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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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The months leading up to Nov. 3, 2020 were, for Donald Trump, almost a carbon copy of what he did in advance of the presidential election four years previously: He thumbed tweets, whined at his rallies and complained to anyone who would listen that the election had been “rigged” by Democrats. Of course, after election eve 2016, we never heard another peep out of him about the dastardly Democrats and the wily ways they had rigged the election against him, because he won.

But from the moment that his network of pet poodles at Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden in November of 2020, causing a series of eruptions in the private quarters at the White House, culminated in a call to Fox executives to demand that the network reverse its Arizona projection, Trump understood that this time it would be different. He would lose.

Trump turned immediately to the courts, filing more than 60 federal lawsuits in the battleground states he lost claiming that the election had been “stolen” from him. But as one case after another went down to defeat or outright dismissal, he turned to loyalist loons like former general Michael Flynn, online conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, My Pillow guy Mike Lindell and — wait for it — the Proud Boys to push his obsession that he hadn’t lost, and that the election had been rigged by nefarious forces.

See if this doesn’t sound familiar. On Dec. 12, several thousand pro-Trump demonstrators showed up in Washington for at least two rallies, one on the Mall and the other on the steps of the Supreme Court, to protest its decision the previous day to throw out a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of Texas seeking to bar the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania from casting their electoral ballots for Biden. The court issued a brief unsigned order on Dec. 11 saying that Texas had no “interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections” and dismissed the lawsuit. A few days earlier, the court had dismissed another suit filed by Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to throw out that state’s Biden electors, thus disenfranchising millions of voters.

Trump was watching closely. With Proud Boys marching through downtown Washington in mock-military formations shouting “Move out!” and “1776!” Trump tweeted "Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA." A bit later, he tweeted, “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!"

He must have liked what he saw on the streets of the nation’s capital that Saturday, because seven days later, on Dec. 19, Trump was tweeting “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!" The next week, on Dec. 26, he tweeted "The ‘Justice’ Department and the FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud, the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history, despite overwhelming evidence. They should be ashamed. History will remember. Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th."

After seven hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Saturday by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, and five hours of testimony before the same committee on Friday by Rosen’s former acting deputy, Richard Donoghue, we now know that behind the scenes, Trump was very busy.

On Dec. 15, the day after Bill Barr announced that he would be leaving his post as attorney general, Trump summoned Rosen to the Oval Office and told him he wanted the DOJ to file legal briefs supporting the lawsuits he had not yet lost challenging election results in battleground states. He demanded that Rosen appoint special counsels to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, which had provided voting machines in multiple states. Rosen demurred, citing what Barr had already reported to Trump, which was that the DOJ had investigated his charges and had found no evidence of widespread or significant voter fraud.

Rosen told the Judiciary Committee that Trump called him almost daily trying to get him to have the Department of Justice declare that the presidential election was “corrupt” and announce that the department was initiating investigations of “election irregularities” in multiple states, including Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all states Trump had lost narrowly to Biden.

Rosen continued to defer and delay on the phone, and Trump started talking with the acting head of the DOJ’s civil division, Jeffrey Clark, who was more amenable to Trump’s conspiracies. Rosen described to the Judiciary Committee five separate “encounters” with Clark over his plotting behind Rosen’s back with Trump, all of which took place between Dec. 23 and Jan. 3.

Trump became fixated on his narrow defeat in Georgia, placed a now-famous phone call to Gov. Brian Kemp on Dec. 5, trying to get him to pressure the state legislature to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. Kemp deflected, telling him that he had no power to call for investigations into signatures on absentee ballots or any of the other things Trump was urging him to do.

On Dec. 27, at Trump’s urging, Clark produced a letter dated the following day he wanted Rosen and Donoghue to sign. Aware that the governor of Georgia had rejected Trump’s entreaties, Clark’s letter amounted to a DOJ legal analysis that the state legislature could call itself into session without the governor’s authority, reject the electors pledged to Joe Biden and appoint its own slate of Trump electors. “Time is of the essence,” the Clark letter pleaded, because Congress would convene in joint session to certify the election on Jan. 6.

Rosen and Donoghue refused to sign the letter, telling Clark “this is not even within the realm of possibility.”

That didn’t end it. Clark apparently demanded a meeting with Rosen and Donohue, which took place at the DOJ on New Year’s Eve. Clark told them Trump was planning on firing Rosen and replacing him with Clark so he could carry out his plan to manipulate the Georgia legislature into appointing a new slate of Trump electors. Clark told his two bosses that he was meeting with Trump the next week to carry this out.

Instead, Clark met with Trump a day later and showed him the letter, discussing their plan for a Trumpian “Saturday Night Massacre.” Rosen and Donoghue demanded a meeting with Trump, at which they planned on telling him that the entire senior leadership of the Justice Department would resign en masse if Trump appointed Clark as acting attorney general.

Before that meeting took place, news emerged that Trump had placed a lengthy call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, demanding that the latter “find” enough votes to overturn the election results in his state. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said, according to a tape of the call obtained by the Washington Post.

The Oval Office meeting between Trump, Rosen, Donoghue and Clark went on the next evening, attended by White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who advised the president not to fire Rosen because such a move would trigger congressional investigations and distract from Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. After three hours, the meeting broke up, with Rosen and Donoghue still in their jobs.

Rosen and Donoghue told the Senate Judiciary Committee that with only 17 days remaining until the presidential inauguration, they believed they had avoided a constitutional crisis. But we all know what happened three days later, on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol building and delayed for several hours the certification of the electoral ballots which made Joe Biden president.

Between the early hours of Nov. 4, when Trump first realized he had lost the election, and Jan. 6, when the assault on the Capitol dominated every news cycle until the inauguration (and beyond), Trump was all over the place in his attempts to overturn the election. He was consumed with the lawsuits being filed around the country on his behalf — but was losing them, one after another. He was obsessed with following conspiracy theories about Biden ballots being carried by Special Forces soldiers from Germany and stuffed into ballot boxes in battleground states, about mysterious computers and satellites controlled by Italy switching Biden votes for Trump votes in battleground states, and multiple other outlandish conspiracies.

But beginning on Dec. 12, with the Proud Boys march through Washington and the demonstrations on the Mall and at the Supreme Court, Trump became fixated on holding a rally on Jan. 6 that he believed could prevent the certification of electoral ballots taking place that day. Two days later, he began his campaign to get the Department of Justice to join his plan to pressure state legislatures in a handful of states he had lost to throw out Biden electors and appoint their own slates of Trump electors.

He tweeted on Dec. 19, 26, 27 and 30, all dates coinciding with his pressure on Rosen and Donoghue to use the Department of Justice to help him overturn the election. On Jan. 1, the day he met with Jeffrey Clark to discuss firing Rosen, he tweeted “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!” On Jan. 4, Trump traveled to Georgia to hold a rally, nominally in support of the two Republican candidates in the U.S. Senate runoff election, but really to put pressure on Georgia legislators to overturn the election.

Practically every move Trump made in December and January in advance of Jan. 6 was a crime. Pressuring Jeffrey Rosen to misuse the Department of Justice to support his private lawsuits was a crime. Conspiring with Jeffrey Clark to fire Rosen so Clark could send the letter to the Georgia legislature was a crime. Calling Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp and pressuring them to “find” votes and use the legislature to overturn the election was a crime. Meeting with his own White House staff and outside advisers to plan the rally on the Ellipse at which he would incite the assault on the Capitol was a crime.

Trump’s problem, to put it frankly, was that he didn’t start committing crimes early enough. The crimes he committed in December and January were largely impulsive, not carefully planned or focused. He exploded with tweets and phone calls and meetings and rallies.

In short, Trump was Trump, as incompetent a criminal conspirator as he was a president. The only question left to be answered at this point is whether Merrick Garland and the Biden Department of Justice will have the courage to charge him and his co-conspirators with the felonies they committed: defrauding the United States by attempting to illegally influence the outcome of the 2020 election.

If that crime sounds familiar, that is because it is the same one special counsel Robert Mueller charged 24 Russian nationals with committing in 2016, when they illegally hacked into Democratic National Committee servers, stole campaign emails and set up fake accounts to influence voters on American social media platforms. With Donald Trump, nothing is ever new. Just watch him. He’s out there right now raising $100 million to do it all over again in 2024. And the entire Republican Party is right there with him.

[This is my special Wednesday Salon column. It is open to all subscribers.]

LucianTruscott Newsletter

#newsletter #political #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #Lucian Truscott #Lucian K Truscott IV #January 6 2021

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alphapockets · 3 years

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Here is what’s in store for my writing!

Hey everyone. As promised, I would give more information about everything going down with my writing both in the fanfiction world and in my personal endeavors.

Fanfiction: I am setting a schedule for the two I have currently. Behind the Screen will be Mondays and Discord will be Thursdays. There is no plan to fill those slots when one inevitably is brought to a close, though that may change in the future.

Through Ko-Fi, I will be accepting commissions by the end of next month when I have a better understanding of what I can/cannot write and what will fit within my timeslots. My major issue is I am less versed in fandoms as I am not a large consumer of shows/movies/games with plot.

Personal works: For those who follow me here and on Twitter, I will have available the novelized version of the DnD campaign that my friends and I have been running for now 72 sessions of tonight. That will be available on Wattpad and linked through Twitter and Tumblr.

I also have started to flesh out a Patreon page that will have new chapters monthly for three (3) Origins novels for characters at a time, as well as an LGBTQ+ supernatural series that I worked on for NaNoWriMo 2019 and the Sci-Fi/Soulmate series that I worked on for NaNoWriMo 2020. Tiers will be based around that, getting behind the scenes content, priority on commissions if that ever becomes a thing… etc.

Social Media: YES all things Alphapockets (excluding my IG because I can’t change it now because there is an imposter Pockets out there somewhere) will be dedicated to writing updates/small notes/ stream of consciousness/ pictures of my dog while I write because she’s adorable. I also want to get better and building a community, so please, message me! Contact me! I love hearing from y’all <3!

Free Content:

Into the Wolf’s Den

In the continent of Elazic in the South Sea a slumbering darkness is waking. The whispers of discourse tangle in the winds as the nations are faced with ever growing tensions. A king's assassination. Dragons awoke. The barriers between the planes grow thin. And danger and responsibility is thrust toward a group of strangers who met at chance in a tavern amidst their separate travels.

Tags: High Fantasy, Magic, Violence, Minor Adult Content, LGBTQ+ Characters, Adventure, Mystery, DnD, Dark Undertones.

Tier Content:

Origins: The Angel

The island nation of the Drakken Isles is a world of exotic and beast-like beings who have made a life far from the humans of Tranel. Caoimhe, a cleric of the King of Storms and child of his celestial and another cleric grows up in a world where she knows something more exists in her future. At the age of 18, she heads out on her own spirit quest as her mother had over two decades before, unsure of where her path may lead.

Origins: The Taken

Aelira spent much of her early years traveling with her parents who had left their life of rules and royal demands to be merchants and artisans. After half a century living by the capital of Fremorē, a voice came in the night to her saying she must leave. For the next 160 years, she roamed the world and left the life she knew behind to keep them all safe unaware of all she had done in service of a darker entity that had stripped her of her soul.

Origins: The Thief

Marcus was a child of the streets who had been raised in a tough world. Parentless, homeless, and without rules, the young boy grew into a young man who lived outside of the law. A chance run in with a being who was far more than a man trapped him in a cycle of debts he could not escape. Even as the man died before his eyes, he would come to collect again and make Marcus far more dangerous to his companions than he may seem.

Hunted

Four friends living in a cramped apartment in Savannah notice their friend Eliana has captured the attention of a man. While Meghan, Jamilla, and Petra continue to dig deeper, they uncover another side of their beloved city and a whole world that was better left untouched. In an attempt to keep their friend safe, the other girls start to make dealings with the devils who run the underground groups of supernaturals.

Starscapes

Micah worked hard to get where he was: special operations in the part of the military that was never fully public with their actions. His failed bond through the program left him as an outlier on the job until one night, he was visited in a dream by a young man with pale green eyes. As he investigated and trained, Micah uncovers the truth of his program, the government, and the young man who he cannot stop feeling despite the distance he knows exists between them.

So that’s it! If you have any questions, please ask. I would love to let y’all know more! The Patreon is not live yet, as I am still editing the content before posting it, but I am due to open at the end of January with the first month’s content available. Thank you to everyone who has made me feel like my writing could be more than just for fun. This will NOT impact my fanfiction writing on AO3 at all, as that is one of my favorite things to do. Honestly, I couldn’t quit that if I tried.

Xoxo Pockets

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zippdementia · 3 years

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Part 95 Alignment May Vary: End of All Things

Here we are. I’ve been putting this off for a while, but this will be my final two-part post in the AMV campaign. This is the post that describes the end of our game, which happened on January 15th, 2021, over 4 years from our first campaign. It was an emotional moment for us all. I remember writing the notes the day before the session and then realizing I was sobbing openly as I wrote the campaign’s potential final lines. I thought, whew, well at least I’m getting it out of my system early. But the 4 hour session ended up being full of tears for us all, and once one of us started crying, the whole group couldn’t stop. It is impossibly hard to say goodbye to characters that you’ve essentially been the parents of, the creators of. And in writing this post, I’m doing it all over again.

This post was originally one long post, but I decided to break it into two pieces for ease of reading. If you’re reading this post after having read all 94 other posts, bless your heart. But regardless of how you arrived here, I’m glad you are here with us at the end of all things.

Our session begins right where the last one ended, at the foot of the Jarlberg mountain, at the summit of which Abenthy waits in the old cave of the stone giant Kirazov, for his ritual to complete and the plane of chaos merge with the material plane.

The PCs were saved in the final moments of the grand battle between the armies by Roger Krisp on board the renamed Anope intergalactic vessel, and a fleet of Githyanki who followed him to this planet to save the reality of those who had once aided them.

There is little time for reunion. Roger Krisp gives the PCs the last of the Surveyor’s remaining revitalization injection, which essentially long rests them all. They manage to save one: Imoaza took no damage during her stealth assassination in the last battle. Sasha, one of Aldric’s goblin children (his spunky daughter), has a brief and emotional greeting with the group. Time differentials in space travel (as well as speedy Goblin maturation) means she is an adult now, and she tells them that her father would be proud of them, and shows them that everyone on Anope has joined the Green Company to honor him. In death, he achieved what he had sought in life, the revival of his old Company.

(Cue our first round of tears).

Most surprising is the emergence of the The Old Surveyor from the ship. This is the old man from the Air Planet, who had disobeyed the orders of Primus centuries ago, and whose disobedience led to the creation of the “Progenitor Surveyor,” the one who created humanity and whom Imoaza’s ancestors worshipped long ago. He disembarks from the ship as well, now, and tells them that most will not be able to survive the “space beyond space” where Abenthy has fled to, so as to not be interrupted in his summoning of the Chaos Plane. He tells them that only Blackrazor can let them enter that space and allow them to do battle.

“He is no longer just Abenthy,” The Old Surveyor tells them. “He is a merging of three powers, three distinct lines of fate and alignment. Lawful, Evil, and Neutrality have all blended inside of that being. It carries the power of law, the knowledge of magic and the planes, and the determination of destiny.”

“We have the numbers,” Roger Krisp chimes in. ”It’s time to storm this mountain and end this!”

“Only these three can enter. Anyone else, anything else, would be torn assunder by trying to survive in that limbo. Blackrazor will keep Imoaza safe, the Surveyor’s Stone will keep Carrick safe, and Milosh's chest plate will keep him safe as it carries the true essence of Primus within it, the heartbeat of a god. Anyone else would be torn apart by what waits beyond. The fate of this plane of existence must be left in the hands of these three. Well, and one more, if you will grant him your protection.”

Out of the Surveyor's sleeve comes the Chi Chu, the little pet turned familiar that Imoaza hasn’t seen since entering the Abyssal plane ages ago. it flits over to Imoaza. They hear a "Chiiiii?" as if asking, you won't leave me behind this time, right?

(The return of a favored animal mascot? Cue our second round of tears).

With this, the group begins the ascent, though Carrick stays behind a moment to ask the Surveyor what will become of the Surveyors (of which Carrick and the old man are both technically the last) once Abenthy is defeated and Primus and Chaos’ soul erased in the process. The Surveyor says that for himself, it will be time to rest at last, and return to Primus’ side, even in oblivion. But for Carrick it will mean a different kind of freedom. Freedom to choose his own destiny.

"This is Where I First Learned to Hate”

As the group climbs the mountain, I remind them of the prophecy, to center us in on what this final session will cover. Friezurazov is the throne of power in the prophecy, a leyline in the world where reality can be weakened. It radiates power, and this power is what originally drew the Stone Giant Kirazov to the land, to make the Jarlberg (the seat of that psychic radiation) his lair. Now Abenthy has taken that seat back and from there plans the end of the world.

The party have to enter and pursue him, and Blackrazor Alpha, which Imoaza carries, is needed to cut through into that limbo space where the fight will occur. Once they face Abenthy, they will also face his Blackrazor, the one that is corrupt and filled with all the powers of chaos. But even destorying the sword cannot kill that which Abenthy has become. They can only weaken him enough to call upon another power to destroy him.

That power is the Source, Primus’ power which resides along with Primus’ soul inside Milosh's chest plate. Before this power is used, to truly win this fight, Carrick must use the Surveyor’s Stone to draw Primus' soul forth and Imoaza must weave that soul into one of them to become the shield in the prophecy, which is a word meaning sacrifice in the old languages.

Destroy both the shield (imbued with Primus’ soul) and Abenthy’s body (imbued with Chaos’ soul), and they will finally win and achieve the destruction of the abyssal plane forever, for it cannot be reborn if balance (Primus) is also gone. They were birthed of the same universe. This is all the true meaning of the prophecy of the Three.

Is that a mouthful? A mindful, maybe? Ah, but there is more! For another prophecy was given, this one specifically to Imoaza, and it concerns her fate.

As the group summits the mountain and enters the Stone Giants cave, I remind Imoaza of her prophecy. She got this from the ice tribe shaman, who used a Taroka deck to do her reading. She thinks back and remembers it as if it were happening again...

The first card she drew was the Collector and showed a pursed lip noble placing coins into a bag. “This is a decision made in your past,” the Shaman says. “The Collector represents a debt you must someday pay, and you have stolen from time itself. Time will have its due, in due time.”

Then he holds up a hand of cards and tells her to draw two, this time. She draws, and reveals first a cocky looking man gripping a sheathed blade with one hand and tossing a cloak over his shoulder with the other. Then a naked man, engulfed in flame and surrounded by a circle of swords, his head thrown back in either ecstasy or pain. The Shaman closes his eyes. “These cards represent a choice you will make. For you, the choice will be between two lives: the Rogue and the Tyrant. You shall choose one. The one chosen shall be saved, given a second chance. Those unchosen shall be lost forever, a sacrifice.”

The final card Imoaza draws depicts a skull inside a jar. It is labeled the Artifact. “The last card shows a bond, a bond embedded deep in your soul. All that you do is tied to this bond. And for you, that bond is to an item of power. When that artifact meets its destiny, only then shall you be free to pursue your own.”

Finally, the Shaman tells her that the power she wields, to see the Weave, is not one that is simply developed. It is a gift from Mystra, the goddess of the weave… some say she is the Weave itself. He tells her that the gift comes with responsibility and purpose. She does not need a teacher: the Weave itself will guide her to where she needs to be, when she needs to be there.

While Imoaza has been having this remembrance, they have completed the climb to Kirazov's old chamber, where they see the bones of the stone giant, where Abenthy struck him down long ago. There is a rumbling crack in the cave floor, like a rip in space time. They put Blackrazor in and split it open and jump into the Abyss to meet Abenthy.

Where they land is not where they expected. Things are quiet. There is the sound of lapping water and sea gulls. They are in an abandoned city, they see, a city of docks and ships, built on the edge of the ocean and looking out over its green-blue expanse. It is a peaceful, sunny day. And though the city seems deserted, they are not alone here. One figure stands near the docks, a beautiful man who radiates celestial power.

Abenthy stands over a bloodstain on the stone ground. He tells them “This is where I first learned to hate. This is where I was taught that people could not be trusted to govern themselves justly. It is also where I first learned failure.”

They have ended up, of course, at Ottoman’s Docks, abandoned as Abenthy sent his Tarasque there several weeks ago to empty the city. Abenthy refers here to one of his defining character moments, when he witnessed a child be put to death for stealing and was helpless to do anything about it.

(Cue, maybe not tears, but certainly chills from Milosh’s player, who used to play Abenthy).

The group tries to reason with Abenthy, tell him that what he has done since that time has only led to more evil and destruction, but it is not just Abenthy they speak with here. It is Nazragul, Karina, and Abenthy smashed into one... and Nazragul seems to be the dominant personality, though it is Abenthy’s form he controls.

Abenthy (as pushed to madness by Nazragul) says that crashing Chaos into this world will destroy both planes and usher in a new beginning for everyone. Carrick in particular derides him for this, saying that ending everything to start over is the ultimate act of cowardice. He also says it will not work: life by its nature is flawed. That is its beauty.

No, Abenthy says. This time it will not be flawed. This time he will be there to show life the proper way. As he will show them now.

He begins summoning chaos, they see it coming up into Ottoman's docks, ripping through the docks as the translucent purple tentacles that have plagued them before. Wings erupt from Abenthy’s back, one black and one white. Black Razor warps into the battlefield, gives a crass greeting to Imoaza and taunts her for not wielding him when she had the chance (to which she shows him Blackrazor Alpha and prepares to fight back). Finally, three small crystals rise into the air, floating around Abenthy. They are old surveyor stones! The last remaining, aside from Carricks. They glow with power, and from the edges of the docks, two shadowy monsters approach to aid Abenthy in this fight.

Roll initiative!

“I Will Show You”

As far as music goes, if you want to play something while reading this, I use Kefka’s theme from FFVI, Zeromous’ theme from FFIV, and the Final Lavos theme (this one) from Chrono Trigger. They are appropriate choices. A lot of this battle, and in fact the entire set up, has been inspired by both Chrono Trigger and FFVI in particular, which I think had some of the best final set ups of any JRPG ever. In FFVI Kefka wins and the party has to regather allies to face him like they do here. Chrono Trigger’s final battle takes place in time and space, which so does mine. And finally, there is the crystals that are so prevalent in early FF games (and sorely missed in more modern entries). They come into play in my design as well.

To get down to business... so I design Abenthy as a modified Solar from the Monster Manual, with some different spells that let him bring the Abyssal tentacles onto the battlefield (this is stuff like Evard’s tentacles, Shadows of Moil, Arms of Hadar) and which he can use as legendary actions in addition to a normal action. Note that the Solar is very deadly on his own, especially with his longbow:

Slaying Longbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +13 to hit, range 120/600 ft., one target. Hit: 15 (2d8 + 6) piercing damage plus 27 (6d8) radiant damage. If the target is a creature that has 190 hit points or fewer, it must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or die.

Holy instant kills batman. Especially with the Solar’s ability to teleport and fly, he can keep some massive distance between himself and the PCs and rain down destruction with that bow. That said, Abenthy does not start out combat using this deadly combo. Early on, he prefers to use his tentacles to suck the life from the PCs and use magic blasts to try to weaken them.

Abenthy also has four crystals floating around him, which serve to grant him different powers and which really should be targeted first in order to weaken him enough to fight. One crystal heals him every turn. Another two controls (one each) the shadowy monsters (which are themselves monsters from Tasha’s guide, beefed up versions of the Shadowspawn (pg 114, Tasha’s). This means the action economy is more balanced between the players and Abenthy, slightly skewed in his favor because of the legendary actions and the constant battlefield effects of the tentacles. Finally, the last crystal can block spells of up to 4th level, which helps mitigate Imoaza’s easy damage dealing cantrips (she is deadly with her Eldritch blasts).

Finally, there is Abenthy’s Blackrazor, which moves on its own and attacks with the same basic stats as a Solar’s Greatsword:

Greatsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +15 to hit, reaah 5 ft. , one. target. Hit: 22 (4d6 + 8) slashing damage plus 27 (6d8) radiant damage.

Sooo shit tons of damage. Blackrazor is also indestructible and invulnerable, except for one caveat... which we’ll get to later.

The final gimmick of this fight is that each round, as Abenthy takes damage, he changes the battlefield, taking the party through space and time to places that were of import to him, with his tentacles (representing the plane of Chaos) ripping these places to shreds as they fight. Basically, they are witnessing the destruction of their world as they fight, beginning with places that meant something to the players (if not necessarily these specific characters). It’s a way for me to meta-nod to our previous adventures, while also hitting us all where it hurts, right in the nostalgia feels. At the same time, it reveals more about Abenthy’s psyche and fall from grace.

So, below, I’m going to go through each place Abenthy takes them, and the general progression of combat events there (I won’t be getting action-by-action specific).

Time and Space

The opening clashes take place at Ottoman’s docks, but quickly this falls away to reveal floating space, the limbo before combat begins in earnest. This lets the combatants get off some opening salvos, test each other’s strengths and powers, and then we really dive into things, as the battlefield shifts for the first time to another memorable place.

You hurtle through space towards the planet you recognize as your own, heading at the speed of a comet through the atmosphere, coming down towards the crater of some long ago crashed meteor, heading through the earth itself to come to rest in a gigantic cavern, the epicenter which is a forgotten Yuan Ti pyramid.

Abenthy says that this is the place where an entire people proved they did not have the foresight to handle the responsibilities of caring for a world. They only sought power. And it was granted to them. They used it to destroy themselves. This is the Yuan Ti he refers to, this is their fane, Imoaza’s ancestors in particular, who worshipped the Surveyor and ultimately killed him when they felt he was giving their world to the humans he had helped raise out of primitive apes. Imoaza was last here at the end of the Red Hand campaign and it is also where our current Carrick awoke inside a clone body more recently.

The fight progresses for a time, with Milosh focusing on the shadow spirits, Imoaza trying to deal with Blackrazor, sword against sword, and Carrick rushing to fight Abenthy directly. And eventually the battlefield changes again.

The world shifts and shatters around you and the first sign of the transition is the biting cold. You find yourself standing on the edge of a ruined village, floating on an icy glacier.

Abenthy says he has seen that they themselves dare to think themselves capable of judging others, referring to the ice village that Milosh destroyed. “You have eradicated an entire village out of anger. What I do, I do out of foresight, not anger.”

Carrick gets some critical hits in this round and the PCs begin to figure out that they need to be targeting the surveyor stones floating around Abenthy. Their strategy changes, and as it does, something seems to split inside of Abenthy... his confidence changes to something more like sorrow.

Your next destination smells of brine and your ears fill with the roar of the sea as you stand aboard a wrecked seaship. Fog emanates from all around the dilapidated vessel and you can see bits of debris from its hull floating in the choppy waters. One board has the name STORM painted across it.

“Here is where she learned sorrow,” Abenthy says, and they wonder who he refers to. “Where she learned that she could not save the world. Her friends died here. The one who helped kill them she later took as lover. She never told you that, did she? Karina didn’t tell many that story. But I know it. For I know Karina, better maybe than she knows even herself.”

One of the stones, one controlling one of the shadow demons, is destroyed this round, by Milosh, while Carrick distracts Abenthy. However, this sends Abenthy into a rage and he unleashes his Bow of Slaying on Carrick, nearly taking him out of the fight completely. Carrick has to pull back to heal, and the map changes again.

This place you all recognize, for you were here but recently. It is the inside of the volcano in which Haggemoth’s tomb resides. Lava fills its chambers now, except for one high precipice on which you all find yourselves facing Abenthy.

This area ends up being the most critical of their fight. Imoaza finally realizes that Blackrazor is indestructible, but has the thought that her version of it, Blackrazor Alpha, is the promise of all that the evil sword will become. And if it never existed... the sword Alpha actually finishes this thought for her, telling her that, yes, this is the only way. And so, with her action, Imoaza throws Blackrazor Alpha into the lava flow, destroying it forever.

This is a shockingly intense moment for the player. Once she starts crying, we all do. She explains it as a huge arc for Imoaza. Blackrazor Alpha was made in part from her Drosselgreymer, the weapon she stole from her people. It represented her desire for power, her class as a Hexblade. It was her Hexblade. To destroy it all now symbolizes her letting go of that pursuit of power. It also dooms her people to being a simpler folk, for the power of their hexblades is drawn from Blackrazor, and now that is forever destroyed. This also fulfills a piece of her personal prophecy: she has let go of the artifact, and freed her fate from it.

The more evil Blackrazor lets out a mighty scream, saying that its destruction is impossible, that time has already decided it exists. But the lava of Haggemoth’s lair was imbued with his magical energy in order to destroy artifacts. What’s more, with such a powerful artifact destroyed here, the sacrifice offered to the gods is complete. The balancing of Haggemoth’s soul, so long ago disrupted by Abenthy, is finally complete. Attonement is given to the dwarf. He appears briefly, thanks the party, and finally goes to rest in the halls of his ancestors.

However, though Blackrazor is destroyed, the fight goes on. Abenthy begins to spiral back towards his old self, remembering... and as he remembers...

The roar of lava is replaced by the roar of the sea, crashing against a sandy shore. Above you looms a great cliff, at the top of which can be seen a broken pagoda. Another roar sounds, a quake shudders the island, and the pagoda begins to split apart even more.

This is the Island of the Oracle. “Here,” Abenthy says, “is the sanctum of one who could have changed things. She saw. She knew. But she choose to send me on the quest. Because she knew what needed to happen.”

As they fight here, the island continues to fall apart. The Oracle is dying, her power being drawn from the world, for she received her power from the surveyor’s stones, and Abenthy has channeled the last of that energy into this fight.

In the fight, the stones are all but destroyed now by the PCs. The last one remaining under Abenthy’s control is the one that heals him, and Carrick makes a desperate gambit to snag it out of the air and flee from Abenthy with it, getting ready to destroy it at all costs.

You are in a cool, calm place. Books and shelves surround you, as does an aura of austerity. A shield depicting a woman’s profile, her head wrapped in a laurel crown, is set in a place of honor overlooking this large library.

“And this is where it happened. This is where I met my father. He thought he knew the way. He thought he could control me. But he was wrong. He was only a lesser evil. He had failed so long ago, he had become irrelevant. I ignored him and he met his fate at the hands of the demons he fought with over power.”

Abenthy’s voice rings through the halls of the Sisters of Celaenos. And then suddenly a new voice takes over. It speaks in an arcane tongue and tentacles erupt all over the battlefield.

“Enough of this whining and melancholic tripe,” the cruel voice of Nazragul speaks, though it comes from Abenthy’s body. “I have indulged you all long enough. Now it is time to end this.”

The battle changes drastically at this point. The tentacles snatch at the party, trying to tie them to the ground, while Abenthy/Nazragul flies high into the air, far beyond their reach, and begins raining magic down on them. His blasts destroy the final crystal, but he doesn’t seem to care. He is raining destruction on the party, seeking to end them before they have a chance to recover.

Imoaza uses her last remaining injection from Roger Krisp to heal Carrick to full health. MIlosh frees everyone from the tentacles, Imoaza uses the last of her magic to cast fly on them all and they rush to reach Abenthy. They rush as the battlefield continues to shift to other places they know... Waterdeep... the ruins of Vraath Keep... and finally as they reach Abenthy and strike a grevious blow against him, it becomes a temple, darkly familiar, a temple that should destroyed.

You stare at a place you thought you would never see again, hoped to never see again. Its dark corridors have been rebuilt and blue flame flickers in torch brackets all around the rebuilt altar room of the Maakengorge temple. Where the Tarrasque once blocked the view of the abyssal chasm of the Maakengorge, now instead there is only space beyond that opening, a void without color or definition.

Nazragul sees the end coming for him and so he curses the players, telling them that there is no way for them to win here... there never was a way. He is inevitable. He is timeless. He is the death beyond the end of the world. He is the new beginning.

And as he speaks, he summons his final spell. A storm of meteors crashes through the high roof of the temple above him, fire raining down on him and the players alike, dealing hundreds of damage, utterly destroying the temple and leaving Nazragul alone, broken but regenerating, floating in space.

The players have been defeated.

Next time, the second part of this final session!

#Alignmentmayvary #AMV #D&D 5e #D&D #Abenthy #Karina #campaign journal #End of the World #Final Battle #D20

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dmsden · 5 years

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Take It from the Top – Andy’s advice for new DMs

Hello, my dear readers. I love this week’s Question from a Denizen, which comes to us from manqoz. They ask, “hi!! So I’ve been playing D&D for a little over a year now but my campaign only meets once a month and I haven’t been able to find another one to join on our off weeks. This has led me to consider trying out DMing my own campaign, you know, “be the change you want to see in the world” and all of that, but I’m worried that I don’t have enough experience to do a good job. Do you have any advice for a beginner DM in my shoes? I love your blog & I’m very grateful for the content you share with us ♡”

Manqoz, first off, do it! Be that change, and try being a DM! It’s not for everyone, but I think more people should try it and see whether it’s for them.

As far as advice goes, I’ve actually written many articles about advice for new DMs, and you can probably find those articles if you look back in the blog. I know that kind of advice can always use repeating, however, so I’m going to give you some things I hope will help.

First, and utterly the most important advice I can give any DM is to talk to your players frequently and to really listen to what they tell you. Communication is key in any relationship, and a D&D game is a relationship. Talk to them about what they enjoy, things they’d love to see in a game, monsters they’ve always wanted to fight, and more. Obviously you can do this during a Session Zero (and you really should run a Session Zero), but I think you can start even before this.

When you have someone you want to play with, tell them, “I’m thinking about running a D&D game, and, if I do, I’d like you to play.” In my experience, this usually leads to an outpouring of enthusiasm that will lead you to want to run a game even more than you did. Ask for advice, or ideas, or just what they think. Would they want to play? Players are a pretty important thing to have for your game to be successful after all.

Second, don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel. This is your first time, and there are resources out there. Has your group ever played through the adventurers from the Starter Kit or the Essentials Kit? If not, why not grab these? They’re pretty cheap on D&D Beyond if you don’t want to buy the physical boxed sets. The adventures in both are some of the best written for new DMs and players, and you can mix and match the bits you like if you don’t want to just run the adventure as written. If your groups have run these, consider some of the other campaigns that’ve been released for 5E. Storm King’s Thunder, Curse of Strahd, and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist are all excellent campaigns that’ve done lots of the work for you so that you can concentrate on running the actual game.

If you’d rather not run these, and you want some advice on putting your own campaign setting together, go back and read through my Worldbuilding articles. I’ve been writing a series of articles since January 2018 about putting together a campaign setting, and you can feel free to use the setting and the advice within as you like.

Third, recognize that you don’t have to be some kind of expert to run a great game. Not everyone who runs a game has an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, and the only real rule you need is to make sure everyone has a good time. You can ask your players for help, too. Ask them to keep track of initiative for you, to look up rules, to control music choices, or even to run some allied NPCs in combat. Most players are happy to help out with tasks like these. When we play Star Wars, I usually run the music, since I set up the playlists, and it’s one more thing our GM doesn’t have to deal with.

Fourth, recognize that you’re a player, too. That means you’re supposed to have fun, too. You want to run the game that your players want to play, but you also need to run the game that you want to run. This sometimes takes some experience to balance, but you’ll find your way.

I hope this helps, manqoz. I encourage you to run a game, and come back and tell us about it!

#d&d #D&D #d&d 5e #d&d 5th edition #dnd #DnD stuff #DnD 5e #dnd 5th edition #dnd 5e campaign #dnd 5e homebrew #dungeons & dragons #Dungeons and Dragons #dungeon master #dungeonmaster #DM advice #GM Advice

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michellesartjournal · 3 years

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Sonia Boyce talk hidden in plain sight.

In the talk she discusses the issues that emerged during the making of six acts 2018

It was to do with the controversy that arose out of a performance that took place at Manchester art gallery in 2018. Which included the removal of the painting Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) It formed questions surrounding group endeavours and the format of consciousness raising.

She starts the talk by explaining how she and several others people where at the Manchester Art Gallery on a curatorial narrative discussing what the performance for the 18 of January would be. As with all previous sessions the conversation ends up in front of “ Hylas and the Nymphs” By John W Waterhouse.

A painting depicting the geek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, where Hylas a companion is beckoned to his death by the charms and beauty of prepubescent and naked females as nymphs. In this conversation a direct link was made between sexual desire, predatory and peril was made. Most people are in consensus about the negative depiction of this painting and what it suggests. In many ways the painting was a locus of issues that drove the project six acts and becomes the deserving headline of the project.

It opened up the discussion to how representation spills over into social relations.

Mierle laderman Ukeles (cleaning the museum 1973) as an early example of institutional critique as an artistic practice. One that speaks of the hidden in a space of harmonious visibility.

The issues

* Representation of female form and its recurring theme.

* The continue narrative of re-occurring naked or semi naked female images.

* Suggested narrative of young seductive women that causes danger to men.

* the idealised white female in quiet contemplation.

* Issues of femme Fatal

* Issues of male gaze

But hidden in the ensuing debate was that a significant number A female staff members at the Manchester Art Gallery had received unsolicited and unwelcome attention and how it had been considered a low level of harassment.

In the last conversations there were several consideration about whether the issue of grooming and predatory behaviour in the museum was as serious as some stated or overblown. Some had different views about “Hylas and the Nymphs” and thought it was more about sexual empowerment? Some people seem to subscribe to it being about male mortality. But decisions were made and the show was made ready.

Six Acts comprised of performances by:

1. Artist Lasana Shabazz was invited to respond to this painting Othello the moor of Venice 1826 by James Northcote Originally titled the Moor, meaning the Black or the Negro. Drawing ideas of the dandy of cross dressing or black face or it’s reversed white face. Lasana lead the audience on what was to become a bawdy and carnivalesque evening.

2. Michael Atkins as Cheddar Gorgeous as Unicorn a response to “Eve tempted lady in the night by John Spencer Stanhope 1877 What are unicorn did was to engage audience members by Sharing apples.

3. Dan Wallace as Anna Phylactic the Mad hatters responded to. Syrinx by Ather Hacker 1872,s he became the fairground master of ceremonies inviting audience members to peep through his structure to look at the painting Syrinx. The mad hatter draw attention to the relationship between the nymph and the nymphomaniac.

4. Catherine Simpkins as Vienna Venus as nymph insisted on audience members take one of the intimate polaroid portraits hanging on her self in response to the painting Hylas and the nymphs

5. John Roberts as liquorice black as Sappho painting by Charles August Mengin he sat quietly all night without speaking to anyone screwing up handwritten notes and throwing them on the floor in response to the painting.

6. The museum staff also took part in the performance by removing Hylas and the nymphs, returning it into storage. The blank space was then filled with an explanatory poster and surrounded by post-it notes from the audience members of there thoughts.

What took Boyce by surprise was what took place the days after. They were several newspapers articles about the performance and the taking down of the painting.

But the narrative was mostly negative and it was reduced to iconoclasm of prudish Marxist feminist activists masquerading as serious museum curators, taking offence to mildly erotic images of naked bodies. The museum itself received over 900 comments on its social media. Resulting in many calls for the sacking of the curator as well as death threats. For many it seemed it was seen as a shameless press stunt to promote retrospective exhibition. Within the week due to public pressure the painting was returned to the walls of the gallery.

mag blog post:

So what went wrong?

The criticism after the painting was removed was overwhelming and the social gang up grow bigger. Many argued that the role of a curator was to be a custodian of cultural heritage. And to some extent this is true but does that end up making limitations for progress?

Boyce said she reflected and after much consideration she thought the act of taking the painting down was an active censorship” and thought widespread conversation would have ensued a different understanding. That maybe engagement of the audience might come before her own inward thinking.

She spoke about how the whole experience made her re-evaluate her conception of social art practice in the wake of contemporary way of communicating.

She admitted that she was not fully aware of social media click bait. And how social mindsets can reflect so differently . Her first response was to be defensive, but she had to listen and understand what people wanted had to always be taken into consideration. A small cohort of like minded people can so far from the general audience.

My thoughts

I personally loved this talk and had my own retrospective thoughts on how to effects my own practice. Similarly my own practice has its own social separate context that is different from what I’ve come to understand.

There are many who think that the issues surrounding Afro hair are not issues at all. some believe that wigs and straightening are not appropriation or a form of simulation. I used to be in that frame of thinking myself before I educated myself on the issues. But I also have to take into consideration that the view and reality of artists is different. Our ideologies are scholastic and many of our viewpoints are politicised or loooked at from A polarised viewpoint.

We can easily live outside of the viewpoint of an audience and assume they see what we see and understand. we can appoint an audience towards a sort of thought but we have to always remember that they are influenced by different social structures and beliefs. We have to find ways to navigate around their beliefs in a sensitive way that makes them understand what we are trying to convey. There is a thin line between provocative and insulting. And as a female artist there’s always the fear of being criticised as overly feminist by those who do not understand as we have learned to.

The six acts event was designed to ask questions about beauty ideals and presentation of women. Especially the what the painting Hylas and Nymphs symbolises and the importance to address much issues, I liked how the performance was thought out. In my view the show was very successful regardless. But the sample taking down of the painting changed the whole direction of what the work should’ve been about which was saddening.

And made me aware of the perceptions of public opinion and how they can change the meaning of what are you trying to copy and how artists should be wary of this when making art work.

but also the whole talk made me think about the work by Gorilla girls.

Art of behaving badly (2018)

About the poster campaign that they created to target museums The post is still relevant today I’m still in the direction of needs to go in terms of female artists Recognition.

Is it time yet to thinking about changing historical ways in which museum function. As times progress historical ways cause The statistics are alarming in terms of exclusion of women. Is it time to change the face of history.?

Another part of her talk that resonated with me was when Sonia spoke of how she has referred her own artistic practice as parasitic. Because of how it relies on the appropriation and involvement of others to take part in improvised performance.

I thought this was also a good way of me to describe my own work as it also takes a parasitic form in terms of appropriation. I parasitically appropriate images found online and become part of them

She also spoke about the influence of French philosopher Michel Serres and specifically his booked the parasite. And how that had been incredibly important to how she approached and considered the sense of work with the agency of other people in the here and now. I intend to read this book she made it sound very fascinating to me.

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feyariel · 3 years

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Fey’s D&D Woes, Part 1

or “When Will This Game Start?!?!”

I had been talking with the people who own/operate my Friendly Local Comic slash Game Shop™ about a D&D campaign for a few years now, but we didn’t start putting it together in earnest until January. (I know because I was working on my character for that game when I started running Sorcerer.)

Having gotten burnt out of DMing, I was fortunate to have another regular who said he was willing and had experience.

The game officially started on March 15th (beware the Ides of MARCH!!!); thanks to the lockdown, random Sundays we haven’t met, and one-offs someone else has DMed, we’ve only played approximately 50 hours of the campaign this year.

In our last session (two weeks ago):

our party finally met up

we were given a guard duty job

we completed said job without incident

we were about to begin the first combat of the campaign.

Yeah.

What have we been doing this whole time?

Well, take Rise of the Runelords, #1: Burnt Offerings, Part 1 -- “The Swallowtail Festival” (c. four pages of combat encounters). Then remove the goblins. And the skeletons. And the fighting. Multiply the leftover “there’s a festival!” and “you found a clue!” parts by an ungodly factor, but have it go absolutely nowhere. Stretch out what you have over the course of ~50 hours by having the DM engage one player at a time. Then spend another session setting up the cliché combat encounter in the tavern basement without actually starting the combat.

“How do you stretch out that little across so many sessions?” I dunno. Some of it is description. Some of it is him getting sidetracked. Not all of the time wasted comes from just those two things.

We’ve been more than patient with him. We don’t want to hurt his feelings, but it’s become clear that he doesn’t do any prep work, hasn’t run much past character creation before, and doesn’t know how to start a plot or how to keep one going. He might have some false preconceptions about how this works thanks to Critical Role (though that’s another player’s theory).

Starting in August, we’ve had three players DM sessions in a round-robin style in the hopes that he’d learn something by example. While he’s gotten a little, mostly he just checks out entirely unless talked to directly.

I have it in mind to offer taking over as DM. The aforementioned player with the CR theory opposes this on the grounds that I shouldn’t have to, but I’d rather DM for a group that knows what it’s doing than sit there doing nothing. I mean, I said a few weeks ago that we’ve been playing long enough that I could have had a kid by now; I’d like to get something accomplished before the kid would be able to walk.

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qtakesams · 5 years

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Is Traveling Really Therapeutic?

For those of you who haven’t followed my social media this year (I really apologize for how showy I can be on Facebook), 2019 has been a really powerful year of my life.

In the first week of January, I took a weekend trip to Toronto with two of my best friends. We did everything from the driving to the hotel booking to the meal planning. It was intense and so, so much fun. Over my spring break, my dad and I took a week trip out to California, Nevada, and Arizona. We started in Vegas, worked our way the entire way through Death Valley into the Sierras, and back down to Willow Beach. In the span of four days, I fell in love with the Sierras, Joshua Tree, and flying in planes. It was right before this trip ended that I received an email, lying in bed as the sun poked through my window shades, that I had earned an internship in Edgewater, Maryland, with the Smithsonian. Directly after spring break ended, I headed back to school where I remained until May 16th. Over Memorial Day weekend, I moved down to Maryland, where I lived until August 2nd. Two weeks later, I hopped on a plane to move to Amsterdam for study abroad, where I currently sit writing this post.

If you aren’t a seasoned traveler or you don’t have excessive wanderlust, your head is probably spinning from reading that paragraph. I don’t blame you, because my head spun while I wrote it.

There have been summers of my life where I was barely home at all, usually because of a lengthy field trip in June and then vacations in July and August. Yet, this has been the first year of my life where I have truly been everywhere, up and down, side to side. Every minute of every day. Every month had a new place, a new adventure.

I’ve been in Amsterdam almost a full month now (more on this later). Yet, I’m still having the moments where I leave class or get off the tram or open my curtains in the morning and think holy shit, I live here. This city is one I’ve dreamt about visiting for my entire life. Nothing is more striking than walking down a narrow, brick street in Amsterdam West and realizing you’ve seen a picture of it in National Geographic.

I grew up watching Bindi Irwin, Malala Yousufzai, Malia Obama. These young women are all my age, women who started globetrotting before they started high school. Their shows, books, and photos have instilled in me dreams of journalism in the Middle East, making a difference in the animal kingdom, and kickstarting campaigns that work toward reducing sexual stigmas against women. If the amount of traveling and adventure I’ve had in 2019 had taught me anything, it taught me, finally, that the world is big, but I am bigger, and I can do the things I want to do.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how “The Year Quinn Goes Everywhere” ended up being the last year of this decade. In 2010, I was an annoying, awkward, anxiety-riddled fifth grader who had no idea where I stood in the world. In one single decade of the 2010’s, I battled middle school, high school, and over two years of college. I flew threw my teenage years directly into my early twenties where I am now. I changed a lot, in so many ways. Quite honestly, if I had a time machine, I might use it to return to that 2010 Quinn and show her what she’d turn into by 2020. That said, I’m not sure she’d believe me.

This rambling brings me to the purpose of this blog post: is traveling as educating and therapeutic as we are led to believe?

My first year of college, I didn’t do very much outside of academics. Multiple things were occurring in my life that I disliked strongly but didn’t have the courage to end because I didn’t think I could. This last year, a few major changes happened in my life that for once, I welcomed with open arms. Then the spring semester happened. My social life was awesome, and my grades stayed mostly decent, but I felt drained from the life changes and my mental health dipped a little. Not a lot, but enough to feel disappointed in myself. For about a month, (this is my first time admitting this), I strongly considered dropping out of college, not sure if I had what it took to keep going. I told myself to finish what I’d started, to prove to the world that average kids like me could still make something of themselves. I suppose, ultimately, I realized I needed to keep going because 2010 Quinn had kept going, and she’d made it. If I kept going, I would make it, even if it was a difficult journey.

A love of travel is something I think I love, partly, because it runs through my family’s blood. On my father’s side of the family, there are seven cousins. I am the youngest, and my oldest cousin is roughly eight years older than me. Between all of us, we’ve lived in different countries throughout Europe, South America, and North America. Between the cousins and the parents and the grandfather, the 16 of us or so have covered every continent on Earth, dozens of countries, and so, so many cultures. If I didn’t have excessive wanderlust, I’d be kicked out of my family.

I know I’ll get backlash for saying this, but I do not like the way our current governmental administration looks at the rest of the world. I don’t like “America First” or “Make America Great Again”. I dislike these phrases because they isolate us. They prohibit us from the ability to walk a mile in another’s shoes. They imply that we used to be something fantastic and then we weren’t, for a long time. Our administration tells migrants and refugees they are not welcome here or they should go home, when in fact our country is founded upon immigrants and the work, they do to keep themselves alive. It’s occurred to me several times that our administration focuses on these phrases because they have never worried about anything, or anyone, else but themselves.

This, my friend, is where traveling comes in. Just by visiting Toronto, Death Valley, and Amsterdam, I’ve seen ways of life that are entirely different from my own. There are differences in safety measures, environmental protection, and the way homeless people will react to your presence. Differences in grocery stores, the way people hold doors open, and food preparation. Mind-blowing little things you could possibly only notice if you travel to these different places.

In some ways, 2019 has been one giant therapy session for me so far. I’ve learned (thus far) how independent I can be—how well I can take care of myself when nobody else can do it for me. I’ve looked some of my greatest fears (more on these later) in the face and told them to fuck off. Traveling forces you to leave your comfort zone. It forces you to expose the raw parts of you to the literal, worldwide public audience that watches you navigate an airport or a new city.

I’ve cried a lot this year, sometimes from sadness and sometimes from being so happy I cannot contain it all. I’ve smiled so much that I think any wrinkles I started developing have dissipated. Until this year, when I started going on so many trips, I never realized how trapped I feel in my hometown. Of course, I love going home for a few weeks at a time, specifically during the holidays. Yet, whenever I return to the town I grew up in and I drive past my high school, I feel myself reverting back to who I was as a teenager. The overly introverted, shy kid who doesn’t know where she’s going. I don’t dislike this version of myself, but I’m still glad she’s gone, and I never want to return to her.

At the end of this year, I think I’m going to get to look back at my adventures and realize how much I’ve changed. Or at least, I hope so. I feel refreshed and new, and hopefully I’ll give off similar vibes when I come home in a few months. And, I’ll get to answer once and for all if this year was as therapeutic as it currently feels.

Mostly, I hope that somewhere out in space, wherever that fifth grade, 2010 Quinn is, that she can deem herself proud of me. I’m obscenely proud of her, and somehow, I think she knows that.

#studyAbroad #Amsterdam #change #travel #2019

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hillaryisaboss · 6 years

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Hillary Rodham Clinton’s essay on why the midterm elections are of dire importance.

American Democracy Is in Crisis: Our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back.

It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.

They were not.

In the roughly 21 months since he took the oath of office, Trump has sunk far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign. Exhibit A is the unspeakable cruelty that his administration has inflicted on undocumented families arriving at the border, including separating children, some as young as eight months, from their parents. According to The New York Times, the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders. Then there’s the president’s monstrous neglect of Puerto Rico: After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, his administration barely responded. Some 3,000 Americans died. Now Trump flatly denies those deaths were caused by the storm. And, of course, despite the recent indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, he continues to dismiss a serious attack on our country by a foreign power as a “hoax.”

Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track. I think that may be the point—to confound us, so it’s harder to keep our eye on the ball. The ball, of course, is protecting American democracy. As citizens, that’s our most important charge. And right now, our democracy is in crisis.

I don’t use the word crisis lightly. There are no tanks in the streets. The administration’s malevolence may be constrained on some fronts—for now—by its incompetence. But our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back. There’s not a moment to lose.

As I see it, there are five main fronts of this assault on our democracy.

First, there is Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law.

John Adams wrote that the definition of a republic is “a government of laws, and not of men.” That ideal is enshrined in two powerful principles: No one, not even the most powerful leader, is above the law, and all citizens are due equal protection under the law. Those are big ideas, radical when America was formed and still vital today. The Founders knew that a leader who refuses to be subject to the law or who politicizes or obstructs its enforcement is a tyrant, plain and simple.

That sounds a lot like Donald Trump. He told The New York Times, “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the Justice Department.” Back in January, according to that paper, Trump’s lawyers sent Special Counsel Robert Mueller a letter making that same argument: If Trump interferes with an investigation, it’s not obstruction of justice, because he’s the president.

The Times also reported that Trump told White House aides that he had expected Attorney General Jeff Sessions to protect him, regardless of the law. According to Jim Comey, the president demanded that the FBI director pledge his loyalty not to the Constitution but to Trump himself. And he has urged the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, violating an American tradition reaching back to Thomas Jefferson. After the bitterly contentious election of 1800, Jefferson could have railed against “Crooked John Adams” and tried to jail his supporters. Instead, Jefferson used his inaugural address to declare: “We are all republicans, we are all federalists.”

Second, the legitimacy of our elections is in doubt.

There’s Russia’s ongoing interference and Trump’s complete unwillingness to stop it or protect us. There’s voter suppression, as Republicans put onerous—and I believe illegal—requirements in place to stop people from voting. There’s gerrymandering, with partisans—these days, principally Republicans—drawing the lines for voting districts to ensure that their party nearly always wins. All of this carries us further away from the sacred principle of “one person, one vote.”

Third, the president is waging war on truth and reason.

Earlier this month, Trump made 125 false or misleading statements in 120 minutes, according to The Washington Post—a personal record for him (at least since becoming president). To date, according to the paper’s fact-checkers, Trump has made 5,000 false or misleading claims while in office and recently has averaged 32 a day.

Trump is also going after journalists with even greater fervor and intent than before. No one likes to be torn apart in the press—I certainly don’t—but when you’re a public official, it comes with the job. You get criticized a lot. You learn to take it. You push back and make your case, but you don’t fight back by abusing your power or denigrating the entire enterprise of a free press. Trump doesn’t hide his intent one bit. Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, asked Trump during his campaign why he’s always attacking the press. He said, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another—all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.

Fourth, there’s Trump’s breathtaking corruption.

Considering that this administration promised to “drain the swamp,” it’s amazing how blithely the president and his Cabinet have piled up conflicts of interest, abuses of power, and blatant violations of ethics rules. Trump is the first president in 40 years to refuse to release his tax returns. He has refused to put his assets in a blind trust or divest himself of his properties and businesses, as previous presidents did. This has created unprecedented conflicts of interest, as industry lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican organizations do business with Trump’s companies or hold lucrative events at his hotels, golf courses, and other properties. They are putting money directly into his pocket. He’s profiting off the business of the presidency.

Trump makes no pretense of prioritizing the public good above his own personal or political interests. He doesn’t seem to understand that public servants are supposed to serve the public, not the other way around. The Founders believed that for a republic to succeed, wise laws, robust institutions, and a brilliant Constitution would not be enough. Civic, republican virtue was the secret sauce that would make the whole system work. Donald Trump may well be the least lowercase-R republican president we’ve ever had.

Fifth, Trump undermines the national unity that makes democracy possible.

Democracies are rowdy by nature. We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Trump doesn’t even try to pretend he’s a president for all Americans. It’s hard to ignore the racial subtext of virtually everything Trump says. Often, it’s not even subtext. When he says that Haitian and African immigrants are from “shithole countries,” that’s impossible to misunderstand. Same when he says that an American judge can’t be trusted because of his Mexican heritage. None of this is a mark of authenticity or a refreshing break from political correctness. Hate speech isn’t “telling it like it is.” It’s just hate.

I don’t know whether Trump ignores the suffering of Puerto Ricans because he doesn’t know that they’re American citizens, because he assumes people with brown skin and Latino last names probably aren’t Trump fans, or because he just doesn’t have the capacity for empathy. And I don’t know whether he makes a similar judgment when he lashes out at NFL players protesting against systemic racism or when he fails to condemn hate crimes against Muslims. I do know he’s quick to defend or praise those whom he thinks are his people—like how he bent over backwards to defend the “very fine people” among the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The message he sends by his lack of concern and respect for some Americans is unmistakable. He is saying that some of us don’t belong, that all people are not created equal, and that some are not endowed by their Creator with the same inalienable rights as others.

And it’s not just what he says. From day one, his administration has undermined civil rights that previous generations fought to secure and defend. There have been high-profile edicts like the Muslim travel ban and the barring of transgender Americans from serving in the military. Other actions have been quieter but just as insidious. The Department of Justice has largely abandoned oversight of police departments that have a history of civil-rights abuses and has switched sides in voting-rights cases. Nearly every federal agency has scaled back enforcement of civil-rights protections. All the while, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running wild across the country. Federal agents are confronting citizens just for speaking Spanish, dragging parents away from children.

How did we get here?

Trump may be uniquely hostile to the rule of law, ethics in public service, and a free press. But the assault on our democracy didn’t start with his election. He is as much a symptom as a cause of what ails us. Think of our body politic like a human body, with our constitutional checks and balances, democratic norms and institutions, and well-informed citizenry all acting as an immune system protecting us from the disease of authoritarianism. Over many years, our defenses were worn down by a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—who spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. By undermining the common factual framework that allows a free people to deliberate together and make the important decisions of self-governance, they opened the way for the infection of Russian propaganda and Trumpian lies to take hold. They've used their money and influence to capture our political system, impose a right-wing agenda, and disenfranchise millions of Americans.

I don’t agree with critics who say that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy—but unregulated, predatory capitalism certainly is. Massive economic inequality and corporate monopoly power are antidemocratic and corrode the American way of life.

Meanwhile, hyperpolarization now extends beyond politics into nearly every part of our culture. One recent study found that in 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they’d be displeased if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party. In 2010, 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats said they’d be upset by that. The strength of partisan identity—and animosity—helps explain why so many Republicans continue to back a president so manifestly unfit for office and antithetical to many of the values and policies they once held dear. When you start seeing politics as a zero-sum game and view members of the other party as traitors, criminals, or otherwise illegitimate, then the normal give-and-take of politics turns into a blood sport.

There is a tendency, when talking about these things, to wring our hands about “both sides.” But the truth is that this is not a symmetrical problem. We should be clear about this: The increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of the Republican Party, including decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump. Whether it was abusing the filibuster and stealing a Supreme Court seat, gerrymandering congressional districts to disenfranchise African Americans, or muzzling government climate scientists, Republicans were undermining American democracy long before Trump made it to the Oval Office.

Now we must do all we can to save our democracy and heal our body politic.

First, we’ve got to mobilize massive turnout in the 2018 midterms. There are fantastic candidates running all over the country, making their compelling cases every day about how they’ll raise wages, bring down health-care costs, and fight for justice. If they win, they’ll do great things for America. And we could finally see some congressional oversight of the White House.

When the dust settles, we have to do some serious housecleaning. After Watergate, Congress passed a whole slew of reforms in response to Richard Nixon’s abuses of power. After Trump, we’re going to need a similar process. For example, Trump’s corruption should teach us that all future candidates for president and presidents themselves should be required by law to release their tax returns. They also should not be exempt from ethics requirements and conflict-of-interest rules.

A main area of reform should be improving and protecting our elections. The Senate Intelligence Committee has made a series of bipartisan recommendations for how to better secure America’s voting systems, including paper ballot backups, vote audits, and better coordination among federal, state, and local authorities on cybersecurity. That’s a good start. Congress should also repair the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act by restoring the full protections that voters need and deserve, as well as the voting rights of Americans who have served time in prison and paid their debt to society. We need early voting and voting by mail in every state in America, and automatic, universal voter registration so every citizen who is eligible to vote is able to vote. We need to overturn Citizens United and get secret money out of our politics. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.

But even the best rules and regulations won’t protect us if we don’t find a way to restitch our fraying social fabric and rekindle our civic spirit. There are concrete steps that would help, like greatly expanding national-service programs and bringing back civics education in our schools. We also need systemic economic reforms that reduce inequality and the unchecked power of corporations and give a strong voice to working families. And ultimately, healing our country will come down to each of us, as citizens and individuals, doing the work—trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics and see through the eyes of people very different from ourselves. When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street outside Independence Hall, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That response has been on my mind a lot lately. The contingency of it. How fragile our experiment in self-government is. And, when viewed against the sweep of human history, how fleeting. Democracy may be our birthright as Americans, but it’s not something we can ever take for granted. Every generation has to fight for it, has to push us closer to that more perfect union. That time has come again.

Never Forget: this brilliant woman won 3 million more votes than her opponent.

#hillary clinton #bill clinton #barack obama #bernie sanders #donald trump

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious https://nyti.ms/2KlW3oV

PLEASE READ and SHARE this FASCINATING, IN-DEPTH expose on Elizabeth Warren's life, her DEEPLY HELD BELIEFS and excellent POLICY prescriptions to ADDRESS INCOME INEQUALITY, CORPORATE POWER and CORRUPTION in policies. She is an AMAZINGLY INTELLIGENT strong woman.

#2020PresidentalCandidates

#2020Vision #VoteBlue2020 #2020PresidentialElection

Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious

About income inequality. About corporate power. About corrupt politics. And about being America’s next president.

By Emily Bazelon | Published June 17, 2019 | New York Times | Posted June 17, 2019 |

The first time I met Elizabeth Warren, she had just come home from a walk with her husband and her dog at Fresh Pond, the reservoir near her house in Cambridge, Mass. It was a sunny day in February, a couple of weeks after Warren announced her candidacy for president, and she was wearing a navy North Face jacket and black sneakers with, as usual, rimless glasses and small gold earrings. Her hair had drifted a bit out of place.

The dog, Bailey, is a golden retriever who had already been deployed by her presidential campaign in a tweet a week earlier, a pink-tongued snapshot with the caption “Bailey will be your Valentine.” Warren started toweling off his paws and fur, which were coated in mud and ice from the reservoir, when she seemed to realize that it made more sense to hand this task over to her husband, Bruce Mann.

In the kitchen, Warren opened a cupboard to reveal an array of boxes and canisters of tea. She drinks many cups a day (her favorite morning blend is English breakfast). Pouring us each a mug, she said, “This is a fantasy.” She was talking about the enormous platform she has, now that she’s running for president, to propagate policy proposals that she has been thinking about for decades. “It’s this moment of being able to talk about these ideas, and everybody says, ‘Oh, wait, I better pay attention to this.’” She went on: “It’s not about me; it’s about those ideas. We’ve moved the Overton window” — the range of ideas deemed to merit serious consideration — “on how we think about taxes. And I think, I think we’re about to move it on child care.”

Her plan, announced in January, would raise $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years through a 2 percent tax on assets over $50 million and a higher rate for billionaires. Warren wants to use some of that money to pay for universal child care on a sliding scale. As she talked, she shifted around in her chair — her hands, her arms, her whole body leaning forward and moving back. Onstage, including at TV town halls, she prefers to stand and pace rather than sit (she tries to record six miles a day on her Fitbit), and sometimes she comes across as a little frenetic, like a darting bird. One on one, though, she seemed relaxed, intent.

Warren moved to Cambridge in 1995 when she took a tenured job at Harvard Law School, and 11 years later, Mann, who is a legal historian, got a job there, too. By then they had bought their house; Warren’s two children from a previous marriage, her daughter, Amelia, and son, Alexander, were already grown. The first floor is impeccable, with a formal living room — elegant decorative boxes arranged on a handsome coffee table — a cozy sunroom and a gleaming kitchen with green tile countertops. When Warren taught classes at Harvard, she would invite her students over for barbecue and peach cobbler during the semester. Some of them marveled at the polish and order, which tends not to be the norm in faculty homes. Warren says she scoops up dog toys before people come over.

For her entire career, Warren’s singular focus has been the growing fragility of America’s middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years while employees’ share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the 1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren’s view of history, “The constant tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it to their own purposes.” Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That’s why economists have estimated that the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent.

As a presidential candidate, Warren has rolled out proposal after proposal to rewrite the rules again, this time on behalf of a majority of American families. On the trail, she says “I have a plan for that” so often that it has turned into a T-shirt slogan. Warren has plans (about 20 so far, detailed and multipart) for making housing and child care affordable, forgiving college-loan debt, tackling the opioid crisis, protecting public lands, manufacturing green products, cracking down on lobbying in Washington and giving workers a voice in selecting corporate board members. Her grand overarching ambition is to end America’s second Gilded Age.

[Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans.Together, they would remake the economy.]

“Ask me who my favorite president is,” Warren said. When I paused, she said, “Teddy Roosevelt.” Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his day — Standard Oil and railroad holding companies — in the name of increasing competition. She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity. Warren, who has called herself “a capitalist to my bones,” appreciated Roosevelt’s argument that trustbusting was helpful, not hostile, to the functioning of the market and the government. She brought up his warning that monopolies can use their wealth and power to strangle democracy. “If you go back and read his stuff, it’s not only about the economic dominance; it’s the political influence,” she said.

What’s crucial, Roosevelt believed, is to make the market serve “the public good.” Warren puts it like this: “It’s structural change that interests me. And when I say structural, the point is to say if you get the structures right, then the markets start to work to produce value across the board, not just sucking it all up to the top.”

But will people respond? Warren has been a politician for only seven years, since she announced her run for the Senate in 2011 at age 62. She’s still thinking through how she communicates her ideas with voters. “The only thing that worries me is I won’t describe it in a way that — ” she trailed off. “It’s like teaching class. ‘Is everybody in here getting this?’ And that’s what I just struggle with all the time. How do I get better at this? How do I do more of this in a way that lets people see it, hear it and say, ‘Oh, yeah.’”

In the months after Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, Warren staked out territory as a fierce opponent of the president’s who saw larger forces at play in her party’s defeat. While many Democratic leaders focused on Trump himself as the problem, Warren gave a series of look-in-the-mirror speeches. In the first, to the executive council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on Nov. 10, she said that although there could be “no compromise” on standing up to Trump’s bigotry, millions of Americans had voted for him “despite the hate” — out of their deep frustration with “an economy and a government that doesn’t work for them.” Later that month, she gave a second speech behind closed doors to a group that included wealthy liberal donors and went hard at her fellow Democrats for bailing out banks rather than homeowners after the 2008 financial crisis. In another speech, in February 2017, to her ideological allies in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Warren said: “No matter how extreme Republicans in Washington became, Democrats might grumble or whine, but when it came time for action, our party hesitated and pushed back only with great reluctance. Far too often, Democrats have been unwilling to get out there and fight.”

Warren fought in those early months by showing up at the Women’s March and at Logan Airport in Boston to protest Trump’s travel ban. On the Senate floor, opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Trump’s first attorney general, she read a letter by Coretta Scott King criticizing Sessions for his record of suppressing the black vote in Alabama, and Republican leaders rebuked her and ordered her to stop. The moment became a symbol of the resistance, with the feminist meme “Nevertheless, She Persisted,” a quote from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, defending the move to silence her. Warren helped take down Trump’s first choice for labor secretary, the fast-food magnate Andy Puzder (he called his own employees the “bottom of the pool”), and she called for an investigation of the Trump administration’s botched recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

But somewhere along the way to announcing her candidacy, Warren’s influence faded. She was no longer the kingmaker or queenmaker whose endorsement Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders avidly sought during their 2016 primary battle. When Warren failed to endorse Sanders, the left saw her decision as an act of betrayal, accusing her of propping up the Democratic establishment instead of trying to take it down. (When I asked Warren if she had regrets, she said she wasn’t going to revisit 2016.) Sanders emerged as the standard-bearer of the emboldened progressive movement.

Trump, meanwhile, was going after Warren by using the slur “Pocahontas” to deride her self-identification in the 1980s and ’90s as part Native American. In the summer of 2018, he said that if she agreed to take a DNA test in the middle of a televised debate, he would donate $1 million to her favorite charity. Warren shot back on Twitter by condemning Trump’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border (“While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas”). But a few months later, she released a videosaying she had done the DNA analysis, and it showed that she had distant Native American ancestry. The announcement backfired, prompting gleeful mockery from Trump (“I have more Indian blood than she has!”) and sharp criticism from the Cherokee Nation, who faulted her for confusing the issue of tribal membership with blood lines. Warren apologized, but she seemed weaker for having taken Trump’s bait.

Sanders is still the Democratic candidate with a guru’s following and a magic touch for small-donor fund-raising, the one who can inspire some 4,500 house parties in a single weekend. And he has used his big policy idea, Medicare for All, to great effect, setting the terms of debate on the future of health care in his party.

With four more years of Trump on the line, though, it’s Joe Biden — the party’s most known quantity — who is far out in front in the polls. Challenging Biden from the left, Warren and Sanders are not calling wealthy donors or participating in big-money fund-raisers. Sanders has been leading Warren in the polls, but his support remains flat, while her numbers have been rising, even besting his in a few polls in mid-June. Warren and Sanders are old friends, which makes it awkward when her gain is assumed to be his loss. Early in June, an unnamed Sanders adviser ridiculed Warren’s electability by calling her DNA announcement a “debacle” that “killed her,” according to U.S. News & World Report. A couple of weeks before the first Democratic primary debates, on June 26 and 27, I asked her what it was like to run against a friend. “You know, I don’t think of this as competing,” she responded. It was the least plausible thing she said to me.

In March, Warren demonstrated her appetite for challenging the economic and political dominance of corporate titans by going directly at America’s biggest tech companies. In a speech in Long Island City, Queens — where local protesters demanded that Amazon drop its plan to build a big new campus — Warren connected the companies’ success at smothering start-up rivals to their influence in Washington. She remarked dryly that the large amounts that businesses like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spend on lobbying is a “good return on investment if they can keep Washington from enforcing the antitrust laws.” She wants to use those laws to break up the companies instead — a move that no other major American politician had proposed.

After Warren started talking about the four tech giants, along with other critics, the Trump administration let it be known that it was scrutinizing them for potential antitrust violations. Conservatives have suspected social media platforms of bias against them for years, and with concerns about privacy violations escalating, big tech was suddenly a bipartisan target. Warren has specifics about how to reduce their influence; she wants to undo the mergers that allowed Facebook, for example, to snap up WhatsApp, rather than compete with it for users. Warren could unleash the power to bring major antitrust prosecutions without Congress — an answer to gridlock in Washington that’s crucially woven into some of her other plans too. (Warren also favors ending the filibuster in the Senate.) Warren wants to prevent companies that offer an online marketplace and have annual revenue of $25 billion or more from owning other companies that sell products on that platform. In other words, Amazon could no longer sell shoes and diapers and promote them over everyone else’s shoes and diapers — giving a small business a fair chance to break in.

“There’s a concerted effort to equate Warren with Bernie, to make her seem more radical,” says Luigi Zingales, a University of Chicago economist and co-host of the podcast Capitalisn’t. But Wall Street and its allies “are more afraid of her than Bernie,” Zingales continued, “because when she says she’ll change the rules, she’s the one who knows how to do it.”

Warren’s theory of American capitalism rests on two turning points in the 20th century. The first came in the wake of the Great Depression, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the chance to protect workers and consumers from future economic collapse. While the New Deal is mostly remembered for creating much of the nation’s social safety net, Warren also emphasizes the significance of the legislation (like the Glass-Steagall Act) that Democrats passed to rein in bankers and lenders and the agencies (the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) that they put in place to enforce those limits. Warren credits this new regulatory regime, along with labor unions, with producing a golden era for many workers over the next four and a half decades. Income rose along with union membership, and 70 percent of the increase went to the bottom 90 percent. That shared prosperity built, in Warren’s telling, “the greatest middle class the world had ever known.”

Then came Warren’s second turning point: President Ronald Reagan’s assault on government. Warren argues that Reagan’s skill in the 1980s at selling the country on deregulation allowed the safeguards erected in the 1930s to erode. Republicans seized on the opening Reagan created, and Democrats at times aided them. (Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.) That’s how the country arrived at its current stark level of inequality. “The system is as rigged as we think,” Warren wrote in her 2017 book “This Fight Is Our Fight”— in a riposte to Barack Obama, who insisted it was not, even as he recognized the influence of money in politics. This, Warren believes, is what Trump, who also blasted a rigged system, got right and what the Democratic establishment — Obama, both Clintons, Biden — gets wrong.

The challenge for Warren, going up against Trump, is that his slogan “drain the swamp” furthers the longstanding Republican goal of discrediting government, whereas Warren criticizes government as “a tool for the wealthy and well connected,” while asking voters to believe that she can remake it to help solve their problems. Hers is the trickier, paradoxical sell.

Warren faces a similar challenge when she tries to address the fear some white voters have that their economic and social status is in decline. Trump directs his supporters to blame the people they see every day on TV if they’re watching Fox News: immigrants and condescending liberal elites. Warren takes aim at corporate executives while pressing for class solidarity among workers across race and immigration status. Trump’s brand of right-wing populism is on the rise around the world. As more people from the global south move north, it’s harder than ever to make the case to all workers that they should unite.

It’s a classic problem for liberals like Warren: Workers often turn on other workers rather than their bosses and the shadowy forces behind them. “Populism is such a slippery concept,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University and author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History,” told me. “The only real test is whether you can be the person who convinces people you understand their resentment against the elites. Trump did enough of that to win. Bernie Sanders has shown he can do it among young people. Can Elizabeth Warren pull it off? I’m not sure.”

It’s an inconvenient political fact for Warren that she’s far more associated with Harvard and Massachusetts, where she has lived for the last 25 years, than with Oklahoma, the childhood home that shaped her and where her three brothers still live and her family’s roots are multigenerational. If you include Texas, where Warren lived in her early 20s and for most of her 30s, she spent three formative decades far from the Northeast.

When she was growing up, Warren’s father worked as a salesman at Montgomery Ward and later as a janitor; neither of her parents went to college. (White women in this group broke for Trump by 61 percent in 2016, and white men supported him by 71 percent.) In the early 1960s, when Warren was 12, her father had a heart attack and lost his job in Oklahoma City. One day, after the family’s station wagon was repossessed, her mother put on the one formal dress she owned, walked to an interview at Sears and got a job answering phones for minimum wage. This has become the story that Warren tells in every stump speech. She uses it to identify with people who feel squeezed.

There’s another story that Warren tells in her book about the implications, for her own life, of her family’s brush with financial ruin. Warren was going to George Washington University on a scholarship — “I loved college,” she told me. “I was having a great time” — when an old high school boyfriend, Jim Warren, reappeared in her life.

He asked her to marry him and go to Texas, where he had a job at IBM. Warren knew her mother wanted her to say yes. “It was the whole future, come on,” she told me. “I had lived in a family for years that was behind on the mortgage. And a secure future was a good man — not what you might be able to do on your own.”

Warren dropped out of college to move to Houston with her new husband. “It was either-or,” she said. Many women who make this choice never go back to school. But Warren was determined to become a teacher, so she persuaded Jim to let her finish college as a commuter student at the University of Houston for $50 a semester. After her graduation, they moved to New Jersey for Jim’s next IBM posting, and she started working as a speech therapist for special-needs children.

Warren was laid off when she became pregnant, and after her daughter was born, she talked Jim into letting her go to law school at Rutgers University in Newark (this time the cost was $450 a semester). After she had her son, she came to terms with the fact that she wasn’t cut out to stay home. “I wanted to be good at it, but I just wasn’t,” she told me.

In the late 1970s, she got a job at the University of Houston law school. She and her husband moved back to Texas. A couple of years later, when their daughter was in elementary school and their son was a toddler, the Warrens divorced. In her book, Warren writes about this from Jim’s perspective: “He had married a 19-year-old girl, and she hadn’t grown into the woman we both expected.” (Jim Warren died in 2003.)

Two years later, Warren asked Mann, whom she had met at a conference, to marry her. He gave up his job at the University of Connecticut to join her in Houston. At the university, Warren decided to teach practical classes, finance and business. In 1981, she added a bankruptcy class and discovered a question that she wanted to answer empirically: Why were personal bankruptcy rates rising even when the economy was on the upswing?

At first, Warren accepted the assumption that people were causing their own financial ruin. Too much “Tommy, Ralph, Gucci and Prada,” a story in Newsweek called “Maxed Out”later declared. Along with two other scholars, Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan, Warren flew around the country and collected thousands of bankruptcy-court filings in several states. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay,” she said in a 2007 interview with Harry Kreisler, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley. But Warren, Westbrook and Sullivan found that 90 percent of consumer bankruptcies were due to a job loss, a medical problem or the breakup of a family through divorce or the death of a spouse. “I did the research, and the data just took me to a totally different place,” Warren said.

That research led to a job at the University of Texas at Austin, despite the doubts some faculty members had about her nonselective university degrees. (Mann worked at Washington University in St. Louis.) They finally managed to get joint appointments at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and she stayed there until 1995.

During this period, Warren was registered as a Republican. (Earlier, in Texas, she was an independent.) Her political affiliation shifted around the time she began working on bankruptcy in Washington. More than one million families a year were going bankrupt in the mid-’90s, and Congress established the National Bankruptcy Review Commission to suggest how to change the bankruptcy code. The commission’s chairman, former Representative Mike Synar of Oklahoma, asked Warren, now at Harvard Law School, to be his chief policy adviser. “I said, ‘No, not a chance, that’s political,’” Warren said in her interview with Kreisler. “I want to be pure. I want to be pristine. I don’t want to muddy what I do with political implications.”

But Synar persuaded Warren to join his team. It was a critical juncture. Big banks and credit-card companies were pushing Congress to raise the barriers for consumers to file for bankruptcy and harder for families to write off debt. Bill Clinton was president. He had run — much as Warren is running now — as a champion of the middle class, but early in his first term he began courting Wall Street. He didn’t want to fight the banks.

Warren flew back and forth from Boston to Washington and to cities where the commission held hearings. It was her political education, and the imbalance of influence she saw disturbed her. The banks and lenders paid people to go to the hearings, wrote campaign checks and employed an army of lobbyists. People who went bankrupt often didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and by definition, they had no money to fight back.

By 1997, Warren had become a Democrat, but she was battling within the party as well as outside it. In particular, she clashed with Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware. Biden’s tiny state, which allowed credit-card companies to charge any interest rate they chose beginning in 1981, would become home to half the national market. One giant lender, MBNA, contributed more than $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Biden strongly supported a bill, a version of which was first introduced in 1998, to make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy and more difficult to leave behind debt. He was unpersuaded by Warren’s charts and graphs showing how the change would increase the financial burden on families. “I am so sick of this self-righteous sheen put on anybody who wants to tighten up bankruptcy,” Biden said during a Senate hearing in 2001.

The bankruptcy battles continued, and when Warren testified against the proposed changes to the bankruptcy code before the Senate in 2005, Biden called her argument “very compelling and mildly demagogic,” suggesting that her problem was really with the high interest rates that credit-card companies were allowed to charge. “But senator,” Warren answered, “if you are not going to fix that problem” — by capping interest rates — “you can’t take away the last shred of protection from these families” that access to bankruptcy offers. The bill passed two months later.

Biden’s team now argues that he stepped in to win “important concessions for middle-class families,” like prioritizing payments for child support and alimony ahead of other debt. When I asked Warren in June about Biden’s claim, she pursed her lips, looked out the window, paused for a long beat and said, “You may want to check the record on that.” The record shows that Warren’s focus throughout was on the plight of families who were going bankrupt and that Biden’s was on getting a bill through. He supported tweaking it to make it a little less harmful to those facing bankruptcy, and the changes allowed it to pass.

In the years since it became law, the bankruptcy bill has allowed credit-card companies to recover more money from families than they did before. That shift had two effects, Matthew Yglesias argued recently in Vox. As Biden hoped, borrowers over all benefited when the credit-card companies offered slightly lowered interest rates. But as Warren feared, the new law hit people reeling from medical emergencies and other unexpected setbacks. Blocked from filing for bankruptcy, they have remained worse off for years. And a major effort to narrow the path to bankruptcy may have an unintended effect, according to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by making it harder for the country to recover from a financial crisis.

In 2001, a Harvard student named Jessica Pishko, an editor of The Harvard Women’s Law Journal, approached Warren about contributing to a special issue. She didn’t expect Warren to say yes. Students saw Warren as an example of female achievement but not as a professional feminist. “She didn’t write about anything that could seem girlie,” Pishko remembers. “She wasn’t your go-to for feminist issues, and she was from that era when you didn’t put pictures of your kids on your desk” to show that you were serious about your work. But Warren wanted to contribute. “She said: ‘I’m doing all this research on bankruptcy, and I want to talk about why that’s a women’s issue. Can I do that?’”

The paper Warren produced, “What Is a Women’s Issue?” was aggressive and heterodox. In it, she criticized the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund for singling out Biden for praise in its annual report because he championed the Violence Against Women Act, which made it easier to prosecute domestic abusers. Warren thought his support for that law did not compensate for his role in pushing through the bankruptcy legislation, which she believed hurt women far more. “Why isn’t Senator Biden in trouble with grass-roots women’s groups all over the country and with the millions of women whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation he sponsors?” she asked. The answer raised “a troubling specter of women exercising powerful political influence within a limited scope, such as rape laws or equal educational opportunity statutes.

Warren wanted feminism to be wider in scope and centered on economic injustice. She urged students to take business-law classes. “If few students interested in women’s issues train themselves in commercial areas, the effects of the commercial laws will not be diminished, but there will be few effective advocates around to influence those policy outcomes,” she wrote. “If women are to achieve true economic equality, a far more inclusive definition of a women’s issue must emerge.”

She challenged standard feminist thinking again when she published her first book for a lay audience (written with her daughter), “The Two-Income Trap,” in 2003. Warren argued that in the wake of the women’s movement of the 1970s, millions of mothers streamed into the workplace without increasing the financial security of their families. Her main point was that a family’s additional income, when a second parent went to work, was eaten up by the cost of housing, and by child care, education and health insurance.

Conservatives embraced her critique more enthusiastically than liberals. Warren even opposed universal day care for fear of “increasing the pressure” to send both parents to work. She has shifted on that point. The child-care proposal she announced this February puts funds into creating high-quality child care but doesn’t offer equivalent subsidies to parents who stay home with their children. Warren says she’s responding to the biggest needs she now sees. More and more families are squeezed by the cost of child care; not enough of it is high quality; the pay for providers is too low. Warren is framing child care as a collective good, like public schools or roads and bridges.

“The Two-Income Trap” got Warren onto “Dr. Phil,” giving her a taste of minor stardom and the appeal of a larger platform. When the financial crisis hit, she moved to Washington’s main stage. At the invitation of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader at the time, Warren led the congressional oversight panel tasked with overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that Congress created to save the financial system. In public hearings, Warren called out Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Treasury secretary, for focusing on bailing out banks rather than small businesses and homeowners. Through a spokeswoman, Geithner declined to comment for this article. In his memoir, he called the oversight hearings “more like made-for-YouTube inquisitions than serious inquiries.”

But Warren could see the value of the viral video clip. In 2009, Jon Stewart invited her on “The Daily Show.” After throwing up from nerves backstage, she went on air and got a little lost in the weeds — repeating the abbreviation P.P.I.P. (the Public-Private Investment Program) and at first forgetting what it stood for. She felt as though she blew her opportunity to speak to millions of viewers. Stewart brought her back after the break for five more minutes, and she performed well, clearly explaining how the country forgot the lessons of the Great Depression and the dangers of deregulation. “We start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric,” Warren said. She listed the upheavals that followed — the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the collapse of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the Enron scandal a few years later. “And what is our repeated response?” Warren said. “We just keep pulling the threads.” Now that the government was trying to save the whole economy from falling off the cliff, there were two choices: “We’re going to decide, basically: Hey, we don’t need regulation. You know, it’s fine, boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust, and good luck with your 401(k). Or alternatively, we’re going to say, You know, we’re going to put in some smart regulations ... and what we’re going to have, going forward, is we’re going to have stability and some real prosperity for ordinary folks.”

Stewart leaned forward and told Warren she had made him feel better than he had in months. “I don’t know what it is that you just did right there, but for a second that was like financial chicken soup for me,” he said.

“That moment changed my life,” Warren later said. Stewart kept inviting her back. In 2010, Congress overhauled and tightened financial regulation with the Dodd-Frank Act. In the push for its passage, Warren found that she had the leverage to persuade Democratic leaders to create a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Its job is to safeguard people from malfunctioning financial products (like predatory loans), much as the government protects them from — to borrow Warren’s favorite analogy — toasters that burst into flames. Warren spent a year setting up the C.F.P.B. When Obama chose Richard Cordray over her as the first director because he had an easier path to Senate confirmation, progressives were furious.

Warren was an unusual political phenomenon by then: a policy wonk who was also a force and a symbol. In 2012, she was the natural choice for Democrats recruiting a candidate to run against Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, a Republican who had slipped into office, after Ted Kennedy’s death, against a weak opponent. Warren had another viral moment when a supporter released a homemade video of her speaking to a group in Andover. “You built a factory out there?” Warren said, defending raising taxes on the wealthy. “Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.” Brown called Warren “anti-free enterprise,” and Obama, running for re-election, distanced himself in an ad shot from the White House (“Of course Americans build their own businesses,” he said). But Warren’s pitch succeeded. She came from behind in the race against Brown and won with nearly 54 percent of the vote.

Voters of color could determine the results of the 2020 presidential election. In the primaries, African-Americans constitute a large share of Democrats in the early-voting state of South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, when many other states vote. In the general election, the path to the presidency for a Democrat will depend in part on turning out large numbers of people of color in Southern states (North Carolina, Virginia, possibly Florida) and also in the Rust Belt, where the post-Obama dip in turnout among African-Americans contributed to Hillary Clinton’s squeaker losses in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Warren has work to do to persuade people of color to support her. In the last couple of Democratic primaries, these voters started out favoring candidates who they thought would be most likely to win, not those who were the most liberal. Black voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2008 until they were sure Barack Obama had enough support to beat her, and in 2016 they stuck with her over Bernie Sanders. This time, they have black candidates — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Wayne Messam — to choose from. And voters of color may be skeptical of Warren’s vision of class solidarity transcending racial division. As it turned out, Warren’s case that most white people voted for Trump because of economic distress, and “despite the hate,” as she said right after the election, didn’t really hold up. A study published last year found that among white voters, perceived racial or global threats explained their shift toward Trump better than financial concerns did. What does that say about the chances of winning as a liberal who tries to take the racism out of populism?

When Warren makes the case about what needs to change in America by leaning on the period from 1935 to 1980, she’s talking about a time of greater economic equality — but also a period when people of color were excluded from the benefits of government policies that buoyed the white middle class. In a video announcing that she was exploring a presidential bid, Warren acknowledged that history by saying that families of color today face “a path made even harder by generations of discrimination.” For example, the federal agency created during the New Deal drew red lines around mostly black neighborhoods on maps to deny mortgage loans to people who lived in them.

Warren spoke about this problem years before she went into politics. Redlining contributed to the racial wealth gap, and that had consequences Warren saw in her bankruptcy studies — black families were more vulnerable to financial collapse. Their vulnerability was further heightened by subprime and predatory lending. In “The Two-Income Trap,” Warren called these kinds of loans “legally sanctioned corporate plans to steal from minorities.”

In March, Warren took a three-day trip to the South. She started on a Sunday afternoon, with a town hall — one of 101 she has done across the country — at a high school in a mostly black neighborhood in Memphis. It’s her format of choice; the questions she fields help sharpen her message. The local politicians who showed up that day were African-American, but most of the crowd was white.

The next morning, Warren drove to the Mississippi Delta. Her husband, Mann, was on spring break from teaching and along for the trip. Warren’s staff welcomes his presence because Warren loves having him with her and because he’s willing to chat up voters (who often call him “Mr. Warren”). In the small town of Cleveland, Miss., Warren sprang out of her black minivan in the parking lot of a church to shake the hand of an African-American state senator, Willie Simmons. They were meeting for the first time: He had agreed to take her on a walking tour after her campaign got in touch and said she wanted to learn about housing in the Delta.

Simmons and Warren set off down a block of modest ranch houses, some freshly painted, others peeling, preceded by TV crews and trailed by the rest of the press as her aides darted in to keep us out of the shot. The scrum made conversation stagy, but Simmons gradually eased into answering Warren’s questions. He pointed out cracks in the foundations of some houses; the lack of money to repair old buildings was a problem in the Delta. They stopped at a vacant lot. The neighbors wanted to turn it into a playground, but there was no money for that either.

Warren nodded and then took a stab at communicating her ideas to the local viewers who might catch a few of her words that night. She hit the highlights of the affordable housing bill she released in the Senate months earlier — 3.2 million new homes over 10 years, an increase in supply that Moody’s estimated would reduce projected rents by 10 percent. When the tour ended, Simmons told the assembled reporters that he didn’t know whom he would support for president, but Warren got points for showing up and being easy to talk to — “touchable,” he said.

That night, Warren did a CNN town hall at Jackson State University, the third historically black college she has visited this year. Warren moved toward the audience at the first opportunity, walking past the chair placed for her onstage. She laid out the basics of her housing bill, stressing that it addressed the effects of discrimination. “Not just a passive discrimination,” Warren said. “Realize that into the 1960s in America, the federal government was subsidizing the purchase of homes for white families and discriminating against black families.” Her bill included funds to help people from redlined areas, or who had been harmed by subprime loans, buy houses. The audience applauded.

Warren also said that night that she supported a “national full-blown conversation” about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. She saw this as a necessary response to the stark wealth gap between black and white families. “Today in America — because of housing discrimination, because of employment discrimination — we live in a world where the average white family has $100 and the average black family has about $5.” Several Democratic candidates have said they support a commission to study reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the influential 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” said in a recent interview with The New Yorker that Warren was the candidate whose commitment seemed real because she had asked him to talk with her about his article when it came out years ago. “She was deeply serious,” Coates said.

Warren is often serious and doesn’t hesitate to convey her moral outrage. “I’ll own it,” she told me about her anger. She talked about women expressing to her their distress about sexual harassment and assault. “Well, yeah,” Warren said. “No kidding that a woman might be angry about that. Women have a right to be angry about being treated badly.”

Trump gets angry all the time; whether a woman can do the same and win remains a question. Warren’s campaign is simultaneously working in another register. On Twitter, it has been posting videos of Warren calling donors who have given as little as $3. They can’t believe it’s her. When the comedian and actress Ashley Nicole Black tweeted, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren tweeted back and then called Black, who finished the exchange with a fan-girl note: “Guess who’s crying and shaking and just talked to Elizabeth Warren on the phone?!?!? We have a plan to get my mom grandkids, it’s very comprehensive, and it does involve raising taxes on billionaires.”

After Trump’s election, Warren and Sanders said that if Trump followed through on his promise to rebuild the economy for workers and their families, they would help. If Trump had championed labor over corporations, he could have scrambled American politics by creating new alliances. But that version of his presidency didn’t come to pass. Instead, by waging trade wars that hurt farm states and manufacturing regions more than the rest of the country, Trump has punished his base economically (even if they take satisfaction in his irreverence and his judicial appointments).

Warren has been speaking to those voters. In June, she put out an “economic patriotism” plan filled with ideas about helping American industries. By stepping into the vacuum for economic populism the president has left, Warren forced a reckoning on Fox News, Trump’s safe space on TV, from the host Tucker Carlson. Usually a Trump loyalist, he has recently styled himself a voice for the white working class.

Carlson opened his show by using more than two minutes of airtime to quote Warren’s analysis of how giant American companies are abandoning American workers. Carlson has warned that immigrants make the country “poorer and dirtier” and laced his show with racism, but now he told his mostly Republican viewers: “Ask yourself, what part of the statement you just heard did you disagree with?” He continued, “Here’s the depressing part: Nobody you voted for said that or would ever say it.” The next day, a new conservative Never Trump website called The Bulwark ran a long and respectful essay called “Why Elizabeth Warren Matters.”

A month earlier in Mingo County, W.Va., where more than 80 percent of voters cast a ballot for Trump, Warren went to a local fire station to talk about her plan for addressing the opioid crisis. It’s big: She wants to spend $100 billion over 10 years, including $50 million annually for West Virginia, the state with the highest rate of deaths from drug overdoses. In Trump’s latest budget, he has requested an increase of $1.5 billion to respond directly to the epidemic. Against a backdrop of firefighters’ coats hanging in cinder-block cubbies, Warren moved among a crowd of about 150. Many hands went up when she asked who knew someone struggling with opioids. She brought up the role of “corporations that made big money off getting people addicted and keeping them addicted.” People with “Make America Great Again” stickers nodded and clapped, according to Politico.

If Warren competes for rural voters in the general election (if not to win a red state then to peel off enough of them to make a difference in a purple one), her strong support for abortion rights and gun control will stand in her way. Lately, she has framed her argument for keeping abortion clinics open in economic terms, too. “Women of means will still have access to abortions,” she said at a town hall on MSNBC hosted by Chris Hayes of the effects of new state laws aimed at closing clinics. “Who won’t will be poor women, will be working women, will be women who can’t afford to take off three days from work, will be very young women.” She finished by saying, “We do not pass laws that take away that freedom from the women who are most vulnerable.”

Biden and Sanders have been polling better with non-college-educated white voters than Warren has. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist and political commentator, thinks that even if her ideas resonate, she has yet to master the challenge of communicating with this group. “She’s lecturing,” he said. “There’s a lot of resistance, because people feel like she’s talking down to them.”

Warren didn’t sound to me like a law professor on the trail, but she did sound like a teacher. Trying to educate people isn’t the easiest way to connect with them. “Maybe she could bring it down a level,” Lola Sewell, a community organizer in Selma, Ala., suggested. “A lot of us aren’t involved with Wall Street and those places.”

Warren may also confront a double bind for professional women: To command respect, they have to prove that they’re experts, but once they do, they’re often seen as less likable. At one point, I asked Warren whether there was anything good about running for president as a woman. “It is what it is,” she said.

When I first talked with Warren in February, when her poll numbers were low, I wondered whether she was content with simply forcing Democratic candidates to engage with her ideas. During the 2016 primaries, when Warren did not endorse Sanders, she wanted influence over Hillary Clinton’s economic appointments should she win the presidency. Cleaving the Democratic administration from Wall Street — that was enough at the time. She could make a similar decision in 2020 or try to get her own appointment. If Warren became Treasury secretary, she could resuscitate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Trump has worked to declaw, and tip all kinds of decisions away from banks and toward the families who come to her town halls and tell her about the loans they can’t pay.

By mid-June, however, when I went to Washington to talk to Warren for the last time, she was very much in the race. New polls showed her in second place in California and Nevada. She had more to lose, and perhaps as a result, her answers were more scripted, more like her speeches.

Warren, like everyone in the race, has yet to prove that she has the political skills and broad-enough support to become president. But a parallel from another country suggests that perhaps bearing down on policy is the best strategy against right-wing populism. Luigi Zingales, the University of Chicago economist, comes from Italy, and he feared Trump’s rise back in 2011, having watched the ascension of Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt billionaire tycoon who was elected prime minister of Italy in the 2000s as a right-wing populist. After Trump’s victory in 2016, Zingales pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed that the two candidates who defeated Berlusconi treated him as “an ordinary opponent,” focusing on policy issues rather than his character. “The Democratic Party should learn this lesson,” Zingales wrote. He now thinks that Warren is positioned to mount that kind of challenge. “I think so,” he said, “if she does not fall for his provocations.”

Warren and I met in her Washington apartment. The floor at the entrance had been damaged by a leak in the building, and the vacuum cleaner was standing next to the kitchen counter. I said I was a bit relieved by the slight disarray because her house in Cambridge was so supremely uncluttered, and she burst out laughing. She sat on the couch as we spoke about the indignities to come, the way in which her opponents — Biden, Trump, who knew who else — would try to make her unrecognizable to herself. What would she do about that? Warren leaned back and stretched her feet out, comfortable in gray wool socks. “The answer is, we’ve got time,” she said. “I’ll just keep talking to people — I like talking to people.”

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.”

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oharaisbaee · 6 years

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Former Sky Blue players, staff lash out over poor playing, living conditions

NEWS

Former Sky Blue players, staff lash out over poor playing, living conditions

By John D Halloran, Dan Lauletta, and Allison Lee

July 17, 2018

On July 7, former Sky Blue FC forward Sam Kerr returned to her old stomping grounds at Yurcak Field for the first time since leaving the club in January. Now playing for the Chicago Red Stars, Kerr scored a hat trick that night against her former team.

However, the striker’s celebrations were muted, almost apologetic, and after the game she explained how she’d nearly been in tears at some points during the game.

“If I’m honest, I didn’t enjoy it,” Kerr told reporters after the match. “I wish things were better here, and that I could stay. It just sucks that that’s the way it had to be.

“I wish I could take every single one of them with me,” she added, nodding in the direction of the Sky Blue bench area, “but that’s not the way it is.

“I’m just going to say the girls deserve better, and leave it at that. These girls are great girls. They give everything for this club and this league, and they just deserve better. I scored a hat trick, but I wasn’t myself today. I feel sick playing against these girls.”

Since then, The Equalizer has spoken to a half-dozen people affiliated with the club, some of whom requested to remain anonymous. All shared a bleak picture of life at Sky Blue beyond the club’s current winless season: stories of poor housing situations, poor facilities, and broad mismanagement.

Caroline Stanley, who played for the club in 2016, knew from the first day she arrived at Sky Blue that something wasn’t right.

“The first day I actually got there, I landed, checked my phone, and had an email saying the place they told me I was living had been changed,” she told The Equalizer.

“It was Day 1, new team, moving across the country, the place I thought I was living I’m no longer living and it’s just kind of ‘To Be Determined.’ The comfort, and the management of off-the-field quality of life was just really poor and unorganized. I ended up getting shoved into a really tiny little house in a beach town with four other girls, and it was two sets of bunk beds.”

MORE: Sam Kerr’s unhappy hat trick

“Last year housing was a disaster,” said former assistant coach Dave Hodgson, who left midway through the 2018 campaign. “Like one of the houses that players had to live in just should have been knocked down. Plastic bags for windows, sheets of cardboard for windows, comforters stuck in holes in the wall. I’m not exaggerating. Stuff like that’s horrific.”

General manager Tony Novo said that housing is a challenge in New Jersey where cost of living is high and beach front property is at a premium in summer months, but said the only player who was shuttled around this season was one who chose to arrive late.

“Especially over the last three years—’16 to ‘17 and from ‘17 to ‘18—we’ve made it better,” Novo said. “More housing and better housing for our players. We currently have three, three-bedroom apartments that are very nice—I’m going to use the term plush for those apartments. Those are the more senior by age players. Then we have a five-bedroom house that is five blocks from the beach that is furnished. I can clearly say that our housing has gotten better over the last three years.”

Novo said the rest of the players live with their families in the area or with host families plus one player who has elected to go on her own with a friend from outside the team.

While Hodgson conceded that housing for some players has improved in 2018, two former players said that some other players have lived in five to seven different locations in a single season. Multiple sources also said that players currently with the club were relegated to sleeping on couches in other players’ apartments, and that housing for the players on the bottom tier of the roster is as bad as before.

“We have never made anybody sleep on a couch,” Novo said.

Multiple sources also told The Equalizer that in a previous season some players were forced to live with an elderly man who repeatedly made inappropriate comments to the players and made them feel uncomfortable. When the players addressed their concerns to the team, the players were told they would have to find alternate housing for themselves. Other players who addressed concerns regarding housing were told the same, and multiple players did arrange their own living arrangements when those provided by the team were unsatisfactory.

On the house with the elderly man, Novo acknowledged that particular house did not work out as planned and was dropped after a season but added that when asked, only one of five players said she wanted to move out and that her request was granted.

Complaints about the training facilities and the team’s home field at Yurcak are also common.

“When there are no showers in your stadium locker room, you don’t feel like a professional. When you don’t have an equipment manager and you show up to practice in your training gear—you don’t have a locker room—you throw your crap on the side of the field like it’s club practice and then leave in your nasty clothes and wash it yourself, you don’t feel like a professional. You cannot perform under those conditions.” – Caroline Stanley

One training facility is referred to as “The Jungle,” and multiple sources confirmed that the team’s training facilities have no locker rooms, no running water, and no bathrooms absent a porta-potty.

“They don’t enjoy being the red-headed stepchild of the league,” said Hodgson. “They don’t enjoy having Rutgers as their home, because it’s crap. I mean, there’s literally a hill on the side where there should be bleachers. There’s no showers—there’s no showers. The two-time World Player of the Year [Carli Lloyd] has to get an ice bath in a 50-gallon trash can. It’s ridiculous.”

Novo explained that the team began the season training at indoor turf facility Sportika Sports Complex and then moved to Rutgers where bathrooms and showers were a short walk away. With Rutgers sports in need of their field back, training has now shifted to a field in Jackson which, according to Novo, was to be supplied with portable bathrooms and showers this week. As of the start of training on Tuesday, they had yet to arrive.

Besides the lack of proper ice baths—or in some cases, ice itself—players also noted the lack of basics like ultrasound equipment, stim machines, and leg recovery systems.

“When there are no showers in your stadium locker room, you don’t feel like a professional,” said Stanley. “When you don’t have an equipment manager and you show up to practice in your training gear—you don’t have a locker room—you throw your crap on the side of the field like it’s club practice and then leave in your nasty clothes and wash it yourself, you don’t feel like a professional. You cannot perform under those conditions.”

Multiple sources also complained that the lack of training gear provided, combined with the lack of laundry services, meant players would sometimes have to wear dirty gear during practice sessions.

“We are given two socks, two shirts, two shorts for practice gear for six months,” said one former player in an email. “We get one pair of cleats for the entire year. We use this gear every training and some days, multiple times.

“We do our own laundry. One player was given children’s cleats to play in. Some of these seem insignificant but we are talking about a professional organization and professional athletes.

“At least in college we are given enough gear to wear so we don’t have to re-wear our sweaty gear for a double day,” she later added.

Novo said that in the past, so few players took advantage of the laundry service that it became pointless to keep it, and emphasized that game uniforms are washed and returned to the players on match days.

“Sky Blue has always been unfinished projects and broken promises,” said another former player. “Each year it’s been less of a progression and more of a digression.”

Complaints about travel were also common. To save money, multiple sources told The Equalizer that the team does not reimburse the players for baggage fees, finds cheaper travel by forcing the players to take very early and very late flights, provides per diems on the road that often don’t cover the cost of food, and has, at times, stopped at gas stations and fast food restaurants for meals on the road.

“Just every single trip is a debacle,” explained Hodgson. “It was a debacle last year. Our first trip to North Carolina this year, the credit card didn’t work. There was no money on the credit card. We couldn’t hire any vans. Our players were sitting at the airport for two hours. Just a debacle.”

“When we travel for one, two, or three days, most of the players bring a carry-on.” Novo said. “We provide them with team bags where they can put their personals, and then we carry all of our equipment. I haven’t been asked for a big need for checking bags.”

The GM added that per diem meal money is in line with league standards with team meals excluded from the day’s total. Continental breakfast at hotels is in lieu of breakfast money for the players.

Medical bills for injuries sustained while playing for the club have also been a problem for some players. Stanley says that while playing for Sky Blue, she was injured in a match against Portland and needed multiple doctor visits to deal with a separated shoulder.

“I just received a call from collections a couple weeks ago,” said Stanley. “I had no idea. I had my credit dinged pretty hard for a $50 doctor’s visit that wasn’t taken care of by the organization.”

“The girls that are scared to use their voice because they fear losing an opportunity—I will do it for them. I have nothing to lose.” – Caroline Stanley

Other players have told Stanley that they’ve had to “hound” the organization to take care of similar situations. Novo acknowledged that, on rare occasions, medical bills have slipped through the cracks. He attributes this to players not using the club’s mailing address during doctor’s visits and Sky Blue not seeing bills in a timely fashion. “We would never purposely not pay a $50 bill.”

The team, for its part, has repeatedly told players and coaches that things would improve, including a move to better, permanent training facilities and a new stadium. However, multiple sources confirm that the new training facility has not materialized this season, as promised, and there is little faith left that the club will live up to its promise of a new stadium.

“Sky Blue has always been unfinished projects and broken promises,” said another former player. “Each year it’s been less of a progression and more of a digression.”

“There’s the old saying that a fish rots from the head down,” she added. “For Sky Blue, this is where it is. It’s that the owners are not invested, they’re not. I haven’t seen them invested in any year and the owners are in charge of the GM.”

Stanley says that the current players are afraid to speak up, worried that doing so could harm their career prospects going forward. She says that’s why she’s decided to come forward.

“The girls that are scared to use their voice because they fear losing an opportunity—I will do it for them,” she said. “I have nothing to lose.”

“I want my friends’ quality of life, who play in the league, to be better,” said Stanley, who now coaches at Tulsa. “If they don’t have people standing up for them, I’ll do whatever I can. It’s been crazy how many girls have texted me this week and called me about this whole situation.”

Multiple sources explained to The Equalizer that Sky Blue has become a way station, of sorts, for the players. The players themselves widely believe that the ownership views the club simply as a “tax write-off” and, stuck in a difficult situation, the players hold out hope that a trade, a move abroad, or new team ownership might improve their situation.

“The players really want to be bought out by owners that give a damn,” said one former player.

The poor conditions around Sky Blue are not only a major factor for large amounts of roster turnover between seasons, but also for the team’s 15-game winless start to the current season. As Stanley said, it’s hard for the players to play at an elite level “when your quality of life is so poor.”

Several sources expressed concerns that the off-field conditions surrounding the team coupled with its on-field performance this season have put the team’s future in jeopardy.

“My concern is I don’t want the team to fold because I care about the team and the past organization that has built my career,” one former played explained. “But it’s something that I cherished and my friends are involved in, and I love that. And I don’t want a Boston to happen or a Western New York to happen. But it’s like, how do we prohibit this?

RELATED: When Sky Blue nearly joined Red Bull

“I don’t think that there’s any pressure. Again, this is the NWSL’s fault because they’re not involved, they’re not harping, and if they’re not harping, then the owners feel like they can get away with stuff.”

Sky Blue co-owner Steven Temares declined to be quoted for this story, but made it clear that the team’s ownership remains committed and that Sky Blue will be part of NWSL for the 2019 season and beyond.

Numerous sources close to the team also told The Equalizer that the league and NWSL Players’ Association are aware of the problem, but that the players have given up hope after being ignored for so long.

“I think it would just be best for everybody if they dissolved as a club. Their owners can find a new tax write-off,” said Stanley.

“Something has to change. To me, I don’t know how it would happen internally. I really don’t see how you could turn that club around at this point, unless it was bought out by somebody else.”

#nwsl #sky blue fc #new jersey #soccer #futbol #woso #caroline stanley #Tony Novo #Phil Nurphy #Dan Lauletta #Grant Wahl #USWNT #US Soccer #kelley o'hara #carli lloyd #kailen sheridan #janine beckie #imani dorsey #savannah mccaskill

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sexydeathparty · 2 years

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Photos of The Citizens Stepping Up To Defend Ukraine

February 28, 2022

Ukraine had a troubled past on its way to statehood. Even though the nation can claim its fair share of credit as a participant in shaping the history of Europe, it has had very little time to enjoy its independence.

The country has been invaded and reinvaded for centuries, often passing between empires. Ukrainians have endured a wide variety of tyrants, and now they hold their breath as they battle another.

Amid the new and possibly much more horrific stage of the ongoing tensions, Ukrainians have flocked to territorial defence units ― a reserve branch of the military that trains civilians to defend their cities in case of a full-scale invasion.

Such units accept and train volunteers between the ages of 18 and 57, who, upon signing up, commit to weekend drills, target practices and occasional weeklong training camps. Army instructors, often veterans who have already seen the front line in eastern Ukraine, administer the training.

A recently passed law, with the unambiguous title “Foundations of National Resistance,” has given these civilian units a supporting role to the Ukrainian army in case of war, and envisions them having partisan duties in case of occupation. It also benefits the volunteers, allowing for the purchase of arms and legalising their privately owned weapons in the event of mobilisation. The Territorial Defence Units have seen a massive influx of recruits since the law was passed in January. Ukrainians have also been arming themselves at an unprecedented rate.

Maryana Zhaglo, 52, is a Kyiv native, a marketing analyst and a mother of three. She is one of the people who recently purchased a weapon, the Ukrainian-made rifle Zbroyar Z-15. Zhaglo says she became a reservist out of a desire to defend her birthplace. “Territorial defense for me is defending my city, my home,” she said. “My motivation is my family, my city and my country.”

Zhaglo enrolled in the territorial defense on a dare from her friend from Donetsk, who had to move to Kyiv after Russian-backed separatists took over his city in 2014. “If anything starts, I’ll show up and be ready to follow orders,” she said. “My whole family is here. We have nowhere else to go, and we shouldn’t be going anywhere. This is my country, I was born here and I want to be ready to defend it.”

The process of joining a civilian unit like Zhaglo’s is not as simple as just volunteering. If a person is interested, they can first attend an intro training session. If they want to join, they have to undergo a rigorous health and psych evaluation, supply copies of numerous documents, and then sign a contract to become a reservist. The process might take two to three weeks before the volunteer gets sworn in.

Borys Cherkas, 45, went through this process long before the current crisis. In 2017 he volunteered as a reservist. Now he is preparing for an exam to become a junior lieutenant of his local Territorial Defence Unit. Cherkas has a history Ph.D., works as a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and is a part-time teacher at a school in the suburbs of Kyiv.

Cherkas is pleasantly surprised by the number of middle-aged and older recruits in the last few months. “You know that Cossacks would not send out their young to fight when they’d go on military campaigns,” he said. “So I think the youth should not be left out as the last line [of] defence ― it should be older folks taking the punch.”

Yuriy Boyko, 68, is a retired army colonel. He started his military service in the Soviet army in 1970, took part in Soviet military involvement as an adviser during the Iran-Iraq War in the ’80s, and finished his career in the Ukrainian army after the fall of the Soviet Union. After his retirement, he went into information technology and started his own firm.

Quoting Sun Tzu, Boyko said: “The greatest victory is one which requires no battle.”

See more photos of the citizens helping to defend Ukraine below:

Art Directors: Isabella Carapella and Christy Havranek Senior Photo Editor: Chris McGonigal Copy Editor: Alexander Eichler

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burganprell · 6 years

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Welcome, Y’all

I just hate those bumper stickers popping up around Austin that say “Don’t Move Here.” Many a Facebook post expresses the same.

I get the joke, but it’s just not funny.

This is a post about the future of Austin. It’s a post about Mayor Adler and his challenger this Fall, Laura Morrison. It’s a post in some ways about about the inevitable. It’s a little bit about Amazon, and it’s a lot about making sure Austin’s continued rise benefits everyone.

“We can only say the state of our city is strong if we are affirmatively building a future in which we preserve the soul and spirit of Austin.”

—Mayor Steve Adler

Our problems aren’t any one person’s fault, and no more the fault of a newcomer than a decades-long veteran.

If we ever stop being hospitable, we really will have lost the soul and the spirit of Austin. If we ever stop being a refuge and a block party and a march for good over evil, we really will have lost the soul and the spirit of Austin.

If we ever stop using our disposable income to vote for how we want the city to be, we will have lost the soul and spirit of Austin.

Instead of saying “Don’t Move Here” I’d rather we say what so many of you said to me when I first showed up, 12 years ago.

Welcome, Y’all.

. . .

In fact, when we say “Don’t Move Here,” we start sounding a lot like the anti-immigration nationalists we so strongly oppose on the national stage. I’m flabbergasted by my liberal brethren regularly these days, and this is just one reason why.

Unless we are going to build a Trump-like wall around Austin, we have got to be more solution minded.

I’m not particularly interested in hearing more from complain-y do-nothings, and least of all Laura Morrison, who already had her shot at addressing these issues in her first stint on Council from 2008-2015.

During her tenure, the issues in play were exactly the same as they are today, and the progress made was to my mind and many others’ deeply unsatisfactory.

Folks like Morrison can be eloquent when talking about Austin’s problems, but remain woefully short on ideas and action.

Every single one of Morrison’s answers to a difficult question — about transportation, about economic segregation, about homelessness, about CODENext — ends up with a non-committal “we have to strike a balance” or “we have to look at that closely” or “I think there are ways that we can grow, without doing that” — to which no specifics nor any follow-up is ever offered.

. . .

The one thing Morrison did do?

She led the anti-Prop1 PAC “Our City, Our Safety, Our Choice,” which fronted the fight against Uber and Lyft in Austin.

The net result? The Texas State Legislature overruled us and Uber and Lyft are back, more free to operate than ever before.

When meeting with technology companies and their workers, Morrison is likely to bring up her professional training as an engineer at her time at Lockheed. Don’t take the bait.

In case you have erased all memory of the ugly battle with Uber and Lyft from your mind, now is the time to recall:

Mayor Steve Adler had actually negotiated a signed, precedent-setting MOU from both Uber and Lyft that extracted important concessions from both companies, most important of all related to ensuring both driver and passenger safety. Tax revenue and data sharing were the other key components.

What caused that fight in the first place was later obscured: the rideshare-related numbers for rape and sexual assault had indisputably risen according to SAFE and our own Police Department. Folks predictably cast doubt on those numbers but they held up under scrutiny.

The philosophical argument about the utility and efficacy of fingerprinting drivers was less compelling to me personally and for many of you; regardless, Adler had solved this also. His innovative Thumbs Up! ordinance passed; a corresponding 100% voluntary identification program was to use market dynamics to incentivize validation instead of requiring it.

Alas, Council rejected the MOU, afraid to act. At the time it was much more popular to put the vote to the people, avoiding what had become a political third rail for everyone.

Uber and Lyft of course did themselves zero favors with their brash tone and dishonest backroom dealings. But I and many others were strongly in search of a workable compromise, instead of a temporary moral victory, followed by swift rebuke.

. . .

It’s really easy to fear-monger like Morrison does. “Everything’s going to change,” she loves to say. Change in Austin is not only not new, it has been constant for more than 100 years.

Morrison never goes so far as to claim she can prevent change, but it’s clear she intends to slow it down as much as possible. In the process of making her argument, Morrison enlists the typical boogeymen: real estate developers, Californians, technology companies, and businesspeople generally.

The funny thing is that those constituencies are forwarding some of the most progressive initiatives in the city, driven by a race to recruit, train, and develop talent (more on this later).

The scariest speaking point in Morrison’s arsenal? “It's time for a leader whose priority is the people who live here right now,” she often says.

The Chronicle’s Michael King was quick to pick up on this rhetoric in his interview of Morrison this past January when she first announced:

“[You make] a fairly sharp distinction between the people that live here “now” and the people that are going to live here. Does that mean people who have lived here for five years? For 10 years? Does the door slam tomorrow?”

Morrison’s response was typical: “Nobody has the power for the door to slam – if somebody had the power, would that be good? Probably not.”

Probably not?

It gets better. She continues: “the fact of the matter is, we need to make sure that we don’t turn people into losers.”

To me that’s code for protectionism, not egalitarianism. Morrison isn’t worried about the people who are already hurting. She’s looking out for folks who are not losing now, but are worried they will start losing soon.

Remind you of anyone else’s rhetoric? Shall we just say it aloud together? Is it really time to Make Austin Great Again?

I think that’s precisely how Morrison’s campaign intends to have a fighting chance against Adler.

Invoke a particular way of life, romanticize it, and protect it. Hat-tip the little guy, and act like the incumbent has a swamp worth draining. Get elected. Start governing like it’s 1980, or earlier. Most importantly try like hell to give your NIMBY old guard donors their Austin back, come hell or high water.

. . .

Here is why I am still all-in on Steve Adler and why I think you should join me by giving whatever you can to his re-election campaign.

Steve is a convener who gets things done, but who also goes out of his way to make sure others get all the credit.

Steve is not a career politician. He’s a successful lawyer and committed philanthropist who isn’t worried about optics. He isn’t afraid to stand up to Abbot, Paxton, Sessions and Trump.

In recognition of this fact and more, the Anti-Defamation League gave Steve Adler and Diane Land the Audrey Maislin Humanitarian Award last year, which is a huge honor not to be taken lightly. It’s not just another one of these nice gala things that people in power are given to curry favor.

Neither Steve nor Diane ever hesitates to speak truth to power, and it shows. They have demonstrated time and time again that they are fierce advocates for the oppressed, the segregated, the discriminated, and the powerless. Their record in these matters is substantial.

In times like these our Mayor must be incredibly effective in affairs both foreign and domestic, so to speak. There’s no one else in Austin right now who can pull off that combination without sacrificing one endeavor for the other.

And I do love it when Steve gets his lawyer on.

Whether he is fighting SB4 tooth and nail, collaborating with Judge Eckhardt to protect Austin’s right to be a sanctuary city, or leading more than 50 other cities to join us in recommitting to the Paris Climate Accord, Adler makes me proud to live in Austin and to be part of these precedent-setting fights.

Steve’s “worst” flaw is trying to pull the sword from the stone on tough issues that no one else has the courage to touch.

I can live with that.

. . .

Sidebar: here’s a good related read in case you missed it: “Why the nation’s mayors are watching Austin Mayor Steve Adler” in the Statesman.

Accomplishments: here are the Mayor’s 2017 accomplishments. It’s a big list.

Priorities: Adler’s priorities for 2018 are here.

Donate: here’s where you can give to Adler’s campaign.

. . .

The hands down, no question, most alarming thing about Austin is that we are #1 in the nation in income inequality. That’s not a good list to be atop of.

Every other issue in my mind takes a back seat to this one.

Not nearly everyone is benefiting from Austin’s growth and prosperity. Our community is still suffering from the mind-bending injustice our leaders perpetrated way back in 1928.

And no, keeping companies like Amazon out of Austin isn’t going to help our #1 problem.

The jobs and the growth and the money that companies like Amazon and Apple and Oracle bring are not at all the problem. Folks worry about what Amazon would do to traffic, or affordability. The actual problem with these big new HQ projects is routing and bridging the opportunities they comprise to everyone in the city.

I know a lot of people who’d love to wade through traffic for an $85K yearly salary. I was at Huston-Tillotson University a few weeks ago with President Dr. Colette Pierce Burnette. Their students’ desire for tech jobs is consistent and intense, across a dozen majors.

A fix will not happen overnight, but again, addressing Austin’s intense, perverse, historic economic segregation must be our overriding priority.

Good news: our newly-minted Master Workforce Development Plan is strong, and can serve as a reliable template for decades to come.

The Austin Monitor captures the plan’s purpose and progress in a few succinct paragraphs, for those of you who may have missed it:

At last week’s City Council meeting, a procedural public hearing paved the way for the formal addition next month of the Master Community Workforce Plan to Imagine Austin, which is the city’s plan for the next 30 years. But it’s the work being done with high-profile employers like Samsung and job training providers such as Austin Community College taking place quietly in the background that proponents of the plan expect will soon produce more applicants for positions that employers said they’re having trouble filling. The workforce plan has a stated goal of creating 60,000 middle-skill jobs in three high-growth sectors – health care, information technology and advanced manufacturing – as well as lifting 10,000 residents out of lower-class income brackets. Since the plan was unveiled last June, employers in similar industries have been courted to participate in ongoing sessions to identify the needed soft skills and common challenges that make it difficult for them to find and retain new employees. Their findings are then presented to representatives from Austin Community College, Goodwill of Central Texas and Capital IDEA to help those organizations tailor their existing job training programs to better suit the needs of the market. Thus far those workforce development programs are being funded in part with $660,000 in workforce data management contracts Workforce Solutions has secured with the city and Travis County, which includes some contributions from Google and JP Morgan Chase. Ongoing fundraising efforts are expected to contribute as well.

If Amazon can commit to helping build these kinds of socio-economic and racial bridges both notionally and materially, I want them here. And same goes for every other company considering a move to Austin, large or small.

As Mayor Adler said in his letter to Amazon as part of our response to their RFP (full text here):

Our long-term goal in Austin is to both preserve the soul of our community and make it accessible to all – even as we excel as a community that continues to attract top talent. What new solutions and long-term investments in workforce development, affordability and mass transportation might we achieve together that would not have been possible otherwise? I firmly believe that Austin and Amazon can help each other achieve solutions to our biggest challenges. Even as you assess our community’s great assets, I ask you to look at our community’s greatest challenges as an opportunity to help craft a story for Amazon and for Austin that will be told for a long time.

. . .

Now, about those complaints. Are housing prices way up? Yes.

Are folks selling their homes and moving to cheaper enclaves in the suburbs to stave off property taxes they can’t afford? Are musicians moving to Lockhart and further, in search of more room to breathe, and make art?

Absolutely. Yes. Unequivocally. And irreversibly.

Austin’s going to need to be an active and innovative partner to Pflugerville and Round Rock and Manor and Taylor and Bastrop and Lockhart and San Marcos. Austin’s going to need to continue to aggressively invest in affordable housing. We are going to have to get together at long last and pass a new land use code, too.

Our current land use system is almost 50 years old and it’s the engine behind many — if not most — of our shared frustrations about Austin’s growth and development. Not passing a new code is not an option.

By the way, it is okay to complain about the flawed process of producing CodeNEXT, but no one should be up in arms that it’s hard to get this right. No other American city has grappled with the challenges Austin currently faces and succeeded. We are at the cutting edge in terms of defining of how modern cities can best scale.

For a super smart deep dive on this issue, read Nautilus Magazine’s “Why New York Is Just An Average City.”

We’re going to have to raise taxes too, a tough sell here in Texas, no doubt. This will most likely happen via larger and larger bond measures, with transportation and our school system remaining serially at the forefront for at least a decade. We’ve become a big American city, like it or not. It is time to acting like one too. That process starts and ends with infrastructure and education.

. . .

We are also going to have to consider community micro-bonds to fund and perhaps outright reclaim some of our struggling institutions. We are going to have to re-fund our longest-suffering school districts with private money too.

We are going to have to offer a lot more *paid* internships so that folks who don’t have “friends and family money” have equal access to personal and professional development opportunities.

We are going to have to continue being a “Kitty Hawk” for things like autonomous cars and delivery drones, no matter how uncomfortable or controversial.

We are going to have to continue fighting passionately, and standing steadfastly, as Mayor Adler consistently has, against SB4, as we are the epicenter of the nationwide fight about sanctuary cities; for the Paris Accord as a leading green, smart city; for restorative justice in our local courts and jails; for innovative, community-based policing; and against a state legislature that champions states’ right while denying incorporated Texan cities the same privilege.

And look, we have just got to vote —not just at the ballot box — but with our time, talent and money — on how we want Austin to be for years to come. Spend nights and weekends working on the causes you care about most, and spend cold hard cash on the stuff you value about this city above all else.

But of course, vote at the ballot box, too, for God’s sake. Vote again. Keep voting. Vote in the little stuff. Vote in the big stuff. Vote for fun. Vote even though it’s boring. Vote because so many others can’t.

As Beto has said more times than I can count, Texas isn’t a red state or a blue state. It’s a non-voting state.

We are actually 51st in the union in voter turnout (that number includes Puerto Rico). Sadly, Austin is no better than the rest of our fair state in this regard.

Travis County turnout dropped a whopping 50% between the 2016 Presidential election and last November. Some dropoff is always to be expected but wow. That’s pretty bad, friends.

Part of it I have to think is that folks are exhausted. No doubt others underestimate the importance and effect of local politics. But what I really think is going on is that for most people, Austin is wind at our backs, and we’re too often too busy to really notice, or care. Austin protects a lot of us from a lot of things. The mandate to vote shouldn’t be one of them.

. . .

It’s not all bad news. In fact, an incredible amount of the new has been incredibly good. It’s useful to remind ourselves of a few things.

Yes, UT is churning out high quality talent, but so are Huston-Tillotson, the Acton School of Business, St. Ed’s and ACC.

I think what Gary Keller is doing on Red River is awesome. We haven’t nearly saved live music yet, but we have the appropriate levels of panic and corresponding commitment to get the job done.

There is a ton of innovation going on in Austin around homelessness, affordable housing, tiny housing, and more. Have you visited Community First Village, which has pioneered a game changing approach to solving chronic homelessness?

Divinc is a local business incubator focused on women and people of color, and it is churning out high-quality, high-growth companies. 3/4 of the last graduating Techstars class had either a woman CEO or a woman on the executive team, no small thing sadly, in tech.

Speaking of UT, they recently hired Scott Aaronson. The university is building an incredible new quantum computing center around him, the first of its kind.

When was the last time you went to the Harry Ransom Center? Have you been to the new Ellsworth Kelly building at the Blanton?

The New York Times called Kelly’s Austin a “temple of light” and suggested that “no contemporary artwork of this scale by a major artist has matched its creator’s initial ambitions so perfectly as Kelly’s Austin.”

In fact, the paper’s art critic M.H. Miller went so far as to conclude that:

Long the music capital of the Southwest, Austin is now also a burgeoning outpost of the tech industry. But the presence of Kelly here almost instantaneously transforms it into an important art destination, the kind of place people make pilgrimages to.

How about that?

Our new medical school and teaching hospital are out of this world. Do you know about how they have completely reimagined the clinic from the inside out? Do you know what it takes — and means — to be a Trauma 1 center?

Mueller’s a big real estate project sure, but it is also the #2 green neighborhood in the whole U.S. according to Redfin, and an exciting precedent for future development.

Do you support Urban Roots and the Sustainable Food Center? Austin Bat Cave? SAFE? UMLAUF? The Thinkery? Foundation Communities? The Trail Foundation? The Texas Civil Rights Project?

Do you know about Manor New Tech high school, where you can see the best STEM curriculum in the country firsthand?

RideAustin emerged from a nasty fight about who gets to set the rules, but it is not just solvent, but writing big checks to other Austin nonprofits every single month, $350K in total and counting.

If we are lucky, Meow Wolf makes Austin their 3rd location. Liberty Lunch is long gone and so is Las Manitas, but The Skylark is still kicking, and so is the Sahara Lounge.

Wth all the traffic and our kvetching about it, we didn’t even drop down to #2 in the 2018 best places to live. We stayed #1. Even if we slide to number 4, 5, or 6, we are in great shape compared to most cities.

Obviously, I remain optimistic. Very much so. I’d love to hear why you remain so, too.

. . .

12 years ago, when I first got to Austin, another patron at Wink one table over stood up to tell us that we were “the problem” with what Austin was quickly becoming, having overheard our table’s conversation about my recent arrival.

Which was kind of funny in and of itself because we were all at...well, Wink. On the west side of Austin, sipping fancy wine with abandon.

This conversation is not new. These sentiments are not new. Generations before us invested in the icons and institutions that make Austin what it is today, in education, the arts, business, health and more. For that they should be lauded, and hopefully their example inspires us to do the same once more.

Those generations also irresponsibly kicked the can down the road on transportation, education, systemic racism and inequality, zoning, healthcare and more. We are left today to clean up several messes we didn’t make. But let’s not spend too long lamenting the errors of those who came before us.

I’m here for the long haul. I hope you are too. I’m glad we are talking about Amazon. I’m glad Amazon is talking about us.

I’m glad Steve Adler has an opponent. The contrast is striking, and useful because of the conversation it forces about original and modern Austin, and about complaining versus getting things done.

I’m glad we have a lot of work to do. Even better, we have the money, the talent, and the drive necessary to fix what’s broken.

I grew up in Baltimore. I love Baltimore. And it is doing better, slowly and surely. But Baltimore is not Austin, not yet anyway. Most cities would love to have our problems.

Again, we have every ability to solve what ails us. And I think we have a duty to do just that. For those of us to whom Austin has given so much, it’s time to give back.

Welcome, indeed.

P.S.

Steve has the biggest fundraising deadline of his reelection campaign on June 30th at midnight. That’s in 6 days.

Current and potential opponents will look at his report when deciding what their next moves will be. Please help out with a donation of $25, $50 or any amount that you can.

The max is up to $350 per person or $700 per couple, as allowed by our City. Click here to donate now.

Thank you!

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go-redgirl · 4 years

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The public swallowed a story of the wayward president’s son who cleaned up his act to take his place in the White House. Kitty Kelley exposes what really lurks in George W Bush’s past

On November 6, 1997, the exclusive club of America’s current and former presidents and first ladies gathered at a college campus in Texas for a celebration. President and Mrs Clinton arrived on Air Force One to join President and Mrs Ford, President and Mrs Carter, Nancy Reagan and Lady Bird Johnson.

They were there to honour President George Bush, who had raised $83m to build his presidential library at Texas A&M University.

His eldest son, George W Bush, governor of Texas, welcomed the 20,000 guests. With a few words, W smashed the bonhomie of the occasion: “I’m here to praise my father as a man who entered the political arena and left with his integrity intact . . . A war hero, a loving husband . . . and a president who brought dignity and character and honour to the White House.”

Spoken at the height of Clinton’s personal scandal in front of a predominantly Republican crowd, the assault on the current president’s integrity was not lost on anyone.

The Bush family had never accepted Clinton as a worthy successor, and they delighted in his unfolding scandal. They e-mailed one another ribald jokes about Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit against Clinton.

When it was reported that Jones claimed she could identify a “distinguishing characteristic” of Clinton’s anatomy, George Sr did not rest until he discovered what she was talking about. He then e-mailed his sons and friends: “His Johnson curves to the left.”

The family was looking towards its restoration to power through the presidential candidacy of George W. His mother, Barbara Bush, referred to him as “the Chosen One”. There was a problem, however. After eight years of Clinton, the American public “want to elect a statue”, as Oklahoma’s Republican governor Frank Keating put it. “They want a hero, an unblemished and untarnished guy in the White House.”

Karl Rove, the political adviser with the task of shaping W’s image, knew he had to present his candidate as the anti-Clinton: fresh (no drugs, no alcoholism), religious (acceptable to evangelicals) and faithful to his wife (majority of voters: women).

Fanning out across the country, Rove and the Bush team began to tidy up the governor’s past. Rove wanted no potentially devastating revelations to emerge that might portray W and Laura, his wife, as anything but an ideal and idealised couple. But to present W as pure and pristine was hypocritical and untrue.

George W Bush wasn’t Bill Clinton, certainly not in terms of sexual excess. But Clinton is not the standard to which he should be held. He must be compared with his own declarations on morality and his own carefully crafted public image — the image that the entire Bush family has cultivated for so long.

THE first hurdle facing the tidy-up team was to deal with W’s past drug use. As governor of Texas, he took a hard line on drugs. He supported increased penalties for possession and signed legislation mandating jail time for people caught with less than a single gram of cocaine.

Yet, as the claims of Sharon Bush, his sister-in-law, show, he could have been subject to jail time himself had he been caught “doing coke” with his brother Marvin at Camp David during his father’s presidency.

In the midst of an unfriendly divorce from Neil, another of the Bush brothers, Sharon told me last year: “He and Marvin did coke at Camp David when their father was president and not just once, either.”

As governor, George W had been very careful not to lie about doing illegal drugs himself, because he knew there were too many people who could testify to the truth. “When I was young and irresponsible,” he would say, “I was young and irresponsible.”

So what was his drugs record? When they were young, both he and Laura used to go down to the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands where they attended and enjoyed heavy pot-smoking parties. Smoking pot was hardly a sin but it did not mesh with the strait-laced image the Bushes were now presenting to the voters.

Then there were the allegations about cocaine. When W was at Yale in the mid-1960s, it was the most popular drug on campus. One contemporary, who insists on remaining anonymous, admitted years later to selling cocaine to W at the university.

Another man who was at Yale’s graduate school recalled “doing coke” with George, but he would not allow his recollections to be used on the record. This was not simply through fear of retribution. He said he did not feel right about “blowing George’s cover because I was doing the same thing”. A confirmed Democrat, he also said that although he could not stand George’s Republican politics, he liked him as a person.

Alcohol, the more familiar thread in W’s life story, started at Andover, the exclusive school W attended.

Andover stressed athletics as part of its regimen. Unable to live up to his father’s legacy as one of Andover’s most outstanding athletes, George W played his own kind of sports and won a reputation as a prankster.

“He loved stickball, which is baseball played with a broomstick and a tennis ball and funny hats,” recalled his contemporary, J Milburn “Kim” Jessup. “George made himself the high commissioner of stickball, which was a joke job.”

Alcohol was absolutely forbidden on or off campus, but the high commissioner of stickball figured out a way to beat the system. He designed an official stickball membership card that seemed to carry the imprimatur of Andover. He distributed the cards as fake IDs.

“People took the cards and started slipping off campus to go to Boston so they could get drunk,” said Jessup.

When W moved on to Yale at 18, with the Vietnam war at its height, he felt alienated on the liberal campus because of his father’s conservative politics and his own Texan childhood.

“George was definitely not on the popular side of the war issue, but he stood his ground,” said Robert Dieter, his Yale roommate. “Saying someone was conservative back then almost had a moral sting. I remember him coming back to the room and telling me that someone had been in his face about his father’s position. There was a certain arrogance that the left conveyed back then. It was hurtful.”

As a result, George spent most of his time carousing at the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity house or “the drinking jock house”, as it was known. Some classmates remember him as a “hard-drinking good-time guy” and “a jock sniffer” who “loved to raise hell”.

Ken White, a DKE contemporary, told me: “My wife remembers him roaring drunk one night at a DKE party without a date doing the Alligator; that was some sort of dance back then when you fell to the floor on all fours and started rolling around.”

In the spring of 1972, after graduating from Yale and while serving part-time in the Texas Air National Guard, George W embarked on what he would later describe as his “nomadic years”. Seeing him adrift, his father got him a job with the Republican campaign in a Senate race in Alabama.

Those who worked with George at that time remember him as an affable social drinker who acted much younger than his 26 years. They recall that he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey at the Cloverdale Grill in Birmingham, Alabama. They also say he liked to sneak out the back for a joint of marijuana or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine.

According to their recollections, he tended to show up for work “around noon”, prop his cowboy boots on a desk and start bragging about how much he had drunk the night before.

Spending Christmas in Washington with his parents, W went out drinking with 16-year-old Marvin. Driving home, he smashed into several dustbins. He swaggered into the house with the bravado of someone who had drunk too much, and there was his father, sober and unsmiling.

“You want to go mano a mano right here?” George junior challenged.

Big George called John White, a former footballer with the Houston Oilers. Bush wanted his son to perform community service with a mentoring programme for inner-city youth started by White and his teammate Ernie “Big Cat” Ladd.

Young George reported for work in January 1973 at a warehouse in a tough district where kids up to 17 years of age were offered sports, crafts, field trips, free snacks, rap sessions, tutoring for those who had been expelled, and big-name mentors from the athletic, entertainment, business, and political worlds.

Ladd recalled young George as “a super, super guy . . . If he was a stinker, I’d say he was a stinker. But everybody loved him so much. He had a way with people . . . They didn’t want him to leave.”

W stayed only seven months before he was accepted at Harvard Business School — a more hostile environment. It was the height of Watergate and his father was running the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon, who was considered the Antichrist at Harvard. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the town that surrounded the college, only 400 people were registered Republicans.

“I remember seeing Georgie at the Harvard Business School,” said Torbert Macdonald, an old classmate from Andover, “but he looked so lost and forlorn I didn’t have the heart to say hello.”

Others were less sympathetic. “I can still see him in his cowboy boots and leather flight jacket walking into macroeconomics,” recalled a classmate. “He sat in the back of the class, chewing tobacco and spitting it into a dirty paper cup . . . He was one red-assed Texan who made sure he was in your Yankee face and up your New England nose.”

Most of his contemporaries at the business school headed for Wall Street after graduation but W moved back to Midland, his boyhood home town in Texas, trying to become an oilman. He lived above a garage in an apartment that was piled high with dirty clothes that his friends’ wives periodically washed. Most of his nights were spent in bars, drinking with buddies in the oil business.

In July 1977, soon after his 31st birthday, friends introduced him to his polar opposite, Laura Welch. “We were the only two people among our friends who had not yet married,” she later joked.

Nobody expected the introduction to ignite, but George and Laura were married within three months at the First United Methodist Church in Midland.

Laura, the only child of a Midland builder, is remembered by some former students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for not being as conservative as most. She had smoked marijuana and backpacked through Europe after graduation. A Democrat, she had also supported the anti-war candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for the presidency in 1968.

In the early years of their marriage Laura joined her husband in his revels. “George and Laura ran in a much faster and fancier crowd than we did — their friends were all hard-drinking and drugging. That was part of the oil business scene then,” said Robert Whitt, a Midland lawyer.

But after a hard struggle to conceive and a fragile pregnancy with twins, Laura pulled back from the hellraising while he charged on, leaving her behind.

“I suppose there were strains in her marriage, just because he’s so difficult and high-energy and . . . she isn’t, but she never talked about it . . . Just read paperbacks and smoked cigarettes,” said Sharon Bush.

The couple kept their distance from the Bush family for several years in the 1980s, staying in Midland and even skipping the big surprise party that George Sr — by then vice-president of the United States — threw for his wife on their 41st wedding anniversary. “It’s a long way,” Barbara said, “and too expensive.” But family members confirmed that she had stopped speaking to her son, whose drunken outbursts had become a source of unending embarrassment to his wife and parents. The last eruption at a family gathering had been a tactless crack to the wife of one of his parents’ friends at her 50th birthday party: “So, what’s sex like after 50, anyway?”

He was 40 by the time he gave up tobacco, alcohol and drugs in 1986 and became a born-again Christian. In his memoir, A Charge to Keep, W credited his family’s good friend, the Reverend Billy Graham, with planting “a mustard seed in my soul”. He did not mention that he actually came to Jesus in a coffee house conversion with a much more flamboyant evangelist, Arthur Blessitt, who was known among born-agains as the man who had wheeled a 96lb cross of Jesus into 60 countries on six continents, winning a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

W figured, perhaps, that Graham was more palatable to churchgoing voters than Blessitt, who came to Midland after the bottom dropped out of the oil boom and fortunes crashed overnight. In a desperate effort to rescue lives and restore morale, some church elders invited the evangelist to stage a revival in the town. Loudspeakers exhorted the populace “to experience the love of God, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the holy spirit”.

George, who had already begun attending a men’s Bible class, asked a friend to arrange a meeting at a hotel coffee shop. As Blessitt recalled, George began with a few pleasantries, and then plunged in: “I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow Him.”

“I was quite shocked at his direct and sincere approach,” said Blessitt. “I slowly leaned forward and lifted the Bible that was in my hand and asked him about his relationship with the Lord: ‘If you died this moment do you have the assurance you would go to heaven?’” “No.”

“Then let me explain to you how you can have that assurance and know for sure that you are saved.”

“I’d like that.”

The evangelist read from the Book of Romans. He quoted Mark, John and Luke to the vice-president’s son, who held hands, repented his sins, and proclaimed Jesus Christ as his saviour.

Conversion and abstinence did not affect W’s machismo, however. He still swaggered and cursed constantly. When a friend accused him of taking the Lord’s name in vain, George exploded: “That’s bullshit. Total bullshit.”

Whether talking to reporters, congressmen, or heads of state, George made no effort to curb his trash mouth. Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon was taken aback to hear, “I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that.”

Those closest to George agreed that the key to his new persona lay in his steely discipline. His sister Doro described him as a fat boy who deprived himself to stay thin. His mother depicted a drinker who denied himself to stay dry. Both acknowledged that the effort to control these appetites was monumental.

In order to maintain his rigid discipline, George imposed an inflexible order on his life. Like any addict in recovery, he needed a regular schedule, rising early and retiring early. He prayed daily from his One-Year Bible, which was divided into 365 readings, each from the New Testament, the Old Testament, Psalms and Proverbs.

Edgy and impatient, he exercised at least one hour, sometimes two hours, a day. With martinet punctuality, he started and ended meetings exactly on time. The routine became the core of his developing political career, first as governor of Texas and then as president.

He refused to read memos longer than two pages. He thrived on making quick decisions. His religiosity allowed him to live in a black-and-white world of absolutes with no bedevilling in-betweens. His decisiveness sprang from his need to control and to establish order amid chaos. Once he made a decision, he rarely looked back.

Despite his quick temper, he was capable of nice gestures, as he showed on the presidential trail. Ruth Gilson, an estate agent, recalled a touching moment during a $1,000-a-head fundraiser in a Washington hotel in 1999.

She was one of very few women to attend the event. “All the men looked to be lobbyists in expensive suits with huge stomachs. The room filled up fast and we were all squished together. I was at the front of the rope line. A little old lady about 85 years old crept in beside me. She said she needed to see the governor. ‘I just have to talk to him,’ she said.”

The elderly woman was frail and wearing clothes that looked worn and dated. “She looked like a church lady from the 1950s.”

George W arrived and started working the crowd. The old lady stepped forward and asked if she could say something.

He reached out and took her hand. She whispered in his ear to please do something about the price of prescription drugs for the elderly.

He nodded. “I’ll try,” he said. Then he stepped back to look at her. “Did you pay $1,000 to come here?” “Yes, sir, I did.”

“Well, I want you to get your money back.” He turned to the man with him. “Get her name and address and see that she gets a cheque for $1,000.”

The little old lady shook her head. “No, I want you to have it all, Mr Bush. I want you to win.”

“Well,” said George. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep $100 and you keep $900 and we’ll both win. That’s what we’ll do.”

She smiled gratefully.

“It was such a sweet gesture on his part,” recalled Gilson. “Others might have seen it as patronising, but I didn’t. In a crowd of fat-cat lobbyists that little woman in her tattered coat looked like someone’s poor grandmother, and he responded sensitively.”

Extracted from The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley.

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