#he should pay me. does he know how expensive those are… it this economy?

[gla-ssstar]

Ok im done… The sfh animal crossings were strange… but as promised, bad and crazy… i just have a worm in my brain that compels me 2 do things ig… i miss this show so much… anyway.

[morsking]

if there is a ruling class of wealthy individuals who fund politics that consistently throw the rest of society into the incinerator everywhere in the world, the only way to stop that from happening is by abolishing that class and redistributing their wealth as well as disqualifying them, and the politicians that serve them, from ever entering politics. if you ask yourself who is going to run society, that is, make the political and economic decisions that go into making sure things keep running if you can't trust bosses and the government, then the obvious answer is the worker must fulfill that political leadership. and if you find that concept preposterous, there is the problem: you treat matters of labor exploitation that drive the economy into crisis with disdain that serves no purpose other than apologize for and preserve the unsustainable status quo (and you might also be confessing, with an evident degree of plausible deniability, that you benefit from this and you exclude yourself from the workers' struggle, even if you are yourself a wage slave, in which case your foot would really appreciate if you stopped shooting at it).

if you believe the workers are not smart enough to make efficient and sustainable decisions and coordinate industries at an international scale, then you've already suggested a solution you are cynically avoiding speaking into existence: the worker must be educated. this is not impossible by virtue of the fact a worker who understands his trade already exists: many strikes, historically and in the present day, have happened because workers point out there is a more efficient and less costly way to run a business that managers repudiate and sabotage in favor of instituting needlessly wasteful and redundant systems that preserve their personal job security. they do this at the expense of the personal well-being of the workers under them and the consumers who must pay extra to use a service that would otherwise be cheaper and more ubiquitous if it were organized more efficiently - that is to say, the way the workers who know what goes into the day to day of the trade would run it and not management.

the only thing stubborn, self-righteous, and reactive ignorance does is allow things to get worse, and then help those who view others with revulsion wash their hands off the responsibility of their inaction in the face of social adversity born from the dysfunctional character of politics as they have developed. "i don't know how to make things better, and fixing them shouldn't fall on me." indeed, it would be unfair to assume only one person holds all the answers, but it is flawed thinking to assume the question of what the human race should do to build a better society is addressed to any one individual. a new society free from the weaknesses of the current can only flourish if everyone knows how things work, why, and for whom. therefore, the question isn't individual, but collective, and the answer must be collective in kind by nature and necessity. and that's encouraging, because you are not alone and have no reason to be if we deliberate and decide at an equal level. we cannot be fooled into making the same mistakes that led us to this point if we all know how the working class has been fooled (and how the bourgeois might fool itself), and that can only happen through education and organization.

if you agree with any of that, congratulations! you are already a marxist. a communist, even, if you are willing to stop being afraid of that word for a couple of seconds and bear with me. and to put my money where my mouth is, here's some resources, a few of many other people on this site have been very generous to share, to get you started on the political education that stands in opposition to keeping us locked in the same cycle of mendacity and cruelty ruining our lives, and sure to ruin our lives in the future.

trotsky's transitional program - what to do when you get tired of he bosses' shit

dialectical materialism - the theoretic framework to make sense of what happens

historical materialism - examining history through the materialist perspective to understand how we got here in the first place

"capital" by marx - how economics work and how they make or break inequality

happy reading!

[gatekeeper-watchman]

Empathy

          Empathy, a word seldom used in our daily conversations, the meaning of which is understood even less by many of us, is defined in Wikipedia as “the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another…. being”, i.e. putting one’s self in another’s shoes—to feel another’s pain. Obviously, it is very difficult for one to feel another’s hunger when one’s stomach is full. It is very difficult, when one’s belly is full of expensive wine and luxurious dinners, when his baths are furnished with $4,000.00 shower curtains, when he lives in large and expensive homes, and when he drives expensive automobiles, perhaps even chauffeur driven, to comprehend the needs of the poor for basic food, clothing, and shelter. After all, you worked hard for yours, and they can do the same for themselves. Doesn’t everyone have equal opportunity? Think about it. Do we? Do we really? How many of you who read this have ever known hunger? How many know the absolute fear in the pit of one’s stomach when losing his job, with neither food in the closet, or money to pay the rent. How many have been out of work for a year or more with no job in sight and absolutely clueless as to where to turn? How many have had that feeling of being all alone with nowhere to turn—homeless perhaps? I dare say, not many.

          I suggest this to you, to everyone who reads this. The good old days are over; and, for most of us, they aren’t coming back—not in our lifetime anyway. We need all the empathy we can get—especially from government. If you think I’m nuts, you haven’t been keeping abreast of the news in the papers, on television, and/or on the internet. Our economy is in recession, our demand for product and services, the real producer of jobs in our economy, is down, and we as well as our government are in debt “up to our necks”. To exacerbate our problems as a nation even further, we are in a pseudo civil war with our government which has been overthrown by an oligarchy of the Corporatocracy and Power Elite within.

If you and I entered into a conspiracy to overthrow our government, we would be arrested, thrown in jail and, perhaps even shot. Our Corporatocracy and Power Elite, on the other hand, have taken over without firing a shot (that we know of), and not one of them have gone to jail. All that has happened to them is that some of them have been forced to pay huge fines, the money for which has come on the backs of their stockholders. They have usurped the power and authority to run this country from the three branches of our government which are supposed to be in authority.

You don’t believe me. Tell me. Who said corporations have the rights of free speech when they aren’t people. For that matter, who said they are people? I’ll tell you, but you already know. Our Supreme Court of the United States of America did. Not only did they do it once; but, also, they did so more than once. Now that doesn’t come close to being in our Constitution, does it? But they did it anyway. Was it cause or effect? I’ll leave that to you, but one thing is obvious, we are no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Our government, our Shadow Government, an oligarchy of the Corporatocracy and Power Elite, has their money in the pockets of a significant number of the elected members of our government; and they are pulling the string—running the show. They have effectively usurped our vote. Our underclass is growing, our middle-class is rapidly disappearing, and we are melting into the status of serfdom, not unlike Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.

What should you do about it? There is much we should do about it and it begins at the ballot box. Vote for a party of the people. Stay away from any candidate whom you think may follow the money and turn from the people when the going gets tough. Stay away from those candidates who follow the money. Stay away from any candidate who votes for the oligarchy of the Corporatocracy and Power Elite—especially those corporations which don’t pay income taxes and/or move their companies overseas. Vote for high tariffs on all products of those companies that move overseas and sell their products back here, especially those using slave labor abroad (If their wages and standard of living is less than ours and they work under sweatshop conditions, they are slave labor—a rose is a rose by any other name). Let’s adopt an amendment to our Constitution that takes private money out of politics and pay for elections from a surtax on corporate income (this would be a good time for a comprehensive reform on voting and elections as well as taxes).

This is just a beginning but we should begin with the election coming up in November. Let us shed our bumper sticker mentalities. Let’s really take back our country. Let’s get the Corporatocracy and Power Elite out of our government and out of our affairs. They exist to serve us—not us to serve them. Jobs? They’ll come. They’ll come when we start spending again—when our demand for product and service comes (Perhaps we should start with our infrastructure and go from there).

[sublimeobservationarcade]

Peter Dutton Is Hoping To Buy His 27th Property

Some call him Lord of the landlords, others the banker’s friend and share market king but Peter Dutton is hoping to buy his 27th property. Whilst many Australians are doing it tough in the wake of high inflation the Leader of the Opposition is thriving. One of the sneaky things that the party of the rich, the LNP Coalition, do is to never set limitations on things. So, when they introduce new laws like the discount on capital gains tax, back in John Howard’s day, they ensure that it does not matter how many houses you own or how rich you are you still get that 50% discount. Photo by Michael Tuszynski on Pexels.com

Dutton Landlording It Over Ordinary Australians

Australia, like many modern economies, does not tax investment earnings in the same manner as they do income from working. Thus, we have the situation where the humble worker pays the lion’s share of tax revenue while the wealthy enjoy their riches from property ownership and investments. Indeed, Peter Dutton is hoping to buy his 27th property very soon to add to his real estate empire. Australian politicians know how to look out for themselves via their legislation and what’s in the fine print of the laws they bring in. Dutton Champion Of The Wealthy Hiding Millions In Superannuation It's the same with superannuation in Australia, as there are few limits currently on what you can stash there. Superannuation was brought in by the Hawke Keating government to fund the retirements of ordinary Australians. However, it has become a low tax bolthole for the wealthy to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in the case of some individuals. Accountants and the very rich have no shame when it comes to manipulating the laws to serve their greed. Politicians become enablers for the billionaires and oligarchs to feather their own nests at the nation’s expense. This money should be taxed to pay for health and education but clever schemes put pay to this. Australia’s Robodebt Shame & The LNP Coalition It is understandable that Peter Dutton is just too busy to look out for those Australians doing it tough. His massive property portfolio and share market shenanigans would keep most of us busy. The LNP Coalition don’t like poor people, as Robodebt taught us that if nothing else. An ideological attack on welfare recipients falsely accusing half a million, yes 500, 000, Aussies of cheating Centrelink. Robodebt was illegal but the Coalition government didn’t let that stop them for 6 years. It was the greatest betrayal of ordinary citizens by an Australian government in the history of the nation. People died in despair taking their own lives. A settled class action has cost the tax payers, you and me, $1.8 billion. Billions more in Royal Commissions and inquiries. The NACC are making a meal of it at the moment, as elites shy away from holding other elites accountable. These folk look out for each other at the expense of ordinary folk. In Australia, you can do illegal stuff that costs billions and results in vulnerable people dying and still not be prosecuted. This is the kind of place we live in. The wealthy and powerful look out for themselves with lawyers and accountants. "I think this story gives us an insight into why it is that Peter Dutton has consistently voted against cost of living relief for average Australians and why he's now going to an election saying that if he's elected, he will cut Labor's $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund," he told reporters. “ - (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-26/peter-dutton-response-property-shares-reports/104985374) Peter Dutton is hoping to buy his 27th property, if and when he deems it appropriate to do so. He may have made a share market motza on the back of a few whispers from bankers back in 2009 and invested that wisely in residential property. Indeed, it is people like this who have fuelled unaffordable property price inflation, as first home buyers have to compete with property investors like Dutton. This is the country we live in and the kind of folk wanting to lead the nation. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump. ©MidasWord Read the full article

[unrequited-words]

2/28/23 Tuesday

I’ve been trying to process the burning that bridge within the last 24 hours.  let me think of where it’s all began and what it was. I think Sunday night when she called me instead of texting… no, it was this past Friday when I look at my phone records … I’m sorry for being a savant when it comes to dates that’s just who I am … and we talked for about an hour and a half and while I’m on the phone with her it’s obviously on speakerphone because I don’t want to have a phone to my ear and I don’t have a Bluetooth or headphones so I decided the speaker

anyway while on the speakerphone she’s saying in so much word calling my husband a bum because he doesn’t work, but does she not realize that she’s a stay at home dad while I work at home to provide for my family that was the deal we made and it works for us.

It does because hello daycare is fucking expensive. I couldn’t imagine putting my kid in daycare, by the cost alone.  she’s always told him to get a job and stop wasting his time and when she said stop wasting your time meaning stop playing video games but that’s his hobby and that’s how he decompressive and I understand it now.

What’s fucking ironic I mean fucking ironic. It’s the fact that she quit her job for years ago because she couldn’t be a working mom who breast-feeds and is taking care of a newborn so she came up with this deal with her last employer to where they would let her go and she would get unemployment. 

It will be I’m pretty sure for years this April so four years next month but she’s been a stay at home mom and she doesn’t understand how fucking lucky she is so her husband with the one working until about a year ago maybe six months ago I don’t remember the date exactly and they didn’t have a back up plan and what fucking ironic is her husband doesn’t have a job she doesn’t have a fucking job but she wants to condone my husband for basically a.k.a. being a bum and not working when in reality I’m the only motherfucker who has a steady job.

I’ve had my job for three years. I work really really hard to provide for my family. I work really hard to make sure I’m doing my job right and somehow with my job I get to bonus so if I meet certain metrics if I make those qualifications I bonus, so on one salary, my salary, I am making about 35 to3 7 1/2 to 38 a year and I might be calling her out on her bullshit but I’m the one fucking working she has no room to fucking talk.

She has no room to fucking talk because back in October she told me she quit cold turkey drinking because she was doing it too much and it scared her and this is on her daughter‘s third birthday. And I find it hilarious that she’s such a big hypocrite.

She’s burned three decades worth of friendship and the more I look back at it I think why did I always have to go to her house to play growing up? Why do I always have to call her? why doesn’t she respond? Why did she put me on read and that in my mind is a toxic fucking relationship so about 10 minutes ago I unblocked her and I know they’re fighting and I’m not going to message her but if she wants to fucking call me she can but I’m just to the point where I’m so fucking disgusted that she has the balls to call my husband out on his I guess laziness and unwillingness to get a job?

but she doesn’t realize he’s been searching every fucking day on the job boards he’s been looking for a job for the last two years and with the economy that were in with inflation being fucking stupid, he can’t get a job to where he should be making $35-$40 an hour to where they want to pay foreman and painters $12 a fucking hour where he would make more money working at fucking McDonald’s. Let’s be honest. 

So I’m pacing back-and-forth trying to articulate my feelings of how this is kind of detrimental I don’t have any girlfriends that are solid  Friendship, wise, and I think in the last four years this is comparing me to not rely on people.

This is preparing me to realize people are fucking shit. They truly truly are and it’s preparing me to realize that he fucking don’t need anybody I know I have trust issues obviously I know I have a fourth of issues but at the end of the day why can’t people tell you who they truly fucking are and why can I see these red flags for what they fucking were?

It’s currently 412 and if you’ve made it this far in the afternoon congratulations I know this is a long fucking post and I don’t really fucking care who read this or he doesn’t. It’s just it’s fucking heartbreaking is heartbreaking that I wasted almost 30 fucking years with this girl thinking while our relationship was a solid, but in reality, it’s not solid not at all everything was always on her terms, and the fact that it blew up and she doesn’t like when I haven’t had to say, just truly prove his point, and his point is that she was OK with bringing a bridge and friendship of 30 years all because of her ego

When I saw that text message come through in the last three or four hours I was fucking shocked at the sheer gall she had, but she had the balls to say that to his face not directly in his face, but to text it and that she’s a hypocrite I mean honestly what the actual fuck?

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

“We Are Closed”

Thank you Biden. I’m so glad that you find the need to smother small businesses in favor of multinational corporations. I’m so glad you think that just printing money (Much like all democrat politicians seem to) is the answer to every problem. I’m so thankful that you getting elected has resulted in our economy crumbling around us, where gas prices will reach $6-15$ a gallon. Where Milk will cost $8 for a half gallon. Where bread will cost $6 for the off brand. 

Now for those still reading let me make something clear. Biden was to worst case scenario to be elected. Trump contrary to popular belief was not a fascist. Fascists don’t get “voted out”. Fascist also rule with absolute authority. And the media lied about him and smeared him relentlessly. Does that mean I liked him? No it doesn’t. But the economy boomed under him. Now all that’s going on is us waiting for hyper inflation. 

So to the TITLE of this post. “We Are Closed” is trending 3 in the US on Twitter. And most of the tag is a bunch of entitled Americans, whom think everything should be a right for them. Our parents and grandparents often times had to work 2-3 jobs just to make it. And did that suck for them? Yes it did. But here is what you need to understand. Small town jobs exist. Small city chains exist. Mom and Pop shops exist. And a lot of you are out there saying they should not be allowed to exist. And let me explain why you are a moron. 

Small Business Running Expenses etc:

Rent for Building (The better the location the more the rent)

Property Taxes

Cost for Resources (Groceries, Silverware, Raw Material for products your business makes, cleaning supplies etc)

Cost for licenses to operate (Several in some cases)

Cost for any and all Inspections needed to open and continue running

Cost for any repairs and renovations

Insurance on your business and anything it possesses and sales

Costs for Security Measures

Salaries to your employees 

Costs for Advertising

Things they don’t tell you about running a small business

You still have all of your own bills to pay (Rent, property tax, food, health insurance, family, car Insurance, gas, city/state/federal tax, etc)

You will probably need a loan to even open a business

You will likely be paying off that loan for years and will be in debt most of if not the entire time

If you are competing with fast food chains or multinational store chains you will either fail in the first 2 years or you will barely keep your head above the water. 

In short, I get miffed when entitled little shits complain that they should not work because unemployment is paying them more. YEAH BECAUSE BIDEN IS A MORON. He is the one extending the unemployment bonus. And do you know why I hate everyone saying, “Well if your business can’t afford to pay living wage then you have a shit business model and shouldn’t be running a business anyways.” BECAUSE IT’S STUPID. So basically what you are advocating for is for Walmart, Target, and Amazon to get much MUCH bigger than they already did during lockdowns. Meaning their top brass line their pockets a LOT MORE. Meanwhile we devolve down to a system to only allows multinational businesses to exist, creating monopolies. “Hur dur you can always start a new business you just have to pay your employees $50 an hr hurdur”. You. Are. A. MORON! Do you think Walmart went global in a day? A month? A year? NO. It took years to decades for them to become what they are today. 

Also let’s go over the myth of “Minimum living wage” as a broad standard.  How much are the taxes where you live? City, State, Federal? Ok how much is the house you live in? The apartment? The condo? The colonial mansion? Notice a trend there? No two people at the same job are gonna have the exact same bills. Maybe I’m a single male, no kids, living in a condo. I don’t get sick often and I eat very little. What do my bills look like? OK, now I’m a Single mother of 2 living in a 2 bedroom apartment, my family eats a lot, the kids are constantly sick, they go through clothing very quickly and add school to that. 

Do you see what I’m getting at? Businesses can’t just PAY what ever the highest possible denominator is because they would go bankrupt. Minimum living wage as a broad scale is a fallacy. Each person has a minimum living wage but they can’t just pay each person that either because people will grip when they are getting paid less than other people. And it’s discriminatory, and it also incentivizes the workers to live in the most extravagant places possible. So consider this for a second. When businesses have to raise minimum wage they often cut hrs or layoff workers/cut down their work force. To that end the decision you meet is this: A: Pay 20 people $10-$12 and hr or B: Pay 5 people $15-$16 an hr (and layoff 15 people)

Because that IS the option. 20 people with money even if it’s not the most they could have. Or 5 getting paid “living wage” and 15 with no money and no jobs. *And before the commies or socialists come in talking mad shit, NO, your systems don’t work. They can not ever work outside of 50 people or less, with near iron fisted rule. So kindly screw off.*

Oh and another fun fact you don’t seem to realize. Walmart actually will force retirement on to people after 15-20 years because they don’t want to pay out the amount of money those individuals make. I’ve personally seen it happen. Meanwhile the top 20% of the business and it’s shareholders are getting more and more rich because of entitled little shits who just don’t want to work. Then you all have the nerve to shit on businesses that are likely to DO their best to take care of their employees, mostly because it’s still small scale and you get the best out of your workers when you take care of them. (Not to say it will always happen but more often than not it does)

[whatifyoulivelikethat]

So serious question albeit random. Advice on quitting a job with no back up plan? Or just thoughts? I’m seriously dreading going back to work tomorrow. I audibly gasped when I saw tuxedo cat drabble and it has been the only shining beacon of my day. 🥴🥴🥴

Financial independence is important, both in order to have the necessities and/or disposable income. Planning for and having reasonable financial independence relieves a lot of stress in life. It should not come at the expense of your physical / mental health.

I would not advise quitting your job without some sort of plan. If you are at a point that you have saved enough money to last you about 3-6 months (covering everything, rent, utilities, food, etc), then that is the best scenario to quit cold turkey. However, depending on the economy and where you live, such a thing might be impossible. Heck, even saving money in it of itself might be impossible right now. If you have someone in your life (parent(s), spouse, friend(s), etc) willing to front your cost of living while you are looking for a new job, then that could be an option. However, such is a privilege, and not everyone is lucky enough to be in that situation.

A job could be but does not have to be your passion. That being said, I do understand there are many factors that could make your job unbearable: bad management, shitty co-workers and/or customers, poor working conditions, etc. Some money is better than no money. It really depends on how bad it is. If your life / health is being compromised, then those are reasons to leave ASAP.

You can do the bare minimum at your current job while looking for other options (did I just say that? *whistles*). You might get lucky and find a better opportunity elsewhere. You may have to take something of lower pay for a while if only to protect your mental / physical health. Personally, a good work atmosphere is more important to me than how much money I make. Still, I would have some sort of back-up plan if I wanted to change careers, either pursuing further education to get a better job or having another job lined up so I don't have a gap in income.

Sadly, living costs money... TㅅT

There is a saying, "Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life". I call bullshit. Even people who love their jobs have days where they are tired and just wanna go home. XD There will be days that feel like work and that's okay. That's life. It all depends on how you look at it. Work-life balance is different for everyone. Some things that may be your deal-breakers are simply minor inconveniences for others. It is important to find a job where you are comfortable and where it doesn't constantly stress you out.

But don't stress yourself out either, dreaming for an ideal rather than keeping your options open. Many people stumble upon their jobs / careers by accident, giving something "random" a chance. You never know, right?

Here's what I think. Work doesn't feel like work when you find people that you love working with. If the actual job itself becomes stressful, having people who understand and help you shoulder that turns a shitty situation into a funny story later. Keep an eye out for those that you want to work with during your next job hunt.

You will feel much better when you have a plan on what you want to do - learn a trade, go back to higher education, switch jobs, etc. If you need a temporary solution to get out of your current situation, look for a seasonal / temp job. There are many options available and, although they might not be desirable at the moment, it may be better than your current experience.

Cat-man Yoongi is always here to help, right?

... RIght?

*pokes tuxedo!Yoongi*

He grunts and rolls over, ignoring me.

Well.

I think that means yes. XD

[notebooknebula]

Private Money & Self-Storage Investing with Scott Meyers and Jay Conner

https://www.jayconner.com/private-money-self-storage-investing-with-scott-meyers-and-jay-conner/

Scott Meyers shares the world of Self-Storage Investing

Scott and his affiliated companies focus on the acquisition, development, and syndicating of self-storage facilities nationwide. He currently owns and operates over 2,200,000 square feet and over 13,000 units nationwide.

His education organization www.SelfStorageInvesting.com provides courses, tools, life events, and mentoring to help others launch self-storage businesses to enjoy a lifestyle, as his saying goes “free from tenant, toilets & trash!”

His various companies are also very mission-focused and funded the construction of 12 houses in Mexico and the Dominican Republic by taking his staff, partners & other associates on their all-expense-paid short-term mission trips.

Timestamps:

0:01 – Get Ready To Be Plugged Into The Money

1:38 – Jay’s New Book: “Where To Get The Money Now”- https://www.JayConner.com/Book

2:58 – Today’s guest: Scott Meyers

5:44 – How Scott Meyers got started in the real estate business

8:31 – Scott Meyers’ very first storage facility

10:15 – Scott Meyers’ lesson learned on his first storage facility deal

11:04 – What is syndication?

13:29 – Does the storage investing business also offer multiple exit strategies?

17:09 – Get connected with Scott Meyers – https://www.SelfStorageInvesting.com

18:34 – How does the pandemic affect the Self-Storage industry?

22:09 – No business strives unless it’s solving a lot of people’s problems

23:10 – Scott Meyers’ recent projects

25:19 – Best way on starting with Self-Storage Investing business

27:43 – Common mistakes that new self-storage investors make

30:17 – Scott Meyers’ parting comments – “It’s when everybody is running out that you should be, not just running in but understanding what it means to be in the real estate business.”

Private Money Academy Conference:

https://jaysliveevent.com/live/?oprid=&ref=42135

Have you read Jay’s new book: Where to Get The Money Now? It is available FREE (all you pay is the shipping and handling) at https://www.JayConner.com/Book

Free Webinar: http://bit.ly/jaymoneypodcast

Jay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.

What is Real Estate Investing? Live Private Money Academy Conference

https://youtu.be/QyeBbDOF4wo

YouTube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/c/RealEstateInvestingWithJayConner

iTunes:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/private-money-academy-real-estate-investing-jay-conner/id1377723034

Listen to our Podcast:

https://realestateinvestingdeals.mypodcastworld.com/11241/private-money-self-storage-investing-with-scott-meyers-and-jay-conner

Private Money & Self-Storage Investing with Scott Meyers and Jay Conner

Jay Conner:

Stir. And you are still struggling to do your first deal because you don’t have the funding and you can’t find the money for your deals, or are you a wholesaler? And you’ve received some assignment fees, but there’s some deals you want to stay in, but you said probably haven’t been able to stay in the deals because you don’t have the money or the funding, or are you a seasoned real estate investor? And you’ve done a ton of deals, but you’re sick and tired of paying high interest rates and you want to be in control of your business and you just want to get some more cheap money really, really fast. Well, if you answered yes to any of those three questions, don’t go anywhere because I’m getting ready to plug you into the money right now.

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the private money academy podcast. I’m Jay Conner, the private money authority. I’m the host of the show. And I want to welcome you here to the show here on the private money academy podcast. We obviously always talk about private money and getting deals funded, getting money for your deals. But in addition to that, I typically have an amazing guest and expert to join me here on the show. And today is no exception, but before I introduce you to my good friend and expert in this area of self storage, that you’re going to find amazing. I’ve got a free gift for you for just being here on the show. And that is, I just recently released my new book, which is titled where to get the money now, subtitle, how and where to get money for your real estate deals without relying on traditional or hard money lenders.

So here’s the deal folks. I just released this book hit number one on Amazon. And this book was show you. Step-by-step how I went from having no funding from ideals to over $2 million in less than 90 days and how you can get plugged into money as well. We’re not talking about traditional money. We’re not talking about institutional lenders, how to get money very, very fast at super cheap, low interest rates. And I’m glad to send this book to you for free, just cover delivery. You can get the book for free at www dot Jay Conner, J a y C o n n er.com forward slash book. Again, you can get the book, we’ll ship it right out to you@wwwdotjcounterjayconner.com forward slash book. And we’ll get you plugged into the funding for your deals right away. What, as I mentioned, I’ve got an amazing guest and a very, very close personal friend of mine on the show with me today, a little bit about him before I bring him on he and his affiliated companies, they focus in this area on the acquisition, the development and the syndicating of self storage facilities nationwide.

Now, my guests currently owns any operates over check this out 2 million, 200,000, my land’s square feet and over 13,000 units that is gotten nationwide. Well, not only does he do the business, but he also teaches and coaches other real estate investors that want to learn about self storage and how that works. His education company is self storage, investing.com, and it provides courses and tools and live events, coaching, and mentoring to help others launch like you self storage businesses to enjoy the lifestyle. And, you know, as my guest, a good friend is known to say many, many times, get in this business and you’ll be free from tenants free from toilets free from trash. Well, you know, one thing that he and I talk about, and he and I are in a high end mastermind group together, his various companies are also very mission focused. He’s got a heart of gold, he’s got a servant’s heart and he is so far to date. He’s funded the construction of 12 houses, and I’m very, very familiar with this project. 12 houses down in Mexico and the Dominican Republic by taking his staff, his partners, his friends, his business associates on their all expense paid mission trip to do houses for these people. Wow. What a service heart, where that my good friend, Scott Myers, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Meyer:

Hey Jay, it is a good to see you again, my friend, how are you?

Jay Conner:

I am doing fantastic. I know we’ve got a mastermind meeting coming up pretty soon out there in Scottsdale. Are you going to make that one or you don’t know?

Scott Meyer:

I am looking forward to it and I will attend to any, and all of those that will be held in Arizona because now I have a two kiddos that are going to grand canyon university in Phoenix. And so we’re going to be spending a lot of time out in Arizona.

Jay Conner:

Oh, that’s great. Well, Carol joy and I we’ve already got our plane tickets. We’ve got our hotel reservations. So I look forward to seeing you in Scottsdale in just a few short weeks, right around the corner.

Scott Meyer:

Likewise can’t wait. Absolutely.

Jay Conner:

Well, Scott, as I told everybody in the introduction, I mean your expertise, your wheelhouses self storage and self storage facilities, but before we get into that world and your arena, first of all, just tell everybody how you got into real estate.

Scott Meyer:

Yeah. Wow. I think probably like most people out there started with the single family house and I learned from, and many folks on here will this name and a whole lot won’t Carleton sheets, who was one of the grandfathers along with Ron Legrand and some of the others that taught people how to get into real estate. So I followed this program to buy houses, rehab them refund, and some rent them out and then replicate and do that over and over again. So the burn method before it was called the bird method. And so that’s how we got started bought a single family house. This was back in 1993 was the first one that I ever bought. It had an assumable VA mortgage on it, which I don’t think there’s any of those left out there any longer and allowed me to get in and just assume that mortgage with very little experience in the way of even credit history at the time, it was a pretty young guy at the time, as you can tell by my age now and doing the math.

So that’s how it started. And then we moved on to buying up more. We refinanced about two more houses than we need to fix them up refinance and buy more. So we had about 75 in 76 houses and didn’t really have the cashflow and the, the, you know, the freedom that we wanted that Carlton sheets had mentioned in the home study system. So we thought, well, economies of scale will fix this. So we started getting into apartments and buying several complexes around central Indiana, but same thing and just kind of bought us more tenants, toilets, trash headaches, and the business model just wasn’t right for us. We wanted to have time. We wanted the freedom that real estate brings. And so to do that in real estate, that means no tenants, no toilets. So that’s either parking lots or self storage, and you can’t really build a lot of value in, in parking lots.

And then we found, but once I dug into self storage, I realized that, ah, this is, this is a place I need to be. People don’t pay rent. You lock them out and you sell their stuff off and get paid. You turn it around by taking a blower and you blow the unit out with no paint, no carpet, no extensive clean-out or repairs. And once I more, the more I looked into the business, I really saw the light and decided that this is the path I wanted to take. So sold their houses, our apartments, and now we’ve gone just, you know, 100% into self storage made that transition about 2005 to where we are now, today, which is where you mentioned Jay, we, we buy existing facilities. Still. That same model is in place. We also convert industrial buildings, grocery stores, anything that is, can be repurposed into so storage, we’ll buy it and convert it. And then we build from the ground up and we do a lot of this on by partnering and doing joint ventures and then syndicating the private equity, which is where you come in, Jay and you know, all too well, what that looks like and how we can leverage other people’s money and bring them along as limited partners to enjoy in the growth in this incredible business. So I hope that wasn’t longer than what you were looking for, but that’s, that’s my story.

Jay Conner:

No, that was perfect. Well, tell us the story about your very first self storage facility that you got into and, and what lessons did you learn from that first deal?

Scott Meyer:

Yeah, so the F the very first facility that I got into was a, that we were sending out mailers to facility owners, just like we all do in real estate to the asset class that we’re in. And we ran across some business owners and they were getting a business, a divorce. They were partners in a concrete business and things weren’t going so well. And they wanted, they were parting ways. And this facility, they owned together as well. Well, they, as what happens, unfortunately in the worst is the other one, one side wants to hurt the other. And the other one definitely wants to destroy the other one. And so that’s what they were doing. And they were destroying the value of the facility in the meantime. And so what that meant is we were able to get into this a facility for it, was it appraised for $800,000 more than what the selling price was?

And they just had to get out from under the note, because those two had done such a good job of fighting each other, that the bank was about ready to take the facility back. So I partnered, I partnered up with a gentleman. We came in at 50, 50 cash and both on the balance sheet and excuse me, on the loan request and ended up moving forward on this first property, by taking the existing tenants and raising the rates, which they hadn’t been raised in 10 years, we let them manage, well, let me see. We didn’t let her, we freed up her future to pursue other career opportunities and put a kiosk in place because we don’t have to manage these facilities with a person on site. And then we bought the land next door and expanded and built that up and leased that up as well.

So I sold off to my partner eventually. And that leads to, I guess, the second part of your question, Jay, which is what did I learn from this? Well, first of all, I, I understood the power of leveraging and bringing partners in to projects. But I also, the lesson I learned is that I, I really want to be in that manager position. I wanted to have that control rather than 50 50, and it’s not a control issue. It’s just that, you know, once I learned about syndication and moving on to other projects, that I can be the syndicator, the promoter, and the person who is calling the shots, and I can bring in limited partners for sometimes their balance sheets to sign on the loan as well. But mostly for the equity that is, that is required to get into a facility. So that was probably the biggest lesson. And I also learned, sometimes you shouldn’t bring people that are close to you or friends into a business as well. Sometimes it doesn’t always turn out well. Yeah. Yes.

Jay Conner:

I’ve been, I’ve been down that road myself as well. So to make sure everybody understands what you’re talking about, what do you mean by syndication? What’s that look like? And what’s the benefits of it.

Scott Meyer:

Yeah. So in the true sec definition, and I am paraphrasing, anytime you bring two or more people together into a project, and in this instance, a real estate investment where one person is, is active, doing all the heavy lifting, doing all the work, and the other person is bringing money and they’re passive. They don’t have a hand in making decisions or doing any of the project management in a project. Then, then you’ve created a security and then it’s governed by the securities and exchange commission. And so they state that you have to file that, and you have to register with the, depending on the fund or the entity that you set up that has to be registered. So for us, that is a true, so for us, there was one person, as I just mentioned me that I am the promoter. I am the active person on the investment.

Whereas I bring in then a lot of private equity, a lot of limited partners that come into the project. They don’t lend a hand. They’re not involved in the decision making process. And what they’re lending is money into the project. They’re investing into the project with me. And so their role and responsibility is to wire, the funds to close the project. And my responsibility is to do everything else, report back to them, the progress show, the projections and how we are exceeding, hopefully meeting, or if we are underperforming on our projections and then send out to our K ones at the end of the year, because they do become owners of this entity. And they get to participate in the upside as well as in the depreciation as well. So that’s, and I guess a limited sense without getting too far in the weeds, Jay, is, is the definition of a syndication and how we go about approaching the market. Yeah.

Jay Conner:

So, you know, in the world of single family houses, there’s multiple exit strategies. There’s multiple strategies of what someone’s going to do with that property after they invest in it, you know, you can, you can buy a single family house, you can fix it up, you can flip it, you can wholesale houses and, you know, wholesale houses out through other real estate investors. You can buy houses and you can fix them up and you can hold them, you know, for the longterm. So compare self storage to what I just did with single family houses. Are there all these different strategies as to how you can go about the self storage business. And second part of that question is if there are different strategies, how do you decide which one you’re going to do?

Scott Meyer:

Yeah, I’d say property is property. And, you know, in a general sense, and you can do all of the above. You know, we buy them and wholesale them, or sometimes a wholesale without us ever taking ownership or taking deed to the property. You can buy them, you can fix them up, turn around and flip them. You can buy them and turn them around partially, and then sell them off and call it a flip or non you sell them to the next person down the road. That’s going to take it the rest of the way, the way that we do it is typically we’re a longer-term hold three to five years. That gives us time to in an existing facility, really turn it around, raise rates, make the improvements, and reduce the expenses as much as possible to maximize the net operating income and then sell it for maximum dollar, our conversions and development.

You know, those projects take roughly four to five years to either buy a building, say a vacant grocery store and convert it to self storage, and then start from ground zero. And at least it up to 80, 85% occupancy and bring in our limited partners and allow them to have a payday and an exit that is comparable to if they were to invest in any other type of entity, a business over that time, and really focusing on the internal rate of return and the same goes for development. So in terms of an exit strategy, it’s a little more difficult in, in the way that we head into those larger projects with our partners in that we can’t do a 10 31, unless everybody decides to go along with us into the next project, which obviously they’re not going to. So at that point we will sell and that we will take our profits off the table.

And then we will move into the next project for our limited partners. For the most part, they are investing through a retirement vehicle like a self-directed IRA or a solo or a real estate 401k. So they don’t really have those tax consequences at, at, at the exit. We also are looking at in terms of an exit strategy. And I guess to back up a step, you know, Jay, I think you, and hopefully everybody on this call recognizes that you, you should always look at the exit strategy or determine what your exit strategy is before you get into a project. It’s not a good plan to just don’t say, well, there’s a good deal. I’m just going to buy it and figure it out later. You can find yourself, maybe a do not, you know, don’t want her later on down the road, or you sit back and take a look at your empire and you realize what a mess.

I can’t even manage this because I never paid any attention to what I was doing. So every time we hit into a project, you know, we identify if it’s a good deal, are we going to keep it? You know, if we’re going to flip this thing in a year, then we’ve got some, you know, capital short-term capital gains taxes. That’s a consideration. If we own it solely, then we can do a 10 31 into something else on. Do we want to do that three years from now? And I’m saying at any point in time, do we want to do that two or three years from now? Where, what are the interest rates going to be and what our cap rates going to be, and how do we expect the market and the economy? What’s it gonna look like? So we’re, we’re always looking six months a year down the road, five years down the road and anticipating what’s going on with the market, meaning interest rates and our capitalization rates, which is how we value these facilities.

And then overall, does this really fit in our business plan? I suffer like everybody from shiny object itis, and I want to buy them all, you know, if somebody else buys a self-storage facility and develop those one, and I’m going down the road, I was just like, that should have been mine. I should have built that. I should have bought that. And it’s a, it’s a real struggle. But if we get into that, you know, we can paint ourselves into a corner if we get into that situation where we just, you know, every once in a while we have to say no. Yeah, for sure.

Jay Conner:

So just to make sure everybody knows before, anybody’s got to jump off a listing here to the podcast. How can people get in contact with you and your companies, Scott, to learn more about what you do and how you can help them in this area of self storage?

Scott Meyer:

Sure. So we go into self storage, investing.com. That is the mothership, and there’s a links to our other websites that focus on the passive investing side of the business. But self-storage investing.com is really the mothership. And, and this is where we’ve been at this longer than anybody in the business and teaching people the right way to go about investing in self storage. I’m just in hopes that once again, you know, a rising tide raises all ships and so that we want everybody to be as educated as possible to go out into the marketplace before they do this to avoid any mistakes. And then also, you know, that just kind of makes it more difficult for the rest of us, that there are a lot of gunslingers out there that aren’t really doing their due diligence and doing things the right way. So that is our, our main purpose in educating people in the business. Cause it just makes it easier for all of us to conduct business in this incredible niche. Exactly.

Jay Conner:

So if you’re remotely interested folks and connecting them with Scott and his team, that website again is www dot self storage, investing.com, self storage, investing.com. We’re coming out here, hopefully on the other side of COVID and the pandemic and all that stuff. What are you seeing in the self storage industry? I mean, overall nationwide is the industry growing, how has COVID affected self storage?

Scott Meyer:

Yeah. Self storage is on a tear right now. I mean, if you look at the asset classes in real estate, no matter what stat you look at in terms of, you know, which asset class has done well, of course I’m biased, but the stats don’t lie, self storage and industrial are right up at the top. I think data centers may be up there as well. Industrial has done really well with Amazon expanding and, and the supporters of the Amazon and the distribution centers that are now coming down to the smaller market size. And, and as we see, unfortunately, the slow death of retail, the, the industrial side and the industrial sector has benefited greatly and self storage because we are heading into a time where we’re heading into a recession. Again, we also have seen now people come home from work and they had to clear out the dining room, the spare bedroom, the spare of family room, or living room and create a workspace for one of the income earners.

And sometimes too, they also last year during the lockdown, you know, when everybody was sent home from school, the colleges shut down and, and the kids had to put all their stuff into storage again, until they were able to go back. The kids that were in K through 12 came home, and we also had to make room in our homes to do school at home as well. So clearing out more furniture to make all of that happen. And then unfortunately there’s a whole lot of businesses that immediately when, when the lockdown started, it just went under because you know, customers are go figure on the lifeblood of their business. And if they couldn’t do it online, they went under. And so their inventory machinery and furniture, business furniture went into storage. And so, you know, we see this was somewhat of a microcosm of what we see during a recession and self storage really benefits during a recession because businesses downsize and put their things in storage, individuals downsized during a recession, they may have to move in with somebody else, a friend or move back home.

And so their extra stuff goes into storage. And so we, we, we spritz traditionally has always done better. You know, we go up to the right during times people buy more stuff and they store more stuff. That’s the nature of what we do here in this country. And if that’s you on behalf of the industry, I thank you for that mentality in this country. But during a recession, you know, we get the hockey stick effect. And then that’s when banks slow down development slows down of all sorts and then demand for self storage goes up. And so that’s what we saw during the pandemic last year. And 2020 was an absolute banner year for our industry. We have been, we have been contactless and touchless since before it was cool to be contactless and touchless using kiosks to rent a unit, much like a kiosk because self storage, you know, renting a unit is a very low labor intensive transaction that can be done over the internet.

And it can be done by way of a cell phone access to our facility, our software, getting a gate code and even a key fob and access on the phone to access a unit can all be done by way of a smartphone as well. So J we don’t, we don’t celebrate recessions personally, nor my company. We don’t celebrate pandemics for now shakes, but our, our industry, I’m, I’m thankful for the industry that we’re in because we have benefited with a huge wind in our sail, not only during a recession as we’re going to pet into again, but then the pandemic, which kind of accelerated that has really benefited our industry. Well, you know,

Jay Conner:

No business thrives, unless it’s solving a lot of people’s problems. And that’s what, and that’s what you and your company and the industry is doing. I mean, due to the pandemic, you got all this and increased demand for people needing to put their stuff somewhere. And unless your industry comes along and provides a place to put their stuff, then you know, you’re not a, you’re not solving that problem. So it’s what is, so let’s say someone is, and I’ll tell you, it’s the same thing as going on around here. It’s like here in my little area where Carol joy and I live total, total area of only 40,000 people, I know of four brand new self storage facilities that are under construction right now, four of them. And we already got them everywhere. It’s like my lands, people must have a whole, much more stuff. It’s just like, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. How are you? Are you doing new construction these days? Are you still focusing on existing facilities?

Scott Meyer:

Well, a little bit of both, we are, we were really focused on in 2020 on construction. We had some projects already in the pipeline and then also picked up some others from some folks that while we’re just kind of taking the ball the rest the way down the field, some folks that had some stalls due to due to COVID and some funding issues. And so absolutely we’ve been known developing for a number of years. Now, we’ve got the team, we’ve got the experience. We’re in several markets where we know where the demand is, and we just know it’s a business model that we can replicate over and over again, that allows us to look at a market. And, and Jay, if I could, just the reason why we see so many opportunities and why you’re seeing the say, four facilities going up in your town is a lot of folks will think, well, wait, I see these things everywhere.

Isn’t the market saturated. And you know, how can we possibly, you know, have enough demand for this, but, you know, when we go into a market and we’re looking at it in a place that potentially maybe good for developing a self storage facility, there’s a lot of research that goes into that. First of all, our market is really five mile radius. That’s all the further people are going to travel to a self storage facility from their home is about five miles. And so within that five miles, if the facility is the 1, 2, 3, 4 facilities are full, have a waiting list. And the raising rates every three or four months, then we know what equilibrium is in a market. And it’s, you know, anywhere from five and a half to six and a half, you know, five and a half to six and a half square foot per person.

And anytime that we’re below that if there’s only three or four square foot per person, we know that there’s a lot of demand in that market. So that, and rental rates will dictate when we’re going to go in and build. So it’s not a build it and they will come or hope that they will come and just, you know, hope is not a strategy. And we spend millions of dollars on these facilities. And so that is the reason why we’re seeing a lot about construction. And so we absolutely are bullish because of all the factors that I just mentioned that are, that are occurring in the market right now, which is creating a huge surge in demand for storage.

Jay Conner:

If someone is brand new to self storage, and they’re really interested in exploring it and, you know, really want to see if this makes sense for them, what’s the best way for a brand new person to even get started? Where do they start looking?

Scott Meyer:

Well, I think it starts with, with learning so that they know what they are looking for. And so no shameless plug, but we just got a lot of free resources on our website. Again, just to help people, you don’t have to spend a dime on it, just so you know, what you’re looking at and looking for, then begin to seek out if you’re a part of a real estate investor group in your city and there’s people that are in stores and then strike up a conversation. I I’d asked you to ask them to go out to lunch, to pick their brain, but we know that there’s a whole lot of folks that maybe aren’t interested in doing that these days, but if you can strike up a friendship, get into a conversation or even a subgroup, and some of these other real estate investor circles, or online with several meetups around at your area, then that’s the best way to get plugged in and just sit back and be a consumer of the information and to be a student of the industry to know what’s going on.

There’s I was in single family homes for a number of years. I was in commercial real estate being multifamily. And although a lot of that skillset applies and I’m looking at leverage and cap rates and underwriting, it’s a different business. And so to understand the nuances is really key before you take a take that next and first step, and we’ve seen, as you can imagine in our, on the education side of our business, we’ve seen a lot of folks that have taken that first step and they, and they stepped in a lot of do-do and create a lot of mistakes and messes for themselves. And men have come to us to help them unwind it and get out of it or to survive that one, you know, lose the battle, but win the war by understanding what it takes to succeed on the next one.

So, and then temper that with, you know, don’t, don’t analyze too much or, you know, analysis paralysis by analysis and analysis that causes paralysis. You, you, you know, the saying that to spend too much time researching before you do actually pull the trigger. So learn about the business, get some good advisors and mentors around you before, you know, to put some eyeballs on your underwriting and your offers, and obviously the good legal team or, or a, an attorney to look at your contracts before moving forward. Those are probably the best ways to Intuit, to avoid getting into a catastrophe. My

Jay Conner:

Good friend and guest today is Scott Myers, founder of self storage, investing.com. Be sure and check out his website for the free training and resources that he has there. One last question for you, Scott. And that is what are the most common mistakes or some of the most common mistakes that new real estate investors in self storage makes.

Scott Meyer:

Yeah, I’m writing a book on it as we speak, that’s going to be out before long. So I got 101 of them because that’s the title of the book. So I’ll, I’ll focus on how about the overarching one. And that is I think, and perhaps I’m guilty of this, you know, we’ve been teaching and training people how to do this for 16 years. And, you know, we, we, we state that it is a very simple and predictable business model because it’s compared to other businesses. It is, it’s a simpler and predictable business model. You know, we know the numbers, we know the equilibriums and we can go into a, an existing facility or a development project and make our projections and darn near hit our marks and, and beat them almost every time. But so I, I say that I’m, I’m a product of that.

And that is, I think people have heard that enough. And they’ve heard that, you know, this is a simple, less moving parts. You know, you don’t have the rehabs, you know, lock them out. They don’t pay their money and then you just blow it out and you’re done. You move on to the next and all that’s true, but it’s not a hobby. I mean, this is a business and you have to treat it as such and you have to walk the four corners of your business, and you have to understand it before you get in you. As most people know that are in commercial real estate, you make a $10,000 mistake in your underwriting, meaning you miss some expenses by 5,000 and you missed them. You know, they overstated the income for late fees and other things that shouldn’t have been counted. Well, a $10,000 mistake and underwriting is a hundred to $120,000 in value that you would over pay for a facility.

So you need to understand the nuances, how to value them, how to underwrite them before putting offers, in understanding how to analyze the market. And then for gosh sakes, I’m you don’t take your hands off the wheel and assume that this is a mailbox business because no rental businesses, I don’t care who you said listen to, or, or who says it. It’s not, it’s a business and a business needs to be tended. So a long-winded answer to your question, Jay. But the mistake that people make is that they think, and they hear and assume that it is a simple business because it’s simpler than what they were doing before, but it, it means that they have to understand it and they have to tend it. And, and you do have to farm the business once you own it. And constantly be working, looking at ways to grow occupancy, to grow rates and reduce expenses. And that is perpetual, and that is on a regular basis.

Jay Conner:

In other words, folks, don’t start doing this business without joining hips with somebody that knows what they’re doing, right. And of course, Scott Myers is the expert in this arena. Scott final comments and advice.

Scott Meyer:

Final comments change is good to see again, my friend, I can’t wait to, to see each other. I can’t hold that back. And so you always make me smile and I’m looking forward to hopefully getting together and having dinner together as well with you and Carol joy. And maybe we can get that old gray hair gentlemen, to pay our bill next time again, too, that might be nice and fight from that gang. It’s an exciting time to be in a, in real estate. There’s certainly a lot of changes and there’s some potential threats that are out there, but it’s when everybody’s running out that you should be not just running in again and shooting from the hip, but understanding, you know, what it means to be in the real estate asset class and investing the way and where you should be investing. But now it’s absolutely an exciting time to be doing so. So with that, just great to be here. I’m thankful for the industry of the real estate industry and self storage and a happy to help and assist anyone anywhere along the way that we can. And just be kind, just, just choose to be kind how’s that after a long weekend, so far, and it’s only Tuesday, I’ve had some difficult conversations. So how about I leave it with, let’s just choose to be kind to one another.

Jay Conner:

I love it. There you have it. Folks. My good friend and expert in self storage, Scott Meyers, visit him at www dot self storage, investing.com. Well, so glad to have everyone here on the show. I’m Jay Conner, the private money authority wishing you all the best here’s to taking your business to the next level. And we’ll see you right here on the next private money academy podcast.

[ssvgawara]

Haikyuu boys and some oddly specific crime they’d commit

a/n: I come back and the first thing I write is a shitpost!! enjoy </3 tw for drugs, murder, alcohol and general crime committing xoxo

Karasuno

Daichi- he’s a cop sorry that’s all there is to it man

Suga- Suga has multiple charges of 1st-degree murder against him but they can’t seem to find his identity so he continues committing murder and will continue until he gets caught or ends up murdering enough people to be put in a position of power

Asahi- everyone is probably like “Oh Asahi is innocent” NO. He has learned that his slightly scary face will let him get away with a lot, he is buying alcohol illegally because he looks old enough to, and he’s buying so much other shit and just getting away with it

Nishinoya- This man gives fucking pimp vibes I can just see him in the big leopard print fur coat with a pretty girl in his lap and he calls himself big poppa but no one else will

Tanaka- Drug dealer vibes, probably runs an entire fucking drug ring with his sister and not just a Lil weed these mfkas have the hard shit too like you could probably buy meth from them, he’s not using it but it’s good business

Ennoshita, Kinoshita, and Narita- They literally rob a bank they have an entire scheme and get away with multiple bank robberies and this goes on for MONTHS

Kageyama- We know he’s volleyball smart but otherwise he’s so mfing stupid and I love him for it but he is a chronic shoplifter. Just picks something up and takes it, has walked out of a store without paying for an entire bed set once and got away with it somehow so idk props to him

Hinata- He is the little guy in any heist situation, he fits anywhere so he can sneak in and out the best, he gave himself the stupid ass code name tiny giant but everyone goes with it because somehow he is the best

Tsukishima- armed robbery, but he doesn’t have a gun just a knife like he’s tall and as an attitude, a knife will get him whatever he needs he doesn’t need the gun

Yamaguchi- He runs a catfishing scheme where he pretends to be a naive girl, scams old men out of their money, and then ghosts them and I think it’s what he deserves let him carry on especially because no one would believe it’s him. Also not really like a crime crime but still a crime in a way

Kiyoko- She kills men and I know it, Queen Kiyoko ending the patriarchy one shitty man at a time like she only kills men who deserve it bc some have rights.

Yachi- She’s too anxious to commit an in-person crime so she does a lot of cybercrime, hacking government databases and releasing info to the people, truly the anonymous we deserve

Saeko- She’s running that drug ring with Tanaka, and she loves it because there’s a thrill to it even though yknow she’s dealing literal meth but like its fine plus she loves rocking people’s shit when they get too handsy, which bring me to my next point underground MMA Saeko, like the illegal one with no rules yeah <3

Ukai- this man probably sells all kinda shit to minors that he shouldn’t he is so unbothered a 7-year-old could probably walk in ask for a pack of camels and get them and leave before he noticed what was going on.

Takeda- Did y’all see how scared Hinata was when Takeda gave him that lecture? This dude could kidnap someone and scare them into giving all the information he needed, a legend truly

Aoba Johsai

Oikawa- took steroids one time. And of course in sports, that’s not allowed. But he only did it once and regretted it for months afterward. Never told anyone and was just relieved he didn’t have to piss in a cup and have someone find out.

Matsukawa- Without hesitation, I know this man takes dead people’s bones and sells them on the internet. Has dubbed himself the bone man and he feels so much power when someone buys a femur or sumn. It’s kinda funny honestly he has a hoard of bones to sell, his fave is the pelvis.

Hanamaki- He’s in between jobs because he stole money from his last job, like he said he was sorry he just needed a little extra for gas but was sad to find out that’s a literal crime and he was laundering money.

Iwaizumi- he’s a street racer, like the fast and furious style and it’s so sexy of him like late-night races ugh to be in an expensive fast car with him where he has one hand on my thigh okay that’s enough of that.

Kunimi- Look me in the eye and tell me he does not do drugs. He does and if you don’t believe me you are wrong and I will fight you on this one. 

Kyotani- If there is a crime he will commit it for fun. Like he will do it with no hesitation. He has a record longer than twilight and I’m not sure how he is not in prison actually nvm he escaped and is  a wanted criminal lol

Shiritorizawa

Ushijima- Assault, he just reeks of getting into bar fights when he’s absolutely wasted. Like he most likely didn’t start it but he will be finishing it

Tendou- grave robbing, he just goes into the cemetery picked the oldest plots, and gets to digging. Has made thousands on dead people jewelry and probably won’t get caught, like besides the groundskeeper there’s no security he will never stop.

Semi- he breaks copyright laws on the daily. He’s sampling music in his all the time but he’s doing it so sneakily it’s fine its what deserves stream his band on Spotify right now,

Shirabu- His bangs are criminal enough. No, but he has stolen drugs from the hospital before he just wanted to try the Xanax, and yeah he could just write himself a prescription for it nut like it’s so easy to just go get some and no report it so that’s what he did.

Goshiki- y’all want me to say arson don’t you?? Fine. He commits arson multiple times and kills 7 people with fire before getting arrested and he doesn’t even feel bad so in prison he probably fucking runs a gang he is crazy.

Nekoma

Kuroo- he is a capitalist and class traitor and that’s crime enough I don’t care is he’s attractive or rich, He commits crimes daily by just existing but I still love him anyway.

Kai- Could not commit a crime he just wants to garden and live his life. Jk there’s at minimum one body in that garden let him kill a man he deserves it just let him have one dead body

Yaku- he keyed someone’s car once just because they pissed him off. Was it kuroo? Yes. But that’s fine because he also keyed Lev’s car but blamed lev for keying kuroo’s and Kuroo for keying Lev’s. He just wants to watch the world burn.

Kenma- cyberbullying but man he is mean. Like no bars held we will dig into every insecurity he can and that shit hurts and he doesn’t even feel bad about it he will just be as mean as he can if you’re not careful

Lev- his crime is being tall and dumb also doesn’t understand the economy and prints counterfeit money because why can’t we print more money? The government should get on that.

Inuoka- He released all the animals from a zoo, like snuck in one night and just let them all free, I’m surprised the tiger didn’t eat him but hey the animals are free, there’s still some missing uh oh he’s very proud of himself for it. After the rush, he starts sneaking into shelters and freeing all the dogs and cats

Yamamoto and Fukunaga- Have egged a house before, it was Kuroo’s he deserves all this bullying and you can’t stop me.

Date Tech

Aone- Criminal Conspiracy, sure he had an entire foolproof plan to get away with the perfect crime but someone found out, and now his plans are ruined, damn </3 and no one ever suspects the quiet guy either.

Futakuchi- Having a prostitute, he just wanted some company like mans is lonely so he paid a girl to just spend a Lil time with him it’s all good.

Fukurodani

Bokuto- I know we all haha funny laugh at tax evader bokuto and sure maybe he evades his taxes but he’s also committed vehicular manslaughter, he cannot drive and has killed someone with his car maybe even multiple someones but he always drives off in a panic because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Akaashi- Hasn’t actively committed a crime but has been an accomplice in every vehicular manslaughter Bokuto has committed why the fuck does he keep letting bokuto drive? He really needs to stop that.

Konoha- A master scammer he is so convincing everyone gives him money even if they’re a little sus because he’s just that good each scheme is so convincing.

Inarizaki

Kita- He grows weed, you can’t tell me those rice fields are just for rice he’s got all this space he is growing marijuana and selling it, let him do it I want him to be my plug.

Atsumu- "What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning, the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier."

Osamu- resisting arrest. He just said no and ran. Granted he shouldn’t have punched the cop in the first place to have to be arrested but like that’s not the point here.

Aran- accidental child abandonment, like he just forgot he was babysitting and left the kid alone for like a day. He felt terrible but he still forgot the kid and now is fearful of parenthood

Suna- owns an illegal weapon, like he just never registered it and keeps it around and would use it if needed Suna please just point the weapon at me maybe

Others

Terushima- Graffiti, he loves painting on the walls of buildings and tagging them, has so much spraypaint and his day isn’t complete if he doesn’t tag at least one building or train car.

Daishou- Public intoxication- he got a little too fucked up and stripped on the street he will forever have to live with everyone knowing he has an ass tattoo like damn bruh

Sakusa- Perjury he simply wanted to get out of court so he said some shit so he could leave granted he lied under oath but whatever, did they ever find out? No, so he’s fine and he’d do it again if it meant he could leave faster. Like sure he was a witness to a murder but bruh he pretends he does not see.

Hoshihumi- driving without a license he simply thought you didn’t need one because why do you need a piece of plastic to say you can drive a car like??? Just know how to drive it.

[crystalstar8]

Eye of the Sky

Ch. 3

Pairing: Namjoon x oc

Genre: heist au, action

word count: 1,245

warnings: action, violence, gun violence, car chases, car crashes, swearing, blood probably

notes: heist au, action, adventure, crime, enemies to lovers, ooc namjoon, because he has his license lol

Summary: Ten years ago, Namjoon's father was killed by his best friend and partner in crime, A man who now goes by the name Hawthorne. Now, Namjoon wants to get into the family business in order to avenge his father's death. After finding the man who killed his father, Namjoon builds a team and creates an elaborate plan to finally take the man down.

But will they be able to get through Hawthorne's state-of-the-art security system? And will they succeed with a mysterious assassin chasing them? Let's just say, it's a good thing Namjoon's team members keep surprising him with useful skills.

@mozy-j  @strawberriewithchocolate-blog @daechwitad-2

“Remember to practice your forms before next week, because we’ll be learning new stuff!” Jungkook shouted as the kids ran to their parents at the front door. Jimin and Jungkook had long since removed their belts, letting their jackets hang open because they were sweaty.

“Excuse me, Sensei,” one of the mothers said, approaching Jungkook and Jimin, the two teachers. Her six-year-old daughter was clinging to her pantleg, her brand-new green belt clutched in her hand. “I hate to do this, Minji really loves coming here every week, but money is getting a bit tight these days. We’re going to have to cut corners where we can in order to just pay rent-“

Jimin didn’t let her continue. There were no other children around with their parents, but he still lowered his voice when he said, “We can give you a few weeks for free.”

“Yeah, Minji is one of our best students, we can tell she loves it,” said Jungkook. “She’s the youngest in the class to earn a green belt.”

“Are you sure?” Minji’s mother asked. “I hate to take advantage…”

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” said Jungkook. “We know how the economy is these days, if you need to take some time to get your feet back on the ground, we understand.”

“Thank you! Thank you both so much!” she said, bowing deeply. After saying their goodbyes and congratulating Minji on her green belt one last time, the front doors finally fell shut.

“How long do you think we can keep this place open?” Jungkook asked.

“I’m sorry, I know we promised we wouldn’t let this happen again but-“ Jimin began.

“No, it’s okay. I was going to do the exact same thing if you hadn’t,” said Jungkook. “I can always ask my cousin if I can borrow money…”

Just then, the doors opened, letting in a gust of wind. It blew their jackets and hair back in slow motion as they turned to see who was entering.

Jin was the first to walk in, followed by Namjoon and Taehyung.

“I heard you needed to borrow my money?” said Jin.

“Were you listening at the door or something?” Jungkook asked in shock.  

“No, my money senses were tingling,” said Jin.  

Namjoon pushed to the front and said, “Before the bickering starts, we should tell you why we’re here. Jin told us that you two were martial arts masters and gymnasts. We could really use you on our team.”

“Who are you guys?” asked Jimin.

“Oh, pardon us,” said Jin. “I’m Jungkook’s cousin, Kim Seokjin. You might know me from my latest movie, ‘A Heart’s Desires: Fate Unknown: A sequel’. And this is Namjoon and Taehyung. Guys, this is Jeon Jeongguk and Park Jimin.”

“Is there somewhere more private where we could talk?” asked Namjoon. “Anyone could walk through those doors.”

“I’ll go lock them,” said Jimin, running off to the doors.

“We have a job for you both,” said Namjoon. “It will be dangerous, but if everything works out right, which it will, it will pay very, very well.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

               “Park Jimin…Park Jimin…” Namjoon paced his apartment, mumbling the name over and over again. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

               Jin shrugged and continued flipping through an Italian Vogue magazine from his spot on the couch. Taehyung had gone back to the museum. Jungkook and Jimin had agreed to do the job. Jimin was especially enthusiastic about it, eyes lighting up when he heard the name of the item they would be stealing. Jimin didn’t even know them. Why was he so enthusiastic about the job? It was suspicious.

               Namjoon went to his laptop and began a search for Park Jimin. Not much showed up on social media accept the website for their dojo. All of a sudden, the screen went dark and green text began typing itself at the top.

               You might want to refrain from doing a Naver search for your teammates on a laptop riddled with porn viruses.

               Namjoon stared at his laptop with wide eyes and mouth hanging open for several seconds before saying, “Hey, Jin. You might want to look at this.”

               Jin tossed his magazine onto the coffee table then walked over. As soon as he caught a glimpse of the screen, he choked on a laugh, slapping a hand over his mouth. Namjoon swatted at him. The green text erased itself and then began typing again.

               I know what you’re doing. I know what your plan is. You won’t succeed, but you will with my help.

               “Try to type back,” said Jin. Namjoon started typing.

               Namjoon: Who are you?

               ?: be at your apartment at 7:30 pm tonight and you’ll find out.

               ?: make sure you’re alone.

               Namjoon and Jin stared at the screen for several seconds before Jin spoke.

               “I’ll be on standby,” he said. “I’ll wait in my car in the garage downstairs. Just call me if you need backup.”

               “Good idea,” said Namjoon. “But I have a good feeling about this.”

               “Oh yeah?”

               “Yeah,” said Namjoon. “I think we just got ourselves a hacker.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

               Yoongi had been keeping an eye on Namjoon and his little escapades for a while now, but he had never seen the inside of the man’s apartment. Finally seeing it in person, it was obvious Namjoon came from money. The décor was obviously professionally done and everything looked expensive and high-end. Even the coffee he was sipping from was better than anything Yoongi could afford in his budget.

               “Are you sure you don’t want cream and sugar?” Namjoon asked, rummaging through his smart fridge.

                “This is fine,” Yoongi said as Namjoon fumbled with a jar of pickles falling from one of the door shelves. He caught it before it could hit the floor then closed the fridge.

               “You said I needed your help?” Namjoon asked, turning to face Yoongi, who was sitting at the breakfast bar, his laptop open beside him.

               “How much do you know about Hawthorne’s security system?” Yoongi asked.

               “I know that it uses state of the art technology and that it’s hack proof,” said Namjoon. “That’s why I wasn’t sure what you meant when you said-“

               “Nothing is hack proof,” said Yoongi, taking a sip of coffee before continuing. “The thing is, though, I need codes. And those only exist in the lab his tech was created.”

               “How do we get into the lab? How do we know where to find the codes? Are they on a flash drive or something?” Namjoon asked.

               “Probably,” Yoongi said with a shrug. “We can just ask the person who made his security system. I know her.”

               Namjoon’s eyes lit up. “How? How do you know she’ll help us?”

               “Because Hawthorne had her fired after she tried to tell him there were still flaws in the design,” said Yoongi. “Not enough to be a detriment to Hawthorne, so he took it anyway. He ran her out of the country and everything. I was thinking I’d set up a meeting with her for you. You can ask her about where to find her old office and stuff.”

               “How do you know her?” Namjoon asked.

               “We went to college together,” said Yoongi. “And I…also used to work at the lab with her. It was a long time ago. I didn’t stay long before quitting and going freelance.”

               “Well, when can we meet?” asked Namjoon.

               Yoongi hid a smirk in his coffee cup and said, “I’ll give her a call.”

[ot3tropetober]

Fic: A Bushel And A Peck

AU:  Eliot runs an apple orchard. @aimlessglee  [AO3]

“What the hell is this?” Eliot asked, but he took the folder Hardison was handing him.

“Flavor,” Hardison said. “Background. Worldbuilding. Just read it, okay? I spend a lot of damn time on these aliases. You need to know who you are if we have to deploy them.”

Eliot flipped through the file. “Why is there a picture of me holding a basket of apples?”

“Just read it!” Hardison said.

Jeremiah Atherton, Jem to absolutely everyone or suffer the consequences, stood at the booth at the entrance to his family’s orchard. Momma and Pops had finally taken the plunge and bought a place down in Florida for the winter. The days were still sunlit and warm, but the nights were getting nippy, and they’d headed south a few weeks ago, promising to be back in the spring. They’d earned it, he thought. He smiled at the pretty blonde beside him - he’d known Heather since they were kids, even babysat her a few times when their parents went out and did stuff together. She made the best apple cider doughnuts in the county, and her pies were melt-in-your-mouth good. Their families had worked together a long time. It was a solid partnership, kind of part of his inheritance, and only he knew if he had a couple of soft thoughts about her every one in a while.

“Is that supposed to be Parker?” Eliot asked.

“Yes, it’s Parker,” Hardison said.

“Apple orchard, huh,” Eliot said. “Kinda…not very tough. Why can’t I run cattle?”

“Damn, Eliot, do you know the kind of effort it takes to keep a small operation running in this economy?” Hardison scowled. “Cows take care of themselves. Trees don’t. Also you can’t run cattle like that in New England.”

“Huh,” Eliot said, and went back to the file.

“Think it’s gonna be a good weekend?” Jem asked her.

Heather grinned. “It’s always a good weekend in the orchard.” She gestured around her. “Sun’s out. Nice and cool. People are gonna come pick a ton of apples and eat a bunch of doughnuts.”

“And they’ll drink cider,” Jem told her, hefting a gallon jug in each hand. “Don’t forget about the cider.”

“I never could,” Heather promised.

“It’s farm fresh,” he said.

“Honey, I know,” she said, putting her hand over his. “Why do you think I started making doughnuts? I wanted to get out of cider pressing.”

“‘Scuse me,” somebody said. They looked up to see a very tall, very handsome Black man dressed in a v-neck sweater that clung to the muscles of his chest, an expensive coat, and a scarf.

“Uh huh,” Eliot said. I see you.“

"What?” Hardison asked, all innocence.

“Hey, man, what can I do for you?” Jem said.

“I’m here to pick apples,” the guy said. “I kinda thought that was what people did here?”

“Weren’t you here last weekend?” Heather asked suddenly. She leaned her elbow on the counter and cupped her chin in her hand. “You were. You bought a dozen doughnuts and a half-gallon of cider.”

The guy smiled at her. “Good memory. I was, and I did. But you make a couple of pies and a batch of applesauce and boom, you need more apples.”

“And the weekend before that,” Heather said.

“I…like apples?” the guy said.

“We should make you a punch card or something,” Jem teased. “Tell you what.” He took one of the orchard’s business cards from a rack and scribbled on the back of it. “Come four weekends and I’ll give you a free peck the fifth time.” He held out the card, and the guy took it and looked at it fondly before he tucked it in his pocket.

“Deal,” the guy said.

“Take a doughnut,” Heather urged, wrapping one in a napkin as Jem pulled a basket off the stack and put it on the counter. “On me. You’ll need your energy.”

“Thanks,” the guy said. He smiled at them as he took the basket and the doughnut.

“Hey, man, what’s your name?” Jem called.

“Alistair,” the guy said. “Alistair Weaver.”

“What are you in this fantasy, some kind of fancy city lawyer?” Eliot asked.

“Well, yeah,” Hardison said. “That’s kind of how it works.”

Alistair did come back the next weekend, and then the weekend after that. They had a nice conversation every time Alistair showed up at the booth, which he did more and more often, coming back for a refreshing glass of cider or one of Heather’s sandwiches or a bag of cinnamon almonds. Jem found he was looking forward to seeing him. This time, Alistair was in a more casual outfit: a fleece and fitted jeans. He looked good, sophisticated in a kind of way Jem couldn’t pull off.

“Can’t resist that free peck, huh?” Jem teased.

“Not when you’ve got the best apples in the state,” Alistair said, and grinned.

“Did you know a peck can also be a quick kiss?” Heather said suddenly. “Usually on the cheek, but sometimes on the lips.” They both looked at her.

“She’s just kind of like that,” Jem told Alistair. “Says things.”

“I get it,” Alistair said.

“He owes you a peck,” Heather insisted. “Come on, Jemothy. Cough up.”

“That’s not my name,” Jem mumbled.

“Hey, if it’ll make you happy,” Alistair said. He leaned over the counter and presented his cheek to Jem.

“Uh,” Jem said.

“We’ll both do it,” Heather said. “Ready, Jem?” She pushed herself up on the counter and gave Alistair a dry little kiss on the cheek. Jem didn’t move.

“I get it,” Alistair said, winking at Jem. “You’re a big talker. You talk the talk, but you don’t peck the peck.”

“I do,” Jem insisted, and he leaned in and gave Alistair a quick kiss, barely brushing his lips over Alistair’s warm, freshly shaved skin. Alistair smelled really good, honestly. It kinda made Jem tingly inside. He wanted to press his nose against Alistair’s neck and just breathe him in.

“Now that’s customer service,” Alistair said. He took his basket and the doughnut Heather had insisted on giving him again. He grinned at them. “See you in a couple of hours.”

“A guy like that doesn’t drive out from the city every weekend just because he likes our apples,” Heather told him. “He likes you.”

“Maybe he likes you,” Jem said.

Heather shrugs. “Everybody likes me. He likes you especially. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

Jem squinted at her. “I don’t think so.” But he was definitely waiting for Alistair to come back, he realized, as he weighed people’s baskets of apples and took their money. His heart jumped around a little when he saw Alistair approaching, or maybe that was his stomach. He’d stress-eaten a couple of doughnuts between customers. He snuck a glance at Heather, but she was busy, thank heavens. He’d had enough of her help for one day.

“Hey, man,” he said as Alistair handed the basket over.

“Hey yourself,” Alistair said, smiling sweetly. Jem ducked his face to hide the fact that he was blushing a little. Alistair leaned on the counter. “About earlier…I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable. Seemed like kind of a joke between you and Heather, you know? I was just trying to play along.”

“What, the kiss?” Jem said airily, pretending like it hadn’t meant anything to him. “Nah. Heather’s like that. She likes to meddle. Don’t ever play Truth or Dare with her. I’ll give you that one for free.”

“Oh, that was a kiss to you?” Alistair joked. “Damn, I guess it’s a good thing I never asked for your number.”

“No, it wasn’t…” Jem started and then squinted at Alistair. “I gave you my number. It’s on the business card. You could have called any time. If, uh, you wanted to call. For whatever reason.”

“I didn’t think that was your personal number,” Alistair said. “Besides, I was kind of busy this week. Had to rush to finish all the work for a big trial so I could come out here today. Then I find out if I did call you and ask you out, the kiss I’m gonna get at the end of the date is a peck on the cheek.”

“That’s not how I kiss,” Jem protested.

Alistair raised one eyebrow and smirked.

“Not on a date, anyway,” Jem mumbled. He felt half-hypnotized by the warmth in Alistair’s deep voice and dark eyes.

“Tell you what,” Alistair said. “I’ll come back next week and you can prove it. When does the orchard close?”

“Seven,” Jem said.

Alistair nodded. “I’ll make reservations for eight. Where’s good around here?”

“My place,” Jem said boldly. “Not a better cook in the county.”

“It’s a date,” Alistair said. He checked his watch. “Hey, let me pay you for those apples.” Jem startled out of his daze and started bagging them up.

“You leaving already?” Heather said, finally disentangled from her customers. She started putting doughnuts and a half-dozen hand pies into a box. “Aww, Alistair. I feel like I barely saw you.”

“Don’t you worry,” Alistair said. “I’ll see you both next weekend.” He took the apples and the bakery box and handed over some cash.

“Y'ain’t that slick, ace,” Eliot said, but he said it fondly. He reached over and patted Hardison’s knee.

“You wanna put together the aliases, be my guest,” Hardison said, tapping at his keyboard and frowning at his screen. He softened up enough to smile at Eliot.

The date went well. Really well, actually. Jem had made dessert to go with the simple bread and stew he’d prepared, but dessert had to wait while he proved to Alistair that hell yeah, he kissed better than a peck on the cheek. Alistair made it back to his AirBnB that night, but after the next couple of weekends, he stopped bothering to book one, and they started waking up cuddled together on crisp Sunday mornings. Honestly, their relationship was pretty perfect: Alistair worked in the city in the week and came out on the weekends. Sometimes he even helped in the orchard, though operations were winding down and Jem was shifting to pumpkins, the corn maze, and hay rides, motorized and unmotorized.

“It’s not like work at all,” he said, standing in the front booth with Heather while Jem tinkered around in the engine of the old farm truck they used for hay rides sometimes. “Work is all research and computers and suits and yelling. This is peaceful. There’s fresh air. People are happy to see me.”

“I’m happy to see you,” Heather told him. He put his arm around her companionably. Jem grinned at both of them. He looked down at his stomach.

“Aw, hell,” he said. “Got grease all over my t-shirt.” He shrugged off his overshirt and reached down and stripped off his t-shirt. He put his overshirt back on and started to do up the buttons.

“WAIT,” Heather yelled. She ran to the house and came back with a glass, which she filled with cider and handed to Jem. “Alistair! Do you have your phone on you? Take a picture!”

“Way ahead of you, H,” Alistair said, coming up and crouching. “Jem, baby, strike a pose on that hay bale.”

“This is dumb,” Jem said.

“It’s absolutely not,” Alistair said. “I’ve got a buddy in advertising and we’re gonna use this to make an ad campaign for the orchard. Double your business easy.”

“We’re going to sell so much cider!” Heather said excitedly, clasping her hands together.

“Now that’s too much,” Eliot said.

“You wanna see the cider ad campaign or not?” Hardison asked.

“…yeah,” Eliot said.

“Back page,” Hardison said, still staring into his screen. Eliot flipped through. He had to admit, Hardison had done a hell of a job. He didn’t remember lying half-shirtless on a hay bale at any point, but looking at the photos, maybe he’d just forgotten. Hardison asked him to do a lot of stuff that seemed foolish at the time, and Eliot tried to forget it.

“Are we gonna use this any time soon?” he asked.

“You never know,” Hardison said mysteriously.

“I know,” Parker said, coming down from the ceiling. “And I like it. So maybe.”

“Well,” Eliot said. “Could be worse.”

“I know you know how good you’ve got it,” Hardison told him.

“Really good,” Parker agreed.

“Really good,” Eliot said, nodding along. He grinned at them. “The best.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Parker told him. “Let’s go find some cider doughnuts. I need to know what those are.”

“Let’s do it,” Eliot said, and together they pried Hardison away from his computer and went to find an orchard.

[anarchist-soupkitchen]

ooop its a really long essay

A brief list of why the Tories is pretty rubbish

 Before we start, I have a few things to say. As this is intended for UK audiences it might be a little difficult for people outside of the UK to understand the wording of certain topics, I will include somethings that need more explanation up here but if I do not include it here, please feel free to ask down in the comments.

Tory: someone who is a part of the conservative right

Anglicanism: the English church’s version of Christianity

This essay is a PERSUASIVE ESSAY this means its BIASED I hope you could tell from the title. This essay is from the view of someone who is white I am not trying to speak over people of colour on issue like race and I encourage you to look at non-white creators within the UK to get views on this matter.

I am pretty armature when it comes to my writing so do not expect something ground-breaking. And with that out of the way, let us begin.

1.       The tory party we know today was founded in 1834, you would think that would be plenty of time for its members to grow and shape the party into the best organization it can be. But with the tory party still stuck on the same ideas that Anglicanism is the only true religion, and that queer people should not have rights you would think that the party is straight out of the early 20th century, or still stuck on the same ideas the party was founded upon. It does not matter what side you are on and how your choice to view the tory party, people can agree on the prominent figures inside the tory party from old to recent. An example of a prominent tory of old was Winston Churchill a well know racist who also, coincidentally got us through WW2 when he was appointed by Chamberlin. He fostered such views that white people should govern over the “primitive” black and indigenous people of Africa and that Indian people “bred like rabbits”. To anyone who knows their UK history, 1983 was a very eventually year for politics and the UK as a whole. You now have to wear seatbelts in the front seats of cars, the dismembered victims of serial killer Dennis Nielsen are found in his London flat, unemployment was on a record heigh since the 1930’s and a general election found that Margaret Thacher was to be the next prime minister after a landslide win in the polls. Over the course of her 11-year reign of terror she periodised free-market capitalism and privatised public sectors including transport, railways and mines. Then because she did not like the Scottish government, she through a hissy fit and closed all mines in Scotland. Just like that she fucked up the economy, where in the big mining areas of the past are still experiencing the aftershocks today. I remember my granny telling me how she made up food packages for the miners around town and how it was so devastating to the town’s economy. Everyone was unemployed and starving, even my grandad. These examples really show that the Tories will support people who are the worst in British society if they have the parties’ interests at heart. You would think the tory party cannot get any worse but with modern polices such as pledging to get 50,000 nurses for the NHS while only giving them a 1% pay rise, which is only £7.78 for a low band nurse, by 2023. Or being “tough on crime” even though 96.4 crime were recorded by every 1000 people in 2019. You can see how tough they are about carrying out their polices. Let me tell you my favourite of the lot, Boris Johnston, our current PM, wants to limit immigration by 100,000 people. They want to only let in “the brightest and the best,” what a load of shite. Our immigrants are the backbone of our society doing everything people like the Tories would not even dream of doing. Imagen seeing Boris working in a McDonalds or in your local call centre. That fucker probably has not worked a day in his life. According to the migration observatory, migrants make up 50% of the low pay workforce. Either way you look at it, its abysmal. The government should do more for these people that letting them rot in a McDonalds or in a low paying job. If you have taken time to be a model citizen, train and get your qualifications, possibly learn a new langue to mover over to a shitty wet rock I do not see any problem with the government providing necessities to get you started in your new life. We have got the money.

2.       Can I ask you, what side do you think Boris Johnson is on? I will let you think for a moment. The Working class makes up more than half of our population according to the BBC’s class calculator. They say that a government is reflective of the people’s views and I think that is bullshit. Out of the working-class eligible to vote, who do vote, only three in ten vote conservatives. Do you want to know why people in the working class do not vote tory? Because under tory leadership since 2010, 6000,000 more children and their families were forced into poverty. The need for foodbanks skyrocketed 12.3% in the last five years and that is no even accounting for the pandemic. It is clear by now; I have given you enough time to think. “we know whose side Boris Johnson is on- the billionaires, the bankers and the big business.”- labour shadow chancellor, John McDonell. We know the conservatives are very busy committing acts of voter suppression and giving money to their friends instead of caring about you. They are buzzy introducing laws that make it mandatory to have voter ID in order to vote. If you do not make it free people will stop coming. The electoral commissions think 3.5 million voters just will not come back. this is all a part of, “takle[ing] every aspect of electoral fraud”- tory manifesto. It is well known that many rich people have been investing in the party for quite a while. Here is just a few: Anthony Bamford head of machinery in JCB, he gave £12.1 million since 2005. Charles Cayzer owns a shipping tycoon, he gave £480,00. Did you also know, Boris is known to be very generous when it comes to giving back. You’ve probably herd in the news about the conservatives handing out £3mil in contracts to tory owned covid PPE companies over the course of the pandemic. Some of that went to a MP, Nadim Zahawi who is a shareholder in SThree. SThree was given £1mil in contracts over the course of the pandemic. With all the evidence I have given above you’d think the government its rolling in it, I suspect they are but I doesn’t look like it from the outside. They have cut funding to courses drastically, as well as benefit schemes. Like cutting access for eighteen- to twenty-year-olds to the housing benefits. Yet with all the money they been cutting away from services and councils who desperately need it they still have enough money to cough up a commission for a royal yacht named after the duke of Edinburgh, costing over £200 million. Seems sweet does it, name a yacht after the ghoul of Edinburgh, right? You probably know the just of it now, your wrong. Not only is the yacht being paid for by taxpayers, but they are also naming it in honour after a racist. Or how the BBC would phrase his words as “memorable one-liners”. Here is a selection I find quite fitting: “The Philippines must be half empty if you’re all here running the NHS”- while meeting with a Filipino nurse. “If you stay here much longer, you’ll be all slitty-eyed”- he said to a group of British students while on a royal visit to China. My favourite must be “It looks like it was put in by an Indian.”- referring to and old-fashioned fuse box in Edinburgh. He is supposed to be the duke of the bloody place! I really like how one article what I read put it “[Prince Philip] screams out loud what other racists like him have learned how to conceal and camouflage in what they think and project as civilised demeanour.”- Hamid Dabashi.

3.       What I find absolutely astounding, is the Tories inability to show compassion to the people who have nothing. If you did not know the vagrancy act among other things crimeless the homeless and rough sleepers, which is by far a very bad mixture with the recent homelessness statistics, homelessness has risen 28% since labour was last in office and if the Tories continue down the path they are now, it is only going to keep rising. What you would find is most shocking is that there’s solutions for the homeless crisis right in front of us, what the Tories must to not be able to see. Layla Moran of the liberal democrats thinks they “must take a more compassionate and holistic approach, starting by scrapping the vagrancy act”. I think that would be a step forward and away from the old ways of prosecuting people for not being as fortunate as the rest of us, but there is something even more simple than that. Repossessing the 200,000 buildings that have been vacant in the UK for more than six months. Not only would that put a sizeable dent in the houses we need, but it also saves space. The UK is small collection of islands and I do not think the Tories can see that. We do not have the land available to just start building everywhere while leaving all those homes empty and unfilled. Its not a way to solve the housing crisis and its certainly not a way to save the money we supposedly need. Even the homes the Tories are building are left dormant because they are too expensive for the area, they are located in. With the way things are going the Tories will have to build more houses than they ever built before, because by 2041 homelessness is expected to doble. That is 400,000 more households if things do not change -a study by heriot-wat university. The evidence suggests that whatever the Tories are doing to end homelessness it is not working. Everything is not as bleak as I just told you though, the conservative has ended homelessness before. In the hight of the pandemic the conservatives got 90% of all rough sleepers off the streets and put them in hotels or hostels. This helped people apply for benefits, find jobs and get some more permanent assistance. People was helped during the pandemic, but when the funding ran out last July, homeless and the rough sleepers in the hotels and hostels where back out in the streets again. Alone and forgotten by the government that promised to end the very crisis they are apart of years ago. Theis shows that the Tories have the money to help the unfortune but they would rather sit on their arses chatting about what colour they should paint the walls of their house. More recently the Torie introduced a law what will fine people for sleeping in doorways. It really shows what the Tories care about, getting linings for their pockets. The Tories have the money to stop homelessness and when it was a danger to them, they stopped the issue what has been so recuing in our politics for decades. They helped the people who so desperately needed it only to chuck them back into the cold when covid-19 was no longer a danger to them.

4.       The conservatives fail to keep minorities safe in the society that they created. It is not surprise that the Tories are the most incompetent as ever. A study by BBC radio 5 found that hate crimes have doubled since 2013. An optimist would assume that is great, that there must mean that people have been reporting it more, right? Partly so. Although we have seen a rise in reports of hate crimes, the rate of prosecution has dropped down from 20% to just 8%. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, in a survey of faith-based organizations; the home office found that seven in ten of the employees surveyed has never reported a hate crime to the police where one happened. For a country where we are supposed to be the most tolerable it is no surprise that a big portion of the hate crimes committed are ones where the religion the victim followed played a big part. Our population, like many others, is influenced by our politicians. After Boris described Muslim women in burkas as “letterboxes” in an interview; citizen UK found that there where a surge in hate crime directed to Muslim women where the word “letterbox” was used. Again, continuing with the theme of hate crime against religions, Muslims made up half of the statistics in 2018 – 2019. The biggest spike we have seen in the last few years has been to Jewish people, where hate crimes against them have more since doubled. It is not a surprise since people seem to relate being a ‘good’ Jew to being a Zionist. Other minorities like trans youth under sixteen in England and whales now must go through everything that goes with puberty on top of not wanting to have the body you cuntly have all because TERF’s and conservatives do not think puberty blockers should be available to them.  At this point I genuinely think they want trans kids dead, how could you not see that the benefits of puberty blockers far out way the potential consequences. If puberty blockers really where the target they would have taken them of the shelfs completely, but they did not do that did they? They just restricted the rights of an already marginalised group more. Its not just trans kids but the fight for a third gender to finally get recognised is still waging on despite it being a battle since 2018. The government petition has been signed 136,000 times demanding non-binary finally be recognised as a valid gender in the eyes of the law. I hope I can get recognised as well as everyone else. It may not seem a big deal to some of you reading this but it is to thousands. Especially the people who want to go on hormones and medically transition. Because right now I and many other people are restricted and not allowed to get that service. If you are in the UK and you are of age, I urge you to signs the government petition. In other news the conservatives are just now getting to outlawing conversion therapy three years after they announced they would do so. It just shows how the party is not on target. On the topic of not on target let us talk about the increasing number of racial minorities becoming homeless because of lack of funding to their communities. Since the conservatives got into power in the 2010 racial minorities now make up 40% of all homeless despite being only 15% of the current population. It really shows how much they care about anyone who is not white. Yet people like my gran will continue to say they are doing enough for these underfunded communities.

the tory party really has nothing going for them, they are certainly not for the working class, they cannot solve homelessness and they do not give two fucks about minorities. To think anyone would vote form them is just amazing. Its fucking stupid to believe that they are anything but a bunch of rich shites dawdling around and thinking up ways to get more money into their pockets. To end this really all over the place essay, if you vote tory you are a massive twat.

Sources in comments:

[kodzuken5]

Time Skip Rich Kuroo and Kenma Headcanons

On one hand I’m like “OOO YAY RICH KENMA AND KUROO!!! They did so well for themselves. They made it big. It’s amazing. Neither of them were especially special before. They had their own talents but they weren’t the ones in the magazines or going to the top schools or whatever. And they were both so quiet and shy as kids. Look how far they’ve come!”

On the other hand I don’t like rich people in real life and ya know,... eat the rich and all that. It’s hard to see them like that even when I’m proud of them. So I’m a little torn about how they ended up. So I’ve come up with some headcanons for them that makes it a little easier for me to make peace with their outcomes.

KENMA

 Kenma hires people to care for his lawn and sometimes to dust and stuff around his house. Sometimes pays people to get his groceries or feed his cats when he can’t too. But he pays them all super well and gives extra when it’s deserved. 

Sometimes he doesn’t feel like figuring out the exacts of what he owes so he just rounds up because easier.

He’s also very understanding. You need to come tomorrow instead of today? Sure. Whatever. As long as you’ve been a decent employee, no problem. Your kid is sick and you gotta go? No problem. Here’s what I owe you for what you’ve done. Never complains about it unless you’re typically a bad employee and don’t even try.

He’s helped out employees and friends financially when they needed it. All his employees are paid well too.

He’ll invest in people or small businesses that interest him. He’s given good sized checks to places just because they had an interesting idea he wanted to see happen. He prefers spending on that rather than a watch or a limo or something.

He should maybe consider investing in some better suits though....At least one for an important meeting...

He donates to other things too. If he comes across something asking for donations, he’s willing to give. Not always a lot, but usually something.

 Aside from games, he doesn’t spend much on himself. He doesn’t even own a car. He rides his bike and takes the train most of the time. And he has no desire to live in some fancy expensive place. He just wants a decent house with space between him and his neighbors. 

He always makes sure his parents have everything they need too. One of the first things he did was update his parents house since his mother really wanted a new kitchen.

He’s not really worried about running out of money. He knows he’ll find a way to make more if things go horribly wrong and he keeps enough to last him quite a while even if things do go wrong. He’d just have to spend less if that happened but he’d be fine.

Totally buys those passes that allow you to skip lines at amusement parks though and anything else to just make things easier.

KUROO

Not quite as simple as Kenma. He does like to have a fancy apartment and good food. He’ll spend money on nice things if he likes them.

He enjoys entertainment and will often spend money on that. He really likes seeing games or just spending the night out after work with some friends. Drinks are on him.

But spending it means it’s going back into the economy so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

He eventually gets a car but he still rides the train or walks a lot of places. He doesn’t mind it unless the weather is bad or he has to transport a lot of things.

He does donate though. He takes the time to research the group or company more than Kenma does though and only gives money once he’s sure they are a good place using the money for good purposes. One bad spot on the groups record and it’s likely not going to get his money. He’s very particular about it.

Still, he does like to keep a lot of his money. It’s saving for his future. He never wants to worry about money again.

He sends money home regularly to help out his dad and grandparents. 

He usually does his own cleaning and buying of groceries but if he hires someone to clean or watch over his pets, they are paid well and treated well.  

His dad always wanted to visit some place like Tahiti, Maui, or Bali, but he could never afford it. One of the first things Kuroo did with his money was by them first class tickets to Maui and spent a week with his dad.

He refuses to be in regular plane seats or train seats. His legs are way too long. It’s always first class.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.  

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs  - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of  valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

[ifthereisnowind]

capitalism

context: why does it make me cringe? why does sales make me cringe?

why did I feel for a while that I don’t want to get caught up in the career ladder?

why do I judge people who chase money or fame?

what should truly motivate us at work

In a perfect world, when it came to choosing an occupation, we would have only two priorities in mind:

– to find a job that we enjoyed

– to find a job that paid us enough to cover reasonable material needs

But in order to think so freely, we would have to be emotionally balanced in a way that few of us are. In reality, when it comes to choosing an occupation, we tend to be haunted by three additional priorities. We need:

– to find a job that will pay not just enough to cover reasonable material expenses but a lot more besides, enough to impress other people – even other people we don’t like very much.

– we crave to find a job that will allow us not to be at the mercy of other people, whom we may deep down fear and distrust.

– and we hope for a job that will make us well known, esteemed, honoured and perhaps famous, so that we will never again have to feel small or neglected.

reforming capitalism

The system we know as Capitalism is both wondrously productive and hugely problematic. On the downside, capitalism promotes excessive inequality; it valorises immediate returns over long-term benefits; it addicts us to unnecessary products and it encourages excessive consumption of the world’s resources with potentially disastrous consequences – and that’s just a start. We are now deeply familiar with what can go wrong with Capitalism. But that is no reason to stop dreaming about some of the ways in which Capitalism could one day operate in a Utopian future.

What we want to see is the rise of other – equally important – figures that report on a regular basis on elements of psychological and sociological life and which could form part of the consciousness of thoughtful and serious people. When we measure things – and give the figures a regular public airing – we start the long process of collectively doing something about them.

The man is indeed employed, but in truth, he belongs to a large subsection of those in work we might term the ‘misemployed’. His labour is generating capital, but it is making no contribution to human welfare and flourishing. He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious).

We intuitively recognise it when we think of work as ‘just a job’; when we sense that far too much of our time, effort and intelligence is spent on meetings that resolve little, on chivying people to sign up for products that – in our heart of hearts we don’t admire.

Fortunately, there are real solutions to bringing down the rate of misemployment. The trick isn’t just to stimulate demand per se, the trick is to stimulate the right demand: to excite people to buy the constituents of true satisfaction, and therefore to give individuals and businesses a chance to direct their labour, and make profits, in meaningful areas of the economy.

This is precisely what needs to be changed – and urgently. Society should do a systematic deal with capitalists: it should give them the honour and love they so badly crave in exchange for treating their workers as human beings, not abusing customers and properly looking after the planet. A standard test should be drawn up to measure the societal good generated by companies (many such schemes already exist in nascent form), on the basis of which capitalists should then be given extraordinarily prestigious titles by their nations in ceremonies with the grandeur and thrill of film premieres or sporting finales.

There’s no shortage: we need help in forming cohesive, interesting communities. We need help in bringing up children. We need help in calming down at key moments (the cost of our high anxiety and rage is appalling in aggregate). We require immense assistance in discovering our real talents in the workplace and understanding where we can best deploy them (a service in this area would matter a great deal more to us than pizza delivery). We have unfulfilled aesthetic desires. Elegant town centres, charming high streets and sweet villages are in desperately short supply and are therefore absurdly expensive – just as, prior to Henry Ford, cars existed but were very rare and only for the very rich.

But we know the direction we need to head to: we need the drive and inventiveness of Capitalism to tackle the higher, deeper problems of life. This will offer an exit from the failings and misery that attend Capitalism today. In a nutshell, the problem is that we waste resources on unimportant things. And we are wasteful, ultimately, because we lack self-knowledge, because we are using consumption merely to divert or quieten anxieties or in a vain search for status and belonging.

If we could just address our deeper needs more directly, our materialism would be refined and restrained, our work would be more meaningful and our profits would be more honourable. That’s the ideal future of Capitalism.

In the Utopia, businesses would of course have to be profitable. But the success of a business would primarily be assessed in terms of its contribution to the collective good.

On changing the world

the only way to bring about real change is to act through competing institutions. Revolutions in consciousness cannot be made lasting and effective until legions of people start to work together in concert for a common aim and, rather than relying on the intermittent pronouncements of mountain-top prophets, begin the unglamorous and deeply boring task of wrestling with issues of law, money, long-term mass communication, advocacy and administration.

Our collective ideal of the free thinker is that of someone living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of ‘boring things’, cut off from practical affairs and privately perhaps rather proud of being unable even to read a balance sheet. It’s a fatally romantic recipe for keeping the status quo unchanged.

We have to make what we already know very well more effective out there. The urgent question is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with proper organisational tools that actually stand a chance of giving them real impact in the world. From a completely secular starting point, it can be worth studying religions to learn how to alter behaviour.

This is what religions have, for their part, excelled at doing. They’ve realised that if you put down an important idea on paper in somewhat pedestrian prose, it won’t have any lasting or mass impact. They’ve therefore, over their history, engaged the most skilled artists to wrap their ideas in the coating of beauty. They have asked Bach and Mozart to put the ideas to music, they have asked Titian and Botticelli to give the ideas a visual form, they’ve asked the best fashion designers to make nice looking clothes and they’ve asked the best architects to design the most impressive and moving buildings to give the ideas heft and permanence.

We should use the history of religion to inform us about the role of repetition, ritual and beauty in the name of changing how things are.

There is a great deal of large-scale ambition in the world, but all the largest corporate entities are focused on servicing basic needs: the mechanics of communication, inexpensive things to eat, energy so we can move about. While our higher needs – for love, beauty, wisdom – have no comparable provision. The drive to grandeur is missing just where we need it most.

Good business

So, inevitably, businesses will evolve to profit from their wishes. Capitalism has not traditionally been interested in whether these are sensible, admirable or worthy desires. Its aim is neutral: to make money from supplying whatever people happen to be willing to pay for.

Philosophy, by contrast, has long recognised a crucial distinction between desires and needs:

A desire is whatever you feel you want at the moment.

A need is for something that serves your long-term well being.

And it’s our needs that are required for a satisfying, fulfilled life (which Plato, Aristotle and others call a life marked by eudaimonia).

Capitalism goes wrong when it exploits this cognitive flaw: large numbers of businesses sell us stuff that we desire but which (in all honesty) we don’t need. On longer, calmer reflection we’d realise those things don’t actually help us to live well.

Sadly, it’s easier to generate profits from desires than from needs. You can make much more money selling bad ice cream than by marketing Plato’s dialogues.

In a utopia, good businesses should be defined not simply by whether they are profitable or not; but by what they make their profit from. Only businesses that satisfy true needs are moral.

Good capitalism requires that we address two, core educational needs. Getting us to focus on what we really need, what the real challenges in our lives are. And getting us to focus on the value of particular goods in relation to our needs: that is, how do these particular purchases help with eudaimonia?

So, in search of a better economy, we should direct our attention not simply to shopping centres and financial institutions, but to schools and universities and the media. The shape that an economy has ultimately reflects the educated insights of its consumers. When people say they hate consumerism, what they often mean is that they are dismayed at peoples’ preferences. The fault, then, lies not so much with consumption as with the preferences. Education transforms preferences not by making us do what someone else tells us. But by giving us the capacities and skills to understand more clearly what we genuinely do want and what sort of goods and services will best help us.

tbc

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The Star asked the leaders of Canada’s major political parties to talk about the issues that move them deeply. In the first of the series, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh identified the challenges faced by today’s youth as the cause he wanted to talk about. Singh spoke with the Star about why he chose the topic and what he’s going to do to address the issue:

Why are young people and the challenges they face so important to you?

All the major crises we’re faced with, they’re the ones feeling it the most. Young people are the ones who are priced out of the (housing) market, can’t imagine ever buying a place. It was not unattainable for their parents and grandparents.

So, they really embody all of the poor decisions that have been made by governments in Ottawa. Young people have that look of hopelessness. They have this fear, this uncertainty, and I want to replace that look in their eyes with one of hope and positivity and optimism. I really believe young people have gotten a raw deal. And that’s why they need a new deal. I want to now revert to making decisions that actually put young people — and by doing so, people in general —at the heart of the decision-making.

How is being a youth today different from what it was like when you were growing up?

The challenges are just a lot worse. I kind of remember what that’s like a bit. Because my father was ill and couldn’t work, and because of his addiction, it meant that he lost his ability to continue practising and we fell into debt. So we ended up losing our home and not being able to keep it, which meant that I felt that anxiety about having a home. But that’s otherwise something I didn’t think about. Like, I wasn’t in high school worrying about housing. That’s why what I went through is really different from what young people are going through now.

I wanted to find a way out of my financial difficulties by going to school. And, for me, school was kind of affordable. Undergrad was in the $2,000 range, and going to law school was $8,000 a year. Even in my difficult situation, it was something that I could see my way around. I got some loans and I was able to pay my tuition.

But for young people now, they’re faced with economic uncertainty and they want to take university or other courses to upgrade their skills, or, if they want to go to professional school, it’s really limited for those who don’t have the means. It’s so expensive that it could be scary and maybe even just a barrier that’s not surmountable.

Full article below read more (due to paywall):

Why do you think you’re the right candidate to tackle these issues?

(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer) don’t have the courage to take on these issues. They’re kind of like the old boys club. It’s in their best interest to maintain the status quo. They’re not really going to bring in the change that people need. They’re just maybe going to tamper around the edges, tinker here and there. They’re not going to bring in a new deal. I’m proposing a bold new deal, a new way of looking at the way we should be prioritizing people over the wealthiest and the people at the very top. And I know it’s achievable. I really care about making life better for people, and I’m not afraid to bring in the changes.

Why focus on young people when many of them can’t vote, and the ones who can often don’t bother?

When I got elected in 2011, I got elected because I had all these young volunteers and many of them couldn’t vote. I was 32 and I was the oldest person in my campaign by far. We had all these young, passionate people that work hard, and they care, and they got me elected.

I really think young people shouldn’t be counted out because they have parents and they have grandparents. For some people, that could be as many as six people they can influence and say, “hey, this is my future, if this matters to you, please care about this issue or vote this way.” So, I see immense power in young people. Though they can’t vote right now, I still think they can really influence the outcome of the next election.

How will you convince the next generation, and all Canadians who care about climate change, that it’s a threat to their future that you take seriously?

Since being elected, I’ve taken really fierce positions on the environment. We are the only official federal party that has opposed things like the Trans Mountain pipeline. We’ve taken strong positions on environmental issues historically as a party and I’ve taken on that and taken us to the next level with really bold announcements and really concrete commitments. I want to end fossil fuel subsidies, something that I know a lot of people are really frustrated by. I think my track record of positions that I’ve taken, the boldness of our vision and our plan, really speaks to the fact that we take this seriously and I’m committed to doing something about it.

Students who graduate from school can no longer rely on that degree to land them stable work. In today’s gig economy, many end up doing internships, contract work, part-time work or freelancing for years without any prospects of stability ahead. What will you do to help young people in these precarious situations?

People used to be able to get a job to get benefits. Now in the gig economy, people don’t have those benefits. That’s why it’s more important than ever that our health-care system step up and provide that head-to-toe coverage that includes dental care, medication for all, eye and hearing care and addiction and mental health services, so that all the needs that someone has for their health are not something they have to depend on the job for.

Right now, employment insurance is basically not something that self-employed or precariously employed or a freelance person can have access to. I want to change the way we look at employment insurance and modify it so that it does cover people who are working in these precarious positions. The new vision I see is cumulative hours — I propose 360 — and looking at someone’s best 12 weeks as the way we set someone’s employment insurance. I want to extend our parental leave to allow self-employed people to take advantage of it.

I also want to continue to fight for good pay and good jobs. For federal regulated jobs, I’m pushing for a $15-minimum wage and also changing the labour code so we offer better protection, set a better standard for what a job should give to workers and hopefully inspire other provincial and territorial governments to follow.

Owning a home or even being able to comfortably afford a place to rent feels like a pipe dream to many youth today. How will you make housing more accessible and affordable for this generation?

Really boldly invest in building new homes. What I’m imagining is 500,000 or half a million new homes over the next 10 years. The focus is going to be rental, cooperative, non-market housing so that people can have a place where there’s a confidence in knowing they can live there and that it’s affordable.

We want to waive the GST on bills where private developers build affordable housing to encourage the building of rental or affordable housing. To reduce the cost of housing, we want to end money laundering, which is driving up speculation. We want to impose a federal foreign buyer’s tax, which would get at the foreign investment that’s actually driving up the cost of housing.

For first-time homebuyers, we want to double the tax credit that’s available now and we also want to expand the mortgage to a 30-year mortgage which would lower the monthly payments so that someone can actually afford to buy a house.

This interview has been edited and condensed.