#new suv in 2021

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #steve stecklow #autoenshittification #norihiko shirouzu #reuters #you're holding it wrong #r2r #right to repair #range rage #range anxiety #grifters #demon-haunted world #drm #tpms #1201 #dmca 1201 #tesla #evs #electric vehicles #ftc act section 5 #unfair and deceptive practices #automotive #enshittification #elon musk

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The Proud Boys are back: How the far-right domestic terrorist group is rebuilding to rally behind Trump

Aram Roston at Reuters:

A dark SUV cruised past former President Donald Trump’s supporters near his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey on a windy April afternoon. Billowing from the vehicle were three flags: one for the Trump campaign, two others with the initials “PB” – the insignia of the far-right Proud Boys movement. Through the open windows, three Proud Boys flashed the “OK” sign with their hands, a gesture often associated with white supremacy and the far right. Trump’s fans cheered. Four men dressed in the signature black-and-yellow shirts of the Proud Boys spilled out of the SUV and began glad-handing the crowd like homecoming heroes. The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.

Since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, four former Proud Boys leaders have been convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy, each sentenced to 15 or more years in prison. At least another 70 members were charged with participating in the violence. But that crackdown hasn’t stopped the Proud Boys. Some Proud Boys say they are preparing to emerge once again as a physical force for Trump, drawn to his hardline nationalism and convinced their leaders will be pardoned if he wins. Trump himself promises to pardon convicted Jan. 6 rioters if he’s elected. After last Thursday’s historic guilty verdict against Trump, an Ohio Proud Boys chapter vowed “war” and posted a video of Proud Boy street brawls that ended with the message, “Fighting solves everything.” A Miami chapter said, “Now, more than ever, we are recruiting!” Some posted images of the upside-down American flag symbolizing the “Stop the Steal” movement that falsely claims Trump won the 2020 election. One Proud Boy told Reuters that America is in a period of “calm before the storm.”

The group’s main Telegram channel, however, posted a message urging Proud Boys to stay calm and not get drawn into a trap and risk arrest. “Trump is, of course, getting railroaded but we will not be walking into any honey pots over this.” In recent weeks, the group has become more prominent at pro-Trump events, highlighting the risk of renewed violence in this year’s presidential election. Dozens of Proud Boys – some in body armor and helmets – marked the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection with a show of force at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. On April 20, nearly a dozen gathered at a rally for Trump’s Republican campaign in Wilmington, North Carolina.  More recently, groups of Proud Boys from two chapters mixed with tens of thousands of Trump supporters at a campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, in May.

On a boardwalk near the entrance of the Wildwood rally, several Proud Boys identified themselves as members of the “New Jersey State” chapter. One said they were there to provide security and stop agitators from “disrespecting or assaulting everybody.” Inscribed on his wraparound sunglasses were the initials “POYB” – short for “Proud of Your Boy.” He wore a ring with the initials “PB” and a black shirt with the yellow laurel wreath of the Proud Boys. Three men from another chapter greeted them, their faces hidden by gaiter masks. The re-emergence of the Proud Boys at Trump’s political rallies and events coincides with polls showing a majority of Americans fearing political violence will flare around November’s election. It also comes when Trump’s use of incendiary rhetoric is inspiring his supporters to target his opponents – including judges, prosecutors and political rivals – in a wave of threats that’s unprecedented in modern American politics.

Trump himself has not ruled out the possibility of political violence if he loses in November. “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he said when asked by Time magazine in April if he expected violence after the election. If he’s jailed or put under house arrest, “I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” he said in a Fox News interview that aired on Sunday. “At a certain point there’s a breaking point.” Before the last election, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Three months later, federal prosecutors say, the group’s leaders plotted and led the insurrection of the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s baseless, rigged-election claims inspired the gathering, and Trump himself urged the assembled crowd to march on the Capitol as Congress certified Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to questions for this story about his rhetoric, Jan. 6 and the Proud Boys. As the Proud Boys regroup, they’ve made changes designed to make them less vulnerable to law enforcement scrutiny, including doing away with layers of top leadership, according to interviews with members. The Proud Boys now operate with self-governing chapters in more than 40 states, with little apparent central coordination, members said. While the group’s structure has changed, its Canadian founder remains an inspirational figure to today’s Proud Boys. Gavin McInnes, a British-born far-right commentator who lives in New York, announced his resignation from the Proud Boys in 2018. But he remains deeply involved with the group, according to interviews with Proud Boys.

[...]

After McInnes stepped down, his successor, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, raised the Proud Boys’ profile, pulling them from the fringe of the far-right toward the center of Trump-era Republican politics. Tarrio, a Floridian of Afro-Cuban descent, was sentenced last September to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, defined as an effort by two or more people to overthrow the government or use force to hinder its operations, and other charges related to the Capitol riot. He has appealed.

Two criminal defense attorneys for Tarrio did not respond to emailed questions and phone calls. In the past, McInnes, Tarrio and a group of leaders dubbed “Elders” spoke publicly on the group’s behalf, set the agenda and guided its confrontations with left-wing groups around the country. They sat atop a formal structure and could disband Proud Boy chapters or expel members. Now, members say, the chapters are largely independent of each other and ban communications with the media. Most members who spoke to Reuters for this report did so on condition of anonymity. The group’s resilience has surprised some extremism experts. “The amazing thing is that so many people from the Proud Boys can be in jail and yet you have these active chapters,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “Traditionally when the head of a neo-Nazi or white supremacist group goes to jail or dies, the organization will collapse, but that does not seem to be happening with the Proud Boys.”

[...]

During the Trump administration, the Proud Boys engaged in large-scale street brawls with antifa – antifascists – and other leftist groups across the country, typically by taunting demonstrators to instigate a fight. They adopted the slogan “Fuck Around And Find Out,” and emblazoned the letters “FAFO” on hats and t-shirts. Some historians compare the Proud Boys to fascist European militias of the 1920s and 1930s such as the Brownshirts, a Nazi paramilitary group that helped bring Hitler to power in Germany. Proud Boys say they’re nothing like the Brownshirts and bear no resemblance to fascists. But street violence and extreme nationalism are features of both groups. In the weeks before the Capitol riots, some wore a patch inscribed with “RWDS,” short for “Right Wing Death Squad,” a term used to describe Central and South American paramilitaries who supported right-wing governments and dictatorships. [...]

After Trump left the White House, the Proud Boys turned to America’s culture wars. They clashed with supporters of abortion rights and vaccine mandates, and harassed organizers of Drag Queen Story Hours, where female impersonators read at libraries or bookstores to children. Fights often ensued. Since the 2021 Capitol attack, Reuters identified 29 incidents of political violence involving the Proud Boys, almost all of them centered around social issues. All but one of the eight cases in 2023 involved clashes between Proud Boys and left-wing activists at demonstrations supporting LGBTQ+ rights. The tally was based largely on news reports and court records of fights, assaults and other physical confrontations. This year, the Proud Boys have returned to politics. In the first three months of 2024, there have been far fewer Proud Boys public events than in the same period last year. But half of them have been pro-Trump and the rest have been political in nature, related to guns or immigration, said Kieran Doyle of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit that monitors political violence.

On April 24, Proud Boys founder McInnes appeared at Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests. He told Reuters that the Proud Boys were not getting involved in the anti-Israel unrest, saying he was there to “ridicule” liberals by pretending to be a left-wing journalist. It didn’t work, he said, because people saw him and posted alerts on social media. “They recognized me and were scared.” There’s no authoritative count of Proud Boy members. McInnes claims there are about 5,000, down from 8,000 during Trump’s presidency but up from lows after the Capitol riot arrests. Official estimates of the Proud Boys’ strength vary widely, from 300 to 3,000 members, said a law enforcement source who has monitored the group. Reuters could not independently corroborate its numbers. Some former Proud Boys have abandoned the group for other, more overtly racist and violent groups, including the neo-Nazi Blood Tribe and the underground “Active Club” scene, a white supremacist male movement, one Proud Boy told Reuters.

Reuters has an informative article about far-right domestic terrorist group Proud Boys is rebuilding to rally behind convicted felon Donald Trump.

After the January 6th Insurrection, the group turned towards right-wing culture war items to launch protests, such as COVID mitigation measures (esp. vaccine mandates), drag story hours, and abortion access.

Read the full article at Reuters.

#Reuters #Proud Boys #Right Wing Extremism #Right Wing Terrorism #Right Wing Violence #Donald Trump #2020 Presidential Election #2024 Presidential Election #Capitol Insurrection #The Big Lie #Stop The Steal #Telegram #Gavin McInnes #Anti LGBTQ+ Extremism #Vaccine Mandate Protests

[couldawouldashoulda50]

The Distance and the Time Between Us

A/N: So this is my attempt at writing my very first series involving William Nylander.

Overall, it is more or less a “right place, right person, wrong time” type of storyline.  The fem reader grew up outside of Toronto and is gifted in all things music.  She’s had world-wide success as part of a band as well as a stellar solo career.  She’s been bestowed with absolute (perfect) pitch and has been categorized as one of the best singers/musician/songwriters of recent time.

Where it was suitable, I have tried to be accurate with various facts but I will at certain points be changing reality around to aid in the story.  I guess that’s the beauty of fiction; you can snap your fingers and make it so, no matter what it is.

Not to sound like I’m accepting an Ocscar, but I wanted to thank @leafs-lover and @spine-buster for interacting so kindly with me as a newcomer to this space, and for reading through the first iterations of my thoughts blurted out onto the page.   

Not to beat this to death, but I’m still figuring out Tumblr so hopefully I won’t make a giant mess of things as I post each new segment.  

Warnings - allusions to sex, swearing, end of a relationship, I think that’s it

Word Count - 3.8k

----------------------

September, 2021

The end of the evening hits differently than you thought it would.  

A few hours ago, up on the bandshell stage with your bandmates, Brandon (the guitarist, alongside you, and vocals), announced to the audience that you and the band were taking a step back from performing, recording and touring.  For the past decade (give or take), the band that you co-founded with Brandon had achieved remarkable success along with fame and fortune.  You all had far exceeded the low expectations that many had when you began your music careers together. 

And it was time….in fact, it was very much overdue.  

Personal lives are albeit neglected in order to reach this pinnacle of stardom and for once, you all mutually agreed that it was time to give up the rigours of a touring band and enjoy life. After all, for all that’s been sacrificed, you all deserved it.  

The other members, Maebh (bass, vocals) and Colin (drum, vocals), together had their blossoming family to look forward to.  Brandon and his partner wanted to pursue other musical interests.  There was a sense of excitement, and relief, leaving behind the pressure-cooker lifestyle that your lives had become. 

And then there was you.

In one sense, you had been dreaming of this moment for years.  Almost complete freedom from all the commitments from both your explosive solo career, and the band from which you emerged.  Until now, it had always been one more appearance, one more record, one more song, one more tour, one more interview, one more movie - year after year after year.  On the surface, you were one of the most successful and sought-after musical artists of the past 10 years.  Coupled with your band’s success, your individual success had been nothing short of magical.  The drive and determination you possessed, alongside a bit of luck and (mostly) sensibility propelled you up to and through the insanity of stardom.  You always made sure you kept grounded and were full of gratitude, always keeping your humility intact. You had become, in the eyes of the entertainment world, the epitome of grace and etiquette under such scrutiny and pressure.  

On the flipside, you have been grappling with an overwhelming sense of despair and an ache deep within that you can almost taste since the moment the band made its decision.  

Now that this last performance was in the books (and it was an incredibly successful one at that), you sit in the backseat with your sullen thoughts as your driver navigates the SUV towards your Toronto home.  You glance over to your manager, Evelyn, and choke back a sob - your throat constricts and you bite your lip to try and will back the tears that threaten to fall.  

Evelyn's typical stoic demeanour softens for a moment, and she grabs your hand; she's well aware of what has gotten you in this state.  

You return to staring out the window; your mind replaying what you’ve sacrificed for your career and the fear of the unknown with your future.

The reality is that it's not what you've sacrificed, but whom.

It was when you saw William in the crowd tonight, surrounded by peers, teammates and countless beautiful women, the pit in your stomach formed.  You weren't prepared to see him and God, he looked better than anyone should ever be allowed to.

The pit grew as you saw him singing along to the songs sung by your voice.

It grew even more as you saw his eyes fixed on you perform alongside some NHL players and other hockey notables in attendance who came up on stage to sing their favourite songs with you - clearly fueled by the liquid courage that was in abundance at the event.

The pit became virtually unbearable as you saw him laughing and dancing with a beautiful girl that was not looking like anything plutonic.  At least not in the way she was clinging onto him.

It was no small feat to get through the rest of the night, performing and interacting with the crowd as effortlessly as you did.  Trying not to focus on the thought of him being close enough to breathe the same air as you.  If you glanced his way, you forced yourself to dismiss the idea that he was often stealing glances back at you, or the notion that perhaps he might still want you as much as you clearly still wanted him. You became a master at suppressing your feelings in the past and tonight was no exception.

It had been almost two years since you last saw or heard from William.  

At the start of September of 2019, you and William found yourselves yet again in a familiar place in life; William beginning another hockey season, single, after he and his girlfriend had parted ways during the summer and you returning to your home town of Toronto to visit loved-ones after a summer of festival performances and travelling.  

Your calendar was full with invitations to many high profile events in the city and your attendance always drew quite a crowd. As usual, you were attending all of the events alone which seemed to be mercilessly pointed out by every entertainment news correspondent that lined the red carpet.  William would catch a glimpse of you on TV as they showed you arriving at a film festival party or an exclusive restaurant, and soon thereafter, you'd receive a notification from him on your phone.

That is how it always started; a few sweet and flirty text messages, then a couple of phone calls and not long after, you and William would be tangled in the sheets of either your luxurious Toronto home or at his hi-rise condo that boasted an incredible view of the city.  It was such a natural and easy existence when you were together.  As overly sugary as it might sound to most, your insides felt like there were beams of sunshine that would radiate through your body from the sheer sight of him.  Somehow, you always felt calm and at peace in his presence.

Simply put, it always felt incredible spending time with him and it always brought out the best of you.  You felt happy and it was very apparent William felt that way too.

However, true to the pattern of the past few years, you would need to leave again, having to depart mid-way through October for an unknown period of time.  You had several performances booked throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia followed by more exclusive appearances for royalty and dignitaries around the world.  Leaving William throughout the years under these same circumstances only became increasingly difficult, leaving you both heart-sick for a time afterward.  Eventually you both would bounce back and resume life without too many broken-hearted thoughts about each other swirling around in your heads.  

You and he had often discussed trying a long-distance relationship, only for you to hold firm on your initial refusal.  You had always maintained it was not fair to him to have no say or input on when you could see one another.  You felt it was too much to ask someone as young as him to have to stand by and watch everyone around him celebrate with their significant others, or be consoled by them, while he has to go it alone.  He deserved to be in a relationship where both people were utterly devoted to one another; you desperately wanted to be that person but your contract obligations just kept stacking up against you and those circumstances were out of your control.

Once you had returned to London, sitting alone in the new opulent townhome you had just bought in Knightsbridge, you had made the decision on a dreary November evening in 2019, that it was time you fought for what you wanted; the man you had fallen in love with.  

Calculating the time difference, it was nearing dinner time in Toronto on William’s day off.  Barely able to contain your excitement, you sent William a text asking him to call you.  It wasn't long before your phone rang and the familiar picture of his jersey appeared on the screen.  Your excitement quickly dissipated once you answered; it was clear from his low, soft tone that this call was not going to be a happy one.  

Before even getting to your reason for wanting to talk, you had asked if he was ok.  He paused for a torturously long period of time and said he was not.  He explained that it had become too much for him after these past few years to be on this rollercoaster of being lovers (mostly secret lovers at that), for such short moments in time, only to have to watch you leave again and again and never being certain when you’d return.  He wanted to be able to give all of himself to another and up until that point, he had quietly kept a part of his heart solely for you.  To pour salt into an open wound, he finally added that the level of celebrity you had reached was not something he felt he could handle as the pressure of being inevitably thrust into an even bigger spotlight is not what he wanted in a relationship. 

An extreme ache travelled through your body.  You felt blindsided.  Perhaps it wasn't for the reasons that William rhymed off for wanting to essentially sever ties with you, but more that you had finally succumbed to your deep feelings of love for him and now it was too late.  Your heart completely shattered from his words as the visions of your future with him disintegrated into nothingness. 

William quietly apologized, his voice barely above a whisper. He said he had to go and hung up, never giving your brain a chance to catch up or for your voice to speak.

Once the call ended, the friendship you had with him ended.  In your mind, he became an apparition - nothing more than a figment of your imagination.  

The many memories that you had of the two of you together became too much to bear and with that, you clicked into total self-preservation mode.  You no longer followed him or his siblings on any social platform.  Aside from a select few, you limited your interactions with the Maple Leafs, many of whom you had become friends with over the years along with their significant others.  You wouldn’t watch game highlights or check scores - you untethered yourself from anything to do with William.

It was not long after that painful conversation that you heard William and a previous on-again/off-again girlfriend were back together.  It was exactly what you expected, which was of little comfort.  The heartache you felt was profound and rather than giving yourself time to grieve or heal or whatever you needed to do, you allowed the loss of his existence in your life to harden you.  Save from your close friendships and your family, you no longer cared about the love aspect of a normal human life.  

Between rehearsals for your tour, you threw yourself into writing music; sitting for hours on end in your state of the art recording studio on the lower level of your home. Up until that point, you had a massive catalogue of songs that, at the very least, uplifted people.  The message of your songs had now transitioned to loss.  The record execs salivated with each song you presented - dollar bills in their eyes  given the huge music market for words rife with longing and regret.  Even the accompanying music you created held the same vibe; music that would make the hardest person want to weep.  As time went on, your songs were released under the guise of other popular singers.  The releases were wildly successful which further catapulted your reputation into the stratosphere, being deemed as one of the most talented songwriters in current time.  With all the notoriety, you found it difficult to embrace the new heights in popularity and monetary gain, given that it was all based on the inner turmoil of someone that felt as broken as you did.

There was a domino effect with shutting down the pleasure side of life; your once effervescent personality was replaced with forced smiles and you were noticeably disengaged in conversation.  The change in your demeanour didn’t go unnoticed with your circle of friends. Forever begging you to come out before you departed on the first leg of your tour, your friends tried to rally around you, nearly breaking down the double doors to your home to let them in.  

Even the rare times you relented and allowed them to drag you to all the exclusive clubs that dotted London’s Soho and other districts close by, you ended up drinking little and leaving early.  

Despite how you felt, you always looked exquisite, dressing in elegant attire that perfectly accentuated your shapely figure, and hair and makeup that were magazine worthy.  Other than writing and recording music, dressing up was one of the few things that surprisingly made you feel better, even if it was for a fleeting moment.  

The good feelings were often chased away as a result of the jeers and catcalling which inevitably started from the snobby and ill-mannered men that occupied space at each club.  What these men had in money, from their aristocratic lineage or otherwise, they lacked in every trait you valued.  If it didn’t make you feel ill first, it made you seethe with rage with their greasy, vulgar, drunken comments about what they would do to you if they got you alone.  After berating them for their tastelessness, and saying apologetic goodbyes to your friends, you would leave to go home.  The rage that coursed through your body would then dial down to frustration which would then lead to a pit of sadness.  

Washing the night off in your oversized bathtub, you started to sob.  Tears streamed down your face forming tributaries along your cheeks to your jawline before dissolving in the hot bath water.  You missed William totally and completely.  His friendship.  His laugh.  His face.  His touch. The way he felt under you or on top of you.  The way he looked so disheveled when he’d first wake up.  The taste of his tongue against yours. When he teased you of how badly you suck at every video game you tried.  The list of things you missed about William felt endless.  You were certain, more than ever now, if you were to ever try to love again, you would have to settle for someone that was a distant second to him.  That thought broke you even more.   

As the days leading to the end of 2019 grew shorter, and weather more miserable, your mood and thoughts about William changed, seemingly adopting the climate that surrounded you.  You started to convince yourself that perhaps the feelings you and he shared weren’t really real; perhaps he had been wheeling you since you met.  Your thoughts continued to darken when you realized you were likely nothing more to him than just a convenience when he was in between relationships; he used you like a disposable girlfriend…once you would leave for your next project, he was totally free to move on to someone else.  For all you knew, maybe you were amongst a string of girls he was wheeling.  It would not be unheard of.

More and more you pieced the puzzle of your own design together. He couldn’t have loved you -  even though he admitted that he did when you were in his arms last.  Once you had whispered the same to him, it was like floodgates opening with the words “I love you” that flowed effortlessly between you.  You told each other every chance you had during that last blip of time together.  

You resumed the previous thought.  He couldn’t have loved you to only turn around and cut you off the way he did, a mere month later.  

Once the tour began, the moment came when you all but discarded the loving feelings you once had for William and forced out the amazing memories.  You continued to captivate audiences around the world with your powerful songs and incredible voice. Images and videos of you being celebrated for your beauty and elegance were in continuous rotation on every social media platform.  Leading up to award season, your name was on repeat for several music award nominations. You graced a number of red carpet events and attended after parties, always looking ravishing as you engaged in chats with interviewers and stopped to take pictures with other celebrities and onlookers.

Your mind snapped back to reality as the SUV pulled up to and through the security gate of your sprawling Toronto home.  You thanked the driver and Evelyn politely asked him to wait for her, and you and Evelyn disappeared into the house.

You stood in the front foyer for a moment, soaking in the fact that this is where you’ll be hanging your hat, both literally and figuratively, until you decide where you truly want to be.  As beautiful of a house as you had here in this city, you knew it would take a lot more than an exquisite interior to make it feel like a home.  All you wanted was for your home to be filled with love and laughter and family and friends.  

“Why don’t you just head straight to bed…you look like you’re ready to collapse” Evelyn said, picking up your small suitcase and walking toward your master bedroom on the main floor.  

You ran your hands gently over your face, trying to stimulate enough alertness to respond.

“Very good idea…God, I’m just beyond.  I think I may end up sleeping for 2 days straight” you said. 

The adrenaline that surges through your body during your performances is a feeling like no other, but you knew the downside to that was utter exhaustion after the fact. 

The welcome sight of your large California King bed took hold, and you immediately stripped down to your bra and panties, and slipped between the crisp cotton sheets, pulling the overstuffed duvet up over your shoulders.  Evelyn continued bringing in a few more of your belongings into the bedroom, all the while, you could already feel yourself sinking into the mattress and the urge to sleep was taking hold.

“Thank you Evelyn…for everything.  I don’t know what it’s going to be like not to see you almost every day”.  Your eyes welled up with tears, your throat tight with emotion.  

“I’m going to LA, not Mars…all you need to do is call.  You just remember - we made an incredible team, and that was just as much you as it was me.  Evelyn paused.  “You have been such a gift to my life.”  and she leaned over to kiss the top of your head.    

“Call me soon and let me know how it’s going with your new act” you yawned, and started to drift off.

“Do you want me to turn your phone off?” Knowing the answer already, she didn’t wait for a response….you had fallen asleep already anyway.

Evelyn grabs your phone from the charger and sees text notifications on the lock screen.

Knowing your passcode, she bypasses the biometric prompt and the home screen appears.

Evelyn realized your phone had been on do not disturb for quite some time.  She taps the message icon and sees a familiar name as the sender.

The first text is short, sent earlier that night.

Hey - it’s William Hoping to get a chance to talk when you have a min

Then there’s a second text sent a little while after the first:

Are you still here?

Then lastly:

K - well.  I hope you’re staying in TO for a bit.  Would like to see you.

Evelyn looks over at you, sound asleep, and considers the options.

Ignore the messages, turn off your phone and leave it for you to decide on how to handle it once you’ve got some rest.

Text William back on your behalf to at least let him know you’re home and to try back in a day or two

Wake you up to show you the messages.

Given your current peaceful resting state, and knowing you like virtually no other, Evelyn is aware that waking you up now would only unleash a rabid and maniacal beast - and she wanted no part in that.

Just as she considers shutting the phone off, the words “Incoming Call” appear with “Ny88” underneath.

Evelyn stares at the caller for a moment and then picks up.  

“Hello, Y/N’s phone”

“Um - Hi…this is William, a friend of Y/N.  I was trying to get a hold of her for a couple of hours…I was just, uh…worried”.  William’s voice trails off

“Hi William, it’s Evelyn…not sure if you remember me; we met a few years ago.  Y/N’s back home now - sorry, she had her phone on do not disturb. Not sure why.” Evelyn confesses.  “But she was knackered and is asleep now….I think you know the drill with her after she comes off after a concert” Evelyn laughs.

“Oh, right - yes…hey Evelyn.  Yeah - I remember…she’s down for the count afterwards” William chuckles.  “Well, I was hoping to bump into her tonight after the show but it seems like she was surrounded the entire time.” 

Evelyn paused, unsure of exactly how much she should convey to William.

“I know it’s been awhile; she would have liked to have seen you, I’m sure.”

There was further silence, and remembering she had a flight to catch, Evelyn tried to speed up the conversation.  “Do you want me to leave her a message for her to call you when she wakes up?

“Fuck…that'll be days” William muttered under his breath, suddenly realizing Evelyn may have heard.  “Sorry…shit…scratch that, '' he said nervously.  "I…I just really was hoping to see her or talk with her tonight, but I guess that's not possible" he said, defeated.

Evelyn looks down at you sleeping.  She recalls the car ride home, you flushed and wrought with emotion as the memories you suppressed of William came flooding back.  She watched you during the intermissions of tonight's performance hiding away in the dressing area, trying to keep your shit together after seeing William in the crowd.  She had seen you at your highest highs over the years when you and William were able to spend time together and at your lowest low after he ended it. 

You finally have the time now, she thought - so it's go time…now or fucking never.

"I've got to catch a flight, so I'm leaving straight away.  If I give you the security codes to get in, I can trust you that she'll be in good hands, right William?" Evelyn paused before finishing with "Because so help me God William, if I hear of anything to the contrary, you do not want to see my other side."

“I’m leaving now” William says with a rushed tone and hangs up before Evelyn has a chance to respond.

#william nylander #toronto maple leafs #nhl imagine #hockey fic #rock star #musician #right person wrong time #angst #fanfic #nhl fanfiction

[lilgooberz]

i just wanna say that UM theres so many amazing artists to explore if you enjoyed the concept of wilburs sound but obviously aren't gonna support an abuser, new band suggestions for ppl to expand because i love sharing my special interests

Pigeon Pit

I absolutely adore their sound its so good and theres so many good songs by them, if you were anywhere through 2020-2021 you deffo know their one song, nights like these, BUT they have so many more terrific songs, to name a few that i LOVE

- Milk crates

- f.m.i.d

- cigarette song (if u like angst)

- Eat Your Heart Out

Everybodys Worried About Owen

Just like I said before, he was massive in 2021, and you definitely know his song mawce if youre queer and was on tiktok at all

For the suggestions on this one i think you should listen to the whole album There Are Leaches In Denton Lake, I haven't gotten into his newer stuff yet but it seems great and you should all support his music !!!!

AJJ

if you enjoy angsty ish whininess this is deffo the music tor you, i was HEAVILY into them this summer, theres a few songs that rlly stand out in my mind imo

- rejoice

- People

- personal space invader

- sorry bro

- junkie church

- no more tears

Fredo Disco

theyre a more recent band i got into:D but if you enjoy more upbeat indie stuff theyre deffo the vibe, songs i adore by them:

- canker sore

- temporary tattoo

- saturn suv (one and two)

- shower song

- dad jeans

That is all my suggestions

I hope you take some into mind !!! I also hope that you Stop supporting wilbur soot, i dont want you anywhere near me if you do. Believe the victims, support shelby, if youre able to you should donate to charities that support victims of domestic abuse. I know im talkimg about music here but, what comes first is supporting shelby and helping to empower her voice and the other victims of wilbur soots, voices.

#wilbur soot #shubble #osddid #endos dni #mcyt #fuck wilbur soot #music recs #🔒 posting

[hockeylovee12]

Anyone But Him

Chapter One

July 1st, 2021

The summer sun slowly starts to sink casting a golden glow over the cloudless sky, as Luke's sleek white SUV glides along the I-90, following the signs for Massachusetts. His tires hum against the pavement, creating a steady rhythm within the backdrop of passing cars and typical highway sounds. 

Inside the car, the thumping beat of some random ass country song fills the air, and Luke absentmindedly taps his lengthy fingers along the smooth, cool surface of the leather steering wheel in front of him. 

For a moment, Luke's eyes temporarily leave the road ahead, as he glances towards the seat next to him, where Sadie dons a cropped lilac tank top, jean shorts, and a pair of worn-out Hightop Converse, quietly gazing out the window, while a book, a classic piece entitled Mrs. Dalloway rests on her lap.

Over ten hours have passed since they began the long drive from their hometown in Michigan to the small lake town in New Hampshire where Luke's family lake house awaits their arrival. 

Luke's eyes return to the road, and a small smile forms across his lips as he uses the button on his steering wheel to lower the volume of the music, "Excited for freshman year?" Luke asks his voice laced with excitement as he brings up the topic of college-a subject that has been occupying both their minds since they tossed their caps in the air at their high school graduation less than a month ago.

Sadie hesitates, the silence somewhat deafening against the fading music, and shifts in her seat causing the fabric of her tank top to cling to her skin. 

"Definitely" She replies, the word squeezing past the tight feeling in her throat as she forces a smile to cross her lips. 

"Michigan is gonna be so fucking awesome! I can't wait till we start!" Luke energetically adds, his previously small smile broadening into a wide grin

For him the idea of attending the University of Michigan with his best friend is more than just a hope or a silly dream, it's their reality, it's their plan. 

At least it's supposed to be.

"Have you picked your classes yet?" Luke continues, riding the wave of his anticipation.

She bites the inside of her cheek before mumbling "Sort of,"

Her hesitant response holds significant weight to an unforgettable event, eleven days prior, when the possibility of a different future presented itself-one that's not painted in blue and maize, but rather in the scarlet embraces of Rutgers University, a school attended and cherished by her late mother. 

The vivid image of ripping open her acceptance letter surfaces in her mind. 

She applied several months ago after being accepted to the University of Michigan, and with the exception of her dad-seeing as how she didn't wanna have to pay the $75 application fee out of her own pockets-she didn't tell anyone, because even with a 4.3 GPA and a long list of extracurriculars, the reality of actually getting accepted to Rutgers, was always a long shot, and there was no reason to get anyones hopes up or in Luke's case crush them, for something that probably wouldn't happen. 

Except it did happen. 

Rutgers accepted her and now she's faced with making a decision between going to Michigan with Luke or following in her mother's footsteps and attending Rutgers. 

She prepared herself to share the news with Luke the same day she received her acceptance but that same evening another, far more momentous event was taking place: The NHL Entry Draft.

This wasn't just any draft, this was Luke's draft. This was the day that would determine his future, determine if everything he had worked for, everything his family had worked for, his coaches, his teammates, every game, every loss, every win, if all of it was enough to make it to the NHL. 

So when his name was called as the fourth overall pick, to the New Jersey Devils-a team the Hughes family is very familiar with as one of Luke's older brothers, Jack was their coveted 1st overall pick, two years prior-the sheer look of happiness on Luke's face caused a surge of restitance to rush through Sadie's bones. 

And at that moment she thought 'How the hell could she possibly interrupt what is probably one of the most important moments in her best friends life, with news that would absolutely crush him?"

She couldn't, no she wouldn't. So instead she stayed quiet. 

Over the next few days, she probably rehearsed the conversation in her mind over a hundred times, promising herself she would tell Luke before, they left for their annual summer trip, but she didn't and she could lie and say she couldn't find the time, but the truth is what she couldn't find was the courage. 

Now they're two hours away from the lake house, where they'll spend the next eight days with Luke's family and a few of his brother's friends and Luke thinks she's going to Michigan with him, when the reality is she has no fucking clue where she's going yet. 

Sadie glances over at Luke, who has since returned the music to its blaring and probably ear-damaging volume and is tapping his fingers to the beat of a Morgan Wallen song. 

Sadie's mind trickles back to the beginning of their friendship nearly six years ago. 

It all started the same year Luke’s family moved to Canton, Sadie’s hometown. Luke was really nervous about starting at a new school, in a new environment -having previously lived in Toronto-and even more so because this would be his first time attending a school without his older brothers, who were both attending the local high school. 

On the first day of seventh grade, Sadie and Luke found themselves seated next to one another in homeroom. 

They didn’t talk much, or really at all over the first few weeks, both being rather shy, but all that changed when they were invited to a house party by a mutual friend. 

Sadie remembers having to beg and plead with her dad to receive permission to go, but eventually he agreed. 

It wasn’t the typical house party, like you see in the movies, there were no drugs or alcohol-thankfully considering this was a party for twelve year olds. 

However it was a makeout party, something neither of them had ever experienced before. 

People were playing spin the bottle, the PG-13 version of truth or dare, and the infamous seven minutes in heaven. 

Somehow a close friend of Sadie’s at the time, Reagan Arnold, managed to convince Sadie to participate in a round of seven minutes in heaven. 

Reagan told Sadie to wait in the closet while she chose the guy, swearing up and down she would choose a good guy. 

Sadie was surprised, when Luke, the new kid, opened the door and walked in. 

It was really awkward at first, obviously considering two people who had barely spoken ten words to each other, were now locked in a small, dark coat closet, expected to kiss. 

Funny thing was neither of them had kissed someone before. 

They managed to find a light in the closet, and that’s when Sadie spoke “So do you like movies?” was the first thing she said. The question sorta caught Luke by surprise, but either way he replied “Ya I love movies, I like the Marvel ones the best!” 

“Me too I always watch them with my dad” Sadie had said. They spent the next few minutes talking to one another and they quickly realized they have a lot in common, then towards the end of the seven minutes, they attempted their first kiss, which resulted in their foreheads bumping rather than their lips. They started laughing uncontrollably, and from that day forward, they’ve been practically inseparable. 

Over the past six years, they’ve shared pretty much everything together, memories, secrets, fears, the whole nine yards. 

They’re best friends, that’s what they do.

Best friends talk to each other, they share things, they trust one another, at least they're supposed to. 

A small sigh escapes from Sadie's lips as her eyes drift towards the window, absently watching as an array of cars come flying by. 

It shouldn’t but the thought of telling Luke she might not go to Michigan feels terrifying because how the hell do you tell your best friend of six years ‘Hey I know you’re all excited thinking we’re going to college together, but actually I think I’m going somewhere else. But I’ll see you over break!’

She can’t do that. 

But at the same time, her mom died when she was only nine. Rutgers was a huge part of her life, and if she passes on the opportunity to attend the school that brought her mom so much, joy and happiness, it would basically be abandoning her mother's memory, or surrendering the chance to continue her legacy-it would be giving up on her mom. 

She absentmindedly lets out another sigh, her thoughts returning to the present as a soft touch lands on her exposed shoulder.

Her striking hazel eyes—a mirror of her late mother's—shift towards Luke.

shift towards Luke.

“You alright?” Luke asks, his voice slicing through her brain, like a scolding knife through a block of ice. 

Sadie shakes her head once, a literal attempt to remove the thoughts from her mind, “Ya sorry what’d you say?” She replies 

Luke chuckles before repeating “I asked if you’re excited to watch me play at Yost?!” 

Sadie pauses “Oh ya, definitely…super excited” her voice trying to mimic just enough enthusiasm to make it sound believable. 

Luke glances towards her, the previously lingering excitement in his eyes fading to display a mix of affection and concern, “Are you sure you’re alright? You seem really distracted” he asks 

‘Tell him’ Sadie’s mind practically shouts to her ‘Just get it over with!’

In a moment, Sadie takes a deep breath, forcefully pushing her thoughts aside before responding “Ya I’m just a little tired, you know long car rides” 

Luke nods in agreement, his smile returning “Why don’t you take a nap, we still got like an hour or so before we make it to the house” Luke suggests

“Ya good idea” Sadie replies, as she leans back in the comfortable seat and rests her head on the transparent window before allowing her eyes to close shut. 

***

Sadie's eyes begin fluttering open to the sound of tires rolling on gravel. 

Her eyes lock on the familiar silhouette of the lake house, illuminated, by porch lights. The sight of the lake house, with its weathered cedar shingles and windows mirroring the lake's calm waters, brings an immediate wave of relief to Sadie. 

Luke turns his head towards her, his face painted with a soft smile, before latching on to the key, stuck in its slot, and flicking his wrist, allowing the previously roaring engine to hum into a peaceful silence, "Ready?" he asks. Sadie smiles, and nods, unbuckling her seatbelt.

They exit the car, their shoes crunching on the gravel, as the nostalgic scent of pine and lake water fills their noses bringing the memories of past trips to the forefront of their minds. 

The two exchange a smile, as they step towards the front of the car, when the large wooden door, leading into the house, swings open revealing Luke’s parents Ellen and Jim.

Ellen, with her gentle blonde waves reflecting the warmth around her, approaches Sadie, “Hi Sweetie” Ellen greets, her voice filled with genuineness as she wraps her arms around Sadie in a comforting embrace, “How was the drive up?” 

“It was good” Sadie replies, nestling closer into the hug, finding solace in the normality of it. 

A small smirk, dances across Sadie’s lips as their arms untangle themselves from one another, and Sadie, glances towards Luke, who’s standing, to the left of her, embracing his father in a hug. “Luke somehow managed to get us here in one piece” She teases, eliciting a laugh, from both Ellen and Jim. 

“Careful, there I wouldn’t insult the driver” Luke remarks, with a smirk, as he turns to embrace his mom in a hug, “Remember I’m your ride home” Luke adds

Sadie lets out a playful giggle, knowing deep down, Luke would never leave without her.

"Jacky and Q here yet?" Luke asks his parents

"Not yet they should be arriving any minute" Ellen answers, her blue eyes shifting around the scene as if she's trying to activate her x-ray vision and find their car through all the trees. 

Luke nods and turns to his car, walking towards the trunk, planning to remove his and Sadie's luggage when a loud honking sound startles him. 

“FUCK!” he curses 

Jim raises his eyebrows in disapproval towards his youngest boy, who proceeds to send an apologetic look in response, before rotating his body, to see his older brothers along with two of their friends Trevor Zegras and Josh Norris, arriving in Jack’s car. 

Luke quietly mutters ‘idiots’, before finishing his task of removing the luggage from his car. 

Once finished, he shuts the trunk of his car, and steps towards Sadie, allowing Jack to park his car. 

Quinn is the first to exit, from the passenger side, immediately making his way towards Luke and Sadie and pulling the two teenagers into a hug. 

“Hey guys! How you doing?” He asks, his voice laced with platonic affection. 

Sarcasm creeps into Luke’s voice as he teasingly replies “Doing good, until you showed up and damaged my ear drums”

Quinn retaliates by pulling the taller boy closer to him and ruffling his hair much to his annoyance. 

Sadie smiles watching her best friend interact with his-and basically her-older brother, while the remaining of the group emerges from Jack's car. 

Trevor, always the playful one, practically jumps out of the car with a laugh, his oak colored hair tousled from the drive. Josh follows, calmly exiting and taking a moment to stretch his arms above his head. The amiable smile that crinkles at the corners of his eyes hints at the warmth and friendliness of his demeanor, as he makes his way toward Ellen and Jim, politely greeting them. 

Then comes Jack, extracting himself from the drivers seat, with the same blend of confidence and composure, of a team with a 7-0 lead in the dying seconds of the third period. He's the older-at least of Luke-, the mega-talented and undeniably attractive brother, the epitome of charm and charisma. The first overall pick, the ladies man of the group, the ‘golden boy’, the term frequently used by Luke in an envious driven attempt to paint an accurate description of his brother.

Jack steps closer to Luke and Sadie before attacking Luke in a bear hug, nearly knocking the youngest and tallest of the family off his feet. 

"JACK!” Luke shouts, his voice more playful than annoyed-although it still radiates waves of annoyance-as he tries to push the older boy off.

“Ugh get off of me!” Luke continues, clearly struggling, before finally managing to remove his brothers hold.

“Hey Sades” Jack says, a smile crossing his lips, as he turns his attention towards her, his arm lingering around Luke, before resting on his shoulder. 

“Hey Jack” Sadie replies politely 

“I see you’re still hanging around this one” Jack teases with a smile as he playfully ruffle his fingers through Luke’s curls, which causes Luke to send an ‘if looks could kill’ type of glare towards both his brothers, clearly annoyed by the fact that they have deemed it their civil duty to mess with his hair-which it’s not. 

“I'm not that annoying” Luke retorts with a grin, his hand moving to smooth down his messed-up hair.

Luke’s gaze shifts, finding Trevor standing a few feet away interacting with Quinn and Josh, a large smile present on his face, “And besides at least one of us has normal friends” Luke adds, purposely raising his voice enough for Trevor to overhear

“Is he talking about me?” Trevor asks, a sly grin forming, as he steps closer to Luke

Jack’s response comes quick “I think so” 

“You just wait Lukey, this summer Jack and I are finally gonna get you back for all the pranks the two of you pulled on us last summer” Trevor declares, his eyes shifting with unwavering confidence between Luke and Sadie.

Jack nods in agreement, the smile on his face never fading, it’s the kind that reaches all the way up to his striking blue eyes, a similarity shared between him and his brothers. 

Luke and Sadie exchange a knowing glance of confidence with one another, indicative of disbelief at the thought of Jack and Trevor successfully pulling off a prank. 

Sadie’s voice is light as she chimes in “Isn’t that what you said last summer, and the summer before?” she teases, because it is, they say it every summer, and every summer they fail. 

Jack’s cheeks flush red, as he tries to force, credibility into his voice “No” 

Josh who had, finished helping Quinn, unpack the car and is now standing beside him on the outer circle of the conversation, interjects “Uh ya it is”

Jack and Trevor share a playful look, mixing with a hint of embarrassment, their previous expression of confidence disintegrating as Trevor replies “Ok well…maybe…but this summer for sure” 

Luke and Sadie exchange a laugh “Uh huh we’ll see about that” Luke says his voice wavering with skepticism.

Ellen shakes her head, the smile on her face, washing away any accusations of annoyance “Alright guys” she begins “Let’s try and keep the pranking to a minimum this year” 

One last look of mischief and playfulness is exchanged among the group before they nod and begin walking towards the front door.

***

After having a chance to unpack their belongings and settle into their respective rooms-Ellen and Jim taking the master bedroom on the first floor, well the remaining six split between four rooms on the second floor, Jack and Trevor sharing one room as well as Quinn and Josh sharing another while Sadie and Luke, are given their own-the clock creeps towards nine pm, and the group gathers in the spacious living room, to discuss dinner plans, something on everyone's minds and stomachs. 

"Mhm, a burger sounds so good" Luke comments to no one in particular, as he flops down next to Sadie, on the u-shaped couch.

"Eh not really and too much work" Quinn claims, allowing a yawn to escape his lips. 

Jim, who had previously been in the kitchen, walks towards the center of the room with a stack of takeout menus, and raises his voice over the growing chatter. "I was thinking we could keep it simple tonight—takeout sound good to everyone?" 

He's met with an array of nods, ya's and yes's as suggestions start flying back and forth-Chinese, Italian, Mexican-Luke lobbies for burgers again, but after a few minutes and naming pretty much every type of cuisine they could think of they agree on pizza and salad, leading to a discussion on toppings.

It takes another five minutes and a heated debate on whether pineapple belongs on pizza, before Ellen can dial the number of a local restaurant, confirming the mishmash of orders-two large caesar salads, a meat lovers pizza, one with just cheese for the less adventurous ones, a pepperoni one and an experimental half-and-half with pineapple, sausage and olives.

"Thank you! See you in 20 minutes" Ellen says, relaying the information to the rest of the group before hanging up. 

"I'll pick em up, Trev you wanna come?" Jack asks, starting to stand up. 

"Sure man" He answers and with that the two head towards the front door, disappearing into the night air, and leaving behind a fleeting echo of their voices, discussing who's driving, and who's bringing the pizza's in.

Back in the living room, Quinn flops down on the couch "So, any big plans while we're up here? I mean, other than stuffing our faces?"

"Speak for yourself," Luke quips, "I'm hitting the lake first thing tomorrow."

A murmur of approval ripples through the group as plans begin to take shape with talk of wakesurfing and late-night bonfires, until the conversation shifts to the University of Michigan.

Sadie feels a knot form in her stomach, as Josh and Quinn, former players of the hockey team, chime in with their two cents. 

Her eyes trickle to the glass doors leading to the wooden deck, searching for an escape when a wave of emotions wash over her as she recalls her first trip here.

It was the summer after she met Luke, the summer before eighth grade. They drove up with Luke’s parents, Jack and Quinn and two of their friends Cole and Brady. 

Most of their days were spent, swimming in the lake, roasting marshmallows over the bonfire, or all the boys trying to teach Sadie how to play hockey on the driveway-which she’s gotten much better at- but what she remembers the most is sitting on the deck, talking to Luke about her mom.

He was the first person she felt comfortable enough with to open up about her mom’s passing, what it was like to be nine years old watching your mom rot away in a hospital bed, knowing there was nothing you could do to stop a disease you barely understood. 

With Luke, Sadie didn’t need to put on a smile and pretend that everything was okay, when it wasn’t, and despite only being 12 at the time Luke didn’t try to fix it either. He didn’t run to his parents or brothers, he just listened. 

Luke was the first person to show her with more than just words, she didn’t need to bury all her thoughts and secrets inside. 

Luke was the first person to show her she wasn’t alone. 

Suddenly her eyes turn to glass as she wonders if everything would change if she chose Rutgers, if she would lose everything she has with Luke?

“You okay?” Luke asks his voice, pulling her back to reality

Sadie hesitates before responding “Ya, I’m fine. I just remembered I forgot to call my dad, so I’m gonna do that real quick” Luke watches as she swiftly stands up and makes her way to the stairs leaving no time for him to respond.

Once her feet reach the top of the stairs, she rushes into her room, her mind too occupied to notice, she doesn't properly close the door. 

Sadie scrambles to unlock her phone, her fingers trembling as she fumbles with the green call button.

Finally her fingers press the button, the loud dial tone filling, the otherwise silent room. Sadie leans against the wall.

“Hey dad” she greets, her voice wobbly.

“Hi pumpkin, how you doing?” Her dad asks

They begin talking about everything and nothing-the drive, the weather, her dad’s job.

Meanwhile, downstairs, the front door swings open. Jack walks in, followed by Trevor, both carrying two large pizzas and a box of salad.

Jack and Trevor set the food down on the kitchen counter, as the rest of the group, crowds around the kitchen sink, preparing to wash their hands. 

“Where’s Sadie?” Trevor asks as he makes his way towards the sink as well.

Ellen motions to the stairs “I think she went upstairs, Jack do you mind telling her dinner is here please” Ellen requests, her clean hands busy gathering plates and napkins from the oak cabinets.

Jack nods, “Got it” He replies as he walks towards the stairs.

He stops in the room shared by him and Trevor, to set his keys on the nightstand, before making his way towards Sadie’s room.

Her voice, seeping through the small crack in the door frame, causes him to slow, pausing as he listens in. 

“Dad, I don’t know what to do! I don't wanna hurt him" 

Sadie’s words spill out like a waterfall, “How do I choose between Rutgers and Luke” Her voice trembles.

Jack instinctively takes a step back, his heart racing as he realizes he shouldn’t be listening to this. He turns his back to the door, his mind screaming at him to walk away, but his body remains in place. 

Every fiber in his being is drawn to Sadie, to the pain and secrecy hidden in her voice. 

And then it hits him-Rutgers. Why is she talking about that? And what does Luke have to do with it?

A whirlwind of emotions swirl within him as he struggles to piece together Sadie's words, when the muffled reply of “Love you too” seeps through the door frame, sending a jolt of panic through his body.

Before he can force his body to move, run, jump, do anything, the door swings open and Sadie’s small gasp of surprise forces him to turn around. 

Their eyes meet, Jack can see the tears that slipped from her eyes, have been firmly wiped away, and a surge of conflicting emotions swirl inside of him-a feeling of protectiveness and anger at the thought of unknown actions hurting Luke, guilt for eavesdropping, and an overwhelming desire to comfort Sadie, but all he does is stand frozen, staring at her. 

“Jeez Jack you scared me!” Sadie says 

Jack hesitates, searching his mind for a response. Does he confess, does he tell her he overheard her? He wonders. He slightly shakes his head before settling on a response “Sorry, I uh I had to put my keys away, and uh my mom wanted me to tell you dinners here” 

“Sounds good, I’ll be there in a second” The previous quiver in her voice is a distant memory, as she replies. 

Jack nods slowly, attempting to regroup himself, before he slowly treads down the stairs.

Jack makes his way to the kitchen, rummaging for a bottle of water.

He finds one and begins taking slow sips, when Sadie, slips into the kitchen, planting her feet next to his, and turning on the sink faucet. 

Jack’s eyes wander in her direction, catching a quick glance. Sadie notices and replies with a friendly smile as she dries her hands on a nearby hand towel, and moves towards the open pizza boxes with a plate. 

She reaches in and places two slices of pepperoni pizza onto her plate, stacking one on top of another, before using the plastic tongs to add a handful of salad. After grabbing a fork and napkin, she walks towards the crowded couch and takes a seat next to Luke. 

Jack remains quiet the entire time, slowly watching from the counter, before following her actions and making his way to the couch, he sits next to Trevor, listening in to the ongoing conversation surrounding college, as he slowly indulges in his dinner. 

Most of the group, with the exception of Sadie, have finished their dinner by the time Trevor makes a controversial comment -in a room full of Michigan and hockey fans- about Boston University, a school he spent two years at. “Listen Michigan is great but BU 100% produces more star NHL players” 

Quinn’s face drops in an exaggerated response, “Jack please tell him to leave” Quinn insists, struggling to keep a straight face. 

Laughter ripples through the room in response.

Quinn manages to pull off a pretty solid poker face as he says “I’m serious” 

“So am I” Trevor remarks with a grin, and a slight shrug of his shoulders

Josh shakes his head, “There is nothing BU can do better than Michigan” 

“Mhm I disagree, hockey, academics, parties” Trevor claims 

Josh opens his mouth to disagree “Michigan parties are legendary” He begins.

“Michigan is better than BU at everything, and out all the options that’s the one you choose” Jack comments, because it’s not like Michigan has been ranked the #1 NCAA hockey program for the last six years, or consistently been in the top 30 for best academics or anything like that. 

Quinn and Josh exchange a playful look, before simultaneously answering yes. 

Ellen and Jim shake their heads, with a small laugh, as Luke rolls his eyes and Jack smacks his lips together in an audible response. 

“You know one time Quinn and I were at this party” Josh begins before being cut off by a somewhat hard punch to the shoulder by Quinn 

“Shut it” Quinn insists 

Most of the group laughs.

“Alright guys I think we’re going to turn in” Ellen tells the younger crew as her and Jim begin standing “Don’t do anything dangerous, and whatever happened at that party Quinn please take it to the grave” Ellen jokes as she walks towards the hallway

Once the parents are completely out of earshot, Josh continues “Can I finish my story” 

“Didn’t you hear my mom she said take it to the grave” Quinn argues 

Luke chimes in “Oh come on I wanna know” 

“Ya it’s funny come on” Josh tries

Quinn looks between his kid brother and his best friend before replying “No”

Luke continues to try and reason with him “Come on, You never tell me” “I’m not gonna tell mom and dad” “Please Sadie and I will literally be there in like two months” 

Jack’s eyes trickle towards Sadie, as Luke mentions her name, her presence somewhat forgotten through the bubbling conversation.

His thoughts are a jumbled mess. Should he confront her about what he heard? Maybe he should try to comfort her instead. Or maybe it's better if he just leaves it alone?

But before he can figure out what to do, Luke loudly grumbles, snapping Jack back into reality.

Another wave of laughter ripples throughout the room, as the conversation shifts seamlessly, abandoning the topic of Michigan, at least for the moment, before they decide to settle down and watch a movie. 

They search through various streaming services, debating between watching, action, sci-fi, or comedy. 

“No more alien stuff, Luke! We get it, you want to meet E.T.,” Josh teases, flicking through the science fiction offerings with the remote, only to be met with playful groans from the group.

"What about 21 Jump Street?" Luke asks 

"Ya no" Jack answers 

"How about a comedy?" Quinn suggests

"21 Jump Streets a comedy" Luke mutters, earning a subtle look from Quinn, before refocusing on the screen.

“Oh, come on, something with some punches!” Trevor eggs on, eyes lighting up as he spots 'Goon' in the streaming library.

"They have Hot Tub Time Machine" Josh suggests 

With each suggestion, counter-arguments volley around the room until eventually receiving majority approval for the hockey-themed comedy Goon, which follows the story of a bouncer who basically turns into a hockey enforcer/fighter. 

"Goon it is," Josh declares, hitting play as everyone settles deeper into their respective cushions and chairs, and an anticipatory silence spreads as the screen comes to life.

The silence only lasts about 15 minutes, because none of them, know how to keep their mouths shut during a fucking movie, like when Doug Glatt stumbles onto the ice for his first practice, Trevor's jab — "Look, it's Quinn!" — is a catalyst for a burst of laughter, Quinn’s mock outrage only fueling the fun.

"Jack can you please make him leave!" Quinn begs

"Fuck no" Jack insists causing the rest of the group to laugh 

"Then just shut up and watch the movie" Quinn huffs toward Trevor 

Or during Doug's first game, when Luke quips "And I thought Bambi on ice was just a Disney thing" 

During a slow-motion sequence of a well-executed check "Figure skater right there"

And so on and so forth, as they're unrestrained voices follow the ups and downs on screen.

At one point the movie reaches maximum goriness when Doug, engages in a brutal fight with an opponent, and the room erupts in a mixture of gasps and chuckles, the line between horror and amusement blurring.

Jack's gaze drifts to Sadie, where she and Luke are whispering to each other in hushed tones. 

He turns his attention back to the movie, trying to shake off the negative feelings creeping up on him.

During another scene, Luke jumps at a particularly raucous fight , "Holy shit! Did you see that punch?"

Laughter erupts, and all eyes fall towards Luke, except for Jack's which find Sadie again, he can't shake the feeling of guilt gnawing at him, knowing something about Sadie that Luke doesn't, even if she doesn't know he knows. 

His mind is a silent turmoil for the remainder of the movie, the group’s laughter and heckling fading into a background static against his internal dissonance, until eventually, the movie's closing credits begin rolling and the reaction is satisfying stretches and yawning from the group.

Josh, who had been animated throughout, rises and announces "I'm hitting the sack, guys," his eyelids heavy. The room hums with goodnights as he disappears up the stairs.

Quinn, as always the responsible one begins gathering empty plates, and throws them in the trash before heading upstairs. 

Trevor and Luke, their energy seemingly boundless, launch into a spirited debate about who would make the better hockey player enforcer, even if we know the answer, but their banter echos off the walls until they too concede to the call of sleep, trekking upstairs.

With the room now emptied Sadie and Jack find themselves momentarily alone, the stillness stark in contrast to the evening's livelyness. Sadie lingers around the kitchen, wiping down the counter with a quiet grace. Jack's mind spirals the secret nudging at his tongue, demanding release. He inhaled, ready to break the silence, and say something but Luke's sudden re-entry halts him mid-breath.

"Forgot my phone," Luke says, swiping it from the coffee table. "You coming, Sadie?" 

"Yep, be right there," she replies, tossing the last of her garbage in the trash can

With a final nod and a half-hearted smile in Jack's direction, she departs to the sound of Luke's receding footsteps. The room was silent now, save for the echoes of what had been left unsaid. Jack let out a heavy sigh, the weight of his newfound burden grounding him to the couch.

He was alone. His sigh hangs in the air, a fog of unresolved tension as he stands, flicking off the lights and making his way toward the stairs. The day had ended, they made it to the lake, and now he's going to bed with more questions than he came with. 

Lying there, staring at the ghostly shadows dancing across the ceiling, Jack knows he won't be able to stop wondering about Sadie's secret until he gets answers, and he just hopes whatever secret she's hiding doesn't end up destroying his younger brother. 

A/N I hope you enjoyed, feel free to send me in any asks!

#anyone but him #luke hughes #jack hughes #original story

[offender42085]

Post 1003

Before trial, the Judge said he would accept a plea bargain and impose a term of 1 1/3 to 4 years in prison--but after loosing at trial the Judge gave a longer sentence.....

Nauman A Hussain, New York inmate 23B2641, born 1990, incarceration intake 06/13/2023 at age 33, parole eligible 05/14/2028, scheduled conditional release 05/14/2033, Full Release 05/14/2038

Manslaughter

Nauman Hussain, the limousine operator convicted earlier of 20 counts of manslaughter for his role in the deadly Oct. 6, 2018 crash, was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in state prison.

The Schoharie County Courthouse is just a few miles from the scene of the wreck. State Supreme Court Justice Peter Lynch handed down the sentence — the maximum allowed under state law.

“I’m familiar with all the facts of this case, and I’m going to render a verdict accordingly,” said Lynch, who last year rejected a plea deal that would have seen Hussain complete community service and receive probation in lieu of prison time for his role in the crash.

Hussain, the operator of Prestige Limousine & Chauffeur Service — the Wilton-based company, owned by his father, which rented the stretched 2001 Ford Excursion SUV, that would later crash after suffering catastrophic brake failure, to a group of 17 friends from the Amsterdam area to attend a birthday celebration in Cooperstown — did not speak during the proceedings.

He sat silently with his head down, handcuffed, wearing bright orange prison garb, as family members spoke for more than an hour.

All 17 passengers, the vehicle’s driver and two bystanders were killed after the vehicle’s brakes failed as it descended a steep hill on state Route 30, before crossing the intersection of Route 30A at speeds in excess of 100 mph, striking a vehicle in the parking lot of the Apple Barrel Country Store and coming to rest in a culvert.

Some raised questions about what role Hussain’s father, Shahed, played in the crash and whether his past ties to the FBI as an informant allowed the family to circumvent state and federal vehicle registration and inspection laws that could have prevented the wreck. Shahed Hussain was not in the country at the time of the crash and has never been charged in connection to the incident.

The FBI provided families of those killed in the crash a briefing about their handling of Shahed Hussain a few days before sengencing, but several have said questions remain about whether he used his connections with the agency to avoid persecution.

The sentencing comes two weeks after a jury convicted Hussain of second-degree manslaughter following a seven-day trial that was initially expected to last up to six weeks, but almost never happened at all.

Hussain, in 2021, accepted a plea deal to 20 counts of criminally negligent homicide that would have seen him escape jail time and instead serve probation and community service.

But Judge Lynch rejected to deal at a sentencing hearing, offering Hussain the option to serve 1 1/3 to 4 years in prison or go to trial.

Lynch, who called the deal “completely disingenuous and unacceptable to this court,” began overseeing the trial after Schoharie County Court Judge George Bartlett III, who approved the plea deal, retired.

The crash was caused by a ruptured rear brake line that rendered the vehicle’s back brakes inoperable and caused the front brakes to overheat and melt. The master brake cylinder was determined to be working at the time of the wreck.

3l

#inmate

[ghenry]

No More Heroes 3, and my Summer of 2021

I was recently playing through the PC port of No More Heroes 3 again to help a friend get some footage. And I found myself lost in a lot of nostalgic feelings while playing through the game again. The visuals, the sound effects, the cutscenes, everything was hitting me again almost like the first time I got to play the game back in August 2021.

I know it sounds weird to have nostalgia for a game that's only 2 years old, but I have my reasons. Not only was I really hype to finally play this game (I even managed to snag an early review code from one of GHM's PR reps), but a lot of 2021 was also a period where my life would change significantly in a lot of ways. In fact, I received my review code just two days before me and a very special someone made a life-changing decision.

I've been talking to someone for a while, and she expressed that she was looking to move somewhere new in order to get out of this cycle she was stuck in. I initially offered moving to my neck of the woods in Jersey. I was adamant about it being a platonic offer, but perhaps I was fooling myself trying to deny developing strong feelings for her, unaware that this would blossom into an amazing relationship.

We did admit feelings towards one-another after months of talking online daily, but were finally marking August for her to come here! It was a big risk we were both taking, frankly, but I couldn't be more excited! On my way to see her, I made a few stops as plans kept getting delayed for the day, but I couldn't be more content at the moment because I was playing my most anticipated game right on my Switch! Being able to play the new No More Heroes so conveniently added so much to my enjoyment. Especially with its summer vibes in the middle of August!

I was a nervous wreck the second we finally met face-to-face, but she didn't hesitate for even a moment to embrace me, ready to turn a new chapter of her life. I shared the sentiment, as we spent hours driving back to Jersey with an SUV full of her stuff, and the cutest cat in the world!

As we were getting accustomed to sharing this living space, we got to share the experience of playing No More Heroes III for the first time ever, and it was enthralling. What I'm trying to say is No More Heroes III houses my sweetest summer memories of 2021, finally meeting this girl whom I'd end up loving more than I could have possibly imagined before.

So with that all said, happy 2-year anniversary to No More Heroes III! It's almost as special to me as the anniversary I just got to celebrate and share with my true love. She's helped me get through some of the toughest times I've ever had to face these past two years, and all I want to do is love and support her in any way I could!

#grasshopper manufacture #no more heroes #no more heroes 3 #travis touchdown #nmh3 #suda51

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Big night for CNN, out with a story about document boxes being loaded onto a Trump plane bound for Bedminster, New Jersey, on the same day the Department of Justice showed up to receive a folder of top secret documents from a Trump lawyer who certified they were the only secret documents she and lawyer Evan Corcoran could find.

According to an interview by CNN with former Trump valet Brian Butler, referred to six times in the classified documents indictment as “Trump Employee #5,” the boxes were loaded onto the Trump plane on June 3, 2022, as Trump’s lawyers, Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran, were meeting with Jay Bratt, the prosecutor from the Department of Justice in charge of the classified documents case.  Christina Bobb famously signed a certification to the DOJ that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar a Lago, and that the 31 documents being handed over that day were the sum total of all the classified documents that had been found.

Two months later, in August, FBI agents would execute a search warrant and discover more than 100 additional top secret documents in Trump’s private office, including several marked with the highest classification, “Top Secret/SCI,” or “Top Secret – Secure Compartmented Information.”

Former valet Butler told CNN that he was surprised to get a phone call from Trump’s “body man,” Walt Nauta, on June 3, asking if he could borrow one of Butler’s Cadillac Escalade SUV’s to help carry material to the West Palm Beach airport to be loaded onto a Trump airplane.  Butler was told that Trump and his family were flying to Bedminster for the summer that day.  Butler told CNN he was not usually called upon to move luggage to the private Trump jet and thought it was also unusual that Nauta asked for the favor “in a guarded way,” CNN reported.

Butler used his own SUV to carry Trump family luggage to the airport, while Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom were indicted with Trump, used the Escalade he had loaned to Nauta to move the rest of the material.  “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler told CNN.

Butler described his relationship with Nauta as “best friends,” at least until questions about the classified documents found by the FBI at Mar a Lago began coming up.  Butler told CNN that on one of the frequent “nightly walks” he took with Nauta around their neighborhood in West Palm Beach, Nauta told him that he, Nauta, Butler, and De Oliveira were “all dirty” when it came to the boxes they had moved around inside of Mar a Lago and to the Trump airplane on June 3.  De Oliveira repeatedly urged Butler to sign up with the same attorney Trump had provided to himself and Nauta, but Butler demurred, choosing instead to hire a former U.S. Attorney in Florida, Jeffrey Sloman.  Butler met “repeatedly” with prosecutors for the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, according to CNN. 

In one interview, Butler told prosecutors about a time he was driving Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt and his chief of staff in the Spring of 2021 when he heard Pratt talking about secrets of U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines he had heard from Trump while he was visiting Mar a Lago.  Pratt was a paid member of the Trump club at the time.  It was on May 6, 2021, that the National Archives first formally requested that Trump turn over any and all classified and non-classified documents Trump had removed from the White House when he left office.  On May 8, the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, had a photographer at the West Palm Beach airport who took photographs of Trump boarding a private jet to fly to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.  The photographs show several Trump aides loading a half dozen or more bankers boxes of documents into the jet.

On July 21, 2021, just two months later, Trump showed a top secret military “plan of attack” on Iran to an interviewer who was working on a book with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.  The interview took place at the Trump golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Before Butler signed with his own private attorney, he was witness to two conversations between Trump and De Oliveira when Trump asked De Oliveira, “Are we good?”  After one conversation De Oliveira had with Trump on the phone in the presence of Butler, he said Trump had promised to get him a lawyer.  In another conversation Butler told prosecutors about, Nauta asked him “to make sure Carlos (De Oliveira) is good.”  Butler told CNN that he twice assured Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal and wouldn’t do anything to hurt his relationship with Trump.”  It was after that conversation that Butler decided to get his own lawyer and broke contact with the two men who ended up being indicted with Trump.

Based on the new CNN report, we now know that boxes of documents were moved from Mar a Lago to Bedminster twice – once in May of 2021 immediately after the National Archives had requested that Trump turn over documents he took from the White House, and again in June of 2022, on the very day the DOJ had shown up at Mar a Lago to take possession of what they were told were all the classified documents being held there.

What happened to the classified documents Trump took with him to Bedminster is not known.  It is also unknown why the FBI never searched the Trump New Jersey golf club.

Trump has recently filed motions to dismiss the Mar a Lago indictments based on spurious claims of “absolute immunity” and an entire made-up claim that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to possess classified documents.  Special Counsel Smith has opposed both motions.  The judge in the case, whose previous decisions in the case have been overturned twice by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has yet to rule on the Trump motions to dismiss.

[Lucian Truscott]

#stolen documents #CNN #TFG #Lucian Truscott

[maaarine]

Bibliography: articles posted on this blog in 2024

Posted in January

Men Just Don’t Trust Women – And It’s A Huge Problem (Damon Young, Huffington Post, Mar 16 2015)

Amsterdam sex workers protest against plan to move red light district (The Guardian, Oct 19 2023)

They were Israel’s ‘eyes on the border’ - but their Hamas warnings went unheard (Alice Cuddy, BBC News, Jan 15 2024)

The Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men (Sari M. van Anders, Debby Herbenick, Lori A. Brotto, Emily A. Harris, and Sara B. Chadwick, Aug 23 2021)

A new global gender divide is emerging (John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, Jan 26 2024)

The secret of OnlyFans: It’s much more than porn (Marta Biino and Madeline Berg, Business Insider, Jan 18 2024)

—

Posted in February

Half of Spanish men feel discriminated against amid feminism backlash (James Badcock, The Telegraph, Jan 16 2024)

Parisians vote in favour of tripling parking costs for SUVs (Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, Feb 04 2024)

Ireland kickstarts vote on constitution’s wording about women and family (Rory Carroll, The Guardian, Jan 25 2024)

Divorce rates plummet to lowest level in 50 years ‘due to cost-of-living crisis’ (Kieran Kelly, LBC, Feb 22 2024)

—

Posted in March

‘There are some really extreme views’: young people face onslaught of misogyny online (Clea Skopeliti, The Guardian, March 01 2024)

Johnson: Why men interrupt (The Economist, Jul 10 2014)

France makes abortion a constitutional right in historic Versailles vote (Kim Willsher, The Guardian, March 04 2024)

‘My self-worth plummeted every month’: the hidden disorder that can ruin women’s lives (Chloe Aslett, The Guardian, Oct 16 2023)

The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same (Kyle Chayka, The Guardian, Jan 16 2024)

DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest (Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, March 18 2024)

Finland is world’s happiest country for 7th year while US drops out of top 20 (France 24, March 20 2024)

Swedish pharmacy bans sale of anti-ageing skincare to children (Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, March 20 2024)

Women are being diagnosed with ADHD at unprecedented rates. Here’s why. (Kaelyn Lynch, National Geographic, Jan 16 2024)

5 Takeaways From an Investigation Into Hysterectomies in India’s Sugar Industry (Megha Rajagopalan, The New York Times, March 24 2024)

English Just ‘Badly Pronounced French’, Paris Academic Says (Tom Barfield, Barron’s, March 09 2024)

—

Posted in April

Why are women more prone to long Covid? (David Cox, The Guardian, June 13 2021)

French Revolution: Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In Paris (Carlton Reid, Forbes, April 06 2024)

Long Covid may be the body trying to fight off other viruses (Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph, April 08 2024)

The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex (Peggy Orenstein, The New York Times, April 12 2024)

Sydney knifeman who targeted women ‘was desperate for a girlfriend’ (Andrea Hamblin, The Telegraph, April 15 2024)

Revealed: Israel has sped up settlement-building in East Jerusalem since Gaza war began (Jason Burke, The Guardian, April 17 2024)

‘I was only a child’: Greenlandic women tell of trauma of forced contraception (Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, March 29 2024)

Hormones and their Interaction with the Pain Experience (Katy Vincent and Irene Tracey, 2008)

—

Posted in May

Study suggests injury risk varies in menstrual cycle (Katie Gornall, BBC News, May 01 2024)

‘Urination equality’: Amsterdam women win fight for more public toilets (Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian, April 29 2024)

You can want things you don’t like and like things you don’t want (Shayla Love, Psyche, May 07 2024)

‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine (Rashid Khalidi, The Guardian, April 11 2024)

The important link between eating disorders and past trauma (Giulia Suro, Psyche, May 14 2024)

Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank (David Graeber, 2015)

—

Posted in June

AfD: How Germany’s far right won over young voters (Hans Pfeifer, Deutsche Welle, June 10 2024)

#article #articleindex #2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The impoverished imagination of neoliberal climate “solutions

This morning (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

There is only one planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life, and it is rapidly becoming uninhabitable by humans. Clearly, this warrants bold action – but which bold action should we take?

After half a century of denial and disinformation, the business lobby has seemingly found climate religion and has joined the choir, but they have their own unique hymn: this crisis is so dire, they say, that we don't have the luxury of choosing between different ways of addressing the emergency. We have to do "all of the above" – every possible solution must be tried.

In his new book Dark PR, Grant Ennis explains that this "all of the above" strategy doesn't represent a change of heart by big business. Rather, it's part of the denial playbook that's been used to sell tobacco-cancer doubt and climate disinformation:

https://darajapress.com/publication/dark-pr-how-corporate-disinformation-harms-our-health-and-the-environment

The point of "all of the above" isn't muscular, immediate action – rather, it's a delaying tactic that creates space for "solutions" that won't work, but will generate profits. Think of how the tobacco industry used "all of the above" to sell "light" cigarettes, snuff, snus, and vaping – and delay tobacco bans, sin taxes, and business-euthanizing litigation. Today, the same playbook is used to sell EVs as an answer to the destructive legacy of the personal automobile – to the exclusion of mass transit, bikes, and 15-minute cities:

https://thewaroncars.org/2023/10/24/113-dark-pr-with-grant-ennis/

As the tobacco and car examples show, "all of the above" is never really all of the above. Pursuing "light" cigarettes to reduce cancer is incompatible with simply banning tobacco; giving everyone a personal EV is incompatible with remaking our cities for transit, cycling and walking.

When it comes to the climate emergency, "all of the above" means trying "market-based" solutions to the exclusion of directly regulating emissions, despite the poor performance of these "solutions."

The big one here is carbon offsets, which allows companies to make money by promising not to emit carbon that they would otherwise emit. The idea here is that creating a new asset class will unleash the incredible creativity of markets by harnessing the greed of elite sociopaths to the project of decarbonization, rather of the prudence of democratically accountable lawmakers.

Carbon offsets have not worked: they have been plagued by absolutely foreseeable problems that have not lessened, despite repeated attempts to mitigate them.

For starters, carbon offsets are a classic market for lemons. The cheapest way to make a carbon offset is to promise not to emit carbon you were never going to emit anyway, as when fake charities like the Nature Conservancy make millions by promising not to log forests that can't be logged because they are wildlife preserves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Then there's the problem of monitoring carbon offsetting activity. Like, what happens when the forest you promise not to log burns down? If you're a carbon trader, the answer is "nothing." That burned-down forest can still be sold as if it were sequestering carbon, rather than venting it to the atmosphere in an out-of-control blaze:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#murder-offsets

When you bought a plane ticket and ticked the "offset the carbon on my flight" box and paid an extra $10, I bet you thought that you were contributing to a market that incentivized a reduction in discretionary, socially useless carbon-intensive activity. But without those carbon offsets, SUVs would have all but disappeared from American roads. Carbon offsets for Tesla cars generated billions in carbon offsets for Elon Musk, and allowed SUVs to escape regulations that would otherwise have seen them pulled from the market:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, Tesla figured out how to get double the offsets they were entitled to by pretending that they had a working battery-swap technology. This directly translated to even more SUVs on the road:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Misuse_of_government_subsidies

Harnessing the profit motive to the planet's survivability might sound like a good idea, but it assumes that corporations can self-regulate their way to a better climate future. They cannot. Think of how Canada's logging industry was allowed to clearcut old-growth forests and replace them with "pines in lines" – evenly spaced, highly flammable, commercially useful tree-farms that now turn into raging forest fires every year:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/#pulped-and-papered

The idea of "market-based" climate solutions is that certain harmful conduct should be disincentivized through taxes, rather than banned. This makes carbon offsets into a kind of modern Papal indulgence, which let you continue to sin, for a price. As the outstanding short video Murder Offsets so ably demonstrates, this is an inadequate, unserious and immoral response to the urgency of the issue:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

Offsets and other market-based climate measures aren't "all of the above" – they exclude other measures that have better track-records and lower costs, because those measures cut against the interests of the business lobby. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, Yale Law's Douglas Kysar gives some pointed examples:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/climate-change-and-the-neoliberal-imagination/

For example: carbon offsets rely on a notion called "contrafactual carbon," this being the imaginary carbon that might be omitted by a company if it wasn't participating in offsets. The number of credits a company gets is determined by the difference between its contrafactual emissions and its actual emissions.

But the "contrafactual" here comes from a business-as-usual world, one where the only limit on carbon emissions comes from corporate executives' voluntary actions – and not from regulation, direct action, or other limits on corporate conduct.

Kysar asks us to imagine a contrafactual that depends on "carbon upsets," rather than offsets – one where the limits on carbon come from "lawsuits, referenda, protests, boycotts, civil disobedience":

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/aug/29/carbon-upsets-offsets-cap-and-trade

If we're really committed to "all of the above" as baseline for calculating offsets, why not imagine a carbon world grounded in foreseeable, evidence-based reality, like the situation in Louisiana, where a planned petrochemical plant was canceled after a lawsuit over its 13.6m tons of annual carbon emissions?

https://earthjustice.org/press/2022/louisiana-court-vacates-air-permits-for-formosas-massive-petrochemical-complex-in-cancer-alley

Rather than a tradeable market in carbon offsets, we could harness the market to reward upsets. If your group wins a lawsuit that prevents 13.6m tons of carbon emissions every year, it will get 13.6 million credits for every year that plant would have run. That would certainly drive the commercial imaginations of many otherwise disinterested parties to find carbon-reduction measures. If we're going to revive dubious medieval practices like indulgences, why not champerty, too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champerty_and_maintenance

That is, if every path to a survivable planet must run through Goldman-Sachs, why not turn their devious minds to figuring out ways to make billions in tradeable credits by suing the pants off oil companies?

There are any number of measures that rise to the flimsy standards of evidence in support of offsets. Like, we're giving away $85/ton in free public money for carbon capture technologies, despite the lack of any credible path to these making a serious dent in the climate situation:

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/072523-ira-turbocharged-carbon-capture-tax-credit-but-challenges-persist-experts

If we're willing to fund untested longshots like carbon capture, why not measures that have far better track-records? For example, there's a pretty solid correlation between the presence of women in legislatures and on corporate boards and overall reductions in carbon. I'm the last person to suggest that the problems of capitalism can be replaced by replacing half of the old white men who run the world with women, PoCs and queers – but if we're willing to hand billions to ferkakte scheme like carbon capture, why not subsidize companies that pack their boards with women, or provide campaign subsidies to women running for office? It's quite a longshot (putting Liz Truss or Marjorie Taylor-Greene on your board or in your legislature is no way to save the planet), but it's got a better evidentiary basis than carbon capture.

There's also good evidence that correlates inequality with carbon emissions, though the causal relationship is unclear. Maybe inequality lets the wealthy control policy outcomes and tilt them towards permitting high-emission/high-profit activities. Maybe inequality reduces the social cohesion needed to make decarbonization work. Maybe inequality makes it harder for green tech to find customers. Maybe inequality leads to rich people chasing status-enhancing goods (think: private jet rides) that are extremely carbon-intensive.

Whatever the reason, there's a pretty good case that radical wealth redistribution would speed up decarbonization – any "all of the above" strategy should certainly consider this one.

Kysar's written a paper on this, entitled "Ways Not to Think About Climate Change":

https://political-theory.org/resources/Documents/Kysar.Ways%20Not%20to%20Think%20About%20Climate%20Change.pdf

It's been accepted for the upcoming American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy conference on climate change:

https://political-theory.org/13257256

It's quite a bracing read! The next time someone tells you we should hand Elon Musk billions to in exchange for making it possible to legally manufacture vast fleets of SUVs because we need to try "all of the above," send them a copy of this paper.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

#pluralistic #neoliberalism #climate #market worship #economics #economism #there is no alternative #carbon credits #climate emergency #contrafactual carbon #carbon upsets #apologetics #murder offsets #indulgences

[saiyanprincessswanie]

Civil War Brooklyn

Pairings: Steve Rogers x Reader x Bucky Barnes

Word Count: 2570

Summary: Brock’s mansion is finally raided by Steve & Bucky. The reader, not waiting to be saved, takes matters into her own hands. No more being a victim is her mentality as she makes her way through the mansion. When she is finally reunited with her men she wants nothing but revenge. Don’t cross a woman with anything left to lose.

Warnings: Violence, Minor Death, Mention of Torture

A/N: Finally after this being on hiatus since 2021 I bring you a new chapter. Thank you to those who understood why it took so long to write. It’s been a tough road health wise but I’m hoping now things will be updated more often.

A/N 2: Thank you to my beta readers @pigwidgeonxo​ & @lfnr-blog-blog-blog​ & @music-culture-mythology​. Without you this would never have gotten out. (All grammar and spelling mistakes are my own.)

Reblogs & Comments on Tumblr are welcomed and encouraged. Even if you leave an emoji you will make my day. 😊💜

I do NOT give my consent to have my work translated or reposted on any social media platform, apps, or third-party sites. If you see my work anywhere else besides my personal Tumblr & AO3 accounts then it has been stolen. I will NEVER give written or verbal permission to repost or translate any of my fanfics as they’re MY intellectual property. 🚫🚫

Steve, Bucky, and Tony parked their SUVs just down the street from the mansion you were being held at. Their crew consisted of Rhodey, Nat, Clint, Thor, Loki, and fifty other men that worked for them collectively. This was going to be an ambush and Hydra agents were going to be slaughtered. Fury had given Steve and Bucky the green light to do whatever was necessary to get you to safety. They had a small window of time to get in and get out before Fury showed up with the remainder of Shield and the FBI. 

One of their men was set to have the power shut down to the mansion. This would give them the coverage of darkness that they needed to go in guns blazing. Steve’s phone finally dinged with the order to move in from Fury. Quickly the lights went out in the mansion and the ambush descended onto the Hydra home. Hopefully, you weren’t in bad shape when they found you or hell would freeze over.

You stood there, knife in your right hand as the lights went out inside the room you were in. The sounds of footsteps running around and shouting could be heard clearly. This is what would make your fight for your life easier. Remembering all the skills you learned over your life you gripped the knife tighter. The sound of a key unlocking the door to your room seemed louder in your mind. You crouched behind the door waiting for whoever decided to come into the lion's den.

The door was pushed open by a tall, burly man who scanned the room for you. Keeping his back to you, you decided to strike fast like a viper. Quickly you stabbed the man in the neck, blood squirted everywhere as his finger squeezed the trigger causing the gun to go off twice. Your hand let go of the knife and you grabbed the Glock before it could hit you. The man fell dead at your feet and you had his Glock in hand. 

Outside the room, you heard yells from men and gunshots. Whatever was happening you needed to leave now before things got worse for you. Quickly you checked the gun for ammo and had thirteen bullets left. Looking down at the dead body you knelt next to him, pulling the knife out of his neck, and wiped the blood on him. If all else fails, this was your backup. 

Standing up you stalked slowly to the bedroom door, gun raised in defense. The echoes of gunfire continued outside the front door. You poked your head out quickly to see if there was anyone on your floor. Thankfully there was no one to be seen as you made your way to the stairs, back against the wall, you descended one step at a time. 

Halfway down the stairs, you saw a Hydra agent run through the front corridor. Your finger was quick, you shot him twice and he dropped dead. Your feet descended the rest of the stairs just as you saw another agent. You both saw each other simultaneously, guns raised as you hollered at him, “drop your gun now!”

“Not a chance in hell you bitch!” He shouted back with a sneer on his face.

Wrong thing to say to a woman unhinged. You lightly squeezed the trigger and shot him but not before he grazed your shoulder. You yelped in pain from where the bullet grazed you. More yelling and the commotion was growing louder outside as you took a right, heading into the kitchen. Gun still raised, you cleared the kitchen and could see through the window that the fighting in the backyard was slowing down. 

Who in the hell would attack Hydra? 

Behind you there was the sound of a boot on the floor that made you spin around, throwing the knife you had on you at the sound and training the gun on the person sneaking in. Your breath hitched as you came face to face with your blue-eyed and blonde-haired man Steve. The knife was embedded into the wall near his head.

“That was a great throw sweetheart.” He proudly said.

You ran and threw yourself into his arms, he quickly caught you. His familiar scent filled your senses as you nuzzled his neck. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

Steve smiled into your hair. “I would burn the whole world down just to find you.” You looked up at him and kissed him passionately. In your heart, you knew both men would rain hell on the world to get you back. You pulled away just in time to see Bucky shoot a Hydra agent that was approaching you both.

“Hate to break it up but we have a clearing in the front to leave,” Bucky said, as soft eyes landed on you. “Fury showed up with some of his men and they plan to secure the mansion until the FBI gets here and he wants us gone.”

Steve nodded in agreement, “Let’s get you out of here and get you home.”

Bucky left first while you followed him and Steve followed behind. Gunshots had now ceased and Hydra agent bodies littered the front yard. It was a massacre. As you got closer to the SUVs you spotted Tony standing with Rhodey as they chatted. Tony caught sight of you with Steve and Bucky, and ran towards you, calling your name. You sprinted towards him and you both embraced. 

“Thank God you’re okay kiddo. I was so worried.” Tony spoke softly to you as he hugged you tighter. You squeaked out in pain from where you were injured. Tony pulled away to look you over and saw your arm lightly bleeding. 

“I will be okay.” You looked between Tony, Rhodey, Steve, and Bucky trying to brush off your injury. “Where is Brock? Is he dead?”

“He’s gonna wish he was once we find him.” Bucky blurted out. 

“Brock must have hopped on his boat down by the dock and taken off into the bay. Though our guys grabbed Zemo instead and took him to the barn.” Tony answered, trying to hold back his anger. Your stomach sank at hearing Brock got away but knowing Zemo was captured both scared and made you happy to seek out revenge against him for what he did to you. You knew what the barn was and that no one left alive. 

Steve and Bucky walked you to an SUV where you all made your way back to Tony’s place.

You sat at the kitchen table sipping whiskey from a glass as Dr. Cho patched up your left arm. The bullet as you thought grazed the skin. Once you were patched up you walked into the living room and to a large window that oversaw the barn. They had told you about Rollins going in there and you breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the bastard wasn’t coming back. 

You lost count of how many men went into the barn and the dark part of you didn’t care. Only the wicked go in and that’s where Zemo is now. Tony, Steve, and Bucky went in thirty minutes ago and hadn’t appeared yet. Tony told you to tell them everything Zemo did to you and reluctantly you did. Now you’re nursing a drink because this was going to be a long night. Revenge on Zemo goes beyond you, it also goes to Steve and Bucky. Zemo had tortured them a decade ago and you knew the boys wanted blood. For them and for what he did to you, they would have blood.

Finishing off your whiskey you decided to go to the barn to see your tormentor. Heading out the French doors you were met by one of Tony’s men who was standing guard. 

You nodded at him as you passed by and headed out to the barn. The sound of crickets filled the air on your short walk but that would change as you opened the door. 

Zemo was hanging by metal shackles from the ceiling and was shirtless. His body was littered with fresh cuts from one of the knives Bucky was holding. Tony sat in a chair watching as Steve and Bucky let loose on him. When they heard the door and saw you they stopped.

You looked at the pained face of Zemo and felt pity for the torture these men were causing. That was until Zemo spoke.

“Hello, my kotyonok. I’m so happy to see you again.”

Bile rose from your stomach at hearing the pet name he gave you. But you swore to yourself you wouldn’t let this man get to you. Not now or ever again. You grabbed a knife off the table, approaching Zemo menacingly. Both Bucky and Steve stood back as they watched you spin the knife in your hand.

“You won’t be happy to see me once I cut your balls off and shove them down your throat.” Your hand twirled the knife and you slashed him from neck to belly button. Zemo hissed out in pain but never broke his stare at you. “If I did that to you it would be a quick death and I would rather know you were going to suffer. When you’re being tortured I want you to think of me and the hell you put me through. Think of every time I begged you to stop and you didn’t. Not only will these three men in here torture you but I was told a certain man with the same tastes as you, torture, will be here any minute. You should know him, Lloyd Hansen.”

Zemo paled at the name but refused to beg for mercy. “When you go to sleep tonight little lamb will you dream of me or Brock? I’m so curious to know if I left a lasting impression…”

Your hand moved quickly as you stabbed him in the right shoulder causing him to holler out in pain. “I will never think about you again once I walk out of here. As for Brock, once he is in jail or dead he will never cross my mind again.” Turning on your heel you started to walk out but stopped at the door. “Make him pay, guys. Let him know he fucked with the wrong family.” On that note, you walked out of the barn, and before the doors closed you heard the sound of an electric screwdriver.

The next morning you woke up in bed between Steve and Bucky. There was no telling what time they joined you. You didn’t dare move as you watched both men sleep peacefully, each on their side facing you while you lay on your back. It was nice to finally feel safe again with them. With everything you have been through it was going to take time to heal your mind and body. Something you knew they could help you with over time. 

Bucky’s eyes fluttered open, his soft blue eyes looking into yours as he smiled. “Good morning, doll.”

You smirked at the pet name and rolled onto your side to face him. “Morning Buck.”

“How did you sleep last night?” He inquired, watching you closely as you let out a sigh.

“I slept the best in ages honestly.” You spoke the truth. It had been over a month since you were with them last and that’s when you slept normally. With the trauma you went through with Zemo and Brock, sleep was not something that came easy. 

Bucky ran his hand up and down your arm. “I’m happy you slept. You need all the rest you can get.”

“Speaking of rest, when did you both crawl into bed?” 

“A couple of hours after you. Don’t worry, everything is taken care of and we have things under control.” Bucky reassured you, his hand moved from your arm and caressed your cheek. You couldn’t help but nuzzle into his hand as you placed your hand on his. 

Behind you, you felt warm lips kiss your shoulder. Steve stirred behind you and wrapped an arm around your waist. “Less talking and more sleeping.” You couldn’t help but chuckle as these men did not like early mornings. Your eyes softly closed as you took in the feeling of them. Steve pressed against your back, his arm still holding tight. Your face was inches away from Bucky as he held your hand. This is where you belonged. This was your safe space. The three of you could do anything in this world as long as you were together. The last thought you had before you drifted off to sleep was that hell was going to rain down on Brock.

With Zemo off in an undisclosed location with Lloyd Hansen being tortured to death the only thing left was to locate Brock. This gave you a spring in your step as you dressed and made your way to Tony’s living room. There you found Tony, Rhodey, Thor, Loki, Clint, Nat, Steve, and Bucky all talking business. Tony got up to hug you while the other associates nodded at you as you walked over to sit in between Bucky and Steve.

“Sorry, I’m late. Continue with what you were discussing before I walked in.” You crossed your legs while Thor spoke.

“Our intel has Brock staying in Brooklyn but we don’t have a location. The word in Hydra is that he plans to fly out of New York tonight on a private jet from JFK airport. Rumor is that’s where he flies out of normally.” 

You slightly leaned forward and nodded your head. “You’re correct. His plane will be there. He talked about taking me to the Caribbean where his money is in a bank. When I was taking photos and sending them to you Tony there were accounts listed. I’m sure if you look through them we can find his offshore account and drain it of all the funds. That will get him out of hiding. Hit him where it hurts since the FBI has arrested all of his associates and taken the weapons he was trying to sell.”

Steve smiled proudly at you as he spoke. “I have to say, she is right. Hit him hard in the wallet and he’ll come crawling out of his hiding place.” 

Tony grinned at you and stood up. “Well let me see what I can dig up on my computers.” He excused himself and headed to his office, followed by Rhodey. 

“While Tony is doing that we need to strategize, bring Fury and the FBI into this. I want to see that man rot in prison for the rest of his pathetic life.” You angrily said to everyone in the room. 

“We will make sure that happens, doll.” Bucky put a hand on your knee. 

“We’re with you till the end of the line,” Steve reassured you, his hand grabbing yours. 

You shook your head, your lips curling into a sinister grin. “Well let’s get started.”

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#saiyanprincessswanie #missy writes #civil war brooklyn #steve rogers x reader #bucky barnes x reader #steve rogers x reader x bucky barnes #mob au #brock rumlow #steve rogers #bucky barnes #dark mob au #stucky x reader

[mariacallous]

This summer, a Vancouver car mechanic named Max got a perplexing ping on his phone: Betty White was in Ukraine and needed his help. This was surprising because she had died on a Canadian highway back in January.

When Max last saw Betty White, his nickname for his Tesla Model Y Performance, they were both in rough shape after getting sideswiped on the highway. Max’s rotator cuff was torn in several places. The small SUV had bounced off multiple concrete barriers at high speed and was bashed in on all four corners, its wheels ripped to pieces. Coolant appeared to be leaking into the battery chamber. From his own work on EVs in the garage, Max knew that Betty was done for. “No auto shop would put a repair person at risk with that kind of damage,” says Max, whose last name isn’t being used out of doxing concerns. A damaged EV battery can become dangerous due to the risk of shocks, fire, and toxic fumes. His insurer agreed, and Betty was written off and sent to a salvage yard.

Months after he had last seen the car, Max’s Tesla app was now telling him that Betty needed a software update. It showed the car with an extra 200 kilometers on the odometer, fully charged, and parked in Uman, a town in Ukraine’s Cherkasy Oblast, midway between Kyiv and the front line with Russia’s invasion force. Minutes after that first ping, the app showed the car in service mode, suggesting Betty was undergoing repairs. “I thought it must be a mistake,” Max says.

There was no mistake. WIRED tracked Betty down to a Ukrainian auto auction website, looking good as new, maybe even better, with newly tinted windows and rearview mirrors wrapped in black. Betty 2.0 was being sold by “Mikhailo,” who wrote that the car had suffered “a small blow” in Canada and been repaired with original Tesla parts. The price, $55,000, was roughly the same as a new Model Y Performance costs in the US.

Betty White’s intercontinental resurrection was impressive but not unusual. For a long time, cars written off in North America have found their way to Eastern European repair shops willing to take on damage that US and Canadian mechanics won’t touch. In 2021, the most recent data available, Ukraine was a top-three destination for used US passenger vehicles sent overseas, close behind Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. And Ukraine’s wreck importers and repairers are particularly known for their ingenuity. Some have made fixing EVs written off across the Atlantic into a specialty, helping to drive a surge in the number of electric vehicles on the country’s roads, even as the war with Russia rages.

Though few automakers sell new EVs in Ukraine, the share of newly registered vehicles that are fully electric, 9 percent, is about the same as in the US and nearly double that of neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic. Most of Ukraine’s refurbished EVs come from North America, and many arrive with major damage.

There’s a ready supply of crashed North American EVs in part because electrics are becoming more common, and also because in recent years, relatively new EVs with low mileage have been written off at a higher rate than their gas-powered equivalents, according to data from insurers. US and Canadian repair shops and insurers see them as more dangerous and difficult to fix. Scrapyards find it hard to make money from their parts and instead ship them abroad.

Ivan Malakhovsky is not afraid to work on cases like Betty White. His five-year-old repair business in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, fixes about 100 Teslas a month, roughly a fifth of them from overseas, and employs a staff that varies between six to 10 people. He’s currently away from home, serving with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but he manages his workers, and sometimes makes software-mediated repairs, remotely. “We have problems in our lives and can fix them, whether a battery or a full-scale invasion,” says Malakhovsky. “Electric cars, electric car batteries—it’s no problem.”

An electric vehicle battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, which store and release energy. Sometimes, Malakhovsky says, he and his coworkers will break up large EV batteries damaged beyond repair and repurpose the cells to power electric scooters or even drones for the war effort. He says the vast majority of Teslas on Ukrainian roads were once involved in wrecks in North America.

The war has even boosted Ukraine’s EV resurrection business at times, by driving up gas prices and making electrics more attractive to drivers. Ukraine has a public charging network of some 11,000 chargers, according to Volodymyr Ivanov, the head of communications at Nissan Motor Ukraine—that’s more than the state of New York, and double the number in neighboring Poland. Since 2018, Ukraine’s government has removed most taxes and customs duties on used EV imports. In the US, electric vehicles tend to be expensive, and the average EV driver is still a high-income male homeowner. North American wrecks, Ukraine’s EV incentives, and its relatively low electricity prices have created a different picture. “There is a joke here that all poor people are driving electric cars, and all the rich people are driving petrol cars,” says Malakhovsky. “Tesla is a common-people, popular car because it’s very cheap in maintenance.”

That’s a relatively recent development, says Hans Eric Melin, head of Circular Energy Storage, a UK-based consultancy that tracks the international flows of used EVs and batteries. He began watching the Ukraine market in particular a few years ago, after he noticed more ads for Nissan Leafs on auction sites listed in Ukrainian than in English. At the time, the Leaf, a pioneer among EVs, was essentially the only one that had been around long enough to develop a healthy used market. Over time, Ukraine’s electric fleet grew to encompass the full range of EVs sold around the world, including Teslas, as more cars hit the roads and aged or got into crashes.

Melin had suspected Ukraine’s EV boom would end with the war. “I was completely wrong,” he says. By this summer, Ukraine’s EV fleet had doubled since July 2021, to 64,312, according to data compiled by the Automotive Market Research Institute, a Ukrainian research and advocacy group.

Roman Tyschenko, a 25-year-old IT worker who lives in Kyiv, decided last September that he was sick of his Jeep’s $400-a-month gas bill. Friends had purchased used, damaged electric cars on an online auction website called Copart, a US-based public auto reseller with 200 locations around the world. He logged on and spent $24,000 on a gray 2021 Tesla Model Y that had taken a solid blow to its passenger side in Dallas, Texas. Its bumper was almost fully detached; its hood was tented; some of its airbags had deployed.

That Texan Model Y was likely declared totaled by an insurer. From there, it probably moved to a salvage auction in the US, where licensed exporters, salvage shops, and repairers tried to figure out how much value they could squeeze out of the wreck. The winner, or perhaps the insurer itself, listed the car on Copart, which made it available to anyone around the world who wanted a smashed-up Tesla and was willing to pay for shipping.

If Tyschenko hadn’t brought the Texan Tesla to Ukraine himself, it had a good chance of being shipped there anyway by someone who professionally flips cars to countries like Ukraine. These exporters look for wrecks potentially worth more than their scrap value, but little enough that an expensive US repair and resale wouldn’t make sense. Some ship vehicles directly to Ukrainian repairers and pay for the fix, while others import damaged cars and relist them for sale to Ukrainian buyers who can figure it out for themselves.

It takes a damaged North American car between one and five months to reach a nearby port. Before the war, wrecked cars headed to Ukraine’s Port of Odessa on the Black Sea. Since Russia invaded in 2022, they come through Klaipėda in Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, or Koper in Slovenia on the Adriatic, and are brought to Ukraine by truck. A shop like Malakhovsky’s can fix a Tesla in somewhere between one week and one year, depending on the damage.

Tyschenko arranged for his Model Y to be shipped to a local repair shop in Kyiv, where it arrived in February 2023, five months after he hit the Buy button online. The technician sent him videos of the EV’s ongoing revamp every few weeks, and Tyschenko stopped by to visit a handful of times. By May, he had paid the technician some $25,000 for his work and was driving the Model Y around Kyiv.

Two months later, the battery died and Tyschenko spent another $4,000 to replace it—a demonstration of the risks of electric vehicle rescues. Still, he’s happy with how things worked out, and now pays just $10 to $100 a month to refuel his car, depending on whether he charges at home or at public stations.

Finding parts to repair Teslas and other EVs can be a challenge. On Facebook and Telegram, groups like “Renault Zoe Club Ukraine” host thousands of EV owners who barter with each other for spare parts. Oleksandr Perepelitsa, a 25-year-old electric vehicle repairer in Kyiv, says that when he first began his work three years ago, he and his business partners would buy two wrecked Teslas from overseas to create a single working vehicle to sell to local Ukranians. “Even that was profitable for us,” he says. Now, business connections can send Tesla parts from the US or Europe, or repairers buy cheaper Chinese reproductions.

The success of Ukraine’s EV resurrection industry is the flip side of the failure of insurers and manufacturers in North America to figure out what to do when a shiny new EV becomes roadkill.

US insurers are more willing to write off vehicles of all kinds that in the past may have been fixed. New vehicle repairs have gotten more expensive, in part due to vehicles getting more complex and computerized, as well as a shortage of vehicle technicians. In the past decade, the damaged cars up for auction “are better and less damaged,” Copart CEO Jeff Liaw told investors on an earnings call this year.

Industry-wide data is hard to come by, but numerous sources suggest that EVs are more likely to be written off than gas-powered cars, and can be declared unfixable after even minor crashes. A Reuters analysis this year found that a “large portion” of damaged EVs sold for scrap were low-mileage, nearly-new vehicles. While one in 10 new cars sold in the US and Canada this year are forecasted to be electric, the infrastructure and expertise needed to assess and fix damaged EVs can be patchy. “In an ideal world, electric vehicles are as easy to repair as internal combustion engine vehicles,” says Mark Fry, research manager at Thatcham Research, which crunches auto market data for insurers and other clients. It recently found British EVs get written off at disproportionately high rates.

The main reason EV repairs are so tricky comes down to a lack of agreement on how to handle EV batteries after a crash. Worldwide, there is no industry standard for measuring battery health. Vehicle manufacturers sometimes refuse to sanction battery repairs because of liability concerns. “If you repair the battery, what's it going to be like after another two, three years and another 50,000 miles?” Fry says. It’s easier to let nearly new vehicles be declared dead than to find out.

The North American scrap industry is also somewhat leery of EVs, says Megan Slattery, a researcher at UC Davis who studies what happens to damaged EV batteries. Scrap businesses generally make money by taking cars apart to extract the most valuable widgets to resell. But dismantling a battery takes dedicated workers, equipment, and—most important of all—space, due to the fire risks of storing lithium-ion cells. Many mom-and-pop dismantlers don’t have any of that.

Plus, EVs tend to have simpler drivetrains, with more plastic and large, prefabricated body components that can’t be easily pulled apart. In some electric vehicles, the battery is built directly into the car’s structure, making it especially difficult to dismantle or repair. All of that means that exporters looking to sell to eager buyers abroad have less competition when bidding on totaled cars.

In the US, there’s increasing pressure to keep broken EVs from heading overseas. Regulators are concerned about safety, hoping to better track broken batteries through shipping channels as fears rise of fires sparked by used EVs, including on cargo ships. Another is to avoid dumping e-waste on countries without the means to recycle or repurpose, and instead keep the valuable minerals inside batteries local. Battery recycling startups have received vast amounts of private and public investment—both in Western Europe and the US, with funds from the Inflation Reduction Act—with a promise to help shore up raw material supply chains. But so far, they have received only a trickle of used batteries.

Policies that wind up choking off the export of EV wrecks would in some ways be a shame, Slattery says. More stringent European Union export rules for used cars and EV batteries in particular are one reason why the supply of Teslas to Eastern Europe is so dependent on North American wrecks. Without them, the electric revolution would be much less advanced in places like Ukraine, where US and Canadian write-offs have helped support the emergence of charger networks, trained repair specialists, and a wide familiarity and acceptance that electric propulsion is not just green but also practical.

In North America, there's a widespread belief that “people don't want electric vehicles and that it's just laws and regulations that push us to buy them,” says Melin, the used EV analyst. “There are other markets that want to have electrics.” It’s a testament to a system that is working, Melin adds, that used EVs end up in places like Ukraine, where new models are difficult to come by.

For Max in Vancouver, Betty White’s reappearance overseas did cause some headaches. The car was still logged into his Google, Netflix, and Spotify accounts, potentially allowing the new owners to access his personal data. When he asked Tesla support, he was advised to change his passwords, Max says. (Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions.)

But looking back on the crash, and now driving a new Model Y—named Black Betty—Max says his old car’s resurrection is the best possible outcome. “I’m happy to see that Betty White has lived to see another day,” he says.

[sims4cars-breezemotors]

“Electric SUV”

2021 Volkswagen ID.6 🇩🇪

There’s a new addition to Volkswagen’s all-electric ID lineup. Meet the VW ID.6, the brand’s answer to the full-size electric SUV. And while the brand hasn’t completely ruled out bringing the United States, it’ll remain a China-only model for the moment.

Available exclusively for “No Limits” and “All Inclusive” tiers this September. Since November 1’st. Available for All Inclusive tier only.

Model with HQ interior, open/close doors, tail gate and functional light.

Go and join my Patreon!

#the sims 4 #sims 4 #sims4 #sims4car #the sims 4 cc #the sims 4 custom content #thesims4cars #the sims 4 cars #sims4vehicles #the sims

[georgegraphys]

@grbambi63's theory really made me peek into Daimler's 2018, 2019, and 2023 annual report to see the difference between Zetsche's management to Kallenius' management.

Zetsche's objective:

Kallenius had a similar objective on that too but I won't include it for today because we're not talking about the similarity but... the one thing Kallenius had that Zetsche didn't.

2019 & 2023's Kallenius-term annual report objectives:

Lower cost base. Reduction of (...) costs.

This isn't just some move that Kallenius added just because he loved saving some pennies but it might be due to the chaos that happens in his first year as a CEO. I am going to highlight two major events here.

1) Diesel Emission Scandal

In the beginning of 2018 (Zetsche's term), Daimler was accused of having shit devices on their control software for their US products but they denied this allegations. Then it was reported that the US authorities were investigating them for diesel emission cheating scandals.

In June 2019, Daimler had to recall 60,000 Mercedes diesel powered cars in Germany, the model affected is the Mercedes-Benz GLK 220 SUV produced between 2012 and 2015, the car is fitted with software aimed at distorting emissions tests. And during the same year, Daimler was fined 870 million euros in Germany for "negligent violation of supervisory duties" in relation to not fully complying with emissions regulations. In 2020, they had to pay $2.2B in settlement.

The scandal got serious actually as "The Daimler boss is also putting the german federal government in trouble. It has its back against the wall internationally because of the fraud committed by its flagship industry. US President Donald Trump has targeted Daimler in the trade dispute and threatened that he no longer wants to see Mercedes cars on Fifth Avenue in New York" source

This crisis ironically started at Zetsche's management but the peak of the case was handled during Kallenius' early stage of leadership 💀💀💀 (I FELT BAD FOR HIM NGL LMAOOO)

2) COVID 19

Do you think Kallenius' trials decrease after his first year? No. COVID-19 happens. They still profit as they are THEE Mercedes but sales were slow at one point. Kallenius and other executives had to take pay cuts due to COVID and even before, COVID he also had to struggle with Daimler's stocks dropping drastically while having to deal with the lawsuit and satisfying the investors. He also said this: (source)

Looking at how they have interesting differences as CEO. Kallenius is definitely all about cost efficient and maybe this was due to the crisis he felt in 2021 and as a preparation for Daimler's future ventures in focusing more about EQs

Update: Yeah this confirms that he had a pretty rough start to his management year in 2019 due to diesel scandal (source)

And bold of you to think that Zetsche retired from Mercedes with a bang. No he didn't. (source)

AND THE BEEF THICKENS as some board member reportedly are against his rise to be the chairman of the supervisory board (source)

Just a personal thought from me, but what if the reason Kallenius was pissed at LH in 2021 is caused by all these financial wrecks Mercedes are in during these years? They were hit again and again. To add that, Kallenius is very adamant on his cost efficient and cost reduction objectives after these hardships. And at that time, just after 2020, LH demands a raise. A raise from a company who is literally in the trenches fighting for a surplus and good result from all the legal battles they're in and COVID that caused the board members and employees to get paid cuts. Maybe this was what pissed Kallenius off? Because at that time, Mercedes wasn't doing so well and suddenly, LH asked for pay raise to a guy who is very set and clear about saving every pennies 😭😭 That must've pissed the hell out of him. I'm not saying Lewis is wrong but kinda 💀💀 to think that the butterfly effect from that moment of their contract negotiation in 2021 to what is happening rn in 2024 💀💀.

If that is true then Zetsche is the catalyst for the butterfly effect happening rn:

Zetsche diesel scandal>Him retiring>Kallenius' rise to position>Mercedes financial flopification due to dieselgate and covid>LH demanding more salary>Cost efficient and suffering Kallenius, with his hands full on Zetsche's mess, getting pissed at LH>LH and Mercedes fallout>Kallenius using George as a piece in the contract negotiation>Toto Wolff power decrease in Kallenius' era>George to Mercedes>Another contract negotiation problems>Ambassadorial promise getting yeetus deletus-ed>LH pissed>Ferrari move early>George steps forward as team leader

If this is real. If the butterfly effect is real, then it's crazy.

#corporate talks

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

Toyota Camry

2017: Toyota Camry – 387,081 units sold

Car sales continue their slow decline in the U.S. in 2017, although that same year the Camry is all new (and labeled a 2018 model). America's best-selling car ranks seventh in 2018 sales overall when trucks and SUVs are factored in. Other Camry sales-beaters include the Honda CR-V, Nissan Rogue, and Ford F-150. In 2020, sales took a 13 percent drop, thanks to the global pandemic that put the world in park. Camry sales in 2021 were a better showing. With a total of 313,795 units of the family sedan sold in the U.S., the Camry took the sixth spot in overall sales. Despite Camry sales falling below the 300,000-unit mark in 2022, the Toyota sedan actually moved up to the fifth spot in overall sales for the year, with trucks such as the Ford F-series, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ram line of full-size trucks taking the top three spots. Toyota's RAV4 SUV, meanwhile, claimed the fourth spot with a total of 399,941 units sold in 2022.

2018: Toyota Camry — 343,439

2019: Toyota Camry — 336,978

2020: Toyota Camry — 294,348

2021: Toyota Camry — 313,795

2022: Toyota Camry — 295,201

#car #cars #toyota camry #toyota #camry

[mossandfog]

Toyota's New Land Cruiser Brings a Retro Boxy Look to the Trail

Toyota discontinued its classic Land Cruiser in the US in 2021, and fans thought it might be gone forever. Toyota proved them wrong with the return of the solid, off-road SUV, totally redesigned for 2024 with a boxy, retro aesthetic that harkens back to the earlier models that are still in use around the globe today. The redesigned Land Cruiser gets a turbocharged four-cylinder hybrid powertrain,…

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#2024 Land Cruiser #2025 Land Cruiser #Land Cruiser design #new Land Cruiser #New Toyota Land Cruiser