#first gen immigrant children rise!

[aion-rsa]

Scarface: Where Tony Montana Went Wrong

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“All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one,” Tony Montana declares in the 1983 gangster classic, Scarface. Yet Al Pacino’s antihero breaks both in his quest for money, power, and women. And just as he is on the brink of winning the trifecta, he is blown away like so much dust up a nose.

Did he lose because the Cuban mobster didn’t heed the advice of his first crime boss? Or is it because he just couldn’t stand to see his sister and his best friend wearing his-and-her pajamas? In truth, Montana’s fall can probably be traced back to when he learned to speak English by “watching guys like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.”

Directed by Brian De Palma, and written by Oliver Stone, Scarface is a remake of Howard Hawks’ vastly influential 1932 mob movie, so Montana’s explosive descent was preordained. Tony Montana continued Pacino’s run of criminal icons, which included Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon and the ultimate crime family head, Michael Corleone in The Godfather films. The actor supplanted Paul Muni’s Tony Carmonte as the recognizably scarred face of the title role. Pacino would go on to play Carlito in Carlito’s Way and Lefty in Donnie Brasco, but while each hoodlum brings a new facet to his rogues gallery, none of his gangsters ever achieve their ultimate desires. They almost all reach dizzying heights, and everyone of them sees the dream slip through their fingers. Still, Montana experiences perhaps the greatest fall of all.

The original 1932 film took place during Prohibition when crime was a viable means of survival. De Palma’s adaptation happens in the Reagan era, a time when lucky opportunists could get their lips around the spigots of cash before it got a chance to trickle down. Tony’s economic theory is much more succinct: “You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked.”

Scarface is a rags-to-riches-to-self-destructive fireball story, and nothing succeeds like excess. Montana’s first crime boss in America, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), has weathered the climate change from President Carter to the Gipper, and warns Tony to never “underestimate the other guy’s greed.”

In the original Howard Hughes production, Tony was an immigrant from Italy. In the Cold War era film, Montana is a refugee from Cuba. Their shared first mistake is to believe in the American Dream.

The World Is Yours

These words are flashed in both films and hit each of the two criminal aspirants as hard as the “give me your tired, poor, and hungry” promises carved under the Statue of Liberty. Scarface opens shortly after the Mariel boatlift, the 1980 exodus which followed Cuba’s economic crash. Montana seeks asylum, telling immigration officers he is a political prisoner who doesn’t agree with his country’s politics and owns nothing under communism. He says even American prison is better than his life on the Caribbean island. The officers note his criminal past, the telltale tattoo on his arm, and the scar on his face, which despite their insults was obviously not caused by oral sex.

In exchange for a Green Card, Montana and his friend Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer) assassinate Gen. Emilio Rebenga, who tortured the brother of the crime boss Lopez. Tony settles in sunny Miami. And when he gets out of the kitchen and into the heat of crime, he hits the ground running. “The World Is Yours,” after all. All you have to do is take it, and Montana has both hands out.

Frank warns his protégé, “The guys who last in this business are the guys who fly straight – lowkey, quiet; and the guys who want it all – chicas, champagne, flash – they don’t last.” But Montana is a meteor, bound to burn up in the atmosphere. He gets caught on the orbit of Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), agreeing to supply cocaine from Bolivia independent of the other drug lords. Within a few years, Montana is doing so well, the feds target him for tax evasion.

Tony’s Betrayal of Frank Lopez

Montana’s betrayal of Frank Lopez is crucial to his downfall. Frank is the father figure who initially took a chance on Tony. He let him rise through the ranks, even as he tried to bite off more than he could chew. Frank’s biggest mistake is not making sure his underlings follow his sage advice. He also ignores one of his own commandments. Lopez underestimates Montana’s greed. He trusts Tony to accompany his trusted second-gun Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham) to Bolivia to meet with Sosa, and continues to let Tony operate after the druglord hangs Suarez from a helicopter.

The deal Montana makes behind Frank’s back is a major step toward the fall. The vow Tony takes never to betray Sosa ultimately leads to the last splash. Montana breaks his word to both of these men, and they bust his balls as a result. When Tony returns to Miami, Frank is suspicious over Omar’s death and his returning soldier’s independence. As Montana begins to build his own cocaine empire, Frank orders a professional hit.

For gangsters, the only good cop is a bad cop, and it is advisable to grease the wheels which move crime. Mel Bernstein (Harris Yulin) demands his take early in the film at the Babylon Club, which has the perfect cocktail napkins for bribery notes. Bernstein was willing to overlook the murders of Rebenga, “Hector the Toad,” and “that bloodbath at the Sun Ray Hotel.” Tony should have taken him at his word when the cop said he could clean up Tony’s Lopez mess.

Before Tony eliminates Frank, he is hungry. The money and drugs are not a distraction. After he begins to accumulate power, he lets his public profile rise and indulges in conspicuous consumption. Montana keeps a chained-up tiger in front of his compound just to let everyone know how powerful he is. There are real life precedents for this. Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar imported hippos for his private zoo. Brooklyn mobster “Crazy” Joe Gallo kept a pet lion named Cleo in the basement of his headquarters. The scenario was also probably inspired by Miami’s most notorious drug lord, Mario Tabraue, whose predilection for wild cats was featured in the Netflix documentary Tiger King. But the most conspicuous acquisition Montana leveraged cut Frank the deepest.

It’s always a mistake to go after the boss’ girl. James Cagney’s Tommy Powers knew this in The Public Enemy (1931). James Woods’ Maximillian “Max” Bercovicz skirts this in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Montana sets out to steal Frank’s trophy wife, Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer), from the moment he lays eyes on her, though he waits for the height of his reign to claim her. He does it as much to emasculate his former boss as he does it out of desire. It’s a betrayal equal to having Manny whack Frank while he pleads for his life.

The new couple is married by 1983, but with a marriage always on the rock.

Don’t Get High on Your Own Supply

Montana’s downfall is aided, abetted, but most of all mirrored in his descent into addiction. He probably took his first sniff from Elvira’s stash, but even as Montana bemoans, “I got a junkie for a wife,” he doesn’t get wind of his own problem. “Another Quaalude, and she’ll be mine again,” he reasons as the trophy wife climbs off the pedestal and up on a shelf.

Montana is in deep drug denial when Elvira leaves him after he openly complains she can’t have children because she is polluted with the yaya he’s been peddling. He should at least entertain the notion when she openly wonders if he would even be alive to raise their child.

In American Gangster, Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas knows enough not to dip his nose into the supply. And while Pacino’s slide into the junkie aspects of his character is physically more subtle than Ray Liotta’s bug-eyed Henry Hill in Goodfellas, the results are just as devastating. When Montana was crushing the competition and bagging the Sandman, he had discipline. His mind gets muddled as his drug use spirals out of control. He makes rash decisions, dips into schizoid delusions, and succumbs to white powder paranoia. He can’t see his way through the haze to find alternatives. He walks right into the undercover cop’s money laundering bust.

The drugs dull his instincts. If Tony wasn’t high at the security command center, he would have seen Sosa’s soldiers encroaching his compound over the cameras. He had 10 bodyguards on the property, he could have positioned them defensively. The only thing his ultimate hit man is hiding behind is a pair of killer shades. He never should have been able to sneak behind Montana’s back. Tony also wouldn’t have gotten rid of his most trusted weapon.

Over and Underestimating Little Friends

Tony Montana’s right-hand man would have been the best, first defense against the Sosa attack. What Tony does to Manny Ribera is his worst action. The two are virtually brothers. Their bond goes beyond being partners in crime, it tightened in the “Freedomtown” concentration camp, and solidified in the Miami chainsaw massacre. It is because Manny is Tony’s most trusted soldier that he will never be good enough for Tony’s sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Tony’s saving grace is he believes he is doing all this to ensure a better life for his sister. Gina is supposed to represent the innocence he sacrificed, but she is also an unattainable sin.Tony’s mother doesn’t try to separate her children merely because her daughter might be swallowed in the criminal life; she is curbing what she sees as Tony’s unnatural urges. 

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Even if Tony doesn’t see Manny as a rival for his sister’s affections, he still sees him through the eyes of a fellow criminal, and a womanizing one at that. Tony is just like his mother, who rejects him. Tony brands his friend, and ultimately seals his fate with it.

The problem is Ribera wasn’t made to be a gangster. He is a loyal and efficient consigliere and soldier for Tony’s crew, but he would have been happier slapping his name on knockoff designer jeans. Besides the bubbling incestuous tension exacerbated by the coke haze, Tony doesn’t want to see his best friend happier than him, and denies Gina a real chance at the happiness he wants for her.

It’s the one thing Tony can’t buy for her. Gina and Manny fully expect Tony to be thrilled by their marriage. They were going to surprise him with the news. Tony’s incestuous protectiveness speeds his downfall. He murders Manny as a punishment. Gina is shot by Sosa’s men. Montana loses the two most important people in his life, and his inability to control his lusts destroy them all.

“Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy”

The biggest contributory factor in Tony’s downfall is his humanity. In The Godfather, Sonny Corleone advises his brother Michael not to take things too personally in business. When Lopez gives Montana the mission of delivering a bundle of cocaine to Columbian dealers, the rising mobster takes things very personally. The deal goes bad when Montana’s friend Angel Fernandez is murdered with a chainsaw in a scene so aurally graphic (watch it again, there’s no violence shown, only heard), it almost got the film an X rating.

It was allowed in the film in the name of education, Stone pointed to a DEA report which detailed the exact scenario. Tony teaches the Colombians a lesson in humanity. Not content with leaving with the cash and the coke, he kills every single gang member who had anything to do with Angel’s death.

Tony also lets his conscience be his guide when he’s working the GPI on a hit. Faced with serious jail time for his tax evasion arrest, he makes a deal with Sosa, who is also under fire. Montana agrees to fly to New York and assassinate a journalist before he can give a speech on Sosa’s organization. A bomb has been planted in the journalist’s car, and Tony is in charge of tailing until the perfect detonation point. But when Tony arrives on the scene to assassinate the journalist, he notices the man’s wife and children are with him. Montana not only breaks his word, the promise to protect his powerful partner, but he murders Sosa’s right hand man, Alberto, rather than kill the children playing in the back seat.

“I Always Tell The Truth. Even When I Lie.”

Tony Montana may have been the ballsiest and most charismatic of his machismo mob, but he wasn’t the brightest. He acknowledges his intellectual shortcomings, “I come from the gutter,” he admits. “I know that. I got no education, but that’s okay. I know the street.” But he doesn’t read signs. He can’t tell a freeway from a dead end. Frank Lopez may be a blowhard, but his words of wisdom could have been carved in the cement. 

All the concrete Tony brags about has gone to his head, making his skull thicker than Pacino’s accent. Montana is brash and unbending, narcissistically adherent to only his own advice, and his own worst counsel. His anger blinds him, the battery is running low on his foresight, and he’s so flashy his enemies can see him coming from miles away. And he can’t see them when they’re standing close enough to breathe on the back of his neck. 

Final Massacre

Of course the most obvious reason Tony ends up the way does is because he fights off an army by himself. He’s got quite an arsenal, and the coke probably makes it seem like a good idea at the time, but the decision to stay and fight is vastly miscalculated. Even if Tony had survived the last assassination attempt, Sosa’s men would always be hunting for him. It would have been a short hunt. Tony Montana would have died of a heart attack from all that coke he snorted.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[creepingsharia]

“32,000 Christians Butchered to Death”: Muslim Persecution of Christians, May 2020

by Raymond Ibrahim

The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of May 2020:

The Slaughter of Christians

Nigeria: From January 2020 to mid-May 2020, Muslim terrorists massacred at least 620 Christians (470 by Fulani herdsmen and 150 by Boko Haram). According to a May 14 report:

Militant Fulani Herdsmen and Boko Haram … have intensified their anti-Christian violence … with hacking to death in the past four months and half of 2020 of no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians, and wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning. The atrocities against Christians have gone unchecked and risen to alarming apogee with the country’s security forces and concerned political actors looking the other way or colluding with the Jihadists. Houses burnt or destroyed during the period are in their hundreds; likewise dozens of Christian worship and learning centers.

The report further states that, since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists.”

Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria,” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants…” More recently, in a May statement, the Christian Rights Agenda, another human rights group, expressed concern for “the seeming silence of Nigeria’s President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, who as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces has not only failed to protect the Christian communities but has remained silent over these killings. To date, no Fulani herdsmen have been arrested and prosecuted over the killings, a development that has helped to embolden them.” It is worth noting that Buhari himself is a Fulani Muslim.

Separately, the Muslim man who murdered Michael Nnadi, an 18-year-old seminarian at the Good Shepherd Seminary, confessed from his jail cell that he did so because the youth “continued preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ” to his captors. According to the May 3 report, “the first day Nnadi was kidnapped … he did not allow [Mustapha Mohammed, his murderer] to have peace” due to his relentless preaching of the Gospel. Mohammed “did not like the confidence displayed by the young man and decided to send him to an early grave.”

Democratic Republic of Congo: Muslim fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces, which earlier pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), murdered at least 17 people, possibly many more, in the Christian-majority (95%) African nation. “They fired several shots in the air,” a local said. “When the population was fleeing, they captured some people and cut them up with machetes.” In late 2019, the same group murdered a pastor after he refused to stop preaching and convert to Islam.

Attacks on Christian Churches, Cemeteries, and Crosses

Greece: Muslim migrants ransacked and transformed a church into their personal toilet. This public restroom was once the St. Catherine Church in Moria, a small town on the island of Lesvos, which has been flooded with migrants who arrived via Turkey. “The smell inside is unbearable,” said a local. “[T]he metropolitan of Mytilene is aware of the situation in the area, nevertheless, he does not wish to deal with it for his own reasons.” According to the report:

This is only the latest incident … [I]t has become extremely common for Greek Orthodox Churches to be vandalised and attacked by illegal immigrants on Lesvos….

As a deeply religious society, these attacks on churches are shocking to the Greek people and calls to question whether these illegal immigrants seeking a new life in Europe are willing to integrate and conform to the norms and values of their new countries.

These continued attacks have ultimately seen the people of Lesvos, who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, become increasingly frustrated by the unresolved situation that has restricted and changed their lives as they no longer feel safe on their once near crime-free island.

Other incidents on Lesvos include “African immigrants ridiculing and coughing on police in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, and thousands of olives trees being destroyed.”

St. Catherine’s in Lesvos, now a Muslim toilet.

Turkey: On May 8, a man tried to torch a church in Istanbul; the church had been attacked in the previous years, sometimes with hate-filled graffiti. When police detained the arsonist, he said “I burned it because they [Christians] brought the coronavirus [onto Turkey].” Discussing this incident, another report said that “Minorities in Turkey, such as Armenians, Rums and Syriacs [all Christians], as well as their places of worship, are occasionally targeted in hate attacks.”

Two weeks later, on May 22, in broad daylight, a man climbed the fence of a historic Armenian church in Istanbul and proceeded to yank off its metal cross and hurl it to the ground, as captured on surveillance footage. The man, who looks more like a Westernized “hipster” than an ardent Islamist, walks up to and stares at the cross for a while — he even looks at and strikes a pose for the security camera — before attacking the crucifix.

Pakistan: After Friday prayers on May 8, an armed Muslim mob shouting “anti-Christian slogans” attacked and tried to set fire to the Trinity Pentecostal Church in Hakeem Pura. Built 22 years ago, the church was desecrated, and a large cross and part of a wall broken. The Muslim man behind the attack had sold land to the growing church a year earlier, and now wanted it back. A Christian eyewitness said that the mob, “after attacking the walls and the cross, challenging anyone who dare oppose them, fled… Not only was the cross broken, but our hearts were crushed too.”

Separately, Muslim “land grabbers” seized, desecrated, and ploughed over the graves of a century-old Christian cemetery with a tractor. According to the May 22 report:

The Christian community there reportedly protested against the violation and tried to stop the vandalism. However, they were allegedly threatened with guns… [A]ll graves that were destroyed had crosses fixed on the top… [S]ome of the houses occupied by the Christians were demolished and people were forced to flee from their homes. Amid widespread discrimination against the Christian community in Pakistan, the properties owned by the minorities are often subjected to injustice including land grabbing and being the target of criminals. Moreover, the economic disparities and religious bias in Pakistan’s judiciary have increased the struggles Christians face to recover the lost land.

Serbia: On Sunday, May 31, two Muslim migrants entered the St. Alexander Nevsky Church in Belgrade during service and robbed several of the mostly elderly congregants. “There were two of them. They broke into the church during the liturgy, which was in progress, and they stole two purses along with three mobile phones,” a church leader said, adding:

Upon entering the temple, they split up on two sides, and after the people saw what was happening, they managed to catch one of them and take away his mobile phones and the money he stole. The other managed to escape. He took two purses, in one there were 3,500 dinars, while in the other there were 18,000, which was the entire pension of one woman. We handed that young man over to the police, while the other managed to escape. This is an insult. Isn’t anything sacred to people, such as the liturgy? Terrible.

Egypt: On May 30, 2020 — two days before President Trump recognized Global Coptic Day — Egyptian authorities demolished the only Coptic church in village of Koum al-Farag, even though it had stood for 15 years and served 3,000 Christians. According to the report:

The destruction of the church was a punishment for the ‘crime’ of building rooms for Sunday school…. When the work began, some extremist Muslims began to attack Christians.

A separate report on this incident relates:

According to an ancient Islamic tradition, or common law, churches are prevented from being formally recognised or displaying any Christian symbols if a mosque is built next to them.

The authorities decided to solve this issue by demolishing the church, which took a tractor “six long hours,” a Copt recalled:

The decision was not welcomed by the Christians in the village, so they protested by appearing at the site in possession of the documents. However, the police and some radicals began to insult and assault Christians, including women and children. The church leader received so many punches in the face and chest that he passed out.

In a separate attack in the early hours of May 16, “an air conditioning technician threw a Molotov cocktail inside the Virgin Mary Church in Alexandria.” According to the report:

Security camera footage led to his apprehension. Fortunately, no one was injured in this attack. Predictably, however, the prosecutors appear to be [pursuing] an acquittal on the claim that the perpetrator of the religious hate crime is also mentally ill. Based on precedent, it is extremely unlikely that this perpetrator will face any consequences for his attempt to torch a church.

Mozambique: Islamic terrorists attacked a monastery. The four monks residing in it managed to hide and emerge unscathed. However, the hospital they were building for a nearby village was destroyed by the armed Muslims. According to the May 18 report:

Little is known about the insurgents, and until recently there were doubts they were actually islamists, but they have claimed to be fighting for the imposition of Sharia law in the North of Mozambique…. The attack on the monastery, which included the destruction of a hospital that the monks were building in the village, is the second most serious attack against a Christian target since the troubles began. Last month a Catholic mission was also attacked, although, as here, nobody was killed. Other communities have not been so lucky, as the insurgents have left a trail of death and destruction behind them in the towns and villages they attack.

Nigeria: On May 7, a helicopter bombed and destroyed a church. The building was empty at the time; no casualties were reported. According to a local leader,

The helicopter used to hover around the area, dropping some things. We don’t know what they have been dropping but yesterday in the afternoon, the helicopter came and dropped a bomb … [The] Assembly of God church was destroyed including a nearby building…. Hours after the incident, a group of people numbering about 100 pass through the village carrying guns. Some were trekking while others rode on motorcycles. One of them was carrying a flag which is not a Nigerian flag; one other person was making some incantations in Arabic… People have fled the village… The question is who was in the helicopter dropping bomb?… We are very concerned … If it was a mistake by security agencies, they should come out and explain so as to allay the fears of the community.

Algeria: Four Muslim guards responsible for protecting a church vandalized and overturned its statue of the Virgin Mary. According to the report,

[T]he chapel of Santa Cruz built in stones extracted from the mountain of Murdjadjo where it is perched, was the object of an attempted theft… Four looters allegedly destroyed the statue of the Virgin Mary by attempting to steal it. They have even destroyed other holy monuments in their path….

It was later found, however, that the chapel’s four hired guards were themselves the “looters” responsible for the desecration. The report continues:

In addition, the Christian community in Algeria denounces… the intimidation which the faithful are subject to. Many Christians have denounced the series of closings of churches in the national territory. Several evangelical associations and organizations have called for an end to “the increasing pressure and intimidation from the Algerian government.”

Iran: On Sunday, May 17, a Christian cemetery was set ablaze, just two days after the tomb of the biblical Esther and Mordecai was also set on fire on the 72nd anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. Damage at the tomb — a holy site shared by Jews and Christians — was reportedly minimal. Few other details concerning the burned Christian cemetery aside from video footage showing smoke billowing over its walls are available. A Hindu temple was also reportedly set on fire in May.

France: Unknown vandals cut down an iconic iron cross that had stood on the summit of Pic Saint-Loup since 1911 and was visible for miles around. According to the May 14 report,

While Europe has experienced a growing number of acts of vandalism and profanation of Christian sites, the greatest number of such acts have occurred in France, where churches, schools, cemeteries, and monuments “are being vandalized, desecrated, and burned at an average rate of three per day,” according to reports drawing from government statistics.

Although the identity of the vandals responsible for this latest outrage is unknown, it appears that Western European nations that have large Muslim migrant populations are seeing a disproportionate rise in attacks on churches and Christian symbols. According to a 2017 study on France — which has the largest Muslim population in Europe — “Islamist extremist attacks on Christians” rose by 38%, going from 273 attacks in 2015 to 376 in 2016; the majority occurred during Christmas season and “many of the attacks took place in churches and other places of worship.” Similarly, around Christmas 2016, in a German region where more than a million Muslims reside, some 50 public Christian statues (including those of Jesus) were beheaded and crucifixes broken.

Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion of Christian Women

Nigeria: Between March 23 and April 30, six young Christian girls and one older married woman were kidnapped. “We are saddened to report to you the battles we have been fighting even amidst the lockdown,” the Hausa Christians Foundation reported on May 4, adding that it “has been working on the following tragic incidences of abduction and forceful Islamization, despite the fact that the lockdown has limited our efforts.” The statement continues:

The usual practice is that these girls will be forced into marriage and perpetually be abused sexually, physical and emotionally. We are doing our best to rescue these precious lives but our efforts have been truncated by the current government imposed lockdown that has put everything on hold…. The simple reason for the injustice and the persecution we have been subjected to… is because of our faith in Christ Jesus.

Two of the young girls have since been rescued.

Pakistan: Another young Christian girl was kidnapped. According to a May 2 report,

On Sunday, April 26, a 14-year-old Christian girl … was abducted by a group of armed Muslim men… [T]he Christian girl’s family has filed a police report and is begging police to recover their relative…. Myra Shehbaz was abducted by a group of Muslim men led by Muhammad Naqash. Eye witnesses claim that Myra was attacked while she was traveling to her workplace as a domestic worker on Sunday afternoon…. Myra’s abductors forced her into a car and Myra tried to resist…. [The] abductors were armed and fired several shots into the air…. [The girl’s mother] fears her daughter will be raped, forcefully converted is [sic] Islam, or even killed…. [A]n estimated 1,000 women and girls from Pakistan’s Hindu and Christian community are assaulted, abducted, forcefully married to their captor, and forcibly converted to Islam every year.

Egypt: In a May 22 report, Coptic Solidarity, a human rights organization focused on the plight of Egypt’s Christians, made the following remarks:

The indigenous Coptic Christians of Egypt continue to experience increasing persecution, by the government and society…. To illustrate, at least five Coptic women, including some minors, have reportedly been kidnapped or disappeared in just the last few weeks, and Egyptian state security has made no concerted effort to recover them…. Ranya Abd al-Masih, a Coptic wife and mother of three from a town just north of the capital, Cairo… remains hidden despite protests, including from the region’s church, which laments “the total lack of reaction by the authorities.”

Hate for and Abuse of Christians

Austria: A local newspaper reported:

A graffiti that rightly causes a lot of agitation. The lettering “Christians must die” can be seen at the Traisen-Markt train station. Above it, in the same style, the words “Allach Akkbar” [sic]. The removal of the graffiti has already begun and will cost about 500 Euros.

Uganda: A Muslim father burned his daughter for converting to Christianity. While traveling with her father, a sheikh (respected elder) of the Muslim community, Rehema Kyomuhendo, 24, heard the gospel and secretly converted. On the night of May 4, while she and her father were staying at her aunt’s home, she called a Christian associate: “As she was sharing Christ with me, I was so overjoyed,” Rehema later explained, “and my father heard my joy and woke up, came from his bedroom furiously and started beating me up with blows, slaps and kicks.” He also shouted that he was “going to kill her.” He broke a gas container, lit the pieces with the unspilt fuel, and began to burn his daughter. Her cries awakened her aunt, who protected her from the sheikh. Last reported, Rehema was expected to need more than a month of hospitalization due to “serious burns on her leg, stomach, rib area, near her neck and on part of her back.” No one has “reported the assault to police for fear that her father might try kill her.”

Pakistan: In another example of abuse of Christians in connection to COVID-19, “an Islamic cleric claims his organization is using COVID-19 food aid to convert non-Muslims to Islam,” according to a May 8 report. Speaking on Pakistani television, the cleric boasted of how when a destitute Christian man came for aid, the “staff of the organization offered him conversion against food which he accepted.” The man was subsequently renamed Muhammad Ramadan, signifying his conversion had occurred during the Muslim holy month. The cleric had added that Muhammad was then fasting (which is ironic considering hunger is what prompted him to convert in the first place).

About this Series

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic.  Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed in 2011 to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that occur or are reported each month. It serves two purposes:

1)          To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.

2)          To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.

Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; apostasy, blasphemy, and proselytism laws that criminalize and sometimes punish with death those who “offend” Islam; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam;  theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis, or second-class, “tolerated” citizens; and simple violence and murder. Sometimes it is a combination thereof.

Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the West, to Indonesia in the East—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.

Previous Reports:

#Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Jihad #Immigration #Legal #News #Persecution #Religion #Terror #Politics #Travel #Media #Mosque

[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: Nocturne (26/30) - Ao3 Link

Fandom: Final Fantasy XV Pairings: Mostly Gen

Summary: In which Cor Leonis loses his temper, accidentally acquires a kid, and tries to single-handedly dismantle the Lucian immigration system – and that’s before he and his lawyers find out about this Prophecy business. If the Astrals think Cor’s going to let his kid’s best friend die without a fight, they’ve gotten the wrong cheetah ‘taur.

(a young adult novel set in @kickingshoes’ ‘taur AU)

—————————————————————————————— ——————————————————————————————

Sylvia staggers out of the cave, shading her eyes against the light of the winter sun - her fur covered in pieces of rock and dust, her hooves slipping a little on the slick volcanic rock underneath.

She looks up.

Niflheim airships fill the sky, their banners unfurled and flapping in the breeze.

It's a more familiar sight than Sylvia would like to admit. She's pretended for years that Tenebrae was an equal power to Niflheim, or at least that Niflheim was nothing more a distant overlord when her powers of self-delusion failed her: Tenebrae was hers, to rule and to care for, and she thought that she could preserve their quality of life that way. To be sure, Niflheim came often, and she received them with grace and dignity, as a monarch to an emperor.

It was a lie, of course.

Niflheim showed her that lie when they pulled the leash tight at last, spurred on by Chancellor Izunia's quest to destroy the line of Lucis and the Oracle.

They came into her country and attacked her in her own home, and all the stories she'd spun to herself – that they wouldn't dare pay her such an affront lest the people rise up in defense of their Oracle – dissolved into the mist they always were, ground down under the heels of Niflheim's MT soldiers, who cared nothing for whether anyone would rise up and would never permit it to happen anyway, no matter how high the cost.

And so Sylvia sees the Niflheim ships in the air, and she remembers the day they came to Tenebrae with their armies of mechanical monsters, wielding sword and gun and flame, and she stares at them blankly, unmoving, even as the bellies of the ships open up and their payload of bombs begins to fall.

"Watch out!" someone calls, and then Sylvia is falling very ignominiously onto her side as someone barrels into her, knocking her over a ridge just as a bomb hits the place where she was just standing.

She coughs and wipes the dust upended by the explosion out of her eyes, and sees –

"Counsel Scientia?! What are you doing here?!"

"I'm an ibex," Scientia says briskly. "When we saw the bombing start, we came up here, quick as we could, and I can climb mountains faster than all the rest. Good thing, too, what with you standing around gawking like an idiot."

Sylvia opens her mouth to say something cutting in return – she is absolutely intolerable, this Scientia – and then abruptly realizes the terrible truth. "You just saved my life."

"Think nothing of it," Scientia says, blinking a little owlishly from behind her glasses – she clearly hadn't thought about it either, and seems equally horrified by the idea of a life debt between them. "I'm sure you'll have ample opportunity to repay the favor soon enough, as I am entirely without any martial abilities whatsoever."

"You – you can't fight? At all?"

"I'm a lawyer," Scientia says, sounding aggravated. "Jokes about my ability to eviscerate someone using only my sharp tongue aside, the closest I've ever gotten to murder is when I consider bludgeoning co-counsel with their own overstuffed binders."

"Then why are you even here?!" Sylvia demands.

Scientia looks at her like she's stupid – a not uncommon look on her face, and likely the reason that Sylvia developed such an immediate antipathy upon meeting her in person – and says, "Because of Luna, of course. You hardly think I'd let a few magitek soldiers stand in my way if she was in danger, would you?"

Sylvia recalls the massed army at the base of the mountain, but then her own instincts hit her with the force of one of Niflheim's bombs and she starts struggling back up to her hooves. "Lunafreya – Ravus – they were in the cave – it was collapsing – did they make it out?"

"No," Scientia says, looking around. "I don't see them. Did you see if they were merely stuck, or if there was some more space in there for them go?"

"What sort of question is that?"

"A useful one. Stop panicking and think."

Sylvia forces herself to remember those last few moments inside, hazy and confused – leaping to the side to only just avoid a falling rock, Ravus charging forward at full speed, Luna falling backwards, her eyes going wide as her hooves slipped and she began to slide –

"There was a tunnel, further in," she says, opening her eyes – she hadn't realized she'd shut them. "They all fell down the tunnel: Lunafreya, and Ravus, and Prince Noctis."

"Good."

"Good?!"

"They're probably alive then, aren't they?" Scientia points out. She's as calm as ever, the cold fish. Nothing ever moves her. It drives Sylvia up the wall. "Better than the alternative."

"You realize they're alone in there," Sylvia points out. "Facing who-knows-what."

"I'm well aware of that," Scientia snaps. Honestly snaps, which is something of a surprise; Sylvia is accustomed to the other woman being utterly unflappable. "But Luna is fifteen and well-trained, and Prince Ravus is now seventeen and presumably equally well-trained. They are quite capable of escaping this alive. We will simply have to hope for the best, because there's nothing else to do about it."

Sylvia studies her for a moment, taken aback by Scientia’s highly uncharacteristic vehemence. "You really do care quite deeply about Lunafreya."

It's not that she didn't know it, really, but it hadn't ever really seemed that important in comparison to her own need to get her suddenly too-adult, suddenly distant baby back.

"Of course I do," Scientia says stiffly. "Neither of us are particularly effusive individuals, you and I, but it would be a mistake to think that my reticence is due to a lack of emotion rather than a desire not to interfere with your reunion, however many mistakes you seem determined to make."

"Mistakes!" Sylvia exclaims, her sympathy evaporating. "What mistakes –"

"Ladies!" Cor shouts. "Maybe now is not the time!"

They turn downhill in his direction, both of them scowling and ready to shout at him for his interference, and then they see the MT armies from the bottom of the hill charging up at them.

"Oh dear," Scientia says. "Sylvia, that opportunity to return the favor appears to have arrived."

Sylvia summons her Trident into her hands, secretly relieved that it comes as swiftly as always despite her gift of it to Prince Noctis.

"That may indeed be the case," she says, stepping in front of Scientia. She might not like the 'taur, but she will certainly protect her.

Besides, even putting aside her duty as the Oracle to defend the lives of innocent ‘taurs, there is always the fact that Scientia, having known Lunafreya these past five years, might actually have some insight into her daughter – or, for instance, into the background of that lovely jackrabbit that showed up at the last minute and insisted on joining the back-up army on the grounds that her girlfriend was going ahead with the royal party.

Given Luna's earlier mention and the extremely low chance that Aulea has abruptly developed a taste for barely-turned-eighteen-year-olds, Sylvia suspects she knows who the relevant girlfriend in question is.

"Say,” she says, “earlier, when you were listing off characteristics to ensure the survival of the children, you mentioned that both Luna and Ravus are well-trained. Wouldn't it be more correct to also mention Noctis?"

"Noctis is trained," Scientia says. "The addition of the phrase 'well' may be less than entirely appropriate, given his overwhelming inclination towards sloth."

"Sadly, as much as I adore him, I'm forced to agree," Aulea interjects, coming up from behind them. She's holding a gun very confidently. "Come this way, Regis and I found a ridge that will give us the high ground without losing visibility. If we can get a break through the fighting, we'll signal the Niflheim ships and try to see if we can get a ceasefire – it appears that the MTs have started attacking both sides."

Sylvia glances up. It takes her a second to see clearly, but she confirms that there is fighting aboard the Niflheim ships, the largely 'taur pilots and crew fighting with the on-board MT troops that appear to have turned on them.

Given the stories Sylvia has heard – and Regis has confirmed – regarding how MTs are formed, it suddenly makes sense why the Accursed teamed up with Niflheim. It wasn't just to spread the Starscourge, but to do so in the most efficient way possible. And now it appears that Niflheim, falling for his promises of power, quite literally built him an army.

They probably should have thought of that before betraying him, Sylvia thinks spitefully, before reminding herself that the interests of her people – and peace – come first, and therefore that she should pray that the ceasefire is successful rather than for the ruin of the yet-loyal soldiers of Niflheim.

It just might take a while before she really believes that. The memory of her violated house remains very near to her hearts.

"Aren't you concerned, then?" Sylvia asks Aulea, gesturing for Scientia to go first and covering her tail as she hops easily up the mountain. "About Noctis, I mean? If he's not well-trained?"

"Well," Aulea says wryly. "I mostly comfort myself by reminding myself that Noctis can summon Astrals now. That helps a remarkable amount."

"What do you mean, your summoning powers don't work?" Ravus demands, glaring at Noctis as if that's going to change the answer.

Luna glares at him. “Ravus, this isn’t helping,” she says shortly. “And if it matters, I can’t seem to use my abilities, either.”

Ravus immediately goes concerned. “You can’t? Are you well, does it –”

“I’m fine,” she hisses. “Noctis, how are you doing?”

“I’m okay, other than my magic being cut off,” Noctis says, very carefully not interjecting himself into the argument. He’s staring firmly at a blank wall, actually. They must be making a terrible scene. “I can’t even summon a basic sword right now.”

“Maybe it has something to do with this place,” Luna suggests. “Or some trap that Ardyn set up.”

The fact that the place where they have fallen is clearly not the further extension of a cavern suggests the latter, in fact. Luna's not sure how Ardyn intended to get them to fall backwards through a wall into that particular hole in the ground, but slick volcanic rock had quickly given way to the even slicker slide of sheer metals and plastics, and they'd slid all the way down some sort of ventilation shaft until they'd reached the bottom where – luckily – the gigantic fan with its shear-like arms wasn't working.

Couldn't be working, in fact: it was rusted solid, half-eaten away, and covered in dust.

But it'd been easy enough to duck through the fan and then for Ravus to kick his way through the opening on the other side, and they were able to exit the shaft through the narrow doorway shaped like a thin vertical rectangle rather than the more traditional square. It's a good thing none of them have particularly sizeable hindquarters or they would’ve had trouble fitting through.

Beyond the doorway was what was immediately recognizable, at least to Luna, as some sort of laboratory, even if there wasn't any equipment in the hallway they were standing in - linoleum tiles, blank-washed walls, dull yet perfectly even lighting suggesting the use of a local generator, a certain sense of sterility that makes her expect to see people in white coats or possible hazmat suits wandering around.

The only thing that's strange about it is how much dust there is. Dust, and cracks, and even intrepid but very strange-looking plants making their way through the walls, somehow, even this far down into a volcano.

This place, Luna concludes, is very old – and long abandoned.

"Even if it is a trap, we should go and find Ifrit," Noctis says.

"And what makes you think he'll be here?" Ravus asks scornfully. "Given that the boar-god is dead and –"

"A lab makes sense," Noctis interrupts. His back is unusually straight and he looks Ravus in the eyes. There’s something reminiscent of his father in the way he looks now, older than his ten years, and the way that Ravus falls silent in the face of that gaze. "Given that the remaining copy of Ifrit’s memory is supposed to be located in deep storage. This is as deep as it gets without going into the ocean. We need to find the computer banks."

"Because you think the Astrals are actually computer programs," Ravus says, rallying once more. It's clear from his tone that he thinks that Noctis' shocking discovery – which caused even most adults Luna knew to decide to put the implications aside and not think too hard about them – is not even worthy of consideration. "Right. The literal gods that we worship. Of course; how could I forget?"

Ravus clearly never believes anyone about anything, so perhaps it's reasonable that he also doubts Noctis about this.

Reasonable, but still infuriating.

Is it just Ravus, or are all seventeen-year-old boys this obnoxious?

"Ravus," Luna says tightly. "Noctis discovered that fact from – no, you know what? Never mind. You won’t believe me anyway, so why don’t you just shut up? Noctis and I will go exploring. You can stay here if you like."

"I'm not staying back here while you go into danger," Ravus snaps.

"Suit yourself," Luna says icily. "Come along, Noctis. Where to first?"

"Oh, boy, this is going to be so much fun," Noctis mumbles, his back returning to its habitual slouch as the aura of force he had for a few seconds there fades away. He doesn't appear to be very sincere, which isn't entirely in keeping with his usual approach to adventure - though Luna supposes it makes sense, given how much he dislikes intra-family fighting. "Okay, let's try going to the left first."

They check through the window of each door they pass by, but it's almost all the same – desks mostly rotted away, lab equipment of some arcane variety, mostly dials and measuring equipment insofar as Luna recognizes it, and where there are computers, they are clearly inoperable.

"Everything here is ancient," Noctis marvels. "It's like one of those horror video games, where at any turn something might jump out and –"

"Noctis," Luna says. "Not helpful."

Even if she'd been maybe-kinda-sorta thinking the same thing.

Iggy likes horror games, he feels that they have more 'depth' than other video games, and the game play is rather mesmerizing...especially when Luna's doing homework in the same room...

"The maps on the walls indicate that we're heading deeper into the facility," Ravus says. "Rather than doing the intelligent thing and heading out."

"Given how everything is rusting away to dust, you're being awfully presumptuous in assuming there even is a way out," Luna says archly. "Maybe if we go to those doors, the only thing we'll find will be the skeletons of the people who tried desperately and unsuccessfully to escape before the end."

"Lunafreya," Ravus says. "That is not helpful."

Noctis shoots her a thumbs up from behind Ravus' back.

Luna hides a smirk and takes a step over to the next window, intending on a brief scan before moving on – they stopped bothering with any in-depth sort of review fairly early on – and then she sees it and freezes.

The other two continue walking for another taurlength, then realize they're leaving her behind.

"Luna?" Ravus asks. "Did you find something?"

"Are they skeletons?" Noctis asks interestedly.

"No," Luna says. "Worse."

She pushes open the door and walks inside to better inspect the item that caught her interest.

"Is that what caught your attention?" Ravus says, standing by the door to hold it open as Noctis peers in over his back. "Really, Lunafreya? It's an item of furniture."

"Yes," Luna says solemnly, inspecting it with no little sense of wonder. "It is."

"What is it, though?" Noctis asks. "It's like a chair, just way too small. You can barely fit your hindquarters into it – you can't, actually. If you put your hindquarters in it, your forelegs would need to be standing up; if you put your forepaws in it, your hindquarters would be on the floor...some sort of medical assistive device, maybe? Like when people break their hindleg and need to wheel around?"

"No, Noctis," Luna says. "Your first guess was right: this is a chair."

"Why, exactly, are we devoting time to an inadequately made chair?" Ravus asks.

"It's perfectly adequate," Luna says. "If the person sitting in it doesn't have hindquarters."

"Doesn't have – what are you talking about –"

"Oh!" Noctis exclaims, interrupting Ravus. His eyes are wide. "Luna, you can't mean – a chair for humans?"

"It would explain how old everything is," Luna points out. "A human laboratory, from the days of Solheim, left abandoned after the Great Astral War –"

"They would have abandoned it when Ifrit was laid to rest here," Ravus says. His face is a little pale. "That explains why all the doors are so narrow - a human is about the same length as they are width around, so there's no consideration of someone trying to go through the door sideways or having large hind-quarters. Luna – the historical relevance of such a discovery – not to mention what diseases might be here, locked away in these walls like a tomb –"

"I'm a healer, remember?"

"One who can’t use her powers right now," Ravus points out. "And even if you could, you can't heal everything, or else –"

He cuts himself off, but Luna knows what he was going to say.

Or else you would have healed me by now.

"I am trying my hardest, you know," she says resentfully. "It's not that easy –"

"I know you are," he says, holding up a hand. "Nothing else ever crossed my mind, not for a second."

Luna considers his face, which seems sincere, and decides that she'll be appeased, just this once. After all, he's her brother and he's scared, she knows that. "Well, anyway," she says, shaking her head and heading back to the door. "I don't think there's anything more to – oh, Ramuh! There's a map in here!"

"So?" Noctis says, blinking at her. "There's been a map every half-hallway."

"This one's labelled – no, don't come in! Someone needs to hold the door in case it locks automatically."

Ravus has already come inside, but Noctis catches the door. "I've got it," he says. "Is there a computer bank?"

"It's not labelled," Ravus says with a frown.

"Yes, it is," Luna says. "See those raised bumps? That's the language for the blind."

"Wouldn't it have changed over the years?"

"Probably," Luna says, crestfallen. "But it's worth a try."

She runs her fingers over the words. They're not quite in any language she recognizes – though if she thinks of them as letters, instead of words, and thinks of her lessons in pre-Solheim dialects (thank you, Mr. Tenebrius, for all those boring ancient pottery lectures! Something Luna never thought she'd ever say!) – and then she has it.

"This one!" she points. "It says 'back'-something – or, uh, possibly hide-something, maybe tail, it's not always that easy to tell – anyway, I think it means that it's the computer room because the next word is 'server' – or maybe waiter – but assuming it's 'server' as in 'computer server', then that's what we're looking for."

"It's several floors down," Ravus says with a frown. "Isn't that a bad idea in a horror movie, going down?"

Luna hides a grin. Now even Ravus is doing it.

“At least we’re not splitting up,” Noctis points out.

Ravus makes a face.

Thus agreed, they march down the corridor to the stairwell – they don’t even bother checking the dusty elevator banks, which everyone unanimously agrees is an obvious death trap – and head down to the sublevels.

“Is it just me, or are we getting warmer?” Noctis asks. "Like - literally warmer, not metaphorically."

“It’s not just you,” Luna agrees, wiping some sweat off her brow. “Maybe that’s a good sign?”

“Or simply a sign that we’re heading down a volcano,” Ravus says gloomily.

He’s not necessarily wrong.

The computer room, when they find it, is absolutely massive – and, unlike the majority of lab, unmistakably alive.

“Okay,” Noctis says after a moment of staring at the rows and rows and rows of gigantic black-metal machines, each glowing with dozens of pinpricks of red light, the whole room humming with power, “now I’m officially creeped.”

“At least we found…something?” Luna offers. She’s creeped, too.

“Well, we should go inside – ouch!”

“Noctis!”

“I’m okay,” Noctis says, sticking his fingers into his mouth. “The doorway just gave me an electric shock when I tried to go through it.”

Luna turns her attention to the doorway, frowning. She reaches out and tries to put her hand through the door, feeling a little foolish as she does, and feeling decidedly less foolish when her hand hits some sort of invisible barrier that promptly gives her a sharp shock when she tries to go further in. “Ouch!”

“Maybe we should consult the warning signs,” Ravus says dryly; he’s come up from behind Luna without her noticing and is standing right next to her. He nods at the wall, which has a sign with a number of unrecognizable designs on it.

And at least one very recognizable design that apparently no one bothered to change in all the centuries since Solheim: a small circle with three fans going out to form an invisible outer circle.

“Radiation warning,” Luna says, shivering. “That’s why there’s a shield, I guess?”

“It feels almost like magic,” Noctis offers, frowning at the deceptively open door. “The wall, I mean. It feels like – well, it feels like when the Kingsglaive make their walls. A bit. Or like the Wall. Except a lot more hostile, somehow?”

“We should get out of here,” Ravus says. He seems upset, all of a sudden. “Let’s go.”

“I mean, I guess –”

There’s a sound from down the hallway.

They all look at each other.

“Follow the sound?” Noctis suggests, looking doubtful.

“I don’t see what our alternative is,” Luna says. “Except maybe running away in terror, which sounds more and more appealing every second.”

“Let’s go see what it is,” Ravus says, and marches off.

Luna has no idea what’s gotten into him that's suddenly made him so ready for action, but she hurries up into a trot and catches up to him, with Noctis loping along at her side.

The hallway is long and lit by the same dull generator-powered light as the rest of the facility, but even so Luna can tell that the door at the very end of the hallway contains a much brighter red light – so bright, in fact, that they can see the glow all around the windowless door.

It also gets noticeably hotter as they move closer to that room.

“Do you think this might be where Ifrit is?” Noctis asks. “He is the god of fire. Was the god of fire? What tense do you use for a dead god?”

“Is,” Luna says. “Shiva uses ‘is’, even though her original incarnated body is still lying dead in Ghorovas Rift.”

“Are you still in contact with Gentiana?” Ravus asks, side-eying her a little.

Luna flushes. “Only sometimes,” she says primly. “And we don’t talk about her being Shiva.”

Gentiana’s rule, but one that Luna’s more than happy to follow. Every once in a while she remembers that she’s gossiping about her relationship developments (the Crowe v. Cindy debate! Crowe eventually finding a new girlfriend back on Galahd, thereby solving that problem! Cindy inviting Luna for a midnight ride and Luna stressing out for hours if it was a date or not! The sheer excitement of finding out that yes, in fact, it was a date! Finally ‘tauring up and asking Cindy to be her girlfriend! Agreeing that they're going to stick to kissing for now until Luna feels more ready!) with an actual goddess and she gets weirded out by it all, but she refuses to give it up. Gentiana is too good a confidant, and anyway, Gentiana seems to enjoy it just as much.

Still weird to think about, which is why Luna firmly doesn’t whenever possible.

“Should we go inside?” Noctis asks, gnawing at his lower lip and staring at the door with the red light and the heat.

“I don’t think we have a choice at this point,” Luna says, but she doesn’t move. None of them do; they just stand there and stare at the door.

After a few seconds, Noctis audibly gulps and takes a step forward, reaching for the door.

“Wait!” Ravus exclaims. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out one of his gloves. “Use this – the door handle might be hot.”

“Thanks. Good idea.” Noctis takes one glove and uses it to gingerly wrap around the door handle, then he pulls it open.

There’s an unexpected pull, as if of wind, and they all stumble straight into the room, even Noctis, and the door swings ominously shut behind them. It’s a vast room, filled with computer stations and laboratory equipment, and at the end of the room there is a giant set of thick metal doors with the radiation symbol painted on them.

And sitting before them all, there he is: Ifrit, the Infernian, in all of his towering glory.

The boar-god isn’t as large as some of the other Astrals have been when they manifested, but he still towers over the three of them, a dozen feet tall and nearly as long, a massive presence that dominates the room even as he reclines in an equally massive throne surrounded by flame.

“Oh,” Luna says, trying not to gulp. She’s faced Astrals before, but they don’t normally have an expression of such blank indifference on their face. Still, she’s the Oracle, and speaking to the Astrals is her duty. She steps forward. “Infernian,” she calls. “We have come, Oracle and Chosen King –” To be, she mentally adds. “– and we seek an audience with you.”

“You entered my domain,” he says, and his face suddenly twitches to the side, twisting into a terrible snarl of rage before returning to its uninterested expression. “You are invaders – you are here to steal -”

Steal?

“We’re not here to steal anything,” Luna says quickly. “We’re –”

“You cannot have them,” Ifrit says, his booming voice easily overriding hers. “No one may have them. The forbidden weapons were locked away and banned, and no living being may access them.”

“Weapons?” Ravus asks. "What weapons?"

“No one may have them,” Ifrit says again. He’s not speaking to them, Luna realizes; he’s reciting some long-ago speech, set like a hound to watch for intruders without discrimination – reduced, perhaps, to the unthinking computer program he was once long ago. What a terrible fate for a living creature, no matter how mechanical their origin. “You have come to steal them, and for this you will die.”

“No,” Luna says. “You don’t understand, we’re here to seek the Covenant –”

Ravus tackles her to the floor just in time for the burst of flame to explode over her head.

“Noctis!” she shouts, but Noctis has also taken cover behind one of the computer stations in the room.

“I’m okay!” he shouts back. “Luna – these forbidden weapons he's talking about – do you think he means the nukes? The ones that nearly destroyed the world? They’re here?”

“That would explain the radiation symbol,” Luna says, scooting herself back behind one of the other computer stations, Ravus scrambling to join her. That’s absolutely horrifying – she’d always thought they were gone, somehow – and she really hopes Noctis is wrong, but she thinks he’s probably right.

She peers around the side of the station. Ifrit is still sitting there, but his face keeps changing: initially calm and indifferent, then metamorphosing into terrible rage for a split second, then returning to the original state.

Rage…

That reminds her. Titan, too, had been struggling with rage – here, though, there is no struggle. Ifrit is consumed by rage, but cannot control himself, the rage breaking free at random intervals even without any impetus.

“He’s been corrupted with the Starscourge,” Luna calls, even as Noctis scrambles from one computer station to another as Ifrit throws flame at the one he had been at before. “Much worse than Titan was. He won’t listen to us – I don’t think he even can anymore.”

“We still have to get that Covenant,” Noctis calls back. His face is white. “The MTs outside...”

An army. And Lucis had brought its own army, too, and with Luna and Ravus and Noctis missing, their parents would almost certainly order an attack.

There would be battle, and with battle – death. So much death.

And all for nothing, if they do not succeed here.

“We have to get it,” she agrees, and stands up.

“What are you doing?” Ravus demands.

“What I need to,” she says, and grabs one of the weird human chairs and throws it right at Ifrit.

After all, there are many different ways of defeating an Astral to obtain the mark of their Covenant – and one of those ways is the obvious.

“Oh for the love of – here, use this at the very least,” Ravus says, pushing a long knife into her hand. He has another in his own; he must have smuggled them in his jacket. “I’ll keep an eye on Noctis; he’s hopeless.”

Noctis has started throwing whatever he can get his hands on – usually broken computer parts – at Ifrit, and missing half the time.

“You’re – letting me do this on my own?” Luna asks, a little stupidly.

“I should’ve listened to you,” Ravus tells her. “About – everything. I should’ve given you that respect. And part of that respect is knowing that if my baby sister can wipe the floor with me in the middle of a temper tantrum, Ifrit won’t know what hit him.”

Amazing, really, how Ravus can be simultaneously so incredibly awesome but also annoying at the same time.

Must be a brother thing.

“Go save Noctis from his own laziness,” Luna says, beaming at Ravus. “I’m on Ifrit.”

She rounds the other side of the computer station – Ifrit is snarling at Noctis, who finally managed to score a direct hit, pegging the Astral in the head with a spare microscope – and charges into Ifrit’s blind spot, slashing with the knife and then leaping away just in time, his burst of flame very nearly singeing her small tuft of a tail.

Ravus goes in from the other side as Ifrit turns to her, slashing down low and aiming for his forelegs, and Ifrit’s seated position interferes with his attempt to dodge. Ravus falls back at once. “Now, Noctis!”

Noctis jumps up from behind the computer station and heaves something large and metallic over his head.

It hits Ifrit dead in the chest, causing the Astral to rear backwards, shake his head, and then – worryingly – rise up from his throne.

“This is going to go badly very quickly,” Luna shouts. “We can’t get his Covenant until he’s defeated – we can’t talk to him as long as he’s corrupted by the Starscourge, and my healing abilities aren’t working!”

“We need to get to his memory!” Noctis shouts back.

“What does that mean?” Ravus asks, grabbing Noctis and pulling him out of the (quite literal) line of fire.

“The computer banks! They’re the only other thing in this whole complex that’s still active, and he’s an AI, remember? If we purge his memory and restart, we might be able to talk to a non-corrupted version of him!”

“But we can’t enter the computer banks!” Luna points out, then notices that Ravus has gone still. “Ravus, duck!”

He dodges, just barely missing the missile of flame Ifrit sends out with a wave of his hand.

“You can’t lose attention like that,” Luna scolds, ducking behind a computer station. "We're in the middle of a fight, you know, it's dangerous to -"

“I can do it,” Ravus says.

“No, you can’t, that’s what I’m saying –”

“No, the computer banks,” he says, crouching down behind the same station as her, with Noctis at his side. “I can enter them.”

“What?” Noctis and Luna chorus together.

“I tried it, earlier,” Ravus says. “I could put my hand through, where neither of you could, but when I did, my veins turned…black.”

Noctis looks confused, but Luna gets it immediately. “The Starscourge.”

“I’m infected,” Ravus confirms. “That room – I think it’s infected, too, somehow. That’s why it would let me in, but not you: you’re too pure.” He swallows. "I can go and restart the system."

"But if your hand turned black, then whatever's in that room is aggravating the Starscourge already in your system," Luna protests. "And without my abilities to heal you – and who knows where Mom is –"

"I know," Ravus says. "It's okay. I'll do it anyway." He smiles shakily. "We're at war, right? For the future?"

Luna hugs him. "You come back right away," she says fiercely in his ear. "Right away, and we'll find our way out of this place, and we'll heal you. You got that? Don't you dare die on me."

He just hugs her back. "Keep an eye on Noctis, will you?"

"I can –" Noctis starts, but then Ravus hands him the knife and it looks like it hits Noctis all at once, the fact that they might die here. "Oh."

"Good luck," Ravus says, and then he's gone.

"Noctis, we've got to keep Ifrit distracted so he doesn't notice what Ravus is doing," Luna says. She can't think about the fact that her brother - her brother, who she's finally made up with, who she adores and forgives and wants back at her side already - is going off into such terrible danger. She can't, or else she's going to get fried - and she'd really rather not be fried 'taur. "That's our job, you and me. Okay?"

Noctis nods. "Got it."

"Let's go!"

#final fantasy xv #ffxv #lunafreya nox fleuret #ravus nox fleuret #noctis lucis caelum #sylva nox fleuret #apollonia scientia #cor leonis #aulea lucis caelum #my fic #nocturne

[libraryresources]

Wikispaces: Youth Services Librarianship - English Language Learners

[By the time you see this, Wikispaces will have shut down due to financial troubles. This transcription (July 2018) is my attempt to preserve professional knowledge for the youth library field, until such a time that a new, updated resource becomes available! c: ]

(Last revised: 2011-2013)

Introduction

Non-native speakers of English is a broad category that refers to a diverse group of youth services patrons. It describes youth and caregivers who are learning English, and as well as children of immigrants who speak English, but do not operate in it with the fluency of a native speaker. This latter group is sometimes labeled "Generation 1.5" because it is comprised of people who arrived to the U.S. as children, and therefore straddle a place between their first generation parents and second generation siblings. Although there are several terms to refer to non-native English speakers, this article will use ELL (English Language Learner).

Public libraries have a long history of serving ELL patrons. In addition to providing access to educational materials for English learning and citizenship exams, many also offer English classes. Though historically librarians sought to speed the "Americanization" of foreign-born patrons through education, recent efforts recognize the importance of embracing multiculturalism, and changing the library to reflect its community. These efforts include events and fairs that celebrate ELLs' cultures, bilingual storytimes, foreign language materials for children and adults, and circulation paperwork and signage translated into multiple languages.

Even if your library does not currently serve ELL patrons, it cannot hurt to be prepared, especially as demographics shift. Around 12% of the current American population is foreign-born, with over half hailing from Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by immigrants from Asia, Europe and Africa. In recent years, the foreign-born population has also become more widely disbursed; while over half of immigrants still mainly reside in 6 states (California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Florida), many more recent arrivals are settling in the Midwest and South. An ALA study of non-English speakers in public libraries revealed that most of the participating libraries were located in places with populations under 100,000. In 2006, the Department of Education reported that ELL children are the fastest growing student population, and projected that 1 in 4 students will be ELL students in 2025.

Youth services departments and school libraries can play a critical role in the education and cultural adjustment of young ELL patrons and their families. They are safe places, and offer opportunities to speak with friendly and interested English speaking adults. They have access to print and multimedia materials that will help them learn and practice English. Materials available in their language may encourage them to read to a child if they're an adult, or help them scaffold their learning if they're literate in that language. Foreign language materials, as well as items in the collection, library decoration, publicity, or events that reflect their culture will also make them feel more comfortable. These efforts will help them feel like the library is for them, and that they are true members of the community. Youth services staff have the opportunity to represent the core values of the profession by reaching out to people from different backgrounds: "we, as public library youth services managers, must lead the fight to uphold democracy here."

What's in a name?

There are many acronyms and terms associated with non-native English speakers. What term best fits your community?

ESL – English as a Second Language Describes the type of program that enrolls non-native English speakers, rather than the speakers themselves. Also tends to be inaccurate, since many non-native English speakers know multiple languages, and English may be a third or fourth language.

ESOL – English for Speakers of Other Languages. Like ESL, this describes English language programs

ELL – English Language Learner. A term that has become more widely used in K-12

Gen. 1.5 – A group that arrived to the U.S. as children and grew up in it, but may not have the language and cultural fluency, or U.S. citizenship, of their second generation siblings A relatively new term to describe an old phenomenon.

Immigrant – A person who leaves his country and settles in another.

Refugee – A person who cannot return to his country due to persecution or a "well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, membership in a social group, political opinion, or national origin." Although refugees are commonly lumped in to the broader classification of "immigrant," they do not have control over where they will resettle.

Asylee – A person who seeks refuge in another country to escape persecution. They must travel to and enter the U.S. before they can apply for asylum.

For more information, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees has a comprehensive glossary of terms associated with U.S. immigration.

History

The history of library outreach to ELL patrons stretches back to beginning of American public libraries. The rise of public libraries coincided with the great influx of immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many librarians embraced services to immigrants to help ease their assimilation into American society. Libraries offered English classes, and promoted access to educational English and citizenship books, as well as foreign language materials.

Some libraries, like the Cleveland Public Library, established home libraries in neighborhoods that were far from library branches, which included many immigrant neighborhoods. Additional branch libraries were also added in factories, fire stations, and elementary schools. Some elementary school branch libraries also included adult materials in foreign languages so that ELL children could take home reading material for their parents. Multilingual story hours and youth clubs held in other languages also helped promote library service to immigrants.

Collaborations between libraries and and social service agencies were also common; librarians participated in citizenship classes to better understand naturalization requirements, and worked with social workers and instructors to identify immigrant communities and needs.

As early as 1916, the ALA discussed the possibility of creating a unit for librarians who worked with immigranta and ELLs. Within two years, in 1918, the ALA formed a committee: the Round Table on Work with the Foreign Born, which existed for thirty years.

Programming and Outreach

Librarians in the early 20th century recognized the importance of leaving the library and bringing services to the community. They proactively established home libraries in immigrant neighborhoods, and visited English and citizenship classes for insight into ELLs' needs. This outreach was important because immigrants were isolated, not only physically from the nearest library, but socially from the English speakers. Isolation is still very present in the lives of non-native English speakers. The state of isolation for today's American immigrants may be even stronger if they are illiterate, have no English experience, and settle in an area where no one else shares their culture or language. The 2008 ALA survey of ELL services in libraries notes: “Yet increasingly libraries...are more and more struggling to serve those linguistically isolated--a growing number that do not speak or understand English at a high enough level to understand the most elemental of communications.

Library programming and outreach can alleviate isolation by bringing the community together. Bilingual storytimes and family programs give both parents and children a social outlet and opportunity to form friendships. Some libraries have also used this time to introduce ELL families to the library with a tour and library card sign-up.

The Vancouver Public Library reported several success stories for how bilingual storytime changed its participants lives. A Chinese woman who was too shy and embarrassed about her English to visit the library, started attending regularly after she was approached and invited by a Chinese librarian. She later reported that the storytime helped her and her child became more sociable, and become friends with other families. A woman in a similar parent child group for Filipinos revealed that the friends she had made helped her become less dependent on her husband.

While the programs may help children develop literacy skills, parents also benefit through developing networks with other parents. Programs can also boost parents' confidence by encouraging them to participate and share their culture through traditional songs and rhymes.

Culture fairs are another great form of programming that can greatly benefit a neighborhood and improve relations between ELLs and native English speakers. Hilltop Library in Columbus, OH organized an event called "Latino Day" in order to promote library services to Latinos and promote Latino culture to the non-Latinos in the neighborhood. Over 270 people attended and the library collaborated with local restaurants and businesses to provide food and entertainment. Culture fairs are a fun way for the library to assert that ELLs belong to the library community, and that the library is a respectful and welcoming place.

Aarene Storms (2012) suggests creating a teen English discussion group to help teen ELL students practice their vernacular in a low pressure environment with other teens in ways that the more academic-centric school programs don’t allow time for. She provides a guide for starting your own that discusses the how to advertise and manage a teen talk group as well as the importance of flexible scheduling, teen leaders, and (of course) snacks.

Programming and outreach are also important because they can bridge the literacy divide. If ELLs do not come from a culture of recreational reading, and reading is the main activity they associate with the library, they're not likely to make a visit. Programming is an activity that can educate and entertain users from multiple cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds. This was one of the conclusions of the 2008 ALA report: “The emphasis on family programming, as well as targeting programming and collection to children, was powerful. This type of effort begins to overcome a major barrier that non-English speaking adults face ‘lack of reading and library habit,’ as well as ‘lack of knowledge about the library.’

School Libraries and ELLs

Nearly 5 million students in public schools across the country are ELLs. As the population of ELLs in schools continues to grow, school library media specialists must adapt in order to increase educational opportunities for their students who do not have native fluency in English. Students' linguistic backgrounds can affect not only their ability to comprehend what is happening in the classroom, but can also affect instructors' perceptions of students' abilities. Additionally, cultural backgrounds can also affect the way students approach school and learning. School library media specialists have the opportunity to act as advocates for students in multiple ways.

School libraries can push for incorporating multilingual and multicultural resources across the curriculum, not simply in language arts classes. School libraries can, for example, collect newspapers, music, or web resources from students’ countries of birth, based on in-depth knowledge of their communities. Using technology such as MP3 audio can be incredibly useful in supporting language instruction. If it’s feasible for your library, circulating MP3 players and downloading audiobook version of texts that students’ classes are reading can allow the student to both read and hear their assigned reading—or their personal reading as well.

If your district has dedicated ELL instruction, working with teachers to identify useful materials for instructional purposes can help support students in efficient ways. For example, the school librarian and ELL teachers at H.O. Wheeler Elementary School in Burlington, Vermont worked together to create visual aides for their students with limited to no English. These aides helped children convey their meal choices in the cafeteria, and understand the concept of a fire drill. The librarian also contacted a software company and explained the needs of their ELL students, and the company donated software, software licenses, and a computer in response.

Librarians can also act as a safe haven for ELL students in unfamiliar territory. School librarians have suggested the following techniques:

Learn ELL students’ names, welcome them personally, and recruit them as library volunteers.

Attempt to learn your users’ languages—greet students in their languages.

Display materials and posters for celebrations of diverse holidays, festivals, and heritage events.

School libraries are also uniquely poised to engage parents in literacy initiatives to strengthen communities and support their students. According to some reports, one-third to one-half of ELL students’ parents have less than a high school education. Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento has a high population of Hmong refugees. In order to engage students with reading materials of their own choosing and to promote parent engagement in their children’s education. the school librarian created a webliography of “talking stories” to help develop English skills and provided take-home laptops for students to use with their parents. The “talking stories” then helped encourage students to select library materials based on topics of interest. Involving parents of ELL students can be beneficial because parent engagement can “support students by developing parent relationships, strengthening families, and helping families develop more English skills and self-confidence so they can feel more energized and capable of working to improve their local communities.”

Collection Development

Reading often and broadly is one of the best ways to acquire vocabulary and learn a language. As librarians, we can help ELL users through thoughtful collection development that encourages them to read and use the library as much as possible. This means incorporating multiple types of resources and formats into the collection. It also means striving to find materials in ELLs’ native languages, as well as materials that respectfully reflect their culture.

Belmont Public Library, English as a Second Language webpage

A good collection will contain resources that support multiple learning styles and build off prior knowledge. Reading materials are important, but ELLs also need reference sources, like dictionaries, pictures, and bilingual and native language materials. Visuals can provide context for vocabulary words, and effectively explain unfamiliar concepts, such as information literacy.

Electronic resources often have many benefits; for example, students can see a word, hear it, and practice technology skills simultaneously. Different resources allow the patron to connect to new vocabulary in multiple ways and contexts, which strengthens their understanding and transfer of knowledge.

Marie Kelsey suggests that in addition to fiction materials, youth nonfiction with clear and concise writing can help develop vocabulary and awareness of concepts. She particularly recommends photo essays, which use copious illustrations to complement ideas in the book and make them easier to follow. Developing a diverse collection of compelling photo essays is beneficial to libraries on multiple levels--including supporting their ELL patrons.

Multilingual and multicultural resources not only enable ELLs to build off their knowledge base, they also motivate them to read. ELL parents will be more likely to read to their child and interact with them if they have books in their language. Pre-readers can gain enormous benefit from these interactions with their parents, regardless of language, because they are still learning literacy skills like narration, print awareness, and print motivation. Older children and adolescents are more likely to read material with themes they connect to and characters with whom they identify. They may also feel more motivated to learn in general if their self-esteem and “sense of belonging” is strengthened through the inclusion of materials representing their culture.

The challenge of collecting materials from other languages and cultures may be intimidating for librarians who do not belong to those groups. How can one discern if the materials are authentic and high quality? Your community will be one of the best sources of advice about what to collect and where to find it. This community includes not only ELLs, but ELL instructors, who may supply you with specific suggestions about what resources could supplement their lessons. Patrons may also be a valuable source of advice about whether there are local booksellers that carry materials in lesser known languages, like Bengali or Tamil. In terms of judging quality, Information scholar Denise Agosto suggests examining a work with five standards in mind: accuracy, expertise, respect, purpose, and quality.

She also recommends keeping an eye on multicultural award winners, like the Pura Belpre Award.

Examples:

Muzzy is a language learning program developed by the BBC for children with several language options, including English. It includes many cheerful animations and a storyline about a royal family in a fictional land that runs through the lessons. It provides video examples of phrases and matching exercises, unfortunately instructions are given in English. This is not a complete class in language development, but could be a useful supplement to ESL classes for children. For libraries with sizable ELL populations that provide children’s computers with preloaded games, consider devoting a computer to this program.

Mango is another language learning program that is marketed towards adults, but would be appropriate for middle grade and teen users as well. In addition to language learning for English speakers, it has a variety of courses for ELLs that includes written and verbal instructions in their selected native language. It also allows a microphone component for recording speech. One advantage of a subscription to this service is that it can be useful for both English and non-English speaking patrons, however focus is on conversational skills, so it is not a substitute for formal language classes.

Advice:

Be clear about the concept of a bilingual library because it can be defined in two different ways and whichever way you choose to interpret it would affect collection development. A bilingual library can be either a library with two distinct collections, one collection in English and one collection of exclusively foreign language material, or it can be a library with an English language collection and a collection of material that is both in English and in a foreign language within the same book. You can, of course, have both kinds of materials, but you should be aware of the distinction.

Order resources for a variety of learning levels because students may have been places in a grade level based on their age, but their reading level in their native language may be different and you want to be able to accommodate as many patrons as possible.

Do your research when looking for reviews and ordering from vendors. Although it is easier to order from the same vendor that you have always used for materials in English, there are vendors that specialize in non-English language material, and some vendors, like Follett and Baker & Taylor that have special divisions for non-English language material. Also consider publishers that focus on multicultural material (e.g. Lee & Low Books) which often includes titles in languages other than English, and publishers that specialize in foreign language material (e.g. Lectorum) to make sure you are getting a full and complete collection to serve your population of English Language Learners.

Attend as many conferences and professional development sessions as you can. As noted above, contributions and suggestions from the community you are trying to serve can be invaluable, but engaging with other professionals who also serve non-native English speaking patrons is another great way to get new ideas for cultivating your own collection.

There are grants out there specifically designed to help meet the needs of English Language Learners, such as those provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for educated kids and racial equity, and the ELL mini grants funded by the National Writing Project that are given annually. It is important to be prepared when these opportunities arise by doing an assessment to find out what is lacking in your own collection and what you might need to better serve your diverse patron base.

For more on multicultural collection development click here.

Technology

In an ever-increasingly digital world, it is necessary to make sure that ELLs are able to have access to library digital resources. Library patrons may be unintentionally excluded digitally by providing instructions for using technology solely in English. “The ability to teach and provide written instruction in the patron’s native language is often overlooked, but the patron rarely complains because of the lack of English-speaking skills or embarrassment.” Providing instructions for using computers, the Internet, and library digital resources in languages of need is one way to increase ELLs’ success in using your library. For example, the Brooklyn Public Library has an program called TELL—Technology Literacy for English Language Learners—that provides basic computer instruction for those whose limited proficiency in English makes other technological literacy classes unfeasible. Even just having translated versions of your website can promote access to your constituency: the Brooklyn Public Library’s website is accessible in French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Hebrew, the most commonly spoken foreign languages in the borough.

Visual OPACs provide another option for increasing your library’s accessibility for ELLs. Visual OPACs offer the option to toggle between text and images for OPAC records. Visual OPACs display search results with images of book covers, as well as “excerpts from chapters, video clips, audio files, magazine articles, or web site addresses.” These tools also allow users to search the catalog by clicking on icons or using integrated word processing programs. Some visual OPACs are customizable, allowing librarians to create lists—such as those books that might be required by a class or a list of books of interest for a display—and add icons to the search interface. Using these kinds of tools are powerful for increasing the ability of ELLs, who may not have the language skills necessary to run a sophisticated library search, to access library materials on their own.

As has been noted with Muzzy and Mango, technological resources can also help as language-learning tools. Electronic resources can help meet demands for English as a second language teaching tools and classes in public—and possibly even school—libraries. Resources such as audiobooks designed to teach English, streaming video (like those offered by the Orange County Library System, which are designed by professional ESOL instructors), and computer-supported courses like Rosetta Stone and ELLIS can provide unique opportunities for ELLs. “In addition to offering ESOL teaching opportunities free to patrons, these resources allow the Library to offer alternatives that do not limit patrons to fixed schedules and do not require the Library to hire tutors.”

Ensuring Equal Access

In her article, The Myth of Equal Access, Cary Meltzer Frostick argues that one of the biggest challenges facing libraries is providing equitable access information and education when serving a diverse collection of patrons. Providing patrons with the best possible assistance is always a bit challenging, but it can be especially difficult when those patrons speak a different language or have different cultural expectations. Being mindful of the obstacles posed by serving a diverse group of patrons, we have included a few important issues that may help guide your library’s policies and procedures to help ensure equality of access and the most effective service,

Literacy and Reading Habits

In the American Library Association’s 2007 report, “Serving non-English Speakers in U.S. Public Libraries,” literacy is described as one of the largest barriers for non-native English speaking patrons to using the library facilities and services. Non-native English speakers, just like other patrons who have limited or non-traditional literacy skills, or do not come from a familial environment where recreational reading is encouraged, may be less intrinsically motivated to visit the library, and would thus be unaware of the variety of helpful services that public libraries offer including literacy programs (one of the most common programs found in public libraries that serve non-native English speaking communities), technology and computer skills classes, and free and available internet access. The promotion of these services within the library and outside in the community could help alleviate this problem.

Library Facilities and Services

According to the “Serving Non-English Speakers” report, knowledge of the library and its role in the community is the second biggest barrier to ELLs using the library. Some families may have different perceptions about the function of a public “library.” For example, in several Latin American countries, libraries are not open for public browsing, but rather use a system of paging for materials and are often utilized solely by specialists and researchers. This is important to consider when trying marketing the library’s programs and services, like literacy programs, bilingual storytimes, and media classes, because those may seem very foreign to someone not familiar with a typical public library in the United States.

Once you get patrons into the library, there are other problems of access in the general administration of the library including the process of getting a library card, which may seem simple, but might actually be challenging for a non-native English speaker. To address this concern, try creating card applications that are more user friendly by adapting them to use the applicant’s native language, not asking for legal status, and allowing applicants to use an official photo ID from any country or a school ID as long as it is accompanied by postmarked mail from within the library’s service area.

Access to Collections

Providing a balanced collection of up-to-date materials, both fiction and nonfiction is the responsibility of a library that wants to provide an equitable level of service of all members of the community, but simply collecting the materials is not enough. Patrons should be able to access the materials easily and independently both in the catalog and the physical organization and display of the materials. The non-English language materials should be cataloged (as best as possible) in the original language or script so as to provide bibliographic access in English and the original language.

If the material is housed separately, make sure it is visible and accessible to the community with directional signage in the languages of the major linguistic groups that would be using that collection.

Other Possible Challenges

Challenges to bilingual education affect funding and support for non-English materials and teaching in languages other than English. It is important to prepare for backlash by those who think that resources spent on non-native English speakers takes away from money spent on native English speakers. Samuel Huntington's 2004 article "The Hispanic Challenge," presented a number of reasons that the author, a Harvard Political Scientist, warned that the recent influx of Mexican immigrants threatened "to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages." Huntington wrote, "the United States ignores this challenge at its peril." Many politicians and educators strongly disagree with Huntington, arguing that bilingualism is not a threat but an opportunity. An editorial in Rethinking Schools argues that bilingual education is both civil right, citing the 1974 Lau vs. Nichols court case, and a human right; they refer to the Convention on the Rights of a Child, adopted by the United Nations in 1989, which states that "the education of the child should be directed to ... the development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values" (ctd in "Bilingual Education is a Human and a Civil Right”).

These arguments can be especially heated in communities where immigration is a divisive issue. Harrington (2012) suggests countering these arguments by collecting demographics to support the importance of these services, getting board members and staff agreement, and selling the library as a resource that helps parents adapt to cultural, language, and legal differences. Your programs and collections are also more defensible if they are unique to the community. If there are still concerns, remember that using politically motivated means to manipulate the library’s collection in order to alienate any particular group is a “marginalizing act” and goes against the intention of a public institution. Libraries should be providing free and open access to information that serves the needs of all members of the community. For helpful ideas and advice on how to enact this policy, please see Reforma’s Librarian’s Toolkit for Responding Effectively to Anti-Immigrant Sentiment.

Best Practices and Strategies

Collaboration

Collaboration both in and out of the library is one of the best ways libraries can effectively serve ELL patrons. Community agencies such as refugee resettlement agencies, Adult Education and ELL programs, advocacy groups, and--most of all--ethnic community groups, can pool resources with libraries to solve specific needs and offer more holistic assistance. In school libraries, librarians can work with ELL teachers to creatively overcome language barriers with students. Here are some examples of how librarians have solved problems through collaboration:

Library cards

The Utica Public Library worked with the Utica school district to issue every public school student a library card. Using the child’s school as proof of address eliminated a step and made it easier for ELL students to get cards. The school district also funded the translation of library card applications.

ELL classes and cultural programming

Columbus Library was able to offer free English classes in many of its branches by volunteering the use of its meeting rooms to the Columbus Literacy Council for classes several nights a week. The library also joined forces with several ethnic restaurants, stores, and the Friends of the Library to organize a cultural night to welcome the growing Latino population to the area and celebrate their culture.

Cultural miscommunication and behavioral disturbances

When a Columbus Library branch started having disciplinary problems with the local Somali teens, the branch manager contacted Somali community groups to seek advice from Somali elders. The elders suggested create and clearly display signs about behavior rules and translate them into Somali. The branch also began to offer homework tutoring after school.

Outreach

One way to deal with challenges of perception and access is to create a portable library. A Bookmobile well equipped with diverse language materials and ready to help with library card applications can be an initial welcome into the library and eliminate transportation problems found in low income communities. A cheerfully painted van or bus in a patron’s own neighborhood can be less intimidating than walking into a brick and mortar building. King and Shanks (2000) also advocate using a bus that can be equipped with internet terminals and audio-visual equipment as a way of demonstrating the various resources of a library and changing conceptions of those who come from cultures where libraries are formal, academic resources. An additional advantage of using the bus is that they can easily be brought to schools and ELL programs for convenient visits. Pairing these visits with bilingual story-times can be the perfect library introduction for young patrons.

Staff Training and Education

When there was an influx of Somali refugees to Columbus, OH, the Northern Lights Branch devoted a staff in-service to education about this new patron population. The branch manager invited leaders in the Somali community, and staff from the local refugee resettlement agency to share information for the staff about the Somalia's history and the present situation for refugees.

Re-evaluate Current Policies and Procedures

The Utica Public Library had to reconsider policies and procedures that didn't fit the realities of their ELL patrons. Some of these rule changes were allowing more than one child at a computer, issuing a warning rather than eviction for cursing, and removing children's limited borrowing privileges on DVDs.

Respect and Empathy

In her article, "Culturally Speaking," Sherry York provides some practical advice about treating ELL students with respect and empathy. She urges readers to avoid singling out students and embarrassing them, asking "simple questions that require only short answers," remembering what it's like to learn a new language and that one can always understand more than she can actually express (and speaking loudly to an ELL student doesn't help). She also points out that ELL students may have had to change their names upon coming to the U.S., and that the expectations of schools in other countries, and the student's culture, inform their behavior

Be an advocate!

Utica Public Library Youth Service Manager Cary Meltzer Frostick learned to be an advocate for her young ELL patrons and help change policies in their favor by collecting sympathetic stories and regularly relating them to the director, board members, and other important people in the community. This raised both the importance of the library in the public eye, and importance of extending equal access to ELLs in the community.

Resources

General

The American Dream Starts @ your library. – A toolkit of resources developed by the American Library Association to improve library service to foreign-born patrons.Thirty-four libraries contributed to extensive bibliographies, a history of libraries and immigrant outreach, and examples of best practices that have emerged through other libraries' experiences. Though some links no longer work, the bibliography and examples are still very valuable to any library serving ELLs.

**Arlington Public Library New Americans Page** – A libguide geared towards new foreign-born residents in Arlington, Virginia.

Library Service to Special Population Children and their Caregivers – A committee of (ALSC) Association for Library Service to Children that advocates for and works to improve library services to ELL children and their caregivers.

NCELA-National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition

Ohio Library Council Diversity Awareness and Resources Committee, Children's Services

REFORMA (The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking) – ALA affiliate that represents the interests of Latino and Spanish speaking patrons through collection development, staff recruitment, and outreach efforts that educate libraries about Latino users and Latino users about libraries.

Spanish Language Literature - S.A.L.S.A. – This wiki provides strategies, professional development opportunities and resources in Spanish and in English about how to best serve the Latino community in school and public libraries. It includes book lists, collection development ideas, and publisher information as well as loads of other resources.

Serving Non-English Speakers in U.S Public Libraries – The 2008 ALA report about the state of public library services to non-English speakers.

Programming

Arlington County Bilingual Storytime Youtube Channel – This is the Youtube page of Cuentos y Mas, or Stories and More, a bilingual Spanish storytime filmed and featured on the Arlington Virginia Network. Includes about 20 episodes.

Dia – El día de los niños/ El día de los libros (Children's Day/Book Day) is an opportunity to recognize reading in the lives of children around the world. Founded by writer and poet Pat Mora, in collaboration with REFORMA, Dia is currently sponsored by ALSC and celebrated on April 30. Started in 1997, the event grows each year; over 300 libraries participated in 2011, its 15th anniversary. ALSC currently offers Webinars and educational resources for Dia on its website.

Multicultural Programs for Tweens and Teens,by Linda B. Alexander and Nahyun Kwon. American Library Association: 2010.

Windows on the World: Multicultural festivals for schools and libraries, by Alan Heath. Scarecrow Press: 1995.

Collection development

A,B,C's of Student Resources – a website provided by Champaign Schools containing helpful links that ESL patrons can use to learn English. Offers links to various topics such as idioms, games, flash cards and translation website etc.

Celebrating Cuentos: promoting Latino children’s literature and literacy in classrooms and libraries, ed. Jamie Campbell Naidoo. Libraries Unlimited: 2010 – Collection of articles and advice from Latino educators, librarians and authors. Includes comprehensive bibliography, historical overview, and programming ideas.

Colorín Colorado! – This is a free web-based service that provides information, activities and advice for educators and Spanish-speaking families of English language learners (ELLs).

ESL Kids Stuff – Features flash cards and educational activities for parents and ELL teachers to use with children. Great website to add to the collection.

Integrating Multicultural Literature in Libraries and Classrooms in Secondary Schools, by KaaVonia Hinton and Gail K. Dickinson. Linworth Publishing: 2007.

International Children's Digital Library – Digital library of foreign language books, available as e-books. The current collection is 4468 books in 55 languages.

Internet Public Library Pathfinder for Multicultural Literature for Children

Multicultural and Diverse Children's Literature LibGuide – LibGuide created by Michigan State University

Multicultural Review – A journal devoted to reviewing multicultural resources, including work published by small presses.

Reading is Fun-Reading Planet Book Zone – Interactive book site that users can create reviews read, recommend books, watch and listen to books.

Santillana Spotlight on English – Research and standards-based K-5 Program which helps ESL students develop English language proficiency and access grade-level content.

Starfall – a free public service to teach children to read with phonics.

Recommended Publishers and Review Sources

This list was adapted from a similar one given in "Bilingual Books: Promoting Literacy and Biliteracy in the Second-Language and Mainstream Classroom."

Arte Público Press – Its imprint for children and young adults, Piñata Books, is dedicated to the realistic and authentic portrayal of the themes, languages, characters, and customs of Hispanic culture in the United States.

Bilingual Books for Kids

China Sprout

China Sprout promotes learning of Chinese language and culture by providing Chinese and English books relating to Chinese language, Chinese test, Chinese food, Chinese zodiac, Chinese symbols, Chinese music, Chinese tea, Chinese calligraphy, Chinese New Year, Moon Festival, Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Chinese Arts.

Cinco Puntos Press – Publisher of adult and children's literature, and multicultural and bilingual books from Texas, the Mexican-American border, and Mexico.

Del Sol Books – Spanish, English, and Bilingual Children's Books and Music.

Hoopoe Books for Children – Stories from Central Asia and the Middle East available in a variety of languages.

Lectorum – One of the largest Spanish-language book distributors in the United States with a catalog of over 25,000 titles.

Lee & Low Books – An independent children's book publisher specializing in multicultural themes and authors and illustrators of color.

Mantra Lingua – This is a UK based publishing house, but offers dual language resources in over 50 languages, including less collected languages like Tamil and Yoruba, which means it could prove to be a very helpful resource.

Pan Asian Publications – It publishes bilingual picture books of Chinese folktales, stories, and legends to promote Chinese and other East Asian cultures.

Works Cited

Adams, Helen R. 2011. "Welcoming America's Newest Immigrants: Providing Access to Resources and Services for English Language Learners." School Library Monthly 27 (10), 50-51.

Agosto, Denise. 2007. "Building a Multicultural School Library: Issues and Challenges," Teacher Librarian, February, pp. 27-31

American Library Association. 2007. “Literature Review (2010)." Every Child Ready to Read @ Your Library.

American Library Association. 2010. "Public Libraries." The State of America's Libraries.

American Library Association. 2010. "School Libraries." The State of America's Libraries.

American Library Association Office for Research and Statistics. 2008."Serving Non-English Speakers: 2007 Analysis of Demographics, Services and Programs.

Asher, Curt. 2011. "The Progressive Past: How History Can Help Us Serve Generation 1.5." Reference and User Services Quarterly 51 (1): 43-48.

"Bilingual Education is a Human and a Civil Right.” Rethinking Schools Online. Winter 2002/2003. Web. 28 Nov 2011. www.rethinkingschools.org

Brisco, Shonda. 2006. "Visual OPACs." Library Media Connection 25 (3), 56-57.

The Cleveland Public Library. 1908.The Work of the Cleveland Public Library with Children.

Corona, Elena and Lauren Armour. 2007. "Providing Support for English Language Learner Services." Library Media Connection 25 (6).

DelGuidice, M. (2007). Cultivating a Spanish and Bilingual Collection: Ensuring the Information Literacy Connection. Library Media Connection, 26(3), 34-35.

Ernst-Slavit, G., & Mulhern, M. (2003). "Bilingual Books: Promoting Literacy and Biliteracy in the Second-Language and Mainstream Classroom." Reading Online, 7(2). Retrieved from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=ernst-slavit/index.html.

Ferlazzo, Larry. "Family Literacy, English Language Learners, and Parent Engagement." Library Media Collection 28 (1), 20-21.

Frostick, Cary Meltzer. 2009. "The Myth of Equal Access: Bridging the Gap with Diverse Patrons." Children and Libraries 7 (3).

"Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Multilingual Collections and Services." (2007). Reference & User Services Quarterly, 47(2), 198-200.

Harada, Violet H. and Sandra Hughes-Hassell. 2007. "Facing the Reform Challenge: Teacher-Librarians as Change Agents." Teacher Librarian 35 (2), 8-13.

Harrington, L. (2012) ELL programs in public libraries. Public Libraries, 51(5), 10-11.

Huntington, Samuel. “The Hispanic Challenge.” Foreign Policy. March/April 2004. Web. 26 Nov 2011. www.foreignpolicy.com.

Kelsey, Marie. 2011. "Compel Students to Read with Compelling Nonfiction." Knowledge Quest 39(4), 34-39.

King, B., & Shanks, T. (2000). This is not your father’s bookmobile. Library Journal, 125(10), 14.

MacCann, Donnarae. 1989. "Library Service to Immigrants and 'Minorities': A Study in Contrasts." In Social Responsibilities in Librarianship: Essays on Equality, ed. by Donnarae MacCann. Jefferson, NC: Metarland & Co: 97-116.

Mack-Harvin, Dionne. 2007. "Speaking the Language at the Brooklyn Public Library." Kirkus Reviews 75 (21), Special Section 1-3.

Mates, Barbara. 2004. "Who Aren't You Serving Digitally?." Library Technology Reports 40 (3), 6-9.

Melillo, Paolo. 2007. "Transforming ESOL-Learning Opportunities through Technology." Florida Libraries 50 (2), 11-13.

Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich, Lisa M. Dorner and Jennifer F. Reynolds.2006. “Children.” In Immigration in America Today: An Encyclopedia. Eidted by Larry J. Estrada, James Loucky, Jeannne Armstrong. Santa Barbara, Greenwood. http://ebooks.abc-clio.com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/reader.aspx?isbn=9780313083099&id=GR1214-779.

Patton, J. (2008). You're Not Bilingual, So What?. Library Media Connection, 26(7), 22-25.

Prendergast, Tess. 2011.“Beyond Storytime: Children’s Librarians Collaborating in Communities." Children and Libraries 9 (1) Spring.

Quesada, Todd D. 2007. "Spanish Spoken Here." American Libraries 38 (10), 40-44.

Reforma. (2006). Librarian’s toolkit for responding effectively to anti-immigrant sentiment. Retrieved from http://www.reforma.org/content.asp?contentid=67

Riley, Bobby. 2008. "Immersing the Library in English Language Learning." Library Media Connection:

Shelley, Kristin. 2004. “The Faces of Change in Columbus.” Ohio Libraries Vol. 17, Iss. 2; p. 10

Storms, A. (2012). Talk Time for Teens, Alki, 28(2), 16-17.

Walters, Nathan P. and Edward N. Trevelyan. 2011. "The Newly Arrived Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 2010. " American Community Survey Briefs. U.S. Census Bureau.

York, Sherry. 2008. "Culturally Speaking: English Language Learners." Library Media Connection 26 (7).

[Tumblr transcriber: Camilla Y-B]

#library community #wikispaces #professional development #library #librarian #english language learners #english as a second language #Youth Library Services

[khalilhumam]

Just before COVID-19, American migration hit a 73-year low

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/just-before-covid-19-american-migration-hit-a-73-year-low/

Just before COVID-19, American migration hit a 73-year low

By William H. Frey In the year before COVID-19 swept the country, a smaller share of Americans changed residence than in any year since 1947, when the Census Bureau first started collecting annual migration statistics. This migration decline occurred during an upswing in the economy, when young adult millennials were beginning to get back on their feet after the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. While no comparable migration statistics are available for the 10 months since the pandemic occurred, there now appears to be a new mix of migration patterns across different parts of the country, as evidenced by real estate, moving, and survey data suggesting selective migration upticks and downticks due to both safety and economic concerns. Still, newly released pre-pandemic census statistics show a continuation of the decades-long migration decline, bringing the percentage of Americans who changed residence to a post-World War II low of 9.3%. This one-year rate—between March 2019 and March 2020—occurred on the heels of a year when the nation’s total population growth fell to a 100-year low, with a continued downturn in the nation’s foreign-born population gains. Thus, even before the pandemic, the nation was in the throes of stagnating demographic dynamics. The new migration statistics draw from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which has tracked American relocations since 1947. They allow for analyses of different kinds of domestic moves over that 73-year period, chronicling a continued stagnation of American mobility. Especially noteworthy are the migration declines for the nation’s young adult population, now mostly occupied by millennials.

The long pre-pandemic decline in American migration

U.S. migration trends show a fairly consistent decline since the late 1940s to 1960s, when approximately one-fifth of Americans changed residence annually. This was a period of economic growth and robust housing consumption, with a younger population than today. Afterwards began a gradual but sustained downturn in migration due to a variety of demographic and economic forces, including the rise of dual-earner households (making them less footloose), an aging population, and more homogenous labor markets emerging across the country. By the late 1990s, only about 15% to 16% of the population moved each year, dropping to 13% to 14% in the early 2000s. Migration dropped even further—to the 11% to 12% range—after the Great Recession, no doubt reflecting the immediate impact of housing and labor market crashes. Since 2012, it has continued dropping to this year’s new low of 9.3%. It is important to note that while both local moves (those within counties) and longer-distance moves (those across counties) have declined since the immediate postwar decades, their downturn has become more sustained since the recession and post-recession period. As shown in Figure 2a, local mobility hovered in the 8% to 9% range between 2005 and 2010. Since then, local mobility has plummeted to 5.4%. Because local moves comprise three-fifths of all moves, their consistent downward trend drove the overall pattern. Since 2007 (the first year of the Great Recession), cross-county movement has hovered between 3.5% to 3.7%, as shown in Figure 2b. Prior to this, cross-county mobility levels were 4% or higher—including rates in the 5% to 6% range in the 1990s. To better understand the downward trends in local and cross-county moves, it is useful to understand the different motivations for each. According to recent census surveys, more than half of local movers cite housing-related reasons such as the desire for new, better, or more affordable housing. Another quarter cite family reasons, including establishing a new household or a change in marital status. A plurality of longer-distance movers, on the other hand, cite labor market reasons such as starting or relocating to a new job for their migration. Changes in the nation’s housing market and labor market both during and subsequent to the economically turbulent late 2000 to 2010 decade could have been responsible for migration declines for most of the 2010 to 2020 decade.

Millennials became stuck in place

While the migration slowdown occurred among most segments of the population, it is important to focus on young adults ages 18 to 34. This is historically the most mobile class of Americans, and can numerically drive the overall migration trend. But over the past decade, the millennial generation—a large portion of this group—has borne the brunt of housing and job crises that have deeply affected their mobility. Figure 3 shows the rates of mobility by age in 2005 to 2006 and 2019 to 2020. It makes plain that young adults (the group with highest mobility rates in both years) showed the largest decline in those rates. For example, among young people ages 20 to 24, only 19% made a move between March 2019 and March 2020, down from 29% in 2005 to 2006. As the figure indicates, this downturn in mobility also affected the movement of children under age 18, who are largely the offspring of these young adults. When focusing on annual changes in migration rates for 25- to 34-year-olds over this span, distinct patterns emerge for both local and cross-county migration (see Figures 4a and 4b). These patterns are broadly consistent with overall U.S. trends, and suggest that young adults are the driving force for them. Local migration for this age group dropped from a pre-2010 rate of 14% to 15% to a low of 10% in the year before the pandemic. Likewise, cross-county migration after 2006 hovers between 6% to 7%, down from rates of 8% or higher before. Millennials moving into this age group were saddled with “stuck-in-place” issues associated with higher housing costs and underemployment, leading them to postpone key life events such as marriage, childbearing, and homeownership. And even though renters tend to move more frequently than owners, the rental market has become increasingly unaffordable. The new census data shows that annual migration rates of renter households have declined precipitously over time (from 30.2% in 2005 to 2006 to 17.7% in 2019 to 2020). On the other hand, cross-county migration trends for young adults—while not reaching pre-2006 levels—have fluctuated over the past decade.

Migration during and after the pandemic

A demographic stagnation has characterized the nation over the course of the 2010 to 2020 decade, alongside a downturn in within-U.S. migration right up to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.   Clearly some aspects of stagnation (lower immigration, more deaths, and lower birth rates) are likely to continue as the country struggles to cope with health and economic challenges. But what about internal migration? There is evidence of some immediate COVID-19-induced migration of residents fleeing some large cities, and others—including young adults—are seeking a safe haven by living with other family members. And after an initial dampening of housing markets, some parts of the country have experienced a market uptick. But it is yet to be determined how permanent any of these pandemic-related migration patterns turn out to be. In the long run, after the widespread adoption of a vaccine and a more normal housing market prevails, migraton rates could continue to shift downward, as they have fairly consistently done over the past few decades. For example, increased telecommuting may reduce employment-related migration. Much of this is now unknown. What is known is that internal migration in the last decade—and especially in the year before the pandemic—reached historic lows, particularly among young adults.  These millennials and Gen Z youths are now in their peak migration ages, but the pandemic has hit them hard. Their future mobility—and that of upcoming generations—will tell us whether or not the country’s recent “immobility” will continue. If so, it would reinforce America’s demographic stagnation in ways that could further reduce dynamism in the nation’s housing and labor markets.

[displacedprincess]

Pachamama -  An all-female resistance group against the Shuriki dictatorship in Avalor.

Who?: Started by close friend of Princess Elena, Daya Vidal, and other noblewomen, spread throughout Avalor City, then to the rest of the country. A collection of girl gangs more or less. Trans-inclusive. Magicks and mundus alike. Members are called Sisters.  Why?: The mission of Pachamama is to resist the illegal government of Shuriki and the oppressive laws its put in place, and to look out for the well-being of other women who have been put in bad situations from the conflict in and around Avalor City.

Where?: All over Avalor. Branches in conflict areas can deal in some resistance violence alongside other resistance groups. All branches are involved in peaceful demonstrations. 

In October of 2015, the month following Shuriki’s coup that deposed Crown Princess Elena, Dayana Vidal and other pro-crown noblewomen formed an opposition group called Pachamama. Despite a benevolent interpretation in modern times, in pre-Hispanic culture, Pachamama is often a cruel goddess eager to collect her sacrifices. The women felt this was quite symbolic. Pachamama grew from just a small group of Avaloran noblewomen, to a large all-female network of girl gangs in opposition to Shuriki. Some use guerrilla-like violence to fight her henchmen, in areas that are hotbeds for conflict, and Pachamama members have been responsible for at least three known failed assassination plots on the dictator since the group’s inception.

The group’s main focus though, is women helping women. Helping look at women whose husbands have been killed or imprisoned, looking after orphans of disappeared parents or children who were in the once-robust-now-broken foster system, helping out disabled women and their families, teaching women to grow home gardens to combat rising food costs, and educating children in the handful of parts of Avalor where it’s become too dangerous to function remotely normally.

Pachamama fighters and activists also aid pro-crown rebel groups with supplies and medical care, runs safehouses for anti-Shuriki magicks in light of her attempts to make them submit or risk being purged, operate a print regional newsletter in each county/district/etc; a weekly nation-wide podcast, an online news site, organizes demonstrations; and a range of other things to aid in the resistance.

Many of Pachamama’s members are any combination of educated, multilingual, and tech savvy. The group was started by noblewomen, most of whom had university degrees, all of whom were more than bilingual. Prior to the coup, Avalor’s public universities were very accessible to even the poorest Avalorans, so members all the way down the socioeconomic ladder bring skills to the table.

Daya’s vision for Pachamama’s media outreach was to spread the truth and hope, and that’s how it’s continued on as since her 2016 death.

The podcast is broadcast simultaneously in Spanish and Portuguese. There’s two separate groups of hosts, one primarily Spanish-speaking, one primarily Portuguese-speaking, and they discuss the same topics. Of course, it’s two different conversations so the exact content differs, but the gist is the same. The podcast’s Spanish transcript is then translated into Arabic, Farsi, Cantonese, and other common at-home languages in Avalor by younger immigrants or first-gen Avalorans in the group or by men allied with them, and also into English, French, and German to further awareness of the situation in Avalor.

Avalor’s foster care system was once the global ideal, but its become neglected post-coup. Several nonprofits and private citizens around the country have stepped up when possible. So has Pachamama; wealthy women involved with the group house who they can in their big mansions. Women of more average means generally will take in one to three extra kids or teens if they choose too. In areas still generally safe, the children go to school and live more or less like normal. In less safe areas, they are educated as best as possible by members.

Older children and teens will help Pachamama members operate safehouses sometimes. Usually they are the homeowner’s own children, sometimes not. Women who run safehouses will often take in a kid or teen or two since they have the space anyway.

Not all they do is peaceful, though.

In mid-2016, a group of six women were executed for planting a bomb at a social event with the intent to kill Shuriki. They were led by Lady Serafina Molina, aged 30, who was a good friend of Chancellor Esteban before the coup. The others were Lady Camila Maradona (22), Duchess Genoveva Pacheco (27), Lady Paula Valderrama (24), Lady Pilar Castillo (26, cousin of Elena’s, father’s side), y Representative Salete Requião (33).

#gun tw #explosion tw #readmore for general wartime topics discussed #&&...hc #tw #smoking tw #bdrptask #tw guns #take me home [avalor]

[newstfionline]

Headlines

After wildfire smoke clears, protests resume in Portland (AP) Protesters returned to the streets of Portland, Oregon, following a dayslong pause largely due to poor air quality from wildfires on the West Coast. Police declared an unlawful assembly Friday night in a neighborhood near a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building where protesters had marched, according to a police statement. Demonstrators participated in criminal activity and threw items at officers, police said, leading to 11 arrests.

Police: 2 dead, 14 wounded at party in Rochester, New York (AP) Gunfire at a backyard party killed two people and wounded 14 others early Saturday in Rochester, New York, a city that has been roiled in recent weeks by outrage over the suffocation death of Daniel Prude. As many as 100 people were at the gathering when the shooting started just before 12:30 a.m., Acting Police Chief Mark Simmons told reporters. A man and woman, estimated to be in their late teens or early 20s, were killed, Simmons said. The 14 wounded by gunfire were not believed to have life-threatening injuries. They were all between the ages of 17 and 23, police tweeted Saturday morning.

Tropical Storm Beta spurs hurricane worries for Texas (AP) An exceptionally busy Atlantic hurricane season was churning along Saturday as the Texas coast prepared for a tropical storm that could strengthen into a hurricane before breaching its shores in the week ahead. Both the city of Galveston and Galveston County on Saturday issued voluntary evacuation orders ahead of Tropical Storm Beta, as did the city of Seabrook to the north of Galveston. Mayor Pro Tem Craig Brown said in a statement that high tides and up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) of expected rainfall would leave roads impassable, especially along the city’s west end and low-lying areas. If Beta makes landfall in Texas, it would be the ninth named storm to make landfall in the continental U.S. in 2020, tying a record set in 1916, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach.

Street life slowly returns to Mexico (Los Angeles Times) The stream of vehicles bearing flowers and lost lives has not abated, but vendors are back at the gates of the San Mateo Tlaltenango cemetery. Street life and all its attendant hubbub—crowded buses and trains, packed parks, jammed highways—have been returning gradually to this metropolis of more than 20 million. Social distancing mandates are often flouted, though masks are the norm. Remote learning remains in place at schools, and large gatherings are still banned. Both deaths and cases have been on the decline in recent weeks, as have the percentage of positive tests. But health authorities have warned of potential new outbreaks, especially if people abandon caution.

Peru president survives impeachment vote amid virus turmoil (AP) Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra easily survived an impeachment vote Friday night after opposition lawmakers failed to amass enough support to oust the leader as the country copes with one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. The decision came after long hours of debate in which legislators blasted Vizcarra but also questioned whether a rushed impeachment process would only create more turmoil in the middle of a health and economic crisis. In the end, only 32 lawmakers voted to remove the president, while 78 voted against and 15 abstained. A two-thirds majority was needed to oust Vizcarra.

New UK lockdown likely sooner rather than later: former advisor (Reuters) Britain is likely to need to reintroduce some national coronavirus lockdown measures sooner rather than later, a former senior government health advisor said on Saturday. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that he did not want another national lockdown but that new restrictions may be needed because the country was facing an “inevitable” second wave of COVID-19. Ministers were on Friday reported to be considering a second national lockdown after new COVID-19 cases almost doubled to 6,000 per day, hospital admissions rose and infection rates soared across parts of northern England and London.

Deputy PM says time is right for Spain to become a republic (Reuters) Spain’s far-left deputy prime minister said on Saturday that a financial scandal which has rocked the royal family had presented an “historic moment” to push for a republic. Pablo Iglesias, leader of the Unidas Podemos party, the junior partner in Spain’s coalition government, said the monarchy was no longer relevant to a younger generation. “Less and less people in Spain understand, especially young people, that in the 21st century citizens cannot choose who their head of state is and that he does not have to answer to justice like any citizen and cannot be removed from charge if you commit a crime,” Iglesias told a party meeting. Spain’s former King Juan Carlos left the country under a cloud of scandal last month and is living in the United Arab Emirates. Once a popular monarch, he abdicated in favour of his son Felipe in 2014 after a tax fraud case involving members of his family and an ill-judged elephant hunting trip at a time when Spaniards were struggling with a deep recession.

After Fire at Refugee Camp, Europe Faces a Reckoning (NYT) A 31-year-old law school graduate, Masomeh Etemadi says she left Iran with her husband and two children to escape persecution as a Hazara minority. Now, she says, she doesn’t care where in Europe her family ends up. As long as it isn’t here. “Here” is between two olive trees on a hillside near what, until last week, was Europe’s largest refugee camp, Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos. The camp, whose cramped and squalid conditions had made it a byword for the desperation of migrants trying to reach Europe, was set alight by an angry group of its inhabitants protesting coronavirus restrictions. Some 12,600 people were left homeless. “Europe says, ‘We want to help refugees.’ Greece says, ‘We don’t want you here,’ and I understand that—there aren’t even enough jobs for the locals,” Ms. Etemadi said as she changed a diaper in the shade of a tree. “But if Europe really wants to help us, why don’t they come here and help us?” The answer to her question—one that continues to haunt Europe—amounts to a kind of migrant fatigue that has yet to subside even years after the continent’s migration crisis has. Next week, the European Union will try once again to fix its broken asylum system by forging a new compromise among its member states, a process that will force it to confront its inadequate response. Few issues are more heated, and most leaders wish it would simply go away.

Belarus police detain hundreds of protesters in Minsk (Reuters) Belarusian police detained hundreds of protesters in central Minsk on Saturday, a witness said, as around 2,000 people marched through the city demanding that President Alexander Lukashenko step down. Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, has been rocked by mass street protests since Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory in an Aug. 9 presidential election that his opponents say was rigged. He denies their accusation.

Biggest Thai protest in years targets government and monarchy (Reuters) Around 20,000 people protested in Thailand’s capital on Saturday against the government of former coup leader and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, with many demonstrators also calling for reforms to the monarchy. Protests have been building in the southeast Asian country since mid July, demanding the removal of the government, a new constitution and elections. They have also broken a long-standing taboo by criticising the monarchy of King Maha Vajiralongkorn. The king was not in Thailand and has spent much of his time in Europe since taking the throne from his late father in 2016.

Singapore says it’ll start paying people to work out with Apple’s smartwatch (CNN) Singapore announced Tuesday that it would reward residents with hundreds of dollars if they use a new health app designed for the Apple Watch. The app encourages users to exercise and complete certain activities each week, such as walking, swimming or practicing yoga. It also reminds users to sign up for health check-ups and immunization appointments. By checking off those goals, users can earn up to 380 Singapore dollars (about $280). In a statement, Apple described the partnership as “the first of its kind.” Singapore is known for its tech-savvy approach to public issues. It was one of the first countries to roll out a contact-tracing app to halt the spread of the coronavirus this year. It also deployed a robot “dog” to patrol a park and encourage social distancing this summer.

Islamic State is flush with cash (WSJ) Islamic State remains flush with cash despite setbacks in the past year, holding financial reserves and a range of revenue streams that U.S. and Western security officials warn could pay for a dangerous resurgence. The extremist organization and its affiliates have assets ranging into the hundreds of millions of dollars across the Middle East and Central Asia, according to the officials and government records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “The underlying conditions that allowed for the rise of ISIS remain,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, in charge of U.S. Central Command, said last month. “They continue to aspire to regain control of physical terrain. Without sustained pressure, they have the potential to do so in a relatively short period of time.”

#headlines #news

[kellynakamatsu]

Mental Health is Wealth

Episode 4:

Welcome, to the most meaningful episode that will be starred in this blog. In this episode, mental health will be the star of the show. If you are Asian American and have parents and/or family that have immigrated from a country in Asia, it is most likely not common to talk about feelings and hardships. Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) families who are considered foreign have been raised to always be grateful for every opportunity they have been offered and to always obey the rules. If you are reading this and you are a first or second-generation child, then your parents probably immigrated to America to reap the benefits this country has to offer. Just like my mother did. To be clear, I am not blaming our immigrated family members for having the mentality to work hard and be grateful, but unfortunately, times are evolving.  People are evolving. Most Asian Americans have coherently adapted to the evolvement. Mental health issues such as high stress, depression, anxiety, etc. are at an all-time high due to several circumstances in an individual’s life.

Mental health awareness has not been deemed important or seen as “real” in an Asian society when in actuality it is. This is because it is seen more like a “disruption” rather than a dangerous matter (Park, 434). The lack of communication upon the issue can create several stressors for a human because not mentioning “disruptions” that may occur is normalized. Going against the grain, AAPI parents, is not easy to do let alone achieve. This is because of the way they were raised. Being unable to talk about the trials and tribulations that first and second-generation AAPI’s are going through is extremely difficult. Lisa Park, an Asian American woman, had written a letter to her passed sister that had me question the model minority stigma. Park’s sister had committed suicide due to the pressures from her parents to become a well-developed Asian, also known as the Model Minority. Park’s father and mother were “perpetual foreigners” that wanted their children to assimilate to Western culture, but also still be the model citizen they were “meant to be”. The Park family assumed that “The American Dream promises that each generation will be more successful than the preceding ones, but we are proof that assimilation is making us worse” (Park, 441). The process of assimilation was her sister having to deal with racism, bullying, and the biggest contender of all; depression (Park, 436). One quote from the letter to her sister that resonated with me the most was, “Your suicide was finally something that belonged to you” (Park, 439). Being part of the “model minority” stigma means that your future does not belong to you but in most cases, it is your family’s.

As a first-generation Filipina myself, I am expected to manage straight A’s in every class. As a model minority, it is expected that I live a prosperous life. It is expected of me to focus on my education and not my social life unless it has to do with academics. Most importantly, Filipinx parents expect their children to move into a profession that they can brag to their friends about, based on personal experience. Being a model minority rises the question of when does our life actually become our own and not our family’s life? Millennial and Gen Z Asian Americans have grown up around social media which means that more likely than not, they have been victims of peer pressure. That makes us very different from our immigrated parents. There are so many opportunities that we are able to achieve instead of the ones listed as normalized according to the “model minority” myth. The problem in most Asian households is that our parents or extended families are stuck in their generation due to normalizing mental health issues and trauma. As I have said before, AAPI young adults are evolving. I think it is time that we are able to talk about anything and everything in the Asian community. There is no need for us to keep our expressions and emotions bottled up and pushed to the side anymore because with the way things that have been going, mental health disparities are not disappearing anytime soon.

[thewebofslime]

After probing his deep-state background and Illuminati connections, I was hoping to be rid of the Jeffrey Epstein file but here we are spinning another round in this Part IV of a saga of sexual perversion and financial crime that refuses to go away. It's a cold day in hell for me to find any agreement with The Daily Beast, which means the Netherworld must now be sufficiently frozen to toss a few snowballs at child-porn producer Nicholas Negroponte and his acolyte Joi Ito. As founder of the MIT Media Lab and his pedophilia sex-fiend buddies with American diplomats and major corporations, including Boeing, all in with the George W. Bush team, Negroponte was involved in systematic rape and video production of kiddie porn at a Phnom Penh orphanage, that was busted by "the Father's group" of anti-pedophile activists, which included Wayne Madsen, the late Gerald Thorns and me. Those tiny victims, mostly boys ranged from six to 14 years of age, along with a few subteen girls for some hetero action, until their expulsion on orders of Queen Monica of Cambodia. These crimes of underage porn produced at the MIT Media Lab later culminated in that coven's role in the murder of reddit editor and anti-pedophile activist Aaron Swartz in January 2013. To give credit where's it's due, the Beast exposed Epstein's secretive funneling of investment funds through Nick Negroponte's MIT Media Lab as a conduit to tech "start-ups" involved in next-gen sexual perversion to amuse the mind-raped heirs of elite families when they get a bit older with their own bio-synthesized AI-capable sex androids, presumably modeled after young kids from your neighborhood. Jeffrey Epstein, who had a personal preference for teenage girls, was their angel investor, providing an estimated one million dollars or more to the Lab's bag-man Joichi "Joi" Ito, whose background check discloses zero academic or engineering qualifications for being in charge of anything except the janitorial service at MIT, indicative again of the intellectual level of the baboons with the Bush crime mob and their queer pals in the Obama regime, who managed to subvert academia. Further on, this essay will examine the occult Shabbatean roots of the Greek Jewish Negroponte family from Calchika, the Venetian fortress of Negroponte on the Aegean island of Euboea (Evvia) where their pimping Khazarian Jew ancestors flourished in the service of the Doge of Venice and the Ottoman court, as continued into our present era in Ambassador John Negroponte's relishing of the perverse sadistic torture at Abu Graibh Prison in military-occupied Iraq. The elite's sex crimes against defenseless children are legacy operations of cults that operate in secret like vampire covens in Eastern Europe and Turkey as depicted in the "Underworld" series and the Dracula movies. Nick and John, you diabolical scum, walk quickly on dark nights though you've tired with age, because it's never too late for the ghosts of your victims to insert and squeeze the castration tongs when you least expect it. Ventriloquist's puppet The stand-in for Nick Negroponte as current lab director, Joi Ito, has just apologized for his secret meetings inside Epstein's posh homes to collect "gifts and funds" to MIT along with an undisclosed amount for Ito's private investment company. Under pressure of media coverage, MIT disclosed that Jeffrey Epstein donated $800,000 to Joi Ito and Seth Lloyd, the latter involved in quantum computing theory, without providing further details as to the specifics of project allocation. Ito claimed the MIT Media Lab received $200,000 of that sum and admitted that Epstein also channeled an undisclosed amount into one of Ito's private investment fund. This funneling of large sums of money, of unknown origin (when Epstein's prime business client Les Wexner is now complaining about grand larceny due to misappropriation from his fortune) is a financial crime implicating Ito and possibly other individuals with the governing board at the Media Lab and MIT administration. To assume Negroponte had no insider knowledge is absurd considering his crime biography. Instead of launching a credible investigation into the MIT-Epstein nexus, the university administration has quietly encouraged a "non-official" petition by Media Lab faculty, fellows, staffers and students in support of bag-man Ito to retain his position as crook-in-chief, even though he has, this late in the game, failed to disclose any specifics about the amounts, recipient research projects and individuals involved, and the purposes of Epstein's funding. Due discipline at major universities, including MIT, requires legal contracts for major donations, which Ito and his board have failed to produce for public inspection. His admission of a secret financial relationship with Epstein came long after the media expose of the donor's sexual misconduct with underage girls. The complicity of DARPA and the National Science Foundation in this campaign of misdirection under a blanket cover-up is yet to be exposed. This level of financial fraud demands FBI action and Massachusetts state attorney general's probe into the MIT Media Lab, including its role in the Cambodian pedophile-child porn project and the murder of Aaron Swartz. The nexus of evil must be dismantled in a court of law and the culprits assigned long prison terms. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos needs to step into this quagmire, which threatens to suck down MIT and Harvard into a swamp of distrust. Minority Report Contrary to the ethically stunted majority of MIT Media labbers, two of its professionals resigned in protest of the hidden relationship between Ito and Epstein, and undoubted its shadow director Negroponte. As reported in CBS News: "Ethan Zuckerman, director of the lab's Center for Civic Media, said that director Joi Ito had failed to disclose the deceased financier's funding of the MIT incubator as well as investments Epstein made in Ito's personal venture capital fund. "Visiting scholar Nathan Matias, who works on the social impact of online platforms, said in a blog post that he, too, was severing ties with the Media Lab over business relations that occurred after Epstein's 'appalling crimes were already known.'" Well done, gentlemen, for setting an ethical example. Two honest individuals versus 100 ethically impaired careerists who signed the support letter, plus several cowards who remain anonymous, in favor of Ito's continuing as director. This is a scandal of academic complicity in criminal activities and ethical lapses at one of the nation's most respected institutions of higher learning, setting a disgraceful example for America's system of higher education. That said, who and what is Joi Ito? Houseboy in Charge Due to the moral influence of my father from a samurai clan who went off to war in the U.S. Army's 442nd Regiment against the Nazi-led forces in Europe (yes, there is such a thing as real men among wimpy Asian Americans), I get uncomfortable whenever having to discuss our subservient immigrant phenomena of "houseboys" like actor James Shigeta, Lt. Sulu aka George Takei and this creepy Joichi Ito, and various mango smoothies named Cary or Grant. Orientalism, with its sexual exoticism, is a powerful undercurrent in Western societies that have neocolonial commercial interests in Asia, with Ito's suspect role as a purveyor to pedophiles of Japanese child porn being a case in point. Joichi Ito's academic biography is noteworthy for its lack of mention of graduation from any university, not even with a bachelor's degree, having been a dropout from Tufts and the University of Chicago. One of his disappointed teachers said that Joi believed himself to be too "creative" but actually was too lazy and undisciplined to attend class. His curriculum vita is otherwise packed with honorary mentions and highfalutin titles, obviously exchanged for generous donations by this fraudster. Institutional bribery bought his ticket to ride. PSY op Tokyo His "big start" in tech came with development of the PSY network in Tokyo, thanks to a little help from Cable and Wireless PLC, a private-sector telecom that fronted for the British CGHQ spy agency (equivalent to the NSA) operating out of Hong Kong and Australia. The Brit intel connection also links the Negroponte brothers to UK Princes Charles and Philip, those descendants of the King of Greece, a Brit-installed puppet during the Greek independence struggle against the Ottoman Turks in which Lord Byron figured so publicly. Is the MIT Media Lab actually a British intelligence outpost in the Ivy League? What else can explain Joi Ito' mercurial rise based on nothing but hot air? Anyway in the early 1990s, Japan's early Internet system was being developed by a coalition of computer departments at leading universities, which called itself TWICS. In that early phase, my Japan Times Weekly webpage was the runaway leading website in Japan, but was forced to shut down under the threat of an advertising boycott made against the parent newspaper by Dentsu, then the world's largest ad agency, which boldly told our executives about its plan to control the top 5 websites in Japan for online advertising purposes. My replacement website was titled "Archipelago", a description for insular Japan borrowed from Alexander Solzenitsyn's novel "The Gulag Archipelago". At that moment, Joichi Ito was a bit player, virtually unknown who made his first fortune quietly from the British imperial spy apparatus. The GCHQ, for those who have not kept up with the Brit spooks, has more recently been directly implicated in the Russiagate scandal against Donald Trump, the rise of Huawei out of colonial-era Hong Kong, and John Podesta's excursion to New Zealand for the false-flag staged at ISIS mosques in Christchurch, plus a player in Ghislaine Maxwell's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the hidden hand behind the Negroponte neocon brothers and the MIT Media Lab. Therefore, this logical thread suggests that the British top queers aka the Rothschild-Goldsmith cabal were ultimately behind the murder of Aaron Swartz and before that the arson that killed banker Edmond Safra, patron of the Aleppo biblical and Torah scholars opposed to the Illuminati State of Israel. The Illuminati fingerprints are all over the Epstein-Wexner-Maxwell affair. Absurdity always accompanies evil, that is provided by Joi's sister Mimi, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine who "studies" geek "culture", for instance, computer gaming without her having any clue of how cheats and points are traded for money by these ethically stunted young criminals spending all their hours in game parlors (to avoided being tracked down by cybersleuths). Then again, she's probably spent a lot of geeky hours in the dark web trolling for virtual goods to sell to sexually bent gamers. It's hard to believe that top universities are permitting pseudo-academic "researchers", but then again whenever I meet intellectually devoid professors I start to believe in the improbable. Brit Fags Now what does British-Australian intelligence have to do with child porn during Joi Ito's early Internet days in Tokyo? I can recall one of my sub-editors who was married to staffer at the Australian Embassy expressing her dismay at embassy cocktail parties, where the male staffers (to the disgust of their wives) boasting about their outrageous sexual exploits against little brown boys and girls, in a game of one-upsmanship between cringeworthy pedophiles. That was in the same time frame that several European diplomats were arrested at their home-country airports for possession of child porn. One Spanish offender, who was second secretary at the Tokyo embassy, was caught bringing in a couple of suitcases full of Japanese child-sex videos, which included Caucasian men raping sub-teens and even infants. The Japanese yakuza-owned studios were the world's leading producer of child rape and S&M videos, available in uncensored format only for export. The underground trade and file-sharing over the Internet at his PSY operation (TWICS would have detected massive online porn) should explain how Joi Ito endeared himself to the high-end pedophile studio known as the MIT Media Lab. In that early era of the Internet, videos were too large for file-transfer and so shipments by TNT overnight air-express (the American founder of TNT was a serial rapist of underage Filipina girls). Ah, yes, those golden days of underage rape across Asia from Japan to Thailand. Pressure from the Interpol forced the Japanese pedophile video industry to go underground. Many outsiders have wondered what accounts for the grotesque genres of Japan's porn industry including elaborate knot-tying bondage, dripping candle infliction of pain, student gang-rape of teachers, 100-to-1 ratios of men to lone woman in the semen coverage rituals called bukkake, scatalogical poop fests, golden showers, female ejaculation, "new-half" trannydom and other demented rites with a rear-religious quality akin to Satanism? Partly because of racism payback whenever the more bizarre sex acts are staged by the ethnic Korean mafia out to humiliate the Japanese, much like how the Jewish cabaret owners in Weimar Berlin took out their race hatred against German Christians though deviant performances like the dog leash walk, scat-eating coprophilia acts (still enjoyed by Eric Schmidt and his Google technology freaks from Stanford), transvestism, leather and rubber fetishes, lesbian shows, and so on. Underdogs can be rabid vicious mutts that need to be put down before their affronts to public decency bring on another race war by the majority against the criminalized minority. Koreans like the Jews indulge in complaints against discrimination while failing to address the question of provocation, as seen among many newer minorities in the USA with their Antifa posturing and nudity at gay-lesbian marches. If one was to be accepted, learn to live with others instead of assaulting their sense of decency. CV of a Faker Back to the Joi boy, the socially approved innocent who was appointed at Harvard Law as a "professor at Practice" (whatever that means): "Ito is chairman of the board of PureTech Health and serves on several other boards, including The New York Times Company, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation. He is also the former chairman and CEO of Creative Commons, and a former board member of ICANN, The Open Source Initiative, and The Mozilla Foundation. Ito is a serial entrepreneur who helped start and run numerous companies including one of the first web companies in Japan, Digital Garage, and the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, PSINet Japan/IIKK. He has been an early-stage investor in many companies, including Formlabs, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits, and Twitter. He has received a lifetime achievement award from Oxford Internet Institute" Impressive for a college dropout." Blah-blah-blah. Show us the credentials. Joi Ito is one of those tech con artists, spewing optimistic predictions to gain the naive trust of gullible investors and foundation grant-makers, not an educator or researcher, which is exactly what's wrong with the over-leveraged, absurdly hyped tech sector and the Ivy League, where inventiveness is mainly focused on ridiculous e-commerce scams, redundant apps and counterfeit digital currencies. The bust of tech shares is looming, promising to wipe-out bigger than the dot.com bust. Sayonara, Elon and Zuck! Last and least mentionable: "Ito has been awarded honorary doctorates from The New School and Tufts University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ito is a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School." So he failed attend classes in his freshman year at Tufts and now Ito has a doctorate from that same prestigious institution of higher learning. What a disgrace for Tufts! Pull your kids out of that fraudulent diploma mill. Because on Christmas I hope to give the university president a silver beggar's cup to piss in. Another point that hasn't been raised is: Japan does not permit dual citizenship with the USA making his appointment at MIT an even bigger stretch. (Whereas dual citizen status is granted to Japanese descendants born in Peru and Brazil, based on those nations' fascist alliance with Imperial Japan in the run-up to World War II; meaning the USA is still considered an enemy state.) As a Japanese citizen, Joi Ito cannot hold U.S. citizenship. A non-citizen with no college degree with prestigious Ivy League postings? How is this possible without payoffs? Why not appoint John Gotti's grandson to the Wharton School? Another mongrel from the Jewish kennel Joi Ito's obscure origins involved a father who immigrated from Kyoto to work as researcher for the Detroit auto industry. Somehow his mother became particularly close to Stanford Ovshinsky, a battery designer and solid-state "inventor" (who never studied electrical engineering), who "treated Joichi Ito almost like a son." Hmmm. This so reminds me of that other Polish Jew named Bernard Krisher, the Tokyo correspondent for the Moonies' UPI, who gained notoriety as a pedophile during the Cambodian orphanage affair. Ovshinsky's father was from Minsk, then Lituania but now Belarus, in that same border regions dominated by the Frankist-Shabbetean sex cult, discussed in my earlier articles on the Epstein-Wexner family origins. To those familiar with Operation Paperclip-Overcast, Ovshinsky's "inventions" in solid-state electronics are not impressive works of a creative genius, given the fact that most of those "inventions" were developed in wartime Germany and hijacked (without an iota of concern for copyright). During World War II, Ovshinsky worked at the Goodyear plant in Litchfield, Arizona, where he modified lathes to produce artillery shells, and in the postwar period worked for the defense contractor Hupp Corporation, an assembly plant for Army vehicles. While maintaining the pretense of being an "inventor", Ovshinsky was one of dozens of contracted managers with the Defense Department procurement program, transferring captured German technology to the private sector. Ovshinsky later established an electronics parts company in Nara, Japan, presumably with Mrs. Ito as his translator and guide-companion. Therefore with the connections to Operation Paperclip, which morphed into DARPA, Joi Ito grew up as one of the Pentagon brats just like Jeff Bezos, the favorite boy of his maternal grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise, a founder of NASA and DARPA, as disclosed in one of my earlier articles for rense.com. It's called nepotism, folks, based on "family secrets" reinforced by incest. These hand-me-down "geniuses" are mere managers and secret-protectors, not bright lights. Another one of these Jewish family heirlooms is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the NASA-awarded "science genius" with a thick Yiddish accent, whose "uncle" with the Kirshenbaum clan at Mount Sinai hospital's research center facilitated her research on a microscopic worm. Inside Plato's Cave Joi Ito is surrounded by a crew of likewise dodgy characters. The petition is online, but The Daily Beast's Taylor Hatmaker has done a great job of condensing it: "Some of the prominent signers of the petition to keep Ito include former presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig, Whole Earth Catalog creator and tech icon Stewart Brand, managing partner of MIT Media Lab's venture fund Habib Haddad, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, LittleBits founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir, and Harvard genetics professor George Church. Church previously apologized for his own connections to Epstein, chalking the relationship up to 'nerd tunnel vision.'" Tunnel Vision? There is actually light at the end of a tunnel. These benighted ignoramuses are more like those blind believers inside Plato's cave. So now that George Church is outed as an Epstein researcher, we're right back to "transhumanism", which is not a transition for humanity but a genocide-in-planning that can more accurately be called the Post-Human Future, the roboticization of our simiian species to function like "intelligent" machines, albeit with less efficiency. Among that list of MIT Media Lab notables one can detect a Turing machine logic that reduces human cognition to electro-mechanical imaging, processing and patterning programs as opposed to our mammalian intuitive natural perceptions and surreal leaps of logic. The Media Lab promotes interdisciplinary attempts to render thought into algorithms, essentially in denial of the human propensity to a higher calling as well as our negation capability to hold out for a more demanding solution than what's on offer, or as Nancy Reagan put it: "Just say no." And that is exactly why the managerial class prefers mechanics over human intelligence. At a macro level, the post-human agenda is to turn a maddeningly complex human society into an ant colony. George Church, molecular biologist specializing in genetic editing, CRISPR, was co-initiator of the BRAIN project launched by President Barack Obama, which is (face it, folks) a continuation of MK-ULTRA, using plug-in chips to fine-tune cognition after the initial experiments by those pioneering Doctors Sydney Gottlieb with LSD studies and Ewan Cameron through electro-shock therapy produced such excellent results in the assignments for Mark David Chapman and Whitey Bulger. An innovator of chip-DNA synthesis, Professor Church has been the director of research projects at the Department of Energy (DOE), National Institutes of Health (NIH, genomics) and the Wyss Institute of Synthetic Biology. For those who recall my Pizzagate series, Hansjorg Weiss is the Swiss philanthropist who ran Synthes, a producer of prosthetics, implants and biomaterials, which was hit with medical malpractice suits for illegal experiments that killed several patients. Wyss was a friend and associate of John Podesta until he was scared off by the risk of blackmail following sexual performances at private showings. Herr Doktor Victor Frankenstein, where are you now that we need you? To simplify the difference between the mechanistic post-human approach to science and a humanitarian philosophy of existence, one can look at MIT Lab researcher Aya Bdair's "little bits" concept, which represents proteins and other long molecules with manipulable magnetic blocks, something like Lego pieces without holes and pegs. Linking her twisting pieces gets the player to falsely assume that biology is mechanical and that its biochemical configurations can be represented through mathematical modeling. In opposition to this constructionist viewpoint, life is energy, electromagnetic and biochemical via synapses and cytokines, moving with ever-changeable fluidity and reactivity to the point of being uncontrollable by external intervention, being both dancer and the dance, and at the quantum level ultimately inter-dimensional. A computer cannot begin to model those levels of complexity and therefore replicating even the simpler life-forms is beyond the grasp of the futurists. Jeffrey Epstein's sex life reflected that mechanistic outlook, with insertion of an organ in to another organ (as put in the Robert Burns poem that influenced "The Catcher in the Rye", "when a body meets a body passing through the rye") with casual sex as a mere physical function, devoid of the energy dimensions of hormones, nerves pulses, emotional longing, psychological imaginings and mammalian affection. His research quest for synthetic biology spawning of sex cyborgs reflected his mental isolation from the immense range of expectations, perceptions, reactions, emotions and communication that arises spontaneously in the love between a man and a woman. A cyborg made of "beyond meat" protein and methyl cellulose controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms is not in anyway equal to the human it is modeled after. After all the experiments with sex cyborgs are done, one fact will remain: the Post-Human Future is a dead end. Negroponte's inhuman past in Cambodia Can you recall Colonel Kurtz, with Marlon Brando in that role? "The horror, the horror!" Like that PT boat crew sent to terminate the madman gone native, I was one of troopers who stumbled on Nick Negroponte's encampment inside a sprawling Cambodian orphanage. The path to it, however, with dirty cops pointing guns to my head. Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte was our Col. Kurtz, a core organizer of a pre-puberty predator ring in charge of kiddie porn sent by encrypted files from his computer lab at a Cambodian orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. At the time over several years after 2002, I was a member of an unofficial "The Fathers' Group" of anti-pedophile activists who defied bribed-off Cambodian police and sex fiends at the U.S. Embassy to crack a child-sex ring run by Bernard Krisher, former UPI chief based in Tokyo who was a Moonie, and Nicholas Negroponte, who set up an Apple computer-learning center with video equipment and an outdoors transmission tower in the schoolyard, to transmit rape clips of boys as young as 6 years old. Shutting down his child-sex coven was a brutal challenge involving murders, assaults and threats, eventually resolved only through the intervention of Her Highness Queen Monica (the Cambodian orphanage affair is recapped at the end of this essay). This notorious affair, which was sanitized over but never punished by the State Department, CIA or FBI, served up proof of Nick Negroponte's role as a purveyor of child-rape porn to elite government officials and their corporate supporters. Without an ounce of official support, our team used night-vision videocams to provide the honest Cambodian cops with the identities of sex predators entering and leaving bordellos pimping sub-teen children. Later, the investigative journalist Wayne Madsen traveled with me to the orphanage where teachers informed us of "weekend parties" for visiting American diplomats and corporate executives in 5-star hotels in Phnom Penh. Dozens of children were sexually violated, with a core group of compliant victims of both sexes of "average age 10 years old." Jeffrey Epstein is a statutory rapist, Negroponte's group are by comparison monsters, who compounded their criminal spree by arranging the murder of Aaron Swartz, the heroic Reddit editor who broke into an internal link on the MIT campus to hack the wire feed of child-sex videos prior to encryption. The corrupt New York police, of course, attributed his hanging by the neck in his apartment, even though the belt was several sizes larger than his waistline. Another assault from the Krisher-Negroponte lackeys in Phnom Penh resulted in a roadway ambush outside of Sihanoukville on a New Zealand collegue in the father's group, who had met with Madsen and also knew an informer inside the Krisher child-care NGO network in Phnom Penh. In the middle of night, he was beaten by the paid-off cops until blood poured out of his ears and all 10 fingers were bent back out of their sockets in the hands. He eventually died a few years later due to the long-term effects of those injuries. The pedophile coven were disappointed that he had survived the attack. The paid-for hit was in retaliation for one of their own volunteers at a pre-school nursery who had visited him to disclose the sexual abuses by the Krisher ring, which included the boss's son and daughter-in-law. That informant was soon thereafter executed and they tried to assign the blame to our member. The coven suspected our Kiwi friend of bribery, never considering that one of theirs might have pangs of moral conscience about organized rape sanctioned by the highest officials in the U.S. government and its intelligence operations in Southeast Asia. The existence of Cambodian child-sex tapes was detected by reddit editor Aaron Swartz who pursued the clues from San Francisco to New York and onto Cambridge, Mass., to the MIT campus sprawled along the dirty water of the River Charles. As I have pointed out in the past, he was then working on research grant for the Edmond Safra foundation, under the cover of open access to academic research but his personal passion was to expose the politically connected pedophile. The late tycoon Safra gets a lot of bad press from Illuminati-controlled publishers, but in reality he was one of few traditional Jews to resist their perversion of the Jewish community and the Hebraic tradition. Although I've been vocal on this issue, it really is the moral responsibility of faithful Jews to launch action against the perverse and criminal heresy. The Original Blackfriar's Bridge Negroponte is an Italian surname that translates as the Black Bridge, named for the wooden passage over the dark waters of the channel between the Greek mainland near Athens and Euboea Island in Aegean. The Venetian fortress in Chalkida, Euboea or Evvia, is therefore called Negroponte castle. The eponymous Greek Jewish family of Nick and John were perhaps servants of the Venetian lords. The charismatic "messiah" Sabbatai Zevi was born in Smyrna, a port on the Turkish mainland, but his family were originally from Greece, and possibly served as spies for Venice following the fall of Euboea to the Turks in 1490. In contemporary history, the Negroponte family's most prominent members are the brother Nicholas with the MIT Media Lab and John, the former neoconservative UN Ambassador for George W. Bush. By no coincidence, the Podesta family, headed by John and Tony of Pizzagate fame are also long ago Venetian Jews, whose surname derives from "pedestal", the corrupt concierges in charge of audiences with the Doge (ruler) of Venice. That city, being allied with the Eastern Roman Empire rather than Rome, was a center of barbaric sorcery and witchcraft, as implied by the custom of wearing masks to disguise one's going to places of illicit activity, run by the Khazarian Jews, a black tradition kept up by the Negroponte brothers. A large population of Khazar Jews emigrated from the region between the Caspian Sea and Georgia to flee the rival Turks (both tribes have origins in what is now Xinjiang, western China). A stream of Khazar Jewish refugees moved through Venetian Euboea northward to the Black Sea to form large communities in greater Poland and Lithuania, the homelands of the Epstein and Wexner families respectively. Others like the Negropontes remained behind, living under Turkish rule, when in the early 18th century the self-proclaimed "messiah" Sabbatai Zevi recruited much of Greek Jewry to convert to Islam as the "Donmeh" or hidden Jews, first disclosed in recent years by Wayne Madsen in his field reporting in Turkey. The Shabbetean cult was, as discussed in my earlier articles on the Epstein-Wexner affair a promoter of pedophilia, group orgies and homosexuality, introducing these to the Hapsburg court and to the Frankfurt-Hesse region of Germany, the center of financial power for the Rothschild house of usury. This deep history of a vicious warped cult explains my description of them as a coven. Global Population Reduction Bill Gates has been a guest, at least on one flight, aboard Epstein's Lolita Express Boeing 727. Their secretive encounter goes a long way toward understanding the hidden agenda behind transhumanism, which is the planned genocide of the major of the human population, which will eliminate more lives than all previous genocidal events in past history. Never mind Himmler's drop in the bucket compared to the Gates-Epstein plan for mass destruction. The very tact that androids are going to be needed as workers and personal assistants indicated at least 7 billion people are being targeted in the soon-coming clean sweep. The biowarfare labs certainly have sufficient deadly pathogens to accomplish the task while the elites will be in Earth orbit or on moon bases. "Transhumanism" has genocidal implications of technology-enable savagery at its most extreme, which is why I prefer the more accurate term of the post-human order. In this regard it is quite fitting for Joi Ito being a Japanese citizen to be running the project much like the"modernization campaign" at Nanking achieved by eliminating its native population in 1937-38. It may seem financially inefficient to spend many millions of dollars on technology-enhanced sexuality when humans are willing to that task for free or, nowadays, the price of dinner and hotel room with a Tinder date. Investment in human-resembling cyborgs makes more sense in terms of the population-reduction agenda of the Gates and Rockefeller foundations. Jeffrey Epstein served on the board of trustees for the Rockefeller University, one of the original brain trusts for eugenics and population control of lesser subtypes. From the perspective of reducing the total number of births worldwide, this anti-humanistic agenda has been advanced through investment in promoting sexual identity movements, since homosexuality and transgender options result in birth-rate reduction without surgical intervention. Partner androids, far more advanced that present-technology sex dolls, will be the means to maintain the illusion of normative coupled relationships while precluding the potential for breeding offspring. Due to religion-based belief systems, sex-partner cyborgs will not reduce population growth in Muslim and Catholic developing economies, which oppose popular use of condoms and birth-control pills. By logical deduction, human-resembling sex androids are being develop for after the great kill-off of 7 billion people. Sex cyborbs are, therefore, part of post-genocide social engineering for the planned survivor group, to prevent another wave of human population expansion, in other words, a steady-state demographic system. Given the time-factor of development of "near-real" substitute spouses, say within 20 years, you my reader are scheduled to die in the soon-arriving genocide. So eat, drink and be merry, or join the resistance. Anyone with children or grandchildren had better choose the latter, due to your moral obligation for family preservation and social responsibility. While the festering genocide is still in preparation, one must activate a counter-strategy and prepare for war. My father, as I mentioned, was in the American military unit that broken up the gates of Dachau, which in fact are not as bad as things to come in our brief moment of time. Remember this is a battle for the human future against insanely evil forces, so none can be spared for the crime of consenting to the agenda. The world has recently seen the deliberate release of cloned mosquitoes that transmit ovary-destroying toxins into the human bloodstream during the Zika scare in Brazil and the ongoing vaccine-induced ebola "epidemic" in West Africa and now the Congo region. Under the cover of modern medicine and vaccination, the Rockefellers, Gates and Epstein's convoy of tech companies, are preparing catastrophic campaigns of sneak mass murder. The coming struggle is on two fronts: Against criminal science and also in strong opposition to Muslim and Catholic ideological propaganda against birth control in the developing countries, along with the "escape valve" of migration to the developed economies. Population-exporting nations, regardless of their natural wealth, need to be quarantined by sealing borders, so that the rising populations threaten their own national leaders and religious fraudsters who promote a high birth rate. Until those false values are squelched and realistic policies, there will be no peace or sustained development and therefore compromise is futile. Be very clear that a new world war is shaping up, and planning and preemptive action needs to be taken against the two extremes: the advocates of population growth and the supports of genocidal population reduction. The global population will have to decline, but this should come about by consent and social policy, not by either terrorism or genocide. Jeffrey Epstein left behind time bombs that must be defused and junked. There are hundreds of thousands of madmen like him among us, and they must be rooted out from positions of power and influence, or there will be hell to pay in days and hours to come.

#TheWebOfSlime

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Validation

 By Daymond Duck Published on:

August 4, 2019

The fulfillment of hundreds of Bible prophecies is validation that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

Here are seven examples.

First, Bible prophecy indicates that the Promised Land will be divided at the end of the age (Joel 3:1-2).

There are two areas in Israel with large Muslim populations.

One is controlled by Hamas in Gaza (Islamic Jihad and others are there too), and the other is controlled by the PA in Judea-Samaria.

These two areas are separated, and the Israeli military controls all traffic between them.

Jared Kushner released the economic part of Pres. Trump’s “Deal of the Century” at a “Peace to Prosperity” workshop in Bahrain on June 25-26, 2019.

He suggested the creation of a land corridor with a railroad and highway to connect the Hamas-controlled area of Gaza to the PA-controlled area of Judea-Samaria.

That land corridor will divide Israel, strengthen the terrorists, and increase the threat to Israel by allowing trains and trucks to move missiles, rockets, troops and vehicles between the two areas.

Israel is clearly opposed to this, and it appears to violate God’s warning against dividing the Promised Land.

There is some speculation about the possibility that the recent natural disasters in the U.S. might be a warning against dividing Israel this way.

Second, the way I understand the Scriptures, the last Gentile world government will consist of ten groups of nations in the world, not ten nations in the EU.

The EU will be one of the ten groups, and it will be the model or pattern for the other nine groups.

The Antichrist will be an eleventh horn (a little horn, diverse from the ten, not one of the ten horns), and authority will be given to him over everyone on earth (Dan. 7:24; Rev. 13:7, 17:12).

It is important to know that the globalists have a three-step plan: 1) Divide the world into ten regional trading blocks of nations (a financial or economic New World Order); 2) Change the rules to convert the ten regional trading blocks of nations into ten regional political blocks of nations (a political New World Order); 3) Merge the ten regional political blocks into a one-world government.

Anyway, on Nov. 30, 2018, U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, Mexico’s Pres. Enrique Pena Nieto and Canada’s Prime Min. Justin Trudeau signed the USMCA (also called the new NAFTA or the NAFTA replacement agreement).

It was Pres. Nieto’s last day in office, and he said the following in Spanish, “The negotiation of the Mexico-United States-Canada Treaty made it possible to reaffirm the importance of the economic integration of North America.”

This will merge the North American nations into a trading block (formerly called the North American Union or NAU).

Mr. Nieto said, “The renegotiation of the new trade agreement sought to safeguard the vision of an integrated North America, the conviction that together (merged into one regional block) we are stronger and more competitive.”

Shortly after signing the agreement, Mr. Nieto tweeted: “On my last day as President, I am very honored to have participated in the signing of the new Trade Treaty between Mexico, the United States and Canada.”

“This day concludes a long process of dialogue and negotiation that will consolidate the economic integration of North America” (a major step toward a financial New World Order).

Mr. Nieto said, “The USMCA is not a step back towards American independence and sovereignty; it’s a step closer toward greater integration” (there goes MAGA).

On July 23, 2019, Christian Gomez wrote an excellent article for The New American titled “USMCA and the Quest for a North American Union.”

https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/32771-usmca-and-the-quest-for-a-north-american-union?vsmaid=5353&vcid=1356

Mr. Gomez called the USMCA “a steppingstone toward an EU-style North American Union.”

He notes that globalists use trade agreements to gain control over the governments of participating nations, and the end result of trade agreements is the erosion and transfer of national sovereignty to world government.

He points out that the USMCA will set aside the U.S. Constitution and establish a Free Trade Commission run by bureaucrats with more authority than the leaders of the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

Mr. Gomez states that the USMCA is a “living agreement” that the Free Trade Commission can change without U.S. approval (change into a political block without the approval of Congress, and even the Pres. of the U.S. won’t be able to do anything about it.).

For whatever it is worth, it has been reported that Pres. Trump plans to send the USMCA to Congress after Sept. 1, 2019 (about one month from now).

It has also been reported that there is growing optimism that Congress will approve it.

Those that are against world government are running out of time to stop this.

Third, according to the Bible, Israel will prosper (Ezek. 38:13), and the angel Gabriel will stand up for Israel at the time of the end.

On July 22, 2019, it was reported that a Major Gen. in the IDF (Israel’s military) called the IDF the biggest start-up in Israel and perhaps in the entire world.

A nation needs investments to grow, but investors are reluctant to invest in a nation that is unstable and insecure.

God has given Israel a powerful military that makes Israel stable and secure, and that motivates investment in Israel.

Fourth, concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog, God told Russia’s dictator (Gog) to prepare for the war, prepare her allies and be a guard unto them (Ezek. 38:7).

In Aug. 2018, Israel shot down a Syrian drone over Israeli territory.

An examination of the drone found that it contained Israeli technology that was sold to Russia in 2010.

Vladimir Putin is using Israeli technology to prepare Russia’s allies for war.

Fifth, God will cause Jews to go back to the Promised Land from all over the world at the end of the age (Jer. 23:7-8).

On July 19, 2019, it was reported that Israel is expecting 30,000 immigrants from 40 nations in this year alone (Israel is now home to more than 7 million Jews).

Sixth, Jesus said, “brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against theirparents, and cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved” (Matt. 10:21-22).

China is now encouraging schoolchildren to report family members that are Christians.

Students are told that Christianity is evil, and reported family members could be arrested and prosecuted.

Seventh, according to the Bible, hyperinflation and a global economic collapse are coming in the Tribulation Period (Rev. 6:5-6).

On July 22, 2019, America’s national debt hit $22,023,119,533,123.43, and our debt ceiling was suspended for two more years.

God is validating the truth of the Scriptures on a daily basis.

Those that haven’t accepted the death of Jesus as punishment for their sins need to do so now.

Prophecy Plus Ministries, Inc. Daymond & Rachel Duck [email protected]

[robininthelabyrinth]

Nocturne (FFXV) - 1/30

Fic: Nocturne (1/30) - Ao3 Link

Fandom: Final Fantasy XV Pairings: Mostly Gen (variety later to come)

Summary: In which Cor Leonis loses his temper, accidentally acquires a kid, and tries to single-handedly dismantle the Lucian immigration system – and that’s before he and his lawyers find out about this Prophecy business. If the Astrals think Cor’s going to let his kid’s best friend die without a fight, they’ve gotten the wrong cheetah ‘taur.

(a young adult novel set in @kickingshoes' 'taur AU)

A/N: Some background almost certainly necessary here for those who aren't yet familiar with @kickingshoes' wonderful 'taur AU:

In this AU, everyone in FFXV is a 'taur of some sort, 'taur being short for "centaur" but not limited to horses: there are cattaurs, dog-taurs, deer-taurs, the traditional horse-taurs, etc. Each 'taur has a human head, arms and torso extending up from the bend in the spine, and the lower half of some sort of animal, including all four legs and tail. See the art for that here!

They've even gone ahead and create anatomical drawings for the 'taurs, including interesting features such as two hearts: one located in the "human" chest (the supernal heart) and one located in the "animal" body (the infernal heart). See the art for that here!

For context: a 'taur baby is called a "kitling" (general term) or after their type (kittens, puppies, etc.), then they grow up into being children, and then teenagers, and then adults.

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A seat on the King’s Council is a rare privilege, typically given to individuals who have given many years of service to the royal family of Lucis. An offer to take a seat at the Council is more than a mere honor – it is a request to share one's wisdom and experience with the King and so, in turn, with Lucis itself. It is a position of both power and influence, and of great prestige, and it is widely coveted by those who would be in the center of the seat of power. Wise kings of the past have sought to protect the Council from those who would befriend young and impressionable Princes in search of a seat at the table, decreeing that only those with a minimum of a decade of extraordinary service to the Crown would be permitted to join the august body.

Unfortunately, they didn’t really account for the problem of prodigies.

After all, if one counts his years first in the Crownsguard, then as part of the personal bodyguard of King Mors, then as the personal bodyguard of Prince, later King, Regis, and now most recently in his appointment as Marshal of the Crownsguard, there is no question that Cor Leonis, nicknamed "The Immortal", has served the throne loyally and with distinction for the required ten year period, despite the fact that he is currently still only twenty-three, and a young-looking twenty-three at that.

Indeed, although there was some grumbling about his age, mostly from the older scions of the nobility, there was widespread approval among the populace when the news spread that their beloved Immortal would be joining the Council: his skill at fighting, now honed by caution and discretion after his experience in the Tempering Grounds; his extraordinary and intuitive grasp of tactics and strategy; and his surprising talents in the management and organization of armies were all considered extremely valuable additions to the Council’s wisdom.

It’s just that Clarus sometimes wishes his young friend had learned a little bit more diplomacy alongside his undeniable martial skills.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” Cor says mildly, his hands laced together in front of him. His manner is easy, his shoulders relaxed, his face habitually stern but almost casually neutral; if Clarus had never seen Cor mid-battle, that same expression of mild concentration on his face as his sword destroyed the enemy, he might even be deluded into thinking that Cor is just making friendly conversation. Unfortunately, Clarus does know better. “Entirely wrong, even. It’s not that I have a problem with taxonomy – after all, as we all know, there are many benefits to classifying species, both sentient and non-sentient, natural and daemonic, by easily identified typological traits –”

The esteemed Councilor Cor is speaking with – Taceo Dovinius, who was appointed in the days of King Mors and who has not ever seen Cor fight – looks pleased by what he mistakenly thinks is acquiescence, smiling condescendingly at his younger colleague across the table.

“– it’s just that I think it’s a crock of shit,” Cor concludes.

The smile vanishes.

“Listen here, young kit,” Taceo snaps, “you might think that you’re some hotshot because you can swing a sword well, but swinging a sword doesn’t change the facts of the world: the people of Lucis are felidaetaurs, or cattaurs, the upright taurus cousins of the family Felidae, while our sworn enemies of Niflheim are canidaetaurs, or dogtaurs, who are more akin to the family Canidae, and as anyone can tell from looking at nature itself –”

“Yes, yes, we’re cats, they’re dogs, ‘fighting like cats and dog’ is axiomatic, I’m familiar,” Cor says, his calm voice cutting through Taceo’s rising voice as sharply as his sword would. “But that’s irrelevant, and not just because the scientific community has largely replaced the Felidae classification with Feliformia and Canidae with Caniformia. It’s irrelevant because it is absolutely useless for making any determinations about sentient individuals such as ‘taurs. A person with the hindquarters of a cat can be a traitor and one with those of a dog a friend, if that’s what they decide to be; that’s what sentience means. And even if you were planning on going entirely by pure animal taxonomy, there’s no system of classification that even makes any rational sense – would you condemn every person with the legs of a fox as an enemy, and accept every hyena as a friend, just because that’s how science has arbitrarily broken them down? Why do we get the mongooses and the civets, and they the weasels and raccoons? And what does any of that say about our ungulaetaur friends from Tenebrae, with their goats and deer and elks? Where do they fall?”

“You’re splitting hairs,” Taceo snaps.

“Hardly,” Cor says. “Since your proposal is that we differentiate our treatment of individuals based on the species they resemble – indeed, not merely their treatment but their access to the very rights to which they are entitled under the Charter of Lucis – and given both the known arbitrariness of nature itself and the historical unreliability of taxonomical science, my question is quite to the point: who, exactly, should be entitled to make so important a decision as to which person is classified as what?”

Taceo has gone pale with rage. “Our taxonomists –”

“Oh, taxonomists,” Cor says, and for the first time his voice is actively scornful. “Yes, they know so much, don’t they, with their always excellent classification that always right on the first try, and never any issues. Is that right? Or need I remind you of my own history with taxonomists?”

Clarus winces, as do many of the others at the table.

It’s all rather notorious now, of course. Being born (or at least, found) within the Crown City, Cor, a foundling orphan left on the doorsteps of the city foster home, had been immediately taken to the nearest hospital to be given the standard taxonomic analysis.

The taxonomic analysis program has its origins in the insurance system, given the fact that different ‘taur breeds often have vastly different medical requirements even within the same family or sub-family. After all, genetic drift and mutations exist: a pair of felidaetaurs would generally have a felidaetaur child, of course, but while it is still common for a two-tiger pair like Clarus and his wife to have another tiger as a child, or two lynxes a lynx, it is perfectly possible for a child of two species-alike parents to come out as a different felideataur species entirely, like a bobcat or a puma. Even if you exclusively married other ‘taurs of the same felidaetaur breed and had for generations, you could end up having a different-breed felidaetaur child, just because of the drift. After all, even the Lucis Caelum line, which is rather famously almost all lions and almost always married other lions, has supposedly sometimes produced a non-lion child that modern genetic tests confirmed to be their own natural child.

The insurance system therefore developed taxonomic analysis as a method of testing for and classifying species at birth. The system became even more popular once the scientists definitively established that ‘taurs are not bound by any cross-species breeding restrictions the way that their animal cousins are, enabling any 'taur of any variety to have children with any other variety of 'taur, and, around the same time, any remaining legal prejudice against mixed-species relationships was definitively eliminated. Of course, in the face of all scientific knowledge, such prejudice hasn’t entirely disappeared as a cultural phenomenon – a lingering bigotry of a less enlightened age, when genetic drift wasn't as well understood and paternity tests were not trusted as much as they should have been, and there were accusations of infidelity every time a ‘taur came out a different type.

Of course, the principles of genetic dominance means that a mixed-species child will look like a single animal species, no matter how mixed, and will generally take wholly after one parent or the other in terms of their appearance, but that just means there is even more of a chance of species variation – Clarus’ own mother was a bear, as it happened, but he himself took after his father the tiger, and he married another tiger in his wife Cyrella, and his son Gladio is also a tiger despite there being a decent chance of him being a bear like his grandmother. While mixed-species relationships are still a minority, they are a sizeable one, and have been for generations and generations, and that means that no matter what you are or who you marry, you could end up with a surprise.

Given that, and given the wide range of medical treatments – not to mention medical insurance requirements – that depended on knowing what your little kitling is from the moment of birth, the taxonomic analysis is therefore considered crucial. Even though the kitlings and, later, children who are so classified run the risk of being stereotyped simply because of their classification, parents regularly opt for analysis in order to better prepare for the future, especially as Insomnia grows increasingly more cosmopolitan.

And so the taxonomic analysis system remains in place, with all of its benefits and drawbacks.

In Cor’s case, of course, it was mostly drawbacks.

At the time of his initial testing, Cor was stamped with the standard Felis catus taurus (domestic housecat 'taur) designation that the majority of the population of Lucis has – out of sheer laziness, Clarus presumes, since well before the time Cor was officially re-tested at age fifteen, it was obvious to everyone with a pair of eyes that he was actually an Acinonyx jubatus taurus, the far rarer (indeed, almost unheard of) cheetah ‘taur.

It might not have been such a big deal if Cor wasn’t quite so famous: the great prodigy of the Crownsguard and, by the age of fifteen, already starting to be widely known as the Immortal for his daring, almost suicidal feats of bravery and his equally amazing ability to survive them. Indeed, if Cor had been any other child, growing up in relative poverty as he had, he likely wouldn’t have had any choice but to take what he was initially offered: his designation quietly changed on the books without anyone in the medical or insurance industries having to admit that they’d made a mistake and thereby open the door to incurring liability.

But Cor was not any other child, and he was not exactly inclined to take insults lying down – especially not at fifteen, mere months before he’d gone to the Tempering Grounds, back when he’d been a regular firecracker, hotheaded and rash and so very, very angry at the world. After all, he’d received years and years of incorrect medical care as a result of his misclassification; worse, his foster parents had turned him out of their house when the expense of his medical requirements turned out to be considerably greater than what was allowed for under his category of insurance, and he’d lived for some months (no one is quite certain as to the exact timeline, and Cor won’t say a word about it) on the streets of Insomnia before he’d forced his way into the Crownsguard by lying about his age and only revealing the (incredibly obvious) truth when he’d already beaten the tests and defeated four current Crownsguard members in one-on-one duels. So instead of simply agreeing to a change of classification, he’d demanded an official recognition of his misclassification.

A court-sanctioned recognition.

The medical and insurance industries had (unwisely) decided that instead of admitting the mistake and opening the door to future suits by misclassified individuals, they would simply refuse to reclassify him, arguing instead that they’d been right the whole time and that he was actually simply a spotted tabby with a peculiar resemblance to a cheetah.

It was a scandal, of course; the entire city was appalled at the obvious untruth being spouted by otherwise respectable doctors, especially with Cor visibly growing into the so-characteristic spots and infamous speed of his species. It didn't help that Cor, being a foundling, was surnamed Leonis, the traditional foundling surname in honor of the royal family of Lucis (all lions, of course).

A cheetah named after a lion being misclassified as a housecat? The political cartoons all but drew themselves.

Realizing belatedly that they had seriously thrown their own credibility into jeopardy, the medical and insurance agencies quickly retracted the argument, but the damage was done and Cor’s lawyers proceeded to definitively rip them apart in court.

All together, that history makes for a pretty strong argument against Taceo’s profiling proposal on Cor’s part, especially given the fact that Cor virtually never makes reference to his past in any context, much less as a rhetorical argument. In fact, Clarus doesn’t think Cor has so much as mentioned the lawsuit since the day he won an unconditional victory in the courthouses.

Taceo seems to realize that he’s losing his audience, as many of the other Councilors are nodding in agreement with Cor, so he quickly says, “You misunderstand the nature of my proposal, young Marshal –”

“Just Marshal is fine,” Cor says, his voice reverting back to pleasant. “You lost all rights to refer to my age when you called me a kitten. But please, do go on.”

“You act as though I were suggesting that we rely exclusively on speciesist assumptions and stereotypes,” Taceo says, pretending as though he hasn’t heard the interruption. “Nothing could be further from the truth! I merely suggest that given the limits of our resources and the well-known fact that our enemy is largely canine, that we focus our security forces on examining individuals with canine characteristics –”

Cor arches his eyebrows. “Still sounds a lot like discriminatory stereotyping to me, oddly enough,” he drawls. “You’re aware, of course, of the large numbers of refugees that have come to our city are canidaetaurs?”

“That’s precisely my point!” Taceo exclaims. “The influx of refugees is a perfect opportunity for a Niflheim spy to –”

“If I were an idiot,” Cor says flatly, “and I assure you I’m not, even then I would still have the bright idea of seeking out my spies via the usual method of recruiting dissatisfied individuals already living here instead of trying to sneak them in as refugees – without money, without food, hurt and alone and having lost everything. Your suggestion is little more than anti-immigrant bigotry dressed up for public consumption.”

“Now listen here, you impertinent little youngster – ” Taceo starts.

“Cor,” Regis says from the head of the table. “That was uncalled for.”

Cor bows his head. “You are correct, of course,” he says. “I spoke too hastily. The fact that the idea is based on no science, no reasonable rationale, and would undoubtedly result in increased internal strife within the city boundaries is obviously no reason why we should not continue to entertain the idea suggested by Councilor Taedeo –”

“Taceo!” Taceo roars, rearing back on his haunches.

“Really?” Cor asks, blinking. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Clarus very nearly chokes trying to keep himself from laughing. The root of Taceo’s name comes from the old word for ‘silent’, while the similar-sounding ‘taedeo’ originates from the word for ‘disgusting’; a fact that Cor is well aware of, given that as a teenager, he briefly all but moved into the library to make up for his missed education, at least whenever he wasn’t on the training field.

“I think that’s enough for today,” Regis says quickly, though Clarus can tell from the way that his lips are pressed together that he’s also having trouble keeping from laughing. He rises, his lion's tail flicking majestically behind him, and everyone automatically rises as well. “Our time is up, and unfortunately I have another appointment following this one. Perhaps we can take up the subject again next week?”

Cor smiles with teeth, his hands behind his back in military style. “Certainly, your Majesty. Anytime.”

Taceo stalks off with stiff legs, his wildcat tail stiff with anger; the other Councilors disperse as well, most of them shaking their heads in amusement or disapproval, depending on where their politics fall. Cor heads off back to the Crownsguard grounds without another word, shrugging off the traditional Council cloak almost before he reaches the door.

Regis nods at Clarus before heading back towards the throne room, an obvious hint, and Clarus falls into step beside his king. They’re of a size – Regis is, of course, a lion, and Clarus a tiger – and it makes it a little easier than it might have otherwise been. Of course, ‘taur physiology means that no matter what species make up their lower halves, people are generally proportionate to their upright humanoid halves, typically ranging between five to six feet tall, but Clarus distinctly remembers how annoying Cid found the casual walk-and-talk style generally prevalent in Insomnia, his jackrabbit stride being totally out of sync with their relaxed feline prowl. While that certainly wasn’t the reason he was no longer really talking with them, Clarus can’t help but think it might have contributed to his decision never to visit, at least a little.

“What do you think?” Regis asks.

“Of Taceo’s proposal to focus our security on profiling canidaetaurs? Absurd, of course; the second Niflheim got wind of any such rule, no matter how secretly implemented, they would double their efforts to conquer territory which is primarily felidaetaur, and we obviously don’t want that. Not to mention the effect it would have on morale in the local non-felidaetaur population –”

“I meant Cor,” Regis says, amused. “I’m aware of the flaws in Taceo’s proposal.”

“What about Cor?”

“He was speaking,” Regis says. “Quite a bit, if you’ve noticed; I think the amount of words he uttered in session today is about equal to everything he said the first month he was assigned to travel with us.”

Clarus doesn’t disagree. Cor tends towards silence, most of the time, whether due to shyness, as it was when he was just a kit of fifteen, following along and trying to protect a group of 'taurs at least ten years his senior, or to sternness, as after his experiences in the Tempering Grounds. The only exception is when he loses that fiery temper of his – rarer after his experience with the Tempering Grounds, but definitely not gone for good.

Still, Clarus isn’t sure what Regis is getting at.

“He has good reason to be especially bothered by proposals that hinge on classification,” Clarus points out.

“Bothered, yes,” Regis says. “But such a proposal has no room in my kingdom and he knows it. There was no reason for such an outsized reaction.”

“You have a theory,” Clarus interprets. He knows his friend well.

“I have a theory,” Regis agrees.

“Would you be interested in sharing that theory?”

Regis snorts. “He’s twenty-three, Clarus.”

“So?”

“Do you remember being twenty-three?” Regis asks. “When all those adolescent hormones have finally started evening out –”

“He would’ve told us if he was going to go into a premature heat,” Clarus hisses, face flushing. “Honestly, Regis!”

“I’m not concerned about his heat schedule,” Regis says dismissively. “Besides, you know for a fact he wouldn’t tell us a thing about it – you remember that time with the mesmenir den in Duscae?”

“Six, do I remember Duscae,” Clarus mutters, conceding the point: Cor had technically been on heat-leave at the time, bedding down in an abandoned mesmenir den while they continued onwards, but that hadn’t stopped him from going straight into battle against the Niflheim forces in the area when they’d ambushed the rest of the party, and never mind that it had made him the target of every single Niflheim soldier out there. Yes, his intervention was likely the only reason they’d survived that particular ambush, but still…“Then what are you suggesting, Regis? Stop pussyfooting around the issue already.”

Regis rolls his eyes at Clarus. “He’s the only one of us without a mate or a child, Clarus. I have Aulea and Noctis, you have your lovely Cyrella and little Gladiolus – Six, Cid has a granddaughter already. And Cor certainly doesn’t mind playing with them when we’re having dinner, for all that he likes to loudly claim an inability to understand how children function.”

“Weskham doesn’t have kids, if I recall,” Clarus grumbles, though now that he thinks about it, Cor has been vaguely antsy recently, in what could be interpreted as a courting-season sort of way but is probably, in Clarus’ view, more of a Cor-sometimes-loses-his-temper sort of way. “I take your point. But I thought that Cor isn’t interested in courting?”

“He’s not yet, according to him,” Regis says dryly. “That doesn’t mean his biological clock hasn’t started in on him – and you know how his anxiety issues act up when he’s dealing with his body doing things he doesn’t agree with.”

Clarus makes a face. Cor is perhaps typical for a cheetah, brutally efficient and terrifyingly fast, but paying the price in heightened perceptiveness that often manifests as severe anxiety. When Cor is anxious, he doesn’t eat; when he doesn’t eat, he's grouchy; when he's grouchy, he snaps at people – much like he did in the Council chamber earlier today.

Damn, it probably is an anxiety issue. And yet the stupid ‘taur refuses to see a regular shrink about a single one of his issues, despite being dragged to a first visit with at least half a dozen in the last few years. Not that Clarus could really blame him, what with his experience with doctors…

It doesn’t mean the rest of them don’t worry about him, as his friends and colleagues. Or, for Regis, as his king.

“He’s too young for baby kitlings, anyway,” Clarus adds, still grumbling and unwilling to admit he missed this. “Not counting Cid, who had kitlings before we ever met him, the oldest one Cor knows is my Gladio, and he’s only two. And we’re both well over ten years older than him!”

“Only twelve years, Clarus; we’re not ancient. Regardless, he’s a cheetah; you know what they say –”

“Fast to grow, fast to bed; fast to run, fast to wed,” Clarus recites the old poem with an eyeroll. “Didn’t we just get out of a meeting discussing why we should not apply traditional species-based stereotypes to people? You just want it to be all about romance, you old tomcat.”

“Says the person who keeps trying to pair him up with company for the Chocobo Festival?”

Clarus coughs. “Enjoying some pleasant company and having a mate are two totally separate things,” he says archly. “A ‘taur’s needs are not all intellectual upper heart, you know; the secondary lower heart, the animal instinct, also needs to be satisfied…have you considered that he may just be lonely, Regis, and not necessarily for want of a mate? There aren’t many other cheetahs in the city – and none quite like him.”

“Perhaps,” Regis concedes. “But at any rate, we need to do something about it. Get him to exercise all that restlessness out, something like that.”

“Exercise,” Clarus says dryly. “The head of the Crownsguard doesn’t get enough exercise.”

Regis makes a face. “Oh, you know what I mean.”

They enter the throne room. Instead of going to the throne, Regis heads towards the windows overlooking the Crownsguard training arena. Clarus joins him and looks down to where Cor is – well, to be frank, where Cor is kicking the ass of ten highly regarded Crownsguard.

At once.

“He’s going to be unpopular if he keeps up with that,” Clarus observes.

“I know,” Regis says with a sigh. “Perhaps some time outside the Wall will do him good.”

“You just named him the Marshal of the Crownsguard,” Clarus reminds Regis. “You can’t just reassign him.”

“Not reassign him, no. Perhaps a covert mission of some variety...?”

Clarus snorts. “That’s a terrible reason to send someone on a covert mission,” he warns, but he can already feel himself giving in. He’s always been protective of Cor, ever since old King Mors had come back from his travels with an overgrown fluffball at his side as his bodyguard, of all preposterous things; Clarus hadn’t believed it until Cor had demonstrated at some length why Clarus ought to let Cor guard him instead of the other way around. Clarus still secretly thought it more than a little ridiculous; ridiculous prodigy or not, best fighter in the kingdom or not, thirteen years old is far too young to be on the front lines of a war. “Very well; we can pick a mission for him to go on, something reasonable…hmm. We did get that one letter from Niflheim, do you recall – the one about the factories?”

“Didn’t we think it was some sort of trap?”

“We thought it was likely a trap of some sort, yes,” Clarus agrees. “But this is Cor we’re talking about. He can be trusted to scout out the situation fully before going in.”

“And very likely to survive coming out,” Regis says wryly. “If anyone ever finds out we sent him on another death-defying, impossible-to-survive mission, he’ll never get that Immortal nickname off of him.”

“He’s never getting rid of that nickname anyway. If we send him solo with - at most - some back-up within radio distance, he’ll at least avoid being afraid that everyone around him will die,” Clarus says. “Again.”

“It’s not his fault he’s so much faster than everyone around him,” Regis sighs. “It’s just the way he was born, and how talented he is; anyone else would have died along with their squad. He’s not somehow to blame because he survived where they didn’t, no matter what he might think. Do check with the Crownsguard that he’s been eating enough, will you?”

“You already know he won’t be,” Clarus says gently. “But I’ll tell him he can’t ship out unless he eats a full meal.”

“That’ll be something, at least,” Regis says. He shakes his head and pads up onto the throne, settling in for his next meeting. “Very well, we're agreed; let's send him out. Do remind him to be cautious about it, will you?”

“Don’t worry,” Clarus says firmly. “He won’t do anything rash.”

#final fantasy xv #cor leonis #regis lucis caelum #clarus amicitia #nocturne #my fic #I hope people enjoy this!

[khalilhumam]

The nation’s racial justice protests are a pivotal moment for millennials and Gen Z

Register at https://mignation.com The Only Social Network for Migrants. #Immigration, #Migration, #Mignation ---

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-nations-racial-justice-protests-are-a-pivotal-moment-for-millennials-and-gen-z/

The nation’s racial justice protests are a pivotal moment for millennials and Gen Z

By William H. Frey After months in hibernation, America has woken up—especially the nation’s young, diverse millennial and Gen Z generations. These generations will be the ones to suffer the greatest economic hardship from the COVID-19 pandemic, which will rob them of career-defining education and employment opportunities. But their recent convergence on America’s streets and squares is not a response to reopening the economy—these generations are demonstrating their commitment to fundamental civil rights for Black Americans, making up the vast majority of protesters marching against the unjust police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and others impacted by police brutality and racial injustice. This is a pivotal moment for these youthful generations, and—by extension—the nation as a whole. The year 2020 was bound to be consequential: a presidential election year that began with the impeachment trial of an incumbent president. Underlying this was a deep-seated political and cultural divide between a rising, racially diverse America and the whiter, older generation that was most responsible for Trump’s election. This cultural generation gap has been fomenting since Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, was elected in 2008. In both of Obama’s elections and in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the increasingly diverse bloc of voters under age 45 favored the Democratic candidate, while the older age group voted Republican. In many respects, the 2016 election reflected a backlash among older voters to a changing America, further inflamed by Trump’s incendiary rants against political correctness and immigrants. Since taking office, the Trump administration has shortchanged programs that benefit younger families—especially families of color—by reining in health care access, benefits to immigrant children, public education, housing assistance, and other parts of the social safety net. The president has shown little interest in issues that millennials and Gen Z support: greater racial justice and inclusion, better treatment of immigrants, stronger environmental protections, and effective gun control. The good news is that as these diverse generations age, their political clout should increase. The 2020 census will show that more than half of Americans under age 18 identify as a nonwhite racial or ethnic minority. In 2030, this will be the case for Americans under age 50;  49.7% will be white, 24.8% will be Latino or Hispanic, 13.7% will be Black, and 7.2% will be Asian Americans.

Yet the presidential elections between now and then will still very much be up for grabs if today’s Baby Boomers and their seniors vote the way they did in 2016. Meanwhile, President Trump’s dubious allegation of voter fraud is placing limits on young and minority voters through strict voter ID requirements and limits on mail-in ballots and same-day voting. This is why the mass activism of millennials and Gen Z that we are seeing right now is so consequential. Unlike the protests and activism of the 1960s—which led to the ground-breaking Civil Rights legislation of that era—today’s movement is occurring in the midst of a fundamental demographic transformation. Diversity is not just their future—it is the nation’s future. It is these younger, multihued generations that—prior to the pandemic—already accounted for most of the growth of our labor force population and an increasing share of our consumer base.  As their influence grows, they can no longer tolerate past patterns of systemic racism. Their voices need to be heard and their concerns need to be addressed. The combination of a pandemic (which will undoubtably diminish their economic futures) and the horrific deaths of  Black Americans at the hands of white police officers has focused young Americans’ outrage in a manner that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. The intensity of their protests—while risking their health—ought to awaken the consciousness of older Americans. The nation’s children and grandchildren are on the frontlines in a fight for long-overdue change in racial justice.

[thisdaynews]

How a Democrat Can Win Over a Never-Trumper

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-a-democrat-can-win-over-a-never-trumper/

How a Democrat Can Win Over a Never-Trumper

Dear 2020 Democrats—all 23 of you who are running for president:

You are itching to be rid of Donald Trump. Who can blame you? Of course, if this were a normal Republican presidency, I would not share your feelings. Not remotely. As a lifelong conservative, I think your policy ideas are ill-advised. But this cycle, other Trump-disgusted Republicans and I can contemplate voting Democrat. We could do so not because we’ve become progressives, but because we think it’s in the long-term interests of conservatism and the country to be rid of Trump. If he gains a second term, conservatism may well be irredeemably tarnished. Still, much will depend upon whether the Democratic Party can resist its own drift toward Trumpiness. I’ll explain, but first, let me make the case that you should court Republican refugees like me in 2020.

Story Continued Below

You may think you don’t need us—but you’d be wrong. I know things are looking good for you: Trump’s approval rating has never topped 46 percent, and among younger voters, millennials and Gen Zers, his support is 30 percent or below. But Trump was elected with the lowest approval ratings of any major candidate in history. Polls can disguise as well as reveal. The “shy Tory” phenomenon—in which voters seem disinclined to tell pollsters that they support conservatives—is real across the globe, as evidenced most recently by the upset victory of the conservatives (called “liberals”) in Australia. Right-wing populism continues to show strength worldwide as recent election results in Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland and the Philippines attest. And if the results of the 2018 midterms have you feeling confident, you should look to the not-so-distant past. Democrats were pasted in the 2010 midterms and yet President Barack Obama glided painlessly to reelection in 2012.

While we’re on the subject of the midterms, remember that your 2018 victories were not a left-wing triumph. Your 40-seat pickup was due in no small measure to Republicans and independents who voted Democrat. In other words: Voters like me.

Democrats are well-positioned to win in 2020 by embracing political normalcy again. They can follow the path that brought Warren Harding to the presidency a hundred years ago, when, after World War I and the Spanish flu, Americans thought they’d seen theFour Horsemen of the Apocalypse: famine, war, pestilence and death. Harding ran on a “return to normalcy” and won in a landslide. Trump’s tenure has not, thankfully, featured pestilence or war. It’s more like the Three Stooges than the Four Horsemen. Still, today, many of us are prepared to put our long-term goals of balanced budgets and less government-controlled health care aside to feel some sense of political equilibrium again.

But that’s not the tone you are adopting. First, you seem taken with the idea of executive overreach. At the second candidate debate, Senator Kamala Harris declared that “When elected president of the United States, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to pull their act together … and put a bill on my desk for signature” for new gun control measures. And if Congress does not, she said, she will take executive action to put in the “most comprehensive background check policy we’ve had,” require the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to take the licenses of gun dealers who break the law and ban the import of assault weapons. She further declared her intention to reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status on “Day One,” not just for those brought here as children but for their parents and for veterans.

By what authority? This is precisely the kind of power grab that Trump engaged in when declaring his spurious state of emergency to redirect funds to his border wall. And though Democrats’ frustration with his lawlessness is justified, this would represent a total vindication of it. If Democrats respond to Trump’s arrogation of power by doing the same thing, our constitutional system is threatened.

It’s not just Harris. Beto O’Rourke has said that, while he opposed President Barack Obama’s reliance on executive authority to change immigration law, he would resort to it to fight climate change, “because we don’t have time to waste and there’s some things that are under the purview of the administration.” Like O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren vows that on her first day in office she would issue an executive order “that says no more drilling—a total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases, including for drilling offshore and on public lands.”

Is this the Democratic version of “I alone can fix it?” For all his crazy-uncle socialism, at least Bernie Sanders promises to propose legislation—not to rule by decree.

The assertion of unlimited executive power is not just contrary to the Constitution; it’s also a recipe for rising political tensions. If I believe that a Democrat will propose legislation with which I disagree, I know I stand a good chance of having my representatives modify or even block it. That’s not true of executive action. The stakes of each presidential contest thus get ratcheted up, as both sides fear that the next president, unconstrained by Congress, can lurch the country in a dramatically new direction. That severely decreases the chances that all of you, hopeful Democrats, can bring more centrist voters over to your side.

Second, have some respect for the norms and institutions that undergird our system’s stability. You claim to be dismayed by Trump’s norm-shattering ways, and yet your proposals are political earthquakes. At least four Democratic presidential contenders—Kirsten Gillibrand, Pete Buttigieg, O’Rourke and Warren—have endorsed eliminating the Electoral College, and one, Harris, has pronounced herself “open” to it. Warren, Bill De Blasio and Harris would abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE is a relatively new agency, created in 2003, but enforcement of immigration law is not.Harris and Buttigieg also favor packing the Supreme Court. The court has had nine justices since 1869. Remember, when FDR attempted to pack the court in 1937, he was thwarted by his own party. If Democrats take this step, it will invite further erosions of tradition by the next Republican majority. And, like executive orders, it will heighten the sense that presidents are would-be emperors.

Sanders, Cory Booker, Harris, Warren, Julián Castro and Andrew Yang have endorsed the “Green New Deal,” and Amy Klobuchar and Gillibrand support the “aspirations” of the plan, if not the details. The plan would demand a vertiginous (in fact, impossible) reordering of our entire government and economy—for instance, by requiring the refurbishment of every single building in the country. If that isn’t enough, the Green New Deal also requires that all Americans be provided with health care, good jobs and “access to nature.” Stalin promised every kid a happy childhood. This is close.

There’s a clear way forward, Democrats, and it is grounded in the Constitution. Do what you think is right—propose legislation to fix Obamacare or spend more on basic research of climate change or whatever—but in the constitutional way. No sweeping, federalism-smashing plans to overhaul everything in the name of your preferred policies. And please, don’t call for the abolition of traditions and constitutional structures, like the Electoral College, that make voters nervous about your stewardship.

Joe Biden is one candidate who seems to understand voters’ longing for political quiet after the upheaval we’ve lived through. He hasn’t called to abolish ICE; he is fine with nine justices on the Supreme Court; and he intends to keep the Electoral College as he found it. He has not succumbed to the temptation of executive orders, and has in fact called them “wacko.”

Democrats would be wise to embrace that sensibility, in the person of Biden or another, not just because it could win, but because it’s important for all of us, right and left, to turn our faces away from Caesarism—of the right or the left.

Read More

#Democrat #Foreign #Never-Trumper #Politics

[newidaho]

21.  Imaginary Friend

Don’t have the time/patience/desire to read with your eyes? Don’t have eyes? Well, have your friend read you this:  You can check out the audiobook for free on Apple, Google, Stitcher, or Spotify.  Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday!

Amidst all the press given to New Idaho as the “City of the Century”, people often forgot to give credit to the burgeoning tech industry in Omaha, Nebraska.

Though some place the beginning of its growth period as early as the 2010s, Omaha seriously took off toward the tail end of the ‘20s.  Young adults living there often said the city was ripe for immigration, if only the rest of the state would “get with the times”.  In 2026, the state, evidently, did get with the times, becoming the 38th state to legalize marijuana and providing no excuse for millennials and Gen Zers not to move to the growing city in America’s heartland.

As with the most of the other major cities in the country at this time, most of Omaha’s wealth came from it’s growing tech industry, specifically in areas of Virtual Reality.  Among some other relatively successful, though less interesting, B2B Virtual Applications, Omaha finally found it’s Lex Lucid in Eric Phillips, the CEO and Founder of Imaginary Friend, a 2028 start-up that continued to grow into a multi-national corporation and one of the most-downloaded apps on the Virtual Market.

As a 2028 company, Imaginary Friend started as a little AI experiment, attempting to add a visual element to the AI chat-bots that had populated livestreams and group messaging apps throughout the 2010s.  The first iteration of the app included a few pop-culture characters that partner organizations agreed to develop with the start-up, in addition to a crude (compared to modern-day) avatar generator.  The characters/avatars moved realistically in the virtual world and learn to converse with you as you put more time into the app.

The multi-siloed marketing tactics of the Imaginary Friend Corporation (IFC) were part of the genius that made the technology so relevant.  Of course, the most obvious audience was children, and Phillips certainly focused on this safe bet.  Children could now hang out with some of their favorite cartoon characters and practice making friends with avatars of their own creation.

The next audience Phillips marketed to was young adults in their 20s and 30s.  These young adults were attempting to make their way in the world, learning to communicate.  Phillips chose to include job interview simulations and programmed the AI for some common difficult conversations.  This sort of conversational capability made Imaginary Friend a practical application to use when deciding how to breach a certain topic or have a certain conversation for the first time.  Are you practicing a proposal?  IFC can help.  Breaking some hard news to your parents or children?  IFC had it covered.  By marketing the practical uses of the application, Phillips was able to broaden his audience to include these young adults, which naturally expanded to older adults once they saw the proven therapeutic capabilities of the software.

The last, and most difficult, audience to penetrate was teenagers.  Phillips was aware of the danger of losing the childhood portion of his audience as they aged out of the lovable cartoon characters pre-programmed into the software.  Once these children aged out, it would be harder to retain them as adults.  Phillips’ answer to this conundrum was to include appropriate and clever retorts to any of the inappropriate and crude remarks that teens were bound to make to the software.  As he had expected, this gave the software a hip factor that teens could vibe with.  It wasn’t the perfect marketing strategy, but from what Phillips could tell, it slowed the drop off considerably (and of course there were plenty of teens who extended their childhood use of Imaginary Friend in secret).

Though the virtual app was successfully used for playtime and therapeutic conversations, its stationary nature, like all Virtual Applications, kept it from expanding very far.  It wasn’t until 2035, with the advent of Imaginary Friend AR that IFC really took off and became the behemoth it is today.

Through augmented reality, IFC was able to integrate all of its improvements and advancements in avatar creation and character selection with the Lucid Lens to offer a friend that would follow you around for any adventure.  This was a game-changer—no longer did kids have to stay secluded in one room to play with their Imaginary Friend.  Now, if they had Lenses, they could take their Imaginary Friend to school, recess, the grocery store, and anywhere else they could think of.  Not to mention, the wireless communication between Lenses made it easy for groups to share the same Imaginary Friend.

The upgrade was an immediate hit.  Having an Imaginary Friend in AR was more realistic, and being able to share them with your friends made for endless games and permutations. Young adults would waste time trying to compete for the attention of a beautiful Imaginary Female in a safe, competitive practice of seduction.  Children would entertain themselves for hours on end on the playground with their favorite cartoon characters and heroes.  Entrepreneurs went on walks to bounce ideas off their custom avatar.  Performers used various AI personalities as audiences.  Writers created their own focus groups.

From 2035 to 2054, Imaginary Friend scaled into the gigantic corporation it is known as today.  IFC expanded its service to offer different Imaginary Friend Packs for purchase and began to host large-scale Imaginary Friend conferences and events. Though New Idaho remained the most interesting city in the country, Omaha quickly became one of the most popular (New Idaho was still being a bit too isolated and unusual for many to actually move to).

As the use of Imaginary Friends consistently grew, the etiquette used with the software, as with any new technology, went through its own growing period.  In the early days of IFAR, a common complaint was that users seemed to be talking to their Imaginary Friends more than their real friends, even in social settings.  Critics considered this similar to the advent of Smartphones, when it wasn’t uncommon to see groups of friends scrolling through apps while hanging out or eating dinner together.  Just as that practice was eventually socialized out of existence, so was gratuitously hanging out with your Imaginary Friend in public.

Alternatively, the use of Imaginary Girlfriends became more normalized as the software aged.  Though IFC still didn’t condone pornographic packs (there was another start-up for that), it wasn’t uncommon for people to create beautiful avatars to hang out with, that many eventually fell in love with.  Though this was initially viewed as lonely and pathetic, it soon came to light that there were a great deal of men and women alike who enjoyed the low-stakes companionship they could find in a Virtual Partner.  Some critics even argue that real-life intimacy grew as a result, with users gaining valuable practice in engaging with the opposite sex outside of actual, often demoralizing, interactions.

IFC CEO Eric Phillips and Lucid Labs CEO Lex Lucid had become friends in the early ‘30s, and were often in communication, with Phillips visiting the Labs in New Idaho at least once a year.  As IFC grew, their partnership with Lucid Labs became even more important as Imaginary Friends were optimized for each new round of Lucid Lenses.  Phillips was always present at Lucid Events if he could make it, and Lex Lucid himself lauded Phillips on the effectiveness of Imaginary Friends as sounding boards for ideas, even though Lucid tried, as a minimalist (even in idea-generation) to use them sparingly.

During the Christmas 2054 announcement of Lucidity, however, Phillips had been home in Omaha with his family.  Though he doubted he would have gone all the way up to Idaho on Christmas in any case, he was admittedly disappointed when he realized that there had been a Lucid Event without him.  He had wondered whether Lex thought IFC was on track to become obsolete, a possibility that had worried Phillips even with the company’s seemingly invincible rise to the top.  After seeing the ground-breaking new technology Lex had dreamed up, Phillips was even more disheartened at not being let into the loop sooner.

Thus, when Phillips received a call around 1900h CST that very Christmas, he was happy to hear that Lex still had interest in meeting with him.  They worked out a meeting as soon as was convenient for both of them, deciding on a date of 28 December, three days hence.

Lucid put Phillips up in his house on the night of the 27th.  They used that time to catch up on what they had been working on, relaxing and reflecting over their past year.  2054 had been great, and 2055 was due to be another big one—now for both of them.

On the 28th, Lucid and Phillips spent all day at the Labs.  It turned out that Lucid had planned to eventually work with Phillips on this project all along.  During the early stages, the technology was too life-changing to let anyone but the closest teams in on it.  Now that it had been announced, however, the Labs were ready to bring Phillips in on development.  They had already had one of their in-house engineers working on how best to optimize Lucid Dream for integration with Imaginary Friend.  The code was, more or less, there.  At this point, he just needed Phillips and his team to dot some i’s and cross some t’s.  Phillips, though admittedly slightly put off by the ease of which Lucid could have his team code for IFC, was happy that the ball had been passed to him as an assist.  He promised to get his team working on it as fast as possible to finish the layup.

On 3 January, Snow woke up from his last day on Christmas break, brushed his teeth, and opened up his Lucid Dream application.  Though initially rather resistant to the idea of putting a brain-reading patch on his head, Snow had quickly become used to it, and had spent more than half of his nights since Christmas recording and enjoying the playback of his dreams.  He was starting to understand the utility of being aware of what he dreamed of every night.

This morning, Snow was surprised with an update on his home page.  Lucidity had just been announced a week ago, there were only maybe 2000 in the world (at most), and there was already a software update?

Snow’s eye was drawn to a picture in the top corner of the update box.  It was a familiar icon—an orange-ish brown figure resembling the “man” often seen on bathroom doors, with his arms raised and his bottom half tapering to a point like an old cartoon of a ghost or genie.  The man was outlined in green.  It was the icon for Imaginary Friend software.  The message read “Would you like to integrate Lucid Dream with Imaginary Friend?” with responses reading “Yes” and “Not Now”.

Snow hadn’t used Imaginary Friend much since his younger teen years.  He had used it quite often in the past—as an only child, the ability to have a confidant, no matter how Virtual, was a godsend—but as he grew older, he became more introverted, and he hadn’t felt a need to open the software in ages.

It was still, however, downloaded on his Lenses.  Snow thought about the benefits he had noticed after closely reviewing his dreams.  He was starting to notice patterns in his own personality.  He could feel himself maturing as he inspected these aspects of himself.  He wondered if it was time to bring Imaginary Friend back into his life—maybe this time for the therapeutic purposes that he knew many adults used them for.  He could see how using one of the characters from his dreams could be a good place to start on that journey.  He waved his hand over “Yes,” and a circle of characters, both fantastic and realistic, from all the dreams he had recorded in the past week, appeared in front of him.  He was prompted to select one to transfer to Imaginary Friend software.

Snow closed the application. Cool update, he thought.  But he would need a little more time to decide if and how he was going to use it.

#New Idaho #Ben Vizy #New Novel #Writing #Writing Community #Novelist #Novel Writing #2054 #Augmented Reality #Futurism #AR Technology

[cathrynstreich]

Dream Big. Stay Humble.

Realty ONE Group Creates a Legacy for the Future 

Editor’s Note: This is the cover story in the June issue of RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine. Subscribe today. 

Real estate in the next two to three years? We can only imagine. And if we dare to, we’ll probably fall short of foreseeing the change that will occur in our industry in just 24 months. Change so fast you can’t look away.

Realty ONE Group is keenly focused on it, innovating their technology, training and marketing services, and orchestrating key partnerships to not just be a part of that change, but to drive it.

This is “ONE” company that always seeks bigger. Looks farther. Knows there is more.

Since the company’s inception, Realty ONE Group CEO and Founder Kuba Jewgieniew and his bright and talented executive team and staff, who are committed to the same principles and values upon which he founded the company, have been determined to build an organization with the staying power of the Fortune 500 greats. To do that, they know it’s not about just pivoting on the newest technologies or adopting the latest marketing fad.

It’s about looking beyond the immediate future. Not just anticipating change, but seeking it out.

Like the precious face of the hopeful young girl on this magazine’s cover, there’s a bright and exciting future ahead for the next several generations. Realty ONE Group knows it would be a shame to get distracted by what’s right in front of us.

Why It Happened 

Realty ONE Group is committed to driving change…for generations to come.

It was just too much: the amount of money that Jewgieniew (pronounced Yev-gen-yev) paid to his broker when he did 111 transactions and more than $30 million in volume as an agent in his first full year in real estate in 2004.

“It was too much to leave on the table when I did all the work,” says Jewgieniew. “I was grinding it out and loving what I was doing, but never saw my broker until I had to hand over my commission. I realized quickly that there had to be a better way and that I wasn’t the only one feeling like this.”

Like with everything in his life that causes him discomfort, the spark ignited and Jewgieniew looked for a solution, not just for him, but for anyone experiencing the same angst. And he walked out the door.

Based on a 100-percent commission model, Jewgieniew created Realty ONE Group to give real estate professionals a better life. (Note: Jewgieniew refuses to call them agents. Using the term “professionals,” he believes, gives them the respect they command.) But, from the beginning, he wanted something different for everyone—buyers and sellers, office staff, online traffic, friends, neighbors, partners, anyone who crosses paths with Realty ONE Group at any time. It has to be a whole different experience, or it’s just not good enough.

Jewgieniew and the Realty ONE Group team make a big impression at their first NAR Convention, 2018.

The Very Definition of Humble Beginnings We love a good “rise to greatness” story, and Jewgieniew has one. His mom, Elizabeth, and his dad, Jerzy, met at a young age in Poland and started their family with nothing. His dad was a mechanic by trade, but did his best work as an inventor. They seeded their only boy, a young, determined, sometimes mischievous Jewgieniew, with both humility and ambition. His parents instilled hard work and drive in their son the same way most parents instill manners and good hygiene. But it wasn’t an easy start, as the family had very little money.

“Despite what little we had, I’m so grateful to my parents for giving me what I consider to be the perfect start in life,” says Jewgieniew. “For me, it was the combination of freedom and guidance, passion and gratitude, and, ultimately, love that shaped me.”

His family immigrated to America and continued to build a better life. Jewgieniew worked his own way through college and, after graduating from the University of California, San Diego, started a lucrative career as a financial planner and portfolio manager. But he’s an inventor like his father, and was building hardware and software programs on the side; always curious, always exploring what could be.

Affecting people and creating change are what Jewgieniew values most about his role in creating one of real estate’s fastest-growing and most disruptive franchisors today.

The One Difference 

The energy is palpable at Basecamp, a leadership retreat.

With his eye fixed on what he considers an industry mired in traditions, Jewgieniew and his leadership team know that real estate will look entirely different in the next decade and that the stakes are high as competition continues to flood the playing field.

To entice anxious real estate agents and would-be franchise owners hoping to build on retirement, you have to not only stand out, but also let them know you’re here to stay. To do that, you have to prove you have the foresight for what’s to come and that you’re thinking of not only their children, but also their children’s children. And for Realty ONE Group, that means acting differently.

“Creating new, compelling experiences for people is what it’s all about for Kuba,” says Mike Clear, Realty ONE Group’s chief operating officer, who joined the company in 2017. “He truly believes that life is just too short to be unoriginal, and it’s hard not to believe it, too, when you’re around him.”

There’s a bright and exciting future ahead for the next several generations.

The make-it-different lens is used on everything, so much so that it has become second nature to the Realty ONE Group team.

“We’ll usually map out a project and then immediately flip it on its head,” says Clear. “By the time we complete it, it can, and usually does, look totally different from our original concept.”

That happened when the Laguna Niguel, Calif., office lease came up, prompting a move to a new space. Plans for the new Realty ONE Group “Hub”—named as such to avoid any implication of an ivory-tower headquarters office—changed repeatedly as the team burst with new, fun ideas meant to give the staff a reason to want to come to work. The Hub has a front entrance made entirely of glass—giving the illusion of not having a front door—and the brand’s signature black and gold cover are splashed all over the walls with vivid canvas portraits of Realty ONE Group’s love and laughter. A turf and gold ball soccer wall, shipping container conference room, zen garden and coffee barista are alone worth going in for a tour, and, of course, everyone is welcome.

“The passion Kuba has for everything he does is so infectious that it fuels us all to dream and imagine and go big—really big,” says Chief Brand Officer David King, who led the marketing and branding efforts for an expansive U.S. mortgage company before joining Realty ONE Group in 2017. “Every space in the new Hub was an opportunity for us to add meaning to our environment—to give our team something to think about or to be inspired by or to simply enjoy.”

Every space in Realty ONE Group’s new Hub provides the opportunity to add meaning to the work environment.

Another preview of the difference will come when Realty ONE Group launches its new website later this year, promising to look nothing like any other real estate website.

“The key is to not just create something to be different,” says King. “We do it to elevate the experience, give people something to be excited about and hope that it leads them to their own inspiration. At the end of the day, we do it for people.”

One Cares 

Giving back is a key piece for Realty ONE Group’s “coolture.”

Jewgieniew’s passion transfers to whatever he fixes his gaze on, including the disadvantaged and underprivileged, which led the team to establish ONE Cares in 2014, the official 501(c)3 arm for Realty ONE Group. It was a real way to solidify the company’s commitment to giving back to its family of agents and to others in need.

For years, the company and its real estate professionals have raised money, donated, hosted charity events, volunteered and worked together to make an impact on a variety of organizations. And ONE Cares has helped its own agents who suffered loss or faced challenges.

That work will continue, and in a big way. The company plans to do much more in the years to come and with a greater focus on nonprofit organizations that are committed to really making change and benefiting others.

In recent months, Jewgieniew pledged $11,111 to kickstart 2019 fundraising for ONE Cares, and he recently donated another $11,111 (see the ONE again) to S.A.F.E., or the Stop Abuse for Everyone non-profit organization, on behalf of husband and wife agents in his Temecula, Calif., office who lost a daughter to domestic violence.

“This is really how we make a difference,” says Jewgieniew. “Beyond helping people buy and sell homes, we can instantly impact lives by just doing our part. And that’s the legacy we want to leave for our kids and for our families.”

Realty ONE Group just celebrated its 14th anniversary on May 1, and unlike other cake-filled anniversary celebrations, the Realty ONE Group offices and its agents celebrated with a company-wide day of giving. It’s become a tradition symbolic of the company’s high value on people and making an impact.

But Still, There Is Fun 

Giving back is a key piece for Realty ONE Group’s “coolture.”

One of the hallmarks for the Realty ONE Group culture is fun, which is why the company coined its own term, “coolture.”

“Contrary to popular opinion, work and fun don’t have to be separate experiences,” says King, who orchestrated the company’s biggest convention to date, the ONE Summit, this past March at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. “We packed ONE Summit with fun, valuable and memorable experiences so our real estate professionals would know we’re here to help them not just be more successful, but enjoy their jobs.”

Realty ONE Group hosted memorable speakers like Earvin “Magic” Johnson and U.S. Navy Seal Rob O’Neill, while celebrating award winners with a formal masquerade party open to all attendees. The company also broke a Guinness World Record by creating the largest word out of dice—the ONE logo—with 11,111 gold and black dice, each carefully placed by convention-goers.

Work and fun went hand in hand at ONE Summit, the company’s biggest convention to date.

“It was the typical case of Kuba finding a way to let Realty ONE Group real estate professionals be a part of something unique and memorable,” says King.

And for the company, there’s no telling what memories will be made next as it continues to add onto the company’s army of real estate professionals and places an office in all 50 states while looking to expand into new countries.

Like a blockbuster movie, you definitely want to stay until after the credits just to get a teaser of what’s next.

For more information, please visit www.realtyonegroup.com.

Paige Tepping is RISMedia’s managing editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at [email protected].

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