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foilfreak · 3 years

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4 Lords Raise Rose AU Ideas

Not a single person asked for this, but that other post where I talk about the 4 lords adopting Rose but still technically being terrible people got way more popular than I expected it to, so, with about 6 shots of tequila in my system and a terrible urge to spit my thoughts out for all the internet to see and judge, I’ve decided to make a follow up post. Here’s how I think the 4 lords would take care of Rose in the event they rebelled against Mother Miranda and decided to raise Rose as their own instead, but like under the cut after a little bit cuz i accidentally went way too fucking hard with this and I don’t want ppl to get mad at me for making them scroll for an hour to get past this post:

First and foremost, I think they’d do it in stages, and what I mean by this is that Rose would essentially be given to a specific Lord for some period of her life, like a couple years, and then when she was deemed old or strong or annoying enough, she’d be moved to a different lord for some period of time and so on and so forth. They would do this because a) they all live in different areas and have shit to do so it’s easier to have Rose live with one lord at a time and then the other lords can just go visit her there from time to time, rather than try to work out a weekly custody schedule which we all know Alcina and Karl would NEVER be able to agree on so let’s not even bother, and b) because each lord would have either some skill or set of knowledge that would make them the best for caring for Rose at that specific point in her life. This way, all the lords have a (somewhat) equal chance to be a part of Rose’s life and teach her something while she’s with them. So with all that in mind now, let’s get down to who would have Rose and at what point in her life.

1. Starting off with infant Rose, I think she’d end up with the Dimitrescu’s for the first few years of her life, and the reason why I think this is because... well, Alcina IS already a mother to 3 girls, and while we don’t know a terrible amount about Bela, Cassandra, and Daniela’s “upbringing” under Alcina, we can gleam and theorize from her notes that, despite their fully grown bodies, the girls could very well have started out with the mental and physical capabilities of infants, and thus needed to be cared for and brought up in a similar manner as infants or children until they reached a certain point where they could officially be considered adults in mentality and ability, not just in physical appearance. So with this in mind, it’s entirely possible that Alcina could have at least some vague idea of how to care for an infant child through her experiences with the bug sisters; perhaps there’s some gaps in her knowledge, but if nothing else I imagine Alcina would be an infant Rose’s best shot at surviving infancy if only because the other 3 are so incompetent on how to care for a baby that Alcina looks like an expert in comparison. Not to mention that, of the possible locations for an infant to be raised, I do genuinely think that castle Dimitrescu would be the safest place for Rose to be kept during this vulnerable part of her life. Not only that but if Alcina has actually come to care for Rose as though she were one of her own daughters, then she would absolutely spoil Rose rotten with all the nicest clothes and fanciest toys, things that a small infant wouldnt be able to appreciate but would show that she’s loved and cared for nonetheless, and don’t even get me started on the bug sisters, I could see them fawning over Rose for hours on end, playing with her, singing to her, telling her stories of all the man-things they’ve gotten to play with today, and so much more. Overall, Rose would just be the most spoiled and pampered little baby with the Dimitrescus and there’s no changing my mind about this. The only thing I’m struggling to wrap my head around is how they’d feed her, since I doubt a small infant would take very well to blood wine and human flesh. I suppose it wouldn’t be terribly outrageous for them to hire a wet nurse/nanny to care for Rose during the day while the other Dimitrescus go about their daily duties, and when Rose is finally old enough to be introduced to solid food (I.e. fried human flesh cubes) they could do what they always do and turn the nurse into wine too, I guess. It’s not a solid idea but it’s more plausible than anything else I thought of so it’ll work!

2. After spending about 3 years with the Dimitrescus, Rose would then be moved to the Beneviento house. Now, If u don’t know anything about 3 year olds, then you’re probably ignorant to the fact that they are some of the craftiest, sneakiest, and most coniving groups of people to exist on this planet. 3 year olds are masters at getting into and touching just about anything and everything u don’t want them to touch, and worst of all, u won’t realize what they’re doing until they’ve already done it and left a huge mess behind, so while the Dimitrescus love and adore Rose dearly, they know it’s sadly time to hand her over when they find her sitting on top of a pile of dead bodies playing with a metal scythe in the dungeons. Once Rose is dropped off at the Beneviento house, I imagine Donna is her usual stoic self the first few weeks Rose is with her. She’s not cold or distant necessarily, in fact she’s quite happy that it’s finally her turn with precious baby Rose, but Donna isn’t exactly known for being outwardly expressive herself (and even Angie isn’t being quite as forward as she normally is), so things are quiet and peaceful for the first little while that Rose is under her care. It’s not until Rose takes an interest in her doll Angie, and more importantly the things that Donna can do with Angie, that things really start getting fun. By the end of Rose’s first month in the Beneviento house she and Donna are the best of friends and often spend their days either playing dress up and make pretend with Donna’s extensive doll collection, or playing elaborate games of cat and mouse, where Donna will set up lots of puzzles throughout the house for Rose to find and solve (I.e. rose has to match her dress to the doll with the same one as her to find a map telling her which kitchen cabinet Donna hid the chocolate in, or something like that), but be careful little Rose, Angie has been trying to get her hands on that chocolate all day, and if u take too long, she’ll find the map first and eat all the chocolate without saving you a single piece. Just silly little puzzles with enough at stake to engage the mind of a curious 3 year old, but never enough to put rose in any actual danger. Donna is nothing if not a watchful caretaker, so she makes sure she has sight of Rose at all times, occasionally giving her a hint if she’s struggling, and perhaps occasionally making things harder if that day’s puzzle is proving too easy for her. Overall, Rose’s time with Donna, while not as grand and luxurious as the Dimitrescus, was still a fun and enriching experience for the young girl, and there’s nobody in this world who thinks that Donna’s scar is cool more than Rose.

3. After another 3 years with Donna, Rose is now 6 years old and officially far too good at puzzle solving for Donna to keep up with. No matter what she tries or how hard she makes it, Rose just keeps blazing through the puzzles at an almost alarming rate, making it clear that Rose is desperately in need of not only a change in scenery, but also a change in education, and this is where Salvatore finally comes in. After leaving the Beneviento house, I think the next logical place for Rose to stay would be with Salvatore, who, with lore hinting at him perhaps being a scholarly man of some kind, would basically act as her elementary school teacher throughout the duration of her stay. Now, to be fair, Rose could have gone to Heisenburg’s factory, but Heisenberg outright refused to take her and the other 3 lords decide that the factory is simply too dangerous for Rose rn, who thus far hasn’t shown any signs of being anything other than a normal human girl with no noticeable abilities (save for a smart mouth and a terrifying habit of popping up when least expected, a habit she mostly uses to mess with Heisenberg, much to his disdain and Lady Dimitrescu’s delight), so it is to the mutant fish man’s unimaginable delight that he is unanimously voted Roses next caretaker, and the one responsible for her basic education. Despite his initial excitement however, when Rose is finally dropped off at the windmills by Donna, Salvatore realizes that he’s not 100% sure what to do with Rose now that he has her. He’d like to get started on her education right away but at the same time he’s so fearful of Rose hating him because of his disgusting appearance that he kind of just... avoids her entirely at first. He’s never far away from the little girl and is always ready to jump to her rescue should she need it, but other than that Salvatore seldom allows himself to be seen for the first month that Rose is with him, the only sign of him still being around being the platefuls of food that mysteriously appear in Rose’s room 3 times a day, as well as the occasional shiny trinket Salvatore found and thought Rose would like. At first, rose doesn’t seem to mind being left entirely to her own devices, but after every stone, log, and rotting fish corpse within 5 miles of the lake has been turned over and thoroughly examined, Rose decides she’s had quite enough of her Uncle Sal ignoring her, prompting the headstrong little girl to go looking for him herself. She finds Salvatore hiding underneath a patch of floating algae not far away from where she was playing and all but demands that the mutant man come out of the water and give her something to do or she’d tell Mother on him. Salvatore, shocked by the small child’s fearlessly blunt request, hesitates, not wanting to frighten Rose, but ultimately relents, crawling out of the water and timidly suggesting that he teach her how to read and write. Rose quickly agrees, seeming totally unbothered by Salvatore’s grotesque appearance, and the two quickly move to the schoolroom that had been set up specifically for Rose, where Salvatore spends hours upon hours a day teaching Rose everything he knows, filling the little girl’s head up first with the basics, letters and words, then numbers and simple equations, followed later by historical dates and time periods, algebraic formulas, and classic literature analysis, then biology, chemistry, physics, astrology, calculus, ecology, and so much more. Basically, anything there is to know, Salvatore knows at least something about it and he’ll make sure that Rose knows about it too. In the 3 years Rose spends with Salvatore she goes from already sharp as a whip, to being smarter than most adults even, and Salvatore takes immense pride in how intelligent and knowledgable Rose becomes thanks to his surprisingly effective teaching style. Overall, as a caretaker, Salvatore is pretty weird and doubts himself a lot, but Rose thinks he’s funny and loves learning from him so they get along very well and she loves him very dearly! He probs teaches her to swim and fish too.

4. So another 3 years come and go with incredible speed, and its with great sadness on Salvatore’s part that Heisenberg finally comes banging on the fish man’s door, all but demanding that he now be given his turn with Rose. Now, personally, I can see several different arguments being raised by the other 3 lords over why its a terrible idea to let a 9 year old anywhere near Heisenberg, much less be given into his care fully. After about 9 years of seeing his siblings paling around with the constantly growing child, and looking like theyre having the time of their lives all the while, however, Karl decides that perhaps there’s more to this little girl than he originally thought, and, with his interest now piqued (or at the very least looking forward to pissing the other 3 off for entertainment purposes), that its only fair that he be given a turn with her now too, seeing as how he’s the only one who hasn’t been given the chance to be her caretaker yet. This naturally does NOT go over well with the other 3 lords. Alcina all but threatens to kill Karl should he step so much as within 10 ft of Rose, while Donna pipes up and demands to know what his sudden interest in Rose is. Even Salvatore, who is quick to flinch away from direct conflict, goes as far as to harshly point out the plethora of times Karl had outright denied their previous attempts to get him to engage with Rose, so why on earth would they hand her over to him now when he’s previously shown to have absolutely no interest in her? After a long spout of yelling between the 4 siblings, an agreement is reached, wherein Rose herself will be given the chance to decide whether she wants to go with Heisenberg, or whether she’ll return to one of the other 3 lords for the time being. It is to Alcina, Donna, and Salvatore’s absolute horror however, that Rose enthusiastically agrees to go with her Uncle Karl to live in his factory, and with the deal already set, the other lords can do nothing to stop her from going. The trip to drop off Rose at heisenberg’s factory is a long and arduous one, especially for Salvatore, who sobs the whole way there about Rose forgetting about him despite the young girl’s insistence that she’d visit. The first thing Karl does after officially having Rose handed over to him, is give her an extensive list of all the places in the factory in which she is under no circumstances permitted to enter without his permission (which basically only leaves the control room and the old storage closet that acts as her bedroom as viable places for Rose to go and explore). The second thing Karl does is dump her in her new storage closet bedroom and then hightail it for his workshop to work on whatever sick and twisted amalgamation he’s got cooked up this time around. At first, Rose isn’t terribly bothered by this, since she’s used to having something of an “adjustment period” when she’s with a new caretaker, but unfortunately for her, this adjustment period lasts a hell of a lot longer than the others did, and by the time 3 months of almost no meaningful contact with Karl, Rose decides to take matters into her own hands and ascends into the depths of the factory despite the express orders not to do so. Now, going back to the idea that the 4 lords are still pretty terrible people, I doubt Rose has been kept ignorant to the less savory aspects of her caretaker’s lives, and tbh she probably doesn’t think anything of the fact that the Dimitrescus makes wine out of the blood of virgin women or that Salvatore still does cadou experiments (and had her help on occasion), but I imagine even Rose would find the projects Karl works on to be at least a little

4, cont. gruesome and horrifying in nature, especially since Heisenberg is the one she knows the least about. However, instead of turning Rose away from Heisenberg, these terrifying metal creatures she sees locked up only spark her already insatiable curiosity, and by the time she finally tracks Karl down, Rose is all but trembling to learn more about this horrifyingly fascinating metal world. Unfortunately, Karl is not nearly as happy to see Rose as Rose is to see him, and the engineer all but grabs Rose by the scruff of her neck and drags her back up to the control room, yelling and screaming at her all the while about how she was explicitly instructed not to enter these parts of the factory without his permission. Needless to say that Rose does not enjoy this treatment and immediately lashes out, half out of anger and half out of confusion as to why Karl was treating her like this. He was the one who wanted her here in the first place, so why the hell was he just ignoring her now? It didn’t make any sense and it was starting to piss Rose off, so naturally the only thing left for her to do in order to solve this complicated situation would be to continue to disobey Karl until he either gave up and sent her back to one of the other lords, or finally payed some damn attention to her for once. So that’s exactly what she did. Every single day Rose left her room (which Karl kept telling himself he needed to put a lock on, but never did cuz he’s an idiot) and descended down into the depths of the factory looking for something ogle at or tinker with, and every single day Karl would track her down wherever she’d managed to get to and throw her back upstairs threatening to feed her to the lycans if she did it again. This incredibly frustrating cycle continued on for the better part of the next month or so, finally coming to a head when Rose managed to wander into the part of the factory where the... less than successful experiments got put whenever Karl doesn’t have any further use for them but is feeling too lazy to kill them off himself. Long story short, Rose runs into a Sturm that chases her around the factory, causing all manner of mayhem and destruction, and would have torn her to ribbons had it not been for Karl, who jumped in at the last second and was able to fend the damn thing off long enough for Rose to get the ever living fuck out and back up to the control room where it’s safe. There’s a lot of loud noises and explosions coming from deep within the factory that last for what feels like an eternity, but Rose doesn’t dare venture out again until everything has gone eerily quiet and a deep sense of worry has settled in the pit of her stomach over what had become of her latest caretaker. Turns out the Sturm had recognized its creator and, after watching its initial prey escape because of said creator, quickly decided that it fucking hated Karl with every fiber of its being and wanted him dead if it was the last thing it’s propellers did. Now, we all know that Karl is a big strong boy who’s more than capable of handling his own creations and taking down strong enemies, but the Sturm is a creation that even he struggles to control on good days and today is decidedly not a good day so not only does Karl not have the slightest bit of control over the death machine trying to kill him, but its also a lot stronger than Karl initially thought and apparently not picky about the method which causes Karl’s death, which is evidenced by the nearly dead Sturm ramming itself into a power generator as a final act of defiance and nearly blowing up the whole factory and everybody inside. Heisenberg is able to contain the explosion somehow but not without considerable damage to himself first. Rose is, naturally, quite horrified to find Karl passed out in the elevator that had taken him up from the lower levels of the factory where the explosion was, skin burnt nearly to a crisp in certain areas and blood pooling from just about every part of him, and immediately heads over to try and help her injured caretaker.

4, cont. again cuz I physically can’t stop myself. Now, I imagine that any normal 9 year old probably wouldnt be able to handle this sort of situation in any meaningful way, but i think we can all agree that Rose is the furthest thing from normal (especially considering who raised her) and has probably seen enough blood and gore to not be terribly freaked out by it, but this is where things get a little speculative because we don’t know what Rose’s powers are exactly but we do know from the final cutscene that she does have them, perhaps even a plethora of abilities, and I like to think that some of those powers are related to Ethan’s superhuman healing capabilities, but unlike Ethan however, who from what we’ve seen could only heal himself, Rose can actually heal other people (tho this isn’t something she’s aware of at this point in time). The second the elevator door opens to reveal, what looks to be, a half-dead Karl slumped over in the corner, Rose panics and runs to him, doing everything she can think of save for maybe grabbing him by the collar or slapping him across the face, to try and get Karl to wake up, except nothing works, he wont wake up no matter how hard Rose tries and i imagine this must be incredibly distressing for Rose who never intended for something like this to happen or for her caretaker to die because he had to protect her even tho he told her not to go down there because its dangerous and anything down there WOULD kill her if given the opportunity. Anyways Rose is now full on sobbing on top of Karl like only a 9 year old who just discovered that her actions have consequences can, but unbeknownst to her (and technically Karl cuz he’s a little busy bleeding out all over the floor) Karl’s wounds are slowly beginning to close, the burns on his face and hands shift from a bright red to a dark brown before crusting over and flaking off, and even his breathing, which had been labored and inconsistent at first, began to level out slightly. Karl woke up not long after that and was surprised to find that a) he was still alive, which was cool, b) he was injured but not in indescribable pain, also cool, and c) there was a literal sobbing child all but sitting on top of him, which is definitely not something Karl was expecting but he supposed he’s been met with worse things upon waking up after almost dying so why question it. After taking a moment to gather their bearings, the two return to the safer parts of the factory to rest and recover and for the most part this little incident of their’s goes largely unspoken, with Rose not exactly in the mood to talk about how her disobedience nearly got herself and Karl killed, and Karl being too fucking tired to go after her about it, especially since she seems to have learned her lesson. The only downside to this whole thing is that now Karl has a busted up fuckin leg thats gonna take an eternity to heal even for him, and with so much work to still do he’s more or less forced to drag Rose around the factory and use her like the annoying assistant he never wanted (except he did want her, thats how this whole fucking mess started, you lug), except that Rose, who is more than used to playing lab assistant from her time with Salvatore, quickly proves to be a rather capable and handy person to have around, if only because she knows the difference between a philips and a flathead screwdriver even better than he does. An amicable, if still slightly awkward peace settles over Heisenberg’s factory once Karl starts actively engaging with Rose and giving her something to do on a daily basis, even if its just standing around watching him work and occasionally having her questions about what he’s doing answered. It doesn’t take very long after that for Karl to begin realizing that perhaps throwing a huge tantrum to get Rose to come here only to ditch her upstairs by herself for 3 months might not have been the smartest (or most considerate) thing he’s ever done, and even goes as far as to (kinda) apologize to Rose for being such a dick to her since she arrived.

4, last one i swear. Rose forgives him, though not before adding that she already knew he was an asshole from Alcina, which earns her a halfhearted swipe from Karl that Rose easily dodges with a childish giggle. From that point on their relationship improves astronomically as Karl finally gives in and teaches Rose about about engineering and everything else that goes into making the metal horrors that he’s known for. Karl is shocked at how quickly Rose picks up on the trade, getting to the point where Karl wonders if he should start giving Rose her own projects to work on, but quickly rolls his eyes and groans when he remember that Salvatore was the one responsible for her education up until this point, the mere thought of having to give compliments to that “moronic freak” for giving Rose such a good educational foundation makes him want to vomit despite how secretly impressed he is. Overall, Rose’s time with Heisenberg starts out shaky, very shaky even, but after a bit of disaster and some swallowing of the pride on Karl’s part, they end up growing quite close and have a nice fun Uncle and martass Neice dynamic. They make a good team and Karl does genuinely enjoy having a little assistant around to help him with his projects, even if Rose can sound a bit too much like Alcina on some days for his liking.

5. 3 more years come and go and now Rose is a strong and healthy 12 years old, perhaps riddled with a few more scars and smearings of ash and motor oil across her skin than when she first arrived but still strong and capable nonetheless. Going back to that first statement however, this of course means that it’s time for the other 3 lords to come banging on Karl’s door for a change, all but demanding that Rose be handed back over to them. Karl of course refuses, telling them all to fuck off and that Rose didn’t want a leave the factory, so upon realization that all 4 lords were gathered here with the intention of taking Rose back to live with them indefinitely, a fight immediately breaks out between the 4 siblings, as each one makes their case as to why Rose should be returned to them and not the other 3, which of course none of the 4 lords can come to an agreement about because they ALL want Rose to stay with them. So after another long and pointlessly arduous argument, Alcina finally breaks, proclaiming that they’d be here for all eternity of they didn’t make a decision now, and that, like the first time the 4 siblings argued over whether Rose should go with Heisenberg or return to one of the previous lords, Rose would be the one to decide which of her four caretakers she would return to. The agreement is made reluctantly, mostly on the part of Salvatore, Donna, and Heisenberg, but there was seemingly no other way for them to come to a decision, so it would unfortunately have to be up to Rose to decide which of her 4 caretakers she wants to stay with permanently. Rose is quickly brought before the 4 lords and explained the situation, before being given some time to herself to think and make her final decision. A tense and uneasy silence falls over the 4 lords as they wait for the little girl, who they had shown an uncharacteristic amount of mercy and time and devotion and love in the 12 years since Mother Miranda had brought her to the village with the intention of using her to revive an already lost and long-gone baby that she never would have gotten back no matter how hard she tried. Although they refused to admit it to one another, the lords all secretly knew that Rose had wormed her way into each of their cold, dead hearts, reviving an aspect of their humanity that they’d all thought had been lost ages ago. Rose came to the village bringing with her a wave of death and destruction, and yet throughout her childhood she has brought them nothing but light and life, illuminating their previously dark and desolate existences. The 4 lords loved their Rose very dearly and desperately wanted her to be happy, yet each of them possesses a dark and selfish desire to have Rose pick them over the other 3, to come and live with them forever and fill the hole deep inside them that they never knew needed filling. After a short while, Rose comes back out and stands before her 4 beloved caretakers, looking around nervously as she picks at her fingernails. The silence is thick and heavy as the 4 lords stare at the young girl, waiting with bated breaths for her to give her final verdict. Rose continues to say nothing as tears begin to flow from her eyes, sliding down her cheeks in thick streams as the girl begins to sob, dropping her head and clenching her dress. The 4 lords look between one another in confusion, unsure of what to do with this sudden burst of tears. Rose tearfully admits that she can’t and doesn’t want to choose which of the 4 lords she wants to live with permanently because she loves them all very much and wants to be able to see and live with all of them, like they’ve done thus far. Although the lords detest the idea of having to share Rose with anyone, they reluctantly come to an agreement for the girl’s sake, deciding that they would continue with the arrangement they’ve had thus far, only that Rose would switch between caretakers every 3 months instead of every 3 years, giving rose plenty of opportunities to see each of her caretakers just like she wanted. From then on, Rose continues to live her life

5, cont. growing up and learning more and more from each of her beloved caretakers. Although Rose would likely never know what a normal life looks like, living with 4 criminally insane monsters in the remote mountain village in Romania, it would be impossible to say that she wouldn’t have a happy life despite that. Perhaps its because the girl simply doesn’t know any better, so she doesn’t have the ability to see just how messed up her life and her 4 caretakers really are, but i imagine that Rose probably wouldn’t care very much to learn even if she had the opportunity. She’s a happy little girl living a strange but enjoyable life with the only family she’ll ever need. What more could she possibly ask for?

6. As for how Mother Miranda would play into this whole scenario I’ve just drunkenly spat out, im honestly not 100% sure. Ive seen some people suggesting that MM just kinda chills and lets the lords do what they want with Rose, but tbh I honestly don’t see that happening in this universe. MM would still have been just as crazy and driven to get Eva back as she was in canon, so i doubt she’d willingly standby and let her “false children” take away her one shot of getting her real child back simply because they didn’t want to hurt her, i just don’t personally see that happening. The two most likely scenarios i can come up with is that the Lords either banded together and look Miranda on together, their combined forces being enough to take her down and kill her, OR, Ethan is the one to take down MM like he did in canon but he passes out before he can get to rose, giving the lords (who he hadn’t ended up killing but just escaping from i guess) the opportunity to slide in, grab rose, and hightail it out of there, leaving Ethan’s body to be retrieved by Chris, who, due to not seeing or hearing Rose anywhere, believes that Rose must have been accidentally killed along with MM, which he later tells to Ethan and Mia. Regardless of how MM gets taken out of the picture (or if she’s given room to potentially come back later), the 4 lords retreat with Rose and begin the whole cycle I explained up above, but i did want to briefly address how I saw MM fitting into all of this since she is a vital part of the original story and the biggest obstacle to the lords having anything to do with Rose.

Anyways, that was so much longer than I intended it to be but I had so much fun with it just because it gave me the opportunity to spit some fun ideas and potential plot points out about this cool AU that I like and hope someone does SOMETHING with, please god someone do it, I’d do it myself but i have enough projects at the moment unfortunately. If you managed to make it all the way to the bottom, thank you for reading all of that, I appreciate it, and I hope you enjoyed at least some parts of this, and maybe even agree with some of the things I said. Feel free to leave your own ideas in the comments, I’d love to read them and hopefully if enough people like this maybe i will actually do something with it. Who knows? I certainly dont. Anyways thank you for reading all this, i hope you have a great day, and maybe ill see you around in another post. Bye!!! <3

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fork-tectors · 3 years

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trusted ⁽ᵖᵃʳᵗ ²⁾

; among us au trusted ; unordinary / among us reader insert [ unedited ] [ word count ║ 1108 words ] [ part one ║ part two ]

One (1) impostor remains.

What the absolute hell? No one informed us that there were gonna be two of them. They never at least hinted at it. I thought once we ejected the one, then the nightmare would be over, we'll be back to our separate daily lives. But, surprise, surprise, there were two.

I huffed. This sucks. Finding the first impostor took four days, we don't know how long the next one would take to be discovered. Maybe less? One can only hope so. If it lasts for more than a week, chances are that everyone gets murdered.

I squeezed my eyes shut, rolling over to my side to pretend to sleep.

The transition from evening to the early morning was horrendously long, let's just say that I didn't get the amount of sleep I need to be energized enough. I didn't want to get up from the bed. I covered myself of the blandly coloured blanket, going back to complete my rest. It's so cosy...

I was distracted by the loud knock on my door, I groaned in annoyance.

Enduring the relentless knocking, I finally left my bed. Both of my feet came into contact with the cold metal floor, sending a chill throughout my whole body. I brushed off the feeling and walked over to answer whoever was here.

Not bothering to get ready before answering the door, I open it. The teal haired girl was shyly standing in my doorway, already suited up in her cyan spacewear whilst I was still dressed in the white shirt and shorts they supplied for all of us. It's a uniform, I guess. It's weird, yes.

"Oh! Uh, (Y/n-), I mean, White!" She quickly corrects herself, not that mind her addressing me by my real name. If I was talking one-on-one with another crewmate, I'd feel comfortable if we'd address each other as our name. We all agreed to identify ourselves as our colours. It's easier.

"It's fine, you can call me (Y/n) if you're more comfortable."

"Oh, thanks. But I think it'll be better if I call you by your colour." Elaine or Cyan replies, "By the way, um, you should dress up. They're waiting for you in the cafeteria."

"Fuck, I'm sorry. I'll be quick, I promise!" I head back into my room, hearing her tell me that she'd wait for me, then I heard a click of a door. I grabbed a towel from the clothes shelf and ran into the bathroom.

I finished doing my thing, not wanting to waste more time. I made sure I decently dried myself with towels before I got suited up, so it wouldn't feel uncomfortably moist in it.

Once I finished, I caught up with Elaine, so she didn't have to wait long for me. The cafeteria came into view, and we decided to spit. Everyone was keeping to themselves, except for the trio. Blyke, Isen and Remi.

I quickly acquired the tray with the space food, which wasn't exactly appealing, but if I was to get through the day; I might as well feed myself enough. Unwillingly, I trudged myself into an already occupied table, each table was.

Dark Blue was sat in this one, he was mindlessly pushing the thing around his tray with his utensil; looking like he had no plan on eating the remains. "Um, do you mind if I sit here?" He dropped his fork as a reaction.

I awkwardly chuckled at him. "Nah, it's cool. I don't mind at all."

I set myself beside him, but not too close and ate my food. We made small talk here and there, but nothing of importance. He seemed pretty nice, It'll be a shame if he would be the impostor.

The day went as is. Completing tasks, suspecting impostors, voting to skip due to having not enough shreds of evidence and leaving to our rooms for rest. It seems like the impostor was preparing for something, something big maybe. I was growing more anxious by the minute.

Those days of us waiting led to this moment.

"It's orange, I tell you! He was the one who murdered Cyan! Not me! I was there!" Holden pleaded with desperation in his tone. He's close getting ejected as the time of votation counts down, the number of votes pinned on him was high. It was around maybe four or five.

"Don't fucking lie to my face!" Blyke sneered, "You were alone in navigation with the body. No one else was in there! You're not taking me for a fool, are you?!"

"Orange vented out of Navi! Fucking listen to me! Why do you always take his side?!" Holden gritted his teeth, looking aggravated.

The duration of choosing came to an end. Green was loosening the ejection chute, but not opening it yet, preparing to throw Dark Blue out.

The photos of each crewmate along with the votes they received were displayed on the screen. There only two people who were competing for the ward of ejection. Four voted for Dark Blue, who were Purple, Pink, Green, and Red. Dark Blue and Yellow we're the only ones who went to Orange. I didn't get to vote, the time ran out before I get wrap my head on who to choose.

Not that anything I did would change the result.

Remi must've noticed the ratio and turned to the quiet male, "Yellow, why'd you vote Orange...?" She asked in a not-so-obvious accusatory voice.

Arlo didn't reply, just brushed her question off. My ears hurt as I heard the loud pleas for him to stay on board. "I didn't do anything wrong! I'm innocent!"

His words were left unheard while he was harshly shoved into the chute, no regards for his comfort. The guy was gonna die, maybe not make it too painful.

"I hope you're happy now," was his last sentence to us as he was pushed off the ship and pulled into a breathtaking hug by the dark blanket of space. I watch his body go limp through the thick glass. There was no point in fighting it since he was bound to run out of oxygen in no time.

He’s gonna die.

Our faces were washed over with guilt as the bold text appeared letter-by-letter on the large screen followed by the italicized words. It was mocking us of our mistake.

Holden/Dark Blue was not an impostor. One (1) impostor remains.

Idk where will this go tbh. Consume my creation. Tumblr just hates it when I indent my writing. The formatting sucks ass :)))

#unordinary #unordinary oneshot #unordinary x reader #this has no plot just murder #unordinary reader insert #reader insert #x reader #PART 2 :0 #among us

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theonyxpath · 5 years

Link

With the Creature Collection for Scarred Lands 5e Kickstarter funded and scuttling along, and the Deviant: The Renegades Kickstarter starting this Thursday, we will actually have two KSs running at once for most of their duration.

To be fair, the Creature Collection KS is being run by our friends at Handiworks Games (who also created this gorgeous book of monsters), but it is on our new KS site. Deviant will be run on our long-time KS site with my name on it, and ably run by our own Kickstarter Concierge, James Bell.

As to the whys and wherefores, well, for a while we’ve struggled with a limitation that we can’t run more than one campaign at a time on a single KS site. There’ve been times that we had two very different sorts of projects that we didn’t think would overlap much audience-wise, but one had to wait for the other. So I started looking for options.

Aeon Aexpansion art by Grzegorz Pedrycz

One direction – that we’re still looking at – is to go with a different crowd-funding site. The biggest drawback? They aren’t Kickstarter, so our established audience would need to jump to the new platform. Additionally, we too would have to adapt and adopt a new platform’s processes and quirks.

So we keep looking.

(Another option is to move to pre-orders, which we as a company have not dabbled in, but which I am all too aware of since the many years of White Wolf pre-orders and other traditional sales methods. They work, but I sure feel like we’d be losing a lot of the fun that a KS brings to our interactions with our community. Might give one a try, though).

Meanwhile, I set up a new KS account specifically designed as Onyx Path‘s account, not mine. I gotta tell you, with all the internet harassment out there, I’ve gotten a fair bit just by having my name and picture and bio on that site. Plus, with our delightful KS Concierge James Bell running them now, it can get a tad confusing as to who folks are talking to.

We’re still expecting that it’ll be a longer road to get folks used to the Rich Thomas KS account over to the Onyx Path one – but I think it’s a shorter road than trying to get folks to jump to another whole platform. Plus, the original Scarred Lands Players Guides KS wasn’t run by us anyway, it was run by the late Stewart Wieck as his company and Onyx Path co-owned Scarred Lands at that time.

My thinking was that we were going to have to ask that earlier group of backers to find a new site anyway, why not have them go to our new one and give it a try?

Dark Eras2 art by Brian LeBlanc

Like I mentioned above, we’re also looking at two very different projects. Creature Collection is a great monster book overall, but very much geared to the fantasy genre, Scarred Lands, and 5e with all the twenty-sided rolls to hit and all.

Deviant: The Renegades is the very latest Chronicles of Darkness game line, a gritty world where you seek revenge on those who made you into something… else. It uses the 10-sided dice pool system all of the Chronicles of Darkness lines do, and is a complete game unto itself.

Of course, we’d love it if our audience would completely overlap both these and pledge for them both – that’d be great! But our expectation is that there won’t be much of a mix and one part of our Many Worlds, One Path community will back one KS, and another will back the other.

Creature Collection is also set up to have a different KS experience, with the biggest chunk of the book already finished – I mean laid out and everything – but one of the fun parts of the KS is to have backers pledge for rewards that allow them to add monsters, and for monsters to be added after Stretch Goals are achieved. So more pledges, bigger book!

Deviant is set up as most of our recent KSs have been, and backers can expect to have the full text released to them as the weeks go by. Art and layout are still mostly in the future, but everyone can see exactly what this new game is all about by the end of the KS. Stretch Goals will be mostly for new projects to add to the fun of playing Deviant!

So c’mon and check them out – in their own ways, each is a really excellent book, with a fun KS to get it started!

VtR2 Spilled Blood art by Michele Giorgi

In the Monday Meeting today, we also talked about a new project that is being offered for free on DTRPG. No, it’s not one of ours, it’s Consent in Gaming from Monte Cook Games, written by Shanna Germain and Sean K. Reynolds. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/288535 Basically, it’s a book of advice on how to make sure that scary, disturbing, or freaky events during TTRPG sessions don’t actually mess up the players.

That’s it.

Part of the advice is a handy worksheet that has lists of possible things that might cause issues with the players that each player can go through and check off, with blank spaces to fill in things that you might have a hard time dealing with personally that aren’t on the pre-printed lists. The sheets are tools to be used, like several others like the X-Card that are now available for groups to use for their sessions if they choose to use them.

Judging by the commentary where this product is being discussed, Monte Cook is going to personally come to your group’s gaming session and put a gun the the heads of your gaming friends, and force everyone to fill out these forms. Nope. That’s obviously not going to happen, nor is anyone being forced to implement this tool, or any of the others, around their group’s table.

At the end of the day, these sorts of tools are designed to help players have better gaming experiences, and can be really helpful in assisting players who have previously had bad experiences to come back and give our hobby another chance. We want more people enjoying our hobby, contributing to it, and from my perspective, buying more books and games and stuff so that our creators can make more books and games and stuff.

Let’s not protest things designed to bring more people to our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

Our Creature Collection Kickstarter for Scarred Lands 5e went live last week, funded, and is advancing on creepy-crawly legs towards the first Stretch Goal to add more monsters – that the backers vote on – to the book! This book was designed with amazing art by our friends at Handiwork Games, and they’ll be running the Kickstarter for us on our brand-new Onyx Path Kickstarter page!

And, of course, our next Kickstarter is:

The Deviant: The Renegades Kickstarter launches this Thursday the 19th at 12 noon US Eastern time!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features a recording of our What’s Up With Onyx Path Community Content panel from Gen Con, as well as the usual banter and tomfoolery with the Trio! Go to https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/ or to your favorite podcast venue!

The Onyx Path News had another live broadcast today, where Matthew spoke about the Creature Collection, Deviant: The Renegades, Canis Minor, the Slarecian Vault, the Storypath Nexus, You are not Alone, V5 Cults of the Blood Gods, and more, right here: https://youtu.be/98UQKnD_lSY

Please follow our Twitch channel if you haven’t already done so! Our schedule is filled with games including Vampire, Scarred Lands, TC: Aberrant, Pugmire, Scion, Mage: The Awakening, and Hunter: The Vigil! Visit www.twitch.tv/theonyxpath and give us a follow, and if you have an Amazon Prime membership and haven’t already subscribed to a Twitch channel for free using it, just type Amazon Prime Twitch into Google and please use it on our channel!

Remember, if you miss any content on our Twitch channel, some of it finds its way to our YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/user/theonyxpath Don’t forget though, that some of that content is Twitch exclusive or belongs to the Storytellers running their games, so don’t miss out and remember to follow us!

The Botch Pit continue their actual play of Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2E, with their chronicle “Twice Shy” listenable right here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQfcGvYILEV1vznP5__bOWg

Occultists Anonymous appears on our Twitch channel with their Mage: The Awakening 2E chronicle, but if you’re after a breakdown of episodes, here’s 43 and 44: Episode 43: At the Round Table With Lynnewood Hall scoped out, the cabal rallies with their allies. Seers in Philadelphia must be confronted and the question of … booty is broached.https://youtu.be/r7OdSvwQvE4

Episode 44: Scooby-Doo Routine The cabal infiltrates the lair of the Seers, Lynnewood Hall, and come up against various magical and mundane defenses in search of their stolen Grimoire.https://youtu.be/RqBYdJzZTjQ

The Story Told Podcast have made an episode devoted to how they go about preparing for and running Exalted right here: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/fall-of-jiara-episode-14-planning-a-campaign-with-terry-robinson

Plus, the ENnie award winning Red Moon Roleplaying continue their actual play of The Sacrifice, from V5 Chicago by Night, with Klara Herbol as the Storyteller and Matthew Dawkins as a player! Please check them out on www.redmoonroleplaying.com

Drop Matthew a message via the contact button on matthewdawkins.com if you have actual plays, reviews, or game overviews you want us to profile on the blog!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!

As always, you can find most of Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we’re offering Pugmire character journals and stickers on our RedBubble store!

Conventions!

Save Against Fear: October 12th – 14th GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd PAX Unplugged: December 6th – 8th 2020: Midwinter: January 9th – 12th

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Redlines

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)

Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Development

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Manuscript Approval

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Post-Approval Development

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

V5 Chicago Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Editing

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Post-Editing Development

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

W20 Art Book (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Indexing

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution core (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

Hunter: The Vigil 2e – Sam on the fulls.

Ex3 Lunars – Contracted. More sketches coming in.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers – LeBlanc on this.

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Trinity RMCs – Contracted.

Cults of the Blood God (KS) – Contracted.

Chicago Folio – Getting some art notes out.

Mummy 2 (KS) – Characters being worked on, fulls next.

Memento Mori – Contracted.

City of the Towered Tombs – Contracted.

In Layout

They Came from Beneath the Sea!

Dark Eras 2 – Files with Aileen

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds

VtR Spilled Blood – In progress.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties

Proofing

C20 Cup of Dreams

Signs of Sorcery – Prepping PoD files.

M20 Book of the Fallen – Josh inputting first round of corrections.

DR:E Jumpstart – Sent to Eschaton for approval.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel – With Rose for final approval.

At Press

Trinity Core Screen – At Studio2.

TC Aeon Screen – At Studio2.

Trinity: In Media Res – PoD proofs coming.

Trinity Core – Printing. PoD proofs ordered.

Trinity Aeon – Printing. PoD proofs ordered.

V5: Chicago – Files sent to printer.

Aeon Aexpansion – Backer PDFs out, errata.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Eight years ago today, Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition was released at the Grand Masquerade in New Orleans! Wow, a lot of stuff has happened since then with Vampire! Not to mention the rest of the White Wolf game lines, as well as this little not-so-old company of ours. Why it seems simultaneously both yesterday and a million years ago since I sat in the auditorium signing copies of V20 as the line stretched around the room and out of the door.

#Onyx Path Publishing

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braindamageforbeginners · 6 years

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Hair Loss

For those keeping count, today is Day 16 (that’s chemo doses), Radiation Treatment 10 (that finishes up week two on that calendar), and experimental infusion #3. Here’s a shocker; radiation is awful (we’ll get into details shortly), which is hardly news, but it’s worth saying, because there is a small contingent of Americans (mostly) who are gleefully looking forward to nuclear apocalypse, for reasons ranging from “I have a really cool bunker, and I want to know what humans taste like” to a very strange group of Christians who believe that Jesus will come back and nuke the planet (which doesn’t seem very Christ-like, but Apocalyptic Christianity is a very, very strange doctrine, which is why most Christians I know are somewhat doubtful). Before you push the nuclear button (or vote for someone who claims they’ll do it), I would urge you to get written, notarized guarantees of immunity from Jesus, because radiation is utterly miserable. Again, I’m in a waiting room with people whose faces are literally - not figuratively - falling off; and I’m getting - from what my doctors say - a relatively specific, mild-dosage of the stuff. And I’m still feeling wretched, so I’m pretty sure that exposure to weaponized radiation would be unimaginably awful. That is today’s Life Lesson.

I started today checking in at the lobby of the Cancer Center of the Large Hospital in Socal, which is like Freshman Registration; they tell you where to go, and when (even though I have a pretty good idea of where I need to be, and at what time, you do need someone to flag your arrival in the system, otherwise everyone will ignore you). I was flagged for having new insurance - regular readers will remember I called many, many, many people, and filled out assorted forms in order to guarantee continuity of care. I was assured by some billing demon that, if I provided them with all appropriate information prior to the New Year, they’d be able to figure it out. So, you can understand my consternation at some receptionist who said they were still processing my claims and/or insurance information.If you are involved in health administration in any capacity, the only - ONLY - acceptable response to a patient waiting for paperwork to clear is, “You ain't got no problem, Jules. I'm on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them niggas out and wait for the cavalry, which should be coming directly.”

This doubly-pissed me off, because the radiation folks somehow figured this out yesterday, in only a few hours, without any administrative staff (if I was middle-management in the medical system, I would be very, very worried that not-MBA-possessing nurses were capable of doing the job better than an entire billing department). I was mentally calling upon my Inner Sith Lord and reenacting Carthage (we’ll return to that thought momentarily) when Dad advised me to count to ten. Good news, the receptionist had me sign some sort of legal waiver that would enable them to retroactively bill insurance and/or sue me (or some combination of the two), and sent me on my merry way.

A brief aside; I’ve noticed, since Surgery #3, that my fight or flight impulse has dramatically shifted from “Skulk away glaring” to “Don’t be afraid to use your teeth.” I don’t know if that’s some sort of neurological effect, but it is getting 1000% better results than being good and hoping for some sort of karmic reward. I’m not going to discourage kindness or good behavior, and I’ll certainly do my best to foster those qualities in the future. At present, we live in a society where the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and you can not just wait and hope someone will take care of you. Or, that could just be the radiation turning me into the Hulk. Please, don’t take that as license to abuse the nurses or receptionists, but you’d be amazed at how well being ugly can cut through stupidity (I will also admit that I’ve had 16 years in the system, I’m pretty good at spotting the gristle in the steak).

There’s also a chance I had an angel on my shoulder for that incident; Research Coordinator told me later he’d heard about my insurance woes and made some calls on my behalf, and said I shouldn’t encounter any more insurance issues in the foreseeable future. Which is a victory for me. Then Research Coordinator hit me with a bomb; they want various samples once a week every week for a year (and the clock on that doesn’t even start until February), as well as experimental chemo drug infusions (and good old Temodar) every couple of weeks. Now, don’t get me wrong; if that’s what it takes to survive, I’ll do it, but that’s a massive commitment without any guarantee that it’ll work (Research Coordinator pointed out that Dr. A, who’s running the trial, got a PhD in glioblastoma treatment, which is probably why my Nocal Mad Scientist Oncologist referred me to him). And I guess it’s better to aggressively and constantly manage a disease, but it still smarts. And the medical team here is absolutely superb; I spent two days trying to get my pharmacy to renew one of my prescriptions (an antidepressant, to be exact); I made a note of it on the back of my hand to ask Dr. B (Dr. A’s research partner)(I’m beginning to suspect this man is some sort of dark trickster god, given his penchant for chaos and his warped sense of humor)(in other words, a kindred soul) about getting a renewal, since the pharmacy told me they were waiting for physician authorization. Dr. B didn’t originally prescribe me this medication, but, within minutes, he’d photographed the back of my hand (which had the medication and dosage on it)(I had it written down elsewhere, but I was hooked up to an IV, and had it written on my hand both as a reminder, and because I knew digging through my pockets for a Post-It wouldn’t be an option), and said I should call the pharmacy by the end of the day. Literally within four hours of that conversation, the pharmacy had my prescription ready. Which was something of a morale boost; since that’s the sort of competence and can-do attitude that will keep me alive.

Also, because life is a horrible march to death, my third-most-feared radiation symptom has showed up: hair loss. Fortunately for my sense of vanity, it’s not noticeable at the moment, and I’ve received wildly differing estimates on the severity, duration, and size of mange-patches to expect. If you read this, please don’t shave your head out of some sort of misguided solidarity or empathy (though I’m interested in any imaginative hat ideas anyone has); I appreciate the gesture, but I’d really rather you make a donation of some sort to a hospital or medical research group. Still, I’m up, coherent, capable of understanding how much trouble I’m in (again, it’s telling that my radiation oncologist double-checked that in our first meeting), and determined to find the punchline to what is the most horrible joke I’ve ever heard. So, I suppose that’s some sort of victory. Still, a year of Gatorade (”Drink of the Damned”) and mega-chemo hangovers.

Anyway… WEIGHT: 98 kg CONCENTRATION: Good. Maybe. It’s hard to tell on these all-day visits, because there’s constant noise, interruptions, forms, and discomfort. MEMORY: Very good. Again, I wasn’t really in a good setting to assess that. APPETITE: Not bad. I’m still eating, but not very much. I suspect that has little to do with the weird drugs, and more to do with drinking 17 gallons of Gatorade. ACTIVITY LEVEL: Not bad, but I also spent the vast majority of the day sitting or lying down. SLEEP QUALITY: Not bad; I slept most of last night, but not very well. COORDINATION/DEXTERITY: Good. I guess? Again, I spent most of today lying down or sitting, so I can’t really judge that. PHYSICAL: That nasty stiffness/fatigue I’ve learned to fear from the other injections is creeping into my neck and shoulders, so I’m sure I’ll be praying for death tomorrow morning. And I have a nasty headache at the suture site (Radiation Oncologist told me she’d be willing to prescribe decadron, but she also knows I hate that drug, and there’s no guarantee it’d do anything for inflammation at a surgical site, so I have a Tylenol salt-lick this evening). SIDE EFFECTS: I’m going bald. And I feel generally lousy.

#brain cancer #brain tumor #cancer

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allonsysilvertongue · 7 years

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Wiping History

“What will happen when we get to your arena?” she demanded. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.“ 75 arenas and one colossal task for Effie Trinket. Hayffie. Post-MJ. Previously

4. The Old Colleague

For the second time that day, Effie checked her watch as she hurried down the third floor corridor of the Parliament that Plutarch had so graciously given to her for the duration of the project.

Inwardly, she cursed Enobaria for being the reason she was running late.

The phone call Effie had placed to the victor of District Two had been disastrous from start to finish. For starters, Enobaria had not been pleased at all that Effie had her contact details much less knowledge that she had moved to District Five. Of course, Effie had tried to explain that any information pertaining to her whereabouts she received from Plutarch which in itself was a mistake because the woman blew her top, going off about being tagged even after President Snow had fallen. Truthfully, Effie did not think there was any surveillance on any living victors except that the Government kept information on where they were currently residing.

Effie was not easily intimidated not even by a woman with fangs but she did grow tired of being on the receiving end of her tirade. When Enobaria finally slammed the phone down after Effie managed to get a word in regarding the arena, Effie let out a breath in relief. She took Enobaria’s ‘do not ever call me again or I’ll rip your throat out’ to simply mean ‘no’.

Some people just wanted to live in peace without being dragged down memory lane and she could certainly respect that.

Effie pushed open the door to the meeting room and hurried in, quickly noting that nearly everyone was present, including Barron Holland, the leader of their demolition team. She nodded at each of them in turn, apologising for being late.

“I was not expecting you here, Plutarch,” Effie remarked.

“Oh, just the off-chance that I was around the area and as it is I also have some excellent news to share,” Plutarch smiled. “Haymitch Abernathy will be joining the team. I have since officially appoint him as representative of the victors as a whole.”

If Effie was the kind to groan outwardly in displeasure, she might have done so. The only indication that she was in any way affected by the news was by the slight clench of her jaws.

“From my visit to Twelve a few days ago, I had the notion that he might be,” Effie said when Cressida turned to look at her questioningly. “He said something to the effect of wanting to see the destruction of the arena through.”

“Perhaps he does not trust us to do the job,” Plutarch chuckled. “But be that as it may, it will make for a good publicity.”

“No,” Effie disagreed firmly on that. “This will be difficult on the victors as it is. We do not need to make a spectacle out of it. Cressida and Pollux will film what is necessary for their post-war documentary with the interest of preserving this as part of our country’s history – that is all and nothing more.”

A murmur of assent rippled through the room, and Barron who came from a district seconded her decision for which she was grateful.

“It is too short a notice for Haymitch to attend this meeting but I trust that you will keep him updated?” Plutarch said in a clipped tone.

“Yes, certainly,” Effie nodded. “Plutarch, I need your word that there will be no camera crews except for Cressida and Pollux when each of these victors arrives in the city. If the public noticed that they are here so be it, this project would hit the papers soon enough, but I will not have them hounded by the press. I gave them my word and now I need yours.”

Plutarch, she noticed, looked as if he had swallowed something sour. It was not every day that he was talked to in this manner by anyone, much less her but those victors are hers and she would protect them while they were here to the best of her ability.

“Of course,” Plutarch bowed before excusing himself from the meeting.

“That went better than expected,” Cressida commented.

“Yes, I am glad he did not argue on it. He controls the media and if I do not draw the lines….”

They spent the next half an hour going through the procedures with Effie giving Cressida full creative control on her plan for the documentary. From Cressida’s history with the victors, Effie trust that she would have their best interests at heart and thus gave her permission to interview the victors as long as they consented to it.

“The hovercraft should leave for the first arena as scheduled,” their pilot updated. “We’re planning for two arenas per day. If any of the arenas are situated close to each other, the plan is to do more – at which point, I will advise you accordingly.”

Effie nodded.

“We’re on track,” Barron chimed in. “My team is ready, and the explosives are stocked.”

“Haymitch should arrive before then,” said Cressida.

“He will,” Effie assured.

That was another thing she needed to arrange. He would need some place to stay and she certainly was not going to offer the extra room in her apartment to him.

XxX

Haymitch arrived one day before the day the first arena was scheduled to be destroyed. He hopped off the train with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, his hair messy from the wind and his clothes a little rumpled from the journey, and just like that, at the sight of him, her heart skipped a beat.

She hated how traitorous her heart was.

“Sweetheart,” he greeted, his smile was cocky and smug as if he won something just by being here.

Still, she was not an idiot. On any other circumstances, Haymitch Abernathy would not have been happy to have to set foot back here in the city but since he was here on some personal challenge that he had set for himself, and because he knew she really did not want him here, she figured it was the exception.

“Haymitch,” she said cordially. “I never thought I’d say this but welcome back.”

He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

“I’ll be gone as soon as it’s done," he said and then looked her way. "And you'll be coming home with me this time 'round."

He was so certain, so confident but Effie said nothing to that.

She spent the entire car ride staring out of the window wondering just how he was acting as if the argument they had on the day he brought Katniss home didn’t happen. That scene was still fresh in her mind even after all these months, and she could remember how hurt she felt when she found out he was leaving her again or worse, the betrayal that twisted in her heart when she learnt of his vote.

The feelings had dulled with time and she had months to think it through. Haymitch had never done anything without a reason, she understood that. Still, he could at least have told it herself instead of her finding out from Johanna.

You forgave Johanna, a voice whispered. She voted yes.

Except of course, Johanna didn’t leave her behind twice and because of their history, she somehow held Haymitch up to a certain degree that she did not impose on Johanna. With Haymitch, it was the cumulative events and she had been exhausted, hurting and angry.

“You excited?”

“What about?” Effie turned her gaze to him.

“Working together again – you and I.”

“Could it be that the position has reversed?” she asked, referring to years before when she had been eager to work together with him.

He narrowed his eyes and she went back to staring out of the window until they reached their destination.

"What's Clemens getting outta this?"

"I am not privy to the details," she answered truthfully, "but he has run out of favours and I'm certain he knows it will be in his best interest to cooperate. Now," she turned to him just outside of the door of the place he would be staying for the coming weeks or months, "are you completely sure that you want to do this?"

She was still trying her luck to dissuade him but he had always been as stubborn as her.

"Yeah."

With that, Effie turned the key and pushed the door open. She had managed to rent the place on a short notice and billed the expenses to the project's finances. Considering that she did not have much time to look around, she was still proud of this place. It came completely furnished, granted the furniture were a little mismatched from her taste but one cannot really be choosy right after the war. There was one bedroom and an adjoining kitchen. The living room had a two-seater sofa, coffee table and small television.

He let his bag fall to the floor with a thud and surveyed the place.

“You'll be staying here until the end of this project. The faucet in the bathroom sink is not working unfortunately, a burst pipe or something," she waved her hand and she had used that little fact to ask for a reduced rent. She could be very adamant when she wanted to. "Other than that, everything works as it should be. I trust it is to your liking?”

“I'll stock up a couple bottle of booze and everything will be right as rain,” he shrugged. “You'll tell me where I can get the alcohol, yeah? This place's changed."

She produced a map of the neighbourhood and he smirked.

"Always prepared," he chuckled, taking the proffered map from her. "Where are you staying?”

Effie held her tongue and then duly released the information to him. Sooner or later, he would find out.

"There," her finger tapped an area on the map, "about ten minutes' walk from here."

"So that it'll be easier for you to come over and haul my ass out of bed in case I'm late?" He teased.

That had certainly been one of the points she considered when choosing this place but she merely smiled at him.

“You want me to walk you back?” he asked, startling her.

“I will be fine. Thank you for the offer.”

Haymitch sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "Don't do this, Effie. Don't talk to me like... I'm a stranger."

She looked away and that was when she saw the glint of gold under the sleeve of his shirt. It was the bangle she had given him during the third quarter quell and he was still wearing it after all this time, even when he had no reason to.

"See you tomorrow, Haymitch. Nine am. Do not be late."

With that, Effie closed the door behind her and let out a trembling breath.

Haymitch isn't the only one who can be protective. Effie can be protective over her victors just as well. Now that they're both here in the same place, tell me what you think!

#hayffie #effie trinket #haymitch abernathy #plutarch heavensbee #johanna mason #wiping history

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janekira2 · 4 years

Text

The Scoop: July 22, 2020 Edition

In this edition

COVID-19 special enrollment period in Massachusetts ends Thursday, July 23

Montana exchange insurers propose average rate increases of about 3% for 2021

Tennessee rate proposals range from 6% decrease to increase of nearly 13%; UnitedHealthcare rejoins for 2021

Nevada exchange board approves extension of open enrollment through January 15, 2021

Georgia enacts laws to protect consumers from surprise balance billing, extend postpartum Medicaid coverage

Illinois Department of Insurance fines four major insurers more than $2 million for mental health parity violations

South Dakota Medicaid expansion advocates will begin gathering signatures to get expansion measure on 2022 ballot

22 states, DC sue to block Trump administration’s elimination of LGBTQ healthcare nondiscrimination protections

Appeals court upholds Trump administration rules for short-term health plans

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to reinstate Arkansas Medicaid work requirement

COVID-19 special enrollment period in Massachusetts ends Thursday, July 23

To address the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all of the fully state-run health insurance exchanges established special enrollment periods to allow uninsured residents to enroll in health coverage even if they didn’t have qualifying events. Those enrollment windows have mostly ended, although a few are still ongoing. The COVID-19 special enrollment period in Massachusetts is scheduled to end this week, on July 23. After that, residents in Massachusetts will need a qualifying event in order to enroll in a private individual-market plan. ConnectorCare plans will continue to be available year-round to people who are newly eligible for that coverage, and Medicaid/CHIP (MassHealth) enrollment is also available year-round.

Montana exchange insurers propose average rate increases of about 3% for 2021

Last week, Montana’s insurance commissioner publicized a summary of the rate changes that insurers have proposed for 2021. In the individual market, insurers are proposing rate increases that vary from about 2 to 5 percent, with an average proposed increase of about 3.1 percent. In the small group market, insurers are proposing rate changes that range from a 4.5 percent decrease to a 3.7 percent increase, although very few members would be affected by the proposed rate decrease; most would instead experience a small rate increase.

The specific details of the rate filings are not yet available, but Montana’s insurance commissioner, Matt Rosendale, has said that he believes it’s inappropriate for insurers to increase rates at all in the current climate, due to strong profits and the reduction in elective medical procedures amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Public comments on the proposed rate changes are being accepted by the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance through August 1.

Tennessee rate proposals range from 6% decrease to increase of nearly 13%; UnitedHealthcare rejoins for 2021

Individual market insurers in Tennessee have filed proposed premiums for 2021 that range from a decrease of 6 percent for Cigna, to an increase of nearly 13 percent for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. The filings all include an additional data set that specifically details the anticipated impact of COVID-19 on insurer costs in 2021, although insurers’ projections vary from a slight reduction in costs as a result of COVID-19, to an increase of 4.4 percentage points.

UnitedHealthcare plans to rejoin Tennessee’s individual market for 2021 (just as they will in Maryland), with plans available in western and central Tennessee.

Nevada exchange board approves extension of open enrollment through January 15, 2021

In states that use HealthCare.gov, open enrollment for 2021 coverage will run from November 1 to December 15, 2020. But states that run their own exchange platforms have the flexibility to add additional time to their enrollment windows. Nevada Health Link’s board of directors voted this week to approve an extension to the upcoming open enrollment period: It will begin November 1, 2020 and continue until January 15, 2021.

California, Colorado, and DC have all permanently extended open enrollment. Pennsylvania’s new state-run exchange, which will debut this fall, will also extend open enrollment for 2021 coverage until January 15, 2021.

Georgia enacts laws to protect consumers from surprise balance billing, extend postpartum Medicaid coverage

Earlier this month, we told you about bills that had been passed by Georgia lawmakers to protect consumers from surprise balance billing and to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for new mothers. Last week, Governor Kemp signed both pieces of legislation into law.

The surprise balance billing protection law will take effect in January 2021. The extension of postpartum Medicaid coverage was dependent on funding being included in the state’s budget, and that funding was left intact in the FY2021 budget that lawmakers approved in late June. But Georgia may also need a waiver or state plan amendment approved by the federal government before the extended postpartum Medicaid coverage could take effect.

Illinois Department of Insurance fines four major insurers more than $2 million for mental health parity violations

The Illinois Department of Insurance has announced fines of over $2 million levied against five major insurers for violations of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. The fines were levied against Celtic, two Cigna entities, HCSC (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois), and UnitedHealthcare for violations that were discovered from 2015-2017, including step therapy and prior authorization violations, failure to use medical necessity guidelines, and failure to establish internal protocols to ensure that plans were in compliance with mental health parity rules.

The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a federal law that was enacted in 2008 (and expanded by the ACA to include individual market plans), requires health insurers to cover mental health and substance abuse treatment — assuming they cover such treatment at all — with the same coverage rules and limitations that they use for medical/surgical care. Large group plans are not required to cover mental health and substance abuse treatment (but if they do, they must do so in the same manner that they cover medical/surgical care), but the ACA does require individual and small group plans to cover mental health and substance abuse care as an essential health benefit.

South Dakota Medicaid expansion advocates will begin gathering signatures to get expansion measure on 2022 ballot

South Dakota is the latest state where voters may eventually get the opportunity to determine whether the ACA’s Medicaid expansion is enacted in the state. Last week, South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg published explanations for the two petitions that will be circulated in an effort to gain enough signatures to get on the 2022 ballot. Both call for Medicaid expansion in South Dakota under the terms of the ACA — one via a constitutional amendment and the other via an initiated measure that would require lawmakers to implement Medicaid expansion in the state. The proposals are sponsored by Rick Weiland, a former U.S. Senate candidate and former regional director of FEMA. Medicaid expansion advocates will have until November 2021 to gather the signatures necessary to get the measures on the 2022 ballots: Nearly 17,000 for the initiated measure, and nearly 34,000 for the constitutional amendment.

Voters in Oklahoma approved Medicaid expansion earlier this summer, and voters in Missouri will have a chance to do so on their August 4, 2020 primary ballot. Medicaid expansion had previously been approved by voters in Maine, Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska.

Thus far, South Dakota is one of 13 states that refuse to accept federal funding to expand Medicaid. Coverage is not available to non-disabled adults without minor children, regardless of how low their income is. And parents of minor children can only qualify for Medicaid in South Dakota with a household income that doesn’t exceed 53 percent of the poverty level (for a household of three, that amounts to less than $1,000/month in total household income). There are currently an estimated 14,000 low-income adults in South Dakota who are in the coverage gap, with no access to any financial assistance with their health coverage. If Medicaid is expanded as called for in the ACA, a single person would qualify for Medicaid in South Dakota with an income of up to about $17,600 (that number increases a little each year as the poverty level rises).

22 states, DC sue to block Trump administration’s elimination of LGBTQ healthcare nondiscrimination protections

Last month, the Trump administration finalized regulations that roll back Obama era health care nondiscrimination protections. The rule, which changes how ACA Section 1557 is interpreted and enforced, removes nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, sexual orientation, and termination of pregnancy. LGBTQ groups soon filed suit against the rule change. This week, attorneys general from 22 states and DC filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Trump administration’s new rules for Section 1557. The states challenging the rule include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

Appeals court upholds Trump administration rules for short-term health plans

Two years ago, the Trump administration finalized new rules for short-term health insurance plans, allowing them to have initial terms of up to 364 days and total duration, including renewals, of up to three years. The rule was challenged in court, but it was upheld by a federal district judge last summer, and has now been upheld again by a panel of judges for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The 2-1 ruling from the appeals court panel allows short-term plans to continue to have much longer durations than they were allowed to have in 2017 and 2018. But short-term plans have stricter state-based limits in more than half the states, and are not available at all in some states.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Health Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce issued a lengthy report detailing the myriad ways that short-term plans leave consumers without adequate coverage, and the misleading marketing and sales tactics that are sometimes used to sell these plans.

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to reinstate Arkansas Medicaid work requirement

Medicaid work requirements have been endorsed by the Trump administration and approved for several states. But due to legal challenges and the widespread unemployment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are no Medicaid work requirements currently in effect anywhere in the country. Arkansas implemented the nation’s first Medicaid work requirement in 2018, which quickly led to thousands of people losing their health coverage. A federal judge overturned the state’s Medicaid work requirement in March 2019, and a federal appeals court panel upheld that decision earlier this year. Now the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the case and allow the Medicaid work requirement to be reinstated in Arkansas once the COVID-19 situation resolves enough to make that practicable.

Louise Norris is an individual health insurance broker who has been writing about health insurance and health reform since 2006. She has written dozens of opinions and educational pieces about the Affordable Care Act for healthinsurance.org. Her state health exchange updates are regularly cited by media who cover health reform and by other health insurance experts.

The post The Scoop: July 22, 2020 Edition appeared first on healthinsurance.org.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246807 https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2020/07/22/the-scoop-july-22-2020-edition/

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keneerike · 4 years

Text

On George Floyd, Donald Trump, and Social Progress

[Listen to the audio version here: https://soundcloud.com/user-31492767/on-george-floyd-donald-trump-and-social-progress-jttg-june-2020]

A number of people have asked about my thoughts on the George Floyd situation, so I'll explore that below.

On George Floyd and Officer Chauvin:

Office Chauvin should go down for manslaughter for leaving his knee on Floyd's neck after he was no longer a threat. He deserves that punishment for his negligence.

George Floyd’s epilogue is less clear-cut.

"George Floyd" as '”Victim'”? Certainly.

"George Floyd" as "Martyr"? No.

What he was doing before he was 'cuffed on the ground set the events in motion. He is not a figure to idolize.

We've got to be careful about how freely we throw around the "Hero" label.

Police Brutality and The Biggest Threats to Blacks in America:

Police brutality is a problem.

The biggest threat to blacks in America? Not even close.

There exist larger, more pressing hurdles facing the average black person in America on a daily basis.

Income, health, education, parenting concerns: Just a few of the issues more likely to impact your life than the transgressions of the police.

Heck, statistically, black-on-black civilian crime is much more likely to impair---or end---the life of the average black person than a run-in with the police.

I'm not denying that racism---at the hands of the police or others--- exists. Or recommending silence on issues that matter to you most. Just putting the spectre of police fatalities into context.

One concern that's seldom voiced: The assault on free speech of anyone who has a dissenting opinion---not just on this topic, but others---is dangerous. We've got to be careful about allowing emotions and hidden agendas to control narratives.

Be mindful of those in the background pulling the strings who benefit when the country settles for low-hanging fruit.

On Creating Effective Protests:

A couple excerpts from posts past....

Two problems facing the protest community:

1) Inability to Create Change

2) Sullied Reputation: “Protesters are Thugs.”

"They only have one question: What’s in it for them?

Why should they invest the time and effort to help you, beyond offering empty gestures and lip service?

It could be an emotional reason or a financial one. It could be to create tranquility inside their own minds. You have to give people a reason to get off the sidelines.

Until you do that, you’re just pounding sand."

Full Article: Freddie Gray, Dirty Cops, and The Problem With (Peaceful) Protests

https://justtaptheglass.com/post/117772177598/freddie-gray-protests

"The problem with this anthem movement, like most demonstrations, is that the players have no specific stated goal. “Awareness” is not precise enough, nor is “starting a conversation”. Only the most dyed-in-the-wool bigots deny racism exists. Awareness is overrated. Problems don’t get solved without actionable solutions and the first step to meeting a goal is defining the target.

Open discourse helps. Shaming people in to silence does not. Activists are too quick to dismiss detractors as racists, instead of encouraging an exchange of ideas. All intellectual-dishonesty does is stunt progress. We will not get anywhere if people are afraid to speak up."

Full Article: Anthem Demonstrations and Protests in The NFL

https://justtaptheglass.com/post/166323807657/patriotism-in-the-nfl

Protest gatherings that devolve into looting and vandalism mobs just undermine the cause. That mayhem puts businesses on notice about locating their stores in impoverished neighborhoods---those who need convenient access to services the most---as well.

Looting and polluting is not the way.....

Many of the people protesting aren't doing much to move the needle. A sizable portion of them arrive with ulterior motives, content just to be seen or galvanized by being part of a crowd.

And then there are those looking for opportunities to act up, emboldened by the belief they'll get away with it.

(Well, most of the time.)

Also lost in the shuffle is the impact of these mass gatherings on the COVID infection curve. Politicians, no strangers to double-talk, are condoning protests, arguing that social activism "trumps" any other considerations, be they pathological or ideological. This sort of pandering casts doubt on the actual threat level of the Coronavirus to local municipalities and undermines government credibility going forward.

Apparently, infection brakes for politics.

The Impact on the 2020 Elections:

I'd be remiss not to throw in a few words about the potential impact on the 2020 elections:

A lot of criticism has already been lobbed President Trump's way: that's expected given his position in the free world. Like every modern-day POTUS, he will receive inordinate censure for the bad---and more praise for the good---than he actually deserves. President Trump is a particularly-conspicuous target because of the frequency (and carelessness) with which he communicates through social media.

That said, the Floyd saga should have negligible impact on Trump's chances for a second term. Ditto for local elections.

"But what about all those protesters, civil unrest, and celebrity commentary on the need for change? That imagery has got to play in the coming elections, right?"

Impact Bias: We overestimate the importance and duration of most events on our lives.

Most notable events hit hard for a few weeks and then gradually fade away from national consciousness We remember what happened, but it recesses further and further into our minds as time passes.

That's never been more true with how quickly news cycles turn nowadays. The world reacts for a short while and then everyone goes back to their normal lives.

Many celebrities and organizations comment on notable events for publicity purposes, seizing the opportunity to pander to fan bases. They offer a sympathetic quote, bask in the goodwill, and consider it "mission accomplished". Talk is cheap and committed problem-solvers are in rare supply. In an uncertain world, there will always be something to get outraged about in the future.

You know, like the way Americans followed through on eradicating Boko Haram after the 2014 kidnappings in Nigeria, which birthed the #BringBackOurGirls Movement.

That terrorist organization is still alive and wreaking havoc in West Africa, but the world has moved on to to the next cause du jour.

But hey, "awareness" is what counts, right?

And many of the same protesters out in force in cities across the country are those most likely to skip the voting booth on Election Day. Easy answers to difficult questions never go out of style and most activists would rather look the part than actually do the work required to get results.

If you hated Trump before the incident, you still hate him. And if you're one of his supporters, nothing new hit the scene to alter that.

There was---and still is---a lot of talk about foreign influence on the last presidential election. For centuries, governments have attempted to influence foreign policies for their own agenda. With the advent of social media, that's never been easier to accomplish.

Don't be fooled, though: voter apathy, misaligned values, and flawed political outreach were much bigger factors in the previous presidential election outcome than any foreign interference. As convenient as it is to blame Russian boogeymen, the Democratic Party committed serious strategic blunders in their approach to winning the vote.

Trump opponents would be wise to focus on the real reasons the 2016 contests didn't go their way. Come to terms with the truth and the path to victory becomes much clearer.

Do let me know what you think about the Floyd situation and the ramifications for Americans---of all colors---going forward.

#George Floyd #Psychology #Business #Police #Donald Trump #Government #Controversy #Race Relations #Election 2020 #Strategy

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dhgfashe · 4 years

Link

Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:

The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes:

In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.

He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action:

ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)

argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)

argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)

appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)

begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)

observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)

statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)

misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);

inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);

non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;

post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)

meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)

excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)

short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);

slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);

confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)

straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)

suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)

weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)

Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:

Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.

#We need this more than ever these days

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

When a presidential race that was supposed to be won by a mainstream moderate instead ends being captured by a far-right gadfly, you better believe pollsters are gonna get some scrutiny. But when this situation took place in the first round of French elections in 2002, bumping the incumbent prime minister from the final round, it wasn’t just the failure of prediction that led to a polling protest. Instead, people were concerned that opinion polling, itself, had caused the outcome.

Twenty-four years earlier, France had muzzled opinion polling, banning the publication of poll results for a week before any election out of fear that voters were following the polls, rather than the other way around. That changed in 2001, and the 2002 election was the first time since the 1970s that French voters had been able to make their choice knowing what their neighbors were likely planning to do.

As hard as it may be for some of us to imagine (especially readers of this website), laws limiting when opinion polls can be published before an election are pretty common. Of the 216 countries whose election rules are tracked by the United Nations-backed Electoral Knowledge Network, 92 have some kind of regulated blackout period where polls cannot be published. Even after its 2002 rule change, France still has a 24-hour blackout period before the vote. Experts say most of these laws are based around the same premise: Polls can influence votes. If you know that most of your fellow citizens are planning to pick a specific candidate, you might decide to be part of the winning team. If you know the person you’d pick is so far ahead that there’s no chance of them losing, maybe you’ll chill out and stay home on election day.

Election poll blackouts are common outside the U.S.

Number of countries per opinion poll blackout duration

Length of Poll Blackout Number of Countries 1 day before election 21

–

2-3 days 31

–

4-5 days 11

–

6-7 days 8

–

8-9 days 2

–

10 or more days 19

–

Not applicable* 33

–

No information available 91

–

* “Not applicable” includes countries that have no regulations limiting the publication of polls, as well as countries that don’t conduct public polling and ones that don’t have elections.

Source: The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network

But despite the power this fear has to shape law and fuel media narratives, the evidence supporting it is complex. Polls probably do influence how people vote in some situations, experts say. But it’s not anything like a universal, definitive effect. What’s more, some of them told me they aren’t sure that would be a bad thing. The question isn’t just whether polls determine outcomes, it’s also a debate over how people should decide their vote.

Looking through the published research on how polling might influence elections, the first thing you find is that the risk has a name — “the bandwagon effect.” The second thing you find is that paper after paper seeks to figure out if the bandwagon effect is real. How could a thing have a name but still need proof of its existence? “It’s very difficult to get at and isolate this effect,” said Tom van der Meer, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Like many social science questions where the outcome is often determined by interactions between more than one factor, this is not an easy effect to study. Laboratory settings tend to show a bandwagon effect in action, van der Meer said. But these are spaces where research subjects look at pretend poll results and place hypothetical votes, which may not reflect the real world. Observational studies — looking at the outcomes of real elections — are thickets of potential causal factors, nearly impossible to hack your way through. How do you determine whether it was the polls themselves that shifted the vote, or the polls that shaped media coverage that, in turn, shifted the vote? You can see the problem.

But, on the whole, experts say the bandwagon is real. How real, though, depends on the context. “Are we talking about turnout, voting for a particular candidate, support for an issue …?” said Todd Hartman, a professor of quantitative social science at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “Depending on what area you’re talking about, the effects are stronger or weaker.”

For example, in 2013, researchers used a change in French law to get an idea of the potential impact of polls on voter turnout. Prior to 2005, citizens of France who lived in territories west of the country didn’t get to vote until after the mainland election had ended. Thus, they had the chance to see exit polls before they even went to cast their ballots. That changed after 2005, so researchers could compare several years worth of elections and see how knowledge of the presumed winner changed voter behavior. The result: After 2005, there was a nearly 12 percentage point increase in voter turnout. Far more people in those overseas territories voted when they didn’t already know who the winner was — a finding that has big implications for countries like the United States, where time zone differences mean voters in one part of the country can see the completed exit polls from earlier in the day.

But the effects aren’t always that distinct. A different paper, published in 2016, involved a series of experiments that sorted more than 20,000 Dutch voters into groups that were then exposed to different kinds of polling data. Surveys showed that the people given just poll numbers didn’t change their vote intention at all — they looked no different than the group that received no polling information. But a third group, which was presented with a narrative-style interpretation of the polls showing one party gaining ground over time, did change their intended vote, becoming 2 percentage points more likely than the control group to vote for the party that was surging. That’s a small effect, but it could matter in a tight race.

Another study showed that American voters with strong partisan preferences alter their votes to conform to opinion poll results that show what their preferred party likes or doesn’t like — but won’t do the same to match overall American opinion. Likewise, while polls won’t affect every voter, they can, in aggregate, become self-fulfilling prophecies that heighten how people feel about a given issue.

But while the experts I spoke to generally agreed that bandwagon effects exist under certain conditions, they weren’t as certain about the implications of those effects and what, if anything, we should do about it. They even disagreed with themselves at times. “It’s a hard question,” said Neil Malhotra, professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

On the one hand, he told me, you don’t want people making choices in elections based on the kind of herding behavior that leads to a mediocre restaurant having a line down the block for no reason other than that there’s always a line there. Sometimes, popularity isn’t actually a proxy for quality. On the other hand, polls can provide voters with valuable information that allows them to vote strategically, especially in primaries where you’re less likely to know a lot about the candidates. Say you’re a Democratic primary voter who likes both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. A poll can help you decide which of those two candidates is most likely to benefit from your vote.

Hartman was also conflicted. “People will use whatever information is available to them,” he said. “In an ideal democracy, we’d like to see people making decisions based on the issue platforms. But we also know that many voters are low-information voters, and they’re going to use whatever cues they can to sort out which candidate to vote for.” Those might be endorsements. It might be party affiliation. They might be poll results. In that sense, bandwagons aren’t exactly good or bad. They just exist.

Which means the media has a large role to play in how voters hear about which bandwagons to jump on. Van der Meer’s research on those Dutch voters suggests that raw information doesn’t seem to shift votes, but narratives about the information do. In that case, he said, the media needs to be extra careful how it presents polling data.

Which, of course, brings FiveThirtyEight into the mix. As a publication that presents a lot of polling data to the public, we’re as much a part of this story as we are reporters of it. Nate Silver, our editor in chief, certainly thinks about bandwagons. But he doesn’t consider them to be that big of a deal, he told me. That’s because Silver doesn’t really see the choice as being between poll-informed voting and policy-informed voting. “Without polling, there’s a vacuum filled by punditry and media assumptions,” he said. Banning polls doesn’t necessarily mean people vote smarter. In fact, from Silver’s perspective, it means they’re likely to vote even dumber — basing a choice on speculation instead of data.

In the end, the question of whether polls influence voters might be less important than the question of whether voters have a right to access information they want. Consider, again, the 2002 French election. Analysis after the fact suggests that polling results did make a difference in that upset — leading voters to assume a mainstream runoff was so certain that it was safe to cast a ballot for a more extremist candidate, just to send a message to the winners. If enough people do that, their assumptions about who the winners will be won’t be accurate.

But that outcome didn’t make the French switch back to a longer poll blackout. They couldn’t. That’s because the whole reason the blackout was shortened was that the country’s highest court found it to be an infringement of an article of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents public authorities from interfering with people sharing their opinions. Polls may well have changed the outcome of an election in France. But that was a choice the voters had the right to make.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Maggie Koerth

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gyrlversion · 5 years

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DUP reject Mays toxic Brexit deal as support for the PM falls away

Theresa May‘s hopes of getting a Brexit deal through Parliament have been handed a devastating blow today after the DUP signalled that it does not intend to back it.

The Northern Irish party’s Brexit spokesman said there was ‘no pressure on me or my party to vote for this deal’ as the Prime Minister headed to Brussels.

EU leaders are expected to make a three-month Brexit delay sought by Mrs May today conditional on her being able to squeeze a withdrawal agreement through the Commons next week.

But hardline unionist and Brexiteer Mr Wilson tore into Brussels, including European Council president Donald Tusk, accusing them of ‘arrogance’ over their offer in an interview with TalkRadio.

He said: If anything the arrogance of the EU negotiators … this arrogance is born of the fact that the EU see us as a bit of a rollover when it comes to negotiations.

But for anyone to say we’ll give you a three month extension if you accept this toxic deal – I neither want this toxic deal nor the extension so there is no pressure on me or my party to vote for this deal, and certainly not on the basis of demands from Donald Tusk.’

Sammy Wilson said there was no pressure on the DUP to support a deal from Theresa May linked to a three-month Brexit delay

Donald Tusk made a short speech in Brussels today after speaking to Theresa May by telephone and following talks with EU leaders over the past week

Theresa May, pictured at RAF Northolt in London today, will ask EU leaders in Brussels this afternoon for a Brexit delay until June amid disarray and fury in Westminster

The DUP has a ‘confidence and supply’ deal with Mrs May’s Conservatives for its 10 MPs to support her in the Commons.

But they have so far voted against her Brexit deal twice because of their intense opposition to the provisions for the Northern Irish border backstop.

Even with their support Mrs may faces an uphill task to convince MPs to back her.

The last time she put a meaningful vote to the Commons on March 12 she lost by 149 votes, including 75 Tory rebels.

Yesterday Mr Tusk said: ‘In the light of the consultations that I have conducted over the past days, I believe that a short extension would be possible.

‘But it would be conditional on a positive vote on the Withdrawal Agreement in the House of Commons.

‘The question remains open as to the duration of such an extension.’

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt today admitted the Prime Minister is ‘under extraordinary pressure’ after raging MPs branded her a ‘f***ing disgrace’ for using a TV speech to scold them for not backing her Brexit deal.

With the UK just eight days from a No Deal departure, Mrs May went on live TV to condemn the Commons for failing to back her EU withdrawal agreement and accused them of playing ‘political games’.

The Downing Street address was meant to persuade Brexiteer Tories, Labour rebels and the DUP to back her deal – after the EU said it would only grant a short delay to Article 50 if the Prime Minister can win a vote on her plan before next Friday.

But May’s address appears to have spectacularly backfired as she heads to Brussels today for a crucial summit.

Her defiant speech caused a great deal of upset among MPs who branded it ‘toxic’, ‘contemptuous’, ‘incendiary and irresponsible’ while another called it a ‘f***ing disgrace’.

Mr Hunt said ‘no Prime Minister in living memory has been tested’ in the way that Mrs May has and claimed the tone of her speech reflected her ‘extreme frustration’ at the current Brexit stalemate, which he said is ‘sapping our national confidence’.

Defending the Prime Minister, who is facing calls to quit, he told the BBC: ‘Let’s not forget the extraordinary pressure she is under. She was expressing her frustration and the public’s frustration’ – but added: ‘I don’t think we should all make this about Theresa May’.

Tellingly the Foreign Secretary twice admitted it is not yet certain Mrs May can bring back her deal for a third vote – but said if it’s defeated there are three options: No Deal, revoke Article 50 or a ‘long delay’ to Brexit.

The Prime Minister will travel to Brussels today to ask for an extension until the end of June to try to get her plan through arriving at around midday. She will address EU leaders at around 3pm.

Last night Mrs May appeared to misjudge a live TV speech by blast MPs for not backing her Brexit deal as she heads to Brussels today to beg for a three-month Article 50 extension.

Tory Remainer Sam Gymiah hit out at his party leader and said: ‘Resorting to the blame game, as the PM is doing, is a low blow’ while Tory Brexiteer Henry Smith says that Britain must now opt for No Deal

Potential Labour ‘switcher’ Lisa Nandy claimed last night that Mrs May had blown her chance to win her and other MPs over

Tory Remainer Sam Gyimah hit out at his party leader and said: ‘Resorting to the blame game, as the PM is doing, is a low blow. Democracy loses when a Prime Minister who has set herself against the House of Commons then blames MPs for doing their job. It’s Toxic.

‘She knows MPs are receiving hate mail. We’re repeatedly being urged to hold their noses to the stench of this deal and vote for it. That cannot be the blueprint for our great country and I cannot support it’.

Potential ‘switcher’ Lisa Nandy claimed last night that Mrs May had blown her chance and said: ‘There’s absolutely no chance she is going to win over MPs in sufficient numbers after that statement. It was an attack on liberal democracy itself. I will not support a government that takes such a reckless approach’.

But Brexit Minister Kwasi Kwarteng said today he believes more MPs will back the Prime Minister’s deal after her intervention and insisted she has a ‘good shot at landing the deal and winning a vote next week’.

He added: ‘I don’t think there is a blame game at all- she set out very clearly where we are in the process. There is a deal. If we get the deal through, we can get a short extension to the Article 50 process and we can leave the EU.

‘I think saying: ‘I’m with you’ makes perfect sense. The cab driver who drove me here this morning said: ‘I just want to leave…get the deal done and I want to be out of the EU’.

‘The Prime Minister very much reflected that opinion, which is widely held. People are fed up…they want to leave the EU’.

The post DUP reject Mays toxic Brexit deal as support for the PM falls away appeared first on Gyrlversion.

from WordPress https://www.gyrlversion.net/dup-reject-mays-toxic-brexit-deal-as-support-for-the-pm-falls-away/

#Entertainment News

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thrashermaxey · 6 years

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Early Norris Contenders (2017-18)

Sure, it’s a bit early to be thinking about who will take home the hardware at season’s end with so many games to go. Especially regarding the Norris Trophy for the league’s top defender which Erik Karlsson is always one hot streak from running away with in a landslide victory. Alas, he’s yet not in the running and the contention pool for the Norris is larger than just him and Brent Burns (who’s also not deserving at this time). In fact, of the following names only one listed has won the award before. As we’ve seen in some recent years the trophy has seemingly gone to the defender who scores the most points, but such should not be the case in my opinion. Nonetheless the following are deserving of a nod either because of great two-way play or because of elite offensive contributions from the back end.

Drew Doughty

The muse for my proudest fantasy squad name, “Doughty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”, Doughty is compiling an absolutely stupendous season thus far on a resurgent Los Angeles Kings squad. Arguably the most valuable fantasy defender in the game today, he is murdering it across the board for owners. To start he is on pace for an absurd plus-42 by the end of the year; wow. Couple that with the projected 11 goals, 46 assists, 223 shots, 134 hits, 109 blocks, 48 PIM, and we indeed have the uncontested most valuable defender on our hands. Did I mention he averages 27:03 minutes per game? A startling realization regarding his 57-point pace is that he only starts his shifts in the offensive zone 48.7% of the time. For any player, let alone a defenseman, to be able to put up that type of offense when you are primarily deployed to protect your own end speaks to why Doughty went second overall in 2008. If a guy named Steven Stamkos wasn’t in his draft class, he would’ve went first overall no question.

Doughty is currently holding down the highest PDO of his career at 1020 with a healthy 52.83 CF%. In a nutshell, things are more than likely going his and the Kings’ way when he is on the ice, which is quite often. He is a candidate for a bump in goal scoring production as his overall shooting percentage is only 4.9%, 0.6% lower than the average over the past five seasons including this one. Although it is not a tremendous variance it’s one that could translate potentially to 15 goals by the end of the campaign if statistical correction ensues. Not to beat a dead horse but you really cannot find anything in Doughty’s stat line that comes up as a red flag. If he continues to be the defensive stalwart we’ve all been accustomed to and posts a 50-point season he should be unanimously voted to take home the hardware at the awards ceremony.

Alex Pietrangelo

Does everyone still want to hype up Colton Parayko or are all finally on board the correct defenseman train? Pietrangelo has crossed the 45-point threshold three times in the four seasons prior to 2017-18 and I still feel he is grossly undervalued. The overhype on the uber young was never more apparent than the past couple of seasons when Parayko was being talked up beyond belief after Kevin Shattenkirk’s departure from St. Louis. To the point where Pietrangelo almost seemed like an outcast, he must’ve been insulted as he went on to open the season with four goals and eight assists in the first ten games played. There is no question in the Mike Yeo era that this is Pietrangelo’s blueline. Currently on pace for a 16-goal, 56-point season, he’s bringing real value to fantasy owners and has put his name in the hat for Norris contention.

If you are not able to watch the Blues often you probably are not aware of just how much this guy does for his team at both ends of the ice. Not once has his CF% dropped below 50% in his career speaking to his ability to help drive play when he is on the ice and one aspect to take notice of under Yeo is that his offensive zone starting percentage has bumped up by eight percent from 2016-17. Though he’ll never attain Karlsson level offense because of all he is entrusted with defensively, Pietrangelo is a basic lock for 45-points every season while in his prime. Those of you who invested in him in drafts sure are wise and can just set and forget him each and every night he is in play. Although his offense and the team’s in general has dried up as of late, when it comes to Norris talk he must be in the mix because of the complete package he brings to the table.

Tyson Barrie

Tyson Barrie serves as the ultimate example of a player to target in a draft following a down year. Like many players I have covered in recent weeks it would seem that one lowly season is enough to discount a player so far down the board that it's arguably criminal. Though his chances at claiming a Norris trophy are essentially null and void at this point due to his broken hand I am still giving him his due as this article is based off performances to this point in time and Barrie was an absolute force prior to going down. On pace for 64 points in 80 games played prior to this unfortunate injury leading the league in offensive production from the blue line, nobody was talking about him seemingly at all. A lot of people might look at the minus four he currently holds but that’s a plus-30 improvement from the minus-34 he finished last season at. Let the record show that by no means is Barrie a defensive stalworth but at day’s end what you have is an elite puck mover, elite point producer, and an average defender. All in all that is quite the package that no coach would ever gripe about.

What’s most impressive about his production is the fact he does not line up with any fantasy relevant defenders on his own squad that you could claim he ciphers points off of. Despite the lack of elite talent at his side he still manages to manifest a pts/60 rate of 2.2 from the blue line! That would be highly impressive even for a forward in the game today. No question Barrie is an offensively oriented player starting 57.87% of his shifts in the offensive zone and even though his CF% leaves something to be desired at 47.82, he was boasting a healthy PDO of 1021 which is in line with 2014-15 when he had a 53-point season. His even strength shooting percentage is a tad high for him at 10.94% but overall shooting is only at 4.8%, meaning he could’ve stood to see an increase in goal scoring with some statistical regression towards the mean. Prior to 2016-17’s disaster, Barrie was routinely potting 12 or 13 goals per season, so this would’ve been highly plausible. Because of the duration of time he will be out with injury compiling 60 points is unforeseeable but if he can reclaim his scoring touch immediately upon return he may still cross the 45-point threshold. Someone so vital to his team generating offense was more than deserving of consideration for the Norris being that he was scoring at the rate he was as a defender.

John Klingberg

Although I am in the school of thought that the Norris should be handed to the defender who brings the best two-way approach to the game, as I stated earlier there is no hiding the fact that the voting process in recent years seems to favor the defender who generates offense like a top-six forward. Much like Barrie who nobody is going to confuse for a shutdown defender, Klingberg is producing offensively at a profound rate for the Dallas Stars. Not to say Klingberg is horrendous defensively but if you saw Dmitry Orlov savagely embarrass his life the other week you know he is not the pinnacle of shutdown capability. Only but once so far this season has Klingberg gone three games without scoring a point, four times without scoring in two games. That is some solid consistency if you ask me and speaks to him being a key cog in the offense.

Nonetheless, Klingberg has established himself as an assist factory with 178 total going back to 2014-15 including the current campaign. Sure, the fact he is setting up the likes of Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn have certainly helped him achieve this gaudy assist total, but the man can put it in their wheelhouse no question. Despite him being assist heavy for points his overall shooting percentage this season is six percent lower than 2016-17 which means he could very likely see a goal scoring surge here in the coming weeks to further bolster his value. Thanks to his defensive minded partner Esa Lindell, Klingberg can always be rest assured to play his game which is offense so you as the fantasy owner most likely need not worry about serious point scoring droughts. Being on pace for a near 70-point season makes him a must for Norris consideration.

John Carlson

It only took until a contract year for 2014-15 John Carlson to reemerge but alas he’s back and better than ever. Carlson’s importance to this blue line is unquestionable for if you remove his name from the equation this is a pretty meager defensive corps nowadays in the District of Columbia. Currently on pace for a six goal, 58-point campaign, he is certainly a benefactor of feeding Alexander Ovechkin in his wheelhouse time and time again. Although goals are few and far between for Carlson with three on the season so far, it’s not because he has been afraid to shoot with 107 put on net. That translates to a 228-shot pace by the end of the campaign and with a 2.8% overall shooting percentage one has to expect that statistical regression towards the mean should occur providing him with a goal scoring bump in due time.

Carlson is averaging nearly four minutes a game on the powerplay which helps to offset the fact that he only starts shifts in the offensive zone 48.07% of the time.His pts/60 at this point is right in line with his career best 2014-15 season and he’s averaging almost four more minutes a game this year than the season prior. With the Capitals youth injection on the blue in Christian Djoos and Madison Bowey, Carlson is relied upon to lead the way. As the uncontested top option on their blue line with his primary man advantage deployment, barring injury he should have no issue crossing the 50-point barrier for the second time in his career. There’s no arguing this blue line is devoid of high end talent beyond him and Dmitry Orlov. As Brooks Orpik fades ever faster out of his prime, Carlson has to carry the load big time especially since Djoos and Bowey are just getting their feet wet in their initial campaigns. Should he go down to injury the Capitals would have a serious problem on their hands replacing his contributions all around. His ability to produce all the while shouldering immense pressure in a fading contention window warrants him receiving Norris consideration.

from All About Sports http://www.dobberhockey.com/hockey-home/frozen-pool-forensics/early-norris-contenders-2017-18/

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omginstantpaperbouquetblr · 6 years

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By Andrew Levine / Counterpunch.

At long last, Donald Trump and his Republican co-dependents have a major piece of legislation they can use to show their “donors” and their diehard supporters that they are able to “govern.” This, anyway, is the story corporate media tell.

“Donor” is the media’s euphemism for “capitalist paymaster.” Both duopoly parties have them. They are a “bipartisan” bunch, loyal to their class, and therefore generally of one mind — though, of course, their first loyalties are to themselves. They pay the piper; they call the tune.

“Governing” comes down to enforcing intraparty discipline. This means riding herd on doctrinaire libertarians and later-day Tea Partiers. There are also still a few Republican Senators and House members who, on rare occasions, are capable of surprising everybody, including themselves, by summoning up a shred of moral decency and common sense. They need to be kept in line as well. This is especially crucial in the Senate, where the Republican majority is razor thin.

Fortunately, governing, so understood, has turned out to be a lot harder than sensible people a year ago feared. Immobility has been our salvation. The more that Trump and the GOP “govern,” the worse off we become.

Governing does not involve making nice to Democrats. If the members of the other duopoly party were a tad more obdurate, the way Republicans are, it might be different, but, as matters now stand, Democrats are irrelevant. When it suits them, Trump and the Republicans will mouth off about “bipartisanship”; in fact, though, they could care less. What matters is getting and keeping Republicans on board.

To that end, Republican legislators find it useful to pander to Trump’s diehard supporters. They hardly have to, however. Anyone who is still standing by the Donald must neither know nor care how dangerous he is, and how little he cares about matters of concern to them. The more Fox News time they log, and the more they immerse themselves in other rightwing propaganda, the less they know.

On the off chance that a ray of light somehow penetrates through the miasma that engulfs their minds, Fox and the others are there to set them straight. Fox is especially good for riling up “the darker angels of their nature.”

Therefore, there was never much need for a legislative victory to keep the Trump base on board. They are there for the duration.

Had the GOP tax scam gone the way of GOP efforts “to repeal and replace Obamacare,” Trump’s stalwart supporters would be standing by their man with much the same intensity and in roughly the same numbers as they were before they rammed their tax cuts through, and as they will be when the dreadful new tax regime takes hold.

The donors are another story. They are a demanding lot, and they expect some bang for their bucks.

Stacking the federal judiciary with rightwing judges and neutering regulatory protections is not enough for them. They want tax breaks too. And, before long, it will become even plainer than it already is that they want to privatize everything that they can milk for profit.

In short, their appetite for plunder is limitless. For them, there is no such thing as being too rich. Neither do they have time for, much less sympathy with, challenges, no matter how tepid, to the untrammeled power of their class.

Their flunkies in the House and Senate understand this perfectly. They understand too that, to keep the money flowing in, they need to demonstrate that their services are worth the cost. Thus they needed a win or at least something they could pass off for one.

Trump wanted a big win too – not so much to impress his class brothers and sisters, the ones who are already on board, as to impress himself. He wanted a victory because he is a pathetically vainglorious creature who cannot celebrate himself too much.

He is therefore always on the lookout for ways to toot his own horn, and always on the verge of decomposing when reality frustrates his efforts.

In his little bubble, surrounded by the most nauseatingly obsequious cabinet officers ever to disgrace the republic, and by a Vice President eager to take over but adept at feigning an adoring gaze that puts even Nancy Reagan’s to shame, he can get away with it.

However, at some level, surely even he must know better. External validation helps with that. In this case, though, he will soon be ruing the day he won.

Trump may know even less about what is in his tax scam than the average Republican legislator, but he nevertheless owns it. From now on, the tax scam rammed through Congress last week will be known as “the Trump tax cut.” When the economy starts heading south, as it soon will, that name will become toxic.

The polling data is clear: even now, the Trump tax cut is less popular than any tax increase in living memory. It can only go downhill from there. The morning after euphoria of the miscreants responsible for it will be short-lived. Before long, that stubborn, non-alternative fact may even penetrate the thick skull of the Commander-in-Chief.

Indeed, one can only wonder in disbelief at the sheer irrationality of the idea that led Trump and the Republicans to think that their scam would benefit them in next year’s midterm elections. There are times when something is not better than nothing, and any idiot could see that this was one of those times.

What the likes of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan cobbled together, under the watchful eyes of their donors’ nefarious lobbyists, is a ridiculous concoction that will benefit those donors and the larger donor class, and harm nearly everyone else.

The donors will make out like the bandits they are. But unless Democrats fumble even more spectacularly than they normally do, the bounty they will acquire will be a nail in the coffin of their favorite political party.

McConnell and Ryan and the others did see to it that a few crumbs would go to some “middle class” taxpayers, especially those living in “red” states with low taxes, and low property values. They seem to have taken their cue from their friends in the predatory lending business: lure the suckers in with teaser rates, and then milk them for all they are worth (or more).

Did they really think that tax cuts big enough to finance a family dinner at a fast food restaurant would cause “average” people – not all of them by any means, but more than a few — not to care about deficits that put the remnants of New Deal–Great Society programs that everyone who is not filthy rich depend upon in jeopardy?

It is already obvious that Ryan and others of his ilk are salivating at the prospect of using those deficits as a pretext for doing precisely that. Could they really expect even viewers dumbed down by Fox News not to figure out that the only reason for creating those deficits is to make themselves and their donors richer still?

By now, it should be dawning even on Trump’s most gullible supporters that not only are they being played, but that their intelligence is being insulted — more blatantly even than when Hillary Clinton called them and others like them “deplorable.”

With Democrats for opponents, anything could happen. But unless the less odious of our two semi-established neoliberal parties flubs again, the tax scam Republicans rammed through can hardly fail to deliver a mortal wound to the GOP.

Surely, Republicans would want to prevent that.

Or maybe not. After all, their mind-boggling irrationality does make a kind of sense in a political universe as corrupt as ours has become.

With sufficient ingenuity, one could make a case for the Trump tax cut on ideological – specifically, libertarian – grounds. There is not much ingenuity in Republican ranks, but there probably are libertarians in the House and Senate Republican caucuses who think – reflexively — that anything that “starves the beast” is worthy of support.

There are also Republicans, many of them with libertarian leanings, who consider themselves policy wonks and who think that there actually are sound public policy justifications for the ludicrous concoction they have just pushed through.

Paul Ryan is a case in point; he seems to have been thinking along these lines since the days when, as an adolescent, he discovered that Atlas Shrugged could be useful for more than just a stroke book.

In the final analysis, though, the Trump tax cut is not about ideology or policy or anything else that democratic theorists would claim it is or ought to be. It is about money. In American elections nowadays, money makes the world go round.

However, in the Age of Trump, this is the least of it.

The authors of our Constitution supported or at least tolerated slavery, and they packed all sorts of non- and anti-democratic features into the basic institutions of the republic they founded.

However, they also envisioned a political sphere in which enlightened representatives, assembled together to debate and collectively determine the common good, decided collectively what is to be done. In line with the most advanced political theorists of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, they sought to establish a modern version of the Roman Senate or the Athenian agora.

But, almost from Day One, their best laid plans went mightily astray. In American democracy, there has seldom been more than a pretense of rational deliberation and debate, and talk of the common good is hypocritical nonsense. The parties and factions whose malign effects the republic’s founders sought to guard against run the show; and self-interest is all.

We do have generally free and fair competitive elections, especially now that restrictions on the franchise have been relaxed enough to accord the right to vote to nearly all adult citizens, regardless of class, race or gender. But our elections are emphatically not about electing wise, disinterested rulers. They are about “special interests” selling biddable candidates to the voting public.

Or rather that was how it was before Trump’s election magnified the prevailing level of corruption many times over.

Getting reelected is now no longer all that it is cracked up to be. There isn’t as much percentage in it as there was even just a year ago.

Like Trump himself, many House and Senate Republicans have better, quicker ways to feather their own nests.

Trump has botched up so much, undermined so many norms, and delegitimized so many venerable understandings that, outside the shrinking precincts of the hopelessly benighted troglodytes who latched onto him even before his campaign got underway, he has come to be so despised that even Republicans now expect a Democratic landslide in 2018.

It is no sure thing, of course; not even with Trump stirring up fear and loathing in roughly two thirds of the population. Democrats have a knack for defeating themselves – Hillary Clinton style, though electoral incompetence, and because they too do yeoman service for the rich and heinous.

Nevertheless, they are on track for an overwhelming victory in 2018, notwithstanding the gerrymandering rampage that Republicans undertook after their electoral victories in 2010.

For many a Republican legislator, a “shellacking” (Obama’s word) equal or greater than the one that Democrats got in 2010 could actually be a blessing in disguise. Instead of spending years in Congress pretending to care about the public good while prepping to cash in eventually in the lobbying racket, they may soon be able to jump right in.

This is all the more reason for them to do all they can to stay on the donors’ good side. This holds as much for those who won’t themselves get a direct windfall from the scam as for those, like the turncoat Senator Tom Corker of Tennessee and many of his similarly shameless colleagues, who will.

Genuine fascists, or rather their twenty-first century successors and moral equivalents, expressly oppose democracy. Trump has empowered people who come perilously close to that — Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are the best-known examples.

But that is not, or not yet, his administration’s main thrust. Its effect has been not so much to underwrite opposition to democracy as to cause its level of corruption to increase – to a degree that is unprecedented in American history.

In the absence of a bona fide resistance — an organized, well-resourced countervailing force that is not and cannot be marginalized — this could be almost as bad.

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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