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berniecranes · 2 years

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There are many different reasons to talk about Lincoln as a character, in particular when it comes to how violent he is. While there is a major talk there, around the games' own bias and prejudices when it comes to how they view Lincoln as a whole. Maguire, really tries to paint him as some monster, saying he did more damage to this state than any war or hurricane can do.

And uhhhhhh that boils my blood. The game won't say it, but it's so obvious the reason why these are the views, is because the lead is a black man. They made him the most violent from the other two, they chose to do that. Yes. It plays into his revenge story but still. That was a choice they made. And is still what people will do when trying to hold the two other Mafioso protags higher than him.

But also when it comes to his killings..... WHO is Lincoln killing? The fucking Mafia. People will act like he's slaughter women in children in the streets when he ISN'T. That is SUCH a different dynamic. And should change the whole view point of Lincoln. Yes killing is wrong regardless, but it's not like these are normal folks. They too are criminals apart of this life, organized crime. The underground world that is threatening the lives of normal folk.

Also the game doesn't focus enough on how most of these characters are violent racists. Like yes it's obvious because they're working for the Marcanos, D*xie Mafia, S*uthern Union, but like that applies to nearly all their random men too. And it's not like they hide that. It's very clear by what the random men say.

I just think it's interesting when Lincoln's whole underlying plot is morals and what that entails. When Lincoln's whole journey is a revenge piece getting back at the Mafia for what they did to his family. It quite literally just so happened y'know he's an ex war vet, that worked under the C*A in his time there and had a friend being willing to help his so meticulously track them down.

Oh and that's the thing. Donovan. Yes people will say Donovan is in the wrong but not enough. Just like how the documentary says his name once?

When Donovan represents Lincoln's negative moral alignment. The fact the he continues to encourage Lincoln to continue on with killing them all. Because Donovan is the fucking C*A and understands how to do all of this? He is what kept it running. Getting information, getting contacts set up. Yet because he's not the one who is physically violent he is seen as not as bad? While I understand the reasoning, it doesn't change the fact he is still actively apart of this?

And talking about morals again. Lincoln is the one who is more positively morally aligned. He's not perfect of course but certainly better than Donovan. Lincoln makes effort to not hurt those that don't need to be, he tries to not hurt women unless it's absolutely necessary (hell, the game doesn't even let him murder a racist white woman). Whereas Donovan here, is okay with what is happening, and has one comment where he is racist towards Asian folks and says rather misogynistic things in that part as well. Yet, that isn't talked about nearly enough. What Donovan said was wrong, it's not okay. Yet you don't see people talking about how fucked up that was?

Sorry jumping to another point again, the game too makes sure to point out both of their desentization to things was majorly pushed due to their time in war. Making commentary about just doing the same things they did over in war, and doing it here when it comes to taking down the Marcanos. Like that is pointing out one of the reasons they can act in a way they do. Yet that gets brushed over? Like no! The game is pointing up how fucked and gruesome the war is and how much it changes people. Like this is also a big factor in how they act. (Also since I mentioned it, I just want to be clear. I am anti war and anti military. I'm not saying I agree with them being apart of it, just pointing what it does mean to them as characters)

Okay this is way too long but TL;DR. Lincoln is a great character and it's people's own bias that continue to frame him like some monster.

#just max ramblin'#racisim #please let me know to tag anything else and i will do that #just ugh its so annoying seeing the way people talk abt Lincoln #long post #mafia (game) —#m3 etc

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olivish · 3 years

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Some thoughts about Melanie Cavill and her beautiful mind.

I agree with others that Mel is neurodivergent/ autistic. I think this helps explain her passion and focus, and also why, in S1, she was so adept at “putting on a mask” and pretending to be someone else. Basically, I think she had been masking in some way or another her entire life, so when the time came to create the “Hospitality Melanie” persona, it was already second nature.

I think this also explains why it took Melanie so long to see Wilford for the monster he is, and why he was able to control/ manipulate her for most of her life, despite her superior intelligence. On that note, here are some of my MC HCs (I hope it goes without saying, I don’t mean to imply that anything described below is necessarily an “autistic” trait. This is simply how I imagine Melanie the person, who also happens to have autism.)

1. Before meeting Wilford, Melanie struggled to find her place in the world. She dropped out of high school because she was bored with the lessons and couldn’t be bothered to complete assignments. She had no friends, and most adults wrote her off as a trouble-maker.

Her family was poor, so she “borrowed” things they needed for the farm (some of them rather LARGE things), which earned her a juvenile record for theft.

2. Because of this, Melanie believed she’d never go to college. That was fine, she thought, she wouldn’t fit in there. She didn’t fit in anywhere. The only person who didn’t make her feel like a misfit was her father, John Cavill, who was a patient man who loved farming, and who taught his daughter everything he knew about the trade.

It wasn’t long, however, before John ran out of knowledge to share. Melanie was 8 when her father took her to the local library. “So,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

From that moment on, John watched his daughter surpass him in every subject, every field of study. It was hard, not because he was prideful, but because it felt like he was losing her. But not completely. At least, not yet.

Because for years after that, Melanie would seek her father out, and she’d talk at length about the topics that interested her, and he listened, enjoying her company, even after he ceased to understand a single word that came out of her mouth.

I mean that literally.

“Certains nématodes posent problème en agriculture parce qu'ils parasites des plantes ou des animaux d'élevage, mais la plupart stimulent la croissance en améliorant le cycle des nutriments.” “Mellie.” “Oui, papa?” “You’re speaking French again.” “Oh. Sorry.”

3. Melanie’s mother was a different story. Shanon Cavill, nee Shanon O’Connell, was stern, intelligent and, due to an undiagnosed mood disorder, emotionally unstable. She’d lose her temper at the drop of a hat, and although she loved her daughter, she didn’t understand her. Shanon didn’t understand why someone so brilliant was throwing her life away. Dropping out of school, getting arrested, fooling around with boys, and girls, who didn’t care about her, and who only got her into trouble.

Shanon said many words in the heat of many moments that she could never take back. Foolish. Reckless. Lazy. Quitter.

The day Joseph Wilford showed up at the farm looking for Melanie, Shanon peered at him through the porch screen door. “Did she steal something from you?” she asked. “Because whatever it is, we can’t pay you back, so you’d best just leave before I let the dogs out.”

Looking back, Wilford deeply regrets not heeding the lady Cavill’s advice.

4. Melanie saw Wilford as her missing piece. Melanie always knew she was “bad with people”. To her, human beings were confounding black boxes. INPUT > [???] > UNEXPECTED RESULT, USUALLY BAD.

But Wilford. Joseph Wilford was a social magician! She watched in awe. Everyone adored him. He’d tell a joke and everyone laughed. Anything they needed for their work - funding, IP rights, permits, materials, labor - he procured through sheer force of charisma.

He was just like her, except he had that one missing piece.

It was the apparent gap in their interpersonal skills that led Melanie to conclude that she could never be a leader like him. That’s why she allowed Wilford to take credit for her work, why she believed him when he said it was better for all involved if she remained a ‘silent partner.’

That’s also why she never tried to run Snowpiercer as herself. Despite having all the skills, Melanie couldn’t imagine anyone would follow her leadership.

(I think she was wrong about that...)

5. It was Wilford who sent Melanie to college, and it was Wilford who coached her on how to “mask.” As a sociopath, nearly all of Wilford’s social interactions are theatre. They have to be. So when he met Melanie, he immediately saw what her problem was - the silly girl wasn’t acting!

So he sat her down one day and gave her a gift. “A chess game?” she said.

“Not a game. This box contains the secret to the universe.”

She smiled, but he was serious. As Wilford set up the pieces he explained, “This is the whole world. Every type of person you’ll ever meet is here. Pawns, knights, bishops. They all have their rules, their own little scripts. The trick is, figure them out, while revealing nothing about yourself.”

She didn’t understand, but in time, she would. Wilford taught her how to survive, but not as herself. He taught her to hide, to blend in, and to trust nobody but him.

And it worked, to a certain extent. Melanie earned degrees from MIT and Yale, graduating with the highest honors, lauded as a prodigy. A recruiter from NASA asked if she’d be interested in applying for the astronaut program. Elon Musk asked the same thing, but he offered more money.

Melanie could have worked anywhere. Done anything. But she went back to Wilford, partly out of loyalty, and partly because she believed he was the only person in the world who truly knew her, and saw her, and valued her for who she was.

They weren’t lovers, but Melanie considered him just as close. For many years, he was her one partner and closest friend.

6. When Melanie got pregnant with Alex, she was afraid she’d be a bad mother. She worried that she wouldn’t have that mysterious ‘maternal instinct’ that seemed to come naturally to other women. She thought maybe she was “broken” in a very particular way and shouldn’t be a parent.

Those worries disappeared once Alex was born. More than that, Melanie’s deep connection with Alex made her consider that maybe she’d underestimated herself. In motherhood, Melanie found courage. She built stronger friendships with Ben & Jinju, and she began to interact with Wilford on a more equal footing.

She started speaking up about things she never dared interfere with before. She didn’t like the company’s environmental practices. Their anti-union stances. Their parental leave policies were atrocious. Wilford was beside himself. He didn’t recognize her. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what happened.

At a loss, Wilford blamed his catch-all word for human behavior that fell outside his bounds of understanding.

“Sentimentality.”

7. When Melanie lost Alex, she lost faith in herself. It wasn’t just the grief, or the guilt, though those were enormous. Melanie understood now: Alex was her missing piece. Alex was the one thing that made Melanie feel like she could do anything.

It cannot be overstated what a colossal blunder it was for Wilford to return Melanie’s superpower to her. He thought he was being clever in saving Alex, but from the moment Melanie blew up Big Alice’s connector and Alex gave her that grudging look of respect, all bets were off.

Melanie remembered who she was. The awakening started with Layton, but it ended with Alex.

Final thoughts: Melanie’s particular neurology has been a hot-button issue in the past, so I’m a little nervous posting this. Please reach out to me with any comments or concerns. Everything here is written with an open heart in good faith, and while I’m allergic to argument, I am addicted to discussion. <3

#Snowpiercer #fanfiction #hc

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therefractory · 3 years

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The clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool | Boris Johnson | The Guardian The Guardian · by Edward Docx The long-running German satirical show Extra 3 recently featured a sketch with the following voiceover: “From the people who brought you The Crown – the epic saga of the Queen – now comes the ridiculous story of this guy, a notorious buffoon at the head of a country … The Clown.” The word “clown” has often been used in a flippant or dismissive way with regard to Boris Johnson. But the underlying paradox is that it is only as a clown – a fool in the oldest and deepest sense of the word – that his character can truly be understood. What happens when you make the clown king is what we in the UK have been witnessing in real time. With the success of the vaccine, though, a new question emerges: can one archetype transform into the other? Can Johnson creep away from his clownish past altogether? Clowns, of course, are very serious and important people. At their simplest, they remind us of the silliness of things: that the world we have created is ridiculous. They reassure us in this observation by appealing to our innate understanding of the absurd. They relieve the endless tension and trauma of reality. At a deeper level, the clown is the mirror image of the priest. Both represent two ancient sides of our nature. Both elucidate what it means to be human. The priest summons, celebrates and interrogates the sacred; the clown does the same with the profane. The one is concerned with the eschatological, the other with the scatological. The priest propounds abstinence and fasting; the clown gluttony and indulgence. The one solemnifies sex, the other carnalises. As David Bridel, founder of the Clown School in Los Angeles, says, clowns are often roundly welcomed because they “remind us that we are as practised in falling over, shitting and humping, as we are in prayer and purification”. Would-be biographers of Johnson might do worse than to read Paul Bouissac, the leading scholar on the semiotics of clowning. Clowns are “transgressors”, he writes, cultural subversives who enact rituals and dramatic tableaux that “ignore the tacit rules of social games to indulge in symbolic actions that … toy with these norms as if they were arbitrary, dispensable convention.” Clowns “undermine the ground upon which our language and our society rest by revealing their fragility”. They “foreground the tension” between “instinct” and “constraint”. Bouissac could be writing directly of Johnson when he adds: “Their performing identities transcend the rules of propriety.” They are, he says, “improper by essence”. Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all. His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to agree. And, of course, we do. Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous. He goes further, though – pushing the clown’s confetti-stuffed envelope: isn’t pretending you don’t want to eat great trolleys of cake and squire an endless carousel of medieval barmaids … dishonest? Oh, come on, it’s so tiresome trying to be slim, groomed or monogamous – when what you really want is more cake and more sex. Right? I know it. You know it. We all know it. Why lie? Forget the subject under discussion – Europe, social care, Ireland – am I not telling it like it is, deep down? Am I not the most honest politician you’ve ever come across? Herein the clown’s perverse appeal to reason. Next, witness how, in the company of a journalist, Johnson’s whole demeanour transmits the sense of him saying: “Aha! An interview! How absurd! This is no way to find anything out! But, yes, if you want, I will play ‘prime minister’ and you can reprise my old role – if that’s what the audience is here for.” Notice how often he asks (knowingly) “Are you sure our viewers wouldn’t want to hear … ?” or “You really want to know this?” This is because the clown is always in a deeper relationship with the audience than with his ostensible subject. See how he rocks on his feet as if to lampoon a politician emphasising his words. Hear how his speech is not – in truth – eloquent, but rather a caricature of eloquence. The dominant mode is not fluency, but a kind of stop-start oratio interruptus; hesitancy followed by sudden spasms of effusion. The hesitancy is designed to involve us in the confected drama of his choosing the next word. The sudden effusion that follows can then be marketed as clinching evidence of his oratorical elan. You do not have to be a dramatist to recognise the clown archetype immediately. Johnson’s impulsiveness. The self-summoned crises. His attitude to truth, to authority, to every construct of law and art and politics, to power and to pleasure. His personal relationships and his relationship to the public. The self-conscious ungainliness. His blithe conjuring of fantasy and fairytale. The way he toys with norms – inverts, switches, tricks, reverses. The collusive warmth oddly symbiotic with a distancing coldness. Anything for a laugh. Everything preposterous. All of it richly articulate of the antic spirit that animates his being. Indeed, Johnson is an apex-clown – capable of the most sophisticated existential mockery while simultaneously maintaining the low moment-by-moment physical comedy of the buffoon. Recall general election Johnson of 2019. Think of the famous moment where he drove a JCB through a polystyrene wall on which was written the word “Gridlock”. His union jack-painted digger burst through the polystyrene with the legend “Get Brexit Done” written on its loader. His subsequent speech even mentioned custard: “I think it is time,” he said, smirking, “for the whole country – symbolically – to get in the cab of a JCB – of a custard colossus – and remove the current blockage that we have in our parliamentary system.” This scene must surely be as close to the actual circus as politics in the UK has ever come. Boris Johnson at the JCB headquarters in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, December 2019. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Consider what is actually going on here. The wall is a wall that he helped create. Now he wants everyone to join him demolishing it. And he’s the man to lead the charge. Why? Because he’s the only one who can smash through the nonsense that is … the wall. Yet, he built the wall. Most of this nonsense is his doing – figuratively, literally, in the studio, in the country. And why are the hazard lights on? Because, of course, this is an emergency, for the clown must forever be concocting drama. An emergency that he has conjured and staged – to place himself in the cab of the rescue vehicle. Which is not a rescue vehicle. But a JCB. (Paradox inside paradox; is he destroying or rescuing?) A JCB painted as a union jack. Why? To celebrate the flag? Not quite. To mock it, then? Also, not quite. But in order to toy with it – to clown with it – to move back and forth across the borders of the serious and the comic. “Time for the whole country,” he says, “symbolically – to get in the cab of the JCB.” Symbolically? Was ever a word deployed with so many layers of foolery? What – we thought he might mean we all get in the JCB? Of course, we didn’t. So who is he mocking with that word? He’s mocking everything – the stunt, us, himself – even in the moment of performance, he mocks his own performance. We cannot take him seriously and yet we must take him seriously. And note how that word “symbolically” steps up from the backstage of Johnson’s consciousness when talking of Brexit – which, as he well knows, is an act of symbolism at the expense of everything else. The JCBs, the polystyrene walls, the stuck-on-a-zipwire-with-two-mini-union-jacks, the hiding in fridges, the waving of fish, the thumbs up, the pants down, this is the realm of the mock heroic – to which Johnson returns again and again. This is where he’s most at home. This is where he’s world-king. And he urges us to join him there. Nudges our elbows. Offers us a drink. Beckons us in. Smirks. Winks. Johnson’s novel Seventy-Two Virgins is one long tour of the territory. The book is beyond merely bad and into some hitherto unvisited hinterland of anti-art. More or less everything about it is ersatz. Commentators who fall for his self-conjured comparisons to Waugh and Wodehouse miss the point entirely and do both writers an oafish ill-service. Because here again: Johnson is not seriously interested in writing novels at all. It’s not that he’s a fraud. Rather, as ever, he is a jester-dilettante peddling parody and pastiche. In truth, the attentive reader is not invited to take anything seriously about the novel – not its title; not its handling of character, dialogue, plot or point of view; not its dramatic construction, nor its stylistic impersonations. And certainly not its thematic dabbling. In fact, for more than 300 ingenious pages, Johnson manages to commit to nothing in the art of writing a novel so much as the attempt to be entertaining in the act of mocking a commitment to the art of writing of a novel. There is no heroic; it’s all mock. “To a man like Roger Barlow,” Johnson writes of his clownishly named hero in the book, “the whole world just seemed to be a complicated joke … everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and religion, laws, principle, custom – these were nothing but sticks from the wayside to support our faltering steps.” Clowns have been with us through history. They turn up in Greek drama as sklêro-paiktês – childlike figures. During the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a clown-king was chosen and all commerce was suspended in favour of a wild cavort. (“Fuck business.”) In Norse mythology, the archetype is the figure of Loki – silver-tongued trickster and shape-shifter who turns himself into horse, seal, fly, and fish. (Note the echo of the reference by a close ally of Joe Biden to Johnson as a “shape-shifting creep”.) In the Italian commedia dell’arte, there is the character of Pierrot. There is Badin in France, Bobo in Spain, Hanswurst in Germany. And here in Britain: Shakespeare’s many famous fools. We need our clever fools, of course. Too much solemnity is sickly. We need the carnival. We need reminders of our absurdity. The culture should be subverted. The sacred should be disparaged. Institutions should be derided when they become sclerotic. We live in an age of posturing and zealotry and never needed our satirists and our clowns more. But the transgressor is licensed precisely because they are not in power. The satirist ridicules the government – fairly, unfairly – and we smile because (ordinarily) they are not in charge of the hospitals, the schools, our livelihoods or the borders. We laugh and clap at the circus, the theatre and the cinema because we can go home at the end of the evening, confident that the performers are not in charge of the reality in which we must live. Boris Johnson stuck on a zipline in Victoria Park, London, August 2012. Photograph: Getty Images Previously, of course, this was Johnson’s relationship to power. He was the clown-journalist tilting idly at straight bananas, Tony Blair, political correctness gone mad. When he was made mayor of London, he was in effect elevated to quasi-official court jester. There he was stranded on the zipwire (the buffoon parodies the circus trapeze act) but real power still remained elsewhere. Even during the referendum campaign, David Cameron and George Osborne were the government … whereas Johnson was continuing to perform the role of fool – holding up a kipper here, draped in sausages there, arriving in town squares with his red circus bus and a farrago of misdirection and fallacy. He was stoutly devoid of any real idea or concern for what might replace the structures he disparaged. His humour, his glee, his energy, his campaigning brilliance – it delighted and sparkled because he was free of responsibility, free to be himself, free to throw the biggest custard pies yet dreamed of in the UK. Vanishingly few people had any serious idea of what was involved in leaving the EU; and resoundingly not Johnson. But those who simply wanted to leave because their gut instinct told them it was right to do so would have failed and failed miserably without him. These men and women – the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Steve Baker, Nigel Farage, Mark Francois, John Redwood, Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey et al – were never more than a dim congregation of rude mechanicals. And what they required to win was someone who instinctively understood how to conduct a form of protracted public masque. Someone who could distract, charm, rouse and delight with mischief and inversion and a thousand airy nothings. (The clown was ever the perfect ambassador of meaninglessness.) But even Puck sends the audience home with an apology and the reassurance that all we have witnessed was but a dream. We, however, have made our clown a real-world king. And from that moment on, we became a country in which there was only the mock heroic – a “world beating” country that would “strain every sinew” and give “cast-iron guarantees” while bungling its plans and breaking its promises. A country “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles” and act “as the supercharged champion” of X, Y, Z. A country on stilts – pretending that we had a test and trace system that was head and shoulders above the rest of the world. A country performing U-turns on the teetering unicycle of Johnsonian buffoonery – A-levels, school meals, foreign health workers and more. A country of tumbling catastrophes. Trampolining absurdities. Go to work. Don’t go to work. A country proroguing parliament illegally here, trying to break international law there. Paying its citizens to “eat out to help out” in the midst of a lethal pandemic. A country testing its eyesight in lockdown by driving to distant castles with infant and spouse during a travel ban. A country whose leadership stitched up the NHS in the morning and then clapped for them at night. A country opening schools for a single day, threatening to sue schools, shutting schools. A country on holiday during its own emergency meetings. A country locking down too late; opening up too early. A country sending its elderly to die in care homes. A country unwilling to feed its own children. A country spaffing £37bn up the wall one moment and refusing to pay its own nurses a decent salary the next. A country doing pretend magic tricks with the existence of its own borders – no, there won’t be a border in the sea; oh yes there will; oh no there won’t; it’s behind you …. A country of gimmicks and slapstick and hollow, honking horns. This is Eastcheap Britain and Falstaff is in charge. It is in the two Henry IV plays that Shakespeare most clearly illuminates the gulf between his great, theatre-filling clown, Falstaff, and the young Prince Hal who will go on to become the archetype of the king – Henry V. At the mock-court of Falstaff’s tavern, we are invited to laugh and drink more ale, pinch barmaid’s bottoms, dance with dead cats and put bedpans on our heads while Falstaff entertains us with stories of his bravery and heroism that we all know are flagrant lies. Says Prince Hal to the portly purveyor of falsehoods: “These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” Meanwhile, the realm falls apart. Since we have no Hal and have crowned the clown instead, the play we are now watching in the UK asks an ever more pressing question: can Falstaff become Henry V and lead his country with true seriousness and purpose? Or is the vaccine-cloaked transformation now being enacted merely superficial – a shifting of the scenery? The lies themselves are the problem. The kingly archetype embodies at least the ambition of sincerity, meaning and good purpose at the heart of the state. Whereas deceit continues to be the default setting on Johnson’s hard drive. Rory Stewart calls Johnson “the best liar ever to serve as prime minister” but writes that “what makes him unusual in a politician is that his dishonesty has no clear political intent”. But Stewart does not quite see that Johnson is the purest form of clown there is – “improper by essence” – and that truth and lies are like two sides of the argument to him: equally tedious, equally interesting, equally absurd, both a distant second in their service of tricks, drama, distraction, invention, manipulation. He will write you two columns, four, 10, 100 – pro-Marmite, anti-Marmite; pro-EU, anti-EU. And then he’ll tell you all about them. All about how he couldn’t decide. Because not deciding is where all the drama is to be found and who cares about the arguments anyway? No, what the trickster wants is neither your agreement nor your disagreement. (For he himself agrees and disagrees.) What the trickster wants most of all … is for you to admire his trickery. Heinrich Böll, the German Nobel-prize winner and author of the truly great novel The Clown, answers Stewart’s question when he says: “You go too far in order to know how far you can go.”

The clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool | Boris Johnson | The Guardian

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bellakitse · 5 years

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The alien glow stick- Day 4: Alien shenanigans

Alex Manes is not in the mood, as a matter of fact as he parks his car outside his father’s old anti-alien bunker now turned alien headquarters, he is downright annoyed. Kyle and Liz’s cars are already there, and Alex rolls his eyes wondering what’s the latest alien drama. The last few months have been relatively peaceful in spite of Max’s death and resurrection, Rosa being back to life as a teenager, and the aliens learning to expand their abilities. Yet it didn’t fail that if Alex were on a date, something alien related would happen that pulled him away from his good time. It was starting to feel like their little group had some kind of alarm that when off every time someone had their hand on his dick.

“This better be good, Valenti,” he calls out as he makes his way into the bunker. “I was having a nice date with Ben and was really looking forward to getting laid,” he trails off as he finds not just Kyle there -who had been the one to call him- and Liz, but also Isobel, Max, Rosa, and Michael.

“Why is Guerin glowing green?” he asks bewildered as he takes in the man before him. A scowl on his face, his arms crossed and actually glowing green.

Rosa smirks, all but laughing as she sits on the center table, her feet swinging back and forth. “Because apparently being green with jealousy is an actual thing in Roswell.”

Alex looks from her to Michael who’s glow is now turning bright pink and then to the rest of the group who are all standing around awkwardly at the sudden tension in the room. Alex can feel the beginnings of a headache. With a sigh, he takes off his leather jacket and starts to roll up the sleeves of his fitted dress shirt. He doesn’t miss the once over that he gets from Michael, Isobel, and Rosa who is shameless as she flashes him another amused grin. “Someone better explain, now.”

“Michael and I were working on a serum,” Liz steps forward, twisting her hands she starts to explain, and Alex sighs again suddenly bone tired by just her words alone, and he knows he’s going to hate this explanation if it involves their resident science geniuses experimenting. “Something to better help them control their emotional outburst when they use their powers,” she continues with a grimace when he gives her an unimpressed look. “We decided to try in on Michael and long story short now whenever he feels a strong emotion it causes him to glow a color corresponding with that emotion,” she finishes pointing at Michael who is still glowing pink.

“Pink,” Alex points out.

“Embarrassed,” Isobel supplies. “I know Michael, and that’s his embarrassed stance.

“Thank you, Isobel,” Michael mutters glaring at her, the pink turning into a red.

“Red is anger,” Max points out, sitting by the computer station. “I riled him up earlier, and he went blood red.”

“Well you’re annoying as fuck, Maximo,” Michael snaps in his brother’s direction.

“Green was jealousy,” Rosa adds her two cents, amused as ever as it turns awkward again.

“No, it’s not,” Michael protests.

“No?” Rosa challenges, with a glint in her eye. “Alex, please tell us about your date, who’s this Ben guy and just how hot is he that you were going to sleep with him?” she asks with a grin. Alex isn’t sure why, but for some reason, Rosa finds it endlessly amusing to know that he and Michael have history. She had still been around when he had been crushing on Michael back in high school, and while she was already gone by the time, they kissed in the museum. Before that, she had sat in on his conversations with Maria and Liz about his fail attempt to kiss Michael in his shed, knowing that Michael was his mystery guy seemed to tickle her.

“Ben?” Kyle interrupts, with a smirk of his own, because he’s just as much of a shit starter as his half-sister. “You mean Dr. Ben Mitchell, that’s who you went out with?” Kyle laughs loudly. “I knew you guys were giving each other ‘fuck me’ looks the other day at the hospital, not bad Alex, he’s very hot.”

“Thank you, Kyle,” Alex says drier than the desert as he wills himself not to react otherwise. “Your approval in my sexual partners means the world to me.”

Kyle flashes him a bright smile in response. “So you are sleeping with him.”

Alex curbs the urge to yell as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Why are we even talking about my sex life.”

“To prove green equals jealousy,” Isobel answers with a bored expression as she points back her brother who is indeed green-ish again. “Seriously, Michael, way to rise to the occasion, Rosa and Kyle aren’t even trying to hide what they’re doing, and yet here you are lighting up like some human glow stick.”

“Alien glow stick!” Kyle and Rosa say in union, sharing an amused look between them.

"Maturity, guys," Liz says with an eye roll though Alex can see that she's trying to laugh.

"You're one to talk," Alex replies shaking his head. "We're going to take you chemistry set if you keep experimenting with the aliens, Liz."

"That's a mean thing to joke about with a scientist, Alex," Liz frowns at him, even has her lips curve upward, obviously not the least bit bothered by his comment, after all, Liz, her science and her big brain have saved their collective asses more than once. No one would dare stop her experiments.

Alex turns to Michael and looks at him, really looks. He doesn't allow himself to do much of that these days. He and Michael are in a weird limbo of maybe friends, maybe more someday soon. It's not as awkward or as painful as when Michael stood him up and ended up in Maria's arms for all of five minutes before they both realized that was a mistake, but it still hurts to look at him for too long.

As short as Michael and Maria’s relationship had been, the repercussions of it have lingered. He and Maria were stiff and weird around each other, their best friends status more than a little banged up. Maria finding out about aliens and that everyone but her knew hadn't helped. Michael had gone back to random hookups, Alex followed his lead and did the same. They were trying to be friendly, which just meant they didn't spend a lot of time together alone because neither of them knew how to just be friends with each other.

“What?”Michael blurts out, not as pink as before but it doesn’t matter because Alex knows his uncomfortable posture too.

“Nothing,” Alex answers with another sigh. “Though we might have to have a conversation about preservation skill and not playing lab rat, Guerin.”

Michael rolls his eyes, as he loses more of the pink hue to him.

“Okay, so what do we do?” Alex asks looking around.

“I’m going back to work, I’m covering for the sheriff tonight,” Max answers as he stands.

“I’m going back to my lab at the hospital, and I’m taking Kyle with me to help since Michael can’t be in public glowing,” Liz says before pointing at Isobel and Rosa. “I need you two to go into the desert and get more of the plant I was using, maybe I can reverse engineer this.”

Alex watches as they all start to move, making their way towards the exit of the bunker.

“What am I suppose to do?” Alex asks turning to watch them leave. “Why did you guys even call me?”

Rosa looks back at him with another knowing grin, and at Michael who is behind him, even without looking back at him he knows he’s bright pink again. “Ask Michael, he’s the one that asked Kyle to text you.”

The door to the bunker closes behind her, leaving him and Michael alone and in silence.

“Why, Guerin?” he asks after a moment, his back still to Michael and he hears the man shift from foot to foot behind him. The room full of nervous energy.

“Because I’m currently a walking, talking mood ring with no way of hiding what I feel. And instead of thinking how to fix it, all I could think of is that maybe we can finally have a conversation without misunderstanding if you can see my feelings.”

Alex doesn’t turn to face Michael right away, Michael might be the one glowing emotions at the moment, but Alex has never felt more exposed.

“Alex?”

Alex sighs and turns to face Michael who is now glowing yellow, he raises an eyebrow at that.

“Nervous,” Michael answers his silent question. “Were you really on a date?”

Alex blinks at the question. “Yes, the third one with Ben.”

“Third,” Michael repeats, licking his lips as he looks away, his glow is still yellow with bits of green. “Is it going well?”

Alex thinks of his answer for a moment, because yes, it’s going well enough with the doctor he’d met a month ago when he’d gone into the hospital for a check-up on his leg.

“It’s easy with him,” Alex finally answers with a shrug. “I can see why you needed that too,” he continues coming as close as he’s ever been able to address the Maria situation.

“That didn’t last long,” Michael answer. “It couldn’t.”

“Guerin,” Alex starts, warning, because the fact is that months later he still can’t talk about it. Can’t deal with the hurt he’s been carrying since he found out that the love of his life had found comfort and refuge in the arms of his best friend to escape the pain he feels when he’s around Alex.

“Easy wasn’t better,” Michael continues, despite Alex tone. He takes a step forward and then another and another until he’s standing within touching distance of Alex. It makes him want to take a step back, but Alex had been telling the truth when he’d said he was done running away. “Easy isn’t an all-consuming love that takes my breath away.”

Alex closes his eyes and just breathes for a moment.

“Huh, would you look at that,” Michael says quietly making Alex open his eyes again to find that Michael is now glowing a soft, serene blue.

Michael is looking at him with an expression that makes Alex’s eyes sting and his heart squeeze, it’s a look Alex has been intimately familiar with since he was 17, a look he feared he would never see again on Michael’s face.

“I guess love’s color is blue,” Michael continues softly, and Alex can’t stop the small gasp that escapes past his lips.

“Don’t believe me?” Michael question shorting the gap between them, his front brushing against Alex’s. “I’ll prove it.”

“Michael,” Alex whispers, helpless as Michael brings his hands up to cradle his face.

“I love you, Alex,” Michael whispers, glowing bluer, brighter. “All my life I have only loved you, all my life I will only ever love you.”

Alex’s sob is lost between them as he crushes his lips against Michael’s. He sinks into the feeling of Michael’s mouth on his, the only thing holding him up is Michael’s hold on him as he grips the front of Michael’s shirt for dear life. Years of longing is poured into their kiss, and Alex doesn’t understand how he’s survived the last few months without this feeling. It’s as vital to his existence as oxygen.

“Alex,” Michael breathes as he pulls back enough to break the kiss, resting his forehead against Alex’s.

Alex gets go of the front of Michael’s shirt long enough to move his arms around Michael and grip the back, pressing himself against him with nothing but their clothes between them.

“I love you too, Michael,” he whispers, the words dancing against Michael’s mouth that curves upward into a bright smile, even brighter than the blue of Michael’s skin.

part 2- the alien popsicle

#roswell nm #alexmanesweek2019 #malex fic #malex #michael x alex #my writing

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axther · 4 years

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🗨️ Hi! Can I please request a Bnha matchup, if it’s not too much to ask. I’m a 5’1 pan female with long hair that fades from red to blonde. I am very curvy/busty and I am very insecure about it, which leads to me shutting myself out from others. I am very soft-spoken, intelligent, and extremely patient. I love to play the ukulele and sing! I really just want someone who can defend me, I have been bullied for most of my life because I am really shy. I’m also an INTJ. Thank you so much!

Let’s get this show on the road babeeyyyy!!!! Finna go off!!!!

#1 is...Bakugou!

Okokokok so the aforementioned patience??

You’re gonna need a lot of it

The first time y’all met he probably was going off about the new transfer who was too quiet

And how he wanted to beat the shit out of her to prove his dominance

And you’re just like ‘ok :|’

And bakugou??

Scared.exe

Why???

This is the first time he can remember in forever that someone didn’t really react negatively to his comments

Midoriya always had a sort of ‘no kaachan!!’ reaction

Kirishima would tell him it wasn’t manly

And even Todoroki would just tell him that he didn’t stand a chance

So why did this foreign chick so cool about it??

At first it really pissed him off, but then he realised several things.

One, you never really tried to defend yourself when people said something that would’ve at least irked anyone else

Two, you didn’t socialise a whole lot compared to the rest of the class. It was comparable to Tamaki Amajiki in terms a shyness, though you never turned to face a wall.

Three, you were cute.

Like, really cute.

like...

Tiddy

This boy would love it

He does his best not to show it nor to oogle but

He really likes your body

Plus a redhead???

Exotic isn’t the right word but here it is

So you’ve definitely caught his attention

He realises very quickly that bullying you isn’t the solution to gaining your respect

He just sees that it makes you withdraw even more

So he begins lowkey befriending you

Now

His way of going about it kinda sucks

But he’s trying

This includes, but is not limited to:

Going off on Mineta and Kaminari if they comment on your body

Studying together

Listening to you play the ukelele

Slowly but surely he realises that regular boy/girl friends don’t have sleepovers at each other’s dorms

And that he doesn’t smile around everyone else as he does with you

And that his heart doesn’t jump around when he’s around the others as opposed to being alone with you

And that his eyes don’t wander the same as when he-

yeah so he realises he has a crush

And because he’s emotionally constipated, this has him screwed over

He lays in bed at night, face bright red, thinking about the most scandalous thing ever-premarital holding hands

He’s whipped

If you catch him staring at you, he’s spin away and just say that he was looking at something else

And he has no idea what to do about this

So he just keeps quiet

Until one day

Monoma is talking shit about you and how you’re so shy for someone trying to be a hero

And see now, Bakugou usually just either ignores it or says something sharp and then ignores it.

But this time? Something in him snaps

He has no idea what it was, but he spins around and begins ripping Monoma apart, almost literally.

He’s got him by the neck of his shirt and is howling into his face.

‘She’s better and stronger then you’ll ever be, you fucking dipshit quirk thief! At least she can rely on herself for her own fights, while you have to whimper and mope around waiting to touch somebody like a fucking pervert! You wish you could be her with how much you talk about her, huh? You know a lot for someone who’s supposed to hate her! Back the fuck off of my girl!”

And the hall drops silent.

Everyone’s side-eyeing everyone, there’s a confused silence, Monoma’s eye is twitching while he slowly turns blue, before Bakugou realises what he said.

‘I fucking said what I said, assholes! She’s my fucking girl!’

Takes your hand and runs all the way back to his dorm

There he turns and looks down at the ground, trying to find the words he wants to say because this was not how he wanted you to find out, if at all

He hates being so blushy and nervous and he feels like a schoolgirl and he wants to blow it to oblivion

But he glances up and sees the heavy blush on your face and his heart just goes 🥴

‘I..’

He hesitates, before clenching his fists and spewing it out without looking at you in the eyes.

‘I fucking love you.’

#2 is...Kirishima!

Now

He’s very very extroverted

We all know this

And he wants to be friends with everyone in the class

So when he notices that you don’t really talk to people, he’s all over it!!

Before you know it, he’s tagging along with you to places and he’s talking about a new restaurant and if maybe you would want to go

And let’s be honest

The boy knows he has a crush on you since day one

He sees this beauty walk through the door and he just goes ‘😳🤔🥴🤔’

So there’s that going for him

He’s surprisingly good at hiding his crush??

He always acts super chill and sweet with everyone so you don’t suspect a thing

Until one day you’re talking with Mina and she’s like ‘I tried asking Kiri if he wanted to go see Killer Slayer 300 Part 7 but he said he already had a date to see it with someone!’

And you’re like ‘...it’s me. I’m the date. I’m the DATE????’

And then the secret’s out

Mina spills it to EVERYONE and the boy is so embarrassed

He feels really bad like was tricking you or something and he starts trying to avoiding you

And I am so sorry

But you have to make a move

He will think forever that he was emotionally...deceitful??? Something along those lines.

Like he didn’t want you to think that he was one-sidedly dating you

So when you hunt him down this means several things

One, that you had enough initiative to talk to him despite being so shy, so that already tells him that you really want to talk about this

Two, that you really did like him

And three, that nonetheless, you wanted to see him

This makes his heart ‘!!’ and through the entire talk he’s got a blush and he’s trying to avoid saying outright that he loves you in case it derails the entire conversation

So when you talk the leap and say it first, he fucking SHOUTS it.

‘What?! For real?! I love so so much babe!!!’

#3 is...Momo!

Big tiddy gang

There was an unspoken allegiance the first time you two met eyes

And instantly you two are hangin out 😤

Every night is spent in each other’s dorms, just vibing and talking about life

Momo needs that kind of casual support, and oh boy is she getting it

And you are getting a kinship with a fellow intellectual lady!!

You two are super patient together, and if anyone has a problem, the momo-y/n gang has got them

You become a mom figure despite being so shy, because momo does her best to help you out of your shell

And naturally

You guys formed an anti mineta union 🙅🏻‍♀️

He said one (1) word about your boobages and Momo, for the first time in her life, genuinely went OFF

‘That is so disrespectful! How do you intend to become a hero if you always harass women? If we wanted to, all of us girls could have you expelled and even potentially sent to jail! If you do not stop this behaviour towards Y/N, then I will have a word with not only Aizawa-san, but also with Principal Nezu!’

Everyone, much like Bakugou going off, is shook but on a much greater scale.

Momo?? Capable of rage on this level??

Impossible

Mineta is cowering, and while he thinks it’s also kinda hot, he is also very aware that his entire existence is on the line

You’re watching Momo with shock, but also a mix of blushy embarrassment, pride, and ‘oh god that’s my wife’

Later that night while you two are chilling in Momo’s dorm, she looks over and tells you, very quietly

‘I think I’m in love with you.’

You look over with a soft, shy smile.

‘I think I love you, too.’

@shslpotato

#bnha x reader #bakugou's was so damn long...#I really went off like a dumb bitch huh....#also idk if this is tmi?? but i'm dd38 can I be allowed in the big tiddy gang #matchups

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thisdaynews · 4 years

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Australian Open 2020: Margaret Court to be 'recognised' - why is she such a divisive figure?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/australian-open-2020-margaret-court-to-be-recognised-why-is-she-such-a-divisive-figure/

Australian Open 2020: Margaret Court to be 'recognised' - why is she such a divisive figure?

In 2017, Court said tennis was “full of lesbians” and transgender children were the work of “the devil”

Margaret Court’s tennis achievements are unmatched. So is the level of controversy surrounding her.

The Australian holds the record for all-time Grand Slam singles titles and 2020 is the 50th anniversary of when she won all four major titles in a calendar year.

But her views on gay marriage and transgender athletes have split opinion on how these successes should be marked.

Tennis Australia says it plans to “recognise” – rather than “celebrate” – her 1970 sweep of the Slams at this month’s Australian Open, while reiterating its stance against the 77-year-old’s “demeaning” personal views.

Court was a quiet champion, dominant over her sporting rivals but shy and retiring in public life. Now she finds herself at the centre of a long-running polemic set to play out its latest chapter. She is a divisive figure, branded “homophobic”, “ignorant” and “dangerous” for her very publicly expressed beliefs.

So just how did a women with 64 Grand Slam singles and doubles trophies get to this point?

There was a time when Margaret Court was simply a “great champion”.

Her haul of 192 career singles titles between 1960 and 1977 is a women’s record and her 24 Grand Slam singles titles is an all-time record. She also shares the record with Belgium’s Kim Clijsters for major titles won as a mother (three).

Her calendar Grand Slam 50 years ago came in a season where she won 21 of 27 tournaments, and 104 of 110 matches.

“She was a great athlete and an all-court player,” says former French Open and Australian Open champion Nancy Richey, who reached the doubles final with Court at Roland Garros in 1969.

Court, pictured here at Wimbledon in 1973. Months later she would win her final Grand Slam singles title, with victory at the US Open

“She was as good on the baseline as she was at the net, which is a rarity. She had good groundstrokes, a good forehand, a good backhand – she was just tough.

“Most of the players were about my height – 5ft 6in or 5ft 7in – but she was about 5ft 10in or so. There were so few that had a lot of height, she was very imposing.

“She was the first one really to lift weights and she had really built up her right shoulder and arm. She had long arms, in fact her nickname was ‘Arms’. She went about it almost like they do today as far as lifting weights and that kind of thing.”

Court’s Grand Slam singles record is close to being equalled – Serena Williams is one title away from drawing level and will get her next chance to do so at the Australian Open, which starts on Monday.

The American, 38, has been stuck on 23 for three years, with her last major victory the 2017 Australian Open, which she won while eight weeks pregnant. Since coming back from having her daughter, she has reached four Grand Slam finals but failed at the final hurdle each time, most recently in September’s US Open defeat by Canadian Bianca Andreescu.

Many will point out that Court’s record was set in a different period – spanning the amateur and professional eras, with only 11 of her major titles coming in the Open era. Many will argue that some of the fields were not as competitive as today. Still, the Australian’s record is one Williams covets.

This milestone is “why she came back to playing tennis after having a baby and so many medical complications”, Williams’ coach Patrick Mouratoglou said before last year’s Wimbledon final, which she lost to Simona Halep.

Court’s achievements earned her multiple honours, including an induction to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, an MBE and her face on an Australian postage stamp.

She also had the Margaret Court Arena named after her at the Australian Open’s Melbourne Park in 2003 – but less than a decade later there were calls for it to be renamed.

What has Court said?

Towards the end of her tennis career Court, who was brought up as a Catholic, became involved in the Pentecostal church. She was ordained as a Pentecostal minister in 1991 and went on to found her own church – the Victory Life Centre in Perth – where she is the senior minister.

Her stance against gay marriage – which was legalised in Australia in 2017 – comes from her religious beliefs, she says, and is voiced regularly in her sermons.

In 2017 she wrote an open letter to Australian airline Qantas, saying she would be boycotting it because it had become an active promoter of same-sex marriage.

“I believe in marriage as a union between a man and a woman as stated in the Bible,” she wrote. “Your statement leaves me no option but to use other airlines where possible for my extensive travelling.”

That same year she also said tennis was “full of lesbians”, while she has also spoken against transgender athletes and branded the teaching of LGBT rights as “of the devil”.

Court finds herself in the centre of controversy these days. Yet as a player, she had a reputation for being quiet and disliking the limelight.

Former champions (from left to right) Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Steffi Graf, Margaret Court and Maria Bueno are honoured at Wimbledon in July 2006

Describing how she sealed her 1970 calendar Grand Slam with victory over American Rosie Casals in the US Open final, the International Tennis Hall of Fame writes: “There was no triumphant tossing of the racquet or leaping the net or falling on the court in disbelief. Court methodically and calmly walked to the net and shook Casals’ hand.

“She retreated to her seat courtside $7,500 richer – which was the biggest monetary prize in women’s tennis at the time – and had become a calendar year Grand Slam champion, fulfilling a dream long in the making. Court was calm, cool and composed.”

She was also a nervous public speaker. Richey recalls watching the Australian having to address the Wimbledon winners’ ball in 1966.

“She was petrified of doing any public speaking and she broke out in big red blotches on her chest and back,” Richey says. “She got through and did it but it was not what she was comfortable doing.”

Contrast that with the Reverend Margaret Court, who stands and speaks in front of her congregations – her services are also streamed online – with unwavering confidence in both herself and her views.

Only a month before this year’s Australian Open, she again hit the headlines with a sermon declaring: “You know, even that LGBT in the schools, it’s the devil, it’s not of God.”

And it reopened the debate about the country’s most decorated female tennis player.

‘Hiding behind her Bible’- what has the response been?

Court’s opinions have been widely condemned, with 18-time Grand Slam singles champion Martina Navratilova labelling her most recent outburst “pathetic” before going on to say it was “amazing how strong her homophobia truly is”.

She added: “It’s outrageous and so wrong. We don’t need to change or rewrite history when it comes to anyone’s accomplishments but we do not need to celebrate them. Margaret Court is hiding behind her Bible as many have done before her and will do after her. Let’s not keep elevating it.”

Fellow great Billie Jean King, who like Navratilova is gay, is among those who have called for the Margaret Court Arena to be renamed. She says if she were competing today she would not play at the stadium.

British player Laura Robson wore a rainbow headband on the court in 2012, while in 2018 players faced repeated questions about whether they would boycott it.

No-one shunned the court in protest – in fact it was Court herself who did not attend the Australian Open two years ago, saying she had decided to go crabbing with her family instead and implying it had nothing to do with the furore surrounding her. “I don’t run from things, I face them,” she told the Australian Herald Sun at the time.

Martina Navratilova, in a BBC documentary, called on sport to change its rules so trans athletes are not excluded

Australian former doubles specialist Rennae Stubbs describes Court and her views as “ignorant and dangerous”. LGBT rights group Stonewall says it is “sad” that she continues to voice “offensive and prejudiced” views.

“Sportspeople are considered role models to many and so anti-LGBT comments can have a hugely negative impact, particularly on younger lesbian, gay, bi and trans people,” Stonewall’s director of sport Robbie de Santos says.

“They make clear that LGBT people are unwelcome and so they feel they have to either hide who they are, or not take part in sport.

“Court’s remarks also show us how faith is often used to justify anti-LGBT views and attitudes. This is wrong and perpetuates a myth that faith and LGBT inclusion cannot coexist.

“Faith is a big part of many LGBT people’s lives, and acceptance as part of a faith community can be incredibly powerful.”

Court does, though, have her supporters.

Nancy Richey – who won the Australian Open in 1967 and the French Open in 1968 but lost two US Open finals to Court, in 1966 and 1969

Nancy Richey had just opened a Christmas card from Court when she spoke to BBC Sport. She said the Australian had included a note about “how they have twisted her words and what-not in the press”.

The American, who lost in two Grand Slam finals to Court, has sympathy for her former rival. She holds the same views on gay marriage. She even wrote to Tennis Australia a couple of years ago to urge them not to rename the stadium.

“It is so wrong, they put her name on there because of her great tennis career – and end of story,” she says now.

“I believe, like she does, [that] marriage is between a man and a woman, that the lesbian thing is against what the Bible says it should be.

“Where she and I both come from is that that’s a sin and we love the sinner. That’s no different than sex before marriage, sex outside marriage – sin is a sin in God’s eyes.

“I feel like her words have been twisted on occasion and what I’m telling you is the way we both think on the thing and I guess where I know I come from is you can’t say anything about what we believe without having all hell break loose.

“We can’t say how we feel about it, our belief about it – that to me is wrong, I should be allowed to voice my opinion and the way I see it and the way I believe and that’s where she is coming from.”

Television debates in Australia have been heated on the issue, while the Australian Christian Lobby has gathered more than 22,000 signatures since December on a public letter that says it stands with her and thanks her for her “boldness, despite overwhelming pressure, in speaking God’s truth and standing with Christ as a public figure and Aussie icon”.

And as Melbourne Park prepares to host Court for her anniversary, the debate about the player versus the person is likely to surface again.

Marking anniversary is ‘no-win’ situation

When Australian great Rod Laver celebrated 50 years since the second of his own Grand Slams in 2019, it was much more straightforward. He was honoured at all four of the majors, receiving replica trophies and ovations.

Before plans were announced for her own big year, Court had asked to be recognised in the same way as Laver, saying: “I think I should be invited [to the Australian Open]. I hope they [Tennis Australia] would pay my way to come like they paid for him, and honour me. If they are not going to do that, I don’t really want to come.”

When Tennis Australia eventually announced it would be recognising her achievements it took the unusual step of distancing itself from her views at the same time – effectively tagging a disclaimer on the end of the press release, saying: “We cannot condone views that fracture our incredible tennis community, nor indeed, the wider community.”

Court, pictured in January 2003, when the ground at Melbourne Park was re-named after her

It added there was “an important distinction” between “recognising champions and celebrating heroes”.

That led to Court’s four children releasing a joint statement, saying: “It is hard for her family to understand how her current lifestyle would possibly affect her tennis career in any way.

“It is disappointing to see Tennis Australia in the open letter amalgamating her sporting career which she won for the nation.”

It should, perhaps, be pointed out that Court herself does not necessarily keep her tennis and her other life separate – her profile page on her church website includes an invitation to buy her autobiography about “the greatest tennis player of all time”.

Tennis Australia has yet to detail exactly how it will be marking the 1970 Grand Slam 50-year anniversary. It says a mini-documentary will be released during the Australian Open, there will be a feature on her achievements in the tournament programme and some “in-stadium entertainment that takes the audience back to 1970 and Margaret’s historic win”.

Whatever the governing body does, it is hard to see it happening without criticism or debate.

“Tennis Australia was in a no-win situation in some respects,” Stubbs tells BBC Sport.

“I would have loved for them to not have honoured her as a respect for all the people that she has denigrated over the years, including some of our own players, but I understand they were in a difficult situation. I hope it’s the last one they have to make when it comes to Margaret.”

The other three Grand Slams have yet to decide what they will do, with only Wimbledon saying: “We will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of her win across our content plans as we did with Rod.”

They all have the luxury of waiting to see what the reaction is in Melbourne first.

What will the reaction be at the Australian Open?

The plans for marking her anniversary have been so vague that it is not even clear if Court will be presented to the public and so it is hard to know what kind of reception she might get.

“The public may yet be taken out of the equation if Tennis Australia feel nervous enough about any potential reaction,” says Mike Hytner, sports editor of Australian newspaper The Guardian.

Police officers attempt to stop protesters from storming the back entrance to Melbourne’s Athenaeum club, where Court was the keynote speaker on 22 June 2017

“I can’t imagine her getting booed, to be honest, certainly not on Rod Laver Arena, which is generally less rowdy than the outer courts can be.

“There were strong feelings about renaming the arena but there is more of a pervading sense now that her views are irrelevant. Most of the country is ambivalent to her.”

Asked last month whether the Australian Open was bracing itself for controversy, Tennis Australia chief Craig Tiley told reporters: “That’s going to be up to the Australian fans. There are no fans in the world that are like Australian fans. I’ll leave their response up to them.”

Tiley, though, did say Court would not be presenting the women’s singles trophy – although Laver also had no trophy-presenting duties in Melbourne in his anniversary year, so it cannot be viewed as a snub as such.

Stubbs says some people may well choose to do just that, though.

“I think the people that want to honour her on that day have every right to,” she says. “I also suspect there will be many people and players that will not be there to honour her and that is their right also.”

#divisive #figure

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monkeyandelf · 4 years

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The Real Reasons Why the US Government Keeps UFOs Secret

Tom Rogan, a foreign policy commentator, published an excellent article in the Washington Examiner, giving his opinion on why the US government is afraid to talk about UFOs.

Image is for illustrative purposes only. Credit: latimes.com Two years ago, on Sunday, the New York Times released the impressive story of a secret Pentagon program to study unidentified flying objects. This story led me to plunge into this strange world. I have learned some interesting things about UFOs (‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ or ‘UAPs’, as the Pentagon refers to them) ever since. But there is a problem. The US government makes it very difficult to figure out what and where things related to UFOs are happening. Is it because the government is behind some major conspiracy to cover up the evidence of alien visitation to Earth? It would be because the government is conspiring with exotic species to create human-alien hybrids? Maybe, but I suspect not. What I believe is really happening here is that the few individuals in the US government who know about this believe the phenomenon could be a threat. And that they don’t know how to handle it. So what fuels the fear of government? Well, first the nuclear issue. If you ask a Pentagon representative about a specific UFO incident, as I did recently last week, you will get a boring answer such as: Our airmen train while fighting. Any intrusions that may compromise the security of our operations, tactics, or procedures are of great concern. As the investigation of sightings of unidentified air phenomena is ongoing, we will not discuss individual sighting reports or observations. When it speaks of ‘airmen’, the Pentagon refers to the specific frequency with which UFOs tend to interact with US naval airmen operating from aircraft carriers. But what the Pentagon is leaving out is because UFOs tend to come across these naval airmen. And this is essential for why the Pentagon is concerned about UFOs. Although they don’t admit it, the government’s assessment is that UFOs are emerging near aircraft carriers because they are powered by nuclear power. Also note that UFOs like to appear near nuclear submarines and Air Force bases. Now recognize that this paradigm has been going on since the Manhattan Project operations in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and also at nuclear facilities in the Soviet Union and Russia. Oh, and how Robert Hastingsd ocumented, these UFOs sometimes temporarily shut down US nuclear weapons systems. Interesting, right? Now, remember what I just said: The modern UFO phenomenon really happens at exactly the same time as the Manhattan Project. Has the perfection of humanity’s nuclear energy aroused the curiosity of anyone or anything in us? Do not misunderstand me. This is not to say that these UFOs are hostile (although it should be noted that the divergent UFO forms, behaviors and ability patterns suggest more than one source of origin). On the contrary, UFOs seem to be quite friendly, except when badly advised Russian crews try to attack them. But pretend you are a military or intelligence officer. You see the nuclear connection point and get hit by something strange happening. Now add to the core issue that some UFOs are intelligently operated machines capable of instantly achieving hypersonic speeds. Oh, and they are also capable of anti-gravity and invisibility, and were tracked in and out of Earth’s orbit, atmosphere and underwater. Suddenly you have something that is making the most advanced capabilities of the US military and all other military personnel on Earth seem like an absurd joke in comparison. You get an unpleasant conclusion: If whatever is controlling these things is meant to harm us, we have no chance. Once again, put yourself in the shoes of the military officer. Something has repeatedly demonstrated that they can easily find carrier strike groups, designed and operated to be hidden in the distant oceans, and find nuclear ballistic missile submarines running almost silently deep in the water. Something can penetrate the most protected areas of the most important areas of the US military and render our most critical deterrent platforms useless. For Pentagon planners, this is Armageddon level stuff. But the truth is clear: if ‘they’ wanted to, they could defeat the United States without breaking a sweat. The extent is that even if the US government believes, as it believes, that these UFOs are not Chinese or Russian, disclosing the issue itself risks another danger. That is, if the US shares what it knows about UFOs, China or Russia (the Russian government has long been interested in UFOs) can learn enough to replicate the technologies behind UFOs themselves. And since these technologies are almost certainly built around space-time manipulation, if Beijing or Moscow finds out before the US, we have a pretty big problem. This is not to say that the US government is idle. Whatever you think about claims of people like Bob Lazar, which claims to have worked on crashed UFOs in Area 51, and I am not convinced of its history, civilian and military government agencies maintain active programs to determine the source, capabilities and intent of the UFOs. In fact, at least some UFO material accident is in the hands of the US government. Just don’t count on the military to share more of what you already know soon. Your understanding of professional phenomena and instincts weighs heavily toward more secrecy. And the politicians? President Trump admitted to being informed about UFOs, and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama probably were. Interestingly, when asked about it, the two former presidents end up joking. But since they have few good answers, they probably believe there is no point in scaring people and creating social norms without a solution. Where does this leave us? Well, with the need to keep pushing that issue. But also with confidence. It will take time, but we will get to the truth eventually. After all, UFOs keep popping up. And considering their ability to hide, there is only one obvious answer to why they let themselves be seen. At least sometimes, they want to be seen. Source Source link Read the full article

#militaryintelligence #UFOs

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a-man-adrift · 7 years

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So, @lost-translator remains my fanfic-reading MVP, following The Anti-Agathics War chapter by chapter as I write it and putting insightful comments on each one and generally being deserving of hugs. The most recent has more questions and comments than I can respond to on AO3 without blowing through the character limit for comments, so as I promised, I’m responding here!

This chapter kinda made everything clearer in my mind I think, probably because Liara has a more global view of the situation.

I’m really glad of this, ’cause it means I’m succeeding at one of the specific goals I set myself, at least to a certain extent. One of my Opinions about the trilogy is that sometimes the writing makes the galaxy seems kind of small, so I’ve definitely set out to tell a Big Story, one that’s at least plausibly on a galactic scale (to the extent that us puny meatbags can imagine such a thing). Of course, the danger with that is that I’ll have so much going on that the reader ends up getting lost, so I’m glad this chapter is helping ward that fate off.

I love your Liara

Me too! ’S a shock, I know 😜

and the way you put hints of more private feelings through that little break (I wish I could go back to work that swiftly)

One of my headcanons about asari (many of which will be appearing in this post!) is that as well as being able to control their nervous systems practically fibre by fibre, so they can use biotics without needing implants, they are also capable of formidable mental discipline, especially if they’re super-awesomely-smart like a certain archæologist we both want to snuggle. So if Liara wants to stop thinking about one thing and go back to another, she can generally just… do it. Of course, there’s a limit to how much anyone can bottle up, so sometimes there are tears 😟.

and Samara's motherly instincts :D

Ah, here comes another headcanon right now: I picture Samara practically adopting Phil and Liara (with all manner of emotional Sturm und Drang, what with Samara having killed and lost two of her daughters, and Liara and Phil having killed and lost their mothers, respectively), particularly after the girls are born and she becomes their godmother, but also sooner than that. One Scene from the Life of Phil Shepard I have planned starts with EDI telling Phil that Liara has gone into the Normandy’s starboard observation lounge, and Phil going… well, even paler than usual as it occurs to him that Liara’s brokered some shadows in ways a justicar might not necessarily approve of. He races down there… and finds Liara already curled up fœtally with her head in Samara’s lap, tearfully telling the story of Benezia’s death.

I also plan to write Phil and Liara taking Terri and Nezzy to Lesuss to visit Auntie Falere! 😁

I still haven't figured out how Shepard's plan with Halina fits into that, not sure I should have but if I get the time I should really go back and give everything another read!

Liara is mostly letting Shep and Ashley look after that end of things, but I did work a couple of lines into this chapter that foreshadow things Halina will get up to in the next couple of chapters 😉

And so knowledge can be exchanged through melding without having to learn it? I think I remember reading Phil learned Liara's languages from it :o That'd be interesting! Do you have an idea if they can control what they want to teach the other person?

Yup, the languages thing is in A Hill of Beans, and this is the face of A Man Adrift in a sea of warm fuzzies that you remembered: 😄.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I have some pretty detailed headcanons about the whole asari melding thing (in fact one of the reasons I’m so into this fandom is that I wish that it was how human sex worked…)

So, I see it as a spectrum, running from the lightest meld, where either party has to think “loudly” and clearly if you want your thought to get across, or focus on what you’re experiencing through one particular sense to share it, down to the full union (which is the kind that can result in pregnancy), where you share… everything, to the point that while it’s going on you forget which of you is which, and afterwards you have basically all of one another’s memories, as I describe for Phil and Liara in Love at the Speed of Thought and the beginning of Family.

(Incidentally, I headcanon that this is why nobody ever had to try and genophage the asari, despite the fact that any one of them will have potentially centuries of fertility in which to overpopulate the galaxy: finding someone you’re willing to share yourself with to that extent is hard, to the point that many asari simply never would if it weren’t for the fact that they tend tohave a fairly hellacious biological clock thing going on during the peak of their matron days.)

With a less… intense joining, where the parties retain their sense of identity and intentions, yes, they can steer the meld in the direction of something specific that they want to share (particularly the asari party, what with that mental discipline I mentioned, plus the fact that they obviously get more practice at the whole thing). Liara does this in Chapter 2 of TAAW when she shares her memories of Aethyta’s death with Phil.

Because of this, light melds needn’t be sexual, although of course sharing physical sensations with your partner does heighten the experience, as I’ve posted about before, so there’s a fairly nudge-nudge wink-wink connotation to it no matter what purpose it’s put to. I headcanon that one debate that’s been on-going for millennia in asari society is about the extent to which it’s OK for teachers to use the meld pedagogically: most communities agree that it’s not for those who teach children (some think it’s inappropriate in the same way that a human teacher hugging and kissing their pupils a lot would be; others think it can become a crutch, keeping the child from developing good learning habits and/or hiding the fact that the teacher kind of sucks at getting the material across without it!)

‘Teaching’ melds are considered a little more acceptable for adult learners, but there are still safeguards in place: at a minimum the express and affirmative consent of the student needs to be clearly established, and at some universities teachers aren’t allowed to make the offer: the student has to request it. Older universities, like Serrice, have a tradition that by the time Liara and Taurien are students there is considered a bit of an embarrassment, of using the meld for teaching unless the student specifically requests otherwise, and in days gone by of bringing all kinds of social pressure to bear to get them to consent to it.

Finally, asari attitudes to joining are roughly as variable as human attitudes to physical contact. At one end of the spectrum you have the equivalent of humans who hug people they’ve just met: asari who will offer to start a light meld just to help a conversation go smoothly, and who, if they like the thoughts that you share, will drag you off and get down to some serious sharing of… sensations at the drop of a hat. At the other end, you have, well, Liara, who I headcanon is an introvert and the asari equivalent of a demisexual: the only kind of meld she’s interested in is one at least deep enough to share any old thought that happens to cross either mind, shared with someone whose mind she likes hanging out in enough to take it all the way.

Serrice was… challenging for her in some ways, what with Taurien good-naturedly suggesting that they might want to fool around a bit by night, and tutors sighing theatrically by day at the prospect of having to get their ideas across by just… talking. But it’s the pre-eminent university basically anywhere in the Republics, and of course as such it has an enviable reputation throughout Council Space, so on the whole Liara thinks it’s worth it to have her doctorate from there. The fact that she spent the next seventy-odd years seeking out the most remote and solitary archæological digs she could find is purely coincidental…

Hoooo-kay, that ran long. Congratulations to anyone who read it in its entirety!

#Liara is best waifu #headcanon #lost-translator #fanfic #asari

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libertariantaoist · 7 years

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We’re all supposed to be outraged by alleged Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, despite the fact that no actual evidence of such interference has been made public. First it was “17 intelligence agencies” supposedly confirmed that Moscow was behind the DNC/Podesta email releases, and then it was down to just three – with the National Security Agency modifying its judgment to “moderate confidence.” But the media continued to make this claim, as did the Democrats (or do I repeat myself?), and the conspiracy theorizing plowed ahead. Yet the real meddling by foreigners in American politics has been ignored because it doesn’t identify the right targets.

To begin with, there’s the anti-Trump “dossier” that contained salacious details about Donald Trump, a document obtained by Sen. John McCain, delivered to the FBI, and eventually winding up as the subject of a White House “briefing.” This was compiled by one Christopher Steele, a “former” MI6 agent, and commissioned by the opposition research firm known as “Fusion GPS,” with the bill being paid by mysterious “donors.” Steele showed the dossier to a “British security official” before sending it off to McCain, and you can bet that the British intelligence organization knew everything about this dossier, and thoroughly approved, or else it wouldn’t have been put together and shopped around Washington in the first place.

This dossier was the seed from which the “Russia-gate” investigation sprouted – oh, but that kind of foreign meddling is fine with our media and our political class, because it didn’t originate with an “adversary,” i.e. Russia. And speaking of “collusion,” the interplay between the Clinton campaign and the Ukrainian government to discredit Trump advisor Paul Manafort is also fine and dandy, because – again – the Ukrainians are the Good Guys, as opposed to those dastardly Russkies.

Yet this is just the beginning of the story of how foreign governments have acted to intervene in our politics and undermine the Trump administration.

I was interested to read a piece by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept about the latest incarnation of the developing liberal-neoconservative merger, detailing the founding of a new group that calls itself the “Alliance to Secure Democracy.” This hybrid creature is a two-headed monster, with Clinton foreign policy honcho Laura Rosenberger, who served as a key figure in the Obama administration, and Jamie Fly, the neocons’ neocon, formerly with the now defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (the reincarnation of the infamous Project for a New American Century), at the helm.

My readers will not be surprised by the union of neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, which has been documented in this space continuously not only during the recent presidential campaign but also predicted as far back as 1999 (!). So no breaking news there.

While left-leaning commentators like Greenwald are understandably upset that the Democratic party, and its ostensibly “liberal” wing, are canoodling with the neocons, and people like Paul Begala are ranting about how we should “bomb the KGB,” us libertarians – and also students of history – realize that this coming together merely replicates the history of the last cold war. Just Google “cold war liberalism,” Glenn.

While reading Glenn’s piece, I noted a link to the Alliance to Secure Democracy’s web site, and later went back to click on it – and right there on the front page, in the upper left corner, are the initials “GMF.” These also appear under the Alliance’s logo. What the heck is this?, I wondered. I clicked – and wound up on the site of the German Marshall Fund of the US: indeed, the Marshall Fund site hosts the Alliance site. The headline reads: “’Alliance for Securing Democracy’ Launches at GMF.”

Don’t be misled by the “of the US” appellation: the German Marshall Fund is an instrument of the German government, which has subsidized it to the tune of several million dollars since its founding. It has offices in eight countries, including the US. And it’s not just the Germans who are involved. Aside from the German Foreign Office, the donors include:

Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($500,000-999,000)

Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($250,000-499,999)

Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($250, 499,999)

Compagnia di San Paolo, a quasi-governmental association of Italian banking interests ($1,000,000-1,999,999)

The government of Montenegro ($100,000-249,999)

Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($100,000-249,999)

The Brussels Capital Region (the municipality of Brussels) ($100,000-249,999)

Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($100,000-249,999)

Romania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($100,000-249,999)

United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office ($100,000-249,999)

Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($50,000-99,999)

Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office ($25,000-49,999)

France’s Ministry of Defense ($10,000-24,9999)

And last, but hardly least, the US government contributes between $1 million and $2 million via the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Oh, and there’s one donor listed as “Anonymous,” whose contribution is “$2 million and beyond.” In addition, among the listed donors there are a number of foreign foundations and trade associations with links, including financial links, to their respective governments.

The agenda of the Alliance is clear to anyone with eyes to see: when you go to their web site, the first thing you see under “Our Mission” is:

“Finding out what happened in the United States in 2016 and the impact it had is important. But that is not enough.”

Of course it isn’t: the goal is to get Trump out of the White House, and, in the process, conduct a witch-hunt on American soil that will root out “Russian influence,” i.e. anyone who opposes the new cold war,

A puff piece by Josh Rogin in the Washington Post fails to mention the foreign funding issue, but does give us a clear indication of what the group’s real goals are: “mapping” alleged Russian infiltration of the US. Trump, of course, is at the center of that “map.” Rogin cites former top CIA official Mike Morell – who endorsed Mrs. Clinton and called Trump Putin’s “useful fool” – as saying:

“In a perfect world, we would have a national commission that would be looking into exactly what happened, exactly what did the Russians do and what can we do as a nation to defend ourselves going forward and deter Putin from ever doing this again. We all know this is not going to happen, so things like the GMF effort are hugely important to fill the gap.”

The Trump administration is hardly going to be setting up a “national commission” to overthrow itself, so foreign governments will “fill the gap.” In short, “The Resistance,” as the anti-Trump fanatics like to call themselves, is getting help from abroad, as well as from our own Deep State.

What’s so astonishing is how brazen the whole thing is: the German Marshall Fund isn’t hiding its relationship with the “Alliance,” which will be headquartered in the Fund’s Washington digs. It says right there on the Alliance web site who is footing the bill. The scale of this kind of foreign meddling in American politics makes the Russians – who run two little-trafficked web sites, RT and Sputnik – look like a joke, which in large part they are.

The very name of the Alliance to Secure Democracy speaks volumes– on whose behalf is our democracy being “secured”? We aren’t told – but a look at the long list of foreign funders tells the whole story. Our parasitic “allies,” who operate generous welfare states while we pay for their defense and risk war on their behalf, have every interest in “securing” a foreign policy that puts them first and America last. Their agenda isn’t hard to discern: one can go on the Alliance web site and listen to Ms. Rosenberger accuse the President of the United States of “dereliction of duty,” while comparing him unfavorably to Angela Merkel.

Although much of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda – NATO is “obsolete,” foreign wars are a drain we can’t afford, etc. – has fallen by the wayside, the mere expression of such sentiments is enough to enrage the internationalists. That such a man is occupying the White House is an affront to them: they cannot let it stand. Their campaign to cleanse the American political landscape of such sentiments is the most comprehensive – and well-funded – effort by foreign entities on American soil to date.

The “Alliance” is a regime change operation funded by foreign governments and corporate interests: its American servitors, such as Ms. Rosenberger and Mr. Fly, are seemingly exempt from having to register as foreign agents. Their immunity to the laws that govern the rest of us is a mystery, especially when one remembers that the current President of the United States pledged to neutralize the efforts of foreign lobbyists and start putting America first.

These fifth columnists have to be held to account: they’re foreign agents, pure and simple, and should be treated as such. Why are they exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act?

Yet registering them, and labeling them for what they are, isn’t enough. It’s long past time to get them out of our politics, and out of our country. This kind of brazen foreign meddling should be illegal. Foreign contributions to political campaigns are currently against the law: extending this principle to the post-election scene is the logical next step, and one that needs to be taken immediately.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/politics/watch-did-rep-omars-remarks-on-israel-cross-the-line-to-anti-semitism/

WATCH: Did Rep. Omar's remarks on Israel cross the line to anti-Semitism?

Transcript for Did Rep. Omar’s remarks on Israel cross the line to anti-Semitism?

Last fall, ilhan OMAR became one of the first two Muslim women ever elected to congress. One of the new faces of the democratic house majority, but with that spotlight has come intense scrutiny as comments by OMAR about Israel in recent weeks have been perceived as anti-semitic. Sparking a debate dividing the democratic party over what constitutes anti-semitism and what is legitimate political speech. Congresswoman, speaker Pelosi says it’s up to you if you want to explain your comments at all. It started with a February tweet in response to a story about the house Republican leader threatening action over OMAR’s criticism of Israel. It’s all about the benjamins, baby, she declared. She soon apologized for using age-old stereotypes of Jews using money to buy influence. But then more controversy after OMAR questioned the loyalties of American Jews who support pro-Israel lobbying groups. Talking about political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance of foreign country. Her fellow Democrats reacting harshly, including Lorraine Luria who is jewish and a veteran. Against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Is that not enough to prove my loyalty to my nation? Democratic Minnesota state senator Ron Latz told NPR he talked to OMAR about how she should discuss Israel even before she was elected. Unfortunately, she keeps repeating the mistakes and so I’m troubled by what appears to be a pattern reflecting an attitude at least toward Israel, if not, toward Jews. But OMAR’s defenders say she is facing unfair scrutiny. I just want to make sure that we are protecting also the right for the first Muslim woman to be in congress and to question legitimately foreign policy towards Israel. OMAR herself has been the target of intolerance. Just last week, this poster in the West Virginia capital at a GOP day connected OMAR to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The motion to reconsider is laid on the table. The debate over OMAR’s words sparking a house resolution this week, but broadened to condemn not just anti-semitism, but also islamaphobia and white supremacy. That resolution passed the house unanimously among Democrats with just 23 no votes from Republicans who said OMAR should have been directly named in the resolution. Let’s bring in the round table to discuss all of this now. Alex Castellanos, an ABC news contributor and Republican strategist, democratic strategist, Stephanie brown-james. Julie pace, Washington bureau chief for “The associated press,” and cokie Roberts. Good morning to you all, and Stephanie, I want to start with you. You heard congresswoman OMAR’s comments. You were part of a group that helped elect her. What would you say to her about those comments? I would say this is your megaphone moment I’m not sure he — she was ready to embrace. That through a tweet this has now caused, quite frankly, a firestorm, but what’s important to understand is that the resolution that came out was ultimately good. We should be condemning acts of hatred and bigotry, but at the same time, my advice to her at this moment would be, focus on your agenda, what you told your constituents you wanted to do for them, and now quite frankly, that’s going to be a little bit up in the air as so much attention is now on her comments. Alex, you’re shaking your head. You shook your head when you said, ultimately this came out good. I don’t think it came out well. I don’t think it came out well for the Democrats overall. It’s — she — congresswoman OMAR got mud on her white dress that she wore to the state of the union. Anti-semitic mud, and instead of apologizing and washing it off went — she hid in a crowd and not a cave. She said, let’s put other people on the stage with me and get mud on them, and Republicans were reluctant to help the Democrats I think hide their anti-semitism in a crowd like that and rightly so. Those 23 Republicans who voted against it? Yes, and how toothless was this? The congresswoman herself not only voted it, but celebrated it and said, oh, this is great because it’s the first time congress has voted against islamaphobia. This tells us something else too. How much power Nancy Pelosi does not have over the Democrats in congress now. The young Turks are running the show. She has to — she has to balance it. She has young people who come in with a tremendous amount of energy and followings. This is what’s different. This is what we have never seen before. We have never seen freshman members of congress have, in the case of AOC, millions of followers, and in the case of congresswoman OMAR, thousands, all independent. It has nothing to do with party. It has nothing to do with following even their own constituents. It is a completely independent power. So how do you handle that, and should they be trying to handle that? Sure they need to handle that because they need to have a party they can take to the electorate in 2020, and say here’s who we are in a voice that the electorate can recognize and vote for. One of the challenges for Pelosi is yes, she has a freshman member who has a following and they are quite active on social media and they have platforms, but they are not the ones who got Democrats the house majority back. That’s right. Those are freshmen who came from swing districts — Not even swing districts. Very Republican districts. Very Republican districts in some cases who were able to push Republican lawmakers out. Some of these freshmen come from safe democratic seats. Pelosi’s real challenge is she knows the energy of the party is there, and she has to contend with these lawmakers, but she actually needs to save and help re-elect a whole different crowd of lawmakers. That’s a real challenge for her over the next two years. They don’t understand that. They think — they think that because they won in some cases, defeating other Democrats, big in democratic districts, that that’s where the party is, and it is where the energy is, but it’s not where the voters are. I want to go back to these remarks that OMAR made again, and what that means. She said — she says she’s being unfairly labeled anti-semitic for those comments, but you heard congresswoman Luria there, Ted Deutsch who also called the comments wrong and hurtful. Do you think her comments are sparking a healthy conversation about how you can talk about Israel or just shutting it down? I think it is creating a healthy conversation. You can be critical of Israel like you can of any country that does not equate to being anti-semitic. She did come back to apologize to say she recognized why people felt this way, but I think it’s a debate that we quite frankly have kind of put behind closed doors. We need to bring this — this conversation to the forefront, because it is an issue for a number of people. The point of resolution was not to have it focus on anti-semitism, which was the original offense. It was to dilute it and hide it and let’s go to a safe place, and talk about hate speech in all — which is fine, but that’s not the offense. So no. You can’t have that debate in the democratic party right now. We brought up that poster that has OMAR in front of the towers. I mean, Alex, you remember this. This is of allegiance to a foreign power. It was used against catholics for many generations, you know, that they were allegiant to the Vatican. So there is this notion that if you are part of a religion that has some other country involved that you are not fully American, and that is really what that was all harking back to. And we mentioned that NPR interview with the senator who said he had spent hours with her before the election on how to talk about this issue, and stereotypes. Did she not listen or not understand or is she pushing? We have had pushing from our colleagues in Minnesota before she was running and took office there was some concern among jewish leaders in particular, some of her constituents she wasn’t talking about these issues in the right way. To a point that Stephanie was making, there could be a legitimate debate and has been a legitimate debate over a U.S. Policy toward Israel, but if that’s what she’s trying to advocate for, she’s actually hurting that cause versus the language. For Democrats, they won in 2018 and picked up a lot of seats. Running moderate-looking candidates who have had ar-15s and American flags in their commercials. Now they have been elected and we see where the passion and the energy is in the democratic party, and if the face of the democratic party is — is anti-semitic protosocialist, that’s going to be a good election for Republicans. One of the Republicans who defended the president’s comments after charlottesville voted against this. Is that a double standard? He was wrong to defend that, but right now if the two wrongs make a right argument is not going to work for the Democrats here, they did it too? The point is an anti-semitic barrage of comments. She apologized and then doubled down on this, and the democratic party can’t clean its own house. When Steve king did something like this, what happened? He got kicked off his committee. 13 years later though. That is fair. Republicans have lived with Steve king and he got a lot of endorsements. The number of things he has said over the decades. As the face of the democratic party for 13 years, good luck. She’s not the face of the democratic party. I want to talk about how president trump responded to this. Let’s listen. The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They have become an anti-jewish party, and I thought that vote was a disgrace. Kind of a highly dubious statement there, but we are seeing this pattern about immigration, socialism, putting these extreme labels on everything the Democrats do. Clearly a strategy for 2020. This is a re-election strategy for the president. He knows he has a base that’s going to be with him, but he is also well aware there is a segment of the Republican party that could be looking for another option if Democrats nominate a more moderate candidate. What he’s trying to do is paint the entire democratic party as It’s a smart technique. His base may love it, but how about the moderate Republicans he will lead? It will play pretty well because 2018 was a referendum on him. Does Donald Trump need a brake pedal? Yes, let’s send some Democrats up there. This man tweets at night. He’s a reckless and wild and disruptive president. 2020 is not going to be a referendum on trump. It’s going to be a choice. The choice is Donald Trump and the return of a democratic Washington establishment that can’t condemn anti-semitism when it emerges in its own party and that is running, you know, the energy is running with a socialist agenda. The green new deal. I mean, if the Democrats decide to have their convention in Venezuela, it’s not going to go well for them. You’re all in on this. We’ll have much more on that

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

#election news #indian politics #political news #political news articles #politics news #US politics

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andrewdburton · 4 years

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GRS Insider #92: Racism is not a political issue. Racism is a MORAL issue.

Yesterday, as I do most Fridays, I sent the GRS Insider to folks who subscribe to the Get Rich Slowly email list.

The email was unusual. It was more like a blog post than a simple summary of recent articles. I've had several people request a version they can share with other people, so — this one time only — I've created a stand-alone web version.

Parts of this have been edited slightly to account for the transition from email to web.

If you've been reading me for any length of time — or if you know me in person — you know that I hate conflict. I hate hate hate it. Some people seem to thrive on it. Not me. I shirk from it.

This is one reason I've steadfastly kept my financial writing politically neutral. I don't want conflict.

It helps that I'm neither liberal nor conservative. I'm some strange mix of the two. But mostly it's because I think financial advice is important for everyone regardless of political persuasion. It's rare that I take a stand on something political.

Because of who I am and what I believe, Get Rich Slowly will never become a political platform. (It'll touch on politics occasionally, but politics will never be a driving force at the site.)

That said, I'm mad as hell about not only the recent bout of racism in the U.S., but also the long history of racism that underpins our society. Something's gotta give. The current protests are 100% justified and they're not acts of terrorism. They're a call for action. What sort of action? I have no idea. I don't have solutions. But the problem is plain as day and it must be addressed. We, as a nation, must — at long last — deal with our history instead of sweeping it under the rug.

On May 15th, I saw video of the Ahmaud Arbery killing. I was mortified. I was livid. How could this happen in our country in 2020? Now, as more details of his execution are coming to light, the crime is even more heinous than I could have imagined. How can you read this and not be sickened?

On May 25th, I saw video of Amy Cooper, a white woman, calling the police about Christian Cooper, a black man who had asked her to put her dog on a leash. Amy blatantly lied, claiming that Christian was threatening her. All he wanted to do was watch birds in peace, and this woman was willing to ruin his life because he made a polite request. W. T. F.?

And the very next morning, I saw video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for 8 minutes, 46 seconds. We all know that story by now, and we all know what's come of it.

Look, I'm a 51-year-old white guy who lives in one of the whitest neighborhoods of one of the whitest states in the union. I live in a bubble. No joke: I can go weeks (months?) without ever seeing a black person. I am the definition of white privilege, and I know it.

But it's time for me to stop hiding behind that privilege — and to stop bristling at the term. It's time that I stopped using my conflict-avoidant tendencies as an excuse to never talk about controversial subjects. And, really, why is racism even controversial? Why is it considered a political issue? Racial equality and racial justice aren't political problems — they're moral problems. But they're moral problems that we must address, in part, at a political level.

This week, I wanted to use Get Rich Slowly to address this subject, but I couldn't see a way for me to do it effectively. First, as I said, I'm an old white guy. Second, I don't have the education yet to discuss these topics effectively. (More on how I'm trying to educate myself in a moment.)

So, I asked two of my friends if they'd help.

The ebullient Michelle Jackson shared a candid conversation about race in America. — “What you do when I'm not in the room when people are making jokes and comments says a lot about YOU…Will you say nothing and be complicit because it's hard to stand up for people who aren't in the room? Basically, will you take the easy way out or do the heavy lifting which is hard? Which means you may lose friends and family.”

And the eloquent Lynnette Khalfani-Cox offered a lesson in economic violence. — “Imagine being born in 1866 as a ‘free' Black person. For generations, your ancestors worked for others and received nothing for their labor…And you, born in 1866 as a ‘free' Black person, start with nothing while a White child born at the same time enjoys the fruits of your ancestors' labor. Would that depress you? Anger you? Motivate you?” [This is very similar to what I want to write once I'm better educated.]

As you know, I generally spend a lot of my free time reading about money. (I'm a nerd like that.) This week, though, I read very little about money. I read about race. Here are some of the most interesting pieces I found.

How you can help close racial wealth gaps. [Smart Money Mamas] — “The racial wealth gap we see in our country today is part of the foundation of our nation. It started when we built an economic powerhouse of a country on the back of slave labor. And then, when we finally abolished slavery (mostly for economic reasons), we transferred essentially zero wealth to those who created that economic prosperity.” [Related: How big is the racial wealth gap?]

A sociologist examines the “white fragility” that prevents white Americans from confronting racism. [The New Yorker] — “DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself…Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: ‘To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.'”

Unpacking the power of privileged neighborhoods. [CityLab] — “Research has shown that where children grow up affects how they fare academically, economically, and physically; it also predicts how they interact with the criminal justice system. This study confirms that neighborhoods do matter, but gives a new, surprising answer to questions like ‘for whom?’ and ‘how much?'” [Related: “My white privilege.”]

This week, I've also watched far more video than usual.

I watched Dave Ramsey talk about racism.

youtube

I watched how black parents teach their children to deal with the police.

youtube

And I watched an hour-long Google Talk about the “black tax”, about the high cost of being black in America.

youtube

But for me — for who I am — the most important video I watched was this ten-minute presentation from my colleague Julien Saunders. It's all about embracing conflict.

youtube

From the talk: “When you run from conflict, you give up an opportunity to change your life before you even start. When you embrace conflict…you come out the other side a better version of yourself.”

God, I hate conflict.

And I'm especially going to hate the conflict that comes from publishing this article. But you know what? The time is long past for me to stop prioritizing my personal comfort over the safety (and equality) of others. If one week of articles about the evils of racism is enough to make you leave Get Rich Slowly, so be it.

But I hope that most GRS readers are just as angry as I am.

Finally, in an effort to educate myself and address my own issues — because let's be clear, I have plenty of implicit racial bias — I've begun reading more about this subject. Here are a few of the books I've picked up (all of which were recommended by readers and colleagues). Note that these are not affiliate links.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

How to Be an Anti-Racist

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (I'm starting with this)

The Hate U Give

Here's the bottom line: As much as I hate conflict, I hate hate even more. One of the things that drew me to Kim as a partner is that she embodies LOVE. She loves everyone. I can't say that I love everyone. But I try. And I wish that others would try too.

One of my friends recently said something profound in a group conversation, something I agree with 100%:

It's an amazing thing to work from the premise that everyone is basically good, that everyone is unique and has something important to say. Life is more interesting when you give other people the benefit of the doubt, when you assume the best in them instead of the worst. Working from this premise makes the world a glowing, wonderful place, a place packed with superstars. I wish more people could see that.

True story: When I was in college in the 1980s, Maya Angelou came to speak on our campus. I was charged with giving her a tour of the grounds for an hour or two before her presentation. I had no idea who she was. And I didn't go hear her speak. I had a pleasant time showing her the library, the botanical garden, and the theater, but I never asked her about herself and her life. (Same thing with Studs Terkel, who has become one of my personal heroes.) Ah, missed opportunities…

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/racism/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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phgq · 4 years

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Reds raise 'red-tagging, 'state terrorism' cards when beaten

#PHnews: Reds raise 'red-tagging, 'state terrorism' cards when beaten

MANILA -- Why do allies and supporters of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army (CPP-NPA) always play up the "red-tagging and state terrorism" cards every time the government gains a significant victory against the terror organization?

This was the reaction of Major General Antonio Parlade, Jr., of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF ELCAC) in reaction to a recent statement of CPP founding chairperson Jose Maria "Joma" Sison claiming that “under the tyrannical rule of Duterte, state terrorism is running high with red-tagging, abductions, arrests with planted firearms and murders of social activists, critics, and political opponents.”

Sison made the comment after military and police operations in Bacolod City that resulted in the arrest of at least 60 suspected militants, including 15 minors.

Same tune

"I heard this familiar statement yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon during the Defense Committee hearing in Congress. It is almost what Rep. Arlene Brosas of Gabriela party-list and Rep. France De Castro of ACT PL were saying about their perceived 'state sponsored crackdown on critics of the government'. It was the same line (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan) Renato Reyes, (Bayan Muna Party-list) Teddy Casiño, (Kabataan Party-list) Rep. Sara Elago, and (Bayan Muna Party-list) Rep. Carlos Zarate said of the series of successful arrests the government, through the NTF ELCAC, has done in a week," Parlade said in a statement to the Philippine News Agency Wednesday.

The most disconcerting thing, he said, is that the party-list representatives aired all their gripes during the hearing of the Defense and Security Committee to determine what legislative agenda they may have to adapt or prioritize to enhance the protection of the people and the state.

"Instead, the Kamatayan (Makabayan) bloc members present took turns questioning (Department of National Defense) Secretary (Delfin) Lorenzana if the DND's modernization plan was to enable it 'to kill more people' or to use its funds to harass, red-tag, and arrest more activists," said Parlade, who is also Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Deputy Chief-of-Staff for Civil-Military Operations.

While readily dismissing such baseless and groundless allegations, he he role of the DND and the AFP is to protect all Filipino citizens in times of conflicts or calamities.

"Of course not. It is to perform our constitutional mandate to protect its citizens, in times of war or calamities, like the procurement of more helicopters which you see are now being used in the rescue operations in Makilala, North Cotabato. Don't these "critics" of government see how delicate these air evacuations are like this one perching dangerously in a slope to save people?" he added.

He said while the DND and AFP has surveillance capabilities, these are being used against terrorist groups especially those known to exploit vulnerable minors and put into harm's way

Parlade added that only in self-defense or when their own lives are endangered will government troops use force to neutralize these terrorists.

"We will kill these terrorists if necessary or if they fight back. But some remain alive for not resisting a lawful arrest. This was the case with the series of successful raids in Bacolod City, Escalante, Manila, and Quezon City. Apparently, these Kamatayan (Makabayan) bloc members are not happy that nobody from their members fought back. It could have been perfect cases of EJK (extra-judicial killing), most fitting for their narrative," he added.

He said the "motherly-looking" Gabriela or "teacher-actor" members of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) is only a facade willingly to gain them sympathy from the public.

Howl like wolves

"But the communist terrorists in them are actually wolves, as they hide as members of the underground MAKIBAKA (Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan) for Gabriela and KAGUMA (Katipunan ng mga Gurong Makabayan) for ACT," he added.

The leanings of these individuals or groups, he said, are quickly exposed whenever Sison decides to attack the government whenever the latter gets the upperhand on the campaign against local communist insurgency.

"Look how they talk in unison with Joma Sison, and this is exactly what we said last week. They all walk like a wolf, howl like a wolf, so they must all be wolves. They have been red-tagged by 'Joma' again, after the latter came to their rescue. Yet they continue to deny they are Joma's stooges in the communist party. They continue to belie reports that those arrested are terrorists," Parlade said.

He said he can’t help but wonder why Brosas did not protest the many minors arrested in the last week's operations in Bacolod City.

This is a bit disconcerting as Gabriela party-list, which Brosas is representing, is supposed to advocate rights and issue affecting all women in the country.

"As representative of many mothers, have we ever heard Rep. Brosas complain why there were even kids in the group? Six of them were aged 12-14 and five were aged 15. Many by the way did not give their true names because they were given aliases. What for? So, tell me Rep. Brosas? As a mother, why did not you raise this alarming issue about CPP-NPA's child exploitation?, he said.

The arrest of these CPP NPA personalities with 15 children, he said, were consistent with the Senate inquiry findings that many children could still be missing after being recruited by the CPP-NPA.

“It is consistent with the files of CPP's Vic Ladlad, which said that they have recruited 8,635 children, aged 13-17, up to September 2015 alone," he said.

Parlade scored Gabriela for doing nothing to rescue these minors and yet have the time to protest of being "red-tagged" despite evidence.

"Instead of rescuing these children from their CPP-NPA handlers, you complain of Gabriela being 'red-tagged', even as your group consistently appear in recovered documents and computer files of captured CPP-NPA top personalities. By the way, the houses raided will not pass as an office because the government only knew about them as underground (UG) houses, until you claimed them to be a Gabriela or Bayan Muna office," Parlade said.

He also finds it ironic that these party-list representatives, while having time to complain of the killings of their members by alleged government troops, seem to be indifferent to atrocities committed by the communist rebels.

"Rep. Castro for her part, complained of the killing of many of their members? Would she care to hear the video interview and testimony of surrendered Special Partisan Unit (SPARU hitman) James Durimon alias 'Juros'? He was 14 when recruited by NPAs in Negros and confessed to the killing of many farmers and activists in Panay, on orders of Charity Amacan, Secretary of 'Komiteng Rehiyon' (KR)-Cebu Bohol Negros Siquijor (CBNS) CPP-NPA. Listen to alias 'Juros' and ask Secretary Lorenzana again who is killing your own people so that you can blame the AFP and PNP. Why don't you listen to the tape interview of NPA rebel priest Conrado Balweg who admitted to attacking civilians, while clad in constabulary uniform, in order to create more hatred against the government," he added.

In rebels’ company

Parlade also scored Castro, who is a teacher herself, for not asking why these minors are not in schools and in the company of NPA rebels, when arrested.

"And at age 12-14 (years old) what are they doing in Bacolod, when they are from La Carlota City? Is it not trafficking of minors? Are they not recruits for your 'Teatro Obrero'? Yes, theater so what's wrong with that? Well, take a look at these pictures of the kids under arms. Better yet, why attend the Defense Committee hearing when you can instead follow up on the case of an NPA-failed attack on teacher Zhydee Cabanelez and husband Ramil of Valencia, Bukidnon, the former of whom you insist to claim as ACT member when she is not?" he added.

Members of militant groups claims of being attacked by government security forces are in sync and very much calibrated with Sison's earlier statements, he added.

"Maybe you are all too naive to claim that Jose Maria Sison, your idol who personally tagged Gabriela and ACT as the CPP's progressive allies, is just another political activist and critic of government policies. But how do you explain his order to the NPA to attack all government security forces in light of these arrests? A social or political activist, progressive or regressive moron, does not do that. The CPP-NPA was declared a terrorist organization by US, UK (United Kingdom), Australia, NZ (New Zealand) and the EU (European Union) for nothing," he said.

No sense

He added that he sees no sense in the continued harassment claims of these militant groups except to get more foreign funding for their "fake human rights advocacies".

"How do we make sense of all these allegation of a tyrant government and its propensity to abuse its power? The explanation could be as simple as this: the CPP and the Kamatayan (Makabayan) bloc merely want to sustain that narrative of a 'consistent pattern of gross, flagrant, or mass violation of human rights', by projecting a fascist and anti-people PRRD government," he said.

Parlade said such narrative is needed to ensure that Sison can invoke the so-called "non-refoulement clause" and allow him to stay in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

"This is in order for Jose Ma Sison to continue to invoke 'non-refoulement' (Article 8, Section 2, UN Gen Assembly Resolution 47/133). That affords him to stay in Utrecht, and escape state persecution as the EU court ruled. This propaganda of a tyrant state is now more significant for him, especially that a Philippine court had issued a warrant for his arrest due to his crime of genocide," he said. (PNA)

***

References:

* Philippine News Agency. "Reds raise 'red-tagging, 'state terrorism' cards when beaten." Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1085260 (accessed November 07, 2019 at 01:46AM UTC+14).

* Philippine News Agency. "Reds raise 'red-tagging, 'state terrorism' cards when beaten." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1085260 (archived).

#Philippines #News #Filipino #Pinoy #Tourism #Politics #Culture #Editorial #Environment #Society #History

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celticnoise · 5 years

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Late last week, Rod Petrie finally emerged from the bunker where the SFA hides its leaders and went on the offensive, defending the SFA from allegations that they have done nothing about the tide of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hatred in Scottish football.

The media ran his statement in its usual uncritical way. Especially The Scotsman.

What sparked Petrie’s foray outside of the Hampden bubble was, not surprisingly, Neil Lennon.

Our manager said before the Ibrox game that it was “embarrassing” that it had taken UEFA to act on this when the governing bodies here have ignored it for years.

The manager was, as ever, speaking for us all on this subject.

Nobody in the country is more qualified to speak about it than he is. Those who won’t listen to him won’t listen to anybody.

Petrie, of course, isn’t listening.

The SFA has “nothing to be ashamed of” in their handling of the issue, Petrie said. UEFA is responsible for its competitions and they’ve acted … it doesn’t mean that Scottish football’s governors are asleep on the job because they didn’t.

The truth, as we all know, is a little bit different.

The SFA’s failure to get a grip on this issue before now is scandalous and damning.

Indeed, it was recently revealed that they delivered a statement to UEFA on the song The Billy Boys where they said they didn’t believe that the way the word fenian was used in that little ditty was sectarian in nature. Only the most backward people could refuse to see that.

“I think the events that took place, and obviously the punishment that’s been imposed by the organisation running the competition, has had an impact,” Petrie said.

An impact on what though?

The Ibrox club has told its fans not to sing the songs, because they will get the club into trouble.

Nowhere in sight is there any recognition that anti-Irish, anti-Catholic songs are just plain and simply wrong.

And what constitutes an improvement?

No singing at one European game and one league match at Ibrox?

The European game was played without the usual Ibrox choir in attendance.

When it comes to the way the league match is viewed, The Scotsman’s article contains a particularly sick joke.

Read this wonderfully imaginative line. “It was noticeable that following the punishment there was no evidence of such chanting in last week’s derby clash with Celtic.”

The Celtic match was marred by “paedo” chants and a banner blatantly knocked off from Loyalist murals and which depicted a dead Celtic supporter.

Only in Scotland could that be regarded as an improvement.

It is shameful that we still tolerate this sort of thing, and continue making excuses for it when any other association would confront it.

Some would undoubtedly point to the club’s refusal to support Strict Liability; as I’m sick and tired of pointing out, it’s a red herring.

The SFA has ample regulations in place already for tackling this stuff, if they cared to.

The Get Out Of Jail Free card they often cite is that the clubs can escape sanction if they can demonstrate that they’ve tried to solve the problem.

Let’s be honest, if a board at Ibrox wanted to solve this it would be easy enough to do.

It would also be expensive and they’d play a lot of games in front of empty stands.

And that’s the bottom line here; this is about money, and nothing more.

This craven surrender to the bigots is because that club in particular wants their money. Far from trying to keep this stuff away from their ground, they’ve actively fuelled division with their Britishness days and their embrace of militarism and styling themselves as “the club of the troops.”

It is so cynical, but whereas other clubs would try to find ways of being more inclusive theirs has instead retreated back towards the core element, the Union Jack brigade and, lately, the black clad nutters of the Union Bears.

If the club wanted to tackle sectarianism in its ground it could have made proper example of that lot and banned them completely. They slapped them on the wrist and invited them for tea and biscuits instead. A wee “rehabilitation” session.

It must have been a quick one, because in spite of another partial stand closure they’ll be in their own spot for the next European game.

That’s not even paying lip-service to the idea of tackling bigotry.

It’s sneering at the rest of us whilst people inside the club laugh along with the racists, in full sympathy with their ideology and agenda.

How do we know that? As Phil pointed out, that banner at the weekend was too big to have been brought in the turnstiles on the day … someone at Ibrox stuck that hateful thing in a cupboard for them and made sure that it was on display.

The SFA has not commented on it at all.

Petrie, who professes to be unashamed by the inaction of the governing body he now heads, hasn’t uttered a word of condemnation about any of the incidents involving that club in the past few weeks, although the disgusting behaviour of their supporters brings shame and disgrace on the whole country.

At least The Scotsman’s article does acknowledge what the problem here is, and that’s a step in the right direction if nothing else is.

“Petrie concedes that UEFA’s actions can be a positive driver in ridding the Scottish game of a strain of anti-Irish Catholic expression that finds voice among the Rangers support,” Andrew Smith wrote, and whilst I think that’s optimistic it’s good at least to see the words written down, and this thing dragged fully out of the darkness.

But I have no faith that the media will keep it out where we can see it.

I have no faith that they will expose it to the sunlight that will finally destroy it.

They would rather sweep it back into the shadows than have to actually do something about it, and whilst Petrie talks about tackling sectarianism being a “priority” it’s easy to talk. Others have done it before him and we’re no closer to getting this matter resolved. Talk is cheap in Scottish football.

What people want to see is action.

It is overdue.

And yet none of us are holding our breath for it.

The CelticBlog is your site, and it thrives with your support. Please share our articles on social media, and subscribe to receive updates whenever we post a new piece. Remember, we have a Facebook page for all the articles and a Facebook Group for discussions about the pieces and other issues, and you can follow us on Twitter and on Celtic News Now.

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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European privacy search engines aim to challenge Google

LONDON — In the battle for online privacy, U.S. search giant Google is a Goliath facing a handful of European Davids.

The backlash over Big Tech’s collection of personal data offers new hope to a number of little-known search engines that promise to protect user privacy.

Sites like Britain’s Mojeek , France’s Qwant , Unbubble in Germany and Swisscows say they don’t track user data, filter results or show “behavioural” ads.

These sites are growing amid the rollout of new European privacy regulations, numerous corporate data scandals and even comments by high-profile tech executives such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, which have combined to raise public awareness about the mountains of personal information that companies stealthily collect and sell to advertisers.

Widespread suspicion in Europe about Google’s stranglehold on internet searches has also helped make the continent a spawning ground for secure search sites. Europe is particularly sensitive to privacy issues because spying by the Nazi-era Gestapo and the secret services in the Soviet Union is still within living memory.

“For us, it’s all about citizens and citizens have the right to privacy,” said Eric Leandri, chairman of Paris-based Qwant. He said that view contrasts with the mindset across the Atlantic, where internet users are seen as consumers whose rights are dictated by the terms of their agreements with tech companies.

Traffic numbers show interest is rising. Qwant handled nearly 10 billion queries in 2017, more than triple the previous year. On a monthly basis, it’s getting 80 million visits while requests are growing 20 per cent. Leandri says the site now accounts for 6 per cent of search engine market share in France, its biggest market.

Qwant is even getting official support. Last month the French army and parliament both said they would drop Google and use Qwant as their default search engine, as part of efforts to reclaim European “digital sovereignty.”

The site doesn’t use tracking cookies or profile users, allowing it to give two different users the exact same result. It has built its own index of 20 billion pages covering French, German and Italian. It plans to expand the index to about two dozen other languages, for which it currently relies on results from Microsoft’s Bing.

Mojeek, based in Brighton, England, operates on similar principles and has so far cataloged 2 billion webpages. The company says it gets 200,000 unique visitors a month and search queries have quintupled over the past year.

Germany’s Unbubble is a “meta-search” engine, sending encrypted queries to more than 30 other search engines and hiding its users’ locations. It promises neutral search results rather than ones filtered by an algorithm catering to personal biases.

To be sure, Google’s in no danger of toppling. The company based in Mountain View, California, accounts for three-quarters or more of global market share, depending on whom you ask, and rules the mobile market with its Android operating system.

Some privacy search operators say an equally big motivation behind these startups is to avoid “filter bubbles,” in which internet content is pre-selected for users by the likes of Google and Facebook based on previous searches and other data.

“The main idea is to provide neutral information and allow people to depend less on machine learning-based filters,” said Unbubble founder Tobias Sasse. “If you are using Google today, perhaps you’ll notice that there is always the same mainstream information,” preventing people from seeing the “great diversity” online, he said.

Netherlands-based Startpage anonymizes Google search results, stripping out ads and tracking. Another British startup, Oscobo , does anonymous searches for U.K. users, with results licensed from Yahoo/Bing. Outside Europe, there’s also U.S. site DuckDuckGo .

Some of these sites rely financially on donations, others from “affiliate advertising” — links from Amazon, eBay or other shopping sites that pay a commission but don’t target or track users. That’s different from Google’s behavioural, or targeted, ads that come up based on your search history, which many find creepy and invasive.

Mojeek has private investors. Founder Marc Smith, who began in 2004 with two servers in his bedroom, is “very much anti-advertising,” said Finn Brownbill, Mojeek’s head of marketing. “It’s a necessary evil and we’ll look for whatever route we can to avoid it.”

In Switzerland, a country whose banking sector became a byword for secrecy, Swisscows has grown rapidly, handling 20 million search queries a month, up from 14 million a year ago, said founder Andreas Wiebe.

Even so, Wiebe said there was plenty of skepticism when he started the site. “In 2014, I had people talking to me (saying) ‘you’re crazy’,” and that the project would be dead within a year. Instead, National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. government surveillance the following year gave it a kickstart.

Swisscows has built its own German-language web index. For other languages, it uses Bing but queries and results are run through a firewall that strips out personal identifiers such as IP addresses.

Along with a conventional list of results, Swisscows also has a nifty grid of keyword tiles to narrow down search results by context.

The site’s servers are buried in former military bunkers deep inside the Swiss Alps. Funding comes from donations and Wiebe’s software company Hulbee. He plans next year to launch a secure messaging app, Teleguard, with a paid business version he hopes will help fund the site.

——

Follow Kelvin Chan at twitter.com/chanman

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leadsourcing · 6 years

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China ‘twice hacked US navy contractor and stole data on submarine warfare including secret plans to develop supersonic missile’

Chinese government hackers have twice compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare – including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on US submarines by 2020, according to American officials.

The breaches occurred in January and February, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The hackers targeted a contractor who works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Centre, a military organisation headquartered in Newport, Rhode Island, that conducts research and development for submarines and underwater weaponry.

The officials did not identify the contractor.

Taken were 614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as “Sea Dragon”, as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.

The Washington Post agreed to withhold certain details about the compromised missile project at the request of the Navy, which argued that their release could harm national security.

If it is true [that the data was hacked] … that is a significant reversal for the United States

Former Nato Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis

The data stolen was of a highly sensitive nature despite being housed on the contractor’s unclassified network. The officials said the material, when aggregated, would be considered classified, a fact that raises concerns about the Navy’s ability to oversee contractors tasked with developing cutting-edge weapons.

The breach is part of China’s long-running effort to blunt the US advantage in military technology and become the pre-eminent power in east Asia.

The news comes as the Trump administration is seeking to secure Beijing’s support in persuading North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, even as tensions persist between the United States and China over trade and defence matters.

The Navy is leading the investigation into the breach with the help of the FBI, officials said.

Navy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks said, “There are measures in place that require companies to notify the government when a ‘cyber incident’ has occurred that has actual or potential adverse effects on their networks that contain controlled unclassified information.”

Speaks said “it would be inappropriate to discuss further details at this time.”

Altogether, details on hundreds of mechanical and software systems were compromised – a significant breach in a critical area of warfare that China has identified as a priority, both for building its own capabilities and challenging those of the United States.

“The United States consistently has been able to use highly compartmented security systems to protect its most innovative and dynamic defence advancements, and any time one of those is penetrated you give up an enormous advantage in surprise,” said James Stavridis, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a retired admiral who served as supreme allied commander at Nato.

“So if it is true that this was a penetration of one of those very compartmented systems, that is a significant reversal for the United States,” he said. Stavridis had no independent knowledge of the breach.

We are going to rely heavily on submarines in the early effort of any conflict with the Chinese … So anything that degrades our comparative advantage in undersea warfare is of extreme significance

Bryan Clark, naval analyst

The Sea Dragon project is an initiative of a special Pentagon office stood up in 2012 to adapt existing US military technologies to new applications. The Defence Department, citing classification levels, has released little information about Sea Dragon.

However, it has said hat it will introduce a “disruptive offensive capability” by “integrating an existing weapon system with an existing Navy platform.” The Pentagon has requested or used more than US$300 million for the project since late 2015 and has said it plans to start underwater testing by September.

Military experts fear that China has developed capabilities that could complicate the Navy’s ability to defend US allies in Asia in the event of a conflict with China.

The Chinese are investing in a range of platforms, including quieter submarines armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons and new sensors, Adm. Philip Davidson said during his April nomination hearing to lead US Indo-Pacific Command. And what they cannot develop on their own, they steal – often through cyberspace, he said.

“One of the main concerns that we have,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “is cyber and penetration of the dot-com networks, exploiting technology from our defence contractors, in some instances.”

In February, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats testified that most of the detected Chinese cyber-operations against US industry focus on defence contractors or tech firms supporting government networks.

In recent years, the United States has been scrambling to develop new weapons or systems that can counter a Chinese naval build-up that has targeted perceived weaknesses in the US fleet. Key to the American advantage in any face off with China on the high seas in Asia will be its submarine fleet.

“US naval forces are going to have a really hard time operating in that area, except for submarines, because the Chinese don’t have a lot of anti-submarine warfare capability,” said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The idea is that we are going to rely heavily on submarines in the early effort of any conflict with the Chinese.”

China has made closing the gap in undersea warfare one of its three top military priorities, and although the United States still leads the field, China is making a concerted effort to diminish US superiority.

[Theft of undersea data] deeply reduces our level of comfort if we were in a close undersea combat situation with China

“So anything that degrades our comparative advantage in undersea warfare is of extreme significance if we ever had to execute our war plans for dealing with China,” Stavridis said.

The US military let its anti-ship weaponry languish after the cold war ended because with the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Navy no longer faced a peer competitor on the seas.

But the rapid modernisation and build-up of the Chinese navy in recent years, as well as Russia’s resurgent forces at sea, have prompted the Pentagon to renew heavy investment in technologies to sink enemy warships.

The introduction of a supersonic anti-ship missile on US Navy submarines would make it more difficult for Chinese warships to maneuver. It would also augment a suite of other anti-ship weapons that the US military has been developing in recent years.

For years, Chinese government hackers have siphoned information on the US military, underscoring the challenge the Pentagon faces in safeguarding details of its technological advances.

Over the years, the Chinese have snatched designs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the advanced Patriot PAC-3 missile system; the Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defence; and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship, a small surface vessel designed for near-shore operations, according to previous reports prepared for the Pentagon.

In some cases, suspected Chinese breaches appear to have resulted in copycat technologies, such as the drones China has produced that mimic US unmanned aircraft.

Speaks, the Navy spokesman, said: “We treat the broader issue of cyber intrusion against our contractors very seriously. If such an intrusion were to occur, the appropriate parties would be looking at the specific incident, taking measures to protect current information, and mitigating the impacts that might result from any information that might have been compromised.”

The Pentagon’s Damage Assessment Management Office has conducted an assessment of the damage, according to the US officials. The Office of the Secretary of Defence declined to comment.

Theft of an electronic warfare library, Stavridis said, could give the Chinese “a reasonable idea of what level of knowledge we have about their specific [radar] platforms, electronically and potentially acoustically, and that deeply reduces our level of comfort if we were in a close undersea combat situation with China.”

Signals and sensor data is also valuable in that it presents China with the opportunity to “know when we would know at what distance we would be able to detect their submarines” – again a key factor in undersea battles.

Investigators say the hack was carried out by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a civilian spy agency responsible for counterintelligence, foreign intelligence and domestic political security. The hackers operated out of an MSS division in the province of Guangdong, which houses a major foreign hacking department.

Although the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is far better-known than the MSS when it comes to hacking, the latter’s personnel are more skilled and much better at hiding their tracks, said Peter Mattis, a former analyst in the CIA counterintelligence centre. The MSS, he said, hack for all forms of intelligence: foreign, military and commercial.

In September 2015, in a bid to avert economic sanctions, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to President Barack Obama that China would refrain from conducting commercial cyberespionage against the United States.

Following the pact, China appeared to have curtailed much, although not all, of its hacking activity against US firms, including by the People’s Liberation Army.

Both China and the United States consider spying on military technology to fall outside the pact. “The distinction we’ve always made is there’s a difference between conducting espionage to protect national security and conduct military operations, and the theft of intellectual property for the benefit of companies inside your country,” said Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator under Obama.

Source

http://scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2149998/china-twice-hacked-us-navy-contractor-and-stole-data

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