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mayhem24-7forever · 2 years

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Rage Becomes Him - Prologue: Homecoming

Dark!Rick Flag/Lazarus Pit!Rick Flag x Reader

Series Summary: After Colonel Rick Flag dies, Amanda Waller dumps him in the Lazarus pit and resurrects him. But she quickly realized that the soldier that had been sent to Corto Maltese to die was not the same one that walked out of the Lazarus pit. Loyal, friendly, patriotic Colonel Rick Flag was gone and in his place was a cold, rage-filled demon who becomes uncontrollable. And when he gets loose, his first stop on his revenge tour is Evergreen, Washington and a certain “hero” living there…

Author’s Notes: This series is gonna be DARK! There will be major character deaths and very mature themes throughout. Minors, this series is NOT for you, please respect my wishes and do not read this. I deserve a safe place to express myself just as much as you do. This series is based off of an idea I made in this post and then in this edit with encouragement from @edwardbaldwin and the amazing and spectacular @a-reader-and-a-writer who also came up with Dark!Rick’s vigilante name and beta read this for me. Thank you so much! Lovely dividers by @silkholland

Content Warnings: DARK AND MATURE THEMES THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE WORK! In this chapter: descriptions of violence and a canon death, near-drowning, the consequences of the military industrial complex, Waller being Waller which is a huge TW in itself, nudity, resurrection

Amanda Waller sat at her desk, staring at the files from the Corto Maltese mission. It had been a month since the operation and she was still furious. Of the fourteen members she had sent to the small island country, nine were dead, one had been placed in a coma in the hospital, and the other four had used a hard drive of sensitive government information to barter for their freedom, not to mention the handlers that had betrayed her and needed to be punished. She had already arrested one of them, sending the other two to work on a special project for her in Washington with the injured, but alive and still loyal member, still in the hospital. She didn’t care about any of the deaths, they were all expendable to her, including the team’s commander and only non-criminal member: Colonel Rick Flag. It was more the principle of the thing, four of her best recruits were now off-limits and the rest of her cannon-fodder had been used up in a single mission. It would take a lot of whatever desperate enough criminals she could get to sign up to equal even half of the four soldiers she had lost.

She needed something to offset this betrayal, a soldier that would be skilled enough to do what she needed them to do and loyal enough to not betray her like the others, at least until she could find enough powerful metahumans to fill out the team. Fortunately, she had just the person in mind: a highly skilled soldier that had been able to keep up with and even control the large team of metahumans despite being a non-enhanced human. His loyalty had always been steadfast and although he had slipped up during the Corto Maltese mission, it was nothing that couldn’t be easily rectified with a little conditioning. Unfortunately, he was deceased, his corpse still somewhere in the ruins of the Jotunheim lab.

She pondered the situation, considering how she could solve this “little” issue of him being dead. An idea struck her suddenly and she smirked. It was dangerous, not for her of course, and it was as of yet untested, but if it worked she’d have her perfect little soldier back and better than ever. She sent a message off to the workers clearing the debris of the destroyed lab to focus all efforts on retrieving the body from the rubble as soon as possible. Then she pulled up a file on her laptop, locating a phone number and beginning to dial on her desk phone. She sat back in her chair as it rang, a grin on her face when the line connected.

“Mr. al Ghul… I believe it’s time to collect that favor you owe me for keeping you out of prison…” she began, pleased with herself.

“Peacemaker, what a joke…” The words echoed in his head. It was his voice, but it sounded so far away. The world was black, there was nothing and he was nowhere.

“Peacemaker, what a joke…” There it was again, his disembodied voice floating from afar, but a little closer that time. The world was still black but for a moment, it wasn’t. For a moment, he was somewhere else, somewhere he knew but couldn’t remember. Gray dust. Rusted metal. Stained white tile.

“Peacemaker, what a joke…” Closer again. The flash was back, cutting through the black for a little bit longer and he could hear something. Grunts and groans. Water running. Porcelain scratching on concrete. Suddenly, he could feel. A metal pipe. Water on the floor. A red hard drive. Warm blood. A salty metallic taste in his mouth. Pain.

“Peacemaker, what a joke…” Closer again, this time as if it was right in front of him, ringing in his ears. Pain overloaded the other senses as the black flashed in and out, losing the battle. The pain was everywhere, radiating through every cell of his body. It was excruciating and he wanted to scream but nothing happened. The black seeped out and the flash became his world.

He was in the strange room with the dust, metal, and tile. It was the basement laboratory of a secret facility in Corto Maltese. He was seated atop a man, who struggled and grunted as a metal pipe is held down on his throat. He was going to kill the man, pushing down harder and harder as he struggles for air. Then a sharp pain in his chest, in his heart. The air was knocked from his lungs, the metal pipe falling to the floor. He looked down and saw a shard of porcelain lodged right into his heart. Warm blood was seeping from it. The man was looking up at him, a strange expression on his face. Regret? Pity?

“Peacemaker, what a joke…” he muttered and the man looked hurt. And then everything was black again…

And then it wasn’t. The world was blurry, distorted and a sickly green. He opened his mouth to breathe and found it filled with acidic liquid that burned his lungs. He breached the surface, spitting out the acid and taking a huge breath of air. It was stale but he didn’t care. There was a green glow to the liquid around him, and he couldn’t see anything through it. He tried to keep himself afloat so he could breathe but his body was slow to his commands and he felt heavy. A hand grabbed his arm, then another hand on the other and he was hauled upwards and dropped on hard ground. On his knees, he tried to catch himself by putting his hands out but only succeeded in falling onto them, the dirt clinging to his wet skin. The air was cold, he was drenched, and without clothes, he started to shiver immediately. He was still heaving in breaths, his eyes looking down at a small, jagged red scar on his chest, right on his heart. The green liquid still dripped from his body, a texture somewhere between water and slime as it pooled below him, turning the dirt to mud.

The clacking sound of heels approached and a pair of red shoes came to a stop just in front of him. Still panting and shivering, he pushed himself off his arms to look up at the figures he was kneeling in front of, two soldiers standing as straight as boards on either side of a woman wearing clothes suited for an office. He knew her but her eyes had a spark of twisted joy in them and her smirk felt more menacing than usual.

“Welcome back, Colonel Flag.” Amanda Waller said. “Your country needs you…”

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karlie-what-you-want · 2 months

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You probably know who I am just from the subject of this ask but... this seems like a worthwhile thing to bring up, because Taylor fans are generally caring people, I find, and despite being served teenage rom com stunts, we're actually capable of understanding and caring about more complex and vital issues. And since, apparently, we're to have football shoved into our faces, let's talk about the dark side of the business. Let's talk about the accumulating studies on traumatic brain injuries. About how the NFL invested a lot of money to try to block them, discredit them, distract from them. Let's talk about the harm it does to their players and how much they don't care. Same with wrestling. Same with boxing, MMA. And in the more recent years, the eyes of medicine has turned to soldiers and the military industrial complex has pretended to be super surprised to learn that soldiers get brain damage from training alone because wow, really, rockets and gun shots create shock waves???? And you'd think big money systems would care about athletes, right? The golden gooses? Well, until they start malfunctionning and after that, they're just an investment to dump. I'm hoping the discourse getting louder around soldiers will make the public opinion more caring. You know, the public opnion that calls them "our boys". But then again, I've seen how vets are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. So, I dunno. Maybe public safety? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lewiston-maine-mass-shooter-robert-card-traumatic-brain-injuries-scan-rcna142194 Understanding of what CTE is? How it doesn't just affect the victim, but that you could make a whole ass true crime podcast about how when you break people's brains, they can become dangerous, and never run out of seasons? Maybe we can stop finding big dudes displaying fits of rage hot and start maybe thinking about regulating emotions and asking them if they won't, or if they can't? Anyway. Industries that just need bodies to keep running will never care about the people it steamrolls. And the consequences of that, even if they affect others. WE have to.

We have to be the ones to say Black Lives Matter, Queer Lives Matter, Free Palestine, Save The Planet, etc.... I'm going to keep pointing the finger at big industries and say "what you're doing is evil, and we see you". I think, in this community, I'm not the only one who'd care to do so.

Thank you so much for reaching out with these thoughts, anon. I agree 100%, and I think these facts are being swept under the rug by so many with the power to actually address it.

You’re right. It’s up to us to speak up.

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moregraceful · 6 months

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Trick or treat! 👻

In honor of a Jasper Weatherby proof of life that was also proof of glow up, here's a snippet of an abandoned WIP in which Thomas Bordeleau and William Eklund ineptly try to seduce him but he's so closeted that he just...misses every single cue lol. I miss u Yasper 😭

;;

Jasper made the Sharks opening night roster and so did William! Jasper scored in the Sharks home opener and they both got an assist on a Tomáš freaking Hertl goal!

Then William got sent back to the SHL and Jasper got sent down to the Barracuda.

William was miserable. They were living in the hotel when Dougie Jr. dropped the bomb, same as the rest of the guys who were waiting to see if they’d make it past nine games.

They spent a lot of time together, playing video games or exploring downtown San Jose. There wasn’t a lot to do in downtown San Jose and Burnzie kept telling them they’d be murdered if they stayed out past 10PM, so they mostly played video games. They were working on Red Dead Redemption 2 when William got sent back to Sweden. Jasper played and William commentated. William wanted to watch Jasper play Call of Duty, but Jasper was still haunted by a class Jared took on the US’s military industrial complex.

Now Jasper was facing a whole year playing alone.

William came to Jasper’s room to complain. “I’m doing everything right,” he said. “I’m playing good. Fucking a.”

“It’s only for a year,” said Jasper. He was making tea in the microwave. “You’ll be back.”

“I don’t want to leave,” said William. He was lying on his back on Jasper’s unmade bed and frowning at the ceiling. “I don’t want to leave San Jose and I don’t want to go back to Sweden and I don’t want to play in the fucking—augh.” He put his hands over his face and blew out a breath. “Whatever, I’ll make them regret it.”

Jasper wasn’t leaving San Jose, but he was leaving the big club. He wasn’t super salty about it, because while he’d been playing well, he hadn’t been playing well enough to stay up a whole season, and the Sharks had a packed forward roster. Dougie Jr. said Jasper probably wasn’t ever going down to Florida because they would need him when people got injured.

He was grateful for the opportunity and determined to work hard. But he was going to miss William. They’d become good friends. He was signing a lease on an apartment in the Sharks’ subsidized rookies-on-their-ELC apartment building tomorrow and he’d been planning to sign it with William. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do in the mornings by himself without someone all up in his face.

He sat down on the bed next to William. “The year will go by fast,” he said. “It’s November. Season’s over in – uh, let’s say May. Then it will be summer and you’ll be here for rookie camp.”

William groaned. “I don’t want to wait until next summer. I don’t want to go home.”

Jasper patted his knee. “I’ll miss you too,” he said.

William put his hands down and looked over at him. “Really?” he said.

“Yes?” said Jasper. “You’re my friend?”

“Oh,” said William. He sighed. “Yeah.”

#cage replies #hopingfortinystars #i started writing this in like. september of last season so the characterization is hella wack HOWEVER i'm still very fond of it #even if i can no longer work on it bc i get too mad at joe will and mike grier lol #also CRITICAL line i was working up to:#It all came to a head at the most romantic place in the world: the Home Depot across the street from Ikea on Election Night.#wait one more critical line i was working up to:#''Jasper my love my one my only'' said Pat Sieloff who was drunk.

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readingsquotes · 1 month

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"Like Nguyen’s other books, this memoir is critical of the US military-industrial complex. His oppositional stance informs his support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, he’s been a vocal advocate for a cease-fire. Two dates on his tour had to be moved to different locations, partly because of his public position on the conflict. The cancellations underlined what his writing has sought to uncover: As Americans, Nguyen says, we’re trained “to think of wars as episodic” rather than as a continuous production of the American war machine and its long history. He’s made it his life’s mission to trace these larger connections until they are impossible to ignore."

....

“The work of dominant ideologies is to prevent people from seeing how their particular situation might in some way be related to somebody else. If people can’t see these connections, they’re trapped in their singular sorrows,” he says. “That’s not politically productive. But if you connect the singular sorrows, that becomes ever more radical.”

#colonization #american imperialism #us politics #american empire #viet thanh nguyen

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coochiequeens · 1 year

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I agree that producing babies for adoption is human trafficking but the people who should be punished are those exploiting poor women not the women themselves. And making poor women raise children not theirs is just cruel to born the women and children.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The baby was not hers, not really.

Hun Daneth felt that, counted on that. When she gave birth to the boy, who didn’t look like her, she knew it even more.

But four years after acting as a surrogate for a Chinese businessman, who said he had used a Russian egg donor, Ms. Hun Daneth is being forced by the Cambodian courts to raise the little boy or risk going to jail. The businessman is in prison over the surrogacy, his appeal denied in June.

Even as she dealt with the shock of raising the baby, Ms. Hun Daneth dutifully changed his diapers. Over the months and years, she found herself hugging and kissing him, cajoling him to eat more rice so he could grow big and strong. She has come to see this child as her own.

“I love him so much,” said Ms. Hun Daneth, who is looking after the boy with her husband.

The fates of a Cambodian woman, a Chinese man and the boy who binds them together reflect the intricate ethical dilemmas posed by the global surrogacy industry. The practice is legal — and often prohibitively expensive — in some countries, while others have outlawed it. Still other nations with weak legal systems, like Cambodia, have allowed gray markets to operate, endangering those involved when political conditions suddenly shift and criminal cases follow.

When carried out transparently with safeguards in place, supporters say, commercial surrogacy allows people to expand their families while fairly compensating the women who give birth to the children. Done badly, the process can lead to the abuse of vulnerable people, whether the surrogates or the intended parents.

The practice flourishes in the nebulous space between those who can and cannot bear children; between those with the means to hire someone to bear their biological offspring and the women who need the money; and between those whose sexuality or marital status means they can’t adopt or otherwise become parents and those whose fertility spares them having to face such restrictions.

Cambodia became a popular surrogacy destination after crackdowns in other Asian countries nearly a decade ago. Foreigners flocked to newly opened fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies in Phnom Penh, the capital.

As the industry flourished, the government imposed a ban on surrogacy, promising to pass legislation officially outlawing it. The ill-defined injunction, imposed in a graft-ridden country with little rule of law, ended up punishing the very women the government had vowed to safeguard.

In 2018, Ms. Hun Daneth was one of about 30 surrogates, all pregnant, who were nabbed in a police raid on an upmarket housing complex in Phnom Penh. Although Cambodia to this day has no law specifically limiting surrogacy, the government criminalized the practice by using existing laws against human trafficking, an offense that can carry a 20-year sentence. Dozens of surrogates have been arrested, accused of trafficking the babies they birthed.

In a poor country long used as a playground by foreign predators — pedophiles, sex tourists, factory bosses, antique smugglers and, yes, human traffickers — the Cambodian authorities said they were on the lookout for exploitation.

“Surrogacy means women are willing to sell babies and that counts as trafficking,” said Chou Bun Eng, a secretary of state at the ministry of interior and vice chair of the national countertrafficking committee. “We do not want Cambodia to be known as a place that produces babies to buy.”

But applying a human trafficking law to surrogacy has imposed the heaviest costs on the surrogates themselves. Nearly all of those arrested in the 2018 raid gave birth while imprisoned in a military hospital, some chained to their beds. They, along with several surrogacy agency employees, were convicted of trafficking the babies.

Their sentencings, two years later, came with a condition: In exchange for suspended prison terms, the surrogates would have to raise the children themselves. If the women secretly tried to deliver the children to the intended parents, the judge warned, they would be sent to prison for many years.

This means that women whose financial precarity led them to surrogacy are now struggling with one more mouth to feed. The intended parents are separated from their flesh and blood. And surrogacy, a well-regulated practice in places like the United States, Georgia and Ukraine, has been relegated to the shadows in Cambodia.

From behind the bars of a courthouse in Phnom Penh, Xu Wenjun, the intended father of the boy to whom Ms. Hun Daneth gave birth, spoke quickly, his words tumbling out before the police intervened. He has been in prison for three years.

“My son must be big by now,” said Mr. Xu, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. “Do you think he remembers me?”

‘Where did he come from?’

Amid a cloud of mosquitoes, near a pile of garbage sodden from recent rains, a boy ran up to Ms. Hun Daneth, still in her factory uniform. She scooped up her son and sniffed his cheek, a sign of affection in parts of Southeast Asia.

Ms. Hun Daneth, now 25, decided to become a surrogate for the same reason as the others: debt, lots of it.

Over the past few years, Cambodian households have become some of the most indebted on earth, victims of a microfinance crisis. Once touted as a transformational tool for lifting families out of poverty, microfinance has in some countries, Cambodia included, devolved into a predatory scheme trapping millions in cycles of dependency.

Local banks compete to offer microfinance loans that can balloon fast. Ms. Hun Daneth said her family took out multiple loans, some just to service interest payments that exceeded 10 percent a month.

“At first it was a few hundred dollars,” Ms. Hun Daneth said, of her family’s burden. “Then it was thousands of dollars.”

Like nearly a million other Cambodians, mostly women, she had left the countryside to stitch together T-shirts and bras, gym bags and sweatshirts in factories. But a couple hundred dollars a month doesn’t go far in the cities.

A scout at the garment factory where Ms. Hun Daneth worked told her of a way out. She could earn $9,000 — about five times her annual base salary — by acting as a surrogate.

She knew of villages outside Phnom Penh where imposing concrete houses, said to have been built from surrogacy payments, loomed over bamboo shacks.

“They paid off their debts,” Ms. Hun Daneth said. “Their lives could start like new.”

The scout was connected to an agency managed locally by a Chinese man and his Cambodian wife. Her sister ran luxury villas where the surrogates stayed.

Eight surrogates who spoke to The New York Times described chandeliers, air conditioning and flush toilets in the villas, none of which they enjoyed at home. Their meals were plentiful. The women dreamed about the money they would earn. They also thrilled at the notion that they were providing a desperately needed service.

“I was helping give someone a baby,” Ms. Hun Daneth said. “I wanted to give that joy.”

Mr. Xu, a prosperous businessman from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, was matched with Ms. Hun Daneth. The one thing he was missing, he told friends who spoke to The Times, was a son to continue the family line.

Most of the Chinese babies carried by Cambodian surrogates are boys. Sex selection is banned in China, but not in Cambodia. Commercial surrogacy is not openly practiced in China, despite official concern about the country’s plummeting birthrate after decades of a brutally enforced one-child policy.

In Cambodian court testimony, Mr. Xu said his wife could not bear a child. But Mr. Xu’s friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of antagonizing the Cambodian authorities, said that his situation was more complicated: He had no wife and was open about being gay. Ms. Hun Daneth said Mr. Xu told her about his sexuality. L.G.B.T.Q. couples cannot adopt in China, and gay or single individuals are precluded from surrogacy in most countries where that practice is legal.

Perfect Fertility Center, or P.F.C., a surrogacy agency registered in the British Virgin Islands, showed rare sympathy for L.G.B.T.Q. intended parents, promising babies via Cambodia, Mexico and the United States. The company’s website is illustrated with photos of same-sex couples cradling babies.

P.F.C. was founded by Tony Yu, who turned to Cambodian surrogates for his own children. Mr. Yu, who is openly gay, said Cambodian lawyers assured him that his agency was legal.

It was a multinational operation that spanned continents. Mr. Yu partnered with a fertility clinic in Phnom Penh run by a Vietnamese person. There, a German fertility specialist trained Cambodian doctors. An Indian logistics expert flew in with eggs harvested from donors.

In 2017, Mr. Xu signed a contract with P.F.C., agreeing to pay $75,000 for surrogacy in Cambodia, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

Mr. Xu visited Ms. Hun Daneth at the luxury villa. He told her that the egg donor was a Russian model, and he later showed Ms. Hun Daneth and her husband photographs of a white woman with wavy hair standing next to a sports car.

Mr. Yu, the agency founder, said that many of its egg donors came from Russia, Ukraine and South Africa. The intended fathers were Chinese, and many were gay.

“Mixed-race children are popular with our clients,” said Mr. Yu.

For the Cambodian surrogates, being forced to raise children from other ethnicities can create additional strains in their families and their communities. The children’s features make it hard to explain their origins.

“People wonder, ‘Why does he have brown hair? Where did he come from?’” said Vin Win, 22, another surrogate who was arrested with Ms. Hun Daneth.

Ms. Vin Win’s husband resents the child she bore, she said. They have separated. She hopes the boy will get more than the third-grade education she received.

“I look at my son, and I feel pity because I think he should be living in a nice place,” Ms. Vin Win said. “This is not his real home.”

‘Disaster happened’

The police swarmed past the compound’s marble arches and burst into the two villas, handcuffing pregnant women who had been dozing on their pink-framed beds or lounging on sofas playing Candy Crush.

The police operation in July 2018 followed a regionwide crackdown on commercial surrogacy. Three years before, Thailand had banned the practice for foreigners, shutting down a cheaper alternative to surrogacy in the West, which can cost more than $150,000.

Two cases spooked the Thai authorities. One involved an Australian couple accused of refusing a baby boy with Down syndrome. A judge in Australia later found that the couple had not abandoned the child; the boy remained in Thailand, with the surrogate.

The other case raised concerns about baby trafficking after a Japanese man fathered at least 16 children by Thai surrogates. A Thai court eventually granted the man custody over most of the children after he said that he wanted a large family.

India and Nepal also limited surrogacy for noncitizens. In many of these cases, politicians spoke of the sanctity of the maternal bond and the purity of Asian women.

With options narrowing, Cambodia beckoned. Fertility clinics in Thailand moved across the border. Intended parents arrived from Australia, the United States and, most of all, China.

Ten Cambodian women who spoke to The Times, including the eight who were arrested in 2018, said surrogacy was their choice.

As the surrogacy business blossomed, a senior official from the ruling party questioned whether foreigners should be paying for access to Cambodian women.

With its compromised courts and pliant legal system, Cambodia has been plagued with exploitation, by foreigners and by its own citizens. The government of Hun Sen, the world’s longest-serving prime minister and a former functionary for the murderous Khmer Rouge, has been tied to systemic corruption and the erasure of human rights.

Late in 2016, the Cambodian Ministry of Health announced the ban on surrogacy, but did so without adopting new legislation making it a crime. In the resulting gray space, fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies continued to open up.

The raids began the next year. An Australian nurse and two Cambodian staff members at a fertility clinic that worked with surrogates were convicted of human trafficking.

Mr. Yu, who was not in Cambodia when the police raided the villas, said he’d had no idea that his agency was breaking any law. Lotus Fertility, one of the clinics the agency relied on to perform in vitro fertilization for surrogates, operated out of Central Hospital, a private facility with a strong political pedigree. The hospital’s director and deputy director are the daughter-in-law and son of Dr. Mam Bunheng, Cambodia’s health minister. The hospital has not responded to requests for comment.

“I wanted to do everything legally and openly,” Mr. Yu said. “With the fertility clinic, everyone said, ‘Everything is safe, everything is comfortable, they have a good background,’ so I believed them.”

“But then disaster happened,” he added.

Ms. Hun Daneth said she’d had a sense that she wasn’t supposed to talk too openly about what she was doing. Four other surrogates said they were warned by agency staff not to stroll outside the villa complex.

In documents for Mr. Xu’s payment to P.F.C.’s bank account, an addendum cautions: “Do not note surrogacy-related words when transferring money.”

A Cambodian employee of Lotus Fertility, who agreed to speak only if her name was not used, said that the clinic filed documentation stating that all the in vitro fertilizations were for prospective Cambodian mothers, even though it was clear many of the women were surrogates.

Lotus Fertility has closed. A representative for the clinic blamed the coronavirus for the closure.

In testimony this spring before the United Nations-linked Committee on the Rights of the Child, Ms. Chou Bun Eng, the government official, dodged questions about the children born of imprisoned surrogates.

“The committee does not take a position on whether surrogacy is wrong or right,” said Ann Skelton, a children’s rights lawyer and member of the committee. “But we are concerned about a situation that does not uphold the rights of the women, the intended parents and, of course, the children.”

‘Our babies are the crime’

Chained to a military hospital bed in August 2018, Ms. Hun Daneth delivered a baby with soft brown hair, a pale complexion and the same wide eyes as his intended father.

Another surrogate, Phay Sopha, gave birth sprawled on the cement floor of the military hospital, no midwife in sight.

“The baby came out, and I thought, ‘It looks Chinese,’” Ms. Phay Sopha said. “Then I passed out.”

After Mr. Yu, by his account, paid the police nearly $150,000, the surrogates were released. In total, Mr. Yu said he spent more than $740,000 trying to fix the situation, money paid in cash to intermediaries or to anonymous bank accounts.

A spokesman for the Cambodian National Police, Chhay Kimkhoeun, questioned Mr. Yu’s claim.

“First, is there any evidence of what is said?” he said. “Second, if there is factual evidence, they can file a complaint.”

Ms. Phay Sopha now works at a garment factory, from 6:30 in the morning to 8 at night. She rents a boardinghouse room barely long enough to fit her outstretched body. The child, she said, is back in her village, being raised by her mother.

The government ordered a Christian charity, founded by Americans to combat child sex trafficking, to check up on the women after they gave birth, officials said. Some surrogates said they also had to report to the police station, children in tow.

“It was like we were criminals,” said Ry Ly, another surrogate. “Our babies are the crime.”

Most of the women are struggling financially. Soeun Pheap, aunt to Chan Nak, a surrogate who gave birth to twins, said her niece fed the babies water thickened with a squirt of condensed milk. After living for a while with her aunt, Ms. Chan Nak left abruptly with the babies. She sent another surrogate a message saying she was out of the country and would be returning without the twins.

Despite the surrogates’ promises to the court that they would raise the babies, a good number of the children are no longer in Cambodia and have been united with their Chinese parents, Mr. Yu said.

Mr. Xu, the Chinese businessman now in jail, went to Cambodia to try to extricate his child. He contacted Ms. Hun Daneth directly, even though the agency had warned him to keep a low profile. He bought toys and diapers for the boy, whom he called Yeheng in Mandarin, a name alluding to karmic perseverance.

Mr. Xu submitted a paternity test to the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh. In 2019, he secured a passport for the boy.

A worker from the Christian charity accompanied Mr. Xu to the police station to finish up paperwork. The founder of the surrogacy agency warned Mr. Xu that it was a setup by the police. Officers were waiting. He has been imprisoned ever since.

Representatives for the charity, Agape International Missions, would not comment on Mr. Xu’s arrest.

In 2020, Mr. Xu was convicted of human trafficking and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In June, his appeal was denied.

“Are they serious that he is trafficking his own child?” said May Vannady, Mr. Xu’s lawyer, waving a notarized copy of the paternity test.

Mr. May Vannady says they will take their appeal to the Supreme Court. Ms. Chou Bun Eng, the government official, said that the conviction should stand. She suggested that Chinese gangs wanted to harvest organs from children born of Cambodian surrogates.

This spring, Ms. Hun Daneth took a day off work and rode a motorized rickshaw to the appeals court in Phnom Penh. Mr. Xu didn’t mean any harm, she told the judge. He only wanted a son. He was not a baby trafficker.

Still, she told the court, she had grown attached to the boy. After the hearing, Ms. Hun Daneth said she had decided to move back to the countryside because she did not want anyone to kidnap her son. She didn’t like it when Chinese-speaking people showed up at her home.

“No one will take him from me,” she said. “He is mine.”

#cambodia #surrogacy #human trafficking #Exploitation of women #Surrogacy destination #China’s one child policy #A lot of unmarried men who want children #Sex selection in cambodia #Sex selection in surrogacy #Sex couples and surrogacy #It’s men #Most Lesbian couples don’t need surrogates #Picking egg donors based on appearance #Surrogacy and children with disabilities

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nikproxima · 1 year

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Horizon WIP Post 13

The Story of Enceladus

Enceladus is known as the Second World, the second system liberated from PSSA control in 2223. As the nascent ICM would wrap Titan in their grasp, their attention would soon turn to the icy moon, eager to exploit the strategic position that the subsurface ocean provided. The PSSA, sensing that the Saturn system had begun to slip from their grasp, would dispatch well over 30 ships to help secure it, landing thousands of troops to ensure a strong presence at spaceports and industrial facilities. The ICM, acting as a unified Navy for the first time, would see this not as a deterrent, but a call to arms. For the very first time, they would make themselves known, launching long range volleys at the assets in orbit, using 21 extensively modified Behemoth class cruisers. The PSSA, initially, was skeptical of their ability to engage, but soon found that ICM tactics were unlike anything they had ever seen. Shot after shot was fired from the ICM position, staged just inside the terminator. The line held, for now, but all would change when a bold crew, the crew of the ICM Destroyer Gargantua, would make a break for it, charging headfirst at the central grouping of vessels, taking shell after shell. Their crew were most likely dead before they made it to the line, but they were, in the eyes of the ICM, a necessary sacrifice. Their fusion reactor, primed to explode in proximity to the PSSA forces, would rupture in a cloud of plasma, disabling at least 7 PSSA ships, enabling ICM forces to charge towards a now confused and weakened enemy. It was the shot that the ICM needed, and the remaining 20 ICM ships would scatter the PSSA Navy, destroying 19 of the 30 ships in orbit - sparing no one. Transports, clearly trying to make a run from the fighting, were captured by slower boarding craft rising from Titan’s surface, and all of those in uniform would be taken back to the ICM capital for incarceration. The moon would fall quickly, and landing teams would soon secure the capital city, capturing and executing those who occupied her. With PSSA forces in retreat to Mimas, the ICM flag flew over Diyar Planitia for the first time.

Growth on Enceladus would be rapid, and almost chaotic. New shipyards, water refineries, and soil production facilities would spring to life, and geothermal vents would be tapped for power. Construction crews would face a harsh radiation and cryogeological environment, with losses mounting in the first years after the invasion. The Great Dying was most felt here, in the harsh outer fringes of ICM territory, but the message from the State was clear - the work must go on, the factories must churn out machine after machine. It was a matter of survival. The great grooves of Enceladus would be carved into channels for cargo, and a robotic spiderweb of industry would begin to occupy the surface. Anyone with a powerful enough telescope could see the surface of the world changing before their very eyes. Tycho Drive Yards became the centerpiece of ICM construction on Enceladus, a monument to industry and military might. It would be here that the first indigenous ICM ships would be built, great behemoths that would hope to one day rival the might of the PSSA’s ever growing military complex. Soldiers would report to this icy world to train, and its ferocity and might would become something of legend throughout ICM culture. It was a harsh and cruel world, but it was a necessary world. An ever vigilant reminder of their power.

#horizon #space #alt future #alt history #science fiction #hard science fiction #story #worldbuilding #ICM #PSSA #sci fi #wip #science #combat

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theculturedmarxist · 2 years

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A Waning Military Superpower

The sections of the book on American military prowess are where Martyanov’s expertise really shines through. Martyanov claims that a revolution in military affairs has already destroyed the foundation of American post–World War II hegemony and that America simply has not yet awakened to this reality. This is due to the fact, Martyanov says, that the United States has “lost both its competitive edge and its competences in some crucial fields such as building complex machines, commercial aerospace, and shipbuilding.” Effectively, he argues, the United States has already lost the arms race. Martyanov compares the efficacy of America’s Tomahawk missile with Russia’s Kalibr. He argues that both weapons have seen ample usage in recent years, and Russia’s missile is far more effective against missile defense. He points out that 70 percent of Tomahawks launched at Syria in April 2018 were shot down.

But this is not Martyanov’s core critique, which is that the American military is simply not tailored to the needs of today’s world. It is structured for incursions against much weaker opponents—such as Iraq in 1991 and 2003. But it is not in a position of strength when faced with a peer that can compete in terms of troop deployment and firepower.

Critical in this respect is America’s continued reliance on aircraft carriers to project power across the globe. “The American super-carrier died as a viable weapon system designed for modern war with the arrival of the long-range supersonic anti-shipping missile,” Martyanov writes. This renders “the 100,000-ton displacement mastodons of the US Navy obsolete and very expensive sacrificial lambs in any real war. Modern Russian hypersonic missiles such as the Mach-9 capable aero-ballistic Kinzhal have a range of 2000 kilometres and are not interceptable by existing US anti-missile systems.” In fact, if an advanced enemy decided to sink a U.S. carrier battle group, it could do so with the push of a few buttons. These missiles cost a few million dollars to make in countries, like Russia, with low labor costs. A carrier battle group, by contrast, costs about $30 billion and has around 6,700 hands on deck. Martyanov seems genuinely concerned that the Pentagon does not recognize the scale of this problem and could deploy a carrier battle group against a competitive peer in the near future. The enormous, immediate losses that would result might force the United States to use nuclear weapons in response.

Finally, Martyanov points to the shortcomings of U.S. missile and air defense systems when measured against their Russian equivalents. He notes that this makes America’s military increasingly vulnerable against even smaller nations like Iran, reminding readers of the September 2019 attack against Saudi Aramco oil refineries where Western-made missile defense systems failed to protect the infrastructure.

Martyanov traces the failures of U.S. military technologies back to the nature of the U.S. military-industrial complex. He reminds readers that this is effectively a for-profit enterprise, and so what ends up being built is not always what is best in terms of defense capabilities, but rather what will make the most money for commercial actors.

Now that we have a large-scale land war, how has Martyanov’s analysis played out? Martyanov’s prediction that the structure of America’s military is only suited to relatively small wars against far weaker powers appears accurate in retrospect. Western weaponry and covert intelligence support has certainly helped Ukraine achieve some real successes on the battlefield. But as the war drags on and artillery capacity becomes decisive, the situation appears far more perilous.

Alex Vershinin at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute has estimated that the Russian military has been using around 7,176 artillery shells a day. He then compares this with American productive capacity. His conclusions are stark: “US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine,” he writes. “If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.”1

In June, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, Vadym Skibitsky, admitted the gravity of the material challenges. “This is an artillery war now,” he said, “Ukraine has one artillery piece to 10 to 15 Russian artillery prices. . . . We are losing in terms of artillery.” Skibitsky then asked that more munitions be sent from the West, but as Vershinin’s analysis shows, it is likely that we simply do not have them in sufficient supply and cannot produce them. As early as April, Germany’s defense minister Christine Lambrecht admitted as much: “In the case of deliveries from Bundeswehr stocks, I have to be honest, we have now reached a limit,” she said.

Vershinin believes that the United States no longer has the arms manufacturing capacity to act as the “arsenal of democracy.” The Russo-Ukrainian war, like World Wars I and II, has been fought on an industrial scale. To fight it, the resources of a strong industrial economy must be deployed. Needless to say, the West has allowed its industrial capacity to erode considerably, having outsourced much of its manufacturing to poorer regions of the world. This is also visible in another surprising recent development. After putting a great deal of effort into lobbying the Australian government to buy submarines from the United States under the aukus deal, it was recently revealed to Congress that the United States does not actually possess the manufacturing capacity to produce these submarines in a timely fashion. Martyanov argues that the structure of America’s postindustrial military reflects its postindustrial economy. It is to this that we now turn.

A Hollow Economy

The book really comes into its own in the long sections on the American economy. These chapters seem especially prescient after Western sanctions against Russia failed to stop the invasion or decisively cripple the Russian economy, while causing increasing strains in the West. In a word, Martyanov views American prosperity as largely fake, a shiny wrapping distracting from an increasingly hollow interior.

Martyanov, reflecting his Soviet materialist education, starts by discussing the food supply. He recalls the limited food options available in the old Soviet Union and how impressed émigrés were by the “overflowing abundance” of the American convenience store. But Martyanov notes that today such abundance is only the preserve of the rich and powerful. He references a 2020 study by the Brookings Institution which found that “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.” And while some of this was driven by the pandemic, the number was 15.1 percent in 2018. Martyanov makes the case that these numbers reflect an economy that is poorly organized and teetering on the edge. In the summer of 2022, when the food component of the CPI is increasing at over 10 percent a year and rising fast, Martyanov’s chapter looks prophetic.

Martyanov then moves on to other consumer goods. He recalls the so-called kitchen debate in 1959 when Vice President Richard Nixon showed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a modern American kitchen. During this debate, Nixon explained to Khrushchev that the house they were in, with all its modern luxuries, could be bought by “any steel worker.” Nixon explained that the average American steel worker earned about $3 an hour—or $480 per month—and that the house could be obtained on a thirty-year mortgage for the cost of $100 a month. Martyanov points out that this is impossible in the contemporary American economy. As vital goods have become less and less affordable for the average American, debt of all types has exploded. He notes that the flip side of this growing debt has been a decline in domestic industrial production, which has been stagnant in nominal terms and falling as a percent of U.S. GDP since 2008. “The scale of this catastrophe is not understood,” he writes, “until one considers the fact that a single manufacturing job on average generates 3.4 employees elsewhere in non-manufacturing sectors.”

Needless to say, Martyanov does not believe that America has the most powerful economy on earth. Deploying his old school materialist toolkit, he surveys core heavy industries—including the automotive industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, and later the aerospace industry—and finds U.S. capacity wanting. He points out that in steel production “China outproduces the United States by a factor of 11, while Russia, which has a population less than half the size of that of the United States, produces around 81% of US steel output.”

Martyanov is particularly critical of GDP metrics as a basis for determining the wealth of a country or the power of its economy, because they assign spending on services the same weight as spending on primary products and manufactured goods. He believes that the postindustrial economy is a “figment of the imagination of Wall Street financial strategists” and that GDP metrics merely provide America with a fig leaf to cover its economic weaknesses. In a separate podcast that Martyanov posted to his YouTube channel, he explains why these metrics are particularly misleading from the point of view of military production. He compares the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack submarine and the Russian Yasen-class equivalent. He argues that these are comparable in terms of their platform capabilities, but that the Yasen-class has superior armaments. Crucially, however, he notes that the cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.2 billion while the cost of the Yasen-class submarine is only around $1 billion. Since GDP measures quantify economic output (including military output) in dollar terms, it would appear that, when it comes to submarine output, Russia is producing less than a third of what it is actually producing. Using a purchasing-power-parity-adjusted measure might help somewhat here, but it would still not capture the extra bang for their buck that the Russians are getting.

A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day.

Next, Martyanov looks at energy. While many American pundits believed that the emergence of fracking technology would make Russian oil and gas less and less important, Martyanov views the shale oil boom as “a story of technology winning over common economic sense.” He believes that America’s shale boom was a speculative mania driven by vague promises and cheap credit. He quotes the financial analyst David Deckelbaum, who noted that “This is an industry that for every dollar that they brought in, they would spend two.” Ultimately, Martyanov argues, the U.S. shale industry is a paper tiger whose viability is heavily dependent on high oil prices.

Martyanov is even more critical of “green energy,” which he views as a self-destructive set of policies that will destroy the energy independence of all countries that pursue them. He also points out that China, Russia, and most non-Western nations know this and, despite lip service to fashionable green causes, avoid these policies.

Finally, Martyanov returns to the collapse of America’s ability to make things. He recites the now familiar numbers about falling manufacturing output and an increased reliance on imports from abroad. But he also points to the collapse in manufacturing expertise. Martyanov cites statistics showing that, on a per capita basis, Russia produces twice as many STEM graduates as America. He attributes this to a change in elite attitudes. STEM subjects are difficult and require serious intellectual exertion. They often yield jobs on factory floors that are not particularly glamorous. “In contemporary American culture dominated by poor taste and low quality ideological, agenda-driven art and entertainment, being a fashion designer or a disc jockey or a psychologist is by far a more attractive career goal,” he writes, “especially for America’s urban and college population, than foreseeing oneself on the manufacturing floor working as a CNC operator or mechanic on the assembly line.”

Rotting from the Head Down

Martyanov’s economic analysis may reflect his Soviet materialist education, but ultimately, he views America’s core problem as being a crisis of leadership. He traces this problem back to the election of Bill Clinton in 1993. Martyanov argues that Clinton represented a new type of American leader: an extreme meritocrat. These new meritocrats believed their personal capacities gave them the ability to do anything imaginable. This megalomaniacal tendency, Martyanov observes, has been latent in the American project since the founding. “Everything American,” he writes, “must be the largest, the fastest, the most efficient or, in general, simply the best.” Yet this character trait has not dominated the personality of either the American people or their leaders, he says. Rather, the American people remain today “very nice folks” that “are generally patriotic and have common sense and a good sense of humour.” Yet in recent times, he argues, something has happened in American elite circles that has let the more grandiose and delusional side of the American psyche run amok, and this has happened at the very time when America is most in need of good leadership.

Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly overestimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game; the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for self-assuredness and self-interestedness.

This creates an echo chamber in the halls of power. The elite incentive structure does not allow for self-correction when error is detected. Rather, when mistakes are made, they are ignored and forgotten. To illustrate this phenomenon, Martyanov recalls the popularity of the phrase “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” on Wall Street in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Since the incentives are set up for people to focus wholly on themselves and their own careers, there is no reference to any common good to be defended, and so anyone who points out mistakes risks career suicide. Ensuring that the mechanism securing elite individual gain is upheld and insulated from criticism is more important than ensuring that it works. As with late Communism, most effort is expended on producing self-reinforcing narratives that justify the system itself, and there is little energy left for addressing genuine problems.

Martyanov posits that this is how American leaders are viewed in much of the rest of the world, where he contends that leaders are selected along more genuinely meritocratic lines. “American [public] intellectuals come across as feeble and unconvincing, if not laughably incompetent and trite,” he writes, “when measured against the best minds from Russia, China, Iran or many other regions of the globe.”

Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Martyanov’s assessment of the American elite, his view has explanatory power if it is widely shared outside of the West and especially in Russia. Given that Russia, China, India, Brazil, and most of the Global South appear to have broken with the West in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, we can infer that their leaders share at least some of Martyanov’s views of Western elites.

#russia #ukraine conflict #us imperialism

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mapsofmystery · 1 year

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episode 7 of Batman Beyond, "Shriek", is about the Wayne-Powers corporation attempting to tear down Gotham's historical district. this was such a striking episode to me since we already know the mythos of batman has always attempted to tackle the 'grittier' aspects of crime & justice. [read grittier as "grimly realistic"]. as a product of the late 90s-early 2000s it hold similar themes that many grunge comics and cyber punk/sci fi punk themes held about corruption, corporate greed, and the wealthy albeit in a general sense since it's still american comics, but it is doing something interesting here that i've always loved about gotham centric media.

Bruce is seen speaking with what i am assuming are the board of directors about the leadership's decision to expand into the historical district and fortunately it is successful. Bruce Wayne really cares for Gotham city, and many poor people across many other cities can relate to having their cherished neighbourhoods becoming slum-like landscapes only for property developers to do as they please once they are bought out. last month i was reading about gentrification (I forget from who) so the ideas are still a bit fresh and it was discussed how property developers will buy land and purposefully allow it to degrade in order to justify tearing down a neighbourhood and pushing out locals. this is of course to build cheaply made condos and other properties meant to line the pockets of the rich. i am already fairly well versed in the harm of gentrification, but it was interesting to the more malicious ways in property owners continue to harm the working class through things like housing and intentionally hostile infrastructure.

Bruce Wayne/batman is really special in that despite being from a rich background and having luxuries, he is one of the few people who still feel quite responsible for the state of inequality within the city. it shows through much of his actions as well as his psyche, he also doesn't even identify with being bruce wayne, but rather as "Batman" which is mentioned at the end of this episode. it is absolutely not new information to him about "crime" being directly to meeting the needs of the working class. i don't remember much from my first watch of Batman Beyond, mostly because I was quite young, but I am heavily appreciative of these explorations of IRL issues. I personally love when fiction is grounded in reality this way. Terry is somewhat beholden to the state of Gotham, he doesn't see the value in the historical district, but I wonder if his time with Bruce is helping him mature his ideas or if there's ever any tension between them seeing as Bruce had turned his back on city years ago and still maintains his wealth; or about the fact that it's Bruce's company that is directly responsible for the exploitation of the working class. i see bruce as not necessarily trying to push his ideals on others seeing as that never worked in the past (maybe he's too old to be so controlling...), but rather truly guide him in his missions. I'm sort of anticipating for any moment Bruce talks about past robins since I remember Return of the Joker the most out of the whole series 😅

we also see other things happen in the episode, Shriek having been rescued from bankruptcy by Powers and becoming a criminal so that he continue research. at the heart of Batman media we know the biggest criminal is the rich and the police/politicians that maintain their material interests. while watching this episode it is just so clear that Powers is responsible creating criminals and that he is able to pay/coerce these villains into doing what he needs to in order to consolidate power. (thinking about the first 2 episodes where we see Wayne-Powers corp as integrated into a fictional military industrial complex). when Shriek chases after Terry and get's spotted by the cop hover-crafters, he is next seen in Powers' office talking about how he can't show his face and can't use his name and can't return to his lab. how he is being forced to face the consequences of his actions. Powers tells him that being feared is better than being loved and convinces him that having power as a criminal is worth it. in the end Shriek is the only one that suffers for his actions while powers is able to walk away.

maybe this is just the lens that I'm watching this through, but it is so clear that this is pointing to the Powers being representative of systemic issues seeing as he is CEO to such a wealthy company and the villains that he uses every episode are complicit middle men. i also really appreciate that Batman Beyond actually explores bruce's trauma. the historical district is one of the only areas that doesn't have neo-Gotham's futuristic infrastructure, in fact, it contains the movie theatre in where his parent were murdered. i mentioned this earlier, but it was noted that Bruce knew that he was not experiencing psychosis because the voice that was attempting to manipulate him called him by his name as opposed to "Batman" I wish DC would allow Bruce to age and reflect more, especially with respect to his ideology and identity (but that would also require the writers to understand marxism and anti-capitalism lol). the mythos of Batman is so interesting and so many recent iterations of him do such a bad job? there's both an attempt at working through the logistics of him as a figure as well as a removal from the understanding of class politics unless it's for a one liner joke.

I am glad that the Bruce of the future is revitalizing hope for the future of his city and that he is able to share this knowledge and experiences with Terry. there is so much value in "organizational memory" and although Terry is not very smart, he is absolutely a great fit for bruce's cranky pessimistic nature while still being able to interact with these themes.

#Batman Beyond #batman #watching batman beyond

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