dedication to creating a global e-sports environment, securing its position as one of the top-tier competitive games of our time. 

References: 

IGN 2022, Beginner’s Guide to Valorant, IGN, viewed 11 June 2023 <https://www.ign.com/wikis/valorant/Beginner's_Guide_to_Valorant>. 

Taylor, TL 2018, ‘Broadcasting ourselves’ (chapter 1), in Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton University Press, pp.1-23 

[sagarg889]

Sirens Market Research by Key players, Type and Application, Future Growth Forecast 2022 to 2032

In 2022, the global sirens market is expected to be worth US$ 170.1 million. The siren market is expected to reach US$ 244.0 million by 2032, growing at a 3.7% CAGR.

The use of sirens is expected to increase, whether for announcements or on emergency vehicles such as ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks. A siren is a loud warning system that alerts people to potentially dangerous situations as they happen.

Rapidly increasing threats and accidents have resulted in more casualties and missed business opportunities in developing economies. Demand for sirens is expected to rise during the forecast period as more people use security solutions.

As a result of rising threats and accidents in developing economies, the number of victims and lost business opportunities has rapidly increased. Adopting security solutions, such as sirens, is an effective way to deal with these challenges. Long-range sirens are used in mining and industrial applications, whereas motorised sirens are used in home security. Hand-operated sirens are used when there is no power or when a backup is required.

Some additional features of sirens include a solar panel upgrade system to keep the batteries charged and a number of digital communication methods, including Ethernet, satellite, IP, fiber optic and others. Sirens have conformal coatings on their electronics, which help protect them against harsh environments. Some of the systems are made in such a way that they can be expanded or scaled depending on future capabilities.

Omni-directional sirens can be used in areas of high noise levels and those with large population densities as they provide a greater area of coverage. Sirens have external controls with triggers, which can be customized according to needs. The lightening types of sirens include bulb revolving, LED flashing and xenon lamp strobe. The loud speakers in sirens are adopted from latest piezoelectric ceramic technology.

Get a Sample Copy of this Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-4274

Other sirens are hydraulic or air driven and mostly find applications in plants and factories. Lithium batteries have replaced alkaline batteries in sirens now, since lithium batteries need not be replaced for several years. Modern sirens use latest technologies and find applications in civil defense, emergency vehicles, security systems and others. Typically, sirens are made of stainless steel, aluminum or UV stabilized polycarbonate to avoid corrosion and are equipped with protection cages. An LED flashing siren has a light source with a semi-permanent lifespan and it is used in places where bulb replacement is a problem.

Region-wise Outlook

In the global sirens market, the dominant share is held by the U.S., India, China, Japan, Australia, Germany, Singapore and the UAE. This can be attributed to the demand for security solutions in developed as well as developing economies.

The regional analysis includes:

North America (U.S., Canada)

Latin America (Mexico. Brazil)

Western Europe (Germany, Italy, France, U.K, Spain)

Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia)

Asia-Pacific (China, India, ASEAN, Australia & New Zealand)

Japan

The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries, S. Africa, Northern Africa)

The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.

Market Participants

Some of the key market participants identified in the global siren market are Acoustic Technology Inc., Sentry Siren Inc., MA Safety Signal Co. Ltd, Whelen Engineering Co. Inc., Federal Signal Corporation, B & M Siren Manufacturing Co., Projects Unlimited Inc., Phoenix Contact, Mallory Sonalert Products and Qlight USA Inc.

Rising population and rapid urbanization have led to an increase in demand for security solutions. The need for implementation of security has paved way for the use of electronic equipment on a large scale globally, which in turn has created opportunities for the global sirens market. As these products are durable with a high voltage capacity and easy to install, they find high selling propositions. Characteristics and properties of electronic and pneumatic equipment play a vital role in security solutions, thereby driving the global sirens market with a rise in diverse end-user applications, such as industrial warning systems, community warning systems, campus alert systems and military mass warning systems.

Report Highlights:

Detailed overview of parent market

Changing market dynamics in the industry

In-depth Polishing / Lapping Film market segmentation

Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value

Recent industry trends and developments

Competitive landscape

Strategies of key players and products offered

Potential and niche segments, geographical regions exhibiting promising growth

A neutral perspective on market performance

Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprint.

Browse Detailed Summary of Research Report with TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sirens-market

Key Segments

Product Type:

Electronic

Electro-mechanical

Rotating

Single/dual toned

Omnidirectional

By Application:

Civil defense

Industrial signaling

Emergency vehicles

Home/vehicle safety

Security/warning systems

Military use

Others

By Installation Type:

Wall mounting

Self-standing

Water proof connector

By Regions:

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America

MEA