#just keep in mind this state has almost 40 million people in it. and that’s just those who legally count

[seilon]

love the fact that the entire west coast isn’t even done with its vote count (cali is only at 45%) and realistically a huge amount of those votes will be blue, raising the overall number of blue votes in the entire country to a very possible majority. but. it doesn’t fucking matter because the electoral college exists and represents states like california disproportionately considering its absolutely massive population. for the love of god when will we get rid of this stupid fucking system

[viv-hollande]

Ok, so this is a post that I should have made sooner. I've been somewhat out of the loop with regards to current events and the state of discourse on this website courtesy of a pretty serious depressive episode from which I am only just now recovering. As I have emerged from this state I have been pushed towards a conclusion about this website and the state of discussion around the ongoing Israel-Gaza War that I had thus far avoided due in part to my barely possessing the energy to keep myself alive and due in part to my denial that the conclusion could be true. But that denial can no longer hold.

It has become openly apparent that the pro-Palestinian camp on this website has become popularly infused with a degree of blatant, aggressive antisemitism that I, in my naivety thought impossible in the days just after October 7. I am trying to avoid turning this into a mea culpa because that would be unproductive and feel self-serving, but I do feel an obligation to admit that I disregarded prescient warnings from Jewish users whose warnings I dismissed as over-blowing a problem that I felt was real, but more limited in scope than they made out.

I'm neither an idiot nor am I ignorant. I am well aware of the long history of antisemitism in leftist politics and in the Palestinian Liberation movement. Back at the beginning of this crisis I was prepared to see the occasional instance of antisemites using the inevitable, overwhelming Israeli retaliation as an excuse to air their hateful politics. I was prepared to see both the well-meaning but ignorant and the malicious alike sharing tweets from antisemitic pro-Palestine accounts, spreading and normalizing low-grade, subtle antisemitism. Make no mistake, this should have been condemned. Antisemitism, like all bigotries, has no 'safe' level. There is no background level of antisemitism that society should just accept as normal. But I was more focused on the inevitable cacophony of suffering that Israel would almost certainly begin meting out, and so I failed to act.

The fatal blow to my denial was the increasing prevalence of the use of quotation marks around the word "Israel" and "Israeli". The first few times I saw this, I didn't really understand what it meant. Still laboring under the belief that antisemitism was a manageable problem on the left, I was certain that most of the users on this site, well-intentioned, goodhearted, critically thinking people that they were, would have recognized and called out even disguised antisemitism before it took over a good 20-40% of all posts about the conflict. I was a damn naive fool. For those, like past me, who have not cottoned on to the meaning of the quotation marks, they have become a way to express the denial of the legitimacy or even existence of, individually or all together, the State of Israel, the Israeli people, or the right of either Jews or Israelis to identify as Israelis.

CONGRATULATIONS TUMBLR! You have successfully revived from depths of 4chan neo-Nazi boards the (((fucking echoes))).

Are you serious? Are you fuckers for real? This, right here, encapsulates the pitch-black absurdity of this whole situation and why I remained in denial for so long. Never, in a million years, would I imagine that the proudly pro-Social Justice, anti-fascist, 100% Certified SAFE-SPACE(tm) website would end up using the same language as the goddamn Nazis on 4chan. I thought this website was smarter than that. But noooo, it turns out that I was a damn naive fool.

This was where the post was originally going to end. I say my piece, hope to change a few minds, and commit myself to actually fighting antisemitism instead of sitting back and dismissing the problem. But I figure, while I'm here and while I still have the driving forces of anger and guilt pushing me along, I may as well put pen to paper and spew forth my other thoughts on the ongoing crisis. I am thus compiling a much longer post detailing my thoughts on some aspects of the current situation. [EDITED ~1:25 AM GMT, 5 Dec 2023: add link to finished post] That post will definitely be long, probably be angry, possibly wrong on some aspect of fact, and will absolutely be pretentious, preachy, self-righteous and hubristic to a positively Hellenistic degree. Brief, non-comprehensive summary so you can decide whether or not get mad at me ahead of time;

Israel does apartheid, or near enough for government work.

Israel is definitely conducting a campaign of forced displacement, possibly amounting to ethnic cleansing, but I remain unconvinced of the claim of genocide.

Hamas may or may not be a anti-colonialist revolutionary group, but it definitely is an antisemitic terrorist organization with genocidal aspirations and actively supporting them is morally indefensible. Yes, this includes the Al-Qassam Brigades.

Anti-colonial and other revolutionary movements do in fact have fundamental moral obligations and suffering oppression does not give you carte blanche to do terrorism, even when an oppressor attempts to render peaceful opposition impossible. There is a middle ground between peaceful marching and 850+ dead civilians; aim for that.

The left is just as prone to unhinged conspiracism as the right.

Verify your sources, for fuck's sake.

Use nuance. It won't kill you.

There's more, but it's a little difficult to summarize an unfinished post. If you want to argue with any of these points, go ahead, just keep in mind that a longer, more comprehensive post is in the works that might have the answer to your argument/complaint/insult/intellectual disagreement. If that post isn't up by midnight GMT on Friday, assume I forgot about it and argue away. In conclusion, antisemitism is bad, apartheid is also bad, Tumblr is a hellsite (derogatory), "From the river to the sea" is, in fact, antisemitic, seriously, stop saying it, take Jews seriously when they warn you about antisemitism instead of writing them off like a damn naive fool, and last but not least, free Palestine.

[barillapasta]

Ditto. I remember moving to Philly from Florida as a kid and being awestruck by snow over the top of my head. Couldn’t even tell you where my snow boots are right now.

But!

I also remember a successful global campaign to reduce the use of aerosols and heal the ozone, which is still on track.

I remember going to restaurants and being asked if you wanted smoking or nonsmoking seating. Indoor smoking bans and public health campaigns have reduced the prevalence of tobacco use from a global average of around 23% in 2007 to around 17% in 2021, even with increases in several regions. Considering that tobacco products are the most littered item in the world and the industry produces 84 million tons of CO2 annually, this is a promising trend.

I remember the first time I saw the milky way and being very angry that I had to drive so far to do so. I also remember when Tucson became the first city in the world to enact a dark sky ordinance, then Malibu, then Pittsburgh, then-

I remember when solar panels were just a weird thing that preppers had. Now there are ten US states that offer tax credits for them, and the US is catching up to the top 40 countries by % of energy produced by PV. We are also the second largest producer of renewable energy in the world, after China (no one is even close to competing with China right now) and just ahead of Brazil.

I’ve witnessed the rise of “reef safe” sunscreen, and while it’s mostly a sales gimmick, increased public attention on coral reef preservation and global bans have forced many companies to stop using oxybenzone and octinoxate in their products.

I remember when people accepted the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a depressing fact of life. I remember critics openly mocking Boyan Slat as recently as 2019. To date, The Ocean Cleanup has removed 16,000,000kg of trash from the Pacific Ocean and placed 14 interceptors in rivers around the world to prevent more from entering.

I remember when 21 children sued the government of the United States for failure to ensure their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I remember that the media brushed it off as a cute way to draw attention to climate change, but in reality it remained open for nine years and those kids are still fighting.

I remember when Greta Thunberg skipped school. I remember a year later when she stood next to Jean-Claude Juncker as he pledged a quarter of the EU's budget to climate action. This has since been increased to 30%.

I remember the fields around my house gradually making way for parking lot after parking lot. The parking lots are still there, but I’m also watching as LA covers almost 200 lane-miles of road in cooling pavement, mandates cooling roofs, and plants tens of thousands of native trees. I'm watching cities like Phoenix, Nashville, and even Philly follow suit, and that's just in the US.

July 2024 marked 14 consecutive months of record breaking heat. In December, there will be a hearing at The Hague to determine if nations can be held liable for failure to act. Regardless of their decision, it will not get better soon in any way that is immediately noticeable. This is a long haul, you cannot let yourself get burnt out and you cannot give up. Even if you never stop baring your teeth online and at public hearings and on the phone with your representatives, you serve no one with constant fear and anger in the privacy of your own mind. Allow yourself mental breaks to appreciate the small victories so that you can keep going.

[didanawisgi]

Martin Luther King Jr., Guns, and a Book Everyone Should Read

BY JEREMY S. | JAN 15, 2018

“Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 89 years old today, were he not assassinated in 1968. On the third Monday in January we observe MLK Jr. Day and celebrate his achievements in advancing civil rights for African Americans and others. While Dr. King was a big advocate of peaceful assembly and protest, he wasn’t, at least for most of his life, against the use of firearms for self-defense. In fact, he employed them . . .

If it wasn’t for African Americans in the South, primarily, taking up arms almost without exception during the post-Civil War reconstruction and well into the civil rights movement, this country wouldn’t be what it is today.

By force and threat of arms African Americans protected themselves, their families, their homes, and their rights and won the attention and respect of the powers that be. In a lawless, post-Civil War South they stayed alive while faced with, at best, an indifferent government and, at worst, state-sponsored violence against them.

We know the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 refused to recognize black people as citizens. Heck, they were deemed just three-fifths a person. Not often mentioned in school: some of that was due to gun rights. Namely, not wanting to give gun rights to blacks. Because if they were to recognize blacks as citizens, it…

“…would give to persons of the negro race . . . the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, . . . and it would give them the full liberty of speech . . . ; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Ahha! So the Second Amendment was considered an individual right, protecting a citizen’s natural, inalienable right to keep and carry arms wherever they go. Then as now, gun control is rooted in racism.

During reconstruction, African Americans were legally citizens but were not always treated as such. Practically every African American home had a shotgun — or shotguns — and they needed it, too. Forget police protection, as those same officials were often in white robes during their time off.

Fast forward to the American civil rights movement and we learn, but again not at school, that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit. He (an upstanding minister, mind you) was denied.

Then as in many cases even now, especially in blue states uniquely and ironically so concerned about “fairness,” permitting was subjective (“may issue” rather than “shall issue”). The wealthy and politically connected receive their rights, but the poor, the uneducated, the undesired masses, not so much.

Up until late in his life, MLK Jr. chose to be protected by the Deacons for Defense. Though his home was also apparently a bit of an arsenal.

African Americans won their rights and protected their lives with pervasive firearms ownership. But we don’t learn about this. We don’t know about this. It has been unfortunately whitewashed from our history classes and our discourse.

Hidden, apparently, as part of an agreement (or at least an understanding) reached upon the conclusion of the civil rights movement.

Sure, the government is going to protect you now and help you and give you all of the rights you want, but you have to give up your guns. Turn them in. Create a culture of deference to the government. Be peaceable and non-threatening and harmless. And arm-less, as it were (and vote Democrat). African Americans did turn them in, physically and culturally.

That, at least, is an argument made late in Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms. It’s a fantastic book, teaching primarily through anecdotes of particular African American figures throughout history just how important firearms were to them. I learned so-freaking-much from this novel, and couldn’t recommend it more. If you have any interest in gun rights, civil rights, and/or African American history, it’s an absolute must-read.

Some text I highlighted on my Kindle Paperwhite when I read it in 2014:

But Southern blacks had to navigate the first generation of American arms-control laws, explicitly racist statutes starting as early as Virginia’s 1680 law, barring clubs, guns, or swords to both slaves and free blacks.

“…he who would be free, himself must strike the blow.”

In 1846, white abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, advocating distribution of arms to fugitive slaves.

Civil-rights activist James Forman would comment in the 1960s that blacks in the movement were widely armed and that there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.

A letter from a teacher at a freedmen’s school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

Low black turnout resulted in a Democratic victory in the majority black Republican congressional district.

Other political violence of the Reconstruction era centered on official Negro state militias operating under radical Republican administrations.

“The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” So said Ida B. Wells.

Fortune responded with an essay titled “The Stand and Be Shot or Shoot and Stand Policy”: “We have no disposition to fan the coals of race discord,” Thomas explained, “but when colored men are assailed they have a perfect right to stand their ground. If they run away like cowards they will be regarded as inferior and worthy to be shot; but if they stand their ground manfully, and do their own a share of the shooting they will be respected and by doing so they will lessen the propensity of white roughs to incite to riot.”

He used state funds to provide guns and ammunition to people who were under threat of attack.

“Medgar was nonviolent, but he had six guns in the kitchen and living room.”

“The weapons that you have are not to kill people with — killing is wrong. Your guns are to protect your families — to stop them from being killed. Let the Klan ride, but if they try to do wrong against you, stop them. If we’re ever going to win this fight we got to have a clean record. Stay here, my friends, you are needed most here, stay and protect your homes.”

In 2008 and 2010, the NAACP filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court, supporting blanket gun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago. Losing those arguments, one of the association’s lawyers wrote in a prominent journal that recrafting the constitutional right to arms to allow targeted gun prohibition in black enclaves should be a core plank of the modern civil-rights agenda.

Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there’s one more Negro killed — the more of ’em dead, the less to bother us. Don’t spend too much money running down the killer — he may kill another.”

But it puts things in perspective to note that swimming pool accidents account for more deaths of minors than all forms of death by firearm (accident, homicide, and suicide).

The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers.

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated 1,900,000 annual episodes where someone in the home retrieved a firearm in response to a suspected illegal entry. There were roughly half a million instances where the armed householder confronted and chased off the intruder.

A study of active burglars found that one of the greatest risks faced by residential burglars is being injured or killed by occupants of a targeted dwelling. Many reported that this was their greatest fear and a far greater worry than being caught by police.48 The data bear out the instinct. Home invaders in the United States are more at risk of being shot in the act than of going to prison.49 Because burglars do not know which homes have a gun, people who do not own guns enjoy free-rider benefits because of the deterrent effect of others owning guns. In a survey of convicted felons conducted for the National Institute of Justice, 34 percent of them reported being “scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.” Nearly 40 percent had refrained from attempting a crime because they worried the target was armed. Fifty-six percent said that they would not attack someone they knew was armed and 74 percent agreed that “one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot.”

In the period before Florida adopted its “shall issue” concealed-carry laws, the Orlando Police Department conducted a widely advertised program of firearms training for women. The program was started in response to reports that women in the city were buying guns at an increased rate after an uptick in sexual assaults. The program aimed to help women gun owners become safe and proficient. Over the next year, rape declined by 88 percent. Burglary fell by 25 percent. Nationally these rates were increasing and no other city with a population over 100,000 experienced similar decreases during the period.55 Rape increased by 7 percent nationally and by 5 percent elsewhere in Florida.

As you can see, Negroes and the Gun progresses more or less chronologically, spending the last portion of the book discussing modern-day gun control. It’s an invaluable source of ammunition (if you’ll pardon the expression) against the fallacies of the pro-gun-control platform. It sheds light on a little-known (if not purposefully obfuscated), critical factor in the history of African Americans: firearms.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I highly recommend you — yes, you — read Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms.

And I’ll wrap this up with a quote in a Huffington Post article given by Maj Toure of Black Guns Matter: 

https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/huffpo-maj-toure.jpg”

[zzizzigom]

Fun | Bucky x Fem!Reader

Characters: Bucky Barnes x Avenger Fem!Reader (2nd person p.o.v but no Y/N use) Genre/Warning(s): no warnings, minor fluff Length: 1.8k words Summary: in which you've joined Sam and Bucky on their mission and have ended up at Sharon's home in Madripoor. AO3 Link

A/N: I haven't written something in AGES, and this isn't anything particularly special but it's something I was able to finish and that's a relief for me right now. If you read it, I hope it brings at least a little joy to your day:)

Apologies for any typos I may have missed while editing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You stood at the bar, drink in hand, as you people watched. The overall vibe of Sharon’s house-turned-club was jovial. You’d caught glimpses of Sharon speaking to buyers, tablet in hand. You didn’t know how she got any type of business done in this environment but, looking at the state of the mansion and the fact she has it all to herself, it seemed to be working just fine for her.

From the corner of your eye you caught sight of a figure sauntering towards you. Your gaze dragged to the man and watched with barely hidden contempt as he smirked. As soon as he came within earshot you met his gaze. “Turn around. You don’t want me.”

His eyes went blank and the smirk fell off his face. His voice was monotone and heavy as he repeated, “I don’t want you.”

Then he spun on his heel and walked back the way he came. You watched for a moment, only turning away when he shook his head clearing away the compulsion. Lifting your champagne flute to your lips, you catch sight of Zemo circling the dance floor. Surprisingly, he’s bobbing his head to the music and you almost laugh. You figured Zemo would’ve preferred a classical piece or maybe some type of orchestral villain theme song.

Your eyes linger for a moment, the usual suspicion settling on your shoulders but when he continues to just bob to the beat you figure it’s fine. Next to you, someone plops down on the empty stool and you turn readying the command to leave you alone. It dies on your tongue when you catch sight of Sam.

“You watching Zemo, too?”

“Yeah. But unless his killer dance moves are actually murderous, I think we’ll be fine.”

Sam snorts and takes the drink the bartender hands him. “Anything from Sharon yet?”

“Nope. She’s still doing her rounds.” You sigh and then move in for another sip only to find your glass empty. Setting it down on the bar top, you turn away from it. If you’re expected to be going straight to Nagel’s hideout after this you don’t want to have too much.

“I saw you turn that guy away,” Sam commented.

“Okay.” Years ago someone pointing out you using your abilities would’ve brought you shame and guilt. But now it no longer bothered you…too much.

“If Zemo can seemingly have fun for a little bit, so can you.”

You scoff and cut him a glance. “Sam, that man looked ready to spike my drink the first chance he got.”

“Okay, maybe not with him, but you can loosen up a little bit. You’re over here looking ready to slit a throat.”

Grinning, you shake your head. “What about you?”

“Oh, I’m having fun. In fact, this is my leave because I was in the middle of telling a story to some criminals.”

Laughter bubbles out of your mouth, “Don’t get too friendly.” Sam nudges your arm with his elbow and steps away. You see him join a group and you can’t hear what he says to them but you do hear some of their laughter over the music.

Rolling your neck to loosen some of the tension, you turn to the bar again. Screw it. One more won’t hurt. You catch the bartender’s eye from where he stands and point to your glass. He nods and starts to pour another one. Once your new drink is in hand you decide that while you may not need to have “fun” you don’t need to stand in the same spot the whole night.

You take your time moving through the crowd, careful to keep dancing people from bumping into your drink. The top Sharon lent you is a smooth ivory colored silk and the last thing you want to do is return it damp.

Finding the art displays, you move through the lit up cases. The music is still loud, but in the tucked away corner it’s not as deafening. A few other people lingered at paintings and artifacts but none paid you any mind. You pause at a painting you vaguely recognize but you don’t know enough about the art world to name the piece or the artist.

It’s a beautiful painting, the way the soft colors mesh together brings a small calm to you. You feel the presence of someone standing behind you, and with it brings the new swooping feeling in your chest, but before you can do anything a familiar voice speaks, “This one is worth $10 million.”

You give a low whistle and take a sip of your drink. You don’t think you’ve ever had that much money in your life. Looking over your shoulder, you find Bucky looking at the painting with his hands in his pockets. His shoulders are a little stiff and his jaw is tense. His brow is mildly puckered and though his eyes come back to look at the painting, they dart off as if still surveying the room. You imagine this is how you looked to Sam standing at the bar. Lips quirking you nod at him. “Modern day night life not doing it for you?”

Bucky only gives a soft grunt.

You continue, “What? Bucky Barnes didn’t get down back in his day? You said you liked 40's music, right? I could make the DJ switch it up for you.”

The looks he shoots you is exasperated and mildly annoyed. You can’t help but add. “Believe it or not but I can do a mean swing step. You wouldn’t be alone out there.”

“You’re being annoying.” Despite his words you catch the faint smile and mirth in his eyes.

“Ah, ah! I saw a smile!” When Bucky only continues to stare you give him a shrug. “I’m taking the brooding silence as confirmation.”

You start to move on to the next painting, expecting him to turn the other way but instead he moves with you. You didn’t want to dwell on it (a.k.a get your hopes up about it), but you noticed him doing that more and more. As you take in the old looking necklace in front of you, you catch sight of Zemo through the glass case. He’s now in the middle of the dance floor…dancing…

You laugh a little and give a shake your head. Bucky seems to follow your gaze and you hear another grunt from him.

“I could’ve gone my whole life without seeing him dance.”

“You know, if Zemo can have fun, so can you.” You use Sam’s earlier words to you. Hopefully that doesn’t make you a hypocrite.

Bucky is quiet and you don’t think too much about it, starting to get used to it. Moving on from the necklace, you take in another painting. This one is not your favorite, the harsh lines and odd colors bring a mildly confused frown to your face. Your head tilts as you continue to study the piece. Behind you, Bucky says, “I am having fun.”

Without looking at him you reply, “Are you?”

“Yes.” This finally pulls your attention and you turn to meet his eyes. “I think you’re fun.”

Bucky takes his hands out of his pockets and starts to fidget with the cuff links on his borrowed jacket. You can't quite tell if he's telling the truth, or just saying that to make sure you don't feel awkward. However, you know enough about Bucky to know that if he didn’t want to be talking to you he would’ve left, or he wouldn’t even have spoken to you in the first place so he must be telling the truth. At your silence, he drops his hands and clears his throat.

“Are you having fun?”

You pull your bottom lip between your teeth as you think about it. Bucky’s face gives nothing away as he waits your answer. Part of you wants to open up your senses and let your powers read his emotions but you stop yourself. Instead you think about the past few days and the situation you’re in. When you practically forced yourself onto the airplane with Bucky and Sam, you figured it would only be for one mission, something to get the sudden need for danger and adventure out of your system.

You never imagined it would’ve brought you to breaking out a criminal from prison and then ending up at a former colleague’s illegal art dealership, and you couldn’t imagine where it’d lead you from here. And yet despite the ups and downs this adventure has brought to your little group…

“I suppose I am having fun,” you finally reply. You can’t stop from adding, “It’s been…fun learning more about you and Sam. We’ve all fought together before, but I never really took the time to get to know either of you. It’s been nice, all things considered.”

There’s quiet between the two of you. The song has shifted into a new melody, this one just as pounding as the last but it doesn’t seem as if either of you are paying attention to it. You give a soft laugh and down the rest of your champagne. “Sorry. That was more than you asked for.”

“Don’t apologize,” Bucky responds. He steps a bit closer. “I agree. I kept my circle to Steve and, against my will, Sam—“ he pauses when you give a quick laugh “—Even during the whole Accords stuff, I didn’t really interact with the team and then I went off to Wakanda. It’s nice to have another person to talk to.”

Movement behind Bucky catches your attention and your eyes are pulled from his soft expression. Behind him, Sam approaches looking around at all the art pieces. “Figure I’d check in on the dark and brooding duo.”

“You just checked on me,” you shot back.

“Well, I’m checking on you again. I lost sight of Sharon.”

“She’ll find us when she’s ready,” Bucky replied. He heaved a sigh and shoved his hands back into his pockets.

You nod your agreement but before you can say anything Zemo’s voice carries through the room as he steps up next to you. “Well, I will admit this has been quite entertaining but I’m ready to get a move on.”

“We were just talking about that.” Sam turned to the necklace you’d been looking at earlier. “As nice as all this art stuff is I’m getting antsy.”

Everyone falls into silence and through your senses you can feel that everyone agrees. You think about telling everyone to split up and find Sharon to ask if she’s found anything but soon she steps around a display case.

“Hey, guys, I got something. Let’s go.”

Zemo steps around you and him and Sam follow after her immediately. Setting your glass down on a nearby table you turn and find Bucky waiting for you. “Ready for this?”

Giving a sure nod you move past him and after a moment you can sense him take up the rear.

[foreverlogical]

Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.

As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.\

None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys generals and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.

And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.

COVID-19 is now killing Americans at the rate of about one per minute, but the president is “just done with COVID,” a source identified as one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID ... It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

This is where Trump’s crippling psychological condition—his complete inability to face unpleasant facts, his toxic narcissism, and his utter lack of empathy—became lethal. Trump’s negligence turned what would have been a difficult winter into a dark one. If any of his predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to go back just 40 years—had been president during this pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives would almost surely have been saved.

“My concern was, in the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, one of the very few Republicans to speak truth in the Trump era.

In 30 days, Donald Trump will leave the presidency, with his efforts to mount a coup having failed. The encouraging news is that it never really had a chance of succeeding. Our institutions, especially the courts, will have passed a stress test, not the most difficult ever but difficult enough, and unlike any in our history. Some local officials exhibited profiles in courage, doing the right thing in the face of threats and pressure from their party. And a preponderance of the American public, having lived through the past four years, deserve credit for canceling this presidential freak show rather than renewing it. The “exhausted majority” wasn’t too exhausted to get out and vote, even in a pandemic.

But the Trump presidency will leave gaping wounds nearly everywhere, and ruination in some places. Truth as a concept has been battered from the highest office in the land on an almost hourly basis. The Republican Party has been radicalized, with countless Republican lawmakers and other prominent figures within the party having revealed themselves to be moral cowards, even, and in some ways especially, after Trump was defeated. During the Trump presidency, they were so afraid of getting crosswise with him and his supporters that they failed the Solzhenitsyn test: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.

”During the past four years, the right-wing ecosystem became more and more rabid. Many prominent evangelical supporters of the president are either obsequious, like Franklin Graham, or delusional, like Eric Metaxas, and they now peddle their delusions as being written by God. QAnon and the Proud Boys, Newsmax and One America News, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—all have been emboldened.

These worrisome trends began before Trump ran for office, and they won’t disappear after he leaves the presidency. Those who hope for a quick snapback will be disappointed. Still, having Trump out of office has to help. He’s going to find out that there’s no comparable bully pulpit. And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

For the foreseeable future, journalists will rightly focus on the pandemic. But once that is contained and defeated, it will be time to go back to focusing more attention on things like the Paris Accords and the carbon tax; the earned-income tax credit and infrastructure; entitlement reform and monetary policy; charter schools and campus speech codes; legal immigration, asylum, assimilation, and social mobility. There is also an opportunity, with Trump a former president, for the Republican Party to once again become the home of sane conservatism. Whether that happens or not is an open question. But it’s something many of us are willing to work for, and that even progressives should hope for.Beyond that, and more fundamental than that, we have to remind ourselves that we are not powerless to shape the future; that much of what has been broken can be repaired; that though we are many, we can be one; and that fatalism and cynicism are unwarranted and corrosive.

There’s a lovely line in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.

”There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love. One person doing it won’t make much of a difference; a lot of people doing it will create a culture.

Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant.

Just after noon on January 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

[mydayserenade]

My Dear Starlight

Yunho x OC

rom, angst, fluff (???)

first time playing around w/ this kind of genre so apologies if its shitty

i suggest listening to Fix You by Coldplay cause it will definitely send you to sad hours while reading

"Do you remember the last time we went star-gazing? It was the night before I eventually confessed to you, we were lying on the grass and I was pretty much sleep deprived and alongside handling an empty stomach that was growling" he said and chuckled, reminiscing the sweet moment ever so vividly like it happened just yesterday. Yunho took his attention off the sky and watched silently as his fiance gaze the starry night without even noticing him staring at her like she was the brightest thing to ever exist as of the moment, which has always been a thing for them to do to each other... but mostly Yunho.

"I do dummy, can you believe it has been 5 years since then? Time flies so fast" Luna responded, leaning towards her right side to get a closer look at Yunho's visuals "And now here we are, engaged and a few months away from officially tying the knot." she giggled, toying with the necklace that he gave to her during their first anniversary and looked back at the night once more to admire it; the moon dawned on them like a bright spotlight, the sky was as blue as the deep sea, complimenting the shining stars that laced the sky, telling tales of long lost lovers which completed the visually angelic twilight that these two would share for hours.

Yunho looks over to his paramour with the endearment in his doey eyes and smiles ever so sweetly as she laid beside him, interlocking hands with one another and her hair that sprawled like beautiful waves; in a swift move he sits himself up and props Luna to lay down on his chest. Luna responds in a squeak, shocked by the sudden gesture her fiance did.

"Whenever you miss me" Yunho broke the silence between them and rested his cheek on the head of his soon-to-be Mrs. Jeong, she flinches as she felt his warm arms wrap around her chest, feeling his heartbeat going at a slow but steady pace.

"Um, where are you going with this?" she asked confusingly as Yunho snuggled on her neck, inhaling the delicate perfume that he oh so loved whenever she would put it on; he breathes in the intoxicating fragrance and lets out a satisfied sigh before he continued.

"It's just an intrusive thought" he replied and continued to snuggle, "but whenever you miss me while I'm away or when I suddenly get called by the House of Hufflepuff" he said jokingly in the last part, receiving a slap on the arm by her and continued on. "Look up at the night sky and think of me. My mom always told me that I had a special connection with celestial things most especially stars. I thought it was just nonsense she shared with me as a teenager but as I got older and took into consideration the feelings I had and enviroment or situations I was in, I did notice a few things that made me convinced that my mom was indeed right about her speculations." Luna was bewildered, all she could do was laugh. This was the first time she has ever heard of this story from Yunho considering the fact they've been together for 5 years, 24/7, 365 and he would often share his most atrocious memories; even his embarassing ones. She looked up at Yunho who was looking straight at her, showing how perplexed she was by her furrowed brows and confused grin.

"So you're telling me, God decided to make your bloodline 40% human and 60% celestial and as you age the more you feel connected with these things, will somehow tingle in your bones and signal you to shoot supernovas out of your hands like Starfire or some shit whenever it's nightime?" she asks.

"You're phrasing it like it's a crazy Sci-Fi movie Luna, I wasn't even finished." Yunho eyerolls and massages the bridge of his nose, letting out a deep sigh of annoyance. Luna enjoyed teasing him and seeing him all fired up; even if Yunho had a fierce exterior that people would be afraid of approaching, only few knew his childish side and how young at heart he was for things that he loved and took interest in.

"Go on continue, I was just annoying you." she giggles at the sight of him pouting and scrunching up his nose, Yunho takes a deep breath before he proceeds to the next.

"Eversince I was a little boy and when there were times where I had no one to play around with" Yunho looks up at the stars and grows a grin on his face as he points upward "they were always my companion and relate to how I was feeling. Whenever I felt happy, it would always blink at me, become bigger in size and blind me with its light; however when I felt sad, it would always shrink and release very little light. It would sometimes respond to the many queries I had and decisions by its blinking, it somehow felt like I had a mood lamp with me everywhere I go." he crooks his head to the right, scoffing at the many memories of him that flashed in his mind. "Even if I had no one to talk to at that time, as crazy as it sounds, the stars comforted me in a way that is unexplainable."

"It felt like someone understood the things you were going through like no one else has, almost as if you had an alternate you up in the galaxies." Luna looked up at how Yunho admired each white dot with the happiness in his eyes, looking so astonished like a little kid who just visited a candy store for the very first time. She now understood the many moments where he would suddenly look up the sky while driving, walking or even eating and just stare for seconds before eventually returning to what he was doing, almost as if he was thanking the heavens above or checking up on them like they were part of his family.

"You understand now? Whenever that time comes, just look up and I'm there." He whispers in Luna's ear, hands interlocking with hers and giving her a soft kiss on the head. Luna couldn't help but tear up by the gentle gesture Yunho did, the tale he had told and the thought of not seeing him for even a second. He was her rock and she was his, not a day would go by if they did not see each other in between the hours.

"I do Yunho, I do." she sits up and faces Yunho, cupping his face with her warm hands with Yunho gently caressing it and gives him a gentle kiss on the lips.

6 years later...

"I'm here" Luna whispered, standing in the middle of the silent and deserted park which was quiet enough to hear her; holding onto her precious necklace, she looked up the sky, admiring the white dots that scattered the sky. The stars were a bit different from normal, they were shining and twinkling more and more, almost as if it was calling out to her in morse code.

"You should really try and hide your excitement to a bare minimum, see this is why I never planned any surprise parties with you" she scoffed and sat down on the grass, closing her eyes and completely taking in the midnight breeze that brushed against her skin and blew on her hair. She lets out a sigh and toyed with the golden chain that was entangled on her fingers, feeling every abrasion and imperfection this necklace presented.

"You're probably wondering why I am here at 3 am in the morning" she said, fluttering her eyes to a vast field with streetlights surrounding it, "Awww man" Luna laughed, "You're most likely gonna kill me if I went out especially in this hour, well truth be told Mr. Jeong; are you battling me now with this cold gust of wind you blow?"

No one responds.

"I thought so too." she said under her breath as she hangs her head down, taking a deep breath before she continued to talk.

"I came here because I couldn't really sleep well these past few days and" she starts to choke up, sniffling and trying her absolute best to not break down, that's the last thing he would want Luna to do... especially in a time like this. "I don't know" she shrugs, rubbing her hands on her face. "I've been in my head too much, I've been emotionally unstable for the first time in a long time and I'm just" she suddenly pauses while a million thoughts circulates her mind. She urged herself to keep a strong and stable state for the past 6 years in front of friends and family, always say she was doing alright and all but deep down inside she was suffering the greatest loss of all and couldn't even bare to hold it in any longer.

"Yunho I'm so so so sorry" she lets out her tears, hysterically wailing on the field. She clutches her heart, completely lost her sense of reality and just wanted to scream out the pain and tiredness she has been holding on for the past few years, hiding behind a facadé so that people around her would not have to feel the burden that she might put on them. The countless nights of tear stained pillows and fake happy days were all weeped away at this night, she looks up at the skies; frozen and chanting swear words like a maniac.

"I'm sorry for not noticing sooner how much you suffered on the inside, for being such an asshole to you during those times and for not being enough of a friend and wife to you." she whimpered, losing all her might to prop herself up. In a graceful fall she lands on the grass, curled up, shiverring and clutching her knees amidst the cold breeze and moist grass under her.

"I'm a terrible person, I'm a fucking disgrace, and yet somehow I still exist in this world when it should've been you who is still alive. I tried my best to not worry you every night by saying I was doing okay, that I was living good and this and that, but for the past few days..." she closes her eyes and squeezes the pendant with her palm as tears streamed endlessly down her cheeks, "The wave of guilt just hit me harder than ever and I honestly am not so sure I can carry on this shameful life that only keeps me breathing."

From the day she knew up until his deathbed, Yunho never wanted Luna to see him at his worst neither did he want her to struggle and pity him, but his condition allowed Luna to see her beloved slowly succumb bit by bit. As much as she wanted to help him; he would always brush it off, plaster on his dimpled smile and please her in the best of his abilities and strength even if his state wasn't the way it was before. He did not want Luna to regret the moments she had with him and only fill her memories with the pain that he had felt and the hardships he's going through. She didn't agree to any of his ordeals but he had tried and persuaded her to commit to his wishes, in the end however; it would only lead to many arguements and her cursing him out. Eventually she caved in and did the best she could to seize the days, nights and hours with the presence of her one and only love yet deep down inside she was guilty of not helping with his condition and wanted to cater to his medical needs even if she had to travel miles away to get what he asks for.

"I respected your wishes, I carried on the many months with you with a positive outlook and a cheery personality. I was happy during those times I'll admit, because I was by your side everyday until the last second of you breathing, but at the back of my mind I knew I should've gone against what you wanted me to do and assist to your needs." she runs her hand through her hair, fuming at the thought of herself not doing her part during the days of Yunho's struggles. "You told me that I shouldn't feel guilty as this isn't my fault that you were diagnosed with this and it isn't my business to meddle around something like this, but goddamnit Yunho" she breathes uncontrollably as tears yet again pools in her eyes "I'm your fucking wife! I'm your best friend! I have been with you for as long as I can remember and I have made a vow to you that I'm gonna take care of you and nurture you when needed until our hair turns gray and we are all wrinkled." She bursts into annoyance and disappointment. None of what she did made perfect sense to her, all she wanted was to cry and rewind time so that she can make up for the past mistakes she's done and the many regrets she wanted to be erased in her mind. Luna didn't have the energy to continue on and she just lied in the grass, sprawled out and cried until her lungs gave out. She felt pain, she felt disappointment, she felt useless, she felt defeated.

A blinding light then hovers over Luna's exhausted and tearstained body, at first she did not mind this but as the light lingered on her for how many minutes now, she was irritated to this God-like halo that did not want to leave her be. She then slowly opens her eyes and was immediately welcomed to a soft, bright and white light that the moon shined on her, way different from the previous. The stars then aligned, creating a mystical ceiling that somehow calmed Luna's nerves and distract her away from her thoughts, it shined excitingly but twinkled in a calm matter. Luna was in awe at how much beauty the sky emmited, she had completely felt relaxed and wiped the tears that streamed down her face. She goes on to bask under the moonlight and stars, breathing in and out and feeling liberated and worry-free, something she has never felt ever since Yunho was put to rest.

"Now I truly understand what you meant." she mumbled, feeling lighter than ever. Luna then proceeds to put back her shoes on and did a flying kiss to the air multiple times before she left the park. "I think I know what I need to do now." she smiled and took a deep breath.

"Thank you for giving me something I never believed in but eventually found myself with you, love." she sighs lovingly as she gets up and moves towards her car. She takes one last look at the stars and glances down the necklace she has been holding. "Thank you for tonight, see you soonest, my dear starlight."

[markftmingi]

sit down! - part one

sit down! masterlist

summary: the king of south korea hires you personally to become the prince’s personal bodyguard after he receives death threats but still continues to life his life dangerously.

pairing: prince!badboy!jaehyun x bodyguard!badass!reader

warning(s): mentions of smoking/drug use, gang activity, and some other crime stuff, swearing, jaehyun’s an asshole tbh.

a/n: this was almost a yugyeom story on wattpad over a year ago (excuse any typos pls) but i’ve been in my jaehyun feels recently. i also really want to make this a social media au🥴. also this is my basic “y/n” kind of story but like “y/n”’s gang code name is siren, cause like you lead men to their deaths, get it? 

you took a deep breath before knocking on your boss's office door. his right hand woman, joy, opened the door with a smile.

"miss siren, he's been expecting you," she bowed politely.

you bowed back, "you can call me by my real name you know... i've known you for most of my life."

joy blushed slightly but before she could say another word, your boss interrupted.

"she was instructed to call you miss siren and she will do as such,” he ordered as you sat in the chair across from him.

"whatever you say, yuta," you said mockingly, "what's my job now?"

"you were hired by someone to keep his son out of trouble. his son has a pretty bad record: fighting, smoking, drug use, gang activity, sleeping around frequently, and the list goes on. your job is to make sure that he never does anything like this again... he has a major reputation to manage. he'll be disowned if he doesn't."

"okay... and how am i going to do that?" you questioned.

"you'll be living with him, watching his every move. he lives in seoul palace in south korea." he said sliding the case files over to you.

you raised an eyebrow, "seoul palace? who is he? the prince?"

yuta let out a small laugh, "yes, actually."

you held back the urge to scoff. what kind of prince doesn't respect his father –the king– enough to listen to what he says? especially if it's for his own good. if he keeps up the recklessness, he'll be dead by 25.

"a prince... needs me... to babysit him so that he doesn't get into anymore trouble?" you said slowly to make sure that yuta wasn't losing his mind.

he gave you a hard look, "a prince with a really rich king father that's willing to pay us 500,000,000 yen to babysit him so that he doesn't get into anymore trouble. the prince has been receiving death threats too and he just continues the recklessness.”

500,000,000 yen? that’s nearly 5 million dollars... you could do a lot with that kind of money. you could retire with that kind of money.

"okay, deal."

"great because i already had joy pack your bags and call the jet to south korea. your flight departs in less than an hour." yuta smiled brightly as your face dropped.

although he wasn’t family, yuta was all you had left. he was more of a relative than your boss. it was his father’s company before he took over. his father raised you to obey every single word that came out of his mouth and keep your guard up at all times. sometimes yuta could overstep his boundaries but hey, at least you were getting paid and weren’t an orphan anymore.

you sighed before standing up, taking the files with you. joy followed you out of the office and into her car.

"miss siren, the jet takes off in..," she glanced at her phone, "roughly 40 minutes."

you nodded, "you packed everything i needed?"

"i got most of your clothes, toothbrush and other necessities, your laptops and chargers, and your favorite weapons. the usual things i pack." joy explained as she drives.

you nodded once more before opening your client's file.

name: jung jaehyun (sometimes goes by yoonoh)

nationality: korean

birthday: february 14, 1997

zodiac sign: aquarius

height: 180 cm (5’11")

weight: 63kg (138 lbs)

blood type: A

hobbies: piano, basketball

languages: korean, english, and some japanese

as you continued to read his file, you couldn't help but to want to laugh. the way yuta talked about jaehyun made him sound like public enemy number one. he seemed like a normal man... until you got to his police reports:

seven charges of aggravated assault, four charges of drug possession, two DUIs, and three charges of theft. all of which was pardoned because he was the prince. you didn’t get why the prince himself would do anything of these things. jaehyun could have anything he wanted at anytime but he was acting out.

"he's handsome." joy smirked slightly as she pulled up to the airport.

you looked back up at his picture. she wasn't lying. jaehyun was gorgeous. definitely has the looks of a prince. she laughed once she caught you staring at the picture.

"true, but not happening."

"i'm just saying, y/n - i mean siren. he's handsome, you're beautiful. i saw his friends' profiles too. they all looked like pieces of heaven. something is bound to happen." she said teasingly.

you rolled your eyes as you got out the car, "no romance, no relations. besides he's a prince. he probably acts like he has a stick up his ass."

“you act like you have a stick up your ass too sometimes. maybe he can take it out for you,” joy laughed as you slammed the car door shut and walked away. the jet ride from osaka international airport to seoul, south korea was only about two hours, so you took the time to rest up for what awaits you.

_______________________________________________________

when you got off the jet in seoul, you weren’t expecting four men to pick you up from the airport. nor were you expecting to be riding in a limo. you usually didn't talk much when you were working but this awkward silence was killing you and you think the other men knew it too.

"so how long have you been working under mr. nakamoto?" the man on your right questioned, trying to break the ice.

"majority my life basically."

he turned to you with wide eyes, "how?"

"well, it's the family business. i’m not blood family but they adopted me in. from the time you're able to walk, you're trained to fight. you don't actually work serious jobs until you go through all the training."

"when did you get your first serious job?"

"i had just turned eleven,” you stated.

the man didn't say anything after that and you were relieved. you let out a breath you didn't know you were holding as you all drove to a gate. as if expecting you, the gate slowly opened. you’d been to korea on other jobs before but you never saw this palace before. the building was tall and stretched for yards. it was surrounded by various ponds and small gardens. guards with guns were in a line at the front door. you adjusted your backpack straps as you walked through the main door. the palace was rather modern looking from the old architecture on the outside. it looked like it could house hundreds of people. when the door shut behind you, two women and two men rushed to greet you.

"welcome back, mr. kim!" they all chorused as they bowed slightly.

"staff. this is siren, don’t ask for her real name. she's head of security over jaehyun along with johnny and taeyong. she'll be living here for awhile. treat her with respect." the man you spoke to in the car explained. guess he was addressed as mr. kim.

"yes, mr. kim. welcome, miss siren." they chorused and bowed once again.

do they practice being in synchronization like that?

"uh, thanks." you mumbled, adjusting your bag straps again.

you heard a door open, followed by seven men jogging down the stairs. all seven pairs of eyes locked on you.

"oh don't tell me she's the one who's going to be keeping jaehyun out of trouble," one of them said as a smile grew on his face.

five out of the seven started laughing. something you didn’t take lightly. you didn’t like being laughed at or taken as a joke.

"i'm trained in eight styles of fighting, i have a perfect aim with the gun on my hip, and a few other skills that you'll quickly find out if you laugh at me again." you said calmly.

that shut all of them up. mr. kim gasped, sending an elbow into your side. you didn't flinch at all.

"this is siren and yes, she'll be assisting johnny and taeyong in keeping jaehyun out of trouble which includes limiting the visits of the four of you. siren, this is jung jaehyun, the prince of this kingdom. these are his friends – dong sicheng, prince of china. huang xuxi, prince of hong kong. wong kunhang, prince of macau. chittaphon leechaiyapornkul, one of the princes of thailand. they may be princes but only sicheng acts like it." mr. kim said, giving them a fake smile.

one of the seven came up to you, "i'm sorry for kunhang's comment earlier, i'm johnny– the head of security, and that’s taeyong, other head of security. you can call him ty though." johnny introduced himself and taeyong, holding out his hand.

you shook his hand shortly. joy was right about his friends... they all looked amazing, especially the one locking hands with you. mr. kim looked between you and johnny with a shocked expression and you didn’t know why.

i made a mental note of each of their appearances so i could remember their names quickly. one of the most important things about being on a job was to take note of everyone around your client.

"i'm jaehyun, the one you'll be keeping out of trouble,” jaehyun said copying mr. kim's words.

they both glared at each other. the tension in the room was almost sickening.

"we're gonna go." taeyong announced before ushering the remaining boys to another part of the house.

"bye, siren!" sicheng smiled brightly.

i waved goodbye as they walked away.

"well, you got your wish, doyoung. i got a babysitter now and you ran my friends off again. you happy?"

"very happy."

"good, so get the fuck out." jaehyun said angrily.

you didn't know that much about the royal family but you were shocked. princes were supposed to be respectful or at least act like it. yet you could hear how much hatred jaehyun had in his voice.

mr. kim, doyoung as jaehyun called him, scoffed but looked at you, "siren, be careful. he's a tricky one," he stated before leaving.

you turned to look at jaehyun who was already staring at you.

"johnny really respects you."

you shrugged, "a lot of people do. what's your point?"

"he likes you for some reason and i don't know why and its bothering me."

"you're a big boy. you'll get over it."

jaehyun smirked, "yeah, i'm a big boy alright."

you rolled your eyes and walked past him. had to walk yourself into that pun, didn't you? you felt his eyes on your ass as he followed you up the long spiraled stairs.

"tenth door on the right is your room. next room over is my bedroom in case you get lonely."

ignoring him once again, you walked into your new room. it was huge: a king-sized bed with black silk sheets, dresser, nightstand with a flatscreen TV positioned on the wall. you took out your laptops and phones to charge them.

"why do you have two laptops and two phones?" jaehyun asked, reaching to pick one of the laptops up.

however, you grabbed him by the wrist before he even got the chance.

"don't touch anything that doesn't belong to you... that's rule number one. don't ask me anything business related or too personal. my job isn't to befriend you. my job is to keep you out of trouble, got it?" you asked angrily, “good, don’t make me tell you again.”

"you're so fucking sexy when you're angry." jaehyun whispered, staring at the grip you had on his wrist.

you rolled your eyes and let go of him, “it’s my job to keep you alive and out of trouble. why are you already making it hard for me?"

"didn’t they tell you how bad i was, baby?"

[georgiaswarr]

lister bird - part 1 (part 2)

this is me trying - taylor swift

“they told me all of my cages were mental / so i got wasted like all my potential” starting this playlist off with a song that i feel definitely will come to describe lister’s mental state, especially during iana - he’s fallen behind, he’s dependent on partying and drinking, but at least he’s trying to get better

still learning - halsey

this song incorporates a fuckton of lister’s struggles - the pressures of fame, trauma, dealing with past mistakes, of course self-loathing, and much more

timebomb - finish ticket

and another self-deprecating tune !!! this one in particular addresses the connection between drinking/alcoholism and feeling like a fuck-up

the key to life on earth - declan mckenna

i could probably go into great depths to explain how exactly this is a lister song but suffice it to say, lister grew up poor and we mustn’t forget that. “holy smokes / you kids and your jokes / asking where we got our jeans / and where the hell we found our coats” reminds me a lot of meeting lister, him getting into fights and being “held back for after-school meetings”, etc.

new age meds - the wldlfe

“self-deprecation; / a new age medication / and you might need some therapy if / you're gonna live your life suffocating / someone who you're supposed to be” here we have the theme of self-hate again, used in connection with drugs and addiction, too, which is very lister

are you satisfied? - marina

another song highjacked from @kindaorangey, they did a better job than i ever could explaining it here

knock me off my feet - soak

“saturday night on the highest wall / settin' 'em off, all 50 fireworks / kickin' the cannons, we watch them fall / it doesn't exist, the law” lister starts living the high, indulgent life once he gets rich, which is a stark contrast from how he grew up. in the end, though, he still has people he can call his home.

narcissist - no rome

“stayin' late, i just wanna get stoned / telling all your friends that I'm never at home / and my face filling up with blood / but you're still the same living like a bourgeois” highjacked from alice’s 5 playlist, another song about partying and the like but also being painfully aware of your own flaws

big black car - gregory alan isakov

a song about feeling inadequate and worthless compared to another person, which is how lister feels about himself compared to jimmy and rowan

eventually, darling - declan mckenna

abandonment issues, lost hope, impostor syndrome, disillusionment and an almost nihilistic view on a relationship - this song has it all. i personally associate it with bicci and lister reassuring both jimmy and himself that it’s okay if he doesn’t like him back - after all, “everyone leaves eventually, darling”

swimming pools - lxandra

lister grew up poor and we mustn’t forget that part 2 - this is another flashback to his childhood, while simultaneously showing the stark contrast to his current life - i like to interpret the line “still the kids who don't have swimming pools / in their 40-million-square-feet mansions, ooh” in a “yeah, he’s rich, but he still came from almost no money and this has had a profound effect on him” way

mind - declan mckenna

according to declan mckenna himself, this song “makes me think of my friend matty’s party i went to on halloween 2015 after playing a show […] the song lyrically and artiscally kind of reflects the confused mess of my 16 year old self”. this is something lister can probably relate to, feeling emotional turmoil and an incoming existential crisis while partying

joan of arc on the dance floor - aly & aj

“at the stake, we don't fight the flames / are you born in vain if you die a savior?” first of all, joan of FUCKING arc metaphors, second of all the death motif and lister’s “die young” mentality, third of all another dark party song which is how this applies to lister in particular

why do you feel so down - declan mckenna

listerowan song !!! “i think you're one of a kind so i'll never like myself / i think you're older and wiser so i won't let you tell / i think it over and over and hope you're thinking too / i think it over and over and hope i'm over you” because angst

know me - the band camino

and yet another angsty listerowan song, gosh i’m really making myself emo over here

18 forever - maris

a) such a bisexual anthem, b) a song about partying and feeling forever young

house party no. 1 - blossom caldarone

“you want to grow up too fast / it's a race to see who is left last / from lemons to liquor to loving each figure / you're constantly wired up the wrong way / you'll be dead in a year if i wait one more day”. this is how jimmy and rowan see lister, as a party-obsessed “rebel without a cause”

sedated - hozier

a song about addiction and self-destruction. i could probably go through every line of it but imma keep it short and just trust all of you to understand the sheer levels and poetry of sedated by hozier as a lister song

shadows - ruth b

another song from jimmy and rowan’s perspective - they see that lister indulges in a lot of self-destructive behaviour, smoking, drinking, having sex, etc. in the first part of iwbft, they notice all of that in an almost accusatory way, which to me feels like the tone of this song - “kiss yourself another stranger / ‘cause you know you love the danger, don't you? / give yourself to someone new every night, is what you do” for example is them thinking he sleeps with everyone with a pulse

burning incense - skott

i talk about lister and his relationship to religion in greater depth in part 2 with preacher man but i think that theme appears in this song too. generally this song is very much about emotional turmoil, feeling unloved and distant from your friends, and feeling worthless, so very much a lister song

those nights - bastille

theme of loneliness and finding comfort in strangers (which i know lister doesn’t really do anymore but still)

sunday morning - matoma

“i probably shouldn't say this / should keep it all inside / but maybe i'm just wasted / enough to speak my mind” bicci bathroom confession??? anyone????

love like ghosts - lord huron

another beautiful bicci song about unrequited love and feeling so incredibly strongly for someone that it feels beyond the realm of the living - that’s also where the theme of death in iwbft comes in, which lister grapples with in particular

high hopes - kodaline

this song makes me think of the confession scene too - lister realising jimmy maybe doesn’t like him back, losing hope and all that, and deciding he needs to move on

mirrorball - taylor swift

theme of personas - lister has the Lister Bird persona which is there to entertain people, to make himself appear fun, aloof, approachable, almost like a clown, even though that isn’t who he actually is deep inside

much like myself - emma jayne

and another song about appearing happy on the outside despite the fact that you don’t feel much like yourself

[jess-rewatches-prodigalson]

Head Case (S2, E6)

My time-stamped thoughts for this episode. As always I reference Malcolm’s mental health. A lot. So if that’s going to be a trigger for you, don’t keep reading.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

0:03 - This clip of Malcolm in the car is from the pilot episode. I was so betrayed by this clip. Full disclosure - I’ve always had a thing for Malcolm’s jacket from the pilot episode. I just love it and I think Tom Payne looks cute in it. BUT - I was betrayed because Malcolm isn’t wearing my favourite jacket in the next scene (I was disappointed but not surprised). Rant about wardrobe over. 

0:20 - This is weird to me. In the clip right before this, when Malcolm was coming to Claremont (wearing the awesome jacket) - Malcolm is clearly in emotional distress. He’s not in a good mood. BUT right here, when Malcolm is chatting with Mr. David he seems like he’s in a good mood. Not one of his manic good moods - just a regular good one.

0:32 - Anyone else notice how visibly uncomfortable Jessica AND Malcolm are? This whole Ainsley situation is literally going to destroy them both. :(

0:34 - sooooo Mr. David knows by now right? He has to? ALSO when the European FBI guy shows up in a few episodes this is going to be bad for Malcolm and Jessica right? The FBI guy will probs talk to Mr. David who will be like - oh yeah, they’ve had more ‘family meetings’ in the past 6 months than in the past 20 years. 

1:22 - Sooooo this whole family honestly thinks Ainsley’s going to become a serial killer. From the tidbits of her childhood that we’ve seen, the way she treated Malcolm in Q&A, and generally how she acts when she wants to get a story - I’m not surprised. Read my thoughts on older episodes (1x7, 1x20, 2x5), I’ve always thought Ainsley was a sociopath or psychopath. The girl doesn’t show a lot of moral backbone or sympathy for anyone. 

1:33 - Wait. Does this montage of Malcolm’s erratic behaviour mean that Malcolm killed someone as a kid? And doesn’t know it? Or is this just a reference to the whole ‘girl in the box’ trauma arc from last season?

1:44 - “I wish I didn’t know that you were a killer.” Anyone else get major flashbacks to the movie Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause? “I wish I had never become Santa at all” then we get an AU for 40 mins? Just me? Cool - excuse my bad taste in Christmas movies. 

1:50 - hahaha Martin is so bitter.

2:25 - You know, as much as I love to hate Martin - he has a point. Malcolm loved his Dad (still does whether he wants to admit it or not) in 98′ - why is Malcolm chill with Ainsley killing but not Martin? Is it because with Martin, he found a poor girl tortured in a box but with Ainsley he saw her kill a man that was threatening their family? Or was it because Martin tried to kill Malcolm but Ainsley hasn’t (yet?) **honestly - that would be such an interesting episode - if Ainsley tries to kill Malcolm**

2:33 - THANK YOU. Someone finally thanks Malcolm for trying to protect Ainsley (and in extension Jessica) from the emotional trauma he’s been dealing with since the age of 10. EVEN THOUGH PROTECTING THEM IS MAKING HIS MENTAL STATE WORSE. Seriously - Malcolm is going to snap soon I honestly won’t be surprised if we get some suicidal ideation from him this season (especially if things don’t improve). Look at those big sad puppy dog eyes when Jess thanks him.

2:38 - hahahaha that side-eyed glare directed at Martin. 

2:53 - I know Jessica had good intentions here - she’s trying to protect both of her children but honestly, this whole interaction was probably super upsetting for Malcolm. Think about it - BOTH of his parents haven’t tried to have a serious discussion with him at the same time since he was at 10 years old or younger. This interaction is probably bringing up some memories for Malcolm and making him grieve for the childhood he lost all over again. 

3:06 - “You’re gross.” followed by a very regal wave at Mr. David. YES. Queen Jessica. <3

3:25 - Malcolm startling JT is pretty freaking cute. Look at how JT’s expression immediately changes from startled to concerned. I don’t blame him. Malcolm gives off major manic energy in this scene. The visit with the parents did not leave him in a good place. Also - Malcolm straight up admitted that he’s had a ‘rough morning’ this boy almost never tells the truth when he’s struggling. He’s fine. He’s always fine. 

3:30 - “Rough month.” IS THIS IT? IS THIS ALL I’M GOING TO GET? JT had a baby THREE EPISODES AGO. ‘rough month’ is a reference to the fact that he’s a new dad and he’s struggling with lack of sleep, leaving Tally alone with the baby while he’s a work, being a good husband, adjusting to dad life, ect. RIGHT?!? We’ve literally had no mention of the baby since 2x3 and I’m losing my mind. I just want someone to say, “Hey JT, how’s the baby?” that’s it. I want 5 seconds of dialogue. Just an acknowledgment that the child exists. 

3:54 - “Sooo bring me up to speed.” OMG. That smile is both extremely manic and completely adorable. Seriously - why is no one on the team more concerned about Malcolm during this episode? AND WHERE THE EFF IS EDRISA IN THIS SCENE?!? We’ve been robbed. 

4:21 - “What? I liked math class.” OMG. JT is a closet math nerd. You can’t take this headcanon away from me. 

4:24 - hahahaha look at Malcolm absorbing the new information about JT. He’s like.....yes. I will keep that information for later. Very good. Will pry further. 

5:04 - I love Dani. She’s perfect. She can see that Malcolm just checked out into his own horror of a memory. So she gently teases him to bring him back to reality. <3 This is true friendship. <3

6:00 - Was I the only one who thought it was weird that Gil asked Malcolm to help with the canvasing? Like - doesn’t Malcolm always help? Isn’t that part of what he does to build his profile?

6:12 - “KGB agent” Yes. Malcolm is still annoyed that Ainsley was so competitive about a literal murder last episode. I promise you. Ainsley’s probably still annoyed too. 

6:26 - This is why Malcolm is considering telling Ainsley the truth. He’s already losing her. May as well rip off the band-aid. She might not react as badly finding out from him as she would finding out by herself.

6:51 - “That is my vagina.” hahahahaha OMG. As a woman I must say: HOW?!?! As someone who adores JT:  hahahahahahahaha OMG. 

7:23 - “You’re getting a lot of mileage out of that tidbit”. lol. JT gently teasing Malcolm is one of my favourite things. Hands down. Especially since they’ve reached a point in their friendship where Malcolm doesn’t seem scared or offended when JT makes fun of him. They’re acting like brothers and I LOVE IT. <3

7:25 - “That’s the tip of the iceberg my man.” I have no idea why I am so amused by someone calling Malcolm “my man” but I am. 

7:36 - “The Bowery Ripper” hahaha the look that JT and Dani exchange when Malcolm starts nerding out.

8:00 - Wendell is kind of creepy. But like a weird, non-threatening creepy?

8:22 - OMG. JT let the vagina sculpture go. hahaha Look at how grossed out Dani is hahahaha she’s like, “Ugh. Men are gross.”

8:30 - This is why I love JT. He knows that that elevator is sketchy as hell. Plus it’s some (less than subtle) foreshadowing for what’s to come in this episode. 

8:41 - How did Dani find out he was at Claremont?! Does Mr. David call Gil every time Malcolm visits?!? ......this is my new headcanon. You will have to pry it from my cold dead hands. 

9:00 - This is a really cute moment between Dani and Malcolm. Regardless of whether or not you ship Brightwell - it’s really sweet to see Malcolm interacting so honestly with someone. He’s telling Dani the truth about something and she’s not making him feel bad about how messed up his family is or how weird his situation is. She just listens and teases him to make him smile. That is a good friend. IDC how you feel about Brightwell - right now - this is a GOOD FRIEND moment and Malcolm deserves more of them. 

9:10 - Annnnnnndddd this is why Brightwell shouldn’t happen (right now). Dani is still hurt that Malcolm doesn’t trust her enough to tell her everything. She still doesn’t completely trust him after what happened last season. A romantic relationship without 100% trust will fail. End of story. They’re great friends but right now they can’t be in a romantic relationship. It’ll end poorly. (Damn, I hope Brightwell is endgame though).

9:38 - hahaha Greta Swan is a perfect comedic relief for the Dani/Malcolm tension we just witnessed. This girl is a little nuts and a lot funny. 

10:00 - “Dad’s lived here his whole life” - wow. The writers really left us some big bread crumbs. We go from the scene where someone mentions a serial killer who killed someone (who was abducted from this hotel) in 1963. THEN we find a strange, gossipy woman and her grumpy father who has lived there his whole life. Coincidence? Nah. 

10:17 - SERIOUSLY?!? The Whitly home is ENORMOUS. WHY IS JESSICA LETTING AINSLEY WORK IN THE MURDER BASEMENT?!?!?! We literally just found out that Jessica has a SOLARIUM somewhere in this house. 

10:40 - “The guy definitely seems like he kills people.” Oh the irony here. 

10:55 - “Are you upset with me?” This is soft and I love it. Malcolm is being vulnerable with his little sister and it warms my heart. 

11:07 - “Insomnia sucks.” “Who knew?” Again. Irony. 

11:18 - “Anything you want to talk about?” This is precious. Malcolm loves Ainsley SO FREAKING MUCH. He has major Dad/Big brother/concerned school counsellor energy here and I’m here for it. 

11:38 - Malcolm’s soooo going to replay this conversation in his head about a million times. He’s going to blame himself for Ainsley’s murder victim of this episode. He’s going to play the “what-if” game. What if - he told her the truth here? Would she still have killed someone tonight? 

11:52 - Look at Ainsley’s face here. She seems sort of confused and comforted? Like maybe the fractions of memories that she’s admitting to having are making her believe that she killed Endicott and it scares her. Malcolm telling her otherwise is probably comforting on some level. It’s helping her convince herself that she’s done nothing wrong. 

12:25 - According to IMDB - this isn’t the episode LDP directed SO WHY IS THERE SO LITTLE GIL CONTENT IN THIS EPISODE?!?!?!

12:27 - What the hell is the puddle on the floor btw? Is it paint? Tar? Blood? I thought construction hadn’t started on the hotel yet?

14:14 - Malcolm. You. Are. A. Moron. Why go towards the creepy elevator that opened by itself? Why did you think that was a good idea?

14:29 - The Bowery Ripper is pretty strong for an old guy. I mean, Malcolm isn’t that big and he was caught off guard but still.

14:38 - I wanted this scene to be reality SO SO BADLY. I don’t even care about the Brightwell interaction in this scene. Malcolm is on a hospital bed. With an ice pack. I could’ve watched 45 minutes of “Malcolm in the hospital” content. The fact that this boy didn’t spend longer than a 30 second scene in the hospital is a CRIME. Why does Fedak hate giving us the whump aftercare?!? WHY?!?! Doesn’t he know like half the fandom LIVES FOR IT?!?

14:40 - You know how I knew this was the start of Malcolm’s AU dream? 2 reasons: 1) Dani has her hand on the ice pack on Malcolm’s head, even though he totally doesn’t need her help to hold the ice pack to his head. 2) GIL ISN”T HERE. .....although this episode did us dirty with the lack of Gil content (I miss Papa!Gil so much)

14:46 - There’s something about dream JT. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Real and dream JT are almost identical. But dream JT seems to be more open with Malcolm? IDK - he’s more relaxed around Malcolm? I can’t quite describe it. Did anyone else notice that there was just something a little bit different about dream JT? Not even in a bad way. Just different. 

15:15 - “Noooo she said it could’ve been worse. Not the same.” hahaha YES DANI. Good looking out. Call out this boy for neglecting his health. 

15:24 - This whole scene where Dani and Malcolm do a joint interrogation was awesome. They were talking pretty fast which I found a little distracting but JT said it best, “They were on FIRE”.  One thing I REALLY liked about the scene was the dynamic between Dani and Malcolm. Neither one of them was really taking a lead in the interrogation. They were equal partners and I think that says a lot about Malcolm’s romantic desires. He doesn’t want to dominate anyone. He doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. He just wants someone he can trust and respect. Someone who will trust and respect him. He wants a partner. An equal partner. I think that’s a really healthy desire for anyone in search of a relationship. 

16:12 - an affair? Did we know that Lyle and/or Katrina were married?!? If they weren’t married it would just be a relationship. Not an affair. 

17:01 - Is this honestly the first time Dani has called Malcolm by his first name? In 26 episodes? It must be right? Because I swear I was so shocked my heart skipped a beat (also my Brightwell heart melted but that’s a whole different thing). 

17:06 - .....so in Malcolm’s dream does he still work for Major Crimes? Is JT running the department? I need some more details here. 

17:12 - Soft!JT <3 <3 <3 How cute is it that in Malcolm’s AU dream, JT (and Dani) don’t actually change (in terms of personality). Their roles in his life just intensify. Dani becomes his significant other and JT becomes a much closer friend/brother. It’s precious. <3 <3 <3 

17:52 - Something about the fact that Jessica isn’t drinking liquor in the AU is hilarious and depressing to me. It’s funny because, well, it just tickles me. It’s depressing because Malcolm understands that Jessica drinks to dull the pain. In this AU, she isn’t in pain. She’s happy. Therefore, she doesn’t need alcohol. I don’t know about you but the fact that Malcolm’s subconscious wanted his mom to be happy so badly that she became (more or less) sober - is heartbreaking and heartwarming all at the same time. 

18:11 - “No one in this family is scared of a little blood right?” The irony here is THICK.

19:23 - The fact that Ainsley is a doctor just like Martin in Malcolm’s AU is terrifying and hilarious. This whole “I watched Ainsley kill a man” thing is really destabilizing Malcolm’s questionable mental health.

19:27 - “Please Ainsley is the talented one. I’m a distance second.” ....does this mean that Endicott isn’t the first person Ainsley has killed? Does this mean subconsciously Malcolm somehow thinks that Ainsley is a better serial killer than Martin?

19:56 - “No phones at dinner okay?” Something about the way Martin is looking at Malcolm at this moment and Martin’s tone of voice made me think - “Shit. Martin’s still a serial killer in Malcolm’s AU.” Especially since they Ainsley literally just announced to the room that he’s getting a from Claremont. 

20:06 - Yep. That’s a nightmare. From the back, Claremont!Gil probably looked like Martin circa mid-2010s for Malcolm. 

20:09 - Look idc who you ship on this show. But I will fight you if you don’t think that Malcolm being comforted after a nightmare by someone he loves is the sweetest thing ever. Look at how Dani gently rubs his arm and back. Ugh. This is the kind of safety Malcolm DESERVES. 

20:43 - Dani lying on Malcolm’s chest. <3 It just makes me so happy. Not even necessarily because it’s Dani (although I do ship Brightwell as end game) but because Malcolm’s subconscious is showing us his ideal relationship and we don’t see anything wild or questionable - we just see G-rated cuddling. And damn if that doesn’t say a lot about how much Malcolm just wants to be loved. 

20:53 - .......Can we have a full episode’s worth of footage where Malcolm is unconscious on the floor? I know I’m a basket case but it would make my whump heart so happy.....even happier if that footage was immediately followed by 40 mins of hospital care/comfort footage.

20:59 - I know that time has sort of slowed down for the purpose of plot in this episode but ngl - every time we saw the elevator approaching passed out Malcolm all I could think was “this is the slowest elevator in the world.”

21:26 - Malcolm is so so relaxed and comfortable in this scene. I want him to be this happy forever. 

22:07 - “You deserve all of it.” Malcolm subconsciously just wants permission to be happy. He doesn’t think he deserves to be happy (especially after Endicott). That little revelation broke my heart. Also the Brightwell kiss was adorable. Dani takes control because, Malcolm wants to feel wanted and this is how his subconscious is manifesting that desire. I will argue that Malcolm doesn’t necessarily want a relationship where his partner takes charge or dominates him. He made coffee of both of them. They’re living in his apartment. They’re having calm, mature, adult conversations. They are both equal partners in his dream relationship. 

22:45 - Dani isn’t scared of Malcolm when his hand starts shaking. She isn’t judging him. She’s just concerned. <3

22:47 - “Existential ennui”? Soooo much french in this episode. Damn. “Jamais vu”, “Quelle suprise”. Now “ennui”. 

23:35 - “I don’t fit your profile.” ....am I expected to believe that Malcolm didn’t realize this was a dream until this moment? Dani calling him “Malcolm Whitly” in the last scene wasn’t a red flag? Or the fact that Ainsley is a doctor. Or that Martin isn’t in Claremont? Or that Jessica isn’t drinking booze by the bucket? I mean, I know he has a head injury but these are big red flags. 

24:15 - Sooooo is Wendell dead irl? Because this is technically a dream. 

25:02 - “I thought we were looking for an inexperienced psychopath. A first time killer.”......this is him projecting about Ainsley right? Am I overthinking this? And now he says, “I was wrong”. Is that supposed to suggest that Malcolm thinks Ainsley has killed someone before Endicott?

25:07 - “The blows are confident. They were having fun.”.....couldn’t the same be said about how Ainsley stabbed Endicott? They were definitely confident stabs (plus a confident throat slitting). 

25:14 - “We’re looking for a serial killer.” Istg the writers are hinting that Ainsley is a serial killer (or will become one soon).

25:27 - Mr. David appears in the AU but Edrisa doesn’t. We were ROBBED.

26:07 - I’m not the only one who thinks that beard makes Gil look like a werewolf right?

26:33 - Claremont!Gil is creepy. LDP’s performance here is really really good. Also - I hate it. Because serial killer Gil is just not my Gil and it upsets me to see Gil chained to a wall. 

26:56 - Sooooo in the AU “The Surgeon” is still at large right? ....you’d think Malcolm would be trying to solve that case with Dani and JT. You know, an active prolific serial killer in New York?

27:34 - The way that Martin, Gil, and Malcolm interact in this scene is really interesting to me. In a lot of ways, this isn’t an AU. Think about it. 

In the dream: Gil is frantically trying to convince Malcolm that Martin is a serial killer. In a way, Gil is trying to protect Malcolm from Martin.

In reality: Gil just shoots Malcolm disapproving looks when he mentions seeing Martin. Gil desperately tries to protect Malcolm from Martin.

In the dream: Martin is trying to convince Malcolm that Gil is a monster. He’s trying to convince Malcolm that he’s a Good father. That he would never hurt Malcolm. That he loves Malcolm. 

In reality - Martin is the same. 

The only main difference between AU!Martin, AU!Gil, and their real counterparts is their temperaments. AU!Martin has Gil’s calm, comforting, and rational temperament while AU!Gil has Martin’s angry, manic, and controlling temperament.

What is the same between the AU characters and their real counterparts? 

Martin is still a manipulative killer.

Gil still shoots Malcolm looks of concern (27:45). 

Gil and Martin still hate each other. 

28:30 - Even dream Martin tries to gaslight Malcolm. 

28:56 - “You can always count on Dad.” ....is this how Malcolm really feels about Martin subconsciously? It kind of makes sense? Who did Malcolm turn to when Ainsley did the unthinkable? Not Gil or Jessica. Malcolm said it in 1x12 - (I’m paraphrasing) “The child in me thought he cared. Loved me even.” I think there’s still a part of Malcolm that believes that. Or at least a part of Malcolm that desperately wants to believe that. 

29:17 - “I’ve never been to a crime scene before.” That’s because you create the crime scene, Martin. In all versions of reality. 

29:20 - annnnnnd AU Martin shares regular Martin’s weird fascination with Dani. 

31:00 - JT being buddy-buddy with Martin is hands down the most horrifying part of the AU. 

31:10 - “I think he’s having a psychotic break.” ......I want this to be foreshadowing so so so badly. I think it would be so interesting to see how the team, Jessica, Ainsley, and even Martin deal with Malcolm just having a total breakdown. Maybe not a full psychotic break. Maybe a nervous breakdown? Or he succumbs to his suicidal ideation? Probably a little too dark for network TV though.

31:34 - “I’m very protective of her and her boots.” Does Malcolm see himself as the Bowery Ripper, trying to protect Ainsley as opposed to his daughter? Or is the Bowery Ripper supposed to be a metaphor for Martin protecting Ainsley? Is Malcolm going to take the fall for Ainsley and all her murders?!? 

32:45 - “Why did you kill again? After all these years.” istg this is hinting that Ainsley killed someone as a kid and Martin knows about it.

33:00 - “I can’t let my daughter know what I was.” .....is the Bowery Ripper supposed to be Ainsley? Is Ainsley killing people to try and protect Malcolm? Ugh. I’m totally overthinking this.

33:02 - Even in his dream, Malcolm can’t bring himself to kill his father. Wether that is by cutting off contact with Martin irl or letting the Bowery Ripper kill him in the AU.

33:07 - Actually though - why doesn’t Malcolm carry a gun IRL? We know he’s trained to use one. We saw him use one in the pilot on a case for the FBI. Is there some sort of NYPD rule about consultants carrying weapons? Is it a rule that Gil has imposed on Malcolm? Is it a rule that Malcolm has imposed on himself? A mixture? I want to know. 

33:38 - OMG. Is Malcolm going to try and kill Ainsley?!?! What a twist that would be. AU Malcolm just killed a killer. He doesn’t seem to feel bad about it and he agrees with Martin that “everything is okay now”. 

33:55 - This hug deeply moved me. Malcolm is fully aware that this hug isn’t real but he looks so content to be hugged by his father. Malcolm is finally getting a proper hug. <3 It honestly makes me wonder what Malcolm would do IRL for his father’s approval though. He’s clearly sooo desperate for Martin to love him. Who knows what Martin will be able to convince Malcolm to do in this season? Malcolm’s not all that mentally stable right now and he’s really vulnerable emotionally. I’m worried.

34:26 - “Not that it’s a competition.” ....yep. Ainsley wants to be better than Malcolm even in Malcolm’s own subconscious. 

35:00 - Heart. Breaking. Watching Ainsley, Martin, and Jessica tell Malcolm how good they think Dani is for him breaks my heart. Look at how happy Malcolm looks. Look at how desperately Malcolm wants this to be real. Ugh. My heart is shattered. 

35:20 - “You’re the best, big brother.” Even Malcolm’s subconsious knows that he’s an excellent big brother. Seriously, I love my younger brother but I don’t think I could ever cover up a murder for him. Never mind dispose of the body. Maybe I would? IDK the situation has never come up (thankfully).

35:25 - .....aaannnnnndd we’re back to the Girl in the Box.

35:58 - “Why would you ever want to leave?” “Because it’s all a lie.” Isn’t Malcolm living a lie IRL too? He’s pretending that Ainsley is a law-abiding citizen. He’s pretending that he isn’t an accomplice in a murder. He’s living in constant fear because of his secrets. They’re going to destroy him. This is why I think a suicide attempt is a possibility for this season. This trauma is a lot bigger (in some ways) than last season’s. Plus - Malcolm has a lot of pre-existing trauma. This could be the metaphoric straw that breaks the camel’s back.  

36:45 - “Even in my wildest dream. I’m still a detective. I need to seek the truth. No matter how painful.” That’s it. That’s Malcolm’s character in a nutshell. “Traumatized boy who intentionally puts himself through more trauma for the sake of seeking the truth.”

37:01 - “You’re right. I need to work on that.”.......if Malcolm tells Gil and/or the team about Ainsley next episode I will lose my mind. 

 37:15 - TOM PAYNE. YOU ABSOLUTE TREASURE. THIS IS SUCH A GREAT PERFORMANCE. THOSE UNSHED TEARS. THAT DESPERATE ANGER. THAT HOPELESSNESS AND DESPAIR.  <3 <3 <3 <3 

38:21 - Look, I’m a mechanical engineering student (not an expert) but if that was a wooden stick like I think it is - that would’ve NEVER stopped an elevator (at least, not long enough for Malcolm to escape). But I’ll overlook it for whump. Because Malcolm has a head wound and I’m loving it. 

38:33 - I’ve rewatched this clip of Malcolm with a bloody face meeting JT and Dani about 50 times (wish I was exaggerating that number). There is something so gorgeous about this scene. I mean - the fact that Malcolm is clearly in physical and emotional pain is enough to make my whump heart sing but it’s more than that. Listen to the genuine concern in JT’s voice when he says, “You okay?”. Look at Dani’s concerned face. Listen to how soft and desperate Malcolm’s voice is when he says, “When was the last time I talked to you?” Look at how concerned and confused JT and Dani are when Malcolm says, “I know who the killer is.” They’re not scared of Malcolm. They’re scared for Malcolm. Malcolm just showed up covered in blood, he can’t walk straight, he’s clearly confused, and now he’s claiming that he’s solved the case. They’re worried about him and they have every right to be. Listen to how broken Malcolm sounds when he says, “Long story.” <3 <3 <3 I’m in love with this scene. 

39:19 - “Are you sure about this?” “I have no idea.” This. Is. Important. JT and Dani have every reason to believe that this old man isn’t a killer but Malcolm’s head injury is making him confused. BUT they choose to trust Malcolm (or at the very least, humour him). They trust him enough to take a risk on him and I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s exactly what Malcolm needed after his nightmare of an AU dream. He needed to know that they care about him IRL. I hope he notices their behaviour despite the head injury. 

39:35 - Malcolm puts the skull down with his ungloved hand. I’m blaming the head injury. 

39:55 - Look this was a really moving scene. The parallel of Malcolm arresting a serial killer in front of the serial killer’s child and Martin being arrested in front of Malcolm is haunting. HOWEVER, when that old man stood up from the wheelchair my stupid brain went “THAT ASSHOLE NEVER EVEN NEEDED THE WHEELCHAIR?!?”.....even though he literally wasn’t in a wheelchair in Malcolm’s dream. 

40:40 - WE WERE ROBBED. I want to see the scene where Malcolm explains his dream to the team. I want to see GIL. WHERE THE EFF IS GIL IN THIS EPISODE?!?! FURTHERMORE - I WANT THE IRL VERSION OF “MALCOLM GOES TO THE HOSPITAL FOR A HEAD INJURY” SCENE. WTF FEDAK. GIVE ME THE AFTERCARE. 

40:47 - “That man will be buried in a turtleneck.” hahahahahaha OMG. Iconic. 

41:27 - “Goodnight Malcolm.” <3 <3 <3 She called him Malcolm IRL. Excuse me while I go and stoke my slow burn Brightwell fire. 

41:36 - “Goodnight.” This is the face of a man who just accepted the fact that he will never be happy. Malcolm honestly doesn’t think he deserves to be in a relationship. Especially with someone as beautiful, kind, and talented as Dani.

41:40 - THAT HAT. Was this really in Season 1?!?! I don’t remember it? But holy hell - I want to see Malcolm wear it. Like now. It’s going to make me laugh. I can feel it. 

41:53 - Immediately you can hear that something is wrong in Ainsley’s voice. She sounds distracted, dissociated, and scared. 

42:14 - Give. Tom. Payne. An. Emmy. Listen to his voice breaking here. He’s so close to tears and it’s genuinely beautiful. Such an astounding performance. 

42:51 - I honestly think Ainsley is shaking her head because she realizes that she made a mistake. She came to Malcolm because she thought he killed Endicott. She thought that he’d be able to understand. That he’d be able to help her because he had committed the same crime she just committed. She was wrong. He can help her - but legally, he really shouldn’t.

43:08 - Look. A new scene for Malcolm’s night terrors. 

43:15 - Yep. This is going to drive Malcolm into a mental breakdown. This is bad. 

43:20 - There’s a part of me that wants Malcolm to tattle on Ainsley. Just so he doesn’t have to keep the secret any longer. The secret is killing him. Telling won’t make the situation any better though. Gil and the team will react horribly and it’ll make Malcolm feel like garbage. Plus I can only imagine how the press would scrutinize the Whitly’s again. It won’t be good any way you slice it. 

I have a love/hate relationship with this episode. On one hand - it’s the cannon AU episode that every fanfiction lover dreams of. It’s also a really compelling episode complete with some excellent acting and great insight into Malcolm’s psyche. HOWEVER: 1) not enough Gil, 2) WHERE IS MY WHUMP AFTERCARE?, and 3) I wanted to see Malcolm at the base of that elevator for longer. The whump wasn’t prolonged enough for my sick soul. 

[futuresticagadh]

Here’s why email marketing is important in 2021?

Many people think that email marketing is gone forever. The increasing use of chatbots, social media sites, and so forth presupposes that the significance of e-mail in marketing has diminished. But this fact and the hypothesis on which it is based is incorrect. In reality, the concept and practice of email marketing has been around for a long time. Email marketing is indeed one of the safest ways to meet your potential customers. However, modern standards and trends continue to evolve and rapidly replace old practices.  

Email marketing is also one of the strongest ways to attract consumers. There are some primary email marketing benefits that other marketing tactics do not have.

This post will examine email marketing trends to be used in 2021 and beyond.

What is the purpose of email marketing?

Email marketing is the process by which your audience and clients are targeted via email. It lets you increase conversions and revenue by offering useful insights to subscribers and consumers to support their objectives.

Importance of email marketing 2021 1. Stay in touch with your customers

E-mails help keep your consumers updated. Your consumers are likely to search their emails since they are handy. Your emails give them a sense that you care about them. Your B2C mails can be as straightforward as: ‘Hello, you are on our mind, here’s a deal we have for you!’ Or “An overview of what has happened with your business in the last couple of weeks.” Many that have subscribed to your mailing list get committed to receiving your notes. So, they would probably love to receive your e-mails (as long as you are ready). That would further increase your customer interaction.

2. Reach your audience in real-time

Litmus states that 54% of all emails received on a mobile or a computer do get opened. This is an essential piece of information to prepare a robust email marketing campaign. More and more people access not only emails but also other media and documents through their mobile devices. Not just that, well-structured emails generate higher mobile converting rates than any other medium. So, what are you waiting for? Get started!  

3. People engage deeply with emails

Email has been a means of communication for a long time, spanning almost 40 years. E-mail is now one of the key communication options for businesses. Back in the day, we were all careful to answer an e-mail in a certain way.  

All of us have been groomed for answering, forwarding, or clicking on something within an e-mail. Whether it is for removing, purchasing, or subscribing to a promotion, we often tend to display some activity with the e-mails that we receive daily. You may use email to get people to your official business website, to call you directly, or request another appeal. As a matter of fact, it accounts for over 25 percent of any business’ revenues.

4. Email marketing is easy to measure

The majority of email marketing tools enable you to monitor what happens after your email campaign has been set up. You can monitor different types of rating parameters such as:

delivery rates

bounce rates

unsubscribe-rates

click-through rates  

email-opening rates  

This gives you an insight into how your e-mail campaigns operate, which ones you should modify or which ones can be completely eliminated. These proportions should not be overlooked. They constitute an integral part of the whole internet marketing strategy. Although different research and surveys provide “optimal” numbers to be targeted, everything is dependent on the business and target audience. You better give your customers e-mails if they want them expect regularly.  

Your “unsubscribe-rate” will rise, however, if you dispatch too many emails to your customers who do not need more than one per week. Conversely, your emails could end up being a source of knowledge and useful content for your clients.

5. It’s affordable

Yes, we know that you waited for this very important question to be addressed. For fewer than pennies per tweet, you can reach a large number of customers. Companies often invest or communicate more often, where email marketing acts as the medium for the cost of (possible) conversion.

Why email marketing is effective in 2021?

COVID-19 has had a significant effect on email marketing that was useful for targeting ideal markets. In the early days of the pandemic, Campaign Monitor reported that email open rates increased because people needed to know what was happening. E-mail is probably also one of the leading marketing platforms of 2021.

Studies indicate that e-mail is one of the leading marketing forms:

•There were 3.9 billion e-mail users worldwide in 2019, and according to Statista’s research, that figure is projected to rise to 4.3 billion by 2023.

• E-mail campaign traffic accounts for 4.29% of the total internet traffic, which, according to WordStream, is higher than the average traffic from direct searches and social media.

• You should predict an average return of $42, as per Litmus’ analysis, for every dollar that you spend on email marketing. This is a better ROI than any other method of marketing – digital or otherwise.

Why is MailChimp so preferred in email marketing?

MailChimp is just one of the several options for email marketing available out there. Then why is this service the best one for you?

• MailChimp offers free service for a maximum of 2000 e-mail subscribers and 12 000 monthly emails.

• More than 7 million people trust in this globally renowned email-marketing service.  

• It seamlessly integrates with WordPress.

• MailChimp is very convenient to use and allows you to build HTML templates without any necessary coding experience. Extremely user-friendly.  

Email marketing for B2B

Business-to-business e-mail business involves a special form of email marketing approach in which you target companies rather than individual clients via your email campaigns.

While several email marketing campaigns for business to business (B2B) coincide with conventional email marketing techniques for businesses to customers, there are some unique variations between each of them.

And how well you grasp such gaps depends on your effectiveness as a B2B email marketer. Look at some of the most-riveting B2B email marketing statistics:

90% of the best-performing content marketers focusing on B2B prioritize the audience’s informational requirements.

47% of B2B marketers prioritize personalization for their 2020 campaign

LinkedIn is the source for 80% of all B2B leads.

73% of US millennials influence the purchase decision-making at their companies

Email marketing was the most implemented B2B marketing tactic in 2019

These statistics give us subtle clues as to how you need to approach your B2B email marketing plan.

Email Marketing for B2C

Believe it or not, for a number of reasons, email is the fastest way to meaningfully engage with your consumers. How can a B2C contact be established by email strategies to include your clients and to boost sales? Regardless of you being a seasoned veteran or a novice, prepare for some crucial insights!

B2C Email Marketing is a key interactive tool for promoting consumer prospects. In reality, email has become the most common form of brand correspondence, perhaps because its effects are observable.

B2C email marketing best practices

Before we dive into the top details, let us quickly glimpse at some prolific B2C email marketing best practices so that you provide ultimate value to your subscribers.

Data driven: You can build tailored promotions based on your subscriber’s actions by periodically checking your data. The more you are aware of your clients’ activity, the more e-mails you deliver.

Customization: Segmenting the delivery lists ensure you distribute custom messages based on preferences, region, age and much more.

Smartphone-optimized: Mobile use is growing and emails should not only be mobile-compatible, but should also have brief (and impactful) subject lines and CTA regions accordingly.

Preference Centers: A preference center guarantees the subscriber receives only the frequency of information they choose to communicate with.

Conclusion

It’s time to reassess your marketing approach if you’ve ignored e-mail marketing until now.

It rewards marketers heavily once they learn how to do it well. Having been around for a long time, it is not as confusing or intimidating as some other marketing strategies.

Stay up to date & keep following Agadh for the latest digital marketing trends!

[arcticdementor]

Other possible Holocausts: why pro-lifers are lying to us, and why thats a good thing

…

Ive had a running argument over the past few years that the raw lack of anti-abortion terrorist action proves no one really thinks abortion is murder, ie. intentional 1st degree murder of a life equal to yours or mine.

Ive always gotten pushback to quote WillyWang:

The "revealed preference" of those that oppose abortion but don't firebomb clinics and kill doctors? It won't help, you'll be made an example of in the negative sense, and civilized norms are more important than a useless symbolic point. One clinic destroyed won't end abortion, after all.

From which this Effort-post got its Genesis:

Would you say the same about those who participated in the french resistance or Warsaw Ghetto rising to Nazi Germany?

Everyone of those claims applies there: they were likely to be made examples of, they were damaging civilized norms, and any given action had relatively little to no impact.

Yet the same people who insist abortion is murder, and thus that America is committing a holocaust, yet denounce any of the people who employed violence against abortion doctors or clinics, and can’t distance themselves fast enough from any call for violence... none of those people apply the same logic to the first holocaust. None of them say the frenchmen who bombed german police stations where dangerous terrorists who deserved their executions, none of them denounce the Warsaw ghetto rising as an attack on civilization.

…

If anti-abortion advocated genuinely believed a fetus was a equivalent human life to yours or mine or the little kids they see walk to school, and that this was an ongoing holocaust of American Children at a scale possibly 10x or more what was done to the jews... they wouldn’t need to come up with ad hoc reasons why they don’t resort to violence, their mind would be screaming at them to take bloody vengeance 24/7 in righteous outrage, demanding that oceans of blood and fire be unleashed that it might wash clean the horror, that nuclear fire would be be an acceptable emergency shut off to end such wanton and cruel slaughter... and if thinking through all the logic they concluded that no violence wouldn’t help and they must pursue some peaceful negotiation to stop the slaughter, then their minds recoil and call themselves cowards and the moment of coming to that conclusion would be an ongoing trauma they’d carry with them for the rest of their life, even if they knew they were 100% right. They would meet the “pro-choice” and barely be able to conceal their desire to see them dead or imprisoned... they would meet women who had had abortions and scream bloody murder at them and tell them they deserve the death penalty, the way many of the same people react when presented with women who’d murdered their children, but after their children had left the womb.

The people who were jailed for assassinating abortionists, or fire-bombing clinics would be folk heroes lionized in songs and crowd funded hagiographic documentaries and folk traditions, like John Brown, or John Wilkes Booth, or Louis Reil, or Saco and Vancety, or Huey Newton, or Malcolm X, or David Koresh, or Levoy Finecolm... or hell even just Jesse James, or Killdozer.

Americans abort on average 1 million plus babies a year... that means if abortion is murder and those are human lives, then the 50 years since Roe vs.Wade has been a worse crime than the holocaust, slavery, or the crimes of Stalin, and we’d have to consult a historian to see if they were worse than Mao (on a per capita basis, certainly)...

This would be the worse crime ever commited, the greatest mass slaughter ever perpetrated in human history, and 50 years later our society would remain committed to repeating it in the next 50 years.

If that does not demand violence, then nothing in human history ever has, no even defensive war has ever been justified, and only Jainists and Jehovah’s witnesses are morally acceptable actors. An extreme unexceedable pascifism we know the vast majority of anti-abortion advocates do not endorse, since they overwhelming supported or at-least did not conspicuously oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (over a mere 3000 Americans dead, and a less than a years abortions worth of Iraqis killed by Saddam) and continue to conspicuously “Support our troops” troops that exist to carry out violence, despite their moral commitments saying they can apparently never in human history be justified.

.

When i say this proves “Pro-lifers” clearly do not believe a fetus is an equal human life, thats me being incredibly charitable. That is me extending a overwhelming large olive branch, that is me expressing a stupendous care and concern and sympathy and brotherly love to rival the best 19th century dinner host, the dearest of friends, a benevolent older sibling, a lover, a parent, a mother who on hearing the taped confession of her son to serial murder, doesn’t hesitate once before screaming “you monsters you’ve drugged and tortured him! What threats have you made to my grandchild! He would only say such things to save his daughter’s life!”

My claiming they are full of shit and lying to themselves, to you, and to me, is an expression of love and faith in my fellow man which until now I did not realized I possessed nor was capable of...

Because if I merely took them at their word? If I believed that they believed what they say they believe? They would be monsters.

.

Lets play a game called “Other Possible Holocausts”. Approximately 800,000 babies where aborted this year.

Lets imagine the US government has just announced that crime has gotten to cumbersome and that over the next 3 years it plans to execute every single one of the 2.4 million people in US prisons jails and Jeuvenile detention centres.

Lets imagine that to reform education, the US resolves to kill the bottom 1% of all 80 million students in the country based on an age adjusted standardized test every year.

Lets imagine hatred of the obese takes off, and a policy is passed to resolve America’s 30% obesity rate by the mass instituting of bounties on hunting and killing the obese... that every year 800,000 to 1.5 million tags will be issued for a fee to allow the hunting of the obese in return for monetary rewards on successful hunts and getting to keep the carcasses for meat base animal foods and the manufacture of fuel, or fat based household products. These bounty hunters become known a “whalers”.

Lets imagine the US announces its done with African Americans... if the problem hasn’t been solved since 1619, its not going to be... and so they’re going to genocide all 40 million African Americans at a rate of 2% a year, for the next 50 years.

Lets imagine opposing extremists get in charge and decide the racists rednecks have to go, and so they’ll be forming death squads to roam the South, Appalachia, and the rust belt, with the objective of killing 800,000 poor whites a year, “until the problem is solved”... with many happily stating 50 years of this would be acceptable, while others state it’d be perfectly fine to renew it another 50 years after that.

…

These are all American lives, and according to pro-lifers of equal moral value to the babies aborted every day, no better, no worse.

By saying this and by saying violence is not and cannot be justified to resist it, they are saying that their reactions to any one of the above eventualities would be to continue to live their lives as they have lived the past 50 years.

I do not know how to respond to that. Even if Abortion is truly murder of an ensouled equal human life... The Pro-choicers committing the murders don’t think it is... hell the Nazis murdered 6 million jews and a further 5 million undesirables, but they didn’t think of them as human, they thought they were monstrous and “life unworthy of life”, like a burning man begging you to shoot him so he doesn’t suffer or hurt his fellows... a mercy in a way.

Pro-lifers on the other hand claim these are equal viable human lives of equal status to yours or mine or perhaps even greater.... They’re Children.

And their reaction to the greatest mass slaughter in human history, the reaction of almost half the electorate, who regularly talk about the need to resist tyrrany and defend the weak (as both left and right in the US do, in their way), their reaction is to vote every 4 years, and have it perhaps not even be the #1 issue if the economy seems bad, they have the opportunity to vote for the first black president, or the Orangeman says something crude about Mexicans... they won’t be single issue voters even when it comes to the greatest crime ever committed in human history?

.

I refuse to believe it. Even I, cynical as I am, have to believe we are not that far gone, and the age of men has not come crashing down... i would believe the US capable of such a crime, but to believe that a double digit percentage of Americans could look at that, recognize the victims as their fellow humans,recognize their state and society as committing mass murder of their neighbours, future friends, and relatives...to recognize that they have a moral imperative to act on this... and then just go “welp them’s the breaks, gotta be civilized” because 9 people in black robes said it wasn’t murder?

Holy fuck. No that is not how people work, that is not how humans behave, I cannot accept that, and leftists who spent the summer rioting in response to fewer than a thousand police killings of black men a year, who remember the civil rights and anti-war movements, who kinda vaguely recall that they’re supposed to remember Huey Newton, or Saco and Vanseti, or those Rossen...something people... who like to imagine they’d have been abolitionists in the 19th century. They’re right to call bullshit.

They’re right to call the pro-lifers liars who don’t believe their own messaging, and instead just want to control women’s bodies, after a lie like that to their face, they’re right to treat them with scorn.

…

Pro-life is rescuable as a sentiment and an activist movement...

But not while it claims a Holocaust is going on and somehow magically no violence could ever be justified to resist it, thus lining up all the arguments that will allow the next holocaust to be committed without resistance.

There have been a double digit, perhaps even a triple digit number of mass murders and genocides in the hundreds of thousands or millions of people, since the 20th century. America is enabling its ally Saudi Arabia to commit one against the Yemenis right fucking now.

We need to be very fucking clear about what it is justified to do to members of a regime that commits such a crime, and what it is definitely justified to do to the immediate perpetrators of the murder. And That we will back violent resistance to such a horrible crime by the state even if it serves only to make the resister a martyr we’ll praise, or it degrades “civilization” (what civilization could remain in such a regime?), or it ultimately has no effect (it is on the survivor to try harder)... The major members of the House of Saud deserve the Gallows under international law for what they’re doing in Yemen , as do their American attaches and core enablers... and if that comes from a Judge in the Hauge or from a convoy of irregulars in pickup trucks, or from lone assassins who manage to get through to them, It is justice, and i will praise it.

What we cannot do is pretend that genocides and mass slaughter on unconscionable scales are occurring and then come up with excuses for why we should do nothing and anyone who does resist is a criminal. Or else those excuses will be the ones that allow the next real genocide in the west or on US soil to actually happen.

If there is a genocide or democide or whatever you want to call mass slaughter. You must recognize the justice the violent resistance to it, even if you personally do not participate, or you must admit you were lying about there being such a crime... to say otherwise, to say a state can commit such a crime and still retain its right to your loyalty, to say a people up to and including its victims must obey such a thing, a creature made of bureaucracy that has set its sights on massacring humans by the thousands if not millions... it is to side against the human race in a war of extermination.

And as someone whose pro-choice as they come, I’d much rather, if the pro-lifers really believe its murder, I’d much rather they start a bloody civil war, than for it to become the norm that that is ethically acceptable.

[route22ny]

America’s Vaccine Rollout Is Already a Disaster

By David Wallace-Wells

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

Almost as soon as the coronavirus arrived in the United States, public-health officials understood quite precisely the basic building blocks of a proper response: test, trace, isolate — in the three-beat mantra of those early months. There were, along the way, misunderstandings and miscalculations — about surface versus aerosol transmission, about mask-wearing, about the relative safety of outdoor socializing, among others. But the basic path was abundantly clear, as nearly every epidemiologist kept screaming, and yet the country failed spectacularly to walk down it. Within hours of receiving WHO guidance on January 13, scientists in Thailand began deploying a COVID-19 test, as the Washington Post recently recounted; it took the CDC 46 days to produce one that worked. By March 1, South Korea was administering 11,000 tests per day, a rapidly growing figure; in the U.S., a country about seven times larger, the number was 183. Early, low-end estimates suggested 500,000 to 700,000 tests each day were necessary to slow the spread of the disease, and high-end estimates ran to 3 million per day; the U.S. didn’t reach 700,000 daily tests until mid-June, and still hasn’t reached that threshold of 3 million per day. As recently as August, lab delays caused by pent-up demand meant it was taking so long to deliver results that the tests themselves were effectively meaningless.

That is just the story of testing, but contact tracing and isolation were bungled just as badly. Early estimates for the number of contact tracers needed ran between 100,000 and 300,000 people working, nationwide, to alert the contacts of positive cases to encourage them to isolate. As of May, the number was under 8,000. Today, it is still just 70,000, and those who are reached by those tracers are overwhelmingly not responding. There has also been hopelessly inadequate support for those hoping to isolate, or quarantine, during periods of risk — not to mention insufficient protections for those who had to miss work to do so.

And now here we are, nearly a year into the pandemic, making precisely the same mistake with the vaccine. That is to say, despite the horrible continuing brutality of this pandemic and the incredible efforts and good intentions of health-care workers, we are, practically speaking, at a social level, not even bothering to try to end it.

How badly are we doing? In September, President Trump promised 100 million vaccinations by the end of the year. As a country, we have only 40 million doses, and had aimed, according to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, to vaccinate 20 million by year-end. That’s bad enough. But we have administered only 2 million of those — barely 10 percent of the goal. At this rate, achieving sufficient vaccination to reach herd immunity and bring the pandemic to a close in the U.S. will take about seven years. In Israel, they are vaccinating about one percent of the population each day, meaning the full program of population-wide vaccination will be done by this March.

Of course, at that speed the effects will show up much sooner, as well. Because of the dramatic age-skew of disease, vaccinating the small number of very old people has an astonishing impact on mortality risk. According to one assessment of the Israeli approach, which focuses on protecting the elderly first, vaccinating just the 0.5 percent of people over 90 drops the total fatality risk by 19 percent; vaccinating the 2.5 percent over 80 cuts it fully in half; vaccinating the 7.5 percent over 70, drops it by three-quarters. Ultimately, Israel chose to bulk-vaccinate all those over 60, so the improvements are less dramatic than they might have been. But by late January, the country will probably have reduced its fatality risk from the disease about tenfold.

The U.S. is not Israel — it is a large country, much more rural, with a much more complicated (indeed, tattered) health-care system. There are probably some understandable, if maddening, reasons that we are not moving as swiftly as others to administer the vaccine. But it is an awful show of hot-potato responsibility that no entity or authority with the wherewithal to accelerate rollout is actually functioning properly. This is precisely as we were warned throughout the fall, as close observers noted that the federal government was dumping the responsibility onto states, most of which lacked the capacity to truly administer the rollout, and many of whom would push the job to local groups, hospitals, and even pharmacies. Keep in mind that, in 1947, New York City vaccinated 5 million people against smallpox in two weeks. Now just look at this chart from Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker:

As a whole, the country has administered barely 10 percent of even the first doses allotted — and 20 million (identical) doses are being reserved for a second shot. A group modeling the Canadian rollout suggested that rushing to get as many first doses as possible out, and waiting for new supply to deliver second doses, could avert as many as 34 to 42 percent of new infections, which is why Canada has now embraced that approach — as has the U.K. Here in the U.S., we are continuing to hold back half of the vaccine doses we have, and hardly any state in the country is significantly above 10 percent of that initial allotment — which is to say, 5 percent of available doses. Though refrigeration capacity varies from location to location, vaccines are only cleared for 30 days of storage in the most common units (including those in which they have been shipped). States have been rushing to build out their storage capacity, but have been warned of monthslong waits for ultracold freezers that could extend shelf life to about six months. That means that, in many places, this first batch of vaccine is set to expire in late January, around the time Joe Biden, who has been criticizing the rollout and promising to accelerate it, is set to take office. Presumably, the American pace will accelerate somewhat even before then. But on the current pace, by that point about 6 million Americans — perhaps 10 million — would have been vaccinated. And, depending on local bureaucracy and storage capacity, perhaps many million doses will be set to expire.

source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/americas-vaccine-rollout-disaster.html

[jordanianroyals]

Jordan Has Become a Banana Monarchy (Foreign Policy)

By SEAN YOM APRIL 15, 2021

As the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan marks its centennial this month, its citizens are still buzzing about the “Hamzah affair.” The political earthquake began two weeks ago, when security services rounded up almost two dozen prominent figures on charges of coup-mongering. Among those was former Crown Prince Hamzah, one of King Abdullah II’s half-brothers, who was ordered to stop meeting with opposition-minded tribal communities. Angered by economic hardship and rampant corruption, many of those communities had begun to see him as a better choice for king than Abdullah.

Jordanian protesters chant slogans during an anti-austerity rally in front of the Labor Union offices in Amman, Jordan, on June 6, 2018. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images

The British imported the Hashemites from the Arabian Peninsula to rule over their invented kingdom in 1921. Though it lacked wealth and prestige, the monarchy maintained domestic stability by patronizing and protecting its tribes, particularly after Jordan absorbed millions of Palestinians after the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. The bargain was austere, but it worked: bread for loyalty. Since Abdullah’s enthronement in 1999, however, tribal Jordanians have seen many jobs and social services vanish. It was this fraying relationship between the monarchy and its tribal base that Hamzah entered.

While some allege a real conspiracy tied to Saudi meddling, most analysts believe that the entire affair was a manufactured crisis designed to distract a public enraged about the ruling monarchy’s worsening mismanagement over the past decade. The pandemic made the already-stagnant economy worse, spiking unemployment from 15 to 25 percent and raising the poverty rate from 16 to a staggering 37 percent. Fruitless promises of democratic reform from Abdullah have led nowhere. With tribal activists regularly criticizing the king—the ultimate act of transgression—the monarchy is responding not with better policies and more transparency, but by doubling down with heightened repression.

But neither stifling dissent nor palace intrigue is the real story. Like all autocracies, Jordan has little tolerance for popular opposition. Moreover, most of the Arab monarchies suffer from dynastic infighting. Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Bahrain have all seen powerful hard-liners muffle dissident princes over the last decade. Kuwait’s Sabah monarchy has been rocked by coup conspiracies and succession disputes.

What this crisis actually reveals is the painful demise of a U.S. protectorate in the heart of the Middle East. Jordan has become a banana monarchy whose popular legitimacy is in tatters and that survives only through massive infusions of aid and arms from Washington. It has surrendered much of its sovereignty with a new defense treaty—inked in January without the Jordanian public’s knowledge—giving the U.S. military such untrammeled operational rights that the entire kingdom is now cleared to become a giant U.S. base. All this makes the regime inherently unwilling to entertain any domestic reforms without explicit American pressure.

Meanwhile, the United States remains complicit in the economic bungling and political abuses unraveling the country. Abdullah is currently the longest-reigning national leader in the Arab world, and U.S. leaders routinely celebrate his pro-Western monarchy, framing it as an Arab model of reform and moderation. During the recent crisis, the Biden administration reached out to Abdullah to endorse the arrests and confirm his well-being. U.S. President Joe Biden counseled him to “stay strong,” while Secretary of State Antony Blinken trumpeted the U.S.-Jordanian “strategic partnership.”

This is a sad but familiar story. Think of Iran under the shah or non-Middle East cases such as South Vietnam or Honduras under the Somozas. History shows that when sponsoring a client dictatorship becomes a sacred pillar of Washington’s foreign policy, client rulers become extremely dependent upon U.S. support, prioritizing their relationship with Washington over their own people. In Jordan’s case, the government has preserved U.S. dominance in the Middle East and protected Israel while neglecting Jordanians’ own woes. Such rulers surrender to the worst excesses of autocracy, enriching themselves and alienating society. They ignore the warning signs of revolution, believing that Washington will save them. But it never does.

Client rulers ignore the warning signs of revolution, believing that Washington will save them. But it never does.

This hegemonic impulse to back banana regimes as they self-destruct is not simply a rehash of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, the idea that even the most corrupt pro-Western dictatorships are preferable to anti-Western democracies. It stems from a more quotidian reality. Once the United States becomes committed not just to defending a regime but also to running the country itself, it cannot get out. Trapped in the trenches, the United States faces a paradox. Policymakers fear that reducing any part of their support will destabilize their client state, which could not survive without it. The only option is to perpetuate the current system, even though that regime’s own policies are clearly destabilizing it. This is why the Biden administration can recalibrate ties with large and wealthy Saudi Arabia on account of its authoritarian overreach, but it can do nothing in small, poor Jordan.

Jordan’s transformation into a U.S. dependency began during the Cold War. Washington replaced the fading British in the late 1950s as its great protector, a logical move given the need to back anti-Soviet regimes everywhere. Jordan had no oil. However, so long as Jordan endured, it could be a geopolitical firebreak insulating Israel and the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula from the radical forces of communism and Arab nationalism.

After the Cold War, Jordan became more integral by helping to inaugurate Pax Americana in the Middle East. It made peace with Israel, facilitated counterterrorism campaigns, and expedited the invasion of Iraq. It hosted the coalition against the Islamic State and funneled guns for Syrian rebels, albeit not without its own intelligence agents skimming off the top. The recent U.S. defense treaty goes a step further, conscripting the monarchy to help wage future U.S. wars in the region.

Throughout this process, Washington helped build the Jordanian state. Foreign aid was one mechanism. In many years, U.S. economic aid exceeded all domestic tax revenues, the only thing keeping “Fortress Jordan” from collapsing into insolvency. While Jordan today receives support from many donors, including the International Monetary Fund, U.S. economic support remains uniquely fungible: It comes mostly in cash, it is guaranteed, and it now exceeds $1 billion annually.

Likewise, the U.S. Agency for International Development began designing and operating much of Jordan’s physical infrastructure in the 1960s, doing the basic task of governance—providing public goods to society—for the monarchy. When Jordanians get water from the tap, no small feat in the bone-dry country, it is because of USAID. Even the Aqaba Special Economic Zone, a mega-project aimed at turning the Red Sea port city of Aqaba into a regional commercial hub, was funded and designed by U.S. technocrats.

Above all, the coercive institutions bolstering the Jordanian regime became symbiotically attached to America. The General Intelligence Directorate, glorified by Western journalists as an Arab version of Mossad, spends as much time smothering Jordanian dissent as battling terrorism. It owes much of its skills and resources to the CIA. The armed forces soldier on thanks to U.S. training and military aid. Most of its armory—tanks, jets, artillery, guns—is made in the United States.

All this explains why as Jordan’s banana monarchy devolves further, from rounding up its royal kin to suppressing its tribal critics, the U.S. instinct is still to give full-throated support. Washington cannot imagine any other kind of Jordan, because it never had to. It may yet learn the hard way. Not only does history show that American support fails to save authoritarian clients from social upheaval, but the governments that replace them are also often tenaciously anti-American. Iran’s Islamic Republic is a canonical case, one that has haunted U.S. leaders for 40 years. Closer to the United States, Cuba’s regime is the historical result of revolution toppling one of the original banana republics, the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship.

Given the unlikelihood of the United States imposing any pressures for serious reform from a distance, the onus of change rests upon Jordan’s shoulders. The monarchy already knows what not just tribal Jordanians but all citizens crave, because they have been loudly protesting for it since the Arab Spring. They want credible, transparent campaigns to end widespread corruption. They wish to replace wasteful public spending with productive, job-creating programs. They desire less repression and more democracy, a pledge famously made by Abdullah himself in 2011.

But time is running out. The Middle East remains a revolutionary place, as six of its autocratic rulers have lost power to mass uprisings in the last decade. Whether Jordan is next depends upon if the monarchy can fundamentally rethink its approach, rather than fall back upon the United States for affirmation. If it does, the Hashemite Kingdom may actually become the model of reform and moderation that Washington proclaims it is now.

[lunariasilver]

The Virtuoso: Chapter 1

Masterlist

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Despite my better judgement, I decided to let the woman who attacked me live. She told me her name was Zara. I thought that was a stupid name.

I told her that, too.

She wasn't pleased, but what could she do about it? I had already made it pretty clear that the only reason she was alive was because of...I don't know, some sense of whimsy. Regardless, I was sure that I wouldn't see much of her in the future. It wasn't like I seemed like the type to run a gang, so she had no reason to bother me in the future with some strange desire to suck up to me.

Or at least I hoped not. The concept seemed like a lot of effort.

Now I was regretting not killing her. Those thoughts weighing heavily on me, I set about figuring out exactly how Meteor City worked in the first place.

It didn't take long for me to make a name for myself. Zara helped, actually. Immediately after I let her go she started spreading rumors about some "demon child."

I took a great deal of offense to that nickname.

I was 15 years old. I wasn't a child.

Meteor City was awful. Practically lawless. Dangerous. And yet...aside from a few big names I had to avoid, I found myself flourishing there.

Old habits died hard. Soon after my arrival people started coming to me to 'take care of' their problems. It seemed I was an assassin wherever I went. I had almost the finest amenities that Meteor City had to offer, which was admittedly not much.

We had no plumbing. Disease ran rampant. I threw an excrement bucket on someone's head for fun. There were some water sources, of course. But...well. They weren't exactly filtered.

I set myself up a decent base by one such water source. I threw the previous occupants out back.

I was starting to get settled into my new life of misery when I woke up one morning to find my violin missing.

My violin.

The only gift my grandfather ever gave me.

The only thing that brought me an ounce of comfort.

My most cherished possession.

The only thing that was keeping me sane in this hellhole.

I had to find it.

-

-

-

I had left a trail of blood behind me. Finally I stood in front of one of the only places I had actively avoided in Meteor City. It was a large building by Meteor City standards, but it was still pretty small.

HQ of the so called Spiders. They were an up and coming gang that was already gaining some sway in the City due to their strength. The trail of bodies led me here. I hesitated for only a moment before barging into their HQ. I needed my violin.

Desperately.

"Where is it." I called out in a monotonous tone.

"Where's what?" Some guy in a dark outfit responded. He was currently lounging on a beat up couch, reading a book. He barely spared me a second glance.

"My violin." I deadpanned. Now he looked at me. Both of us seemed to have the same dead-eyed expression.

"I don't have it."

"Bullshit."

"Tch." He then turned his attention back to his book. I narrowed my eyes at him, my mind running a million miles a minute. He wasn't the only one here, that much I knew. It would be stupid for me to attack him, even if I could beat him in a one on one fight, which I wasn't even certain I could do.

"Where's your boss?" I asked.

"Upstairs." He responded, turning a page.

I pursed my lips at him before turning away and quickly finding a stairwell.

'I can tell we'll never get along. I hate that boy.'

I remained alert as I trekked up the stairs. Who knew what they would try to throw at me-

I dodged out of the way of what I could only assume was a giant. "What the hell?!" I exclaimed before quickly reschooling my expression.

"Ha!!! You're fast" Some insane man with an afro exclaimed, grinning at me. It looked like he was wearing fur? For pants?

"Um-" I started, furrowing my eyebrows at him.

"Less talking!" And with that, he ran at me again. I managed to move out of his way again, despite being in a stairwell.

"Why are we fighting?!" I exclaimed, frantically dodging.

"Why aren't you fighting!?!" The man exclaimed. He looked fucking feral!

"I'm not in the habit of fighting animals!" I retorted before narrowing my eyes. 'I'm not in the habit of dying, either.' With that thought in mind, I reached over my shoulder and pulled a ridiculously decorated dagger out of thin air.

'Killua's dagger.' I thought, unable to stop the flash of bitterness, or the shame that came immediately after.

Somehow his grin became even more feral as he charged at me again. I would really prefer to come at him from a distance, but I was in close quarters. I didn't have much of a choice.

This time I met his swing with my dagger, which extended in length a bit. I managed to deflect his blow so that my dagger was now pushing into his forearm. Strangely enough, it didn't cut him. It didn't take long to realize that I wouldn't be able to meet him blow for blow. His own brute strength far outweighed my own.

I pushed myself off of him and pivoted to the side, leaving him to crash into the wall as I took off up the rest of the stairs.

"Hey, get back here!" He shouted.

"No! You're like 40 years old, I'm not fighting you!" I shouted back. He actually only looked about 19, 20 at the most. I didn't know why I said that.

My eyes were wide as I kept running. Somewhere in the back of my mind I registered that my father would be ashamed of me for showing fear, so I schooled my expression.

"HEY YOU BRAT!" I heard him shout. I entered a hall and kept running straight ahead before crashing through the door. In hindsight I could have just opened it, but it looked like I could just break it, so why not. There was a man with dark hair and dark eyes sitting at a desk calmly.

He had a disarming smile on his face as he regarded me. His hair was straight and free of fly aways, but he had shaggy bangs. It led me to believe that he put a bit of care into his appearance, despite the fact that we lived somewhere that modern amenities were practically non-existent. I quickly drew my eyes away from his face to the top of his desk. Sitting there, in plain sight, was my violin case.

My mouth twitched towards a scowl before stilling as I marched up to the desk. "That belongs to me."

His expression didn't change from the very vision of tranquility that it was. "It didn't take you long to get here."

I snatched the case and narrowed my eyes at him. "Never take my things."

"I gave it back." He replied. It was pissing me off that he looked so nonplussed about all of this.

I closed my eyes for a second, my eyebrows twitching. "I took it back."

"If I wanted to keep it, I could have."

I kept my eyes closed. I was well aware of the fact that I was in danger. I couldn't take on all of these people.

I couldn't see them all, sure, but I was well aware of their presence. Yet another reason for me to keep my expression as still as possible.

"I believe that." I opened my eyes and met his gaze. "So what do you want?"

"Just to say hello." He responded.

I inhaled sharply. "Hello."

I hate him.

-

-

-

That wasn't the last time I saw Chrollo Lucilfer, as I later learned was his name. It wasn't the last time I saw any of the three members I had seen that day.

Chrollo I found lounging by one of the cleanest water sources we had, reading a book that I recognized from a glance. It was one of my absolute favorites. Before I realized was I was doing, I was approaching him and taking a seat next to him.

"Hello Ivela." He greeted, turning a page.

"Do you like that book?" I asked, not bothering to return his greeting.

"I wouldn't be reading it if I didn't."

I bristled, but calmed myself. It was a fair answer.

I kept sitting there in silence for a moment, trying to think of what to say. On one hand, I wasn't here to make friends. On the other, I had never seen anybody else reading that book, and my family certainly never discussed literature with me.

Chrollo, to his credit, didn't push me to either carry on the conversation or leave him alone. He just kept reading his book, either unbothered by my presence or patiently waiting for me to say something else.

"It's one of my favorites." I finally spoke, breaking the silence. The water was suddenly extremely interesting to me as I ran my hands through the dirt. "Have you finished it yet?"

"Yes. I'm rereading it." He replied. I felt his gaze finally land on me. "I'm curious, what did you think of-"

We talked about that book for hours that day. The two of us had, apparently, lost track of time. I stared after his retreating form with narrowed eyes and furrowed eyebrows for a moment, before deciding that he wasn't bad company to keep after all.

I found the bad mannered guy when I followed the sound of blood curdling screams coming from somewhere nearby. Normally I wouldn't care about screams, but this one seemed somehow worse than usual.

When I found the source of the screams, it turned out to be the bad mannered guy from the Phantom Troupe building torturing someone who I didn't recognize.

I turned to walk away, deciding it was none of my business, when I noticed where he was cutting.

"It'll hurt more if you cut about an inch to the right." I stated. My expression remained neutral.

He said nothing, but, out of curiosity perhaps, did as I recommended. He was rewarded with louder screams.

The dead-eyed guy turned to look at me. Years of reading the members of my own family's expressions made it child's play to understand his unspoken question.

"You were just shy of hitting a group of nerve endings." I explained.

He regarded me for a moment. "I'm Feitan."

I nodded in response. "Ivela."

As it turned out, he knew some things about torture that I was unfamiliar with. We spent the day swapping techniques.

The barbarian actually found me. I was walking, scavenging for food when he chucked a beer can at my head. I caught it, of course. It took a second to register that he wasn't attacking me.

"Ivela! Have a drink with us!" The barbarian offered. He was accompanied by a tall man with a sword at his side.

I blinked. "I'm underage."

They laughed. "There's no laws here! Come on!" It was the tall one who spoke.

"Didn't you try to kill me?" I asked, still staring at the can.

"Pfffft. I wasn't tryna kill you!" The barbarian defended.

"Whatever." I said with a sigh. After a moment's debate, I popped open the can and chugged it down.

"Yeah! She's not a wuss!" One of them cheered.

The side of my mouth twitched. "It would take a lot more than that to get me drunk." Or even buzzed.

"Oh, I like this one. Come on, let's go drink some more!"

I found out the barbarian's name was Uvogin, and the tall one's name was Nobunaga. They were both incredibly irresponsible....but kind of fun to be around. I didn't mind drinking with them.

Apparently I was destined to keep running into members of the phantom troupe. The next one to approach me was a blonde woman with an odd nose in smart business attire. Something about her put me at ease. For a second.

I berated myself and raised my guard back up. Anyone who immediately makes you feel safe is probably out to kill you.

"Do you want something?" I asked her.

"I'm Pakunoda." She introduced. "I'm a member of the Phantom Troupe."

"Another one of you?" I muttered. "Are you all following me around for any particular reason?"

"We all have our own reasons." She deflected. "Mine is that I'm a fan of classical music."

I narrowed my eyes at her. I couldn't tell if she was lying or not.

"I'm not lying. Would you play something for me?" She requested.

I opened my mouth to tell her to get lost before I shut it. Had anyone ever asked me to play for them before?

I wasn't sure. I didn't think so. Why would she be interested in my music. Was she plotting something?

She had to be.

"Not today." I muttered, before walking away.

Pakunoda was persistent. She seemed to really want to hear me play. Or she was determined to kill me. I honestly wasn't sure which. Eventually, I caved and played for her. She didn't try anything, but I still didn't trust her.

It wasn't the last time she asked me to play for her. She seemed oddly fond of my music. I found myself looking forward to her asking me to play. It felt right to perform.

The last member I met was a girl about my age. Machi. She approached me out of the blue one day and started talking to me about random nonsense. I wasn't sure about her. But, I did find her easy to talk to. We seemed to have a lot in common. Probably because of our age. And our less than orthodox upbringings, respectively.

I stared at her one day. "Do you think I should dye my hair pink?" I wasn't sure what had made me want to do it, but I was tempted.

"What? Why?" She asked incredulously. She had been mid sentence when I interrupted her.

I shrugged in response.

"Also were you even listening to me?!"

I smirked sardonically at her in response.

-

-

-

Some time passes with me spending more and more time with the Troupe members. I didn't like them, of course, and they weren't my friends. I was just passing the time. Using them for entertainment. And because they were strong, it helped to be known as a friend of theirs's.

As I pondered on the fact that none of them were my friends and I wasn't fond of any of them, it occurred to me that I hadn't talked to Nobunaga in a while. That wouldn't do.

So I set off to go find him.

I was a pretty good tracker, so it didn't take me much time to find him. He seemed to be practicing his swordplay by himself.

"I could spar with you." I heard myself offer.

He stilled and regarded me with a hardened expression. "Do you even know anything about swords?"

"I know plenty." I responded. I was at least proficient with most weapons due to my upbringing. An assassin needs to know how to use any weapon available to them.

"Well then. Here!" And just like that, he tossed an unsheathed blade at me. I had no idea where he got it from, but I didn't have time to question it. No sooner had I caught it then he charged at me.

I blocked his swing, and we spent some time dancing around each other, steel clashing against steel. It was surprisingly fun.

I was holding my own just fine, but it was clear he was more talented with a blade than I was. I was constantly on the defensive. I managed to attack a few times, sure, but goddamn he was on a different level with his sword. It was honestly quite impressive.

I wondered how we would fare against each other in a nen battle. I almost wanted to try.

When the fight ended, it was because I was on my ass.

He was laughing. He was laughing at me.

I felt my face redden as my hands clenched into fists.

"Hey, don't be angry! You're great! Who taught you?" He asked as I stood up.

I was stunned. "You were laughing...because you were impressed?" That didn't make any sense.

"Yeah!" He replied.

"Uh." I was at a loss. "My...father and grandfather mostly handled my training." None of this made any sense. He was praising me for losing?

"They must be good." Nobunaga said. "I'd love to fight them."

I shifted my weight back and forth between my feet. "I think you'd die?" I told him. "They're, uh, assassins."

"You're an assassin?!" He exclaimed. I nodded at him, my hands fidgeting. He calmed down and paused. "Hm. That explains a lot."

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I had been holding. I wasn't sure why I felt relieved. "Yeah. That's why I've had so much training."

"You and I should fight again sometime. Go ahead and keep that sword!" He offered with a disarming smile.

I tilted my head to the side slightly. "It's...a gift?"

"Yeah! Make sure to use it!"

I looked down at the sword in my hands, unable to comprehend him giving me a gift. I didn't expect to ever get any more gifts after being banished. I would make good use of it.

I always made good use of gifts.

A/N

Buckle up guys, we're gonna be in Meteor City for a while.

[stevishabitat]

The summer wasn’t meant to be like this. By April, Greene County, in southwestern Missouri, seemed to be past the worst of the pandemic. Intensive-care units that once overflowed had emptied. Vaccinations were rising. Health-care workers who had been fighting the coronavirus for months felt relieved—perhaps even hopeful. Then, in late May, cases started ticking up again. By July, the surge was so pronounced that “it took the wind out of everyone,” Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital Springfield, told me. “How did we end up back here again?”

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.

Many experts have argued that, even with Delta, the United States is unlikely to revisit the horrors of last winter. Even now, the country’s hospitalizations are one-seventh as high as they were in mid-January. But national optimism glosses over local reality. For many communities, this year will be worse than last. Springfield’s health-care workers and public-health specialists are experiencing the same ordeals they thought they had left behind. “But it feels worse this time because we’ve seen it before,” Amelia Montgomery, a nurse at CoxHealth, told me. “Walking back into the COVID ICU was demoralizing.”

Those ICUs are also filling with younger patients, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, including many with no underlying health problems. In part, that’s because elderly people have been more likely to get vaccinated, leaving Delta with a younger pool of vulnerable hosts. While experts are still uncertain if Delta is deadlier than the original coronavirus, every physician and nurse in Missouri whom I spoke with told me that the 30- and 40-something COVID-19 patients they’re now seeing are much sicker than those they saw last year. “That age group did get COVID before, but they didn’t usually end up in the ICU like they are now,” Jonathan Brown, a respiratory therapist at Mercy, told me. Nurses are watching families navigate end-of-life decisions for young people who have no advance directives or other legal documents in place.

Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected. “You hear post-pandemic a lot,” Frederick said. “We’re clearly not post-pandemic. New York threw a ticker-tape parade for its health-care heroes, and ours are knee-deep in COVID.”

That they are in this position despite the wide availability of vaccines turns difficult days into unbearable ones. As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said. While there were always ways of preventing COVID-19 infections, Missourians could have almost entirely prevented this surge through vaccination—but didn’t. “My sense of hope is dwindling,” Tracy Hill, a nurse at Mercy, told me. “I’m losing a little bit of faith in mankind. But you can’t just not go to work.”

When Springfield’s hospitals saw the first pandemic wave hitting the coasts, they could steel themselves. This time, with Delta thrashing Missouri fast and first, they haven’t had time to summon sufficient reinforcements. Between them, Mercy and Cox South have recruited about 300 traveling nurses, respiratory therapists, and other specialists, which is still less than they need. The hospitals’ health-care workers have adequate PPE and most are vaccinated. But in the ICUs and in COVID-19 wards, respiratory therapists still must constantly adjust ventilators, entire teams must regularly flip patients onto their belly and back again, and nurses spend long shifts drenched in sweat as they repeatedly don and doff protective gear. In previous phases of the pandemic, both hospitals took in patients from other counties and states. “Now we’re blasting outward,” Coulter said. “We’re already saturating the surrounding hospitals.”

Meanwhile, the hospitals’ own staff members are exhausted beyond telling. After the winter surge, they spent months catching up on record numbers of postponed surgeries and other procedures. Now they’re facing their sharpest COVID-19 surge yet on top of those backlogged patients, many of whom are sicker than usual because their health care had to be deferred. Even with hundreds of new patients with lung cancer, asthma, and other respiratory diseases waiting for care in outpatient settings, Coulter still has to cancel his clinics because “I have to be in the hospital all the time,” he said.

Many health-care workers have had enough. Some who took on extra shifts during past surges can’t bring themselves to do so again. Some have moved to less stressful positions that don’t involve treating COVID-19. Others are holding the line, but only just. “You can’t pour from an empty cup, but with every shift it feels like my co-workers and I are empty,” Montgomery said. “We are still trying to fill each other up and keep going.”

The grueling slog is harder now because it feels so needless, and because many patients don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late. On Tuesday, Hill spoke with an elderly man who had just been admitted and was very sick. “He said, ‘I’m embarrassed that I’m here,’” she told me. “He wanted to talk about the vaccine, and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, You have a very high likelihood of not leaving the hospital.” Other patients remain defiant. “We had someone spit in a nurse’s eye because she told him he had COVID and he didn’t believe her,” Edwards said.

Some health-care workers are starting to resent their patients—an emotion that feels taboo. “You’re just angry,” Coulter said, “and you feel guilty for getting angry, because they’re sick and dying.” Others are indignant on behalf of loved ones who don’t already have access to the vaccines. “I’m a mom of a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old, and the daughter of family members in Zimbabwe and South Africa who can’t get vaccinated yet,” says Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis, who works at a Veterans Affairs hospital in St. Louis. “I’m frustrated, angry, and sad.”

“I don’t think people get that once you become sick enough to be hospitalized with COVID, the medications and treatments that we have are, quite frankly, not very good,” says Howard Jarvis, the medical director of Cox South’s emergency department. Drugs such as dexamethasone offer only incremental benefits. Monoclonal antibodies are effective only during the disease’s earliest stages. Doctors can give every recommended medication, and patients still have a high chance of dying. The goal should be to stop people from getting sick in the first place.

But Missouri Governor Mike Parson never issued a statewide mask mandate, and the state’s biggest cities—Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, and Columbia—ended their local orders in May, after the CDC said that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks indoors. In June, Parson signed a law that limits local governments’ ability to enact public-health restrictions. And even before the pandemic, Missouri ranked 41st out of all the states in terms of public-health funding. “We started in a hole and we’re trying to catch up,” Towns, the director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, told me.

Her team flattened last year’s curve through testing, contact tracing, and quarantining, but “Delta has just decimated our ability to respond,” Kendra Findley, the department’s administrator for community health and epidemiology, told me. The variant is spreading too quickly for the department to keep up with every new case, and more people are refusing to cooperate with contact tracers than at this time last year. The CDC has sent a “surge team” to help, but it’s just two people: an epidemiologist, who is helping analyze data on Delta’s spread, and a communications person. And like Springfield’s hospitals, the health department was already overwhelmed with work that had been put off for a year. “Suddenly, I feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day,” Findley said.

Early last year, Findley stuck a note on her whiteboard with the number of people who died in the 1918 flu pandemic: 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the U.S. “It was for perspective: We will not get here. You can manage this,” she told me. “I looked at it the other day and I think we’re going to get there. And I feel like a large segment of the population doesn’t care.”

The 1918 flu pandemic took Missouri by surprise too, says Carolyn Orbann, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who studies that disaster. While much of the world felt the brunt of the pandemic in October 1918, Missouri had irregular waves with a bigger peak in February 1920. So when COVID-19 hit, Orbann predicted that the state might have a similarly drawn-out experience. Missouri has a widely dispersed population, divided starkly between urban and rural places, and few highways—a recipe for distinct and geographically disparate microcultures. That perhaps explains why new pathogens move erratically through the state, creating unpredictable surges and, in some pockets, a false sense of security. Last year, “many communities may have gone through their lockdown period without registering a single case and wondered, What did we do that for?” Orbann told me.

She also suspects that Missourians in 1918 might have had a “better overhead view of the course of the pandemic in their communities than the average citizen has now.” Back then, the state’s local papers published lists of people who were sick, so even those who didn’t know anyone with the flu could see that folks around them were dying. “It made the pandemic seem more local,” Orbann said. “Now, with fewer hometown newspapers and restrictions on sharing patient information, that kind of knowledge is restricted to people working in health care.”

Montgomery, the CoxHealth nurse, feels that disparity whenever she leaves the hospital. “I work in the ICU, where it’s like a war zone, and I go out in public and everything’s normal,” she said. “You see death and suffering, and then you walk into the grocery store and get resistance. It feels like we’re being ostracized by our community.”

If anything, people in the state have become more entrenched in their beliefs and disbeliefs than they were last year, Davis, the St. Louis–based doctor, told me. They might believe that COVID-19 has been overblown, that young people won’t be harmed, or that the vaccines were developed too quickly to be safe. But above all else, “what I predominantly get is, ‘I don’t want to talk to you about that; let’s move on,’” Davis said.

People take the pandemic seriously when they can see it around them. During past surges in other parts of the U.S., curves flattened once people saw their loved ones falling ill, or once their community became the unwanted focus of national media coverage. The same feedback loop might be starting to occur in Missouri. The major Route 66 Festival has been canceled. More people are making vaccine appointments at both Cox South and Mercy.

In Springfield, the public-health professionals I talked with felt that they had made successful efforts to address barriers to vaccine access, and that vaccine hesitancy was the driving force of low vaccination rates. Improving those rates is now a matter of engendering trust as quickly as possible. Springfield’s firefighters are highly trusted, so the city set up vaccine clinics in local fire stations. Community-health advocates are going door-to-door to talk with their neighbors about vaccines. The Springfield News-Leader is set to publish a full page of photos of well-known Springfieldians who are advocating for vaccination. Several local pastors have agreed to preach about vaccines from their pulpits and set up vaccination events in their churches. One such event, held at James River Church on Monday, vaccinated 156 people. “Once we got down to the group of hesitant people, we’d be happy if we had 20 people show up to a clinic,” says Cora Scott, Springfield’s director of public information and civic engagement. “To have 156 people show up in one church in one day is phenomenal.”

But building trust is slow, and Delta is moving fast. Even if the still-unvaccinated 55 percent of Missourians all got their first shots tomorrow, it would still take a month to administer the second ones, and two weeks more for full immunity to develop. As current trends show, Delta can do a lot in six weeks. Still, “if we can get our vaccination levels to where some of the East Coast states have got to, I’ll feel a lot better going into the fall,” Frederick, Mercy’s chief administrative officer, said. “If we plateau again, my fear is that we will see the twindemic of flu and COVID.”

In the meantime, southwest Missouri is now a cautionary tale of what Delta can do to a largely unvaccinated community that has lowered its guard. None of Missouri’s 114 counties has vaccinated more than 50 percent of its population, and 75 haven’t yet managed more than 30 percent. Many such communities exist around the U.S. “There’s very few secrets about this disease, because the answer is always somewhere else,” Edwards said. “I think we’re a harbinger of what other states can expect.”