#never in a million years does he think ted will choose him

[trentcrimminallybeautiful]

yknow i have a lot of aus in my brain but the one currently spinning in my lobes is a stardust au. like. honestly it really works both ways like. i feel like thematically it's probably more appropriate for ted to be the star, changing trent's life forever, but my first thought was like. michelle asks ted to bring her a star, because he's always trying so hard to please her and she needs space and he will literally pluck a star from the sky if it means making her happy--only instead he finds a man where that star fell (he's beautiful, but ted tries not to notice) who's rather disgruntled with being on the ground, suddenly. and like. idk man i'd have to watch the movie again to really get into this au either way but i am just spinning it. slowly rotating it.

[lichfucker]

tagged by @domesticatedanimals ty jack I love u

Rules: Go to your (current/main) AO3 account and find the following:

What ratings do you write most of your fics under?

explicit lmao but only just! I have five fics rated E and four rated M

What are your top three fandoms?

Black Sails (6) The Fetch Phillips Archives (3) Community (2)

if I had finished say it out loud then ted lasso would be tied w community at two but that's simply never going to happen after s3 killed all enthusiasm I ever had for the show

I wish these numbers were larger but. listen. I write big, slow pieces that take a million years so my published oeuvre is. small. the gap between black sails and everything else is only going to increase with time

What is the top character you write about?

"Long" "John" "Silver." I put all three names in quotes because none of those are his name 🥰😘

flint and silver would be tied but I didn't tag him in Ner Tamid because he's barely in it lmao

What are your top three pairings?

Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver (5) Madi/John Silver (3) Muldoon/John Silver (2)

I thought Annie Edison/Britta Perry would be tied with silvermoon at two but I forgot that I didn't actually tag annie/britta in Five Girls Annie Almost Kissed, which IS the correct choice for me to have made but it obscures the numbers very slightly. I need to rewatch community and then write some porn abt it. I think that'll fix me

What are the top three additional tags?

Pining (5) Canon Disabled Character (4) POV Alternating (3)

canon disabled character tag my fucking beloved 💛💛💛💛💛 that number will be increasing very soon 😈

Does any of this surprise you?

no lmao like I said my catalogue is small I know what all is going on in there and I know where my own fixation lies

I can't say I'm surprised by it because, again, I know what I've written, but it's interesting that my work is so silver-centric because if you asked me to choose I'd call myself a flint girlie (gn) before a silver one. it's because of Ner Tamid. it's the judaism. that's the difference maker. also there are too many fics out there with a silver pov written by people who do not fucking understand him at all so I feel like I need to balance the scales. plus the treasure island of it all. silver lives and it's a horrible thing and a fascinating thing and I need to write about it forever

anyway! this was fun. we all saw all of this coming from miles away. I am naught but a parody of myself

tagging @asterofthevoid @etoilesombre @jaynovz @boasamishipper do this if you wanna (no pressure obv)

[willowcrowned]

Okay but has anyone considered Obi-wan/Cody/Satien (is that how its spelled?) Regardless, hes got two hands for his two mandalorians, the au where this happend is gotta be top notch ridiculous ye?

Okay thank you so much for giving me a reason to think about this, because this AU contains three things I adore: polyamory, ships where everyone is frighteningly competent, and Obi-Wan

In this AU, Ventress is somehow even less well-adjusted (bear with me). What this means is that, instead of taking a gap year and finding herself after her family is brutally murdered, she decides she needs to get revenge even more now. What does this mean? In the short term, she still becomes a bounty hunter, but in the long run? She’s looking for a Sith lord team up so she can punch Dooku (with a lit lighstaber) in his stupid, elitist, backstabbing face.

So when Maul invades Mandalore, what happens? Ventress comes right along, ready to give her ‘I know we hate each other, but consider teaming up to kill someone we both hate even MORE’ space TED talk. And though Maul may be terribly annoying, a closet theater kid, always in a tits out kind of mood, and denying his gay awakening, he’s not stupid. He knows Sidious is coming for him, sooner rather than later, and he knows he needs more people on his side than his (impressively beefy) brother. He and Savage agree to the team-up.

Cue Obi-Wan showing up, ready to save his sort-of girlfriend, and finding Pre Vizsla, who got REAL sus the second ANOTHER lunatic with a red lightsaber showed up, occupied by capturing Maul, Savage, and Ventress. 

Obi-Wan saves Satie, who convinces him to call Cody for a quick evac, and they’re running away, flirting, and arguing over shooting things (as usual), when they spot Ventress, Maul, and Savage, about to be executed.

Oh, they both think, hell no. And then, because they have a stupid moral code that makes them do stupid moral things, they go save them.

A little background on Obi-Wan at this point: He has been fighting in a war for over two years. He is exhausted, close to a breakdown, and seriously questioning his place as a General. Next to him at all times, supporting him, helping him, and saving him, is Cody, who is clever, kinder than he has any right to be, and is, of course, devastatingly handsome when he does his special, unique-to-Cody half-smirk.

Obi-Wan, to put it mildly, is totally gone on him. Obi-Wan also, to put it less mildly, is his commanding officer in an army that Cody can’t leave on pain of death. To do anything— make any advance beyond the flirting that he engages in with most people— would put Cody in a very uncomfortable position, whether or not he returns Obi-Wan’s feelings. So Obi-Wan watches him from afar, hoping against hope that his affections are returned, and that one day, after the end of the war, there will be a future for both of them.

A little more background on Obi-Wan at this point: He has always respected Satine. Their correspondence fell apart just a few months after the end of his mission with Qui-Gon, but he’s been keeping up with her professional accomplishments for years. Over time, the love he bore for her faded, leaving him with good memories and an enduring appreciation for her courage, her cleverness, and her ability to deliver devastating blows to someone’s confidence with a few well-placed words.

Until he sees her again. And yes, alright, he might be angry that she’s choosing to stay out of the war— he knows what good she could do— but he understands her fears, understands the very real possibility that if Mandalore gets embroiled in yet another war, they may never recover. The thing is... well, she’s still very beautiful, especially when he’s yelling at him, and as slowly as his feelings had faded then, they come back in a rush now.

He has very much fallen in love with Cody, and he is very much still in love with Satine.

Cut back to the present— Obi-Wan and Satine rescue the three most annoying Sith in the galaxy and get the heck out of dodge. Cody, because he’s Cody, comes swooping in with a last-minute rescue.

At this point, two things are occurring.

The first: Obi-Wan is stuck in a room with four people he’s periodically flirted with over the past few years, two of whom he’s desperately in love with, one of whom he had a weird encounter with that he can never tell Anakin about when she and him got trapped in a middle school auditorium, and one of whom is definitely wearing no shirt and all that jewelry for a reason. It is Supremely awkward for him.

The second: Every single person in that room, each of which is (barring Savage) deeply attracted to Obi-Wan, is realizing that Obi-Wan is dressed in Mandalorian armor, and while Obi-Wan in three layers of tunics and a cloak is an absolute knockout, Obi-Wan in Mandalorian armor may very well kill them (and he won’t even have to touch his lightsaber to do it).

For one single moment, everything is absolutely still as they all stare at each other.

...And then Maul starts on the ‘I will rend your flesh from your bones, feel my wrath, Kenobarrgh’ spiel, and Satine stuns him. Oh, and Savage. Ventress agrees to watch the two of them if they don’t stun her, and Obi-Wan agrees.

Which then leaves him, Cody, and Satine in a room alone.

A word on Cody at this point: He has been bred from birth to be the perfect soldier— loyal, clever (but not too clever), and rigourously adherent to protocol. Yet, within three months of knowing Obi-Wan, he’s, well, calling him Obi-Wan in his head. Even just that is a gross breach of protocol, but he’s compromised in more ways than one. He talks to Obi-Wan, now, not just as a subordinate, or secondary advisor, but as a friend, as a councilor. Every time Obi-Wan touches him— never for longer than a brief second— his skin lights up under his armor. One time, Obi-Wan fell asleep on him for half an hour, and Cody’s was sure everyone would hear his heartbeat. 

What he’s doing— how he feels— he knows it’s putting Obi-Wan in danger, knows that if the Kaminoans had wanted to the clones to be equals to the Jedi, they would have told them so. And look, he knows what the natborns would call the way he’s feeling, but he can’t feel that way. He’s a clone— he’s expendable by definition. Even if, on some off-chance, he makes it out of this war alive, there’s nothing for him. Obi-Wan couldn’t care for him like that, couldn’t care for a man with the same face as millions of others, born and bred only for war. So it doesn’t matter how he feels.

A word on Satine at this point: Obi-Wan, when he left, was a gawkish, bumbling thing of red hair and freckles and the sweetest smile. Obi-Wan, when he came back, was graceful, eloquent, and very, very handsome. He is also infuriating. (This does not change how attracted she is to him in the least.)

She’s not a romantic, really, but she is a realist, and she knows she’s loved him in some form or another for over twenty years. She knows she can’t ask him to return it— knows that asking him to leave the order for her wouldn’t just be for her, it would be for Mandalore, and while the politician in her cries for her to claim him, the person in her who loves Obi-Wan could not abide tearing him away from his culture for her own purposes. She still loves him, deeply and irrevocably, and she knows he still loves her. (Maybe, she thinks, after the war... But she can’t afford to be sentimental).

What do Cody and Satine have in common? They’re both extremely competent, both instinctively ruthless, and they both love Obi-Wan. Oh, and they’re also both immediately jealous of their counterpart.

They know they shouldn’t be. They know it’s not fair, not when Obi-Wan isn’t theirs anyways, but it doesn’t change the surge of envy and dislike that happens when they see Obi-Wan use the soft voice he only uses for the people he likes best on the person across from them.

Cody knows he can never compare to the Duchess, who is beautiful and well-spoken and has held Obi-Wan’s heart since they were fifteen. Satine knows she can never compare to Cody, who has been at Obi-Wan’s side every second since the war’s beginning, who is so much closer in ideals to Obi-Wan than she is, however it might appear on the surface.

Fortunately, they don’t have to deal with it for long, because Ventress comes in with Maul and Savage and proposes a team up, at which point Maul reveals the identity of the Sith Master.

Obi-Wan swears a string of words that Cody and Satine are both very impressed by, and agrees to the team up. Cody and Satine, who are both going to Coruscant anyways, agree to it too.

What ensues is a good deal of scheming, during which Cody and Satine avoid each other like the plague, Obi-Wan is repeatedly told to get some sleep, and Ventress cuffs Maul to a door on multiple nonconsecutive occasions. When they get to Coruscant, Satine has already told Padmé, who has in turn told her group of anti-war (and anti-Palpatine) senators, Cody has given Rex a heads up, and Ventress, Maul, and Savage have been metaphorically sharpening their lightsabers for ages.

(It occurs to Obi-Wan, at one point, after he’s woken up from his enforced 25-hour nap, that Palpatine must have created the clone army for a reason— must have a failsafe in place— and he asks Ahsoka to pull all the data the Kaminoans have on the clones. They find out about the chips, and Ahsoka immediately immediately holds the Kaminoans at laser sword point until they reprogram every order into a command that dissolves the chip.)

The thing about organizing a coup together is that it makes it very hard to avoid each other. Cody and Satine are forced to work together, and, what do you know, it turns out that even with seething jealousy at work, they end up respecting each other. (Note: Obi-Wan comes into a room at one point to see them both bent over a commlink, heads together and hands nearly touching. He short circuits.)

In any case, coup, Palps dies, Republic fixed, whatever.

What’s important is that Obi-Wan gets really, really injured— so much so that he might die. Cody and Satine have dealt with him being dead before (Deception arc anyone?), but this? Watching him slowly fade, knowing there’s nothing they can do about it? That’s worse.

One night, when Anakin has fallen asleep, they have a long conversation in low voices about Obi-Wan, darting from fond to furious to devastated over and over again. If he wakes up— if, not when— they agree to say something to Obi-Wan, to let him know that they love him. It’s a meager consolation after all they’ve been through, but this is the end, in one way or another, and they deserve to be honest with him.

(Cody thinks, privately, that he will be— well, not tossed aside, because Obi-Wan isn’t the sort of person who does that, but there won’t be a place for him by Obi-Wan’s side anymore. Obi-Wan is a Jedi, a negotiator, a peacekeeper, and Cody is a soldier for a now-ended war. He is already steeling himself to accept Obi-Wan’s polite rejection with equanimity, to not cause more pain to the man. (It will be easy, he knows, to wish him every peace, every happiness. Cody has only ever wanted to see Obi-Wan happy. This does not mean it will not be painful.) Obi-Wan said once that he would have left the Order for Satine if she’d asked— she will ask, now, and Cody knows Obi-Wan will leave, can see the love written in his face, in his spine, in his hands, whenever he is around her. Satine will ask, and Obi-Wan will leave, and Cody will be left to look for a place in this new galaxy.)

(Satine thinks, privately, that Obi-Wan’s feelings for her must be long faded, replaced by his obvious ones for Cody. Obi-Wan is a warrior, a Knight, and Satine is a diplomat who foreswore violence long ago. She is already steeling herself to accept his rejection with grace. (It will be easy, she knows, to wish him well. She has only ever wanted good things for him. This does not mean it will not be painful.) He said once that he would have left the Order for her if she’d asked, and whatever he’d felt then for her pales to what he feels now for Cody. Cody will ask, and Obi-Wan will leave, and Satine will rule as she always has.)

And then Obi-Wan wakes up.

Cody and Satine let him have his long talk with Anakin first, partially because they know how important it is to him, partially because Anakin wouldn’t let them if they wanted to, and partially because they are dreading their own coming conversation. When Anakin has finished, and Obi-Wan is asleep again, they go in, hand-in-hand, and wait for him to wake up.

When he does wake up, he sees them holding hands and immediately comes to several wrong conclusions. Wrong Conclusion A: Cody and Satine are in love. Wrong Conclusion B: Cody and Satine are going to try to break the news that they’re in love to him gently. Wrong Conclusion C: This conversation is about to break his heart.

Then they speak.

At the end of it, Obi-Wan has some Thoughts. Thought One: alkdfjhskhsgjljlbhkgkjbjvnab,gkjvn;qlerghjsv?????!!!!fwbfwlkrehwogwhuwrijvhfdbhkf!!!! Thought Two: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Thought Three: Oh, we’re all idiots. Fantastic. 

He then passes out, because being on the edge of death for days and then having a shock to your system this big tends to do that to you.

When he wakes up, he is mildly more coherent. Then he sees that Satine and Cody are asleep on each other, and the coherence is lost, but he does manage to wake them up and get across three things:

Thing One: He is desperately in love with them both.

Thing Two: He’s leaving the Order for a multitude of reasons, but they are a Significant Bonus.

Thing Three: He would very much like if they both held his hand while he falls back asleep.

Cody takes Obi-Wan’s right hand, Satine takes Obi-Wan’s left hand, and the three of them stay like that, fingers intertwined, for a long, long, while.

[broughttoyoubytheletterf]

18,19 on E/H?!

Squishing the other's cheek, high fiving

A million years later I write this. I couldn't fit them high-fiving in here and I'm annoyed by that so I might have to write a whole other snippet.

I have a few other late additions from this prompt list I might or might not write. (Do not send anymore!!!). I might have to reblog another prompt list at some point.

"So we're stuck here?" Elizabeth asks. "Yes," Blake responds. "In this room?" "Yes." "Until DS thinks it's safe?" "Yes." "All of us?" "Yes," Blake is finally starting to sound exasperated. It's been a long trip and this is just the cherry on top. Elizabeth turns to Henry, sitting next to her on the couch. "Hell of a trip for you to come on." "I believe I was promised a nice beach vacation, when you were sweet talking me into coming with you." Henry says with a laugh.

"We saw the beach!" She defends. "Yeah through a hail of gunfire," Jay mumbles from the other side of the room. "They weren't shooting at us!" Elizabeth says, her voice betraying that she realizes how weak an argument it is. Henry laughs at how worked up she's getting. He leans forward and kisses the tip of her nose. "No one is blaming you babe." He cups her face and swipes his thumb over her cheek. "Everyone is safe and that's what matters." He squishes her cheek. "Well at least until you start getting hungry then no one will be safe." She bats his hand away and makes an offended sound. "I'm already hungry." Matt moans. He is sitting at the table with his head down. The door clicks open and Nadine walks in carrying a bag. "I have the solution for that," she shakes the bag, "Sandwiches from the cafeteria." Elizabeth's eyes alight and she jumps up. "Gimme!" She practically pounces on Nadine who half stumbles into the door behind her. Elizabeth has the bag now and is looking through it. "Chips too!" She says, as excited as if the peace treaty they were here for were actually signed. "Why did they let you leave the area? DS practically tackled me when I tried." Blake grumbles . Nadine just stares at him. Blake just rolls his eyes. "Oh right..." "Ted," they all say in unison. "It was Jack if you must know, he said he didn't want us going hungry," she responds primly, dusting off an invisible speck of lint on her skirt. "He also said they should be able to get us out by tomorrow morning or so." "That's about what Conrad said when I talked to him earlier." Elizabeth is still sorting through the food, placing it on the coffee table. "Since we're not really in danger, the plane is just broken again and the rebels are between us and the airport. I'm claiming the turkey. Babe what do you want?" Matt huffs. "Why do you get to choose first?" Elizabeth stares him down until he puts his hands up in surrender. Jay laughs. Matt says something under his breath and Jay laughs harder. "Yes it's a real abuse of power." Henry smiles as Elizabeth ignores her staffs antics. "I'll take whatever, you know I'm flexible." "You certainly are," she says, her voice a little deeper and her meaning clear. The other people in the room groan. "I told you to let her be late to the meeting this morning," Blake states as he goes over to make his own selection. Jay makes a face. "For what it's worth I told Jay we would all be well served by letting her be late," Nadine adds on. She unwraps her own sandwich and begins eating. Henry looks between them all slightly aghast as Elizabeth seems unfazed and is digging into her food. "I will never get used to that," he says. "People managing your intimate life?" Blake shrugs. "I've been doing it since I was her TA." Henry's eyes widen even more. Blake chuckles. "You thought all those long chunks of time you didn't get interrupted in her office were chance?" Henry looks over at Elizabeth. "Babe you want to chime in here?" Elizabeth looks up, looks around, and shakes her head before going back to her food. "For what it's worth Dr. McCord," Nadine chimes in, "it's not that unusual. Though it is usually scheduling things so that the mistress and the wife never meet. You two are unusual in that regard." There's a dark thread in her voice that no one wants to touch so they all switch to other topics. Hours later they are all spread over various surfaces attempting to sleep. Jay is using his suit jacket as a pillow and is laying on the floor. Matt has scrunched himself onto an uncomfortable looking chair. Elizabeth is splayed across her husband laying on the couch. She is curled into his chest, their legs tangled together. He has an arm loosely wrapped around her waist Nadine and Blake are still awake, Blake is trying to at least look like he's doing work, shuffling through a sheaf of papers. Nadine gave up that pretense and is sneaking glances at the McCords over the book she grabbed from the shelf. "You think it's inappropriate." Blake calls her out, he sounds ready to defend

Elizabeth. She sighs and puts down the book. "That the Secretary loves her husband? No, not particularly." Blake scoffs. "You know that's not what I meant." Nadine lets out a long breath. "They've never hidden their affection for each other." "It bothers you?" He poses it as a question this time and studies her thoughtfully "Sometimes," Nadine concedes. "But not for the reasons you think." Blake stays silent, he's learned a few tricks from his boss. Nadine however could write a book on the tricks so she doesn't expound on her thought. Blake shifts in his seat as the silence stretches. "They're a rarity in DC." Nadine finally takes pity on him. "They've always been like this. You should have seen all the undergrads mooning after both of them, but they've never had eyes for anyone but each other." Blake accepts the slight shift in topic, Nadine can keep her secrets. "The undergrads huh?" Nadine raises her eyebrows. "None of the grad students?" Blake doesn't blush but he does look away. "Well as long as the Secretary is happy then so am I." Nadine picks her book back up, ending the conversation. Blake refocuses on his paperwork but can't help looking up occasionally to look at the Secretary and her husband. When Nadine catches him, only because she is again doing the same thing, she smiles and this time he does blush.

[nriacc]

Ok butttt, I know everybody is very mad at Matty, but I kinda understand him, I mean, the thing of writing about your feelings it’s that they are temporary so sometimes we say nasty shit just because we are mad and that doesn’t mean matty is the same douche that wrote those songs, it wasn’t the best move but that’s how he felt hahaha either way I love them both and I think Matty still deserves a chance, am I to crazy for thinking this way??

Alsoooo: I loved this chapter, as always! Sweet Dreams it’s one of my absolute favorites and I loved how you put it into the fic, lyyyy xx

Omg yassss you put it into words 🥺😭💜 Like what Matty is thinking is so different from what we know. Imagine his insecurity with the whole Alex situation. First he’s never trusted Al because of what happened on the Favourite Worst Nightmare tour. Alex broke Wheels heart and Matty was the one who looked after her, he’s never forgiven Alex for that (and rightly so because if this was a real story he would have been fucked right off, like imagine if Wheels bestie knew. She would have ripped him to shit).

Then Matty would be seeing how close her and Alex still are (around 2010) and he’s gunna think that’s sus given their history and Matty’s not that stupid to not see Alex’s silent pining (before Arielle) for Wheels even when she was with Matty officially. All the while he knows how close the pair are as they are best friends and Matty trusts Wheels 1000% but he still never trusted Alex.

And then yes Matty fucks up royally (Alexa, play tonight I wish I was your boy) and he rightly gets dumped. But then months after, Matty is still being shoved with the knowledge that Alex is only Wheels’ bestie but then he sees the kiss at the Brits. Which Wheels initiated and Matty’s world begins to crumble. He thinks Wheels has been lying to him and he starts thinking ‘she obviously does still see him as more’ after years of her telling him otherwise. He starts to believe that every ‘he’s just my best friend’ that he’s heard is a lie.

But then Matty sees everything on the AM tour (all the while knowing exactly what happened on the last tour). And he would be in his head more and more and he’d of been writing songs from a place of hate. And yes he lashes out in the wrong way (Arielle and Halsey) but he’s doing that for a reaction because he isn’t over Wheels either. Not to mention the hurt he’s overcome with at leeds fest (still not excuse to be throwing glasses) but seeing wheels actively choose Alex instead of him after all those years hurts him.

More of this will come out later in the series but I agree with you Anon, he does deserve another chance. She’s forgiven Alex for cheating, and she was willing to forgive Matty for it but she thinks that Matty wasn’t interested in her after the accident (incorrect). Wheels definitely took some things in some of the songs the wrong way (Somebody Else). And if Alex wasn’t right next to her when she was listening to eycte she would have reacted very differently too.

Really glad you loved this chapter💜 Sweet Dreams is one of my faves too! Sorry about the Ted Talk😂 thanks a million for reading the chapter 💜 lyyyy💜💜💜

[awfullyaster]

andreil shenanigans bc i’ve been thinking about them a lot lately (as per usual)

ok but thEoretically

what if

what if

one) andreil just laying in bed, facing one another, ready to go to sleep but not quite yet---and they’re just staring at each other. liek they Cannot look away. and andrew kinda lets it happen. neil is still slightly hesitant but still can’t look away. sir and king are asleep around--between???--them but if they noticed, they didn’t acknowledge them. and you know. they’re just kinda...staring. searching. for anything. worry, anger, doubt, frustration, panic, tension, any type of negativity. they’re looking into each other’s eyes--and they don’t see it. not a speck. it’s just serenity. comfort. dare i say, genuine enjoyment in the other’s gaze. and maybe, just maybe, it grows into a contest, like a staring contest--but instead of whoever blinks first, it’s whoever sleeps first. OR whoever reaches out first. because they’re just staring, silently, not touching, but close. real and there to stay. 

(idk where i was going with that)

two) ok but NEIL giving ANDREW piggyback rides: a concept. (of course this would be very far in their relationship when andrew is comfortable with neil touching all of him) and it could be for any reason. liek andrew’ll just call neil or nudge him, ask yes or no, and if neil asks why, there’d be a different reaason every time. i don’t feel like walking anymore. so no? both of our arms will be occupied so if someone asks to hold something we can’t. because you haven’t been lifting enough. i don’t need to explain myself to you. you know, amdrew being amdrew. but it’ll never be the truth (because we all know andrew): because he wants to. he actually wants to be just slightly above the ground, because he knows that he won’t fall. neil simply would not let that happen. and he controls the direction, so that he doesn’t put andrew in danger. and andrew trusts him. he really does trust neil to not let him fall. and he likes it, though you’d never, not in a million years, catch him saying that. 

(idk but it’s a cute concept to me)

three) hOly shit amdrew and neil getting those liek couple fashion winter item thingies--more specifically that one glove where you can hold hands in it--i forgot what it was called but them getting that,,,,right,,,,and i know they’re not a very affectionate type of couple--much less pda--but say liek,,,,idk it was snowing out and neil lost a glove idk and they just so haPpEn to have that sitting around and as well as andrew and andrew alone waiting for neil to finish getting ready for wherever they’re going--and andrew just suggests the glove, tiring of neil teleporting here and there looking for the other damn glove. and neil just freezes up because he did Not expect that but he was glad it happened but of course, wasn’t going to show it and asked if andrew was sure. and andrew just asks yes or no, and neil responds with yes, and andrew just walks up to neil, holds his hand firmly, and pulls the big ‘ol glove out one of his coat pockets (backtrack to their matching coats, yes, yes) and slips it on, and they walk out their apartment together, using one hand each for other tasks. (it was andrew. andrew hid neil’s other glove. it was in his other coat pocket the entire time.)

four) amdrew beimg affectiomate (especially during the early stages of their relationship) yes,,,,i am wEll aware that amdrew minyard is not a big fan of affection generally,,,,but just iMaGinE,,,,liek,,,when he first showed the first safe zone to neil (the hair) and neil just played/s with it sometimes. (because they’re simultaneously gentle and hardcore, as we know) not out of spite, not out of pity, just because he wants to. just because they both want to. andrew shows absolutely no sign of it, but he enjoys it. he doesn’t stop neil, but in just the slighest way, silently encourages him to proceed. and neil does. oR, maybe andrew lying his head in neil’s lap when they’re on the roof or giving him back hugs randomly or just running hands through his hair or lying his head on neil’s shoulder in the bus bc he’s Mr. Instigator and yk, it’s easier to touch than to be touched, so. (yes or no?s asked first, of course) and neil doesn’t mind. not at all. of course, it’s all so brand new to him, but it’s andrew, and he knows andrew. he trusts andrew. he knows there’s no malicious intent behind his touches. the reassuring thought keeps him grounded, at ease, and not itchy with the urge to run. because andrew is the reason he would choose to stay. every single time. even if his legs would disagree.

(idk what the fuck that one was or why i wrote it like that)

anyway i ran out of top-of-my-head ideas and i’m tired so thank you for coming to my ted talk

i was randomly looking at the almost-sunset and my brain instinctively wandered to reminiscing andreil roof moments and i want(ed) to cry

i miss andreil oh so much

sending my love to them

(and you)

(take care of yourself)

(you’re great)

[phroyd]

When I ask my European friends to describe us — Americans, Brits, who I’ll call Anglo-Americans in this essay — they shake their heads gently. And over and over, three themes emerge. They say we’re a little thoughtless. They say we’re selfish and arrogant. And they say that we’re cruel and brutal.

I can’t help but think there’s more than a grain of truth. That they’re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world.

The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them.

And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…wel…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots?

Let me pause to note that my European friends’ first criticism — that we’re thoughtless — is therefore accurate. We’re not even capable of noticing — much less understanding — our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening — that the English speaking world isn’t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union.

So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die.

(The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.)

Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it’s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set.

That brings me to arrogance. What’s astonishing about our elites is how…arrogant they are…and how ignorant they are…at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way…while they’ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don’t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close.

And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.” The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people.

That’s not some kind of jeremiad. It’s an objective, easily observed truth. Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it.

How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death. For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now — gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle — but the winnings.

People who are battling for self-preservation can’t take care of anyone else. If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society’s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn’t be simpler. People can’t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else — let alone everyone else?

The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can’t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else?

A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either.

What makes European societies — which are far, far more successful than ours — successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don’t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other — because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us.

We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest?

A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period.

That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead — now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this.

People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty — like ours have.

People who can’t make ends meet can’t even invest in themselves — let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones.

The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to?

Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish.

(Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other — and then hate each other. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food.

As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn’t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?)

That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to.

A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that.

You can see how a society dies — with horrific, brutal clarity — in the self-destruction of America and Britain. The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn’t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn’t they blame anyone and everyone they can — from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans — for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain’s collapse is nobody’s fault — nobody’s — but their own.

They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. They don’t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist.

And though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse.

Umair December 2019

Phroyd

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

13 Keys to the White House: 2024

Historian Allan Lichtman has produced an astonishingly accurate system for predicting presidential elections; although first implemented in 1984, going backwards it correctly accounts for every election since 1860, with the only hiccup coming from the hotly contested 2000 election. He predicted Gore would win, and he wasn’t entirely wrong, there was just some brotherly nepotism and Supreme Court fuckery. Anyway, his system posits 13 yes or no scenarios about the state of the union; if at least 8 are true then the incumbent party wins another term, less than 8 and the challenging party wins. Simple.

It’s pretty early in Biden’s term to tell for sure, but we can make some soft predictions that we can refine over the next few years before solidifying in 2023 or 2024.

Midterm gains: after the midterms, the incumbent party holds more seats in the House than they did in the previous midterms. Almost certainly false. 2022 will see new districts drawn by the predominantly Republican statehouses, giving them an immediate advantage. Democrats have a razor thin majority as is, it’s never been this close to tied before, I can’t see them holding on when you take into account new census data and partisan gerrymandering.

No primary contest: is there no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Almost certainly true. Like him or hate him, Democrats are stuck with Biden. There hasn’t been a serious primary challenge in either major party since Reagan tried to take on Ford in 1976.

Incumbent seeking re-election: the incumbent candidate is the president. Again almost certainly true. There was an unspoken agreement that Biden would only run for one term, considering the fact that he’ll be 82 at the end of it, but o think he thinks he’s in for the long run now. If he does in office, Harris will become president and run for re-election herself, so the only way this would flip false would be if Biden just decides not to run again. In that case, the #2 might also flip false because I could see a weak senator like Joe Manchin running against Harris to get out of his own impending failure in West Virginia.

No third-party: no significant third party challenger. Too soon to tell, though I’m leaning towards true. The last nationally successful third party candidate was Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. He didn’t win any states, but he split some states nearly in thirds; Clinton and Bush and Dole all won states with less than 50% of he vote because Perot split the ticket. In 2000 Ralph Nader lost New Hampshire for Al Gore, giving it and the presidency to George W. Bush, and the same thing happened with Jill Stein in 2016 in the Midwest. Spoilers don’t need to be major on the National scale to have significant effects in specific states. Lichtman only flips this one false when a third party candidate wins 10% of the vote, so I’m going with true.

Short-term economy: the economy is not in recession. Probably true, but still too early to tell. We are either in the middle or nearing the end of a covid recession, I can’t see it lasting three more years without recovering at least a little, especially with the $2 trillion stimulus package they just passed. The economy is random, but if you look at a plot of unemployment since the Great Depression you will see that it consistently trends up under Republicans and trends down under Democrats. Trump was the only president is recent history to actually destroy more jobs than he created, so Biden could. It have inherited an easier path to victory. He shouldn’t be able to fuck up when the bar is so low, but I’m not holding out hope.

Long-term economy: real pet capita growth equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. Probably true, too soon to be sure. We’re so deep in the hole after Trump that any even remotely upwards tick will count as growth. I can’t see us dipping deeper than 2020 anytime soon, but then again that’s what they said in 2008, so who even knows?

Major policy change: the incumbent administration effects major change in national policy. False, I can call it now with utmost confidence. With Manchin and Sinema protecting the filibuster, Biden will get absolutely nothing substantive done in his first two years. He’ll end up losing one or both houses in the midterms, accomplishing even less in his next two! If he loses the Senate, it’s all over. It’ll be 2016 2.0, no more appointments, no more nominees, complete and utter obstruction until the Republicans take back he presidency and fill all the vacancies themselves.

No social unrest: no sustained social unrest during the term. Too soon to tell, but maybe true. 2020 was an anomaly, a once in a generation thing like 1968, so many crises all compounded together; the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the wild fires, the hurricanes, utter chaos. I don’t see 2024 being as bad, but don’t quote me on that.

No scandal: incumbent administration is not tainted by scandal. Who knows?!? Biden seems pretty white bread/plain vanilla/mayonnaise, but Republicans insist he’s the most corrupt politician since their own guys (Trump and Nixon; lowering the bar for all their successors). They milked Benghazi for years and found nothing, but still tanked Clinton’s integrity going forward, I’m sure they’ll try to milk whatever BS They can find on Hunter Biden, especially if they retake the House or Senate. Whether any accusations will stick is up in the air, but I could see Republicans impeaching Biden just because they can.

No foreign/military failure: incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign/military affairs. Who knows? Biden’s foreign policy isn’t significantly different than Trump’s, so there’s no telling what could go wrong. The Saudis will keep cutting people’s heads off, North Korea will never disarm itself, Iran will probably arm itself, Afghanistan will drag on forever, and I can smell war brewing in the Caucasus, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The future is as clear as milk.

Foreign policy/military success: incumbent administration achieves major success in foreign/military affairs. Probably not, but too soon to tell. Succeeding is very different from not failing, so 10 and 11 aren’t necessarily linked. You can not fail AND not succeed, they’re not mutually exclusive. I don’t see anything good happening overseas for a very long time. If we pull out of Afghanistan, the power vacuum will pave the way for ISIS 2.0, so our hands are tied there. Our best bet would be to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, but then we’ll just be back to status quo anteTrumpum, zero sum gain.

Charismatic incumbent: the incumbent party nominee is charismatic or a national hero. False, false, a million times false. Biden isn’t even beloved by his entire party, let alone the country; Republicans hate him even more than they ought to just because he wears a blue tie instead of a red one (his policies are so middle-of-the-road inoffensive to them that they shouldn’t have a problem with him, but Trump told them to, so they do). If Biden dies or refuses to run, Harris is even more divisive because she’s a woman and a disingenuous liar (she pretends to be super progressive, but she’s a cop, a Clintonesque moderate through and through). Obama in 2008 was a breath of fresh air which got very stale by 2012; 2008 was lightning in a bottle, and neither Biden nor Harris could ever dream of catching it again. They’re nowhere near as nationally beloved as the Roosevelts or Kennedy or Reagan.

Uncharismatic challenger: the challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. True, true, a million times true. It will almost certainly be Trump again in 2024, and he is even more despised than Biden. Sure, he’s beloved by his own party, but they make up less than half of he country. He never had majority approval and lost the popular vote twice, he’s a loser! If by some miracle he chooses not to run, the Republicans will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to appoint a successor. They’ll want one of his kids to run, maybe even his daughter in law who is looking to run for senate in 2022, but they’re tainted by affiliation to the Gonad Lump himself; they’re all the same. Ted Cruz sucks ass, Ron DeSantis might actually have an intellectual disability so I feel bad making fun of that piece of shit bastard, I pray that Rick Scott and Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz suffer debilitating brain aneurysms on live TV, Nikki Haley is a nobody, and Lauren Boebert and Majorie Taylor Green are too regional to have national appeal (though Green will probably run against Raphael Warnock in 2022, so she will almost certainly be a senator by 2024). There are no nationally beloved politicians on either side of the aisle, so I would expect Republicans to cheat like they tried in 2020 to stop black people in swing states from voting.

So, the tally stands thus:

3 are certainly true

4 are probably true, leaning uncertain

2 are uncertain

1 is probably false, leaning uncertain

3 are certainly false

Democrats need 8 true to win, Republicans need 6 false to win. Right now, Biden had a slight edge because it is historically difficult to defeat an incumbent, Trump just sucked. I don’t see a rematch being significantly different, I suspect Biden would still win the popular vote, but Trump could eke by with the electoral college like he did in 2016, especially now that Republicans are taking over the judiciary in Pennsylvania (they’re changing the rules so that judges are elected in gerrymandered districts instead of statewide races). You saw how hard Republicans fought in 2020, they’re not going to change tactics in 2024, they’re gonna double down and try even harder next time. Fewer polling places, fewer drop boxes, shorter early voting, shorter hours, more stringent ID laws. Their MO is systemic voter suppression because their rhetoric has become too toxic to win on a national level. The majority of Americans vote against them in almost every election, general and midterm, but they continue to rule in the minority.

Something has got to give, this can’t go on forever, eventually the situation is going to boil over, be it in a civil war or a constitutional convention to overhaul the entire country; neither are probable, and either outcome would almost certainly hurt people of color in predominantly conservative states.

Biden thought he would be an arbiter president, he thought he would be able to unite the country, heal the divide, being both sides together under mutual compromise, but he failed to understand that Republicans hate him on principal. Doesn’t matter how much he tries to appease them, they still hate him because they have to hate him, even if they agree with him. It would be political suicide for any of them to side with Biden on anything, Trump has already vowed to support primary challengers, his presidency was the final nail in the coffin of bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is dead, it hasn’t been alive in decades, and the only people who call for it are the minority party.

Trump is hard liquor, unappealing to anyone but his alcoholic voters; Biden is diet ginger ale, inoffensive and boring, nobody really wanted him, he only ran to try and settle everyone’s stomachs, and he hasn’t been very successful yet. He honestly believed he would be a neutral alternative for the alcoholics; that level of optimism would be adorable if it weren’t so pathetic. It’s gonna take a lot more than 12 steps to break the country’s addiction.

[tessatechaitea]

Justice Society of America #7 (1993)

The fantasy: old white men are the heroes. The reality: old white men are the villains.

A Facebook memory from my friend Doom Bunny in 2012 came up today that made me cry. Not sobbing or anything! It just made me feel loved and noticed and, sure, proud of my past self. I'm not good at earnestness so please don't mock me or I'll retreat back into the safety of cynicism and sarcasm!

Doom Bunny might have taken the advice a bit too far.

One of the defining moments in my life that helped shape me into a better, more empathetic person was when I killed a massive wolf spider that had gotten into my room and was headed for my gerbil's cage. I caught it in a huge jar to take outside. The spider was so massive you could hear its fangs clink on the side of the jar. I went to go release it outside and was struck by a sudden terror that it would come back. Not the kind of terror that involves life and death decisions. More like the kind of terror that is just a rush of creepiness and discomfort at the prospect of the spider coming back and crawling on my while I slept. So, you know, not terror. But I treated the uncomfortable feeling like terror and decided I should probably kill the spider. Now, if it had been a small spider, I, like millions of people every day, would have probably crushed it without a thought and gone on with my day. But this spider was massive, probably the size of my palm. It wouldn't be a simple swat and done procedure. I tried filling the jar with some kind of cleaner in the hopes of poisoning it but that didn't work. So then I took a stick or something and began smashing it. It didn't die easily. It struggled and it put up a fight and it took multiple attempts to really smash it while in the jar. And even before I had delivered the killing blow, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. This spider didn't deserve this death. This wasn't a struggle to live. This wasn't part of nature. This spider was struggling against the pettiness of one human individual. The spider's only offense: giving me gooseflesh. But once I'd maimed the spider, I had to finish the onerous job. I cried afterward. I sobbed. I mourned this wretched beast. And maybe that's why Doom Bunny's memory made me cry. But I didn't just kill the spider that day. I killed a part of me. Luckily, it was a part of me that was useless and selfish and a thing I was well rid of. Maybe, as a rational justification to make a bleak act I participated in seem more uplifting, I can take solace in the idea that the spider, in death, was able to rise above its natural station. It was the Jesus Christ of spiders, dying so that so many more spiders could live. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands of spiders survived because of this one? And not only that, it was this sentiment (and seeing a documentary on Japanese "fishing" of dolphins) which turned me into a vegetarian. So the spider not only saved many spiders but many other (arguably higher-tier! Is that bad to suggest?!) creatures. Now, I'm not a vegetarian anymore. I was for about ten years and then got, well, a bit lazy and maybe a little less passionate. I got older and dumber. But I'm not what you'd call a meat-eater! I prefer lentils over steak (which is an easy comment to make because I can't even remember the last time I ate steak. I never really cared for it before I went veggie. The main reason I liked steak as a kid was the steak fries soaked in a little bit of steak juice (you know, blood?)). When I eat meat now, it's usually chicken or turkey. Not great, I know. I probably need to get out there and murder a turkey so I can be reminded how fucking terrible it is to kill something with your own hands. But that's part of it, you know? I'm not against eating meat. But we're going about it all wrong. It's too easy and too harmful. We should probably develop a system where people can only buy live animals and must do the killing and butchering themselves. Of course then only sadists will have the option of a delicious chorizo omelette at breakfast! The point is, yeah, I still eat meat. But I also don't rationalize my eating of it! I'm wrong in doing so. It's better for the world if humans, who have a choice in the matter being sentient and rational beings, would choose to stop. I try not to eat it much but that's just a little bit of a little thing and it doesn't make me "less wrong." I'm still just wrong. And I'm tired. And I'm old enough to hope the younger generations do better while I just get the fuck out of the way. Who are all these old people fighting change?! Why do they need to get so worked up about a world they're not going to be part of for much longer?! Let it go already! Especially old people with loads of money. I don't get how they still need to be angry about everything! You're set, you dolt! If you don't want to participate, go live in your vacation house and don't participate. But certainly don't actively try to hamper change! Christ, you're just obstinate dumb ass fools! Did I rant enough against old rich guys to distract from the fact that I had some turkey tacos for lunch? I hope so! Anyway, I guess the rant about old people hurting the world is a good enough segue back into this comic book about old people hurting the world. Not that the JSA is actively hurting the world! But their old man foes certainly are! Plus, I understand if you're old and powerful and rich and immortal, how you'd continue to fight change. But then again, if you're immortal and you've seen how you can never fight change, generation after generation, perhaps by continuing to fight against change, you're just showing how stupid you are? The JSA might not be actively hurting the world but it's still troubling that they think they need to be an active part of it. Just retire already and let the young heroes take over! Maybe, as Alan and Jay wanted at the beginning, stay accessible as mentors. But don't be dicks trying to push your old timey beliefs onto the young heroes' new and modern attitudes! Especially the ones that are sex positive and enjoy showing a lot of skin in their choice of costumes. Hooray for change!

Enough with being earnest! Let's now pretend her dad's advice was sexual in nature!

Jesse wanders into a part of the island that's off limits and after being attacked by guards trying to detain her for trespassing, she decides she now has a right to trespass. That's how law works, right? If I'm falsely accused of murder, I get to do one free murder! Ted Grant has been taken into custody by the Bahdnesian government because he interrupted a boxing match and beat the crap out of one of the fighters. Just because somebody is in a ring boxing doesn't mean anybody can enter the ring and start punching them. That's assault and I'm all for Ted Grant being arrested. Asshole thinks he can do whatever he wants just because he thinks of himself as a hero. Well, no more, old white man! There are consequences to your actions now!

The Atom doesn't think it's wrong to interfere in another country's arrest of a foreign national assaulting one of their own. No, what would be wrong is exposing the Justice Society of America's plans to infiltrate and spy on this nation.

The Atom rushes off to tell Alan and Jay about Ted being kidnapped. They heard Ted was injured and taken off for treatment which is a lie. Al tells them the truth but tries to make it sound like it was unjust. "Ted walloped some creep in the boxing ring and the guards dragged him away." Yeah. Of course they did! Ted wasn't supposed to be in the ring! IT WAS FUCKING ASSAULT! By the end, when we learn that the nation's king or manager or president, St. Germaine, is some villainous creep, all of the Justice Society's actions will be justified. But I want to point out that they have no justification for anything but observing right now! It's like that time in Star Trek: The Next Generation when one of the Captains of a Federation starship begins blowing up Cardassian science stations and supply vessels. They might have been up to no good but there was no proof! Picard does the right thing, in the end, by arresting the captain. Sure, the asshole captain was almost certainly right about the Cardassians being up to no good. But there was no proof! You can't just blow Cardassians up or disappear people from the streets of Portland simply because you suspect them of being up to no good. Fucking assholes. Jesse Quick runs into Doctor Mid-Nite who has found the Bahdnesians and a whole lot of other islanders as well. They're locked in cages underground because they're too sick or infirm to work in the tourist trap topside. So I guess the Justice Society of America has a right to start tearing this nation down. I guess. They're just lucky their instincts were so dead on or else Ted Grant's temper would have started an international incident with a happy-go-lucky nation. Doctor Mid-Nite has a plan to free the people from their cages.

It's not like she can, you know, run at super speed to do the same thing that distracting them with her tits did.

If The Flash had run into Doctor Mid-Nite, would the plan have been for Jay to strut out from the dark with his balls hanging out? Although it was a terrible and unnecessary plan, it might be one of my favorite bits because now I know Liberty Belle loved flashing her tits for justice. Johnny Thunder goes on a day trip to the place he first got his Thunderbolt genie. He discovers that after he left the island with their genie, the entire place fell apart. See, now that's appropriating a culture! Being white and selling burritos out of a burrito cart is just called having a job. The rest of the Justice Society just hangs out until they can hear from Doctor Mid-Nite. That doesn't happen until he interrupts St. Germain's speech about how great and beautiful and the best his island nation of Bahdnesia is.

Oh! The days when you could describe a terrible country treating its people in the worst ways imaginable and the first thing you would think of is Nazi Germany instead of present-day America!

St. Germain's plan was to create a sham utopia and then find a job as a consultant with other governments. After he was offered a job, he would blow a nuclear weapon in the volcano and destroy the place. But when the Justice Society appears, he throws his plan out the window and yells, in front of everybody at his press conference slash job interview, "I've got a bomb in the volcano and I'll blow up the entire island!" So I guess that's his reputation blown! Like the guy in The Dead Zone who uses the kid as a human shield and ruins his entire political career! Sort of. Anyway, that's a thing I just remembered that seemed somewhat like what just happened here, so it felt like a smart thing to add. During the tussle, Ted Grant knocks the detonator out of St. Germain's hands and it sets off the bomb. The volcano explodes but it doesn't destroy the island until the Justice Society can completely evacuate it. St. Germain just looks on and shouts, "My utopia!" That guy might need to get his head straight to decide what he really wants out of life. A utopia? A consulting job? Revenge on the Justice Society? In the end, Thunderbolt reveals that the only actual Bahdnesian left is Kiku, the young girl who has become Johnny Thunder's sidekick. So I guess that's the mystery solved that could have been solved two issues ago if Johnny had just thought to ask Thunderbolt one simple and direct question. Justice Society of America #7 Rating: B-. St. Germaine was yet another immortal guy who was once a Nazi. I think there's some legendary St. Germaine that's supposed to be immortal or something but I'm too hot and uncomfortable in my office to do any research about it right now. There's a similar character in Warren Ellis's Castlevania on Netflix. And, no, I don't want to discuss Warren Ellis. I don't actually want to disucss the Justice Society of America either! At least I only have three more issues to go!

[notanecromancer]

This is How a Society Dies America and Britain are Textbook Examples of a New, Gruesome Phenomeon: Rich Nations Self-Destructing Into Poor Failed States Umair Haque

When I ask my European friends to describe us — Americans, Brits, who I’ll call Anglo-Americans in this essay — they shake their heads gently. And over and over, three themes emerge. They say we’re a little thoughtless. They say we’re selfish and arrogant. And they say that we’re cruel and brutal. I can’t help but think there’s more than a grain of truth. That they’re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world. The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them. And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…wel…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots? Let me pause to note that my European friends’ first criticism — that we’re thoughtless — is therefore accurate. We’re not even capable of noticing — much less understanding — our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening — that the English speaking world isn’t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union. So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die. (The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.) Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it’s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set. That brings me to arrogance. What’s astonishing about our elites is how…arrogant they are…and how ignorant they are…at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way…while they’ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don’t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close. And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.” The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people. That’s not some kind of jeremiad. It’s an objective, easily observed truth. Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it. How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death. For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now — gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle — but the winnings. People who are battling for self-preservation can’t take care of anyone else. If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society’s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn’t be simpler. People can’t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else — let alone everyone else? The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can’t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else? A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either. What makes European societies — which are far, far more successful than ours — successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don’t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other — because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us. We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest? A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period. That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead — now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this. People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty — like ours have. People who can’t make ends meet can’t even invest in themselves — let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones. The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to? Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish. (Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other — and then hate each other. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food. As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn’t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?) That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to. A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that. You can see how a society dies — with horrific, brutal clarity — in the self-destruction of America and Britain. The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn’t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn’t they blame anyone and everyone they can — from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans — for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain’s collapse is nobody’s fault — nobody’s — but their own. They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. They don’t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist. And though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse. Umair December 2019 Eudaimonia and Co.

[raywritesthings]

Wrong Road to the Right Place 19/?

My Writing Fandom: Arrow Characters: Oliver Queen, Laurel Lance, John Diggle, Ted Grant, Thea Queen, Tommy Merlyn, Moira Queen, Malcolm Merlyn, Walter Steele, Felicity Smoak Pairings: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen Summary: Laurel finds herself curious about the marks Oliver showed her that night in his bedroom - and the tattoo on his left shoulder stands out in particular. When she discovers its meaning, she finds herself questioning everything she knows about the man she doesn’t want to admit she still loves. *Can also be read on my AO3 page*

Oliver sat, pouring over pages and pages of notes, schematics and documents. Five years’ worth of them, and yet it seemed unreal.

“How does a person sleep at night, knowing they’re planning that?” Digg asked behind him, not for the first time. “He must not even see them as people.”

The enormity of it was crushing. A whole neighborhood. Potential casualties in the hundreds, maybe a thousand. Everyone in the Glades, the people who came to the Verdant, the Big Belly Burger where Carly Diggle worked and Laurel’s office all gone in a single act of terror. That was what they were up against, and without the aid of some mystery man concealing his face Oliver would never have known until it was too late.

The worst part of it all was that while these were files originating from Malcolm Merlyn, they had come from a different source: his mother.

“She knows about all this...how could she…?”

He didn’t finish the question because he already knew the answer. Him, Thea, Walter. And there was maybe the one spot of good in all of this, because Felicity had been able to find the reason why his step-father had gone missing. But it also told them that Malcolm was a man of his word who would follow through on the threats that he made.

The door to the base opened and Laurel hurried down. “I got your text. What did we find out?”

“See for yourself,” John answered. Oliver left his seat to let her read over the most relevant pieces. He could tell as each new part of the plan was processed just by the paling of her cheeks and the growing horror in her eyes.

“Does he have the bomb?”

“Not according to the latest status report.”

“Then it’s still at Unidac.”

He nodded.

“That might be our best shot, Oliver,” said John. “If we can get into Unidac and destroy their work, that sets Merlyn back months. Maybe years.”

It was a solid plan with only one flaw. “Unidac was bought by Queen Consolidated. Not Merlyn Global.”

“Malcolm probably wanted to cover his tracks. It would’ve looked suspicious for Merlyn Global to suddenly acquire a tech company,” Laurel pointed out. “And it gives him cover for if the police were to look into anything.”

“Exactly.” If he went into Unidac tonight, Laurel’s father and his people would be asking his mother questions. She would be the one implicated, not Merlyn. Exactly as the businessman planned, no doubt.

“Oliver, I know this isn’t easy, but she is involved,” Diggle pointed out. “If Merlyn does go down, she’ll be going with him. He’d make sure of that.”

“I know that, I just—” He didn’t know how to articulate his feelings. His father was far from perfect, Lord knew, but she was his mother. And everything she had done was for him and his sister. Could he turn around and condemn her?

Without the hit on Laurel, it would have been a resounding no. But now?

“Malcolm still has a hostage,” Laurel said. “Your mother’s documents wouldn’t have Walter’s location, but is there some lead we could follow to get to it?”

Oliver shook his head. “If there was, she would’ve followed it.”

He was paralyzed on all sides by indecision. Acting on the Unidac intel put Walter’s life in jeopardy, but could they wait to find Walter before acting on the information they had?

“Maybe instead of following your mother’s leads, we follow her,” Digg suggested. Oliver looked to him with a frown. “You told her I was reaching out to some contacts, right? You say to her one of them got back to me and said they found Walter dead. She goes to Merlyn and tries to call the whole deal they got going on off. He’ll have to give her proof he’s still alive.”

It was a risky bid, but he could see where it was going. “We trace that proof.”

His friend nodded.

“Okay, but after we rescue Walter, what if Merlyn decides your mother is a leak?” Laurel asked. “He could move this Markov device to another facility or change up his plan entirely.”

“Then we strike in two places at once,” Oliver decided after a long moment. “Digg will get into Unidac while I get Walter. It’ll have to be simultaneous.”

“Two solo missions at the same time. Won’t be easy,” Digg remarked.

“That’s not even everything,” Laurel added. “I just filed the deposition against Edward Rasmus before your text came in. He’ll know there’s a case against him now.”

“And so will the Bratva,” Oliver finished for her. This was not good. Obviously, Laurel couldn’t have turned that family away. Scum like Rasmus deserved to be prosecuted for stealing from the innocent. But it complicated things.

“I’m worried about them,” Laurel said. “If Rasmus has ties to the mob, what’s to stop him or them from sending someone to enforce the Moore’s silence?”

Nothing was the answer to that and they all knew it.

“Walter and Unidac will be time-sensitive,” he told her. “We have to go there tonight.”

“Of course you do.” Laurel took a breath and said, “God, everything’s moving so fast.”

“If it was one thing at a time…” He didn’t like the idea of splitting his focus, of worrying about two separate dangers not just to his family but the people of the city. If it was a choice between Laurel and others, it was one he didn’t want to make because he knew which he heart would choose.

But she shook her head. “I’ll talk to Ted, see if he has any advice. You shouldn’t be anywhere near this case, anyway, or the Bratva might suspect the Hood has ties to us.”

It was the same rationale for why he hadn’t gone to the drug deal with the Count in his vigilante persona, and it was just as crucial now.

“Be careful wherever you go now. They’re going to have their eyes on us.”

Laurel nodded. “That goes for you, too.”

Oliver couldn’t help a smile. It had been a long time since anyone who knew what he was capable of had bothered to worry about him.

“So we all know our plans of action,” Diggle said. “This is gonna really play our hand. I know Felicity thinks this information is genuine, but do we know we can trust it?”

It was something that had been niggling at the back of his head as well. Oliver didn’t like relying on others in a mission, especially when he didn’t know them. And if there was maybe the faintest chance that the information was bad, that they would be acting falsely, that his mother was still, perhaps, somewhat an innocent even after all she’d done…

He turned to Laurel. “You spoke to him.”

She took a breath, and he could see her visibly steeling herself. “Yes.”

If it were any other situation he might have laughed. Laurel was all heart, and it showed on her face. “You know who he is.”

“I do.”

“You do?” Digg echoed.

Laurel raised a hand. “But I made a promise. He wants to keep his anonymity for now. I don’t want to scare him off.”

He tried to tamp down a frustrated reply. Who could be so important—

And then he knew. Or he thought he did, because it had to be wrong. How and why would he have—?

He had to be sure. “You trust him.”

Laurel nodded. “Completely.”

“Well,” Oliver said, a million questions buzzing in his head. “That’s all I need to know.”

Laurel closed her eyes. “He’s going to kill me.”

“You didn’t break your promise,” he assured her.

“Hold on, now you know who this questions guy is?” Asked John.

“Yes, and we can trust him.” He said nothing else under Diggle’s scrutiny, which he could tell the other man was annoyed by.

“I don’t think it’ll take much,” Laurel assured their friend. “He’ll have to come back here if he wants the information we had decrypted anyway.”

“If this ends up being some kind of trap,” John began.

“It won’t be.” Oliver checked his watch. “If we’re going to do this, I need to go speak with my mother.” It was not something he was looking forward to; he hadn’t actually seen her since they’d moved out of the Manor. A part of him worried he would give himself away.

“I’ll call Felicity,” said Diggle. “She’s gonna need to track whatever tech Merlyn uses to prove he’s kept up his end of the deal.” He moved off to the other end of the base as he got out his phone.

Oliver turned back to Laurel. “Tommy.”

She shrugged, her lips curving in something like a smile. “I was just as surprised as you are. I guess he got tired of being the last one to know everything, so he did some digging himself.”

Oliver nodded, trying to process the idea. True, Tommy had done some extraordinary things in the past — a trip to Hong Kong came to mind, which he guiltily set aside — but to turn to illegal methods like this?

“I have been a bad influence on both of you.”

“Now you sound like my father,” Laurel pointed out. “I think this city’s been the biggest influence on all of us.”

That certainly held true.

Laurel stepped up closer. “I’m sorry I couldn’t just tell you myself.”

But Oliver shook his head. “I understand.” Laurel and Tommy had a bond, one that had been forged stronger over the years in his absence. He couldn’t fault them that. “If it had been me in your place, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have agreed to the same terms.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing we know each other so well.” Laurel’s smile faded. “After tonight, things are going to get more dangerous.”

“They will.”

“I should warn my father. I just don’t know how to do that without...without telling him everything. Which is impossible,” she added before he needed to.

He didn’t have advice but he could provide assurance. “You’ll find a way.”

“You should talk to Thea,” she told him. His lips pulled into a frown. “Ollie, there are potentially huge changes about to happen in her life and to the people around her. She should be at least a little prepared.”

He knew she was right. “I just want her to be safe.”

Laurel stepped up closer to him. “And she will be. We’ll make sure of it.”

He sighed, taking Laurel’s hands in each of his. “I don’t know how everyone I care about comes out of this. On the island, that was something that happened, too.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed, thinking of Shado. “I didn’t think I’d have to make those kind of choices here.”

“I’m sorry. But we’ll make them together.” Laurel went up on her toes, to hug him rather than kiss him, which he found he truly needed more. When she pulled away, she cupped his face. “Just one thing at a time. We all know what to do.”

He nodded. “Talking to my mother. Not exactly an easy task considering.”

Her lips curved in a wry smile. “Tell me about it.”

“Oliver, ready to go?” John called out.

“Yeah,” he answered back. Laurel let him go, and he headed out to the car. Oliver did his best to try and forget the rest of their plan in the moment; right now, he needed to be convincing despite the confusion and disappointment he felt towards his mother. He needed to lie as effectively as she’d been lying to him.

The gates of the Manor shut with finality as the car went up the drive. John stopped the car momentarily in front of the house and pulled away once Oliver had exited. Inside, he found his mother and Thea just sitting down to dinner. His sister looked up with surprise giving way to happiness. “Ollie!”

“Hey, Speedy,” he replied in a far more subdued tone, his eyes quickly finding their mother again. She looked far more reserved than Thea by comparison, almost afraid.

If she was afraid, it was because she knew that in setting an attack on Laurel, she had put them on opposite sides. And she didn’t even realize what she might have to fear from him — if she were anyone else.

Oliver let that conflict within him fuel his performance. “I have some news. It’s about Walter. Um, Mr. Diggle heard from some of his contacts in the CIA…”

Thea gasped as he trailed off. When he glanced up at his mother again, the shock on her face looked completely genuine. She looked to be buying it.

When it changed into anger, he knew she had.

“No. No, that’s impossible.”

“I’m sorry, mom,” he said, some part of him still aching at seeing the distress he was causing her.

“Whatever Mr. Diggle’s contacts told him, it’s wrong.” She stood up, striding from the room.

“Mom!” Thea called.

“I’m going to sort this out, sweetheart. Stay in the house, both of you.”

Oliver kept his gaze down until he heard the front door open and shut. Then he started to leave as well.

“Ollie!” Thea shot up out of her chair and ran to intercept him. “Where are you going?”

“To follow mom,” he answered truthfully. “Just to make sure she’s okay.” That part was the lie. “Do what she says.”

“But—”

“Please, Thea,” he said. He could see the worry and the frustration in her eyes now. Laurel was right; his sister was struggling to understand what was happening all around her. “Just for a little longer.”

With that nebulous promise — to her and to himself — Oliver got on his bike to follow his mother to Merlyn Global. Once his surveillance tech got Walter’s location, it would bring him one step closer to tearing Malcolm’s plans for the city and for his family down.

And potentially one step closer to tearing them all apart.

—-

Ted got out of the ring just as he noticed Laurel approaching at a fast clip. She wasn’t dressed for boxing, either.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Sure.” Ted walked them back to his office. “Alright, what’s happened now?”

“I filed the deposition against the businessman the Bratva are tied to today, which puts the family in danger. I was wondering if tonight, I could bring them here to hide out.”

“While you do what?”

Laurel shrugged. “About the only thing I can think of. Tell my dad what’s going on so the police can set up a sting operation.”

It was the responsible option at the least. He might have even been inclined to agree with it a few months ago. But he couldn’t help asking, “And what happens to you?”

“Well,” Laurel began before taking a deep breath. “I’m probably going to be answering a lot of questions about my connections to the Bratva.”

“Which may get back to the boyfriend.”

“I would never turn him in.”

“Yeah, but if your father’s anything like you, he’s a smart guy. He can put two and two together.” Ted frowned in thought. “I’m not sure I like Robin Hood. He’s a little too eager to dish out capital punishment for one thing. But I worry even more about what might happen now in his absence.”

Like it or not, the Hood was an established presence in Starling City. His capture would cause a power vacuum, and there could be far worse waiting to fill it.

“I don’t know what else to do. Rasmus and the Bratva have to be stopped, but the Hood has a different mission tonight.”

“Important?”

“Absolutely,” Laurel said with such conviction it was striking. Ted wondered...but no, the less he knew, probably the better. The deeper he got into this, the more likely he was to end up back in the fight himself.

But was that such a bad thing?

He had hung up his suit for good after Isaac had gone too far and a man had ended up dead. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time. But if he could save lives now by putting it back on, what other choice did he have?

“Okay, then here’s what we do,” he said at last. “Moving the family is only going to alert these guys that you’re ready for them. We’re going to have to set a trap.”

“With the family as bait?” She looked pained even saying it.

“It’s risky, but from what I know of the mob, they’re only gonna send one guy. Make it look like a burglary gone wrong. I can handle one guy.”

Laurel blinked in shock. “You would?” When he nodded, a smile lit up her face and he thought she was barely holding back from hugging him. “Ted, thank you.”

He shrugged. “I’m not in the business of letting good people suffer. Now, do you have their address? If we’re gonna do this, we need to know the terrain. And make sure they’re ready to move the minute anything starts.”

Ted closed up the gym early and went with Laurel to scope out the family’s small home. There were a few different points of entry which might make things tricky, but he had a feeling the hired gun was going to come through the front door. There was a spot he could wait between two houses across the street that allowed him a view of the front and one side. It would have to do. Laurel and he parted ways, her to get the family ready and him to prepare.

He returned under the cover of darkness in his old suit. Putting it on felt like donning a second skin for the first time in so many years. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it. Ted watched and waited. Stakeout had rarely been his style, but he was willing to do it to keep a family safe. Eventually, his patience was rewarded.

An otherwise unremarkable looking man with a closely shaved head and dark skin came walking down the street. He held a briefcase and little else. Still, he set off the warning bells in Ted’s head, and he’d learned years ago never to ignore them. When the man approached the Moore’s front steps, he knew his suspicions were right.

Ted crept from the shadows, light on his feet as he approached. His mark tensed, so he figured it was best to go for broke.

“Scuse me,” he called out. “Pretty late, don’t you think?”

The man whirled around, and Ted was forced to dive into a roll to avoid the bullet that came from the briefcase. Clever disguise. This guy had brought a gun to a boxing match. Normally, that’d decide things right there. Not against Wildcat.

He was back on his feet and leaping forward before the man could take better aim, delivering an uppercut with his leading fist while his other hand ripped the briefcase from his opponent’s grasp.

The assassin fell back against the door but quickly got his guard back up. A fighter, too. Good. Ted was ready for a fight.

They regarded each other. In the ring, he might have tried getting the man circling, but he wanted his focus away from the house and the movement going on inside.

There was a small trickle of blood leaking from a corner of the assassin’s mouth, but his eyes were practically gleaming. “Even if I’d expected a vigilante, this would be a surprise.”

“That’s the idea.”

“I’m intrigued, but since you’ve seen my face, we’ll have to skip the pleasantries.”

They both flew into action, Ted landing a flurry of blows. He could tell the man was straining to reach the briefcase, but he kept him boxed in on the front stoop. As long as this was a fistfight, he had the upper hand.

His opponent got in a lucky jab, and Ted grunted, staggering back. He’d been slacking, apparently. Training would have to be stepped up, for him and his student.

Just as the man made to lunge for the briefcase a few feet away, the door flew open and a nightstick came down on the assassin with a sharp crack. He went down like a ton of bricks, revealing a person in all black from their boots to the mask they wore over their eyes and the knitted cap hiding their hair. “You alright?” Laurel asked.

He relaxed his stance. “Sure.”

“You didn’t think I was just going to watch, did you?”

“Guess not. Where in the hell did you get that?” He asked, gesturing to the nightstick. 

“Borrowed it.”

“And I suppose you borrowed the mask from your boyfriend?”

“Nope,” she answered lightly, coming down the steps. She took out a pair of handcuffs she had clearly liberated as well and snapped them over the assassin’s wrists. “This one’s mine to keep. Now come on, the Moore’s alerted the authorities.”

Before he knew it, his student had looped her arm through his and they were quickly making their way from the scene. In an alley, Ted pulled back his cowl and she took off the hat, her hair falling down around her shoulders.

“So, any pointers?”

Ted smirked. That enthusiasm was good; it would be invaluable after a time, when the work eventually might take its toll. Nobody could force themselves to be out here unless they really believed in it.

“Why the hat?”

“Had to hide my hair somehow.”

“Do you?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“This is gonna sound crass, but one of the best weapons you have at your disposal is looking like a woman.”

She crossed her arms. “That did sound crass. Want to qualify your statement?”

“Look, I know better than to think this way, but plenty of guys out there are gonna think they can go easy on you because they’re arrogant. It’s your job to teach them otherwise.” That got a grudging smirk out of her, which he returned. “So forget the hat.”

“Don’t I need something to cover my hair?”

“Who says it has to be your hair?”

She didn’t miss what he was saying. “A wig.”

“Might even help throw the police and anyone else off your trail.”

Laurel nodded.

“One other thing you’re gonna need. A name. Especially since you’re planning on working with a partner.” Ted still had his misgivings about the Hood’s harsher methods — he’d never wanted to cross that line himself — but seeing as Laurel had explained a bit of her boyfriend’s background he could understand it a little better. It helped that since she’d joined up with him, the archer’s body count had significantly dropped. Maybe once she was out in the field officially, they could get that down to zero or damned close.

“We’ve been talking about that,” Laurel told him on a sigh. Something about it indicated she hadn’t found one she liked yet. “How’d you pick Wildcat?”

“My fighting style, mostly. It’s how people described me. That plus I’m a southpaw, it fits. What are your boys calling you?”

Laurel snorted at his description of her partners, then admitted, “Pretty Bird, for the time being. It’s kind of an inside joke,” she added at his raised eyebrow.

“Well, you have any particular liking for birds?”

She shrugged. “Not exactly. My dad got Sara a canary one year for her birthday, and it just drove us all nuts chirping away...but maybe that’s what I want to be.”

A canary, ripping through the criminal underbelly and sounding her song of warning in the Glades, Starling’s proverbial coal mine. Not a bad idea. And as he looked over her dark attire, it hit him: “Black Canary.”

Laurel looked at him, a light in her eyes. It was the right one, and they both knew it.

They found themselves at the halfway point between his gym and Queen’s club, meaning they would go alone the rest of the way.

“Well, I’d say we can consider this good work tonight. Now we just gotta prepare for your boyfriend’s associates once they realize they’ve been crossed.”

“If only that were all,” Laurel said grimly. As she walked away, Ted found he really wanted to ask what that meant, and what he could do.

He smirked at himself. So much for giving this life up.

—-

John felt an uncommon bout of nerves as he stopped the car outside of Unidac Industries’ facility. He’d been on far more dangerous assignments, both in Afghanistan and for the Hood’s mission, but this was the first time he was really going out solo as himself.

Or the self people would hear about on the news, rather. He checked again that the helmet Oliver had rushed to have custom made for him was in place, then got out of the vehicle.

It had been a simple matter to have Felicity pull up Unidac’s blueprints, so he knew exactly where to avoid cameras and the sight lines of any guards as he approached the building. John drew in a deep breath, then unholstered the weapon at his side. 

He turned and kicked the front door in, firing off two shots at the guards sitting at the front desk.

“What the—” They each slumped over, out cold for the next half hour or so.

A woman passing down the hall screamed and dropped her coffee mug. It shattered on the floor, followed by shouts of surprise and alarm throughout the building as John quick-marched down the hall.

“I’m not here to hurt anybody,” he said. “Just keep out of the way.”

He’d armed himself with a tranquilizer rather than his usual gun. For one thing, that weapon was registered to John Diggle, and for another, he wasn’t interested in permanently injuring these scientists. Even if they did know what they were doing and what it was supposed to lead to, he figured the police and the courts of law could deal with them. He was only here for one thing: the bomb.

With the security guards taken out, the remaining scientists that tried to put up any resistance were easy pickings. They weren’t trained soldiers or battle-hardened insurgents, at any rate. John cut a swift path into the lab said to house the Markov device.

He paused in the doorway. “Damn.” The thing was huge!

But fortunately not armed yet when he checked it, so he sent it toppling to the ground. The casing cracked on one side and some of it dented inwards. John reached in to rip out wires and smash any small parts he could find. Then he picked the whole thing up and dropped it again, this time cracking it in two.

He threw a chair through a bank of computers and servers along one wall as well for good measure. He hadn’t permanently hurt anybody at the facility, but he didn’t mind trashing their stuff. Served them right. John wondered with amusement what Oliver would say about the insurance bill that was no doubt going to end up on his mother’s desk after this. If his mother would even be sitting at that desk for much longer.

“No, no! What are you doing!” An older man hastily pulling on a lab coat rushed in, probably summoned by the alarm.

John raised the tranq gun and fired, watching with only the slightest wince as the man crashed to the floor seconds later.

“Believe it or not, this is for your own good.” Or the city’s good, anyway. This guy probably lived in some McMansion outside the city limits and didn’t know anybody in the Glades.

John turned to go when he spotted some files lying open on the workstation next to where the device had been sitting. He picked them up, but sirens had him quickly racing out the door.

He only just got out of there in time and thanked every deity known to man he wasn’t stopped by any cop cars on his way back to the base. He found it empty; Oliver and Laurel were still preoccupied with their own tasks, then.

Mission accomplished, he felt his heart rate slow down as he set the helmet aside and began flipping through the documents he’d stolen. John wasn’t naive enough to think these were the only copies Unidac had, but it might help to have as few in circulation as possible.

As his eyes scanned the text, they widened. “Oh, no, no, no.”

The door to the base opened above him, and two sets of boots descended. “I’ll tell you after we get you over to see Walter,” Laurel was saying. She’d started pulling her mask off and Oliver had his hood down.

“Does it still let me call you Pretty Bird?”

“Shut up.”

“Hate to interrupt, but we got a problem,” John said, turning to face the pair with the file in his hands.

Oliver and Laurel exchanged a look, the easy humor leaving their expressions and postures. Oliver stepped forward. “Did you destroy the device?”

“Yeah, the one that was there. But this file I grabbed says it was one in a set.”

He watched both of them pale. “How many more?” Laurel asked.

“One, according to this.”

“My mother’s files—”

“Must not have been updated or Merlyn was keeping the second one on a needs-to-know basis, and she wasn’t needs-to-know. Oliver, it doesn’t say where the second one is.”

He watched his friend grit his teeth, his hand clenching around his bow. Laurel reached out and took his free hand.

“Ollie, we still have time. We can find it.”

“Merlyn will know about Unidac once the news covers it, if not before. It’ll be a race against the clock, for him and us.”

Oliver’s phone buzzed on the table where he’d laid it. John leaned over for a look. “It’s Thea.”

“You have to put in an appearance at the hospital,” Laurel reminded him. “I can stay with John. I probably should—”

“I’d prefer you with me,” Oliver admitted, then clamped his lips together as if he could take it back. It was clear he was rattled and feeling vulnerable, which he hated being.

“Then I can do that,” Laurel assured him, not even missing a beat. “Let’s get changed.”

She headed for the back of the base and Oliver followed. John set the file back down, taking out each individual page to spread out on the table.

Device 1 of 2, pickup by client, was the original line that had caught his eye. Beneath it was written Device 2 of 2, assembly on site. But where was that site?

He looked up when the two returned in civilian wear.

“I’m gonna keep studying this thing, see if there’s any clues that might indicate where a second one could be stored.”

Oliver nodded on his way out. “Send photos of the file to Felicity to get a second pair of eyes.”

“Right. Hey, is that family alright?” He remembered at the last second.

Laurel threw a smile over her shoulder. “Fine, thanks to Wildcat.”

John nodded. It figured that of all the gym trainers Laurel could have picked, she stumbled on the one with a vigilante past. Made him wonder what her — and Oliver’s, apparently — connection was to this questions guy as well.

None of those things were his priority at the moment. They had a ticking clock that in only a short time could become very literal.

—-

Laurel hung onto Oliver as he navigated their way through the streets on his bike. Not only was it for her own safety; she liked to think of it as the hug he didn’t feel he could ask for right now.

In a few minutes, they would be face-to-face with Mrs. Queen, where she could see plain as day just how little Laurel had followed her request. Laurel wasn’t sure what she thought about the Queen matriarch anymore. Yes, Malcolm Merlyn was a dangerous man who had proven himself capable of following through on his threats — the Gambit was only one example — but to know the older woman was perfectly aware of his plan for the Glades and was doing nothing about it, to know that she had somehow made peace with the idea of all those people perishing...it was unthinkable to her. She could only imagine the turmoil Oliver had to be in over it.

They parked and followed Thea’s directions to the room Walter was resting in. The rest of Oliver’s family was already inside, and Mrs. Queen’s smile froze as she caught sight of Laurel.

“Oh.”

“Mr. Steele,” Laurel greeted instead, knowing now was not the time. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Thank you, Miss Lance.” He was thinner than she’d last seen him all those months ago at the Queen’s Christmas party, but fortunately looked otherwise unharmed in the physical sense. “I’m very glad to be among familiar faces again.”

Oliver reached out to clasp Walter’s shoulder briefly, choosing to speak with his actions rather than his voice. It was probably for the best.

A soft tapping on the doorway distracted all of them. Felicity Smoak stood there, a bouquet of flowers in one hand.

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt a family thing,” she immediately excused.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” Mrs. Queen asked.

“A friend,” answered Walter.

Felicity smiled and stepped up to set the flowers down. “I just wanted to welcome you back, Mr. Steele. But I should get going, because of, um, work I need to be doing.” Her gaze darted to both Laurel and Oliver before she made a swift exit. Laurel gave her the slightest nod as she went.

“So, Ollie and Laurel started dating again,” Thea said to break the tense silence that ensued.

“Well, congratulations to both of you,” Walter said.

Laurel managed a smile. “Thank you. It’s been...interesting.”

Oliver raised both eyebrows at her. She raised them right back.

“Right, well. We should probably let you rest, Walter,” Oliver said at last. She could tell by the line of his body he was incredibly uncomfortable in the cramped space trying to maintain all the lies in front of his family. Laurel slipped her hand into his and followed him to the door.

They nearly crashed into Malcolm Merlyn on the way out. Laurel couldn’t quite stop the slight jump at his presence.

“I’m sorry,” Merlyn said with perfect politeness. “I just heard the news. Walter, so wonderful to have you back safely.”

Laurel felt the grip Oliver had on her hand tighten to an almost painful degree. She squeezed it back, knowing exactly how angry he had to be right now as she felt rather the same.

“Thank you, Malcolm.”

“I truly hate to interrupt, but I hoped to borrow Moira for a few moments,” Merlyn continued. Now even Thea frowned. “I’ll be sure to return her as quickly as possible.”

Mrs. Queen stepped away from Walter’s bedside. “I would hope so.” Laurel had to move back against the door as she passed. Up close, she could make out the same lines of tension in the mother that were present in her son.

Oliver led her out into the hallway, watching Malcolm and Mrs. Queen disappear around the bend in the hallway. “He won’t do anything to her,” he muttered, and Laurel knew the assurance was for his own sake as much as hers.

“Of course not. It’s too obvious. Either he wants to know if Walter said anything incriminating them or it’s about Unidac.”

Oliver let out a sigh but almost immediately stiffened; a different Merlyn was making his way down the hall towards them.

“Hey, I saw on the news. Walter’s back?” Tommy was facing Oliver straight-on but his eyes kept darting to her. Looking for information.

“Yeah,” Oliver replied, his eyes closing for a moment. She wondered if he, too, was blaming himself for this; the three of them had done everything together. Was Tommy following them into this life because of that? “And we need to talk.”

Laurel tensed. Since Oliver had guessed the truth, she had been hoping this confrontation would be much more private. It took them a few minutes to find a secluded corner of the hospital.

“Tommy, what are you doing?”

Their friend blinked, then gave a disbelieving laugh. “Really, you’re gonna give me the lecture?” He turned a betrayed look on her.

Laurel raised both hands. “He guessed.”

“You didn’t have to tell him he was right!”

“Keep your voices down,” Oliver instructed, his voice turning sharp. “Your father and my mother are in this building, Tommy, and if they find out what you’ve done—”

“So you got it decrypted. What’s my father’s plan?”

“We can’t discuss that here,” Laurel stated. “It’s too sensitive, and you’re going to want somewhere private to yell.”

He eyed her warily. “It’s that bad?”

“Worse.” She was sure, as much as Tommy had disliked his father for as long as she’d known him, even he wouldn’t be able to imagine what Mr. Merlyn had planned.

“So when can we talk?”

Oliver shook his head. “There’s nothing to talk about. We’re handling it.”

Tommy scowled. “You wouldn’t even have the information you do if I hadn’t gotten it. It was sitting in your house the whole time, Ollie, but I was the one who risked my butt getting it for you, so I think I have a right to it.”

“We have a lot going on right now.” She could see Oliver’s frostiness for the shield it was. Part of it had to be the hurt he still felt at Tommy’s initial reaction to his secret identity; the other part, she suspected, was him trying to push his best friend away to keep him out of it.

“Like what?”

“Like the Russian mob,” Laurel admitted freely. This was her problem, after all. “They wanted to use me to help one of their associates. I didn’t do what they asked, so now it’s just a matter of time.”

Tommy swallowed. “They’re going to come after you?”

She nodded.

He looked between her and Oliver again. “You’re going to need help.”

Oliver glowered at him. “Tommy, you’re not a vigilante by your own admission.”

“Well I’m your — I’m something, alright!”

Laurel stepped between the two of them before they could really get started again. “Look, Tommy’s right in a way. If the Bratva is sending their own after us, we need all the help we can get. But not from you,” she added to her friend. “You’re untrained, like I said before.”

“Alright, I get the message,” he grumbled a bit, embarrassed. “Got a recommendation for me?”

“Diggle.”

They both blinked in surprise at Oliver.

“Your sudden interest in physical training would raise eyebrows if you did it in public. Digg can get you started on the basics...if you really want some part in this.”

The two friends stared each other down for a time. “Look, I’m still not sold on this whole vigilante thing. It’s not — it shouldn’t be necessary. But, your mom said whatever dad’s doing is for my mother,” he confided in them. Laurel started in surprise. How would destroying an entire neighborhood be in the name of a humanitarian like Rebecca Merlyn? “After he tried to shut down her clinic, I don’t trust him with her legacy. I have to stop him. And you have to stop him for your dad,” he said to Oliver, who nodded. “So then, after that, we’re done, right?”

There was a terrible silence. Laurel looked to Oliver and found the same uncertainty.

Tommy hung his head. “We’re not done.”

“You can be,” she told him gently.

“Yeah, that’s kind of the problem of being a friend to somebody,” he told her. “Makes it hard to sit at home when you know they’re out there risking their lives like a pair of lunatics.”

Laurel couldn’t help a light laugh. Even Oliver wore the hint of a smile though his eyes remained on the ground.

“If I can’t help you with the Bratva, then what kind of help are you going to get?”

“Laurel has a teacher,” Oliver said.

Laurel meanwhile, bit her lip. “This isn’t going to help my ‘lunatic’ image, but I think we need more help than that.”

Both men looked at her.

“We need someone who’s dealt with the mob.”

Tommy stared at her blankly while Oliver gave a vehement shake of the head. “No.”

“Got any better ideas?” She challenged.

“Wait, who are we — oh no,” said Tommy.

“Well?”

Neither of them had a reply. She hadn’t thought so.

—-

Malcolm waited until he was alone before dropping his genial smile. “We have a serious problem, Moira.”

“I have no idea how any of this happened,” she denied immediately. To both his frustration and relief, he could tell she wasn’t lying; Walter’s rescue was just as much a surprise to her as it had been to him.

Still, the timing couldn’t be ignored. “We have a leak of some sort. Our Undertaking is under attack. I received a call from Unidac an hour ago. An unknown assailant broke into the facility.”

Again, only genuine shock registered on Moira's features. “Did they find it?”

“They destroyed it. That room, and nothing else.”

“They knew what they were there for,” she realized without further prompting.

He nodded. “I had our associate take the liberty of cleaning up any loose ends. The police won’t know what was supposed to have happened there.”

He was standing close enough to her that he almost felt her shudder. Malcolm smirked to himself; hardened as Moira had become over the years, she still reacted badly to the mention of violence. It was the edge he held over her.

“Does this mean our Undertaking is at an end?” There was a note in her voice, almost of hope.

“Not in the least. I had the foresight to commission a second device for our purposes,” he told her, enjoying the way her eyes went wide. “Always best to plan in redundancies in a business venture. Minimizes risk.”

“Of course.” He had to hand it to her, Moira always recovered well. “Then we move forward?”

“Naturally. It’s location will have to be moved to the central-most part of the tunnels to ensure the maximum damage to the Glades itself. The argument will have to be made to seize whatever is left of the neighborhood for the rebuilding.” It was not his ideal plan that he had been building towards the last five years but he was too impatient to commission new scientists to build a second device. So it would have to be a combination of hard and soft power that put the Glades into his hands.

“Very well. If that is all?” Moira already made to move past him, but he took her arm.

“One last thing. Should this second device be discovered, Moira, I will know you have betrayed me. And it won’t be a hostage our associate takes next time.”

He could tell by the tremble in her lips that she understood perfectly.

“Enjoy tonight with you family,” he said last, slipping through mask of respected businessman Malcolm Merlyn back on as smoothly as a glove. He stepped away from her and turned, leaving the hospital.

It had not been the Hood who had attacked Unidac. He was unsure if this was good fortune or not. A new player meant unquantifiable variables.

These challenges were a test of his conviction, he was sure. To determine that he was worthy. He would surmount them all, then enjoy the fruits of his labor made all the sweeter with every additional obstacle overcome.

[wellesleyunderground]

Wellesley in Politics: Interview with Lindsey Boylan ‘06 (@LindseyBoylan), Candidate for NY’s 10th Congressional District

While the much of focus on the 2020 national election has been on the presidential race, there will also be Congressional races taking place across the country in just over a year. Lindsey Boylan ‘06 is one candidate on the ballot for the House of Representatives and is running in the Democratic primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District against long term Congressman Rep. Jerry Nadler. A former College Government President, Boylan received an MBA from Columbia Business School after graduating from Wellesley and previously served as the Director for Business Affairs for Bryant Park as well as the Deputy Secretary for Economic Development and Special Advisor to the Governor for New York State under the Cuomo administration. We reached out to Lindsey to hear more about her campaign and why she is running for Congress. 

Thank you for agreeing to chat with Wellesley Underground! Tell us a little bit about yourself and your career trajectory after graduating from Wellesley in 2006. Who is Lindsey Boylan?

First of all, it’s no exaggeration to say that Wellesley changed the trajectory of my life. I’m deeply proud of my parents who endured all kinds of struggles and gave me the gift of believing in limitless possibilities. My mother would have loved to attend Wellesley herself, but that opportunity wasn’t available to her when she became a single mother at 16, with the birth of my older sister. She really overcame so much over the years. My mom was working multiple jobs, still unable to get by without the help of food stamps when she met my dad, a Marine from Queens. Eventually she went back to school and became an accountant when I was a teenager. She recognized that Wellesley would open the world to me, and it did in so many ways.

The year that I graduated, the activist Jane Jacobs died. Because I read about her life’s work and her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I fell in love with urban planning and decided to move to New York City. I moved to the Upper West side of Manhattan with no job and less $100 in my bank account, like so many young women who come to this city--- basically not sure how it will all work out, but completely confident that we’ll find a way.

My first job in the city was with urban planner Alex Garvin. I read that he had worked with Jane Jacobs, so I reached out him and basically pestered him until he hired me. From there I went on to oversee Bryant Park. I later got my MBA from Columbia Business School while working full time. That led me to working for New York State, where I served the state as deputy secretary of economic development and special advisor to the governor. I’m very proud of my work for New York State. It’s where I helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars for underfunded public housing in New York and was instrumental in creating new job growth in the state. I was a strong advocate for passing Paid Family Leave; I helped lead the fight for a $15 minimum wage in New York; and I led the state’s efforts to provide assistance for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

In declaring your candidacy for New York’s 10th Congressional district, you would be running against long-term incumbent Rep. Jerry Nadler in the Democratic primary. What is motivating you to run for Congress now and what would you say differentiates you from the incumbent?

Our experiences couldn’t be more different. Jerry originally won his seat in Congress, nearly 30 years ago, when Ted Weiss died the day before the primary election. Nadler was nominated to replace him. As part of “the machine” of New York politics, he hasn’t faced a serious primary challenger because the establishment uses its full force to protect the status quo. He's one of the least productive members of Congress. In almost 30 years in the House, he’s only passed 3 pieces of his own legislation into law — one of which was the renaming of a federal building.

While I’ve pledged not to take a dime of corporate PAC or fossil-fuel industry contributions, corporations fuel Jerry Nadler’s campaign. He operates on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in PAC money from the very industries he regulates in Congress. He’s checked the progressive box on his votes, but actually has little to show for his decades in office. He has not been a leading voice on issues that impact the everyday well-being of New Yorkers. He hasn’t been a champion for mental health, affordable housing, or reducing maternal mortality. There has been no action on climate change despite the fact that a large part of our district is at risk of devastating flooding from storm surges. 

Obviously, in last year’s election we saw both Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ayanna Pressley defeat long-term Congressmen. How much were you influenced by their campaign victories in making the decision to run for the 10th Congressional district seat?

I think we all were inspired by their historic wins. Women, especially women of color, are constantly degraded and pushed to the sidelines, while others make decisions about their lives. Women are sick and tired of others speaking for us. What we need is more seats at the table. For women of all experiences. For mothers too. Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley’s wins showed us that, despite what the establishment tells us, our time is now. I have been told repeatedly that there’s no point in even running against Jerry Nadler, as if he’s somehow entitled to his seat in Congress. That’s not how democracy works. Women are often told that it’s not the right place or the right time for us. We know that we can’t wait politely for our turn, because if we do, our turn will never come. It reminds me of my favorite quote from Nora Ephron, who said in her 1996 Wellesley commencement address, “Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women."

You previously were featured in an article about the growing sentiment that the Democratic party is attempting to crackdown on challengers to incumbents. What do you think your biggest hurdle will be in next year’s election?

Any time you’re running against an intrenched incumbent, it’s really a campaign against “the machine.” Naturally I don’t have the name recognition that Jerry does. The biggest hurdle will be ensuring that my platform and my ideas reach voters. I won’t rest until I’ve met every single person in New York’s 10th District, so they know that this time they have a choice.

Most of New York City is so overwhelmingly Dem that the primary is everything. As long as Democrats fear taking on the establishment, New Yorkers won’t have real options. Being a challenger means that you don’t have access to the financial resources and institutional support of an establishment that will fight with all its power to maintain the status quo. I expect it’s going to be an incredibly hard fight, but I’m a Wellesley woman. I’m prepared.

There will no doubt be a significant amount of attention focused on the 2020 election. How do you plan to effectively share your vision and get voters energized about your campaign during a time when many may be more focused on the presidential election?

I am just as interested in the 2020 presidential campaign - how can I not be? But change can’t happen in this country without the joint effort of the legislative and executive branches. The real impact happens when Congress and the President work together. It’s fantastic when we have a new leader who is passionate, but, as we saw with Obama’s second term, we need fighters in Congress, too, and I plan to be one of New York’s fighters in Congress.

Speaking a little about the issues that matter to you - what would you say are your top three issues of concern? Are you of the opinion that the key issues differ for those living in the Manhattan part of the 10th District compared to those living in Brooklyn?

My priority is to treat housing, healthcare, and education as basic human rights. The district obviously can’t be addressed as a monolith, but all people living in the 10th district, and across America, deserve to live productive, meaningful, and dignified lives. We're facing numerous urgent challenges that need immediate action, among them the climate crisis, gun violence, and the opioid epidemic. Not to mention the assault on our democracy by Trump. One issue which is very important to me, which I don’t hear elected speak about, is mental health. I don’t know anyone whose family hasn’t been affected by mental illness. It’s well past time for mental health to be an equal part of the conversation when we talk about health care. We desperately need to address it on a national level.

As you launch your Congressional campaign, what do you want potential voters to know about the type of leadership you would bring to Congress, if elected?

In Congress, I’ll be guided by my core values as I have been during a life of public service. I will honor my oath without fear of the political ramifications. I won’t just be fighting for the future of my daughter’s generation, but for my mother’s generation and everyone in between.

What advice do you have for Wellesley alums thinking about running for public office either at the very local or national level?

I’d say that when you enter the arena, you’re going to experience what it means to be a Wellesley woman on a new level. You will be overwhelmed by the support from alums, as well as current students--- we have an amazing group of campaign fellows. They’re all very talented and I can’t wait to see them run for office themselves.

One bit of advice that I’ll offer is to develop a strong “kitchen cabinet”, or circle of trusted advisors. You have to trust your gut when you know something is right, but it’s also important to check in with people you hold in high esteem, who challenge your assumptions. If you haven’t read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, it’s a great read.

Also, remember to take care of yourself, especially when it seems like there’s no time for that. You are going to want to “yes, and” everything and everyone, but you can’t work 25 hours every day.

Speaking about mental health, particularly as you continue campaigning over the next year, what is your self-care philosophy?

I recommend therapy for everyone, which unfortunately is sometimes easier said than done. There is so much work to be done so that everyone can access quality mental health care. At minimum, create boundaries around what you can and can’t allow to consume your attention. Also know what recharges your battery. Everyone is different. For me, it’s quiet time with my 5-year-old daughter. She’s everything to me. I’m 100% committed to bringing transformative change to New York’s 10th Congressional District, but sometimes you have to take a meeting inside a princess fort. 

__________

For more information about Lindsey, check out her campaign’s website, follow her on Twitter @LindseyBoylan and keep up with her campaign on Instagram @LindseyBoylanNY. 

Interview by Cleo Hereford ‘09

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Hate Ted Cruz

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-hate-ted-cruz/

Why Do Republicans Hate Ted Cruz

But Cruz And His Conservative Stances Stirred Up Debate Upon His Arrival In Washington Several Months After His Appointment He Was Famously Called Wacko Bird By The Late Sen John Mccain

In March 2013, McCain called Cruz and other Republicans “wacko birds” whose beliefs are not “reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans,” according to The Huffington Post

Cruz embraced the name and even keeps a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words “WACKO BIRD” in his Senate office, according to GQ Magazine.

When He Was In His Early Teens Cruz’s Parents Enrolled Him In An After

“So we’d meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a couple of hours each night, and study the Constitution, read the Federalist Papers, read the Anti-Federalist Papers, read the debates on ratification, and so on,” Cruz told the New Yorker of the time. “And we memorized a shortened mnemonic version of the Constitution.”

Texas Is Freezing But The Roast Of Ted Cruz Is On

Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This is conventional wisdom in Washington. While not technically true his family members like him, presumably, and his approval rating among Texas Republicans last month was 76 percent it feels essentially true. Maybe its the exhausting smarm, the squirrelly ambition, the hollow theatrics. Maybe its how he tried to block relief aid after Hurricane Sandy, or how he helped to shut down the government in 2013. The Victorian facial hair hasnt helped; it lends an incongruous quality of statesmanship to a man viewed by his colleagues as a pest.

Lucifer in the flesh, Republican John A. Boehner, the former speaker of the House, called him in 2016.

If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham said in 2016.

Said Democrat Al Franken in 2017, when he was still in the Senate: I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz.

Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This was the place that Ted Cruz was starting from earlier this week. Then he went to Cancun. He went to Cancun, where it is mostly sunny and in the low 80s, while many of his ice-blasted constituents were without heating and plumbing, watching their ceilings collapse, huddling in warming centers, defecating in buckets, and generally not packing for a few days on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Not good, Cruz tweeted early Tuesday evening about the shutdown of his state. Stay safe!

Latest From Politics & Policy

Part of the reason for this is the Bush campaign early on decided they would have to defeat Richards with a series of issues. If they engaged in a personality contest, Richards would win.

Cruz and his campaign have allowed his challenge from Democrat Beto ORourke to turn into a personality contest. ORourke often is compared to a member of the Kennedy family of Massachusetts, and substantial portions of his campaign financing have come from out of state, about $2.5 million from California and New York combined. On the other hand, Cruz gets compared to Grandpa from the old TV show The Munsters. Cruz is pedantic and presents himself with a hard-core, knee-jerk conservatism that has a certitude that is irritating to those who do not agree with him completely.

ORourke appears on the talk shows of Ellen DeGeneres and is scheduled to appear with Stephen Colbert. Cruz is on Fox News. One of those is like a fun confectionary. The other is boiled spinach.

At a rally Saturday in Katy, Cruz fired up his crowd by telling them Democrats are angry and ready to show up at the polls.

Ted Cruz Tried To Slam The Mlb Over Cleveland Mascot Change

Meaghan Ellis

Sen. Ted Cruz was one of many Republican lawmakers who expressed faux outrage over the Major League Baseball announcement of Cleveland’s new mascot. On Friday, July 23, Cruz took to Twitter with a quick post sharing his reaction to the Cleveland Indians being renamed the Cleveland Guardians.

The Texas lawmaker tweeted, “Why does MLB hate Indians?”

Why does MLB hate Indians? https://t.co/0kQDMbDBsW Ted Cruz

It certainly did not take long for Twitter users to step up to the plate. With their responses, they hit a home run with relentless insults leveled toward the Republican lawmaker. One Twitter user wrote, “Wait, I thought businesses were free to make their own decisions free of government meddling.”

Another Twitter user challenged Cruz with a question about the blatant disregard for indigenous people. That person wrote, “Really Ted? Is disliking native Americans what this name change is about? You’re incredibly disingenuous.”

Opinion:just How Unpopular Is Ted Cruz

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had this exchange at her Thursday briefing:

Q: Just wondering if the president has any reaction to these reports that say Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancun amid this giant winter storm in his home state of Texas?MS. PSAKI: Well, I dont have any updates on the exact location of Senator Ted Cruz, nor does anyone at the White House. But our focus is on working directly with leadership in Texas and the surrounding states on addressing the winter storm and the crisis at hand the many people across the state who are without power, without the resources they need. And we expect that would be the focus of anyone in the state or surrounding states who was elected to represent them. But I dont have any update on his whereabouts.

Due to the winter weather in D.C., the briefing was by phone, so we could not see if Psaki allowed herself a grin after twisting the knife. Cruz had abandoned his state, hurriedly booked a return flight from Mexico and blamed his kids for the trip the sort of political ineptitude one would expect of a small-town mayor, not one of the most nakedly ambitious Republicans in the Senate .

Read more:

Ted Cruz Is So Easy To Hate That Loathing Him Has Become A Form Of Political Poetry

Indeed indeed, I cannot tell, / Though I ponder on it well, / Which were easier to state, / All my love or all my hate. Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau, it seems, never met Ted Cruz, a man so blissfully easy to hate that loathing for him has become a form of political poetry: wacko-bird, abrasive, arrogant, and creepy are some of the kindest adjectives that have been thrown his way. Cruz has alienated about everyone hes ever encountered in life: high school and college classmates, bosses, law professors, Supreme Court clerks, and especially his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Some detest Cruz the politician because of his grandstanding, but most dislike Cruz the person. In that respect, hes really not your average politicianafter all, most people hate politicians. But everyone hates Ted Cruz. 

Ted’s style was sneering, smirking, condescending, jabbing his finger in your facea naked desire to humiliate an opponent. No kindness, no empathy, no attempt to reach common ground.Ted Cruz is a disaster on illegal immigration.I dont think he could get elected. And, even if he was able to govern without blowing up the world, could we look at a guy who resembles a cable game show host for four years? He has that awful plastered-down hair and everything.An incredibly bright guy who’s an arrogant jerk who basically everybody ends up hating.Listen, you can pick a lot of names out. I’ll let you choose them.

Cruz’s Father Rafael Was Born And Raised In Cuba As A Teenager He Was Part Of The Anti

He gained political asylum four years after his arrival and became a citizen in 2005.

Rafael’s childhood story often provided inspirational fire to Cruz’s speeches, interviews, and debate performances later in life. 

But while witnesses have confirmed that Rafael was beaten by Batista special agents, former comrades and friends disputed some other descriptions of his role in the Cuban resistance.

In a 2015 New York Times article, Leonor Arestuche, a student leader in the 1950s, said that Rafel was a “ojalateros,” or wishful thinker.

She said the term was used for “people wishing and praying that Batista would fall but not doing much to act on it,” according to the Times.

Rafael eventually went on to become a minister and called himself Pastor Cruz. While he’s not affiliated with any church, he became a sought-out speaker and Tea Party celebrity. 

Cruz’s Account Of The Debt Limit Battle Is Really One

Several objections can be raised to Cruz’s account here. For instance, a debt ceiling hike doesn’t lead to “trillions of dollars” in new spending, as he implies it merely allows debt to be issued to cover spending that has already been approved by Congress in other legislation.

But most incredibly of all, Cruz manages to narrate this entire story without even once mentioning an absolutely crucial piece of context about why his Senate colleagues might have been so reluctant to follow his lead. Namely, that this dramatic confrontation occurred just four months after the federal government shutdown of fall 2013 a political disaster for the Republican Party that Cruz and the hard-line negotiating tactics he demanded had directly caused.

During that fight, of course, Cruz and his hard-line allies in the House refused to agree to any government funding bill that also funded Obamacare. This led to a 16-day shutdown of the federal government for which Republicans were widely blamed. Their poll numbers plummeted, and they soon wisely caved to avoid damaging their electoral prospects further.

In this context, Senate Republicans’ reluctance to follow Cruz’s advice makes a whole lot more sense. The very tactics he was arguing for had just been discredited in the most high-profile way possible. GOP leaders thought stoking another similar fight and, this time, risking a default on the nation’s debt would fail disastrously and cause great damage to their party.

Ted Cruz Shunned In The Senate Plays Unpopularity To His Advantage

Dec. 17, 2015

WASHINGTON It is the hate that dare not speak its name.

Since his arrival in 2013, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has managed to alienate, exasperate and generally agitate the plurality of his 99 colleagues in the Senate. In a highly partisan, hypercompetitive legislative body where solipsism is nearly a creed, Mr. Cruz stands out for his widely held reputation for putting Ted first.

I dont think hes been effective, said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the partys nominee for president in 2008. I think thats pretty obvious. Shutting down the government? How did that work out?

Mr. Cruz is so unpopular that at one point not a single Republican senator would support his demand for a roll-call vote, known as a sufficient second, leaving Mr. Cruz standing on the Senate floor like a man with bird flu, everyone scattering to avoid him.

In his presidential campaign, Mr. Cruz uses his role as an outsider as a source of strength. It shouldnt surprise anyone that the Washington establishment is against the candidacy of Ted Cruz, said Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Mr. Cruzs presidential campaign. We are not looking for the approval of the Washington cartel.

Yet many Republicans are loath to criticize him on the record, largely for two reasons: They do not want to help him, and do not want him to hurt them.

Everyone Else At Princeton

Fighting words: Per the Daily Beast, Several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like abrasive,intense,strident,crank, and arrogant. Four independently offered the word creepy.’

People might think Craig is exaggerating. Hes not. I met Ted freshman week and loathed him within the hour.

Geoff January 20, 2016

The beef: Its tough to pinpoint any one cause, but Cruz made female students uncomfortable by frequently walking to their end of the floor in his freshman dorm, wearing only a paisley bathrobe. When he announced his bid for president of the schools debate society, the other members had a secret meeting to pick an anyone-but-Cruz candidate. The eventual winner later that my one qualification for the office was that I was not Ted Cruz.

Texas Senator Has Changed Course So Many Times It Is Hard To Keep Track Writes Andrew Buncombe

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

There was a time, not so very long ago, when Ted Cruz pitched himself as the model of integrity, the very antithesis of the likes of Donald Trump.

Campaigning for the Republican Partys nomination in 2015 and 2016, he was an early favourite of many conservatives and pro-constitution Republicans.

He had enough support among evangelicals to bag Iowa, the very first state in the primary process, and to earn a brief word of congratulations from Trump, before Trump resorted to form and accused the Texas senator of stealing the race.

Later, as the race thinned and Cruz found himself fighting against Trump for his political life, he famously accused him of being a pathological liar, as the Republican frontrunner insulted the senators wife, and claimed his father was somehow involved in the assassination of John K Kennedy.

He is proud of being a serial philanderer, hissed Cruz. He describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam.

Trump then went on to win the Indiana primary, and Cruz dropped out of the race. Such was the bad blood, that Lyin Ted did not endorse Trump at that summers Republican convention, waiting until September before finally offering his support.

Since then, like a mountain stream in flood, Ted Cruz, 50, has changed course several times.

The purpose of the objection was to protect the integrity of our election, he told KTRK-TV

Mccain Isn’t The Only One Who Had Scathing Words For The Senator Former Speaker Of The House John Boehner Once Described Cruz As Lucifer In The Flesh And Sen Lindsey Graham Once Said: If You Killed Ted Cruz On The Floor Of The Senate And The Trial Was In The Senate Nobody Would Convict You

Jason Johnson September 25, 2013

  In the best-known part of the speech, he read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” as a bedtime story to his two young daughters watching in Houston. Heidi suggested he read the book.

In his speech, he repeated an analogy between the “oppression” of Obamacare and the oppression that his father, Rafael, faced as a young man in Cuba.

Cruz’s infamous speech was one of the longest Senate performances ever, stopping after 21 hours 19 minutes.

Donald Trump Or Ted Cruz Republicans Argue Over Who Is Greater Threat

Jan. 21, 2016

WASHINGTON With Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz battling for the Republican nomination, two powerful factions of their party are now clashing over the question: Which man is more dangerous?

Conservative intellectuals have become convinced that Mr. Trump, with his message of nationalist-infused populism, poses a dire threat to conservatism, and released a manifesto online Thursday night to try to stop him.

However, the cadre of Republican lobbyists, operatives and elected officials based in Washington is much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz, a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader who campaigns against the political establishment and could curtail their influence and access, building his own Republican machine to essentially replace them.

The division illuminates much about modern Republicanism and the surprising bedfellows brought about when an emerging political force begins to imperil entrenched power.

The Republicans who dominate the right-leaning magazines, journals and political groups can live with Mr. Cruz, believing that his nomination would leave the party divided, but manageably so, extending a longstanding intramural debate over pragmatism versus purity that has been waged since the days of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. They say Mr. Trump, on the other hand, poses the most serious peril to the conservative movement since the 1950s-era far-right John Birch Society.

Ted Cruz Threatens To Burn John Boehners Book Over Criticisms

Former Republican House speaker called the Texas senator Lucifer in the flesh

Review: John Boehners lament for pre-Trump Republicans

Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.

Read more

Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.

The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is Lucifer in the flesh, Boehner has said.

On the page, he writes: There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.

The book also contains a memorable sign-off: PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.

But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.

But I didnt finish it off just yet, it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a 72-hour drive to raise $250,000, in which donors would get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!

But it could also be pointed out that Cruzs attempt to stoke outrage and dollars might only succeed in bringing Boehners book to wider attention.

Texass Junior Senator Has Never Much Cared For Being Liked Which Has Left Him Vulnerable In The Face Of Public Outrage

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

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Having jetted off to Cancun as his state faced its worst winter disaster in decades, Senator Ted Cruz returned with his tail between his legs and was met with fury from all sides. The famously divisive and aggressive senator may not be up for re-election until 2024, but there are signs that he may finally have gone too far.

Along with the expected protests at the airport and barrage of furious tweets, he faced the ire of his states largest newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, whose editorial board fired off a merciless editorial calling for his resignation. As Texans froze, Ted Cruz got a ticket to paradise, the paper wrote. Paradise can have him.

Whether or not Mr Cruz actually resigns over the ill-advised holiday which he has called a mistake it will stain his reputation forever. But then again, his reputation has been poor for years. In fact, he is famously one of the most disliked people in Congress, and not just by the other party.

First elected to his seat in 2012 as an anti-establishment Tea Party candidate, Mr Cruz entered Congress as a populist right-wing belligerent who commanded a base of angry, hardline voters. He quickly established a reputation in Washington as an opponent of compromise, bipartisanship and pragmatism and unlike some conservative blowhards, he put his money where his mouth was.

Early Life And Family

Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in , , Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Eleanor Wilson was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters and one-quarter descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.

Cruz’s father was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to as child. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a United States citizen in 2005.

At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz’s parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil . Cruz has said that he is the son of “two mathematicians/computer programmers.” In 1974, Cruz’s father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz’s parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father’s first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.

Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.

Government Shutdown Of 2013

Ted Cruz’s Obamacare filibuster

Cruz had a leading role in the October 2013 government shutdown. Cruz gave a 21-hour Senate speech in an effort to hold up a federal budget bill and thereby defund the Affordable Care Act. Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives and House SpeakerJohn Boehner to include an ACA defunding provision in the bill. In the U.S. Senate, former Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the attempt because only 18 Republican Senators supported the filibuster. During the filibuster he read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. To supporters, the move “signaled the depth of Cruz’s commitment to rein in government”. This move was extremely popular among Cruz supporters, with Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government naming Cruz “2013 Person of the Year” in an op-ed in The Hill, primarily for his filibuster against the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was also named “2013 Man of the Year” by conservative publications , and The American Spectator, “2013 Conservative of the Year” by , and “2013 Statesman of the Year” by the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. He was a finalist for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2013. To critics, including some Republican colleagues such as Senator Lindsey Graham, the move was ineffective.

Cruz has consistently denied any involvement in the 2013 government shutdown, even though he cast several votes to prolong it and was blamed by many within his own party for prompting it.

Ted Cruz Leaves Mexico Amid Winter Emergency In Texas

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas flew home from a vacation to Mexico after receiving heavy criticism for leaving the state while millions have struggled with a lack of electricity and water after a brutal winter storm.

Keep working to get the grid reopened, to get power restored, get water back on. A lot of Texans are hurting, and this crisis is frustrating. Its frustrating for millions of Texans, it shouldnt happen.

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On Monday, Senator Ted Cruz urged his constituents to stay home, warning that winter weather beating down on Texas could be deadly. On Tuesday, he offered a shrug emoji and pronounced the situation not good. Then, on Wednesday, he decamped for a Ritz-Carlton resort in sun-drenched Cancún, escaping with his family from their freezing house.

And on Thursday, many Americans who had been battered by a deadly winter storm, on top of a nearly yearlong pandemic, finally found a reason to come together and lift their voices in a united chorus of rage.

FlyinTed, a homage to Donald J. Trumps Lyin Ted nickname, began trending on Twitter. TMZ, the celebrity website, published photographs showing a Patagonia-fleece-clad Mr. Cruz waiting for his flight, hanging out in the United Club lounge and reading his phone from a seat in economy plus. The Texas Monthly, which bills itself as the national magazine of Texas, offered a list of curses to mutter against Mr. Cruz.

For others in his home state, there was little to guess about the incident.

[statetalks]

Why Do Republicans Hate Ted Cruz

But Cruz And His Conservative Stances Stirred Up Debate Upon His Arrival In Washington Several Months After His Appointment He Was Famously Called Wacko Bird By The Late Sen John Mccain

In March 2013, McCain called Cruz and other Republicans “wacko birds” whose beliefs are not “reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans,” according to The Huffington Post

Cruz embraced the name and even keeps a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words “WACKO BIRD” in his Senate office, according to GQ Magazine.

When He Was In His Early Teens Cruz’s Parents Enrolled Him In An After

“So we’d meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a couple of hours each night, and study the Constitution, read the Federalist Papers, read the Anti-Federalist Papers, read the debates on ratification, and so on,” Cruz told the New Yorker of the time. “And we memorized a shortened mnemonic version of the Constitution.”

Texas Is Freezing But The Roast Of Ted Cruz Is On

Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This is conventional wisdom in Washington. While not technically true his family members like him, presumably, and his approval rating among Texas Republicans last month was 76 percent it feels essentially true. Maybe its the exhausting smarm, the squirrelly ambition, the hollow theatrics. Maybe its how he tried to block relief aid after Hurricane Sandy, or how he helped to shut down the government in 2013. The Victorian facial hair hasnt helped; it lends an incongruous quality of statesmanship to a man viewed by his colleagues as a pest.

Lucifer in the flesh, Republican John A. Boehner, the former speaker of the House, called him in 2016.

If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham said in 2016.

Said Democrat Al Franken in 2017, when he was still in the Senate: I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz.

Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This was the place that Ted Cruz was starting from earlier this week. Then he went to Cancun. He went to Cancun, where it is mostly sunny and in the low 80s, while many of his ice-blasted constituents were without heating and plumbing, watching their ceilings collapse, huddling in warming centers, defecating in buckets, and generally not packing for a few days on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Not good, Cruz tweeted early Tuesday evening about the shutdown of his state. Stay safe!

Latest From Politics & Policy

Part of the reason for this is the Bush campaign early on decided they would have to defeat Richards with a series of issues. If they engaged in a personality contest, Richards would win.

Cruz and his campaign have allowed his challenge from Democrat Beto ORourke to turn into a personality contest. ORourke often is compared to a member of the Kennedy family of Massachusetts, and substantial portions of his campaign financing have come from out of state, about $2.5 million from California and New York combined. On the other hand, Cruz gets compared to Grandpa from the old TV show The Munsters. Cruz is pedantic and presents himself with a hard-core, knee-jerk conservatism that has a certitude that is irritating to those who do not agree with him completely.

ORourke appears on the talk shows of Ellen DeGeneres and is scheduled to appear with Stephen Colbert. Cruz is on Fox News. One of those is like a fun confectionary. The other is boiled spinach.

At a rally Saturday in Katy, Cruz fired up his crowd by telling them Democrats are angry and ready to show up at the polls.

Ted Cruz Tried To Slam The Mlb Over Cleveland Mascot Change

Meaghan Ellis

Sen. Ted Cruz was one of many Republican lawmakers who expressed faux outrage over the Major League Baseball announcement of Cleveland’s new mascot. On Friday, July 23, Cruz took to Twitter with a quick post sharing his reaction to the Cleveland Indians being renamed the Cleveland Guardians.

The Texas lawmaker tweeted, “Why does MLB hate Indians?”

Why does MLB hate Indians? https://t.co/0kQDMbDBsW Ted Cruz

It certainly did not take long for Twitter users to step up to the plate. With their responses, they hit a home run with relentless insults leveled toward the Republican lawmaker. One Twitter user wrote, “Wait, I thought businesses were free to make their own decisions free of government meddling.”

Another Twitter user challenged Cruz with a question about the blatant disregard for indigenous people. That person wrote, “Really Ted? Is disliking native Americans what this name change is about? You’re incredibly disingenuous.”

Opinion:just How Unpopular Is Ted Cruz

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had this exchange at her Thursday briefing:

Q: Just wondering if the president has any reaction to these reports that say Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancun amid this giant winter storm in his home state of Texas?MS. PSAKI: Well, I dont have any updates on the exact location of Senator Ted Cruz, nor does anyone at the White House. But our focus is on working directly with leadership in Texas and the surrounding states on addressing the winter storm and the crisis at hand the many people across the state who are without power, without the resources they need. And we expect that would be the focus of anyone in the state or surrounding states who was elected to represent them. But I dont have any update on his whereabouts.

Due to the winter weather in D.C., the briefing was by phone, so we could not see if Psaki allowed herself a grin after twisting the knife. Cruz had abandoned his state, hurriedly booked a return flight from Mexico and blamed his kids for the trip the sort of political ineptitude one would expect of a small-town mayor, not one of the most nakedly ambitious Republicans in the Senate .

Read more:

Ted Cruz Is So Easy To Hate That Loathing Him Has Become A Form Of Political Poetry

Indeed indeed, I cannot tell, / Though I ponder on it well, / Which were easier to state, / All my love or all my hate. Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau, it seems, never met Ted Cruz, a man so blissfully easy to hate that loathing for him has become a form of political poetry: wacko-bird, abrasive, arrogant, and creepy are some of the kindest adjectives that have been thrown his way. Cruz has alienated about everyone hes ever encountered in life: high school and college classmates, bosses, law professors, Supreme Court clerks, and especially his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Some detest Cruz the politician because of his grandstanding, but most dislike Cruz the person. In that respect, hes really not your average politicianafter all, most people hate politicians. But everyone hates Ted Cruz. 

Ted’s style was sneering, smirking, condescending, jabbing his finger in your facea naked desire to humiliate an opponent. No kindness, no empathy, no attempt to reach common ground.Ted Cruz is a disaster on illegal immigration.I dont think he could get elected. And, even if he was able to govern without blowing up the world, could we look at a guy who resembles a cable game show host for four years? He has that awful plastered-down hair and everything.An incredibly bright guy who’s an arrogant jerk who basically everybody ends up hating.Listen, you can pick a lot of names out. I’ll let you choose them.

Cruz’s Father Rafael Was Born And Raised In Cuba As A Teenager He Was Part Of The Anti

He gained political asylum four years after his arrival and became a citizen in 2005.

Rafael’s childhood story often provided inspirational fire to Cruz’s speeches, interviews, and debate performances later in life. 

But while witnesses have confirmed that Rafael was beaten by Batista special agents, former comrades and friends disputed some other descriptions of his role in the Cuban resistance.

In a 2015 New York Times article, Leonor Arestuche, a student leader in the 1950s, said that Rafel was a “ojalateros,” or wishful thinker.

She said the term was used for “people wishing and praying that Batista would fall but not doing much to act on it,” according to the Times.

Rafael eventually went on to become a minister and called himself Pastor Cruz. While he’s not affiliated with any church, he became a sought-out speaker and Tea Party celebrity. 

Cruz’s Account Of The Debt Limit Battle Is Really One

Several objections can be raised to Cruz’s account here. For instance, a debt ceiling hike doesn’t lead to “trillions of dollars” in new spending, as he implies it merely allows debt to be issued to cover spending that has already been approved by Congress in other legislation.

But most incredibly of all, Cruz manages to narrate this entire story without even once mentioning an absolutely crucial piece of context about why his Senate colleagues might have been so reluctant to follow his lead. Namely, that this dramatic confrontation occurred just four months after the federal government shutdown of fall 2013 a political disaster for the Republican Party that Cruz and the hard-line negotiating tactics he demanded had directly caused.

During that fight, of course, Cruz and his hard-line allies in the House refused to agree to any government funding bill that also funded Obamacare. This led to a 16-day shutdown of the federal government for which Republicans were widely blamed. Their poll numbers plummeted, and they soon wisely caved to avoid damaging their electoral prospects further.

In this context, Senate Republicans’ reluctance to follow Cruz’s advice makes a whole lot more sense. The very tactics he was arguing for had just been discredited in the most high-profile way possible. GOP leaders thought stoking another similar fight and, this time, risking a default on the nation’s debt would fail disastrously and cause great damage to their party.

Ted Cruz Shunned In The Senate Plays Unpopularity To His Advantage

Dec. 17, 2015

WASHINGTON It is the hate that dare not speak its name.

Since his arrival in 2013, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has managed to alienate, exasperate and generally agitate the plurality of his 99 colleagues in the Senate. In a highly partisan, hypercompetitive legislative body where solipsism is nearly a creed, Mr. Cruz stands out for his widely held reputation for putting Ted first.

I dont think hes been effective, said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the partys nominee for president in 2008. I think thats pretty obvious. Shutting down the government? How did that work out?

Mr. Cruz is so unpopular that at one point not a single Republican senator would support his demand for a roll-call vote, known as a sufficient second, leaving Mr. Cruz standing on the Senate floor like a man with bird flu, everyone scattering to avoid him.

In his presidential campaign, Mr. Cruz uses his role as an outsider as a source of strength. It shouldnt surprise anyone that the Washington establishment is against the candidacy of Ted Cruz, said Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Mr. Cruzs presidential campaign. We are not looking for the approval of the Washington cartel.

Yet many Republicans are loath to criticize him on the record, largely for two reasons: They do not want to help him, and do not want him to hurt them.

Everyone Else At Princeton

Fighting words: Per the Daily Beast, Several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like abrasive,intense,strident,crank, and arrogant. Four independently offered the word creepy.’

People might think Craig is exaggerating. Hes not. I met Ted freshman week and loathed him within the hour.

Geoff January 20, 2016

The beef: Its tough to pinpoint any one cause, but Cruz made female students uncomfortable by frequently walking to their end of the floor in his freshman dorm, wearing only a paisley bathrobe. When he announced his bid for president of the schools debate society, the other members had a secret meeting to pick an anyone-but-Cruz candidate. The eventual winner later that my one qualification for the office was that I was not Ted Cruz.

Texas Senator Has Changed Course So Many Times It Is Hard To Keep Track Writes Andrew Buncombe

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There was a time, not so very long ago, when Ted Cruz pitched himself as the model of integrity, the very antithesis of the likes of Donald Trump.

Campaigning for the Republican Partys nomination in 2015 and 2016, he was an early favourite of many conservatives and pro-constitution Republicans.

He had enough support among evangelicals to bag Iowa, the very first state in the primary process, and to earn a brief word of congratulations from Trump, before Trump resorted to form and accused the Texas senator of stealing the race.

Later, as the race thinned and Cruz found himself fighting against Trump for his political life, he famously accused him of being a pathological liar, as the Republican frontrunner insulted the senators wife, and claimed his father was somehow involved in the assassination of John K Kennedy.

He is proud of being a serial philanderer, hissed Cruz. He describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam.

Trump then went on to win the Indiana primary, and Cruz dropped out of the race. Such was the bad blood, that Lyin Ted did not endorse Trump at that summers Republican convention, waiting until September before finally offering his support.

Since then, like a mountain stream in flood, Ted Cruz, 50, has changed course several times.

The purpose of the objection was to protect the integrity of our election, he told KTRK-TV

Mccain Isn’t The Only One Who Had Scathing Words For The Senator Former Speaker Of The House John Boehner Once Described Cruz As Lucifer In The Flesh And Sen Lindsey Graham Once Said: If You Killed Ted Cruz On The Floor Of The Senate And The Trial Was In The Senate Nobody Would Convict You

Jason Johnson September 25, 2013

  In the best-known part of the speech, he read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” as a bedtime story to his two young daughters watching in Houston. Heidi suggested he read the book.

In his speech, he repeated an analogy between the “oppression” of Obamacare and the oppression that his father, Rafael, faced as a young man in Cuba.

Cruz’s infamous speech was one of the longest Senate performances ever, stopping after 21 hours 19 minutes.

Donald Trump Or Ted Cruz Republicans Argue Over Who Is Greater Threat

Jan. 21, 2016

WASHINGTON With Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz battling for the Republican nomination, two powerful factions of their party are now clashing over the question: Which man is more dangerous?

Conservative intellectuals have become convinced that Mr. Trump, with his message of nationalist-infused populism, poses a dire threat to conservatism, and released a manifesto online Thursday night to try to stop him.

However, the cadre of Republican lobbyists, operatives and elected officials based in Washington is much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz, a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader who campaigns against the political establishment and could curtail their influence and access, building his own Republican machine to essentially replace them.

The division illuminates much about modern Republicanism and the surprising bedfellows brought about when an emerging political force begins to imperil entrenched power.

The Republicans who dominate the right-leaning magazines, journals and political groups can live with Mr. Cruz, believing that his nomination would leave the party divided, but manageably so, extending a longstanding intramural debate over pragmatism versus purity that has been waged since the days of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. They say Mr. Trump, on the other hand, poses the most serious peril to the conservative movement since the 1950s-era far-right John Birch Society.

Ted Cruz Threatens To Burn John Boehners Book Over Criticisms

Former Republican House speaker called the Texas senator Lucifer in the flesh

Review: John Boehners lament for pre-Trump Republicans

Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.

Read more

Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.

The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is Lucifer in the flesh, Boehner has said.

On the page, he writes: There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.

The book also contains a memorable sign-off: PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.

But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.

But I didnt finish it off just yet, it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a 72-hour drive to raise $250,000, in which donors would get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!

But it could also be pointed out that Cruzs attempt to stoke outrage and dollars might only succeed in bringing Boehners book to wider attention.

Texass Junior Senator Has Never Much Cared For Being Liked Which Has Left Him Vulnerable In The Face Of Public Outrage

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Leer en Español

Having jetted off to Cancun as his state faced its worst winter disaster in decades, Senator Ted Cruz returned with his tail between his legs and was met with fury from all sides. The famously divisive and aggressive senator may not be up for re-election until 2024, but there are signs that he may finally have gone too far.

Along with the expected protests at the airport and barrage of furious tweets, he faced the ire of his states largest newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, whose editorial board fired off a merciless editorial calling for his resignation. As Texans froze, Ted Cruz got a ticket to paradise, the paper wrote. Paradise can have him.

Whether or not Mr Cruz actually resigns over the ill-advised holiday which he has called a mistake it will stain his reputation forever. But then again, his reputation has been poor for years. In fact, he is famously one of the most disliked people in Congress, and not just by the other party.

First elected to his seat in 2012 as an anti-establishment Tea Party candidate, Mr Cruz entered Congress as a populist right-wing belligerent who commanded a base of angry, hardline voters. He quickly established a reputation in Washington as an opponent of compromise, bipartisanship and pragmatism and unlike some conservative blowhards, he put his money where his mouth was.

Early Life And Family

Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in , , Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Eleanor Wilson was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters and one-quarter descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.

Cruz’s father was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to as child. As a teenager in the 1950s, he was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a United States citizen in 2005.

At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz’s parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil . Cruz has said that he is the son of “two mathematicians/computer programmers.” In 1974, Cruz’s father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz’s parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father’s first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.

Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.

Government Shutdown Of 2013

Ted Cruz’s Obamacare filibuster

Cruz had a leading role in the October 2013 government shutdown. Cruz gave a 21-hour Senate speech in an effort to hold up a federal budget bill and thereby defund the Affordable Care Act. Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives and House SpeakerJohn Boehner to include an ACA defunding provision in the bill. In the U.S. Senate, former Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the attempt because only 18 Republican Senators supported the filibuster. During the filibuster he read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. To supporters, the move “signaled the depth of Cruz’s commitment to rein in government”. This move was extremely popular among Cruz supporters, with Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government naming Cruz “2013 Person of the Year” in an op-ed in The Hill, primarily for his filibuster against the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was also named “2013 Man of the Year” by conservative publications , and The American Spectator, “2013 Conservative of the Year” by , and “2013 Statesman of the Year” by the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. He was a finalist for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2013. To critics, including some Republican colleagues such as Senator Lindsey Graham, the move was ineffective.

Cruz has consistently denied any involvement in the 2013 government shutdown, even though he cast several votes to prolong it and was blamed by many within his own party for prompting it.

Ted Cruz Leaves Mexico Amid Winter Emergency In Texas

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas flew home from a vacation to Mexico after receiving heavy criticism for leaving the state while millions have struggled with a lack of electricity and water after a brutal winter storm.

Keep working to get the grid reopened, to get power restored, get water back on. A lot of Texans are hurting, and this crisis is frustrating. Its frustrating for millions of Texans, it shouldnt happen.

Leer en español

On Monday, Senator Ted Cruz urged his constituents to stay home, warning that winter weather beating down on Texas could be deadly. On Tuesday, he offered a shrug emoji and pronounced the situation not good. Then, on Wednesday, he decamped for a Ritz-Carlton resort in sun-drenched Cancún, escaping with his family from their freezing house.

And on Thursday, many Americans who had been battered by a deadly winter storm, on top of a nearly yearlong pandemic, finally found a reason to come together and lift their voices in a united chorus of rage.

FlyinTed, a homage to Donald J. Trumps Lyin Ted nickname, began trending on Twitter. TMZ, the celebrity website, published photographs showing a Patagonia-fleece-clad Mr. Cruz waiting for his flight, hanging out in the United Club lounge and reading his phone from a seat in economy plus. The Texas Monthly, which bills itself as the national magazine of Texas, offered a list of curses to mutter against Mr. Cruz.

For others in his home state, there was little to guess about the incident.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-hate-ted-cruz/

[littlelieshq]

hey my loyal readers, ALISE here, your one and only source of gosan’s finest. aren’t you curious about what i have in store for you today? don’t lie, of course you are! well, today’s highlight happens to be the one and only MOON YOHAN. the moon yohan? yes, that’s right, him. you know him, don’t you? TWENTY-FIVE, PROGRAMMER? no? well—i don’t blame you if you don’t, if you’ve seen one gosaner, you’ve seen them all. but this one, he’s a little special—not everyone steals their college’s roommate idea to establish their own startup, after all.

                                          interested? well why wouldn’t you be?

                                                lucky for you i always deliver.

30 UNDER 30 - FORBES KOREA NUMBER 18: MOON YOHAN

( “You went to school here in Gosan, right?” the reporter asks. Yohan nods. “On a scholarship.” )

He always starts with the scholarship.

Sure, Yohan existed before this, but nowadays he controls the narrative, so he starts with the scholarship. It’s best to start this way, keep his family life out of the picture because honestly, it’s quite boring and boring doesn’t go well with the perfect profile he crafted for himself. So, the scholarship.

There are two Gosans: the one he knows, from his parents’ modest restaurant and their modest house in the most modest neighborhood on the island – the servants have to live somewhere, after all, and it’s not like the rich people will do their own laundry, pick their own trash, raise their own kids.

And the one he gets to know after the scholarship: stinking of privilege, of expensive clothes, cars, people. Shining and polished. And fake. ( “It must have been hard to adapt,” the report says. “Being…” “Poor?” Yohan chuckles. “You can say it. Yes, I was poor. It wasn’t easy and I can’t say I have many good memories, but it wasn’t too hard either. It just was.” )

He is smart – hence the scholarship – so he knows he’ll be an easy prey for the rich kids. Except Yohan doesn’t intend on letting any dumbass iljin take advantage of him, so he makes himself useful by offering his services. Math, science, chemistry and physics homeworks at a very fair price. The students flock to him, open their wallets for good grades to please their parents. The teachers pretend they don’t know, not wanting to fail any important student and quite honestly, happy to not spend too much time correcting abysmal homeworks. This is the first thing Yohan learns: rich people can treat you well if they need you.

( “And after this Korea University,” the reporter raises her eyebrows, impressed. “Also on a scholarship. You must have studied a lot.” “Yes, I did.” Yohan shrugs. “But there’s no reward without sacrifice, right?” )

He always leaves this part out because it isn’t pretty. It’s not ugly either, it’s just… uninteresting. Yohan sells homeworks, makes bank, lies to his parents and his older sister that he has friends and all they expect of the teen life, but the truth is, Yohan doesn’t care about those things. He is a genius, with an intellect so developed he graduates high school a year earlier. And now that Yohan has tasted privilege he knows he can’t go back to his modest life, he needs to have that for himself.

Yohan is good with computers, too good, actually. So good he lands yet another scholarship, this time one for Korea University. His family is happy, but for Yohan this is nothing but the natural course of life. Of course he would get a scholarship for a prestigious university, he is a genius.

( “The marines?” Once again the reporter seems impressed. Maybe a bit too much. “Any reason why you chose them instead of something else?” “I was never a physical person, so I thought it would be a good challenge.” Yohan replies, his PR approved answer on the tip of his tongue. “I’m not going to lie, I thought I was going to die.” he chuckles. “But I did it anyway.” )

Yohan knows that in this life it’s not about who you are, but who you seem to be, and he is a man with a vision, one that leads to pausing college after one year to join the marines for his enlistment. He has to do it anyway, might as well get it out of the way and prove himself to be a great man by joining the hardest corporation. It will look great on his resume, he knows.

( “And then at the young age of…” the reporter checks her notes, “twenty one you had the idea that changed not only your life but communication as we know it.” “I wouldn’t go so far, but it was a good idea, wasn’t it?” Yohan asks, a charming smile on his lips. )

He goes back to university, rooms with a foreigner guy who has dreams. One of those stupid idealistic types Yohan believed only exists in dramas. Except this guy is real and he has a very good idea for one of his projects: an AI that can understand spoken language and simultaneously translate the speech into subtitles. The guy intends to use to help education around the world or some other stupid idea. Yohan intends to help himself and no one else.

Yohan is smart enough to know how to manipulate his roommate into walking him through the early stages of development, from there he takes matters into his own hands: starts coding the prototype of the app, learns how to build the algorithm from scratch. Three months later Yohan is taking the project to investors, showing how profitable the idea can be in the right hands. AIs are the future and Yohan already started it. Well, his roommate started it for him, but honestly, who is going to believe him?

So this is how the story goes:

Moon Yohan, a man born in a working class family, invents all by himself an AI that will revolutionize communications around the world. The investors love the idea, their PR people love that Yohan looks good enough that even people outside of the tech environment will want to know more about him.

( “And what exactly does pyxis mean?” the reporter asks. “Why did you choose this name for your startup and the name lyra for your AI?” Yohan smiles. “They are constellations names. My father always told me to shoot for the stars, so it sounded fitting, don’t you think?” )

He signs the papers to found PYXIS a day after he graduates. The startup is located at the top of a commercial building in Gosan, two small rooms and Yohan plus four other employees. Sure, he has an initial investment of a few million won, but this part doesn’t look very good when people write his profile, so he keeps it out. People love an underdog, so Yohan gives that to him, the boy who had a dream and worked hard towards it.

Soon PYXIS is signing contracts with entertainment and video companies, the company going from a small startup to a medium sized company to something so big Yohan needs to hire a juridic department, HR and marketing, the one he leaves on his sister’s hands. LYRA, his AI, is on k-pop concerts, cellphones and soon even governmental programs. 

Yohan is on the cover of magazines, giving TED talks, meeting creators and CEOs of other technology companies, politicians, mingling with celebrities. Three years and more, now overseas, investments after, PYXIS grows and Yohan doesn’t see it ever stopping. Sometimes he thinks about his roommate, wonders what he is doing and if he knows, but those thoughts never stay in his mind for too long, he has better things to think about.

( “It’s a very incredible career for such a young person. You truly are impressive, Moon-ssi.” the reporter smiles when they end the interview. “Am I?” Yohan chuckles, but he knows he is. “I don’t know about that, but that’s not too bad for a poor kid, right?” No, not too bad. )

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

2024

If we take into account every election since 2008, there would have been 32 possible outcomes for the 2024 presidential election.  Sixteen of them saw the election or re-election of the 46th president, fifteen of them the 47th, and two the 48th.  This assumes that every president runs for re-election when eligible, but only for consecutive terms  It further assumes that no presidents die in office or resign, which haven’t happened since 1963 and 1974 respectively.

Because we know the outcomes of the previous elections, it appears that the two possible scenarios for 2024 are that Joe Biden is re-elected the 46th president, or a new Republican challenger is elected the 47th.  I have a strong feeling that 2024 isn’t going to be a regular election though.

I picture four possible outcomes for 2024, and 9 for 2028.

First, Joe Biden is re-elected; I consider this unlikely.  Biden will be 82 in 2024, and there was an unspoken promise that he planned to only serve one term because of this.

Second, Kamala Harris is elected president instead; this is much more likely.  If Biden doesn’t run, the nomination is all but guaranteed to go to her.  No Democrat with a future would try to challenge her in the primaries, that would shoot the entire party in the foot right out the gate.

Third, a Republican challenger defeats either Biden or Harris.  This is the second most likely scenario for me.  Unseating an incumbent is traditionally very difficult, Trump just happened to be chronically unpopular (he never had 50% approval, and lost the popular vote twice), so if Biden runs he’ll probably win, but if Harris runs I give her 50/50 depending on who the Republicans pick.  There are a lot of contenders; Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, but if Harris gets the Democratic nomination then I would bet the Republican would nominate a woman to go against her; Nikki Haley, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ivanka Trump, Lauren Boebert.  That would guarantee the country elects the first woman president, and make it an ideological thing; everyone assumes the first woman president will be a Democrat (every believed it would be Hillary Clinton since the year 2000), but the Republicans will try to claim that milestone themselves and then push a far-right agenda under the guise of “real feminism,” where they say that real feminists are conservative, they don’t want abortions, they don’t want body autonomy, they don’t support trans women.  One of the primary opponents to the Equal Rights Amendment was a woman named Phyllis Schalfly, so any Republican woman running for office would gladly strip people’s rights away

Fourth, Donald Trump is re-elected to a non-consecutive second term as the 47th president.  I think he’ll make us think he wants to run again, but I don’t think his heart will be in it; he just wants to stay in the limelight and pocket millions of dollars in political donations.  He’ll announce his candidacy and file with the FEC shortly after his acquittal in his senate impeachment trial, but without his twitter account he’ll have trouble staying relevant for 4 years, especially when the media is no longer obligated to follow his every move.  Don’t get me wrong, they’ll still report on him, he’s their bread and butter, but he’s a private citizen, so they’ll be more likely to focus on the current administration.  He’ll have a ton of publicity stunts between now and 2024 to try and stay in the spotlight, but without any executive power nothing he does will be substantive enough to remain a top story for very long.  He won’t start his own news network, he’ll probably just become a regular contributor to the existing conservative propaganda machines like Fox, Newsmax and OAN.  He’ll drop out of the race early and play kingmaker, telling his base to vote for whoever he endorses; I picture him turning the Republican primary season into a reality game show with himself as the judge, whittling down a pool of candidates like he’s back on Celebrity Apprentice, with the nomination going to his handpicked finalist.  The fleeting moderate wing of the party might try to ignore him, but the core conservative wing and the rising fascist wing will play along with whatever he chooses to do.

For the first three outcomes, I predicted fairly tame 2028 campaigns; it is almost certainly going to be Harris or a Republican challenger, but if Donald Trump wins a second term, there is a slim not non-zero possibility that he stays in office for a third.  Just look at what he tried to do between November 7 and January 6; now picture that he and his lawyers learn from experience and try to do it again.  Regardless of who the Republicans choose in 2024, you know there’s going to be a lot of collusion with Secretaries of State, especially in swing states, to try and undermine the election before it begins.  This wasn’t an anomaly, this is gonna happen again, I guarantee it.  They’ve proven themselves willing to cheat to win, so why on Earth would we assume they’d ever play fair again?  Watch as Georgia changes voting laws to strip rights away from black people, watch as the secretary of state interferes in his own re-election campaign to stay in power, watch as states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida create even worse gerrymandered districts, watch as Trump-appointed judges rule against Biden/Harris.

I can see the writing on the wall, and it spells disaster for our democracy.