#and then getting FURIOUS when they find out how much union laborers make

[captainjonnitkessler]

You guys know that capitalism doesn’t mean “involves money”, right? It is legitimately important that you all know that the problem with capitalism is not “uses currency”.

Capitalism is bad because it exploits people and puts profit over human life and dignity. It’s not bad or morally wrong for people to have lots of money, it’s wrong for them to make that money by exploiting workers. It’s not wrong to sell products and labor for money, it’s wrong to run everyone else out of business so you can form a monopoly and jack up prices once people have no choice but to buy from you.

It’s really starting to piss me off, the frequency with which I’m seeing people call others “capitalist scum” and “bootlickers” for things like “charging money for products and services”, “suggesting that laborers should be paid fairly”, and the classic “having more money than me”. Capitalism is a huge problem, but when you don’t understand what the problem actually is and just start assuming that any transaction involving money is “capitalism”, you are diluting and weakening the cause you claim to be fighting for.

The problem with capitalism is the exploitation of labor, not the existence of money. 

#this is SERIOUSLY pissing me off #like yeah. capitalism sucks. obviously #but people have been blaming it for EVERYTHING. and it's like . . . you are missing several points here #like a lot of what people have been blaming capitalism for is just general human nature #you think people are going to stop being jackasses under socialism? you think people are going to stop #lying and stealing and hoarding just because we changed economic systems? #*gestures wildly at all of human history* THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THEY WILL NOT #and don't even get me started on people claiming to be anti-capitalist and pro-worker and pro-union #and then getting FURIOUS when they find out how much union laborers make #and suddenly switching over to 'eat the rich' #bro. an electrician making $50 an hour isn't 'rich' and even if they were #they made it through their own labor without exploiting anyone so what EXACTLY is your problem

[hugodartbender]

Chapter 10

The narrator reports to Liberty Paints early in the morning for work. In the factory are many patriotic symbols as well as signs that say "Keep America pure", suggesting that for them there are some colors that are not considered pure. A man named Macduffy interviews the narrator and sends him to work with Mr. Kimbro. They take the narrator to a locker room where they tell him to change his clothes, they also tell him that the colored boys are brought to oppose the union of the factory, showing that there is obviously tension between black workers and the labor Union. Finally the narrator meets Mr. Kimbro, a moody man who does not show much interest in his workers. The unpleasant boss explains to the narrator how to do his job, just once, because according to him, he doesn't have time to explain it to him more times. Mr. Kimbro explains the procedures and among his instructions is not to think and only do what he is told. Kimbro is only interested in profiting from the narrator. The narrator task is to paint the buckets and later on Kimbro tells the narrator to refill his dope in the tank room. However, he did not mention where the tank room was or how to refill his dope. Despite his instructions not to think, the narrator is forced to do so to find a solution. The narrator finds the room but does not know which tank has the right dope in it, so he decides to smell to see which one smells more than the one he was using and chose the most similar. The narrator realizes that his paint samples are not as they should be so he tries to mix and finish the job before Mr. Kimbro arrives. However, Kimbro discovers the mistake and becomes furious, unable to understand the narrator's explanations. Obviously Mr. Kimbro expects the narrator to work with excellence even with insufficient instructions. Kimbro immediately intends to fire the narrator, so he goes to the office and complains that he is not satisfied with his new employee, unfortunately for Kimbro, there is no one who can replace the narrator so he continues to use him to finish the job. The narrator believes that he is going to be fired but they send him to do another task, to help Lucius Brockway in the basement, who at first refuses to receive help but later reconsiders and accepts it. Apparently the white owners of the factory have tried to replace Brockway but without any result, since although he is not an engineer, his skills are difficult to find. The narrator wonders how Brockway got the job without any education, doing the job of an engineer but earning far less. Needless to say, of course, that Brockway is black. It is revealed that Brockway is one of the most important employees in the factory, the man who makes the base of the paint before it is turned into Optic White. This illustrates the way in which the factory system depends on the work from black and underestimated employees. The narrator even learns that the company's slogan was Brockway's idea: "If It's Optic White, It's the Right White." On the way to get his lunch, the narrator accidentally walks into a union meeting where he is treated with hostility and contempt, which is ironic since the function of the union is supposed to be the equality of all workers. When the narrator returns to Brockway and explains the reason for his delay, Brockway becomes enraged and tries to kicks him out of the basement.Neither the union nor Brockway are interested in the narrator, and for them he is on one side or the other. . The narrator has endured too much, a fit of anger leads him to respond to Brockway and they end up fighting. In the end, when being overcome by a younger adversary, Brockway stops fighting, and the narrator insults him and the union. Brockway explains his hatred for the union and the narrator replies that he did not know anything, later offering his hand to Brockway for a shake to put the fight behind him. The narrator heard a hiss from the boilers, Brockway tells him to turn a specific valve to lower the pressure, but the opposite happens, and when he tries to get Brockway to help him he was already gone, he had used his knowledge of the place in a attempt to kill the narrator after his defeat. An explosion occurs and when the narrator awakens he hears Brockway tell someone that he was not qualified for the job.

[arcadianambivalence]

World on Fire, Episode 3

December 1939

After the invasion of Poland, the newly declared war seemed to ground to a halt.  The nervous calm of the autumn of 1939 led to the war’s nickname of the “phony war.”  As Nancy describes it: “There is simply a feeling among the allied forces that the inevitable will never come to pass.”

In World on Fire, British forces stationed in Northern France fill their time with digging, minor spats, and talk of home.  Because of his class, Harry has been set up as an officer, but his sergeant seems to be better suited for the job.  While Harry tries to be a friend to the men, Stan speaks plainly and gains their respect.  Wanting to help Poland but winding up in France, wanting to protect the Tomaszeski family and having to leave them behind, wanting to fight but digging trenches instead, Harry feels listless and useless once again.

(Read more)

Conversely, Tom is still at the bottom of the pecking order in the Navy, and he bristles at the strict order of life at sea.  To supplement his income, he gets his peers to place bets on when the ship’s canary will lay an egg, but he runs into trouble with a crewmate named Henry.  Crewmate Vic confiscates the money from Tom.  Then the ship goes on red alert.  Tom rushes into the skirmish with enthusiasm until a hit from the German battleship knocks him off his feet, kills Vic, and blows off Henry’s arm.  All personal disputes are set aside as Tom helps Henry to his feet.

Heavily damaged but still afloat, the Exeter is a smokestack gliding across the water.  Tom retrieves the betting money from Vic’s body and gives it to Henry.  “This doesn’t make us mates,” he protests.  He has a reputation to uphold (with whom?  Himself?).

In London, Douglas is desperate for news about Tom as the idea of peace grows fainter by the day, especially with news of the sinking of the Admiral Graf Spee.  Robina is starting to reassess her opinions, too.  Despite calling herself not much of a mother, she can see that Jan is miserable at school.  Her words of encouragement ring hollow even as she says them: “And that’s what you do in this life, you get used to it.  And it makes you a better person.  Eventually.  Resilient, at least—a quality much undervalued.”  

But the immediate ostracism does not make Jan resilient, and Robina quickly changes her tune.  She marches Jan up to the other schoolchildren and stands up for him with a long speech about how everyone in Jan’s family is fighting Hitler and deserves their praise.

(I’ve only had Jan for a day and a half, but any boy who attacks this fine young man must be on Hitler’s side!)

Ludwig, a member of the Resistance, encourages Kasia to use her position as a waitress to observe the occupying German soldiers.  If anyone tries to flirt with her, he says, she could lure the soldier to the bombed-out corner of the city and avenge her mother.  Kasia attempts to do this with a soldier but gets scared and lets him go at the last minute.

That soldier is Klaus Rossler, and his parents are terrified that they will lose both children to the Nazi Regime.  After Hilde’s seizure last episode, the Rosslers believe she will be taken away to an institution like a neighbor’s son once was.  Concerned for Hilde, Nancy investigates the institution and makes a horrifying discovery about its state-sanctioned euthanasia program under Dr. Voller.  She confronts the doctor, but he tries to justify the program with Social Darwinism.  She refutes him with “Human progress is driven by our capacity to look out for those who are weaker than us.”

Nancy shares her findings with the Rosslers: first the parents receive a letter asking for consent to institutionalize the children, and if they don’t reply, there is a second letter and a threat that the child will be taken away.  If the parents still refuse, they will be committed to forced labor and their child taken anyway.  The final letter is a death certificate.  “There is no treatment, only murder.”

But knowledge comes at a cost.  Nancy’s act of investigating the institution may very well draw attention to her and the Rosslers.  Uwe Rossler is furious and forbids Nancy from contacting them again, but he too could have stirred up suspicion at work today.  He interrupted a fight between two workers and refused to deliver any kind of punishment for the women involved.  One worker tries to pull rank with her status as a Party Member and is unhappy when that does nothing to sway Uwe.

No good deed goes unpunished anywhere.  Konrad and Grzegorz continue to run for their lives, but now they have two factions to evade.  I mentioned in my review for episode two that the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, too.  Because of the time jump between episodes, the news of a second invasion is left off-screen (one of a couple of revelations I wish we had time for), but Konrad and Grzegorz are well aware that everyone they meet could turn them in to one side or the other.

A farmer catches the two men as they sneak through his land, but instead of denouncing them, he gives them a warm meal.  This act of kindness doesn’t last for long, though, when a Soviet truck pulls up with a couple of suspicious soldiers.  One soldier in particular takes his time inspecting the house while Konrad and Grzegorz hide in the cellar below.  

Just like in episode one, Grzegorz fights back a nervous coughing fit.  Just like in episode two, the encounter ends with shocking violence as the soldiers murder the farmer and his family.

Compared to all this, the reunion of Lois and Harry seems trite (compared to anything, the back-and-forth with Lois and Harry seems trite!).  Not even an episode has passed since their separation, so the arrival of the ENSA troop Lois happens to be in at the camp that Harry happens to be in doesn’t even feel like two long-lost lovers meeting.  It just feels convenient.

Finally free to make her own choices without thinking of her father and brother, Lois is all smiles for the troops (who are more than happy to see her too!).  Shocked by this side of her, Harry flips his shit and punches a soldier Lois is flirting with.  But, class and rank being what they are, it’s the poor soldier who is apparently in trouble for the fight.

But enough has happened in the few months apart to make Harry wonder if the two can be friends again, even though he decked her date.  And enough has (not) happened for Lois to realize that she’s pregnant.  (I guess an episode-long subplot involving this discovery and Lois coming to terms with it wasn’t as important as Harry’s emotional baggage...)

To complicate things further, Robina realizes that Harry and Kasia are married.

That night, Harry confides his situation to Stan, who casually suggests that the war has done him a favor.  At the thought that Kasia could be dead, Harry flips his shit again.  

There’s no one to punch, so wasting ammunition and scaring some owls will have to do.

For all the flack I’ve given the love triangle, though, it does serve a thematic purpose.  Harry’s sense of guilt and obligation for Kasia and Lois is emblematic of the conflict felt by many soldiers.  At one point, Lois asks him “Why are you here?” and he immediately begins to list his grievances about his inability to fight on the front lines for Poland.  

Britain declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, but no major combat occurred for several months.  Meanwhile, Britain began to shift its focus to its own shores and the threat of their own German invasion.  

The feeling that Britain abandoned Poland is symbolized by Harry’s separation from both Kasia and Jan, and his concern for his own country is symbolized by his relationship with Lois.

When writing World on Fire, Peter Bowker chose his characters carefully, each one drawing attention to a different aspect of life during World War Two: refugees and civilians whose lives were upended by war, partisans who resisted, collaborators who didn’t, soldiers who went to war willingly (or unwillingly), and the cross-section between these areas.  

Lois and Harry can worry about their love lives because they aren’t in danger every second.  Nancy can investigate the euthanasia program because as an American journalist, she is given looser restrictions than German civilians.  Robina has the freedom to (publically) change her sympathies with relative ease after meeting Jan,  but the Rosslers or the Tomaszeskis are too busy trying to survive unnoticed to dare that.  Douglas is able to talk of peace because he is not personally at war (yet).

So when Kasia witnesses the brutal beating and murder of Ludwig, her decision to actively involve herself in the luring and killing of a soldier, and the way this is framed as the death of Kasia’s own innocence, opens up other moral questions for viewer.  What makes that soldier different from Klaus?  And if the answer is “Nothing,” then did Klaus deserve to die, too?  If all Germans are the same, then what does that make Hilde?  Robina sympathized with the British Union of Fascists, so why are we supposed to care what Jan thinks of her now?  And if Nancy has certain freedoms afforded to her as a guest in Germany, why doesn’t she do more?  And finally: if I were in the same situation as any of these characters, what would I do?

With the spring of 1940, the phony war was over, and Germany invaded Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.

Notes:

The battle Tom survives is called The Battle of  River Plate, which places this episode in early December 1939.  Christmas decorations are visible when Nancy goes shopping and when Robina celebrates Jan’s birthday as other clues for dating the events.

One of the women in the fight that Uwe breaks up uses “Jew” as a slur, which unfortunately would have been one more way to dehumanize and debase Jewish people.

Lois is carrying a Hitler puppet at the start of the episode.  I wonder how that routine goes.

…And is it bad that I’m still holding out hope for a Connie subplot?

Further Reading

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/specialfeatures/world-on-fire-s1-ep2-history-images/

#world on fire

[royalbirthchamber]

A Debt of Vengeance Part XIV

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI Part XII Part XIII

**Well...I never thought this tale would go on as long as it did...but here we are! I want to thank everyone for all their support, love, feedback, and questions. I hope you have enjoyed this tale as much as I have enjoyed writing it. And thank you for being so patient in between chapters: would you believe it’s been a year and a half since Malchior and Sybil first met? Anyhow: I hope the ending is everything you all could want and more. Thank you - L. Wyvernic**

The now-empress reclined against the mountain of silken pillows and rubbed the grand swell of her stomach. There were so many questions swirling in Sybil's mind, so many things that didn't make sense. She watched at Malchior turned away from the door as the two other women left and silently walk back to the large pallet where she lay. Kneeling beside her he placed his hand on hers and for the moment they both felt the baby ready to be born, neither saying a word.

"Malchior," Sybil softly whispered. She intertwined her fingers with his and looked into the demigod's face. His eyes were glistening with a torrent of feelings: love, sorrow, guilt, joy...Sybil felt her throat tighten as her own tide of emotion began to rise.  Neither knew how to give voice to the weight in their hearts, the sins they carried beginning for redemption.

Malchior lowered his eyes, fighting to find the words. "All this time I've been nothing but...a monster."

" It's over now," she murmured, squeezing his hand, "It's all over."

He shook his head and looked into Sybil's eyes. "No, you don't understand: I always knew, the moment I first saw you waiting for me in your father's castle, I knew at that second. I just refused to believe it..."

" Knew what?" she asked, puzzled by his words.

The emperor shuddered with sorrow, regret. He forced himself to go on; she had to know.

"When I entered your father's castle, I was ready to destroy you," he whispered, "But then...seeing you seated there, it was as if every single moment of my life was compressed into this tiny point focused into one single second. My past and future all happening at once and in my heart, I felt my destiny calling to me. My prydia..."

"Malchior, I'm not your prydia," Sybil turned her face away as tears spilled down her cheeks. "Please...stop saying foolish things!"

"They're not foolish things, Sybil!" he cried. "I speak the truth."

"Would anyone else treat their 'prydia' as you have treated me?" she asked, facing him again. "Yes, I have been cruel in the past but it was onl-ahhh!" Sybil gasped: her womb contracted, the pain rolling down over her stomach and spreading into her back and hips. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on her breathing instead. The pains were getting stronger and closer together now. She felt Malchior release her hand and massage the underside of her belly where the pressure seemed to focus.

"That was a strong one," the emperor said. Sybil nodded in agreement as the pain finally abated. He grabbed a damp, cool cloth from a near-by crystal bowl and placed it against her forehead. She softly moaned, welcoming the refreshing feel of the wet cloth against her skin.

"Before...I took the throne, I went to see an oracle," Malchior quietly began. "It's customary for the heir to see her visions and prophesy before they are crowned. I was young, then, and did not give her words much thought. But...now I cannot forget her words. Of all the things she saw there was one part, one... prophecy which still haunts me: 'And two empresses will thou have, But only one a prydia be. One will fall, thy soul departed, The Second, sealed, will return it to thee.'"

"But...it doesn't say which one," Sybil replied, "Only that you would have two empresses but only one would be your prydia. That doesn't prove anything."

"'The Second, sealed, will return it to thee'. My sigil...the one I placed to protect you and our child: it can only be sealed to a prydia," he replied. "I placed it upon Thyra as well, even though I feared that prophecy. I would defy Fate, I would prove the old crone oracle wrong, but..."

"You...knew she wasn't your prydia?" Sybil softly asked, "Even when you married her and made her empress?"

"I loved her so much, Sybil." Malchior shook his head. "I loved her and swore that she would be my Fated One, that I would control my own destiny. When I laid my seal upon her, I felt so...confident that I had won over Fate." He then held his head in his hands. "Obviously...we both know..."

Sybil sighed and stared at the vaulted ceiling high above her as her mind tried to process everything. Ever since her father ordered Thyra's death her life had been nothing but chaos. Had Thyra actually been Malchior's prydia his sigil would have protected her and her child from the dark magic poisoning her assassin's blade. Instead both Thyra and the baby perished and proved that Malchior's sigil was powerless. It had, however, protected her own baby...

"You...really hurt me, Malchior," she finally said. "You, my father, Dysarq: all men who have seen me as something to be used." She rolled onto her side, facing away from the emperor. The position eased the pressure from her lower back from the large baby slowly making its way into the world.  "If I'm your prydia...why would you treat me so...cruelly?"

"Oh, Sybil, forgive me," Malchior pled. He gently laid beside her on the pallet and pulled her body close to his own. Even now she felt warm and safe in his arms. Sybil guided his arm around her belly so he could cradle it as well and Malchior nuzzled her neck in response. "Please, beloved...forgive me."

"I just want to know why?" She asked.

"I refused to believe that Thyra wasn't my prydia, even after I failed to prevent her death...even though the oracle had spoken such. During the war, when your father's armies surrendered, I decided that I would make his daughter my consort: that it would prove the prophecy wrong. By marrying the daughter of my hated enemy, a princess I had never met and who would despise me, I would thwart the gods...but I was wrong, Sybil. Fate had outwitted me once more by making you my prydia. When I entered you chambers and realized it the moment I laid eyes on you...I was so terrified. I just wanted to make you...hate me."

"That way...there would be no love," Sybil mused.

"And if there is no love...then I wouldn't be hurt again."

"Only...I would be the one hurt instead."

Malchior gently rolled Sybil onto her back and cupped her face, his own a mask of sorrow and remorse. " I have proven myself unworthy to have the love of my prydia. I accept this. I have drawn up documents giving you reign over Roliam once more. You...and our daughter...can go and live there. When I am gone, she will inherit my throne. I will not interfere: you two can live in peace."

Sybil looked into his eyes and knew he was speaking the truth. He would give her everything: her freedom, her kingdom, even his own child just to atone for his sins. He had hurt her, there was no denying the fact. He had been heartless, cruel, cold...and in turn, she had given him the same but then there were times...he had been tender, loving even. He adored their child from the moment she became pregnant and the fact that it would be a girl did nothing to diminish his love, something her own father never done.

And Sybil, despite everything - everything!- knew in her heart he would be the only man she would ever love. Was theirs a perfect love? No: it was one born from loss, grief, and a desire for vengeance. Both had entered the union wounded and instead of helping each other to heal they lashed out in pain, desiring to make the other suffer just as much. She remembered when her mother lay dying her father refused to see his wife one last time. Sybil was furious and bitterly wept as she held the woman's hand and cursed the king. The queen, whose heart never turned bitter in spite of her sufferings, comforted her daughter with an old proverb:

"If all could be understood then all would be forgiven."

The baby kicked as if waiting for her to make a choice before it entered the world. She reached up and caressed Malchior's face. For the first time in her life, she was free to choose her destiny.

"I shall tell you what I want," she began, "I will stay in this chamber and give birth to our daughter. I will sit beside you on the throne as your empress and advisor, and I will bear you a family of strong sons and proud daughters. All I ask...is that we learn to understand and forgive each other."

"Sybil," Malchior's eyes brimmed with tears as her forgiveness washed over him and finally began to lift the oppressive weight of grief from his soul. He leaned down and kissed his empress, their lips touching for the first time. Sybil softly moaned and wrapped her arms around his neck, her body beginning to yield to his as their tongues intertwined. Warmth flooded her body; not just the heat of lustful passions that she had known but a deeper warmth, more intense than when he had called her 'beloved'.  They would both heal.

Her thoughts were interrupted by another contraction. Her body slightly bucked as her hard stomach surged. A long, low moan escaped from her throat, her mouth pulling away from his as the pain grew along with her voice.

Malchior's hand slid under her gown and caressed her laboring belly, feeling the muscles of her womb tighten around their baby. Sybil arched her back, panting, as the pain peaked and then slowly faded once more. The pressure behind her cervix and in her hips was slowly building as each contraction gradually forced the large, Artemian child into the world. Sybil began to seriously fear that her body would not be able to accommodate such a large baby no matter what Malchior of the midwife said.

" How...far apart are my pains now?" Sybil murmured, "They feel stronger than when you brought me here."

"About fifteen minutes or so," Malchior replied. He pulled back her tight gown and began to kiss her stomach. "You're doing wonderful, Sybil." He rose from the bed and walked to the wooden table where various supplies awaited and grabbed a small glass vial. He returned and gently opened her thighs, allowing him to kneel between her bent knees. He opened the vial and carefully poured the sweet-scented oil onto his hands, rubbing them together as the smell reached Sybil's nose. It was similar to the same heady oil Mavis had poured into her bath. Sybil sighed and she inhaled the perfumed air while Malchior began to knead the sore flesh of her swollen midsection.

"Ahhh," she moaned, "That...feels wonderful, my lord."

Malchior did not spoke but relished watching his laboring empress sigh and moan in pleasure as his hands worked and caressed the tight, translucent skin. Her body was ripe, swollen with life, ready to erupt with his child and seeing her writhe upon the silken sheets was a delicious sight to behold. The baby's movements made ripples across the surface of her belly as it squirmed, impatient with the slow labor. He traced his fingers over the shifting mound as his other hand continued to firmly massage the underside of her stomach.

"Let me see if you've progressed, my empress." He carefully slid his oiled fingers into her sex. Sybil moaned, enjoying the feeling of him inside her despite her current ordeal. "About two, two-and-a-half fingers open." He slowly withdrew from her cunt and began to run his fingers over her sensitive clit. Her gentle signs became lustful moans of pleasure and her hands gripped the sheets as he teased her. After a moment of delicious torment, he rubbed more oil on his hands and began to rub her belly.

Sybil opened her eyes and saw the hungry look on the god-emperor. She slowly raised herself up into a sitting position and held out a hand.

"Please, I think I need to kneel while I labor. My back..."

Malchior helped her up until she knelt upon the bedding and supported her heavily pregnant figure from behind. Her belly hung between her bent knees, resting on the bedding, and the large baby pressed down against her gradually opening cervix. Malchior continued to cradle and rub her stomach. He pulled her in close, his erect cock pressing into her back through his trousers, and began to kiss the nape of her neck. Sybil released a series of moans and sighs as he continued to kiss her until another pain seized her once more, tightening around her like a fist. Her voice raised from a whimper into a painful cry, her hands pressing into the sides of her solid midriff. Malchior placed his hands atop her and whispered encouragements into her ear.

"Breathe, Sybil. Like this," and he led her through the pain, both breathing as the contraction gripped her body. As it passed she sagged against with a soft cry. The demi-god continued to caress her belly and kiss the side of her tired face. "You're so beautiful right now, my love. So strong and beautiful."

"You wanted to see me suffer, remember?" she replied with a wry smile. He softly groaned as he clutched her belly.

"I think you've suffered enough, my empress," he gently replied. "I could still delay this, let you rest for a day, and then make sure your labor is easy...painless..."

"No!" she fiercely shook her head. "I...I want my baby and I want...I want to suffer, Malchior.  I want you to watch me in agony as I birth this child. Just...promise me she'll be okay." Sybil ran a hand over her swell. "Promise me...if something goes wrong, you'll make sure she-"

"Sybil stop," Malchior interrupted her, "You will be able to bear this child. Those things Dysarq said were just horrible lies: I will never allow you or our children to perish in childbed."

The two remained kneeling on the pallet as Malchior hungrily kissed his prydia, cradling her belly through each contraction while Sybil moaned, cried, and panted through the cruel pain. It seemed her labor had stalled: after two hours the contractions were still about fifteen minutes apart. Sybil sat against the pillows once more, her knees bent, as the emperor gently checked to see her progress.

"Still the same," he calmly replied as he withdrew his fingers from her soaking sex. Sybil groaned in dismay. She had hoped for some progress after two hours of laboring in her beloved's arms. Her waters still remained intact and her womb no more open than before: two hours spent in vain! Malchior laid beside her and kissed her greedily, distracting her from the disappointment. She felt a familiar ache between her thighs as fire flushed through her body. She looked up into her husband's face as the lustful blaze burned in her eyes.

"Fuck me," she whispered, "I demand it, Malchior!"

Malchior's eyes widened, ignited with the same carnal flames that now burned in her. " You demand it, royal whore?" he teased. His hand moved from her cheek and slowly trailed down her body. Sybil shivered in delight and kissed him again.

"You promised to break my waters, to ravage me without mercy as I struggled to bear your child." she whispered, "Do it, Malchior! I need you!"

" I did promise, my little whore," he growled into her ear as he slowly slid his trousers off. "I did promise to fuck this child out of you."

"Please..." she whimpered, rolling onto her side to allow him better access. She felt him slide next to her on the pallet and lift her leg up, crying as her cunt ached to be impaled. "Oh Malchior, please..."

"Is this what you want, Sybil?" he teased her soaking folds with the tip of his massive rod. She nodded and moaned with each brush against her sex. Malchior buried his face into her neck, kissing her clavicle. " You do not know how long I've waited for this moment: fucking my whore prydia as she labors with my child, breaking her waters, and then finally watching as the royal baby mercilessly plows through her. Oh Sybil...thank you."

Sybil did not have time to reply as the emperor penetrated her hard. She screamed in a mix of surprise and pleasure as his cock stretched her open and began to thrust mercilessly into her.

"Oh gods, yes!" she screamed, "Harder!"

Malchior roughly gripped her belly, pulling Sybil into him and allowing him to plunge into her sex. Sybil felt him slam into her cervix repeatedly, his thick member filling her and hitting every pleasurable spot. She released a series of moans and screams in rhythm to his thrusts. The emperor groaned: the sounds of her cries only goaded him on and he had missed the feel of her cunt tightly enveloping his rod, missed feeling the baby kick inside his beloved as she begged for his cock.

"The Five Realms may think of you as their empress," he hissed, "but I'll always know you're my royal whore, Sybil. Wicked, wicked whore: begging to be fucked even in the throes on labor!"

"Yes!" she screamed. "And you're just as wicked, Malchior! So wicked! Oh gods!" She gripped his hand, the one holding her belly, as she felt another contraction begin to build. The pain and pleasure began to wrap around her, each building off the other into a mix of glorious torment. She moaned, her voice rich with agony, and her eyes began to flutter.

Malchior knew what was happening as he felt her stomach muscles begin to tighten. "Suffer for me, Sybil," he demanded. Sybil moaned in reply. The sensation of her stomach being seized by such pain only made him thrust faster and harder into his laboring beloved, his own orgasm building. He watched her face shift from ecstasy to a visage of torment. Her stomach surged, rock hard. Sybil bucked violently against his body: she began to shake as the combination of her orgasm and the contraction melted into one. She threw her head back as a raw scream tore from her throat: the pain and pleasure peaked at once and held her body prisoner. Malchior roared as he finally came with one last, deep thrust. His own body quaked with a forceful release, hot and thick. Sybil's cries continued as the tightening band of pain remained around her midsection. She gripped the sheets, gasping for air between her moans. The afterglow still cascaded through her even while she was tortured by the cruel contraction: it was both heaven and hell.

Something gave inside her, forcing a low groan from her lips. Malchior felt it as well and withdrew from her sore sex: a torrent of water burst from between her open, shivering thighs and spilled across the red, silken sheets. The contraction finally faded, leaving the empress trembling and drenched in sweat and birth fluid.

Malchior rose, quickly slipping back into his trousers, and grabbed some towels. He placed some on the soaked bed and used others to clean Sybil's legs and thighs. He gently kissed her stomach as he dried her with the soft towels. She weakly opened her eyes and gazed at her emperor. The chamber was now filled with the burning light of sunset, igniting his long hair into bursts of scarlet, crimson, and ruby. She watched as he placed his hand on her swell and felt the baby's position.

"Is she...okay?" an exhausted Sybil asked. "That wasn't too..."

"She is fine, my love," Malchior replied much to Sybil's relief. She gave a tired smile and stroked her belly. Malchior kissed her stomach once more. "Your labor should begin to hasten, now."

*****

Night fell and the birthing chamber was illuminated by the ethereal glow of candles and the small fire burning in the hearth. Sybil stood before the long wooden table, gripping its edge, moaning as another contraction held her. Behind her, Malchior rubbed her back as his empress groaned in pain. After her waters broke her labor did pick up again and the royal couple had spent the past hours pacing the chamber floors or kneeling on the pallet as Sybil panted and wailed with each fresh contraction. It was nearing midnight and now her pains were less than five minutes apart and lasting what seemed like an eternity. Her frame was soaked in sweat and every joint ached. As the contraction ended her body sagged against the table, her knees weak, and Malchior laced his arms through hers for support.

"I can't do this," she mewed, "I thought I was strong, but I'm too-"

"You are strong, Sybil!" Malchior lovingly whispered into her ear, "You are the strongest woman in all the Five Realms."

"I doubt that," she muttered. She looked over to the soft rug spread before the hearth. Malchior followed her gaze.

"Kneel?" he asked. Sybil nodded.

"...kneel, please."

He carefully led her over to the fireplace and helped her down until she was kneeling on all fours, her belly pressing into the red fibers of the rub. She closed her eyes and panted: the baby was so low now, the pressure almost unbearable. Malchior returned to her side and knelt. He placed a goblet of cold water to her lips, which she gulped down in seconds, and then resumed rubbing her sore back and stroking the side of her stomach.

"You're both going to be fine, " he softly reassured, "Do you think my magick will fail you now after all this time?"

"I'm just...scared," Sybil replied, "So scared..."

"But I'm here with you, beloved. Nothing and no one will hurt you or our daughter. Remember my sigil?"

Sybil slightly raised her head. Something had bothered her but only now did she remember what it was. "Malchior?"

"Hmm?"

"I thought...you said it had only been a dream when you sealed me. Remember?"

Malchior sighed. "I lied."

"But...you were gone. How did you return and then leave again? It doesn't...make sense."

The emperor caressed her face: it seemed the birthing chamber was a place where the truth would come to light as well as see their child born. " I did leave, with some men, that evening. We...that is, I, needed to see the oracle again. I needed to know if Dysarq would succeed and I needed to know...if you were my prydia after all. As we camped for the first night I heard you...calling for me. I knew you were in danger."

"The nightmare," Sybil answered. Malchior nodded.

"Yes. I had...to get to you, so I quickly set a portal back to the bedchamber and found you in bed, crying, but I could also feel his presence. I shouldn't...have left you alone: I knew then that unless I did something he would rob me of the both of you. So..."

Sybil closed her eyes. "You placed your seal-Aahhhh! Malchior!"

Her head pressed against the floor as her womb squeezed and hardened around the babe. Her voice filled the chambers; she felt her hips creak as the pressure behind the giant baby forced it into her pelvis. She gasped frantically for air as the pain overrode all other though.

"Breathe, Sybil! Breathe!" Malchior urged. He moved before her and lifted her panicked face up to meet his own. "You need to breathe!"

She slowly found control over her body and began to breathe deeply, exhaling each time with a long moan, tormented moan. Malchior pressed a cold cloth to her face as she worked through the contraction, knowing that the icy water would feel good against her hot face.

"Ahh...ahhh...ahh...too big," she cried, "The baby...too big."

"You can do this, my prydia," he replied, "All these months you've said you can handle anything this wicked emperor gives you."

"...I guess you're not...the only liar...here."

Malchior could not help but laugh. He leaned down and kissed her mouth. "I do not believe you were lying, Sybil."

" Tell me...what did the oracle say?"

"What do you expect? When I arrived she laughed, wanting to know why I was there if I already had my answer? There was no use in asking if you were my prydia: my seal lay upon you and our child. When I asked about Dysarq she said the seal would protect you from him...but not from me. The oracle warned me that I was on dangerously close to making myself unworthy of a prydia; it happens sometimes if one partner does not honor the other. 'the choice' she said, 'would lie in the Empress' hands'."

"...and I have made my choice, Malchior."

"I know."

*****

As the hours passed the pains became even more intense, almost on top of one another until Sybil felt as if she were suffering an endless contraction. She returned to the pallet, exhausted, and writhed upon the pillows as her body was tormented by wave after wave of excruciating pain. The contractions were frighteningly strong; Malchior barely could see the faint outline of their baby as the muscles of her womb mercilessly tightened into a clenched fist of pain. His hands tirelessly kneaded the sore flesh and his mouth sprinkled kisses on the taut surface of her surging belly, her heaving chest, her pale neck...

A new pain welled up inside Sybil's worn body: an urge she could not deny. She threw her head back against the pillows as her body followed its instinct and bore down. Her thighs opened as the baby finally made its first move towards the world, a journey that would not be quick. She wailed with effort as the felt the massive head sluggishly began to force its way through her hips - her bones creaked at the sheer girth and Sybil feared she would be split apart by the royal babe.

Malchior quickly slid his fingers inside and felt the top of the baby's head just begin to press against his fingertips.

My precious child...

"Let's get you to the birthing stool," he spoke with quiet urgency, not watching to scare his wife but also feeling a mix of excitement and anxiousness. Sybil said nothing, only moaned as he lifted her to her feet. Each step brought a whimper from her lips: the baby entering her canal made walking difficult and awkward. She gripped his arm and the other cradled her low-hanging belly. She could see the stool waiting for her by the fire, the sturdy rope hanging near-by: it seemed so far but somehow she found the strength to make it. She gripped the rope and slowly slid down until she was squatting on the stool. The position opened her hips more and gravity helped bring the baby's head down lower into her canal.

"Ahhh Malchior, she's so big!" Sybil moaned.

"Our beautiful, Artemian princess," he whispered as he sat behind her and supported her tired, heavy body. "She's coming, Sybil. You just need to stay strong."

She gripped the rope, just as she had done all those times before with Ansela except now her labor was real. Sybil felt the next contraction build and prepared herself to push again - she was strong! She would bear their child, and many more; she was the Empress of the Five Realms and would give her beloved many, many heirs.

Her knuckles went white with the sheer force of her grip upon the rope while she bore down on the baby. Her voice roared with determination and pain, echoing up into the rafters, and she opened her thighs as wide as possible.

"Yes, Sybil!" Malchior urged, "Push! Just like that!" He pulled her in close, his hands lovingly caressing her contracting belly, and began to kiss her face and neck. As she pushed he would murmur encouragements and then mention how her laboring cries were driving him insane with desire. She could feel him becoming hard and she could not help but enjoy knowing her agony was filling him with lust.

"I'm surprised you don't force her back inside and fuck me again!" she panted, "You're such a vile, horrible emperor. So wicked..."

"Do not tempt me, little empress!" he growled into her ear. "Your ordeal is still not over." The fantasies helped distract Sybil from the excruciating pressure as the large head continued to brutally force her open.

"Tell me...more, Malchior! What else will you do to me?"

The emperor spun tales of delicious torment: she would give birth before all his guards like a common whore, or perhaps he would force her to carry out her imperial duties while laboring before the court. There would be a special undergarment that would not allow her progress beyond the babe only partially crowning - she would spend the whole day as their baby's head bulged between her thighs, a damp mound behind the silk and leather of the garment. She moaned and begged through all the stories and felt his painfully hard cock throb as it pressed into her. Her fear was replaced by hungry desire: she almost wanted Malchior to force her on all fours and violently ravage her sore sex. Instead, it drove her as she continued to bear down and moan, feeling his heir painfully fill and stretch her. She must have pushed for a solid hour before she finally felt the enormous head barely press against her folds.

"Malchior! Oh god, she's coming!"

Malchior moved from his place behind Sybil and knelt before her so he could see her progress. He watched as she pushed, the lips of her cunt slightly bulged out and he saw the baby's head barely peek out from behind her folds before retreating back inside. Another push forced her sex to swell out a little more, fluid dribbling from her lips, and a second glimpse of the head from the almond-sized opening.

"I see her, Sybil!" his eyes sparkled with excitement and wonder. "She has your lovely, dark hair!"

Sybil reached down to the growing mound between her thighs and slipped a finger inside where she immediately felt the soft surface of her baby's head.

"...baby!" she gasped. "My baby!" Her emotions overwhelmed her and she began to weep with joy as she carefully caressed her child with the tip of her finger. Malchior took her face in his hands and begin to kiss his empress as his tears mingled with her own. She kept her palm placed against her labia and she bore down again, groaning and yelling with effort as her child slowly came. Her lips refused to part beyond a shy, modest opening forcing her sex to swell out with each push until it jutted out to painful proportions. Malchior gazed at the massive bulge and softly ran his fingers over the stubborn lips.

"You need to stop pushing, Sybil," he commanded, " and let your body stretch for the head."

"I can't" she cried, " Malchior I need to-"

"You need to stretch!" he firmly replied. "I'm taking you back over to the bed where you can rest and I can help your lips open."

Sybil didn't even have a moment to protest; Malchior picked her body up in one swoop and carried her across the chambers back to the bed once more. She leaned against the pillows and gripped the backs of her bent knees, pulling them as close to her body as possible. Malchior grabbed the bottle of oil and poured a few drops on her bulging labia before gently rubbing and massaging the tight, red tissues with his fingers. Sybil gently moaned as his fingertips would brush against her clit as he rubbed her glistening mound. He dripped a small cloth into a nearby bowl of hot water, enchanted no doubt to hold its temperature for hours, and then placed the hot compress into her swollen sex.

"Breathe," Malchior coached, "When the next pain comes, don't push: you need to stretch around the baby's head."

Sybil nodded as she felt a pain already on its way. Her moans started and the uncontrollable urge to push began to take hold. Before she was even aware of it Sybil was bearing down hard. Malchior's palm remained firmly pressed against the cloth-draped bulge, applying counter-pressure to his prydia's pushing.

"Sybil, you need to breathe! Don't push!"

"I can't!" she wailed, "I need to push!"

"Look at me!" Malchior leaned over and gently cupped her tired face. "You can do this Sybil! If not for me then for our daughter. If you keep pushing you will tire yourself and possibly tear which could...cause complications. I can't have anything happen to either of you. So breathe, pant - scream if you must!"

"I'm sorry, Malchior," she whispered. He sighed and kissed her face.

"There is nothing to forgive. You are so strong, my love, and the baby is almost here." He looked up at the lancet windows and noticed the first soft blushes of sunrise. "Look, Sybil: the sun is coming!"

She wearily followed his pointing finger and saw the soft pre-dawn light. "This labor will never end, Malchior."

"No, my empress: this will be the first morning out precious baby sees. Her first morning in all the Five Realms." He gently removed the hot compress and used his finger to gently stretch her stubborn lips once more. They had parted slightly, grudging giving the Artemian baby's head passage as it struggled to crown. As the next contraction came Sybil fought the urge to push and instead white-knuckled the sheets as her moans and cries filled the birthing chamber. She closed her eyes and wondered if she could honestly survive such an ordeal, but she had faith in her emperor's magick: he wouldn't let either perish.

The light outside slowly grew as Sybil fought her natural instinct to push. Malchrior continued to rub the burning, sore lips with oil and apply the hot compresses to the stretching swell between her thighs. With each contraction her lips slowly began to peel back around the enormous head, much larger than a mortal child's, until finally, the baby had nearly crowned. Sybil was exhausted, her throat raw from all her cries. She panted, her eyes half opened, as her stretched sex burned from the sheer girth of the child. Malchior placed another goblet of water to her lips and a cold cloth to her face, reviving her momentarily.

"Sybil, look."

Kneeling between her bent thighs he held a small mirror in which she finally caught the first glimpse of her baby. Malchior was right, the child had her dark curls which she reached down and gently caressed.

"Hello," she softly whispered, tears beginning to spill down her cheeks, "Hello my little sweetheart."

"I need you to push now, okay?" Malchior gently spoke, overcome with his own emotions. "Small pushes, Sybil."

Seeing and feeling her daughter, after all the months of sorrow and heartbreak, filled Sybil with a renewed vigor and determination. She pulled her thighs back once more and pushed , groaning as she felt the burning become more intense. Malchior placed both his hands on either side of the crown, pushing the flesh and tissues back around the massive head. Dawn began to fill the room and the first rays spilled through the windows and touched the damp, crowning head of her baby. Malchior gasped; this was a fortunate omen. A new era for his empire dawned with the birth of his firstborn. He gently bent over and gently kissed the exposed head of his soon-to-be-born princess.

Sybil's heart swelled: this dawn marked not only the birth of her daughter but also the beginning of her life, her new life as empress and wife to the man she loved. The old Malchior and Sybil were gone and now, in this new day, they were reborn. They would heal, they would love, they would build a family.

"She's coming!" Malchior excitedly spoke. He grabbed more towels and placed them around Sybil as the head finally crowned. He was amazed at the size of the baby's head jutting out of his mortal wife's sex. He looked back at his wife, his eyes filled with love and admiration. "Oh my prydia, my beautiful, empress. You look absolutely sublime."

"This will not be the last time either, Malchior," Sybil vowed before bearing down, driven to give Malchior their long-desired daughter.

He continued to press her burning lips down around the baby's skull as the empress whimpered with each push. Slowly the head emerged, the brow popping out as he supported her thin perineum. The nose, ears, mouth...all the little features slowly appeared as the head finally erupted in a spray of fluids.

Sybil collapsed against the cushions with a tortured cry, gasping for breath. Malchior cradled the baby's head, checking the neck for a cord and smiling when he found none. He took his wife's hand and placed it on their child's face. Sybil's fingers ran over the damp, chubby cheeks of her newborn with love and tenderness.

"...Avalee," she whispered, "My little Avalee."

"That...is a beautiful name, my love," Malchior replied.

"Malchior," Sybil looked at her husband, a serious expression crossing her weary face, "I want to name her Avalee Thyra...I think...that is best."

The demigod was dumbstruck. For a second he said nothing and Sybil feared she had misspoken, reopening old wounds in the emperor's heart.

"Sybil...," he finally spoke, his voice choked, "...I am not worthy of you."

Before Sybil could reply she was gripped by another contraction and she realized she still had to birth the shoulders. The head gently turned until the babe faced her inner thigh, the shoulders nestled against her pelvis. The two now focused on delivering the child: the journey was almost through. She jerked her legs back as far as possible and pushed with all her strength as the shoulders pressed against her pelvic bone. Malchior held the baby's head and worked to maneuver the wide shoulders free.

"Push!" he urged, "As hard as you can, Sybil!"

Sybil screamed, all her energy focused on pushing out the large baby lodged in her hips. The child did not budge, remaining firmly stuck at the shoulders. She began to panic after the second push: this was taking too long and her daughter needed out!

"She's not coming!" Sybil wept, "Oh god, she's going to die!"

"She's not going to die, Sybil!" Malchior reassured his terrified empress, "but I need you to get on your hands and knees." He helped her carefully turn until she knelt on all fours. Seeing the head of his child, so large compared to the mortal frame of his beloved, left the demigod in awe. He gently took hold and commanded his wife to push. Sybil strained with every ounce of effort left in her body. She forced herself to focus as the massive child stretched her every so slightly, tried not thinking about her daughter remaining trapped in her canal...Even now, so close to birth, she could feel the final few kicks: the child was struggling just as hard as she.

"Yes! Good!" Malchior smiled. "Keep pushing just like that!" A shoulder began to stubbornly slip through her stretched and burning sex. Sybil roared in agony as she pushed once more. Malchior was finally able to get a grip on the emerging shoulder and coax it out. The second quickly followed, allowing the emperor to pulled the rest of his daughter free as the remaining waters gushed out onto the towels. Sybil collapsed face down on the pillows: her body shook and shivered from the shock of delivering such a large child. Her consciousness reeled somewhere between the light and the dark. Malchior cradled the slippery, red newborn princess in his hands. He rubbed and gently patted her back and chest until finally the silent baby jerked and gasped for air, releasing a strong, reedy wail. Malchior sobbed.

The sound of her baby pierced the darkness clouding Sybil's mind and slowly reawakened.

Her baby.

It was alive.

"Avalee..." she softly murmured. Malchior turned his empress over and placed the squalling babying in her arms, weeping with joy. Sybil looked down at the baby: the same dark hair as her own, curls and all, yet her father's nose and eyes. She was so large and heavy in Sybil arms and yet she still found everything about her tiny and perfect. Sybil began to cry as well and kissed her newborn daughter. The three were now together.

****

The Five Realms rejoiced.

Everyone who saw the princess could not help but fawn and coo over the newborn. Sybil recovered in her chambers, the child never out of her sight. She was besotted with the little girl, singing to her as she nursed the Artemian princess or nuzzling her precious face. The other noblewomen who came to see the princess also came to pay respect to their new empress. They were happy for Sybil, who had suffered so and who convinced Malchior To allow them to bear children of their own. A few of the ladies were now pregnant themselves and they kissed Sybil's hand in thanks.

To say that Malchior was a proud father was an understatement. Seeing the mighty and fearsome demigod cradle and hold his newborn, his eyes aglow with love and tenderness...Sybil could not help but smile.

"Look, Avalee," he whispered, cradling his daughter before the windows, "One day you will reign over all of this!"

"Oh Malchior," Sybil sighed, "She's only two days old. She'll worry about that soon enough!" Malchior gave his wife an apologetic smile.

"You're right, my love. I just...I can't believe she is real."

*****

Sybil was crowned empress the same day as Princess Avalee was christened. They royal family rode through the capital as the people cheered. Sybil realized that she had never really left the palace and had no idea that she was so well loved. Stories of her ordeal as consort and of her wise advice had won her over: not only was she Malchior's prydia she was also a worthy successor to Thyra as empress.

Malchior looked at his wife, garbed in her coronation robes and wearing the Imperial diadem, and his beloved daughter cradled in her arms. The christening gown, first sewn by the princesses namesake, glittered and sparkled in the glorious light as the baby calmly watched the scene from her mother's arms. Nothing in the realms or the mortal worlds would tear them from him. Sybil turned, looked into her husband's eyes. She was thinking the same: nothing and no one would come between them. Their love was strong now and grew stronger as each day passed and they learned to heal. Malchior leaned in and they kissed.

The kingdom rejoiced.

#a debt of vengeance #birth #birth stories #pregnancy #pregnant #Pregnant Fantasy #fantasy #childbirth #Birthing

[avanneman]

Carriage House Days

Just off the corner of Connecticut and N Streets in Washington, DC is a reasonably imposing red-brick urban mini-mansion, which, a small plaque informs you, once belonged to General Henry Robert, who, you probably don’t know, wrote Robert’s Rules of Order. But back in 1975 when I worked there as a file clerk, we called it “the Carriage House,” because of the large room in the basement which indeed had once been a carriage house.

Like everyone else in the Carriage House, I worked on the “White & Case Case” for the law firm of Arnold & Porter, started in the late forties by two New Deal alumni, Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas, who were then joined by another New Dealer, Paul Porter. Fortas was appointed to the Supreme Court by his very good friend Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately but inadvertently all but ruined Fortas’ life by seeking to elevate him to Chief Justice, leading to a number of scandals that both prevented Fortas from getting the job and, later, forced him to resign from the Court altogether, which might not have happened if Fortas hadn’t been Jewish, and would have been the nation’s first Jewish Chief Justice.

This was all ancient history by the time my association with the firm—mute, inglorious, and brief—began. Thurman and Abe’s original idea, it seems, was to found an early version of a “boutique” law firm, handling just a few “interesting” cases. Unsurprisingly, that strategy fell by the wayside as Washington boomed. The firm was originally housed in a number of the row houses on N Street, most spectacularly by an impressive mansion on the corner of N and 19th that had been owned by Teddy Roosevelt when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the McKinley Administration. However, by the time I arrived at the Carriage House, most of the senior staff were housed in the I.A.M Building, a Washington, DC sized “skyscraper” on the corner of N and Connecticut, owned by the International Association of Machinists, whose president, William “Wimpy” Wimpisinger, was regarded by some as the most “dangerous” labor leader in America, though if Wimpy ever did anything dangerous, I never heard about it.

Most of the people in the Carriage House were young women, either paralegals or secretaries, which left me doubly the odd man out, or even trebly so, because I was quite possibly the oldest person there—of the regulars, at least—though a fortunately youthful appearance kept my presence and position there from looking as dubious as in fact it was.

I spent most of my time copying and collating documents. The enormous Xerox machines of the time could only copy a single page at a time—no automatic feeds and, of course, no automatic collating. I once spent three days assembling 50 copies of a 300-page document. Occasionally, I would read through transcripts of depositions and circle the names of "important" people whenever they appeared. One of the attorneys at many of these depositions would introduce himself at the start of each session in the following manner: "My name is Bobby Lawyer and I am an attorney."

I lived on Q Street, just a few blocks away from the Carriage House, in an efficiency I rented for $175 a month, furnished largely from what I scavenged from the street. I slept on a $50 mattress and listened to a $1200 stereo, both spread out on the floor. I sat in a worn wicker chair and ate from a worn card table, kept my books in a worn bookcase and my 100-odd jazz albums in a cardboard box.

The young women in the Carriage House who were single would often go to a bar they called “the Airplane”, located nearby on 19th St., but I was far too shy to do that. I would not have wanted to go to a “pick up” bar of any sort, and most certainly would not have wanted to go to a pick up bar frequented by women I knew at work.

However, there was a jazz club located in the basement of the town house right next to the Carriage House, “Harold’s Rogue and Jar”. I never found out what the name meant. I would go there occasionally and sit at the bar without talking to anyone. I would order a bacon cheeseburger with steak fries and a diet Coke. I can’t remember any of the names who appeared at the club, but it was serious jazz—nothing like the terrible “cool jazz” of today. The house drummer was a woman named Dottie Dodgione, who I think was the club manager as well. She was in her fifties, I would guess, with a stiff bouffant hairdo who wore pant suits, and ended each number with a furious solo. Sometimes, despite the jazz, the stress of being around so many people would get to me, and I would take my meal home, wrapped in heavy aluminum foil, and I would sit in my wicker chair and eat my rich bar food in peace and quiet and solitude.

After eight months at Arnold & Porter, I was fired, something anyone with the slightest percipience could have foreseen. Somewhere in Moby Dick Herman Melville warns sea captains not to hire “Platonists”—those with their eyes fixed only on invisible horizons—and he could have offered the same advice to law firms. But my time at the A&P was far from a complete loss. A month before I was fired, I was feeling so flush that I shopped for furniture, at Woodward & Lothrop, then DC’s largest department store. I chose a $400 sleeper sofa, blue and white plaid, a $150 butcher block table, and two Breuer chairs, which I had first seen in an optometrist’s shop and had thought were very classy. I didn’t have a credit card and didn’t know if Woodie’s would take a check, so I paid with $800 in cash, in the form of 16 fifties I had withdrawn from the bank the previous day. It was an investment that, though it might have seemed ill-timed, was in fact very much the reverse. Shortly after being fired, I started dating a young woman who would change my life significantly, a young woman who, I think, would not have dated a man who slept on a mattress on the floor and ate from a card table and a worn wicker chair.

Afterwords The rear windows of the Carriage House faced on the alley behind N Street. A “celebrity” hair dresser, whose name I never learned, parked one of three classic cars that he drove to work each day in that alley—a funereal-looking green and black pre-war Rolls Royce, a post-war Rolls that was cream with red pinstriping, and, surely the pièce de résistance, a midnight-blue coffin-nosed Cord convertible with a tan roof, its chrome supercharger exhaust pipes gleaming in the sun. I wonder how many people would drive such cars in rush-hour traffic today.

The top floor of the IAM building had both offices for Arnold & Porter and the Machinists’ Union. The A&P had lots of attractive, stylish young women who worked as secretaries and receptionists. One of them who sat at the front desk of the top floor told me how difficult it was to keep a straight face when the Machinists’ big shots came swanking in in their horrible 70s-era polyester leisure suits—mint green with white piping and matching white shoes, or what smirky journalists liked to call a “full Cleveland”, white suit, white shirt, and white shoes.

Shortly after I left the A&P, the Carriage House was commandeered by Carolyn Agger, a senior partner and Abe Fortas’ wife. Carolyn, who had been housed in the IAM building, was afraid of elevators, and wanted an office in a building with a nice staircase.

A year or so after I left, Arnold & Porter deserted N Street entirely, building the “Thurmond Arnold Building” at the corner of New Hampshire and M, but they didn’t stay there long. The firm has now merged with a New York law firm, Kaye Scholer, becoming Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, with offices all around the world. The DC office is on Massachusetts Avenue, just southeast of Mt. Vernon Square, a stretch of road that constitutes one of several “lobbyist lanes” radiating from the Capitol.

During the McCarthy years, Arnold, Fortas, & Porter defended many people accused of communism. Fortas in particular was a frequent opponent of Joe McCarthy, but the opposition to his appointment as chief justice seemed to come mostly from southern Democrats, who often saw integration as a Jewish/communist plot. When Jesse Helms (R-NC) was elected to the Senate in 1972, one of his goals was to “get” the Jews. He was a furious opponent of Israel until the Reagan years, when it was finally explained to him that you couldn’t make it to the very top in DC unless you learned to play ball with AIPAC.

The White & Case Case involved another law firm, in New York. One of its senior partners, a Mr. Eply, was facing criminal charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing him of criminal behavior based on the advice he gave to a White & Case client, Cortez Randell, a sixties wheeler and dealer who ended up doing time, though, I’m pretty sure, Eply did not. The SEC’s case against Eply was one of first impression, and naturally White & Case was willing to move heaven and earth to protect both Eply and other attorneys who might find themselves in legal peril merely for trying to turn an honest buck or two.

The story of Cortez Randell and his company, National Student Marketing, had been spectacular enough to be the subject of a book, out in paperback while the White & Case Case was still gaining momentum, called The Funny Money Game, by Andrew Tobias, perhaps not the first and certainly not the last up and coming Harvard graduate to make a name for himself by writing a book about his experiences on Wall Street under the tutelage of Mammon.

The way National Student Marketing “worked”—the reason why Cortez Randell got so rich so quickly and then imploded—was that Randell had either discovered or invented “synergy”. This meant buying out firms that provided goods or services complementary to whatever it was NSM was already selling—“better together”, one might say. But the “real” secret was that NSM didn’t buy other companies with money; it used NSM stock instead, which was better than money, because it increased in value every year.

There are lots of things wrong with this model—NSM was going to run out of “complementary” firms to buy, NSM stock was going up because the economy was expanding and all stocks were going up, not because NSM was so fabulous—but the biggest and simplest reason of all is that any financial instrument that can be better than money can also be worse than money, setting a pattern that has repeated itself a number of times since, on a scale far more spectacular than NSM’s. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, a better mousetrap, and makes a lot of money, and creates a financial instrument based on that idea—be it a simple share of stock, a mortgage-backed security, a collateralized debt obligation, or whatever—that is “better” than money, and a lot of people get rich on that financial instrument. Eventually, however, the better mousetrap, whatever it is, stops being better, and becomes the new normal. It’s lost its edge. But the people who have gotten rich off their “better than money” gimmick can’t believe that, or won’t believe that. The line that went around among the Wall Street geniuses who almost sank the world’s economy back in 2008 was that you don’t stop playing “Musical Chairs” until the music stops, even if you see the chairs disappearing. However, when the music had stopped, they started singing—and telling lies—until there were no chairs left, leaving the government to pay for all the furniture they’d destroyed.

#Arnold & Porter #White & Case #Eply

[mouseymatchmaker]

Batboys call Batmom “mom” for the first time

If I can request, can you make a Bruce Wayne x Reader, and it's about how all four boys call her mom/mother/any other mom names for the first time?

Requested by: anonymouse

Hope you enjoy this sweetie! Heaven knows I did :D These were meant to be shorter... Oops... :P I got carried away... So these are most about the scenarios when they first call batmom by a mothering name as opposed to batmom’s reaction... Hope that’s okay!

Tag list: @cattwomannn (If you want to be tagged in anything I write, just let me know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be for this fandom :D)

Dick:

Y/N clapped with the rest of the crowd as they watched the performers take a bow. She had taken Dick to see a circus performance that was taking place in Gotham. She had know that he loved being part of the circus, the familiarity of it, the family that had been made within it’s community and that he missed it dearly. Also, since Bruce had taken on Dick as his ward, the two of them had never managed to spend any time with just the two of them to build on their relationship. So, here they were. Bonding over Dick’s passionate love for acrobatics and the circus.

“Did you enjoy that Dick?” Y/N asked as they left the tent.

“Yeah! It was great! I mean, they weren’t as good as the circus I’m from but they were amazing!” Dick gushed as he walked with her. Y/N knew she couldn’t replace his mother, hell she didn’t want to. But she would be damned if she left him without a maternal figure. Y/N was content with Dick just accepting her into his life.

Dick chatted all the way to the car and for most of the journey back to the mansion, explaining every little detail and trick that the acrobats could use to their advantage. Y/N listened, enraptured by the boy’s passion. As they got closer to the house, Y/N noticed Dick’s head drooping and his voice slowing. A gentle smile made it’s way onto her face. He was still so new at being a vigilante alongside Bruce. The sleep pattern, or lack of, was taking it’s toll on him.

Once the car was parked, Y/N walked to Dick’s side of the car and gently picked him up. The boy was practically dead to the world. As she carried him through the mansion, Y/N spotted Bruce approaching them. “No patrol for him tonight” she said softly.

“No. I think not” Bruce replied, smoothing over the boys hair.

Together, they took Dick to his room, took his shoes and coat of before tucking him in. One eye opened blearily and he gave them a dopey sleepy smile.

“-ove you Mom… -ove you Dad” he murmured sleepily before rolling over. Y/N stared, stunned. Dick was just too pure for them.

Jason:

Frantic with worry, Y/N made her way down to the batcave. Jason and Batman had been on patrol and they’d had a run in with Scarecrow. Jason, in his recklessness, had taken the full brunt of a dose of Fear Toxin. It had reacted within a few minutes. Scarecrow had gotten away as Batman had to subdue Jason and get him back to the Batcave. Before Y/N had been informed, by Alfred, an antidote had been hastily made and administered. But the boy was still twisting and turning in whatever nightmare he was having.

“He’ll just have to see it through to the end Y/N” Bruce said calmly as he pulled his cowl back on. Though his voice may have been calm, Y/N saw he was furious in his eyes. With Jason and with Scarecrow. Though Jason may get a lecture on recklessness, Y/N knew that the fear toxin was punishment enough. It was Scarecrow who was going to get the punishment tonight.

“Stay safe and keep away from that goddamn toxin!” she warned Bruce before leaving the batcave. Apparently Jason was sweating the toxin out and was therefore running a high fever. They didn’t want to administer anything else into his system in case it reacted badly. So, Y/N and Alfred were on watch duty for the night. Y/N knocked on Jason’s door and stepped inside

“Go get some sleep Alfred. I’ll take over until morning” She offered as she walked over to the bed. Jason was pasty and beaded with sweat; his lips were parted and his breath was labored. Alfred agreed, taking one last worried look at the boy before leaving.

“You know where to find me Miss, if anything goes wrong”

Y/N nodded her understanding and took Alfred’s seat next to Jason. Blearily opening his eyes, Jason looked at her sadly.

“Did I do something bad mama?” He asked weakly, his lower lip wobbling as if he was about to cry. Y/N felt her heart reach out to him.

“Are they mad?” he asked again. His eye glassy, as if he wasn’t really seeing her. Shaking her head, Y/N reached out and smoothed the damp hair away from his forehead.

“No, they’re just worried about you angel… Just sleep now and get better” she cooed as she picked up a rag and dipping it in the cool bowl of water Alfred had provided. She would watch over her little boy until he was better.

Tim:

Today was a day of celebration! Tim was tying the knot! Or at least, he would be once he finally got over his nerves. He had less than half an hour until he got in the car and made his way to the venue to get married. It wasn’t like he was particularly unsure about this, he knew he loved them and wanted to be with them. It was more to do with the fact that what if he did something wrong? Forgot his vows? What if he became so nervous he forgot their name?! If he tripped and ripped their dress?

Tim groaned as he sat on his bed. He’d wanted time to himself, to breath, so he’d sent his groomsmen off to fix any minor issues that had arisen. There was no one here to calm him down or give him any words of comfort. His heart hammered against his chest. Or was that the door? It was the door!

“C-” Tim coughed “Come in” he called. The door opened and standing on the other side was Y/N. His heart lifted a little. Y/N had been a beacon of light in his life in dark times. In fact, she had been the one to help him pick out a ring, sort out the proposal and then kept his brothers away from ruining it. Above all else, Y/N had also saved his life once. Never had he see her so mad that she launched herself at a villain with a battle ax. Whilst he’d been assured the villain lived, they’d never heard from him since. He owed Y/N so much.

“Hey… The car’s going to get here soon and Dick’s demanding a photo with all the groomsmen before you go” she said softly as she walked over to him. Y/N always knew when something was wrong.

“Right. I’ll be ready to go… soon” Tim replied, his throat tight.

“What’s wrong sweetie?”

“What if I mess up? What if they leave me at the altar?! What if-” he rambled his worried to her, his hands wringing together in nerves. Eventually, a soft hand stilled his own.

“Baby… They would never do that to you. As for your vows, tell them exactly what you feel about them and your union together. You can’t go wrong if it’s from your heart. And if you do say something wrong, I can always ask Dick to be very dramatic with his own crying to cover any mistakes!” Y/N said softly to Tim, bringing him in for a hug.

“Thanks mom. You’ve always been there for me”

“And I always will be Timmy”

Damian:

Y/N twisted her hair as she sat in the car.

“What’s wrong?” Bruce asked as he drove.

“I… I guess I don’t know how to talk to Damian once we get back. After all, we got married and went on our honeymoon. And even though we got Damian’s blessing, I feel like something was… Left out, like he didn’t want to burden us…” she replied. Bruce hummed in thought. It couldn’t have been easy for Damian, to be left behind while his father had gone on his honeymoon. And even though Y/N and Damian got on pretty well, she was now in his life as a step-mother. Something that perhaps Damian had never anticipated.

“Well, speak to him when you get back. Just the two of you. I’m pretty sure that if he didn’t like me marrying you, he’d have made that known by now” Bruce suggested as they pulled up the driveway. Y/N knew Bruce was right; the issue wasn’t Damian not liking the marriage. It was something else.

“Welcome back Mr and Mrs Wayne” Alfred greeted as they stepped out the car. “Hi Alfred! You wouldn’t know where Damian is, do you?” Y/N asked. She wanted this sorted as soon as possible.

“I believe he’s in his room” Alfred responded, taking her coat from her.

“‘I’ll be back soon” Y/N said to Bruce. No doubt he’d go straight to the batcave and see how everything went during his absence. Y/N made her way up the stairs towards Damian’s room; once there, she knocked on the door.

“Enter” came the prompt and curt response. Y/N smiled to herself. She’d missed him.

“Hey, Damian” she said softly as she stepped into the room. The boy seemed quite surprised to see her. “Your father and I just got back” Y/N couldn’t help notice the slight wince the boy made when she spoke.

“Dami, what’s wrong?” She asked worriedly, sitting beside him on the bed. Damian looked like he was debating on telling her before shaking his head. “Dami…” she said softly as she reach over to hug him.

“Do you want me as your son?” He asked, his tone sharp as if forcing it out. Y/N looked at him surprised. So that had been what was bothering him.

“You’re already my son. And not just by law” she cut him off before he could point that out. “I love you as my son and I will treat you as my son. Whether you came from my womb or not has no impact on my love for you!” She assured him. Damian’s face crumpled a little, as if he wanted to cry, but no such thing happened. He simply nestled his head between her shoulder and neck.

“Thank you mother”

#bruce wayne x reader #Bruce Wayne #Dick Grayson #Jason Todd #Tim Drake #Damian Wayne #Batmom #This was way longer than I thought #oops

[shanastoryteller]

they call her maid maleen

for the first few trembling years of her life, she is a princess. she is the daughter to the king, born of his beloved wife and of her visage. her dark eyes have the appearance of a smoky quarts and her mother carefully twists her mass of black hair into a hundred small braids down her back. she is a beautiful, quiet child, and for a while all is well. they call her princess maleen.

then her mother dies. it seems as if the king is determined to bury his love for his daughter along with his queen. he moves her to a different wing of the castle, and refuses to see her. her tutors are let go, and the nobles’ children are no longer allowed to play with her. only the maids look after her now.

the king remarries. the new queen gives birth to a son, and maleen is forgotten completely, banished from a home she still resides in and a life she can now only watch unfold.

the maids take care of her, braid her hair and kiss the blisters on her fingers, teach her to scrub at porcelain and polish silver, to clean a fireplace and mop polished marble floors.

they call her maid maleen.

~

the king has a son by his new wife, and then a daughter. they are pale and fair-haired like their mother, with only their dark eyes to show they are the king’s children. but they inherit none of their parents’ beauty, have faces that don’t look quite right and bodies that get stuck between gangly and chubby and never settle into one or the other. princess gisella and prince jan are privately regarded as unfortunate products of a lovely union.

maid maleen spends long hours working, and has neither the time nor funds for creams to soften her skin or oils to care for her hair, has never used face powder or lip color.

maid maleen is twenty three years old, and the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.

her braids are wrapped carefully atop her head, but when she lets them loose they hang past her hips. her dark skin is made even darker thanks to long hours working in the palace garden, and her eyes have never lost that same curious light. she walks straight and strong, years of hard labor giving her muscles and definition to her body that she never would have had as a princess. boys and girls give her long, considering looks and flirtatious smiles, and nobles have to double-take when she passes them by.

no one speaks of it anymore. but maid maleen looks ever more like her beautiful late mother, has the same eyes as her father, and dressing in ill-fitting cast offs and running her ragged can’t hide the truth.

maid maleen is the king’s daughter.

she has accepted her life as a maid in the palace she was one day set to inherit, and tries to see it as a gift. she sleeps with who she likes, may marry whichever of the charming boys from the city who’s smile she likes best. in the maids who raised her she has more mothers than she has fingers, and perhaps she longs for the days when she was a small princess, when she was the apple of her parents’ eye, when the whole of their nation was to be hers to inherit.

but then the blacksmith’s daughter lets her hands linger a little too long on her wrists, and maleen knows that she won’t be sleeping alone tonight. there are some things that worth more to her than a throne she was born to. she doesn’t miss the little girl she used to be.

until.

tensions have always run high between their kingdom and the neighboring one – too many squabbles over borders, over trade agreements, over patrols, over anything and everything the kings can find a reason to be upset about, it seems like. so when prince wolfgang is sent over, the whole palace is abuzz. the prince seems determined to inherit a peaceful land, and is coming over to talk with the king to do it.

maleen does not care for princes. nor for nobles of any rank, in fact. she remembers how they turned on her, she sees the small acts of pettiness and cruelty they thoughtlessly inflict on their servants, and she wants nothing to do with it. commoners may not be as educated as nobles, may not have as many objects to call their own, but maleen finds she prefers their company to that of lords. she’s uninterested in this prince, which is perhaps why she’s the one that gets sent to his rooms. her moms can trust that she at least won’t fawn over him.

“sir wolfgang,” she murmurs, pushing open his door and giving a low curtsy, keeping her eyes trained on his mud covered boots. “is there anything you require?”

silence. she can only stay bent in a curtsey so long before she loses patience. she’s almost given up on him, is about to cut her losses and call it a night when he says, hesitant, “queen sabine?”

her mother’s name is punch to her gut, and her head snaps up at the sound of it, the rolling fire of her temper bubbling just below her skin. “i am maid maleen,” she snaps, then tacks on “your highness,” after a moment’s consideration.

his cloak is half unbuttoned as he stares at her with a slack mouth. she supposes he would not look unhandsome if he were not currently doing his best to imitate a frog. he appears to be only a handful of years older than she is, and if she were not furious she would be impressed that he remembers her mother well enough to see sabine in her.

“maleen,” he repeats, and for a moment she wonders if he will recognize her as well, but he only says, “my apologies. if you would help me with my cloak, i would be much obliged.”

she’s instantly suspicious. she’s met nice nobles before, ones that were considerate and remembered her name and thanked her when she brought them wine. but she’s never met a nice prince before – they’re always of the worst sort. “yes, your highness,” she says, and the cloak is soaked through and clinging, it’s no wonder he’s struggling with it. once she’s gotten it off she hangs it to dry, then goes back to him. she slaps away his numb, struggling fingers and undoes the rest of the buckles and loops of his overly complicated clothing. she’s gotten down him down to an undershirt and pants when his hands grab hers. she blinks and looks up. he has freckles dusting across his nose.

“this is inappropriate,” he says, but honestly she’s stripped a lot of nobles, it wasn’t weird until he took her hands and looked at her like no one’s ever looked at her before.

“yes, your highness,” she agrees, and takes a step back. she places his clothes in front of a fire, curtsies, and leaves. she can feel the weight of his gaze on her all the way back to her room.

wolfgang continues his diplomatic agenda, having long meetings with the royal family. after, maleen goes and tends to him, setting out his food and taking care of his clothes, straightening up any mess that he’s made. at first he’s quiet, and he just watches her, but he quickly discovers that maleen has opinions and thoughts and isn’t afraid to share them. soon they’re debating the finer points of trade routes and arguing the effectiveness of a sliding tax scale, and maleen comes to cherish the evenings she spends with the prince, likes the way he speaks to her and looks at her, likes the shape of his smile.

weeks in she enters his room, dinner steaming in her hands and eager to continue their conversation about state funded orphanages versus a state funded foster system. he’s pacing and tense, shoulder stiff. “wolfgang,” she sets down the food and wipes her hands on her apron, “is something wrong?”

“is it true?” he asks, and he’s not looking at her. he’s always looked at her before.

“is what true?” she flinches away from his coldness, is already preparing to retreat and hide and beg someone else to watch over him.

he turns to her, and she’s baffled by the mixture of hope and anger on his face. “are you the king’s daughter? are you princess maleen?”

she takes a step back, “i am maid maleen.”

“please,” he follows her as she steps away from him, and her back hits the wall. he stops when he’s almost close enough to touch. “my father sent me here with the goal to seal our new treaty with a marriage. he expects me to marry princess gisella. but if you are the daughter of the king – then he will allow me to marry you instead!”

“who says i want to marry you?” she retorts, but he gets on bended knee and she freezes.

he holds a hand for her own, and against every bit of logic, she gives it to him. “maleen, i’ve never felt this way about anyone. i was willing enough to enter a loveless marriage before i knew what true love is, but now i do, and i can’t go back. marry me.”

she wants to. she thinks she loves him. she hadn’t been planning to fall in love with anyone. “i am the king’s daughter,” she tells him, “but i am no princess. i haven’t been a princess in a long time.”

he brings her hand to his mouth so he can kiss each one of her knuckles, “then we’ll have to change that.”

~

wolfgang goes to the king to make his case, to return maleen to her birthright and allow her to marry him.

it goes even worse than maleen had feared.

her father is furious. he’s so angry at the audacity of this request that prince wolfgang is thrown from the kingdom. so incensed is he, that guards drag maleen from her bed in the middle of the night and throw her into a tower. the door closes shut behind them, and she bangs on it and screams but no one comes for her.

there are no windows, and only one door with a sliding metal grate in the bottom. she’s high in the tower, she thinks, from the number of steps she’d been forced to climb, but she stands on a dirt floor. the room contains only the bare minimum needed for survival, and nothing more.

once a week food is slid through the slot in the door. she has to be careful, because if she eats it too fast they will not provide more, she will just starve. days turn to weeks turn to months, and she despairs of ever being let out of this tower. months turn to years, and she gives up hope entirely of leaving this tower. she considers refusing to eat, killing herself slowly through starvation, because death is preferable to life locked in this tower.

one night there’s a scuffle, and shouting, and for the first time since she was shoved inside the door opens. there’s a guard standing there, and princess gisella tentatively steps inside. “maid ma – i mean, maleen?”

maleen stares. this is the first time she’s seen another person in years, and suddenly for all the screaming she’d done she can’t find her voice. gisella takes another cautious step forward, “maleen, please – we don’t have much time.” she holds out her hand, “come with me.”

gisella is sixteen now. although she’ll never be a great beauty, she’s grown into many of the features that she was once mocked for. “where?” she asks, but takes gisella’s hand and lets her lead them down the twisting staircase. anyplace is better than the tower.

“i’m to be married in a week’s time to prince wolfgang.” maleen feels a sharp pain go through her chest. had wolfgang forgotten her? their farce of a romance was such a quick, shallow thing. she was a fool to fall for it in the first place. “i’m not going to show up. you are.”

she stares, “what?”

“wolfgang started a war over father locking you in the tower,” she explains, “but eventually it got to a point where neither could justify it, so our father and wolfgang’s decided our union would mean peace between our countries, as intended. but i don’t want to marry prince wolfgang, and he does not want to marry me.”

“i don’t understand,” she hadn’t paid much attention to the girl when they were in the palace together, and she’s regretting that now.

they finally reach the end of the tower. it’s the first time she’s breathed fresh air in years. she tries not to get distracted by it, and instead focuses on the carriage to her left, and the pure black mare laden like a pack mule on her right. “i’m leaving,” gisella says, “i don’t want to be wolfgang’s bride because i want to be klaus’s,” the guard smiles, and he must be klaus, the princess is rejecting a prince to run away with a commoner. “there’s a map and everything you need in the saddlebags. the wedding dress is waiting for you at the castle. no one will know you’re not me until wolfgang unveils you, and by then it will be too late. he will marry you, and i will be gone.”

“why are you doing this?” she asks.

gisella shrugs, “you’re my sister, and father is an idiot. i want you to be happy, and i want wolfgang to be happy, and i want to be happy too. this way we all get what we want. our brother will be waiting for you in wolfgang’s castle. he’ll help you.”

maleen is speechless. gisella grabs her in a quick hug – the only one they’ve ever shared – and then goes to the carriage with klaus trailing behind her. “i’ll see you again, princess maleen!”

she doesn’t have time for tears. she gets on the mare, and rides for the palace of the neighboring land.

~

she makes it just in time. she sneaks into the castle the night before the wedding, ducking around servants until she find her way to jan’s door. she knocks, tentative, wondering if this was a mistake and all one elaborate trap. but the door opens and his face slackens in relief, “finally!” he pulls her inside, and sits her down. there’s lukewarm water waiting for her so she can clean herself, and jan stands with his back to her the whole time, outlining the wedding and how it will go so she knows what to expect the next day. “father isn’t here,” he assures her, “he didn’t want to leave the kingdom, so i’m here in his stead.”

“won’t you miss your sister?” maleen finishes washing and wraps herself in a soft blanket.

“when i am king, gisella will return,” he says confidently, “she will come home and bring klaus, and you will rule here with wolfgang, and all will be well. our countries shall be great allies when it is me and wolfgang on the throne.”

he’s only a year older than gisella, just seventeen, and maleen feels oddly old next to them, feels old next to these children who know what they want and take it and don’t let anything stand in their way.

“we need to get your hair rebraided,” he says, “you should look perfect tomorrow. it’s your wedding day.”

she stares, aghast. “that will take all night!”

“i’ve brought help,” he says, and sends a servant down the hall. the servant returns with a half dozen of the maids who raised her, and who crowd forward and hug her and kiss her cheeks and say how much they’ve missed her. princess or not, bride or not, to them she will always be their little maid maleen.

~

it’s clear gisella picked her wedding dress with maleen in mind. it fits her for one thing, and is clinging and heavy, and it must have looked awful on gisella, but on her it’s perfect. her dress is accompanied by white silk gloves and a thick veil so that no one can see her, so that no one will know she’s not the daughter of the king they’re expecting to be there.

wolfgang is at the end of the aisle, looking like he’s going to an execution, and it takes more self control than maleen was anticipating not to go running to him. she turns to him, and he lifts her veil. he sees her and freezes, mouth sliding open. she winks at him, because they just need to keep it together until they’re married, he just has to keep his cool for a few minutes and they’ll have won it all. wolfgang closes his mouth and says nothing about how this is clearly not the bride he was supposed to marry. they turn so none of the guests can see them, and the priest gives maleen a confused look, but with a glare from wolfgang he continues on with the ceremony as if nothing is out of place.

“you may now kiss the bride,” the priest says, after what seems like an eternity.

wolfgang grabs her about the waist, dips her, and kisses her soundly on the mouth. her veil falls off and she can hear the horrified and shocked gasps of the guests, and under that jan’s laughter. when they break apart, foreheads still pressed together, she whispers, “hello, prince wolfgang.”

he kisses her again, quick and sweet, and does nothing at all to disguise the joy in his face. “hello, princess maleen.”

and they all lived happily ever after.

read more retold fairytales here

#retold fairytales #maid maleen #grimm fairy tales #my fic #so much so long #i'm so tired #goodnight #long post #so long #i'm sorry

[art-arch-urb]

Refusal after Refusal

What if we acknowledged that we had fallen out of love with architecture and couldn’t remember why we loved it in the first place? That we had given up on building long ago because we had no interest in collaborating with developers, in designing money-laundering schemes or parking garages for foreign capital? And what if we told you that now we even found architectural discourse repulsive? That we had seen the logos for the oil companies emblazoned at the bottom of the biennial posters and couldn’t look away?That we had read the disinterest on the faces of the public and could relate? That we had watched academics lecture about labor practices while exploiting their assistants and overworking their students? That we had tried to warn each other about abusers and assaulters and were reprimanded for it by our heroes? What if we confessed that all this made us depressed, that we could barely summon the energy to get out of bed, let alone to work? What if we told you that we were beginning to think work itself was the problem?

2. The summer was hot. The hottest on record in Los Angeles and Montreal, Glasgow and Tbilisi, Qurayyat and Belfast—though records are easily broken these days. Everything appeared out of focus. The edges of our thoughts were blurred. According to studies, heat makes you lazy and unhappy. But sometimes your unhappiness supersedes your laziness, and sometimes your laziness indicates something about your unhappiness. We decided to try learning from our laziness.

3. It was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the Franco-Cuban radical journalist and activist Paul Lafargue who first articulated a “right to be lazy.” He equated work, and its valorization, with “pain, misery and corruption.”He argued for its refusal. “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” Lafargue writes. “This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.”

4. But, as Marcel Duchamp reminds us, “it really isn’t easy to be truly lazy and do nothing.”

5. “Sleep is a sin,” say the architects. Equipped with coffee or speed, they avoid it at all costs—sacrificing the body for the sake of the project, for the eternally recurrent deadline. When finally the suprachiasmatic nuclei demand submission to the ticking of the circadian clock, they curl up beneath their desks. They wear all black to minimize time spent worrying over clothes. They marry other architects for the sake of having a synchronized schedule. According to a recent study, archi­tecture students sleep less than any others, averaging 5.28 hours per night. More often than not, this is a performative demonstration of their dedication to their studies rather than a necessity, a time-honored ritual of masochistic devotion. In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary interrogates the neoliberal dictum that “sleeping is for losers.” Where time is money, sleeping is “one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Architects embody this attitude, imagining the stakes of the project—a luxury condominium, an arts center—as life or death. In fact, considering that sleep deprivation has been linked to premature death, it is their own lives that are put on the line.

6. Yesterday I woke up around 8:30 a.m. and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil, all swallowed in one gulp of coffee. (The modafinil—a medication used to treat shift work sleep disorder, among other things—is new, added by my psychiatrist last month when I complained I was having trouble working, or doing much of anything.) A few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

7. Beginning with their schooling, architects are routinely required to invest more money than they will ever receive in compensation and workplace protections. While the typical college student in the United States accrues an average of $29,420 in student debt, the architecture student is saddled with an average of $40,000.After graduation, the architectural employee can expect to work 70 hours a week for approximately $70,000 per year—or $15 an hour. And yet, as Bjarke Ingels has stated about the profession’s long working hours, “That’s the price you pay but the reward you get is that you do something incredibly meaningful if you actually love what you’re doing and you’re doing meaningful work."

8. In other words, architecture is a form of labor that masquerades as a labor of love. It contains within it the promise of fulfillment, of happiness. In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed interrogates the normative function of happiness, how it serves as a means of orienting behavior and, in the process, is often deployed as a justification for oppression. That is, what it means to be happy is circumscribed culturally. “In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations,” Ahmed writes. Work should make us happy and fulfilled—even more so when it’s “creative,” an assumption imbued with classist undertones. This draws young people toward architecture school; it makes the burden of debt, harsh working conditions, and low wages appear as an acceptable “price to pay.”

9. But, as the figure of the dissatisfied “CAD monkey” illustrates, the labor of architecture falls short of this promise. Conditioned to believe that fulfillment emerges from creative autonomy and expression, architects instead find themselves laboring over bathroom details or stair sections, and a sense of alienation emerges. It’s a feeling that parallels that of the industrial laborer described by Marx—more so than many architects would like to admit. In classic Marxist theory, workers are estranged from the fruits of their labor, which are taken away from them in the process of becoming rendered as commodities. Because it is understood as nonalienating work, to feel alienated in architecture becomes a sort of double-estrangement. Not only are you estranged from the labor, you are estranged from architecture itself.

10. While working as a studio manager at a New York architecture firm, my colleagues would often remark wistfully that they could rarely attend lectures or engage with discourse as I was able to do. Models, budgets, schematics, client meetings, site visits, overtime, and weekends at the studio had ravaged both their physical and spiritual capacities to participate in the field in a role beyond producing architecture with a capital A. Their passion had become their drudgery; their very own commitment to architectural work became the barrier between contributing to what they had imagined architecture could do and how it apparently must be.

11. I read somewhere that depression is the failure of your neurons to fire like they used to. There’s something ghostly to it: you have the memory of a feeling, of an association, but can’t conjure it anymore. Is there such a thing as a depression specific to architecture? How would it be characterized? I wrote a note on my phone: “The loss of belief in the possibility of designing a different world. Nostalgia for the future.”

12. To express dissatisfaction or alienation in architecture carries deep risks. For one, it could cost you your job. “If you aren’t happy, then leave. Others would kill to have your job.” It could also brand you as an outcast, as if marked by some internal failure or incapacity for feeling what everyone else does. And such a killjoy would ruin the mood of the office. That is, as Ahmed asserts, happiness is framed as a duty to others.18 Misery is contagious and therefore irresponsible. So, regardless of how overworked you are, how alienated you are from the products of your labor, how underpaid you are, how often the boss touches your ass, you must grin and bear it. There’s a reason why architects rarely organize to fight back against exploitative work conditions. Be happy, or else.13. According to Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a mandate to appear happy, which they term the “performance/pleasure apparatus,” underwrites neoliberalism more broadly.19 Today, the individual must not only produce more but also enjoy more—and, pivotally, this surplus of pleasure must be performed. Pleasure serves as a signifier of the subject’s value within a socioeconomic system in which self-edification is substituted for the social and responsibility is privatized. The flip side of the burned-out professional is the determined young architect who spends their free time attending lectures or writing essays or designing their own projects. Such work is valorized as a signal of their commitment to the field and an indicator of their value as an intellectual practitioner. This fuels a culture in which the products of extra-professional labor are exhibited in journals or galleries, often without adequate compensation. We’re told we should feel honored to have such work recognized at all. In other words, today, nothing is work, and everything is work. Even our bodies and minds are objects of labor.14. I was working hard on an essay about work—about the disconnect between discourses on architectural labor and the broader economic context in which the discourses themselves are produced. I stumbled upon an interview with Antonio Negri in which he explains how, by 1965, the architecture school in Venice had become a center for political agitation and organizing. In early 1968, students from Venice and Padua joined forces with the workers at a nearby Porto Marghera factory, the largest petrochemical complex in Italy, where “two kilometers from the most beautiful city in the world hundreds of workers were dying of cancer, literally poisoned by their work.”20 Negri states that the union of students and workers “worked out quite smoothly because they had been in constant contact for a decade: the school of architecture was a gathering place for the working class.”2115. This struggle was a major event in the development of autonomia operaia, or autonomism, a political movement that defined postwar Italian politics and in which Negri played a central role. The solidarity between the academy and the factory was a significant aspect of autonomism, which reconceived of the position of the intellectual within leftist politics. Rather than develop theories upon which to base organizing, the intellectual should learn from work, from the workers and their lived experience. In this way, the autonomists transitioned from a demand for better working conditions to a critique of work itself, in which they understood labor as a totalizing process of subjectivization that sat­urated not only the factory but all of society. They thus displaced the centrality of the static figure of the worker and the working class with an understanding of social class as always in a state of becoming, transforming alongside conditions of work. Work itself—its valorization and the power this gave it over the experience of life—was the problem. “Refusal of work means quite simply: I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep,” writes Franco “Bifo” Berardi. “But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm.”2216. But wait, haven’t we had this conversation before? Isn’t the struggle against work what we studied tirelessly to ace our papers? We worked our bodies and our minds through the night to prove we understood what the refusal of work was about, to prove our political awareness, to garner a critical edge, to be diligent students. But clearly this feverish ambition prevented us from recognizing ourselves as the products of its failure. Why regurgitate the past if not in order to understand how it landed us here, at 4:00 a.m., exhausted, verging on panic, and for what? 17. As Berardi elaborates, struggles for autonomy produced a new monster, laying the foundations for neoliberal economics and governance.23 When workers demanded freedom from regulation, capital did the same. The monotony, rigidity, and harsh conditions of the industrial factory gave way to flexible hours and jobs (in the Global North), but also deregulation, precarity, and the withdrawal of social protections. This shift was ideological and cultural, as well as economic.18. “Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation,” argues Kathi Weeks. “That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract.” Under the contemporary neoliberal regime, work has come to be regarded as “a basic obligation of citizenship.”24Within the realms of politics, the media, and even sociology, the persistent messaging of its importance has generated a singular world-building experience where working remains the only means of belonging. “These repeated references to diligent work,” as David Frayne remarks, “function to construct a rigid dichotomy in the public imagination.”25 Those who work acquire social citizenship, while those who do not are leeches. Within this dichotomy, work becomes a choice: there exist only those who choose to be productive and those who choose to do nothing. “Which are you? The sleeper or the employee, the shirker or the worker?”2619. What if we told you we don’t refuse much of anything? What if we told you that we ate up praise like a spoonful of honey? What if we said that the validation always evaporates too quickly? Like a sugar-addled rush, we work on the premise that the next project will leave us satiated. We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean. 20. If the autonomist refusal of work helped produce a society in which there is nothing but work, what strategies are left for us? What would it mean to refuse after refusal? To stake out a position of alterity to the contemporary work ethic in order to find the room to question where we’re going, what’s driving us, and to what end?21. To work is to be normal. To work is to be socially acceptable. In order to comprehend the commitment to the drudgery and exploitation of working life, Lauren Berlant argues that normativity must be understood as “aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging.”27 To rally for any kind of alternative beyond the moral imperative to work would be to cast oneself almost entirely outside the realm of affiliation, and even personhood.22. Architecture, today at least, is like work, an end in itself. It is autotelic—or, more precisely, a constituent element within the autotelic metabolism of contemporary capitalism. The need for shelter is hardly the driving motivation behind the majority of new builds. Rather, demolition and construction serve as the two poles of a coiling system of endless production for the sake of production. Financial speculation, warfare, and environmental desecration belong to its arsenal. All together, this system constitutes a global force responsible for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions. It results in the mass displacement of the poor and marginalized. In short, shelter is not the ends of architecture—it is its collateral damage. It is a question not of architecture or revolution but, rather, of architecture or survival.23. “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design,” said Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio. “[I]f architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities—until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.”2824. Let’s back up a bit. What produces this all-consuming, obsessive indifference to architecture? On the one hand, the profession and the academy are sites of violence, ridden with sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism. But, perhaps even more than that, we have yet to find a work of architecture that is capable of changing the status quo. On the other hand, we’re obsessed with the belief that it could, since, at the end of the day, all architecture changes the status quo—converting land into capital, emitting carbon dioxide, displacing people. In other words, we acknowledge architecture as immensely powerful but find ourselves—and all architects or architectural thinkers—powerless. Architecture, it seems, has been swallowed up by external forces and put in the service of the smooth functioning of the city and of flows of capital. We can’t imagine an architecture capable of disrupting this. Formalism is a dead end—novel forms are just a means to produce new terrains for the expenditure of surplus capital. We have little control over program since we’re beholden to patronage. Meanwhile, criticism has no bite; speculation, no value; theorization, no impact. Academia and institutions defang all thought. 25. We believe that the problem of work is at the center of all this. The need to work—a shared condition for all but the very wealthy—means we can’t really turn down a client or an opportunity to exhibit or an adjunct teaching position. Refusal, done alone, is a privilege few can afford. But, alongside that, the culture of work has seeped into our souls. Affirmation produces dopamine. Success signals security (even if, in actuality, it doesn’t offer it). Everything we do is for the sake of capital, whether social or material. We look for opportunities to tear each other down so that we can rise up an imaginary rung on an imaginary ladder instead. We are cowards, unwilling to bite the hand that feeds us strychnine-laced food. We can’t pause to think. We’ve lost all hope in the future.26. When commissioned to write this essay, we were asked to provide “concrete alternatives” to the present—but how could we? All we can speculate on is having the time to do so. All we can imagine is a horizon, hazy and distant, in which we discover, or remember, how to refuse—together.

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/refusal-after-refusal?fbclid=IwAR3OA3zuZGwx0-VuEEM2QWZlP44uF2N6MFKoD8M2fUudNZnkNjnj4brp2nk

#harvard #architecture #harvarddesignmagazine

[jessicanjpa]

Alright, I'm here for the Patch headcanons because that's PRECIOUS

(Patch is my headcanon name for Jasper’s horse back when he was human, mentioned in this post)

When I was researching Civil War stuff for my Jasper fic-writing I learned that Confederate soldiers (unlike their Union counterparts) had to bring their own horse if they wanted to be cavalry.  I didn’t like the idea of Jasper being rich enough to have/buy a young horse in top condition, so I decided that he had grown up on a ranch.

Jasper’s mother had died when he was little.  His father had always been an alcoholic, but as the years went on he became more and more of a mean drunk.  Jasper’s grandmother and older sister had been around for a good portion of his childhood, but once they were gone most of the work and decision-making fell on Jasper’s shoulders.  He had to grow up pretty fast. 

Patch was born in the spring of 1860.  It was a hard labor, so Jasper ended up delivering him just as the mare died.  He named the foal “Patch” because of a star-shaped white patch on his neck.  His father was upset about the mare’s death and went on another drinking binge, so Jasper ended up looking out for little Patch, bottle-feeding him until another mare finally snorted and took over.  They were best friends from then on.  Life on the ranch was pretty lonely now that his sister had married and gone, and Jasper sometimes found himself talking to Patch out loud about his worries re: the ranch’s future and the rumors of the possibility of secession and war.

Business began to improve when the war officially began, because of the need for horses.  Jasper was busier than ever, managing the accounts, doing his fair share of the manual labor (I HC two slaves being on the ranch, just so Jasper would have to face the issue eventually), and dealing with customers.  Meanwhile, he was breaking Patch a little younger than was customary, assuming he would be bought any minute by someone heading off to the new war.  He hated the idea of losing his favorite horse, but he couldn’t deny that the sale would settle their debts, and then some.  

It wasn’t long before a pair of gentlemen, father and son, came to look at Patch.  When their backs were turned, Jasper was glaring daggers at the wealthy young idiot who needed a horse to join the famed Texas cavalry, but clearly knew nothing about how to treat a horse.  He couldn’t help but feel a smug satisfaction when Patch literally bit his potential buyer right in the hand and sent him running, even though it had cost him the sale.

The father, a seasoned veteran of the War of Texas Independence (when Texas rebelled against Mexico and briefly became its own country for a few years), had a good laugh at his son’s expense.  He recognized real talent in Jasper himself, if not Patch.  He asked Jasper why he wasn’t in uniform already. When Jasper told him he was only sixteen, the man gave him a wink and said he was tall enough to be eighteen, if he put his mind to it.

Naturally, Jasper had thought about signing up, but hadn’t seriously considered it because of his age, but also because he knew the ranch would fall apart without him.  He had felt a growing sense of duty to fight for his homeland, but he knew his real duty was to his father and the family business.

But that night changed everything.  Jasper’s father was furious about the sale not going through, and once he was drunk enough, went out and took a whip to Patch around nightfall.  Jasper heard the commotion and rushed in to stop him.  They struggled briefly and Jasper knocked his father out cold.  

For a minute he just stood there, breathing heavily and staring down in disgust at his father, and at what he had just done.  Then he went back into the house and took enough food for two days, four dollars and his father’s Enfield rifle.  Within the hour he had Patch saddled and was riding for Houston.

Jasper joined up with the Texas Fifth Cavalry, one of the regiments that was, at the time, part of the Army of New Mexico.  (The Confederacy had this sorta-plan of scoring California gold and establishing ports on the Pacific.) So most of his time in the army was spent out west on a campaign that eventually failed and nearly decimated his regiment.  

While he had made friends over those two years, Jasper soon learned to hold those friends at a distance, because they had a tendency to become casualties.  And once he began to climb the ranks, he felt even more alone.  Patch was his only true friend and confidante.  They rode and fought together smoothly, their coordination perfected by experience.  Whenever he could get them, Jasper kept sugar cubes in nearly all of his jacket and shirt pockets, as a treat for Patch on the trail.  Being one of the youngest horses in the regiment, Patch was always a bit feisty and liked to prance at inopportune moments, but his energy helped Jasper win a reputation for excellent horsemanship.

As the war went on, Jasper’s innocent enthusiasm hardened into more of a grim loyalty, more to the men in his regiment than anything, though he still had a romantic sense of honorable duty to Texas herself.  Like many Texans, he still didn’t care a whit about the Confederacy or the various issues surrounding the “War of Northern Aggression.”  

He rarely allowed himself to dream about what his life might be like after it was all over; he knew the odds of survival weren’t good.  But sometimes, at night when the others were asleep, he would sit with Patch, whispering about his fears and his thoughts about how the campaign was going, and what they might do once the war was won… or lost.

Jasper’s regiment finally limped back to Houston in midsummer, 1862.  While they rested and recuperated (and attended a few military balls to help raise funds), more recruits were rounded up. Jasper was promoted to Major when their general was recalled to Richmond for questioning over the failed campaign.  Like the others, Jasper appreciated the rest but wanted to be out there, fighting for Texas.  Despite all they had been through, the Fifth actually hadn’t seen much action, and felt they still had a lot to contribute.  As a ranking officer, Jasper felt an almost paternal sense of duty toward his men, and used his “gift” as best he knew how to keep up their pride and their energy.  So he was relieved when they finally received their first major assignment since returning home.  He was ready to be out with Patch again, riding hard against the enemy.

But it didn’t turn out that way.  Their mission took them to the blockaded island town of Galveston, which had recently been occupied by Yankee infantry.  The Fifth were ordered to dismount and board a steamer.  On January 1, 1863, while Abraham Lincoln was signing the Declaration of Indendence (I kid you not, this really happened), these cavalrymen turned into “horse marines,” serving as sharpshooters onboard the steamer and finally capturing an enemy ship as part of the Second Battle of Galveston (Sorry SM, having Jasper in the first one makes no sense).  Despite several blunders, the Confederacy won the battle against all odds.  Thus Jasper’s only significant military victory, fought on his nineteenth birthday, was won without Patch.

Jasper volunteered to escort the first batch of evacuees to Houston (the blockade was still out there, so even though Galveston itself had been liberated, it still wasn’t safe).  He was relieved to be reunited with Patch after a three-day separation, and it felt good to be directly protecting Texas’ citizens for once.  But Patch hadn’t been properly exercised during those three days, and was short-striding by the time they reached Houston the next evening.  Jasper couldn’t wait to let him rest; he didn’t know if he might be needed to escort another batch of evacuees.  He switched horses, reluctantly leaving Patch to recuperate until he could pick him up later that week.

He never saw Patch again.

Note: I don’t have those early Patch headcanons written in narrative form, but I have three chapters (here) about Jasper’s time in the army, the Galveston mission, and that fateful evacuation mission.  I will also be writing a one-shot to connect those chapters with the SST story, and that’s where we’ll find out what happened to Patch in the end.

#jasper #horse #headcanon #patch #inbox #civil war #declaration of independence #texas cavalry #horse marines #galveston #cottonclads

[alarawriting]

Dr. Ultraviolet Meets Her Nemesis

Incomplete portion of Chapter 1. Intended to be a full length novel eventually.

Huddled in her underground bunker while explosions went off in her lab overhead, Dr. Ultraviolet took stock of her situation.  Calmly and logically, as befitted the Greatest Mind On Earth, of course.  This wasn't as bad as it seemed.  Yes, her lab was blowing up above her; yes, it was full of toxic chemicals and high-powered explosives and radioactive materials, so it was within the realm of possibility that a chain reaction between volatile substances could possibly break open the roof of her bunker and let superheated air, radiation or poison gas in; yes, her secondary escape route from the bunker had been blocked when Landslide had dropped a few tons of rock down the side of the mountain to cover and fill the cave that had concealed her emergency exit.  But she'd been in far worse situations than this, and survived them.  And, in fact, usually she came out of such situations in a better position than she'd started in.

After all, she considered, there had been the time that her clone had wrested control of her organization from her, and then had ended up being murdered by a rogue member of the Alliance of Good.  That had gotten a volatile, potentially dangerous so-called do-gooder out of her hair with a life sentence for murder, and had given her nearly a year in which the world's heroes thought she was dead to be able to plot and rebuild for her comeback.  Plus, it had taught her the important lesson that if she wanted a clone to harvest for replacement organs, she needed it to be brain-dead on life support.  Things had certainly seemed dark when she'd been languishing in her own dungeon, with her clone gloating to her about using her for replacement body parts, but it had all worked out in the end.

Or then there was the time when her supposed ally Malevil had doublecrossed her and she'd ended up on a spaceship with no controls, rocketing out of the plane of the ecliptic, doomed probably to starve to death or run out of air before she ever reached a planet.  Alien pirates had found her and taken her captive, to sell as a concubine to wealthy aliens with unusual xenophiliac fetishes for human women.  And that had seemed an even worse fate than being trapped on a one-way journey to the stars without an FTL drive had been, until she'd turned the tables on her captors and killed them all with a neurotoxin she'd developed that was extremely similar to chocolate.  (Humans, thus far, were the only species she'd ever encountered, including the other non-sentient beings on Earth, who could tolerate chocolate.  Her neurotoxin might have had an effect on a human who didn't consume several pounds of high-grade ultra-dark chocolate every year, but Ultraviolet had always guessed that her own personal weakness for the stuff would turn out to be adaptive someday, and she'd been right.)  She'd returned to Earth with a faster than light drive and a good deal of alien technology to reverse engineer.  Why, in a sense Malevil had actually done her a favor, which was why she hadn't killed him, although the genetically engineered flying lice with skin-damaging toxins in their bite that she'd infested his base with had probably made him wish she'd just killed him, at least for a while.

And who could forget the time she had been struggling to escape Captain Cosmic's grip as he'd been flying her to the Max, the maximum security prison for supervillains, and she'd fallen while he'd been flying at a thousand feet, and the nanobot lubricant she'd sprayed on him had made his hands so slippery he couldn't catch her, and then it had gotten into his eyes and blinded him temporarily so he hadn't even been able to try any longer?  She would surely have died then if she hadn't happened to have a prototype of the Antigrav Lodestone in her lab coat pocket.  Ultraviolet remembered desperately running the calculations in her head, over and over, as the wind of her descent whipped against her body and the ground below had rushed up to meet her, figuring out how to make use of the tiny amount of power in the Lodestone prototype to negate gravity just long enough to break her fall, and exactly when she'd need to turn it on for its tiny power supply to last long enough to save her. 

As it was, she'd forgotten to carry the 2 and had ended up with three broken limbs, which had left her in traction for a month because she had no minions loyal enough that she could trust them to move her physically immobilized body back to her base with her regeneration capsule.  (That, in itself, seemed hardly fair.  Why couldn't she get good minions?  People were lining up around the block to work as henchmen for Crazy Eights, who'd shoot them for failure, or sometimes success, or sometimes just because he thought it was funny… and even Deathlord, whose stated purpose in life was to kill the entire universe, got plenty of loyal help.  But test an experimental protocol that de-evolved humans into air-breathing, bipedal sharks on the henchmen one time and now she was persona non grata with the union… so she had to go to non-union labor for her henches, and you just couldn't get loyal service that way.)  But that had… well, actually, there had been no upside to that event.  Having a chance to reconnect with her younger sister could have had an upside if Scarlett's life hadn't been so mind-bogglingly, boringly mundane.  And if she'd actually been reliable about bringing Ultraviolet books in the hospital like she'd asked her to.  And if she hadn't spent all her time whining and moaning about her love life when she'd been supposed to be cheering up her older sister in traction.  And if she hadn't been so damned smug about her older sister actually needing a favor from her.

Well.  At least Ultraviolet wasn't in traction right now.  She was free, there were no superheroes dragging her off at the moment and with the temperature and violence of the conflagration above, it was unlikely that they'd figure out that she was alive and hiding in a bunker underneath it.  She wasn't injured.  She had food, supplies, all her amenities.  She even had a computer, though it wasn't going to do her a lot of good with the multiply-backed-up secure RAID array that had stored all her data melted to slag, or exploded to bits, or whichever specific way the destruction of her lab had demolished it.  It was possible that there would be an unfortunate confluence of unlikely but statistically possible events up there that would crack open her ceiling and let in roaring flames, or toxic chemicals, but her calculations suggested that there was only an 11.3709% chance of that happening.  All she had to do was wait for the fires to die down up there, and then the cleanup crew to come through and try to find her body, and she estimated that if she waited down here for eight days, those events would both have run their course and she'd be free to leave by the escape hatch.  She had enough food down here to survive for ten years.  Waiting a week wouldn't be so hard.

Dr. Ultraviolet took a deep breath and went into the kitchen.  Staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was going to crack, was hardly a productive use of her time.  She needed to eat something, and then start making plans for what she'd do when she got out of here.  Unfortunately, her giant walk-in supercooled freezer full of cryo-stored meat and vegetables had developed a tiny crack and was full of toxic fumes, a fact she'd found out about half an hour ago.  The intense cold of the freezer and the intense heat of the explosions upstairs must have combined to weaken the ceiling in that specific area.  Fortunately for her, she'd designed the freezer room to be completely airtight, so all she had to do was keep it locked and she'd be safe from the fumes leaking in.  The lack of the freezer reduced her food supplies, but she still had an enormous pantry stocked with cans, and while canned meat and vegetables were hardly a gourmet experience, they were food.  She could get some canned beans, some diced tomatoes, and cook up some rice, and with a little chili powder make herself some vegetarian chili.  Maybe even throw in some canned chicken breast for a passable chili con pollo.  Ultraviolet pulled the cans she needed out of her pantry and went to the drawer she'd had her minions store the can opener in.

There was no can opener in it.

Twenty minutes later, breathing hard and furious, with every kitchen utensil she had available in this bunker laid out on the table mocking her with their lack of being a can opener, she thought back to that Twilight Zone episode she'd seen with Scarlett when they were kids, or maybe it was Outer Limits?  She could never remember which was which.  It had been a story about a man who'd stocked his bomb shelter with cans, and then there'd been a nuclear war, and he'd discovered he'd forgotten the can opener.  She'd sneered at that.  Anyone intelligent enough to build a bomb shelter, she'd insisted, anyone who'd thought to stock his bomb shelter with cans, would remember the can opener because can openers went with cans.  How could a smart person possibly forget that?  She considered now that it had never occurred to her that maybe he'd asked a friend of his to bring down the can opener or something.  The foresight to put the can opener on the list of supplies she had ordered her minions to stock the bunker with hadn't come to much, in the end, given that her minions were incompetent and she hadn't thoroughly checked their work.

Well.  She had pasta, rice, powdered milk and cold cereal in the pantry as well, and they were all in good condition.  If she had to stay down here for a year, she'd probably get vitamin deficiencies, but she could hold out for eight days.

Another explosion overhead shook the bunker.  Everything was gone.  The work of a lifetime, destroyed.  It was a carefully planned attack, she thought, intended to destroy her as a scientist even if it didn't kill her.  She'd been on the phone with the data center where she'd stored her backups, hearing to her horror that the Teslanauts had trashed the place with their magnetic cannons and annihilated the data on all the magtapes at the center, and had just been ranting to the peon on the phone that if he didn't get his boss to explain to her how this could happen right now she would come over there with her sonic decalcifier and liquefy every bone in his body, when the Alliance of Good had broken in.  They'd been working together.  Who would have ever thought that the overly pompous, self-consciously superior Alliance of Good would have ever coordinated with the nerdy Teslanauts?  She'd have thought Captain Cosmic would feel he had to drag the 'nauts off to the Max for MP3 piracy or something. 

She had other backups – her Antarctic base probably still had her RAID array running; the fusion power generator should have kept the base warm and electrified enough to keep the servers alive and the data on them intact for the next several thousand years, and it had only been five.  But when she'd made her way back to Earth after Malevil's doublecross, she'd found that an icequake had buried the hidden entrance to her base, and she'd have needed to invest considerable resources in excavating her way back into it… and since she'd had backups at the data center, she'd just built a new base and retrieved the data from the backups.  But that meant that even if she got to that old data, it was five years old, and all of the work she'd done reverse-engineering the alien technology she'd brought back from space was gone… as was the technology itself.  She didn't expect any of it to survive the explosions.  And even aside from the alien tech, five years of work for an evil genius was an irreplaceable resource, priceless discoveries and inventions and data and years of her life, destroyed.

Ultraviolet's chest grew tight, and her eyes stung.  She rubbed them angrily.  Not only had the minions screwed up with the can opener, but obviously they hadn't cleaned the air recirculators thoroughly, because somehow something she was allergic to must have gotten into the air supply.  She couldn't possibly be tearing up.  She was the Greatest Mind On Earth, the world's foremost evil genius, a ruthless and cunning supervillain, and she could not possibly be feeling like crying.  Actually, she'd better check the environmental console, she thought.  Toxic fumes might account for the burning in her eyes.  And was her nose running?  Good god.  She hadn't even had tissues packed – she hadn't expected to need them, not with properly clean and working air recirculators.  Well, toilet paper would work as well.

Except, as she found out after quickly checking her readouts to confirm that actually, there weren't any toxic fumes, the minions hadn't packed any toilet paper in her bunker either.

She could kill them, except they'd probably died in the explosion already.

Ultraviolet sighed.  It was going to be a really long eight days.

Eight days later, after her remote telemetry no longer identified any heat sources above larger or hotter than a squirrel, Doctor Ultraviolet was even more convinced that, if any of her minions had survived, she was going to have to hunt them down and kill them herself.  They had packed her wardrobe with one spare costume, one spare lab coat, the two civilian outfits she had hand-picked and given to them, but no bras, no underwear, and no socks.  Also, no soap.  Also, no towels.  Also, no deodorant.

She emerged from underground, smelling like she'd been living underground with no soap, towels, changes of clothes or deodorant, in a pair of civilian business slacks and a nice blouse.  At least no one could see how filthy her underthings or socks were, although she was sure anyone would be able to smell her at ten meters.  Well, at least no one was likely to guess that someone dressed as a businesswoman and marinating in body odor was the feared Dr. Ultraviolet, and she had cash.  Given the attack by the Teslanauts on her data center right before the assault on her base, she doubted any of her credit cards were safe, but she had more than enough cash for some toiletries and a cheap motel room for the night.  All she had to do was get a ride into the nearest city.

This was, unfortunately, easier said than done.  She hadn't been stupid enough to build a secret base near the city; Utopolis was crawling with super heroes.  And the traffic through the suburbs was so bad that she hadn't wanted a base there either; the odds of a random commuter taking a route off the beaten path to try to avoid the traffic and accidentally going past her base were extraordinarily high.  Of course the odds that a sheeplike commuting salaryperson who spent their workday in a cube farm would notice that her base was a secret base, and not just a random manufacturing facility for nothing they had any interest in buying, was much lower, but she'd thought it would pay to be more secure.  On the other hand, everyone always located their bases in places like the Arctic or the Himalayan mountains or the Australian outback, so those places were usually the first places superheroes looked when they were hunting down secret bases, and besides, the low-quality minions she was able to hire weren't generally loyal enough to the job to be willing to live on site, so she had to be near a population center.  Which was just as well, now that she was walking, on foot, through the far exurbs of Utopolis, watching cars drive by ignoring her as she headed down the road.  She might have a ten mile walk to find the nearest motel, but if her base had been located in Antarctica like her old base was, her situation would be much more dire.

A car slowed as she went past.  She turned, expecting that perhaps one of the sheeple heading into the city was going to offer her a ride.  Instead a young man screamed out the window, "Hey, freakshow!  Love the glasses!"  And then he drove off.

Oh.  The goggles.  Right. 

Ultraviolet pulled her goggles off, dismayed.  She'd grown so used to them, she'd almost forgotten she was wearing them.  A critical error that could have gotten her captured or killed – her goggles were her signature, her symbol as much as the skin-tight black bodysuit with the iridescent purple highlights and the sparkles that appeared under black lights was.  But now that they were off, the light was painfully bright in her eyes.  She put up a hand to shade her eyes – the hand holding the goggles, since the other one was carrying her bag, which caused the headband of the goggles to dangle in her eyes.  Irritated, Ultraviolet stuffed her goggles into the bag.  Now the light was hurting her eyes, she could barely see, and of course she hadn't thought to bring her prescription sunglasses, or her prescription glasses with the tinted lenses, or even a hat. 

Two hours of walking alongside the road, holding her hand above her head and squinting her eyes against the ambient glare of the overcast sky, and Ultraviolet was half ready to put the goggles back on anyway in hopes that some superhero would hear about it and drag her off to prison.  At least she wouldn't have to walk miles and miles in inadequate footgear then.  She should have had the minions pack sneakers with her civilian clothes rather than her smart businesswoman pumps, although those would have hardly matched the outfit. 

A car pulled up alongside her with a middle-aged matron at the wheel.  "Miss?  Do you need help?"

The idea that she, Dr. Ultraviolet, nemesis of the Alliance of Good, world-reknowned-and-feared supervillain, would be called "Miss" almost made her snap at the woman to respect her betters… but she had a car, and unless Ultraviolet wanted to fish around in her bag for one of her ray guns and vaporize the woman or mind-control her, she would have to play nice in order to get transportation into the city.  "Oh, uh, yes, thank you.  My car broke down a few miles back."

"And you need to get help?"  The woman smiled.  "Don't worry.  My husband is a mechanic!  Why don't I bring you back to my house, and he can drive you out to your car?  I'll bet he can get it up and running in no time."

Since Ultraviolet did not, in fact, have a car – or, in fact, a driver's license, though she'd like to see a policeman try to stop her from driving one of her flying, radar-and-light-bending, virtually indetectible hovermobiles with computer-assisted control – this was not going to work for her.  "Oh, no, no!" she said, hurriedly – the last thing she wanted was to have to deal with some strange woman and her probably ape-like husband for any greater length of time than necessary.  "You could just drop me at my sister's house.  She's expecting me."

"You don't have a cell phone to call her?" the woman asked sympathetically.

The Teslanauts had found her data center, and someone had found her base and given the information to the Alliance of Good.  The likelihood that her cell phone was uncompromised was so low that Ultraviolet had deliberately left it behind.  "No, I actually left it at her house."

"Oh, I hate that.  I always leave it behind and then I'm like, 'Oh, I'll just call on my cell phone' and then I realize I don't have it and it's so irritating!  I swear, I want one that's connected to my head."

Ultraviolet had had one connected to her head, but she didn't dare wear her goggles in public and hadn't been able to risk using them for teleconnection anyway… and the one that had looked just like a civilian cell phone, she'd left behind so she wouldn't be tempted to use it.  "She lives in—" God, where did Scarlett live again?  Some stupid suburban name.  "Middleton Oaks."

"Oh, that's only about forty-five minutes away.  It's actually not far from my house!  I live in Birchwood."

Ultraviolet was a genius, but even geniuses had limitations on their mental capacities, and as a result she had used up absolutely none of her precious brain's capacity on knowing where the hell Birchwood was in relation to Middleton Oaks, or Utopolis, or anywhere.  "If you could take me there, I would be enormously grateful."

"It's no problem!  Hop in!"

Ultraviolet got in.  The woman turned her music back up.  It was playing some sort of godawful cross between pop and country.  Ultraviolet pretended, very very hard, that the sound was some sort of cacophonous alien speech and not actually something that was posing as music.

Her benefactor winced.  "Miss, I don't want to be rude," she said in an almost whisper, as if there was anyone else in the car who could hear them,  "but I think I should warn you that your deodorant's worn off.  When you get to your sister's I think you need to take a shower."

"Believe me, it's my number one priority," Ultraviolet said, and daydreamed about the creative ways in which she might be able to kill this idiot if she had her back at her base.

#dr ultraviolet #incomplete #supers #supervillain

[junker-town]

Jerry Jones won’t sue the NFL, but he’s not done fighting Roger Goodell

A handy guide for the biggest matchup of the 2017 NFL season.

MAJOR UPDATE: Goodell just got his five-year extension with a reported value of $200 million for his efforts. That’s less than the commissioner had allegedly asked for, but still a tremendous amount of money. It’s safe to say Jerry Jones is taking the “L” on this one.

Update: Is the fight over? No. But, Jerry Jones said recently, that he would not sue the NFL over Goodell’s contract. However, that does not mean he’s backing off his fight with the commissioner. He probably realized he didn’t have much of a legal leg to stand on.

On the surface, Jones is backing down from his legal threat because he says the compensation committee, the six-owner group tasked with finalizing Goodell’s contract, has gone back to the full ownership group to seek input. But they’re not seeking approval from the group again, and Jones is not going to let that part go. He still wants any contract for the commissioner to come before the entire body of 32 owner representatives.

He’ll reportedly be making that push again when owners meet on Dec. 13.

Much of what is written here still applies. Jones isn’t going to sit idly by and let this go without getting his way somehow. The backgrounder below is still applicable, save the lawsuit, and a good understanding of the underlying tensions between the NFL commissioner, the sport’s most powerful owner and a smattering of other owners who fall somewhere into the mix. —RVB

Roger Goodell could be in trouble. As recently as six months ago, that statement would have been, correctly, dismissed out of hand.

The NFL commissioner’s job, perhaps the most powerful position in the business of American professional sports, seemed impervious to any threat, especially the ones of Goodell’s own making.

He survived Bountygate. It was rough for a time, but he made it through the Ray Rice scandal. He skated through Deflategate too, coming out of that with even more legal precedent supporting his disciplinary powers as commissioner.

Owners opted to count their money instead of make a stink. Goodell held a fractious group of 32 billionaires together through the lockout and collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2011. It was his crowning achievement as commissioner, a deal that saw owners get just about every concession they wanted from players and set up a decade of labor stability and overflowing coffers. Goodell was untouchable because he made the league money.

One of the league’s most powerful owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, threatened to turn his lobbying efforts against Goodell’s contract extension into a full-blown legal fight.

Jones says he’s doing this because he wants to make the commissioner more accountable to owners. “I want unprecedented accountability to the ownership,” is how he described his crusade after the Cowboys’ Week 11 loss to the Eagles. While that might be what he says he wants, it looks more like he wants a commissioner who answers to him specifically.

This is about as close as it gets to a coup d'état for the NFL, because he doesn’t like that the league hewed to its three-year-old domestic violence policy and gave his star running back, Ezekiel Elliott, a six-game suspension based on the league’s own investigation.

"I'm gonna come after you with everything I have," Jones said after learning the news of Elliott’s suspension, according to a Nov. 17 report from ESPN the Magazine. "If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a p---y compared to what I'm going to do."

Even if Jones isn’t successful at toppling the commissioner — it’s still a stretch to think that it will — it’s the most serious threat to Goodell’s job since he became commissioner in 2006.

Protecting the Shield is the root of the problem

That same labor deal gives the commissioner unilateral power over personal conduct matters and anything else that falls into the category of “protecting the integrity of the game.”

League commissioners have always had that kind of power. But it’s been Goodell’s signature issue.

Surprise: Unchecked power in the hands of one person leads to problems. The examples cited above turned into drawn-out court battles because of the arbitrary nature of the punishments doled out and the flimsy evidence used to justify it.

The league’s domestic violence policy was adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Rice incident. It was supported by Jones and other owners and actually spelled out levels of discipline for players and league employees involved in those kinds of incidents, starting with a six-game suspension.

However, the league has not been consistent with its punishment since implementing the policy. For example, former Giants kicker Josh Brown got a single game despite a well-documented history of domestic abuse.

You can see why players and the union don’t like Goodell’s role as judge, jury and executioner. They could end up with a short suspension or find their careers on hiatus indefinitely for reasons that are never quite clear.

Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons not to like his disciplinary powers too, taking a star quarterback off the field for footballs that may or may not have been deflated, taking away draft picks for free agent tampering claims, etc.

If it bothered the owners, their dissatisfaction never went beyond an anonymous grumble here and there, and most of them, publicly, still gave Goodell a vote of confidence when asked, even during the Rice situation in 2014.

Jones was among the owners voicing support for Goodell in the fall of 2014. He’s not been so supportive since the league started investigating the prodigious running back from the Cowboys, handing down a six-game suspension before the season started.

Why is Jones so upset with Goodell?

Jones carries a lot of weight in the NFL. He drove the league’s return to Los Angeles and its coming foray into Las Vegas. Few can lead the room full of owners the way the “de facto commissioner” can. So when he threatens to come after the real commissioner, it’s significant.

There’s a more personal element in the Elliott suspension for Jones too, besides just the potential of losing one of his best players for six games. Jones fought the NFL over its investigation into the accusations against Elliott, who was not charged by Ohio authorities who also investigated him, from the start.

In Oct. 2016, Jones confronted the NFL’s lead investigator, Lisa Friel, over the matter in a hotel bar after hours at an owners meeting. He told her, "your bread and butter is going to get both of us thrown out on the street.”

In July of this year, he told the press that there was no evidence against Elliott that warranted a suspension. At the beginning of August, Jones was publicly saying that he believed Elliott would not be suspended.

His reason for thinking that stems from a May conversation he had with Goodell. “'Roger told me there was nothing to worry about -- the evidence just isn't there,'" Jones said, according to a source cited in the Nov. 17 ESPN report.

The league denied that Jones was told there would be no suspension.

Needless to say, when the six-game suspension for Elliott was handed down in August, Jones was furious. He believes Goodell lied to him, telling him that Elliott would not be suspended. Jones called that an “unforgivable breach of trust.”

What’s up with Goodell’s contract?

Goodell’s current contract runs through 2018. The five-year extension would leave him in place through 2024, covering the league’s next scheduled collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2021.

In the past, Goodell’s annual compensation varied but reportedly was required to have an average of $25 million in bonus pay over any given three-year period. His yearly was reported at $44 million in 2014 and $34 million in 2015. But his salary is no longer a matter of public record after the NFL surrendered its non-profit status in 2015.

The argument over the new deal is whether to make it even more incentive-based. The contract the committee is working on is to be as much as 88 percent incentive-based, according to a Nov. 11 report by The New York Times.

But Jones and a few other owners reportedly believe that the incentives are so loosely defined that Goodell’s pay wouldn’t rise or fall too much whatever happened, even with the league facing a number of challenges at the moment — player suspensions, owners fearful of the controversy over protests, ratings in a nosedive, etc.

A curiously timed report from ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen relayed some of Goodell’s contract demands that paint the commissioner in a flattering light. He wanted $49.5 million per year, a private jet, and lifetime health insurance for him and his family, according to an unnamed owner cited in the report.

"That number for Roger just seems too much," the owner said. "It's offensive. It's unseemly."

The league denied that claim. They later said, in the cease and desist letter to Jones, that those contract details were old and outdated ones.

Blank issued a statement on Monday, Nov. 13, that seemed to shoot down some of the claims about Goodell’s deal reported previously. The statement read:

"The Committee is continuing its work towards finalizing a contract extension with the Commissioner, consistent with the mandate provided in the unanimous May 2017 Resolution. Regardless of what may have been reported, the Committee is working within the financial parameters outlined to the ownership at the May meeting. The negotiations are progressing and we will keep ownership apprised of the negotiations as they move forward. We do not intend to publicly comment on our discussions.”

Who has the final approval for Goodell’s deal?

A unanimous 32-0 vote by owners in May authorized the six-member compensation committee to finalize and approve the extension for Goodell, and normally that would be the only vote needed.

Jones’ argument now is that the contract needs to go back to the full ownership group, instead of just the committee, because of the ratings decline, protests, etc.

Goodell is said to be “furious” over Jones’ effort to derail his contract, according to ESPN’s OTL.

"He feels as if the owners have made a lot of money and he should be compensated accordingly," a source told ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham. "The incentives thing really angers him."

Jones was a non-voting ad hoc member of the league’s compensation committee, the six owners tasked with finalizing Goodell’s deal. His membership was revoked on Nov. 2 when he informed the group of his threat to sue.

What’s his basis for threatening the lawsuit?

Jones is said to be one of four of five owners who want Goodell gone. There are reportedly another six wavering in their commitment, who Jones hopes to rally to his side with the threat of a lawsuit and hiring a big-name attorney, David Boies, to push it.

The OTL report says Jones is trying to change the two-thirds majority vote needed to approve a deal to three-fourths majority, giving his voting bloc guaranteed veto power. Jones’ play with the lawsuit is, in part, to get Goodell’s contract back in front of the full ownership group where he could prevent it from going forward if he can rally a small group of owners to his side.

Jones was supportive of a new contract for Goodell as recently as May. His latest threatening letter to the league makes an issue of what’s happened since then.

He claims that Falcons owner Arthur Blank and chair of the compensation committee was not honest about the details of Goodell’s proposed contract extension, according to a Thursday report from Mortensen.

Jones claims that details of the contract were not disclosed and that the deal moved away from a more incentive-based version. He also alleges that the committee is not unanimous on the deal, going back on Blank’s assurance that the committee would be in complete agreement on it.

The league disputed Jones’ claims with a very direct shot at him.

"Your description of the proposed extension is so at odds with the actual facts that we can only conclude that you are either uninformed or seek deliberately to mislead the other owners."

When news first broke that Jones was threatening to sue, it was not at all clear what the basis was for the potential lawsuit. This letter clarifies it — he’s trying to get the contract out of the committee’s hands and back to the full group of owners, in the hopes that he can rally enough of them to block Goodell’s deal and send the commissioner packing.

Still, it feels like an awfully weak case.

He may not have to sue. Jones could be fighting a delaying action. He could conceivably hold up the proceedings on Goodell’s contract to give himself time to rally enough owners to his cause.

Jones suggested as much in a Nov. 14 interview, telling 105.3 radio station in Dallas “we just need to slow this train down and…discuss the issues at hand in the NFL."

He pressed his fellow owners on that same point a week later. In a letter to owners first reported Nov. 16, Jones asked for a special meeting to address Goodell’s contract.

“This is not the time for the League to undertake massive contractual obligations which are inconsistent with the League’s performance,” he said in the letter.

His request was denied, and owners will use their regularly scheduled Dec. 13 meeting to discuss the issue.

If he can successfully get a delay on finalizing Goodell’s contract, it gives him more time to push his case before the commissioner’s current deal expires in March 2019.

What can the league do about it?

In the most aggressive response yet from the NFL’s compensation committee, Jones got a cease and desist letter on Monday, Nov. 13, threatening him with punishment if he doesn’t drop his effort to block Goodell’s contract extension. Possible punishments include fines, loss of draft picks and a suspension for Jones.

The NFL could punish Jones on the basis that his conduct is detrimental to the league. And, yes, that’s fitting given that personal conduct fueled this fracas in the first place.

A more extreme measure for dealing with Jones has reportedly been discussed by a few owners. The league could force Jones to forfeit the Cowboys, something that the Wall Street Journal reports a few owners have talked about, informally. That’s unlikely to happen, and was probably just a strategic leak put out there to threaten Jones.

He shrugged off the notion that the league could take away his team during his regular Tuesday radio show on Nov. 14.

Jerry Jones on @1053thefan on report he may be ousted - “I’ve had NOT ONE inkling of communication with the league office or any owner that would suggest something that laughable and ridiculous."

— Roy White III (@RDubThree) November 14, 2017

Jones’ lawyer, Boies, got a letter from fellow owners threatening action for his “antics” that could be considered “conduct detrimental,” according to the New York Times.

If the league does punish Jones, whatever form that takes, he could fight it in court.

Is this the end for Roger Goodell?

Jones may not have much of a case, but his timing is impeccable.

It’s a strange moment for the NFL. The league was a juggernaut that watched its ratings climb every year, pushing toward Goodell’s stated goal of $25 billion in annual revenue.

Those days are gone.

The NFL skated through mishandled scandal after mishandled scandal without much impact on the bottom line. Now, television ratings are down for the second consecutive season. Owners certainly didn’t like the president turning the sport into a new front in the culture war, and they’re divided on how to respond to the handful of players kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality and racial inequality.

There’s plenty for team owners to be concerned with and no real certainty for what to do about it. Jones is using those things as a cudgel in his fight with Goodell.

The question now is how many owners can he actually get on his side. Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with his job performance, but there’s said to be trepidation about replacing him for an unknown commodity, or worse, a commissioner of Jones’ choosing.

Jones’ moves here are certain to make him more enemies among his peers. The OTL story from Wednesday reports that some owners are upset with Goodell because they feel like he gave Jones too much power in the first place.

NFL owners are not a unified group who all think the same way. In fact, one thing that’s helped solidify Goodell’s status has been his ability to bring them together. Nowhere was he more effective at that than during the collective bargaining negotiations in 2011, when he was able to hold together the rift between small market and big market teams, like the Cowboys, to get a deal that enriched all 32 team owners at the expense of the players.

There’s another collective bargaining agreement on the horizon in 2021. Negotiations for that will be even more contentious than the last one. There’s more at stake this time around. Television viewership patterns are changing fast, meaning the NFL might not be able to count on multi-billion dollar rights deals for easy money down the road.

Having Goodell at the table for the next CBA negotiation was one of the main reasons for getting his contract extension done in the first place. Owners will be leery of switching commissioners with 2021 right around the corner. That might ultimately be Goodell’s firewall against Jones’ palace coup.

I can’t in good conscience endorse either side here. The league could use a different commissioner given the missteps Goodell’s made since the 2011 labor deal. The risk in replacing Goodell is that it’s more likely the next commissioner will have to accept a deal more along the lines of the one Jones wants, and that means the new commissioner’s pay would be subject in part to placating Jones. An even worse option is a commissioner handpicked by Jones.

(Our best hope, for fans, in 2021 is still going to be players willing to miss games to get a more favorable CBA.)

This has been the most interesting NFL season in a long time, on and off the field. And whatever two teams wind up playing in Super Bowl LII, it’s going to be hard to beat a Jerry Jones vs. Roger Goodell matchup. Nothing less than the future of professional football is at stake.

[junker-town]

Jerry Jones won’t sue the NFL, but he’s not done fighting Roger Goodell

A handy guide for the biggest matchup of the 2017 NFL season.

Update: Is the fight over? No. But, Jerry Jones said recently, that he would not sue the NFL over Goodell’s contract. However, that does not mean he’s backing off his fight with the commissioner. He probably realized he didn’t have much of a legal leg to stand on.

On the surface, Jones is backing down from his legal threat because he says the compensation committee, the six-owner group tasked with finalizing Goodell’s contract, has gone back to the full ownership group to seek input. But they’re not seeking approval from the group again, and Jones is not going to let that part go. He still wants any contract for the commissioner to come before the entire body of 32 owner representatives.

He’ll reportedly be making that push again when owners meet on Dec. 13.

Much of what is written here still applies. Jones isn’t going to sit idly by and let this go without getting his way somehow. The backgrounder below is still applicable, save the lawsuit, and a good understanding of the underlying tensions between the NFL commissioner, the sport’s most powerful owner and a smattering of other owners who fall somewhere into the mix. —RVB

Roger Goodell could be in trouble. As recently as six months ago, that statement would have been, correctly, dismissed out of hand.

The NFL commissioner’s job, perhaps the most powerful position in the business of American professional sports, seemed impervious to any threat, especially the ones of Goodell’s own making.

He survived Bountygate. It was rough for a time, but he made it through the Ray Rice scandal. He skated through Deflategate too, coming out of that with even more legal precedent supporting his disciplinary powers as commissioner.

Owners opted to count their money instead of make a stink. Goodell held a fractious group of 32 billionaires together through the lockout and collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2011. It was his crowning achievement as commissioner, a deal that saw owners get just about every concession they wanted from players and set up a decade of labor stability and overflowing coffers. Goodell was untouchable because he made the league money.

One of the league’s most powerful owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, threatened to turn his lobbying efforts against Goodell’s contract extension into a full-blown legal fight.

Jones says he’s doing this because he wants to make the commissioner more accountable to owners. “I want unprecedented accountability to the ownership,” is how he described his crusade after the Cowboys’ Week 11 loss to the Eagles. While that might be what he says he wants, it looks more like he wants a commissioner who answers to him specifically.

This is about as close as it gets to a coup d'état for the NFL, because he doesn’t like that the league hewed to its three-year-old domestic violence policy and gave his star running back, Ezekiel Elliott, a six-game suspension based on the league’s own investigation.

"I'm gonna come after you with everything I have," Jones said after learning the news of Elliott’s suspension, according to a Nov. 17 report from ESPN the Magazine. "If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a p---y compared to what I'm going to do."

Even if Jones isn’t successful at toppling the commissioner — it’s still a stretch to think that it will — it’s the most serious threat to Goodell’s job since he became commissioner in 2006.

Protecting the Shield is the root of the problem

That same labor deal gives the commissioner unilateral power over personal conduct matters and anything else that falls into the category of “protecting the integrity of the game.”

League commissioners have always had that kind of power. But it’s been Goodell’s signature issue.

Surprise: Unchecked power in the hands of one person leads to problems. The examples cited above turned into drawn-out court battles because of the arbitrary nature of the punishments doled out and the flimsy evidence used to justify it.

The league’s domestic violence policy was adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Rice incident. It was supported by Jones and other owners and actually spelled out levels of discipline for players and league employees involved in those kinds of incidents, starting with a six-game suspension.

However, the league has not been consistent with its punishment since implementing the policy. For example, former Giants kicker Josh Brown got a single game despite a well-documented history of domestic abuse.

You can see why players and the union don’t like Goodell’s role as judge, jury and executioner. They could end up with a short suspension or find their careers on hiatus indefinitely for reasons that are never quite clear.

Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons not to like his disciplinary powers too, taking a star quarterback off the field for footballs that may or may not have been deflated, taking away draft picks for free agent tampering claims, etc.

If it bothered the owners, their dissatisfaction never went beyond an anonymous grumble here and there, and most of them, publicly, still gave Goodell a vote of confidence when asked, even during the Rice situation in 2014.

Jones was among the owners voicing support for Goodell in the fall of 2014. He’s not been so supportive since the league started investigating the prodigious running back from the Cowboys, handing down a six-game suspension before the season started.

Why is Jones so upset with Goodell?

Jones carries a lot of weight in the NFL. He drove the league’s return to Los Angeles and its coming foray into Las Vegas. Few can lead the room full of owners the way the “de facto commissioner” can. So when he threatens to come after the real commissioner, it’s significant.

There’s a more personal element in the Elliott suspension for Jones too, besides just the potential of losing one of his best players for six games. Jones fought the NFL over its investigation into the accusations against Elliott, who was not charged by Ohio authorities who also investigated him, from the start.

In Oct. 2016, Jones confronted the NFL’s lead investigator, Lisa Friel, over the matter in a hotel bar after hours at an owners meeting. He told her, "your bread and butter is going to get both of us thrown out on the street.”

In July of this year, he told the press that there was no evidence against Elliott that warranted a suspension. At the beginning of August, Jones was publicly saying that he believed Elliott would not be suspended.

His reason for thinking that stems from a May conversation he had with Goodell. “'Roger told me there was nothing to worry about -- the evidence just isn't there,'" Jones said, according to a source cited in the Nov. 17 ESPN report.

The league denied that Jones was told there would be no suspension.

Needless to say, when the six-game suspension for Elliott was handed down in August, Jones was furious. He believes Goodell lied to him, telling him that Elliott would not be suspended. Jones called that an “unforgivable breach of trust.”

What’s up with Goodell’s contract?

Goodell’s current contract runs through 2018. The five-year extension would leave him in place through 2024, covering the league’s next scheduled collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2021.

In the past, Goodell’s annual compensation varied but reportedly was required to have an average of $25 million in bonus pay over any given three-year period. His yearly was reported at $44 million in 2014 and $34 million in 2015. But his salary is no longer a matter of public record after the NFL surrendered its non-profit status in 2015.

The argument over the new deal is whether to make it even more incentive-based. The contract the committee is working on is to be as much as 88 percent incentive-based, according to a Nov. 11 report by The New York Times.

But Jones and a few other owners reportedly believe that the incentives are so loosely defined that Goodell’s pay wouldn’t rise or fall too much whatever happened, even with the league facing a number of challenges at the moment — player suspensions, owners fearful of the controversy over protests, ratings in a nosedive, etc.

A curiously timed report from ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen relayed some of Goodell’s contract demands that paint the commissioner in a flattering light. He wanted $49.5 million per year, a private jet, and lifetime health insurance for him and his family, according to an unnamed owner cited in the report.

"That number for Roger just seems too much," the owner said. "It's offensive. It's unseemly."

The league denied that claim. They later said, in the cease and desist letter to Jones, that those contract details were old and outdated ones.

Blank issued a statement on Monday, Nov. 13, that seemed to shoot down some of the claims about Goodell’s deal reported previously. The statement read:

"The Committee is continuing its work towards finalizing a contract extension with the Commissioner, consistent with the mandate provided in the unanimous May 2017 Resolution. Regardless of what may have been reported, the Committee is working within the financial parameters outlined to the ownership at the May meeting. The negotiations are progressing and we will keep ownership apprised of the negotiations as they move forward. We do not intend to publicly comment on our discussions.”

Who has the final approval for Goodell’s deal?

A unanimous 32-0 vote by owners in May authorized the six-member compensation committee to finalize and approve the extension for Goodell, and normally that would be the only vote needed.

Jones’ argument now is that the contract needs to go back to the full ownership group, instead of just the committee, because of the ratings decline, protests, etc.

Goodell is said to be “furious” over Jones’ effort to derail his contract, according to ESPN’s OTL.

"He feels as if the owners have made a lot of money and he should be compensated accordingly," a source told ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham. "The incentives thing really angers him."

Jones was a non-voting ad hoc member of the league’s compensation committee, the six owners tasked with finalizing Goodell’s deal. His membership was revoked on Nov. 2 when he informed the group of his threat to sue.

What’s his basis for threatening the lawsuit?

Jones is said to be one of four of five owners who want Goodell gone. There are reportedly another six wavering in their commitment, who Jones hopes to rally to his side with the threat of a lawsuit and hiring a big-name attorney, David Boies, to push it.

The OTL report says Jones is trying to change the two-thirds majority vote needed to approve a deal to three-fourths majority, giving his voting bloc guaranteed veto power. Jones’ play with the lawsuit is, in part, to get Goodell’s contract back in front of the full ownership group where he could prevent it from going forward if he can rally a small group of owners to his side.

Jones was supportive of a new contract for Goodell as recently as May. His latest threatening letter to the league makes an issue of what’s happened since then.

He claims that Falcons owner Arthur Blank and chair of the compensation committee was not honest about the details of Goodell’s proposed contract extension, according to a Thursday report from Mortensen.

Jones claims that details of the contract were not disclosed and that the deal moved away from a more incentive-based version. He also alleges that the committee is not unanimous on the deal, going back on Blank’s assurance that the committee would be in complete agreement on it.

The league disputed Jones’ claims with a very direct shot at him.

"Your description of the proposed extension is so at odds with the actual facts that we can only conclude that you are either uninformed or seek deliberately to mislead the other owners."

When news first broke that Jones was threatening to sue, it was not at all clear what the basis was for the potential lawsuit. This letter clarifies it — he’s trying to get the contract out of the committee’s hands and back to the full group of owners, in the hopes that he can rally enough of them to block Goodell’s deal and send the commissioner packing.

Still, it feels like an awfully weak case.

He may not have to sue. Jones could be fighting a delaying action. He could conceivably hold up the proceedings on Goodell’s contract to give himself time to rally enough owners to his cause.

Jones suggested as much in a Nov. 14 interview, telling 105.3 radio station in Dallas “we just need to slow this train down and…discuss the issues at hand in the NFL."

He pressed his fellow owners on that same point a week later. In a letter to owners first reported Nov. 16, Jones asked for a special meeting to address Goodell’s contract.

“This is not the time for the League to undertake massive contractual obligations which are inconsistent with the League’s performance,” he said in the letter.

His request was denied, and owners will use their regularly scheduled Dec. 13 meeting to discuss the issue.

If he can successfully get a delay on finalizing Goodell’s contract, it gives him more time to push his case before the commissioner’s current deal expires in March 2019.

What can the league do about it?

In the most aggressive response yet from the NFL’s compensation committee, Jones got a cease and desist letter on Monday, Nov. 13, threatening him with punishment if he doesn’t drop his effort to block Goodell’s contract extension. Possible punishments include fines, loss of draft picks and a suspension for Jones.

The NFL could punish Jones on the basis that his conduct is detrimental to the league. And, yes, that’s fitting given that personal conduct fueled this fracas in the first place.

A more extreme measure for dealing with Jones has reportedly been discussed by a few owners. The league could force Jones to forfeit the Cowboys, something that the Wall Street Journal reports a few owners have talked about, informally. That’s unlikely to happen, and was probably just a strategic leak put out there to threaten Jones.

He shrugged off the notion that the league could take away his team during his regular Tuesday radio show on Nov. 14.

Jerry Jones on @1053thefan on report he may be ousted - “I’ve had NOT ONE inkling of communication with the league office or any owner that would suggest something that laughable and ridiculous."

— Roy White III (@RDubThree) November 14, 2017

Jones’ lawyer, Boies, got a letter from fellow owners threatening action for his “antics” that could be considered “conduct detrimental,” according to the New York Times.

If the league does punish Jones, whatever form that takes, he could fight it in court.

Is this the end for Roger Goodell?

Jones may not have much of a case, but his timing is impeccable.

It’s a strange moment for the NFL. The league was a juggernaut that watched its ratings climb every year, pushing toward Goodell’s stated goal of $25 billion in annual revenue.

Those days are gone.

The NFL skated through mishandled scandal after mishandled scandal without much impact on the bottom line. Now, television ratings are down for the second consecutive season. Owners certainly didn’t like the president turning the sport into a new front in the culture war, and they’re divided on how to respond to the handful of players kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality and racial inequality.

There’s plenty for team owners to be concerned with and no real certainty for what to do about it. Jones is using those things as a cudgel in his fight with Goodell.

The question now is how many owners can he actually get on his side. Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with his job performance, but there’s said to be trepidation about replacing him for an unknown commodity, or worse, a commissioner of Jones’ choosing.

Jones’ moves here are certain to make him more enemies among his peers. The OTL story from Wednesday reports that some owners are upset with Goodell because they feel like he gave Jones too much power in the first place.

NFL owners are not a unified group who all think the same way. In fact, one thing that’s helped solidify Goodell’s status has been his ability to bring them together. Nowhere was he more effective at that than during the collective bargaining negotiations in 2011, when he was able to hold together the rift between small market and big market teams, like the Cowboys, to get a deal that enriched all 32 team owners at the expense of the players.

There’s another collective bargaining agreement on the horizon in 2021. Negotiations for that will be even more contentious than the last one. There’s more at stake this time around. Television viewership patterns are changing fast, meaning the NFL might not be able to count on multi-billion dollar rights deals for easy money down the road.

Having Goodell at the table for the next CBA negotiation was one of the main reasons for getting his contract extension done in the first place. Owners will be leery of switching commissioners with 2021 right around the corner. That might ultimately be Goodell’s firewall against Jones’ palace coup.

I can’t in good conscience endorse either side here. The league could use a different commissioner given the missteps Goodell’s made since the 2011 labor deal. The risk in replacing Goodell is that it’s more likely the next commissioner will have to accept a deal more along the lines of the one Jones wants, and that means the new commissioner’s pay would be subject in part to placating Jones. An even worse option is a commissioner handpicked by Jones.

(Our best hope, for fans, in 2021 is still going to be players willing to miss games to get a more favorable CBA.)

This has been the most interesting NFL season in a long time, on and off the field. And whatever two teams wind up playing in Super Bowl LII, it’s going to be hard to beat a Jerry Jones vs. Roger Goodell matchup. Nothing less than the future of professional football is at stake.

[junker-town]

Jerry Jones won’t sue the NFL, but he’s not done fighting Roger Goodell

A handy guide for the biggest matchup of the 2017 NFL season.

Update: Is the fight over? No. But, Jerry Jones said on Tuesday, Nov. 21, that he would not sue the NFL over Goodell’s contract. However, that does not mean he’s backing off his fight with the commissioner. He probably realized he didn’t have much of a legal leg to stand on.

On the surface, Jones is backing down from his legal threat because he says the compensation committee, the six-owner group tasked with finalizing Goodell’s contract, has gone back to the full ownership group to seek input. But they’re not seeking approval from the group again, and Jones is not going to let that part go. He still wants any contract for the commissioner to come before the entire body of 32 owner representatives.

Much of what is written here still applies. Jones isn’t going to sit idly by and let this go without getting his way somehow. The backgrounder below is still applicable, save the lawsuit, and a good understanding of the underlying tensions between the NFL commissioner, the sport’s most powerful owner and a smattering of other owners who fall somewhere into the mix. —RVB

Roger Goodell could be in trouble. As recently as six months ago, that statement would have been, correctly, dismissed out of hand.

The NFL commissioner’s job, perhaps the most powerful position in the business of American professional sports, seemed impervious to any threat, especially the ones of Goodell’s own making.

He survived Bountygate. It was rough for a time, but he made it through the Ray Rice scandal. He skated through Deflategate too, coming out of that with even more legal precedent supporting his disciplinary powers as commissioner.

Owners opted to count their money instead of make a stink. Goodell held a fractious group of 32 billionaires together through the lockout and collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2011. It was his crowning achievement as commissioner, a deal that saw owners get just about every concession they wanted from players and set up a decade of labor stability and overflowing coffers. Goodell was untouchable because he made the league money.

One of the league’s most powerful owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, threatened to turn his lobbying efforts against Goodell’s contract extension into a full-blown legal fight.

Jones says he’s doing this because he wants to make the commissioner more accountable to owners. “I want unprecedented accountability to the ownership,” is how he described his crusade after the Cowboys’ Week 11 loss to the Eagles. While that might be what he says he wants, it looks more like he wants a commissioner who answers to him specifically.

This is about as close as it gets to a coup d'état for the NFL, because he doesn’t like that the league hewed to its three-year-old domestic violence policy and gave his star running back, Ezekiel Elliott, a six-game suspension based on the league’s own investigation.

"I'm gonna come after you with everything I have," Jones said after learning the news of Elliott’s suspension, according to a Nov. 17 report from ESPN the Magazine. "If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a p---y compared to what I'm going to do."

Even if Jones isn’t successful at toppling the commissioner — it’s still a stretch to think that it will — it’s the most serious threat to Goodell’s job since he became commissioner in 2006.

Protecting the Shield is the root of the problem

That same labor deal gives the commissioner unilateral power over personal conduct matters and anything else that falls into the category of “protecting the integrity of the game.”

League commissioners have always had that kind of power. But it’s been Goodell’s signature issue.

Surprise: Unchecked power in the hands of one person leads to problems. The examples cited above turned into drawn-out court battles because of the arbitrary nature of the punishments doled out and the flimsy evidence used to justify it.

The league’s domestic violence policy was adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Rice incident. It was supported by Jones and other owners and actually spelled out levels of discipline for players and league employees involved in those kinds of incidents, starting with a six-game suspension.

However, the league has not been consistent with its punishment since implementing the policy. For example, former Giants kicker Josh Brown got a single game despite a well-documented history of domestic abuse.

You can see why players and the union don’t like Goodell’s role as judge, jury and executioner. They could end up with a short suspension or find their careers on hiatus indefinitely for reasons that are never quite clear.

Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons not to like his disciplinary powers too, taking a star quarterback off the field for footballs that may or may not have been deflated, taking away draft picks for free agent tampering claims, etc.

If it bothered the owners, their dissatisfaction never went beyond an anonymous grumble here and there, and most of them, publicly, still gave Goodell a vote of confidence when asked, even during the Rice situation in 2014.

Jones was among the owners voicing support for Goodell in the fall of 2014. He’s not been so supportive since the league started investigating the prodigious running back from the Cowboys, handing down a six-game suspension before the season started.

Why is Jones so upset with Goodell?

Jones carries a lot of weight in the NFL. He drove the league’s return to Los Angeles and its coming foray into Las Vegas. Few can lead the room full of owners the way the “de facto commissioner” can. So when he threatens to come after the real commissioner, it’s significant.

There’s a more personal element in the Elliott suspension for Jones too, besides just the potential of losing one of his best players for six games. Jones fought the NFL over its investigation into the accusations against Elliott, who was not charged by Ohio authorities who also investigated him, from the start.

In Oct. 2016, Jones confronted the NFL’s lead investigator, Lisa Friel, over the matter in a hotel bar after hours at an owners meeting. He told her, "your bread and butter is going to get both of us thrown out on the street.”

In July of this year, he told the press that there was no evidence against Elliott that warranted a suspension. At the beginning of August, Jones was publicly saying that he believed Elliott would not be suspended.

His reason for thinking that stems from a May conversation he had with Goodell. “'Roger told me there was nothing to worry about -- the evidence just isn't there,'" Jones said, according to a source cited in the Nov. 17 ESPN report.

The league denied that Jones was told there would be no suspension.

Needless to say, when the six-game suspension for Elliott was handed down in August, Jones was furious. He believes Goodell lied to him, telling him that Elliott would not be suspended. Jones called that an “unforgivable breach of trust.”

What’s up with Goodell’s contract?

Goodell’s current contract runs through 2018. The five-year extension would leave him in place through 2024, covering the league’s next scheduled collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2021.

In the past, Goodell’s annual compensation varied but reportedly was required to have an average of $25 million in bonus pay over any given three-year period. His yearly was reported at $44 million in 2014 and $34 million in 2015. But his salary is no longer a matter of public record after the NFL surrendered its non-profit status in 2015.

The argument over the new deal is whether to make it even more incentive-based. The contract the committee is working on is to be as much as 88 percent incentive-based, according to a Nov. 11 report by The New York Times.

But Jones and a few other owners reportedly believe that the incentives are so loosely defined that Goodell’s pay wouldn’t rise or fall too much whatever happened, even with the league facing a number of challenges at the moment — player suspensions, owners fearful of the controversy over protests, ratings in a nosedive, etc.

A curiously timed report from ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen relayed some of Goodell’s contract demands that paint the commissioner in a flattering light. He wanted $49.5 million per year, a private jet, and lifetime health insurance for him and his family, according to an unnamed owner cited in the report.

"That number for Roger just seems too much," the owner said. "It's offensive. It's unseemly."

The league denied that claim. They later said, in the cease and desist letter to Jones, that those contract details were old and outdated ones.

Blank issued a statement on Monday, Nov. 13, that seemed to shoot down some of the claims about Goodell’s deal reported previously. The statement read:

"The Committee is continuing its work towards finalizing a contract extension with the Commissioner, consistent with the mandate provided in the unanimous May 2017 Resolution. Regardless of what may have been reported, the Committee is working within the financial parameters outlined to the ownership at the May meeting. The negotiations are progressing and we will keep ownership apprised of the negotiations as they move forward. We do not intend to publicly comment on our discussions.”

Who has the final approval for Goodell’s deal?

A unanimous 32-0 vote by owners in May authorized the six-member compensation committee to finalize and approve the extension for Goodell, and normally that would be the only vote needed.

Jones’ argument now is that the contract needs to go back to the full ownership group, instead of just the committee, because of the ratings decline, protests, etc.

Goodell is said to be “furious” over Jones’ effort to derail his contract, according to ESPN’s OTL.

"He feels as if the owners have made a lot of money and he should be compensated accordingly," a source told ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham. "The incentives thing really angers him."

Jones was a non-voting ad hoc member of the league’s compensation committee, the six owners tasked with finalizing Goodell’s deal. His membership was revoked on Nov. 2 when he informed the group of his threat to sue.

What’s his basis for threatening the lawsuit?

Jones is said to be one of four of five owners who want Goodell gone. There are reportedly another six wavering in their commitment, who Jones hopes to rally to his side with the threat of a lawsuit and hiring a big-name attorney, David Boies, to push it.

The OTL report says Jones is trying to change the two-thirds majority vote needed to approve a deal to three-fourths majority, giving his voting bloc guaranteed veto power. Jones’ play with the lawsuit is, in part, to get Goodell’s contract back in front of the full ownership group where he could prevent it from going forward if he can rally a small group of owners to his side.

Jones was supportive of a new contract for Goodell as recently as May. His latest threatening letter to the league makes an issue of what’s happened since then.

He claims that Falcons owner Arthur Blank and chair of the compensation committee was not honest about the details of Goodell’s proposed contract extension, according to a Thursday report from Mortensen.

Jones claims that details of the contract were not disclosed and that the deal moved away from a more incentive-based version. He also alleges that the committee is not unanimous on the deal, going back on Blank’s assurance that the committee would be in complete agreement on it.

The league disputed Jones’ claims with a very direct shot at him.

"Your description of the proposed extension is so at odds with the actual facts that we can only conclude that you are either uninformed or seek deliberately to mislead the other owners."

When news first broke that Jones was threatening to sue, it was not at all clear what the basis was for the potential lawsuit. This letter clarifies it — he’s trying to get the contract out of the committee’s hands and back to the full group of owners, in the hopes that he can rally enough of them to block Goodell’s deal and send the commissioner packing.

Still, it feels like an awfully weak case.

He may not have to sue. Jones could be fighting a delaying action. He could conceivably hold up the proceedings on Goodell’s contract to give himself time to rally enough owners to his cause.

Jones suggested as much in a Nov. 14 interview, telling 105.3 radio station in Dallas “we just need to slow this train down and…discuss the issues at hand in the NFL."

He pressed his fellow owners on that same point a week later. In a letter to owners first reported Nov. 16, Jones asked for a special meeting to address Goodell’s contract.

“This is not the time for the League to undertake massive contractual obligations which are inconsistent with the League’s performance,” he said in the letter.

His request was denied, and owners will use their regularly scheduled Dec. 13 meeting to discuss the issue.

If he can successfully get a delay on finalizing Goodell’s contract, it gives him more time to push his case before the commissioner’s current deal expires in March 2019.

What can the league do about it?

In the most aggressive response yet from the NFL’s compensation committee, Jones got a cease and desist letter on Monday, Nov. 13, threatening him with punishment if he doesn’t drop his effort to block Goodell’s contract extension. Possible punishments include fines, loss of draft picks and a suspension for Jones.

The NFL could punish Jones on the basis that his conduct is detrimental to the league. And, yes, that’s fitting given that personal conduct fueled this fracas in the first place.

A more extreme measure for dealing with Jones has reportedly been discussed by a few owners. The league could force Jones to forfeit the Cowboys, something that the Wall Street Journal reports a few owners have talked about, informally. That’s unlikely to happen, and was probably just a strategic leak put out there to threaten Jones.

He shrugged off the notion that the league could take away his team during his regular Tuesday radio show on Nov. 14.

Jerry Jones on @1053thefan on report he may be ousted - “I’ve had NOT ONE inkling of communication with the league office or any owner that would suggest something that laughable and ridiculous."

— Roy White III (@RDubThree) November 14, 2017

Jones’ lawyer, Boies, got a letter from fellow owners threatening action for his “antics” that could be considered “conduct detrimental,” according to the New York Times.

If the league does punish Jones, whatever form that takes, he could fight it in court.

Is this the end for Roger Goodell?

Jones may not have much of a case, but his timing is impeccable.

It’s a strange moment for the NFL. The league was a juggernaut that watched its ratings climb every year, pushing toward Goodell’s stated goal of $25 billion in annual revenue.

Those days are gone.

The NFL skated through mishandled scandal after mishandled scandal without much impact on the bottom line. Now, television ratings are down for the second consecutive season. Owners certainly didn’t like the president turning the sport into a new front in the culture war, and they’re divided on how to respond to the handful of players kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality and racial inequality.

There’s plenty for team owners to be concerned with and no real certainty for what to do about it. Jones is using those things as a cudgel in his fight with Goodell.

The question now is how many owners can he actually get on his side. Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with his job performance, but there’s said to be trepidation about replacing him for an unknown commodity, or worse, a commissioner of Jones’ choosing.

Jones’ moves here are certain to make him more enemies among his peers. The OTL story from Wednesday reports that some owners are upset with Goodell because they feel like he gave Jones too much power in the first place.

NFL owners are not a unified group who all think the same way. In fact, one thing that’s helped solidify Goodell’s status has been his ability to bring them together. Nowhere was he more effective at that than during the collective bargaining negotiations in 2011, when he was able to hold together the rift between small market and big market teams, like the Cowboys, to get a deal that enriched all 32 team owners at the expense of the players.

There’s another collective bargaining agreement on the horizon in 2021. Negotiations for that will be even more contentious than the last one. There’s more at stake this time around. Television viewership patterns are changing fast, meaning the NFL might not be able to count on multi-billion dollar rights deals for easy money down the road.

Having Goodell at the table for the next CBA negotiation was one of the main reasons for getting his contract extension done in the first place. Owners will be leery of switching commissioners with 2021 right around the corner. That might ultimately be Goodell’s firewall against Jones’ palace coup.

I can’t in good conscience endorse either side here. The league could use a different commissioner given the missteps Goodell’s made since the 2011 labor deal. The risk in replacing Goodell is that it’s more likely the next commissioner will have to accept a deal more along the lines of the one Jones wants, and that means the new commissioner’s pay would be subject in part to placating Jones. An even worse option is a commissioner handpicked by Jones.

(Our best hope, for fans, in 2021 is still going to be players willing to miss games to get a more favorable CBA.)

This has been the most interesting NFL season in a long time, on and off the field. And whatever two teams wind up playing in Super Bowl LII, it’s going to be hard to beat a Jerry Jones vs. Roger Goodell matchup. Nothing less than the future of professional football is at stake.

[junker-town]

Why is Jerry Jones fighting with Roger Goodell and the NFL?

A handy guide for the biggest matchup of the 2017 NFL season.

Roger Goodell could be in trouble. As recently as six months ago, that statement would have been, correctly, dismissed out of hand.

The NFL commissioner’s job, perhaps the most powerful position in the business of American professional sports, seemed impervious to any threat, especially the ones of Goodell’s own making.

He survived Bountygate. It was rough for a time, but he made it through the Ray Rice scandal. He skated through Deflategate too, coming out of that with even more legal precedent supporting his disciplinary powers as commissioner.

Owners opted to count their money instead of make a stink. Goodell held a fractious group of 32 billionaires together through the lockout and collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2011. It was his crowning achievement as commissioner, a deal that saw owners get just about every concession they wanted from players and set up a decade of labor stability and overflowing coffers. Goodell was untouchable because he made the league money.

Now one of the league’s most powerful owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, is threatening to turn his lobbying efforts against Goodell’s contract extension into a full-blown legal fight.

Jones says he’s doing this because he wants to make the commissioner more accountable to owners. “I want unprecedented accountability to the ownership,” is how he described his crusade after the Cowboys’ Week 11 loss to the Eagles. While that might be what he says he wants, it looks more like he wants a commissioner who answers to him specifically.

This is about as close as it gets to a coup d'état for the NFL, because he doesn’t like that the league hewed to its three-year-old domestic violence policy and gave his star running back, Ezekiel Elliott, a six-game suspension based on the league’s own investigation.

"I'm gonna come after you with everything I have," Jones said after learning the news of Elliott’s suspension, according to a Nov. 17 report from ESPN the Magazine. "If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a p---y compared to what I'm going to do."

Even if Jones isn’t successful at toppling the commissioner — it’s still a stretch to think that it will — it’s the most serious threat to Goodell’s job since he became commissioner in 2006.

Protecting the Shield is the root of the problem

That same labor deal gives the commissioner unilateral power over personal conduct matters and anything else that falls into the category of “protecting the integrity of the game.”

League commissioners have always had that kind of power. But it’s been Goodell’s signature issue.

Surprise: Unchecked power in the hands of one person leads to problems. The examples cited above turned into drawn-out court battles because of the arbitrary nature of the punishments doled out and the flimsy evidence used to justify it.

The league’s domestic violence policy was adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Rice incident. It was supported by Jones and other owners and actually spelled out levels of discipline for players and league employees involved in those kinds of incidents, starting with a six-game suspension.

However, the league has not been consistent with its punishment since implementing the policy. For example, former Giants kicker Josh Brown got a single game despite a well-documented history of domestic abuse.

You can see why players and the union don’t like Goodell’s role as judge, jury and executioner. They could end up with a short suspension or find their careers on hiatus indefinitely for reasons that are never quite clear.

Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons not to like his disciplinary powers too, taking a star quarterback off the field for footballs that may or may not have been deflated, taking away draft picks for free agent tampering claims, etc.

If it bothered the owners, their dissatisfaction never went beyond an anonymous grumble here and there, and most of them, publicly, still gave Goodell a vote of confidence when asked, even during the Rice situation in 2014.

Jones was among the owners voicing support for Goodell in the fall of 2014. He’s not been so supportive since the league started investigating the prodigious running back from the Cowboys, handing down a six-game suspension before the season started.

Why is Jones so upset with Goodell?

Jones carries a lot of weight in the NFL. He drove the league’s return to Los Angeles and its coming foray into Las Vegas. Few can lead the room full of owners the way the “de facto commissioner” can. So when he threatens to come after the real commissioner, it’s significant.

There’s a more personal element in the Elliott suspension for Jones too, besides just the potential of losing one of his best players for six games. Jones fought the NFL over its investigation into the accusations against Elliott, who was not charged by Ohio authorities who also investigated him, from the start.

In Oct. 2016, Jones confronted the NFL’s lead investigator, Lisa Friel, over the matter in a hotel bar after hours at an owners meeting. He told her, "your bread and butter is going to get both of us thrown out on the street.”

In July of this year, he told the press that there was no evidence against Elliott that warranted a suspension. At the beginning of August, Jones was publicly saying that he believed Elliott would not be suspended.

His reason for thinking that stems from a May conversation he had with Goodell. “'Roger told me there was nothing to worry about -- the evidence just isn't there,'" Jones said, according to a source cited in the Nov. 17 ESPN report.

The league denied that Jones was told there would be no suspension.

Needless to say, when the six-game suspension for Elliott was handed down in August, Jones was furious. He believes Goodell lied to him, telling him that Elliott would not be suspended. Jones called that an “unforgivable breach of trust.”

What’s up with Goodell’s contract?

Goodell’s current contract runs through 2018. The five-year extension would leave him in place through 2024, covering the league’s next scheduled collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2021.

In the past, Goodell’s annual compensation varied but reportedly was required to have an average of $25 million in bonus pay over any given three-year period. His yearly was reported at $44 million in 2014 and $34 million in 2015. But his salary is no longer a matter of public record after the NFL surrendered its non-profit status in 2015.

The argument over the new deal is whether to make it even more incentive-based. The contract the committee is working on is to be as much as 88 percent incentive-based, according to a Nov. 11 report by The New York Times.

But Jones and a few other owners reportedly believe that the incentives are so loosely defined that Goodell’s pay wouldn’t rise or fall too much whatever happened, even with the league facing a number of challenges at the moment — player suspensions, owners fearful of the controversy over protests, ratings in a nosedive, etc.

A curiously timed report from ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen relayed some of Goodell’s contract demands that paint the commissioner in a flattering light. He wanted $49.5 million per year, a private jet, and lifetime health insurance for him and his family, according to an unnamed owner cited in the report.

"That number for Roger just seems too much," the owner said. "It's offensive. It's unseemly."

The league denied that claim. They later said, in the cease and desist letter to Jones, that those contract details were old and outdated ones.

Blank issued a statement on Monday, Nov. 13, that seemed to shoot down some of the claims about Goodell’s deal reported previously. The statement read:

"The Committee is continuing its work towards finalizing a contract extension with the Commissioner, consistent with the mandate provided in the unanimous May 2017 Resolution. Regardless of what may have been reported, the Committee is working within the financial parameters outlined to the ownership at the May meeting. The negotiations are progressing and we will keep ownership apprised of the negotiations as they move forward. We do not intend to publicly comment on our discussions.”

Who has the final approval for Goodell’s deal?

A unanimous 32-0 vote by owners in May authorized the six-member compensation committee to finalize and approve the extension for Goodell, and normally that would be the only vote needed.

Jones’ argument now is that the contract needs to go back to the full ownership group, instead of just the committee, because of the ratings decline, protests, etc.

Goodell is said to be “furious” over Jones’ effort to derail his contract, according to ESPN’s OTL.

"He feels as if the owners have made a lot of money and he should be compensated accordingly," a source told ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham. "The incentives thing really angers him."

Jones was a non-voting ad hoc member of the league’s compensation committee, the six owners tasked with finalizing Goodell’s deal. His membership was revoked on Nov. 2 when he informed the group of his threat to sue.

What’s his basis for threatening the lawsuit?

Jones is said to be one of four of five owners who want Goodell gone. There are reportedly another six wavering in their commitment, who Jones hopes to rally to his side with the threat of a lawsuit and hiring a big-name attorney, David Boies, to push it.

The OTL report says Jones is trying to change the two-thirds majority vote needed to approve a deal to three-fourths majority, giving his voting bloc guaranteed veto power. Jones’ play with the lawsuit is, in part, to get Goodell’s contract back in front of the full ownership group where he could prevent it from going forward if he can rally a small group of owners to his side.

Jones was supportive of a new contract for Goodell as recently as May. His latest threatening letter to the league makes an issue of what’s happened since then.

He claims that Falcons owner Arthur Blank and chair of the compensation committee was not honest about the details of Goodell’s proposed contract extension, according to a Thursday report from Mortensen.

Jones claims that details of the contract were not disclosed and that the deal moved away from a more incentive-based version. He also alleges that the committee is not unanimous on the deal, going back on Blank’s assurance that the committee would be in complete agreement on it.

The league disputed Jones’ claims with a very direct shot at him.

"Your description of the proposed extension is so at odds with the actual facts that we can only conclude that you are either uninformed or seek deliberately to mislead the other owners."

When news first broke that Jones was threatening to sue, it was not at all clear what the basis was for the potential lawsuit. This letter clarifies it — he’s trying to get the contract out of the committee’s hands and back to the full group of owners, in the hopes that he can rally enough of them to block Goodell’s deal and send the commissioner packing.

Still, it feels like an awfully weak case.

He may not have to sue. Jones could be fighting a delaying action. He could conceivably hold up the proceedings on Goodell’s contract to give himself time to rally enough owners to his cause.

Jones suggested as much in a Nov. 14 interview, telling 105.3 radio station in Dallas “we just need to slow this train down and…discuss the issues at hand in the NFL."

He pressed his fellow owners on that same point a week later. In a letter to owners first reported Nov. 16, Jones asked for a special meeting to address Goodell’s contract.

“This is not the time for the League to undertake massive contractual obligations which are inconsistent with the League’s performance,” he said in the letter.

His request was denied, and owners will use their regularly scheduled Dec. 13 meeting to discuss the issue.

If he can successfully get a delay on finalizing Goodell’s contract, it gives him more time to push his case before the commissioner’s current deal expires in March 2019.

What can the league do about it?

In the most aggressive response yet from the NFL’s compensation committee, Jones got a cease and desist letter on Monday, Nov. 13, threatening him with punishment if he doesn’t drop his effort to block Goodell’s contract extension. Possible punishments include fines, loss of draft picks and a suspension for Jones.

The NFL could punish Jones on the basis that his conduct is detrimental to the league. And, yes, that’s fitting given that personal conduct fueled this fracas in the first place.

A more extreme measure for dealing with Jones has reportedly been discussed by a few owners. The league could force Jones to forfeit the Cowboys, something that the Wall Street Journal reports a few owners have talked about, informally. That’s unlikely to happen, and was probably just a strategic leak put out there to threaten Jones.

He shrugged off the notion that the league could take away his team during his regular Tuesday radio show on Nov. 14.

Jerry Jones on @1053thefan on report he may be ousted - “I’ve had NOT ONE inkling of communication with the league office or any owner that would suggest something that laughable and ridiculous."

— Roy White III (@RDubThree) November 14, 2017

Jones’ lawyer, Boies, got a letter from fellow owners threatening action for his “antics” that could be considered “conduct detrimental,” according to the New York Times.

If the league does punish Jones, whatever form that takes, he could fight it in court.

Is this the end for Roger Goodell?

Jones may not have much of a case, but his timing is impeccable.

It’s a strange moment for the NFL. The league was a juggernaut that watched its ratings climb every year, pushing toward Goodell’s stated goal of $25 billion in annual revenue.

Those days are gone.

The NFL skated through mishandled scandal after mishandled scandal without much impact on the bottom line. Now, television ratings are down for the second consecutive season. Owners certainly didn’t like the president turning the sport into a new front in the culture war, and they’re divided on how to respond to the handful of players kneeling during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality and racial inequality.

There’s plenty for team owners to be concerned with and no real certainty for what to do about it. Jones is using those things as a cudgel in his fight with Goodell.

The question now is how many owners can he actually get on his side. Goodell’s given owners plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with his job performance, but there’s said to be trepidation about replacing him for an unknown commodity, or worse, a commissioner of Jones’ choosing.

Jones’ moves here are certain to make him more enemies among his peers. The OTL story from Wednesday reports that some owners are upset with Goodell because they feel like he gave Jones too much power in the first place.

NFL owners are not a unified group who all think the same way. In fact, one thing that’s helped solidify Goodell’s status has been his ability to bring them together. Nowhere was he more effective at that than during the collective bargaining negotiations in 2011, when he was able to hold together the rift between small market and big market teams, like the Cowboys, to get a deal that enriched all 32 team owners at the expense of the players.

There’s another collective bargaining agreement on the horizon in 2021. Negotiations for that will be even more contentious than the last one. There’s more at stake this time around. Television viewership patterns are changing fast, meaning the NFL might not be able to count on multi-billion dollar rights deals for easy money down the road.

Having Goodell at the table for the next CBA negotiation was one of the main reasons for getting his contract extension done in the first place. Owners will be leery of switching commissioners with 2021 right around the corner. That might ultimately be Goodell’s firewall against Jones’ palace coup.

I can’t in good conscience endorse either side here. The league could use a different commissioner given the missteps Goodell’s made since the 2011 labor deal. The risk in replacing Goodell is that it’s more likely the next commissioner will have to accept a deal more along the lines of the one Jones wants, and that means the new commissioner’s pay would be subject in part to placating Jones. An even worse option is a commissioner handpicked by Jones.

(Our best hope, for fans, in 2021 is still going to be players willing to miss games to get a more favorable CBA.)

This has been the most interesting NFL season in a long time, on and off the field. And whatever two teams wind up playing in Super Bowl LII, it’s going to be hard to beat a Jerry Jones vs. Roger Goodell matchup. Nothing less than the future of professional football is at stake.