#fucking useless ass democrats who let this happen

[thequeenofsastiel]

In case anyone somehow doesn't know: Fruits and vegetables are about to get very scarce and very expensive for anyone who lives in the United States. The deportations have started, and farmworkers are now not showing up to work. Enjoy your fruits and vegetables now, because soon you won't be able to afford them, assuming they're available at all.

Personally, the humanitarian aspect of this is the most concerning to me, but in case you don't give a shit about all the suffering that human beings are now facing because of these deportations, you should know the ways this will personally affect you. Undocumented workers are the backbone of our economy, and we're about to feel the loss, from fruits and vegetables, to new construction, to fucking dishwashers. If you voted for this, you're going to suffer along with the rest of us.

Dark days ahead. And behind, for that matter.

[qqueenofhades]

There is no law that prevents a convicted felon from running for and becoming president, nor a law that bans someone from being president in prison. Also, if Trump gets incapacitated in someway, many ultra right republicans who equally despise trans people and immigrants and Muslims would happily take his place

And I ask, with all due respect, what is your point?

Do you think I don't know that?

Do you think I am somehow convinced that everything is hunky dory now and we don't have any work left to do?

Are you just determined to be the first of the gloom-and-doomers who show up like clockwork in my inbox, every time some consequence happens to Trump, to morosely insist that no consequences will happen to him? First it was "he'll win re-election." Then it was "the coup will succeed." Then it was "he will never be indicted." Then it was "2022 will be a red wave!" Then it was "he will never be tried." Then it was "he will never be convicted." Now we've moved on, within less than 2 hours of the first US President ever to be convicted of ONE felony, let alone THIRTY-FOUR, "he'll never be sentenced or face a real consequence or lose the election." The goalposts keep moving RIGHT along without even a single pause to acknowledge the difficulty and the value of the progress we have made thus far, and it makes me CRAZY.

Do you people realize how fucking rare it is, both in the world today and historically, for a former (and would-be future) head of state to be held to criminal account by a jury of 12 anonymous ordinary citizens? When that one person, Trump, is the center of the malignant fascist cancer that has spread through this country ever since 2016, and plenty of his cultists are still insisting that it's Trump or nobody for them? When we've actually reached the stage of holding him legally accountable for (some of) his crimes for the first time in his miserable misbegotten life? I suspect that most of you are so deep in the "America is totally broken and the system is useless and we can only Revolute!!!1" rabbit hole that you're bound and determined to argue away every step we take, however slow, as Meaning Nothing TM. Voting? Fake. Fighting to make real progress? Also fake. Everything is fake except our belief that everything is broken and we need the Keyboard Warrior Glorious Revolution!!! As long as you can keep inventing ever more contorted twists of logic to ignore everything else that's happened so far, this makes sense... or something. I guess?

Now we're onto "removing Trump won't matter :(" when a whole lot of people have been fighting day and fucking night to get all the privileged-princess Online Leftists to get off their Che Guevara cosplaying asses and cast a single fucking vote to keep us from full-on-sliding into fascism. A slide into fascism that, again, has been spearheaded and centered around Trump's toxic cult of personality and which is still tied to him in almost every way. Apparently holding him to account (again, which has never happened to him in his life) already doesn't matter because wah wah he won't suffer any consequences. If he loses this election he's probably going to jail for the rest of his life! We would have electorally defeated the greatest threat to the American democratic experiment in 250 years, and frankly a huge part of the fascist far-right hydra that is currently attempting a comeback around the world! This is, yet again:

THE FIRST TIME ANY AMERICAN PRESIDENT, EVER, HAS BEEN CONVICTED OF MULTIPLE FELONY CHARGES IN A COURT OF LAW BY A JURY OF HIS PEERS

and yet we're still hearing that nothing matters and no work has been done and removing him will have no effect???

Come on. Come on. I know it's tiring and it's slow and it doesn't go as fast as we want. But every single damn time the process goes another step, here you people are in my inbox insisting that we're still at zero progress and it means nothing, and lemme tell you, I am Tired of it. Come on. You don't have to jump up and down (my own feeling is glee and vindication but still not relaxation, I will not relax until he loses the fucking election and goes to jail), but you also don't need to keep myopically pretending that all the effort thus far by so many people means nothing. Come on.

[baiheyurisolidarity]

You know what's real interesting? The reason why the democrats became what is generally conceived as the "more progressive" party in the first place, aka what dragged them to do so ain't got shit to do with what a lot of these "vote blue no matter who" useless idiot democrat liberals are doing right now. Like I know most of this country seems to systematically forget anything and everything that has happened in history beyond 5-10 years from current year, but you think these grown ass niggas would know this by now and take a fucking hint.

The democrats didn't become the "progressive" option by dumbasses voting for them no matter what the fuck they did. You wanna know why they changed and started bothering to pretend to give a fuck about what black people and other minorities think? On a wider level it was the Cold War and making the politics of the USSR less appealing to usamericans including of course the racially disenfranchised and those upset by the discrimination going on at the time such as apartheid in the South and the reactionary violence to maintain it for starters, but let's focus on what people actually did within the country to make them change for the sake of argument. The more internal thing that made them change, not forgetting the larger influence from outside forces for policy change was the national liberation struggles going all over the country, including but not limited to the black civil rights movement, the black national liberation movement, the american indian movement, the gay liberation movement, and so on. To keep it short, it was fucking activism and organized efforts to materially benefit sectors of the working class and the working class as a whole, not no damn unconditional dick sucking that "vote blue no matter who" democrats do knowadays who don't know this basic ass fact.

The democrats didn't appeal to black people and their civil rights movement because they were fucking nice you dumb motherfuckers, and black people wouldn't be nowhere we are now if the black people all went yap yap yap "we gotta vote all, we're powerless to do anything else and it's literally all we can do :(((((". If black people managed to fucking end Jim Crow than the least you motherfuckers can do is pretend to be capable of more than a goddamn ballot box and have higher standards of solidarity than conceding to an administration that is actively participating in genocide. People back then, black people, socialists in general, etc had so much solidarity for colonized peoples it's so heartening to know that people can be so not fucking useless like "vote blue no matter who" niggas. Maybe get some historical perspective maybe.

[pesterloglog]

Jake English, Dirk Strider

Page 47

JAKE: What in the flibergating fuck!

DIRK: That’s not a word.

JAKE: Dirk!

DIRK: ‘Sup.

JAKE: Am I still dreaming? I have to tell you my dream hangovers are not usually nearly this bad!

DIRK: I wasn’t going to say anything, but holy shit, dude. You’ve really let yourself go.

DIRK: Not to say the sloppy drunk look isn’t working for me, because it absolutely is, but come on, man.

DIRK: You passed out in a puddle of your own drool. And what the fuck is that on your face?

JAKE: My face? What do you mean on my face?

DIRK: The moustache, Jake. Who’s idea was that.

JAKE: Oh! You dont like it?

DIRK: I didn’t say that.

DIRK: Point is, you are a fucking wreck, and no amount of well-maintained facial hair is going to be enough to hide that. Not from me.

JAKE: Now see here buster you dont know the situation. You havent been here!

DIRK: We’ve had this conversation before, dingus. I’m you. And I’m me. But I only exist because of your powers. The fact that I’m manifesting here, in the new universe, outside of a dream, is evidence in itself for just how absolutely boned you are.

DIRK: What are you doing? There’s a war happening. All of your friends are out there fighting, and you’re just here, what...dusting?

DIRK: Taking care of a house that nobody actually uses?

DIRK: You’ve been a useless sack of shit for two decades. I’m here to kick your ass back into active duty.

DIRK: You’ve spent years feeling sorry for yourself, totally convinced you made the wrong choices and that it’s all over. And it’s easier that way, isn’t it? If you’re a lost cause you don’t have to try to be better.

DIRK: But you do want to be better. Remember all those dreams about adventure? Life? Love? Remember when Tavros was born and there were so many things in this world you wanted to show him.

DIRK: Beautiful things, Jake.

DIRK: But none of those are going to come from sitting around playing house-husband to your ecto-son.

JAKE: Well what do you propose i do if youre so gosh-darned brainy!

JAKE: Im a cracking good marksman and no slouch when it comes to fisticuffs but what good am i in a war??

JAKE: Ive got some panache but i can hardly hold my own in the face of an army!

JAKE: And what side am i supposed to be fighting on? for jane or against her?

DIRK: Against her. Obviously. What the fuck, dude.

JAKE: But you were the one who wanted her to run in the first place! You wrote her bloody speeches!

DIRK: Yeah, I did. And every single one of them kicked ass. I wanted Jane to be the democratically elected president. Not a cake-slinging Jeff Bezos with a great rack.

JAKE: Jeff who?

DIRK: Don’t worry about it. The point is, you have a chance to make a difference. You’re in the perfect position to infiltrate her operation.

JAKE: Like...a spy?

DIRK: Don’t try to tell me it doesn’t appeal to you. Sexy little suit. Slicked back hair. A bunch of weapons hidden in unlikely places. We’re both liking this idea more and more.

JAKE: Ahahaha well i do look fetching in a cummerbund.

JAKE: Wait! No! You tricked me with thoughts of spies and hijinks and two bros against the world!

JAKE: I left janey! Theres no going back now! She isnt exactly the sort to live and let live you know.

DIRK: That’s horseshit and we both know it. Jane would take you back in a second. She loves you.

JAKE: Psshaw. Not to be maudlin brain ghost dirk but jane hasnt cared about me in a very a long time if she ever did at all.

JAKE: I thought you knew everything i do.

DIRK: There’s a part of you that still hopes. You can’t help it. You’ll never be able to help it. You’re going to hope for a brighter future until you’re in the ground.

DIRK: Better you than me, honestly. Sounds exhausting.

DIRK: You’re going to do this, and we both know it. So why are we even still arguing?

[undeadentropy]

Calling it now. Nonvoter maga will keep pretending Harris would have been just as bad, and blame democrats for not fighting back. While sitting on their ass themselves while their neighbors die, because democrats just mirror them more than anything. Most nonvoters have the privilage of not giving a shit, and their well off asses are the only ones democrats care about. Why do you think they thought they could 'send a message' in the first place by not voting? And yes I see nonvoters as maga. There is no neutrality in fascism. They made their choice, and their choice was that this was acceptable so long as they could pretend to be good people about it. They are as useless as the democrats who we could have been fighting instead right now. Meanwhile the rest of maga will blame biden for making trump and them extremists in the first place. A necessary evil to save america and all that shit. Fascists are nothing if not predictable.

There will be a point where the truth really sets in, once bodies really start piling up and the smog of war fills the skies. People will either go into denial about their role in it, or they will repent and fight back. No matter what happens now, there will be blood. A lot of blood. There's no escaping that now. The trolley has already come and we voted to let it do its thing. The only way to stop it now is before the next trolley problem occurs, and another group must make a fucked up decision because of us.

But we can just shoot the nazis and end it. Deny, defend, depose. It's the only way to save as many lives as possible. But that requires people in this hell country to care about other people for once in their lives, enough to risk or sacrifice their own. It requires heroes to step forward. So uh, we'll see.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

TLDR: even when Democrats win, they still concede defeat and let Republicans take the W

The senate just voted 52-48 to block Biden's vaccine mandate, and even though it will be defeated in the House it raises a lot of procedural questions as to how we even got here in the first place.

It was passed with all 50 Republicans, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Jon Tester of Montana, so why did Chuck Schumer bring this to the floor if the majority of Democrats were against it? Mitch McConnell never let the senate vote on anything unless he personally approved of it, he gave himself the unilateral veto, so why didn't Schumer block this in the same way? Furthermore, why didn't any Democrats filibuster it?!? They didn't even TRY to block it, not a single one, they just let it sail through with 52 instead of 60 votes, handing the Republicans the majority on a silver platter! What the literal fuck?

Why is this party so useless?

Why do they get off on losing?

It's like they're masochists who can only function when the Republicans hold all the cards and can punish them.

"Please sir, can I have another?"

They're gonna get their asses kicked in 2022. The House is as good as gone because of gerrymandering; the Democrats don't seem concerned enough to nuke the filibuster to ensure fair and free elections, so they're just giving up on that front. They're not fighting it, and they're not even claiming to be fighting it, they're just letting it happen in full view of the public and acting shocked, SHOCKED, when it happens and they find themselves out of a job because of it. The Senate could go either way, but I have a strong feeling it's gonna be a bloodbath, with Republicans sweeping. They'll pick up Georgia and Arizona easy because of state level election fuckery to disenfranchise voters of color, and they stand to pick up New Hampshire solely from demographic shifts under governor Sununu (even though he said he's not running, the Republicans were able to flip both chambers of the legislature, so they have a statewide advantage), and I'm also predicting Nevada and Colorado could be very close. Maryland and Vermont are deep blue states but both have "moderate" red governors, so if we're talking worst-case-scenario nuclear apocalypse landslide, that's two more seats that could flip.

Republicans only need 5 House seats to take it, but with gerrymandering and the expected midterm bump for the opposition I'm expecting them to take well over 60. They picked up 63 seats in 2010, and that wasn't even a redistricting year, so they're absolutely gonna give themselves DOZENS of safe seats in 2022, and they'll probably pick up a bunch of competitive seats as well just by happenstance; I'm guessing they'll get 280 seats, but they could easily break 300, and 2024 isn't looking too good for Dems either so the House is gonna be solid red for the foreseeable future.

Republicans only need 1 Senate seat to flip it, but I'm guessing they'll get 3, maybe 4. It probably won't be the nuclear apocalypse, so 56 seems like an upper bound for them; I don't see them getting there, much less surpassing it, though Democrats won 60 seats in 2008 so it's not impossible for the reds to flip some strongholds like California and New York just to rub salt in the wound as the Democratic Party collapses around them. On top of however many seats they win, they'll also have West Virginia and Montana on their side, "blue" senators who will almost certainly vote red to try and save their skins going into 2024, which is gonna be an even bigger bloodbath because Democrats stand to lose the ENTIRE Midwest in one fell swoop; Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and possibly even Minnesota, as well as some east coast states like Virginia and Maine. It's looking REALLY bad for them, and I have NO faith that they'll be able to fix things before then.

We need election reform, and we need it NOW. Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer need to stop FUCKING AROUND and get their goddamn party back in line. If Trump told a Republican to do something, they did it under fear of retaliation. They were afraid of him, but nobody is afraid of Biden. Biden is a laughingstock; he keeps extending an olive branch to the Republicans and they keep slapping it out of his hand and spitting in his face. He never learns! He's betting that they're not as evil as we know they are, and it's gonna cost us everything! All the courts are already rigged, backed by McConnell and Trump, but it's not good enough for them and they'll keep packing it even more so it'll never go the other way again, unless we do something to stop them!

We need a new constitution, an entirely new court system with fresh faces at every level, an all out Revolution to take out the red bastards who are trying to destroy our democracy as well as the blue bastards who are standing idly by and letting them. I'm so mad I could spit.

[arcticdementor]

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

[quakerjoe]

You know how “I told you so” isn’t polite? Sanders supporters, warning you about how this is going to be a repeat of 2016, won’t be so civil about it.

Choosing Biden because you find him “electable” is a coward’s out. You’re no better than a conservative. You’re feckless and ball-less. Clearly, you fear change or have that good ol’ #Murican attitude of “I got mine, so fuck the rest of y’all!”

Going back to “normal” is Biden’s only real promise. Normal? You mean, like the era that led up to trump being elected because he was the outsider? You dumb fucks. Seriously. You’re all that fuckin’ STOOPID. Trump won because the nation wanted a radical; an outsider promising change to the nation- someone who was going to clean house. All the polling data back then reflected that Sanders would have kicked trump’s ass, but no... Y’all chose HRC; the woman funding and running the DNC back then. So, we got what we deserved. Now we’re paying for that ignorance, and even I swallowed a bit of pride and voted for her and, not unlike some of you today, I scorned and tried to shame 3rd party voters and those who chose to abstain. Well, I recant all that. I now see the light, and it’s shit-brown.

To defeat a radical like trumpnuts, it’ll take an actual, HONEST radical to counter him. Sanders’ record over decades has been the same. He’s been consistent. He’s been unbought and honest. If that’s not “electable” then I don’t know what the fuck is. Yosemite? You think Sanders didn’t achieve much? Clearly you didn’t bother to do ANY research. You probably heard the word “socialism” in there somewhere and peed yourself. “He’s not a REAL Democrat!” NO SHIT! That’s not the bug, sunshine, that the fuckin’ FEATURE! What has the Democratic Party done for YOU lately?

Has the DNC done ANYTHING to make Election Days holidays so we all get it off from work?

FUCK NO.

Has the DNC been open and vigilant about gerrymandering, exposing those who do it, and made serious attempts at stopping it?

FUCK NO.

Has the DNC been fighting to ensure safe elections?

FUCK NO.

Has the DNC been on top of making sure that there are enough polling stations for everyone in their districts and that they’re not being closed down?

FUCK NO.

Have they been vigilant about making laws to ensure that the minimum wage keeps up with inflation and the cost of living?

FUCK NO.

Where the unholy fuck were all of you sanctimonious motherfuckers during Obama’s tenure? You handed BOTH the House AND Senate to the GOP and fuck-all NOTHING got done. I was at the voting booth. Where the fuck were YOU?

This last election with this “Blue Wave” everyone was ranting about that won the House... AND... What about the Senate??? Nope. Still run by the GOP and they’ve been cock-blocking practically ALL legislation. The Democrats are SO feckless that they’re trying to offer a bill for table scraps during this epidemic while the GOP is offering 4X MORE. Well done, Pelosi- make the GOP look like heroes just so you can keep your own cashflow issues at bay. You jerkoffs couldn’t even do an impeachment right and you only made trump MORE popular because you allowed yourselves to be pushed around and defeated even though you had Rule of Law on your side. What a bunch of useless twats.

NOW you expect us all to just fall in line and back you up and vote for Biden? Screw that and screw you.

Not all of Sanders’ supporters will help you. More of US backed Clinton last time than did HER supporters did Obama- they backed McCain and that twat Palin. We didn’t forget that. Clinton supporters BACKED McCain!!! Did you forget that?

We are also well aware of how you look down your chicken beaks at us and what is going to happen either way here; let’s be real. If, or likely WHEN Biden loses to trump, you’ll blame us. If, by some miracle, Joe DOES win, you won’t mention us at all or give any sort of “thank you, Sanders supporters, for coming on board” and share that victory with us.

Many of us will hold our nose and vote for the turd of a babbling idiot candidate, but admit it; you’re not sure who I’m talking about really, do you- trump or Biden?

Many of us will go and vote downballot and just NOT vote for potus because we’re sick of being force-fed a hot plate of shit by the Democrats who are even right NOW, pushing for we voters to get sick and catch COVID-19 INSTEAD of postponing the primaries a month or so to keep us all safe. They KNOW some of us will get sick and die, but it’s a sacrifice the Democrats are willing to make to keep Joe’s head of steam going and keep a social democrat from recovering and maybe even winning the nomination.

Some of us won’t come out to vote at all for many reasons, but that you and your spineless party lost the faith of the people, and that’s on you and your establishment, bought-and-sold attitudes towards us. The growing numbers of Independents and the shrinking numbers of Democrats is telling, but party politics and cash flow and power are more important than actually fighting to help those you claim to represent. That’s on you, Democratic Party. You’re weak, you’re toothless and you’re spineless. The GOP knows this and so do many of your voters. Like the GOP, you offer nothing but platitudes and condescension, only the GOP will fight like a schoolyard bully to get what they want you and just sit around in your civil circle-jerks, sipping tea while you tell each other how great you are. 

We Sanders supporters are also well aware that if things come down to it being a brokered convention that the ‘superdelegates’ have ALREADY vowed to NOT vote for Sanders and they’ll just screw him anyway. So, clearly you neither need nor want our support, so remember that before even thinking about running your cowardly mouth. Clearly, you don’t want any real change in the US. You’ll push for yesterday’s news while risking 4 more of trump. That’s on YOU fuckwits; not us. Take some goddamn responsibility for once; your GOP is showing out of your fly. You may want to zip up.

When the General Election comes, I’ll be voting for actual CHANGE. If it’s not on the ballot, then there’s fuck-all for me to vote for, is there..? 

Lastly, for all the shit-talk people like to throw around about ‘unity’ and ‘vote blue no matter who’ and how anyone disagreeing with anti-Sanders snowflakes because “Boo-hoo! Someone was mean to me on the internet!”, y’all can pucker up and suck my ass. You’re uneducated, toothless bullshit has revealed that you “Biden Bros” are every bit as mean; the difference being that MY team wants change and to save us ALL. Your team is in it only to save your own asses, and you don’t realize that the people you’re trying to save it from is yourselves. 

So, to conclude, if you’re pushing for Biden and not Sanders, you can go get fucked. I’ll be standing by watching it all Bern to the ground while YOU are the ones actually stoking the fires higher. God, you people are weak, stupid, and chicken-shit.

[kihyunswrath]

An essay on why I fight for Wonho

I think there has been too much of this “why do you even care that much?” bullshit lately and I’d like to make things clear, at least for my part. And I am assuming many other Monbebes can relate.

Indeed, why do I care? Wonho was never my bias, I have always liked other groups too, I have seen hundreds of groups come and go, it’s just one member in that group and although I want him to return, I actually want this entire industry to burn down to ashes even more and yes, that would mean death sentence to all idol groups. 

But first of all, let me ask this question in return: Why does it bother you that we care? Who gets to define what’s a useless endeavor? What makes you think I can’t simultaneously care for “more important” issues? Why the hell are you judging us for wasting time on this, when we all already know you wasted days watching that useless Youtube vine compilation, binge-watched that one Netflix series you didn’t seriously even care about, played that one stupid mobile phone game when you should have been sleeping, ate those two boxes of cookies that could’ve lasted you two whole weeks? Who are you to say things are useless just because it’s not your favorite idol group or whoever the fuck you care about, who’s under attack? Why do you think we have explaining to do, when literally none of this has anything to do with you personally and it’s literally you who fail to see the implications this incident had?

I don’t need to explain why I found a person inspiring as an idol and human being, why I found his background story motivating and moving and why I found his presence in Monsta X very important for the entire group’s mental health, group dynamics, success and happiness. I don’t need to explain why I find it upsetting that the people I cared about are torn apart because of no fucking reason, and that I can see that pain from their faces as they’re forced to pretend Wonho does no longer fucking exist?

I don’t fucking think I need to explain why I have empathy for a person who is under a police investigation just because. I don’t think I need to explain why I don’t find it fair that someone is under an attack for doing something that is not deemed as illegal in the most civilized, democratic countries. I don’t need to explain why I want to defend someone who’s kicked out of his group because of conservative internet trolls and a couple whose own background is about ten times more shady than Wonho’s. I don’t think I need to justify myself protesting for him, when he is fired from a job that has absolutely nothing to do with the things he’s being accused of. I don’t think I need to explain that unlike many others, I am indeed capable of reflecting this incident against the bigger context and see how flawed the entire Korean legislative system is. 

But let me do your homework for you asshats and explain what this bigger context is. It’s the context where simply having an allegation of whatever kind placed against you is enough to ruin your entire career. The context where people are literally lying about a person’s background and have been caught doing that, but can still continue with the investigation. The context where people can be punished again and again for things they did ages ago, apologized for, moved on and learned from. The context where literal rich drug dealers, convicted criminals sitting in prison, their minions and ENTIRE companies (cough pdx101 cough) might be able to escape from justice, but this one unfortunate person whose existence is only justified by the Korean population if he is superhumanly perfect and flawless, is brought down for allegedly committing a crime that was not harming anybody and was committed six fucking years ago. The context where you can be punished for something so meaningless that it feels like there is indeed space for a conspiracy theory or two. The context that paints idols as literal gods and goddesses who are not allowed to have pasts, backgrounds, redemption arcs or flaws to their character. The context that is taking idols from their hard-earned positions just because someone influential enough had a personal grudge against them. This context where Koreans are not protected by their own companies or labor unions but can be treated like non-human playthings, chess pieces and pawns just for having human traits.  

I don’t think I need to explain why I have empathy. I don’t think I need to explain why this bigger picture I see doesn’t only clash with my morals, but also potentially hurts hundreds of thousands of other people, because something like this could easily happen to them, too, especially if we now use this incident as an example of how things should be handled in similar situations. And if you as a person fail to connect the dots, if you personally fail to see why this is giving an ugly view into a ruthless society many of my friends and loved ones have no other options but to live in, I think that’s on you. That’s literally your personal problem, not mine.

Wonho was not inspiring because he was flawless, he was inspiring because he demonstrated character growth. He was not inspiring because he never did any mistakes, he was inspiring because he kept improving and kept sharing his love and gratitude toward his fans. He was not inspiring because he had wealth, connections and endless virtuosity, he was inspiring because he built his career from nothing and still remembered to explicitly thank his family, his friends, his loved ones and his fans every single day. That alone is something we can’t say from many other people.  

And if you think my argument is flawed because I was biased? Yes. I am biased. It’s not suspicious that people care about stuff more when it turns out to be personally relatable. Stop fucking pretending you are so virtuous, wise and pure that you already fought against bigotry, oppression, discrimination and bullshit in its all forms, way before you were even fucking born. That does not give you more social justice woke points, it just makes you annoying. Just because some Monbebes woke up to notice how flawed, ugly, embarrassing and pathetic the kpop industry can be now that their own favorite idol is attacked, is not a bad thing if it leads to them protesting against similar incidents in the future. Just because people cannot fully grasp issues before it has something to do with themselves doesn’t mean they can’t now use that realization as a boost to change the entire society. 

Yes, we intend to not bring only Wonho back, but also bring down the entire industry that made it possible for things like these to happen. Yes, we as human beings are capable of empathizing with people who we don’t have much to do with, but it’s not wrong if we fight even more fiercely when we try to protect our own. When was the last time you have done something similar? 

If our movement brings light to the fact how little protections workers have in Korea, if our movement makes people see how devastating consequences bullying and baseless accusations can have on people, if our movement continues talking about the same problem that caused a person to commit literal suicide a month earlier? If our movement makes it transparent to everybody how much power all these companies have over their idols and how they can not only treat them like shit after trusting and rooting for them for several years, but also silence all the remaining members and force them to continue even if they’re at a breaking point? If our movement brings light to the fact that maybe, just maybe it’s not fair to punish people for things that they might not only NOT have done, but also are literally meaningless even if he did them ALL, especially because they happened before he ever even was an idol? 

Well, I’ll call it a movement that exists for a good fucking reason.

One of my Korean friends, after being told about this, said that well, the only thing I now need to do is to change my favorite group and move on with my life, because I am literally just a customer and I can’t change things. And you know what? That is exactly the problem here. Without knowing it, she summarized the entire problem up perfectly with that one sentence. 

She and so many other Koreans (and non-Koreans) consider idols mere products. They think idols are here to sell us a certain image of a perfect, successful person who does not really exist as a human being. Idols just represent something the Korean society aspires to be, but if enough people get fed up with them for whatever reason, just to bolster their own feelings of revenge and jealousy like in this case, idols can be dumped and forgotten in a matter of minutes. That hurting one idol does not really matter, because there are people lining up behind him to do his job even better. That being an idol is an endless cycle of improving oneself, requiring less and less time for resting, recovery, privacy and human rights and asking less and less forgiveness from the audience. That if you get an important position in the society, it’s on you if you cannot handle the negative publicity that might follow. That if you have done one mistake once, it prevents you from ever moving on in your life, because it can come and bite you in the ass whenever, arbitrarily, just because, even if technically you had already been forgiven long time ago. That people who have gotten money and fame do not earn those positions because of hard work, but because they are supposed to be superhuman. And because there is no such thing as a superhuman, every and any idol can be brought down whenever they show the smallest sign of humanity. Even if that sign of humanity is just them showing open solidarity and empathy for a friend and colleague that was wrenched from them for no reason.

She and so many other Koreans think the only thing they can do as normal citizens is to pretend this one “flawed, miserable” individual never existed, because they are powerless against the decisions of the companies, press and rich conservative trolls?

And for some reason, somehow, these same Koreans fail to see how that reflects the state of their entire society and how it affects their own rights as workers, as human beings. They fail to see this very, very crucial factor: that idols are more similar to everyday Koreans than they are to the entertainment companies, wealthy chaebol CEOs and a couple of filthy rich drug dealers who escape their own punishment because of their even richer dad.

Idols are NOT extremely wealthy celebrities who have a freedom to choose their own paths, influential politicians who can escape from scandals after scandals or sons and daughters of the company leaders and estate owners of Korea. 

They are workers who have inhumane working conditions. They are faces to faceless, cruel companies who are intentionally hiding behind them to cover their own tracks. 

Idols have no real rights, freedom or future, and thus, they represent us normal people. What you do to one of these idols, you essentially do to every single one of his/her fans. You take our dreams away, you punish us unfairly for things we tried to learn from, you take away our voices that we used to express our own oppression and challenge the status quo.

Idols are not us, but they represent us more than any of these companies, leaders, rich heirs and heiresses and CEO’s could ever do. 

And that’s why I’m fighting for Wonho.

__

And please miss me with that cultural relativism bullshit. I know injustice when I see it. I can distinguish suffering and pain even in cultural contexts I am not born into. Also? Maybe if Koreans don’t want us to meddle with how they handle their own problems, maybe they should have really been thinking twice before trying to buy the entire world with the help of their idol industry. We can hold companies accountable. We can demand change. Companies and wealthy shitheads are not representatives of a culture. We know there are Koreans with us in this fight. 

And if this doesn’t change with us, right now, today... it will sit down with us until something like this happens again, and then the change will come in the shape of a fucking tsunami. 

And what are you going to do at that point, stand in the fucking way, or pretend your past mistakes can no longer hold you accountable?  

[bladekindeyewear]

Bloggin’ bout HS^2′s second upd8 continued.  > (==>)

And it had felt so real, almost like he could have reached out and touched him--

--Yeah, the next page is gonna be BGDirk just standing there like I saw before I read the update, right?

> (==>)

> (==>)

Two pages. Close enough.

> (==>)

Hah!  Get fucked, Dirk.  (Even if you’re supposedly one of the better Dirks.)

> (==>)

Yep, all see-thru and everything.

DIRK: You passed out in a puddle of your own drool. And what the fuck is that on your face? JAKE: My face? What do you mean on my face? DIRK: The moustache, Jake. Who’s idea was that. JAKE: Oh! You dont like it? DIRK: I didn’t say that.

Oh come the fuck on.  He looks good in a mustache, Jane-influence or no Jane-influence.

DIRK: We’ve had this conversation before, dingus. I’m you. And I’m me. But I only exist because of your powers. The fact that I’m manifesting here, in the new universe, outside of a dream, is evidence in itself for just how absolutely boned you are.

Now what exactly do you mean by that last part?  How is this a sign of trouble?

--Is it because this Dirk thinks he’s needed?  And therefore shit will be going down?

DIRK: You’ve been a useless sack of shit for two decades. I’m here to kick your ass back into active duty.

...Hm.

I mean, Jake MIGHT be able to help stop this stupid goddamn war, but this IS Dirk trying to help him, so...

JAKE: And what side am i supposed to be fighting on? for jane or against her? DIRK: Against her. Obviously. What the fuck, dude.

Pffff.

JAKE: But you were the one who wanted her to run in the first place! You wrote her bloody speeches! DIRK: Yeah, I did. And every single one of them kicked ass. I wanted Jane to be the democratically elected president. Not a cake-slinging Jeff Bezos with a great rack.

Pfff.  I mean, you didn’t do a great job the first way, either.  It’s heavily implied things in Canon-land were about to go to shit too.

Not as FAR to shit, nor as quickly, but still to shit.  So, really, how DIFFERENT is this from the way you wanted it done, Dirk?  How can you claim this isn’t half YOUR fuck-up too?

DIRK: Don’t worry about it. The point is, you have a chance to make a difference. You’re in the perfect position to infiltrate her operation.

Oh hell no.  Don’t send him back in THERE you utter horse’s ass!  How could THAT be good for his mental health!? What the fuck about Tavros?!?

DIRK: That’s horseshit and we both know it. Jane would take you back in a second. She loves you.

I think Jane’s definition of “taking him back” would be a bit broader than his body or soul could fucking afford.

> (==>)

Eugh.  You really liked the Condesce’s way of doing things right down to her style, huh?  To think you used to love the spoon.  Is that a fucking spork?  Is that zilly Battlespork your go-to weapon now?

Also, it took me a moment to realize those green and orange silhouettes were Jake and BGDirk.  I was a little like “how did Rose get here?!?”.

> (==>)

Have I mentioned how good all this art is?  So much attention being paid to the use of color, to making everything look so soft and streamlined?

Looks like she’s going in for at LEAST a hug.  And the art style might be mercifully light on showing us indulgent details of just how asset-laden Jane is supposed to be.  Shots of Jake’s manly bod aside, something in me doesn’t like the traditionally-sexualized stuff pushed like that in a canon that’s been light on it for so long...

> (==>)

Oh, that... THAT looks fake.  Or like, she’s about to turn around and happily wail on his ass or something.

JANE: Boo hoo hoo! Oh, Jake! Something awful has happened! JAKE: It--it has? You mean more awful than usual? JANE: The opposition has taken Tavros, Jake. They’ve finally shown their true colors. I knew it was only a matter of time before they attacked our family directly!

.....Ah.  Well, that explains it.  She’d never cry like that about HIM returning AFTER STEPPING OUT ON HER.

It’s then that Jake realizes that Jane isn’t mad because she’d never realized he was gone.

Poor pages, huh?  All their most dramatic gestures always undercut.

...It seems like we might see Candy kind of resolved in less of a fucked-up worldstate after all, at this rate?

She seems to have forgotten that she’d been cross with him the last time they met, because now that Gamzee is gone, there’s no one left to talk to.

It’s true. Gamzee’s absence always improves things.

> (==>)

All of it is made worse by the occasional wry glint in her eye, or moment of self-deprecation in the slant of her mouth. It reminds him of the Jane he used to know. Or the Jane he thought he used to know.

Ambition is a hell of a thing.  Seems like she’s drunk of it almost as deeply as Prince Dirk.  I’d imagine this could be a pretty consistent thing with really active Life players when they get actual power, huh?  The way it just gathers to Life players in all its forms -- power over others, status, wealth -- it’s easy to start to leverage it in ways that constitute abuse of power over others from a Riddle perspective.

At first Dirk stands at Jake’s elbow, a one-ghost support staff, before he appears to lose interest in Jane’s rant and wanders off across the office, reading the spines of books and spending way too long staring at a startlingly phallic piece of installation art,

--PLEASE let us see it.

, the provenance of which Jake doesn’t know, but could hazard a guess it wore a codpiece.

Nope, never mind. Interest lost.

> (==>)

Then he settles on Jane’s desk, propping his ghost butt there and sort of just...well. Here’s a picture of what he does.

Um.

Where is this going?

> (==>)

Oh, so the BEST option, then.  :D

Okay. That’s a bit of an exaggeration.

Boooooo.

> (==>)

--Alright, forgiven.

he’s thoroughly exhausted from attempting to pay attention to his supervillain wife while trying not to look at the crotch of a ghost man from his brain.

...Okay, hold up.  BGDirk, are you trying to steer him into doing this for self-indulgent, non-comedic purposes? Or is this a bit of Prince Dirk in there?  (I mean... I can’t definitively say Jake wouldn’t have wanted this.)

And I’m still wondering how all of this is going to be relevant.  IF it’s going to be relevant.  Despite promises to the contrary that are seemingly being ignored.

> (==>)

DIRK: All according to keikaku.

Fuck you.

JAKE: i really didnt think id fall off the wagon so quickly. I dont think being here is good for my emotions to be honest. DIRK: Yeah, probably not. But that’s okay. They don’t matter. JAKE: Oh.

Yeah, Dirk, you suck at this more than you know.  This ain’t going to go as well as you “hope” I don’t think.

DIRK: Don’t know anything about stiff lips, dude. But that’s not what I mean. It’s not because you’re a man. You’re a god. JAKE: Oh right. That. DIRK: The world comes first, even at the expense of all your relationships and personal happiness. That’s what being a hero means. JAKE: I guess...i never really thought about it like that.

You’re also not guaranteed to be fucking right, you know.

There are definitely dichotomies where what was best for the world wasn’t best for the person, so far, and vice versa in Homestuck.  But Dirk’s taking his anime-flavored principles as gospel as usual, and ignoring, oh I dunno, the impact of the heart in all of this.  Some people, ESPECIALLY JAKE and other Pages so far, CAN’T operate at their best until they’re at least reasonably healthy and sure of themselves, and investments to that effect are essential to letting them slowly realize their full potential.  Brain Ghost Dirk is likely making the same goddamn mistake he made with his overbearing Dirkbot back on Jake’s island.

> (==>)

DIRK: Think what you want about Jane, but at least she realizes that none of you can ever be normal, and she never bothered to try. Can it really be a god-complex if you’re actually a god? DIRK: People like us don’t get happy endings.

...Yup.  This is the fucked-over part of Dirk’s worldview coming in full play, here.  And he believes in it so strongly that he couldn’t even fucking leave NON-CANON alone anymore.  Fuck.

JAKE: Thats bleak dirk i dont think i could possibly believe that!

Mmmhmm.

DIRK: Yeah. That’s probably more a Dirk thought than a Jake one. I told you, it’s hard to tell sometimes. JAKE: Is...is that really how dirk felt the whole gosh darned time?

Mmmhmm.

> (==>)

Last page of the upd8.  Well... all I can say is, it’s a good thing he’s a fucking ghost here.  And half Jake, at that.  At least that can limit the damage.  Hopefully giving Jake just enough of a kick in the doing-something direction without being so overbearing that he makes things worse, making for a balance of...

...Wait.

Wait, is that why we’re here?

Maybe that finally makes some sense of all this.  Of this cut, of this small violation of that last sentence in Meat, of--  ah, yeah, I might be on to something here!  Only maybe, but still--!

We’re quite possibly bearing witness to a realm of influence where, through measures outside of his control, Dirk has a balanced impact.  Where this same ideology of his, tempered by Jake’s hopeful mindset and Dirk’s inability to take direct action, might just manage to make things better and actually make everyone happier by the end, while solving Earth C’s fucked-up Candyland state at the same time.  It’s possibly to show the readers (through the lens of a Hope player specializing in positive possibility) that Dirk, had he been restrained, COULD have had a positive impact, even at the same time that we’re shown Prince Dirk at his soul’s most overblown and heinous.

And, if we want to be optimistic..... perhaps this’ll show Dirk, too?

Canon and Non-Canon may not “meet” again.  But that doesn’t stop Dirk, via this fragment of his multiverse-spanning soul, from seeing Non-Canon.  From seeing how well things COULD have worked out, had he held back.  And if we keep cutting like this -- back and forth between the “real” story and these events in Candyverse -- perhaps the moment at which Brain Ghost Dirk realizes what he’s accomplished, realizes how much better things are because he could hold back, will coincide at the end with Prince Dirk finally, belatedly, realizing just how fucked his plan was, and understanding at the very, very end why he has to fucking die?

THAT would be interesting.

I guess we’ll see?  Talk to y’all next upd8.

[nobodyn01]

Viewpoints of EVERYONE on the 2020 riots

Average People: George Floyd was a normal man like you and me, and he was killed by a man that thought he could get away with murder just because he was a member of the law. We all made sure he got what he deserved, and made an example across the nation that we would not simply let go of what happened and to strike fear into anyone else who would think their power would keep them safe from the consequences of their actions!

Police: this is why we can't put our knees on peoples necks anymore. So if you're trying to arrest someone trying to hurt you whatever you do you must make sure they do not get hurt or die as we are mere servents of the people.

Rich People: a poor person tried to cheat an honest business and got what they deserved.

Chinese Government: an American tried to cheat their own government and got what they deserved. Just like what's coming for you Hong Kong! Gonna make you all disappear, won't even be in history books!

American Government: people think they have the power to try and scare us into rewriting some rules but if we pay some people enough we can get them to fight off the other people for us so we can continue living off their taxes moneys.

Statistics: most of the arrested rioters were black and believed that it was their natural born right to steal to survive. As being born in a free market economy where white males are more frequently hired into high paying jobs often thanks to their connections of friends in high places and rich supervisor daddy's giving them cakewalk jobs they didn't work for.

Religions: God sent us a sign in the form of George Floyd to help us see the errors of our ways and to test our faith in the almighty God! We will forever hold him as a martyr for he died for our sins. We look forward to whatever trials God lays down afore us in the future to further fuck us in the ass because we like it just like fucking all of your children in the ass as we ask you for generous donations to the local charities of us!

Refugees still in Mexico: *looks at smoke and fire over border* guess America wasn't all that better.

Canadians:*looks over border at America on fire* those Americans sure do love their Barbeque eh?

Minimum Wage Worker: we don't get paid enough to care who lives or dies, we don't even really care if one of our Coworkers goes missing, he was still a recovering drug addict but he had it coming anyway. Atleast I make just enough to buy my drugs and alcohol.

ANTIFA and Sovereign Citizens: this is why all governments need to fuck off!!!

Actual Racists: our race is obviously superior and there will not be any world Peace until we have killed off all the other races and the world belongs to a race of one color!

All lives matter people: there's no such thing as minorities! what happens to you is your own fault, I follow the laws like a normal law abiding citizen and I am completely satisfied with my life and privileges, all of you are just opportunists trying to take as much advantage of this thing as you can to do whatever you want and put lives in danger! I don't understand why being black makes you so special.

Disney World: no one died within the walls of Disney Land and no one can prove it and so it has nothing to do with us at all.

Celebrities: Remember we are all in this together! *eats diamond encrusted sandwich surrounded by body guards*

Liberals: George Floyd was an average man that wouldn't have needed to use a fake $20 for food if the oppression of school and job systems didn't make him a victim of poverty and student loans are to blame!

Democrats: Welfare Willy got the Billy.

Republicans(old white conservatives): if the police actually did their job to kill off all the useless people living off our taxes the world would be a better place.

Porn Community: we love black people as we work with them everyday and some of our husbands are black and they are very caring when our fathers were not. They can never be racist since they are already black, sometimes they worry about us and don't want us to work with our fellow black co-workers as they are afraid to lose us but I am my own woman and that's why I'm still going on a date with Daquan tonight and smoke all of his weed.

Feminists: we just gotta wait til all the men kill each other off and then we can move in and steal their girlfriends and wives.

Thanos: I used the people to kill off half the people.

NEWS: THERE IS FIRE EVERYWHERE! EVERYONE IS DYING! EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! EVERYONE IS SHAKING THEIR ASSES AT EACHOTHER! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Jesus Like Being: none of this would be happening if you actually took the time to get to know one another and talk about your life problems and came to an understanding how someone can help you or you help yourself. If you feel afraid to talk to others and feel like you can't trust them and use any social anxiety excuse you have why you shouldn't talk to them, think about how that makes them feel, everyone inside tells themselves "they don't want to pay attention to me, fine ignore me" when really they'd like you to say hello too. Learn more about yourself, learn about the others around you, understand your place, take a step back to look at it all and realize being alive in this world is a privilege and it's all on you to make the most of it without hurting others. That being said with what precious time you have left here don't waste it praying or going to church and following dead end beliefs none of it matters in the end. As a human living in this world you can do whatever you want, believe whatever you want to find yourself. just remember it's natural for us to make societies and instead of fighting this nature we'll have to find a way to work around it til we find peace.

[resonanteye]

via http://resonanteye.net/current-events-condensed/

current events; condensed

A condensed post including short writings on current events.

CONSPIRACIES ARE NOT SECRET IN THIS CENTURY

open up? conspiracies? here’s the real one.

  if They want to “cull the weak” and control us better, what better way than to present a false choice between going back to work and risking lives, or slowly going broke at home?

it’s a false choice. there are hoarders, greedy fucks holding money they’re not entitled to, billions. enough for everything to be covered. hell, the Pentagon LOST enough money to pay EVERYONE’S rent and mortgage for the best six months. LOST IT.

The conspiracy? PRETEND THAT MONEY ISN’T THERE. force people to fight over scraps, pretend there are only two options. don’t let people come together and agree that TOO MUCH MONEY IS IN TOO FEW HANDS, because that might mean we can beat this thing.

unity among the poor? PREVENT AT ALL COSTS. if you kill a few hundred thousand people in the process, fuck it. that doesn’t matter to Them. They want to keep their grip on power, forcing us to behave like serfs working at their pleasure, dying for their capital gains. Living in their damn bunkers.

There is more than these two choices, don’t let them suck you in. the current garbage video circulating is MORE OF THEIR SHIT. it’s part of this. it’s not “secret info” or “exposing an evil plan”.

to get what They want – they’ve just got to keep us arguing about whether to open up or not. that’s it. that’s all they’ve got to do. circulate some fake anti science garbage to make sure it goes over easy.

and murder a ton of people to make another dollar.

THAT’S your conspiracy. THERE’S your elite takeover.

they don’t need micro chips, 5g, or any of this other shit. vaccines aren’t “Them”, the anti vax movement is THEM trying to murder the “useless”.

” WAKE UP, SHEEPLE ” it’s obvious as fuck and you don’t need to go out on any limbs to see it. it’s plain as day. they’re saying it out loud. there’s no need for this conspiracy to be secret. half of you are HAPPY TO JOIN IN.

stop that. join together. fight for the end of greedy leeches stealing from us then pretending that money is gone and they can’t help. the big banks? THEY FUCKING OWE US ONE. it’s time we collect, TOGETHER. right/left/middle. all of us. they owe all of us.

Divine is disgusted by slumming yuppies

SEGREGATION, A REAL THING

in a post about this photo, someone from Europe, younger, asked if segregation was a real thing, a real law in the US. comments were then closed, so I’ll post my reply here instead, in case anyone was not aware.

Elvis sits to eat at a segregated lunch counter while an elderly black woman stands, waiting for food to take away. she’s not allowed to sit there.

it was law, and when it wasn’t the law it was the unspoken rule, for a very long time.

lunch counter (restaurants of all kinds), bus sections, bathrooms, water faucets and schools were separated by race. the fight to desegregate schools is most well known, as it lasted a very long time and required buses, because people of color had also been segregated by neighborhood- many towns refused to sell and owners refused to rent to anyone of color in a “white area”. (the TV show “the Jeffersons” addresses this, and it’s also known as “redlining”)

many politicians on both sides of the aisle supported it, but the Democratic party eventually worked to pass the civil rights amendment and related bills to stop it, although there were those in the party who still argued in favor of these laws.

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-said-desegregation-would-create-a-racial-jungle-2019-7

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Maddox

(of note- this happened after desegregation, that’s how strongly politicians felt about it! ten years in and they were still arguing that it had been a good thing.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance

after it legally ended, thanks to the civil rights movement, there was blowback; people trying to vote, to eat lunch, ride the bus, go to school, were viciously attacked by crowds or groups of white people.

FILE – In this May 28, 1963 file photo, a group of whites pour sugar, ketchup and mustard over the heads of Tougaloo College student demonstrators at a sit-in demonstration at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Miss. Seated at the counter, from left, are Tougaloo College professor John Salter,and students Joan Trumpauer and Anne Moody. John Salter, who also used the name John Hunter Gray, died Monday, Jan. 7, 2019 at his home in Pocatello, Idaho. Relatives say he was 84 when he died Monday after an illness. (Fred Blackwell/The Clarion-Ledger via AP, File) ORG XMIT: MSJAD701

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

during this time, due to so much police and community violence, the Black Panther formed to monitor and protect people.

https://www.wglt.org/post/director-chronicles-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed#stream/0

members of the Black Panthers, preparing to feed the community

GENERATION X

sure, we are slackers. yeah. we’re ok with staying home. you have just told a generation of latchkey tech addicts raised during the bridge from antenna TVs to HD internet streaming to sit at home. if you’d feed us, we wouldn’t even blink at it. this quarantine stuff? that’s not the hard thing.

but we’re watching friends and family die. a lot of us have been down this road before. we’ve watched right wing pigs (yes, I’ll say it) allow our friends to die before. we’ve been down this road of denial and greed and prejudice and all of it. we’ve seen what happens when politicians value money and ego over human lives, and we know it SUCKS ASS.

hell, we watched Reagan. Bush. Bush. Clinton, too-he was only a hair better. and so-

when we need to, we pound the pavement. we toss the bricks. we get arrested. we wipe mace out of our eyes and stampede.

we always tend to be masked, regardless of standards of the moment. I don’t think, in my life, I’ve been to a protest that didn’t have a contingent of masked people wishing to avoid cameras. Now, a protest for actual assistance for people? a real protest, a fight for better conditions, the 300-some strikes that have happened that the news ISN’T covering? yeah. surgical masks. they’re brilliant photos, but not as interesting for the crap media as a few fat guys with guns.

because that’s the joke they want to show us, yeah? not people actually fighting in solidarity, to protect each other, get better work conditions, protect the disabled, get better healthcare for all, support people financially… the shit the majority of people really want. no. they’re not covering that real shit.

the news, they like a spectacle.

we need to find ways to make the facts spectacular.

I have rarely seen my generation protest FOR corporate interests and find any such thing suspicious as all fuck. I don’t believe a bit of that shit. That’s paid for, that’s arranged, that’s a pony show. That’s the same tiny batch of zonked out cultists that don’t have a trump rally to travel to right now. it’s like a damn road show, the same hundred people, like some Boomer deadhead traveling bus shit. I don’t trust it and I don’t believe it. the older folks at them, yeah. they’re that little band of travelers. sure. but us?

Seattle police use gas to push back World Trade Organization protesters in downtown Seattle Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1999. The protests delayed the opening of the WTO third ministerial conference. (AP Photo/Eric Draper)

because even though we will go do Things, we are, in fact, ok with staying home.

and we don’t like your fucking company. and corporations bought our music and art and killed it in front of our eyes, and there’s no getting our trust back. and we will wear a goddamn busted ass thrift store sack before we spend money on slave-sewn clothes. and we would rather read and write and play music and watch movies all damn day, than go to jobs in cubicles.

War protesters and march to Gas Works Park protesting the US involvement in the Persian Gulf and the buid up to war against Irag January 15 deadline 1991 Seattle Washington State USA

I mean, we’ll usually go, because we gotta eat. so feed us. give us bread. you already poisoned the roses.

  THE ASSHOLE FACTORY

this is where your conspiracy videos are made. in the asshole factory.

what do you notice about these photos? do you see the threats? what kind of people are there?

it is almost like there’s a monthly event they’ve been going to, that’s been cancelled, where they could hold up trump signs and boo anything reasonable… wonder what that event is. where have you seen some of these faces before? I’ve seen a few in the rally photos and videos.

check out “small business” guy. who is he? does he own a “small business”, you think? (photos by Orin Louis)

  ON THE PANDEMIC

a lot of people talking about immunity/reinfection and that study.

that study is just saying we don’t know yet. we just don’t know yet.

it’s early days.

Coronavirus is not influenza, they’re two different families of virus. VERY different.

this is more related to the common cold (in its behavior)than to the flu. (the cold is a rhinovirus. SARS & MERS, and Covid-19, if you want to find out more about these viruses, don’t look up the flu-they are Coronaviruses.)

it is contagious the way a cold is, but it has serious effects on any part of the body with ace2 receptors. (simply put- blood, lungs, heart, kidneys, brain)

they have been working on a cold vaccine for decades. no success. BUT. again, it’s early days. there’s never been this kind of pressure for a vaccine for it. so, to be direct: we don’t know yet. they’ve never been this desperate, this well funded, to find a cold vaccine.

this could be a seasonal thing, eventually- it could mutate to be less lethal and become just another cold we can get every year. it could mutate to be even more vicious and we all are in serious danger all the time. it could create immunity, and some will be ok for a year or a month or a decade… it might not, and people can catch it again and worse.

we just don’t know yet. the whole reason we are isolating the way we are is to buy time for science to find these answers. we’re not in quarantine to “kill it off” or stop it. we are slowing it down so science can have time to find answers, so less of us die while that happens.

  every day we don’t infect other people, is a day in which researchers can work. we need them to work. they are doing that. every day we don’t infect other people, is a day this virus doesn’t get a chance to mutate and change. this helps a lot.

science needs time. all this economic mayhem- it’s to buy them time to help us, to figure it out. the answers won’t come right away and during this time we may hear things that are being tried and tested, some may not work at all, some may be worse than nothing, so information won’t be steady or always correct. when you read a thing, wait a day. read more about it. read the actual study- and if you can’t, wait a few days and read what scientific sources say about it (the lancet, NEJM, etc). don’t rely on NBC, fox, etc to do a great job reporting on science. you’ll have to have patience, even science is having to watch and wait while things are researched, right now.

nobody has the answers; it’s NOVEL. brand new.

they’re testing, they’re researching, they’re learning this thing’s secrets as fast as they can, while we wait that process out.

be as safe as you can be while we buy them the time.

image: pink pangolin drawing in frame

  COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE

FOR ACCURACY

You shouldn’t leave the house unless you absolutely have to: food, medicine, or other necessity of life. This includes going to other people’s houses.

Masks are good at protecting others if you are infected, and help protect you too, just not as much as others. Wear one.

Stores are closed, unless they provide food or medicine. Alcohol is a necessity for alcoholics who will have actual seizures and could die from withdrawal, so some of those are open. (Some states have been pressured into letting other things stay open, and people insist on going to church and being able to buy guns in public stores, but that’s political shit and you shouldn’t go places unless you have to.)

This virus is deadly to many people, even healthy ones, is as contagious as a common cold, and has killed more people in a month than the flu does in a year. You don’t want to catch it, and if you do, you want to catch it when doctors and nurses aren’t overworked from other people catching it too. There are 8 strains identified right now. This will change over time, because it’ll mutate- like every virus. EVERY virus.

Glovesw help, unless you change them after touching a contaminated surface. They’re good if used properly and if you’re not sure how to do that, don’t bother. Just wash your hands often.

Everyonen to stay home, but you can go outside- away from people. Staying a good distance from people is really the whole point of staying home.

There will be shortages of some things at the grocery store as supplies run out, and as things are shipped to replace them. Chill out.

The virus does spread through and sometimes kill children, but we weren’t aware of this until we had better information.

You will have many symptoms when you are sick, but you will be contagious for up to two weeks before you get sick. YOU WILL BE CONTAGIOUS WITH NO TEMPERATURE OR SYMPTOMS.

You really shouldn’t be eating restaurant food, unless you can reheat it. Wipe down or wash off your groceries.

You are safe if you maintain six feet distance from others, if everyone is masked and nobody is coughing or sneezing. If they are, you need about 27 feet of distance. Keep space from people.

The virus remains active on different surfaces for a time. The surface being porous may or may not matter; like many things, research by science will give better answers as they have time to figure it out.

We count the number of deaths but we don’t know how many people are infected because most places have not got enough tests to see who is infected. Until we can test everyone, stay home, stay away from people.

We have no treatment. There are clinical trials of many different drugs and at least one vaccine, right now, but it will take time to find out what works.

We should stay away from people to avoid spreading this virus until scientists can offer a treatment or preventative measure like a vaccine. There is no reason to infect people, help the virus mutate, or fuck around with this.

If you are an essential worker of ANY kind, you deserve a living wage, hazard pay, full PPE and kindness from everyone who needs you right now. we should be fighting for your safety, not to make things more dangerous for you.

Stop spreading misinformation. Science doesn’t know everything about this yet, information can and will change or become more specific as time goes by. Yes, business interests and governments have handled the entire thing like a clown show, but you don’t have to be part of making it worse.

  THE VALIDITY OF PROTESTING IN THIS TIME

protest for:

stronger unions

better pay

stronger social safety nets during a pandemic

your right to own and bear arms

your freedom of speech/freedom from unwarranted surveillance

safer working conditions

medical care for all

free education

fair elections

physical safety from police violence

safety from racist/hate crimes

NOT FOR:

fuck, BUYING things. don’t protest to be able to go buy shit? what the hell is wrong with you?!? you can buy a gun next month, dipshit. you can buy through private sale. fuck all the way off with that.

SOMEONE ELSE TO WAIT ON YOU (haircuts, restaurants, nails, tattoos, etc)

the right to block hospital entrances (we all saw the footage, shut the fuck up)

the right to gigantic church services during a pandemic. YOU CAN DO LIKE GRANDPA DID AND WATCH YOUR PREACHER ON THE TEE VEE.

going to a shit job that you’ve never liked instead of all the things above that would have allowed you to get through this shit without starving to begin with

by the way, local seed and feed stores are open nation wide; agriculture is considered an essential business. you can’t buy whatever the fuck at wallymart right now though, SO SORRY. maybe don’t even fucking shop there?

edit to add; if they were only endangering themselves I wouldn’t give a shit – but you know these fuckers are getting too close to store cashiers, walking the wrong way down narrow aisles, and touching every-fuckin-thing.

  also: 81% of people polled, from EVERY political group, think they should be staying home. and agree with that. THIS IS A CRAP PROTEST BY A TINY, UNIMPORTANT GROUP and should not be getting the coverage it is. they aren’t enough to restore an economy, let alone fill a small concert hall.

    I may split these into separate posts, if you’d like that, comment so I know people need/want that.

[bigskydreaming]

princeescaluswords replied to your post:

Alex Summers, after the most recent of 128979889...

Why don’t you write Marvel? You couldn’t possibly do any worse and I could use the laughs!

Lol, its a nice dream, but realistically I don’t think there’s any universe in which Marvel would ever let me write the X-Men. 

Like, my very first story would probably have Bobby refreezing the Arctic while Storm heads up a team of elementals to combat climate change. And then a Republican senator and a Democrat senator would go on TV and make a bipartisan show of expressing their gratitude towards mutants for helping save the planet and this is the real future of humanity, this is them all building a world where they can live side by side in a mutually beneficial -

And then the broadcast would cut off because Cypher just hacked every satellite worldwide and said “all your binary codes belong to me now, resistance is futile, blah blah” before turning the camera to Sunspot who’s all decked out in his snazziest suit and dressed to the nines. Roberto yawns and flips the whole world off and says “LOL fuck you, the X-Men are done with respectability politics, we took a vote and our democratic process actually works, we don’t have a fucking electoral college. We only saved the planet because it happens to be the planet we live on, dipshits, nobody did it for you, you’re still cordially invited to go extinct. Or you can play nice and try getting along with the rest of us for a change but good luck trying to make Sentinels happen again, lmao, funding’s gonna be an issue for you pretty soon I think.”

He turns off the camera and goes back to planning his and Sam’s wedding, because look, I have my priorities, okay.

Then Mystique unleashes her new Fellowship of Evil (Same Name, But This Time Its Evil as in STFU, Its Ironic U Assholes) Mutants that she’s been recruiting from the ranks of the young and disenchanted. Overnight, the market is flooded with gold and gems transmuted from ordinary materials by mutant powers, as well as a bunch of shit ‘liberated’ from the coffers of the 1% via her Fellowship’s alliance with her son-in-law’s Thieves’ Guild. Value plummets instantly, and then technopaths join in the fun, crashing every banking system worldwide.

“Whoopsie, I broke capitalism, money’s worthless now, vive la revolution, everyone eat some fucking cake,” Raven sing-songs merrily from the chaise she’s lounging on while eating grapes. The city outside her window is burning. Meanwhile, a fiddler is playing nearby. She calls him Nero, because Aesthetic.

“Oh relax,” she rolls her eyes when Remy attempts to frown at her disapprovingly. “I had my teleporters evacuate the city before I set it on fire. I’m not a heartless monster, you know.”

“You mean you didn’t want to spend the next ten years dealing with your children yelling at you about innocent civilians and how could you,” Remy says dryly.

Mystique just shrugs and eats some more grapes. “Or that.”

Far-right dominated police forces and white supremacist militia groups attempt to forcibly establish martial law, except mostly they’re just standing around clutching their heads and trying to cope with the mother of all migraines as a gestalt of telepathic minds headed up by a Cerebro-powered octet of Jean, Emma, Betsy, Rachel, Quentin, and the Stepford Cuckoos psychically screams FAKE NEWS!!! into their brains every time their CO’s attempt to bark out new orders.

“Best school project ever,” Quire shouts. Emma smirks.

“Extra credit to the first person to psychically leak the full extent of just how extensively governments have invaded their citizens’ privacy with surveillance extremism in the name of national security.”

Jean attempts a half second of chastisement, but with them all linked this closely, there’s really no way to hide that she’s mostly just amused. Oh no, she and Emma are seeing eye to eye on something and there are witnesses and everything. The revolution was a mistake.

Atlanteans and mutant hydrokinetics team up to shove the worst oil and toxic waste and trash spills up onto the shores of every beach marked ‘privately owned’. The mile-wide ‘island’ of plastic debris that formerly sat in the middle of the Pacific is now parked off the coast of Malibu.

There’s a twenty foot demon from Limbo sitting in the Oval Office. It burps. Illyana beams and boops its nose. “Good boy.” It wags its tail and breaks the Oval Office.

Kitty and Kurt direct teams of similarly powered mutants in raiding the top secret R&D facilities of major pharmaceutical companies for all their research on diseases that never made it to mass production because they decided those treatments or cures wouldn’t be profitable in the long run because healthy people don’t need to spend a ton of money on medical care. Teams of healers are standing by to vet the viability of various research, while Hank, Cece and other mutant geniuses are already working on filling in the gaps on all the projects that were shutdown and Forge, Madison Jeffries and tech-based geniuses are converting existing infrastructure into the necessary machinery to take over mass production of these drugs, prosthetics, and sweatshop labor in general.

Speedsters and teleporters are redistributing food and stocking up the millions of properties worldwide that have just been sitting there empty for god knows how long, useless. Colossus is standing in the smashed remains of a mansion with his arms crossed sternly while a man who is definitely not meant to resemble the CEOs of either Tesla or Amazon or look like some kind of Musky Bozo hybrid cowers on the floor.

“You are a very stupid man,” Colossus says. “Why are you wasting billions funding research into space travel when there are aliens with a strong grasp of the technology in the ships that brought them here on every superhero team on Earth? You could have easily provided the Earth with working and widely accessible space travel by now if you weren’t so miserly.”

“Yeah,” Juggernaut says behind him, scratching his head. “Aliens have been coming and going from this planet for like fifty years. There are tons of fancy spaceships anyone could’ve just reverse engineered and mass produced by now. How come nobody’s ever done that and we’re all just acting like space travel is some far-off dream when everyone we know’s been to space like at least ten times?”

“Stupid people,” Colossus rumbles again. Musky Bozo wets himself and Piotr sighs and shakes his head. He didn’t even touch him.

Cyclops and Wolverine and their teams of bruisers are already done with the ICE facilities and have progressed to busting open prisons and liberating all nonviolent offenders. They inform everyone else that they can appeal to a panel of telepaths to read their minds and see for themselves that they’re innocent.

“Guilt determined by mind-reading?” Someone asks. “Lots of potential for sketchiness there.”

“Absolutely,” Scott says. “Which is why laws about boundaries and oversight have to be established. For now, its a volunteer basis only. Nobody has to get their mind read, but its an option available in the meanwhile as we sort out a better system for determining who’s been imprisoned for crimes of premeditated malice and abuse and who’s just been railroaded by an unjust and biased system.”

“So this is your new utopia, huh?” Sneers the prison warden, from the floor where he’s on his ass with a busted face because, idk, Reasons.

Scott just shakes his head. “No. It’s merely a start.”

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if its broke and you wanna fix it, you gotta start somewhere,” Logan says gruffly. “Shit was broke. This is ‘starting somewhere.’”

He and Scott share a very Passionate look of camaraderie. Rogue sighs loudly.

“Just fuck already, jfc.”

Logan grunts. He already offered, but apparently all Personal Business must wait until after the Revolution was over, because a Scott Summers who put himself first was very clearly an impostor, so its not like Logan could even fucking get mad considering Scott putting in a pin in sucking each other’s faces after their We Were Both Dead But Now We’re Not and Also What the Fuck Was Up With Us For the Five Whole Years Before That reunion was what confirmed that it was definitely the Real Scott’s tongue in his mouth.

“Alright, let’s move it people,” Logan barks, clapping his hands. “There’s three more joints to hit before sundown. We got a timetable here.”

Jubilee squints at him suspiciously. “Since when are you efficient?”

“Mind your own fucking business.”

At no point does anyone suggest they erase the most sacred sites of all the world’s major religions and call them all fake or randomly resurrect a bunch of dinosaurs and release them on unsuspecting and innocent populations, because those are terrible ideas and make no sense and just because they’re stinkin’ commies now doesn’t mean they’re fucking morons.

Also, nobody grows a ridiculous beard or stops using shampoo or starts wearing flip flops or robes, because apparently those are not actually essential components of being a stinkin’ commie or even just a garden variety peace-aspiring socialist. They checked. Extensively. It was almost a dealbreaker. Emma, Monet and Roberto all threatened to side with the Capitalist Pigs if that was not thoroughly clarified before proceeding any further.

Thus ends my first issue. I email Marvel the script. They email it back, almost entirely redacted in red, with the note “This isn’t quite what we were looking for. Do you have anything about a new cure for mutants, maybe?”

I email them back: LOL NO. MAGNETO WAS RIGHT.

I am promptly fired.

I go back to ranting about how Marvel sucks on the internet.

[wenamedthedogkylo]

Queen Mother in "The Crown" season 2: "All to open things up. Bring us more in line with the real world. Democratize us. And so it goes. The stings and bites we suffer as it slips away. Bit by bit, piece by piece. Our authority, our absolutism, our divine rights."

The empath and storyteller in me: It is indeed a monumental and very human struggle to watch oneself become irrelevant, to have stood on solid ground for so long and suddenly find that the ground is no longer as stable as one previously thought. That such lengths have been gone to in order to protect one from that foundation collapsing, even if it means you are lied to or not told things, that it's only when a piece of it falls out from under you that you realize how precarious your position is. It's natural to wish to cling to what you have, the sentimentality of it, the security it once offered, the sense of purpose and belonging. But a mature individual—not even necessarily a wise one or a smart one, but at the very least a mature and forward thinking one who sees the greater import of preparing for the future over clinging to the past—understands that you can't continue living on a shaky, unstable foundation, and that changes must be made to save oneself from falling in a total collapse. This struggle is ultimately the beauty of "The Crown", which, while dramatized a bit beyond reality I'm sure, uses this intimately human fear and struggle for growth and self-preservation to reveal that under the fairy tale and the facade, royals are indeed merely humans like us. And the fear of fading, being forgotten, rendered impotent and useless and relegated to a display behind which you will be scrutinized and mocked, is something which /every person/ can relate to in some form. Watching the maturity and the growth in Elizabeth is inspiring, even as it is frustrating to watch how slowly she must go about it because of the constraints of her position, and feeling how she herself is frustrated by her predicament.

The socialist rebel scum in me: lol stfu imperialist bitch, and let your authority, absolutism, and "divine rights" die faster, honestly cannot happen fast enough, old ass rich white people who cling to the past are what's killing the world and has been killing it for hundreds of years so honestly just fuck off and untwist your girdle, power to the people, catch up with progress or die mad about it lmao

[berlinner]

money

freaks me out. supposedly, the ‘law of abundance’ (Isabel Hickey style) claims that if you don’t ask for what you don’t need the universe will provide. even as i buy into that i’m buying way too much, although my collection of the useless seems less indulgent than it might be. the clothes i buy at Old Navy. for dinner out it’s chinese-in-a-bag. my last vacation was 19 years ago and paid for by a dear friend. when i was a kid i watched mom pay the bills, while the old man in his red leather chair smoked a pipe and chewed ice on his 5th vodka tonic. mum sat at her creaking antique desk, leaning forward, neck long, writing checks and balancing bills vs income. i’m like her. i try not to live beyond my means. i refuse to be held hostage to debt. i don’t O.C.D. balance my checkbook, but i keep a wary eye. i didn’t have a credit card for decades because i’d never bought anything on time. i paid up front or didn’t buy. i loathe the idea of paying money to spend money. eventually my friend’s dad co-signed for a card and now i have one, which i pay off as fast as i use it. i love the bitch. the simplicity of the hard shiny rectangle. the clarity, tax time, of the statement. the speed of web transaction. but here’s the rub: my grandfather’s father was a millionaire. he lived in a mansion in Rhinebeck, NY. he lost his shirt in the crash of ’29 and my grandad, having grown up with dough, with a chauffeur to drive him to school a) never learned to drive and b) didn’t give a fuck about money. his son, my father, felt cheated out of ‘the life’. he wanted the show money could buy. Broadway musicals, fancy suits, new cars, a 50’s bullshit status with decals of the colleges we went to littering the rear window of his Jaguar. my mom had a small inheritance that doubled dad’s income so we were ok, just shy of upper middle class. we lived in a big house with 9 acres of lawn, two cars, private schools and big-assed vacations. but we saw how much dad hated his job at the ‘Girard Trust and Corn Exchange’ (who’s name shitted out of his mouth like an oily turd). he wished he’d been a writer. he resented mom’s income as a sword held over his neck. my sisters and i never mastered the money game. we scratched out a living, two of us as waiters, one a teacher and none of us making the big grab. this painted us into corners. the fat options money could buy were out of reach, but we saw through the charade of vacant materialism, opted for art, life, love and spirit ahead of wallet. we seem happier for it. my sisters have great kids and their lives are full. i don’t have a family, but i spend my tips making records. i lose money, but i love it. it’s who i am, it’s what i do. i stand tall on the catalogue. i wander afield only on those rare occasions when i want to give a friend a good time and they can’t afford it. or if a Democrat has a chance of kicking Republican ass in an election. still, i worry. what will happen when i’m ‘let go’ at work? when my measly Social Security check can’t pay the rent, let alone a trip to the movies. i fantasize myself sporting a beehive n pencil-behind-the-ear and pushing a walker around Doyles ’til the cows come home, but without that, to tell the truth, i’m screwed and drooling toothless in a wheelchair onto a linoleum corridor and hopefully so out of it on tranquilizers i won’t know the difference. was there ever a time in history when money had nothing to do with quality of life? probably not. were this India i would head out onto the dirt path with a rag around my waist, low balls, a wooden bowl and chase all the skinny black-eyed boys who’d have me.

This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press

About The Paragraphs and how to order

Link to buy

Or here

[sethdegrassemacfarlane-blog]

Love In High Places Chapter 2

It was if my feet were melted to the floor and left me unable to move. The excitement coursing through me rendered my body useless. Any chance I had at not making a fool out of myself sailed straight out the beautifully draped windows as I stood in front of Seth MacFarlane and grinned like a mongoloid from ear to ear. Fortunately though, he reciprocated. My father stood between us, darting his nervous eyes back and forth to see who would break radio silence first.

I knotted my fingers together as I felt words beginning to form in my mouth. I didn’t quite know what they were yet, so I could say literally anything. I struggled to shape them as they came out.

“It’s so nice to meet you!” I extended my hand to Seth, causing him to snap out of his trance and back to reality.

“Oh. The pleasure is all mine. My name is Seth.” He blushed and lightly shook my hand before letting his hand fall back to his side.

“I’d know who you were any day. I’m a huge fan of your work.”

My father nodded his head at me to indicate that I had forgotten something. My name! I essentially screamed at him.

“My name is Jessica! You can call me Jess though.”

“You’re definitely a Jess. Definitely not a Jessica.”

I giggled at his innocent joke on my name. I knew I could play with him now.

“Well actually, I’m more of a Megatron. But Jess is easier to remember.”

He threw his head back with laughter at my reference to Family Guy. His teeth were as white as the teeth on his whitening box. His smile put me at ease instantaneously without even the slightest bit of effort. I quickly tried to remember a time just someone’s smile had put me at ease like that. My efforts were fruitless.

My father shook his head and grinned his “all knowing” grin. He looked at us both and said, “Yeah you guys are going to be fine here.”

With that, my father went off to grab a seat and left me alone with my favorite comedian. Each of us stood flashing our best toothy grins at each other. There was noticeable awkwardness, but it was almost as if we knew the other was okay with it.

I casually flipped my hair off my shoulder in an attempt to seem calm and collected. I saw his eyes instantly break from mine, dart to the flesh of my neck that exposed my defined collarbone, and directly back to my eyes. He became noticeably uneasy when I smiled at him, indicating I had taken notice to his slip up.

He gestured to me, but his movements were interrupted by his own doubts. Words wanted to escape, but caught on his distress.

I carefully stepped toward him and gently brought my hand to rest on his forearm. He relaxed into my touch. His gaze rose from where my hand had met him to my tired blue eyes.

“I’d love it if you could show me around the place.” I told him calmly.

“Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.” His eyes lit up and his lips revealed that smile I had admired previously. “Let’s go.”

Seth extended his arm to me and I happily accepted. We made our way through the crowd of tuxedos and A-list celebrities and out the door to the yard. The entire time, never letting go of each other.

“This is better.” I told him as I leaned into him so he could hear me. Frank Sinatra silky tones blared in the background.

“Not by much, but I’ll take it.” He did a closed mouth smile at me which left me wanting so much more.

He brought me further away from the house to where is was quieter. We both say down next to the pool and watched as the party continued on without us.

“I appreciate the stellar guest attention, but you don’t have to be here with me. You have an entire party up there.” I kicked off my heels, hiked up my dress, and let my feet effortlessly dangle in the water without a care.

“There have been and will be many just like it.” Seth sat beside me on the ground, knees at his chest, and arms wrapped around his legs keeping them in place. The horns from a Sinatra song I couldn’t make out rang through the air and down to where we sat.

“Really? So you’re pretty popular with the democrats of America?” I kindly taunted.

“I like to think of myself as their muse, yes.” He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

“I’m glad you realize your worth to American politics.” I laughed back.

We both claimed our laughter until there was nothing left but the hum of the crowd inside the house. I let my head fall back so that I could gaze at the stars. I could feel my hair touching the concrete floor below me. I sighed a breath of content and smiled. I felt Seth fix his look onto me with interest.

“If you told me a couple of hours ago that I’d be sitting next to my favorite comedian at my favorite comedian’s pool tonight, I wouldn’t believe you.”

“You wouldn’t? But I’m your favorite comedian. Don’t I have some type of credibility?”

I giggled and responded, “You know, if you told me that, I probably would be more focused on the fact that it was you and not what you were actually saying.”

We laughed.

“You could be telling me that God was hiding up in Trump Tower and I wouldn’t hear a word of it.”

“Well that’s where he would hide —”

“Because that’s the last place anyone would look for him.” I said with him as our laughter grew into a fit.

“Such blasphemy from a politician’s daughter!”

“A democratic senator of a democratic state’s daughter, yeah! Fuck that Donald Trump noise. I’d rather staple my ear to my asshole than see another tweet of his.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of sacrifice for little result.”

“What can I say? I believe in sacrifice for the greater good.”

“Jesus.” He smiled and stood right up, brushing his hands against his pants.

“What?” I did the same and walked over to him.

“You really know the right things to say to a liberal like me.” He raised his eyebrows at me.

“I’m the child of a politician. I know how to tell people things they want to hear.”

“Good point. Now I feel less special.”

“Eh.” I shrugged. “You’re not the first and definitely won’t be the last.”

“Shit. Now I definitely am minuscule.”

“Better you realize it now.” I said dryly as a I craned my head to the side, bent over slightly, and rounded him to his backside.

“Here. Turn around. You have some shmutz on that millionaire ass of yours.” I joked. He obliged as he watched me brush off his butt. He smiled and his eyes met mine as I stood back up.

He grinned. “There was nothing there.”

“You’re right. I just wanted to touch your butt.”

“I could have you arrested for such conduct.” His voice was low, almost like a hum. The corner of his mouth curled into a smirk in sync with the hitching of his eyebrow.

I had lost all train of thought and was unable to come up with a sly remark. Frankly, it was quite pitiful. It was as if all my senses had chosen to eliminate anything that wasn’t him. As every moment of silence flew by without my recognition, he knew it too.

I snapped out of it and bashfully brought my hand up, rubbing the crook of my neck and answered, “You could. I’d be pretty hard to prosecute though. You know why.”

“Ahhh,” he nodded now with both of his eyebrows raised. “So then I guess I just won’t. Too much hassle.” He began to move toward me. My body opened itself to his arrival just as he stopped short and offered me his arm. I compromised and gratefully received it.

I wrapped my arm in his and rested my other hand on his elbow.

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and asked, “How am I doing?”

“Ten out of ten.” I giggled. He confidently nodded his head, pouting his lip in satisfaction.

We began walking around the grounds in blissful silence as I admired his home. The crowd of politicians above fell to nothing but a buzz.

Never once breaking his hold on me, Seth began stating pointless facts about where he got the things in his lawn in a nervous attempt to make conversation. It was quite a surprise as I was usually the one who babbled on when I was on a date. Well, I hadn’t been on a date since I was 16 when I met Jack. Oh no. Was this a date?

My heart fluttered in my chest as I began to resemble Seth’s apprehensiveness. Suddenly, I was aware of all my surroundings and was beginning to become cognizant of just what was happening. I felt my dress straps digging into my shoulders, I smelled the sharp but pleasant smell of Seth’s cologne, I tasted the heavy, humid air, and felt my hair sticking to my back as my ankles pulsated in pain from my heels. Worst of all, I was recalling the events earlier in the evening that could leave my life in ruins as I had feared.

It was abruptly all too much. I waited until Seth was in between facts and unravelled our arms. In one swift motion, I found myself laying on my back, the cold grass playfully tickling my bare skin.

I shifted my head to see Seth starring down at me. Well, I don’t know why he wouldn’t have been.

“Was I that boring I actually killed you?” He rolled his hands together nervously.

I let out a colossal sigh and fixed my gaze back on the stars above me. “Far from it.”

“Oh,” was all he could say.

A beat of silence before I turned and studied him as he stood above me. “What’re you still doing up there?”

“Oh. Right.” He expeditiously tore off his jacket and lay his body out next to mine. Not too close, but far enough away where I wished he were closer. He rested his jacket on his stomach and lay in silence with me as we watched the sky, satellites, stars and all.

The silence brought me comfort. It was as if neither of us needed words. Just each other’s company was more than enough.

“Aren’t you going to ask me to tell you about myself?” The words shoved their way out of my mouth which startled me. I sat straight up and shivered. He noticed and followed suit.

“Here. Take my jacket. I think its Gucci. Or K-Mart.” He gently draped his jacket across my shoulders and let his hands linger just for the slightest bit of time before returning them to rest on top of his knees.

I reveled in the roomy jacket that instantly brought me a pleasant amount of warmth.

“K-Mart makes a quality jacket if I ever did see one.”

He hung his head and smiled, roping me back into that euphoric state he had me in before.

I groaned which alerted him, but I spoke before he could interject. “Oh my God.”

“Oh my what?”

“Your smile. I hate when people say someone’s smile is intoxicating. Its a complete and utter cliche. But your smile. Holy shit. I’m downright buzzed.”

Seth feigned in embarrassment.

“You’re too kind.”

“I am, but it isn’t kindness talking. Its the truth.” I nudged him with my shoulder which ended up toppling him to the ground.

“Okay! Fine!” He couldn’t help but let the corners of his mouth curl into a smile as he pushed himself up to sit next to me. “I’ll ask you about yourself!”

I cracked up and fell back to the ground, my body convulsing with laughter on the ground. Seth followed me down but only letting out small giggles as he wasn’t about to laugh at his own joke. He lay on his side while his hand propped up his head and his eyes examined me for he knew he would go unnoticed.

“So, Little Adams. Tell me everything and anything there is to know. Give me Jess Adams for Dummies.”

I snickered and instantly felt my face blush. I opened my mouth to divulge my entire 24 years to him, but someone beat me to it.

“Seth?” A voice bellowed through the dark from the house. Startled, we simultaneously jumped at the sound and raced up to see what was going on.

“Yeah?” He yelled back. He glanced at me and shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh. Um, everyone is pretty much here. I think its time for your speech. To, ya know, welcome everyone and stuff.” The voice was clearly that of a younger girl, but not too much younger than I was.

Seth whispered, “Shit.” and rapidly rolled back his sleeve to look at his watch.

“Thanks, Sonya. I’ll be right there.” His voice dropped in disappointment. “Sorry.”

“Yeah you should be. This is hardly fair.”

“How so?”

“Well, I guess you’re never going to know anything about me.”

“That’s not true. I…” he trailed off. His lips pressed tightly together before parting to say, “I have to go.”

“Yeah no totally,” I stammered. “This is your party! Go!” I encouraged him by moving him along. I pressed into the backs of his shoulders and he stumbled forward with a laugh.

“But wait.” He spun around on his heel. “Will I see you again? Will you still be here when I’m done?”

I hesitated.

“I can’t say I will be.”

He repositioned himself closer to me and his voice seductively became more convincing the deeper it went.

“Can you say that you’ll try?”

He eagerly waited for my response as I eagerly awaited to make up my fucking mind.