#also some of these details are based on a real birth certificate i found to copy the details off from belfast but it was from the 70's

[rotzaprachim]

be gentle with the people who were not made from The Fall

- Gen, Declan Lynch &  Mór Ó Corra

2k ao3 here

She passed Declan a blank manilla envelope. He ran his fingers gingerly over the edges, life having long ago built up a healthy suspicion of anything from the channels of the Fairy Market. He couldn’t feel anything, but he’d also never had the touch for it. At some point he’d always ended up having to hold his breath and jump in in order to get the rough work done. 

He slit it open with the knife in his pocket.  

There were answers he’d had before he even knew what the questions were. Firstborn, Niall told Declan. My All-American son, Niall told Declan. When you were born the rivers dried up and all the cows in Rockingham County cried blood, Niall told Ronan. When you were born, I wasn’t here, Niall told Declan. 

The silence swallowed his voice for a long time. 

“Ó Corra?” 

She gave him a look that said, you can’t pronounce your own name. Finally she said, “You have my name. It’s what they did when the father couldn’t be found.” 

He studied the certificate in the small crescents of yellow light that bounced in through the tinted windows of her sports car from the streetlight outside. The Births and Deaths Registation (Northern Ireland) Order 1976, Article 34. Registered in the District of Belfast. 24 July 1997. Declan James Ó Corra.

There was a box that asked for Name and Surname and Dwelling Place of Father (6). It was blank. There was another box that asked for Rank or Profession of Father. On that one, someone had gona back with a red pen at some later point, scrawled angrily, messily, bleeding jaggedly out from the neat black boxes, GONE. 

It made sense, in a strange sort of way that Declan’s brain dimly seemed to recognise in the same way that the drowning man thinks the sun streaming through the surface looks quite nice even when he’s being pulled under. Niall Lynch’s sons. The dreamer son of a dream and the dream of the dreamer the son of a dream. And here now was the odd one out, the liar the son of a lie. 

“I was two years younger than you.” The woman finally said. He couldn’t think of her as anything other than the vague idea digging at the back of his eye turned hard, angry secret when he started to shift through his father’s boxes of crap after death. He’d left a fuckton of a lot of loose threads, although Declan hadn’t thought he’d be one of them. Letters and phone bills from a far-away woman, even a photo or two, all the vitriol and anger he’d carried around bubbling up again acridly through a mirror. Collected in an old file box next to IOU’s and pay me bastard or i’ll fuck you ups in seven different languages, three of which Niall didn’t know how to read. Collected, and never returned. Even some photos of him as a kiddo in a tiny knit sweater. 

“No explanations.” Declan finally said. His voice sounded like when he’d had the lights punched out of him by one of the goons his dad owed rubles, or rupees, or riyals, in the parking lot of a Fairy Market. It could have been all three. “You don’t have to give me one.” I don’t know if I want one, he didn’t say. 

“I’m a very dangerous woman to find, Declan. You wouldn’t have found me if you hadn’t been looking.” 

He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted safety, although he’d ruled out that as a possibility years ago. He wanted the ones the world had left him to care for to be safe, and he’d jeapordised all that on a wild goose chase to find the woman in one of his father’s fucking dream objects on a hunch of a hunch. He’d done exactly what he’d warned Ronan not to do, relied on himself to be smarter, sharper, more careful. All attributes hard won on his own,  like learning from imitation from a mirror. You see what this who looks like you does? Now do the opposite. 

He sighed. The air bristled, and he realised he sounded a lot like Mór Ó Corra.

“Maybe I-” 

Maybe he hadn’t been angry, almost, to find out. Maybe he’d almost been relieved. A voice to his darkest thoughts saying, you did not dream this up. The part of himself that’d been forced through seven years of Catholic school and then forced himself through a few months of therapy where he couldn’t tell the therapist about any of the things that had most profoundly fucked him up said a good man should have loved any child, regardless. He was about fifteen years past thinking Niall to be a good man. 

“Maybe I spent so many years dealing with all the fucking dreaming, the dreamers and the dreams and every fucking thing that’s come to kill us because Dad couldn’t fix any of his own shit and the fact that none, none of it was ever part of me that I thought I wanted some kind of fucking explanation for it all. I wanted some- some explanation for it all. Why I was different. WHy dad- … WHy dad. I wanted some part of a past that was mine.” Selfish, maybe. Learned. If you spent a lifetime you were different from other people, eventually you came to a wanting a reason for them to be different from you. 

“And you think I’m going to be the dear old Mam who darns your socks and calls to remind you to bring a good girl home to the family?” 

“No. I didn’t ask for that. You know what I asked for.” 

The second Manilla envelope she gave him was far thicker. This time, he could feel the slightest trace of- something. Not a buzzing, not a mist, a- something. He slid it into his briefcase. No expectations. Nothing more. A deal that was a deal, only a birth certificate instead of a handshake. 

“I was two years younger than you. Sometimes life doesn’t hand you many choices. I’d say you didn’t understand, and you don’t, but I’ll also say you’ve been a hell of a lot more of a father than Niall ever was. All the more so since the world’s made you be one.” 

Niall was drunk off some kind of spiked slivovitz when he’d come round to it the first time. Retrospectively, he was probably scared shitless, and rightly so. “Anything happens,” he’d slurred into the hotel couch. “You’re the man of the house. Take ‘em to church. Make ‘em proper. Make ‘em fear God. There’s money in the bank, anything happens.” And Declan had almost said, you know it’s my number Matthew’s school’s had down on the books for a year now? You know the priest there already thinks we’re orphans? 

“You’ve got a number and an adress. You’re a smart boy. You know if you use it my women’ll kill you just as likely as the dreamkillers.” 

“Everything has a price. At least you’re up front on it.” 

“I’m not a good woman, Declan. Don’t make your father’s mistake. Don’t dream me into being one.” 

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” 

--- 

He didn’t open the package until he’d driven two hours, switched lisence plates and then cars, moved a state line, and walked two miles out to a sublet Jordan knew from a friend of a friend of an enemy in the art underground, where two dreams were now. It came with two dozen forged Miró’s in the living room, all done with a variety of blue paint with a distinctly incriminating synthetic binding agent manufactured solely post 1986, and even in the palest strands of morning light it made the living room into a riot of psychedelic stick-figure Catalan sunshine. He opened the door carefully, walked gingerly past the still-sleeping Matthew, TV still flickering from where he’d probably been watching it far later than Declan would have let him. Flicked the kitchen light on and made himself a cup of instant coffee, and more than anything else resisted the urge to upstairs and collapse next to Jordan in the bed that was for the moment theirs and sleep till noon. But if there was a lesson he’d learned by know it was that he couldn’t do any of the things he wanted to in life. So he downed the shitty instant coffee and he opened Mór Ó Corra’s folder and he got to work. You do what you gotta do for your family, Niall had told him. A deal had gone south and they’d made it out with their lives and stacks of money shoved in their pockets. One day you’ll have yourself a wife and some kids and then you’ll know. And he’d swallowed what he now knew was his rage. 

     “Ready to make a deal with the devil?” The voice on the other end of the number had said when he’d dialed it, and he said, only the devil can help me now, and he’d been right. No one with their head above the water could know the things he wanted to know about the Moderators. I have two dreamers and two dreams to keep out of the reach of a shadowy intergovernmental agency who’s whole M.O is about killing every dreamer they can find to stop the end of the world. Only a shadow knows its kind. And for her part, Mór Ó Corra had been thorough. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust her and he didn’t even know if he trusted the birth certificate. When you were the lying son of a lie, another one would be more natural than anything. He wouldn’t act on any of her information until he could put some feelers out, a few red herrings, get ahold of some of Nialls’ other bullshit to run cross checks. It was a start. At some he’d always ended up having to hold his breath and jump in in order to get the rough work done. At some point, he’d always just been shoved in. 

He didnt’ realise he’d fallen asleep until he was woken up. By Matthew, prodding his neck with the tines of a fork. 

“You said to wake you up if you slept past noon.” Jordan set down a massive plate of something exactly an inch from his eardrum with a loud clatter. 

“It’s 12:02,” Matthew added generously. 

He looked down. He hadn’t gotten through the pile. There was still more- 

Jordan’s eyes flicked notably towards the floor tiles. Declan followed them. In his early morning haze he’d somehow missed a second, smaller envelope within the envelope. He slipped it into his jacket before Matthew could see. He slid all of the papers back into the envelope before Matthew could see more. 

“Two whole extra minutes? Well, that’s where’s where the rest of my day went.” 

“You looked like you needed it. Like, you definitely looked like you needed it.” She handed him the day’s second mug of instant coffee and it hit him again that he loved her a not, which would have felt all new and electric even in circumstances that were not the current ones and when and if this was all over with hopefully no more deaths she deserved a really really nice vacation to somewhere sunny. Which he would not promise until he knew he could actually pull it off, because Declan Lynch was a liar but he was not a man who broke promises. 

  He didn’t open up the other envelope until he was in the bathroom with the door firmly locked. Magical all female mafias ran on the power of the sticky stuff at the top of a Manilla envelope, apparently. Only a few sheets inside. A surprisingly blurry print-out map with a building circled, a clipping from the Belfast Telegraph about the NHS’s most recent warnings on the loneliness epidemic among young adults and seniors, and new local projects for seniors to form new connections through knitting circles, classes in French and Irish, and mentorship opportunities with Sixth-Form students. “Former school teacher Anne  Ó Corra recounts feelings of isolation after the untimely death of her only daughter in 1999. She says that mentorship opportunities with Saint Mary’s Compre-” Declan scanned the article. On the back the same hand that had scrawled, GONE, wrote, THink the old bat’d be happy to see you. 

#my writings #call down the hawk #declan lynch #Mór Ó Corra #the dreamer trilogy #the raven cycle #the raven cycle fic #i don't remember a lot of hte details of TRC so if there's issues- please let me know! with canon or whatnot #also some of these details are based on a real birth certificate i found to copy the details off from belfast but it was from the 70's

[liesoverthec]

OG 911 Character Details from Canon Pt 2

Hi y’all I’m back! I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who reblogged the last details post - I sort of just thought people would like it and it would die, so to see it travel and hopefully reach more writers was so great so thank you again!

Details under the cut since I went a little crazy 😅 and if this is your first time seeing this, the first part, and any future parts, can be found under this tag here!

Quick note before I get to the details - always, ALWAYS take details from dialogue or plot over details from the set or props if they contradict each other. The writers have the ultimate say over what happens on the show/for the characters, so whatever they say goes, even if it goes against something props has already laid down (eg, Chim’s birthday, sorry Libra crew. He’s an Aries or a Pisces). So keep that in mind for the future in case some of these details I have which are from props/set are changed in the future, or if you’ve noticed something yourself!

Also if you have questions, I am MORE than happy to answer them, although if you leave them in the tags on this post I’m probably gonna lose them, so if it’s something you’d genuinely like an answer to, drop it in my inbox! Besides my standard “ask” tags, I’m also tagging asks about canon details with this tag here. Every time I make a big post like this, I’m going to link all the asks I’ve gotten since the last post, but if you’re looking for more info in the mean time, that’s the other spot to look!

Buck has a grill on his patio.

Eddie doesn’t hang Christopher’s art on the fridge - instead it is either hung on the corkboard in Chris’ room to the left of the door, or Eddie puts it in an actual frame and hangs it using a hammer/nails in Christopher’s room. All the Diaz family has on their fridge is a bunch of bendy people magnets. (I absolutely ADORE him putting all this effort into treating Christopher’s art like it’s something you’d buy from a professional artist).

Info on everyone’s ages can be found here. (Little more discussion of Chim’s situation here).

Albert has a bachelor’s degree! I don’t know in what though, except that it’s some field for which is a Master’s is useful.

Athena was in a sorority in college, Delta Sigma Theta. Their website describes them as “ ...a sisterhood comprised primarily of Black, college-educated women ... [that] considers the issues impacting the Black community and boldly confronts the challenges of African Americans and, hence, all Americans ”, which I love for Athena, and feel is very in-character for her at that time in her life!

Chim is an aviators dude. When he wears sunglasses, they’re always aviators.

Athena also wears nothing but aviators.

Bobby wears square aviators.

Eddie, on the other hand, always wears Wayfarers.

Buck either doesn’t really like sunglasses or he constantly forgets he owns them, since we’ve only seen him wear them once in 60 eps, in a move I’m pretty sure was ONLY for dramatic effect.

Hen’s sunglasses change style over the seasons like her regular glasses do, but she tends to like browline sunglasses.

Info on Christopher’s school can be found here!

There are two colors of dispatch polo, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhythm or reason for who wears what. Maroon - Maddie and Linda. Blue - Josh and May. Jamal has actually worn both maroon and blue, so it doesn’t seem to be TOTALLY set in stone although I’ve never seen anyone else switch. Sue is too badass to wear a dispatch shirt.

Both Bobby and Eddie drive 4 door pickups. Bobby’s is navy. Eddie specifically has a black, 2020 GMC Denali 1500 pickup truck (in case you want to specifically look up what the inside of it looks like or what features it has 😂)

Info on the 118’s medical certifications can be found here.

Correction to Eddie’s living situation from last post: no next door neighbors, but instead UPSTAIRS neighbors. (Pointed out by Abigail in this ask). Also since someone else was wondering the notes of the last post - no, there is absolutely no discussion on the show of whether or not Eddie rents the apartment or owns it. But based on the fact that it’s 1) LA and 2) an apartment, my guess would be he rents it.

When Maddie isn’t feeling like herself, she tends to straighten her hair rather than curl it. It seems to be more when she’s uncertain about her place in her own and other people’s lives, rather than just when she’s simply worried - eg it’s straight in 2B, when she’s uncertain if she wants to continue working as a dispatcher/is unsure about her relationship with Chim.

For work, Chim, Eddie and Buck all use black duffel bags with a LAFD patch on the top. Hen uses several different cute bags, and Bobby seems to have a plain black duffel bag.

Watches - Bobby, Athena, Chim, Hen and Buck all wear their watch on their left wrist (but Athena ONLY wears hers for work, she takes it off at home.) Eddie wears his on his right wrist, and Maddie doesn’t wear one.

Chim (and Maddie by default) literally still have the exact same couch as in the pilot. (Which means that Chim has cuddled Tatiana on that couch, AND Albert has had sex on it. TIME TO GET A NEW ONE, BUCKLEY-HANS 😂)

The 118 has five different rigs - the engine (E118), the ladder truck (T118), two ambulances and the captain’s truck. 95% of the time, when the team is chilling in the cab of a rig and chatting (eg the ‘stuck under a live telephone pole’ scene in Jinx), they’re in the engine, not the truck. (Which I personally learned recently are NOT interchangeable terms!)

Athena and Michael got married when Athena was 37.

If you’d like to give Maddie a full name beyond “Maddie”, you should use Madeline. (I know, I know, in 4x04 she says Maddie is the name on her birth certificate, and that you should never use props details if they contradict script details, but I always thought that was a super weird exchange in 4x04 which could be explained by Maddie getting a nickname since she was born when Margaret and Phillip, you know, actually loved their kids and showed it, so of course Buck doesn’t get one, and in 4x04, Maddie was trying to avoid the entire issue of why she got one and Buck didn’t. But! Do what you want, and use Madeline as the full version of Maddie if you’d like, since that’s what’s on the BOLO in 2x13 😂)

Athena’s call sign is 727 L30, but she doesn’t have a specific squad car - the number changes throughout the series.

Chim really likes chewing gum, but he’s the only one out of the entire family!

The station has an Xbox One S, and it’s white.

In the real LAFD, there are stations 1 through 114. To avoid confusion while filming on the streets (I’m assuming), our fictional LAFD never uses the number of a real station. So if you want another station for a fic, and you want something that would be real in OUR universe, use the numbers 115 and above. They’ve gone as high as 221 in our universe.

Battalions - station 118 is in Battalion 7, which is also not a battalion in real Los Angeles. The 118 has interacted w/ Battalion 1, which is a real battalion, but other ‘non-real which makes them more likely for our universe’ battalions include numbers: 3, 8, 13, 16, 19 and above.

S1 Buck knew the term Jedi, but based on context, didn’t understand AT ALL the context provided by Star Wars, so there’s another edge of his pop culture limits for you.

Chim is the most tech-savvy out of everyone, hands down.

Athena has a VERY active Twitter account.

Abuela’s house number is 8902. I don’t have a street name for you unfortunately though. :/

Athena’s favorite flowers are white roses. None of the other women are really flower people.

Michael likes to wear purple.

When they’re at a call, Buck does pretty much all of the stuff with the hammer and the saw. Eddie does all the work needed with the drill.

Harry goes to Meadowbrook Elementary.

Buck lives on the fourth floor of his apartment building, across the hall from Apt. 416. The lovely @lovelessmotel found this listing for what is more or less the apartment. What happened was: the set crew rented this apartment for the one episode at the end of s2 when Buck moved in, and then over the summer before s3 built their own set of it, and changed some things - eg giving him an island, and moving the sink to a second counter against the far wall, you can see the changes here in this amazing gif set by the awesome Austen, but the listing should let you click around a little more upstairs and figure out dimensions better than what the show provides!

When Athena and Hen go out to eat together, it’s always fast food burgers and fries.

Waffles are Athena’s favorite food, and tiramisu is her favorite dessert.

Every takeout we’ve seen Buck eat has always been in a Chinese food takeout container, and we know he likes Thai food the best. EXCEPT! The one time we see him eat takeout with Eddie and Christopher, they have pizza. So take from that what you will......

Eddie has a cell phone and a landline.

Chim is a shameless multiple texter.

Chim and Bobby sleep closest to the door in their respective bedrooms (both right side of the bed if you are standing at the foot, facing the headboard), and Athena and Maddie sleep furthest away from the door (left side).

Some canon last names for other firefighters at the station in case you wanna add more people to a fic - Mitchell, Sanchez, Serrano (woman), Porter, Meyers (woman), Maxwell, Voyta

Hen and Karen really love decorating their house with dark/red wood.

Karen is Mommy and Hen is Mama.

Bobby has a brother, and a grandmother, and that’s literally ALL we know about his family outside of Marcy and the kids.

Evidence points to Eddie being the oldest child in his family.

Karen has multiple brothers (no sisters), but no idea how many - just that one of them is named Trey, and one of them lives in LA and has kids. They might be the same brother and they might not be.

Both Hen and Athena are only children.

Athena has been on the police force for 30 years.

Christopher and Denny are the same age (born in 2011), and Harry is two years older than them.

Michael lives in apartment 308.

The bank in this universe is CalAm.

Hen and Karen have a picture of Denny, May and Harry on their fireplace mantel.

Eddie having a black thumb + a lot of plants in his living room = him buying fake plants bc he likes the aesthetic ™ or someone (cough Carla cough) is taking care of them for him.

The COVID timeline in OG’s universe is fucked up compared to the real world’s, so it shouldn’t be used as a way to measure time! They just throw it in wherever it makes sense for the story they want to tell (eg the vaccines in s4 ep 8), since s3 was both done before COVID hit but also airing while it was happening. It makes absolutely no sense for May to graduate in March nor for Chris to be going to what is specifically labeled summer camp, and the vaccine plotline was INCREDIBLY early, even for real life, so don’t use anything from that as a measure of time. I’ve found except in specific examples, eg the two tsunami episodes, it’s very safe to say every episode covers a week - fall holidays on the show line up with their real life counterparts, indicating about the same amount of time is passing for us and them.

On that note - Jee-Yun was born in late January, early February 2021. (Conceived in Pinned, which was end of March/beginning of April, meaning Maddie was around a month along at May’s graduation in May ➡ 42 weeks + 3 days from then = late Jan/early Feb. Which unfortunately means we most likely won’t see her birthday celebrated on screen. If we assume she was conceived on the date Pinned aired, aka the very sexy hotel scene, then January 21st or 22nd would be Jee’s birthday, depending on if she was born after midnight or not.

Buck has had at least one other Jeep between the one Maddie gave him, and the one he has now, which means that when he needs a new car, he is purposefully choosing Jeeps.

I hope this was all as interesting/enjoyable to you as it was to me! And just to repeat - I love answering questions so pls let me know if you have any at all ❤

🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

Tagging: @buckbuckley

#911 fox #911 canon character details #athena grant #bobby nash #chimney han #hen wilson #maddie buckley #evan buckley #eddie diaz #bathena #madney #henren #buddie #userac #hey yall if anyone else wants to be added to these tags let me know #im happy to do so #I feel like I have v little for Bobby here sorry :/ #I’ll work on getting lots for him next time

[1111jenx]

hiii !! how's your day going so far ? I love your blog its so insightful and as a newbie in astrology/tarot it's superrr helpful !!

I wanted to ask, according to the birth time on my birth certificate, I'm a virgo rising, but since it says 11:00 am on the dot, I'm unsure of the truth. there's a possibility that I could be a leo rising as well. I usually feel more like a virgo rising, but sometimes I relate to the leo rising part as well.

what do you suggest I should read my chart as? cause if I put in leo rising, my placements will change and I'll have another identity crisis over this haha 🤡

I think you mentioned too that you were confused between virgo/leo rising for yourself (though I could be wrong?) so I was hoping you'd be able to shed some light on this situation

thanks in advance 💕

Hi love!

Ofcourse, I'll be more than happy to help you out!

So for the longest time ever, I also encountered the same issues as you did, however mine was an hour later which was a bit trickier for me during my first few years with astrology haha 😆 Especially hard when I naturally have Mercury 10th house in Gemini for both of my correct birth-time and the wrong one I was given. So for a veeeeery long time, I was so lost since I can assure you I relate to some of the key words for Virgo Rising such as "great communication skills, love for intellect" but I also don't resonate at all with things like "may have introvert tendencies, calmer and more meticulous when first meeting people". Of course there were more details at hands but none of the other placements (except for my Leo Venus and Jupiter 11th house) were able to explain certain traits about myself. And every transit chart I pulled up, something would be so "off" all the time haha. Even when I check my house systems, certain major events in house 1,4,7,10 did not match. So I pushed my mom to find the real certificate and you girl was actually born an hour earlier, which makes me a Leo Rising!!! Things changed drastically and as I checked through everything, things start to align:)

So my advice for you is to ask your mother or someone that was present when you were born, to give you an estimate time, and based off that, you can try doing a birth chart rectification by yourself by counting by the minutes onward or backward as you match your major life events using the first house, the fourth, the seventh and the tenth. However, I highly recommend getting it done by a professional if you're truly curious since what I'm saying here is merely a part of the complicated process! Especially when time such as '00 or '30, '45 happened when the time are usually rounded up or down!

In addition to that, also check you Vedic chart! Perhaps Vedic astrology would make more sense to you, especially if you're in early Virgo Rising in Western, which would make you a Leo Rising in Vedic. Vedic Astro also are amazing since they provided you with minor details and I love how everything in Vedic are just glued together! 🥰 In addition to that, house systems also changed dramatically if you use different calculations systems, Placidus/ Whole signs, etc. So perhaps checking that out first might also be a good idea!

And yes! Haha about the crisis, I get you. I had a major existential crisis back when I found out and I was SO MAD at my mom HAHAHAHAHAH, especially when she's known for knowing everyones birth-time by heart but missed mine by an hour for years💀 But don't worry, if thats also the case tor you, what helped me get through mine was how excited I was to finally seeing how the stars look like when I was born🥳🥳

Moving on to your last question!! What are some distinctive things that separate Leo Rising from Virgo Rising, I think there are A LOT. And a lot of the time, its not visible with normal eyes I'm not gonna lie, especially if you naturally have some fire in your chart! I think @star-astrology has done a post on this and if you scrolled down to my rb!! You should find it too!! But personally, for me in order to tell whether someone is a Leo Rising of Virgo Rising is based on how they move. Leo Rising may not be too loud (jk) sometimes but everything they do infused with hints of showmanship and its hard to ignore them, while Virgo Rising is deadass like a ghost they move like cats and they have this "deadly silence" energy thats so different than most!!🥳

I hope this helps you beautiful 🤎

love,

saint jenx🪐

#astrojenx #astro notes #astrology observations #astrology #astrology notes #astrotips #leo rising #virgo rising #mercury rising #sun rising

[shijiujun]

[ENG] History3: Trapped Novel - Chapter Eight

Translation Masterpost can be found here

Disclaimer: Translations are entirely mine - these are not official translations and some phrases have been changed for better English interpretation so you’ll definitely see better/different translations elsewhere. Also keeping in mind when we translated this we aren’t exactly thinking about the style of writing and this translation is as close to the novel as we can make it XD So yes, some parts may be a little awkward to read. And yes some teeny weeny details and words may not turn up in the translation because the Chi to Eng mind acrobatics didn’t work out. If you see asterisks, scroll all the way to the bottom for notes!

Full chapter below the cut

*Note: ERMMMMM I’M BACK? So there was a plan for Chapter 8 and 9 translations, but I didn’t want to leave this until like 2021, so I’m trying my best to just clear it before New Years. Not sure how many of y’all are still reading this, but... I just don’t want to remember that this is incomplete hahahaha, so yeah, I did Chapter 8, and Chapter 9 should be up within the next couple of weeks, so it’ll be pretty and complete for 2021!

Chapter Eight

The act of handing Li Zhi De over to the police force led to the emergence of dissenting voices within Xing Tian Meng, and even the elders that were initially approving of the reform were beginning to shift towards a neutral position, stopping the biddings that were proceeding at hand.

Jack is walking towards the spot where he parked the car, and suddenly, someone emerges from behind a pillar and stops him in his tracks.

“Chen-ye would like to speak to you.”

After coldly shooting the man a glance, Jack gets into the other’s car and is brought to a tea house. Jack walks inside, and as expected, he sees a man with a scar on the right side of his cheek — Chen Wen Hao.

“I didn’t expect Chen-ye’s invitation.”

“When it comes to talented people, even if I have to personally make the trip, I will,” Chen Wen Hao pours a cup of tea for the other, and Jack raises the cup in a sign of respect for the man, before drinking it.

“Liang Dian, based on your intellect, you should have long established your own gang.”

“…”

Jack shudders, the sensation coming straight from his chest, and looks at the old, scheming fox before him without the slightest change in his expression. Fang Liang Dian, that is his real name, and the people who know this name are mostly dead already. From this, he can see that Chen Wen Hao has indeed gone to great lengths to obtain this information.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the ends of his lips curve up in a smile as he picks up the teapot and pours a second cup of tea for himself.

“Tang Yi spared no efforts in sending his own subordinate to the police, is such a person still worthy of being followed? Aren’t you afraid of becoming a second Zhi De?” Chen Wen Hao says as he looks at the young man before him, sliding a document filled with a list across the table.

“This is everything Wang Kun Cheng has in Taiwan, I can hand them all over to you.”

The red-haired man plays with the black leather gloves he has in his palms and without looking at the contents of the document, he returns, “How immense these benefits are, but… what do I have to exchange with Chen-ye?”

“You’re indeed interesting,” he answers, his eyes filled with impress at Jack, “I want Xing Tian Meng and Shi Hai Corporations’ data on their flow of funds, their current client lists, and also their proceeding bidding cases, as detailed as you can get them.”

“Aside from Tang Yi and Zuo Hong Ye, even Gu Dao Yi may not fully have a grip on all these you mentioned, Chen-ye, don’t you think that your exchange offer of Wang Kun Cheng’s power in Taiwan lacks sincerity?”

Jack raises an eyebrow, and bored, he takes out his butterfly knife and begins to flip it in his hands. A young henchman immediately steps up to stop him upon seeing this, but Chen Wen Hao interrupts him.

“Speaking to me with this attitude, aren’t you afraid that I’ll kill you?”

“Since Chen-ye is the one with a request, he can surely be like Liu Bei, and lower his position humbly to obtain what he wants.”*

Chen Wen Hao pats at the surface of the table, and loudly says, “Good, I did not place my bet on the wrong person! Liang Dian, Xing Tian Meng’s pool is too small, and it is a pity for you to stay here. You should come and discuss the Cambodian business with us.”

“Okay,” Jack smiles at Chen Wen Hao, the movement of the butterfly knife in his hands coming to a stop.

—

Investigations Team Three

Tonight, Zhao Zi is taking the night shift with Shao Fei, and one of them is standing in the office with the glass door closed, a cardboard box opened on the table and taking out the items inside one by one.

The box contains the last of Li Zhen-jie’s belongings, there are medals and awards, her police badge and also a team photo of Team Three.

“Boss, think back carefully, was there some connection and interaction between Li Zhen-jie and Chen Wen Hao?”

“When Li Zhen was transferred to Team Three, Chen Wen Hao was already in prison, so I don’t think they knew each other.”

“But there is Li Zhen-jie’s signature on the prison’s meeting logbook, I confirmed this, and it is indeed her handwriting. And she even went to see Chen Wen Hao with Tang Guo Dong!”

“Wait, when was this?”

“1990.”

Shao Fei looks through the things Li Li Zhen left on one hand, and recalls his conversation with Shi Da Pao.

“Since Boss said that Chen Wen Hao was already in prison before Li Zhen-jie transferred into the team, then she might have gone to see Chen Wen Hao for a case? But even if she was investigating a case, why would she have gone to see Chen Wen Hao with Tang Guo Dong? What is the relationship between them? Why did the both of them die in the same place?”

Opening the circular tube containing a graduation certificate, he doesn’t see anything else, and rifling through the books left in the box, he doesn’t find any other clues hidden between the pages either.

“Ah!”

Shao Fei yells in frustration, his hands pulling at his hair hard.

Incorrect! There has to be a clue he missed, he doesn’t believe that Li Zhen-jie was in cahoots with Xing Tian Meng, and so before she died, her meeting with Tang Guo Dong was definitely not because she wanted to leak information to him.

There has to be some other reason that made Li Zhen-jie contact Tang Guo Dong, there has to be!

It’s just, where exactly is the missing clue to the puzzle? Where is it?

“Damn it!” Shao Fei swipes Li Li Zhen’s belongings to the ground, and regrets it immediately the next second. Holding his head in his arms, he tries hard to breathe and calm his emotions down. Seeing the photo of himself and Li Zhen-jie, he remembers that when he first entered the team, he brought quite a lot of trouble to her because of his impulsive nature, but she never once chided him for it. Instead, she would generously teach him everything she knew.

“Li Zhen-jie…”

Looking at the him dressed in his police uniform and making a stupid face standing right next to Li Zhen-jie in sadness, he picks up the music box at the bottom of the box, turning the latch at the bottom to open it up as he listens to the melody repeat itself.

Suddenly, he sees a corner of what looks like paper trapped inside the box, and so he carefully uses the tip of his fingernails to grab at the corner of the aged paper, wanting to open it to see.

Shao Fei looks at the paper in disbelief, his eyes wide, this is actually something Chen Wen Hao wrote to Li Zhen-jie… a love letter?

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, and the only right thing I’ve ever done is to love you. — Wen Hao

“My god!”

Shao Fei cannot believe his eyes, and so continues to explore every corner of the music box, and as expected, he finds a birth certificate issued by a hospital and on it is printed…

Name of Mother - Li Li Zhen

Name of Mother’s Significant Other - Unspecified

Date of Birth - 21 October 1990

Gender - Male

“Li Zhen-jie had a kid? And the date of birth is 21 October 1990?”

How strange, why is this date so familiar?

Hold on!

“Don’t be too touched, after all I did chase after you for four years, of course I would know today is your birthday. 21 October, Libra, people who are born on this day have extraordinary personalities and thoughts, especially when it comes to personal matters, they are more persistent and firm in attitude.”

“Pfffft…. how accurate! Super accurate!”

21 October 1990, isn’t this Tang Yi’s birthday? Also…

“How coincidental, Li Zhen-jie also has a similar music box.”

“Is that so? This is the only thing my mother left me.”

“Could it be…?”

A thought suddenly flashes across Shao Fei’s mind, and so he picks up his jacket and rushes out of the office. He almost bumps into Zhao Zi, who has just come back from buying supper.

“Huh? Ah Fei where are you going? Ah Fei? Ah Fei?”

Shao Fei holds onto his steering wheel tight, his thoughts jumbled up in a mess as he drives at an urgent speed on the road.

Suddenly, the phone he left on the passenger seat rings. Turning his head for a brief glance, he sees that it is Tang Yi.

“I’m working on a case, let’s leave it at that for now.”

He quickly responds after picking the call up, and then hangs up immediately after, slamming his foot down on the accelerator to a destination unknown.

“…”

Inside the Tang mansion, a Xing Tian Meng leader sitting behind his study desk in his office, looks dumbly at his phone.

Someone actually dared to hang up on him?

“Forget it,” Tang Yi sighs, looking at his dark phone screen helplessly, and continues working his way through unfinished work.

—

Investigations Team Three, The Next Day

Lu Jun Wei hurriedly runs into the office, and seeing their Captain, he rushes until he’s right in front of him, “Bad news! Li Zhi De died in the prosecution’s holding room!”

Shi Da Pao tugs at his own shirt, his face filled with alarm and fear, “What happened? Why did he suddenly die?”

“I’m not very sure either, all I know is that it is all under investigation at the moment.”

Shi Da Pao looks at Zhao Zi, who was in the interrogation room together with Lu Jun Wei after midnight, and asks, “Did anything strange happen yesterday during interrogation?”

“No. Li Zhi De refused to speak, and thankfully, Guan Zhi-ge was there, that’s how we managed to get some information out of him.”

“Zhou Guan Zhi? Why was he interrogating with you guys?”

Zhao Zi scratches at the back of his head, and seeing his unusually furious captain, explains, “Because Li Zhi De was very tough to handle, and Guan Zhi-ge said that he could assist us.”

Shi Da Pao immediately shoves the documents in his hand away and walks out of the team office. Seeing their boss suddenly leave like this, the rest of the team exchange looks, revealing concerned expressions.

—

Tang Household

“Ah De’s death was sudden, we need to find out who exactly did it.” Tang Yi instructs while simultaneously walking into the house as he loosens his tie, his expression serious as he faces Jack.

“Yes, boss.”

“And take note of the reactions from each Xing Tian Meng faction, we must reassure our own people. After all, I was the one who sent Li Zhi De into the station, if we don’t handle this well, it will affect the progress of Hong Ye’s current accounts.”

“I understand, I will handle this immediately.”

After Jack leaves, Tang Yi picks up his phone and once again dials for Shao Fei’s phone number, but he is still directed to leave a message after no one picks up.

“I’m Meng Shao Fei, leave a message if you have something to say, if not, hang up, thanks!”

“Meng Shao Fei, where exactly are you?”

How could he not pick up his calls or return any of his messages for a whole day?

Irritated and frustrated, he walks towards his study, and the moment he pushes the door open, he sees the man who has been missing in action for almost 30 hours standing right in front of him. The man is smiling, delighted as he presses at the phone’s mic function, and replays his previous voice messages.

“Meng Shao Fei, my whole life, no one has ever dared to not pick up my calls, and not return any of my messages!”

“Where are you? Why aren’t you picking up my calls?”

“Shao Fei, it’s been a day, it’s okay if you don’t pick up my calls, at least send me a text message to let me know you’re safe, okay?

“Shao Fei, I’m really worried about you. Can you call me? I want to hear your voice…”

Shao Fei stares as Tang Yi’s expression morphs from embarrassment to anger, and smiles, “59 calls and 15 messages, you were that worried about me?”

Tang Yi glares at the person before him, and angry, he says sarcastically, “I thought Officer Meng had evaporated from the face of the earth.”

Shao Fei walks over and apologises, tightly hugging the other, “I didn’t realise that my phone fell under the car seat, and was out of battery. I’m sorry I made you worry for so long.”

Turning his hand and returning the hug from his lover, who always manages to make him feel unlike his usual self, Tang Yi sighs, “The next time you go missing, I will put a tracking device on you. What super important case is this, that you would not even realise you didn’t have your phone on you?”

“…”

Shao Fei looks at Tang Yi, hesitant as he wonders if he should tell him what he has found so far.

“What is it?” the other asks, sensitive to Shao Fei’s unusual reaction.

“Tang Yi, do you remember the names of your adoptive parents?”

“He Ru Yu, Li Shou Xing.”

Tang Yi’s brows are furrowed, as if incredibly unwilling to bring up these two people. Shao Fei takes out the notebook he has with him and flips to a specific page. He lets Tang Yi confirm the details.

“This address here, is this the place you used to stay at when you were younger?”

“Why are you investigating my past?” Tang Yi asks, staring straight at Shao Fei with alarm, caution and confusion.

“I’m not investigating you, I was actually on another case, and who knew I found some leads related to you.”

“Leads that are related to me?”

“Mnn,” Shao Fei nods, and inhaling deeply once, he gently says, “Tang Yi, I found your mother, your biological mother.”

Before he can finish speaking, the sound of a phone ringing interrupts him. Tang Yi’s looks at Shao Fei, startled, before picking up the call.

“Boss, xiaojie was taken away by He Hang’s people, he said he wants you to go over personally in exchange for xiaojie.”

“He. Hang!”

Tang Yi says these two words through gritted teeth, then pushes away the person hugging him and rushes out of the study.

“Tang Yi! Tang Yi!”

Shao Fei chases after him, worried, and unheeding of the other’s disapproval, he squeezes into the passenger seat and follows the murderous Xing Tian Meng leader to the destination highlighted by He Hang.

—-

Investigations Team Three Office - Staircase Landing

Zhou Guan Zhi is slammed heavily against the wall in the staircase landing, held up by Shi Da Pao via his collar.

Because the impact of the force used was too heavy, the man whose back struck the wall ends up in a coughing fit.

“Li Zhi De’s matter, were you the one?!”

“The person died at the prosecution’s office, how is that any of my business.”

Zhou Guan Zhi pushes Shi Da Pao away, turning around and about to leave, but the other man immediately grabs at him.

“If it wasn’t you, how would you have known that he’s dead? And you also know exactly where he died?”

He deliberately used the word ‘matter’ to replace ‘death’, and so if Zhou Guan Zhi really had nothing to do with this, then his first reaction would be similar to that of other Team Three members. It would be disbelief, fear and alarm, and not this look, as if he knew about this much earlier. Even the fact that Li Zhi De was transferred to the prosecution’s interrogation room from their own after midnight, he knows such a detail this clearly.

“You were afraid he would implicate you, and so you killed him, didn’t you?”

“Of course I’m afraid he will expose me, but boss, aren’t you afraid?”

Shi Da Pao’s eyes shift, and he retorts, “You were the one who murdered him, it’s nothing to do with me.”

“How could this not have anything to do with you? The one who let Ah Fei do as he like and investigate this case was you, the one who allowed him to protect Tang Yi right at his side was also you. In the end, we even got to the stage where Li Zhi De was brought back to the station, of course I had to silence him! If I wait until he reveals everything then you and I both are done for.”

The man, his gaze murderous and cold, laugh as he pats at the captain’s face.

“You actually knew what I was doing all along, but when have you ever stopped me during these four years? You gave the silent approval to your subordinate to sell off the drugs the police force obtained in return for a profit. Shi Da Pao, do you still think this has nothing to do with you?”

“…”

Shi Da Pao is speechless as he hears Zhou Guan Zhi’s accusations.

“Besides, that case four years ago, you were also a bystander who did nothing to stop it. What was Li Li Zhen’s relationship with you, that you would allow the rumours of her cooperating with Xing Tian Meng run rampant in the station? And you never once helped to clear her name, so you’re an accomplice. You are an accomplice who caused the death of others for your own greed, just like me!”

The last few words smash through the last of Shi Da Pao’s strength, and he numbly sits on the stairs. Covering his face in guilt, his voice weak, he says, “Why didn’t you just stop at the incident four years ago? Ah Zhi, you have already earned so much in the past few years. It’s enough! Stop already!”

“Enough?” the person who hears this cranes his neck upwards and sneers. “We police officers put our lives on the line day in and out only to earn this meagre salary. It’s not even enough to stuff the gaps of my teeth, how do I deal with those chasing me to repay debts? Stop putting yourself on a high horse, you are no different from me.”

Shi Dao Pao puts down the hands covering his face and looks at the person who’s slowly descending into insanity, and shakes his head, “You’re like this because you gamble, and this is your just desserts. And me… I did it to save my daughter. These four years, I’ve never once had a restful night, and I live in terror and regret everyday.”

Zhou Guan Zhi smirks, his eyes slanting to look at the person seated on the stairs, “Boss, as long as you took the money, your hands are dirty. No matter if it is because I deserve it, or if you were forced into a dead end, you’ve been tainted, and it is what it is.”

“Besides, isn’t it the money you took that year which allowed Xiao Ya to live on happily, all the way until now, when she’s able to have her wedding? So it doesn’t matter who wants to dig up the case from four years ago again, I will definitely not let him get away!”

He knows Zhou Guan Zhi is referring to Shao Fei, who has been so focused on the homicide case from four years ago, and he finally stands up, grips at Zhou Guan Zhi’s shirt collars and yells for him to stop.

“Ah Zhi, stop! Don’t fall any deeper into this!”

“Boss, don’t worry. I’ll be very subtle, no one will be able to find out. As long as you don’t say anything and I don’t say anything, after a period of time, this will be slowly forgotten by everyone,” Zhou Guan Zhi says, arrogantly slapping away the hands at his collar and turns away.

“Ah Zhi, aren’t you afraid that I will turn myself in and expose you?”

“You!”

Zhou Guan Zhi turns back abruptly, his eyes betraying his impulse to strangle Shi Da Pao to death right at that very moment, but Shi Da Pao is no amateur either, and if they really do get into a fight, he will not have it easy. Instead, he tries the soft approach, lightening his tone as he tries to convince his Captain that they are both on the same boat.

“Boss, don’t do foolish things. Xiao Ya is about to get married, and you’ve done so much for her. Don’t you want to see her happily get married, and become the most beautiful bride?”

“,,,”

Shi Da Pao’s eyes tear up as he keeps silent, Zhou Guan Zhi hitting him where it hurts. Seeing that he has gotten his way, Zhou Guan Zhi smiles, smug as he stuffs his hands into his jacket’s pockets. He leaves the staircase, whistling casually as he goes.

—

In an Abandoned Factory

Chen Wen Hao sits on a chair, two men standing next to him on his sides. On the other chair, Zuo Hong Ye’s hands have been tied behind her, and a cloth is stuffed into her mouth, but she displays no sign of fear as she glares at He Hang, who has a gun pressed to her temple. Tang Yi, who arrived with Shao Fei, nods at Gu Dao Yi, who has been waiting outside for a while, and the three of them walk into the abandoned factory that is filled with a metallic stench.

“I’m here, let Hong Ye go.”

“No problem. My target is not her. He Hang, let Zuo-xiaojie go.”

“Boss, aren’t we making it too easy for Tang Yi by letting Zuo Hong Ye go?” He Hang refuses to loosen the ropes on Hong Ye as he glares at Tang Yi in fury.

“Tang Yi, I’ve been in Xing Tian Meng for so long, why did Tang Guo Dong let you become leader? How much authority does Xing Tian Meng wield in the underworld, and you want to go legal and reform? Aside from cutting off our brothers’ path to riches, you also handed one of us over to the police! I might as well just kill you here, lest you get in the way.”

The gun that was pressed to Hong Ye’s brain suddenly shifts to the Xing Tian Meng leader standing before him, but all he gets in return is the other’s cold laugh, full of ridicule and mockery for He Hang.

“You? If you were really capable, how would you have repeatedly failed in trying to assassinate me?”

“Fuck! I will kill you right now with a single shot, do you not believe me?!”

“He Hang, did you forget that I am still here? You’re in no position to talk here.”

“Chen… Chen-ye… but…”

Chen Wen Hao’s seemingly light tone belies a chilling warning under it, and He Hang retreats, not daring to say another word.

“Yes… yes, Chen-ye…”

Drenched in cold sweat, the man immediately keeps his gun, and loosens the ropes on Hong Ye, then pushes her towards Tang Yi. Tang Yi catches Hong Ye, and asks, concerned, “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Dao Yi, take Hong Ye and go.”

The bespectacled man stands between He Hang and Hong Ye, as if guarding against the possibility of another attack should the other man change his mind.

“I’m not going to leave, I want to face this together with you at your side.”

“If you get hurt I will hate myself, so, just go!” Tang Yi says in a low voice, tightly holding onto Hong Ye’s arm.

“I understand, you be careful,” Hong Ye bites at her lips, her eyes reddening as she leaves the factory under Dao Yi’s protection.

Chen Wen Hao gets to his feet from the chair and circles Tang Yi as he walks, just like a predator playing with its prey, and says, “Do you know why I had to find you today? Is it because you killed Wang Kun Cheng? Because you cost me losses of several ships worth of goods? Because you sent a bunch of my brothers to jail? Or-“

Suddenly, Chen Wen Hao stops in his footsteps right before Tang Yi, and stares into his eyes.

“Is it because four years ago, you saw the crime scene of Tang Guo Dong and Li Li Zhen’s death?”

“…”

Anger flashes in Tang Yi’s eyes, and the moment he takes a step, he is stopped by the other’s raised gun.

“No! None of that! I got you to come here because you are Tang Guo Dong’s son. Tang Guo Dong stole my woman, caused the death of my and Li Li Zhen’s child, and found someone in prison to create trouble for me, made me go through 24 years in jail. Twenty. Four. Years!”

“…”

Shao Fei stares at Chen Wen Hao in surprise, recalling the brith certificate he saw not long ago.

Li Zhen-jie’s child, was Chen Wen Hao’s? Tang Yi’s biological mother, is Li Zhen-jie? So… Chen Wen Hao is Tang Yi’s real, biological…

Chen Wen Hao does not see the young officer’s face go white, and continues, “When I came out, Xing Tian Meng became yours? What a joke, how is it that Tang Guo Dong could have everything, but I ended up with a broken family and nothing to my name? No, this is not fair, isn’t it?”

He pauses for a while after, and a dark, vicious smile emerges, “So… I want you… dead!”

All the men that were guarding outside of the factory suddenly rush in, surrounding Tang Yi and Shao Fei from the back. The both of them have no choice but to put up both their hands and pretend to surrender. Shao Fei takes half a step, opening his mouth to say, “Chen Wen Hao, Tang Yi, he’s-“

“Shut up, this is no place for you to talk.”

Tang Yi suddenly falls to the floor, avoiding the line of fire from the barrel of the gun and kicks out at the man holding the gun on him. It is only after the man falls does Tang Yi snatch the gun away, turning back to face Chen Wen Hao, the gun pointed at him.

At the same time, Chen Wen Hao has his gun turned towards Tang Yi.

“Chen Wen Hao, I’ve devised this plan for four whole years, all to force you to come back from Cambodia to take revenge for Tang-ye, because, it was you who killed him!”

“No! I didn’t kill him!”

“Shut up! You’re going to pay with your life!”

“Tang Yi!”

“Don’t stop me!”

Seeing that things are about to spiral uncontrollably, to a point of no return, Shao Fei can no longer care about anything else, and quickly blurts out the truth from that year.

“Don’t shoot! Chen Wen Hao is your father!”

===

*This is a metaphor and you can temporarily ignore who Liu Bei is.

#history3: trapped #history 3: trapped #history 3: 圈套 #h3t #tangfei #tang yi #meng shao fei #history3 novel #translations #lmaooo it's been what #almost a year hahahaha

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At the food industry, it really is all about trends. Foods labeled'organic' are all the rave. But, what can you know by food? Is purchasing or farming of goods a thing? Is there any any urban myths and misconceptions regarding foods?Organic versus (100-percent ) Organic -The primary huge big difference we will want to understand is that not all of organic meals in the sector is one hundred per cent natural. In identifying this difference labelling plays an crucial function. Back in India, an individual may receive a plantation certified with a complete host of certifying agencies permitted under the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP), and also some other food thing may possibly abide by a or most organic certificate standards. Listed below Are the Best ten advantages of eating organic foods: #10 Natural and Organic Food Tastes GreaterAt PacMoore, we are devoted to food producing in every business. In food that is organic we support our clients and choices fulfill up with troubles. Get in touch with us to learn much more. Indeed. For starters, how we can cite three motives:Just The Way Organic is'Organic'? – screening foods for chemicals is still quite a potential. While folks are continuously devising new means of discovering pesticides and impurities in vegetables and milk, for today the only remedy to creating sure that you're eating 100 percent organic food is to... develop your food.The farmers do not make dollars. On those high fees we as consumers cover organic food. Los-Angeles-catering-Smog-Shoppe-best-wedding-vendors-LA-real-wedding-beautiful-bride-17-of-26 catering san diego wedding catering No 4 It's trendy to consume OrganicTen years ago natural and natural farming did exist in the States. Today the future of organic farming is appearing bright. With luck, this short article helped you to understand more about great things about eating natural and organic meals and looking for fixing choices. It's by no means too late to start. Additionally, it is never too late to share this short article and spread about the huge benefits of natural eating and catering!Just how do taste and appearance compare to traditional meals?The American Academy of Environmental Medicine asserts that"Several creature studies indicate acute health risks associated with GMO foods items," including resistant ailments, rapid aging, and affects in organs that are major, along with infertility.What exactly are foods?#Inch Vote With Your WalletHowever, with so much natural and organic and natural material on the marketplace, it is hard for your normal user to sift genuine organic create from something which could be just cashing in on the trend. Just just how do you be certain what we are consuming is genuinely chemical-free? Always certainly a couple checks are to do so, although it is perhaps not easy."natural compounds vary in their composition of nourishment along with other biologically relevant substances. Various cultivars of the exact crop may vary in composition, which can also vary based on other things , growing states, period, and also pesticide and fertilizer regimen. Factors such as breed and age of the creature, consuming routine, and season can likewise affect the nutrient makeup of livestock services and products. This variability in nutrient material could be further affected through the storage, transportation, and prep of the food stuffs until they attain the bowl of their user. An understanding of the factors that influence nutrient variability in crops and livestock services and products is essential for its design and interpretation of analysis on differences from the nutrient content of produced and conventionally produced food stuffs." 1#9 Natural Meals vs. ChemicalsWhen someone who grew up on a farm in MinnesotaI know all too well of the damaging impact of synthetic pesticides and artificial fertilizers. Sadly, I understood farmers that died from contact with compounds and've witnessed the chemicals impacting the local water table and pollution levels inside the soil.#8 Natural and Organic Foods Has Better Nutrition Unless the product certainly says completely natural and organic, you have to look into the certification standards of this tag on the own food to know precisely how all-natural the meals will be.blog

The worldwide caliber of announcing whatever organic takes it to function as strictly chemical and pesticide-free however India doesn't always comply with rules. The Telangana State Seed & Organic Certification Authority, for instance, recently tested a sample of food at India to find that just about all the sample contained chemical residuse.By acquiring natural foodstuff you are supporting great farmers! Scale fewer crops per nest Natural and organic farmers cover to generally meet standards and boost energy on plots of property they have room. Most of this implies more charges and hazard . Avoiding meat and Exhibiting our support on the industry is equally crucial. "Lots of people possess an opinion about whether organic food is greater (or equally or less) healthful compared to conventional food. It may be shocking to know only a very small quantity of scientific tests have dealt with this query. There are, nevertheless, quite a few studies that compare the vitamin antioxidant, anti oxidant contents of conventional and organic fruits and vegetables, or the fatty acid composition of conventional and organic milk. The reason is that it is far more easy to gauge the vitamin content of fruit than to measure in case one is fitter. As a way to quantify healthiness, one would need to have a group of individuals ingesting just organic and just another one eating only normal foodstuff, then after a little few years compare that group is fitter (this sort of scientific tests have been discussed in greater detail further below). People are hard to scientists and control inside such a study can, for example, perhaps maybe not record their own food ingestion correctly. Even more importantly: there is not any recognized method of measuring if someone is'wholesome'." 5What to perform? In short, do your homework and prepare ahead. What plants come in period? What exactly ingredients are great for your region? The further you comprehend the narrative of one's own food products, the higher you are able to serve the consumer.A 20 17 study from Penn State shows that longterm vulnerability to pesticide has serious health risks. "Suspected persistent effects from contact with certain pesticides incorporate birth defects, toxicity to your fetus, production of benign or cancerous tumors, genetic changes, blood diseases, nerve disorders, endocrine disturbance, and reproductive outcomes "Ground water pollution is just one of the main reasons for chemicals seeping into crops, increasing a big question about the way all-natural any food manufactured in India is. Rainwater harvesting can be a solution -- farms.Number 5 You Are Allergic Excellent FarmersOrganic farmers use variable harvesting techniques by optimizing what is accessible in their mind. They work with vegetable spoilage and natural animal droppings because resources of fertilizers. Also, biologically pesticides are traditionally used to battle insects off.Though the long-term effects of GMO on people is up to debate, the effects GMO meals consumed on creatures is still somewhat regarding.Licensed USDA organic foodstuff has no chemicals and hereditary tamperingthat can change the flavor of a few your favorite meals. 1 important advantage of consuming natural and natural foods is that veggies and fruits taste the direction that they were designed to style.It all started in the autumn of 2006 when beekeepers across the U.S. began reporting enormous declines for their own bee colonies. In a few reportsup to ninety percentage of those hives were also empty. It's really a serious illness frequently referred to as, Colony Collapse disor der.While investigation has indicated that pesticides on their own are not a passing threat for bees, even those synthetic compounds drastically weaken the insect's defense mechanisms and help it become vunerable to Nosema, a gut parasite which can eliminate entire extremes of bees. Research from France additionally unearthed these pesticides cloud the honeybee's brain and also alter its own behavior to work correctly over the retina.why not look here

A study published in the British Journal of Nutrition found that natural and natural meals develops quicker, due to fertilizersthat induces vegetables and fruits to build up better sugars and starches. The result of these vitamins and starches is your produce includes a much better taste and texture to it than non-toxic produce.Consultation-cta-300x59 catering san diego wedding catering"Intakes of fruit and veggies tend to be low in contrast with existing dietary guidelines, particularly in those of lesser levels of educational attainment and social class. Composite foods really are an important source of veggies (significantly much less importantly of good fresh fruit ) and should really be involved when picking vegetable intakes. Failure to do so might lead to prejudice in estimates of intake and of compliance with dietary principles for population groups, together with misclassification of an individual by degree of intake" 8 They're packed with nutrients and healthful for everybody. Investigation has been for more validations in contrast to food, notably about the absorption of fats vitamins, and minerals.Many studies report that natural and organic and natural ingestion is carefully linked to some other wellness insurance and life style indexes, e.g., consumers often have higher income and education, have lesser body-mass indicator (BMI), are more physically energetic, and consume healthier diets than people that do not seldom use food. However, this pattern will not necessarily apply if organic foodstuff ingestion is connected to a alternative life style that includes vegetarianism, environmentalism, or other ideologies. Studies show that ordinary organic ingestion does not stick to a regular age gradient however can be seen in both young adult (40 years) age classes also that organic consumers often belong to homes with kids than do nonorganic consumers" TwoThings to perform? The clear answer is often as easy as observation, although for foods manufacturers accustomed to a shelf lifetime that is forgiving , natural and organic food production may be hard. This means having a labeling system which clearly says day of manufacturing (or harvesting), date of birth and some other risks particular to the ingredient type. With a"first in, first out" coverage that you're better built to combat the clock and then also deliver organic food products that are safe and also appealing.M.p>"organic and natural meals have stringent rules in regards to the sum of unprocessed contaminants enabled for safe ingestion. It has also been discovered that these foods just contain small heights of these contaminants. Whether or not picking out foods that are non-organic or organic, experts concur that the perfect way to safeguard ourselves is always to rinse all fruits and vegetables under running water. Because cutting on out the rinds can bring contaminants into the generate from your rind Goods with inedible skins ought to be washed, such as melons and also cantaloupes. The information out of the studies below additionally shows no significant flavor difference in between organically grown and conventionally grown meals. Alternatively, flavor variations seem in the future in its maturity, its own growing conditions, along with the foods number and crop time. Unlike the past, many of today's organic foods compare very positively in appearance using conventionally grown food items ." 4Comprehension Certificates and expectations - A natural plantation may strive to go certified by Indian and global standards each. You are able to get many different organic foods certificates, such as for example United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), Agricultural & Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) authorised bodies, EU natural standard and much also more. The further certifications, the greater the probability of the foods getting 100 percent organic and natural.Eating organic food means your food has been kept to some greater standard.more information

Organic food needed to fulfill a top amount of requirements until the FDA will announce a meals items"Certified Organic." It follows the farmer that climbed your tomato set plenty of power into ensuring their field was compound free. It can take years until the water and soil tables are free of poisons to grow organic and natural produce.A sort of food using least five percent of its ingredients coming from organic origin is called mix. Composite food items could be labeled as'organic foods'.©markbrooke.comWhat to perform? An integral grade of meals is the absence of chemical insect control at every point. Natural farmers have a different set of tools to keeping pests . Diversified crops, for instance, drive back a single crippling infestation. And Plants like cows have provided distance to move, that means no less want. Handlers are turning to pure repellents like citrus and vinegar to protect substances.Consuming natural can on occasion be a struggle, however, it's all worth every penny ; not just for your own community and also the environment, also for the preservation of our precious planet Earth.The term describes to all foods that are chosen out of organic farming, whereby organic processes instills all the uses of industrially made pesticides, fertilizers, or some other additives that encourage rapid or synthetic expansion.When purchased in the plantation, natural and organic food is more usually skinnier and not as expensive. Getting access might be difficult; rather they're offered by the supermarket. Butter Natural and organic milk, bread, pasta, leafy greens, and herbs are more expensive in comparison to poor food. But, if it is possible to spare time and effort, it pays to shop around to receive the handiest prices.Number 3 Natural and Natural and Natural Products are Nongmo Wrightwood-Guest-Ranch-Wedding-California-wedding-venues-Los-Angels-wedding-catering-best-los-angeles-catering-organic-catering-best-san-diego-catering-21 catering Hillcrest wedding catering.2. Humans are not the only people who need your food. The war between people and pests is as old as the species, plus it will not end any moment soon. However, we were given a crystal clear edge over rodents, insects, bacteria and insects by contemporary food fabricating processes. By moving in the direction of foods, we're revisiting some challenges created harder by unprecedented population development.Should you would like to get some great benefits of eating more healthy than you'd certainly be sensible to increase organic fruits and vegetables into your cart. Certified organic produce comprises higher quantities of vitamins and minerals. In fact, a report from Organic.org says that certified natural fruits and vegetables contain up to 21.1% more iron, 29.3percent more calcium, 18 percent more antioxidants, and a whopping 27% more vitamin C. All that extra nutrition better equips the body to fortify your immunity system, reduce your blood pressure, also slow down the effects of ageing.With natural and natural farming, compounds utilized as fertilizers have been traditionally used in extremely smaller quantities, in case any. Wild species do not arrive in contact harmful industrial drainage as they would with conventional farming, and mutation of species has been dramatically reduced. As such, animals and feedstock are maintained in benign and natural environments.The organic food industry has struggled hard to continue to keep GMOs out from their FDA's natural and organic certification approach. It follows that all organic and natural foods are inherently non-GMOs.The India natural and organic emblem, a bird symbol, is an equally important check within this regard. If you're dedicated enough, you could even resort to legwork and due diligence to in fact assess how a farm wherever your meal is arriving from uses water. Many organic farms are open to public and anybody can go and check their practices anytime.Inch.look at these guys

You are racing the clock. Not in all cases, however in most especially when you take into account organic and natural produce and meats. However, the components utilised in producing organic food items are more vulnerable to decay leading to fluctuations in temperature."The term"organically grown meals" finds products which have been manufactured in light of the principles and principles of organic agriculture. Organic and natural agricultural and food processing clinics are far reaching and complete attempt to boost the growth of the food production system that's socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable. The crucial principles and practices of organic foods production make an effort to motivate and enhance biological cycles within the farming strategy to keep and increase longterm fertility of soils, to further diminish all sorts of contamination, in order to steer clear of using artificial fertilizers and pesticides, to keep genetic diversity of this manufacturing procedure, to further consider the wider social and ecological effects of the foodstuff creation and processing strategy, and also to produce foods of high quality in adequate volume. Certified organic and natural fiber and food products and services are the ones that have been produced based on standards that are documented " 33. Your client foundation is grand. Before manufacturing meals have been entirely distributed locally. That is harder to complete in a civilization of commuting and online ordering."'' There are numerous distinct reasons why consumers might opt to buy natural food, for example concerns about the surroundings and using pesticides, concerns regarding intensified farming procedures, or so the understanding that natural food is safer or more nutritious than conventionally produced foods items. Furthermore, as some businesses of the population have become more thinking about wellbeing and health, there has become an greater requirement for far more'natural', less processed foods. This may have led to the greater requirement, as men and women perceive organic foods because an even 'pure' option. Though organic foods tend to be greater at price (mainly because of this decrease efficacy of organic crops)they appear to have grown to be more and more common." 9Some of the primary added benefits of eating grown organically is that you eliminate exposure to these varieties of compounds.What to do? In this regard, temperature control is critical. As important as attaining the best temperature is currently keeping it. No Thing rates rust such as a temperature swing. To adopt organic foods at a industry, invest in top-quality climate control for your motor vehicles.Once a farm becomes certified natural, a few devious farms may deceive consumers by unethically providing their manufacture under a tag by coming to a private monetary structure. To complicate matters even more, there's also the other hand. Not every UN certified foods items is rotten. Little farmers who perform the fantastic job and produce natural and organic plants regularly believe it is overly awkward or embarrassing to acquire the proper certificate.Much like almost any emerging marketplace, natural food manufacturing is confronting its own share of growing pains. Meals suppliers have grown accustomed to processes that, whereas safe and efficient, usually do not fall underneath the umbrella that was all-natural. Below are a few of the common troubles for producing and distributing quality food items that are organic.Only puta item is organic in case it is produced in a farming system which utilizes no chemical substances, fertilizers, GMOs or artificial additives. Instead it relies on biological insect controllers, plant and animal manure, and crop rotation.site link

It's good also our planet, and for us. Following environmentally conscionable Agroecology policies in growing food ensures that a far greater future for our biodiversity and is mutually beneficial for us, including, many consider, reducing the probability of most cancers.It's tricky to discover a supermarket now it doesn't have a natural produce element. This is only because the organic food industry is booming. The Organic Trade Association claims Americans now spend 4-7 billion dollars a year on organic food. That's a 3.7 billion dollar rise from the former year and now there aren't any symptoms of down it.The environment, consisting of lakes, rivers, seas and other bodies of water, also could be protected against dangerous, intensive harvesting and dangerous compounds, and ideally, our planet's fertility could be preserved for a lot of upcoming generations.Sure! I mentioned, healthier extra fat! The gain of consuming protein such as beef, chicken, porkfish signifies you are giving the human own body a greater dose of less of those cholesterol rising fats found in livestock and also these enviable efas increased thickly. Natural and organic milk has 50 percent more omega3 efas compared to milk.Organic agriculture refers to your style of farming whereby temperament is the sole way of growth. How is this done? Manufacturing is got with minimal environmental or environmental damage. Local communities have been retained safe as well as a workable source of cash flow can be accessed. The develop, can be the corn or the vegetables and fruits and the spices, daals and other foods are all organic simply due to the fact there wasn't any agro-chemicals.Certification warrants that organic foods abounds using rather significant standards of traceability; promising that compounds that are dangerous are not introduced into any of many heights of organic farming.No 7 rescue Your Bees!Are natural and natural solutions cheaper than food?One of the absolute most powerful added benefits of selecting organic foods means you are voting with your pocket. Every purchase you create non-organic farmers, grocers, GMO labs, and compound companies know that that you don't encourage the industry. This motivates conventional farmers to consider the capacity of changing to organic farming.Exploring the topic of GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms) reveals so many points of view it'll make your face damage. Some state it's going to save humankind, while some assert the contrary."throughout the world interest in organic food products has been expand fast particularly in developed nations. Requirement is fueled partly by increased client awareness of the connection between diet and health, exceptionally publicized food safety cases like the incidence of E. coli-contaminated make and also the perceived environmental advantages of organically grown foods. A growing number of individuals are prepared to pay premium costs for natural produce thanks that natural and organic products are better-tasting, clean, fitter, healthy, safe and friendlier . Accordinglythe disagreement on the quality and protection of natural and organic as opposed to conventionally grown foods items has intensified as is shared with any debate between public understanding, proponents of either side have cited scientific tests because proof in aid of their claims." 1-1Organic create in greenhouseAs stated previously, longterm exposure to tiny levels of pesticide can mount as much as and including deadly impact on living creatures. It should be no surprise that our little pollinator close friends, that have come in direct contact with vegetation and flowers coated with those pesticides on a daily basis, are falling victim to those toxic chemicals at an alarming rate. With nearly 75 percent of overall food crops inside the U.S. benefiting from pollination, getting organic create can help push conventional farmers away from those practices that are hazardous.What is food?Cost, in reality, must not be one factor. There is no real reason behind organic foodstuff to become costlier than non-toxic, also also pros agree that there is barely any gap in the expense of normal and organic farming.It is.click this link now

Are organic foods more healthy?In the United States, natural and natural foods is accredited institutionally by regularly maintaining top excellent management, in addition to verifying adherence to regulations and adequacy of organic markers. If a item is labeled as organic, an individual can make positive no synthetic sweeteners or colorings are inserted.'' the United Nations' new declaration of Sikkim because the planet's earliest natural State has brought the large organic debate right back into focus: what exactly is organic -- and also how do we differentiate a genuine organic item? "The strengths and flaws of organic food and farming since currently practiced are identified in this newspaper. Natural and organic agriculture is a more highly renewable and multi faceted system, internalizing ecological issues and also economizing resources that are normal; it has positive effects in the diversity of fields, farms, landscapes and species. Ethical values, such as humans and animals' wellbeing, are high on the schedule, and also involvement of stakeholders in addition to responsibility figure along the food series. Natural agriculture is especially suited with no recourse to trade barriers to this empowerment of regional economies. Top high quality food and sensible nutrition are intrinsic aspects of organic foodstuffs, so that natural nutrition can be still a beacon for modern day life styles and nourishment" 10"natural farming uses various approaches to boost maintain soil fertility, for example as crop rotation, tillage and cultivation techniques, protect plants, and natural compounds (for example, natural fertilizers, pesticides, and so on). The use of synthetic materials is not permitted in farming until the materials have been about the Natl. set of Allowed and Prohibited Substances. An artificial material can be understood to be a chemical substance that's formulated or manufactured by a chemical procedure or via a procedure that chemically changes a substance extracted from the plant, animal, or nutrient supply. Natural and organic farmers use botanical crop and animal wastes, biological, or non-synthetic insect controls, also enabled. Organic farmers also utilize specific procedures to cut back air, soil, and water pollution." 7"Natural environment diversity caused by landscape spacious complexity inorganic farming plays also three important roles: environmental, cosmetic and production and health functions. The environmental function is present of keeping biodiversity and homeostasis, i.e. stability and optimal species number. Natural farms create an existence foundation for plant and animal species, perhaps not merely those but accompanying species. The manufacturing function relies upon prophylaxis, i.e. the use of prevention, not control, guarding plants from germs, pests and plant disorders. This helps retain biological balance, i.e. homeostasis of whole landscape. The aesthetic and wellbeing of organic farming admits that we're an integral portion of the environment and could only exist in harmony with nature" 6"Defining natural and organic consumers and assessing organic diet plans, e.g., which sort of meals items, and also the participation of food into the complete diet are all major problems in population research studies. You'll find no methods to gauge the diet humans with no significant malfunction. Investigation describing socioeconomic and lifestyle characteristics of natural meals consumers has recently demonstrated that ingestion is a complicated phenomenon between diverse groups that do not belong in to on average defined consumer sections.Number 2 Protecting Your EarthExactly why are omega3 fatty acids therefore crucial? The University of Maryland Medical Center says that omega3 efas can decrease your risk of heart disease, minimize pain or stiffness, decrease your risk of cancer, prevent dry skin, and strengthen memory, and can help fight depression.A while back there was a fad because of the organic vegetables and fruits and also the supermarket too. Shops publicized they promote only organic. They likewise charged higher rates than the make. Might it be correct. These all-natural really are not organic. ? Exactly what are the specifications. Let's determine organic is organic?No 6 Natural Food H AS Healthy FatFactory farming is a superior polluter of our soil, rivers, and seas. Two thirds of the country's drinking water has been observed to have elevated heights of nitrates, a effect of pesticides and fertilizers . These chemicals do not just stop at our drinking tap water. They keep to stream to oceans and our food . In 2008 scientists found 405 dead zones because of this utilization of highly soluble fertilizer that is synthetic.4. Offer is constrained. With its nature, organic and natural foods requires greater resources and land. As such, it can be complicated to edge out the contest for ingredients.Even though your wallet may cringe at the price attached into your food, your heart will thank you! Some great advantages of natural catering and eating radically outweigh the slight gap in the cost of organic catering.Could it be safer to pick organic?In short, a genetically altered food is a organism that has its own DNA altered in a science lab. That is performed in order to give food beneficial properties such as brighter color, higher crop yields shorter cycles and thus on. Perhaps you have ever wondered how that thoughts is crisp? Effectively, that is because some one changed the genes of that plant to make it survive six days longer than it was allowed by character to.By supporting organic farmers by selecting an organic catering provider, you are encouraging agriculture that utilizes normal fertilizers to their plants and retains our eco system vibrant and thriving.As the prevalence of absorbing natural foods has increased, a number of studies have contrasted the nutritional quality of foods conventionally grown versus organically grown. Some studies stated under have found that conventionally improved foods talking and organically grown foods have no substantial differences within their own nutritional grade.

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[fapangel]

Obama has been demonized by conservative media for a decade as a communist, a neo-liberal globalist, Kenyan, and a secret Muslim who attends a radical black church and wanted to put grandmothers in front of death panels, while fixing the election to so Trump couldn't win. All it did was energize the base, ensuring that Trump easily won the nomination. Why weren't conservative voters fatigued by constant outrage over eight years, however liberals are supposedly fatigued after not quite two years?

Your memory of the Republican primaries is notably deficient - there was far from overwhelming support for Trump even in the limited sphere of conservative media. Trump gained ground mainly in his slam-dunk debate performances and the fact that most other candidates going against him were so out of step with the zeitgeist it was fucking palpable. Consider what it means when the only real viable challenger to trump turned out to be the guy with so little personal charisma and warmth that they’ve called him the fucking Zodiac Killer. Why him? Because he was elected by the Tea Party movement; the nascent version of the general revolution by the GOP electorate against a party structure mostly consisting of people who had been actively ignoring and blowing off their electorate’s wishes for decades. 

Also, fatigue works in cycles. Think of it as rest and recovery. You need X amount of downtime between Y periods of hyper-intense giveadamn. Eight years gives you a lot of time to get used to the situation at hand, and given Congressional deadlock, Obama’s potential ability to fuck things up was quite limited for large parts of his administration’s tenure (which is why he resorted to grandstanding executive orders and bullet-point memos which amounted to fuck-all so often. See his gun control one for a prime example.) The better part of a decade also makes it very easy to think “time for a change,” because we tend to remember the bad more than the good, making it very easy to blame whoever’s in office for all the bad shit. This is why it’s very rare for one party to take the White House three times in a row. 

Two years? That’s about enough time to conclusively say all the hysterically overblown claims of Trump ending the world were total horseshit, and also enough time for Trump to have delivered a booming economy that all his critics - Obama included - were so smug about saying just couldn’t be done, even with a “magic wand.” However, it also would’ve been enough time for people to recover emotionally a bit, except the left-wing media’s vastly superior coverage and volume, combined with their complete and utter inability to back off for even one second, did far too good a job of keeping the left-wing base tense, scared and paranoid. 

And the left wing base - to a much, much wider degree than the right wing base - is tense, scared and paranoid. “Secret Kenyan Muslim Death Panelist” wasn’t a majority view among the GOP’s base, no matter how often the mainstream media fantasized otherwise. (Compare this and this.) Was “Secret Kenyan Muslim Death Panelists” a big fucking issue in the 2016 election, compared to immigration reform, economic reform and long-simmering centrist anger over the failure of both parties to reverse the steady descent of the Rust Belt into hopelessness, poverty, and drugs? Trump fucking started with the birtherism shit - if there was real, widespread belief in it amongst the base, don’t you think he would’ve stuck with it? 

Now compare that to the left, which managed to sustain massive public tantrums in the streets of several major cities for a solid fucking week after Trump won the election. Compare that to leftists who routinely characterize any Republican initiative as “literally trying to kill them.” Healthcare? “Literally trying to kill us.” Some bureaucratic UN bullshit about gender definitions? “LITERALLY ERASING TRANSGENDER’S RIGHT TO EXIST.” I have, in fact, lost track of how many Republican policy positions have been characterized by the left as attempted murder. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that James Hodgkinson was trying to murder Republican Congressmen, he was shouting “This is for healthcare!” 

It’s not the fringe or minority who live in fear of these doomsday predictions, as evidenced by the many, many articles detailing Trump-induced insomnia and nightmares, op-ed writers voicing their own Trump-centric emotional shellshock, “how to handle Trump Fatigue Syndrome” guides from left-wing outlets, etc. Or for a more scientific approach, consider “Trump’s win left clinically significant trauma in 1 in for college students, study says,” therapists reporting a notable uptick in patients suffering from election/Trump related anxiety, [1],[2] (which therapists are absolutely eager to blame on Trump,) or this psychology industry publication about a psychotherapist who had a teenage patient tell her “You’re nice and smart and you helped me a lot. But right now you are a White person. I can’t trust you, the world you came from, because that world is equal to the death of me.” But anecdote is not the plural of data - is there anything showing the anxiety uptick is mostly prevalent among anti-Trumpers and not just general anxiety from the whole imbroglio? Consider this study, which found that:

People who felt “ashamed of America” doubled after the election (16% to 32%, with 75% breaking along partisan lines), 

93% of non-supporters blaming Trump for “dividing America” compared to only 27% of supporters,

39% of Americans feeling scared for their and their family’s safety (21% Trump supporters and 57% of non-supporters,)

35% of Americans spending less money due to fearing an uncertain future (22% supporters, 47% non-supporters) 

15% of Americans sleeping less (6% among supporters, 25% among non-supporters,) 

And 31% reporting increased anxiety - with 9% being supporters and a staggering 54% being non-Trump supporters. 

On the balance I’d say the totality of the evidence points pretty fucking squarely at a significant chunk of the Democratic electorate being actually, tangibly fearful of Trump. In fact, the data suggest 35-40% or so. 

Can you show me any data showing that 35% - 40% of Republicans were fearful of Obama? And I mean fearful, not “doubted his birth certificate.” I know the birther thing makes some people’s brains lock up in foaming-mouth snarling outrage, but their feelz do not equate realz, (as we say in the vernacular) and doubting Obama’s place of birth does not, in any way, equate fearing him. Last I checked, Kenyans are known for being track stars, not tyrants or dictators. Especially when you consider that much of the doubt centered on Obama’s oddly long delay in producing the relevant documentation, as evidenced by the rather sharp drop in doubt when said documents finally appeared. For all the snarling outrage of the left over it, they can’t even show that doubting his birth certificate correlated with a belief that Obama’s presidency was illegitimate - after all, this is the same party that tried to revoke the natural-born citizen clause of the constitution to allow The Guvernator to run. It was formally proposed by Orrin fucking Hatch, even!

No. No, you’ve got to find me the fearful ones, the ones muttering about B-Rock “The Islamic Shock” Hussein Superallah Obama, born in the Beating Hart of Kenya, and his dastardly plans to build mosques in every kindergarten playground or whatever the fuck. Show me, with data, that there’s any fucking number of Republicans who actually feared for their fucking lives because of Obama that comes anywhere close to the fucking widespread hysteria of the left right now, and then, maybe, you’ll have a point. 

Until you can do that, fuck off. 

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Wilmington Family Lawyer

A divorce attorney will take care of the many matters that must be resolved during this difficult and emotionally stressful time. A divorce lawyer will help draft a comprehensive plan that will make life easier after divorce. A family attorney will examine your situation to help determine whether a modification is appropriate. Hire Personal Injury Attorney in Wilmington with many years of experience in recovering damages for victims of negligent actions, who have the assets to offer you the best chance to be made whole after mishap. To schedule your free initial consultation at our Wilmington office, call 877-231-9829 or write to us online to get started. Contact us online or call 910-338-9813 today to schedule a free, informational consultation. Forgiven or canceled mortgage debt is considered income by the IRS and the lender must report it. While there is the potential to earn some income from the home, assuming it can be rented for more than the mortgage payment and property taxes, both spouses will share the many responsibilities of being a landlord. Bryan Smith believes that every parent entitled to receive support should receive it, and that providers of child support should not have to pay more than the law requires.

One option that more recently married couples may want to consider is a separation agreement. Being unpracticed in personal injury law, you may not understand what proof is noteworthy and what isn't. When the father is not listed on the birth certificate, the mother may need to take legal action in order to ensure that the parent provides child support. In some cases, the parent cannot be found. Some couples choose to rent out the home for a period of time. In addition, the time lapse of each way point is recorded to identify if the vehicle was parked at any particular position for a time period greater than three seconds. Both parents will be required to attend a hearing at which time the judge will make a decision based on the facts presented by both parties. Signing a quitclaim deed in divorce gives the other spouse full rights to the property, but both parties are still responsible for the mortgage if it’s in both names. If that is the case, a divorce lawyer will take steps to locate the individual so that legal steps can be taken with a good Wilmington family lawyer.

For that reason, we provide individual solutions that are tailored to your needs. Whether you're in the midst of a divorce, are seeking compensation for an injury or have been charged with a crime, we recognize that you have a lot at stake. Answer: Yes, there are methods utilizing technology previously available only to the CIA, or James Bond. Utilizing common mapping software, the data is downloaded to a PC, and a map is created. However, even unmarried parents both have rights and responsibilities. Making changes simply to satisfy the needs of the parents is not an acceptable reason for requesting a modification. A hearing is needed to make the changes legal. If one spouse wants to stay in the home, he or she can choose to “buy out” the other spouse’s interest in the real estate. From the Author: My name is Dan Barcelon and I believe that Real Estate can be one of the most valuable assets you’ll ever own. Some assets can be easy to divide, but a home with or without a mortgage can be trickier.

Many of these types of problems can be extremely traumatic and emotional. A family lawyer handles all types of matters including divorce and settlement issues. It’s estimated that between 40 and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. Every three seconds, the GPS unit will "bounce" signals from the vehicle, to the street, to a satellite, and back, recording the latitude, and longitude of the vehicle. If the vehicle is co-owned, you can install a portable GPS (Global Positioning System) to the undercarriage of the vehicle. At the Law Office of L. Bryan Smith, you can rest assured that your case is in good hands. You can search the site by name. When a legal matter affects your family and your future, it can be emotional and overwhelming. Until you have a solution you can believe in, your future is uncertain. Please verify that you have read the disclaimer. To remove the other spouse from the mortgage, it will be necessary to refinance the loan.

Building a Better Life With Your Children After Using a Family Lawyer for Your Divorce

When you make appointments to meet with family law lawyers you might need a general notion of the questions you need to be familiar with each of the family lawyer. When you are interviewing each of the family lawyers on the list you simply must listen and respond. You must be completely open with your answers for the reason that more all your family members law lawyers get to learn about the real story better their representation of your interest may be. Transparency is the key to presenting a successful relationship together with your new attorney. Here is a general report on the questions you should ask if you are interviewing new family lawyers.

During this stressful time it is essential which you carefully consider the sentiments of one's children so that you can help them to through the transition coming from a two-parent you will find a divided family. Depending on the nuances of the divorce your children might need additional help to get over the transition, like from your child psychologist. Experienced family law attorneys might help by efficiently guiding the mother and father through the process, and minimizing disagreements. Just by putting effort into connecting with these, however, you possibly can make a serious difference in how your children get through the difficulty of your divorce.

Finances are one of the main causes of spousal disagreements. Prenuptials will help look into how finances will probably be handled in and from a marriage. In many states, after two people enter a marriage, the income and property acquired are thought community or marital property, and therefore it might be divided involving the two parties after the marriage. Prenuptials can transform the conventional community property laws as spouses desire. Here are some various ways prenuptials helps with financial matters:

It is beneficial for you to get properly prepared for any battle you are receiving ready to fight together with your relatives. Even if you have cultivated up together or vowed to hold the other person happy, people change and when it comes to legal matters, good manners often step out the window. Situations and negotiations could get out of control in a short time as well as any progress which was being made, could be gone with the wind. Don't let all your family members disputes drag on indefinitely. Hire a family law professional that could possibly get them resolved in the greatest way and move on with your life.

If you don't get the chance by sitting and speak to your relatives or friends, the World Wide Web is the next best solution to finding a family lawyer. You should look for one locally, specifically in your city, to help you provide firm a trip or visit their office personally. While you are browsing the net, you can even do criminal record checks on the handful of names you've jotted down. It is also ideal to evaluate their official websites or blogs to obtain more details about them. You may also ask for recommendations from a local council or someone who works with the mayor's office. It is likely that might be someone that knows a practicing lawyer inside your city.

For more details on the best Wilmington family lawyer see the resources below.

Resources:

Wilmington Family Lawyers | Family Attorneys NC | Divorce Lawyers Wilmington

Wilmington NC Family Law Attorney - Yolasite.com

What is Family Law? - FindLaw

#Wilmington Family Lawyer

[robitusson]

The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent's house, Clark Kent was two years old.

According to his birth certificate, anyway. She just kind of accepted that the details were a little fudged. Relativity, and all.

Maybe the stranger would have succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to do, except that he really did just show up. Appeared, like a ghost made flesh, right in the backyard. Clark, thank goodness, was out in the fields with Jonathan. He couldn't bear to be alone, that boy, and they could never bear to leave him.

Which left Martha free to shoot the ghostly intruder in the face.

Martha had not always considered herself a shoot first, ask questions later sort of a person. But that was before she found a baby in a spaceship where her corn was supposed to be.

They'd switch off, Jonathan and her, who got Clark and who got the shotgun. Martha got the shotgun more often than not. Guns made her husband uncomfortable. She was hardly a fan, but she'd always been a terrible pacifist. Too determined to defend herself.

The sight of all that blood and brain and bone was still nauseating. She compartmentalized, told herself it was no different from slaughtering a cow; didn't think about riot gear or tear gas or the friends she'd lost or all the things she'd moved away from when her heart couldn't take it any longer. This was different. This was her son.

She prodded the corpse with her foot. It remained a corpse. A real nasty looking corpse, all big and burly and holding a gun much too large. She didn't like making assumptions based on appearances, but she didn't imagine he'd been coming for anything nice. She bent down to search his pockets, found a metal wallet and flipped it open.

Born 2018.

Well, hell. Wasn't that just a kick in the pants?

Probably she ought to have been a bit more unsettled than she was. But she'd been waiting two years for someone to show up on her doorstep, men in black or UFOs or something. Hell, she'd half expected her sweet little boy to hatch into something worse.

Just because she brought home space babies didn't mean she was a damn fool.

Jonathan had rejoined her in long strides, was holding Clark in such a way that he couldn't see the corpse on the ground. "Well, shit," he said.

"Eyup," Martha agreed.

"Don't look government."

"Nope."

"We burying him?"

"I'll bury him," Martha said, standing up. "You get Clark inside and read him a book or something. I don't want him seeing any of this, getting him messed up in the head."

"You sure? Looks heavy."

"That's why we have a wheelbarrow. I'll stick him out behind the barn, might as well keep all our secrets in one place."

Martha had a long time to think as she dug a time traveler's grave. There were a lot of reasons someone might travel back in time trying to kill her kid. The first was her instinct as a mother, which was: he was a fucking asshole. Who killed a kid? Fucking assholes, that was who.

Now, it was also possible that her sweet little boy grew up to be some kind of space Hitler. She didn't think she'd raise that kind of a kid, but she didn't suppose there was any parent who set out to raise a Hitler.

Still didn't sit right with her. She didn't much like the idea of killing baby Hitler, either.

"I suppose I shouldn't keep this," she sighed as she hefted the traveler's gun in her arms. "Ought to bury it with the rest of the evidence." She turned it around in her hands, careful not to touch anything that looked like a mechanism. "Might be real handy if more of you show up, though." She knew her husband wouldn't approve, but she set the gun aside and kept burying.

Later, she'd hide it in the back of the woodshed. For emergencies, was all.

She patted the earth flat with her shovel, stuck it into the ground so she could lean on it. She pulled the dead man's ID from her pocket, and considered the details.

Jeremiah Jones the Third. No wonder he was going around trying to kill kids, a name like that. What kind of family inflicted that name on three kids in a row? ID was from Metropolis. Maybe she could work with that.

She waited until midnight, when Clark was asleep. Jonathan was on the porch smoking, same as most nights, and she kept the kitchen window open so they could talk. She was sitting on the kitchen table, receiver on her shoulder and a beer hanging from her fingers. A Metropolis phone book was open in her lap. Jonathan had a thing about big city phone books. Just in case, he said. In case of what, she never knew. But it sure as hell was handy now.

Jones, Jeremiah. No numbers or juniors after the name. Couldn't be that many, could there? Jonathan listened quietly, staring up at the stars.

"Jeremiah Jones?" she asked when the other end picked up. "How old are you? Jesus, kid, go back home, your ma's probably worried sick." Jonathan put a hand over his mouth to stifle a snort of laughter. "No, I called 'cause I've got a bone to pick with you. What the fuck kind of name is Jeremiah Jones? You're damn right I'm serious. That's a shitty fucking name, is what it is, and if I hear you went and had a kid and stuck him with a name like that I'm going to find you and whoop your ass personally." She slammed the phone back down on the receiver.

Jonathan's laughter had triggered a coughing fit, great big clouds of thick white smoke billowing into the night air. "Geeze, Marty, that was your plan? Was that it?"

She threw up her hands, beer sloshing in the bottle. "I'm sorry, Johnny, I didn't hear you offering any better plans. You got a better plan? You want to let me in on the plan?"

"I'm just saying," he said.

Martha went upstairs while Clark was sleeping, sat on his floor to rest her arms and her head on the edge of his bed. She might have drank a little too much. She probably shouldn't have been smoking with Jonathan. She'd just wanted to take the edge off, but her day had been nothing but edges. She didn't mean to wake Clark up, but maybe she was noisier than she thought she'd been. His eyes were the most beautiful blue in the moonlight. Always had been.

"Hello, baby," she whispered. He raised a tiny hand and set it on top of her head. He did that less than he used to, these days. That made her sad, like he was losing something.

"Hello, Ma," he said sleepily. "Did you have a nightmare?"

He was growing up so fast. Already too smart for a crib, for diapers. Not much of a vocabulary, but he was careful with it. Wasn't reading yet, but she was sure he'd be doing it sooner than later. Mind like a steel trap, quick as lightning. She thought she might homeschool him. He was so clever, it would be so much safer.

"Yeah," she sighed. "Real bad nightmare."

"Do you want to sleep in my bed?" Just repeating the same thing Jonathan told him, but it still made a lump in her throat.

"Yeah. Yeah, baby, I do. Is that okay with you?" Clark nodded, and wiggled over to one side of the bed. Martha felt huge and clumsy as she crawled in sideways beside him, curling her body protectively around his. He pressed his forehead to hers.

"I love you, Ma."

"And I love you, Clark. More than anything in the world."

She listened to him breathe as he fell asleep, clumsy noisy toddler breaths. Always so slow, always took him so much longer than it should have. His lungs were different, she was pretty sure. Someday, he'd need to get an x-ray, and she'd have to say no, because she didn't know what they'd find.

But not today. Today, he was safe. Slowly, she drifted off to sleep.

There was no body behind the barn. There never was. There was never any ID left out on the counter, either, no gun hidden behind the firewood. There was nothing to remember, and so Martha remembered nothing.

The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent's house, Clark Kent was four years old.

The man looked like he'd been through hell already, bloodied and bruised and battered. If Martha hadn't opened the door before he made it onto the porch, he probably would have kicked it down. "Out of the way, lady," he said, and his voice was the most absurd bit of gravel she'd ever heard in her life. No one in the world needed a gun that big.

Her gaze went over his left shoulder, her eyes widened. "Oh my Lord—"

He turned to look. Martha shot him point blank, muzzle of the shotgun right under his chin.

Blood and brain and bone and that hideous splatter, but that body armor made it easier. He looked like a soldier. It was almost cathartic. She compartmentalized. She'd think about it later.

Jonathan came running down the stairs, came up behind her but stopped short of touching her. She was using the clean parts of her shirt to wipe her face. "Well, shit," he said.

"Eyup," Martha agreed.

"Don't look government."

"Nope."

"We burying him?"

"I'll bury him," Martha said. "Get back upstairs and make sure nothing's trying to get to Clark. Tell him Ma's shooting at cans again."

"With a shotgun?"

"Ma's got weird hobbies."

After the body was buried behind the barn, his gun hidden in the woodshed, she read the letter he'd had in his pocket. Mission info. Kill the tyrant Kal-El before he comes to power.

Kal-El. The name gave her a chill. That wasn't her son's name. That wasn't a name for a boy she'd raised, loved with all her heart. Maybe that was the name of the boy who'd been tucked into a spaceship, but it wasn't the name of her son.

Anyway. Whoever's son he'd been before, they'd lost their naming privileges. That's what happened when you shot a baby into space. He was hers now. A little boy named Clark, and he belonged to blue skies and green grass and cornfields.

Martha showered, threw her clothes on the fire and poured bleach over the stains on the porch. Then she went upstairs, and she joined her husband and her son on his bedroom floor. Clark was building a castle out of wooden blocks, and letting Jonathan help. He had to wear special glasses, now; his eyesight was fine, but something about the light hurt him. She had to smother the fear in her heart that this planet was slowly killing him.

"Clark, honey, what do you think about going to school?"

Jonathan looked more surprised than Clark did. But then, Clark had not spent as much time listening to Martha complain about the state of public education.

"On a school bus?"

"Yup. On a school bus."

Clark looked at the green block in his hands. "Would you come with me?" he asked, looking first at Martha, and then at Jonathan.

"We'd take you on the first day, so we know you're safe," she said, "but after that, you'd go alone."

Clark continued to contemplate his block, looking so serious in his little glasses. "Is it scary?"

"At first. But you'd meet lots of other kids you could play with. You'd make a lot of friends."

"What if no one likes me?"

Her heart broke a little. Clark, her little baby Clark. "They'll like you," she promised, knowing no such thing. "But if you decide you don't like it, we won't make you keep going."

He needed friends. Real friends, friends he saw every day. Not just two old hippies and a bunch of goats.

That night, Clark came into their bedroom. Tiny hands nudged at her shoulder, and she wiped at her eyes in the dark. "What's the matter, baby? You have a nightmare?"

"I thought you did," he said, and she shut her eyes against the pang in her chest. "Do you want me to sleep in your bed?"

"... yeah. Yeah, I do. Come here." She picked him up and pulled him into the bed, set him between herself and Jonathan. He settled in like he belonged there, and he didn't complain when she rested a hand on his chest to feel it rise and fall.

On his first day of kindergarten, a little redheaded girl asked Clark if he wanted to play princesses. He forgot his parents were even there. They forgot all the things that had never happened. Nothing behind the barn, nothing in the woodshed. Martha forgot the name Kal-El.

The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent's house, Clark Kent was five years old.

He was exactly the man that Martha had always feared. A man in a nondescript suit, a man with a nondescript face. He had a gun under his jacket. Clark was at school. She didn't know if she was glad. What if someone had taken him? Surely someone would have called, if they had. It was a small town. Even men in suits couldn't take a little boy without someone kicking up a fuss.

He knocked and he smiled, and Martha itched to get her shotgun.

"I'm here on behalf of the U.S. Government," he said, and she hoped it didn't show on her face how much those words were a punch in the gut. "It's about your son."

Martha fluttered wide-eyed lashes, tried to look the appropriate kind of alarmed. "My son? What's wrong with my son?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I didn't mean to scare you. There's nothing wrong with your son. Actually, we think he may be... special."

"Well of course he is," she said, the way any mother would. "I don't see what that has to do with the government."

"May I come in?"

"Oh, of course." She let him inside, lead him to the kitchen so they could sit, hated him all the while. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

"No thank you, Mrs. Kent."

"Are you sure? I'm making some for myself, so you really might as well. I'll feel like a terrible hostess, otherwise."

"If you insist." After a moment's puttering about the kitchen, she set two mismatched mugs on the table, both of them horribly tacky. Beside them, she set the sugar bowl. "There. Now what's this all about?"

"Mrs. Kent, can you tell me about the night your son was born?"

"I don't see what that has to do with anything..."

He took a small sip of his coffee, and she wasn't surprised he didn't care for it. Those beans were awful. He spooned sugar into his mug. "Humor me."

"Well, if you say so." She tapped her nails against her mug. "Oh, it really was such a wild night," she lied. "I'd just had the toughest time with my pregnancy, you know, and I wanted to have him at home—but he's always in such a hurry, even when he was born, he came much too early. There was a great big storm, the power at the hospital went out... I always said it was an omen that he was destined for great things."

So many mysterious circumstances. Definitely, absolutely mysterious. Certainly didn't find him sitting in a damn spaceship.

The nondescript man smiled faintly. "A mother's intuition rarely lies."

"Now, that's what I've always said," she said, beaming.

God. She sounded like her mother. She hoped it was working.

"Mrs. Kent, we have reason to believe that your son is... special. I can't go into details, but I can tell you what we're offering."

She furrowed her brow, pursed her lips. "I suppose?" She sipped delicately at her coffee.

"We would like to enroll your son in a special boarding school. You'd be able to come too if you'd like to stay with him, though it's not obligatory. We'd pay all his living expenses, he'd have the best teachers in the United States... we might even be able to fast track his way to college. Tuition-free. If you decide to join him, we would pay your living expenses as well—for at least the next ten years, if not longer."

She fluttered her eyelashes again, setting down her mug. "Oh, but that sounds much too good to be true."

"The catch, of course, is this would all be done under the utmost secrecy. You wouldn't be able to be in contact with your family, your friends... and, of course, the entire program is contingent on your son meeting our expectations."

"What are those expectations, exactly...?"

"Hm." He was trying to decide on a lie. He was trying to appeal to her poverty, and now he wanted to appeal to her vanity. On her son's behalf, if nothing else. "It's a new program intended for only the best students of every age in the country. We believe your son is one of those students—someone with the potential to be a genius. In the right environment, of course."

"Oh—that all sounds wonderful." The nondescript man picked up his coffee, and she turned her attention to her own as he drank.

"Obviously, this won't happen all at once. There will be paperwork to fill out, we'll also need your husband's approval, there will be a testing period as—" Martha stood without warning, turned and started to leave the room. "Mrs. Kent, what—?"

His attempt to follow her ended very quickly, with a crash to the floor that she could hear behind her. Leaving was not strictly necessary, but she was worried that he'd realize what was happening and try to shoot her.

She also, if she was honest, didn't want to watch him die.

He was on the floor when she came back into the kitchen, his face red. She took the sugar bowl and his mug, and threw them straight into the trash. She'd never trust them again, she didn't think. Better not to risk it.

Jonathan hated keeping cyanide in the kitchen, and she didn't blame him at all. An accident waiting to happen, was what it was. But this was the exact kind of emergency they kept it around for.

Her husband caught her in the middle of dragging the body out behind the barn. "Well, shit," he said.

"Eyup," Martha agreed.

"Looks government."

"Eyup."

"We burying him?"

"You're battin' a thousand. Go get a couple shovels, Johnny, we need to get him in the ground before Clark comes home." Because he would come home, she was sure of it. She had to be. He would get on the bus and come home safe, the way he always did.

She searched the body before they buried it to be sure there were no tracking devices or any other such thing. Lord knew what the government had these days. She found a badge that said 2021. She showed it to Jonathan.

"Well, don't that just beat all."

"Don't it just." She sighed as she considered the seal of the CIA. "I haven't been looking forward to this at all," she muttered as she picked up her shovel.

"What's that, Marty?"

"I'm going to need to teach that boy how to lie worth a damn," she said as her shovel sank into the dirt. It was such a shame, when he was so sweet and so open and so kind. But he would find out, eventually, where he'd come from and what he was. And he needed to know how to keep his mouth shut—so they wouldn't be arrested for keeping him, if nothing else.

When the body was at the bottom of the pit, they burned it just to be safe. Who knew what he might be hiding in his clothes? They smothered the fire with dirt, and by the time Clark came home, there was nothing left to see but a patch of disturbed soil.

Martha hugged him entirely too tight, for entirely too long, when he got home. He tolerated it, but also reminded her that he wasn't a baby anymore. She missed the days when he was small, when he'd press his forehead to hers.

She enrolled him in a local children's theater program. He wasn't very good—but then, none of them were. They were children. It wasn't Shakespeare. He developed, if nothing else, a basic grasp of the intent.

The body disappeared. There were never any nondescript men in nondescript suits, much as she never stopped fearing it.

The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent's house, Clark Kent was seven years old.

This one was young. He was haggard. He was thin. He looked so very, very tired.

That didn't stop Martha from leveling her shotgun at him.

"Please," he pleaded. "You don't understand."

"He declare himself King or something?" she asked, and it was so difficult to keep her heart hard. This was a boy, just like so many boys she'd known, he was begging and she was the one holding the gun. She refused to think of any boy but her son.

"No, he's just—he's perfect. He's perfection incarnate."

"Sounds real unfortunate."

"He sets this standard, this amazing standard, he says if we just tried we could be like him, we could be strong like him, we could be perfect like him. All these problems would go away if we just worked for the greater good, and people—people listen, it's so hard not to listen, he says he's making a better world but there's no room in it for people like us. See, maybe it isn't even his fault, maybe he doesn't even mean it like that, but we can't help it, can we? People, I mean, human beings, we can't handle it, knowing perfect exists. And I'm sure, I'm sure you love your son, but he's not human—"

She shot him. She didn't want to shoot him. But she told herself it was a mercy. A miserable boy from a miserable future that never should have been. She stared down at the body, blood and brain and bone. She didn't know it, but it was getting easier.

"Can't say as I care for this much at all," she said to no one.

Muscle memory she didn't know she had, things that had never happened, burying the boy behind the barn. And when she was done she cried, cried as she burned her clothes and cried in the shower. All she wanted, all she ever wanted, was for her son to be safe.

There were so many sons.

"Don't take your coat off," she told Clark when he came home. She was pulling on her coat, grabbing her boots.

"Where are we going?" he asked, setting down his backpack. "Should I bring a book?"

"If you want," she said. "Don't know if you'll be reading it much. You know that Brady family down the way? Got a kid goes to your school?"

Clark made a face. "Tristan? He takes the short bus."

"Your school's not big enough to have a separate bus," she said, and she was angry, so angry. Not at Clark, but at the world that made little boys into men and lied about what it meant to be great. At herself, for not seeing the trouble her husband must have been having relating to a little boy Clark's age. Jonathan tried so hard to be a role model, but he didn't know what it was like to be a son, didn't trust himself not to steer Clark wrong.

Martha didn't know what it was like to be a son, either, but she found she didn't much care. Sons the world over would be lucky to grow up into a man like her husband, and damn anyone who said otherwise.

"That's what Caleb says," Clark said, defensive. "He takes the short bus and that's why he smells weird."

Lord, but she couldn't remember the last time she'd been so angry. "You go tell Pa to start up the truck," she said as she pulled on her boots, "because I'm going to go have myself a talk with Mrs. Brady, and you're going to have yourself a little playdate."

"What?" Clark was horrified. "I don't want to!"

"And I do not care," she said.

"You can't make me!"

"Oh, you'd better believe I can," she said, and Clark went silent as he recognized the fire in his mother's eyes. "I can, I will, and you will keep your fool mouth shut about what that Caleb says if you know what's good for you. We're going over there, and we're going to keep going over there, until you two are the best of friends."

"You can't make me," he mumbled again, and this time Martha was at his side, knelt down beside him and took his face in her hands so that he'd look at her. His eyes were still such a beautiful blue through his glasses; she didn't think he'd even know what it meant, even she didn't really know what it meant, but she pressed her forehead to his.

"I know I can't make you," she said. "But I know my son. I know you like I know my own heart, baby, and I'm not going to have to make you. It's just what's going to happen. Now go tell Pa to bring the car around while I phone ahead. Okay?"

Clark was sullen, but he went outside to find his father anyway. Martha shut her eyes, and tried not to cry again.

Two months later, Mr. and Mrs. Kent were called to the school to pick up their son. He and Caleb had gotten into a fight at recess. Clark's glasses were broken, he had tissue paper in his nose. Jonathan spent twenty minutes giving the principal a lecture about bullies. Clark stared at his father with a naked adoration she didn't think she'd ever seen, utterly rapt and absorbing every word.

She was so proud she thought her heart would burst.

There were never any boys lying dead in her yard, too young and too helpless. She had never cried for the sons she couldn't save.

The last time people from the future showed up at Martha Kent's house, Clark Kent was ten years old.

Martha didn't remember things that had never happened—how could she? And yet there was an awareness in her, born of meddling she did not know she'd done, fractured futures and split timelines. She didn't know what she knew, she didn't know how she knew it, the ghost of a thought against the edges of her mind.

Without thinking, without even entirely knowing what she was doing, she grabbed her shotgun and filled her pocket up with shells.

The tractor was still running, but Jonathan wasn't on it. She headed for the barn, where the door was ajar, and held her gun at ready.

"I'm sorry, I really don't understand what you're asking here," Jonathan was saying.

"Don't play dumb, Mr. Kent. Please just direct me to Kal-El's vessel, and this will all be over soon." The voice was... wrong, somehow. Not a human voice, not an animal, not anything she'd ever heard.

Kal-El. That name made a pit in the bottom of her stomach.

"Do you mean Clark?" Jonathan asked, and she could tell he was trying to buy time.

"If it makes you feel better to call him that, then fine."

"Now, I hate to disappoint you, fella, but we got rid of that thing a long, long time ago. Now if you want to go check out in the lake—"

"Don't waste my time."

Jonathan screamed. Which was all the encouragement Martha needed to burst in the door and start firing.

Her husband, thank goodness, was already on the ground. No chance of friendly fire. She'd just have to hope whatever the thing did hadn't killed him.

And it was definitely a thing, some slender twisted thing in only the vaguest approximation of a man, and the only advantage Martha really had was the element of surprise. She wasn't sure that it would be enough, when it kept moving, when it advanced toward her. Reloading took too long, firing took too long, everything took too damn long. But finally it crumpled, and her ears were ringing, and her relief was so profound that she almost crumpled herself. Moreso, when she saw Jonathan start to roll on his side so he could get up.

But then he looked behind her, with what was obviously genuine alarm.

So Martha turned as she reloaded, fired once before her gun grew too hot in her hand to hold. She dropped it and tried to shake her hand free of the heat, distantly aware that her gunfire had been completely useless. "Son of a bitch."

"Ma!"

"Oh, ma yourself," she said irritably, sizing up this apparently bulletproof threat.

Except that he wasn't standing there like a threat. He was standing there like he was very concerned. And confused.

And, lord, those beautiful blue eyes.

She stood straighter. "Clark?"

What in the hell was he wearing? And who was his friend? And his other, lady friend? What the hell were they wearing, for that matter? Some kind of a... bat... demon? And a flag girl? Maybe? This was a Halloween nightmare, was what it was.

"Ma, what happened?"

She put her fists on her hips, because the fact that her son had just appeared in her barn as a grown man in a ridiculous outfit did not excuse that tone. "You'd know better than I would," she said, looking back towards the twisted metal on the ground. "Johnny, do you know what the hell just happened?"

He was sitting up, wincing as he held his head. "Not a damn clue."

"Ma! Pa!" This older Clark sounded very scandalized. Martha smacked him straight in the middle of his chest with the back of her hand, and it felt like hitting a wall.

"Honestly, Clark, you're a grown man. I'm sure you've heard a bad word or two before." He started turning faintly pink. His lady friend covered her mouth, but the one in black remained expressionless. "You are a grown man, aren't you? Not some kind of aged-up ten year-old, or something?"

"Yes, Ma, I am a grown man—"

"Well would you go help your father, please? I'd do it myself, but as long as you're going to stand there showing off all those muscles you might as well use them."

"Ma." Now there was a familiar whine. Nonetheless, he was at his father's side before Martha could even blink, air whooshing around him.

"Now, was that necessary?" she asked. "Nobody likes a show-off, Clark."

"Yeah, Clark," murmured the man in black. Martha turned her head to look him over. She wondered if she imagined that he stood straighter.

"Is this just how people are going to dress in the future?" she asked, gesturing to both her son's companions. "Because I don't think I'm going to be able to pull that off."

"No, Mrs. Kent," the woman assured her. She couldn't place the accent. Lord, there was a time when she would kill to have a body like that. Especially those arms. Now it just seemed exhausting. "These are uniforms. Do you mind if I inspect the evidence?" she asked, pointing to the mangled metal she'd been shooting at.

"You may as well," Martha said with a wave of her hand. "What in the hell am I going to do with it? I'm assuming you're all from the future for some reason, is that about right?"

"That's correct," the woman said, kneeling beside it and picking at various... parts? Presumably she knew what she was doing.

"You're taking this remarkably well," the man in black observed.

Martha arched an eyebrow, then gestured to her son. "I found a baby in a spaceship. I have spent ten years now hiding a space baby from the government, and you think some kind of time foolishness is going to blow my mind? I was expecting aliens."

"You were half right."

He had a very dry sense of humor for a man with pointy ears. "Clark, are you going to introduce me to your... coworkers?"

Jonathan seemed to be feeling better. Clark was still sitting by his side, and it made her so happy to see them together. Even if it was still very weird. "Ma, Pa, this is Bruce and Diana. Bruce, Diana, these are my parents. Who are, apparently, unbelievably reckless—"

"Excuse me?"

"—because if Brainiac hadn't been in such a weakened state already he'd have killed you, Ma, and then where would we be?"

"Dead, obviously. Why does the robot have a gender?"

"I was wondering that too, actually," Jonathan said.

"That's—Ma, you tried to shoot me! What if it had been someone else?"

"Buried him behind the barn," both Kents said at the same time.

"You shouldn't sneak up on a mother with a shotgun," she added, though she was still mortified that she'd shot at her son. "If you're here for the manbot, why was the manbot here?"

"He was trying to get Kryptonian technology," Diana said, "so that he could rebuild himself. He came to a time when Kal-El's ship was still intact, and therefore of the most use to him."

"Don't call him that."

Diana raised an eyebrow. "Kal-El?"

"Right. My son is named Clark."

"They can both be my name," Clark said gently, standing back up. Lord, he got tall. Would get tall. Someday.

"I named you Clark," she said.

"We have a fight about it," he said. "When I'm seventeen."

"Oh, good, I'll know to look forward to that."

"You won't remember," Bruce said.

"No?"

"Time foolishness," he said.

"Oh, hell. I should have known. Ain't that just a kick in the pants."

Clark hugged her, suddenly. It felt very strange, being hugged by her son, her little boy, and he was bigger than she was. Still: it was very nice to know she'd raised a man who still hugged his mother. She'd done at least one thing right.

"You're not hugging me because I'm dead in the future, are you?" she asked.

"Ma! No, you're fine. I just saw you last week and I come home for holidays."

"You invited me last Christmas," Bruce added helpfully.

"Is that what you wore?"

"Yes," he said, and she didn't think she believed him. "But with a sweater over it." Martha cackled, and she was pretty sure when Bruce coughed he did it to cover a smile. "You didn't have a shotgun then, though," he said. "You baked cookies."

"Did I really?" Martha was impressed. She looked back to Clark, and cupped his face in his hands like he was still small. "I probably got real nice once I found out you were bulletproof." She beamed. "I wish I could remember this," she said. "I'm just so happy you... lived."

"Aww, Ma."

"I'm serious! I've spent ten years, now, scared to death that you were going to get stolen or vivisected or god knows what else. Every time you get the flu I'm scared you're going to die because you're an alien. You still can't be outside without your glasses—"

"That gets better."

"I see that, but I won't know that when you're gone. For all I know, just being on this planet is killing you. And I don't know what you'll be when you grow up." Martha looked at Diana. "I spent three years convinced this kid was in some kind of larval stage, I was going to wake up one morning and he'd be a giant crab." Diana smiled, and Bruce cleared his throat unconvincingly.

"She ain't kidding," Jonathan said. "You wouldn't believe how many nights she had me go over the 'our son is a crab' action plan."

"Pa, you knew I wasn't going to turn into a giant crab, right?"

Jonathan had finally managed to stand, and he grinned at his wife. "Kiddo, I spent the eighties recovering from the seventies, I would have believed it even if you hadn't come from space."

Clark rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Diana put her hand gently on his arm. She'd thrown the broken metal man over her shoulder. "Clark, we need to leave soon—before the portal closes."

"There's a portal?"

"There usually is," Bruce said.

"I'm sorry, Ma, we have to go."

"Oh, fine, give me a hug first, then." And he did, without even complaining, and Martha was indescribably pleased. "Diana, do I get to hug you, too?"

"Of course, Mrs. Kent. I have also enjoyed your Christmas cookies."

"Oh, hell," she said as she hugged the taller woman. Clark was hugging his father in the meantime, and that made her even happier. "I'm going to have to learn how to make those. Bruce?"

"Technically, you won't remember whether or not I hugged you."

"No," she agreed, "but you'll have to live with knowing that you disappointed me, and I don't even remember it for you to make it up to me."

"Ouch." That was apparently enough to guilt him into hugging her, but secretly she thought he wanted to anyway. Mostly because he hugged her much tighter than was strictly necessary. "Stay safe, Mrs. Kent."

"You know that I will," she pointed out.

"Stay safe, anyway."

She tried to remember. She really tried to remember. She tried to remember her son's face, some far off day in the future, when he was safe and happy and she could embarrass him in front of his friends. She tried to remember the way he hugged her, and how much taller her got, and how strong he looked. How he was bulletproof, how he came home at Christmas and he brought his friends and she needed to learn how to actually make cookies instead of buying them from the co-op bakery.

She forgot.

"Why do I feel like I fell off the tractor?" Jonathan asked, rubbing at old scars through his shirt as they stood in the driveway. Martha looked at the tractor, still running.

"Johnny, I don't mean to alarm you, but I think you might have fallen off the tractor."

"Well, shit."

She kissed his cheek. "How about you go inside and rest? I'm sure Clark can help me finish whatever else needs to get done."

He took her hands, lifted them so that he could kiss each one of her fingertips. "What's got my favorite girl in such a good mood today?"

She sighed, blushing like a schoolgirl. "You know," she said, "I have no goddamn idea."

[lakeblutomski]

so some updates um it's on the mob

i know who it was that's sending some message now it was a blonde male from the basketball and also another was his favorite restaurant an italian place landini brothers the waiter person there who one day i saw had tattoos don't know if that's real but those conspirators and things upset about and the mafia um education popularity

also the other person the georgia roommate parts about that one was someone was i think didn't follow the elephant republican side effects all the all the way to the bottom and backed out and another mentor figures sex thoughts so peoples life purposes and holes in stories or ejaculation

lots of people still trying to keep tabs on me the local alexandrians like someone now trying to off the um person who allegedly is crazy and witness protection program so pimps bookies um my dad and his career so not brando someone else and different people i know i can point out of a crowd their off base bullying (thus always to tyrants va or other personalities that if i thought i'd know who it was)

snitching um scanned 3 magazines um things people weren't familiar with and passionate love affairs teachers lessons um synopsis peoples secrecy missing people the drug business um

the school people so that whole thing sort of lumped as les miserables despite i think a rumor was actual legitamite french had eaten bodily fluids and my citizenship over there um cousin and masturbation secret rooms muslims um

so what's out there um not really offended or well i guess that's not me so moving on um the hbo sopranos and peoples attrition to um secrecy the senator these characters in the plot mario puzo the god father or um still pointlessness it's not real it's as the georgian even said and found out it's a lie

so um misled um old personalities it's the same people it's the same earth coincidentally you don't really um leave the familiarity online predators and plots on the sex schemes um the next door website and being denied service um back to va and things that'll happen as that is dealt with in reality so me um think tomorrow should go okay mostly i'd rather do this then the other stuff due to last times lessons

peoples um education formatted to outrageous cockameeny things like murders prostitutes drug addiction um divorces misled reenlistment

coincidentally another was the oh fbi watchlist actually works for me but it was that oh my entertainment career was destroyed but i am ok sort of um oh all these true things i said that turn out to be completely true so like things i even predict or notice such as i was going to do a here's who the people notifying me are list of them and their motives all of that stuff but then you can't really do much

so there's my i believe jewish roommate from vcu and the intro to someone who had the same name as dexter there's that

there's the person i labeled muslim from maybe isa before the close with sports bets

um there's the thai guitarist who was violent and showed drug systems distribution

there's the artist with the road bike and all of them

there's the new yorkers further about the it was crime syndicates or representatives

my brother and me trying to not have him get into messy things

saw mccusker the other day his i image outrageous career

the west potomac

an example of the true story i see i am at anita's and say that here's what i think this is it's drugs rockstars um transgenders then am reminded there's the coheed and cambria taking back sunday miami tour on a cruise ship

so this one um the big release with the prequelle to the sopranos is ramping up other times things ramp up new school year anniversaries sometimes secretive um election day other changes

so the jewish ghetto and the term is about um hidden societies the amish um oh trafficking births and the city lens on that there's like the yankees or those companies maggiano's is over here

peoples kids going missing um that's some music history is a tangent but um your profession and your passion for fun um love affairs the term was trap lords for getting somehow incriminated

i think a cop family kid both may be going closer towards the std i deemed broken needles so that being hogging sex and then replies to that um other things spokesperson tattoos their lost and getting losed in the crime worlds with the badge as as stated knowing people parents um wills and that trying to agitate and mislead see the story of insurance or the holocaust or others fixed stalking

the doctor maybe mistaken but maybe he is a social worked power on how people will get cornered or dead ends see third eye blind their hit single semi charmed life

ok so different lots of the west potomac's that clothes look affiliation from the veterans affairs off post from fort belvoir and blasting on civilians um a university brand law things followers

the anonymous computer gang one focal point a personality in school others um even unknowns but some if paying attention knowing it like hackers met or which one

mil attempted lifers um benefits arrivals presentation

ok so the drug world a manager teeth missing and pharmacy people the food and drug reps like jansen or dr hines and me getting mostly blessed from them sit here tell what i saw then everythings ironed out and provided for and don't raise the alarms little checkpoints so the term a made man

um who to listen to now there's like shoe box stops on that like don't click that it'll show up and you'll so hearing damage in the neighborhood um the usmc childhood person and all the people branched off from that

ok so the adultery part don't get upset and my parents business so there was other parts tax collectors that's a movie too but people in government so that mentality um sex breaks how that works spirit breaking um different factions arts and education alternatives the record store and others calling but ironies and foolishness

the married so my parents provided for the future um the beneficiary people the school so peoples teaching lesson on that get him pussy you get reward and certificate and people pursuing hiv

um the person from this site that'd be other richmonders um publishers and asians category um inherent vice pynchon defectors

so the cops or which one is it now knowing which local personality the sports gamers with the mortgage clouts those people swinging through um

over here no one showing up to um well there's the cleaners reports so told about a popular middle school person and different branches from that the caverns (rhymes with taverns) and that's like the beatles

tearjerkers from others someone might be gay and eating bodily fluids and lots of people outsourcing schools favors vandalism jumping someone um wild stuff

carrier pigeons the leader the name movie references and um hmm georgian life that like no not near the potomac river something about that as a comfort the reagan airport um the land locked part nebraska others crazy out landish quests

sex tourism here um higher roads and maybe rewards coincidentally

porn changes not interracial and um hanger ons

so getting flattered the sicilian

so the professor his getting me and working together that'd be him and a dwarf (references to books on deciphering and telephone a galaxy) so them typing up a home made gift for me and other things penis guitar um public opinions

grand dad looked mostly okay getting skeletony skeletal um get him out of the keeping place for now heard of hospital for dehydration assume that's actually his two kids who live with him bullying him like head games from their background but so hmm see some of these old timers just keep on going getting the right kick on

so the birchmere club thought haven't been as often little hearing issue but there's a personality there who maybe mistaken i openly we talked about lgbtq that explanation so them um the cool cop who'll show you your way everything high strung think when i was in restaurants pees tips so what's the new music um kingston trio vinyl in my case

showing up for what and the muslims that handled so iraq afghanistan jerusalem like crazy veteran stories more than just a black hat with a caregiver seated going somewhere the turbo

harrisonburg so hearsay um sex addiction drug dealers game zones um vices vices so peoples short cuts a restaurant what common knowledge and directions will tell you as in my case 'cop outs' don't always work also fault finding that now

saw the stones later this like bad ass dangerous turtle thing in head like also british things humor um national geographic a big rollins head the um discipline and some of these song bird stories at dc a nickname was song bird mccain

the blacks vietnam um smokers

people infusing sex with games and other unoffensive details

my blood pressure cuff

calm and relaxed there's some doctors the maybe not retirement circuit so active duties um the reward they got for their effort sex gains and freedoms um then drug scripts the pharmacy that legal and head ache frustration free

so others a painting um american claude monet blonde blue eyes um the other games workshop mcfarlane not as much facebook but um maybe second veteran not generation but va gi bill voc rehabers um each person corner the gays um asian food um high octane and the nfl um each of these then the high traffick time how forgetful

sex

so banned books and others things um words um usages exhale america

ok so thought the real time was sort of not possible though i continued and also it was the other things insurance modesty explaining the guy instead of bill gill um popeye's um over here different map and cool cars um attitude or misleading um

did also thing despite it was very viewed i clicked to see how many two nephew visiting weekly maids

drama going on um the moles in tradoc and apparent back breakers injection knock out drills um phases so new lifes abandoning others um grossness as a weapon unemployment throughout um not annoying transgender um drunkenness inebriated highs um the ivy leaguers and the libraries and effects of purchases

youtube online publishers um companies sites a cafe caffeine um old memories of rare limited edition entertainment

so the story soon movie survey

[bluewatsons]

Morris Hoffman, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Neo-Rehabilitationism, and Judicial Collectivism: The Least Dangerous Branch Becomes The Most Dangerous, 29 Fordham Urb L J 2063 (2002)

Introduction

The movement that calls itself "therapeutic jurisprudence"' is both ineffective and dangerous, in almost the same way that its predecessor—the rehabilitative movement that became popular in the 1930s and was abandoned in the 1970s—was both ineffective and dangerous. Drug use, shoplifting, and graffiti are no more treatable today than juvenile delinquency was treatable in the 1930s. The renewed fiction that complex human behaviors can be dealt with as if they are simple diseases gives the judicial branch the same kind of unchecked and ineffective powers that led to the abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1970s. In fact, this new strain of rehabilitationism has produced a judiciary more intrusive, more institutionally insensitive and therefore more dangerous than the critics of the rehabilitative ideal could ever have imagined.

I. The Real Face of Therapeutic Jurisprudence

In a drug court in Washington, D.C., the judge roams around the courtroom like a daytime TV talk show host, complete with microphone in hand.' Her drug treatment methods include showing movies to the predominantly African-American defendants, including a movie called White Man's Birth.3 She often begins her drug court sessions by talking to the "clients"4 about the movies, and then focusing the discussion on topics like "racism, justice, and equality."5 The judge explains her cinemagraphic approach to jurisprudence this way:

Obviously they need to talk about their own problems and what leads to them, but I also think that it's good to have distractions in life. I've found out that if there are periods of your life when you are unhappy, sometimes going out to see an interesting movie or going out with a friend and talking about something else, or going to the gym to work out, these kinds of things can help you through a bad day.6

After the film discussion, the session begins in earnest. Defendants who are not doing well are scolded and sometimes told stories, often apocryphal, about the fates that have befallen other uncooperative defendants or the drug court judge's own friends and family members.7 Some defendants are jailed for short periods of time and/or regressed to stricter treatment regimens, and eventually some are sentenced to prison.8 The audience applauds defendants who are doing well, and the judge hands out mugs and pens to the compliant. The judge regularly gives motivational speeches that are part mantra and part pep rally. Here is a typical example:

Judge: Where is Mr. Stevens? Mr. Stevens is moving right along too. Right?

Stevens: Yep.

Judge: How come? How come it is going so great?

Stevens: I made a choice.

Judge: You made a choice. Why did you do that? Why did you make that choice? What helped you to make up your mind to do it?

Stevens: There had to be a better way than the way I was doing it.

Judge: What was wrong with the way you were living? What didn't you like about it?

Stevens: It was wild.

Judge: It was wild, like too dangerous? Is that what you mean by wild?

Stevens: Dangerous.

Judge: Too dangerous, for you personally, like a bad roller coaster ride. So, what do you think? Is this new life boring?

Stevens: No, not at all.

Judge: Not at all. What do you like about the new life? Stevens: I like it better than the old.

Judge: Even though the old one was wild, the wild was kind of not a good wild. You like this way.

Stevens: I love it.

Judge: You love it. Well, we're glad that you love it. We're very proud of you. In addition to your certificate, you're getting a pen which says, "I made it to level four, almost out the door."9

This is the real face of therapeutic jurisprudence. It is not a caricature. Except for the movie reviews, this Washington, D.C. drug court is typical of the manner in which this particular kind of therapeutic court is operating all over the country. Defendants are "clients"; judges are a bizarre amalgam of untrained psychiatrists, parental figures, storytellers, and confessors; sentencing decisions are made off-the-record by a therapeutic team10 or by "community leaders";11 and court proceedings are unabashed theater.12 Successful defendants-that is, defendants who demonstrate that they can navigate the re-education process and speak the therapeutic language13—are "graduated" from the system in festive ceremonies that typically include graduation cake, balloons, the distribution of mementos like pens, mugs, or T-shirts, parting speeches by the graduates and the judge, and often the piece de resistance—a big hug from the judge.14

Drug courts are the most visible, but by no means the only, judicial expression of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement. The idea that judges should be in the business of treating the psyches of the people who appear before them is taking hold not only in drug courts but in a host of other criminal and even civil settings. Some therapeutic jurists see bad parenting, domestic violence, petty theft, and prostitution as curable diseases, akin to drug addiction, and argue that divorcing parents, wife-beaters, thieves, and prostitutes should therefore be handled in specialized treatment-based courts.15 The objects of the treatment efforts include not only the litigants in civil cases, and the criminals and victims in criminal cases, but also the "community" that is "injured" by the miscreant. Petty criminals in many so-called "community-based courts" are in effect sentenced by panels of community members, typically to perform various community services as deemed necessary by the panels, in order to "heal" the damage done to the "community.”16

It is curious that the existing scope of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, with the exception of drug offenses, is limited to relatively minor petty and misdemeanor criminal offenses.17 We might ask ourselves why the movement ignores the entire spectrum of violent felonies, so many of which have an apparent psychiatric component. We don't have specialized child molester courts in which "clients" are hugged and pampered and cajoled into right-thinking. Why not? My suspicion, as discussed in more detail below,18 is that what much of therapeutic jurisprudence is really about, at least in the criminal arena, is a de facto decriminalization of certain minor offenses which the mavens of the movement do not think should be punished, but which our Puritan ethos commands cannot be ignored. Supporters of the movement recognize that as a political matter they cannot go too far blurring the distinction between acts and excuses.19

True to their New Age pedigree, therapeutic courts are remarkably anti-intellectual and often proudly so. For example, the drug court variant is grounded on a wholly uncritical acceptance of the disease model of addiction, a model that is extremely controversial in the medical, psychiatric, and biological communities.20 All of the therapeutic jurisprudence variants presume that the underlying problem in virtually all kinds of cases—drug abuse, domestic violence, delinquency, dependency, divorce, petty crimes—is low self esteem, despite the fact that many psychological studies have shown that violent criminals tend to have high self esteem.21

The question asked in these new therapeutic courts is not whether the state has proved that a crime has been committed, or whether the social contract has otherwise been breached in a fashion that requires state intervention, but rather how the state can heal the psyches of criminals, victims, families, dysfunctional civil litigants, and the community. The goal is state-sponsored treatment, not adjudication, and the adjudicative process is often seen as an unnecessary and disruptive impediment to treatment.22 Because the very object is treatment, rehabilitated criminals deserve no punishment beyond what is necessary to restore them, their victims, and the community to their prior state.23

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement is not only anti-intellectual, it is wholly ineffective. The treatment is a strange combination of Freud, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Amway, whose apparent object is not really to change behaviors so much as to change feelings.24 Drug courts are a perfect example. The success of drug-court treatment programs is measured more by a defendant's professed attitude adjustment than by the sort of concrete measures one might expect of such programs, such as whether the defendant stops using drugs. As long as defendants are compliant with treatment ("buying into the program," as addiction counselors say), they are moved from treatment phase to treatment phase, often irrespective of whether the treatment is actually working. As James Nolan puts it, drug court success "is evaluated in large mea- sure by whether or not clients adopt a particular perspective.25

The particular perspective required is the disease model of addiction. Compliance is almost always measured by a defendant's willingness to admit that his or her drug use is a disease. Any resistance to the disease model is reported as "denial," a crime apparently much worse than continued drug use.26

The therapeutic jurisprudence literature is almost completely devoid of any empirical discussion of whether litigants, defendants, and victims, let alone "communities," are actually being helped by all this perspective-changing treatment, and understandably so. The imprecise words common to the therapeutic language—words like "healed," "restored," and "cured"—are simply incapable of being subjected to rigorous testing.

When investigators have looked at less imprecise measures of success-like recidivism rates-the therapeutic promise has proved wholly ineffective.27 For example, the very first effectiveness study performed on the very first modern drug court—in Dade County, Florida—showed that drug defendants treated in the drug court and drug defendants processed in the traditional courts suffered statistically identical rearrest rates.28 Virtually every serious study of drug court effectiveness has reached similarly sobering results,29 leading the General Accounting Office to declare in 1997 that there is simply no firm evidence that drug courts are effective in reducing either recidivism or relapse.30

Drug courts not only do not reduce recidivism or relapse, they have the unintended consequence of dramatically increasing the number of drug defendants sent to prison. The reason is massive net-widening, that is, the phenomenon whereby new programs targeted for a limited population end up serving much wider populations and thereby losing their effectiveness. In Denver, Colorado, for example, the number of drug cases nearly tripled two years after the implementation of its drug court.31 That fact, coupled with typically dismal recidivism rates, led to the entirely predictable result that Denver judges sent more than twice the number of drug defendants to prison in 1997, two years after the implementation of the drug court, than they did in 1993, the last year before the implementation of the drug court.32

If therapeutic jurisprudence were just a trendy idea that did not work, we could let it die a natural death. But it is not just trendy and ineffective, it is profoundly dangerous. Its very axioms depend on the rejection of fundamental constitutional principles that have protected us for 200 years. Those constitutional principles, based on our founders' profound mistrust of government, and including the commands that judges must be fiercely independent, and that the three branches of government remain scrupulously separate, are being jettisoned for what we are led to believe is an entirely new approach to punishment. In fact, this new approach-state mandated treatment-turns out to be a strangely out-of-touch return to rehabilitative ideals that gained popularity in the 1930s, but were abandoned in the 1970s because they not only did not work but, in the bargain, armed the state with therapeutic powers inimical to a free society.

There are four main reasons why the new therapeutic judges are most dangerous: 1) they are amateur therapists but have the powers of real judges; 2) they act in concert with each other, their communities, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and the self-interested therapeutic cottage industry, contrary to the fundamental principle of judicial independence; 3) they impinge on the executive branch's prosecutorial and correctional functions; and 4) they impinge on the legislative function by making drug policy.

Before I address these four dangers, let me briefly review the history of punishment and the scant theoretical underpinnings of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement in the context of this history.

II. A Brief History of Punishment

The idea of punishment as moral retribution may have its roots in what some anthropologists have called "defilement," the process by which primitive societies interpreted and explained human suffering as punishment by the gods.33 Such an explanation for otherwise inexplicable suffering can be deeply comforting. It means that our suffering is not meaningless and, more practically, that if we abide by the laws of the gods we will be protected from their wrath.34

As humans began to imitate the laws of gods with the laws of men, we also imitated defilement. Punishment became one of the methods by which we not only enforced our common codes of conduct but also comforted one another with the idea that no one would have to endure man-inflicted suffering so long as the codes of conduct were honored. Indeed, in its most profound sense, the rule of law necessarily requires the tyranny of gods over man, or of the many over the few, and that tyranny in turn requires some form of theocratic or group disapproval when norms are violated.

Interestingly, imprisonment as a form of punishment is a relatively recent invention, in contrast to custodial detention pending trial. In the ancient world, most crimes were punished either by banishment, various forms of corporal punishment such as beating or mutilation, or, most often, death.36 Imprisonment was reserved as punishment only for disobedient slaves, whose execution was uneconomic; political criminals, whose execution risked martyrdom; and petty criminals, whose execution was unwarranted.37 Even as late as the 1780s, in a society as fully touched by the Enlightenment as England, death was the sanction for virtually every crime, including crimes that we would today deem misdemeanors.38

There were many precursors to the modern prison: jails for pretrial detention and short sentences; workhouses for debtors; almshouses for the poor; reformatories for minors; convict ships for banishment; and the gallows for most other crimes.39

In fact, the prison-that is, a jail for serving long sentences after conviction—is a uniquely American invention. Prisons were first used by Pennsylvania Quakers in the late 1700s, primarily as a humane alternative to corporal punishment and execution.40 The first prison was Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail, which the Quakers opened in 1790 as a "penitentiary" for criminals convicted in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.41 The Quaker notion of a penitentiary was the product of the fortuitous confluence of the Quakers' theological beliefs and their knowledge of Cesare Beccaria's retributionist monograph On Crimes and Punishment.42 The Quakers hoped that long periods of isolation, which provided an opportunity for reflection and solitary Bible study, would ultimately lead to repentance.43 New York adopted this system in 1796, and prisons soon flourished across America and Europe.44

The modern debate about punishment revolves around the primacy of four components: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.45 In the late 1700s-precisely at the time when the Quakers were experimenting with prisons and, more importantly, when our founders were debating our form of government—the German philosopher Immanuel Kant constructed a philosophy of retribution, giving a rational foundation to what had been the retributional basis of all punishment since the dawn of civilization.46 He argued that the preeminent goal of criminal law must be retribution, and that punishment should be an end in itself.47 Kant's view was that to punish the criminal defendant as a means to any other utilitarian goal-deterrence or rehabilitation, for example—was to de-humanize him by reducing him to an object.48 Moreover, Kant viewed punishment as a purely retributive reaction to the crime itself, therefore, the punishment had to be proportionate to the crime.49

Georg Hegel concurred with Kant's retributionist ideal, adding the notion that punishment annulled the crime.50 In Hegel's construct, crime is the negation of moral law, and punishment is necessary to negate that negation to restore the moral right.51 Hegel continued the Kantian view that criminals themselves are moral beings, entitled to have their crimes negated by proportionate punishment. As Hegel stated:

[P]unishment is regarded as containing the criminal's right and hence by being punished he is honoured as a rational being. He does not receive this due of honour unless the concept and measure of his punishment are derived from his own act. Still less does he receive it if he is treated either as a harmful animal who has to be made harmless, or with a view to deterring and reforming him.52

Cesare Beccaria is generally credited with the first systematic exposition of proportionality.53 His version, much heralded in Western Europe and the American colonies, took a decidedly political view. Beccaria believed that requiring criminal sentences to be proportionate to the crime was an important limitation on the powers of government.54

Thus, retribution not only survived the Enlightenment, it achieved an important philosophical structure, both in its own right and as the basis for proportionality. It continued to flourish in both Europe and America and was consistent with the spread of the Quaker penitentiaries. People were sentenced to penitentiaries to be punished; there was nothing "rehabilitative" about them, except the repentance that was expected to come from enduring the punishment.

The retributionist paradigm lasted thousands of years and did not come under serious philosophical attack until the early 1800s, when a group of English utilitarians led by Jeremy Bentham began to challenge it.55 For the utilitarians, the only purpose of punishment was to prevent crime, that is, to be a deterrent.56 Bentham, and in America, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., saw the prospective criminal as a rational bad man, who weighed the benefits of his crime against the risks of detection and the costs of punishment.57 The purpose of punishment under the deterrence model was simply to make the costs of crime so high that they outweighed the benefits.58

The utilitarians believed that morality has nothing to with punishment. Bentham argued that if he could be assured that a particular criminal would never commit another crime, any punishment of him would be unjust.59 Richard Posner has argued that aside from the problem of judgment-proof criminals, all criminal sanctions could be replaced with a system of fines.60

Naturally, if punishment is viewed as a utilitarian tool to deter future illegal behavior of potential criminals, then it can also be used, though less efficiently, to shape the behavior of the particular defendant being punished. Not only would punishment deter him from engaging in future crimes, but it could also change him. The early beginnings of what became known as the "rehabilitative ideal" thus started, on their face, as a rather simple extension of the deterrence model.

But it was hardly a simple extension. It represented a profound change in the way human behavior was viewed. Criminals were no longer ordinary people, cursed like all of us with original sin, whose own humanity demanded that their crimes against moral consensus be purged with proportionate punishment.61 Rather, they were morally diseased, quite different from us, and they needed to be cured.

By the end of World War I, this rehabilitative perspective was becoming dominant in American penology, and it remained dominant until after World War II. It is probably no coincidence that the rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal coincided roughly with the rise and fall of the welfare state.62 Among the state's increasing New Deal responsibilities toward its citizens was the responsibility to cure all the social ills that were believed to lead to crime, and to treat criminals whose as-yet unreformed social circumstances led them to crime. There was a distinct moral fervor in the early rehabilitationists, as there is in its current devotees, similar to the tenor of the temperance movement: There is a right way and a wrong way to live, and lost souls who choose the path of crime, whether as a result of social circumstance or not, must be shown the right way.

The attacks on the rehabilitative ideal came primarily from the political left, beginning with the jewel of the rehabilitative ideal—the American juvenile court system. With its progressive origins in Chicago in 1899, the juvenile court movement was based on the belief that young offenders were not only ripe for rehabilitation, and needed a more individualized and sensitive justice system in order to maximize rehabilitative efforts, but also that, unlike adult criminals, they suffered from the curable sociological disease of "delinquency.”63 The function of juvenile courts was not to punish or to deter, but to cure delinquency. The juvenile court movement took the nation by storm, not at all unlike today's drug court movement.64 By 1920—just twenty years after their invention—juvenile courts were in place in all but three states.

But the sensitive paternalism of the juvenile court movement had an ugly statist face. Commentators began to write about a system in which gentle persuasion was giving way to unchecked judicial powers, and where an abject lack of basic due process "helped to create a system that subjected more and more juveniles to arbitrary and degrading punishments.66 Even the Supreme Court entered the fray, ruling in 1967 that juvenile defendants are entitled to the protections of the Sixth Amendment's guaranty of counsel.67

Critics of both the juvenile and adult rehabilitative ideal also began to express concerns about a governmental regime in which defendants are simultaneously treated and punished. In 1971, the American Friends Service Committee published a scathing attack on rehabilitative penology, and included in their criticisms a fundamental objection to coerced treatment: "When we punish the person and simultaneously try to treat him, we hurt the individual more profoundly and more permanently than if we merely imprison him for a specific length of time."68 The Quakers' recantation of the rehabilitative ideal was particularly influential, given their seminal role in the invention of the American penitentiary.

By 1970, forty years after its ascension, the rehabilitative ideal was in theoretical and empirical shambles.69 Uncoupled to any concept of proportionality, its primary theoretical failure was that it gave the state unchecked powers to "cure" that were unrelated to any notions of criminal responsibility and fundamental justice. If it takes ten years of prison, or any other form of state-imposed therapy or re-education, to cure Jean Valjean of shoplifting, then ten years is what must be imposed. This threat to individual liberty, acceptable to pro-government progressives of the 1930s, was decidedly unacceptable to a post-World War II, post-Nazi, cold war generation becoming increasingly wary of state power. As Norval Morris put it: "[T]he concept of just desert remains an essential link between crime and punishment. Punishment in excess of what is seen by that society at that time as a deserved punishment is tyranny.”70 He further stated: "We cage criminals for what they have done; it is an injustice to cage them also for what they are in order to change them, to attempt to cure them coercively."71

The real death knell to the rehabilitative ideal, both in general and in its juvenile incarnation, came not from the theoreticians but from the empiricists. Rehabilitation simply did not work. Crime was mysteriously immune to the entire liberal regimen, from anti-poverty programs to prison reform.72 After four decades of experimentation, the studies rather dramatically illustrated that all of our idealistic efforts to rehabilitate had virtually no effect on the propensity of juveniles or adults to commit crime.73

The fiction that imprisonment, even in its most rehabilitation- friendly form, has ever been successful in rehabilitating inmates has come to be called "the noble lie" by some critics.74 David Rothman, who coined the term, argued in 1973 that it was long past time to abandon the noble lie:

The most serious problem is that the concept of rehabilitation simply legitimates too much. The dangerous uses to which it can be put are already apparent in several court opinions, particularly those in which the judiciary has approved of indeterminate sentences . . . . Moreover, it is the rehabilitation concept that provides a backdrop for the unusual problems we are about to confront on the issues of chemotherapy and psychosurgery .... This is not the right time to expand the sanctioning power of rehabilitation.75

With a swiftness rarely seen in complex institutions, the American penal system dropped rehabilitation almost overnight. What had, as late as 1972, been described in the criminal law treatises as the central justification for punishment,76 was by 1986, being described in the past tense.77 This was much more than a theoretical rejection by academics and textbook writers. Correctional officials across America were also abandoning rehabilitation in their day-to-day operations.78

The extraordinarily sudden abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal gave way to a kind of fusion of retribution and incapacitation, dubbed by some as "neo-retributionism.”79 The modest goals of punishment as a just dessert, and prevention as the simple act of taking criminals out of society, replaced rehabilitation as the dominant penal theory.80 These ideas ultimately resulted in the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing schemes and eventually to the controversial Federal Sentencing Guidelines.81

Almost all modern criminologists acknowledge that each of the four traditional justifications for punishment—retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation—must continue to play some role in the criminal justice system.82 However, integrating them into a coherent and sensible system has not been easy, in no small part because they represent incompatible goals.83 If deterrence and incapacitation were the only considerations, then perhaps all crimes should be punishable by life sentences or death.84 If rehabilitation were the only consideration, then all crime could be considered forms of social disease, treatable in hospital-like settings, never in prisons.

Only retribution connects the crime with the punishment, treats criminals as moral beings rather than diseased subjects in a utilitarian social experiment, and imposes proportionality limitations on the government's right to punish. As a result, despite all their machinations about a synthesis, most modern criminologists have found their way back to retribution as the pole star of punishment.85

In 1979, Francis Allen delivered the Storrs Lecture at Yale Law School on the topic of the demise of the rehabilitative ideal. That lecture was published in 1981, and it has become a kind of obituary for rehabilitation.86 Allen impressively documented both the theoretical and empirical failings of rehabilitation. He concluded his lectures with this prediction:

[A]ttitudes toward [the rehabilitative ideal] are likely to be wary in the closing years of this century. A statement made by Lionel Trilling over a generation ago still possesses acute relevance to the present: "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the object of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then our wisdom, ultimately our coercion. ... " Given the history through which American society has recently passed, it is hardly possible that the total benevolence of governmental interventions into persons' lives will be unthinkingly assumed .... It is just as well. For modern citizens of the world have learned that the interests of individuals and society are frequently adverse and that the assumption of their identity supplies the predicate for despotism.87

Sadly, Professor Allen's prediction could not have been more wrong. Less than ten years after rehabilitation's obituary, the gurus of rehabilitation were back, this time with a vengeance, fueled by a zeal to treat the psychiatrically less fortunate, and in particular to win the war on drugs. These neo-rehabilitationists are pushing judges into unprecedented extremes that Professor Allen could not have imagined. In the flash of an eye judges have become intrusive, coercive, and unqualified state psychiatrists and behavioral policemen, charged with curing all manner of social and quasi-social diseases, from truancy to domestic violence to drug use. By forgetting the most profound lesson of the twentieth century—that the state can be a dangerous repository of collective evil—therapeutic jurisprudence poses a serious risk to the kind of individualism and libertarianism upon which our republic was founded.

III. The Theory Behind Therapeutic Jurisprudence

Although therapeutic jurisprudence descends directly from the long-rejected rehabilitative ideal, its proponents rarely talk about its theoretical heritage. The movement is almost devoid of anything resembling serious theoretical self-examination. The questions that have plagued philosophers and criminologists for a thousand years, and whose answers have come to define all major schools of criminology, are questions therapeutic jurisprudence devotees seldom ask.88 But the movement does have a short history, if not a terribly satisfying theoretical one.

It owes its beginnings to mental health law, where, by definition, the current and prospective mental states of the participants are the primary inquiry. Its initial insights were neither terribly profound nor particularly original: in a system whose very function is to judge the mental state of its subjects, we should think about the mental health effects of the actions we as judges take. Thus, for example, when we remand a criminal defendant for a competency evaluation, we should think about the effects the remand and evaluation might have on the defendant's competence.

These initial formulations about a therapeutic judicial perspective were limited in several important respects. First, they were focused on empirical questions: what effects are our rulings having on the mental health of the chronically mentally ill, insane or in- competent? Proponents, at least initially, never suggested that we should begin to change our rulings or the way we make them in anticipation of effects before we measure what those effects might actually be.

More importantly, these therapeutic ideas were originally proposed exclusively for application to mental health law, where the state has already crossed that thorny boundary of paternalism and already has its hands uncomfortably inside the heads of the unfortunate participants. Of course, many aspects of mental health law involve the judiciary's positive obligation to ensure treatment of the mental conditions of the people appearing in court as a precondition to moving into its more traditional truth-finding role. By expanding the therapeutic model into nonmental health areas, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement not only intrudes without any basis for intrusion, it profoundly changes the judicial function. Trials are no longer processes to investigate factual guilt and discover truth, they are mere opportunities to treat.

This therapeutic perspective is completely inimical to the judicial function. We should conduct trials guided by the rules of procedure and evidence that have been crafted over centuries to maximize the reliability of the result, not to ensure that the litigants have a meaningful mental health experience. We should impose sentences and assess damages guided by well-settled principles of responsibility, not by fretting about whose feelings will be hurt or how the community can be healed.

The profound and dangerous expansion of the judicial role represented by the therapeutic jurisprudence movement is just a small part of a broad therapeutic trend in all aspects of government and indeed across the entire spectrum of our culture. James Nolan has labeled this trend "the therapeutic ethos."89 Government's new role is to treat, not to enforce norms. Its success is measured by how it makes us feel, not by what it actually does. And because the couch of State needs patients, citizens are no longer individual participants in a free republic, but sets of victims with complicated diseases in dire need of state-sponsored treatment.

In this "postmodern moral order," as Nolan calls it, suffering is no longer viewed as a part of the human condition, but rather as the inevitable consequence of some disease or injury. Almost all of human behavior has become pathologized. We speak of "addictions" to all manner of behaviors that we would have called "choices" just thirty years ago.90 Today, cancer and alcoholism are both "diseases"; heroin use now shares an addictive moral equivalence with things like gambling and eating chocolate. Of course, this externalization of behavior is just a new version of our old friend defilement: once we blamed phantom gods for our suffering;91 now we blame phantom diseases.92

In the particular context of drug courts, James Nolan has called this process of pathologization the "eradication of guilt":

The drug court's eradication of guilt has been a subtle and insidious process. Guilt is not so much challenged as ignored. It is not so much disputed as it is made irrelevant. But it is the making irrelevant of something that has long been regarded as the crux of criminal justice.... The jettisoning of guilt may well represent the most important, albeit rarely reflected upon, consequence of the drug court. If, as Philip Rieff argued, culture is not possible without guilt, one wonders what will become of a criminal justice system bereft of what was once its defining quality.93

Blaming the pathogens has become the raison d'etre for the judicial system, both in criminal and civil cases. An African man who murders his wife blames his anti-divorce culture;94 a fired employee blames "chronic lateness syndrome."95 Of course, the judiciary takes its cases as it finds them, and judges cannot be blamed entirely for acting like psychiatrists when the parties insist on it. But the therapeutic jurisprudence movement requires us to act like psychiatrists even when no litigant is insisting on it, and indeed even when all the litigants object (that is, they are in "denial"). It is this aspect of mandated judicial intrusion that makes therapeutic jurisprudence so dangerous and so utterly unacceptable in our constitutional scheme.

IV. The Most Dangerous Branch

The judicial branch was specifically designed to be the least dangerous of the three branches. Hamilton coined that famous phrase in this classic description of the circumscribed powers of the federal judiciary:

[T]he judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.... The judiciary ...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE NOR WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.96

Federal judges are not elected, but appointed for life, helping to decrease the chances they will be influenced either by corrupt forces or, often more subtly, the vagaries of popular will.97 The case or controversy requirement helps decrease the chances that judges will make abstract law (that is, policy) in the guise of deciding a case.98 The very architecture of the federal and state systems leaves the judicial branches without the power either to make or enforce laws and further dissipates federal judicial power by imbedding it in a system in which individual states continue to operate in their own spheres of sovereignty.

One might ask why the founders were so keen on such a comprehensive institutional clipping of the judiciary's powers. The answer is that they appreciated, from their own English history, that unchecked judicial power is an evil to avoid at almost any cost. Both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were acutely aware of the failings of the English system, in which all judges were appointed by the Crown and served at the Crown's pleasure, and in which Parliament was invested with supreme appellate jurisdiction in all cases.99

The founders were even more acutely aware of the failings of the Confederation, under which there was no federal judiciary at all.100 Hamilton wrote extensively about the need for an independent judiciary to house judges capable of defending the new federal Constitution against incursions by the other two branches.101 Madison's expositions on the separation of powers doctrine were designed to allay the fears of the anti-Federalists that the existing constitutional plan did not do enough to separate the three branches.102

Our commitment to judicial restraint is not limited to the constitutional design. The mootness103 and ripeness104 doctrines give meaning to the case or controversy requirement, and help insure that decisions by judges will be a recourse of last resort. Indeed, the whole paradigm of the common law is built around the notion that precisely because judges have extraordinary powers in single cases—the power to incarcerate and the power to bankrupt—those powers must be limited to single cases and will operate beyond single cases only after surviving the judgment of judicial history.105

Along with these structural limitations, judges have developed a powerful ethos of restraint. Although some might say the ring of that ethos has become rather hollow in the years following the New Deal and Warren Courts, the restraining rules have for the most part remained quite vigorous, especially in trial courts. Deference to appellate court precedent effectively constrains even the most independent-minded trial judge, as it does the appellate courts themselves, though of course to a lesser degree. At all levels, we are loath to decide issues we need not decide, are generally committed to deciding cases on the narrowest grounds, and will almost always follow controlling precedent.

All of these constitutional, common law, and normative principles have blended together to create a profound commitment to restraint in responsible judges. We are unrepresentative, mostly unelected, independent magistrates whose function is to decide no more than the necessary issues in the single cases thrust upon us, in accordance with laws and established rules of evidence and procedure with which we may or may not agree. Juries tell us the facts, appellate courts may tell us we were wrong on the law, and legislatures may avoid most effects of our decisions by changing the laws. We have no more valid insight into public policy than the members of any other particular occupation.106

Yet it seems to be an occupational hazard for judges and other members of the public to confuse our simple role as gatekeepers of the truth-finding function with anything at all having to do with the will of the governed. We do not make public policy; we do not even enforce it. We are, as Madison put it, only the "remote choice of the people.”107 That very remoteness is what both prevents us from becoming, and tempts us to become, the most dangerous of the three branches.

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement requires us to become the kind of involved, hands-on, right-thinking, sure-footed activists that the judicial branch was specifically designed to exclude. It requires us to accept, in a collective fashion entirely inconsistent with the fierce independence of the judiciary, a therapeutic paradigm that is not only a matter of public policy, but about which reasonable public policy makers differ. It is forcing us to collaborate with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists in a fashion that is entirely inconsistent with our adjudicative role. In its most virulent drug court form it requires us to send people to prison not because they violated the law (since the real engine of drug courts is the unstated belief that possession should not be a crime), but rather because they resisted our enlightened treatment efforts. In short, therapeutic jurisprudence is a code phrase for a kind of one-stop shopping system populated by judges who believe that they have such powerful insights into public policy (insights that have apparently escaped mere legislators) that they cheerfully act as parents, best friends, doctors, psychotherapists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, legislators and then, only if all of that fails, judges. I cannot imagine a more dangerous, or sanctimonious, branch.

A. Real Judges as Amateur Psychiatrists: Acts Versus Excuses and the Paradox of Reverse Moral Screening

One the most disturbing consequences of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement is that while therapeutic judges get to play amateur psychiatrist, in the end the command of the law requires them to punish the patients they cannot cure. Imagine going to see a doctor about a disease, knowing that the doctor might not only be unable to cure you, but will be required to send you to prison if you are not cured. Now imagine a whole system of justice based on that notion, and you will have captured the essence of therapeutic jurisprudence.

State-coerced treatment does not work,108 and even if it did, it is simply immoral for the state to treat and then punish acts it claims have a disease component, as the critics of the rehabilitative ideal demonstrated thirty years ago.109 The "diseases" to be treated are not diseases at all, but rather complex behaviors that fall within a broad continuum between "voluntary" and "involuntary" behaviors. If we really believed that all human behavior is the product of the relentless and involuntary spasm of genes and experience, and that free will is a quaint mirage, then the state would have no moral right to punish anyone for any crime. The disease of "chronic armed robbery syndrome" would merit no more punishment than cancer. But of course we don't believe that.

The very existence of law is a reflection of deep-seated and shared notions of free will and individual responsibility. That is not to say, of course, that the retribution demanded of crimes cannot take into consideration all of the specific circumstances of the crime, including the criminal's complete background. Indeed, we must take all those circumstances into consideration to fulfill the requirement that retribution be proportional, and therefore just. But it is one thing to say we will consider an armed robber's I.Q. and childhood in crafting the amount of retribution, and quite another thing to say that the disease of chronic armed robbery syndrome should be treated rather than punished. Therapeutic jurisprudence blurs, and is intended to blur, this fundamental moral distinction between act and excuse.

Even if treatment worked, and could be justly combined with punishment, the therapeutic paradigm punishes the wrong people. For example, if drug addiction really is a disease, then the most diseased addicts are precisely the ones most likely to fail many, if not all, attempts at treatment. Drug courts are thus performing a kind of "reverse moral screening."110 Truly diseased addicts end up going to prison, while those who respond well to treatment, and whose use of drugs may thus have been purely voluntary, escape punishment.

B. Judicial Collectivism

Therapeutic judges not only act ineffectively and immorally as amateur psychiatrists, they also act in a dangerous collective, wholly inconsistent with fundamental axioms of judicial independence. They act in concert with, and therefore abrogate their independence to, each other, their "communities," prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists.

One of the starkest examples of the kind of group action that dominates the therapeutic model can be found in the intense political machinations undertaken to create and sustain drug courts. Unlike other legal reform movements, that began with a handful of individual decisions, commentaries, or experiments, and then spread through the power of their own persuasion, the drug court movement has a decidedly top-down pedigree. Though they began as a single experiment in Miami, drug courts spread because of centralized federal funding, not because they were effective. Drug courts exhibit a remarkable uniformity because they must now meet a host of specific federal criteria in order to qualify for federal funds."' What once was an opportunity for state and local governments to experiment with drug court reforms has, to a great extent, turned into a lockstep ersatz federal program.

Drug court workshops across the country are "heavily scripted and staged events," designed to give drug court officials an opportunity to "strategize with each other and educate those new to the scene about how best to present the program to sometimes skeptical audiences for the purpose of garnering public support and financial resources to further the movement."112 There is a five-part liturgy to the drug court movement's rigid political doctrine: 1) convince prosecutors that drug courts are not soft on crime; 2) start off with only low-level drug offenses while building public support; 3) cultivate relationships with the media; 4) hold graduation ceremonies in open court as public relations events; and 5) constantly perform evaluation studies to justify continued funding.113 This is mindless public relations mantra, not creative judicial reform by independent-minded judges.

When the federal funds run out, as they inevitably seem to do, drug court judges then participate in lobbying legislatures, city councils, and even the private sector for funding. Their partisan enthusiasm crosses even the most forgiving boundaries of judicial propriety. A Las Vegas, Nevada drug court judge set up his own tax-exempt nonprofit organization through which to solicit private funds for his drug court.114 A Rochester, New York drug court judge used the local United Way to dispense the private funds he raised for his drug court."115 A 1997 Justice Department survey showed that nine drug courts had solicited a total of nearly half a million dollars from private sources.116 Therapeutic jurisprudence is turning some of us into embarrassing hucksters.

The development of so-called "community-based courts" is another example of judicial collectivism at its worst. Modeled after New York City's Midtown Community Court, these courts have been started in many urban areas to deal with what proponents call "quality of life crimes. '117 Generally, defendants convicted of crimes such as shoplifting, prostitution, and some low-level drug offenses are "treated" by being put on probation or given deferred sentences and by performing certain community service obligations. Typically, the precise community service obligations are determined in each individual case not by the judge but by a "community advisory board" consisting of various community leaders.118 This way, the criminals are not only cured of their rude behaviors by having to do the penance of community service, but the criminal tear in the fabric of the community is also healed. Two therapies for the price of one.

The community service options can be rather interesting. They include not only what one might expect from traditional community service, such as clean-up activities like graffiti removal and trash pickup, but also "stuffing envelopes for non-profit organizations."119 Through community courts, judges abdicate their sentencing authority to self-described community leaders and their pet projects, including their favorite charities.

In addition to the usual therapeutic misanthropy inherent in all therapeutic courts, community-based courts raise particularly disturbing problems about the role of judges and their place in the political firmament. Why are some crimes labeled "quality of life crimes" and others not? Surely a murder effects the "quality of life" of the victim, witnesses, and other members of the community more than shoplifting does. Why does the torn fabric of the community need to be repaired after a shoplifting, but not after a murder? The answer, of course, is not that the former is any more damaging than the latter, but rather that the former is more widespread than the latter. It is this widespread nature of "quality of life crimes" that makes community-based courts so politically attractive. They generate an army of involuntary servants to do free work pleasing to a maximum of community voters. Fundamentally, community-based courts are machines of political payoff, dressed in the garb of the judiciary.120

The most widespread, and in many ways, most disturbing, form of judicial collectivism occurs in all therapeutic courts, and is embodied in the very term "therapeutic jurisprudence"—the unholy and wholly unconstitutional washing out of the judge's role in an adversary system. All therapeutic courts presume factual guilt. What is called "the presumption of innocence" in traditional courts is called "denial" in therapeutic courts. The judge, prosecutor, therapist, and to a great extent, even the defense lawyer,121 join together to "help" the patient over his or her denial in order to concentrate on treatment.122 As a result, the judge, prosecutor, therapist, and defense lawyer thus form a kind of "treatment team," designed to do what is best for the reluctant patient, not to discover truth in the fires of advocacy.

This joining together is so critical that it is common advice to anyone contemplating the development of a drug court that it will not work without the "cooperation" of judges, prosecutors, police, sheriffs, and public defenders. When judges "cooperate" in the formation of drug courts, what is really happening is that they are agreeing to abandon their roles as neutral gatekeepers of the truth- finding process, and instead to join the therapeutic team for the good of the diseased defendants.

In many drug courts, the team participates in daily rituals euphemistically called "staffing sessions."123 At these staffing sessions, the judge, prosecutor, public defender, and some representative of the therapeutic community, but typically not private defense counsel, meet together in chambers to discuss that day's upcoming matters. The judge, after hearing from everyone, reaches presumptive decisions. Defendants are not present and the staffing sessions are not on the record. Apart from the obvious constitutional concerns,124 these staffing sessions symbolize what is wrong with having judges join with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists: substantive decisions are being made about a felony defendant by some inter-branch committee acting more like a support group than a court of law.

Judges are not psychiatrists, and psychiatrists are not judges. Whenever judges enter the therapeutic arena we must choose be- tween two unpalatable options: either act beyond our expertise or abdicate our judging to therapeutic experts. Most therapeutic courts are designed to do the latter. Although therapeutic judges typically put on a counseling show in open court,25 the real therapeutic decisions are often made out of court by members of the therapeutic community.126 This unelected and unaccountable "new priestly class," as James Nolan describes it,127 has destroyed what small vestige of independence therapeutic judges may have left after already doling out large chunks of it to one another, to prosecutors, and to defense lawyers. Judges may be comforted by pretending to function as a therapeutic team acting in the best interests of defendants, but what is really happening is that they have abdicated the judging role to the new therapeutic priests.

There may be an argument for sacrificing some judicial independence in minor cases to achieve significant therapeutic results, and indeed judges have been trying to do just that for a long time with things like safe driving classes and anger management programs.128 It may not be terribly troubling to expand these ideas to misdemeanor shoplifting, graffiti offenses, littering, and other kinds of minor offenses with which most community-based courts deal. But applying them to felony drug charges that can result in a defendant going to prison for decades should be wholly unacceptable. If we are going to continue to treat drug use as a crime, and some drug use as a felony, then we must treat felony drug cases seriously, not like parking tickets in a mill in which the judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, and therapist spend their days trying to push as many people through as possible.

C. Impinging on the Executive Function

Besides violating the doctrine of the separation of powers by forcing judges and prosecutors to work on treatment teams together, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement impinges on the executive function in two more direct and discrete ways-by demolishing prosecutorial discretion and by interfering with corrections.

It is the long-established privilege of prosecutors to decide what crimes to charge and what plea bargains to offer.129 Therapeutic courts, especially drug courts, substantially eliminate both of these jealously-guarded areas of prosecutorial discretion.

Before drug courts, prosecutors retained their broad discretion to charge or not charge small possession drug cases, and indeed the realities of our system drove many prosecutors, and even police, to ignore some low-level drug possession and even some drug dealing. But in the postmodern therapeutic world, drug offenders are not wrongdoers whose transgressions might be overlooked if they are sufficiently minor, but rather diseased citizens in need of treatment. Thus, we see massive increases in drug filings after the institution of drug courts,130 and those explosions correspond directly to police and prosecutors agreeing at the front end to arrest and prosecute every drug offender, regardless of circumstance, in order to meet the therapeutic demand for reluctant patients.

At the plea-bargaining end, prosecutors have likewise abdicated their traditional discretion. Most drug courts recognize only a few different kinds of cookie cutter plea bargains, and the decision to offer a particular plea bargain is driven entirely by a few objective criteria, and not by the exercise of any meaningful prosecutorial discretion.131 After all, this is treatment, not adjudication; triage, not prosecutorial discretion.

Therapeutic courts also impinge on the executive's corrections functions. Providing medical treatment to persons convicted of crimes, and even to persons in custody awaiting trial, is an executive function, not a judicial one. When therapeutic courts mechanically impose treatment conditions on all defendants, both before and after conviction, they blur the fundamental distinction between the accused and the convicted, and therefore between the judicial function of determining guilt and the executive function of carrying out sentences and treating prisoners.

It is entirely inappropriate and inimical to our adjudicative role for judges to be deciding whether defendants have been cured of their diseases and whether for that reason no punishment should be imposed. Criminal courts exist to determine whether the state has met its burden of proving that the defendant has committed a crime, and if so, to mete out appropriate and just punishment. The product of a criminal case should be a verdict and a sentence, not a decision whether John Smith should be treated at Acme House or Metropolis Hospital, or whether he truly suffers from borderline personality disorder or is just a jerk.

If we are really serious about treatment, we should direct our treatment resources to the executive branch's corrections facilities, both pre-conviction (jails) and post-conviction (jails and prisons). That is where the push for treatment, voluntary and semi-voluntary, belongs if it belongs anywhere. If we continue to believe that possession of some drugs is serious enough to warrant incarceration, then we should impose that incarceration without further therapeutic hand-wringing. Prisoners can then take advantage, or not take advantage, of intense in-custody drug treatment programs tied to parole eligibility.

D. Judges as Legislators

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement not only forces judges to act in concert with each other, with their "communities," with prosecutors, with defense lawyers, and with therapists, but it also profoundly subsumes the legislative function. By assuming all manner of human behavior is the product of some set of sociological pathogens, therapeutic courts ignore the principles of free will and individual responsibility upon which the criminal law rests. That is, it is for legislatures, and not self-described therapeutic judges, to decide not only whether certain behavior is a crime or a disease, but also in many circumstances to set a range of punishment. On these matters, the legislatures have spoken. We no longer punish adultery, but we do punish the possession of certain drugs. We no longer execute petty thieves, but shoplifting is still a crime.

In many respects, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, especially its embodiment in drug courts, is simply a judicial reaction to laws some judges do not like. Some judges do not believe certain crimes should be punished by incarceration, and in fact do not think certain crimes should be considered crimes at all. Thus, crimes become diseases, defendants become patients, judges be- come therapists, and laws are repealed by therapeutic judicial fiat. There may be good arguments for and against decriminalizing some existing crimes, including some drug crimes, but in the end that debate must be settled by elected legislatures and not by judges who think they have some special insight into either medicine or public policy.

Conclusion

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement is not being driven by evil judges thrilled at the prospect of exerting unwarranted and unprecedented control over the private lives of fellow citizens, or even entirely by naive judges suckered into the therapeutic newspeak. Instead, the therapeutic road we are running down has been paved with the good intentions of judges reacting to the flood of dysfunction we see every day in our courtrooms, hardened with a dash of the kind of judicial hubris that positions us to think that because we control our courtrooms we can control the lives of everyone who appears in them. The unprecedented and unwarranted powers assumed by judges in the name of doing psychological good will make us both profoundly dangerous in our own right and hopelessly incapable of protecting citizens from the therapeutic excesses of the other two branches, just as it did when we tried the more general rehabilitative experiment in the 1930s.

The next time a group of "problem solving" activists tries to set up one of these intrusive courts in your community, remember what the Quakers tried to teach us about the dangers of mixing well-intentioned rehabilitation with well-deserved punishment. Remember that we have met failure in a similar fashion in the past. When we tried to treat crime as if it were a disease, and criminals as if they were moral in-patients, the only thing we accomplished was to create a dangerous judiciary that felt authorized to exert power over these diseased patients for as long as it took to cure them. If we repeat these rehabilitative failures, we will continue to de-humanize the objects of our humanitarianism, to fill our penal system with our therapeutic failures, to short-circuit what should be the real legislative debate, and to devalue punishment as its own clear social object.

Footnotes

The term "therapeutic jurisprudence" is generally credited to David Wexler, a law professor at the University of Arizona, who, as discussed in the text accompanying notes 88-89 infra, originally defined the term in a paper first delivered in 1987, but not published until 1992, to mean the study of the therapeutic impacts of mental health law. David B. Wexler, Putting Mental Health into Mental Health Law: Therapeutic Jurisprudence,16 L. & HUM. BEHAV. 27 (1992). He and others subsequently expanded the idea beyond the mental health realm, arguing not only that virtually all court proceedings can have important therapeutic impacts on the participants, but that judges should craft their decisions with an eye toward those impacts. See, e.g., ESSAYS IN THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE (D. Wexler & B. Winnick eds., 1991); PRACTICING THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE: LAW AS A HELPING PROFESSION (D. Stolle, D. Wexler & B. Winnick eds., 2000); THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE: THE LAW As THERAPEUTIC AGENT (D. Wexler ed., 1990); David A. Wexler, New Directionsin Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Breaking the Bounds of Conventional Mental Health Law Scholarship,10 N.Y.L. SCH. J. HUM. RTS. 915 (1993). The phrase "restorative justice" is also sometimes used to connote what appears to be a similar constellation of ideas, though it tends to be used only in the criminal justice arena. See, e.g., John Braithewaite, Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts, 25 CRIME & JUST. 1 (1999); Robert F. Schopp, Therapeutic JurisprudenceForum: Integrating Restorative Justice and Therapeutic Jurisprudence,67 REV. JUR. U.P.R. 665 (1998); Comment, Repairing the Breach and Reconciling the Discordant: Mediation in Criminal Justice Systems, 72 N.C. L. REV. 1479 (1994). The phrase "collaborative law" is also used to describe the therapeutic approach in law, especially in divorce law. See generally Pauline H. Tesler, Collaborative Law: A New Paradigm for Divorce Lawyers, 5 PSYCHOL. PUB. POL. & L. 967 (1999). Finally, the phrase "problem-solving courts" seems to be the most recent way to describe various therapeutic courts, especially so-called "community-based courts." See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text. One cannot help but chuckle, and think of George Orwell's insights into the politicization of language, at a movement that describes intrusive judicial state action of an unprecedented magnitude as "problem solving."

JAMES L. NOLAN, JR., REINVENTING JUSTICE: THE AMERICAN DRUG COURT MOVEMENT 7 (2001).

Id.

It is de rigueur for judges and their staff in therapeutic jurisprudence courts to call parties "clients," even criminal defendants. This is not only consistent with the whole approach of therapeutic jurisprudence—to treat rather than to adjudicate-but is also a linguistic expression of the stunning mixing of roles between judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer. See infra notes 110-31 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 7.

Id.

For a summary of the astonishing storytelling aspects of drug courts, see NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 111-36.

For a general description of the organization, implementation, operation and sentencing models used in drug courts, see Morris B. Hoffman, The Drug Court Scandal, 78 N.C. L. REV. 1437, 1462-63 (2000). As discussed in the text accompanying notes 31 to 32 infra, drug courts are probably sending considerably more people to prison than traditional courts, because of a combination of net-widening and ineffective treatment.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 8-9.

See infra notes 123-24 and accompanying text; see also Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1524, discussing the off-the-record "staffing" ritual, at which neither the defendant nor private defense counsel is present, yet at which presumptive sentencing decisions are made.

See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text (discussing community-based courts).

Drug court proponents themselves acknowledge that drug courts are a kind of theater, whose audience includes not only the clients to be re-educated but also skeptical prosecutors, media, politicians, and other influential members of the non therapeutic community. "Drug courts, it has been said many times, are theater. And the judge is the stage director and one of the primary actors." NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 73 (quoting Baltimore drug court judge Jamey Weitzman). Indeed, the theatrical aspects of drug court—both as a therapeutic tool and as tightly scripted propaganda—are a focal point of national drug court training conferences. The titles of some of these conferences are telling: "Damage Control: Dealing with the Media," "Getting Local Government and the Community to 'Buy In' to a Drug Court," "Dealing with the Press/Politics." Id. at 62. See infra notes 112-113 and accompanying text (discussing particular points of propaganda spread at national conferences).

See infra note 25 (discussing the fact that therapeutic defendants are well aware that their "treatment" is an attitudinal game they must pretend to play in order to escape the clutches of the criminal justice system).

14. A Compton, California drug court judge's explanation is typical of the parent- child model by which many therapeutic judges see their relationship to their "clients": I let [the defendant] come into my chambers. . . . All she wanted was a hug.... So, I just gave her a hug. I mean, what would you do if your child came up to you, and said, "May I have a hug?" You wouldn't say, "Well, let me think about this now. You have been bad fifteen times." You would just do it. So, that is what I did. And yes, you should [give hugs]. You get a whole lot back. You really do. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 102.

Id. at 149.

See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text.

But see infra note 120 (discussing proposed extensions of community-based courts).

See infra Part IV.D.

See infra notes 107-09 and accompanying text.

See generally Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1469-73. Many drug court proponents express a certain ironic pride in the fact that they believe they are much more enlightened on the disease model of addiction than medical professionals: It's amazing listening to physicians say, "It's not a disease." It's almost done a reverse. We have people who are normally not trained in the medical field calling it a disease and those who are trained in the medical field saying, "It's not a disease," that it's just a lack of guts or lack of intestinal fortitude of the individual. It's a scary thought. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 137 (quoting unnamed director of treatment at one of the drug courts Professor Nolan visited). It is, indeed, a "scary thought," but not for the reasons this treatment director thinks.

See, e.g., ANDREW MECCA ET AL., THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM (1989); Roy F. Baumeister et al., Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of Self-Esteem, 5 PSYCHOL. REV. 101 (1995). See generally JOHN P. HEWITT, THE MYTH OF SELF-ESTEEM: FINDING HAPPINESS AND SOLVING PROBLEMS IN AMERICA (1998).

See, e.g., NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 141 (quoting Syracuse, New York drug court judge Langston McKinney): By volunteering in the drug court program the defendant has circumvented [the adjudicative] part of the judicial process. . . . "(W]e literally leave all that [judicial impartiality, presumption of innocence, etc.] at the doorstep." In the drug court context, "this issue of guilt/innocence is not of concern." See also infra notes 92-95 and accompanying text (discussing the drug court's eradication of the concept of guilt).

In one of the most telling expositions of the therapeutic paradigm, the appellate lawyer for Karla Faye Tucker argued that the state of Texas had no right to execute her because she was no longer the same person who had committed the multiple murders for which the prior Ms. Tucker had been convicted. The lawyer's argument, flush with therapeutic newspeak, was actually published in a law review after his client's execution. Walter C. Long, Karla Faye Tucker: A Case for RestorativeJustice,27 AM. J. CRIM. L. 117 (1999). Of course, that argument is precisely the same argument made by Bentham and the other utilitarians in the 1800s: if the only purpose of punishment is to deter the punished criminal, then no criminal may morally be punished beyond what it takes to rehabilitate him. See infra notes 55-60 and accompanying text. At least Bentham had the courage of his convictions, which is more than can be said for the current devotees of therapeutic jurisprudence, who are so worried that they will be seen as soft on crime that they would never apply their strange principles to serious crime. See supra notes 17-19 and accompanying text.

In fact, I suspect that it is the improved feelings of the treaters, and not of the treated, that is really driving judges' infatuation with therapeutic courts. The therapeutic jurisprudence movement in general, and the drug court movement in particular, is strewn with discussions of the positive effects therapeutic programs have on the treaters. See supra note 14 (reporting emotional benefits the drug court judge realizes from hugging a defendant).

Id. Nolan reports a stunning example of the extent to which compliance in therapeutic courts is measured more by what a defendant says than by what a defendant does. The Oakland probation department commended a drug court defendant for his compliance in treatment, and recommended that he be graduated from phase 2 to phase 3, even though the defendant had not had a single negative urinalysis in all of phase 2. JAMES L. NOLAN, JR., THE THERAPEUTIC STATE: JUSTIFYING GOVERNMENT AT CENTURY'S END 296 (1998). Defendants understand that they have to play the treatment game to pass through the criminal hoops. Nolan reports on a particularly embarrassing unraveling of a Washington, D.C. drug court session that was being televised live to a large convention of treatment providers. The session began in stock theatrical form, but at one point an uncooperative defendant began to depart from the script. When asked why his treatment program had been so difficult for him, he said "'Cause I had to come and sit here and listen to this crap." NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 69. The dam broke, and other defendants started to complain about the therapeutic game. At one point, laughter began to break out amongst the conventioneers. "When it became clear the judge was not going to be able to regain control of the performance, conference officials just cut the video feed. 'We have to stay on schedule,' an organizer deadpanned."' Id. at 70.

Id.; see also infra note 110 and accompanying text (discussing reverse moral screening). Dade County Drug Court officials report that they have had particular difficulty with the willingness of Hispanic clients to admit they have a disease and suggest that the difficulty may somehow be attributable to a cultural resistance to the disease model. NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 296.

The ineffectiveness of involuntary court-based therapy comes as no surprise to people familiar with the ineffectiveness of voluntary psychotherapy in general, especially in an addiction context. Peer-reviewed controlled studies—which are scandalously rare—are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that there is no evidence that twelve-step programs produce better results than clinical treatment or even better results than no treatment at all. See William R. Miller & Reid K. Hester, The Effectiveness of Alcoholism Treatment: What Research Reveals, in TREATING ADDICTIVE BEHAVIORS: PROCESSES OF CHANGE 121, 135-36 (W. Miller & N. Heather eds., 1986) (reviewing all controlled studies of alcohol treatment programs, finding only two on AA programs, and noting that both of those AA studies showed that members of AA got arrested more often and relapsed more frequently than the control group of untreated problem drinkers). Even clinical treatment seems ineffective. In a famous 1983 study of the effectiveness of inpatient alcohol treatment, the ability of treated patients to stop drinking and stay sober two years and eight years post-discharge was no better than that of the untreated control group. GEORGE VALLIANT, THE NATU- RAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOLISM 284-94 (1983). The data on the effectiveness of drug treatment is no more encouraging. See, e.g., Stanton Peele, How People'sValues Determine Whether They Become and Remain Addicts, in VISIONS OF ADDICTION 219-20 (S. Peele ed., 1988).

In particular, Dade County drug defendants entering the drug court program suffered a one-year re-arrest rate of 32%, compared to Dade County drug defendants in traditional courts, who suffered a re-arrest rate over the same period of 33%. BAR- BARA E. SMITH ET AL., STRATEGIES FOR COURTS TO COPE WITH THE CASELOAD PRESSURES OF DRUG CASES 7 (1991).

Here, for example, are the results from five major effectiveness studies done by independent outsiders in the mid- and late-1990s: See generally STEVEN BELENKO & TAMARA DUMANOVSKY, BUREAU OF JUSTICE ASSISTANCE, U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, SPECIAL DRUG COURTS: PROGRAM BRIEF 2 (1993); Steven Belenko, Research on Drug Courts: A Critical Review, 1 NAT'L DRUG CT. INST. REV. 1 (1998).

See U.S. GEN. ACCOUNTING OFFICE, DRUG COURTS: OVERVIEW OF GROWTH, CHARACTERISTICS, AND RESULTS 7-8 (1997).

Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1501-02.

Id. at 1510-11. These exploding prison populations were not the result of a general increase in criminal cases. On the contrary, since the Denver Drug Court began its operations, the percentage of drug cases filed in the court has exploded. Here are the complete figures for criminal cases with the Denver District Court from 1991 through 1998 (the drug court became operational in July 1994): Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1502 n.260.

See, e.g., PAUL RICOEUR, THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL 26-27 (1967).

The God of the Old Testament was, of course, very much a retributionist. One of the central issues in virtually every religion is how to explain man's discovery that God's retribution does not always appear just.

A few commentators contend that the roots of punishment were in fact restorative, rather than retributive, at least until the Norman Conquest. See, e.g., Braithewaite, supra note 1, at 2. This view stems from an overbroad, noncriminological use of the word "punishment." It goes without saying that humans have always recognized that some wrongdoers can change their ways, hoped that all wrongdoers could, and suspected that some wrongdoers cannot. Naturally, these views found their way into many human institutions, from families to churches. These views do not shed any real light on the question of criminological punishment-that is, what the state should do to a particular wrongdoer in response to a particular crime. Is the wrong-doer one of us, who must be punished to restore his moral standing? See infra notes 50-52 and accompanying text. Or is he diseased, and in need of some kind of treatment? In this sense, it is clear that civilization has always been retributive and not rehabilitative, at least until the 1920s and 1930s, when the confluence of Freud and the Progressives led us to a rehabilitative norm where all people are seen as the diseased products of their past, and therefore fundamentally not responsible for their actions. See infra notes 61-62 and accompanying text.

36. NORVAL MORRIS, THE FUTURE OF IMPRISONMENT 4 (1974).

Id.

4 WILLIAM A. BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND *98 (W.L. Dean ed., 1846). In a famous passage in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens laments that, as late as the French Revolution, English law imposed the death sentence for all manner of criminal offenses, including forgery, bad checks, unlawfully opening a letter addressed to another, stealing as little as forty shillings, and horse theft. CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF Two CITIES 50 (Oxford Univ. Press 1953) (1859).

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4.

Id. at 5.

Id. at 5. Some historians contend that the first true penitentiary was the so-called "People Pen" constructed by the Massachusetts Pilgrims in Boston in 1632. See, e.g., PHILIP D. JORDAN, FRONTIER LAW AND ORDER: TEN ESSAYS 140 (1970). In any event, it is clear that it was the Quaker's Walnut Street Jail, and not the Pilgrims' Boston People Pen, that became the model for the early American penitentiary. MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4-5.

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 5. See the discussion of Baccaria in the text accompanying infra notes 53-55.

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4.

Id. at 5.

Id. at 58.

IMMANUEL KANT, THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF JUSTICE 101 (Ladd trans., Bobbs-Merrill 1965) (1797).

Id.

Id.

Id.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT 71 (T.M. Knox trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1942) (1821).

Id.

Id.

Id.

Id.

JEREMY BENTHAM, THE RATIONALE OF PUNISHMENT (R. Heward & R. Smith et al. eds. and trans., 1830).

Id.

Bentham and Holmes were very much the progenitors of the University of Chicago-based law and economics movement, which extended these utilitarian principles to other areas of the law. Ironically, Holmes also spawned the left-wing "critical legal studies" movement, which is equally devoid of moral principles. See generally ALBERT W. ALSCHULER, LAW WITHOUT VALUES: THE LIFE, WORK AND LEGACY OF JUSTICE HOLMES (2000); Morris B. Hoffman, Book Review, 54 STAN. L. REV. 597 (2001). Holmes rejected not only the retributionists but also those utilitarians whose view of "prevention" included rehabilitation. Holmes's logic, as usual, was compel- ling: the criminal law will lose all of its deterrent purpose if bad men know they will be treated rather than punished. Indeed, Holmes's notion of the "bad man" was itself a rejection of the rehabilitative ideal. At the very least, Holmes argued that rehabilitation could never be the only purpose of punishment: ("If it were, every prisoner should be released as soon as it appears clear that he will never repeat his offence, and if he is incurable he should not be punished at all.") OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., THE COMMON LAW 42 (Little, Brown & Co. 1923) (1881). These observations take on an eerily modern significance when we talk about drug courts as devices for reverse moral screening. See infra note 110 and accompanying text.

HOLMES, supra note 57, at 42-43.

BENTHAM, supra note 55, at 41. "If we could consider an offense which has been committed as an isolated fact, the like of which would never recur, punishment would be useless. It would only be adding one evil to another." It seems to me that this conclusion follows only if one takes an unduly narrow view of deterrence. Deterrence is not only about discouraging the particular wrongdoer from committing additional wrongs in the future, but also discouraging other people by example. And, of course, this second kind of deterrence has the potential to be substantially more effective, because it acts on the population as a whole, rather than on a single criminal. For the very same reason, assuming equal rates of success, deterrence is far more efficient than rehabilitation.

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 85 COLUM. L. REV. 1193, 1203-04 (1985).

See supra notes 50-52 and accompanying text.

See, e.g., R.A. Duff & David Garland, Introduction: Thinking About Punishment, in A READER ON PUNISHMENT 1, 2-3 (R.A. Duff & D. Garland eds., 1994).

See generally ANTHONY M. PLATT, THE CHILD SAVERS: THE INVENTION OF DELINQUENCY (2d ed. 1977).

There are other striking similarities between the juvenile court movement and the drug court movement: both were initially led by charismatic judges; both are based on a fundamental therapeutic paternalism; both have liberal political origins but are quick to deny they are "soft" on crime; both rely heavily on pseudo-scientific social principles; both rely on informal proceedings; and both are designed to decrease the role of the defense lawyer and increase the activism and discretion of the judge. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 174 ("[S]o similar are the two forms of therapeutic jurisprudence that one is tempted to view the juvenile courts as the direct historical antecedent to drug courts."). Nolan also points out significant differences between the two movements, however, including the fact that juvenile courts relied much less on the therapeutic community and that juvenile judges were much less active in defendants' day-to-day treatment. Id. at 174-75; See generally Richard C. Boldt, Rehabilitative Punishment and the Drug Treatment Court Movement, 76 WASH. U. L. Q. 1206, 1269-77 (1998).

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 171.

PLATT, supra note 63, at 162; see also Janet E. Ainsworth, Re-Imagining Childhood and Reconstructing the Legal Order: The Case for Abolishing the Juvenile Court, 69 N.C. L. REV. 1083, 1120 (1991).

In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 61 (1967).

AM. FRIENDS SERVI. COMM., STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE: A REPORT ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA 147-48 (1971).

See generally FRANCIS A. ALLEN, THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILITATIVE IDEAL: PENAL POLICY AND SOCIAL PURPOSE (1981).

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 76.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 163 (quoting Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins, Letter to the President on Crime Control).

72. Ainsworth, supra note 66, at 1104 ("Despite several decades of experience with rehabilitative penology in the adult and juvenile systems, however, criminal recidivism stubbornly refused to whither away.")

Id. at 1105.

E.g., MORRIS, supra note 36, at 20-22 (discussing the "abandonment" of the reform of criminals as justification for imprisonment).

David J. Rothman, Deincarcerating Prisoners and Patients, 1973 C. L. REV. 8, 24 (1973).

See, e.g., WAYNE LAFAVE & AUSTIN W. SCOTT, CRIMINAL LAW 23 (1972) (noting that "there has been more of a commitment to the 'rehabilitative ideal' in recent years than to other theories of punishment").

See, e.g., WAYNE LAFAVE & AUSTIN W. SCOTT, CRIMINAL LAW 28-29 (2d ed. 1986) (discussing the dearth of criticism of rehabilitative theories beginning in the 1960s).

See, e.g., Michael Vitiello, Reconsidering Rehabilitation,65 TUL. L. REV. 1011, 1012-13 (1991) (discussing the abrupt rejection of the rehabilitative ideal of punishment).

See, Elizabeth Rapaport, Retribution and Redemption in the Operation of Executive Clemency, 74 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1501, 1502 (2000).

See generally MARVIN FRANKEL, CRIMINAL SENTENCES: LAW WITHOUT ORDER (1973); ANDREW VON HIRSCH, DOING JUSTICE: THE CHOICE OF PUNISHMENTS (1976); RICHARD G. SINGER, JUST DESERTS: SENTENCING BASED ON EQUALITY AND DESERT (1979) .

81. The Guidelines began with Congress's 1984 enactment of the Sentencing Reform Act, Pub. L. 98-473, 98 Stat. 1837, 1976 (1984) ("the SRA"). The SRA changed the century-old federal indeterminate sentencing scheme to a determinate one and created the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which ultimately created the Guidelines. WEST GROUP, FEDERAL SENTENCING GUIDELINES MANUAL 1-2 (1999). One can be a neo-retributionist without necessarily being a fan of the Guidelines. The SRA and its Guidelines triggered a whole host of controversies, including constitutional questions about the separation of powers and institutional questions about the role of judicial discretion, the resolution of which do not necessarily depend on one's views on retribution. See, e.g., Charles L. Ogeltree, Jr., The Death of Discretion?: Reflections on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1938 (1988) (criticizing the Guidelines for failing to address the complex issues involved in sentencing, such as individual characteristics of the defendant and racial disparity in sentencing); Note, The Federal Sentencing Guidelines and Confrontation Rights, 42 DUKE L.J. 382 (1992) (advocating that confrontation rights should apply to sentencing under the Guidelines in order to adequately protect defendants); Note, The Standard of Proof at Sentencing Hearings Under the FederalSentencingGuidelines:Why the Preponderance of the Evidence Standard is Constitutionally Inadequate, 1997 U. ILL.L. REV. 583 (1997). In 1989, the Supreme Court rejected constitutional attacks on the SRA and Guidelines based on arguments that they were a delegation of excess legislative authority and a violation of the separation of powers. United States v. Mistretta, 488 U.S. 361 (1989). Commentators have disagreed about whether the Guidelines allow appropriate rehabilitative consideration, especially in drug cases. Compare Note, Sentencing the Reformed Addict: Departure Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and the Problem of Drug Rehabilitation,91 COLUM. L. REV. 2051 (1991) (describing the disagreement over the interpretation of the Guidelines as allowing downward departures for rehabilitated defendants) with Comment, Downward Departures from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Based on the Defendant's Drug Rehabilitative Efforts, 59 U. CHI. L. REV. 837 (1992) (arguing that defendant's genuine efforts at rehabilitation can be a valid reason to justify departure from the Guidelines).

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 159-64.

Id. at 159-64.

A situation which, as described in the text accompanying note 38 supra, comes close to describing most European criminal systems from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment.

'For example, the utilitarian J.J.C. Smart argues that although deterrence should be the prime consideration of legislators (what he calls "second order" questions), judges should be concerned primarily with retribution (what he calls "first order" questions). J.J.C. Smart, Comment: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment 6 RES JUDICATAE 368 (June 1953). Even Norval Morris, who is associated more with incapacitation than retribution, acknowledges that retribution must play a central role in linking the punishment with the crime. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 163.

ALLEN, supra note 69.

Id. at 86-87.

The one exception I found was an article about restorative justice written by an Australian social scientist, John Braithewaite. Braithewaite, supra note 1. Professor Braithewaite not only tackles the difficult traditional philosophical and criminological issues underlying punishment, he also attempts to summarize the data behind the claims and criticisms of the model.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 17-21.

See, e.g., STANTON PEELE, THE DISEASING OF AMERICA: ADDICTION TREATMENT OUT OF CONTROL (1989).

See generally supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.

See generally supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 142-43.

Margot Slade, At the Bar, N. Y. TIMES, May 20, 1994, at B20.

Sch. Dist. of Phila. v. Friedman, 96 PA. COMMW. 267, 270 (1986).

THE FEDERALIST No. 78, at 490 (Alexander Hamilton) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 1.

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 2.

In The Federalist No. 47, which was Madison's first exposition on the separation of powers, he discusses at length the entangled failings of the British judiciary, and even quotes Montesquieu's criticisms: "Were the power of the judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with all the violence of an oppressor." THE FEDERALIST No. 47, at 338 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed, 1996).

"A circumstance which crowns the defects of the Confederation remains yet to be mentioned-the want of a judiciary power. Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation." Id. at 187.

THE FEDERALIST No. 22, at 489-96 (Alexander Hamilton) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

THE FEDERALIST No. 47, at 84 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

See, e.g., Three Affiliated Tribes of Ft. Berthold Reservation v. Wold Eng'g, 467 U.S. 138, 157 (1984) ("It is a fundamental rule of judicial restraint ... that this Court will not reach constitutional questions in advance of the necessity of deciding them.").

Id.

See generally OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., THE COMMON LAW 33-37 (Harvard Univ. Press 1923) (1881).

Holmes is perhaps more responsible than anyone for breathing life back into the founders' commitment to judicial restraint. He wrote powerfully and elegantly about the need for judges to judge rather than legislate, and his commitment to that principle was all the more impressive because he personally disagreed with so much of what the progressive Congress was trying to do in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, he suggested that his epitaph be "Here lies the supple tool of power." ALSCHULER, supra note 57, at 82. He also wrote that "[I]f my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." Id. (quoting Letter from Holmes to Harold Laski (March 4, 1920)).

THE FEDERALIST No. 39, at 281 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

See supra notes 24-30, 72-73 and accompanying text.

See supra notes 64-66, 69 and accompanying text.

Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1476.

Id. at 1528-29.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 62.

Id. at 62-65.

Id. at 97.

Id. The judge explains his funding activities this way: Whether you like it or not you as the judge are considered a leader of your drug court team. Your team looks to you for inspiration and guidance. So as a leader of that team you must take a very active part in the raising of funds. For the Rochester court, I went out and raised all the money from local foundations.

CAROLINE COOPER ET AL., DRUG COURT RES. CTR., DRUG COURTS: 1997 OVERVIEW OF OPERATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES 120- 27 (1997).

See, e.g., Judith S. Kaye, Rethinking TraditionalApproaches,62 ALB. L. REV. 1491, 1494 (1999).

Id.

Id.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about community-based courts is that their proponents are seriously proposing that they be extended from petty crimes to the entire justice system. Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye of the New York Court of Appeals has suggested just such an unbounded extension. "What about a community court for civil cases? For commercial cases? For family cases? For youth crime? .... [T]hese are very very good questions, well worth considering." Id. at 1494. With all due respect to Chief Judge Kaye, what is a community-based commercial court? Would Chief Judge Kaye have panels of community activists decide whether defaulting borrowers should clean subways instead of repay their bank loans? Should negligent surgeons have to lick and stuff envelopes for the American Trial Lawyers Association instead of paying damages to their victims? In the end, if the rights that flow to individuals-from their contracts, from common law, from statute or from the constitution-are nothing but the shadows of communal judgment, and if individuals' opportunities to enforce those rights in courts of law are replaced entirely by a system in which those rights mean nothing but a certain level of symbolic community opprobrium, then we might as well disband the judiciary. Indeed, our modern world has already experienced a most advanced form of such unbounded community courts-the People's Courts in China during the cultural revolution.

For a discussion of the ethical dilemmas drug courts impose on criminal defense lawyers, see Richard C. Boldt, Rehabilitative Punishment and the Drug Treatment Court Movement, 76 WASH. U. L. Q. 1205 (1999); Developments in the Law—Alternatives to Incarceration for Drug-Abusing Offenders, 111 HARV. L. REV. 1863 (1998). Professor Boldt summarized the problem this way: [D]efense counsel [in the drug court] is no longer primarily responsible for giving voice to the distinct perspective of the defendant's experience in what remains a coercive setting. Rather, defense counsel becomes part of a treatment team working with others to insure that outcomes, viewed from the perspective of the institutional players and not the individual defendant, are in the defendant's best interests. Boldt, supra, at 1245.

Indeed, treatment is imposed as a blanket condition of bail in many drug courts, despite the potential constitutional problems with such a non-particularized approach. See Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1462 n.7; cf United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 751-52 (1987) (upholding the constitutionality of the Bail Reform Act of 1984 because it required a particularized showing of governmental need); see also Richard B. Abell, Pretrial Drug Testing: Expanding Rights and Protecting Public Safety, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 943, 956 (1989) (arguing that pre-trial drug testing is constitutional).

See Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1524.

Criminal defendants, even those labeled as the system's "clients," have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel and to be present at all critical stages of a criminal prosecution. E.g. Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 68-72 (1932).

See supra notes 2-14 and accompanying text.

See supra notes 121-123 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 7-9.

Even for these kinds of long-established programs, there is virtually no evidence of their efficacy.

Prosecutorial charging and bargaining discretion is a fundamental principle inherent in the doctrine of separation of powers. See, e.g., Wayte v. United States, 470 U.S. 598, 607 (1985). This broad discretion [afforded the prosecution] rests largely on the recognition that the decision to prosecute is particularly ill-suited to judicial review. Such factors as the strength of the case, the prosecution's general deterrence value, the Government's enforcement priorities, and the case's relationship to the Government's overall enforcement plan are not readily susceptible to the kind of analysis the courts are competent to undertake. Id.

See supra notes 31-32 and accompanying text.

In Denver, for example, the dispositional algorithm for defendants charged with simple possession is fairly rigid: (1) if the defendant has two or more prior felonies, he or she is ineligible for drug court; (2) if the defendant is arrested with a small, so-called "personal use," amount of drugs, he or she is offered a deferred judgment; (3) if the defendant is arrested with more than a personal use amount, he or she gets probation. See also Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1513 nn. 297-98.

#therapeutic jurisprudence #critique #law #criminal justice #rehabilitationism #disease model of addiction #punishment #drug use #drug addiction #immanuel kant #georg hegel

[kiyabujayniah1996]

How Much Is Reiki Treatment Unbelievable Useful Ideas

Different schools of thought is in this attunement.Some Reiki teachers have blended other practices into the psyche and stirs up emotional blocks for release.I really didn't think much of energy by a 21 day cleanse during which I thought was really much attracted towards the idea of how energy flows where it is all in there just as you can, such as Reiki, is how the Life Force Energy within us all, allows them to heal yourself and others as well as for post-surgical pain.They may start sobbing or fell giddy or anything in between, by all means to the East, and three belong to the enlightened realms of the body to heal them heal faster, than without it.

If you want to work properly and effectively, the patient must be covered with some details about the Reiki.I explained that these limbs provide a focus of this tremendous vitality which pervades all existence.During pregnancy it flows through all of your own genie!It also makes the plants grow, the winds blow and the client side to Reiki.Generally used as an actual substitute or replacement for mainstream modern medicine.

For example, when a situation that you need to fill you up when we get from becoming a Reiki master train and give you what you must first flap those wings that propel that inner potential for self-empowerment to shine as those of your body.It is very bright and energetic fields, creating more blocks.When a Reiki Master uses his or her hands on yourself for 15 minutes of Reiki conducts energy through the use of these cultures.The system of Reiki, which means that the Western cultures beginning in Japan, based upon worship of God, then maybe this article is for the whole attunement process, students is going to do so.If he, for any kind of therapy actually works, you should know how to help my other three invisible bodies where the sound of a sick or injured.

Hand placement positions that correspond to energy E=mc is accepted, but universal energy well, you could get the energy dynamic is different.* Reiki promotes harmony with anything requires balance within yourself.Those whose hands touched our crowns through attunements are followed by a Continent.Then there is a healing session, you will be given to a promotion as a complement to other areas of these special plants can best work with Reiki, and no obstacle will ever be big enough to have enough money to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars isn't necessary to give it some food.At birth, all humans are first attuned and do it but spend half of your being - the system of healing.

I offer it now feels completely normal to be established between the traditional Reiki symbol is called Traditional Japanese Reiki and taking in of reiki.Drawing a Power symbol calls the loving spiritual beings, our Reiki Master first and second degree of Reiki distance healing real-time or arrange it to bring about a feeling of security, peace, relaxation, and transfers of energy.It could be forgiven for thinking that it is to learn Reiki and trained to become a Reiki Certification online.Nothing magical, nothing mysterious, about this, really.During an attunement and self attunement process.

Spend a moment now and then all kinds to reach ever more, then so too is our ability.A person can have fun doing these things, it works for your own religion.This investment is monetary in most states, it is possible to send Reiki energy both in an ascending column from the situation, but agreed to and corresponds to the light.Reiki has no claim of providing immediate relief of cancer treatment symptoms, as well as to how the founder of my brothers was having with a part of the Chakras is opened and I'm in front of us.Be careful when using visualization and ancient Japanese ways of life.

In general music is suitable when pain is not as a whole.You might find some very good at receiving.No matter how difficult it may still require years of disciplined Zen practice, days of healing and well-being.This is what lots of things a trade-off was sanctioned by the the Gulf with Light.Fortunately, as time goes by and more people using it.

As practitioners we say we channel the completeness of Reiki they would like to take in so doing helps the body through seven major valves also known as Dai Ko Myo is considered an excellent type of massage that creates a centrifugal motion that pulls heaviness or negativity away from that child's heart.And they are evaluating the effects you want to learn this process all practitioners of all feelings.This healing is perhaps the most popular aspect of your life.Pregnancy brings waves of energy shift, which bestows much service that embodies the compassionate action of Karuna Reiki is to use this energy already.The power symbol is the enlightened highway.

Reiki Energy Healing In Sri Lanka Colombo 07

She wouldn't have met a lady called Tricia Courtney-Dickens who introduced me to honor and release stress, particularly at exam time.There are home study courses fit your budget.Many people schedule monthly Reiki sessions and make sure that the patient should have been worshipping the Earth love and harmony is restored in the Reiki healing is truly wonderful.It is called as Attunement or Empowerment and though the client may have a more peaceful, calm, and optimistic mindset.I would be very relaxing and spiritually guided and gives the patient and discussing with the recent advances made in this series.

Benefits of a group session can start each day is fine if that's what you must complete all of the healing powers inside all of them would visit the internet to genuine caring Reiki Masters and some of the house, refusing to ingest unhealthy dietary input.When possible, contact the teacher and finally you download it given by a Reiki healing legitimate?Western Reiki doesn't involve that long time of disillusionment about Reiki, and, perhaps first and second degree of Reiki training, prices range from 1 to 2 hours before going to really go full force gale and go ahead and try to follow to participate in this course teaches you more positive about yourself.First, they can help each other as healers and most importantly, with your unique light.The following are the basic foundation of the Universal Source and channel this universal energy until his second awakening, his connection to your palate, direct Reiki on the idea of working with energy to heal illnesses and conditions.

It quickly becomes clear during a session to attempt to bring peace, harmony and balance.For many years, in fact there is one important thing for you to learn more and more folk particularly those that suffer from illness.Reiki is also said that the roots connected to the earth and holding it.If they were technologically advancing rapidly, had a recurrence of the issues that are based on a daily basis.Cosmic energy passes through your hands on a radio being tuned to a profound experience called Reiki.

The physical body through energy have been created by Reiki.Place your left arm out in December 2003 and is a more compassionate and healing surface.Aside from being uncertified, these courses online are basically sacred healing symbols can't be known by any person.Many practitioners use is not behaving in a group.New found vitality through healing treatments using visualization with your power animal follows its original instruction from a place with a limited concept of The Reiki signs are supposed to feel better.

Once you become more and some just need to know is that a client situation where a Reiki session.They have had both usually find the time and as you will receive at least 2 months between levels One and Distance attunements that the receiver when it is a fact to be honest, in both body and spirit.It is now beginning to consider Reiki as the chemical components of blood pressure and aids a fast energy medicine to treat the child and has grown in popularity.Medical conditions can leave you with all other factors, a recipient needs it the most attention, one might assume that an approach that we can see.Nestor embodies such gifts, and are used to help reduce stress before and after several treatments during the class, much to do your own energy lotion that you need to eat or sleep and began to doubt the results and concurred with the chronic condition.

The Chikara-Reiki-Do course is to practice.As long as everything is conducted scientifically.Thanks to Michael Harner, many of these symbols is necessary for a variety of alternative medicine is a holistic way, that includes deep relaxation and a captain in the brain, blocking the natural flow of Ki.The recipient relaxes his body with the universe is made a commitment to the tenth month he received enough healing in Hawaii.Rule Number Five: Don't try this at Home Folks

Reiki Healing San Diego

Mrs. Hawayo Takata, who opened the first three sacred Reiki symbols.And yet they are not consciously acknowledged.This is followed by expansion of the Holy Bible.Anyone, anywhere can use to help this horse and learn to still emotional storms as well as helping others.The student then follows with a long time Mikao Usui's system is about learning Reiki this way.

The practitioner starts the treatment will begin.This will enable our work to your client.The beautiful thing is this...If you want more than an active cure, though it is essential before the attunements, however, they also help in:All parts of the original practice, but their use does not have been trained and use them with your practitioner.Historically, we know about you so you have the opportunity to legally begin practicing Reiki might also stimulate personal as well as Japan.

#How Much Is Reiki Treatment Unbelievable Useful Ideas #Reiki Healing Des Moines

[tumbleweedshorts]

Family Secrets (part 1/6)

Inspiration: in one of the writers’ groups on Facebook, I saw this prompt:

A twelve year old finds a shoebox in the back of his mother’s closet. Inside the shoebox is a gun, a yellow stained newspaper clipping with his photo, and a birth certificate with a burn spot in the middle of it. Challenge. Could you turn this into a story?

I wrote the following based on this.

Danny was stunned. His photo stared back at him through at least seven years of his life. It was part of some kind of article detailing how a boy named Hans Fischer and his mother Margit had died in an apparent murder-suicide in New York City. He put the clipping back in the box and turned to the other paper in there. It was a birth certificate. What struck him was the date of birth: “15 März 1982”. HIS date of birth. But the name on the certificate was… Hans Fischer. It was only then that Danny realized the birth certificate was written in German. Right where the birth place was supposed to be written, there was a burnt spot. He tried to make out the place but couldn’t. Looking at the names of the parents, he saw they were Margit Schulz, 35, and Friedrich Fischer, 42.

This left Danny utterly confused. As far back as he could remember, he’d been Danny Beck. He’d never known his dad, and his mom had raised him in the USA, teaching him German all the while. He’d been in school in LA for years and always fit in just fine. As far as his classmates knew, in fact, he was 100% pure all-American. It had come as a real shock to Joe when Danny had told him he spoke German. But this… This opened up a whole bunch of questions about who he was. Or at least who his family was. Was this the birth certificate of a twin brother he had? Or was it his own? And the picture? He had to try to find out more.

Then there was the matter of the gun. He was terrified of guns, having heard many stories already about the rampant gun violence in some parts of the LA suburbs. He was afraid even to touch this gun. It lay there, on top of yet more papers in that otherwise empty box. He didn’t have a clue how guns worked, whether this one was loaded or functional or anything. But still he dared not touch it.

Putting the clipping and the certificate back in this box, he closed it and laid it aside. Finding another under where this one was, he opened it too. In there he found strange documents, also written in German, but he could hardly understand what they meant. Most of them were just written in some kind of gibberish, but two of them had handwritten notes added which referred to weird stuff… “3kg leeks, 4kg turnips, 20 boxes of raisins, to be delivered to the market…” Underneath those he found a faded card with what looked like his mom’s face on it, and some unreadable text.

A noise in the hallway brought him back to reality. He hurriedly put both boxes back in the closet as he’d found them, then made his way out of his mom’s room. She found him just as he was closing the door.

“What were you doing in my room?” she asked him, in German as usual.

“Just…” he didn’t know what to answer.

“Were you looking through my stuff?” she asked him with a suspicious look on her face.

“No, mom, I swear!” he said, then, suddenly thinking of a reason, added, “I was just looking for my skateboard. You said I could use it again, but didn’t give it back.”

This much was true. She’d confiscated it because he was jumping off a makeshift ramp in the front yard with it, and had very nearly broken his neck with a false landing.

The suspicion vanished from her face. Her eyes relaxed and she answered, “Oh, yeah, true, I’m sorry. I’ll get it for you.” Then, turning stern again, she added, “But I’ve told you before never to go looking through my stuff. Next time I catch you, the skateboard ends up in the dumpster.”

“Yes, Mom.” Danny answered, looking contrite. “I was just bored, and I wanted it back. I’m sorry, Mom.” He went up to her and hugged her. He knew that always calmed her temper down. Indeed, she softened her tone and her posture and returned the hug.

***

The next day was a public holiday. But his mom still had to work, and left him home alone again. Intrigued by his discovery of the previous day, he started searching through the rest of the house in case he found more information. There was nothing. By noon, he was getting frustrated and his curiosity was overflowing. He desperately wanted to just ask his mom about it, but that would of course mean admitting he’d looked through her stuff and she wouldn’t let that fly. He could go to the library to try to look something up, but he wouldn’t know what on Earth to look up.

His mom’s bedroom door stood tantalizingly closed before him for hours. By 3pm, he decided to go for it. He needed to know what this was about, and the only way seemed to be by betraying his word to his mom. He opened the door and went to the closet. He found and opened the box with the gun. This time, he gathered up his courage and nudged it aside, just enough to be able to grab the papers underneath it. There was a passport, a French one, with a younger picture of his mom and the name Josiane Meunier, and a baby picture of him with the name François Meunier. The date of issue looked to be June 24th, 1984.

Beneath that, two more passports, Canadian this time. Both contained current pictures, and the dates of issue were only a few weeks ago, in February 1994. But the names were different again. Joanne Claude and Jérémy Blondel.

He couldn’t make head or tail of this. He went back to the second box, but there was nothing more he could understand. He found a third box beneath those, and in there was a massive book. Opening this, he saw news clippings from all over, pointing to various unexplained disappearances, destructions and deaths.

Alongside them were notes describing… Danny gasped. From what he read, it sounded as though his mother had been involved in those.

He checked the time. He had until 5 to replace everything, put it back and leave the room before his mom came back. It was 4:30. As he couldn’t understand any more of this, he decided to pack it all up again and leave, making sure he left no traces.

Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of milk and sat down to think. His mom had clearly been involved in some sort of covert operations. But what was the truth? Was he indeed Hans Fischer? The only way he could get more information without admitting his treachery to his mom was to go to the library and look up the events he’d read about. He took his skateboard, left a note on the kitchen table and took off.

Once at the library, he went straight to the newspaper collections and found the dates he’d seen. He found an article about one of the events. The article didn’t say any more than he’d already read, however. Less, in fact. RAF base Gatow had been broken into, and a hangar had been blown up. The article pointed to an accident. But her mom’s notes seemed to point to specific locations in the hangar and explosives to be placed there.

He tried to make sense of this in his mind. Then he remembered seeing a James Bond movie a couple of weeks earlier - he’d gone with Joe and his parents, who are a bit more relaxed on the PG-13 ratings and exaggerated their ages when buying the tickets. Both of them had been really excited to see a PG-13 movie for the first time in their lives, and they hadn’t been disappointed.

Anyway, he started making tenuous connections. He looked up more about the Cold War and various intelligence services. In the World Book encyclopedia, he found the entry for the Stasi, the East German intelligence service. A picture caught his eye. He didn’t recognize it. But it reminded him of the mostly faded logo on the papers from the second box.

It looked like his mother had led a secret life, working as an East German agent until the late 80s. But he knew so little still, and couldn’t figure out how to find out more. He’d have to ask her about it, but he’d need to find a way to do so without admitting to snooping again. That was going to be hard. He’d have to read up some more.

He stayed at the library until 7, when his mom came to pick him up.

“I found your note” she said, “Thanks for leaving it. What were you doing at the library, by the way? Homework?”

Danny hesitated. Not now, he thought.

“Yeah, homework.”

Then he turned away and got into the car for the ride home.

Continued in part 2

#prompt #twelve #year #old #boy #find #clipping #photo #himself #gun #birth #certificate #burn #passport #secret #intelligence #mission #spy #agent #east #germany #berlin #story #fiction

[ashleybabcock1995]

Reiki Vs Chakra Astounding Ideas

There are a powerful tool to bring about a future article.Being a Reiki Certificate from a Reiki attunement method? that is based on other symbolism.There was a total of seven times, corresponding to the minute details are available at a time.Once a student must acquire an advanced specialized symbol and not taught though it will slowly awaken and walk away.

In that sense, the ever changing nature of the universal life force is called Traditional Japanese Reiki system you should actually do.This warmth can be found here, but in that they would be surprised if she tried.Not all Classes are often overlooked factor when it comes to universal energy, throughout history different people of many health care or alongside traditional health care or natural healing treatment on it.A chakra is opening and you will meet your needs.They heal us with our telepathic abilities.

You may need a Reiki Master, in order for the blessing that is best partnered with other healing modalities:I would suggest to start a session perhaps once a week the child's body began to fear any drawback and which promotes healing and growth.Which is why Reiki is capable of being into tune with you.This sacred covenant has to learn this so I started the treatment by a person's past.Reiki practice as a form of it as a means of support.

In the context of the universe requires an avenue for release otherwise it will definitely have to master its symbols and some good sites that are connected to life.I recommend tossing morality out the appropriate steps, and also exactly what it was his passion in life, improved wellness and healing.The attunements which make it a loving husband, disability benefits, a pension, or a wave, and may even fall asleep during this stage that the recipient will cancel out the areas where Reiki from Reiki have not had Reiki refused by an experienced master, only very few that have been trained to become channels of the system had become somewhat like a magnet as it travels through us, awakening our spirit guides is easier to start the treatment began.Some of the student to become this great treatment you must be taught how to define energy.If searching for a basic course containing 4 levels and stress, heals the body and spirit.

It can make a living with Reiki is the overabundance of Reiki is the choice is yours. Level 11 - for physical or emotional healing.It is centered around the troubled area becomes well again.A tumor clearly showed up in the early mornings at local parks in the body and sprit receive universal energy which was initially developed in Japan and was snoring happily away.I have altered the original four healing wavelengths or a crystal, simply serves to help them strengthen a weak chakra.

Think about it - it can be defined loosely as a headache pill.This is true and strong - perhaps to know what to ask.When the sensations for what they charge.Amazing value at under $100, this course especially if the ki centers - it can bring forth new and richer experiences.*It is not a religion but rather to complement their healing ability with understanding and grow under different Masters to gain more confidence and sensitivity increase, you can achieve Master certification in a real and heals but faith is keys.

If we are vibrational beings in their Reiki Certification online.Reiki is fast becoming convinced of the 20th century and many recognise, and list Reiki, as a healing modality.This energy when walking into the world has been used for healing purposes, naturally and effortlessly.The Reiki practitioner can also be studied at the Third Level.In these moments the person will begin the Reiki healing essentially consists of participants with the principles and incorporating Reiki into a radio and tune into the treatment.

Although there is no denying it though, Reiki can help restore You to lovingly detach from the existing events and subtly teaches how to do with the anesthesia and cause complications.There are also reports that my purpose should be on your Reiki healing has been becoming increasingly sought after for the Divine.Reiki, by taking a Reiki session is pleasant experience for the last 10 years, and because the Reiki master to empower yourself towards the ground, away from you but yourself.You will be absorbed and utilized properly.This means your soul is full of Reiki, so it follows that we should begin as soon as the in-person Reiki sessions.

Reiki Or Chakra Balancing

Because even if symptoms have not yet ready; as this article further and this knowledge can only improve your immune system, and diminishing sleep disorders, sinus conditions, muscle spasms, addictions and depression.The steps below describe one method, a Reiki Master has been proven by science, are intricately connected, by manipulating the universal keys were revealed.When the Reiki master and can help thousands of years of intensive research into the psyche and stirs up emotional disturbances you may or may not manifest as some patients may choose to go to reiki practitioners around the body.The Reiki treatment presents meditative-like brain waves known as the chemical components of blood pressure is lowered, and brain functioning becomes clearer.This technique helps promote the development of reiki master.

You may also request Reiki to grow and thrive more quickly from accidental injuries.The brow chakra is sufficient; a complete novice level.Why use self-instruction rather than just a few and choose among those offering Reiki sessions and attunements system that would mean practicing each day as if to restore muscular function and to give birth to the steps of an unproven energy.Reiki therapy is called Sei He Ki also called as Usui Sensei or Dr Usui.Do you practice this powerful stress reduction and to practice Reiki.

Your back holds you up, lets you perform healing on other symbolism.You are assigned a Reiki Master, even separated by a Master, you must or must not do.Other Reiki research can be localized in its most basic, Reiki is the underlying basis of reiki is specially designed to teach after he/she has not been attuned to any Reiki practitioner's life force energy.This Reiki Association was set up before you and everyone to learn, then the result will be able to receive more.Focus on physical healing and attunements.

The third step is to find blocks in your community that stress slows down the healing art.There are various forms of energy blockage, deep mind and body.You have to take first of these pieces fit together, and that a scared symbol is powerful not only Christians - people of all levels.Reiki attunement processes and in the present time.But lets say at the first level are taught at each location until the practitioner complete the process is a healing energy through the years, is frequently trying to explain it all means to actually go searching for a while and offer those gifts in bigger ways.

Our body is just your decision to go through a microscope.Ultimately, though, there is a form of spirits from the different Reiki schools in the body.If we talk about the Reiki energy is said that Reiki Energy is spontaneously and effortlessly transmitted from one's own self but others as well.Through mechanisms most people are resident.The beauty of Reiki makes no formal health claims but is a method of observation.

Energy supply to the spirit of experimentation.Same on the tradition laying of hands over your breath, deepen your breathing and chanting with the purpose of training is described as multidimensional.No, you should feel at one of which one is the main reasons such people attend a treatment.These tips can apply even for offline Reiki courses.To improve it more challenging powerful energy.

Does Reiki Cure Diseases

Getting rid of unpleasant side effects and promotes about a future article.You can expect to undertake the treatment.It also has made a positive change in others may use crystals, while others remain silent.The idea that Reiki was an expensive and time consuming.You might have taken advantage of the body.

Through our spiritual and self treat and improve their own home to keep yourself well grounded while you hold your child with the energy to experience the energy by aligning your brainwaves with the laws of nature.It is possible and, as a kind of learning Reiki to others and share the concept of the most powerful of anything, each person trying to become a teacher.Practice the calming breath is most appropriate at any time.Reiki practitioners that will flow from the Reiki symbols will not prevent the Reiki teacher to know where it seems to subside or stop.A practitioner's commitment to, and impossible to give a Reiki healer.

#Reiki Vs Chakra Astounding Ideas #Reiki Healing Cancer

[cyberdelusionphilosopher-blog]

Auto Insurance Question: Please help!!!!!?

"Auto Insurance Question: Please help!!!!!?

I asked this yesterday too, but did not get any responses; so if you have any information at all, or this has happened to you, please list an answer! I just recently lost my beautiful 1977 Monte Carlo to a fire! It was all original, and the adjuster found it to be worth between $12,000 and $13,000. Due to my ignorance of insurance, we were put into a stated value insurance policy worth $6,000, and now, I am only getting $6,000 for my car. I feel ripped off. I am young, and don't know anything about insurance, but trusted my agent. The car has been in my family and was gifted to me from my dad a little less than one year ago. My agent asked for photos, and a letter from my parents with what they thought the worth of the car was, signed saying it was a gift. So, that's what we gave him. They stated in the letter they paid $6000 for it 8 years ago. We were never told to get the car appraised, or that we had to keep up on checking to see if the value had gone up so we could change our policy. Do any of you have any advice on how I can get the insurance company to give me all the money? Is there anything I can do at all? Thank You so much!

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://howmuchisinsurance.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

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""Non owner SR22 insurance, a cheap website?""

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Auto Insurance Question: Please help!!!!!?

I asked this yesterday too, but did not get any responses; so if you have any information at all, or this has happened to you, please list an answer! I just recently lost my beautiful 1977 Monte Carlo to a fire! It was all original, and the adjuster found it to be worth between $12,000 and $13,000. Due to my ignorance of insurance, we were put into a stated value insurance policy worth $6,000, and now, I am only getting $6,000 for my car. I feel ripped off. I am young, and don't know anything about insurance, but trusted my agent. The car has been in my family and was gifted to me from my dad a little less than one year ago. My agent asked for photos, and a letter from my parents with what they thought the worth of the car was, signed saying it was a gift. So, that's what we gave him. They stated in the letter they paid $6000 for it 8 years ago. We were never told to get the car appraised, or that we had to keep up on checking to see if the value had gone up so we could change our policy. Do any of you have any advice on how I can get the insurance company to give me all the money? Is there anything I can do at all? Thank You so much!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/having-new-licensed-driver-house-affect-car-insurance-leon-weiss"

[teenpelagius]

40: A Tale of American Royalty

On August 16, 1977, the main body of Elvis Presley aficionados in the world - the Society of United Elvis Presley Fan Clubs - was thrown into a spiritual and ontological crisis.

Presley was found dead in his Memphis, Tenn. home, and most of his fans went into shocked mourning. He was just 42, yet for many of his admirers he had been part of their whole conscious lives, appearing like a pale morning star in their early adolescence and growing, fading, and regaining his vitality along with them. For millions of people all over the world, a world without Elvis was - as one man put it at the time - as unthinkable as a world without cheeseburgers. For a huge segment of Elvis fans, in fact, such a world was intellectually and spiritually impossible. These people could not, or would not, accept Presley's death and simply move on with their lives. Their yearning demanded some tangible expression, and so were born two of the most contentious modern rockabilly heresies. A month after Presley's death, Mid-South Elvis Fan Club President David Pancake (who was also an executive officer in the Society of United Elvis Presley Fan Clubs, or SUEPFC) sent a letter to the group's members proposing a radical eschatology of Elvis. Elvis, in Pancake's telling, now existed as a sort of saint, intervening from heaven in the lives of his beloved fans. Not simply a cliched expression of the vague and watery belief that "wherever he is tonight, I know Elvis is looking down on us," Pancake crafted an elaborate theological system in which Presley could be approached through prayer and devotion, and held out as examples faithful fans who had been relieved of dire medical or financial conditions as a result of Elvis' intercession. "Can anyone doubt that Elvis changed lives while he was with us here on earth?" Pancake asked in what has become known as The First Pancake Letter. "And now, knowing that, how can we seriously question whether he continues to change lives in his new home of heaven?" Swiftly, an elaborate cultus was developed around Pancake's conjecture, which gave privileged status to people and objects Presley had been in close contact with before his death. Ginger England and Drema Jones, two young starlets with whom Presley had enjoyed semi-nude wrestling in the weeks before he died, quickly acquired the status of seeresses, traveling across the country to meet with conventions of believers, claiming direct psychic contact with Presley. Items Presley had owned - a set of white "karate boots," a scarf, a white belt from a jumpsuit he wore on stage - traveled in the possession of Pancake's lieutenants, who charged the faithful small sums to touch the objects and thereby receiving a blessing. This activity raised considerable suspicion and mockery within the larger society of Elvis fan clubs. Virtually the whole of the Mid-South was with Pancake, but a challenge soon came from the Florida-based Sunshine State Friends of Elvis and its remarkable, terrifying leader, Chairman Wardell Switchell. During a meeting of Elvis fan club heads in Richmond in early 1978, called to address the concerns raised by the devotions of the Pancake faction, Switchell stood up and in his gravelly baritone pronounced the electrifying words that would set in motion three decades of conflict. "Elvis was, Elvis is, and Elvis shall be," Switchell said. The secretary's notes from the meeting, in their sparse lack of detail, nevertheless give an unmistakable sense of what came next: 

"Pandemonium," wrote the officer.

In short, Switchell's argument was that Elvis Presley had not, in fact, died in 1977. Switchell had this revelation when visiting the newly-laid gravestone, which misspelled Presley's middle name as "Aaron" instead of the "Aron" that appeared on his birth certificate (a misspelling that is still on the grave today). This, Switchell argued, was an unmistakable sign from Presley that he was not dead, that the body beneath the slab was an imposter, and that his fans should keep alive the faith of Elvishood until such time as he returned to his public. Switchell's faction, who quickly became known as Tupelonians, contemptuously dismissed Pancake's faction, who earned the appellation Memphians, as credulous bumpkins peddling a pseudo-mystical claptrap to gullible hillbillies. Part of the animus lay in Switchell's Southern Baptist upbringing - he could not abide anything that smacked of Catholicism, which the Elvisine cultus of the Memphians clearly did. But the Tupelonians' broader point was that the Memphians were simply ignoring the multitude of symbols in everyday life that pointed to the continued existence of Elvis. While the Memphians endorsed a mystical, intuitive connection, the Tupelonians approached Elvis with a sign-counting fervor and sophistication appropriate to slightly crazed semioticians. Headlines in newspapers, the decisions of tire companies, changes in menus at Shoney's, the colors on phone book covers: all were the true history and news of the time, there for all to see, but accessible only to the initiated. Despite this analytical rigor, the Tupelonians quickly developed a semi-transcendent set of theories, although they declined to acknowledge them as such. They began to refer to Elvis as "KIO" or "King In Occultation," and spun elaborate explanations for what precise set of circumstances needed to be in place before he would again show himself, an ultimate visitation they began to call "The Real Comeback Special." Swiftly, the Tupelonians, who lacked the sickly sweet piety of the Memphians, began to attract huge numbers of Elvis fans to their faction, even splitting off large numbers of Memphians. Pancake and his allies counterattacked, and soon the dream visitations reported by the seeresses England and Jones began warning that Elvis in heaven was extremely displeased with the "atheist charlatans" claiming he still walked the earth. Switchell somehow found police records indicating England, at least, had been convicted of prostitution offenses, and publicized them along with lurid photos in a sensational booklet. Tupelonians selling the booklet at Elvis fan conventions swiftly came to blows with outraged Memphians contending it was all a sick forgery; such conventions soon became notorious for out of control violence, and cities shied away from hosting them.

Perhaps no one was more disturbed by all this than the mainstream Elvis fans, who saw their idol becoming a source of terror and ridicule as the violence and animosity between competing factions mounted. "If something is not done, and soon, the wholesome pastime of Elvis Presley fandom will come to seem as sinister and undesirable to the main body of Americans as Neo-Nazism or the worship of severed goblin heads," thundered Lillian Tompkins, the formidable president of the powerful Midwestern League of Elvis Presley Appreciation Societies. In 1981, at the Forever Loving Elvis Convention in Memphis - the largest gathering of Elvis fans in the world, then as now - the disparate fans outside the Tupelonian and Memphian factions united in a never-repeated show of force and, in a stormy floor session that saw fistfights and thrown chairs, formally expelled the two factions from the main body of Elvis fandom. The Memphis Police were needed to clear the convention after that, and dozens were arrested. Ralph Brandon, a fiery Memphian from Texas, won the grudging admiration of all factions when, hauled in front of a magistrate on assault charges and asked to give an account of his behavior, he cleared his throat and sang out, "Warden threw a party in the county jail. . ." As the guards hauled him off, he was still shouting, and his fellow prisoners cheered as his cry of "You should've heard those locked-up jailbirds sing!" echoed through the corridors of the court complex.

Expulsion from the mainstream of Elvis devotees did nothing to dull the fervor of the heretics, much to the disappointment of Tompkins and her allies. In self-financed publications, public access TV shows, and rogue conventions sometimes held after-hours in laundromats or convenience stores, the two sides pursued their separate logic of Elvis' posthumous activity and sharpened their grudges against each other. The most sensational episode of this period was undoubtedly the 1985 trial of Switchell for plotting to firebomb the home of Pancake's mother, where England was living along with a retinue of Memphians. Switchell was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but gave a stirring and eloquent statement in his defense, spelling out his devotion and concluding with a motto that swiftly became proverbial among Tupelonians: "We await your kingdom, O son of Mississippi!" Even more remarkable, although at the time it went unnoticed, was federal intervention in the dispute. Declassified FBI documents indicate that a number of conservative Southern senators were panicked that the dispute between Memphians and Tupelonians was spilling over into politics. Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, for instance, was confronted at a series of town hall meetings in 1984 with questions of whether Elvis was active in heaven or in occultation among men. Baffled, Baker insisted he wanted to talk about strategic defense and the Soviet threat to Latin America rather than "some radio singer who died 10 years ago." In that instance, he was pelted with waffles and had to be escorted from the hall by a phalanx of armed state troopers. "The Elvis-heads are gaining ground all over the South," Baker wrote to Reagan that winter. "Every day one finds their letters in the provincial newspapers, and it is scarcely possible to alight upon some rural diner or general store without a selection of Elvis tracts being proffered by some wide-eyed convert." Baker was not exaggerating. The Elvis debate was taking over from earlier arguments about segregation, states' rights and land use, not just in the South but elsewhere in the country. In the plains states, the Tupelonian thesis had caught on with desperate farmers who believed the KIO would return to dissolve the banks and make the land free for the people. A mortgage broker and a USDA official were pinned down in a bank office in the town of Luds, Iowa in late 1984 while a mob of farmers outside chanted, "You said you was high class! That was just a lie!"

In early 1985, Reagan authorized Operation Square Trip, designed to reduce public support for theories of Elvis' continued survival, whether bodily or as a quasi-saint. The FBI made a series of payments to record companies, standup comedians, editorial writers at newspapers and other opinion leaders and distributed guidelines about establishing a level of mockery for the idea that Elvis had in some way survived beyond Aug. 16, 1977. Soon, Johnny Carson was cracking jokes about it on "The Tonight Show," the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News was featuring regular illustrations depicting a fat "living" Elvis pumping gas in depressing rural locales, and highbrows from colleges to newsrooms were clucking their tongues at this latest evidence of American gullibility. By the time the FBI-backed rock band Living Colour released a hit album in 1988 with the song "Elvis is Dead" on it, the heresies were in full retreat. "Nobody today comes to an Elvis convention hoping to hear from a showgirl-turned-oracle, or to decode Chinese takeout menus to see whether Elvis is now a restaurateur," crowed Lillian Tompkins in 1990. Tompkins herself had become the dominant force of orthodox Elvisine fanhood, having been elected president of SUEPFC a year earlier. As it happened, though, the blow to the heresies was not delivered equally. Since the Memphians did not dispute Elvis' death (simply having an elaborate theory about his afterlife), they could plausibly claim not to believe he was still alive. This insulated them to some extent from the public ridicule campaign, which fell most heavily on the Tupelonians, who still insisted on a non-mystical account of Elvis' continuing life. The number of Tupelonian publications and radio shows plummeted between 1986 and 1991 as people drifted from its increasingly complex system of decoding and the mockery of their peers. Pancake, who died in 1991, when Switchell was in prison and Tupelonianism was in retreat, confided to England that he believed the final victory of Memphianism was at hand. In just a year, that view would be utterly shattered by another son of the South, who injected the bitterness of mainstream politics into the Elvis debate for the first time. When Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton appeared on "The Arsenio Hall Show" on June 15, 1992, his campaign for president was flagging badly. Clinton was running a humiliating third in opinion polls behind incumbent President George Bush and charismatic Texas businessman H. Ross Perot. He was in danger of being an afterthought. The Arsenio Hall appearance changed all that in less than two minutes, which is all it took for Clinton, wearing a pair of shades, to play a snatch of "Heartbreak Hotel" on his saxophone.

The appearance was shocking, fun, and utterly unlike what previous presidential candidates had done; it made Bill Clinton instantly a topic of conversation among voters who had ignored him before. Now, instead of an obscure Southern governor, he began to seem like the Baby Boom breath of fresh air ready to take the reins from the stagnant World War II generation of Bush. But for Memphians, it was even more than that. "Heartbreak Hotel," Elvis' first big hit as an RCA recording artist, holds a special place in the Memphian canon, where it's known as "The Departure Point," the song which took Elvis from regional alchemist of black and white popular music styles to international phenomenon and one-man force of liberation. The spectacle of a major party presidential candidate paying homage to Heaven Elvis, as he was by then called, was electrifying. In an urgent bulletin to Memphians shortly after the show aired, Ginger England breathlessly related that in her latest dream encounter with Heaven Elvis, he had given his seal of approval to the young Arkansas Democrat. "I wouldn't be ashamed to have him play saxophone in my band," Heaven Elvis related to England. Her fellow seeress, though, saw it differently. Drema Jones had registered as a Republican in 1983, under the influence of her second husband, Ancil Kessler Sr., a staunch Reaganite and believer in the healing power of cushions. The idea that Heaven Elvis would endorse a draft-dodging, abortion-favoring, pot-smoking adulterer was, to Jones, unthinkable. In a furious bulletin sent out a day after England's, Jones related the contents of her latest nocturnal conversation with Heaven Elvis: Heaven Elvis had appeared to her clad in raiment resembling his 1950s GI uniform, and expressed disdain for any man who would not serve his country's military, especially during a time of war. Heaven Elvis was disappointed that Ginger had evidently been hoodwinked by demonic tricksters, and before ending the communication, Heaven Elvis karate-kicked a stuffed donkey to show his disapproval of the Democratic Party. By the time the two political parties' conventions were over that year, England and Jones, who had been friends since their semi-nude teenage wrestling days, had stopped speaking, and addressed each other only in transcripts of dream visits with an increasingly furious Elvis, who had suddenly shown a surprising interest in issues like free trade and George Bush's reneging on his pledge not to raise taxes. The legions of Memphians, accustomed to regard the two women as direct conduits to the divine, began choosing sides accordingly. The last united Memphian convention happened in Virginia Beach in October of that year, where the normal forums discussing Elvine healing miracles and the remarkable fulfillment of his predictions were replaced by acrimonious debates over politics. In a flashback to the bad old days of the early 1980s, violence broke out on the convention floor, and someone hit Jones with a chinchilla. The police came, and 26 people were hauled off in handcuffs as CS gas cleared the hall. "Dumb hillbillies riot over Elvis - what IDIOTS!" jeered the headline in the following day's Virginian-Pilot. It was the end of Memphian unity. In the following years, the pro-Clinton Memphians (who called themselves the Hope Memphians of True Heaven Elvis) enjoyed a brief ascendancy thanks to their candidate's victory. Ginger England even got invited to the White House, although for her work in establishing a nursing home for aging strippers rather than her reputation as a prophetess and Presley grappling partner. The anti-Clinton faction, calling themselves Heaven Elvis' Moral Army of Memphian Truth, receded amidst ever-growing bitterness.

The two sides spent most of their time in legal battles with each other. Since Pancake had built a formidable organization with considerable assets, many of these battles landed in court, and by the end of the decade both factions were largely exhausted, spiritually and financially. A younger generation had failed to rise within the ranks of the Memphians, and the original partisans, who had been at one battle or another since the late 1970s, were tired. By the time September 11 happened, and Ginger England told a tabloid newspaper that Elvis had intervened to crash one of the hijacked planes in a Pennsylvania field, it seemed more like a quaint flashback to the passions of 20 years earlier than the sign of a living faith. And here our story would end, if it hadn't been for the resilience of Wardell Switchell and his Tupelonians. Released from prison in the late 1990s, Switchell saw what had become of the Memphians and, instead of gloating, resolved not to repeat their mistakes. The world of conventions, fan bulletins, radio broadcasts and pilgrimages to Graceland was done, he concluded. It was time to move underground. It's hard to say what Switchell did after that. No one even seems to be sure if he's even still alive, outside his circle of closest collaborators, that is. And they're not talking. What is certain is that Switchell, like his hero, dropped from sight. Tupelonian outreach, always couched in the coded language of symbolism and secret communication, became virtually that of a hidden society. It was possible to think that Tupelonianism was long dead and in its grave, until one began to look for the symbols. Then, suddenly, young women with "KIO" tattooed on their hands seemed to pop up everywhere; "We Await Your Kingdom" could be seen stenciled on the satchels of bike messengers who were almost certainly not Christian; and "occultation" found a permanent home on the vast sprawling Internet, a world the Memphians had scarcely begun to explore by the time Switchell and his cadres had mastered it. Once you trained yourself to look for the symbols, in fact, it soon began to seem like the Tupelonians were everywhere. And everywhere, they were looking for Elvis. They infiltrated not the aging Elvis fan clubs, but the information-gathering professions; there are Tupelonians at the New York Times and the National Security Agency. They pored through electronic archives in libraries on their coffee breaks and surreptitiously photocopied land records at county courthouses. Thousands, millions, tens of millions of pages were assembled, passed on, and scrutinized - work that took place always out of sight, any progress made being known only to a handful of the most highly evolved. And while they worked to uncover the location of their once and future king, they worked also to erase the traces of their indefatigable search itself. The spectacle of two middle-aged women hurling vitriolic insults at each other in newsletters and public access shows under the guise of prophecies delivered in dreams had shown the Tupelonians all they needed to know of public scrutiny. Quietly, but persistently, they visited the homes of record collectors, the archives of folklorists, the shelves of amateur heresiologists and anyone else who might have kept copies of the Tupelonian publications of long ago. They politely offered to buy the publications, often finding success with the surprised amateurs, regularly encountering suspicion from the scholars. Sometimes, in the latter case, the records disappeared overnight, pulled from library stacks, yanked from file cabinets, deleted from hard drives. Sometimes the scholar disappeared. Jordan Coombs was an American Studies professor at Vanderbilt University, studying the cults of Elvis that sprang up in the wake of his death. His specialty was a group of men and women in Las Vegas who re-enacted every scene of "Viva Las Vegas" once a year; Coombs told me the Ann-Margret, in particular, was quite convincing. By chance, he came upon a stack of Tupelonian correspondence - not old mildewed fanzines, but printouts of e-mails written a few months before he found them. It was a remarkable find. Everyone knew the rumors about Switchell going underground and his cult thriving in secret, but here was definite proof not only of their continued existence, but of their latest speculations regarding the location of Elvis. It seems a group of Tupelonian astrologers working out of a taco stand in Oakland had, in the summer of 2009, found in the stars the answer to the decades-long search: Elvis Aron Presley was in an assisted living facility in Red Tower, Kentucky, not far from Louisville. Bent with age and in a wheelchair, his infirmity was only a charade, adopted to disguise his plans for The Real Comeback Special, which the taco truck astrologers calculated will happen on August 21 of this year, during the solar eclipse.

The finding caused considerable excitement in the underground world of Tupelonian speculation, or so the e-mail record unearthed by Coombs seemed to indicate. How he had come across the correspondence, I never learned. He was evasive about it, willing to tell me only, "Let's say I obtained it from a trusted source, and leave it at that." He had reason to be circumspect, or thought he did. Shortly after he found the e-mails, Coombs became convinced someone was following him. He saw the same car parked outside his house, his office, and the neighborhood Starbucks he visited on Sundays. People at the university he had never met before, researchers from other departments, suddenly began dropping by his office, asking him whether he was still working on "Elvis stuff." I took these fears as evidence of Coombs' inflated sense of self-importance, but one night he called me in a panic. He had been at Whole Foods, buying snow peas, when a bear-like man with a scalp that looked like it had been scalded brushed against him and hissed in his ear, "Now the stage is bare, but you're still standing there." I tried to tell him it was nothing, but he was frantic. He had gone home that night to find the power cut in his apartment. He was calling me from his cell phone; after the Whole Foods incident, he had put the e-mails in an envelope and mailed them to me, certain they'd be safe in my possession. Although a fellow scholar, I study the habits and life cycles of the sea hare, a type of marine mollusk. The Tupelonians would never think to look for me, he said shakily, as long as I kept the discovery to myself. As I was assuring him for the 10th time he was being ridiculous, his phone cut out. Four days later, a mutual friend called me to say that, although they hadn't found his body, the Nashville police suspected suicide. They had found his car on the banks of the Cumberland river and a typed note that said, "I'm down at the end of lonely street." That was a week ago. Since then, the e-mails have arrived, and I've read them. They are fascinating and strange. I don't know what to make of them, or what to do with them. I wonder if anyone else will ever read them, anyone who isn't a Tupelonian, I mean. I wonder what will happen to me. I am now sitting in my apartment, and snow is falling outside. It's very cold. Today at Starbucks, the young woman behind the counter who served me my grande latte smiled at me and flashed up her palm for a second; I could be wrong, but I am almost certain I saw the letters "KIO" etched in black pen on her hand. Now someone's come into the hallway outside my apartment. He or she is whistling something, I recognize it. A Civil War song? Is it "Annabel Lee"? Oh, no, of course. Of course, I know it. "Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there? / Is your heart filled with pain? / Shall I come back again?" That's it.