#we all become its staunchest defenders

[thevalleyisjolly]

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[docpiplup]

Fifth part of the bookscans of Al Andalus. Historical Figures, here's the previous part

expelled from their homes, since they had not surrendered peacefully, but had fought.

Charlemagne, chastened, realized that the pacts signed with the Muslim lords of northern Spain deserved no trust. He would never set foot on the Peninsula again, and subsequently dedicated itself to strengthening its borders with Hispanic Islam. For this he created the kingdom of Aquitaine, whose mission consisted of not taking our eyes off the activity of the Muslims of the places bordering Gaul.

From the disaster suffered by Charlemagne in Roncesvalles we have remains what some consider the most beautiful song of deeds of literature, La Chanson de Roland, an authentic gem of the epic poetry. Within the Spanish Ballads we find two romances that have this fact as their theme: Of the battle of Roncesvalles and the Romance of Doña Alda. The Basques also preserve a song dedicated to Roncesvalles, the Altabizaren cantua, which according to the Irishman Macnab, was written in the same century in which this event took place. But Ibn al-Arabí, who had been the originator of this whole story, was not reflected in any of these beautiful romances!

Amrus ben Yusuf: the muladí of Huesca

Muladí comes from an Arabic word that translates as "mixed race or foreigner", and was applied to those Christians who converted to Islam and continued living among the Muslims. There were many who decided to abandon Christianity, possibly for practical reasons, including stopping paying taxes, or reaching a position of social relevance among the new owners of the country and there were not a few who achieved it. There was also sincere converts, since in those centuries the roots of the Christianity was not as deep as it may seem.

This was the case of our character, Amrus ben Yusuf, whom the Christian chronicles will know him as Amorroz, born in Huesca and one of the staunchest defenders of the policies of al-Hakam I. After the death of Abd al-Rahman I, his son Hisham, a very pious emir, introducer of the Maliki doctrine in Spain, and who Driven by his religious fervor, he dedicated himself to waging war on the Northern Christians. Al-Andalus remained at peace and therefore the new emir was able to dedicate himself

to harass the Asturian monarchy. But his reign was to be very short, just seven years, and was succeeded by his second son, al-Hakam I.

But the arrival of the new emir was greeted with rebellions in all the border marches. In the most remote areas of Córdoba, the authority of the emir hardly represented anything and the governors lived in a regime of almost total independence. The insurrections against the power of the emirate were more than frequent and al-Hakam had the unfortunate luck to have to face them all. In this hard task, he will have a paladin who will always be at his side: Amrus, who will not hesitate to take radical measures when the matter is serious. This muladí would become famous on what was known as the “day of the pit.”

In the year 797, the always restless Toledo, inhabited mostly by muladíes, rose up against the Umayyad power to recognize a rebel Ubayd Allah ben Jamir, who together with a poet of Toledo, Girbib ben Abd Allah, dissatisfied with the emir, had in charge of calming down the spirits. It wasn't the first time this happen, nor would it be the last, and al-Hakam's predecessors had already had to work hard to put a stop to the rebels of Toledo.

Amrus, who at that time ruled the stronghold of Huesca, was commissioned by the emir to subdue that uprising by the means that it considers opportune. And there went Amrus willing not to disappoint his lord.

He began by eliminating the leader of the rebellion, Ubayd Allah ben Jamir, who fell into a trap prepared by him and then decided to give a lesson to the people of Toledo that they would find difficult to forget.

Amrus, according to him to avoid friction with the population, said that the best would be that, along with his troops, he would settle on a mound near the city. Towards the northwest, near the bridge over the Tagus River, rose a small fortress, possibly on the site now occupied by the Alcazar. When the enclosure was more or less finished, the emir, in agreement with Amrus, he sent an army under the command of his son, the prince Abd al-Rahman, pretending that he was going on an expedition against the Christians and that "coincidentally" had to pass near Toledo. It was a good occasion to invite the prince to visit Toledo, and Amrus, accompanied by the most important people of the city, they came out to receive him and begged him to honor them with his presence.

Abd al-Rahman seemed somewhat reluctant to accept the invitation, but In the end he agreed to it and to celebrate it the most influential mula-díes of Toledo were invited to the new fortress to celebrate a banquet in honor of the emir's son. Until then everything was more or less normal, but as the guests arrived, they became enter through a narrow passage, at the very edge of a large ditch, and the Amrus's executioners cut off their heads, while their bodies was thrown into the pit. That was the " castle of you will go and no you will come back"!

The number of those beheaded was very large. Maybe not as much as 5,000, according to some chroniclers; maybe about 700

being a very high number. What the leading class of Toledo was thus beheaded and the terrible impression produced by this event remained, for a long time, both among the Muslims and among the muladies of Toledo and from other cities.

Dozy narrates that terrible day like this: "At daybreak, a doctor that had not seen anyone leave through either of the two door, became suspicious and asked the people gathered near the entrance of the castle what had happened to the guests who had arrived early. "They must have gone out through the other door," they answered- It's strange!-the doctor then objected -; I have been for some time at the other door and I haven't seen anyone leave. After watching the steam rising above the walls, exclaimed:

Unfortunates! I swear to you that this vapor is not the smoke of a feast, but the vapor of the shed blood of your brothers, beheaded"

When things got really bad, al-Hakam knew that he could count on Amrus and so he also entrusted him with the submission of Zaragoza, the capital of the Upper March, as seditious as Toledo.

After the advent of al-Hakam, the two best generals of his father, Abd al-Karim ben Mugith and his brother, Abd al-Malik, in those moments at enmity with the new emir, they tried to evict the Aragonese chief Bahlul ben Marzuq from Zaragoza, to They settled in the city, but they did not succeed. He got a Cordoban army, and

Bahlul fled towards upper Aragon. Later this Bahlul, would take over Huesca, while other small rebellions by the Banu Qasi took place, who were descendants, it seems, of Musa ben Fortún, that Aragonese count who converted to Islam in the first moments of the conquest.

Given this panorama, it was evident that the action of Amrus who, also with full powers of the emir, came to Zaragoza in 802. Its activity was frenetic. Persecuted and killed Bahlul; took over the fiefdom of the Banu Qasi, and harshly punished to the muladíes of Huesca for their rebellious attitude. In that same year he ordered the construction of the stronghold of Tudela, between Zaragoza and Pamplona, an intermediate point that would serve as support in that always upheaval area. In this stronghold there was his son, Yusuf, commanding a strong garrison. He reinforced the walls of Huesca and put one of his cousins in charge of this city. Al-Hakam could sleep peacefully when it came to the Upper March... but even the most faithful soul is tempted in some occasions.

Installed on the banks of the Ebro, Amrus lived like a prince, enjoying your well-earned peace of mind. He had everything, or almost everything he could want, but he began to think that he too, which had garnered so much success for the emir of Cordoba, could become independent of his tutelage. It seems that he came to engage conversations with the Frankish monarch, Louis the Pious, so that supported their independence intentions and all these maneuvers reached al-Hakam's ears. The emir acted intelligent, and instead of openly declaring war on that subject that now

showed to be unfaithful, but that he had served him so many times with loyalty, he sent troops to the border, under the command of General Abd al-Karim ben Mugith, urging him not to act with the weapons until seeing Amrus's reaction to the message that the emir gave him.

This message from al-Hakam was written in the most praiseworthy and affectionate towards the muladí that you can imagine and Amrus, after reading it, was ashamed of his thoughts. He left Zaragoza and marched towards Córdoba to, once again, bear witness the emir his fidelity. Al-Hakam showered him with attention and gifts and confirmed him in the government of the Upper March. Amrus, after of this trip, he only lived two years and at his death the son of the emir, Abd al-Rahman, took charge of this March, for some time, to later pass to the son of Amrus, such was the good memory that his father had left in the emirate of Cordoba.

The "Rabadis": adventurous spirits

Most historians consider the emir al-Ha-kam I despotic and cruel. There is no doubt that his character was too impulsive and his justice extremely summary, but it is also true that his reign was affected by a series of rebellions and serious events that he had to repress as best he could. He never enjoyed the appreciation of his subjects who considered him inflexible, little inclined to piety, although it was not like that, abusive with taxes and little given to listening advice from no one. However, Dozy believes that he also had humanitarian feelings, like any other man, and that, despite of his cruel actions, his bad reputation was due, especially, to the wrath of the rebellious alfaquis, whom this emir never appreciated. And in this context, the terrible events of the suburb, rabad in Arabic, took place.

The emiral city of Córdoba had grown a lot. From Africa and from the East any Arabs and Berbers from the Maghreb continually arrived attracted by the prosperity of al-Andalus. The mosque had to be expanded larger to accommodate the number of believers who came to pray to it, and

The city was expanding beyond its walls. After the Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir was restored, there was no longer a problem for the population to settle in a suburb on the left bank of the river, which reached the vicinity from a village, Shaqunda, ancient Roman Secunda.

The inhabitants of this suburb were of very diverse origins and they carried out a multitude of diverse jobs. Besides of what could be considered the Cordoba plebs, there were many small Mullawad and Christian artisans and merchants, but due to its proximity to the main mosque and the emiral palace, many Cordobans who were employed, either in the mosque or in the palace, they settled there. Among this diverse population, also found the alfaquíes, religious leaders of the doctrine Malikí, who had reached a very prominent position and a very notable influence at court, especially with the emir Hisham, father of al-Hakam I.

This suburb will soon become a focus of discontent towards the emir's policy, promoted by the same alfaquies who with al-Hakam had neither the appreciation nor the influence that they achieved with his predecessor. On the other hand, in the city al-Hakam did not enjoy of many sympathies so it was only a matter of time before the situation exploded.

And it happened that one day a rumor spread through the city that seventy-two leading citizens had been executed and that their corpses were going to be exposed, crucified, on the right bank of the Guadalquivir. The mood be-

gan to exalt, without knowing or without asking themselves the reason for these executions. What happened was that a plot had been hatched to overthrow the emir and put in his place one of his cousins, the Umayyad Muhammad ben al-Qasim. Many notable people from the Córdoba of that time were involved in this conspiracy. Al-Hakam's cousin pretended to accept the proposal, but was immediately to tell the emir, also providing him with the list of the conspirators. Inthat same day, the emir ordered them to be arrested and executed, taking advantage of the occasion to order the murder of two of his uncles, sons of Abd al-Rahman I, who had been imprisoned since his ascension to the throne, possibly to prevent them from rebelling against him or challenging him for power. Between the crucified were figures of great social relevance, such as the son of a cadi, a palace eunuch, a market inspector and even a alfaqui. The impression that this action produced in Córdoba could not be more negative towards the emir, and the discontent, already notable, increased.

There was a plotting everywhere, at any time of the day. In the mosques, in the markets, in the streets discontent was chewed, while everyone distrusted everyone, believing they saw spies and confidants of the emir throughout the entire city.

Al-Hakam, aware of the mood, equipped himself withweapons, restored the walls, surrounded himself with a strong personal guard under the command of a Christian, Count Rabí, and prepared himself for the worst.

[bea-lele-carmen]

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

July 2020

One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.

I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society. [1]

Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points. Anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that which quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.

The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.

The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.

The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.

And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.

When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.

In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive calls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" (It's rather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, but that's the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.) The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will the neighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is "To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is "Eppur si muove."

The four types are not equally common. There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than independent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the smallest.

Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.

Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, In other words , that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders.

I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work. [2]

Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. [3]

In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting — that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.

As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're the canaries in this coalmine.

The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.

You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.

The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned. [4]

The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even on the ground that's safe.

In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves was to congregate in a handful of places — first in courts, and later in communities — where they could to some extent make their own rules. Places where people work with ideas tend to have customs protecting free inquiry, for the same reason wafer fabs have powerful air filters, or recording studios good sound insulation. For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, communities were the safest places to be.

That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began in the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has recently flared up again with the arrival of social media. This seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley. Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded, they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such as they could only have dreamed of.

On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left. [5]

Though I've spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I can't predict how it plays out. Could some reverse the current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want to congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandon them? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened.

But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at protecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised, they'll create new ones. That may require some imagination. But imagination is, after all, their specialty.

[afrolesbikita]

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WASHINGTON — As U.S. Rep. Chip Roy made known his intent Thursday to become the third-ranking House Republican, former President Donald Trump released a statement of condemnation of the Austin Republican and reiterated his endorsement for Roy’s rival for the post.

“Can’t imagine Republican House Members would go with Chip Roy—he has not done a great job, and will probably be successfully primaried in his own district,” Trump said in a press release. “I support Elise, by far, over Chip!”

The “Elise” in reference is U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, an Upstate New York Republican. The flare-up illustrated the increasingly complicated fault lines within the House GOP that its leaders had hoped to put behind them. On Wednesday, House Republicans voted to oust their current conference chair, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, over her willingness to challenge the former president’s repeated efforts to undermine the public’s perception of the country’s election integrity and her vote to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The position at issue, the House GOP conference chair, manages many of the day-to-day inner workings of the conference and is a key person in party messaging to the public.

Roy is without question one of the most conservative members of Congress, but he also has a contrarian streak that has at times put him at odds with the former president. Stefanik, meanwhile, cut a moderate image when she was first elected in 2014 but slowly migrated into the camp of Trump’s staunchest defenders.

A day ahead of the vote, all indicators are that conservative ideology is a diminishing force among House Republicans. Instead, complete loyalty to Trump and a willingness to repeat his lies about the 2020 election are a more valued attribute in House Republican leadership.

Roy was among a small handful of Texas Republicans who voted against overturning the election in January, and he delivered an irate speech on the House floor that was critical of Trump in the raw days after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. He did not, however, vote for impeachment, citing disagreements with the Democratic drafting of the articles of impeachment.

Minutes after the Trump statement, the conservative group FreedomWorks released a statement of support in Roy.

“We are pleased to hear that Rep. Chip Roy will be nominated for Chairman of the House Republican Conference,” said FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon. “Rep. Roy has a lifetime 100% voting record on our scorecard. He has demonstrated that Republicans can legislate based on conservative principles and also get elected in competitive districts.”

As for Trump’s implicit threat of creating a troublesome primary for Roy, that development remains to be seen. The district has a well-known and organized pro-Trump contingent.

But Roy has also demonstrated deft political skills in his first two campaigns. The sophomore overcame a double-digit Republican candidate field when he ran for the Hill Country-based seat in 2018, and he defeated former state Sen. Wendy Davis during his 2020 general election by larger margins than most political observers anticipated.

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[duhragonball]

[FIC] Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan (134/?)

Disclaimer: This story features characters and concepts based on Dragon Ball, which is a trademark of Bird Studio/Shueisha and Toei Animation.   This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made on this work by me. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don’t archive it without my permission. Don’t be shy.

Continuity Note: About 1000 years before the events of Dragon Ball Z.

[14 November, 233 Before Age. Interstellar Space.]

King Rehval would die, very soon. As Luffa led her fleet of warships to his new home, there were a multitude other thoughts running through her mind, but she made sure to focus on her sole objective. Rehval. Must. Die.

Her grudge against him went back to the beginning. Her mother was an anti-monarchist who left the Saiyan Kingdom before Luffa was born. Eventually, Luffa's mother entered into a mercenary partnership with Orij, Luffa's father, and the young family roamed the stars in search of adventure. When Luffa was ten years old, Orij betrayed her mother. He was jealous of his wife's power, and planned to exploit her, until he realized that their daughter had inherited the same potential.

Orij's plan went into effect when Luffa was nineteen. By then, Luffa had taken a mate of her own, Kandai, and Orij conspired with him to betray Luffa to the alien Tikosi. Their ghastly experiments would seek to reverse-engineer the secrets of Luffa's hidden power, and then they would share their findings with Orij. When the Tikosi learned Luffa was pregnant with Kandai's child, they simply removed the fetus, as it impeded their research.

The horrors Luffa experienced during that awful nineteenth year pushed her body through a harrowing transformation. Eventually, Luffa would recognize herself as the Legendary Super Saiyan, a once-in-a-millennium warrior. At the time, she thought she had become a monster, too horrible for even herself to contemplate. The power was satisfying while she took bloody revenge against her tormentors, but it never really went away. Even when she transformed back into her "normal" self, it was still there, that ever-present thing lurking just beneath her skin, eager to shine its terrible light on the universe once again.

Super Luffa was great for slaughtering Tikosi, and for making easy money in the mercenary business, but the power wasn't very helpful for tracking down her treacherous husband, who had gone into hiding when he learned that she had survived. One of the main reasons Luffa founded the interstellar Federation was to expand her contacts through the galaxy. The Federation's member worlds were happy to have her on their side; in return, their spies gave Kandai fewer places to hide. But when she finally caught up to him, he revealed that when the Tikosi removed their unborn child from her body, they had given it over to him. He had sold the remains to King Rehval, who apparently had his own interests in the Tikosi's research.

And Super Luffa wasn't much use in unraveling that mystery either. It only made sense that the King of the Saiyans would see her as a threat to his rule. It also made sense that he might hope to find some weakness by studying Luffa's offspring. What Luffa hadn't expected was the sheer depth of Rehval's treachery. She had never respected the man. Any Saiyan who called himself "king" was a fool in her book, but even setting that aside, he was a statesman, desperate to turn their people into some nation-state with a place among the galactic powers. He wanted the Saiyans to assimilate with the rest of the universe: lop off their tails, dress in alien finery, and pass themselves off as well-behaved citizens of a wider community. The thought of it sickened Luffa, but it was even worse than that. Rehval was an alchemist too. Instead of testing his might in combat, he relied on magical drugs and secret potions to enhance his power. "Rehval" wasn't even his real name. He simply assumed the identity of his older brother, then usurped his father's throne when it suited his purposes.

Rather than face Luffa directly, Rehval tried to seduce and deceive her, leading her into a trap that would strand her on an uninhabitable planet. To keep her occupied until the trap was sprung, Rehval revealed that the fetus he had purchased from Kandai had survived. Rehval was a proponent of gestating Saiyan infants in life support machines, and somehow he had managed to bring her son to term. He then aged the boy to adolescence, and trained him to be his staunchest defender and Luffa's sworn enemy. But the gravest insult, in Luffa's eyes, was that he dared to give the boy a name-- "Xibuyas". It was sacrilige. By Saiyan custom, the right to name a child belonged to the mother alone.

But what did King Rehval care for Saiyan custom? To him, it was just another tool, to be manipulated or discarded when it no longer served his purposes. Xibuyas was uncommonly strong, though Luffa had no way to tell if he had inherited her Super Saiyan strength, or if he was given alchemical enhancements to make him a better enforcer. Rehval wasn't satisfied with merely ruling over the Saiyans, he wanted to control their destiny, their culture, even their very genome. He envisioned a world where Saiyans would be bred like livestock, mated to produce hardier offspring, and her son was simply the stud he had chosen to sire his grandchildren. The very thought of it made her blood boil.

She had escaped his trap, and so he evacuated his throneworld of Saiya, fearing (rightfully) that she would return and destroy everything he had built. Luffa expected to find him cowering in some remote hideaway, but instead he launched a new plan, the Jindan Cult. Assuming the name of Trismegistus now, Rehval recruited Saiyans from all over the galaxy, promising them a potion that would magnify their powers. All he asked in return was absolute control over every aspect of their lives. Really, it wasn't all that different from the plans he had as the ruler of Planet Saiya, only now he wasn't bothering with diplomatic niceties or expensive suits.

The only thing standing in his way was still Luffa, so he launched a series of invasions into her Federation, designed to exploit her compassion for its people and to wear her down. It might have worked, too, except she had help from the fortuneteller Dotz, who predicted his strikes before they took place, and from Rehval's own daughter, the Princess Seltiss. Disillusioned with her father's misrule, the young Princess formed her own Saiyan alliance to serve as an alternative to Rehval's government. Luffa didn't trust her, but they had a common enemy, and Xibuyas was loyal to Seltiss, so at least they had the power they needed to fend off the attacks.

Just when it seemed that there would be no end to the war, Guwar arrived at her doorstep, offering to lead her to Rehval's new base on Nagaoka. A Saiyan mathematician, Guwar had joined his cult, only to realize that Rehval's "leadership" would only get them all killed, or at best, reduce them to a slave species. His defection only proved that Rehval was truly mad, and that his plans were rotten enough that even his own henchmen couldn't accept them.

And so, very soon, Luffa would destroy him, utterly and finally, for the defense of the Federation, for the freedom of her own species, and for herself.

"Five minutes before we drop out of superluminous," she said from the captain's chair of her yacht's bridge. "No one's reported any unusual sensor activity. What about you, Katem?"

"Nothing," Xibuyas said, visibly irritated by the name she used to address him. Luffa would have preferred to have him aboard her own ship, if only to keep a closer eye on the boy, but the Saiyan Free Company had its own fleet, and her attack plan would require him to take up position on the opposite side of the planet. Spending time with her son would have to wait for another day. For now, she would have to settle for the image of his face on the viewscreen.

"Rehval raised you, boy," she said. "Any idea what this means? Guwar told us there wouldn't be much in the way of advance defenses, but I thought we'd see more than this."

"Rehval's servants raised me," he said with a sneer. "And he expects secrecy to be his greatest defense. He believes that no one knows where to find him, so he probably has no idea that we're on our way to kill him."

"Or he's got some escape route set up on the planet," Luffa said. "All right, we'll stick to the original plan. Group A takes the northern hemisphere, Group B takes the south, Group C covers our backs. Carpet bomb the whole thing, and we'll see what they can do about it."

"Pointless," Xibuyas grumbled. "Destroy the entire planet, and they all die in one stroke. I could do it easily, and so could you."

"Too easy," Luffa said. "He'll be prepared for that. I want to see what his preparations are. Let him think he's dealing with a conventional attack before we reveal our true strength."

"If you're so afraid that he'll flee--"

"He seems to be convinced that this planet he's on holds some sort of special power for him," Luffa explained. "If that's true, then he won't give it up without a fight. I want to lure him into thinking he has a chance. We might even be able to get a siege going."

He sighed and sank into his chair. "Fine, have it your way," he said. "There's no arguing with you. We'll send word once Group B is in position."

He signed off, and Luffa made a bloodthirsty smile as she switched the viewscreen to display the Nagaoka system, which was rapidly coming into view. Her son hated her, but he was alive, and soon she would repay the bastard who tried to take him from her. Her wife, Zatte, was in the engine room, making last-minute preparations for the battle. Zatte had elaborate dreams that this battle would mark the beginning of a new era for Saiyan-kind, and maybe she was right, though Luffa never cared for the idea of herself as a Saiyan messiah. It didn't matter. For once in her life, everything was going perfectly.

She gripped the armrests of her seat and leaned forward in anticipation.

*******

[14 November, 233 Before Age. Nagaoka.]

Planet Nagaoka was devoid of intelligent life, save for the Jindan compound, a mostly subterranean facility. Aside from the shipyard and a few other surrounding structures, the planet would have seemed deserted. A thick cloud cover concealed the surface completely, but Guwar had provided the coordinates of the compound. As Zatte escorted him to the bridge, he saw part of the planet on the viewscreen, and he knew the compound lay directly below.

"I thought you'd want to see this," Luffa said as the doorway closed behind him. She never took her eyes off the planet. "They're about to strafe the surface."

"You're just going to blow it up from orbit?" he asked.

"For starters," Luffa said. "If anything survives, we'll go from there. Something wrong with that?"

"I just... I thought you were going to send in ground troops on the far side," he said. "Advance on the compound from the surface, and fight them all hand-to-hand."

Luffa looked at him curiously. "I've had my fill of fighting with these clowns," she said. "There's enough of them down there that even I would have trouble, and I'm not going to send troops down there to die for no reason. If you wanted suicide missions, maybe you shouldn't have switched sides. Rehval would have sent you to your death soon enough."

"I... I had friends down there," he said. "Rehval's the only one you're after, right?"

Luffa turned and spit on the deck. At last, Guwar had her full attention, and he instantly regretted it. He had seen her transform in front of him earlier, when he was first brought aboard her ship. That had been frightening enough, watching black Saiyan hair glowing like molten iron. But she was in her normal form now, or at least as normal as she ever could be, and as she glared at him, he felt that the grim look in her eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life.

"Now you listen to me," she said. "I don't give a damn about your 'friends'. The moment they joined forces with that bastard, their fates were sealed. Don't pretend you thought this was going to turn out any other way."

Guwar's throat went dry. "You're right," he said. "Just get it over with."

Luffa returned to her work, as if he hadn't spoken at all. He looked over to Zatte, the blue-skinned woman who seemed to serve as Luffa's entire crew for this ship. It was ironic to look to an alien for empathy, but he had hoped that she, at least, might appreciate his mixed emotions about this moment. If nothing else, he expected her to be somewhat horrified at the idea of bombing an entire planet to wipe out a single installation. But instead, Zatte had a curious sort of glow in her expression, not unlike the warriors in the Jindan Cult just before they were sent off to their deaths. Guwar had no idea what sort of hold Luffa had on Zatte, but she was fully committed to this action, come what may.

Luffa pressed a button on the console mounted near her left arm. "All ships, fire at will," she said.

A moment later, they did. Gawar watched as hundreds of orange streaks emerged from the edges of the viewscreen and converged on the planet below. It looked like most of the fire was concentrated in a single spot, which he assumed was the compound. But that was only part of it. There energy blasts raining down across every part of the planet that he could see. He could only guess that there were ships positioned on the opposite side covering that hemisphere too.

"There's... there's only the one complex," he said looking back at Luffa. "You're just wasting ammunition, shooting at nothing."

"And you really think I would trust you that far?" Luffa said with a snort. "Even if you have been honest with me, Rehval could still have other bases set up that he never told you about. It all burns. Today. And don't worry your pretty little head about our ammunition, Guwar. I made sure we brought plenty."

Guwar swallowed hard and turned back to face the viewscreen. He could sense the ki energy from the planet dropping as the bombardment continued. Were the cultists unable to fight back? Had Luffa taken them completely by surprise? Or was this Rehval's endgame all along? Maybe he knew all along that it would end this way, and he had led his flock to their doom. For a moment, he wondered if Rehval had been waiting for Guwar to betray him, if perhaps he had wanted Luffa to come to this place and rain fire upon him.

And then he noticed that the ki from the planet wasn't dropping anymore, and that the planet itself didn't look any different than it had before the attack began. Glancing back at the captain's chair, he saw that Luffa had noticed too.

"Scan the planet," Luffa said to Zatte. "Something's wrong down there."

"Life sign readings haven't changed since we started attacking," Zatte said.

"I told you about that," Guwar said. "They have a device to scramble sensors so you can't tell there's any humanoid biopatterns. That way if a ship drops by, they'll think Nagaoka's uninhabited and move on."

"Yeah, I know," Zatte said. "I'm not scanning for humanoids. I'm talking about trees, grass, everything. Nothing's dying down there. It's like we haven't put a dent in it..."

"You didn't say anything about a force field," Luffa said to Guwar. The look on her face was one of accusation, but not surprise.

"As far as I know, they didn't have one," Guwar protested.

"They don't have one," Zatte said. "I don't know what's going on here, but it can't be a force field generator. To cover the entire planet, you'd need an enormous power source, way too big to hide with a cloaking device. I should be able to detect a power signature for something that big, and there's nothing like that on the surface! I don't know what this is... I...!"

She continued tapping keys on the tactical console, and Luffa rose from her seat. "I'm going to the cargo bay," she said. "Get ready to open the bay door for me."

"You're going to attack them yourself?" Zatte asked. "But what if--?"

"Hail the rest of the fleet," Luffa said. "If I'm right, I can punch a hole in... whatever this is... then maybe we can land some ships, play it the way Guwar had in mind. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Guwar?"

He didn't answer, as he really didn't know what to say. Luffa grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the lift.

"Come on," she said, "you can watch."

*******

The cargo hold was mostly empty. Luffa and Zatte had moved most of the supplies to other parts of the ship, leaving only a small, one-person craft.

"Like it?" Luffa asked. She patted the hull of the craft with her gloved hand as they crossed the bay. "My wife captured it from some felinoid raider who tried to impersonate a Saiyan. He thought he could bluff his way to an easy plunder--" She pointed at the bridge of her nose and bared her teeth-- "but all he got was a plasma bolt between his eyes. She's a crack shot."

"Y-your wife?" Guwar asked. "You mean that blue lady on the bridge--?"

"Felinoid!" Luffa growled, ignoring his question. The brown fur on her tail was standing on end, and Guwar suddenly became very aware of his own tail being missing.

"I see that crap all the time, you know? People mistake any humanoid with a tail for one of us," she said. "So weaklings and cowards try to use that to their advantage. Trade on our reputation as a fearsome warrior race. Except we're not so fearsome, are we, Guwar?"

She went to a cabinet mounted to the wall and removed a pair of masks. "Put this on," she said as she shoved one into his hands. He strapped it to his face, letting the flexible hose attached to it dangle from his chin.

"The Saiyans are afraid," she said. "My mother was afraid of the kings, and my father was afraid of my mother, and I was afraid of my father for a while. You and your cult buddies were afraid of me, so what did you do? Run to the biggest coward you could find and beg him for some snake oil. And now he's hiding under his rock, and they're all hiding with him. Makes you wonder what they're so afraid of."

She pulled out a gas cylinder and handed it to him, then found a second and started connecting it to her own mask. As she worked on the fittings, she transformed, suddenly illuminating the bay with a preternatural golden glow. Startled, Guwar took a step back, but Luffa barely reacted at all, as if she hadn't even noticed what she had done.

"I think we're afraid of ourselves," Luffa said. "I know I am. I turned into this thing for the first time and it scared the hell out of me. It still does sometimes. But all I am is stronger. Angrier. More eager for battle. I'm just like you Guwar, only more. Why'd you cut your tail off? Was it because he told you to? So you could fit in better with polite society? Or was it because you were afraid of what the tail means? Of who you really are. Inside?"

She paused her work long enough to tap her fist against her chest, and gave him a knowing look. "Felinoids try to impersonate us Saiyans, and meanwhile we Saiyans are doing our best to disguise ourselves as anything else. We're ashamed of ourselves for being ashamed of ourselves. That's how I see it. I started hanging out with aliens, and I started to notice how crummy Saiyans can really be to people. I never gave it much thought before, but we're all pretty rotten, aren't we?"

"What are you talking about?" Guwar mumbled, but not loud enough to be heard over the steady pulse of Luffa's golden aura.

She pointed at her gleaming yellow hair. "So does this mean I've risen above all that rotten stuff?" she asked. "Or does it make me the worst of us all?"

She didn't wait for him to reply. Instead, she put the mask over her face and tapped the communicator on the nearest wall panel to call the bridge. "We're ready down here," she said, her voice muffled by the mask. After she shut off the channel, she looked back at Guwar and shrugged.

"I can't talk to my wife about this sort of thing, you know. She thinks I can save the Saiyans, but me? I think I'm just part of the problem."

Guwar could hear her voice even more clearly now than he could before they put the masks on. Then he finally realized she was speaking to him telepathically. Most Saiyans had the ability to communicate this way, but they rarely used it. They couldn't read minds-- only Luffa seemed to know how to do that, and only then by making physical contact-- but they could talk to other people with their thoughts. So why didn't Saiyans use that ability more often? Was it fear? Was Luffa right about them? Maybe every Saiyan could read minds like she could, and no one else had the courage to try.

As he pondered this, the cargo bay door opened, revealing the grey clouds of Nagaoka below. Guwar was suddenly reminded of Salziff, the Saiyan who had led him to the Jindan Cult. Salziff had been kicked out of the order, and his Jindan power had been withdrawn, leaving him weaker than he had been before he joined. In his desperate attempt to regain what he had lost, Salziff had turned to performance enhancing drugs, and ravaged what was left of his health. He begged Guwar not to search for Jindan, and said that Guwar would rue the day Salziff told him how to find it. The gloom over Nagaoka looked very much like the pallid complexion of Salziff's face. Guwar wondered if the poor wretch was still alive. Guwar wondered about his own life expectancy, now that the Jindan power had been withdrawn from him as well.

There was an invisible force field that kept the air inside the bay while the door was open. It flickered beautifully for a moment as it deactivated, and Guwar felt the air rushing out into space. Weakened as he was, he still had more than enough strength to keep his footing, but he still grabbed hold of a handrail to be safe. The temperature dropped rapidly inside the bay, but his ki was strong enough to protect him from the cold as well. The great irony of his life was that he was considered a weakling by the standards of his own species, and yet he had so much power compared to most beings in the universe. He felt completely helpless as he watched Luffa stand at the edge of the bay, raising her hands to attack an entire planet.

He could hear her screaming, in spite of the wind, the sound of her aura, even the muffling effect of her mask. Her hands glowed so brightly that it hurt to look at them, so he focused on the air tank she had slung over her shoulder. For a brief moment, he wondered if he could burst the tank and knock her out of the ship quickly enough for her to asphyxiate, but decided that this would be suicidal to attempt. Even if it worked, he would still have to contend with her wife on the bridge, and her fleet around the planet, and the cult on the planet itself. Guwar didn't know about other Saiyans, but Luffa was right about him. He was afraid, because it seemed like no matter what he did, what side he chose, he would always be under someone else's power. At least Luffa's side could save the universe from Rehval's madness, but that wouldn't improve Guwar's prospects much.

At last, she brought her hands together and launched a spectacular beam of golden energy from her hands. Guwar watched it shoot down to the planet like some impossibly straight bolt of lightning. He had never sensed such an amazing power before. It was beyond anything he had ever imagined. It was enough to destroy a dozen planets. And then, when the beam of irresistable light reached the dismal clouds of Nagaoka...

...it dispersed. The energy spread across the clouds and vanished, like so much milk spilling onto a napkin. The clouds parted, revealing a tiny section of Nagaoka's surface, but there was no explosion, no damage. Soon enough, the clouds drifted back together, and the surface was hidden once again.

Luffa stared out of the bay in disbelief, and then after a few seconds, Guwar noticed a yellow glow on the edge of Nagaoka's disk. A second later, he could sense it, too.

"What... what's happening?" he asked. He hoped that this was somehow part of her technique, but the way she moved her tail told him that she was just as confused as he was.

Finally, beams of yellow light started shooting out from the clouds from every direction. It seemed to Guwar that the planet had somehow absorbed her attack, divided it, and fired it back out into space. For a moment, he worried that this was a counterattack from the cult, except the beams didn't seem to be aimed anywhere in particular. He reached out with his ki senses and quickly determined that most of the fleet was nowhere near the paths of these beams. Even so, he did sense a few power levels that winked out of existence as the deadly energy connected with their ships.

Angrily, Luffa stormed to the bay door controls and restored the force field. Air rushed in to repressurize the hold, and she moved on to the wall panel to call the bridge. "What's going on?" she shouted over the thrum of the ventilation system.

"Six ships are reporting heavy damage!" Zatte's voice called back. "One completely destroyed! I... Luffa, that was your energy it shot back at us!"

"I know that!" Luffa snapped. "How does a force field reflect that kind of power?!"

"I told you, it's not a force field!" Zatte said. "It's too big for that, and too... It's more like when I... oh no. Oh, Providence, no."

"What's wrong?" Luffa asked. For every second that passed without a reply, she grew more agitated. Finally, she dug her fingers into the wall and ripped the comm panel out entirely.

"We're going back to the bridge!" she shouted as she tossed the torn panel to the deck. But Guwar didn't move. He was too busy looking at the planet.

"Well? What are you gawking at?" Luffa demanded as she shrugged off her air canister and mask.

"I think you need to see this," Guwar said ominously. A mathematician by trade, he preferred not to give such vague answers, but in this case, he simply couldn't find the words.

"See what?!" Luffa said impatiently as she shrugged off her mask and air cylinder. And then she finally turned to face the bay door, and saw it immediately. The clouds on Nagaoka had shifted, swirling into an unnatural pattern. They were still moving, but it was clear that they were forming an image of a face, and even before that image had come into focus, there was no mistaking whose face it was.

"Hello, Luffa," said the voice of King Rehval.

He was speaking into their minds, just as Luffa had done before. What made it even stranger, Guwar thought, was that the lips on the cloud-image moved as though it were speaking the words.

"I'm so glad that you've finally arrived," the cloud-Rehval seemed to say. "Now, at last, we can put all of this to an end."

NEXT: The Thrice Blessed Who Will Transform the Universe.

[officialleehadan]

Gold Glow

Hello darlings! You guessed it! Another $5+ prompt!

This one is for Bradford! Thank you so much for your support, darling! I hope you love this story!

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“I’m not good with a weapon.”

Tom was sitting on the balcony of Hel’s hotel room. She, as it happened, had paid extra just to have the little outdoor space. It was, apparently, because both Fenris and Harvey smoked and would do so inside if she didn’t give them somewhere else. The tiny bistro table and chairs were also the perfect place to take a mug of coffee and talk.

The family meeting, called because Thor was still sniffing around, and because Harvey would almost certainly go after him if left unsupervised, went well. Tom could hear Cassandra inside, talking with all her uncles. She would never be safer than she was right now, with Jormandgr, Sleipnir, Fenris, and Harvey all there to guard her. Tom was glad for the odd safety of Loki’s Brood all in one place. There was no chance that someone was getting ambushed alone somewhere when they were together like this, and he didn’t think that anyone, including Thor, was stupid enough to take a run at all of them at once.

Fortunately, the safety also gave him a minute to step outside with Hel, who had something to discuss with him personally.

“I know,” she allowed, and sat in his lap when he took one of the chairs. He was still getting used to the way half of her was cooler than the other half, but he wrapped his arms around her comfortably. The Goddess of Death. He sure had strange taste in women, but he also couldn’t remember liking anyone as much as he liked her. It might even be love, given a little more time. “But you must have a way to defend yourself. Freya does not take denial lightly, and you refused her.”

“Will it be a problem?”

“Possibly. She is one of Thor’s staunchest allies, and hates my father.”

And he was the most vulnerable of them. At least she was nice enough not to actually say it, but he knew it was still true. That was okay. He didn’t have a lot of ego to protect. At least, not where his fighting ability was concerned. He wasn’t the athletic sort, preferring just enough activity to stay in shape, and taking little joy from exercise for its own sake.

He was not the crossfit sort. He never would be. Although, now that he thought about it, he might have to get Harvey to show him a thing or three about boxing. It took a hell of a swing to sent the God of Thunder staggering. He liked the idea of having that in his back pocket, and tucked the thought away for later. He had a feeling that Harvey would be perfectly happy to teach him, and that Cassandra would watch gleefully from the sidelines.

Even so, it might be worth it.

“So, what do we do?”

Hel shifted in his lap and fished in her pocket, before producing a glowing golden orb. Light danced around her gloved fingertips like fire, but there was no heat to give the ghostly flames life.  “Take this.”

“What is it?” Tom asked, and considered it. He knew Hel would never hurt him, but he also liked to know what he was getting into. “It’s not one of the Immortality Apples, right?”

“No. I would not offer one of those without having a long discussion, you and I, about the true meaning of eternity,” Hel laughed throatily, and Tom caught a glimpse of white bone under her mask when she tipped her head back. “No, it… it is something like my Boon. It will turn into what you need. Into what you can use. I bribed an old enemy for it.”

“An enemy?”

My family has a lot of enemies.”

“No I knew that, but is it safe?”

“He considers himself honorable. When he gives his word, he keeps it. He made Cassandra’s axes, as well.”

That was all the reassurance Tom needed. He reached out for the ball, which was so bright he couldn’t actually see through the glow. As soon as he touched it, heat rolled over his palm, rich and almost enough to burn.

He would have dropped it, then, but something about it felt right like nothing else ever had. Something about the magic of it spoke to his blood in a way he couldn’t have imagined until this very moment.

When he  closed his fingers around the orb, the glow faded like the sun behind the moon during an eclipse.

When he looked again, opened his fingers to see what it had become, deep amber light raced along his fingers and spilled out, heavy summer sunlight in the cool autumn air.

The golden orb was gone, and in his palm was a tiny dart, made of pale wood with simple goose-feather fletching. It was barely the length of his thumb, but something abut it promised that, if he wielded it with intent it would bite deeper than any mortal weapon.

When Tom looked up at Hel, her face was colorless and her eyes were wide.

“The mistletoe dart,” she whispered, and wetted her lips, uncharacteristically nervous. “I wonder what it says of your destiny, that this is the weapon that choses your hand.”

+++

The Last of Loki’s Brood:

Cassandra Brann is a Troubled Student. She is difficult, at best, defiant at worst, and has more secrets than a dozen spies.

And her family is worse.

BeLIEve Me

Family Gathered

Red-Gold and Silver-Grey

Prophesy Unheeded

Strength in the Dark

Queen’s Blessing

Bigger Fish

Life Once Lost (Subscriber Only!)

A Touch of Normal (Subscriber Only!)

Thunder Son

Goddess Boon (Subscriber Only!)

Coffee and Tea (Subscriber Only!)

Sucker Punch (subscriber Only!)

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MORE STORIES!

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[ridiasfangirlings]

I had this random thought while I was reading your fic Spectrum (which was really good btw, it honestly felt like it could be part of the series to me and I loved it so much and would love to see more!) like can you imagine Saruhiko being chosen as the Green King and Yata's reaction to that? Any thoughts on that scenario?

At what point in the timeline are we talking here, like maybe AUwhere the Slate doesn’t get destroyed but Hisui still dies and thenFushimi becomes King afterward? Like imagine Shiro finds some way forthe Slate to ‘revoke’ someone’s Kingship (maybe something similar tothat abdication thing Munakata was talking about with Mikoto in S1that no one ever spoke about again) and because Hisui relies on hisKing powers to live this effectively kills him. In the aftermaththere’s still something of a mess though because people are stillmanifesting Strain powers and maybe the Slate is really unstablebecause Hisui managed to release so much of its power. Fushimimeanwhile is struggling to deal with his three powers, havingdifficulty with keeping all three powers in check especially with theSlate so unstable. Then one day he’s out on a mission where Homra isassisting Scepter 4, Fushimi’s chasing after a Strain when he hearsYata’s voice from nearby crying out in pain. Fushimi stops hispursuit without even thinking about it, almost instinctively runningtowards the sound of Misaki’s voice, and he rounds a corner to seeYata being attacked by several strong Strains. Yata’s doing his bestbut he’s bleeding and clearly faltering, Fushimi just jumps in with acomment about Yata being unexpectedly weak. Yata grins a little andis like shut up monkey it took you long enough and soon they’refighting side by side. Suddenly one of the Strains launches thisstrong attack towards Yata, Fushimi yells out Yata’s name and runsbut he’s too far to block the attack and even so he throws his knivesand tries to call on his power.

Suddenly green electricity shoots up out of nowhere, forming a circlearound Fushimi’s feet and a barrier of green blocks the attack onYata. The Strains freak out as electricity begins to crackleeverywhere and Yata’s just staring in shock as this green Sword ofDamocles appears above Fushimi’s head. The sight causes everyone elseto come running too, like maybe thinking Hisui is back somehow, andthey all find Fushimi just standing there surrounded by a tornado ofelectricity. Munakata and Anna both step forward to help calm himdown and Yata’s just freaking out worrying about Fushimi and not surewhat the hell just happened. Fushimi would probably not be very happyeither, especially because here he just accepted that his place tobelong was in the Blue clan and now suddenly he’s the Green King andit’s like can he really be in Scepter 4 anymore. I could also seethis leading to some rumors that Fushimi really was a traitor andMunakata just said he was a double agent to help him save face, likehe had the aptitude to become Green King so maybe that’s the realreason why he joined the Greens. Though the people who know Fushimibetter would probably defend him, I could see Yata getting pissed atanyone in Homra who dares to suggest that Saruhiko actually didbetray his clan and it’s a strange reversal, that the person whoalways used to call Fushimi a traitor is now his staunchest defender(Yata himself will admit that he’s grown though, and that heunderstands things better now).

Meanwhile I think Fushimi would be having trouble getting used to hisnew powers, like he was already being overwhelmed by his three colorsand now he has King powers on top of that. Imagine Anna and Yatacoming by because Anna wants to help Fushimi, Munakata’s also beenassisting him but Anna especially knows what it’s like trying to getused to this sudden new power and she wants to make sure Fushimiisn’t pained by it. I think Fushimi’s biggest obstacle would be thathe feels like he doesn’t have anywhere to belong again, he can’treally see Munakata as his King if he himself is a King and the clanwhere he finally felt comfortable isn’t really his clan. Idon’t think there’s any way he’d ask Yata to be his clansman either,so certain that Yata loves Homra so much he would never agree tochange clans even for Fushimi and Fushimi isn’t going to ask just tobe rejected. (Oh and then imagine jungle’s servers just randomlystart coming to life again and suddenly Fushimi finds himselfattracted to it without knowing why, beginning to rewrite the code tosee if he can find a way to use his skills to take the parts ofjungle he hated and excise them even as he tries to see what can beborn out of the remains of what’s left.)

[csown]

July 2020 One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded. I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society. [1] Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points. Anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that the quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules. The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished. The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will. The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100% sure what the rules even are. And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite. When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite. In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive calls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" (It's rather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, but that's the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.) The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will the neighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is "To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is "Eppur si muove." The four types are not equally common. There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than independent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the smallest. Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society. Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders. I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work. [2] Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. [3] In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting — that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time. As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're the canaries in this coalmine. The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones. You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas. The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned. [4] The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even on the ground that's safe. In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves was to congregate in a handful of places — first in courts, and later in universities — where they could to some extent make their own rules. Places where people work with ideas tend to have customs protecting free inquiry, for the same reason wafer fabs have powerful air filters, or recording studios good sound insulation. For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began in the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has recently flared up again with the arrival of social media. This seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley. Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded, they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such as they could only have dreamed of. On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left. [5] Though I've spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I can't predict how it plays out. Could some universities reverse the current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want to congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandon them? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened. But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at protecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised, they'll create new ones. That may require some imagination. But imagination is, after all, their specialty. Notes [1] I realize of course that if people's personalities vary in any two ways, you can use them as axes and call the resulting four quadrants personality types. So what I'm really claiming is that the axes are orthogonal and that there's significant variation in both. [2] The aggressively conventional-minded aren't responsible for all the trouble in the world. Another big source of trouble is the sort of charismatic leader who gains power by appealing to them. They become much more dangerous when such leaders emerge. [3] I never worried about writing things that offended the conventional-minded when I was running Y Combinator. If YC were a cookie company, I'd have faced a difficult moral choice. Conventional-minded people eat cookies too. But they don't start successful startups. So if I deterred them from applying to YC, the only effect was to save us work reading applications. [4] There has been progress in one area: the punishments for talking about banned ideas are less severe than in the past. There's little danger of being killed, at least in richer countries. The aggressively conventional-minded are mostly satisfied with getting people fired. [5] Many professors are independent-minded — especially in math, the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed. But students are more representative of the general population, and thus mostly conventional-minded. So when professors and students are in conflict, it's not just a conflict between generations but also between different types of people. Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Patrick Collison, Sam Gichuru, Jessica Livingston, Patrick McKenzie, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.

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Time Has Come To Rework Campus Sexual Assault Policy

Democrats and their morally superior activists are once again up in arms about possible plans by the Department of Education to overhaul federal policies on campus sexual assault instituted by the Obama administration. They say those changes will protect college rapists and inspire future rapists. 

This is another Democratic tactic at perfect work. Whatever policies Democrats have enacted over the past eight years are morally imperative, they are perfect and any opposition to them is morally wrong. Any attempt to alter them, it’s morally callous, dooming the planet, killing thousands of Americans, or in this case - protecting rapists. 

But whatever one may think of the Trump administration, this is one area in which its initiatives should herald positive change. Federal policies on campus sexual assault desperately needed to be revised. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced in a speech Thursday that she will be revising an Obama-era “guidance” document that drove colleges to implement its own tribunals to be the judge and jury on sexual assault cases. 

It makes no sense for a college to handle such serious crimes. Rapists are criminals, they should be prosecuted in criminal court, and if found guilty, punished accordingly. Yet under the pressure of Title IX, colleges are actively steering students away from reporting crimes to the authorities, instead any reports of rape or sexual assault are dealt with by ill-equipped, untrained university faculty, and the whole thing gets swept under the rug as quickly as possible. This is what Democrats and their activists are defending. Who’s really protecting rapists?

Obama threatened to pull funds and start federal investigations against universities who failed to get positive results from these makeshift tribunals, which forced them to do away with due process for the accused and steer victims away from the police. The minute an accusation is made against a student, regardless of evidence, he is removed from his student groups, he is banned from entering most areas of the university, he is not allowed to defend himself or talk about allegations made against him, he is refused to know the evidence against him, he’s refused to know who has accused him, he is refused to hire an attorney, he is forced to stay in his room, he gets branded a rapist throughout campus and the media, and eventually he is expelled. With never being able to defend himself. This has become a dire problem on campus.

Again, this is what Democrats and their activists are defending. They believe because he is simply accused of a crime, then he has no right to defend himself, he has no right to provide evidence, if she says he is guilty then he is guilty and by giving him his right to due process is only making her suffer more. Professor Nicole Westmarland, a supporter of this failed policy, perfectly sums up their guilty before proven innocent mentality: “The criminal process can take months. If universities refuse to investigate or take action during this time, then the victim is forced to live and study alongside their attacker. Our students cannot be left to study in a culture of fear and misogyny.” Since when did the United States bring in mob rule to replace its legal system? 

Campus sexual assault is a very serious problem, we all want to protect and support real victims of sexual violence, but how is it helping victims by allowing school professors to be the judge and jury of rape cases behind closed doors out of fear of having their funding pulled rather than taking it to our criminal justice system where real punishment and justice can be served? Is rape not a serious enough crime to be properly investigated and adjudicated by trained professionals with the opportunity for real justice to be carried out to those found guilty? Isn’t this enough in itself to challenge the current policy?

The Department of Education is right to insist that schools hold their attackers to account but this has to be done properly and to the fullest extent of the law, otherwise what are we actually achieving? Who are we really protecting? DeVos also said part of the new guidance would include a better definition of sexual assault for schools. This is just as crucially important as the current definition can brand someone a rapist if there was any alcohol consumed before having sex or if the wrong word was said. This would go a long way to stop trivializing rape and sexual assault and leave the support and justice to the real victims of such horrendous crimes, not those who regret their one-night romps. 

The Department of Education have said they will of course continue to interpret and enforce Title IX as a protection for students against sexual violence, DeVos made this very clear, she wants sexual assault on campus eradicated, that is the whole point of this reform. She also said any new rules will be issued after all sides on this issue have had the opportunity to provide their viewpoints, that the public and students gets a say in how the new policy will be shaped, something the Obama administration failed to do.

DeVos cited proposals and critiques from the American Bar Association, the American College of Trial Lawyers, Harvard Law professors and female prosecutors as sources for re-shaping the way colleges handle sexual assault going forward. She suggested schools try something different and gave the example of a regional center that would handle such claims. The center would work with schools who opted in to the program and would be staffed by experts and professionals who know how to investigate properly and collect evidence, letting our professors get back to the only thing they’re supposed to be doing: educating. 

Most of the hysteria from activists appear to believe due process is an impediment to justice and rape should continue to be trivialized in classroom courtrooms. These are frightening beliefs and proves how low the left is willing to sink in order to never agree with a Conservative. Clearly, the current system needs to change. Sure we can keep the good parts, no one is denying that, but we also have to amend what has gone horribly wrong. Giving rape allegations the most serious and extensive investigations and providing the correct support, rights and justice to those involved should be a paramount concern to even the staunchest anti-Trump liberal. Take the bias away and can’t we agree college students across the country deserve better? 

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There is No Position on Israel That Provides a "Get-Out-Of-Antisemitism-Free" Card

People in Donald Trump's orbit -- advisors, hangers-on, enthusiastic supporters, and so on -- keep on being implicated in antisemitism  Steve Bannon is the obvious case. But see also counter-terrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka, or former Arkansas Governor and one-time front runner for Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (the guy who ended up getting the slot over Huckabee is no slouch either). When these issues come up, conservative pundits seem to have a catch-all response. Can you guess what it is? Here's ZOA (quoting Joel Pollak) on Bannon:

Mr. Bannon is 'an American patriot who defends Israel & has deep empathy for the Jewish people.' .... Would Trump’s extraordinary pro-Israel advisors such as Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Sheldon Adelson, and Orthodox Jews Jared Kushner, David Friedman, and Jason Greenblatt ever allow an anti-Semite/Israel-hater to work with them?

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) on Gorka:

I can attest that Dr. Gorka is the staunchest friend of Israel and the Jewish people.

Mike Huckabee on, well, himself:

[A] tiny bit of fact-checking [would] discover[] what most people in the Israel and American Jewish community know quite well, that Israel and the Jewish people have no stronger advocate than Mike Huckabee. ... Israel and Jewish people need to make friends, not insult the ones they have.

It's not even just conservatives. In a post that would be execrable if it wasn't so bizarre, Michael Tracey of the far-left "Young Turks" movement defends the Trump movement from antisemitism charges because, survey says:

[T[he current president continues to express more-or-less unflinching support for the Jewish state. ... [T]here’s scant reason to believe Trump has thought deeply enough about the subject that he should be considered anything less than what he publicly and repeatedly claims he is: stridently pro-Israel, and stridently pro-Jew.

Incidentally, it's notable that in none of the above examples was the claim of antisemitism directly tied to Israel. Bannon's antisemitism stems from his alleged distaste for Jews at his child's school and his association with the alt-right. Gorka has ties to Hungarian antisemitic organizations. Huckabee liked to compare Obamacare to the Holocaust and has engaged in "false flag" conspiracy mongering suggesting that Jews fake attacks against themselves to drum up anti-Trump sentiment. Yet time and again, we see "pro-Israel" bona fides (usually of a very particular, rah-rah Likud sort) used to flatly reject any further inquiry into antisemitic behavior, conduct, or associations. It's a quintessential example of what philosopher Rachel McKinnon calls "allies behaving badly" -- using one's (often self-proclaimed) status as an "ally" to dismiss any inquiry into bad behavior directed at the allied group. This response has become such an ubiquitous catch-all to dismiss the genuine problem of antisemitism on the right that I wish someone like the ADL would call it out explicitly. Their genuine efforts at targeting antisemitism will get nowhere if "support for Israel" is convertible into a "get-out-of-antisemitism-free" card. This is the reason why many Jewish groups' campaigns against mainstream right-wing antisemitism feel so limp and listless -- if they end as soon as the conservative delivers the rote reassurance that "I am a strong supporter of Israel", of course they won't go anywhere or change anything. The truth is there is no position on Israel -- pro- or anti-, favorable or critical -- that immunizes one from antisemitism. It is entirely possible to find antisemitism among supporters of Israel just as it is to find it amongst Israel's opponents (who, for their part, also have a habit of pointing to other allegedly philo-semitic elements of their politics as a technique for dismissing any inquiry into whether their Israel politics are antisemitically-inflected. That we are, or should be, capable of understanding why the move is shady in that case should give us similar reason for pause in this one). To think otherwise requires subscribing to an unreasonably narrow view of how antisemitism manifests that assumes it must ever and always take the form of blind and unmediated Jew-hatred. We would be better served in recognizing that antisemitism is rarely unadorned; it is not just occasionally but frequently partial and contingent, attacking particular Jewish institutions and practices while professing great love and respect for others. None of this is to say that support for Israel isn't important. It is a part of the story, and Jewish groups are well-entitled to insist that it be part of the story. But it is only a part of the story, and it cannot substitute for a holistic politics opposing antisemitism in all its manifestations. Again, it is incumbent on our community's antisemitism watchdogs -- the ADL and others -- to put their feet down and say unambiguously: "There is no -- NO -- position on Israel that immunizes one from antisemitism." Waving "pro-Israel" as a talisman to ward of charges of antisemitism is wrong -- wrong in that it doesn't falsify the antisemitism claim, and wrong in that it bespeaks disrespect towards the Jews making the claim. But people think they can get away with it because, well, for too long mainstream Jewish groups have accepted the pro-Israel credit in lieu of actual payment of antisemitic debts. Hopefully, even those groups are beginning to see just how little that credit is worth; how ineffectual our complaints about antisemitism are when they can and are brushed aside so cheaply. It needs to end. And it won't end until Jewish groups demand that it end. via The Debate Link http://ift.tt/2lsEqUh

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‘Yes we exist’ – Black fans eye NASCAR’s work to diversify – Examiner Online

Kevin Johnson became enamored with NASCAR as a kid through clips on “ Wide World of Sports,” decades before billion-dollar broadcast deals when auto racing shared precious air time with barrel jumping and demolition derby.

Raised in the South Bronx, Johnson considered himself “a closet NASCAR fan,” without a friend or family member who truly shared his interest in catching the latest race.

“As you can imagine,” Johnson said, “there just simply weren’t a lot of people receptive to the sport given its history.”

Johnson recalled staying in his Temple University dorm during the massive blizzard that wreaked havoc on the East Coast in 1979 to watch the Daytona 500, broadcast live in its entirety for the first time. His roommate was stuck elsewhere because of the weather, leaving Johnson alone with the TV.

“Nobody knew,” Johnson said, laughing. “As a Black person in an urban area, it wasn’t acceptable. I wasn’t really out there. But that love continued to this day.”

The 61-year-old Johnson, who has retired to Miami, shares his passion for the sport with a Black NASCAR Fans group on Facebook. The group’s bio says: “Yes we exist.”

The fans share favorite race memories, photos of their collectibles and, yes, stories of the historically uneasy relationship NASCAR has had with the Black community.

Johnson has been called racist slurs at the track, felt queasy at the sight of the Confederate flag and often wondered if the good-ol’-boy Southern attitudes seeped in the sport would ever fade.

The catalyst for change has come for the U.S. with the death of George Floydin the custody of Minneapolis police. Not long after that, driver Bubba Wallace shoved NASCAR toward the overdue step of banning the Confederate flag, for decades a waving, nylon symbol to Blacks that they were not welcome in NASCAR Nation.

FILE – In this June 10, 2020, file photo, driver Bubba Wallace waits for the start of a NASCAR Cup Series auto race in Martinsville, Va. Some Black NASCAR fans have felt uncomfortable at the track. They’re worried about hearing racial slurs or feeling unwelcome from a predominantly white fan base. The catalyst for change has come. Bubba Wallace prodded NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag last month. There is hope the ban opens the doors to more fans. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

The thought of facing the flag and the potential of alcohol-fueled anger from its staunchest defenders has kept many Black fans away and made the ones who did come watch their step. Johnson said banning the flag will make NASCAR “more inviting.”

“We need to get more people, encourage more people of color to come and enjoy what goes on around race weekend,” added Brad Daugherty, the lone Black team owner in NASCAR.

According to NASCAR, the latest demographics show an overwhelmingly white fan base — 75% — but the multicultural slice of 25% has climbed from 20% in 2011. Black fans make up 9% of the total.

The sight of Black fans lined against the Talladega fence to cheer for Wallace a day after a noose was found in his stall was a heartening moment for NASCAR. But earning the trust of a new generation of fans extends beyond “if you ban it, they will come.” NASCAR and its tracks need bolder attempts at ticket and community outreach programs, much in the way baseball, the NHL and the NBA celebrate pride or ethnic-themed nights.

Minorities may not necessarily become the dominant demographic for the stock car series, but they can certainly grab a larger share of the marketplace.

“I think the challenge for NASCAR is this: they spent a lot of time and money over the years building up a specific brand that centered on Confederate flag-waving Southern white folks as their target market, and aligned themselves with business partners and politicians who also found symmetry with this demographic group,” said Joshua Newman, a Florida State professor and author of “Sport, Spectacle, and NASCAR Nation: Consumption and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism.”

“This worked well to create a very specific NASCAR culture, a spectacle of celebrity politicians, military flyovers, conservative symbolism, an all-white driver line-up — for many years, but not always — and grandstands filled with predominantly white consumer fans,” Newman said. “It was unique in the North American sports landscape for its racial homogeneity and pronounced affiliations with one political party.”

But cultural politics can change and NASCAR’s boom has faded. To Newman, that means NASCAR limited its growth potential and now must find a solution.

Could Wallace, who f inished second in the 2018 Daytona 500, engage new fans if he won a checkered flag or two driving for an underfunded team? Would a diversity program that places more drivers in the Cup Series — where Wallace is the only Black driver — broaden exposure and create fans of all genders, ethnicities and backgrounds?

NASCAR has worked on building awareness among multicultural audiences for years, including Latino-focused efforts at Auto Club Speedway in California. Last year, NASCAR and the Urban Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas teamed with a local youth group to bring a group of Black children to the race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The Drive for Diversity program dates to 2004 and a separate effort to work with key minority business and community leaders started three years later.

“If people look at the sport and see the stars of the sport are representative of different groups, I think it’s just another step toward making the sport feel more open to a larger audience of folks,” Drive for Diversity director Jusan Hamilton said. “If people look at the sport and feel that it’s open, that in turn will help make more folks be interested in coming to the sport.”

The few Black drivers who came before Wallace have heard that hopefulness before only to often end up discouraged at the frayed bond between NASCAR and minorities.

“It’s time to realize it’s a new day,” said Bill Lester, who made 145 career NASCAR starts from 1999-2006. “Not all the race car drivers happen to be white. There are people of color. There are women out there who want to race.”

Lester said he believes NASCAR President Steve Phelps, who tearfully told Wallace about the noose in the garage, and veteran executive Brandon Thompson can provoke tangible culture change within the sport.

“There’s a willingness to listen and engage that NASCAR has that I don’t believe they were sincere about earlier,” Lester said.

Still, Wallace is one of just a handful of non-white drivers. Daniel Suarez is Mexican and Aric Almirola is of Cuban descent. Kyle Larson, who is half Asian, was fired in April for using a racial slur.

NASCAR met this month with the Rev. Greg Drumwright, who organized members of his ministry to make the trip to Talladega to support Wallace. Drumwright said he and his group planned to attend other races, too, and he posted a series of encouraging interactions on his Twitter feed from the All-Star race at Bristol on Wednesday.

FILE – In this June 3, 2020, file photo, Rev. Greg Drumwright, right, greets people at the memorial site for Greg Floyd in Minneapolis. Drumwright, a minister at the Citadel Church & Campus Ministries, helped organize a group of Black fans to attend the NASCAR race at Talladega and support driver Bubba Wallace. Drumwright now hopes he can become an advocate of change for NASCAR. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

“We don’t want window dressing,” Drumwright said. “This is a national dialogue.”

Toni Addison, her husband and three children of Newark, Delaware, have never attended a NASCAR race. They drive by Dover International Speedway on race weekends and catch a glimpse of the carnival-type atmosphere at the track and wondered if they’d feel welcomed.

“It sounds like something we’d be interested in,” Addison said. “But guess I couldn’t wear my Black Live Matter shirt or my Barack Obama shirt to that. I’m a (Dallas) Cowboys fan. It’s kind of like a Cowboys fan doesn’t go into the Eagles stadium, at least not with all the Cowboys gear on.”

She’s become one of Wallace’s newest fans (“I didn’t even know there was a Black NASCAR driver”) and watched him slap hands with fans at Talladega, but acknowledged “fear may keep me away from that.”

“My impression of it is they’re mostly Trump supporters, Confederate flag supporters,” the 51-year-old Addison said. “I don’t know how comfortable I would feel fitting in.”

She could talk to fans like Johnson who, while hurt by the slurs, generally have a great time on race day and want all fans to draw the same enjoyment from the sport he has for more than 40 years.

One memory rises about the rest: Johnson and his wife, Julie, attended a meet-and-greet at Atlanta Motor Speedway with Hall of Fame driver Tony Stewart in the mid-2000s. The couple were fervent supporters of Smoke, who asked a group of fans in a suite if they had any questions for him.

Julie stepped up from the back and told Stewart, “As probably your only Black female fan, I really don’t have a question, I just want a hug.”

Stewart smiled and her invited her up for a big hug and later sent over several autographed photos.

It’s the kind of moment that can make a fan forever — from any walk of life.

Credit: Source link

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Why Trump Will Get Re-elected

Massaging the fatigue of a Democratic primary that has gone on forever, we’ve come to the worrisome conclusion that Joe Biden’s the most likely person to face off against DJT. Let me preface this essay by saying I’m going to vote for Biden, or Bernie–any one other than Trump–but I deeply fear Biden is actually the weakest Democratic candidate of everyone we’ve seen…except maybe Marianne Williamson.

Let’s start by taking an abbreviated glance at who was on the field, and how things have changed as the season have browned the grass, leaves and fallen and frost snuck in. In the summer of 2019, we saw so many candidates on the state that we were reminded of the 2015 Republican primaries–too many names to remember, too many biographies to examine. Obama was in his last term and I guess Conservatives thought there’s finally a chance for someone new. In the 2019 Detroit debates, there were 20 candidates, all with the idea that America was so sick of Donald J. Trump that we’d vote for anyone other than the sitting President. Anyone running could garner a few million dollars in contributions, just for not being Trump. The family separation at the border was going on, and America hated Trump as an affront to family, which was the historical domain of the conservative politicians. It was hot, humid, in the upper 80s in New York and there was a sense of pride that so many intelligent and accomplished people could come from the Democratic Party and get up there on stage and be moderated by Fox News. The debates took place in two nights and the three front runners of each night–Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg; Biden, Harri, Booker–would all continue on.

There were some stunts going on in August, September, but it was more or less the usual onslaught of tiresome headlines of America’s biggest persona non-grata. Stupid remarks, fake maps of hurricanes, typical bullshit that we’ve come to accept from the stupidest person to enter American politics.

But eyes really turned away from the primaries to the impeachment preceding in late September. The House. Then the delay. He said, she said, holidays looming, finally gets to the Senate for their evisceration of logic and constitutional protection. By February casualties of the impeachment included John Delaney, Cory Booker, the mystic Marianna Williamson, Julian Castro. The field narrowed.

There wasn’t much to see at the impeachment trial hearings, because everyone knew the outcome they wanted before he was even tried. And politicians are exceptionally bad actors, so watching them try to deliver lines was just painful. The biggest injustice to reasoning were the president’s own personal lawyers who’s central defense was “the impeachment aimed to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a multi-million dollar argument, rehashed from something Lindsay Graham said in passing in the hallway, muttering to a person from the press. What’s particularly infuriating and an assault on basic reasoning is that, to reverse the 2016 election results would mean Hillary Clinton would become President if Trump were removed, but in fact the Vice President would become the President. This sort of non-nonsensical shorthand is not new in the Republican Party, but it’s surprising that the mercenaries that Trump brought into Washington to defend him couldn’t come up with a better explanation about Trump’s call to the Ukraine.

The Iowa Caucuses held on Feb 3, 2020 showed Buttigieg in first place, Sanders in second, Warren in third, Biden fourth and Klobuchar fifth, Gabbard sixth, or last.

February 5, 2020 Trump is acquitted from the Senate Impeachment trial. It was the outcome that pretty much anyone who could count to 100 expected. What wasn’t explicit was what the acquittal actually meant.

With the exception of the Biden, most of the Democratic candidates have faded out of the public until the impeachment hearings were over. Biden’s campaign tried to swing the whole thing as exemplary of the fear Trump had for Biden. Yes, Trump was so fearful of Biden, that I needed Ukraine to investigate Biden so Biden wouldn’t run for President. It’s a good narrative, except the Burisma conspiracy began in 2015.

What was overlooked in the impeachment of Trump is that his acquittal equates to the vilification of Joe Biden, in terms of corrupt practices between the United States and Ukraine. By not finding Trump guilty–remember, this is guilt corruptly engaging Ukraine, forget the articles of impeachment that the House actually approved–the message is essentially that Trump was vindicated in his pursuit to get to the bottom of Ukrainian corruption, i.e. Biden’s involvement in Ukrainian corruption. Yes, no one’s mind was changed in the impeachment trail, but those siding with Trump will have the sense that, not only was Trump unfairly treated by Democrats, but that his actions were warranted to undo the corruption of Joe Biden. It’s reverse logic, but if Trump’s not the villain in American/Ukrainian corruption, Biden is guilty.

Not only does the Democratic party hope this isn’t the interpretation, the Biden campaign crosses its fingers that everyone will just forget about that whole impeachment thing, and the side notes about Ukraine, and Joe’s own implicated corruption.

Billionaire Tom Steyer was in until a bigger billionaire, Mike Bloomberg came in and actually spent money. Bloomberg’s campaign hinged on the lackluster of the centrists, which may have suggested that Democrats weren’t comfortable with Biden and maybe even Biden understood he wasn’t the strongest candidate. Then Elizabeth Warren kicked Michael Bloomberg in the balls so hard, the stock market felt it. He dropped out and then she drops out.

A repeated, unifying slogan during the Democratic primaries was beat Donald Trump. Each candidate would extol his or her record of winning, unique strategy, or ability to reach his base. The debates shared headlines with the Corona Virus.

But is the real way to beat Donald Trump? Remind America about how he tried to rig the election, the second time: Remind America of the impeachment. You don’t need to go into details, you don’t need to remind the public about the arguments for against, but you do need to be able to mention the country that he aimed to coerce Ukraine, and that he’s a cheater. In the last four years, there has been a non-stop barrage of transgressions by the President, ranging from cringe-worthy idiocracy, to down-right blatant corruption and heresy, were I to believe in a higher power. But it’s impossible to mention the impeachment in a debate, or even as a political platform for Biden. The impeachment was supposed to be summary of all of Trump’s illegalities, wrapped up into a nice sound bite, something like this: “You tried to undermine our democracy by coercing Ukraine. And that’s just one example of your blatant corruption.” That’s it. Just repeat that, after every point on the stage, nail the topic home. That’s all you have to do. You don’t need policy, you don’t need wit, looks aren’t necessary. You don’t need a track record or proof you’re a better candidate. The impeachment proceeding already divided the country with those who wanted him gone–those who’ll vote for anyone other than Trump–and those who’d side with him even if he were trying to make the Internet illegal. Anyone could beat him in a debate by mentioning Ukraine, anyone except for Joe Biden.

Why not Joe Biden? Because when he mentions “Ukraine,” Trump is going to dive into the conspiracy theory about Ukraine, Hunter Biden being on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company, and point the finger of corruption at Joe. In a debate, Biden isn’t going to have time to respond to the myriad of nuances which purport no-foul play. It’s 90 seconds. And Trump’s going to interrupt by saying “corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.” And that’s all that going to happen.

For those who have been living in a cave for the last four years, those who don’t watch the news, or follow politics, i.e. “swing voters,” they might actually try to figure out what the hell is Trump talking about. But let’s be realistic: No one has time to read the various reputable articles by the New Yorker [1], New York Times, or the Washington Post, which explains the nuances of the Hunter Biden/Burisma world and how he was allegedly working against corruption. In a country of 350 million people, catch phrases like Lock Her Up, or Fake News penetrate more deeply than hour-long interviews on the Council on Foreign Affairs.

What the undecided are left with is three variations of conspiracy theory:

1) Some Biden supporters think that the entire Hunter Biden narrative is a conspiracy, including the fact that he was a board member of Burisma. Sorry, he was. That’s a fact. [2]

2) Some right-wing conspiracy theory that Joe Biden interfered with the investigation of Shokin to protect Hunter. Sorry, he didn’t. It was the opposite.

3) Whether any conspiracy theory is true. That is, whether anyone was conspiring at all.

What all of this amazing journalism by the New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post fail to cover is why Hunter was on the board of a Ukrainian company in the first place. What’s implied is he was trying to uproot corruption. He was trained as lawyer and worked as a lobbyist. But seriously, there’ a question why does a Ukrainian natural gas company need an American on their board of directors? Is it legal counsel? Right, no lawyers in Ukraine. Is it his expertise in working in natural gas that garnered him $50,000/week for months? There’s something fishy and even the staunchest Biden supporters concede that, while Joe wasn’t involved, his son shouldn’t have been on that board.

I’m happy to suspend any suspicion of Hunter, or even concede “that’s the way the world works.” If you’re the son of a politician, you get on board of natural gas companies in foreign countries and get huge sums of money and nothing illegal is going on. But it’s patently irresponsible for Democrats to expect that Fox News watchers will be so generous and unrealistic that undecided voters will come to my conclusion.

If we can estimate the creativity and cleaver strategies of the Trump campaign for 2020, we can rest assured it will be similar to the 2016 campaign: repeat a singular, simple, unexplained narrative until seeds of doubt sow into a conspiracy theory. For Hillary R. Clinton it was the missing emails. Yes, there were emails missing. She apologized for it. [3] 2020 will be Trump repeating again and again, Burisma. Hunter Biden. He’s going to say that in every debate and on every interview. And it’s even worse because the story already circulates on Fox News and Hill thanks to John Solomon. Like the missing emails, there is no explanation as to why Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma. Surprisingly, Democrats seem oblivious to the massive, Trump strategy, right in plain sight.

Out of plain sight is Rudy Giuliani. Where the fuck has he been since September? I’m guessing he lurking around Ukraine, digging up dirt. You can bet the day after Sanders concedes to Biden, Rudy will be back on Fox and Friends talking up the corruption of the Bidens and Burisma.

But even if you forget about Burisma, there’s something troubling about a Vice President or President whose son’s job title includes lobbyist. Are you fucking serious? In an era when people are trying to reduce the influence of money and special interest groups in American democracy, you’re going to elect a person whose son’s profession is to influence democracy with special interest?

Going back to the 2016 election results, we saw a clear trend among millenials voting for Democrats. The writing was on the wall: the days of the Republican party are numbered. Fortunately, the Democrats too advantage of this ground swell and put in place a candidate who reflected…wait…the values of our grandparents? Are you serious? If either Biden or Sanders gets elected, they’ll be oldest elected sitting President in history?

But we’ll get some reprieve to know that the states that went to Obama in 2012, but to Trump in 2016 are still up for grabs. Many people have wondered, how could this ideological flip occur? How could people who voted for Obama in a landslide, either stay home or vote for Trump four years later? Well, fortunately, Biden is a bet because nothing brings out black voters like a guy who voted…wait, he voted against the Civil Rights Act?

Well, surely, if such a complicated candidate as Biden is compared to Trump, Americans will choose the lesser of the two evils. Yeah, uh, have you googled “Clinton lesser of two evils”? They didn’t vote against the lesser, even though the explicit comparison of two people to evil in a country that is purported separated by church and state makes one wonder how this could be case.

It’s almost as if the centrist (dare I call them “establishment”) Democrats went down the list of everything that people hated about Clinton and came up with Joe Biden. Except, of course, the fact that Clinton was a woman and mobilized female voters. Again: Biden falls short. Not only does he awkwardly hug too long, or say inappropriate things to women, there’s the whole the prequel Brett Kavanaugh trial, aka the Clarence Thomas Affair, in which Biden silenced Anita Hill.

Now it seems we’re faced with candidates: Bernie Sanders, who isn’t even a Democratic, and Joe Biden. The issue with Sanders is his entire platform would be impossible to get passed by the Senate, as not even members of his own party would vote for health care for all. But the problem with Biden is even worse. It’s not clear why even Democrats would choose a candidate with the suspicion of corruption. Is it that hope no one will mention the root of the impeachment of Trump? Is it that they think Trump being re-elected is less detrimental than Sanders getting elected?

[1] “The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine,” Jane Mayer, New Yorker, Oct. 4, 2019.

[2] “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, New York Times, June 1, 2019

[3] “Hillary Clinton apologizes for e-mail system: I take responsibility,” Anne Gearan, Washington Post, September 8, 2015

[4] “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived,” John Solomon, The Hill, February 19, 2020.

https://medium.com/@dhpddaedalus/why-trump-will-get-re-elected-e6916387f791

[bountyofbeads]

Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment https://nyti.ms/2TmvgfS

🚨 🚨 BREAKING: As the November impeachment hearings got underway, Russia's GRU hacked Burisma in what appears to be a repeat of 2016, when GRU hackers breached the DNC and then selectively leaked emails to hurt Clinton's candidacy. https://t.co/nQhhndnAV3 with @AllMattNYT and @nicoleperlroth

The GRU attacks appear to be running parallel to an analog effort by Russian spies to dig up information that could embarrass the Bidens. Russian spies are trying to penetrate Burisma and working sources in the Ukrainian government in search of emails, financial records.

Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment

By Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg | Published Jan. 13, 2020 Updated  7:04 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.

The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.

Then, as now, the Russian hackers from a military intelligence unit known formerly as the G.R.U., and to private researchers by the alias “Fancy Bear,” used so-called phishing emails that appear designed to steal usernames and passwords, according to Area 1, the Silicon Valley security firm that detected the hacking. In this instance, the hackers set up fake websites that mimicked sign-in pages of Burisma subsidiaries, and have been blasting Burisma employees with emails meant to look like they are coming from inside the company.

The hackers fooled some of them into handing over their login credentials, and managed to get inside one of Burisma’s servers, Area 1 said.

“The attacks were successful,” said Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1, who previously served at the National Security Agency. Mr. Falkowitz’s firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe — many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers — which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers.

“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta,” the Clinton campaign chairman, Mr. Falkowitz said. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

The Justice Department indicted seven officers from the same military intelligence unit in 2018.

The Russian attacks on Burisma appear to be running parallel to an effort by Russian spies in Ukraine to dig up information in the analog world that could embarrass the Bidens, according to an American security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. The spies, the official said, are trying to penetrate Burisma and working sources in the Ukrainian government in search of emails, financial records and legal documents.

Neither the Russian government nor Burisma responded to requests for comment.

American officials are warning that the Russians have grown stealthier since 2016, and are again seeking to steal and spread damaging information and target vulnerable election systems ahead of the 2020 election.

[Read: Even as American election defenses have improved, Russian hackers and trolls have become more sophisticated.]

In the same vein, Russia has been working since the early days of Mr. Trump’s presidency to turn the focus away from its own election interference in 2016 by seeding conspiracy theories about Ukrainian meddling and Democratic complicity.

The result has been a muddy brew of conspiracy theories that mix facts, like the handful of Ukrainians who openly criticized Mr. Trump’s candidacy, with discredited claims that the D.N.C.’s email server is in Ukraine and that Mr. Biden, as vice president, had corrupt dealings with Ukrainian officials to protect his son. Spread by bots and trolls on social media, and by Russian intelligence officers, the claims resonated with Mr. Trump, who views talk of Russian interference as an attack on his legitimacy.

With Mr. Biden’s emergence as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination last spring, the president latched on to the corruption allegations, and asked that Ukraine investigate the Bidens on his July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The call became central to Mr. Trump’s impeachment last month.

The Biden campaign sought to cast the Russian effort to hack Burisma as an indication of Mr. Biden’s political strength, and to highlight Mr. Trump’s apparent willingness to let foreign powers boost his political fortunes.

“Donald Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into lying about Joe Biden and a major bipartisan, international anti-corruption victory because he recognized that he can’t beat the vice president,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign.

“Now we know that Vladimir Putin also sees Joe Biden as a threat,” Mr. Bates added. “Any American president who had not repeatedly encouraged foreign interventions of this kind would immediately condemn this attack on the sovereignty of our elections.”

The corruption allegations hinge on Hunter Biden’s work on the Burisma board. The company hired Mr. Biden while his father was vice president and leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, including a successful push to have Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired for corruption. The effort was backed by European allies.

The story has since been recast by Mr. Trump and some of his staunchest defenders, who say Mr. Biden pushed out the prosecutor because Burisma was under investigation and his son could be implicated. Rudolph W. Giuliani, acting in what he says was his capacity as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, has personally taken up investigating the Bidens and Burisma, and now regularly claims to have uncovered clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing.

The evidence, though, has yet to emerge, and now the Russians appear to have joined the hunt.

Area 1 researchers discovered a G.R.U. phishing campaign on Ukrainian companies on New Year’s Eve. A week later, Area 1 determined what the Ukrainian targets had in common: They were all subsidiaries of Burisma Holdings, the company at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment. Among the Burisma subsidiaries phished were KUB-Gas, Aldea, Esko-Pivnich, Nadragas, Tehnocom-Service and Pari. The targets also included Kvartal 95, a Ukrainian television production company founded by Mr. Zelensky. The phishing attack on Kvartal 95 appears to have been aimed at digging up email correspondence for the company’s chief, Ivan Bakanov, whom Mr. Zelensky appointed as the head of Ukraine’s Security Service last June.

To steal employees’ credentials, the G.R.U. hackers directed Burisma to their fake login pages. Area 1 was able to trace the look-alike sites through a combination of internet service providers frequently used by G.R.U.’s hackers, rare web traffic patterns, and techniques that have been used in previous attacks against a slew of other victims, including the 2016 hack of the D.N.C. and a more recent Russian hack of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

“The Burisma hack is a cookie-cutter G.R.U. campaign,” Mr. Falkowitz said. “Russian hackers, as sophisticated as they are, also tend to be lazy. They use what works. And in this, they were successful.”

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Barr Asks Apple to Unlock iPhones of Pensacola Gunman (This is a slippery-slope when you allow the government, especially this administration, to unlock people's phones. We already know this administration using racial-profiling at both the U.S.-Mexico and Canadian borders. Also it raises the question of 'free-speech' and the 1st-amendment.

The request set up a collision between law enforcement and big technology firms in the latest battle over privacy and security.

By Katie Benner | Published Jan. 13, 2020 Updated 3:16 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.

Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of an ongoing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.

“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on Apple and other technology companies to find a solution and complaining that Apple has provided no “substantive assistance.”

Apple has given investigators materials from the iCloud account of the gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi air force training with the American military, who killed three sailors and wounded eight others on Dec. 6. But the company has refused to help the F.B.I. open the phones themselves, which would undermine its claims that its phones are secure.

Justice Department officials said that they need access to Mr. Alshamrani’s phones to see messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to determine whether he had discussed his plans with others at the base and whether he was acting alone or with help.

“The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” Mr. Barr said, citing a message that Mr. Alshamrani posted on last year’s anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks warning that “the countdown has begun.” He also visited the 9/11 memorial in New York over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Mr. Alshamrani also posted anti-American, anti-Israeli and jihadist messages on social media, including just two hours before he attacked the base, Mr. Barr said.

Mr. Barr turned up the pressure on Apple a week after the F.B.I.’s top lawyer, Dana Boente, asked the company for help searching Mr. Alshamrani’s iPhones. Apple said that it would turn over only the data it had, implying that it would not work to unlock the phones and hand over the private data on them.

Apple’s stance set the company on a collision course with a Justice Department that has grown increasingly critical of encryption that makes it impossible for law enforcement to search devices or wiretap phone calls.

The confrontation echoed the legal standoff over an iPhone used by a gunman who killed 14 people in a terrorism attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in late 2015. Apple defied a court order to assist the F.B.I. in its efforts to search his device, setting off a fight over whether privacy that was enabled by impossible-to-crack encryption harmed public safety.

As in the investigation into the Pensacola shooting, the San Bernardino gunman, Syed Rizwan Farook, was also dead and no longer had a right to privacy. In both cases, law enforcement officials worked to piece together a clear motive and any ties to extremist groups.

The San Bernardino dispute was resolved when the F.B.I. found a private company to bypass the iPhone’s encryption. Tensions between the two sides, however, remained; and Apple worked to ensure that neither the government nor private contractors could open its phones.

Mr. Alshamrani’s phones are also of interest because he tried to destroy them at some point before he began firing, according to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Justice Department officials have long pushed for a legislative solution to the problem of “going dark,” law enforcement’s term for how increasingly secure phones have made it harder to solve crimes, and the Pensacola investigation gives them a prominent chance to make their case.

But the F.B.I. has been bruised by Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated complaints that former officials plotted to undercut his presidency and by a major inspector general’s report last month that revealed serious errors with aspects of the Russia investigation. A broad bipartisan consensus among lawmakers allowing the bureau to broaden its surveillance authorities is most likely elusive.

But much has also changed for Apple in the years since Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, excoriated the Obama administration publicly and privately in 2014 for attacking strong encryption. Obama officials who were upset by Apple’s stance on privacy, along with its decision to shelter billions of dollars in offshore accounts and make its products almost exclusively in China, aired those grievances quietly.

Now Apple is fighting the Trump administration, and President Trump has shown far more willingness to publicly criticize companies and public figures. When he recently claimed falsely that Apple had opened a manufacturing plant in Texas at his behest, the company stayed remained silent rather than correct him.

At the same time, Apple has financially benefited more under Mr. Trump than under President Barack Obama. It reaped a windfall from the Trump administration’s tax cuts, and Mr. Trump said he might shield Apple from the country’s tariff war with China.

Even so, people close to the company say that Apple will not back down from its unequivocal support of encryption that is impossible to crack.

Mr. Barr indicated on Monday that he is ready for a sharp fight.

He had said last month that finding a way for law enforcement to gain access to encrypted technology was one of the Justice Department’s “highest priorities.”

Mr. Alshamrani, who was killed at the scene of the attack, came to the United States in 2017 and soon started strike-fighter training in Florida. Investigators believe he may have been influenced by extremists as early as 2015.

The investigation into the shooting also found that some Saudi students training with the American military in Pensacola had ties to extremist movements while others possessed pornography, which is forbidden in Saudi Arabia. About a dozen trainees will be sent back to Saudi Arabia as a result.

Investigators have not found evidence to suggest that any of those students knew about Mr. Alshamrani’s contact with extremist groups or his mass shooting plan.

______

Comments from readers to the above article and I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

"We've got a lot more to fear, as Americans, from William P. Barr than we do from terrorists' iPhone data."

RUSSELL RALEIGH NC

"Barr should spend more time poking around and ensuring that our voting machines are as secure as an Apple phone." JEAN, CLEARY

"Let me get this straight: Barr demands access to potential evidence for an act of terrorism. The House requested access to documents of potential evidence and witness testimony for an inquiry into an act jeopardizing national security. I would like to hear from Barr - or this administration - regarding how public safety is important to them but national security is not. How public safety is important to them but climate change is not. How public safety is important to them but environmental regulations protecting air and water quality is not. Barr's appeal is obviously not about potential harm to Americans." E. SOL, PORTLAND

"Just to be clear, you can't have a backdoor for law enforcement without also leaving the device vulnerable to malicious actors. Politicians don't seem to understand this (probably because they're all too old to even know how to use their iPhones). There's no magical 'middle ground' solution where only law enforcement would be able to bypass security and unlock the phone. A backdoor is a backdoor and someone smart *will* figure out how to take advantage of it. If a law were passed requiring a backdoor for law enforcement, your phone would be vulnerable. That's just the way it is. I can't support any politician who tries to force Apple or any other manufacturer to make their phones less secure."

MR. ADAM'S, TEXAS

"What's not said is that Apple cannot access the contents of encrypted iPhones. This is by design. There is no backdoor for Apple because that would mean a backdoor for potentially anyone who has the tools and expertise to exploit it. Barr is either ignorant of this or willfully ignoring it."

PATRICK, ST. PAUL MN

"Barr made a "high profile request" so he could publicly blame Apple when they refuse. But Apple must resist because there is way more at stake than investigating one crime no matter how terrible it was. Capitulate this time and soon the government will be back demanding access to someone else's phone, and someone else again, etc., all with the "ticking time bomb" rationale. Then it won't be long before our phones, with all their detail about who we are, what we do, where we go, etc. are fair game for government and police on whatever rationale they invent."

PAT, SOMEWHERE

"I'm no great fan of Apple; however, considering the fact that Barr belongs in jail for his illegal acts, lies, and overall corruption, I hope Apple tells him to take a hike." GEORGE ELIOT, ANNAPOLIS, MD

"If Apple gives the government the ability to break encryption they may just as well just forget adding it at all. Both of our super secret agencies, the NSA and the CIA have allowed hacking tools to be stolen. You can bet your bottom dollar that if Apple gives them the keys that our government will find some way to lose them. Even if they didn’t, I have no desire to have what is already an exceptionally insecure digital environment further compromised by giving access to our government. Stand strong Apple."

CRAIG, CAROL STREAM, IL

"Stand your ground Apple. As time passes phones will contain even more of our private lives. You have no right to give them access to my personal property, just because you happened to make it. Thank you." MOMS AWARE, BO

"If Apple were to build a "back door" override to the encryption on the iPhone, accessible by the FBI, it would be a certainty that bad actors would eventually obtain it or hack it. It would be the end of any expectation of privacy, already a precious commodity in today’s world." BOB, NY STATE

"What exactly is Barr asking Apple to do? The article does not make this clear. Apple says (credibly) it has turned over all data from the account, and Barr seems not to dispute this. So st Barr asking Apple to use its resources to try to hack into its own phone? Is the idea that somehow Apple might be aware of security flaws and not identifying those to the FBI? I am seriously concerned about Barr's request. While I do take very seriously the problem of defending the US against bad actors, this must be balanced against potential harm to democracy and civil liberties -- and Barr has given us no indication he is to be trusted in making such a judgment."

SC, MIDWEST

"Well, Apple should be hired to make our voting booths secure! No other company has been able to stop the Russians and other criminals from interfering in our elections. Maybe Apple could protect our votes."

DUDLEY, BANNER ELK, NC

"Apple has given investigators materials from the iCloud account of the gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi air force training with the American military, who killed three sailors and wounded eight others on Dec. 6. But the company has refused to help the F.B.I. open the phones themselves, which would undermine its claims that its phones are secure." No. It would undermine the privacy of all Americans above and beyond the way it already is. We pay taxes and a good portion of that money goes to a Department of State that has refused to sanction Saudi Arabia for the worst of the crimes it and its citizens have perpetrated on this nation. We pay taxes and some of that money, a great deal of it, goes to the NSA, FBI and CIA. Let them use their resources and gumshoe investigative skillz to track down anyone who may have coached or directed this terrorist to commit this crime. Steve Jobs was right to refuse to give the FBI and DOJ the tools to crack open an iPhone. It is the right policy. Our collective privacy rights are not trumped by the police state because it is more convenient to do their job through trampling on our rights than it is to actually investigate. Since Edward Snowden's revelations nothing has been done to safeguard Americans' rights to have their lives remain private vis a vis the state and corporations. Good for Apple for saying no. As for these Saudi students? Send them home." RIMA, SOUTHERN CAL.

Law enforcer often talk as if they have an entitlement to people's most private digital activities. I've read and seen local officials at different levels talk as if the human owners are merely a worthless impediment to a rightful police activity. Many times, access is treated as an excuse to go wandering about the private lives of suspects and even individuals tangentially related. When authorities secure search warrants to go into individuals' homes, they're looking principally for physical objects that confirm their suspicions about a crime and help them build a case. However, mobile phones and digital devices capture not only actions but often deeply private thoughts of owners, as well. Americans need spaces that are sacrosanct. That includes portions of the digital world. Just because mobile devices exist does not mean authorities should ever have the right to crack them open and rummage around. Police have other avenues -- such as social media and strong search tools -- to find what people have already shared online. However, the brains and thoughts of Americans -- to which phones are often an extension -- are supposed to remain their own -- in all instances. The U.S. Constitutions says so.

PEGGY ROGERS PA

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Iran’s Grim Economy Limits Its Willingness to Confront the U.S.

Fearful of public anger over a plunging economy, Iran’s leaders appear to be turning inward, pulling back from escalation.

By Peter S. Goodman | Published Jan. 13, 2020 Updated 6:44 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

LONDON — Iran is caught in a wretched economic crisis. Jobs are scarce. Prices for food and other necessities are skyrocketing. The economy is rapidly shrinking. Iranians are increasingly disgusted.

Crippling sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have severed Iran’s access to international markets, decimating the economy, which is now contracting at an alarming 9.5 percent annual rate, the International Monetary Fund estimated. Oil exports were effectively zero in December, according to Oxford Economics, as the sanctions have prevented sales, even though smugglers have transported unknown volumes.

The bleak economy appears to be tempering the willingness of Iran to escalate hostilities with the United States, its leaders cognizant that war could profoundly worsen national fortunes. In recent months, public anger over joblessness, economic anxiety and corruption has emerged as a potentially existential threat to Iran’s hard-line regime.

Only a week ago, such sentiments had been redirected by outrage over the Trump administration’s Jan. 3 killing of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. But protests flared anew over the weekend in Tehran, and then continued on Monday, after the government’s astonishing admission that it was — despite three days of denial — responsible for shooting down a Ukrainian jetliner.

The demonstrations were most pointedly an expression of contempt for the regime’s cover-up following its downing of the Ukrainian jet, which killed all 176 people on board. But the fury in the streets resonated as a rebuke for broader grievances — diminishing livelihoods, financial anxiety and the sense that the regime is at best impotent in the face of formidable troubles.

Inflation is running near 40 percent, assailing consumers with sharply rising prices for food and other basic necessities. More than one in four young Iranians is jobless, with college graduates especially short of work, according to the World Bank.

The missile strikes that Iran unleashed on American bases in Iraq last week in response to Gen. Suleimani’s killing appeared calibrated to enable its leaders to declare that vengeance had been secured without provoking an extreme response from President Trump, such as aerial bombing.

Hostilities with the most powerful military on earth would make life even more punishing for ordinary Iranians. It would likely weaken the currency and exacerbate inflation, while menacing what remains of national industry, eliminating jobs and reinvigorating public pressure on the leadership.

Conflict could threaten a run on domestic banks by sending more companies into distress. Iranian companies have been spared from collapse by surges of credit from banks. The government controls about 70 percent of banking assets, according to a paper by Adnan Mazarei, a former I.M.F. deputy director and now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Roughly half of all bank loans are in arrears, Iran’s Parliament has estimated.

Many Iranian companies depend on imported goods to make and sell products, from machinery to steel to grain. If Iran’s currency declines further, those companies would have to pay more for such goods. Banks would either have to extend more loans, or businesses would collapse, adding to the ranks of the jobless.

The central bank has been financing government spending, filling holes in a tattered budget to limit public ire over cuts. That entails printing Iranian money, adding to the strains on the currency. A war could prompt wealthier Iranians to yank assets out of the country, threatening a further decline in the currency and producing runaway inflation.

In sum, this is the unpalatable choice confronting the Iranian leadership: It can keep the economy going by continuing to steer credit to banks and industry, adding to the risks of an eventual banking disaster and hyperinflation. Or it can opt for austerity that would cause immediate public suffering, threatening more street demonstrations.

“That is the specter hanging over the Iranian economy,” Mr. Mazarei said. “The current economic situation is not sustainable.”

Though such realities appear to be limiting Iran’s appetite for escalation, some experts suggest that the regime’s hard-liners may eventually come to embrace hostilities with the United States as a means of stimulating the anemic economy.

Cut off from international investors and markets, Iran has in recent years focused on forging a so-called resistance economy in which the state has invested aggressively, subsidizing strategic industries, while seeking to substitute domestic production for imported goods.

That strategy has been inefficient, say economists, adding to the strains on Iran’s budget and the banking system, but it appears to have raised employment. Hard-liners might come see a fight with Iran’s archenemy, the United States, as an opportunity to expand the resistance economy while stoking politically useful nationalist anger.

“There will be those who will argue that we can’t sustain the current situation if we don’t have a war,” said Yassamine Mather, a political economist at the University of Oxford. “For the Iranian government, living in crisis is good. It’s always been good, because you can blame all the economic problems on sanctions, or on the foreign threat of war. In the last couple of years, Iran has looked for adventures as a way of diverting attention from economic problems.”

How ever Iran’s leaders proceed, experts assume that economic concerns will not be paramount: Iran’s leaders prioritize one goal above all others — their own survival. If confrontation with outside powers appears promising as a means of reinforcing their hold on power, the leadership may accept economic pain as a necessary cost.

“The hard-liners are willing to impoverish people to stay in power,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a research institution in London. “The Islamic Republic does not make decisions based on purely economic outcomes.”

But Iran’s leaders need only survey their own region to recognize the dangers that economic distress can pose to established powers. In recent months, Iraq and Lebanon have seen furious demonstrations fueled in part by declining living standards amid corruption and abuse of power.

As recently as November, Iran’s perilous economic state appeared to pose a foundational threat to the regime. As the government scrambled to secure cash to finance aid for the poor and the jobless, it scrapped subsidies on gasoline, sending the price of fuel soaring by as much as 200 percent. That spurred angry protests in the streets of Iranian cities, with demonstrators openly calling for the expulsion of President Hassan Rouhani.

“That’s a sign of how much pressure they are under,” said Maya Senussi, a Middle East expert at Oxford Economics in London.

In unleashing the drone strike that killed General Suleimani, Mr. Trump effectively relieved the leadership of that pressure, undercutting the force of his own sanctions, say experts.

Within Iran, the killing resounded as a breach of national sovereignty and evidence that the United States bore malevolent intent. It muted the complaints that propelled November’s demonstrations — laments over rising prices, accusations of corruption and economic malpractice amid the leadership — replacing them with mourning for a man celebrated as a national hero.

A country fraught with grievances aimed directly at its senior leaders had seemingly been united in anger at the United States.

“The killing of Suleimani represents a watershed, not only in terms of directing attention away from domestic problems, but also rallying Iranians around their flag,” said Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.

Mr. Trump had supplied the Iranian leadership “time and space to change the conversation,” he added. Iranians were no longer consumed with the “misguided and failed economic policies of the Iranian regime,” but rather “the arrogant aggression of the United States against the Iranian nation.”

But then came the government’s admission that it was responsible for bringing down the Ukrainian passenger jet. Now, Iran’s leaders again find themselves on the wrong end of angry street demonstrations.

For now, the regime is seeking to quash the demonstrations with riot police and admonitions to the protesters to go home. But if public rage continues, hard-liners may resort to challenging American interests in the hopes that confrontation will force Mr. Trump to negotiate a deal toward eliminating the sanctions.

Iran may threaten the passage of ships carrying oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for more than one-fifth of the world’s consumption of liquid petroleum. Disruption there would restrict the global supply oil, raising the price of the vital commodity. That could sow alarm in world markets while limiting global economic growth, potentially jeopardizing Mr. Trump’s re-election bid, as the logic goes.

Iran previously had a different pathway toward gaining relief from the sanctions: Under a 2015 deal forged by President Barack Obama, the sanctions were removed in exchange for Iran’s verified promise to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.

But when Mr. Trump took office, he renounced that deal and resumed sanctions.

The Iranian leadership has courted European support for a resumption of the nuclear deal, seeking to exploit divergence between Europe and the United States. The Europeans have been unhappy about Mr. Trump’s renewed sanctions, which have dashed the hopes of German, French and Italian companies that had looked to Iran for expanded business opportunities.

Whatever comes next, Iran’s leadership is painfully aware that getting out from under the American sanctions is the only route to lifting its economy, say experts.

The nuclear deal was intended to give Iran’s leaders an incentive to diminish hostility as a means of seeking liberation from the sanctions. Mr. Trump’s abandonment of the deal effectively left them with only one means of pursuing that goal — confrontation.

“They see escalation as the only way to the negotiating table,” said Ms. Vakil. “They can’t capitulate and come to the negotiating table. They can’t compromise, because that would show weakness. By demonstrating that they can escalate, that they are fearless, they are trying to build leverage.”

*********

Iran Protests Rage Over Downed Jet, as Other Nations Seek Redress

Protesters chanted against Iran’s clerical rulers for a third day, while Ukraine’s foreign minister said five countries would seek action against those responsible.

By Ben Hubbard | Published Jan. 13, 2020 Updated 3:16 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Protesters and riot police faced off in at least two cities in Iran on Monday, a third day of angry demonstrations at the country’s leaders after the government acknowledged having shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane, killing 176 people.

The protests are the most recent spillover from escalating regional tensions between the United States and Iran that built up to President Trump’s decision to kill a high-ranking Iranian general, and Iran’s firing missiles at United States forces in Iraq in response.

After days of denials, Iran acknowledged early on Saturday that it had shot down the Ukraine International Airlines flight on Wednesday, blaming the attack on human error. But the government’s obfuscation has angered many Iranians, already squeezed by poor economic conditions exacerbated by United States sanctions, and some took to the streets soon after.

Videos from inside Iran shared on social media on Monday showed university students in Isfahan and the capital, Tehran, chanting against the country’s clerical rulers while riot police deployed nearby.

The extent of the protests and the amount of violence used to try to stop them were hard to assess because of tight restrictions on social media and the news media inside the country. Videos from previous days have shown protesters carrying off bleeding comrades while gunshots echoed in the background.

The authorities in Iran denied that security forces had opened fire.

“At protests, police absolutely did not shoot because the capital’s police officers have been given orders to show restraint,” Hossein Rahimi, the head of Tehran’s police, said on Monday, according to state-run news media.

[Read: Iran’s only female Olympic medalist has defected from the country over “lies” and “injustice.”]

Late Sunday, Mr. Trump warned Iran not to target the demonstrators. Framing himself as a supporter of the media, which in other circumstances he has frequently disparaged, Mr. Trump exhorted Iran’s leaders to allow unfettered reporting.

“To the leaders of Iran — DO NOT KILL YOUR PROTESTERS,” he wrote on Twitter. “Thousands have already been killed or imprisoned by you, and the World is watching. More importantly, the USA is watching. Turn your internet back on and let reporters roam free! Stop the killing of your great Iranian people!”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

To the leaders of Iran - DO NOT KILL YOUR PROTESTERS. Thousands have already been killed or imprisoned by you, and the World is watching. More importantly, the USA is watching. Turn your internet back on and let reporters roam free! Stop the killing of your great Iranian people!

8:48 AM - Jan 12, 2020

The Ukrainian plane took off from Tehran on a flight to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, before dawn on Wednesday, and barely two minutes later it was struck by an anti-aircraft missile fired by an Iranian crew. Iranian forces had fired missiles at American forces in Iraq hours earlier, and were on the alert for retaliation by the United States.

In addition to the domestic outrage, Iran may also face demands for compensation from nations whose citizens were killed on the plane, Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko of Ukraine told Reuters on Monday in an interview in Singapore.

“We have created this group of foreign ministers from the grieving nations. On Jan. 16, we will meet in person in London to discuss the ways, including legal, how we are following this up, how we are prosecuting them,” Mr. Prystaiko said, referring to the Iranians.

The talks would include five nations, he said: Canada, which lost 57 citizens, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sweden and another country he did not identify.

They and other nations have pushed for greater international involvement in the investigation of how the crash happened, and Mr. Prystaiko said Tehran had agreed to hand over the jet’s black boxes for analysis, but had yet to set a date to do so.

Mr. Prystaiko separately told the BBC in an interview broadcast Monday that President Hassan Rouhani of Iran had accepted full responsibility for the crash, without trying to shift the blame onto the United States for escalating overall tensions in the region.

“At least at the presidential level, nothing of this nonsense was mentioned,” Mr. Prystaiko said, describing Mr. Rouhani’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday. “He tried to do his best to explain that it was human error, that no one who is to be punished will escape the punishment.”

Tensions between the United States and Iran have soared since 2018, when Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of an international agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program and imposed the first in a series of sanctions on Iran to punish it for what his administration sees as its destabilizing activities across the Middle East.

After a number of attacks on United States assets and allies in the Middle East in recent months, Mr. Trump ordered the killing on Jan. 3 of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds force. He headed Iran’s efforts to support and direct allied militias in the region.

Those militias include an Iraqi group that fired rockets at a military base in Iraq late last month, killing one American contractor. United States forces retaliated against militia bases, killing more than two dozen fighters, and militias responded by surrounding the American Embassy compound in Baghdad, breaching its perimeter wall, setting fires and throwing rocks.

The killing of General Suleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport raised fears that Iran or its network of allies across the Middle East would respond against the United States and its allies, possibly igniting a regional war.

On Wednesday, Iran responded by firing a barrage of missiles at two military bases in Iraq that host United States forces, inflicting some damage but killing no one. The Ukrainian jet crashed after being struck in the air by an Iranian missile a few hours later.

______

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.

[omfgtrump]

Impeachable Him

The articles of impeachment approved in the Judiciary committee, that will now be voted on by the entire House of Representatives, are cogent and simple. “Abuse of Power” and “Obstruction of Congress” (Justice.) The two articles are very similar to two of three articles brought against Nixon.

However, back in the day when facts mattered and politicians actually put the country before party, Nixon’s staunchest supporters ultimately did not deny the facts of the case. When Nixon realized he didn’t have the votes in the Senate to save his presidency, he resigned, rather than face the specter of a public trial and the humiliation it would bring.

But we live in scary times. Our democracy is under siege. Facts seem to have little meaning. We have an entire political party standing behind a vile man who at every turn flaunts the rule of law. Our country is being led by an ignominious ignoramus whose only concern is his own enrichment and power; an orange haired bully who gets his greatest joy from devaluing others; a man whose greatest skill is lying with such ease that he has convinced millions of people that he is telling the truth and everything said about him is “fake news”; a craven criminal who believes he can get away with anything.

Instead of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham going to the oval office (like one of Nixon’s staunchest supporters, Barry Goldwater did) and saying Mr. President: “We love ya, but you did some bad stuff and we can’t support you no more,” they are doubling down in their defense of him.

Here’s what each said about the role they will play in the senate trial:

“I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here,” Graham said, adding, “What I see coming, happening today is just a partisan nonsense.”

During an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, the Majority Leader said that “everything” he does “during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can.”

Graham and McConnell’s are jurors in the Senate trial. If they were to make statements like that during a jury selection process in any trial in this country, they would immediately be sent their marching papers. The Don has taught them well. You can thwart any sense of normalcy, defile your oath of office and people will scream for a while, but then no one will care. This is The Don’s brilliance: when everything is not normal then that becomes the new normal.

Maybe there are a few really stupid lawmakers (I mean you Louie Gohmert!) out there that can’t differentiate facts from fiction, or who like a battered spouse, will defend their partner despite the devastation they cause, but almost all of them know that The Don is guilty.

Based on the facts of the case, any second-rate trial lawyer, could sleep walk through this case to victory. Every person who testified reaffirmed the same thing. The Don abused the power of his office to obtain dirt on a political appointment from a foreign government to advance his prospects for winning the 2020 election. He withheld almost $400 million (extortion and bribery) in military aid to Ukraine-a classic example of quid pro quo-which compromised Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself against Russia. He threatened our national security by attempting to allow a foreign government to meddle in our election and by allowing Russia to get an upper hand in its attempt to appropriate part of Ukraine, which is a sovereign state. Then he obstructed Congress at every turn in its attempt to pursue the truth.

The facts are not in question here. What is in question is the Republicans commitment to their oath of office to protect the constitution of our country. The constitution as a political document is only as meaningful as the people’s willingness to defend it. The Republicans are engaged in a shameful and dangerous dereliction of their duty. Their sycophancy is only superseded by their immorality. They have abandoned their posts as the protectors of our democracy and will be remembered for their treasonous behavior; they will be remembered for propping up a malignant narcissist who seeks absolute power and who has shown himself to viciously abuse that power. He will do anything to win a second term and Republicans will be held responsible for the mayhem that will ensue, as we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The very presence of The Don in the White House is a stain on our country. His amorality fundamentally disqualifies him from being president; his lack of humanity and malignant narcissism make him a “clear and present danger” to our country and the world on a daily basis. The list of his impeachable offenses is long but for multiple reasons only two were brought.

That being the case, I’d like to put forth one more for fun.

Impeachment Article 3. Time Magazine Person of the Year award envy.

The Don was apoplectic when he found out he was usurped by Greta Thurnberg, the 16 year old Climate Change Activist, tweeting:

 @realDonaldTrump

So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!

Scene: The Don in the oval office.

The Don: I should have won. I have done more regarding climate change than anyone, ever!

Aide: Mr. President, actually you’ve done more to dismantle climate change policy than anyone.

The Don: So? More is more. It doesn’t matter what kind of more it is. It’s just goddamn more! Now get Time on the phone. This will not stand!

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[internetbetterforall]

Business A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels

Business A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels Business A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels http://www.nature-business.com/business-a-one-two-punch-puts-trump-back-on-his-heels/

Business President Trump arrived in Charleston, W.Va., for a rally on Tuesday, hours after judgments against two of his former confidants.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesWASHINGTON — In two courtrooms 200 miles apart on Tuesday, President Trump’s almost daily attempts to dismiss the criminal investigations that have engulfed his White House all but collapsed.Mr. Trump has long mocked the investigations as “rigged witch hunts,” pursued by Democrats and abetted by a dishonest news media. But even the president’s staunchest defenders acknowledged privately that the legal setbacks he suffered within minutes of each other could open fissures among Republicans on Capitol Hill and expose Mr. Trump to the possibility of impeachment.In Manhattan, Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, admitted in court that Mr. Trump directed him to break campaign finance laws by paying off two women who said they had sexual relationships with Mr. Trump. And in Alexandria, Va., a jury found Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, guilty of eight counts of tax and bank fraud — the most significant victory yet for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.A president who has labored under the cloud of investigations from almost the moment he took office, Mr. Trump now faces an increasingly grim legal and political landscape. Mr. Mueller is methodically investigating whether Mr. Trump and members of his campaign conspired with a foreign power to win the election — and whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation from the White House. And the president is months away from congressional elections that could hobble the second half of his presidency.Democrats seized on the judgments against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Cohen — they both face years in prison — to argue that Mr. Trump was suffused by a culture of graft and corruption, an argument that could prove powerful for an already galvanized party in the midterm contests.Inside the West Wing, aides to Mr. Trump — numbed and desensitized by breathless news cycles blaring headlines about the president’s behavior — said privately on Tuesday afternoon that they were having trouble assessing how devastating the day’s legal events might be.Mr. Trump’s advisers spent hours working on a statement that was attributed to his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but privately, several said that they could not come up with something to explain away Mr. Cohen’s admissions beyond calling him a liar.As he landed in Charleston, W.Va., for a rally with supporters on Tuesday night, a grim-faced Mr. Trump sidestepped questions about Mr. Cohen. He defended Mr. Manafort as a “good man” who had been ensnared in an investigation that ranged far beyond its original mandate.“It had nothing to do with Russian collusion,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “We continue the witch hunt.”Later, the president largely ignored the dramatic courtroom events during a raucous rally in which his fervent supporters cheered Mr. Trump’s usual rants about trade, illegal immigration, Democratic obstruction and the news media.“Where is the collusion? Find some collusion,” he said before shifting topics to declare that illegal immigration is “the beating heart” of the coming elections.ImageKevin Downing, a lawyer for Paul Manafort, on Tuesday in Alexandria, Va.CreditTom Brenner for The New York TimesThe effect of Mr. Manafort’s conviction and Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea on the investigation itself was unpredictable, according to legal experts. But Democrats said it put the lie to Mr. Trump’s argument that Mr. Mueller was engaged in a political investigation.“It shows that Mueller and prosecutors in New York are conducting a professional investigation, following the facts where they lead, and obtaining serious felony convictions,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “They also dramatically increase the likelihood that both men cooperate with the government.”Mr. Schiff said Mr. Cohen’s admission that he violated campaign finance laws in paying hush money to two women “adds to the president’s legal jeopardy,” though Mr. Trump’s advisers played down the likelihood that a sitting president would be indicted for such violations.“There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen,” said Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in a statement. “It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.”Still, Mr. Cohen was blunt about the president’s culpability as he stood in court and admitted his guilt: “In coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office,” Mr. Cohen said he conspired with a media company to keep secret Mr. Trump’s affair with Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels.“Mr. Cohen, when you took all of these acts that you’ve described, did you know that what you were doing was wrong and illegal?” the judge asked. Mr. Cohen answered, “Yes, your honor.”The startling charge directed at Mr. Trump carried echoes of President Richard M. Nixon, who was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the special prosecutor’s investigation of Watergate.And it raised the prospect that Mr. Trump’s presidency could be at risk by impeachment in Congress even if the sprawling Russia investigation never definitively concludes that there was collusion or obstruction of justice.Mr. Cohen worked for decades as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer. He was privy to the innermost details of the president’s business dealings and personal life — once saying that he would take a bullet for Mr. Trump.While Mr. Mueller’s investigation grinds on — reaching into the murky depths of Russian money laundering or Russia’s shadowy efforts to hack the 2016 election — Mr. Cohen’s case throws a white-hot spotlight on the behavior of Mr. Trump and his closest confidants.It also makes it harder for Mr. Trump or his aides to distance themselves from Mr. Cohen’s wrongdoing. Though he also pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud, related to his ownership of New York City taxi medallions, the heart of the case against Mr. Cohen is the payments to women he made on behalf — and at the behest of — his most celebrated client.With Mr. Cohen’s plea, five associates of the president have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of crimes since Mr. Trump took office. In addition to Mr. Cohen, Mr. Manafort, and Mr. Flynn, they include Rick Gates, the former deputy campaign chairman, and George Papadopoulos, who advised the campaign on foreign policy issues.ImageMichael D. Cohen leaving federal court after pleading guilty on Tuesday in New York.CreditAndres Kudacki for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s mood tracked a tumultuous day. In the morning, he was chipper, monitoring Fox News and commenting to aides on the headlines he saw, according to people who spoke with him. But Mr. Trump was already snappish with aides in the West Wing before the Manafort verdict was announced and before Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty, according to people familiar with his conversations.By then, it had become clear that Mr. Cohen was likely to plead guilty to several crimes. The president’s churlish mood had not lightened by the time he boarded Air Force One for the rally in West Virginia, and learned the details of his plea.The president’s team quickly tried to paint Mr. Cohen as a liar, and noted that prosecutors had not targeted Mr. Trump.People close to Mr. Trump privately acknowledged that the declarations from Mr. Cohen, made under oath in open court, could have significant political ramifications.While impeachment discussions have always been treated as having a potential positive effect to turn out Republican voters, the statements that Mr. Cohen made were stark and took it out of the realm of the theoretical.“I think impeachment is now squarely going to define the midterms,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Mr. Trump. “It’s inescapable now that Democrats can legitimately raise that issue.”He added, “There’s a lot of Republican members of Congress sitting in tough districts that are going to have to really think hard about how they’re going to finesse this in the days ahead.”What makes it harder for Republicans, he said, is that this did not emerge from the Mueller inquiry. “This isn’t something from the deep state,” he said. “This is a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses.”And, he added, “It’ll be very hard to distance the president. You would assume that there’s legitimate evidence that the president was aware that those invoices were not for services rendered. You already have the one tape.”Brian Walsh, a former spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that it was too early to say whether this would damage the president, but he noted he is already suffering with suburban voters.“I think the president’s most ardent supporters will continue to defend him with blinders on, but to any neutral observer watching this, it’s impossible to believe that Cohen would engage in this conduct without his client signing off on it or at least being aware of it,” he said.“I think many will take a wait-and-see attitude,” he added. “What it does is serve as another tremendous distraction for Republicans running for re-election and already facing tough political headwinds. Every day that Republicans are being asked about legal questions surrounding the president is a day they’re not delivering the message they want to be delivering on the campaign trail.”Mark Landler and Michael D. Shear reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/trump-manafort-cohen-mueller.html | http://www.nytimes.com/by/mark-landler, http://www.nytimes.com/by/michael-d-shear, http://www.nytimes.com/by/maggie-haberman

Business A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels, in 2018-08-22 04:39:57