#taken out by the cia for daring to say the truth

[alcoholicweiwuxian]

And then after saying there’s probably more gay people in the room the camera cut from Colin to Trent and then to Jamie which mea- *gunshot*

[moonflower-31]

I Won’t Forget You - Spencer Reid x Reader

Masterlist 

Part 2 

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader 

Warnings: Descriptions of dead bodies and cases. Usual CM stuff. 

Tags: @dra-reid, @eevee0722, @ceeellewrites 

~~~~~~~~~ 

Okay, so, maybe you'd admit that sitting next to Reid on a plane was making you nervous. 

After you had made it to the jet, you carried your go back to the back of the jet where they stored the luggage. Right as you did so however, your phone began to ring. You looked at your watch and sighed. You would have to answer the phone and get on the jet. Whoever it was was going to have to accept that it would be a short phone call. 

"Hello?" You answered, adjusting your bag as you made your way back to the boarding stairs of the jet. 

"So~? It's probably not your lunch break yet… but how did seeing mister teacher's pet go? Did he give you any hair care tips cause he looked good for having such messy hair." 

You fought the smile that formed on your face, staying put near the bathroom so your phone call could be semi-private. Though you knew that Gabriel wouldn't have cared otherwise. 

"Hello Gabriel. And for your information, I'm headed out on my first case. On an actual jet of all things. So don't expect me home tonight. I don't think these cases are usually as quick as a day." 

"Ah okay. So you’re avoiding the question now? Jesus, you're really into this guy." He teases. 

"Gabriel I swear-!" You growl. After a much needed sigh, you close your eyes and start your statement over again. "You tease me enough about my study habits. If you don't stop this you'll need to sleep with one eye open. Maybe start wearing a night-cap so I don't cut that hair of yours." You playfully threaten. Gabriel lets out an offended gasp. 

"You wouldn't!" 

"I totally would. Try me." 

"Grr… Fine. Get me lover boy's number and I'll call it even. I'll tell Iris we'll be alone for a few nights~" You could hear his tell-tale smirk in his voice, causing you to roll your eyes. 

"Don't you even dare. You know you'll wake up in the middle of nowhere in nothing but your rainbow underwear. She's capable of more than you realize." You laugh as you warn him of what you both knew Iris was capable of doing to him if he pissed her off. 

"Yeah yeah, sure don't want that to happen again. Anyway, have a good trip with that pretty boy of yours~" Gabriel teased. 

"What did I say?" You warned sternly. 

"What? You didn't get me the guy's number yet, so teasing is still on the table." 

"Leave it to you to find a damn loophole." You groan, rubbing the creases of your forehead out with your fingers. 

"Everyone please take your seats, we need to go over the case, see if we can start building a profile." Hotch announces behind you. 

"Sorry, I gotta go. We're about to take off. Don't die, please." You teasingly beg before you hang up and put your phone in the slot on your belt. 

"So… Gabriel, huh?" 

You gulp a bit and turn your head frantically until you find where Derek had sat on the jet. You roll your eyes and specifically choose the seat farthest away from him out of spite.

"Oh hush. He's my roommate. Not what you think." You insist as you grab your bag and place it in your lap, situating the case file in front of you. As soon as you get settled into your seat, you feel a presence suddenly sit next to you. 

"Sorry, I had to grab something real quick." 

You feel a slight blush grow on your face as you realize who the presence was. That was also accompanied by the sudden increase in the smell of mahogany wood and soft musk. It was pleasing. 

"Don't worry about it, Pretty boy. We were just talking about L/N's little 'roommate'. Weren't we?" Morgan teases. Instead of taunting back you feel like almost sinking into your seat. Why did he have to bring that up right now? Especially when Spencer was here to fucking hear?

"Living with roommates is actually more common than you think. There was a study done recently that showed a total of 18-34 percent of people have roommates. It's more logical as it helps people afford apartments with minimum wages." He explains. You sigh with relief. You were glad for Spencer’s statistic. It moved the conversation away from you. At least you hoped. 

"Whatever. Still. Who is this 'Gabriel'?" Morgan asked with a determined smirk, ignoring Spencer’s statistics. You sighed. You weren't going to get out of this as easily as you thought. 

Spencer swallowed a bundle of nerves as Morgan pushed aside his attempt at changing the subject. If he was truthful, he didn't want to speak about the possibility of you having someone special in your life already. Although he doubted he ever had a chance. Who was this Gabriel though? He wouldn't deny that he was curious, at least to his own conscience. 

"Fine," you sigh. "Gabriel is my best friend. Well… one of my best friends. He is gayer than a rainbow and is currently working as an FBI undercover agent. Happy?" 

Morgan raised his hands in defeat, chuckling. 

"I'm just asking baby girl, no hard feelings." He teases. 

Spencer let out an undetectable sigh of relief, his unknowingly clenched fist loosening against his leg. "He's an undercover agent? How did he get hired as one as a new graduate?" Spencer asks. "Of course there are some rare occasions where recently graduated agents have gone immediately to a semi-high position, but that in itself is exceedingly rare. Almost impossible." He rambled, finally finishing and turning towards you. 

"Oh, well I think it might've been because of his family ties. His father works in the CIA. Though I doubt that his father pulled any strings. He's kind of homophobic." You shrug. "But hey, it's not too impossible. It happened for you and me, right?" You asked, wiggling a teasing eyebrow. 

Spencer chuckled a bit and nodded, laughing gently. "I suppose it isn't as impossible as I make it sound. Although it still is rare. We just both happen to meet the requirements." He answers, flashing you a genuine smile. 

"For someone who's pretty private about her own personal life, you're pretty open about sharing your roommate's life." Morgan speaks up with curiosity. Spencer bites back a growl and glares at Morgan to knock it off. 

"Don't worry, Gabe's not that worried about his own life being leaked. He's got a squeaky clean record, and he says anything that someone finds out from someone other than him is always hearsay in court without proof." 

Morgan shrugged and pulled out the case file, getting the notion that the conversation was over. 

"We should get started. We'll be touching down in Illinois in a couple hours." Hotch announces, gathering everyone's collective attention. Garcia's face popped up on Derek's laptop he opened up as Hotch began to go over the case. "Any outstanding details yet, Garcia?" He began. 

"No sir, the only thing I could find was that each of your victims visited stores for newborns to toddlers. Babies R Us, Bottles and Babies, you name it. Each of them also had either a wife or serious romantic partner who had recently given birth." Garcia answered, looking up from her list. 

"What kind of job would you have to have to know this stuff about your victims? I don't think our unsub is stalking them." Rossi spoke up. 

"Maybe they work at one of the stores? Garcia I'm gonna need a list of employees at each of those locations." Derek started. 

"No wait, if they're all different stores then the idea of the unsub working at one doesn't fit… do each of these stores have the same supplier?" You speak up, looking over the case details before looking up at the rest of the team. 

"Uhh… yes, a company called Mommy and Me supplies all three of the stores these men visited." Garcia clarifies. 

"Good work, (L/N). Garcia, I'm going to need that list of names." Hotch informed. 

"I'll get that straight back to you sir as soon as I can. Garcia out." She says, disappearing from the screen. 

"So what are we thinking about behavior? Why would our unsub attack these men? And why now?" Emily spoke up. 

"The stressor in this situation is most likely to do with a partner. Or perhaps something to do with our unsub's physical appearance or self-esteem. Since each of the men are dark haired and left out for anyone to find." Spencer explained, laying the folder down onto the table in front of him. 

"Maybe something to do with a child? This unsub might just be a customer at each of these places. Maybe their partner recently left them and they're lashing out at surrogates for that partner." JJ suggests. 

"Are we looking for a female unsub?" Morgan asks. 

"I believe so." You spoke up. 

"Why is that, (L/N)?" Prentiss replied. 

"Well, in one of the crime scene descriptions, it was said that the newborn of one of the men was fed after their father had been murdered. I don't believe any man could do that. There weren't any leftover bottles either." You answered. 

"Actually, it is possible for a man to lactate. Although very rare, some men still produce the hormone prolactin even if they have a Y chromosome. This produces the process of lactation. But I doubt that is the case here, as most examples of this happening have been influenced by medical means." Spencer expressed, his eyes widening and sparkling with wonder at his fact. 

Derek groaned. "I really, really did not need to know that man." 

"But he's right. If there is no trace of a bottle having been used, or of one missing, we could be dealing with a woman." Hotch affirmed. "That paired with the obvious craving of power in the way the bodies are dumped and each victim is tortured." 

"What if our unsub recently had a baby also?" JJ spoke. 

"That would make sense, if our unsub is finding men at these different stores, then it could be plausible for her to have taken these men while alternating between stores." Rossi points out. 

"Good work everyone. When we land JJ and I will talk to the families. Morgan, Prentiss, Rossi, I want you three to investigate the last dump site, see if we can gather any more information on this unsub's methods and cause. And (L/N) and Reid, I need you two to take a look at the bodies. See id there are any patterns we missed. However we need to be quick, or Galesburg is going to have another body on their hands very soon." Hotch divides the jobs, closing the folder for the case. "Reid." 

Spencer looks up and turns towards Hotch. "Yeah?" 

"Show (L/N) the ropes for Prentiss. Try to teach her if you can. This is a learning opportunity for her as much as this is a case for us." Hotch orders. Spencer nods in understanding, feeling nervous butterflies building up again in his stomach. 

"Well, I guess you're stuck with me for a couple hours. I promise I don't bite too hard." You tease, nudging his shoulder. He smiles at your tease, letting out a soft laugh. 

"Oh I know that. The question is…" he pauses, raising a teasing eyebrow. "..if I do." 

You snort and laugh, shaking your head. "You wouldn't hurt a fly, Reid. No offense." 

"Wouldn't hurt-" Spencer playfully scoffs. "You hearing this, Morgan?" He says with a teasing smile on his face. 

"I've hurt a fly. I outsmarted its mother." Spencer insisted. Morgan snickered and looked towards Prentiss with a knowing look. She gave him one back, smiling smugly.

"Really? Outsmarted its mother? Reid, a human infant is capable of outsmarting a damn fly. But whatever you say, Fly Genius." You teased. Morgan let out a long 'Ooo' in response.

"You just got told." 

"Whatever Morgan." Spencer playfully rolled his eyes, smiling still under his attempt at trying to look annoyed.

"You're just mad I ended up getting you to prove your innocence." You insist. 

"You totally didn't." He retorts. 

"Spence, you've always been innocent." JJ interjects. 

"See? You can't deny that." You insist, a playful smile cemented on your face. 

"Who knew of all of us to bond with, you'd choose Pretty Ricky first." Morgan teased. 

"You're just jealous I got to talk to her first." Reid insists playfully. You roll your eyes. 

"Yeah, cause without seeing a map I assume your sense of direction is terrible." You tease. He looks at you mock offended and laughs a little. 

"Is not. Your eyes just met mine and you looked friendly." Spencer defended. 

"Alright children settle down before you give me an aneurysm." Rossi teases in a playful sigh. You giggle and shake your head. You didn't expect that amount of welcome feelings coming especially from Spencer. But everyone was already warming up to you. It felt nice. You just hoped you didn't let everyone down. 

○●♡●○ 

Walking off the jet, you immediately were greeted by the chief of the Galesburg PD. 

"Hi, you must be the BAU. I'm Chief Anthony Sherwood. Thanks for comin' down so fast." The chief thanks, shaking Hotch's hand. 

"Of course. I'm Agent Hotchner. This is Agent Morgan, Prentiss, Jareau, Rossi, Reid, and our trainee, Agent (L/N)." Hotch introduces.  The chief goes down the line, shaking almost everybody's hands. (Spencer gave him a peace sign instead) 

"So, a trainee huh? If we weren't so crunched for time to find this guy, I'd ask how you're liking the BAU. Come along now, we got everything you need set up at the station." Sherwood spoke to you before he gestured to everyone else and began to lead you all to the rental SUVs they had waiting for you all. 

You gulp softly and sigh, clenching and unclenching your fists a couple of times before you begin to follow. It was your first case. You were a big bundle of excitement mixed with nerves that wouldn't go away. 

Once inside the police station, you found a place for your things, setting them down in the main room that the Chief had set aside for you all to use. 

Once you had everything settled, you began to head out to the SUVs again without much of an introduction to everyone else. Hotch had said to get to the morgue as soon as you could to take a look at the bodies. You told yourself you were just following orders. 

You climbed into the driver's seat of the SUV that you had ridden to the station and immediately groaned, placing your now aching head against the steering wheel. With all the excitement of being on a case you hadn't been prepared to go on yet, you hadn't noticed you were having one of your head splitting migraines from your hyperthymesia. And lucky you, you had left the bottle of acetaminophen in your bag that you had left in the station. Great. 

"Rough day already?" 

You jumped with sudden fear, banging your head against the window of the car. You groan and rub the affected area, turning your attention to the owner of the voice who just spooked the shit out of you. 

"Reid…" you sighed, turning back to the wheel. Of course he had followed you. He was supposed to go with you. How dumb could you get? 

"Yeah… that's me." He says, a slight smile on his lips. "You okay?" He asks. 

"Yes… No… No not really. With my condition, I get occasional head-splitting migraines. They usually happen at least once a month. I hadn't gotten one yet, till today. And I left my prescription in my bag." You groaned, running a hand through your hair. 

"I see… but I don't think it's just the headaches." 

"Guess you caught me. I'm just nervous about this being my first case. Trainee or not. I've thought about this experience plenty of times. But you can't predict what the case is gonna entail." You conclude, squeezing the steering wheel. 

"That's understandable for any new agent, (L/N). Whether you're wide-eyed like Hotch and Rossi, or cautious, I think it's pretty normal. At least from my own experience." 

You can't fight the urge to smile as he finished his advice. He really didn't have to do this. You were new. But then again, he probably just saw a piece of himself in you. 

"Thanks Reid." 

"Of course, (L/N)." 

○●♡●○ 

"I've seen plenty of messed up injuries in my time, though I've never seen something as crude as this." The mortician said as she guided you and Spencer into the cold chamber room. 

"Most places like this don't usually see much serial killer action, so it's to be expected." Spencer says, trailing off as the mortician pulled out the most recent victim. 

"He looks pretty athletically built. Garcia texted me and told me they all were pretty active in the gym too. Not the same ones nor the same days though." You point out, pulling on a pair of gloves to take a look at the different injuries. "Each of these bruisings seem to be done by hand, no remnants of wood or anything else. So then how did our unsub subdue these men? They had to have been stronger than her." You questioned, looking over John McAllister's wounds near his neck.  

"He wasn't strangled around his neck either… she might've used some sort of drug to temporarily paralyze the body. We've seen it before in a few cases. Was there any traces in their systems?" Spencer asks the mortician. 

"Unfortunately, no. Nothing other than an increase in the production of glutamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and a few others." The mortician clarifies. 

"Hm…" you pondered, crossing your arms briefly. "Are there any needle marks at all?" 

Spencer considers what you say before he takes a gloved hand and tilts the head of the victim to the side. "Yes, behind his ear. Though the access to the blood supply would be harder to reach." 

"I doubt that mattered to her." You remind. 

"Can we see the others? Or have their bodies been claimed?" You ask. 

"The first one, yes. But the second one no." The mortician says, putting the latest victim back in the cold chamber before pulling out the second. 

"Is there a needle mark?" You ask, hoping this connection would help the case. 

"Yes, around the same area too…" Spencer trails. 

You turn your head to the second victim's file and narrow your eyes. "Hey… from this photo, our second victim is supposed to have long dark brown hair, our unsub is cutting the hair." 

"She's trying to make them look like a partner." Spencer realizes, pulling out his phone to alert Hotch. You nod to the mortician and help her put the second victim's body back into the freezer. 

Then you began to follow Spencer out of the morgue, your nerves finally having calmed down. Maybe this is what you had needed, as morbid as it was. Just to see the reality of the case instead of just your own worries and ideas of the case. You were going to be fine. You felt like a real profiler. 

Of course it helped that Spencer was there, but still. It felt good. And you knew this case needed the good. 

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Lie About Everything

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-lie-about-everything/

Why Do Republicans Lie About Everything

Which Came First: Republican Hate Or Gop Misinformation

Do Honest Republicans Still Exist?

Hate is a great motivator. All political parties have used it to get out the vote. Generally, those who seek elected office shape information in a way that helps a certain voting block hate their opponent. Thats how we elect people in America. That is a sad reality we just have to accept in order to fix it. Hope doesnt fix it.

Whats unique and new about negative politics in the post-Obama era is that we have this thing called the Internet and dare I acknowledge itSocial Media. ;Social media has completely isolated the Republican Party base. The Internet and social media have created hard-edged, isolated buckets of information where facts dont matteragreement;and emotion matter. For republicans, agreement with their own bias is considered fact, whereas disagreement is a lie they literally transform reality to support their own opinion: the Post-Truth Era. In order to maintain that alternate reality, they have to hate those who dont agree, otherwise their reality bubble starts to break apart.

This is the case on both sides of the aisle, but the hardliners have taken it to a new level, which is why they seem to hate everything. Theyre even taught to hate things that help them like the ACA, unions, and public education.

Social media and 1000 cable channels dont increase the information we receive they focus the information and repeat it 1000 times more often. Anything can become the truth when its repeated enough times.

The Big Lie Is Gop Gospel

Cheney is not alone in suffering consequences for challenging Trumps allegations.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the states counting process against Trumps attempts to interfere with it, was stripped of his voting power on the State Election Board as part of Georgias new voting restrictions law.

In a special House election in Texas held on in early May, the Trump-critical Republican in the race Michael Wood got 3 percent of the vote.

In January, Michigan Republicans removed Aaron van Langevelde, a GOP attorney who broke with the party to certify Bidens victory in Michigan, from his post on the states Board of State Canvassers.

At the Utah Republican Partys convention this weekend, Sen. Mitt Romney perhaps the GOPs leading Trump critic was booed and called a traitor.

At the same time, Republicans who have embraced falsehoods about the election have been elevated.

Rep. Elise Stefanik , who appears likely to replace Cheney in the No. 3 spot, backed Trumps anti-election efforts to the hilt. Most egregiously, she falsely asserted that there were 140,000 illegal votes in Georgias Fulton County alone which would amount to more than 25 percent of all the votes in the entire Democratic-leaning county. The breakout Republican stars in the House of Representatives, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert , both egged on the January Stop the Steal rally that culminated in the attack on Capitol Hill.

Why Do Conservatives Soak Up Lies

The evidence that conservatives crave lies is abundant.

Conservatives loved George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s lies about “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction” — loved them so much, that the researchers who wrote “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification” surveyed 49 conservative Republicans, during October 2004, who admitted that they still believed Saddam Hussein had caused the 9/11 attacks, and these researchers found that 48 of those 49 extreme conservatives were entirely impervious to the overwhelming factual evidence that was provided to them by the presenters contradicting this false belief they held. Then, a showed that when Republicans were offered the official 2004 Duelfer report that had concluded Iraq hadn’t possessed any weapons of mass destruction for years before the United States invaded it in 2003, the percentage of Republicans who believed that Iraq did have WMD immediately prior to the invasion shot up, instead of going down . Even all of the exposés that had already been published about Bush’s faked WMD “proofs” didn’t persuade Republican voters that they’d simply been deceived by the people they trusted and supported. They didn’t resent it at all; they just asked for more, from those same discredited liars.

So: why do conservatives sop up lies, on topic after topic?

They do it because, if they didn’t, they couldn’t be themselves; they couldn’t be conservatives. Lie-lovers is whom they are. It’s their identity.

———-

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The Gop Elite Gave Us This Party

This dire outcome was not inevitable: The best evidence we have suggests that the rise of the Big Lie is the direct result of strategic choices by Republican leaders.

A new paper by Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes data from a panel survey, which looks at roughly the same group of people over time, running between 2007 and 2020. The survey asked people to rate the fairness of the US electoral system on a scale of 1 to 5, and tracked the changes over time.

What they found was a striking consistency: Support for the American system is both high and reasonably stable when assessed via this measure, Hopkins writes. Though there are some fluctuations, with partisans evaluating the system as somewhat less fair when the other party is in power, generally theyre small.

Hopkinss last survey wave was in October 2020 which means the results dont reflect the false allegations lobbed in the aftermath of Bidens victory. The stability documented here was very likely shattered by Trumps post-election actions, Hopkins concludes.

Other data confirm this supposition. A report from the Voter Study Group analyzed Pew surveys, conducted after every presidential election since 2004, on whether voters thought their vote was counted fairly. You see the same general stability documented in Hopkinss paper, with a majority of voters in both parties saying they were very confident their vote was counted accurately in every year except 2020:

Republicans Have A Good Reason Not To Want To Investigate Jan 6: Theyre To Blame

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Our nations preeminent bipartisanship fetishistsJoe Manchin, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowskiare deeply disappointed that they cant get Republicans to back an investigation into the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Indeed, they seem outright baffled that their efforts at compromise have fallen short on plans for a bipartisan panel. There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats have agreed to everything they asked for, Manchin said in an angry statement on Twitter. It would be so much better if we had an independent outside commission, Collins, a moderate Republican, told reporters Thursday. Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another? added Murkowski, blasting Mitch McConnells anticipated filibuster. Or are we going to acknowledge that as a country that is based on these principles of democracy that we hold so dear, and one of those is that we have free and fair elections.

I kind of want that to endure beyond just one election cycle, the Alaska moderate Republican told reporters.

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More Great Stories FromVanity Fair

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In 2009 Republicans Predicted That The Economic Stimulus Package Would Only Make The Recession Worse And Cause More Unemployment

The results show they couldn’t have been more wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ended the recession after only a few months. Although 750,000 people were losing their jobs each month when Obama took office, after the Recovery Act was passed the rate of job loss immediately decreased each month and within a year the economy showed positive job growth.

Considering the severity of the 2008 economic collapse and the total opposition by Republicans to do anything at all to stimulate the economy, it is remarkable that the US economy recovered as quickly as it did.

Looking at the rate of job loss and job creation, its easy to see that the stimulus of 2009 was highly successful in stopping the job losses and turning the economy around.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Don’t Miss: Who Is Behind Republicans For The Rule Of Law

Republicans Said President Obama Would Raise Taxes Sky High

It never happened. Income taxes for over 95% of Americans remained the same or lower than they were before Obama was elected. The only people whose income taxes increased were those who make more than $400,000 per year, and their taxes rose only 3%. For most Americans, taxes are still lower now than they were under Reagan.

In 1993 When The Brady Law And The Assault Weapons Ban Were Passed Republicans Predicted Increasing Rates Of Crime And Murder

Republicans Are Lying To Themselves About Trump’s Toxicity

Thankfully, just the opposite happened. While the rate of violent crime had increased steadily from the 1970s into the 1990s, it suddenly began to drop after 1993 and continued to decline for more than ten years. What could have happened in 1993 to precipitate such a sudden and prolonged drop in crime? Thats the year Congress passed the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Law, which mandated background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Despite Republican predictions to the contrary, the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban were followed by the most dramatic reduction in violent crime since the FBI started keeping statistics. The graphs below, based on the actual numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports website, show how the rates of murder and violent crime in the US dropped suddenly after the 1993 Brady Law and Assault Weapons Ban were passed.

These charts show the rate of murder and violent crime over 35 years based on numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime reports.

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In The Senate

Here Are A Few More Things Republicans Have Been Wrong About:

Republicans said that Obamacare would have death panels to decide who would live and who would die. Wrong. No such death panels were ever proposed and nothing of the kind ever happened.

They said the 2009 laws to improve automobile fuel efficiency standards would kill the US auto industry. Wrong. The new standards were followed by a resurgence of the US auto industry enabling them to hire back tens of thousands of workers.

They said environmental protection laws requiring companies to clean up their pollution would create an undue burden and kill businesses. Nope, it never happened.

They said Ebola would spread across the country because President Obama allowed American Ebola patients to be treated in the US. The outbreak never happened. Only three people contracted Ebola in the US and all three survived.

They said President Obama would open our borders to illegal immigrants. Wow, were they wrong about that. Under Obama, we set new records for most illegal immigrants stopped at the border and sent home.

They said Obama would drive up the Federal budget deficit. That didn’t happen. Obama cut the $1.4 trillion deficit he inherited by two-thirds.

While someone could no doubt find instances where Democrats engage in over-the-top rhetoric, nothing compares to the consistently false and erroneous claims made by the GOP in recent years. When a political party has been so dismally wrong about nearly everything over the past 30 years, that party should lose all credibility.

‘nothing There’: More Republicans Are Calling Out Trump’s Election Lies

WASHINGTON The more we learn about Donald Trumps baseless, false and discredited claims about the 2020 election, the more baseless, false and discredited those claims have become.

Just consider the revelations over the past week from Republicans:

In Michigan, a GOP-led investigation by its state Senate concluded that it found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigans prosecution of the 2020 election.

Regarding Arizona, a report co-authored by former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson criticized the so-called audit of the election results in that state, saying it does not meet the standards of a proper election recount or audit, and that its being conducted by an inexperienced, unqualified contractor.

And over the weekend, ABCs Jon Karl writing for the Atlantic had former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr debunking Trumps claims about the 2020 election results. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there, Barr said. It was all bullsh!#.

Predictably, Trump lashed out at those GOP findings.

Michigan State Senators Mike Shirkey and Ed McBroom are doing everything possible to stop Voter Audits in order to hide the truth about November 3rd, the former president said in a statement, which even included those state senators phone numbers.

Even Bill Barr doesnt buy them.

Read Also: Who Won The House Republicans Or Democrats

Get Ready For Another Possible Crisis Like 2020

This is not the first time that Republicans have declared a Democratic president somehow illegitimate. They impeached Bill Clinton on flimsy grounds, after previously accusing him of crimes ranging up to murder; there was a widespread campaign to label Barack Obama an unlawful foreign-born president . These campaigns were effective: A 2019 poll found that 56 percent of Republicans still believed that Obama was born in Kenya.

Nor is this the first time Republican elites have ginned up suspicion of voter fraud for political purposes. After Republicans won a series of statehouse elections in 2010, they spent the next few years falsely claiming that voter fraud was a serious threat in order to pass voter ID laws that were nakedly designed to suppress the vote among Democratic-leaning minority groups. Research has found that, even prior to Trump, this convinced Republicans that voter fraud was a real problem when its exceptionally rare.

These earlier campaigns laid the intellectual groundwork for 2020. Republicans were already primed to believe elected Democrats were somehow illegitimate and to believe in widespread fraud in the American electoral system. Trumps innovation claiming that an entire presidential election result was fraudulent was pushing on an open door.

Paying Lower Taxes Hurts Taxpayers

Less revenue means fewer handouts. Thats bad news for Democrats who lie obsessively year after year about how tax revenue never gets the job done in distressed communities because we still arent spending enough.

Why is it that even when the party is in power, when Democrats call the shots every single year like they do in Illinois, the poor stay right where they are most valuable in poverty?

Recommended Reading: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

Times Republicans Were Wrong

It’s no secret that politicians tend to use exaggerated political rhetoric to get people to vote for them. In recent decades, Republicans have repeatedly made very ominous predictions about the horrors that will result from Democratic policies while painting a rosy picture of what will result from Republican policies. Now we have the luxury of looking back over the years to examine those predictions and policies. Below, you will find twenty-one examples of times Republicans were blatantly wrong.

Most Republicans Said That President Obama Should Be Impeached Because Of The 2012 Attack On The Us Consulate In Benghazi

Their own investigations, however, proved them wrong. Every Congressional inquiry, including those by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, concluded that the Obama administration did nothing wrong regarding Benghazi, that there was no stand down order given, and that neither the President nor anyone in his administration lied about it. Each and every Republican investigation has reached this same conclusion, but Republicans continue to exploit this tragedy for political gain.

You May Like: What 7 Republicans Voted To Impeach

Truth Matters Which Is Why I’m Telling It

I take comfort in knowing that I am doing the moral thing by telling the truth to my constituents.;I also;happen to believe;telling the truth;about;the 2020 election;is good politically.

If Republicans;become the party of the Big;Lie if we encourage this madness much longer we;will lose credibility with;the majority of;Americans on issues where I believe we have better ideas.;We will do;lasting damage to our republic.

True Republicans would never dream of wasting taxpayer money to hire an unknown cybersecurity firm with no elections auditing experience to audit an election that has;already been audited.;This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans would not;stand idly by while auditors paid with taxpayer dollars;chased;insane rumors that ballots were flown in from South Korea to change the outcome of the presidential race, or;that;secret watermarks;on the ballots;revealed by UV lights;would;expose fraud;once and for all.

This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

Lies Damned Lies And The Truth About Joe Biden

Saagar Enjeti: Media Lets Biden SHAMELESSLY LIE About Hunter Bidens Business Dealings

Joe BidenKentucky state lawmakers vote to scrap school mask mandate Arkansas governor pushes back against Biden’s vaccine mandate RNC vows to sue over Biden vaccine, testing mandate MORE. I know him, said the House Speaker authoritatively, and that was that.

Does Bidens record warrant such confidence? Not really. In fact, Biden has a long history of lying about himself, about his past and about events that never took place.

Democrats want the 2020 campaign to be a referendum on President Trump. Fine, but if this is to be a contest of characters, it is only appropriate that Joe Bidens history of fabrication and deceit often intended to bolster his intellectual credentials also be fair game.

Over the past year, Biden thundered that the Obama administration didnt lock people up in cages. He also claimed that, Immediately, the moment started, I came out against it. And I was always labeled one of the most liberal members of Congress. Politicos rating of all three assertions? False.

No one should be surprised. Lest we forget

A video is making the rounds in which Biden boasts at a 1987 rally, “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship ended up in the top half of my class.”

Biden also maintained that he “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school” and was the outstanding student in the political science department.

That commentary holds up well, as today more than ever Biden blunders into conversational crevasses, with no way out.

Also Check: Who Created Social Security Democrats Or Republicans

[1000roughdrafts]

Family Secrets: Chapter Fourteen

Town That Never Stops Smiling 

Summary: Being transported to Teraw leaves you tired and confused, but the path to the truth is a long and needy road. 

Warnings: slight angst, slightly OOC Dean 

W/C: 3.2k

Masterlist/schedule

The four of you walk in silence through the field and onto a dirt road. Walking towards the bridge, you peer over at the glistening water underneath it. Dean squints at her, shaking his head, "all right. So where we headin'? Motel? Get some grub?"

Allanah giggles, "no. Here, there are no hotels, as they have no need for them. No one is allowed to travel between the regions without a request from the Head of the Region. From there, the Head provides them with a place to stay, whether that be in his or her own quarters, or at a volunteers. On the topic, we need to be careful about how we interact with the people and places here. It's big enough that we won't be noticed right away, but if we stay in one place too long there are going to be issues," Allanah says while you make your way to the start of the bridge.

"Uh, so what happens if we do get caught?" Sam asks in a whisper, looking around at the decaying bridge and trees that surround it.

As sweet as can be, Allanah smiles, "think American TSA meets intense CIA interrogations," she smirks. "In other words, let's just not get caught." Dean frowns which puts her attention onto him, "you're going to struggle with this the most, Dean, I can already feel it. But Y/N, you've felt it deep down, haven't you? A mother's love is not to be taken lightly, even beyond death."

You keep quiet, peaking over at Dean. He holds contempt in his face, trapped behind that stoic expression but easy to see the swirl of emotion in his eyes. He wants to scream out and ask questions, but what could he say? He has children, or at least a past version of him did and he knows nothing of it, but Y/N does? 

Luna - June 26, 2068

Teraw - Region 3

Complete darkness goes so well with shattering silence. I have known nothing other than the darkness and cherish the quiet. The only thing I hate about the silence is that it traps me in a world of uncertainty. With nothing to grip onto, I succumb to the thoughts raging in my mind like an ocean under a full moon; but it is a beautiful thing.

Just as I am trapped in my mind I am trapped in my body. No movement in my arms, torso, hands, legs, feet or face. I can not open my eyes, nor can I move my lips. Absolutely nothing works anymore. Well, almost nothing. Miraculously my ears can hear anything from a train passing by to a mouse three stories down.

I am surrounded by so much noise in the day that I look forward to the treacherous words my mind whispers to me as I lay to sleep. I rely on my ears so much these days, as it's the only sense I've got left. There's this single sound I hear more than anything. It has a set pace, just as a metronome would tick along to keep the beat of a song. Beep. Beep. Beep. I don't live like many others, they say I'm lucky to be alive at all.

I hear my family as they trickle in, their footsteps are quick and loud. It breaks my concentration on the ticking. The stepping stops, I hear sniffling, deep breaths and then suddenly, "Luna, it's your mama. Can you hear me?" Yes, I hear you. I want to say it. 

"I should start at the beginning," Allanah sighs, slowing her walk to a gentle stroll. "The two of you, Shirley and Bill you used to be called," she laughs lightly. "You enlisted me as a," she motions her hand around, scrunching her face, "guardian of sorts for your five children, quintuplets," she laughs again. "Wren, Ana, Tullie, Aidan and Luna." 

You and Dean lock eyes, "Luna?" he says, pointing at you, "the girl that's-" 

"Indeed," Allanah lets out a long breath, watching the ground somberly. "It's very sad what has happened to her," she says. "There's evil in this realm that neither of you could predict. It's what sent me back to Earth, locked me out. It wasn't until after I'd ended things with Crowley and found Y/N that I remembered who I truly was and what you created me to be. I needed to do something, anything, to bring the two of you back to this realm to fix what had been broken." 

Coming to a stop at the start of the bridge, Allanah looks into her hands, "your children, they," looking back up between you and Dean. "They are very powerful, yet they don't know it. Not anymore, at least." 

"What do you mean?" Sam tilts his head. 

"Each of them possess qualities and powers of an element specific to Earth. When Bill and Shirley created this realm, you split the children up into regions. This was done to protect them, or so you said. Teraw was specific to Luna, but with you two gone and evil sneaking in, the regions had grown a mind of their own," she lowers her voice, "it's gotten out of control. Ana was born in Inequescent, but with the latest reincarnation, the family Ana was brought into grew tired and she was adopted by a family here in Teraw. What I know to be happening soon is that because of Luna's sickness, Tullie will be requested to come help her. Horrible things are in store for the regions, unless we can stop it.”  

"Like what?" Dean asks. 

"This evil... it wishes to gain control of the other regions. After that, other dimensions... like Earth." 

Tullie - June 6, 2068 Hemort - Region 4

A day off is a luxury when one has specialized skills in the medical profession, at least for those in Hemort. I usually try to wind down and relax on those two short days, or tune into my favorite channel to watch some gushy movies about how everything always works out in the end, and everyone is just so nice. They make me sick, and yet I can't bring myself to watch anything else. In my day to day life, I don't always get to see the happy endings. Moreso, with my line of work, I see death more than any sane person should. And that begs the question; am I really as sane as I believe myself to be? 

I admire the house on the screen and the characters who live in it, wondering what it would be like to have a big house with a yard and a cute dog who gets to enjoy it. There's not much of that here, only the Elite live on large plots of land. Instead, I rent this quaint apartment with the ceiling to wall windows I'd dreamt of having since I was young. When the new owner bought the complex, she planted the most beautiful garden and elegant, tall trees on either side of the building, which is better than the concrete nothingness that resided there before.

Pausing the movie, I unravel myself from underneath the blankets to make some tea, although I'd never be able to make it as calming and tasty as my mother had. The storm doesn't help to calm me either, with the trees rattling against the windows and begging to come inside. While waiting for the kettle to boil, I close the blinds and play the movie. I could stand to miss a little of it if it means I don't have to listen to that screaming sound the wind makes.

While adding honey to the mug in preparation, my phone rings. I'm not expecting a call, so I don't scatter to answer it. I pull the kettle and turn down the dial on the stove before going back to the couch to rummage through knitted blankets for my cell. 

"Hello," I say, putting the phone between my ear and shoulder as I make my way back to my tea. 

"Hi, Tullie," the voice says, calmly and sweetly. I spill boiling water onto my hands at the surprise, and curse myself for not checking the caller ID. How dare he call me at this hour. 

"What do you want, Dan?" 

After a heartbreaking pause, he speaks out, "this is not a personal call, okay? I don't care how you're doing. I don't want to know what you're doing. I don't even care if you're hiding from the storm in a cup of tea right now,  or watching those stupid puke inducing movies, I-" I hear him sigh, "this is about the hospital," he says swiftly. 

"Mine or yours?" 

"Why would I be calling about yours? Listen, I have my hands tied on a case over here. I could really use your help. No one has a clue on what to do. They put me on this, but," he pauses and his voice shifts down a tone, "I'm really in over my head." 

"How does no one there know what to do? Your hospital is the best out of all five districts." 

"This case is really strange, Tu-" 

"Don't," I sharply cut him off and take the phone in my hand before he can finish my name. "Please, don't call me that. It's Doctor Marion." 

There is a silence between us as I make my way back to the couch, gripping my mug with both hands and the phone resting back on my shoulder. 

"You know I wouldn't be calling you if I wasn't out of options, but this girl," he sighs. "She's been out for three weeks. There is nothing in her medical history that would help to explain her state. Her parents have no idea what happened, they said they just found her like this." 

"Okay, so assuming it's a coma," I say, mostly thinking out loud. Then back to him, I condescend, "are you sure it's not locked-in state? Er, what about psychogenic unresponsiveness?" 

"Of course, what do you take me for?" he says in a short, agitated breath. "Look, it's absolutely a coma with no explainable source. We've taken MRI's and Cat Scans and still can not locate the site of her brain that's causing it." 

"Were there drugs involved?" 

"No, we did blood work after taken her vitals. No drugs in her system, vitamin levels are all normal and we've been monitoring her brain waves while she's been here. It's like she went to sleep one night and just... didn't wake up." 

"It sounds like you've done everything I would have, so why are you calling me?" 

"Tu - Doctor Marion, I know you-" 

"No, you knew me," I softly yell, foolishly pointing a finger in the air as if he were in front of me. Quieter now, I keep a harsh tongue, "I'm not the same person I was then, you played a huge role in that. I changed myself for the better. I never wanted to hear from you again. The last thing I need is to be reminded..." I trail off before the tear in my eye can drop and listen to the actors giggling on the television. 

"Reminded of what?" Dan asks, in that same torturous way he'd always comforted me in the past. 

"It doesn't matter. I'm going to bed. You'll get an answer tomorrow." Forgetting the tea, I barricade myself in blankets and cry myself to sleep. 

As you walk along the bridge, Allanah continues, “for the first long while that I was here, things were fine. The churches were full, as were the pubs and shops. That’s the way many enjoyed it for a great while, but when those who opened their eyes fought back?” She sucks in air through her teeth, “well, let’s just say blood was shed, and tears were shared.” 

She moves her hands around and slows her steps, “allow me to take this back in time. They followed a set of standards. A hierarchy of social standings and if one was not near the top, they were not worth a loaf. The weight of one’s standing held in community intervention in threefold. It started with the preparation and bringing about of their first church. Many thought that if one was of fellowship they were among deities.” She laughs softly, “as I, the only guardian of this realm, knew there were no deities, just little old me. It was comical. And per the two of you, I was never allowed to step in or intervene.” 

“That’s stupid,” you mutter under your breath, watching your steps along the bridge. 

“Blacksmiths, clergymen, doctors and carpenters were just below, and seen as noble. Those however that farmed land, crops and livestock were seen at the bottom. Along with butchers, dairymaids, tailors, barbers, and the like were noted to be Sepulchers. It’s worth noting, that this system was not one that you two brought in place.” 

“Sepulchers?” Sam twists his face. 

“No one had an inkling as to why, but it was surmised that it was in reference to those folk being just as untitled as the many of the graves placed just outside of this bridge.” 

Dean folds his lips down in a nod, looking around at the piles of dirt outside of the river and under the bridge. 

“After segregating with an older congregating with an older woman who called herself Minerva, it was she that determined there was power in numbers. There were more of them than there were in the fellowship and just as one might catch a second wind, they found their strength. It started at first with the announcement. The Town Crier, also among the Sepulchers, had begun his course into the Town Whisperer, and could be found in the benighted area, or circumferential. They conspired many gatherings and prepared for battle, if need be so. The churches grew ever suspicious as their totality grew by the day. Minerva conducted the rough fifty to leave their work for another day,” she sighs, “and then another. This war lasted for years, reaching all five regions and the only thing that I could do was try and protect your children, and carry them through their reincarnations. I had made many, many attempts to reach out to the two of you and all had fallen short.” 

She focuses on the boards of the bridge and the squeaking they make as you walk over them, “a man by the name of Henry took to ending the war, and was appointed the Head of Teraw for his efforts. This man’s son is now the Head and Luna’s father in this realm. I wasn’t here to place them into the proper families,” she sighs, “and now I worry he’s stirring up trouble.”

Ana - June 6, 2068

Teraw - Region 3 

These briefings make me feel less of who I want to be. I understand the importance of putting together the minds of professional colleagues to come to a conclusion on how to move forward with whatever case we happen to be discussing. However, as someone who works in healthcare, forgive me for stating that I find them to be quite menial. It's usually the same act every day; Dan will turn up late, I drum my fingers on the table, Mary doesn't say a damn word and Nathan does most, if not all, of the talking. 

I'm mid-yawn through one of Nathan's monologues as a pink-haired woman wearing sweatpants, a tank top and a light cardigan walks in. I can only assume she is lost with the confusion draped on her face, so I stand to redirect her. Nathan, the natural born leader that he is, smiles and holds a hand out to her. 

"You must be Doctor Marion. I'm Chief Nathan Scott. Dean speaks very highly of you." Her confusion is overtaken by a smile as she accepts the greeting, "I understand your decision to be here was quite rash, so we'll excuse the lapse in dress code this one time," he jokes. 

I mask a chuckle by returning to my seat and shuffling through my papers. He pulls out his pocket watch and just barely inspects it before looking back up at her. With a careless wave of his hands and a slight shrug he says, "Dan should be arriving soon. If you know him like we do, you would know he's late to everything." 

She laughs softly, looking at her feet. "Go ahead and take a seat right there, next to Ana." He gestures over to me and smiles. I do not. "She doesn't bite, I promise." I might. 

"Enough," Nathan says as if he's heard one too many of Dan's jokes. Then again, we all certainly have. Dan glides across the room, briefcase in tow, and plops into the chair next to Mary. "First of all," Nathan goes on, sitting at the head of the table. He pulls a stack of papers from his own briefcase and shifts to Doctor Marion. "I need you to look over and sign these before we can proceed, for patient privacy and all that." 

"I understand," she squeaks out and inches her chair close to the table. She smiles when she's finished and pushes the papers back to Nathan, who inspects them thoroughly before carrying on with his speech. 

"Now, miss Luna's case is of high priority and exceptionally confidential." He classically folds his hands together and leans slightly into the table, facing me and the new doctor. "You see, her parents are what makes this town what it is." 

"And what is that, exactly?" 

"Powerful," I scoff. 

Approaching the end of the bridge, Dean grips onto your arm, pulling you to face him. “I want to know what’s going on. Damn it, Y/N, we haven’t talked in... ten months, and - and now we’re in an alternate dimension where apparently our kids live, and...” he flops his hands down at his sides, looking around before taking a step closer to you, holding up a finger, “and you knew about them?” 

“No,” you sigh, “I only had a feeling about it, I - I didn’t know for sure. I don’t even know how to explain it, it was just this gut feeling...” you trail off, not really understanding the whole thing yourself. 

Dean rolls his eyes, so you push on, “look, Dean, I’m sorry that you got dragged into this, but-” you take a deep breath, forcefully letting it out. He turns his eyebrows down, crossing his arms. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” you breathe. “What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry? That I never should have left? That I wish none of this was happening in the first place?” 

He continues to glare, and you take one small step towards him, your bodies merely inches from each other. 

“You never should have left, Y/N,” he scowls. “We were heading here from the beginning, Y/N. The only freaking difference is that we spent ten months apart from each other,” he says, voice crawling back into animosity. “I don’t know if I can trust anything you say to me now.” 

You drop your voice to a whisper, “I am sorry, Dean, for everything. I’m sorry that I left, again, but we - I can’t change any of that now, so we just gotta get through this, and when we get back home... if we get back home, we can go our separate ways if that’s what you want.” 

After a long pause, his face softens slightly, “no,” he says. Clearing his throat, his eyes move around your face, “no, Y/N. That’s the opposite of what I want. I want you. Even through all the shit we went through, I was happy with you. Why can’t you see that?” 

Next Chapter 

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[thebraxiatelcollection]

Fugitive AU with whichever galli characters spark your imagination :)

AU List A-Z- You know I’m going to have to do something with Braxiatel right? ;)

-

It’s not the first time Braxiatel has been on the run before. But it’s the first time on being on the run with somebody. Somebody he had to care for, somebody that was his responsibility other than himself.

He had assassinated Rassilon a couple weeks ago and they have been on the run since. Brax knew that if he showed his face at the Capitol again, he would be a dead man. He, Romana and a reluctant Narvin and Leela had been going over the plan in pain-staking details for almost a year now, to make sure, absolutely sure that nothing would go wrong. 

They had all agreed that he should be the one to pull the trigger. After all, he had already killed one president before, how hard can it be to kill another? But he hadn’t anticipated on Narvin being with him in the equation.

He packs away his laser rifle, doing his best to avoid looking at the mirror opposite him, knowing he had now taken one step back to his Lord Burner days.

But to save Gallifrey from its own destruction, he knew it was a price he was willing to pay. 

-

In truth, it’s easier to do so that he might have liked or expected from himself but to not to discuss it with Narvin would take a toll. This was putting Narvin in just as equal danger, being a wanted fugitive on the run. He remembers how the burning lingers in his heart beats and lungs, how it felt to pull the trigger at that very point in time.

Narvin was at the table, had been since they first arrived a few hours ago. A new hideout. A quiet backwater of a planet with no signs of Time War activity. Yet.

They couldn’t take a TARDIS because all the remaining TARDISes had a tracker device on them or were turned into battle TARDISes, meaning they couldn’t be trusted. Braxiatel own TARDIS had been parked somewhere safe and the plan was to try and get it back so at least they had somewhere stable. 

He wants to tell Narvin to at least go and lie down, to get some rest whilst he could before they moved again the next day. He looks just as exhausted as when the Pandora nearly took control of him but knew it wasn’t Brax’s place to say.

Narvin finally lifts his head as though he could feel Braxiatel staring at him. “Do we have anything to eat?”

“No.” Braxiatel admits and wishes they did, wondering when they next will.

-

They’re down to two-thousand credits and a lot of random change that Brax held in one hand.

Braxiatel knew how to make ends meet. Lungbarrow may have been a Highborn House but it wasn’t exactly rich. He had learned how to negotiate with his elders, politicians and diplomats and art dealers all from experience. He knows the value of the cost.

But he what he doesn’t know is the social connections and how these experiences can apply when they change locations nearly every day. 

He looks up to see Narvin, angry and tired clenching his fists. An angry and tired Narvin is never usually a good combination. He learnt that the hard way. “What’s wrong?” He asks, sitting down beside him, their knees touching. They were waiting for the bus to come, which would take them to a spaceport 20 miles away but it wouldn’t arrive until the next fifteen microspans. 

“I’m so tired Irving,” Narvin croaks, gripping hold of his bigger on the inside rucksack. 

“I know,”

“But you don’t, do you? Part of you enjoys this. Part of you enjoys being hunted by the predator, the Time War hot on our tails along with the High Council-” He looks at him straight in the eyes and Brax could see how haggard he looked. When was the last time Narvin had a decent night sleep? “Cardinal Ollistra already has your brother conscripted for the War. When will she catch up with us?”

“Narv-”

“Don’t,” He shakes his head. He stands up shakily. He looks so different out of his CIA uniform. He was wearing a suit, almost stylish with a fedora hat that covered most of his face and Brax couldn’t help but admire him. “Please…just don’t.”

They stood in silence until the bus arrived and Braxiatel paid for their tickets. They just had enough change for their ride out of here and he did a quick glance over at the other passengers. The only passengers were an elderly lady staring at the window. Brax tugs at Narvin’s hand and go towards the back of the bus but to the right, sliding their bags and himself, Narvin following.

They didn’t say anything for almost an hour because Narvin ended up taking a nap, on Brax’s shoulder and Brax was grateful Narvin was taking a moment of rest that he gently kissed his forehead. 

The bus makes a bit of a bumpy turn, causing Narvin to open his eyes. “Sorry,”

“What?”

“Brax,” Narvin sighs through his nose. “I didn’t mean to snap at you earlier.”

“You had every right to snap at m-”

“Let me finish,” Narvin held up his hand, giving him a pointed look. “It’s not your fault with what happened. I had a part in the decision making also, I’m just as equal to blame. I’m almost glad to be away from the Capitol in these hard times.”

Brax reaches for his hand and gives him a squeeze. “I’m glad you became part of the equation, Narvin.”

“What equation?”

“Being a fugitive on the run with me,” He gives a smile, it almost reaches his eyes. “It would have been terribly dull otherwise.”

Narvin smiled back just as the bus pulls to a stop.

They sleep in a park that night on a bench together. Brax wraps his arms around Narvin, sharing his warmth, alert and awake and growling at anyone who dared to walk by too closely.

One day, all this would be over.

One day.

[belore-invictus]

Light Have Mercy

“Since you so willingly chose to take away something I babied, then I will take away your heart.” Her sister hovered over the bloodied Phaeith; a dastardly grin wickedly crossed her features with opalescent teeth stained with blood proudly showcased to Inancia’s elder... 

-

It was a normal morning for Phaeith. One where she awakened to make preparations for her morning meetings, followed by a quick run through the Woods and City. There was nothing out of place in her grandiose room, nor was there anything peculiar about how her gut felt today. Instead, her mind was ever quiet as she bathed in a quick shower and dressed herself in something easy yet presentable.   

 Groomed in nothing finer than Thalassian silks that made up a unique, form fitting onyx and crimson lined suit with golden accents for the woman and simple Sin’dorei Slippers, the Matriarch herself sought to it that business would be the first order of the day- in honor of those she newly, and proudly stood for, and served beside. With the aching want to learn about the new faces of Aegis, she found herself captivated by the idea of relearning herself as well- and this meant being a different leader, a new one. Learning her do’s and don’ts rather quickly with her House project, she chose to take her examples and mistakes and create a new life out of it. 

 Lost in her own mind, the busy woman found herself completely zoned out in front of her vanity. Marble backed brushes set on the acrylic top; ivory eyes lowered to take in the terrors of her last few months. Being held captive and tortured for so long, she wondered why she hadn’t broke yet. Was it because she was used to it at this point, or was she stronger- or perhaps, it wasn’t time for her kettle to overflow quite yet. Her mind was a strange one, and even she knew nothing of how to control it. She knew not of how to prepare her heart for abuse anymore, nor how to protect it from it. Instead, she chose to embrace it and continue on with her hours. Almost a woman watching another, if she could describe herself today. 

 A morning that seemed so perfect was quick to turn dark as her brooding sister swung her door open with Light being wield in her hands- intimate light of aggression and hostility. The Inquisitor set ablaze and angry, huffing and puffing as she would. “How DARE you take Aegis from me, Bella’viere?! You believe you have the right to return to the city, only to declare that YOU are the rightful leader of what -I- have built?! Is this revenge on Ari choosing to be with me, instead of you?!” She hissed like the serpent she was; snarling. 

 The loud noises and voice from behind Phaeith was paid no mind to- and instead, she stood with an all too calm and collective figure. Rising to her feet, fingers to sweep her hair into a tight bun- she was easy to note Inancia’s quick to advance behavior. That was the Inquisitor’s mistake- as aggressive as she was, she left her defense down. 

 “I did not take it from you, Inancia. You lacked the mind of a leader to lead the people I told you to look out for, by being too in love. By forgetting your duties, and making the immature mistake of believing that love was going to push you forward. Love stunts you, and love should NEVER get in the way of the people who trust their lives into your hands; and you choosing to be with your beloved. You are NOT someone who joined Aegis, you created it. It is your DUTY to give them what they wish for- and you LACK giving them it. I have gone to every single meeting for you because you lack the tongue to caress ears that only wish to know what this Brotherhood is to stand for- and where is your tongue? Down the Knight-Lord’s throat, like his lapdog! Your relationship with Ari has no tidings over me.” 

The rumors of Phaeith returning to the Isle were true. As were the rumors of her golden heart being shielded in blood and steel- in her attempt to be stronger. Was she ever weak, or was she too trusting? 

 Inancia who was furious by Phaeith’s tone and words reacted poorly. Striding closer to the Paladin to close the distance, allowing her aura to burn brighter and brighter by the second. “It has been only THREE weeks, Bella’viere. Three weeks! You believe you are better than me- that you deserve the world, is it? That you deserve to lead, simply because your men sided with me after your disappearance? What of the men who left you as you rotted in a cellar- what of THEM? Yet you choose to take it out on me instead. Hmph. A woman who left her family- short of killing her father, and mother- only to backstab her own sister?” She sneered. 

 Bella’viere’s blood boiled. Almost as if it pulsated with excruciating heat that even the Matriarch couldn’t understand. It was if she was back in the status of not knowing when to calm herself, or how to. Even as her blood boiled and cheeks reddened, her tongue was kept in line and her eyes lacked any feeling whatsoever. No one knew that the Patriarch of Ven’torum attempted murder onto his own, nor that his wife had a hand in it. No one understood that she was defending herself; and that she never meant for it to go down as it did. Sadly, it did end in death. 

 “Three weeks is a long time, Inancia. You spread cause, only to lack true reason and inspiration? Some of these men joined Aegis for you because they looked into your eyes and EXPECTED immediate relief from a quiet and lonesome world. Some of them stared into your soul, and wished for the best because they trusted your words. You cannot invite men and women into your cause, only to deny them any taste of their dreams. It has been a week and a half since I have taken place under -YOUR- banner, and yet within that week and a half... My men, and your men, choose to oath their blades to me. Words unswayed, nor bargained. All I had to do was be there for them- because these LIVING beings are not PAWNS in a chess game, Inancia! They are capable of protecting the Isle as we want, and you deserve no such loyalty with the attitude you parade yourself around with!” Phaeith finally extracted the truth from her heart, passionate and furious. 

 “You have no sympathy. I see it now, Bella’viere. You have no sympathy or love for your own family. Father and Mother punishing you as they have were causes of the right reason- you lack anything more than punishment.” With that, the Inquisitor rose a strong hand onto Phaeith’s cheek; aiming to strike her down. Light to burn her tawny flesh- though the action was quick to being denied. 

 Phaeith ever-so calculative of Inancia’s behavior caught her wrist in one hand and shoved it away. A shove not weak, nor aggressive. The woman’s heart did not want to be sullied this morning with a fight, and her still healing injuries told her to relax. “A family that abandoned me first, and yet. I attempted to build a proud name for you all, only to be backstabbed by the one who claims that I took a blade to their back first. This is no rivalry, or novella, Inancia. There is no sympathy on the field, and I will give you none. You deserve none. You dare lay a hand on me, knowing full-well that I seek NONE of your arguing nor fighting. Why must you push a sleeping animal, Sister? We are of the same blood! Who says that you cannot attempt to do right by leading this Brotherhood- side by side with me? I allowed to be announced Sovereign only for your lack of compassion to the people who oath to spill their blood on our grounds for you. I am a Knight, Cia. I will not see to it that my own die for reasons so tragic and wrong. I will build Aegis into something unseen before, powered by a machine of strong individuals who deserve recognition beyond sight.” 

 Although Phaeith meant for each and every single word of hers to come off inspirational to her sister, the plan failed. Cia chose to lust for blood, and blood she would have. Laying hands on her already tarnished sister; throwing her into tables, across the room, and grabbing her hair. 

 The Knight beginning to bleed and bruise, barely had it in her to want to fight back. All she could see were the faces of her mother and father, and terrors of their hands striking down upon her for remotely defending herself against Cia. Then a whirlpool of memories of her time enslaved months ago drenched her brain; leaving her burdened. 

 Every instinct in her body told her to fight, even if her wounds told her that she would only constipate her healing process even further. Every instinct yelled for the woman to put Cia down like the dog that she was; and yet. The woman chose to allow Cia to cause her to bleed. There was no part of her that was angry anymore- no part that wanted to be. Within those months of being gone, she used enough emotion that it stunted her ability to be who she once was, today. 

 It came to a point where Bella’viere sat on her knees in front of Inancia, drenched in her own blood and eyes as lost as the abyss of the sea- stared up at the Inquisitor and found her mind silent. Just as it was awakening this morning, she sat silent on her knees. Nose bleeding, mouth spewing coughs of blood. Skin reddened- heart broken. Numb, she was numb to the pain and anger now. 

“Since you so willingly chose to take away something I babied, then I will take away your heart.” Her sister hovered over the bloodied Phaeith; a dastardly grin wickedly crossed her features with opalescent teeth stained with blood proudly showcased to Inancia’s elder. 

 What was she to do, murder her sister within her own home? Precisely. In this moment, Inancia placed her hands upon the temples of Phaeith’s forehead and chanted a spell; one dark and devious. One Phaeith was familiar to- and one that began to force the woman’s heart to lurch into her throat. 

 Inancia was taking away the memories of those she loved the deepest, romantically. From Romena to the man after, to Lumeal. There was nothing left but the standard memories of their friendships- and that was it. However, as those memories began to be wired from Phaeith, flash floods of her last thoughts with them infiltrated her mind and suddenly tears welted her eyes. 

 The only who stood bright in her mind was Lumeal; and feeling herself forget him, caused the weakened woman to scream out. To cry out in pain, and anger. Which slowly turned to quiet, forgetting what she was screaming out for. What pained her. What felt so empty, and alone within her chest. 

Inancia who walked out of the room after healing Phaeith as much as she could and rearranging the room to her best of her abilities; Phaeith simply sat on the floor. Eyes wide, head lowered, and thoughtless. Mindless. Her soul and heart ripped from her chest- unsure with why she felt so lost and tragic. There was no longer any prominent recollections in her mind of love, and what it felt like. All she knew was the love of being a mother, and that was it. 

[Soft mentions: @lumealblackstrider , @drimmari , @inancia ] 

[imaginethiswrithethat]

It Was Always You (Part I)

Fandom: MCU

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader

Warnings: Language (mild cursing), a little bit of angst.

Summary: You and Steve Rogers were really close during your time as an agent in S.H.I.E.L.D, however, after Civil War took place and he comes back from wherever he was hiding, he is not alone. A beautiful blonde former CIA agent is now with him and you are with …Bucky? Confusion, jealousy and love confessions ensue.

@hunters-from-stark-tower

________________________________________________________________

Reader’s POV

It hurt. It hurt so much. I had never experienced pain like this. Not even during our bloodiest moments in battlefield. Seeing him kiss her the way I’ve wanted him to kiss me for so long hurt more than having to endure hours of unrelenting torture during some of my hardest missions.

“You okay, hun?” Bucky’s voice startled me from behind, making me break my focus on the unknowing couple.

“Yeah, yeah. Just beaten from the mission” I said, taking off my gloves and jacket. Buck just gave me a knowing look, I stared back blankly. He sighed. “Let’s each go take a shower and once we are feeling fresh, I’ll take you out for the best pizza in Brooklyn, huh? Whatcha say, doll? Get your mind off things.”

“I dunno what you mean by things. But sure! I could use some free pizza, Buck. Catch you in twenty?” I answer, feeling slightly better at the thought of food, already on my way to a well-deserved and needed shower.

Third POV

“Hey! What was all that about?” asked Captain Rogers to his best friend Buck looking at your retreating figure.

James chuckled throwing a final glance to the tower entrance you went through a couple minutes ago. “Nothing, Cap” he slapped a hand on his back “I was just telling her that I’ll take her out for some Brooklyn pizza. A treat after a rough mission.” He said as if it was not a big deal, and it wasn’t. But why did the idea of you and Buck going out for pizza gave him a weird, unpleasant feeling?

“Why, problem?” asked Buck with a knowing smirk. Yes! “No, no, no, not all” said Steve clearing his throat. “Just take care of her, man.”

This earned him a laugh from his best friend “Dude, you know she does not need anyone to protect her. She’s a badass. Or wait, what did you mean by ‘take care of her’?” said playfully Bucky, wiggling his eyebrows at Steve.

“What the hell, Buck!? No! Do NOT dare to…to” the Avenger couldn’t even finish his sentence. He couldn’t bear the thought of you and other man, even if it was his longtime friend. Something irked inside him at the mere thought of a man touching you.

“Why not? I mean, we both are adults, capable of making adult decisions and more importantly: single adults” retorted Buck scratching his stubble in a thinking manner with his metal arm.

That last comment felt like a punch, a slap and a bucket of freezing water all at the same time to Steve Rogers because that was the truth. After the whole fighting Tony’s team on an airport, becoming a fugitive and coming back to try and make amends, with Sharon assisting him through it all, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, to be with her. He couldn’t deny that more than once he wished it was you across the table laughing with him instead of the blonde agent, he couldn’t help but miss you instead of her during lonely nights away from home. But he made a decision way before Sharon came along.

When he first met you S.H.I.E.L.D was still up and running, you worked together in a couple missions, to say he was impressed by your abilities and braveness was an understatement: Captain America was smitten.

But one night, after too many beers with Natasha and Clint you confessed to him your deepest secret.

“Sometimes I fear I won’t have more than this” you began, gesturing with your hands “Don’t get me wrong, Cap. Saving the world, or at least attempting to, protecting the small guy, it is all great!” you continued, arms wide open and turning in circles, gesturing at your surroundings. He looked at you with affection and admiration, deep and sincere laughter bubbling from his chest. That laugh set fire to your insides, making you feel warm and fuzzy.

“But?” he asked, encouraging you to continue.

You sighed like a scolded child. He sighed too with admiration and awe, your soft side was just as endearing as your badass one was impressive.

“But I want more too. I ..I want” you looked down, unsure. Steve just waited in silence, giving you time to gather your thoughts. “I want to be selfish” you said so quickly that if it weren’t for his enhanced hearing he wouldn’t have heard you.

“Selfish?” confusion coating his voice, head tilted to the side like a puppy. The handsomest puppy.

“Yes. Selfish. I sometimes yearn for more than missions and undercover jobs. Sometimes, I just want normality, a shot at happiness, you know? Maybe settle down, meet someone, and fall in love, a house in the boring suburbs, maybe a puppy or two” you said chuckling. Silence overtook the atmosphere, none of you saying anything, too preoccupied with your own thoughts.

“Anyways” you interrupted the silence “I know it is impossible for me. The white picket fence kind of life. I’ve made my decision and I must accept its consequences. . . Besides, who’d want someone who has taken as many lives as I’ve tried to save, right?” you finished with a humorless laugh. “I’m off to bed, Cap. See ya later” you said as you practically ran to your room, too afraid and embarrassed to look him into the eye after your silly confession. Gosh, I’m the biggest idiot!

Steve wanted nothing more than to run after you, to tell you how your dream wasn’t silly, how he wanted just the same, how he wanted all that with you and no one else. He saw you disappear behind the door, his mind repeating over and over I want you. But he wouldn’t, he couldn’t give you that life. He wasn´t just Steve Rogers anymore, he was Captain America. That life was no longer an option for him and in that very moment he swore he would never interfere in the way of your happiness, even if that meant you loving someone else.

Once he came back from hiding, to try and solve things with the government, and maybe even try to recover Tony’s friendship, he was shocked to see you at the Avengers facility.

He was sure you would’ve taken your first chance to leave the “super” life behind and try to live in normality as you always wanted to. When he found out you were now an official item of the Avengers he was a little sad to see you still stuck in this life, but he wouldn’t deny the thrill of the idea of sharing a roof with you and seeing you every day. Those thoughts were interrupted when Sharon came from behind him and held his hand, giving him a supportive smile as he made his way back into the building he previously called home.  

“Well, man. I’m heading inside. I have less than 15 minutes to be ready and you know it is impolite to make a lady wait.” Said Bucky clapping his hand down on Steve’s shoulders, successfully pulling him out of his thoughts.

Steve stayed outside, jumbled thoughts running through his mind. He pulled at his already disheveled hair, trying to make sense of anything. He hated the distance he created between you two, but it was for the best, right? He had Sharon, and apparently you had Bucky now.

“When did that even happen?” he muttered to himself. You and Steve were civil to each other, but not intimate, not as a couple of years back, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t look. Boy, did he look. Every time you were in the same room his eyes would follow your every move, during missions he would always make sure to keep you within his sight field, too worried to lose you. You and Bucky were good friends, that much he noticed, but he never, not once, did he catch signals of something more between you two. Maybe you were a better secret keeper than he gave you credit for, or maybe he was so far up in denial that he refused to watch you falling for another man.

“And now I’m losing her to my best friend” he whispered to himself. With a defeated sigh he made his way inside, he too needed a shower. Why can’t I just not be an asshole and be happy for them? If I should trust someone to keep her safe it is Bucky, he would respect her and … love her. Steve felt the familiar sting of unshed tears and quickened his pace to his room.

He stopped when he heard your voice from downstairs. He quietly made his way to the top of the staircase to see you and Bucky standing in front of the door, your hand over Bucky’s mouth. He heard you whisper something to Buck but couldn’t make out what you said.  He could see his best friend’s mischievous glint in his eyes and could see your shoulders shaking with quiet laughter. He felt anger rush through his veins, he wanted to be the only man to make you smile, he wanted to be the reason for your smiles, but he had given up that chance years ago. With a final longing glance he saw you two enter the lift, Buck’s arm hanging loosely around your shoulders.

“Hold her tighter, Buck.  Don’t let her slip through your fingers, don’t make the same mistake I did” he whispered with a broken voice into the air.

“Steve?”

[fallenesspoetry]

Venus and the Wolf (A Blindspot AU)

Summary:

A Roman/Tasha AU story, in which Jane’s memory hasn’t been wiped yet. Instead, she’s missing and presumed dead after the Orion mission had been taken down. A story, in which Roman makes a different decision, and a story, in which Tasha already is an undercover agent for the CIA, posing as an identity dealer.

It’s based on the scene in 2/17 when Roman remembers staring at Alice’s name at the papers for the trust fund (with the bank in the Bahamas) he was asked to cash out, sobbing.

A collab with @eachdressiown (Roman), I'm writing Tasha's POV.

Warning: Swearing.

Chapter Two “A Venus on Ice”

The heat was unbearably stifling, literally crunching on the tip of the tongue, its gritty taste rolling in the mouth. The sky was cloudless, and the sun shone in its full force, leaving no chance for the weather to change into something more humid.

A young woman stretched herself in the chair, desperately wishing the heat to slacken at least for a tiny bit. Her day had just started, so she had, at best, ten hours to go. Or more, if it was a busy day. But it seemed some people were followed by a trouble, so every day had become a busy one quite too often.

Usually, the clientele started coming in ranting how fast they needed the things done and refusing to agree on the price. It never ceased to amaze her how ridiculously dumb most of the people were. No one could comprehend a simple truth:

If you want to get something, you need to give something in return.

It was as simple as that. You could bend the rules, break the laws, but in the end of the day there was always something you had to give up.

The woman clicked the remote, lowering the temperature on the AC, not really expecting it would help. Just as it hadn't helped at all for the past hour. Right now she wished nothing more than to sink into the icy cold bath.

Her outfit made her even more irritated: the white tank top was clinging to her body, and denim shorts almost itched the skin. Her dark straight hair was pinned at the back into a messy knot, a few loose strands tickling her wet neck from time to time. But she couldn't care less about appearing unprofessional.

Anyway, lots of her clients were often hanging by a thread, and judging by their you-are-my-last-hope looks, they could have been fine even if she were naked. She just needed to make them dissolve as if they had never existed.

There was something rough about this particular woman. One could say various tests at the FBI and later at the CIA had certainly left their mark on her: a fit and tough figure as well as outstanding marksman skills made her an invaluable asset for any kind of an op. Especially off-the-books ops.

It was no time though, when the untamable nature got the best of her. Soon enough she got sick of constantly getting under one's thumb and being dependent on someone's dirty secrets.

And so, here she was, in Bahamas, running a business — well, not exactly a business — but it was much better than slaving on one's behalf in the middle of nowhere, risking to be thrown away at the exact second the things went sideways.

Just as she came back with an ice cube taken from the fridge, now pressing its refreshing coldness to her neck, sliding it back and forth, the phone rang.

The number was unknown. Well, it didn't matter. She would answer it anyway.

“¡Hola, señorita! ¿Cómo estás?” cheerfully wondered a cheeky voice, with raspy softness to it, masked by a quite decent Spanish pronunciation. She immediately recognized it:

Richdotcom.

For the past few years she got used to this man's eccentric way of having a conversation. She had to, anyway, since they both had started off this small ‘enterprise’.

Together they developed an intricately sophisticated way of bypassing any kind of security measures allowing to craft a completely untraceable new identity for those in need.

Her business partner was the most skillful hacker of the century who breached dozens of secure and unbreachable systems. And she was the rogue CIA agent going off the radar.

“What's up, Rich?” the woman asked, sounding as nice and polite as she could. Actually, the time went by and she got to like him, but it didn't change the fact he was nothing but a pain in the ass.

“Cold as ever, huh, Toots?”

“I swear if you call me anything but Tasha…”

“Would you mind to keep going? I don't want that ice cube to be wasted,” completely ignoring her, leisurely said Rich, his voice getting silkier and raspier.

“What if my gun is accidentally stuck somewhere it doesn't belong? What do you say about that?”

“I'll say, I'm all game for a good gun-play.”

Un-fucking-believable!

Just as Tasha thought about it, Rich continued:

“As much as I like to chat with you, I actually have a job here.”

“Ok, shoot.”

“So, the lead came from a guy we both know, so it should be solid. Let me double-check real quick...”

Rich made a pause, and Tasha heard the drumming strokes followed by occasional ‘What the…’ and “You're fucking kidding me!”

Meanwhile, the ice cube between her fingers had melted into a liquid. It trickled down her neck to her cleavage, tickling her a bit. She put the phone on a speaker mode, and rose, walking to take another one or two.

The sun seemed to penetrate with its scorching fingers even though the closed curtains. It felt as if one was trapped in the microwave, which was getting hotter and hotter with every second.

The place once was a two-storied flower shop, but Tasha and Rich expanded it into a cozy two-bedroom apartment on the second floor, and the office on the first floor.

For all the nosy go-byers there was a sign that this building was currently on sale, but the price was so sky-high that soon enough no one even dared asking for an estimate. There were a lot of much more cheaper options, and soon enough everyone had just quit to come. Rich also made sure the mayor didn't bother them too. Rumors travelled fast, so only those who had an urgent matter of disappearing from the radars could find their way in here.

Despite the house had been mostly her office for seven days a week, 365 days a year, Tasha liked it. It reminded her a bit if her own apartment with its minimalistic decor, yet preserving the coziness she remembered since that time.

Finally, sounding extremely angry, Rich hissed through his teeth:

“We have a problem. A fucking serious problem.”

Tasha had never heard him talking like that. Hell, she couldn't even remember when it was the last time Rich got angry over something.

“What is it? It can't be that bad, can it?”

“I can't confirm this fucking passport. Not a single trace. It's a damn fake! A good fake, actually. It took me a lot of effort to crack it. It's as fake as the whore's...”

“Please, don't even… So what do we do?”

“‘We’ don't do anything. You, on the other hand, have to meet with this guy. Because according to our idiotic middleman, this fella is on his way to you.”

Tasha got used to different kinds of clients as some of them were either thugs or complete jerks. But this time her gut told her that the guy she was about to meet was a different story. And certainly, confident as hell.

We'll see about that, — thought Tasha to herself. Rich was still murmuring curses as he fiercely typed something. Soon her laptop dinged with a few emails.

“I hate to bring it up, but what if he's… Well, he gets here, sees the place. He could be anyone, you know. What do you want me to do then, Rich?”

To be honest, such things happened not too often, but happened. Just like at any job, there were some complications. And in her line of work, these complications acquired a physical embodiment. It wasn't foreign for Tasha to kill in cold blood and cover her tracks, but it had become very much tiresome.

“Listen, we've talked about this. I'm not a big fan of dead bodies. That's why you get your extra clean up fee, right?”

Well, it was true. Leaning back on the chair, stroking her neck and arms with the ice, she said:

“I'm hoping you're right. I'd really hate to stick to my gun-play promise.”

They said good-byes and hang up. Just as Tasha was checking her gun, she noticed it became dark outside.

Apparently, the sun had finally hid behind a thick set of clouds slowly floating by. The clouds seemed to stall and become filthy gray, but it wasn't raining yet.

But Tasha didn't have time to admire the view as rushed to hide the case boxes with files. Once she was done, she also cleaned any papers left on every shiny surface in the office. A few of her other guns had been also re-loaded, and sticked with tape under the table and the chair.

For obvious reasons there was no alarm, but a special self-destruction protocol and other security measures had been in place. All the files being deleted, one could remotely set the house on fire by provoking an electric circuit failure.

Satisfied with how well she had prepared for her 'guest', Tasha took a quick shower and changed into another pair of shorts and another tank top, this time black.

Just as she got back to her laptop to open the email from Rich, the doorbell rang.

She rose, hiding the gun behind her back, and walked to the door. Pausing for a second, the woman took a deep breath, put on a polite smile and turned the doorknob.

Tasha blinked, making sure it was real.

The man, probably in his early thirties, stood in the doorway, curving his lip in an undecipherable grin.

He perfectly blended in with the environment, wearing a pale-blue shirt, loosened the way one could notice a hard, defined six-pack, and a pair of light shorts as well as sneakers.

Once he saw the door opened, he idly took his cap and sunglasses off, meeting her with the keen gaze of his light brown eyes with a bit green to them. His oval face was slightly tanned, and he had a one-day bristle. Grinning, he looked like a well-fed cat, glowing with a smug satisfaction.

One thing was certain — this man was making her skin crawl. She had dealt before with the most unpleasant and, sometimes, very horrifying men. But he... He was different. The inner strength was emanating from him, though she wouldn’t say he was a typical 'muscle' type.

The stranger was a bit taller than her — almost six feet. His fit figure, wide shoulders and well-defined muscular arms indicated he was always on the move, letting his vigorous self free.

Tasha had an odd feeling she could have known him. But, of course, that wasn't true.

He had something vaguely familiar about him. Was it his roughness reminding Tasha of her own untamed nature? Or, perhaps, the lone wolf-like intense stare?

He kept himself at ease, but she felt he was putting up a show. No, it wasn't nerves — Tasha was sure he was pretty much confident about himself as such a man could be.

The thing was, she sensed this particular man had a bunch of very unpleasant reasons to hide behind this carefree mask.

Meanwhile, the guy was shamelessly checking her out, not even bothering she would notice it. Well, she was used to get dirty looks so it wasn’t a big deal. Those who dared to cross the line got a set of a painful punches resulting in a few broken ribs. This guy hadn’t crossed it yet, so he might enjoy himself while he still could.

Returning him a smile, Tasha noticed a long and thin scar on his cheek. The wound edges were rigid, as if someone was using a piece of glass to cut him. The scar made him look even more dangerous and somehow attractive.

Certainly, this guy was constantly alert, always aware of the situation, and if needed, he could struck swiftly and ruthlessly. His veined, skillful hands with spider-like fingers, lean and long, had told the story to anyone who had a keen eye — he was undoubtedly capable of killing someone, no weapon needed. And one hadn’t needed to guess what happened to the person leaving him with the scar.

At least he seems to know what he wants.

Because most of the time the clients coming in here were nothing but a hopeless whining pieces of shit. It felt good to meet a man like him for a change.

Something told her, things were going to get very interesting.

TBC

[thebrierpatch]

Vaguely menacing agencies aside, this does actually raise some good points. Lifted from -The Arcane Front-.

On July 7, 1985, a CIA “Introductory Programming Manual” entitled “TOP SECRET: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” was uncovered quite by accident when an employee of Boeing Aircraft Company purchased a surplus IBM copier for scrap parts at a sale, and discovered inside details of a plan, hatched in the embryonic days of the “Cold War”, which called for control of the masses through manipulation of industry, peoples’ pastimes, education, and political leanings. It called for a quiet revolution, pitting brother against brother, and diverting the public’s attention from what is really going on.

In this amazing, outrageously crass, and repugnant CIA Training Manual, it says the following:

THE ARTIFICIAL WOMB

From the time a person leaves its mother’s womb, its every effort is directed toward building, maintaining, and withdrawing into artificial wombs, various sorts of substitute protective devices or shells.

The objective of these artificial wombs is to provide a stable environment for both stable and unstable activity; to provide a shelter for the evolutionary processes of growth, and maturity – i.e., survival; to provide security for freedom and to provide defensive protection for offensive activity.

This is equally true of both the general public and the elite. However, there is a definite difference in the way each of these classes go about the solution of problems.

THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF A NATION

- Dependency -

The primary reason why the individual citizens of a country create a political structure is a subconscious wish or desire to perpetuate their own dependency relationship of childhood.

Simply put, they want a human god to eliminate all risk from their life, pat them on the head, kiss their bruises, put a chicken on every dinner table, clothe their bodies, tuck them into bed at night, and tell them that everything will be alright when they wake up in the morning.

This public demand is incredible, so the human god, the politician, meets incredibility with incredibility by promising the world and delivering nothing. So who is the bigger liar? The public? Or the ‘godfather’?

This public behavior is surrender born of fear, laziness, and expediency. It is the basis of the welfare state as a strategic weapon, useful against a disgusting public.

-Action/Offense-

Most people want to be able to subdue and/or kill other human beings which disturb their daily lives, but they do not want to have to cope with the moral and religious issues that such an overt act on their part might raise. Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others (including their own children) so as to keep the blood off their own hands.

They rave about the humane treatment of animals and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed slaughterhouse down the street and out of sight. But even more hypocritical, they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hitmen collectively called politicians, and then complain about corruption in government.

-Responsibility-

Again, most people want to be free to do things (to explore, etc.) but they are afraid to fail.

The fear of failure is manifested in irresponsibility, and especially in delegating those personal responsibilities to others where success is uncertain or carries possible or created liabilities (law) that the person is not prepared to accept.

They want authority (root word – ‘author’), but they will not accept responsibility or liability. They hire politicians to face reality for them.

SUMMARY OF EXCERPT

The people hire the politicians so that the people can:

1. obtain security without managing it 2. obtain action without thinking about it 3. inflict theft, injury, and death upon others without having to contemplate either life or death 4. avoid responsibility for their own intentions 5. obtain the benefits of reality and science without exerting themselves in the discipline of facing or learning either of these things

They give the politicians the power to create and manage a war machine to:

1. provide for the survival of the NATION/WOMB 2. prevent encroachment of anything upon the NATION/WOMB 3. destroy the enemy who threatens the NATION/WOMB 4. destroy those citizens of their own country who do not conform for the sake of stability of the NATION/WOMB

Politicians hold many quasi-military jobs, the lowest being the police which are soldiers, the attorneys and the CPAs next who are spies and saboteurs (licensed), and the judges who shout the orders and run the closed union military shop for whatever the market will bear. The generals are industrialists. The ‘presidential’ level of commander-in-chief is shared by the international bankers. The people know that they have created this farce and financed it with their own taxes (consent), but they would rather knuckle under than be the hypocrite.

Thus a nation becomes divided into two very distinct parts, a DOCILE SUB-NATION and a POLITICAL SUB-NATION. The political sub-nation remains attached to the docile sub-nation, tolerates it, and leaches its substance until it grows strong enough to detach itself and then devour its parent.

As immoral and repulsive as this document is, one must agree that these CIA criminals have done their homework well. Everyone wants to be taken care of. That’s why Americans love Social Security, Disability, and Welfare of all sorts – feeding at the government trough. They have replaced their “mother” with the “government”. They erroneously believe, to their great detriment, that their government “loves” them as their mother once did.

There will be many who protest this message, claiming that they don’t fit into the category of wanting to be taken care of from the cradle to the grave, but reality proves differently.

Reality demonstrates that people give their life and health over to their doctor saying, “Please, take care of me” rather than learning how to take care of their own health.

They accept what their minister tells them about religion and eternity and other spiritual matters, rather than diligently studying the Bible for themselves.

They love “support groups” for everything from single parenting to alcoholics anonymous, to weight watchers, to cancer “support” groups.

If they don’t have a church as their social group, they join a fraternal society such as the Freemasons, or another type of organization such as the Kiwanis or Toastmasters, some place where they feel they “belong”.

And they want to love their government, thinking that their government loves them. They fly the flag, and salute the flag, and reverence the flag, and pledge allegiance to the flag. They chant, “America, Love it or Leave it.” They brag about the “freedom” Americans have while they are unknowingly being progressively enslaved.

They refuse to listen to any truth about what is happening in America and in the world, because they can’t bear to believe that their “mother” (their government) has really been a prostitute, a thief, and a murderer all along, even to the point of murdering her own children (citizens).

But even a cursory look at history, both ancient and recent, tells us that governments hate their own citizens. The rulers look at the citizens as cannon fodder for their war machine, as useless eaters, as cattle and similar beasts, as grasshoppers in a bottle, or as the “disgusting public” as found in the CIA Manual quoted above.

R.J. Rummel, in his book, “Death by Government”, shows that throughout all history, including in our lifetime, more people have been slaughtered by their own government leaders than have been killed by invading enemy armies. It seems that rulers throughout history have understood what this CIA Manual dared to put in writing, namely that the rank and file population is easily manipulated because it wants desperately to be “mothered” from the cradle to the grave.

Why do people have this determination to “return to the womb”, where they can feel warm and protected and taken care of?

Is this a reprehensible characteristic of humanity?

[setsunameioh]

Hi! What about this? Prompt : Kazuha as MI6/FBI/CIA agent. In need of more Kazuha action! XD

It ended up being less action and a bit more Heikazu, for which I apologize, but I did finally get around to filling this prompt! You can also read it on AO3, if you like!

Summary: When she had first been assigned this mission, looking after a headstrong, hotblooded detective had not been in her plans.

“I thought I told ya ta wait at the hotel!”

“Ya did. I just ignored it.”

The admission was so frank, that she almost half couldn’t believe her ears. It wasn’t exactly as if she had expected her most recent job to be easy- but she hadn’t expected it to come part and parcel with this kind of problem. For a moment, she found herself almost finding it akin to babysitting- but not only was the young man who was causing her so much trouble the same age as her, but quite honestly?

Babysitting was easier.

“Ya ignored it?” Placing a hand on her forehead, feeling the throb of a headache, it was all that Toyama Kazuha could do to draw in a long breath, trying not to lose her temper right then and there. “I told ya ta stay at the hotel fer yer own safety, ya know. There’s people gunnin’ fer yer head, an’ here ya are, walkin’ around in public.”

“I’m a detective, people wantin’ ta kill me ain’t anythin’ new.” With an easy grin that made her wonder if he was at all aware as to how much of a headache he was causing her, the detective simply didn’t look worried at all. At this point, she didn’t know if he was brave, or just a huge idiot.

Possibly both.

He had been introduced to her as Hattori Heiji, a private detective who worked in the area. By the time she had been assigned to the case, he had already been involved in it, as a witness, and a rather valuable one at that. By chance, while working on an entirely unrelated investigation, he had happened to witness something suspicious- a pair of men, the same pair of men that they had been looking for, for some time now at that. Members of a drug smuggling ring, one that they had been tasked with rooting out and wiping out.

It had been the first solid lead that they’d had that they were making a move in this country, just as they had first suspected. What they hadn’t realized at the time was just how much trouble the witness in question was going to turn out to be. It wasn’t his information that was the problem, nor the fact that his life was currently being targeted, that they could handle. Rather, the source of the problem was his own behavior.

Namely, his insistence that he be involved with the case. Even though his own life was in danger because of what he had seen, he showed no willingness to let that sort of thing stop him- if anything, it only made him even more eager to help. While it was true that their agency sometimes accepted help from outside consultants when needed, something like this was unprecedented.

To make matters worse, he’d taken a shine to her, for reasons that she could not understand. And while one would normally assume that this meant he might listen to her a bit better than the others, if anything, it was the exact opposite. He’d proven himself as not much of one to listen to anyone, but she got the distinct feeling that he listened to her far less than he did anyone else.

Seriously, what was this guy’s deal?

From what little she knew of him, she knew that he was a rather talented detective, as well as the son of Osaka’s current chief of police, a man even she had heard of. But where the father was levelheaded and composed, the son was hardly anything like that, leaving her to wonder what had gone so wrong in his childhood that he’d ended up like this as an adult. If anything, he seemed to bristle whenever his father was so much as mentioned, leaving her to wonder if they had a bad relationship.

The worst part of it all, of course, was that she actually found herself hard put to truly dislike the guy. There was something almost infectious about his smile, as out of place as it was sometimes, and he had a way of breaking the tension and allowing her to relax when she needed it the most. Were they to meet under other circumstances, she might actually be interested in getting to know him better, but under the current ones?

She just wished he would stay put, for once.

“Detective or not, I’m fairly certain that the people who have tried ta kill ya in the past are on an entirely different scale the ones tryin’ ta kill ya right now.” Kazuha noted, placing her hands on her hips, heaving a long sigh. “These guys are wanted around the world, ya know. They’re not small fries by any means.”

“Eh, not my first time dealin’ with that type.” With an easy shrug of his shoulders, the young man flashed her another wide grin. “Though it has been awhile. Not since I was in high school!”

“I find that rather hard ta believe.” Kazuha noted, staring him down. She knew him well enough now to know that his expression wouldn’t falter from it, but it did make her feel better, if nothing else.

“It the truth, though.” Heiji supplied, tucking his hands into his pockets, jerking his head in the direction she had been monitoring, up until she had spotted him out of the corner of her eye. “So? Those the guys yer watchin’?”

Heaving a long sigh, sensing that she wasn’t going to get out of this one, Kazuha merely accepted that she was going to be stuck with him, once again. “…yes, it’s them. One of the men is one of our contacts, it’s my job to keep tabs on him in case we need ta pull him out, fast.”

“The one in the gray suit, I take it.” Heiji noted, his gaze briefly flickering in his direction.

Pausing only for a moment, mentally wondering what it was that had tipped him off, Kazuha merely nodded her head. While looking after him was something of a chore, his abilities, at the very least, were the real deal. “If all goes well, there’s a chance we might be able ta locate their hideout today.”

“Or one of ‘em, at least.” Heiji said, folding his arms in front of his chest, leaning back in his seat. “From the sound of it, they’ve already rooted themselves deeply in this city. Ta think that they would dare do somethin’ like that on my turf… I’ll definitely teach ‘em why Osaka isn’t a city fer them ta mess with.”

“An’ as I keep tellin’ ya, ya don’t need ta do that, Hattori-san. By gettin’ further involved with this, yer only puttin’ yerself in more danger.” Kazuha told him simply, narrowing her eyes. “This is our job. Leave it ta us.”

“This is my city.” Heiji pointed out, quirking a brow. “An’ I’m a detective. I just can’t sit around an’ ignore somethin’ like this, not when it’s happenin’ right in front of me.” There was a slight pause then, as she all but watched the gears shifting inside of his head. “An’ ya don’t need ta call me so formally, ya know. Heiji’s fine.”

“Besides,” his gaze both darting away from her and the men alike, a hand strayed up behind his neck, something she had come to know as a nervous habit of his, “…ya haven’t even given me yer name yet.”

“I have.” Kazuha said simply, sensing where this was about to go. It hadn’t, after all, been the first time he had asked. “Like I told ya before, my name is-”

“Not that name.” Heiji said, closing his eyes, something of an irritated expression crossing his face. “Yer real name.”

“I’m afraid that’s on a need ta know basis.” Kazuha told him simply.

“Are ya sayin’ I’m not someone who needs ta know?” Heiji asked, peeking one eye open, a glimmer of hope clearly shining in it.

“Why are ya so interested in my name anyways?” Kazuha asked, keeping an eye on the men as she spoke. Well, they’d look more convincing if they were engaged in conversation, she supposed, so long as they kept their voices somewhat down. “It’s not the first time ya’ve asked.”

“I’m curious.” Heiji asked, tilting his head back a bit, watching the man in the gray suit out of the corner of his eye. For the moment, on that end, things seemed to be going rather smoothly, even if he couldn’t hear what they were saying from here. “There anythin’ wrong with that?”

It wasn’t as if he couldn’t claim that he didn’t have a certain amount of personal investment in it- and it wasn’t simply because they’d tried to kill him once already. If anything, the thing that he found himself the most interested in wasn’t the case, but rather, the young woman by his side. This wasn’t the first time they had met, of that he was almost certain- but without her name, he’d never know for sure.

Sometimes he thought about calling her by the one that he knew, but somehow, he got the feeling that wouldn’t go over very well. While she had remained deeply ingrained in his heart, ever since that day, he was alone in that. She didn’t seem to remember him at all, which brought him more of a sting than he would like to admit.

Still, he was never really one to back down from a challenge. He had been chasing her shadow ever since that spring day in Kyoto, over twenty years ago, to the point where others made fun of him for it. Since fate had seen to it to throw the two of them back together again, he wasn’t about to let this chance slip away from him.

If he did, who knew when he’d get another?

And well… he was concerned about the case, too, in the end. Which was why no matter how much he hated to tear his eyes away from her face- she had grown up to be prettier than he could have ever pictured- he knew that he had to focus on the task at hand. All the more so since he had basically butted his way into it.

“Of course there is.” Kazuha said simply. “We wouldn’t be usin’ codenames if my real one was somethin’ that I could give out so freely.”

“Then, what about when this is over?” Heiji asked. “Will ya tell me then?”

There was a slight pause then, and for a moment, he thought that he might not get an answer. No sooner than he had thought such a thing, Kazuha let out a sharp sigh, her gaze only briefly darting his way, before she turned her attention back towards the men.

That was the other bothersome thing about him, really- there was something about him that was just so distracting to her. There were moments, rather brief ones, where she found herself possessed of the notion that this wasn’t the first time they had met, though she was certain that it was. And no matter how much she turned it over in her head, she couldn’t place just exactly what that might be. Strangely enough, it wasn’t entirely something that she found to be unpleasant.

Because in truth, if she really wanted to, there was nothing stopping her from passing the task of watching him to someone else. As much trouble as he was, she hadn’t even considered the notion, even once.

Perhaps it simply meant that she was a fool. Or perhaps it was simply because some part of her felt as if he was worth the trouble. That part, it seemed, was the one who gave her answer. Normally, she would have just said no, and cut it short at that, but…

“I’ll give it some thought.”

[webseries99]

Argo

Acting under the cover of a Hollywood producer scouting a location for a science fiction film, a CIA agent launches a dangerous operation to rescue six Americans in Tehran during the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran in 1979.

In 1979, the American embassy in Iran was invaded by Iranian revolutionaries and several Americans were taken hostage. However, six managed to escape to the official residence of the Canadian Ambassador and the CIA was ordered to get them out of the country. With few options, exfiltration expert Tony Mendez devised a daring plan: create a phony Canadian film project looking to shoot in Iran and smuggle the Americans out as its production crew. With the help of some trusted Hollywood contacts, Mendez created the ruse and proceeded to Iran as its associate producer. However, time was running out with the Iranian security forces closing in on the truth while both his charges and the White House had grave doubts about the operation themselves.

After Iranian militants stormed and took control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 taking 56 Americans as hostages, six Americans managed to get away and took refuge in the home of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor. After two months of the Canadians putting their lives on the line everyday, the CIA and the US State Department try to come up with a plan to get their people out. Tony Mendez is an “ex filtration” specialist who proposes that they pose as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called Argo. Using Hollywood connections, Mendez creates a back story for the movie – ads in Variety, casting calls, inviting he media to a production launch – and then heads off to Iran to lead the six Americans out.

In late 1979, anti-American sentiments are running high in Iran due to the US harboring the ailing former Shah of Iran, who the US put into place in the 1950s, and who many Iranians saw as causing much hardship and death for residents over his close to thirty year reign, solely for his and his family’s own benefit. In November, Iranian militants, working under the name of its new leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, are able to break through the secured perimeter of the US Embassy in Tehran. The fifty plus embassy staff are able to burn or shred most of their documents before they are taken hostage. What the Iranians are unaware of is that six embassy staff members escaped just prior to the raid, and managed to take refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor, and his wife, Pat. Fast forward two months… The situation has not changed, and the State Department has brought in the services of the CIA, both to free the hostages and extricate the six in hiding. Tony Mendez with the CIA is the lead consultant on the six. Although many, in his mind, implausible plans are hatched to extricate the six, Tony eventually comes up with what some others believe is an implausible plan: have the six, under Canadian passports, pretend to be a film crew in Iran scouting for locations, with Tony part of that film crew to lead the six out himself. On the advice of Tony’s Hollywood advisors, make-up artist John Chambers and producer Lester Siegel, Tony’s plan not only has to fool the Iranians to work, it has to fool the entire world, who need to believe that this film is actually in pre-production. Beyond the need to get past the militants, especially at Tehran Airport where they are vigilant about capturing any Americans trying to escape, the plan has many obstacles to success, including: the six, who need to get up to speed basically overnight on their cover stories, some who predetermine certain failure, which if does happen means torturous death; competing priorities in Washington between the six and the fifty plus hostages; the Taylors’ Iranian housekeeper, Sahar, who comes to the realization that the Taylors’ supposed Canadian house guests are not who they say they are; and a mug shot book of embassy staff among the shredded materials, which Iranian sweat shop workers are tasked with putting back together, and which if achieved would identify the fact that the militants are minus six people from among their hostages.

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[bountyofbeads]

Unfit for Office

Donald Trump’s narcissism makes it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.

George T. Conway III | Published October 3, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 3, 2019 |

Part 2 of 2

Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect. Bad faith? Trump has repeatedly used executive powers, threatened to use executive powers, or expressed the view that executive powers should be used to advance his personal interests and punish his political opponents. Thus, for example, he has placed restrictions on disaster aid to Puerto Rico in apparent response to criticism of him and his administration; directed the Pentagon to reconsider whether to award a $10 billion contract to Amazon because its CEO owns The Washington Post, whose coverage he doesn’t like; threatened to take “regulatory and legislative” action against Facebook, Google, and Twitter, because of their supposed “terrible bias” against him; tried to get White House staff to tell the Justice Department to try to block the merger between AT&T and Time Warner in order to punish CNN for its coverage; attacked his first attorney general for allowing the indictment of two Republican congressmen who had supported him; and ordered the revocation of the security clearance of a former CIA director who had criticized him.

And now, in just the past two weeks, we’ve seen the pièce de résistance of bad faith, the one that’s brought Trump to the verge of impeachment: Trump’s efforts to use his presidential authority to strong-arm a foreign nation, Ukraine, into digging up or concocting evidence in support of a preposterous conspiracy theory about one of his principal challengers for the presidency, former Vice President Joe Biden. As one political historian has put it, Trump’s use of his Article II authority to pursue vendettas is “both a sign of deep insecurity … and also just a litany of abuse of power,” and something no president has done “as consistently or as viciously as Trump has.”

Profit? Self-dealing? Look at the way Trump is using the presidency to advertise his real-estate holdings—most notably and recently, his apparent determination to hold the next G7 summit at the Trump Doral resort in Florida. Ultra vires? Trump has made the outrageous claim that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Consistent with that view, he has repeatedly suggested that, by executive order, he can overturn the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship—an utterly lawless assertion. His core constitutional obligations flow from Article II’s command that he faithfully execute the laws, yet he has told subordinates not to worry about violating the laws. According to one former senior administration official quoted in The New York Times, Trump’s “constant instinct all the time was: Just do it, and if we get sued, we get sued … Almost as if the first step is a lawsuit. I guess he thinks that because that’s how business worked for him in the private sector. But federal law is different, and there really isn’t a settling step when you break federal law.” Federal law is also different, one might add, because he’s in charge of upholding it.

Facing the approach of the 2020 election with not a single new mile of his border wall having been built, Trump, as reported in The Washington Post, has urged his aides to violate all manner of laws to expedite construction—environmental laws, contracting laws, constitutional limitations on the taking of private property—and “has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing” they commit along the way.

A duty of diligence and carefulness? Trump is purely impulsive, and incapable of planning or serious forethought, and his compulsion for lying has enervated any capacity for thoughtful analysis he may have ever had. He apparently won’t read anything; he himself has said, in regard to briefings, that he prefers to read “as little as possible”—despite occupying what David A. Graham calls “one of the most demanding jobs in the world” precisely because its “holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading.”

And then there’s the question of honesty. Fiduciaries must be honest. The Framers understood, based upon the law of public officeholding in their time, that “faithful execution” of the laws requires “the absence of bad faith through honesty.” In the private realm, fiduciaries owe a duty of candor, of truth-telling; the standard of behavior was once memorably described by the renowned jurist Benjamin Cardozo as “not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” Today, in my own practice area of corporate litigation, corporate officers and directors, as fiduciaries, owe duties that include a duty to disclose material information truthfully and completely. Trump, whose lawyers wouldn’t dare allow him to speak to the special counsel lest he make a prosecutable false statement, couldn’t pass this standard to save his life.

Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security. Presidential narcissism and personal ego have frequently displaced the national interest. Today, the most obvious—and stunning—example is his conduct toward Ukraine: While trying to pressure the Ukrainian president to restart an investigation against Biden, Trump ordered the withholding of vital military aid to that country, thus weakening its ability to withstand Russian aggression and undermining the interests of the United States. But the list goes on: Last summer, in a narcissistic effort at self-aggrandizement, Trump told the Pakistani prime minister about a conversation he had with the Indian prime minister—leading India to deny, indignantly, that any such conversation had ever taken place. Trump reportedly even lied about trade talks with China—announcing that phone calls had occurred that never occurred and that the Chinese denied took place—in an apparent attempt to pump up the stock market and take credit for it.

Trump’s penchant for vendettas also doesn’t stop at the water’s edge—American interests be damned. When confidential cables sent by the United Kingdom’s ambassador to his government were leaked, and were revealed to contain uncomplimentary (but obvious) observations about Trump’s ineptitude and emotional insecurity, and the dysfunction of his administration, Trump went on an extended Twitter tirade against the ambassador, calling him “wacky” and “a very stupid guy,” “a pompous fool,” and ultimately declared: “We will no longer deal with him.” When reports surfaced that Trump was interested in having the United States purchase Greenland from Denmark, and the Danish prime minister understandably described talk about such a purchase as “an absurd discussion” in light of Greenland’s position on the matter, Trump canceled a visit to Denmark, and then attacked the prime minister, calling her comments “nasty”; for good measure, he also attacked some of America’s NATO allies.

At the same time, Trump happily succumbs to flattery from America’s enemies; he received “beautiful … great letters” from North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, and therefore “fell in love” with him, and rewards him with kind words and meetings even as North Korea continues to develop new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, Trump once said on television: “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.”

Putin, of course, did more than say great things about Trump, which brings up what was, until the Ukraine scandal surfaced, the most significant way in which Trump’s extraordinary narcissism influenced his presidency—the Russia investigation. Trump made that investigation about himself, and in the course of doing so, committed what appear to be unmistakably criminal acts. At the outset, the Mueller investigation wasn’t about what Donald Trump had done during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. It was primarily an investigation about what the Russians had done to interfere with that election and to help the Trump campaign. At its core, it was a counterintelligence investigation—an effort to protect the country, to defend our democracy. An effort to find out exactly what a hostile foreign power had done to attack the United States, so that our nation could fight back, and so that it could take measures to ensure that such an attack never happened again.

Read more: What the Mueller report actually said

But Trump didn’t see it that way. The Mueller report repeatedly describes Trump’s self-obsession, and his disregard for the national interest. Trump viewed “the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference as a threat to the legitimacy of his electoral victory.” He is said to have “viewed the Russia investigation as an attack on the legitimacy of his win.” He thought it would “tak[e] away from what he had accomplished.” The Washington Post has now reported, moreover, that in the Oval Office in May 2017, Trump told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador that he was unconcerned with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

And so, contrary to his obligation to act in the nation’s interests rather than his own, and contrary to the criminal code, he repeatedly tried to obstruct the investigation—and therefore, ironically, put himself in the crosshairs of the investigation. Thanks to Trump’s narcissism, the special counsel was forced to devote an entire volume of his report—some 182 pages of single-spaced text—to Trump’s repeated and persistent efforts to derail the investigation. And persistent, Trump was. He tried to get Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from the investigation, to violate ethics rules and unrecuse himself, so that he could get rid of the special counsel and limit the investigation to future election interference only. Trump tried to get his White House counsel to have the acting attorney general remove Mueller on a ridiculous pretext, prompting the counsel to threaten to resign. Trump tried to encourage witnesses to refuse to cooperate with the very government that Trump himself heads. As I’ve argued elsewhere, in his efforts to derail the Mueller investigation, Trump “did much more than this, but all of this is more than enough: He committed the crime of obstructing justice—multiple times.” Trump even obstructed justice about obstructing justice when he tried to get the White House counsel to write a false account of Trump’s efforts to remove Mueller.

All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation. How else could one describe the attitude Trump expressed when, sitting next to Vladimir Putin in late June, he was asked whether he would tell Putin not to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election? Trump smirked, wagged his finger playfully at Putin, and said, “Don’t meddle in the election.” Putin smirked too. The Russian president was in on the joke—the punch line being how Trump treats America’s interests versus his own.

What constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account? One mechanism discussed with great frequency during the past three years, including within the Trump administration, is Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. That provision allows the vice president to become “Acting President” when the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” But it doesn’t define what such an inability entails; essentially, it lets the vice president and the Cabinet, the president himself, and ultimately two-thirds of both houses of Congress decide.

Certainly it would cover a coma. Had the amendment been in effect in 1919 through 1921, it presumably could have been used to deal with President Woodrow Wilson. A severe stroke had rendered Wilson paralyzed on the left side, but he could still speak, and he could still sign documents with his right hand. Nevertheless, although Wilson had “relatively well preserved intellectual function,” the stroke rendered him “subject to ‘disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment.’”

Sound judgment, of course, is what a president’s job is all about. And as Jeffrey Rosen has explained, “nothing in the text or original understanding of the amendment” would prevent the vice president, the Cabinet, or Congress from deciding that Trump has disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, defective judgment, or other behavioral or psychological issues that keep him from carrying out his constitutional duties the way they were meant to be carried out.

The problem is one of mechanics. Section 4, quite understandably, was designed to be extremely difficult to implement. The vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can determine that the president isn’t able to carry out his duties; if so, the vice president immediately becomes acting president. But if the president doesn’t agree—and you know what Trump’s view will be, no matter what—then a constitutional game of ping-pong starts: The president can certify that he is capable, and he can reassume his authority after a four-day waiting period, unless the vice president and the Cabinet, within that period, recertify that the president can’t function. (As a new book on Section 4 explains, this waiting period exists in part because “a deranged President could do a lot of damage if he could retake power immediately,” and, in particular, he “would also be able to fire the Cabinet, which would prevent it from contesting his declaration of ability.”) If that happens, the vice president continues as acting president, and the whole matter gets kicked to Congress, which must assemble within 48 hours and decide within 21 days: If two-thirds of both houses agree that the president can’t function, then the vice president continues as acting president; if not, the president gets his authority back.

No matter how psychologically incapable of meeting his constitutional obligations Trump may be, that route is virtually certain not to work in this case. Would a vice president and department heads who have shamelessly slaked Trump’s narcissistic thirst at Cabinet meetings by praising his supposed greatness, and who of course owe their jobs to Trump, dare incur his wrath by sparking a constitutional crisis on the basis of what they must surely know about his unprecedented faults? Doubtful, to say the least. They would know full well that, if their decision weren’t sustained by Congress, the first thing that Trump would do after reassuming power would be to fire every department head who sought to have him sidelined. (He can’t fire Vice President Mike Pence, of course.) Which brings up the ultimate question upon which successful invocation of Section 4 would turn: whether two-thirds of both houses of Congress would vote to remove Trump. That’s harder than impeachment, which requires only a simple majority of the House in order to bring charges of impeachment to a trial in the Senate (which in turn can convict on a two-thirds vote).

And so it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism for addressing the fact that Trump’s narcissism and sociopathy render him unable to comply with the obligations of his office. It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.

The phrase high Crimes and Misdemeanors was dropped into the draft Constitution on September 8, 1787, during the waning days of the Constitutional Convention. The discussion before the Convention’s Committee of Eleven was extremely brief. The extant version of what became Article II, Section 4 provided for impeachment merely for treason and bribery. George Mason objected, and proposed adding “maladministration.” Elbridge Gerry seconded Mason’s proposal, but James Madison objected that it was too vague. Gouverneur Morris chimed in, arguing that having a presidential election “every four years will prevent maladministration.” Mason moved to add, according to Madison’s notes, “other high crimes & misdemeanors (against the State).” The motion passed, eight to three. And so, as a result of that brief exchange, Article II of the Constitution of the United States provides that “the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

As Yoni Appelbaum has observed in this magazine, “constitutional lawyers have been arguing about what counts as a ‘high crime’ or ‘misdemeanor’ ever since.” One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’” Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.

Just as the Framers viewed the presidency as fiduciary, they understood the offenses that might disqualify the incumbent as breaches of that fiduciary duty. And that may well be why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament.” Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury. In other ways, it is quite different. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.” As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.

So the congressional judgment in the impeachment process necessarily includes the number and seriousness of offenses, and even extends well beyond those calculations. Congress must also, in particular, weigh the chances of recidivism; that possibility is precisely why the Constitution provides for removal as the principal sanction upon conviction on impeachment charges. As Charles Black Jr. explained in his classic 1974 book on impeachment, “We remove him principally because we fear he will do it again.” Or as George Mason put it during the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practised corruption … be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?”

In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into play. From the evidence, it appears that he simply can’t stop himself from putting his own interests above the nation’s. Any serious impeachment proceedings should consider not only the evidence and the substance of all impeachable offenses, but also the psychological factors that may be relevant to the motivations underlying those offenses. Congress should make extensive use of experts—psychologists and psychiatrists. Is Trump so narcissistic that he can’t help but use his office for his own personal ends? Is he so sociopathic that he can’t be trusted to follow, let alone faithfully execute, the law?

Congress should consider all this because that’s what the question of impeachment demands. But there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer. Not only because of the evidence itself, but because Donald Trump will respond in pathological ways—and in doing so, he’ll prove the points against him in ways almost no one will be able to ignore.

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/americans-encouraged-hate/

The One People Americans Are Encouraged to Hate

by Yvonne Lorenzo for Ooduarere via The Saker Blog

How would you react if you read the following statements and found that they were spoken by government employees who are part of the American Deep State and have a great deal of power over the nation and you? Wouldn’t the prejudice appall and disgust you?

“I do always hate the Israelis,” Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Israel probe, testified to Congress in July 2018. “It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Israel poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life.” As he opened the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign’s ties to Israel in July 2016, FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: “fuck the cheating motherfucking Israelis… Bastards. I hate them… I think they’re probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages.” Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Israeli nationals as a cause for alarm: “The Israelis,” Clapper said, “almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Israeli technique. So we were concerned.”

Of course, readers of Ooduarere know that the officials quoted never actually made those remarks about the Israelis; nor did they express their hatred of Germans, Saudi Arabians, Turks, French, Libyan, Congolese, Somalians, Germans, Italians, British, Canadians, Greeks, or even Chinese. No; the actual nation and people named were the Russians. Here is the link to the original excellent piece published in The Nation. Yet it seems perhaps not with a touch of irony the speakers were engaging in projection and discussing themselves, the so-called America elites.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember how I found ooduarere and The Saker, originally not on this official site of his but at Blogspot blog. Yet as an American slowly waking up to the terrible truths of the corruption and destructive actions engaged by the American government and its “Deep State” from reading LewRockwell.com (where I later became a contributor to Lew’s site via this link) and supporting Ron Paul, I was horrified to discover that American “fair play” was only an illusion. Nevertheless, I am astonished by the hatred that I quoted. In this time of extraordinary oppression against any individual who dares challenge certain dogmas, that is to say if anyone is White and a true follower of the Way of Jesus Christ especially, for example, as The Saker himself wrote recently on the whole homosexual brouhaha here, then the full force of the establishment, the powers that be, will be brought to bear—your employment, perhaps your life would be at risk. Not that Lisa Page or Peter Strozk would ever dare to criticize Israel, or look into the mirror and see themselves as they truly are, but if they did, they’d probably be taken to a CIA black site and waterboarded for their troubles.

A few years ago, I was truly haunted by a photograph posted on the Saker’s site of a beautiful young woman and her infant child; I can’t recall the link yet I believe the post was by a Saker contributor. The two were murdered by shelling from the Neo-Nazi Ukrainians. I wonder why Putin in his interview with Oliver Stone didn’t, in his usual calm yet convincing manner, discuss the terrible loss of life and the tens of thousands of refugees, the human suffering caused by the American Empire, for after all Victoria Nuland admitted that billions were poured into Ukraine in support of “regime change.” Nevertheless, what astonishes me is the complete lack of empathy, in fact the evident enjoyment in wreaking havoc and death around the world on the part of America’s political class especially.

Meanwhile, back in America, America itself is breaking apart at the seams. How can one maintain an empire when the empire itself is built on sand? As Boyd D. Cathey noted in his piece “Is It Time for America to Break Apart?”:

“There are then, palpably, two Americas. They still use the same language, but they are increasingly incapable of communicating with each other. Almost weekly words and terms are redefined beyond comprehension, and those ‘devil terms’ have become the modern equivalents of linguistic hydrogen bombs deployed by the progressivists. They illustrate what political theorist Paul Gottfried has called a ‘post-Marxist’ praxis that has actually moved beyond the assaults of cultural Marxism towards a new and imposed template.

“No dissent from this template is permitted in our society. If it demands you call black, white; then you must comply, or suffer the consequences. If your eyes tell you one thing, but the collective media and elites tell you something else, ‘who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes’?”

I shared the Nation piece, since the news of the statements by the corrupt Page and Strozk were new to me, with The Saker and SmoothieX12, Andrei Martyanov who posted about it on his blog. I think this insight Martyanov offers is important but not the full picture.

He writes, “It is always funny to read about ‘values’ and ‘ideals’–if that ‘way of life’ continues, the end-result will be precisely [the] total elimination of everything of true value [the] combined West ever produced with the US Constitution being shredded to pieces. Ah, wait, I forgot–these are the thoughts of people who are directly involved in [a] criminal coup attempt, which by definition is anti-constitutional and violates this very same ‘way of life’ these people allegedly try to protect. One has to have, of course, [an] appreciation of their fever-pitch hatred of Russians and, what matters here, this is not private, [not] an exception that is, attitude. It is not a secret that [a] very large strata of US policy-makers is afflicted by Russophobia. A large part of this Russophobia, apart from being racial–you know, dirty Slavs and all that jazz–is very much a suppressed complex of inferiority. Throughout all 20th and 21st century not only Russia presented itself as an inconvenient impediment to America-the-savior-of-humanity narrative, but Russia remains the only nation which can remove the United States from the map and can conventionally defeat any combination of forces the United States can assemble. This simple fact makes many in US ‘elite’, which is largely ignorant on the issues of real war, very uncomfortable.”

In due time, I hope to have soon a conversation to be published with The Saker on the topic of Christianity in general and Orthodox Christianity in particular; while SmoothieX12’s secular commentary and observations are entirely correct, I truly believe something far more sinister is taking place. On display in these Russophobic statements is a malevolence, not just willful blindness, fear or arrogance. Is this an Adobe Photoshopped manipulated image or truly the real face and eyes of Peter Strozk taken during his Congressional testimony? What do believers see when they look at this?

Peter Strozk

Philip Giraldi wrote about Jeffrey Epstein and his connections to the rich and powerful “elites” and likely intelligence agencies here at Unz.com and also here on the Strategic Culture website. Aside from the intelligence angle, Vanity Fair discusses the people Epstein “collected” in this article:

“Epstein remained a fixture in elite circles even after he was a registered sex offender. A few years ago, for example, he was a guest at a dinner in Palo Alto hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman for the MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden. At the dinner, Elon Musk introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. (‘Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honoring scientists that was not organized by Epstein,’ Zuckerberg spokesman Ben LaBol told me. ‘Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.’)…

“One source who’s done business with Epstein told me that Epstein’s 21,000-square-foot townhouse on East 71st Street welcomed a steady stream of the Davos crowd in the past decade. The source said Bill Gates, Larry Summers, and Steve Bannon visited the house, which has been called one of the largest private residences in Manhattan. ‘Jeffrey collected people. That’s what he did,’ the source said. Gates and Summers did not respond to requests for comment.”

The site Vigilant Citizen, run by anonymous individuals who investigate the occult hallmarks of the Western “elites,” discussed Epstein on this post via this link and noted his connections to the rich and powerful along with occult symbolism on structures on his island:

The fact that a “temple” was built on an island known for extreme depravity is disturbing. However, when one fully understands the mindset of the occult elite, it makes perfect sense. It is all about symbolism and ritual.

For instance, the “temple” has a striking resemblance with Hammam Yalbugha – a Mamluk-era public bath located in Syria.

Why did Epstein model his “temple” on this specific building? Because of the symbolism attached to it. Indeed, the hammam is a classic example of architecture from the Mamluk era. In Arabic, the word “mamluk” literally means “property” and is used to designate slaves.

During the Mamluk era, children were captured by the ruling class to become slaves. Boys were usually trained to become soldiers while girls were groomed to become the personal concubines of their masters. Considering the fact that Epstein island was used to import child sex slaves for the elite, the symbolism is perfectly fitting.

In order to give the “temple” an unmistakeable occult dimension, the building was adorned with golden statues representing gods (Neptune) and owl-like birds. The building is also surrounded by maze-like patterns, similar to those found in Islamic architecture.

To get a better feel of Epstein island, I suggest you view this drone footage which provides great shots of some truly bizarre elements.

Epstein Island Temple

Hammam Yalbugha Aleppo, Syria

In my opinion, something far worse is going on than fear and self-loathing within the souls of the rich and powerful who rule the Western world, not merely decadence. Global Western “elites” are malevolent sociopaths (although I suspect several of the individuals in the Russian “Fifth column” Saker writes about are as well); while America is disintegrating around them, these elites still can cause great mischief. Reader of my words who are Americans must do all they can to resist and challenge these monsters in power; for monsters they are. Yes, they are presumed innocent until proven guilty but the fact remains the armies they control have killed and maimed millions of innocents throughout the world, including children. That I as a believer I think there is something evil behind them and within them is not provable by the scientific method perhaps; but I trust that my concerns are valid. If the reader of my words is a believer, please pray.

Yvonne Lorenzo [send her mail] makes her home in New England in a house full to bursting with books, including works on classical Greece and by Mises, Murray Rothbard, Tom Woods, Joseph Sobran, and Lew Rockwell. Her interests include gardening, mythology, ancient history, The Electric Universe, and classical music, especially the compositions of Handel, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and the Bel Canto repertoire. She is the author Son of Thunder and The Cloak of Freya.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Poison gas is not only deadly, it often provokes a slow suffocating death. That, perpetrated on innocent children, is particularly cruel. But when such poison gas attacks are mere false flags, or by the new term, “false news”, and are used to provoke war, perhaps an all annihilating war, then humanity has turned to what it never should have become – a lowly-lowly herd of brainless zombies. Is that what we have become – brainless, greedy, selfish beings, no sense of solidarity, no respect for other beings; I am not even talking about humans, but any living being. Poison gas, the weapon of choice for fear. Poisoning in Salisbury of the former Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, visiting her dad from Moscow. Poisoning with a nerve gas, called Novichok that was allegedly made in Russia. In the meantime, we know that nerve gas made in the former Soviet Union, now non-existent in Russia, was military grade and deadly. The gas used for the alleged attack was not deadly. We also know by now that the UK – all of their highest officials, from PM May down the ladder, lied so miserably that they will have a hard time recovering. It will backfire. The foreign secretary, Johnson boy, pretended their secret bio-gas/bio-weapon laboratory Porton Down, just 13 km down the road from Salisbury, where the pair was allegedly found unconscious on a park bench, assured him the gas was made in Russia. Alas, it was a miserable lie. The laboratory’s chief chemists testified later to the media that they could not be sure that the substance was made in Russia. No, of course not. In fact, Porton Down, working in close collaboration with the CIA, is a highly sophisticated chemical warfare facility that can easily make the gas themselves, at the grades they please, deadly or not so deadly, if it should serve a “false news” purpose, which this did. In the meantime, as reported today by RT, the entire case has been deconstructed. The components of Novichok are easy to come by, and almost every decent lab can make the poison gas, tailored to its needs. Were father and daughter indeed poisoned?  This is a legitimate question. Who has seen them since the alleged poisoning occurred on 28 March?  They disappeared from the public eye. Apparently, they are both recovering, Yulia having been released from hospital a few days ago, but has not been seen by anyone in public, nor been able to talk to the media, lest she could say “something” the public is not allowed to know. She is being kept in a secret place. Her father is also recovering and may be released soon – released from where? Is this all a farce? An aunt talked to Yulia from Moscow, where she noticed that Yulia was not free to talk. The aunt wanted to visit her niece in the UK but was obviously denied a visa. Where are father and daughter? Washington has “offered” them a new home and new identity in the US, to avoid further poisoning attempts… how ridiculous! A blind man or woman must see that this is another farce, or more correctly, an outright abduction. The two won’t have a chance to resist. They are just taken away – not to talk anymore to anyone ever. That’s the way the story goes. The lies are protected, and the “Russia did it” syndrome will prevail – prevail in the dumb folded public, in the herd of pigs that we all have become, as Goebbels would say. And the saga continues. The saga to drum up war. That’s the purpose of it all. Nothing else – Russia, the evil nation, led by an evil leader, must be subdued and conquered. But the empire needs the public for their support. And the empire is almost there. It disposes of a vicious media corporate army that lies flagrantly about anything that money can buy. It’s like spitting in the face of the world, and nobody seems to care, or worse, even to notice. — On the other side of the Mediterranean is Syria. A vast and noble country, Syria, with a leader who truly loves his people and country, a leader who has despite a foreign induced war — not civil war, a proxy war — instigated and funded by Washington and its vassal allies in Europe and the Middle East; Syria, a highly educated socialist country that has shared the benefit of her resources, free education, free medical services, free basic infrastructure, with her people. This Syria must fall. Such strength cannot be tolerated by the all-dominating west. Like Iraq and Libya, also socialist countries once-upon-a-time, and like Syria, secular Muslim nations, sharing their countries’ wealth with the people, such countries must fall. According to Pentagon planners and those Zion-neofascist think tanks that designed the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), as the chief instrument of US foreign policy, we know since Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied commander and Chief of NATO in Europe (1997-2000) talked to Democracy Now in 2007, saying that within 5 years seven countries must fall. One of them is Syria. Since 2011, the Syrian people have been bombarded by US and NATO and Saudi funded terrorists, causing tens of thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees. Now, even more blatantly, US bases are vying to occupying the northern third of Syria, totally illegally, but nobody says beep. Not even the UN. The recent fake gas attack on Douma outside of Damascus has allegedly killed 80 to 120 people, mostly women and children. Of course, that sells best in the propaganda theatre – women and children. But there is not proof, none whatsoever. To the contrary. People living in Douma say they haven’t heard of any nerve gas attack. Strangely, like last time, the infamous White Helmets discovered the gas victims, including a gas canister-like bomb laying on a bed, having been shot through the roof of a house… a totally unprofessionally staged event. As Russian military quickly discovered and reported. They called on an independent investigation, one that could not be bought and corrupted by Washington. President Assad invited a team of investigators to inspect the scene. Instead of heeding this invitation, Trump, the bully, calls Mr. Assad an “animal” and a “monster”, twittering his brainless aggressions throughout the world. Tell you what, Mr. Trump.  Bashar al-Assad is a far better human being than you are a monster. You and your dark handlers don’t even deserve being called human. Mr. Assad has regard and respect for his people, attempts to protect them and has so far succeeded with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, recovering the last bits of Syrian territory from the terrorists, except, of course, the northern part, where the chief terrorist and the world’s only rogue state has installed itself, the US of A. Why in the world would Mr. Assad choose to gas his own people? Especially, when he is winning the war?  People, ask yourself, cui bono (who benefits?) and the answer is simple: The western aggressors, who seek a reason to mass bomb Syria into even more rubble, causing even more death and destitution. And making a shitload of money – as war usually does. That’s who. While you, Donald, and those monsters that direct you from behind the scenes, have no, but absolutely no respect for your own people, for any people on this globe, for that matter, not even for your kind, for your greed-no-end kind of elite, as you bring the world to the brink of an all-destructive, all killing annihilating war. Since the other fake event, 9/11, we are, of course, already in a “soft version” of WWIII, but that’s not enough. The United States needs a hard war, so badly it doesn’t shy away from destroying itself. That’s how blinded your own propaganda has made you Americans, you generals, you corporate “leaders” (sic-sic) – and all you Congress puppets. That is the sheer truth. You better read this and wake up. Otherwise your death sentence is hastened by your own greed and ignorance. Both Russia and the US drafted each a Security Council Resolution – which, of course, are both not approved, with Nikki Haley lambasting Russia, accusing them of being responsible for the countless deaths in Syria, pointing again to the children and women, making up the majority. Again, it sells best in the world of psychological propaganda, while evil Nikki Haley knows very well who has caused all these deaths by the millions, destitution and refugees by the millions, tens of millions throughout the Middle East and the world – her own country, directly or through NATO, the European puppets allies and proxy wars, paid and funded by Washington and by elbow-twisting her vassals. On 9 April – UNSC – while Nikki Haley, repeats and over-repeats her lies and fake accusations, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Vassily Nebenzia, listens. And then in a twenty-minute statement of sheer intelligence, he dismantles all the lies, and lays bare the truth, about all the fakeness being played out internationally. The depth with which he addresses the assembly is concise and so brilliant, none of his UK, French and German counterparts could have ever come close to a statement of this magnitude and excellence. Even Ms. Haley can’t help glancing over ever-so often to Vassily Nebenzia, as he speaks. Her eyes reveal some kind of hidden admiration for what he says. After all, she can’t be as dumb as she is paid for to look and sound. By now anybody who dares not just reading and listening to the mainstream presstitute “fake news”, but has the courage to dig into the truth news, RT, TeleSur, CGTN, PressTV and a few others, or websites like Global Research, The Saker Blog, ICH, NEO, Greanville Post, CounterCurrent, Dissident Voice and many other trustworthy sources, knows about the lies and the only, but the very only, purpose these false flags cum false news serve: Provoking a war with Russia, subjugating and dividing Syria, and the Middle East and the US becoming the hegemonic masters of the universe. For the simple reason, and hardly anybody talks or writes about it – the US economy is based on war, is based on weapon manufacturing and international banking which finances weapon manufacturing and the exploitation of mineral resources coveted by weapon manufacturing. The entire war industry with all its associated civil services and industries, of banking, electronics, aviation, mining…. makes up more than half of the US GDP but, of course, it’s never broken down that way. The chosen people will control the world. Well, they do already – financially at least the western part of our globe. But it’s not enough. They will not stop before they bury themselves in their own-dug graves, or rather in one massive mass-grave. But, please, do take all your fakeness, from money, to lies, to hypocrisy and more lies and coercion and sanctions and blackmail with you never to surface again. And give peace a chance for those who survive your (almost) terminal assault on humanity. http://clubof.info/

[uniteordie-usa]

Weapons Went From The CIA To ISIS In Less Than Two Months

http://uniteordie-usa.com/weapons-went-from-the-cia-to-isis-in-less-than-two-months/ http://uniteordie-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/FBICIASIS-600x312.jpg Weapons Went From The CIA To ISIS In Less Than Two Months The study revealed that in one notable instance, a weapons shipment of advanced missile systems switched hands from US intelligence to “moderate” Syrian groups to ISIS in only a two month time period. Mainstream media in 2013: “Conspiracy Theorists!”  Mainstream media i...

The study revealed that in one notable instance, a weapons shipment of advanced missile systems switched hands from US intelligence to “moderate” Syrian groups to ISIS in only a two month time period.

Mainstream media in 2013: “Conspiracy Theorists!” 

Mainstream media in 2017: “ISIS Got a Powerful Missile the CIA Bought!” 

Years late to the party, mainstream media outlets like USA Today, Reuters, and Buzzfeed are just out with “breaking” and “exclusive” stories detailing how a vast arsenal of weapons sent to Syria by the CIA in cooperation with US allies fuelled the rapid growth of ISIS. Buzzfeed’s story entitled, Blowback: ISIS Got A Powerful Missile The CIA Secretly Bought In Bulgaria, begins by referencing “a new report on how ISIS built its arsenal highlights how the US purchased munitions, intended for Syrian rebels, that ended up in the hands of the terrorist group.”

The original study that Buzzfeed and other media are referencing comes from a UK-based independent weapons research organization called Conflict Armament Research (CAR) which has had a team of weapons and munitions experts on the ground in the Middle East for years examining arms and equipment recovered from ISIS and other terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria. Using serial numbers, crate shipping markings, and all available forensics data, the CAR experts began finding that as early as 2013 to 2014 much of the Islamic State’s advanced weapons systems as well as small arms were clearly sourced to the United States and the West.

“Supplies of materiel into the Syrian conflict from foreign parties – notably the United States and Saudi Arabia – have indirectly allowed IS to obtain substantial quantities of anti-armor ammunition,” states the CAR report. “These weapons include anti-tank guided weapons and several varieties of rocket with tandem warheads, which are designed to defeat modern reactive armor.”

Image source: Conflict Armament Research

A PG-9 missile modified to fit a Model 2 recoilless launcher system. Produced in 2016 in Romania, exported to the United States and documented in Mosul in September 2017. Source: Conflict Armament Research

The study further reveals that in one notable instance, a weapons shipment of advanced missile systems switched hands from US intelligence to “moderate” Syrian groups to ISIS in only a two month time period. Though the report is now evoking shock and confusion among pundits, the same weapons research group has actually published similar findings and conclusions going years back into the Syrian conflict.

For example, a previous 2014 Conflict Armament Research report found that Balkan origin anti-tank rockets recovered from ISIS fighters appeared identical to those shipped in 2013 to Syrian rebel forces as part of a CIA program.

And CAR’s damning publications presenting such inconvenient empirical data have been consistent for years, yet were largely ignored and suppressed by analysts and mainstream media who were too busy cheerleading US support for Syrian “rebels” cast as romantic revolutionaries in their struggle to topple Assad and his secular nationalist government. Of course, it’s an old story if you’ve been reading Zero Hedge or the profusion of independent outlets that have long reported the truth about the covert “dirty war” in Syria since nearly the beginning.

Even though it’s now suddenly acceptable and fashionable to admit – as does one recent BBC headline (“The Jihadis You Pay For”) – that the US and Saudi covert program in Syria fuelled the rise of ISIS and various other al-Qaeda linked terror groups, it must be remembered that only a short time ago the mainstream media openly mocked analysts and writers who dared make the connection between the West’s massive covert Syrian rebel aid programs and the al-Qaeda insurgents who so clearly benefited.

When news of the 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report  broke, which described what it called a “Salafist principality” or “an Islamic State” as a strategic asset or buffer in Syria that could be used by the Western coalition “in order to isolate the Syrian regime”, American media outlets dismissed what was labelled a “conspiracy theory” at the time in spite of the hard evidence of a US military intelligence report being made available.

The Daily Beast for example mocked what it called “The ISIS Conspiracy Theory that Ate the Web” – describing those analyzing the Pentagon intelligence document as far-right and far-left loons. This occurred even as the document was taken very seriously and analyzed in-depth by some of the world’s foremost Middle East experts and investigative journalists in foreign outlets like the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Der Spiegal , as well as RT and Al Jazeera.

Daily Beast fail from 2015

And yet now once again “conspiracy theory” has been confirmed as “conspiracy fact”: Conflict Armament Research’s new report out this week is the result of a three-year ground investigation which compiled findings from 40,000 military items recovered from ISIS between the years 2014 and 2017. Its conclusions are scientific, exhaustive, and irrefutable.

View image on Twitter

CAR

International weapon supplies to factions in the Syrian conflict have significantly augmented the quantity and quality of weapons available to IS forces. Read more here http://www.conflictarm.com/download-file/?report_id=2568&file_id=2574 … 

The extensive report confirms what former MI6 spy and British diplomat Alastair Crooke once stated – that the CIA established the basis of a “jihadi Wal-Mart” of sorts – to which ISIS had immediate and easy access. Crooke noted that the weapons program was set up with “plausible deniability” in mind, which would allow its American intelligence sponsors to be shielded from any potential future legal prosecution or public embarrassment. Crooke noted in a 2015 BBC interview that, “The West does not actually hand the weapons to al-Qaida, let alone to ISIS…, but the system they’ve constructed leads precisely to that end.”

This is what enables Buzzfeed, USA Today, and others to report the bombshell findings yet continue to soft peddle the significance by emphasizing things like “weaknesses in oversight and regulation” while also highlighting the “accidental” nature of US-supplied missiles “ending up” in the hands of ISIS terrorists.

Buzzfeed’s coverage of the CAR weapons report is summarized in the article introduction:

A guided anti-tank missile ended up in the hands of ISIS terrorists less than two months after the US government purchased it in late 2015 — highlighting weaknesses in the oversight and regulation of America’s covert arms programs, according to information published Thursday by an arms monitoring group called Conflict Armament Research (CAR).

Though the report says the missile was purchased by the US Army using a contractor, BuzzFeed News has learned that the real customer appears to have been the CIA.It was part of the spy agency’s top secret operation to arm rebels in Syria to fight the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The missile ended up in the hands of ISIS fighters in Iraq, according to the report.

The CIA declined to comment on the Obama-era program to back Syrian rebels, which was canceled by President Trump in July. The Pentagon did not provide information in time for publication.

The missile is one piece of a critical puzzle that is being solved only now, with ISIS on the run: How did the vast terror group arm its war machine? CAR spent three years tracking ISIS weapons as they were recovered by Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish forces — and found that what happened to the missile was no aberration. Indeed, the terror group managed to divert “substantial quantities of anti-armour ammunition” from weapons provided to Syrian opposition forces by the US or Saudi Arabia.

The anti-tank missile recovered from ISIS in February 2016. It originated with the US Army in December 2015. Image source: Conflicts Armament Research, “Weapons of the Islamic State” via Buzzfeed 

But some astute observers might notice the significance of the timeline related to the CIA purchase of one of the anti-tank missiles examined: “A guided anti-tank missile ended up in the hands of ISIS terrorists less than two months after the US government purchased it in late 2015.” As highlighted previously, the CAR team of experts had already documented the trend of CIA weapons delivered to the Syrian battlefield going to ISIS fighters as early as September of 2014. Beyond this 2014 study, a seemingly endless stream of articles going back years published in independent and international media have underscored the reality of ISIS growing and thriving because of Western and Gulf state covert weapons shipments. 

This means that CIA and government analysts knew full well where the weapons were going in real time, yet continued with the program anyway. As former Pentagon intelligence chief Michael Flynn told Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan in a stunningly frank summer 2015 interview (significantly before Flynn was part of the Trump campaign), the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIS and al-Nusra/HTS) against the Syrian government was most certainly “a willful decision.”

Thus General Flynn in the summer of 2015, speaking as recently retired military intelligence officer, warned in no uncertain terms that US-supplied weapons in Syria were going to ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other jihadists. This was so well known at the time that it could be openly stated by a retired high ranking official an a major international program. Flynn also said something similar to both Seymour Hersh and the New York Times in 2015.

But what did the CIA and allied intelligence agencies do? They continued arming the jihadist insurgency in Syria in their efforts to oust Assad. This was indeed “a willful decision” as Flynn affirmed and not mere “weaknesses in oversight and regulation” as Buzzfeed would have us believe.

Read More: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-15/weapons-went-cia-isis-less-two-months-new-study-reveals

[verschwoerer]

CIA Agent Confesses On Deathbed: ‘We Blew Up WTC7 On 9/11’

79-year-old retired CIA agent, Malcom Howard, has made a series of astonishing claims since being released from hospital in New Jersey on Friday and told he has weeks to live. Mr. Howard claims he was involved in the “controlled demolition” of World Trade Center 7, the third building that was destroyed on 9/11.

Mr. Howard, who worked for the CIA for 36 years as an operative, claims he was tapped by senior CIA agents to work on the project due to his engineering background, and early career in the demolition business.

Trained as a civil engineer, Mr. Howard became an explosives expert after being headhunted by the CIA in early 1980s. Mr. Howard says has extensive experience in planting explosives in items as small as cigarette lighters and as large as “80 floor buildings.”

The 79-year-old New Jersey native says he worked on the CIA operation they dubbed “New Century” between May 1997 and September 2001, during a time he says the CIA “was still taking orders from the top.” Mr. Howard says he was part of a cell of 4 operatives tasked with ensuring the demolition was successful.

Mr. Howard says the World Trade Center 7 operation is unique among his demolitions, as it is the only demolition that “we had to pretend wasn’t a demolition job”. He claims he had no problem going through with the deception at the time, because “when you are a patriot, you don’t question the motivation of the CIA or the White House. You assume the bigger purpose is for a greater good. They pick good, loyal people like me, and it breaks my heart to hear the shit talk.”

[John Kerry Admits WTC 7 Was Brought Down By Controlled Demolition]

But even he admits that now, looking back, “Something wasn’t right.”

“No good has come from this. This isn’t the America we envisioned.”

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mamvq7LWqRU  ]

Explaining how the building was bought down, Mr. Howard says, “It was a classic controlled demolition with explosives. We used super-fine military grade nanothermite composite materials as explosives. The hard part was getting thousands of pounds of explosives, fuses and ignition mechanisms into the building without causing too much concern. But almost every single office in the Building 7 was rented by the CIA, the Secret Service, or the military, which made it easier.”

Mr. Howard explains that WTC 7 was “loaded with explosives in strategic places” in the month leading up to the day that changed the course of American history. On September 11th, while the North and South towers burned, fuses were ignited in World Trade Center 7, and nanothermite explosions hollowed out the building, destroying the steel structure, removing the reinforcements, and allowing the office fires to tear through the rest of the building, hollowing it out like a shell.

World Trade Center 7 collapsed into its own footprint at 5:20pm, seven hours after the destruction of WTC 1 and 2. The building shocked witnesses by coming down at the speed of freefall, indicating that it encountered zero resistance on the way down.

Mr. Howard and his colleagues had done their job.

“When the building came down, it was such a rush. Everything went exactly to plan. It was so smooth. Everybody was evacuated. Nobody was hurt in WTC 7. We were celebrating. We kept watching replays of the demolition, we had the whiskey and cigars out, and then all of a sudden the strangest thing happened. We all started to worry that it looked a bit too smooth. We watched the tape again and again and again and we started to get paranoid. It looked like a controlled demolition. We thought shit, people are going to question this. And then we heard that people from the street were reporting that they heard the explosions during the afternoon. When we were told that the BBC botched their report and announced to the world that the building collapsed 20 minutes before it actually did… At that point we really thought the gig was up.”

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltP2t9nq9fI  ]

According to the official 9/11 report issued by the government, WTC 7 collapsed due to “uncontrolled fires” that were caused by debris that floated over from WTC 1 and 2, which had been hit by passenger planes. If the official narrative was true, WTC 7 would be the first tall building in the world to ever collapse due to uncontrolled fires, and the only steel skyscraper in the world to have collapsed into itself, due to “office fires.”

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A9X_8flGeM ]

Mr. Howard and his colleagues feared the public would see through the official narrative and rise up against the government, demanding to be told the truth.

“There were so many loose ends, so much evidence left behind. We thought the public would be all over it. We thought there would be a public uprising that the media couldn’t ignore. They’d be funding investigations and demanding to know why they were being lied to. We thought they’d find chemical composites in the area that would prove Building 7 was blown up.

“We thought there would be a revolution. It would go all the way to the top, to President Bush. He’d be dragged out of the White House.

“But none of that happened. Almost nobody questioned anything. The media shot down anyone who dared question anything they were told.”

Follow the money

Mr. Howard claims he has “no direct knowledge” about the destruction of North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, explaining that “CIA operations are very specific” and that it is common to be working on a larger project while only understanding a small piece of the puzzle.

[9/11: Larry Silverstein Designed New WTC-7 One Year Before Attacks]

But he has advice for investigators seeking to understand the entire puzzle and work out who was behind the most devastating attack on American soil in history.

“Follow the money.”

“When you want to find out who is behind something, just follow the money. Look at the trades made just before 9/11. These are the guys that knew what was coming. The sons of CIA agents, government officials. Close relatives of the most powerful men in America. Cheney, Rumsfeld. They all got rich. It wasn’t just the contracts awarded to their friends in the construction business and the wars and the kickbacks.”

“It was insider trading.”

Many countries including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Monaco launched insider trading investigations in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, believing that if they could prove Al-Qaeda operatives profited on the stock market then they could prove the terror organization was behind the attacks.

And all the evidence pointed to heavy insider trading around 9/11.

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Martino, said: “I think that there are terrorist states and organizations behind speculation on the international markets.” German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his researchers had found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading.”

Even CNN reported that regulators were seeing “ever-clearer signs” that someone “manipulated financial markets ahead of the terror attack in the hope of profiting from it.”

Mr. Howard says that a serious study of who profited on the stock market from 9/11 would “tear the heart out of the oligarchy in America.”

“There is only one organization that spans the entire world, and let me tell you now, it isn’t and it never was al-Qaeda.”

It’s the CIA.

“There could never be a real investigation. The entire shadow government, as you call them now, are implicated.”

The 79-year-old, spending his final weeks at home, said he doesn’t expect to be taken into custody following his confession because “then they’d have to go after everyone else. They will just use the media to attack me. They are all on the payroll to suppress everything around 9/11.”

http://yournewswire.com/cia-911-wtc7/