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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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I’ve been trying to figure out the best obi wan ship. They all have one slightly problematic thing this way or that. I’ve landed on the idea of obi wan and an equal is pretty top tier. But then I saw a picture of Coran from voltron. Coran and Obiwan might be a disaster but also both are dad shaped, both are bad ass, both are ginger, both have an accent. I think it could work. But another part of me is like Coran is just obi and jarjar mashed together. At the very least they hooked up.

Hey I just had restaurant ramen and Starbucks and actually feel like a human being so let's do something unnecessary but funny. I'm taking this as a challenge, anon.

Also IMO Coran has more in common with C3P0 than with JarJar

So obviously, both of these happen in Big Space, but the difference appears to be density. We see about the same complexity of culture and species interactions, but Voltron covers more galaxies. It's vaguely implied that Earth, at least, is the only planet with sapient life in the Milky Way.

I think the way I want to play this out, culturally, is that the Voltron area of the universe covers a much wider, but much more sparsely populated area, while the SW-verse is just the one very densely populated (in part because apparently humans just went Literally Everywhere) galaxy, where they didn't necessarily bother with developing the tech to go to other galaxies (except Rishi, which only sort of counts) because they haven't really even charted out their own yet. It was never contacted by the Voltron side of things because [checks notecards full of excuses] it's really far away from Altea and all that, and the Force shielded the galaxy from Galra interests because Reasons.

All this to say that the two franchises didn't interact until after the Voltron plotline was already over. We'll say it went mostly canon, except Allura survived because uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck that.

We'll say that this is mid-TCW, you know, before Obi-Wan is a bundle of repressed traumas and bad coping mechanisms that's lost almost everyone he's ever loved to the dark side through death or corruption. He's still (mostly) okay! Anakin's not dark (or at least, not as dark as he could be; Obi-Wan doesn't know about the Tuskens), and Ahsoka's still in good standing and most people are alive and--and okay the army is a massive ethical violation he hates with his very soul and he misses Qui-Gon and Anakin's keeping secrets and pulling away from him every day but He's Fine, Guys.

He's Fine.

In comes a ship from not Wild Space, but beyond that. Intergalactic visitors, from the direction of the deeply concerning Force bullshit they felt a few years ago. Translation tech is decent enough on both sides that they get to talking pretty quickly. The explorer is actually a member of the Blade of Marmora, who gets the absolute most basic info (approximately this many inhabited planets, approximately this many trillions of sapients in the recorded galaxy, basic structure of the government for the past however many years, most recent conflict, etc.)

BoM person is like "cool, okay so you guys are really well set-up so I'm just gonna head back and kick this up a few rungs of the coalition ladder because this is way above my paygrade, I'll make sure you get some diplomats who can maybe help out with the whole galactic civil war situation as neutral parties."

The Voltron Coalition does send a diplomat! They, uh, also send Coran, who isn't technically a diplomat, but he's high-level.

The thing is, okay, that Coran is mostly just... passably competent at things. He's a jack of all trades, master of none type. He knows a lot of things, actually, but his practical knowledge in high pressure situations tends to be up in the air. He knows how to fix the Castle Ship and various technologies, but all of that info is ten thousand years out of date. He was a competent fighter at one point but these days his back gives out. He's very knowledgeable regarding intergalactic politics but, again, that information is ten thousand years out of date. He's also a little prone to social gaffs in dicey situations (e.g. the inciting incident in the Voltron Show episode where he misses the single day with clear skies), but puts in so much goddamn effort to make things happen.

In this manner, he's like a warped mirror of what Obi-Wan is and could be.

THAT SAID

Coran is actually really good with teenagers, and specifically with training them.

And Obi-Wan... isn't.

Obi-Wan's snarky and snippy and sassy, and he's decent enough at teaching and he's great at being a jokey friend and all, but he's not necessarily very good at emotions. And unfortunately for Obi-Wan, the teenagers he spends the most time with are Really Full Of Emotions. He tries, bless him, but he's just... he doesn't respond well to emotional conversations at the best of times.

His son-figure saying "You're like a father to me" leads to a response of... radio silence. Guys. That's not the mark of a man who knows how to talk about his feelings with the people he cares about.

In swans Coran with the various other diplomatic envoys of the visiting extragalactic community. The entire situation is really leading to a lull in the war because nobody wants to risk pissing off this clearly well-funded, well-powered third party. As a result, many of the High Generals can interact with the envoys, even if they spend quite a bit of time eyeing the Separatist representatives on the other side of the room, because clearly Everyone Needs A Seat At This Table.

It's a very tense situation.

Obviously, Coran is exactly the weird uncle that goes around telling plausibly-exaggerated stories about Weblums and Yalmors and Balmeras. I'm going to say at least one former Paladin is there, maybe Hunk. Hunk's fun, and also very willing to help Coran make friends and seem Amicable instead of Distant by correcting some of the exaggerations. There's a nice, calm atmosphere in a bubble around Coran and his nonsense, and it's a weird situation but arguably just... you know. It's good. He's good at making people feel safe around him.

Cue the hissed argument between Skywalker and Kenobi. The actual cause of said argument isn't important, just the fact that, in a dark corner where they're less likely to cause a PR issue, Anakin and Obi-Wan are having it out. Anakin's maybe twenty, still a lanky ragebaby, all that fun stuff. Obi-Wan is a the endpoint of every too-young brotherdad. He's thirty-six but feels like he's sixty-three. He's tired, but trying so damn hard to still connect with Anakin and just--just--

Obi-Wan gives himself a few minutes to calm down before following Anakin. He doesn't even remember what they were arguing about, really, but he has to mend the bridge before it frays even more than it already has. If Anakin goes to Palpatine for advice again, he's going to... do something. Obi-Wan isn't sure what, but he just has to fix this.

What he finds is... well, Anakin did end up going to vent to a man of an earlier generation who acts like a slightly eccentric older relative, but it's not Palpatine for once.

The goofy, slightly abrasive but mostly charming, brightly-colored representative of the Voltron Coalition is standing in the little balcony that Anakin's made it to, listening as Obi-Wan's recently-knighted padawan vents. The man nods and makes noises at the appropriate times, and then asks questions that are... maybe a little too accurate.

"You said that you view him as a father, that he raised you after you left your mother."

"Well, yeah, but he doesn't think I'm ready, or--"

"No parent ever does."

"...my mom thought I was ready to become a Jedi."

"I can't speak for your mother," the representative says, "but the princess of my people, Allura... I half-raised that girl from the beginning, and after the destruction of Altea, we were all the other had left. I watched her lead battles and bring life to planets, trying to rebuild a universe out of the ashes of what we'd left behind... I saw the evidence with my own eyes, and I still, every time, I worried for her."

"Why?"

"I worried that she'd be hurt, that she wasn't ready, that she'd make a decision she regretted. Often, she did, and I had to help her back up, and while she's always come back, stronger than before... she is the closest thing I have ever had to a daughter, and I will always worry for her. Every parent does. Do you think, perhaps, that your own Jedi Master, that you consider a father, may worry because he looks at you like a son? That it's not that he doesn't trust you, but that he doesn't trust the world around you?"

Obi-Wan feels his heart in his throat.

The conversation continues in that vein. While Obi-Wan can't say he likes the fact that this stranger is putting words in his mouth, if only as hypotheticals, he can't deny that there's a part of him that relaxes as Anakin does, as every frustrated fresh-knight question gets a measured elderly-steward response that's angled to consider the interpretation that favors Anakin and Obi-Wan in equal measure. Every word encourages Anakin to talk things out and lay boundaries and express his frustrations to Obi-Wan in the plainest words possible.

There's a story in there, more than one. The representative tends to go off on tangents, ones that Anakin sometimes finds interesting and sometimes just resigns himself to. Mostly, though, it goes well, and Obi-Wan... well, he's always been 'a nosy little bastard,' according to quite a few people.

(In his defense, the terms they'd used about Quinlan's 'investigative personality' had been quite a bit stronger.)

He eavesdrops to the end, and Anakin doesn't notice at all. Obi-Wan's not sure if he should try to address Anakin's lack of awareness of the world around him. He's not technically Anakin's master anymore. The comment may be taken as a criticism of his worth and capability, rather than a sincere desire to see his padawan not die.

He approaches the representative instead. He intends to introduce himself. Instead, the first words that tumble out of his mouth are:

"How do you do it?"

The man--older than he looks from a distance, more wrinkles than the bright hair would suggest, but not quite elderly yet--turns and lifts a brow. "Hm?"

"I'm sorry, I'm--" Obi-Wan grimaces. "I'm Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. The young man you were just talking to is my former padawan, er, my former apprentice. I've been finding it harder and harder to speak with him over the past few years, and it seems that every interaction we have leads to an argument. How do you... manage that? I can't get him to listen to me at all."

"Ah, teenagers," the man sighs.

"He's twenty."

The representative pauses, and turns to him. "Are you the one he says raised him? The father?"

"Well... yes, I suppose that's one way to phrase it," Obi-Wan says, eyes darting to the side. He doesn't know how to explain the whole attachment situation to someone who barely knows what a Jedi is. He has even less of an idea of how to explain his own broken ability to speak of emotion, the parts of his mind that Bant clucks over and attributes to his own complicated relationship with Qui-Gon. "I had custody as his primary guardian from ages nine to nineteen and was the primary individual for handling his schooling, health, and general upbringing."

"That sounds to me like a very convoluted way of saying you were his father in all but name."

Obi-Wan grimaces. "I'm not exactly old enough to be his father, and I wasn't exactly the person he was supposed to learn from; I was the... back-up option."

"It seems he cares for you very much."

"He didn't have much of a choice," Obi-Wan says, with the kind of helpless smile and awkward shrug he's long gotten used to sharing with people when they ask. "And I assure you he'd have been happier with the man that was meant to teach him."

"I'd say that the 'would have' in this situation is much less important than what is," the representative says. Obi-Wan probably should have paid more attention to his name. "I wasn't in a position to define my relation to Allura or her father in the way that truly suited our situation, by... oh, tradition, social norms, public relations, take your pick. I was a very well-regarded official, of course, but I wasn't royalty, not even nobility, and I certainly wasn't wasn't legally or publicly part of the family. But for all the limitations there, I was still able to find ways to tell her and her family what they meant to me, and they in return. Your apprentice cares for you very much, and I'm sure you care back, but I'd hazard quite the guess that you've no idea how to tell him that."

"I... I shouldn't," Obi-Wan says. "I'm fond of him, of course, but I've no wish to smother him, and to simply say it would be undignified. I imagine he'd laugh in my face."

The representative raises one eyebrow and takes a sip of his drink.

"Master Kenobi," he says carefully. "Might I suggest you go find your young man, tell him you love him, and perhaps give him a hug?"

Obi-Wan's face flares red. It's been years since anyone short of Yoda has spoken to him like that.

"I'm not a child," he sniffs, trying to angle enough away that the blush isn't as noticeable. He's damnably prone to such things. "You're not that much older than me."

The man laughs, and Obi-Wan lifts his glass to his lips in a futile attempt to hid the embarrassment a little more. "Oh, not counting the stasis, I've well reached the age of six hundred and twenty-four, my boy!"

Obi-Wan chokes on his drink.

The man laughs a little more, but thumps him on the back until he's breathing normally again.

"Yes, most of the humans I've told have had quite the reaction!" the representative assures him. "But yes, even with the times adjusted to what any given local year is, I am significantly longer-lived than most species."

"No kidding," Obi-Wan manages. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand and looks over at the representative. He takes in the wrinkles and bright eyes, and says, "Well, I must say you look very well for a near-human of such an age. I can only name one person in that category that has managed better, and I haven't seen her since I was a child."

"I shall take that as the compliment it's intended to be," the representative says, twisting the edge of his mustache and beaming.

The man is... well, goofy, really, and quite a bit older than Obi-Wan had thought, but he's quite the charmer. Obi-Wan faintly compares him to a few different people in the back of his mind, but nothing quite fits. For all that the man is quite the jokester and--going by some things he'd seen from the corner of his eye in the main party--a master of physical comedy, the representative is actually more competent than he looks, and for all his visible age, not bad to look at. He is also, seemingly, an expert in dealing with teenagers and young adults, something Obi-Wan himself is... decidedly not.

He really should go speak with Anakin.

And there's a war to fight.

He doesn't really have much time, even with the recent lull.

He's in no place to be looking at the clean-shaven jaw and wondering what it would feel like under his lips, or to let himself consider whether this man would be the kind to have an hours-long discussion as to the narrative forms common in other galaxies, and whether they have anything paralleled to those in Obi-Wan's own, or if this man would show the same enthusiasm over teas that he'd shown over the hors d'oeuvres inside.

He should... really go find Anakin.

"I suppose it's time to find my padawan," he says, more to fill the air than anything. "Er... thank you, both for speaking with him, and for speaking with me."

"Not a problem at all, Master Kenobi!" the representative says, and Obi-Wan realizes that there's one last thing he may have... forgotten.

"This is terribly embarrassing, but I don't believe I caught your name?" Obi-Wan says.

"Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe, at your service!" the man says, with a sweeping bow. "As you can imagine, most simply call me Coran."

"Then I insist you call me Obi-Wan," he says, and before he can stop himself, "Might I bother you with an invitation to a shared tea time? You seem a knowledgeable fellow, and I'd appreciate the chance to... eh, pick your brain, shall we say."

It's not the smoothest come on he's ever put out there, or the most easily interpreted, but... well. Perhaps it's for the best. He's rather often found his tastes going in irresponsible directions, and it'll be much easier to brush this off without diplomatic incident if there's room for Coran to politely ignore the less platonic options.

Obi-Wan hopes he doesn't.

It's very selfish of him, but a dalliance with an older gentleman... well. He does, perhaps, make such irresponsible decisions, even now.

"I do believe I'd enjoy such a thing!" Coran enthuses, grabbing Obi-Wan's hand and shaking it in large, effusive movements.

Oh, this is a terrible idea, Obi-Wan thinks, even as he exchanges comm numbers and says goodbye.

Still.

He likes the idea of having at least a little fun, sedate or less so, while they have some time to themselves.

#Obi Wan Kenobi #Coran Smythe #Coran #coran hieronymus wimbleton smythe #anakin skywalker #Star Wars #Voltron #crossovers #Phoenix Posts #Phoenix Answers Asks #parenting

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Do Republicans Hate Gay People

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Why Do Republicans Hate Gay People

Presidency Of George W Bush

George W. Bush did not repeal President Clinton’s Executive Order banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the federal civilian government, but Bush’s critics felt as if he failed to enforce the executive order. He retained Clinton’s Office of National AIDS Policy and was the first Republican president to appoint an openly man to serve in his administration, Scott Evertz as director of the Office of National AIDS Policy. Bush also became the second President, after President Clinton, to select openly gay appointees to his administration. Bush’s nominee as ambassador to Romania, Michael E. Guest, became the second openly gay man U.S. Ambassador and the first to be confirmed by the Senate. He did not repeal any of the spousal benefits that Clinton had introduced for same-sex federal employees. He did not attempt to repeal Don’t ask, don’t tell, nor make an effort to change it.

In April 2002, White House officials held an unannounced briefing in April for the Log Cabin Republicans. On June 27, 2002, President Bush has signed a bill allowing death benefits to be paid to domestic partners of firefighters and police officers who die in the line of duty, permanently extending a federal death benefit to same-sex couples for the first time.

The 2004 Republican Party platform removed both parts of that language from the platform and stated that the party supports anti-discrimination legislation.

Two Reasons Why The Bathroom Bill Targeting Trans People Is Flawed

We believe this bill is flawed for two reasons. First, as conservatives who believe in liberty and in supporting small businesses, we do not think that government should single out businesses for special public censure if they do not enforce the governments current social views.

Americans are still sorting out how they feel about trans people and how they can be tolerant or hospitable neighbors even if they disagree. Government should not use private businesses as pawns in an ongoing culture war, especially with something as private as their customers genitalia.

Second, the bill is counterproductive. We understand that the legislature wants to give parents peace of mind that their daughters will not use the same restroom as biological males. Parents want to make sure their kids are safe this is a completely reasonable concern. But forcing trans women to use the same restroom as young boys can be more disturbing and disruptive to businesses.

Hear more Tennessee Voices:

Dads: imagine walking into the mens room with your son and seeing Caitlyn Jenner, in a dress, fixing her makeup.

More disturbing still is when trans men who are far along in their transition people who look, act, and identify as male must use the same restroom as young girls.

More:Tennessee Voices, Episode 118: Chris Sanders, Tennessee Equality Project

The Fairness For All Act Is A Republican Response To The Equality Act

In March, House Democrats introduced the Equality Act, the first comprehensive LGBTQ civil rights bill to pass the House. While it has been stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate, it would provide sweeping non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people in the US in housing, employment, public accommodations, education, and health care for the first time under federal law.

At the time, there were that some conservative groups were working on a compromise bill, and it appears the Fairness For All Act is that compromise.

A small coalition of religious conservative groups led by the American Unity Fund and including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Seventh-day Adventist Church, 1st Amendment Partnership, Center for Public Justice, and Council for Christian Colleges and Universities have rallied behind the bill.

Im excited about the solutions that are embodied in the legislation, because I think that those are the exact ideas that were going to need to pass federal civil rights for LGBTQ people, said Tyler Deaton, senior adviser at the American Unity Fund.

The Fairness For All Act would provide many of the same protections for LGBTQ Americans, but it also provides ample exceptions for churches and religious organizations to continue to discriminate against queer people.

What we like about it is the stated intentional desire for fairness and a proposed process that will encourage collaboration because weve seen that work in our state, he said.

Republicans May Begin To Embrace Gay Rights

As Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus pointed out, gay marriage and gay rights are platforms that a higher and higher percentage of Americans support. Priebus warns Republicans to be more open to other views on the issue, and less set in their ways. However, Republican strategist Ed Rogers points out the catch-22 in this situation. Most current Republicans still oppose gay marriage. Where 58 percent of Americans now support gay marriage, only 39 percent of Republicans support it, with 59 percent of Republicans opposing it. This leaves the Republican Party in a tough spot. They must either reform their views to bring in new members and gain support in coming elections, which would risk pushing away those that have stuck with the Party through the years, or stand by their age-old platform, and risk continuing to lose support throughout the nation.

The Disney Vault Is Annoying

Disney has drawn the ire of many adoring fans because it only releases its movies to the public for home consumption for a limited amount of time. They even coined a term for this tactic, The Disney Vault. Audiences think this is corporate greed at its ugliest. Disney has a commodity, and they try to build fervor and revenue by only letting the consumer have access to it for a short period. Its basically the same business model McDonalds uses with the McRib and we all know how much everyone hates that. Can you imagine if the Star Wars movies were only sold periodically? Thatd be an outrage, right? Well, you can expect it to happen since Disney bought the rights in 2012 to all things Star Wars, from George Lucas for over $4 billion. Its no wonder why Disney movies have been pirated since VCRs came on the scene in the 1980s.

American Views Of Transgender People: The Impact Of Politics Personal Contact And Religion

As the Supreme Court examines cases it has already heard this term about the rights of gay and transgender people, the American public in the latest Economist/YouGov poll are for the most part tolerant and supportive of transgender employment rights. However, Republicans take different positions.

The overall public supports laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, with Republicans closely divided.

More than one in three people know someone who is transgender, and the probability of this is even higher among Democrats and younger adults. Those with personal contact are more likely to believe there is a great deal or a fair amount of discrimination against transgender people. Half of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats say there is a fair amount or a great deal of discrimination against transgender people.

One in five adults believes employers should be able to fire transgender workers who wear work clothes that match their gender identity. About three times that percentage disagree. Republicans are more closely divided on this question: a third say employers should be able to fire those employees, while 44 percent say that should not be allowed.

There appears to be greater acceptance of female to male transitions than male to female ones. Men generally accept a female to male as male , but also believe that someone transitioning male to female is still male .

Image: Getty

Here’s Where We Stand On Different Lgbt Issues

LGBT leftists tend to hate us because we put our principles first. We believe in religious liberty, free speech, God-given human dignity, limited government, and economic opportunity.

For that reason we frequently oppose radical gender theory and leftist policies like the Equality Act. We support a nuanced, science-based approach to transgender policy issues.

We recently spoke out in support of the legislature’s initiative to keep youth sports organized according to biological sex we find the effort to let biological males play girls’ sports anti-science and offensive.

As a result of stances like these, LGBT leftists regularly picket us, ban us, destroy our property, and call us ugly names.

Recently, our entire leadership team was kicked out of Nashvilles primary LGBT networking Facebook group, in contravention of that groups written rules, because the admins hated us.

We hope this background demonstrates our conservative bona fides. If we oppose a Republican LGBT bill, it is out of principle, not identity politics or blind devotion to those in the LGBT community who reject us. We were not asked to comment on the bill before it was passed, but we feel we would be remiss not to offer our perspective.

More:Tennessee’s anti-LGBTQ bills target vulnerable citizens who are worthy of dignity | Plazas

Views On Religion Its Role In Policy

When it comes to religion and morality, most Americans say that belief in God is not necessary in order to be moral and have good values; 42% say it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.

The share of the public that says belief in God is not morally necessary has edged higher over the past six years. In 2011, about as many said it was necessary to believe in God to be a moral person as said it was not . This shift in attitudes has been accompanied by a rise in the share of Americans who do not identify with any organized religion.

Republicans are roughly divided over whether belief in God is necessary to be moral , little changed over the 15 years since the Center first asked the question. But the share of Democrats who say belief in God is not a condition for morality has increased over this period.

About two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic leaners say it is not necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values, up from 51% who said this in 2011.

The growing partisan divide on this question parallels the widening partisan gap in religious affiliation.

About six-in-ten whites think belief in God is not necessary in order to be a moral person. By contrast, roughly six-in-ten blacks and 55% of Hispanics say believing in God is a necessary part of being a moral person with good values.

International AffairsEconomic ConditionsTrust, Facts & DemocracyClimate, Energy & EnvironmentRace & EthnicitySame-Sex Marriage

Lgbt Conservatism In The United States

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LGBT conservatism in the United States is a social and political ideology within the community that largely aligns with the American conservative movement. LGBT conservatism is generally more moderate on social issues from social conservatism, instead emphasizing values associated with fiscal conservatism, libertarian conservatism, and .

Changing Views On Acceptance Of Homosexuality

Seven-in-ten now say homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared with just 24% who say it should be discouraged by society. The share saying homosexuality should be accepted by society is up 7 percentage points in the past year and up 19 points from 11 years ago.

Growing acceptance of homosexuality has paralleled an increase in public support for same-sex marriage. About six-in-ten Americans now say they favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally.

While there has been an increase in acceptance of homosexuality across all partisan and demographic groups, Democrats remain more likely than Republicans to say homosexuality should be accepted by society.

Overall, 83% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say homosexuality should be accepted by society, while only 13% say it should be discouraged. The share of Democrats who say homosexuality should be accepted by society is up 20 points since 2006 and up from 54% who held this view in 1994.

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, more say homosexuality should be accepted than discouraged by society. This is the first time a majority of Republicans have said homosexuality should be accepted by society in Pew Research Center surveys dating to 1994. Ten years ago, just 35% of Republicans held this view, little different than the 38% who said this in 1994.

Acceptance is greater among those with postgraduate and bachelors degrees than among those with some or no college experience .

Reasons Why Conservatives Hate Democrats

November 5, 2014 by Samuel WardeNo Comments

20 Reasons Why Conservatives Hate Democrats

1. Democrats believe in higher education.2. Democrats believe in preserving the environment.3. Democrats believe in science.4. Democrats believe that carbon dioxide is dangerous.5. Democrats do not believe that minimum wage created our nations unemployment.

6. Democrats do not believe armed rebellion is a viable alternative to elections.7. Democrats do not believe that corporations are people too.8. Democrats do not believe that the sexual revolution created AIDS.9. Democrats do not know the proper height for trees.10. Democrats do not understand decent God-fearing Americans need missile launchers at home.

11. Democrats do not understand that banning abortions for high risk pregnancies can be a positive experience for women.12. Democrats do not understand that intelligent design is a proven scientific theory.13. Democrats do not understand that marriage is related to national security.14. Democrats do not understand that the media is a threat to national security.15. Democrats forgot that Hitler coined the phrase separation of church and state.

16. Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that most good Americans oppose gay marriage.17. Democrats seldom bring guns to crowded public events.18. Democrats want to force innocent multi-millionaires to pay taxes.19. Democrats want to let gays vote.20. Democrats want to let immigrants vote.

Log Cabins Better Record On Gay Issues

While Stonewall was cheerleading Obamas do-nothing Democrats, Log Cabin sued the government to kill DADT. In 2010, Log Cabin won an injunction preventing the administration from enforcing DADT. Only after fighting that injunction, and losing, did Obama finally repeal the law.

Log Cabin has also withheld its endorsement from high-profile Republican candidates who opposed marriage equality unlike Stonewall, we resist partisan groupthink, even when it costs us. We wouldnt be endorsing President Trump in 2020 if he werent truly an ally.

Trump openly supported LGBT equality before any of Stonewalls endorsees did. In 1999, while Democrats defended DADT, Trump opined that gays and lesbians serving openly was not something that would disturb me. In 2000, Trump proposed an amendment of civil rights law to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which would have rendered moot the employment discrimination case currently before the Supreme Court.

In 2015, though Trump needed religious conservative votes to win the Republican primary, he nevertheless stated publicly that religious freedom and LGBT rights are not mutually exclusive. He even rebuked his running mate-to-be, Mike Pence, for initially undervaluing LGBT interests in Indianas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, on which Pence ultimately reversed. Today, President Trump still has our back.

Stonewall Incorrectly Attacks President Trump

Stonewalls article censures Russia for orchestrating an industrial-scale genocide of gay men in Chechnya. Russias behavior is indeed alarming. So President Trump, collaborating with his Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, has launched a historic initiative to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. Basham conveniently omits this fact.

Stonewall calls Trumps plan to reduce HIV/AIDS transmission by 90 percent within 10 years lip service because HIV+ immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are separated from other immigrants. But this policy is intended to provide HIV+ immigrants, some of whom face untreated AIDS, with needed medical care. Stonewall also neglects to mention that Trumps budget included $291 million to fight HIV in 2020 alone. Trump also convinced the antiviral research group Gilead to donate billions of dollars of HIV prevention medication for 200,000 people. That is hardly lip service.

Stonewall further insinuates, ludicrously, that Trump is bigoted for halting Obama-era attempts to tell public schools which bathroom transgender students can use. We say, good: The well-being of children who do not identify with their biological sex is vitally important, but it does not fall under the originally intended purview of Title IX and would thus be better explored at the state and local level without federal intervention. Executive overreach in the name of LGBT rights does nothing to recommend our cause.

Relies On Star Power Not Plotlines

Back in the day, Disney movies sold themselves because their plots were incredible. They showcased fairytales and chronicled the rise of the underdog. This worked in Disneys animated and live-action movies, and the company was untouchable for decades. Then, they had a string of flops like Mulan, Pocahontas and Hercules. Suddenly, Disney was fallible. So, instead of hiring better writers, they took the easy way out they started to hire big name talent to headline its projects. And they havent looked back. Disney has hired giants in the film industry to voice its characters, like Miley Cyrus and . And of course, Disney puts the most popular celebs in its live action movies, like Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

Disney even has upcoming projects with Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon and Emma Watson. But what good is it to have a big star in a movie if the plot is weak? The only good thing about this change in direction is that it finally steered Disney away from cramming cultural sensitivity down everyones throats. There was a period of time when it made sure to give every minority group its own movie, from Hawaiians in Lilo and Stitch to African Americans in The Princess and the Frog. Audiences perceived this to be the pandering that it was.

How Out Of Step Is The Republican Party On Gay Rights

The wedding wasnt the only reason conservatives targeted Rep. Denver Riggleman in a party convention , but it was the driving one. Which raises the question: How out of step with the nation is the Republican Party on same-sex rights?

Its an especially pertinent question on Monday, now that the Supreme Court, with the support of one of President Trumps nominees, just voted 6-3 that existing federal law protects gay and transgender workers from discrimination based on sex.

Thats a sea change in the legal landscape of protections for LGBTQ Americans. Before this ruling, in about half of the states, you could be legally fired for being gay or transgender. Now, you cant under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which the court ruled extends to LGBTQ Americans because it prevents discrimination on the basis of sex.

But like the Republican voters in Virginia who ousted Riggleman in favor of social conservative Bob Good, there is an active wing of the Republican Party seeking to push back on the march toward expanding legal protections for gay and transgender Americans. And they have powerful allies.

The Trump administration opposed interpreting the Civil Rights Act to encompass LGBTQ workers. The leader of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network called the six justices who supported this ruling, one of whom was Trump appointee Neil M. Gorsuch, activists, implying the court got ahead of where the public is on the issue.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

Mike Pence Accidentally Admits The Real Reason Republicans Hate Democrats So Much

Common Dreams

The grassroots organization People for Bernie on Tuesday advised the Democratic Party to take a page from an unlikely sourceright-wing Vice President Mike Penceafter Pence told a rally crowd in Florida that progressives and Democrats “want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable.”

“Good message,” tweeted the group, alerting the Democratic National Committee to adopt the vice president’s simple, straightforward description of how the party can prioritize working people over corporations and the rich.

Suggesting that a progressive approach to the economy will harm the countrydespite the fact that other wealthy nations already invest heavily in making low- and middle-income “more comfortable” by taxing corporations and very high earnersPence touted the Republicans’ aim to “cut taxes” and “roll back regulations.”

The vice president didn’t mention how the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited wealthy households and powerful corporations, with corporate income tax rates slashed from 35% to 21%, corporate tax revenues plummeting, and a surge in stock buybacks while workers saw “no discernible wage increase” according to a report released last year by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Popular Democracy.

Pence’s description of progressive goals was “exactly” correct, author and commentator Anand Giridharadas tweeted.

“Yes, and what’s wrong with making poor people more comfortable?” asked Rep. Ilhan Omar .

Gw College Republicans Invite Log Cabin Republicans And Lgbt Conservatives To Talk About What It Means To Be Gay And Conservative

Kicking off a discussion on the inclusion of LGBT people in the Republican Party, Charles Moran, the managing director of the conservative gay group the Log Cabin Republicans, told George Washington University students that they dont have to be a Democrat because youre gay.

The forum at the Marvin Center Amphitheater Tuesday night, hosted by GW College Republicans, brought together what Josh Kutner, director of political affairs for the group, described as an all-star panel of Republican and conservative political and media consultants: Dave McCulloch, managing partner at Capitol Media Partners; Brad Polumbo, an editor and columnist at The Washington Examiner; and Edith Jorge-Tunon, political director for the Republican State Leadership Committee.

Mr. Moran, who has 14 years of experience managing local and national Republican political races, started the discussion by asking panelists to explain how they came out as conservative and where they fit on the conservative spectrum.

Mr. Polumbo said he realized he was a conservative when he was dropped into the liberal bastion of the University of Massachusetts and wound up persona non grata in the gay community.

A Rand Paul libertarian and technically not a Republican, he said, I definitely have a very right-wing philosophy. I am more than willing to punch at both sides.

Live your life honestly, Mr. Moran advised. Be present. Share and be aware. Accept them for who they are and who they are not.

We’re Portrayed As A Perversion

From the left, right, and even a few biased researchers, people accuse transgender people of being perverts, fetishists, and likely rapists. This is in great part why the right-wing tactics against non-discrimination ordinances have been so successful: the right wing tells people that it’s a choice between protecting their wives and daughters or a tiny group of perverts.

Many Trump Supporters Are Lgbt

So Stonewall is wrong. But something more important is going on here. What really infuriates Basham is that Log Cabin has given cover for the presidents claim that some of biggest supporters are LGBT. As if saying so were a crime Trump commits in secrecy while his fabulous gay accomplices at Log Cabin run interference. But its just a fact: Many of Trumps most fervent supporters are LGBT people.

Left-wing gay activists, however, depend on creating the impression that all LGBT people are Democrats. Democrats then use this false narrative to consolidate unearned moral authority. That is why, when the prominent gay billionaire Peter Thiel expressed support for Trump, The Advocate promptly ran a piece arguing he isnt actually gay he just has sex with men.

The point of such chicanery is to insinuate that all Republicans are homophobes, and all homophobes are Republicans. That only works if Democrats speak for all gays. So just one prominent gay or trans Republican punctures the lie that the left has a monopoly on gay rights.

Log Cabin Republicans stand to disabuse the public of that lie. The Stonewall Democrats dont want you to know we exist. But we do, our ideas are better than theirs, and were not going anywhere.

Trans Rights: A Perplexing Issue

Like many other gay conservatives, however, he seems to disconnect gay rights and transgender rights. Kabel recalled a recent article with a quotation from the conservative activist Tony Perkins that contrasted the Democratic and Republican platforms in 2016.

“The only issue Perkins raised was the transgender bathroom issue,” Kabel said. “And I thought, ‘That means we won.'”

Kabel called transgender equality “one of the most perplexing issues going.”

“Transgender people deserve support and protection just like anybody else, but it’s a very complex issue,” he said. “It’s remarkable when you hear their stories, but it’s just a very perplexing issue about how to really address it and do it so that they’re protected but other people aren’t hurt, so that people’s religious views are actually taken into consideration.”

Transgender visibility is all but absent in the Log Cabin Republicans, from their leadership to their messaging.

An OUTSpoken Instagram post compares the LGBT left to the LGBT right by putting an image of a person who appears to be transgender or gender-nonconforming next to a shirtless picture of former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, while the campaigns store sells T-shirts bearing slogans like “gay for Tucker” “gay for Melania” and “gay not stupid.

OUTspoken sent Brokeback Patriot, who has stated trans women are not women, to New Orleans Southern Decadence party to ask passersby if they think Trump is pro-gay.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Friday, May 7, 2021

60 years since 1st American in space: Tourists lining up (AP) Sixty years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, everyday people are on the verge of following in his cosmic footsteps. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin used Wednesday’s anniversary to kick off an auction for a seat on the company’s first crew spaceflight—a short Shepard-like hop launched by a rocket named New Shepard. The Texas liftoff is targeted for July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to kick off tourist flights next year. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That will be followed by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station in January.

The U.S. birthrate is falling; other countries have faced the same problem (Washington Post) With the U.S. birthrate declining for the sixth year in a row and undergoing its largest drop in nearly 50 years, according to provisional data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is facing a dilemma with which many wealthy nations in Europe and Asia have long grappled. Instead of trying to ramp up immigration, some governments have tried subsidizing fertility treatments, offering free day care and generous parental leave, and paying thousands of dollars in cash grants to parents. But there’s little evidence that these policies have been effective on a large scale. South Korea, for instance, spent roughly $120 billion between 2005 and 2018 to incentivize having children, but its birthrate continued to fall. Singapore began offering new child-care subsidies, more-generous maternity leave policies and grants for new parents that today amount to $7,330 per baby. But those interventions didn’t reverse the trend: Singapore currently has the world’s third-lowest fertility rate. And Japan, Russia, Estonia and other nations have similar problems.

Protest road blockades halt Colombian coffee exports, federation says (Reuters) Road blockades connected to anti-government protests in Colombia, which marked their eighth day on Wednesday, have halted shipments of top agricultural export coffee, the head of the grower’s federation said. The protests, originally called in opposition to a now-canceled tax reform plan, are now demanding the government take action to tackle poverty, police violence and inequalities in the health and education systems. Twenty-four people, mostly demonstrators, have died. “We are stopped completely, exports are stopped, there is no movement of coffee to ports nor internally,” federation head Roberto Velez said in a phone interview.

20 dead in Rio de Janeiro shootout (Reuters) At least 20 people, including a police officer, died on Thursday in a shootout during a police operation against drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarezinho shanty town, O Globo newspaper reported on its website. Two passengers on a metro train were also wounded in the shooting in the northern Rio neighborhood, the newspaper said.

Gunboats and blockade threats as U.K., France clash over fishing (NBC News) The U.K. and France were engaged in a naval standoff on Thursday as a long-simmering dispute over post-Brexit fishing rights escalated in the English Channel. France deployed two maritime patrol boats to the waters off the British Channel island of Jersey, its navy said, after the British Navy dispatched two of its own vessels to the area late Wednesday. The dueling moves came as a flotilla of French fishing trawlers sailed to the Jersey port of St. Helier to protest over fishing rights. The French government has suggested it could cut power supplies to the island if its fishermen are not granted full access to U.K. fishing waters under post-Brexit trading terms. Clément Beaune, the French secretary of state for European affairs, told AFP on Thursday that Paris will “not be intimidated” by the British. On the other side of the Channel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged his "unwavering support" for the island after he spoke with Jersey officials about the prospect of a French blockade. Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands with a population of 108,000, is geographically closer to France than Britain. It sits just 14 miles off the French coast and receives most of its electricity from France via undersea cables.

Ukraine wants aid, NATO support from Blinken’s visit (AP) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Ukrainian counterpart in Kyiv Thursday, telling him that he was there to “reaffirm strongly” Washington’s commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.” Blinken also assured Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba that the U.S. was committed “to work with you and continue to strengthen your own democracy, building institutions, advancing your reforms against corruption.” By visiting so early in his tenure, before any trip to Russia, Blinken is signaling that Ukraine is a high foreign-policy priority for President Joe Biden’s administration. But what he can, or will, deliver in the meeting later with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is unclear.

India hits another grim record as it scrambles for oxygen supply (AP) Infections in India hit another grim daily record on Thursday as demand for medical oxygen jumped seven-fold and the government denied reports that it was slow in distributing life-saving supplies from abroad. The number of new confirmed cases breached 400,000 for the second time since the devastating surge began last month. The 412,262 cases pushed India’s tally to more than 21 million. The Health Ministry also reported 3,980 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 230,168. Experts believe both figures are an undercount. Eleven COVID-19 patients died as the pressure in the oxygen line dropped suddenly in a government medical college hospital in Chengalpet town in southern India on Wednesday night, possibly because of a faulty valve, The Times of India newspaper reported. Hospital authorities said they had repaired the pipeline last week, but the consumption of oxygen doubled since then, the daily said.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid gains chance to form government, oust Netanyahu (Washington Post) Yair Lapid, a former news anchor and leader of Israel’s centrist opposition, was picked to negotiate a new governing coalition Wednesday, opening the possibility of Israel getting its first government not led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in more than a decade. President Reuven Rivlin tapped Lapid to make the next attempt to form a government one day after Netanyahu failed to assemble a parliamentary majority after 28 days of effort. Under Israel’s system, Lapid also has four weeks to craft a power-sharing plan. If he falls short, the president could open to the process to any member of the Knesset or call for Israel’s fifth election since the spring of 2019. Lapid will face a stiff challenge in trying to find common ground among the range of anti-Netanyahu parties elected in March. As a bloc, they would control enough seats to secure a majority. But ideologically, they range from the far right to the far left of Israel’s political spectrum. They also include Israeli Arab parties that traditionally play no part in supporting governing coalitions but that may be needed this time.

Instagram fuels rise in black-market sales of maids into Persian Gulf servitude (Washington Post) The advent of Instagram in recent years has helped create an international black market for migrant workers, in particular women recruited in Africa and Asia who are sold into servitude as maids in Persian Gulf countries. Unlicensed agents have exploited the social media platform to place these women into jobs that often lack documentation or assurances of proper pay and working conditions. Several women who were marketed via Instagram described being treated essentially as captives and forced to work grueling hours for far less money than they had been promised. “They advertise us on social media, then the employer picks. Then we are delivered to their house. We are not told anything about the employers. You’re just told to take your stuff, and a driver takes you there,” said Vivian, 24, from Kenya. Domestic servants sold on the platform described encountering threats, exploitation and abuse. The agencies which marketed them, meanwhile, made thousands of dollars. In response to a request for comment last month, an Instagram spokesperson asked for the list of accounts identified by The Post so company officials could investigate. Instagram has since deleted these accounts.

Nonuplets: Woman From Mali Gives Birth To 9 Babies (NPR) A Malian woman has given birth to nine babies, in what could become a world record. Halima Cissé had been expecting to have seven newborns: ultrasound sessions had failed to spot two of her babies. "The newborns (five girls and four boys) and the mother are all doing well," Mali's health minister, Dr. Fanta Siby, said in an announcement about the births. Professor Youssef Alaoui, medical director of the private Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca where Cissé gave birth, said the babies were born at 30 weeks. The newborns weighed between 500 grams and 1 kilogram (about 1.1 to 2.2 pounds), he told journalists. The clinic has deployed a team of around 30 staff members to aid the mother's delivery and care for her nine children.

Nigeria reels from nationwide wave of deadly violence (The Guardian) Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari has come under mounting pressure from critics and allies alike as the country reels from multiple security crises that have claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks. An alarming wave of violence has left millions in Africa’s most populous country in uproar at the collapse in security. Attacks by jihadist groups in the north-east have been compounded by a sharp rise in abductions targeting civilians in schools and at interstate links across Nigeria. Mass killings by bandit groups in rural towns, a reported rise in armed robberies in urban areas and increasingly daring attacks on security forces by pro-Biafran militants in the south-east have also all risen. In April alone, almost 600 civilians were killed across the country and at least 406 abducted by armed groups, according to analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations. The violence has left much of the country on edge and Buhari facing the fiercest criticism since he took office.

#headlines #news

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revlyncox · 3 years

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Superhero Values (2021)

Whether we have great powers or simply great responsibilities, we return to our values to guide our actions. This talk was revised and expanded for the Washington Ethical Society, February 21, 2021.

Earlier, you gave some advice to “Human Person” (a fictional superhero who “visited” earlier in the Platform) about compassion, understanding, and commitment, which are easier words to say than to practice. It helps to have role models, even if their stories didn’t happen exactly in the way they are told. It seems to me that mythology, fiction, and maybe even history can supply us with examples of values we can agree on. Stories that have captured our imaginations in the past may remind us of the people we hope to become.

When I was a kid, Batman was the lead character in some of those stories. He showed up in comic books and Pez dispensers, but the most influential form of Batman from my childhood was the Adam West character on television. When I was six or seven years old, the other kids who went to my babysitter and I used to run around the yard chasing super villains, pretending the basement steps were the Bat Cave, and generally doing our part for the good of Gotham City. We all traded roles as the heroes, heroines, and the various arch-nemeses.

I learned a couple of things from the Bat-team. I learned that superheroes have origin stories, events that changed the direction of their lives. You might not be able to tell from looking at them, especially in their secret identities, but every superhero has a past. The Bat-team also taught me that superheroes struggle with power. Whether the super skills come from hard work, cool gadgets, or another planet, heroes have to figure out the most effective and responsible way to use those skills. Finally, I learned that superheroes form coalitions. Batman and Robin and Batgirl worked together, not to mention Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara. Even an independent vigilante needs other people for the toughest problems.

Come to think of it, those same things are true for all of us. Each of us has to decide how to respond to the past. Individually and as a group, we are faced with questions of power and responsibility. Teaming up with other people is a source of strength, in spite of and perhaps because of our differences. I think these characteristics of superheroes call attention to WES’s future as a community.

Heroes Have Origins

First, superheroes have origin stories. Some event from the past sparked the character’s discovery of talents and passions, leading to a new sense of identity and purpose. Those events might be associated with death or separation from a loved one, or with the loss of the character’s pre-heroic dreams.

Superman’s powers come from his extra-planetary birth, but his ideas about truth, justice, and the American way come from Martha and Jonathan Kent. There is some speculation that Superman’s creators (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) modeled him after Moses, a baby whose people faced destruction, and was carried in a small vessel to a land where his birth identity had to be concealed.

There is a category of stories in which the characters have qualities that were typical in their place of origin, but something called them to help people in a world similar to our own, where their profound difference turned out to be a gift. Wonder Woman, Black Panther, AquaMan, and Valkyrie fall into this category.

On the other hand, some superheroes start off with an event of pain or trauma, like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite to become Spiderman. Batman’s path is a response to trauma. In the Watchmen mini-series on HBO, one of the characters’ commitment to justice came from being a survivor of the 1921 white supremacist attack on Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan is mainly in this category, having gained her powers during an unusual event.

Whatever the story, most extra-human comic book characters have faced a life-changing event that seems to isolate them from important people in their lives. Often, the character will acquire or discover or place new value on a gift or a talent they have during that experience. Picking up these pieces of loss, loneliness, and strength, the character eventually forges a new sense of purpose.

Michael Servetus (Miguel Serveto) is someone from history whose story follows this pattern a bit. He wasn’t always brave, and he wasn’t known for being kind, but he did set himself apart and commit his life to the truth as he saw it. I wouldn’t necessarily call him a Humanist, but he was a free thinker in that he defied the orthodoxy of his time, and his sacrifices made it possible for the people who came after him to do even more questioning of creeds, dogmas, and oppressive religious organizations.

When Servetus read the Bible for himself for the first time as a young student in the 1520s, he was shocked to discover no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1531, he published a tract, De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity), seemingly convinced that people would see it his way if only they would listen. That’s not what happened. He was run out of town, his books were confiscated, and the Supreme Council of the Inquisition started looking for him.

This is where the secret identity comes in. Servetus fled to Paris and assumed the name of Michel de Villeneuve. He had a varied career as de Villeneuve, first as an editor and publisher, then as a doctor. He worked on a seven-volume edition of the Bible, adding insightful footnotes. He was the first European to publish about the link between the pulmonary and respiratory systems.

During his time as the personal physician for the Archbishop of Vienne, he secretly worked on his next theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). He also struck up a correspondence with his old classmate, John Calvin. Servetus was not diplomatic in his criticisms of Calvin’s writing, and Calvin broke off correspondence. Servetus seemed to think that their exchange was illuminating, because he included copies of the letters when he sent an advance copy of the Restitutio to Geneva.

The publication of the Restitutio in 1553 marked the end of Servetus’ secret identity. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities pursued him as a dangerous heretic. He was burned at the stake on October 27, 1553, by the order of The Council of Geneva. Reportedly, he maintained his beliefs until the end, shouting heretical prayers from the flames. The Catholic Inquisition in France burned Servetus in effigy a few months later. There were a lot of people who didn’t want his ideas to be heard. Luckily for us, a few copies of his books were preserved, and went on to generate new ideas among religious reformers for over 450 years.

Now, I’m not saying Michael Servetus was a superhero. It might be hard to identify with him in some ways. Though he had ideas that were called Unitarian at the time, Unitarian Universalists oday would disagree with most of what he wrote, as would most Ethical Culturists. His creeds don’t match most of our beliefs; though some of his deeds, such as challenging authority and being a medical provider, might resonate. Nevertheless, we can see how a turning point in someone’s life can bring isolation, energy, purpose, abilities, and vulnerabilities, all at the same time. His origins were more like Spiderman than Superman: Being in the right place at the right time, Servetus was bitten by the free thinking bug. He had to adopt an alter ego, but the bug also afforded him the drive and the insight to make great contributions to scholarship and religious freedom.

How often is it the same for those of us who are regular folks? The events that make us who we are may bring a sense of loss or loneliness. These same events may bring a chance for us to develop new talents, or personal connection to the work we aspire to do. Passion and vulnerability can come from a single point in time.

The thing that sets a superhero origin story apart from a villain origin story is how the character translates their past into a future of meaning and purpose. Most of us are not consistently villains or heroes; we have to choose in every moment how to draw from our past to make choices in the present. We can’t control the historical facts of our origin stories. Even if our own choices led to the turning points in our lives, they are in the past now. What we can do is bring our values to the way we understand those turning points, and to our decisions about what to do with the gifts we have now. Let’s do our best to choose to use our origins well.

Heroes Form Coalitions

The very first appearance of Spiderman (in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962) saw the teenage Peter Parker misusing his new powers, only to have his negligence contribute to the death of his Uncle Ben, one of his adoptive parents. Peter’s understanding of Ben’s teaching that “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” shaped his character from then on. The spider counterparts from other universes, heroes like Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales, also have turning points on that theme.

Superhero characters struggling with power and responsibility would have benefitted from reading about James Luther Adams, who was a professor at Harvard during the 1950s and 1960s. Adams had a great deal to say about power and what that meant for the responsibilities of movements for liberation.

Between 1927 and the late 1930s, Adams made several trips to Germany, a country that was renowned for philosophical scholarship. He spoke with religious and academic leaders, was detained for questioning by the Gestapo, and developed a sense of urgency about the political, cultural, moral, and spiritual crisis that went along with the rise of the Nazi party. While Adams developed great respect for the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement, he noticed that Germany’s churches as a whole were not pushing back against the crisis.

Adams said that individual and organized philosophy should be “examined.” There must be a path for critique, self-correction, and development. Adams wrote, “the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power.”

In that same period when Adams was noticing trends of power, organization, and responsibility in Germany, Humanists in the United States were also teaming up. The roots of some of these relationships went back to the Free Religious Association, which was the group where Felix Adler hung around with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. The FRA led to another trend called the “Ethical Basis” group within Unitarianism.

I’m drawing here from The Humanist Way: An Introduction to Ethical Humanist Religion, a book by former WES Senior Leader Ed Ericson. Ericson writes that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethical Basis bloc had successfully advocated that inclusion as either a member or a clergy person in Unitarian congregations be purely on an ethical basis rather than having any doctrinal basis. Ericson continues:

They resisted all attempts to impose any theological requirement, however broadly such a test might be construed. Like Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture, the Ethical Basis Unitarians regarded the dedicated ethical life to be inherently religious without any necessary underpinning of theological belief. This concurrence of views resulted in a close working relationship between the leaders of the Ethical Societies of Chicago and St. Louis and their ministerial counterparts in the Western Unitarian Conference.

(Ericson, The Humanist Way, p. 46-47)

Ericson goes on to say that, while this cohort was concentrated in the midwest, Octavius Brooks Frothingham in New York also largely shared Adler’s philosophy. Ericson also points out that the Ethical Basis cohort provided “a seedbed where organized religious Humanism, under that name, would first put down roots in American soil,” making this development of interest to Ethical Humanism. So, already at the turn of the century, there is some superhero teaming up going on. It gets better!

In 1913, the Unitarian minister John H. Dietrich began using the term “Humanism” to identify his non-theistic philosophy of religion. Dietrich said that he first encountered the term as a religious designation in the text of a lecture delivered to the London Ethical Society (Ericson, p. 61). Ericson writes that “the Ethical Union in Britain had described their movement by the turn of the century.” Ethical Culture in the United States started identifying more closely as a unique expression within the broader Humanist movement a little later, not until after Adler’s death in 1933. At that point, they found a whole league’s worth of Humanists to team up with.

But back to Dietrich, who discovered that his colleague Curtis Reese in Chicago was writing about the same kind of philosophy. Having found each other, they attracted others to the growing Humanist movement. By 1927, they had connected with scientists, philosophers, and journalists, who collectively were turning out what Ericson describes as “a torrent of books, articles, sermons and lectures” (p. 67) that established Humanism as a significant force in American society. In 1933, thirty-four of these prominent figures signed on to The Humanist Manifesto.

Later groups wrote the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973 and the Humanist Manifesto III of 2003. The original 1933 document set a historic precedent, bringing together people from a variety of perspectives and settings. Unitarian and Universalist ministers were well represented, along with V.T. Thayer, Director of the Ethical Culture Schools of New York, plus A. Eustace Haydon and Lester Mondale, who later became Ethical leaders (Ericson, p. 70).

I would suggest that the Washington Ethical Society, by affiliating with both the Unitarian Universalist Association and the American Ethical Union, is living out the spirit of cooperation that has powered the Humanist movement in the United States from its inception. Ethical Humanism is a unique expression and tradition within the larger Humanist movement, and yet that larger movement remains important for understanding who we are and what we are here to do. We come to a deeper understanding of identity and mission when we team up.

In fiction, superheroes seem to gravitate to one another. From the X-Men to the Avengers to the Teen Titans, collections of lead characters become ensembles. They have very different abilities and outlooks. Teaming up isn’t always easy, and it can be risky. Household squabbles may become epic battles if super abilities get out of hand. However, when they combine their gifts in the same direction, they can tackle complex problems that none of them would be able to handle alone.

This is why we form coalitions, too. WES is a community of people who have many differences in your individual lives. Diversity in creed and unity in deed, WES members are able to learn together, make music together, serve the community, and witness for justice, without worrying too much about who is an atheist or an agnostic or a theist or a polytheist. Whether among members, or in coalition with our neighbors across religious or geographic lines, we are able to put differences aside as we work for the benefit of our shared community. It does happen, though, that human beings forget, or retreat into what we think is a bubble of sameness, or narrow our scope of what seems possible.

Let’s build on what is already going well as we resist the shrinking of our horizons. There may be partners in our community that we have yet to meet. There may be institutes for exceptional heroes, or halls of justice, that we have to overcome our internalized hurdles of classism and racism before we can join.

At the very least, we can ensure that we’re making the most of our super team here at WES. Like the superheroes, we can do more and support each other when we come together.

Conclusion

There is a lot that WES has in common with an assembly of superheroes. Each one of us has an origin story, a set of events that shaped our talents, passions, and vulnerabilities. Each one of us has the opportunity to shape that story into a life of meaning and purpose. Like superheroes, it is incumbent on us to come to terms with power. Our collective abilities and assets make us a force to be reckoned with, and it is up to us to do the moral discernment to make sure we’re doing a good job wielding that power. Our honesty with each other and practicing all of our shared values and commitments will help. Like the best superheroes, we form alliances. Within the WES community, we share our specialized powers and support one another to accomplish goals none of us could handle alone. In our coalitions with other groups, we build bridges that support compassion. May all that has been divided be made whole.

May it be so.

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quakerjoe · 4 years

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American conservatism—the so-called “culture of life”—worships annihilation.

A decade ago, in my first public writing since leaving Capitol Hill, I warned that the Republican Party, in its evolution towards an extremist conservative movement allied with extremist Christian fundamentalism, was becoming like “one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” After Donald Trump’s enthronement as the decider of our fate, I analyzed the GOP’s descent into a nihilism that belied every one of its supposed “values.” They value only absolute power or ruin.

It is now long past time to cast off highfalutin’ Latinisms and simply call the Republicans and their religious and secular conservative allies what they are, and in unadorned English: a death cult. As the country reels from the coronavirus pandemic, our national government might just as well be run by the infamous People’s Temple of Jonestown.

By now we are benumbed by the all-pervasive arguments over relaxing workplace shutdowns and stay-at-home orders due to coronavirus. In any sane society, the issue would be how to institute the most efficient measures to defeat the pandemic in the shortest time and with the lowest loss of life. Instead, Trump and his merry band of lunatics have hijacked the national debate into a faux-serious discussion of when, oh, please, how soon, can we “reopen the economy?” Naturally, the media gamely continue to play along with this calculated bit of dezinformatsiya.

This has led to extreme callousness, like that shown by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who opined that grams and gramps should be eager to shuffle off this mortal coil for the sake of their grandchildren.

There is abundant empirical evidence against this notion: voters in Florida, known as “God’s waiting room” for its geriatric population, are notoriously averse to paying one cent in state income tax to fund education or child health, let alone lay down their lives. In any case, the 69-year-old Patrick, who claims he’s willing to die for his proposition, did not relinquish the burdens of his office to volunteer as an emergency room orderly.

The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

There’s also Congressman Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, who put a patriotic gloss on his Malthusianism, decreeing that “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

Then, striking the pose of the Serious Adult in the Room correcting mischievous children, he intoned: “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils.” This encapsulates the stereotype of the economic conservative: Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, the rigid, condescending, and heartless pedagogue.

But some pronouncements from the Trump coalition offer more ethereal rationalizations than the mere pursuit of lucre. The news is replete with stories about evangelical ministers packing their megachurches like sardine cans in defiance of state orders for social distancing, as well as contempt for common sense.

We all know about that harebrained medicine man in Louisiana, Tony Spell, already arrested for violating the state’s prohibition of large gatherings, who continues his antics nonstop. Spell, who sounds as socially responsible as a blood tick, is proclaiming his parishioners ought to choose death: “Like any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear.”

So much for fundamentalists’ vaunted “culture of life,” a slogan which the prestige media never presume to critique.

For a more socially upscale version of this sentiment, let us turn to First Things, a pretentious journal of alleged theology that dresses up its non-stop shilling for the GOP with high-toned words like “numinous” and references to the philosopher Erasmus.

Last month, its editor, R.R. Reno, wrote a piece called, “Say No to Death’s Dominion.” It is an extraordinary performance. Contrary to the title, he actually argues that death should be embraced. He does this by weaving an imbecilic theology that includes falsifying the history of the 1918 flu epidemic to make his basic point:

“In our simple-minded picture of things, we imagine a powerful fear of death arises because of the brutal deeds of cruel dictators and bloodthirsty executioners. But in truth, Satan prefers sentimental humanists. We resent the hard boot of oppression on our necks, and given a chance, most will resist. How much better, therefore, to spread fear of death under moralistic pretexts.”

Oh, I get it! So Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day were more depraved than Josef Stalin! Reno ends with this:

“Fear of death and causing death is pervasive—stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price and unchecked by Christian leaders who in all likelihood secretly accept the materialist assumptions of our age. “

This insane rant against materialism would seem to contradict the crassly materialistic assumptions underlying economic conservatives’ advocacy for letting a deadly virus “wash over” the population, as Trump would say. But these views, at first sight blatantly opposed, can be reconciled.

And who better to reconcile God and Mammon than a grifter like Jerry Falwell, Jr., ringmaster of Liberty University and testifier to Donald Trump’s status as an emissary of the Almighty? Not only has Falwell continued the school year, virtually alone among American universities, and despite pleading from students and parents to close, he has now been sued for failing to refund fees for student activities that have been suspended.

Fundamentalist preachers’ love of money is no secret: it is only by packing churches that the collection plate will yield a bounteous harvest so that their missionary work can continue – perhaps logistically aided by the purchase of a $65-million Gulfstream executive jet. And why not? It would upstage Pat Robertson, who had a mere Learjet, and a rental at that.

Political observers often wonder about the bizarre conservative coalition of plutocrats and theocrats, believing it to be unstable. But the intersection of the heartless pecuniary motives of religious and economic conservatives is no coincidence. And beneath the Ebenezer Scrooge façade of economic conservatives is the same kind of perverted idealism that we see in Tony Spell or R.R. Reno.

The most cost-efficient industrial process is one that wastes the fewest resource inputs. Likewise, internal combustion engines have evolved to get better mileage even as they pollute less. And electric motors are even more fuel efficient and less polluting.

So how do we explain conservatives’ perverse hatred of the environment, even when there are no profits at stake, as well as their tenacious denial of climate change in the face of irrefutable data? Is it not much the same as the Bible thumper who bitterly condemns stewardship of the environment as Gaia worship?

There are other similarities. Since the 1970s oil shocks (and coincident with the rise of the New Right), an abiding feature on the American scene has been the survivalist, hoping for the national Götterdämmerung that will vindicate his having stockpiled 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a horde of Krugerrands. This dovetails with fundamentalists’ weird enthusiasm for the prospect of world annihilation that animates belief in the Rapture, the only difference being the technique by which the elect avoid the mass slaughter.

Firearms fetishism and a fascination with violence, war, and armed insurrection are also mainstays of right-wing ideology, hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell Sr.’s, proclamation that God is Pro-War. And how about the Ultimate Fighting Jesus? The NRA neatly intersects with “muscular Christianity,” revealing both ideological kinship and some very embarrassing gender insecurities that frequently irrupt in misogyny and homosexual panic.

There is no longer the slightest doubt in any sane person’s mind that not only are the GOP’s fundamentalist-extremist religious allies a death cult disguised as 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organizations. The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

“¡Viva la Muerte!”

“Long live death!” That was the defiant cry of José Millán-Astray y Terreros, a general in Francisco Franco’s fascist army during the Spanish civil war. It could just as well suit Trump’s foot soldiers.

- Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government“ and “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”

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life-in-prosper-city · 4 years

Text

The Team

Under the cut are profiles of all the team’s members.

The Team doesn’t really have a name- in their own eyes, they’re just a group of people who want to help others. At the present time, there are eleven members of the team. Five of them are full-time active members, meaning they’ll respond to any type of danger at any time. These members are Cobalt Hunter, Honorstar, Silver Seer, Chlorothorn, and Kingdom Animalia. Three of them are part-time active members, meaning they’re being actively trained to fight, and they can come along on some calls. These members are Langley and Lyndon, the twins, and Zilla. One of them, Dr. Malcolm, is a full-time support member; he stays at the base, or nearby but not right at the fight or danger, as a support for Kingdom Animalia. The last two members, Spectre and Serena, are too young to fight, and are only part of the team because they have nowhere else to go.

Compared to the Safeguard Coalition, whose hub is located in Prosper City, The Team are more of a family; they all live in the same building, each having their own apartment but sharing common areas, and they all know each other’s secret identities. There’s a silent trust between all of them.

In terms of principles, The Team prioritizes citizen safety and limiting collateral damage. They have a no-kill policy against the criminals or villains they fight, as long as they’re living or sentient beings. If they have to let a bank robber get away in order to save civilians, they’ll let the robber go; stolen money is not as important as people’s lives.

Cobalt Hunter/Grace Kearney (She/her)

Part time museum curator, part time superhero, and part time team mom. Grace is the most responsible person on the team, and the official leader. She’s the one who makes the important decisions for the team, though she does take everyone’s opinions into account. Because she has the most demanding day job out of all of them, she makes sure that chores around the apartment building are organized and delegated to the others. Taking care of Spectre and Serena is also her self-appointed job, because the rest of the adults on the team just don’t understand very much about child care. She may not have superpowers like everyone else on the team, but she’s skilled at what she does and strikes fear into the heart of the criminals the team faces.

Abilities: Professionally trained in archery, self-defense, and mixed martial arts since childhood; her strongest skill is her archery. Like many unpowered superheroes, she relies on technologically enhanced gadgets to fight powered supervillains. She has many types of lethal and non-lethal arrows, and her bow itself is customized for additional functions.

Other skills: While archery is her main skill, she can also hold her own in CQC for some time, and she’s super beefy. A good understanding of technology; she can’t create her own gadget arrows but she can repair them. She’s very organized and has a good eye for detail. Though Casey, Honorstar, is the frontman of the team, Cobalt Hunter is also known to answer questions from the press and public; she isn’t as charismatic as Casey is, but she knows how to talk to people and lead conversations where she wants them to go.

Honorstar/Casey Lebeau (They/them)

28 year old professional superhero, and spiritually the leader of the team. The main chef and general housekeeper, Casey inherited a great sum of money from both their parents and their two aunts (and their husbands), who never had kids of their own. There was no one tragic accident that killed their family; there was sickness, accidents, a suicide. Casey was 3 when they became an orphan, and 17 when all their aunts and uncles died. Still, they stay positive, knowing death has a place in the world, and defying it only brings darkness. Maybe it’s the loneliness of having no family, or the feeling of responsibility they have from their powers, but Casey’s compassion is shown on their sleeve, taking in strays, and working to save the innocent.

Abilities: Superhuman, either from birth or something else, Casey doesn’t know. They have super strength, speed, stamina, healing ability, resilience, and dexterity.

Other skills: Good at cooking and cleaning. Able to organize small to medium groups of people; enjoys being an emotional support for other people.

Zilla (They/them)

Zilla is a 15 year old former homeless kid, passed through the foster system like a library book until they ran away. They were saved by Honorstar from a battle they got caught in, and given a place to live with the rest of the team. Zilla isn’t very talkative, but as long as someone else is carrying the conversation, they’ll keep up. They’re still working on building up their social skills, after being alone for most of their life. They enjoy reading all types of books, and watching movies with the other team members. Somewhat defensive still, they quickly grew protective of the team as well- they’re the first real family that Zilla has ever had.

Abilities: Can shapeshift into a monstrous, 10 foot tall, semi-anthropomorphic crocodilian, gaining the jaw strength, sharp teeth, powerful legs, and large lung capacity that are common to crocodilians.

Other skills: Fairly strong even when not transformed; skilled but untrained in close combat fights without transforming, able to take on a few untrained fighters by themself. They’re resourceful and have a good sense of spatial awareness.

Kingdom Animalia/King (He/him, but he doesn’t care he’s a dog)

King is a dog. He’s a good boy. He enjoys chasing ducks but he isn’t allowed to do it because Warren says it’s Mean. He likes to be a gecko when he’s at work with Warren. Warren and Casey tell King to be a human when strangers ask him questions. He has to pretend to be a human like mom dogs pretend to fight puppies when they play. King is not great at pretending to be a human, but he tries his best, and he gets pets when he makes bad guys go in cages or helps not-bad guys get away from danger. King likes helping humans even when he doesn’t get pets. They make happy sounds, and King likes that.

Abilities: King is able to shapeshift into other animals. Without direction, he doesn’t have much of a use for it, but with Dr. Malcolm’s helping telepathy, King can use his abilities to aid the rest of the team in fights and rescues.

Other skills: Very pettable, very cuddly, good at doing tricks for treats. King is good at search-and-rescue in his true form, and he’s the very best on the team for cheering up the other team members. He is a dog, and has all the usual dog skills that come with being a dog.

Dr. Warren Malcolm (He/him)

A 38 year old pharmacist with a kind and selfless heart. He worked with the team for a while before actually joining them, giving them medications they needed even without an actual prescription- It may be against the law, but it wasn’t harming anyone else, and it was saving lives. Once he rescued King, he moved in with the team and joined them full time as King’s “handler”. He’s the oldest person on the team, and his age shows. He doesn’t understand the video games the kids play, not for lack of trying. He prefers working with analogue technology where possible. He likes to read and do logic and word puzzles in his free time. He volunteers at various animal shelters and other animal facilities when he isn’t busy, using his ability to figure out what might need to change for an animal’s comfort.

Abilities: Animal telepathy. For animals he’s unfamiliar with, he can only reach them from nearby. Animals he’s familiar with, he can reach them from a little bit further. Animals that he’s familiar with and they’re familiar with him and trust him, he can reach them from quite a distance. Animals in distress often unknowingly reach him.

Other skills: As a doctor of pharmacology, Warren has more medical skills than anyone else on the team, and a better understanding of microbiology. As such, he’s often the team’s first contact for any sort of medical care. He’s a fairly logically-minded person, as well. He’s handy with a toolbox, too.

Silver Seer/Jordan Sun

Jordan… Isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He struggled in school, not for lack of trying, but seriously, school was so boring. His lack of academic success may seem ironic, given his superpowers are of the mental variety. However, his personal interests fall on the more physical side of things. Jordan is a bit of a gym rat and enjoys other physical activities too. He’s outgoing and playful, he gets along well with the younger members of the team. He tries to be responsible and do chores and help cook, but sometimes he just drops the ball. He’s good at focusing! But only on some things.

Abilities: At the present time, he has many abilities, but they aren’t very powerful. He has prophetic dreams, glimpses of the future in his waking moments, and with strong enough concentration, he can purposefully see up to a few minutes into the future. He has sharp intuition; even without exact images, he can tell when something bad is about to happen, or feel when something is wrong either with a person or an object. He can see illusions for what they are, and can also tell if another person is under the effects of mind control. He himself is resistant to mind control, as well as possession and unwanted telepathic or empathetic readings or projections. With a willing target, he can make a telempathic connection between them or a few people; they can share thoughts and emotions with words, images, and other sensory projections. His strongest mental ability is his telekinesis. With his mind, he can exert twice the amount of force as his physical body; given he routinely strength trains, his telekinesis can reach almost incredible power.

Other skills: Jordan is the mundanely strongest person on the team. With a history in school-level track and field, he also has good physical coordination and team coordination skills. He’s pretty self-sufficient; when he was living alone, he cooked most of his meals and learned how to do his chores.

Chlorothorn/Project Dryad Subject 14/ “Clair” (She/her)

Technically 5 years old, her mental and physical age resembles that of a human in their mid 20s. As her assigned name suggests, Clair was the 14th experiment in a larger project designed to create creatures using both animal and plant DNA. After escaping the laboratory, she met Casey, and agreed to live in his building. She enjoys all types of media, learning more about what humans are like through observation, and learning more about the world in general. She has a desire to protect life, which made her very suitable to join the team’s active roster.

Abilities: Created as a human-plant hybrid, Clair has a humanoid body structure and face, the ability to speak, and a heart, lungs, and nervous system. Her plant DNA, however, mixed with the rapid cell generation chamber that was used to create her, gave her many plant-like traits, and abilities beyond the capacity of any normal human or plant. Her skin can absorb sunlight for photosynthesis, her arms and legs are made of many intertwined woody vines that she can extend and retract at will, and she doesn’t feel pain the same way humans do. She heals relatively easily, as her body’s structures are fairly simple, and she is sustained by a mainly liquid diet.

Other skills: Clair has excellent short- and long-term memory and recall. She has knowledge of a lot of subjects, and learns more every day. She doesn’t have many talents as she hasn’t had much opportunity to attend classes, but she’s kind and polite and always brings a sense of cheer to the apartments.

Langley & Lyndon (Both he/him)

These 18 year old identical twins consider each other their best friend in the world, even if they don’t always get along. They share their looks, their games, and the experience of a disaster that would change their life forever.

Langley Hayes

Hardworking and dedicated, Langley never fails to get a job done, big or small. He’s somewhat more outgoing than his brother, preferring the company of many to the silence of solitude. Currently working at warehouse part time, and on the back-up roster of the team, Langley isn’t shy about showing his emotions or goofing around, often entertaining the younger kids.

Abilities: Gravity manipulation, in the simplest terms. He can increase, decrease, or change the direction of the gravity in an area around him, and after some practice he’s nearly able to reach zero gravity. He may or may not use his powers outside of combat or emergencies, despite his brother’s lectures on being careful and not exposing himself as a super.

Other talents: He has mad video game strats. He enjoys skateboarding, excels at math in school, and handles himself well in social situations. He can also handle spicy food very well for an Irish heritage white person.

Lyndon Hayes

Responsible, dependable, considerate; Lyndon strives to be a good teammate and friend, but often indulges in fun and rebellious activities. Nothing too dangerous, though. Danger and fun can’t coexist, for Lyndon, though he does admit that the battles with the team are fun after the fact. He’s less socially-driven than his brother, able to enjoy some time alone to play video games, watch whatever holds his attention at the time, read a book, or come up with stories.

Abilities: Magnetism. Though at first only able to pick up metal objects without actually holding onto it, Lyndon has trained himself to be able to use his power to attract magnetic objects from a distance, repel magnetic things from him, or attract or repel magnetic objects from a point of his choice. Though not yet strong enough to, say, bend a steel beam, he’s able to manipulate magnetic material through careful and precise magnetic forces.

Other skills: Creative in his thinking, one of the top students in his physics class, and good at managing his emotions. He’s a good cook, one of the best on the team at explaining things to the kids in a way they understand, and he’s learned how to quickly read the team’s moods.

Serena

Only nine years old, Serena lives with the team. Her powers manifested when she was young, out of desperation and fear. She used them to run away, and she ended up alone in Prosper. She met Grace by chance, and went to live at the apartment building with the rest of the team. She spends most of her days at home, learning from workbooks that Grace brings her and hanging out with whoever else is home.

Abilities: Intangibility including invisibility and gravity immunity. Without a physical body she doesn't need to eat, drink, or breathe, and doesn't feel heat or cold. She’s immune to any physical effect, most magical effects, and some psychic effects. She also can’t have any physical effect on the world in this state, however.

Other skills: She’s a little bit above average in education for her age, and she especially enjoys language arts and nature studies. She’s trained with Grace to learn some self-defense moves, and they plan to move onto offensive attacks soon. For someone her age, she holds conversations with adults well, even if she’s a bit shy.

Spectre (He/him)

A six year old boy with a sad past that haunts him. Quiet and somewhat shy, it takes him a while to warm up to people. Because of his powers and his past, he has trouble sleeping when he’s alone, and tends to stick around familiar and trusted people as often as possible. He likes Pokemon, toy cars, bunnies, video games, and yogurt. He doesn’t like taking three vitamin pills every morning, or the permanent scarring to his throat, or that he might leave his body whenever he sleeps, or bees.

Abilities: His soul and body exist with only a weak bond, letting his soul leave his body. He can possess and control other people for short amounts of time, as long as the target doesn’t have a very strong psyche, a lot of willpower, or some other protection against possession, mind control, or ‘ghosts’. While his soul is outside of his body, his cells go into a state of stasis, preserving his body until his soul's return.

Other skills: He’s like 6 he doesn’t need to have other skills. He’s good at colouring inside the lines, though.

CREDITS

Picrews used: Jordan, Langley & Lyndon, Zilla; Warren; Spectre; Casey; Clair; King; Grace; Serena

Divider source

#original writing #character profile #life in prosper city #superheroes #the team #zilla #langley #lyndon #the twins #clair #spectre #king #warren #casey #grace #jordan #serena

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justforbooks · 5 years

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Jacques Chirac, former French president, dies aged 86

The former French president Jacques Chirac, a self-styled affable rogue who had one of the longest political careers in Europe, has died aged 86.

For several years he had suffered from memory loss said to be linked to a form of Alzheimer’s disease or to the minor stroke that he had while in office.

Chirac, who was head of state from 1995 to 2007, boasted one of the longest continuous political careers in Europe – twice president, twice prime minister and 18 years as mayor of Paris.

Although his time as president was marked by inaction and political stagnation, and despite having left France just as divided and struggling with mounting debt, inequalities and unemployment as he had found it, his debonair persona meant that in retirement he was embraced as one of France’s favourite politicians.

Chirac will be remembered internationally for leading France’s strong opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when approval ratings for his anti-war stance in France soared to 90%. “War is always a last resort. It is always proof of failure. It is always the worst of solutions, because it brings death and misery,” he said a week before the US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq. He warned that any occupation of Iraq would prove a “nightmare”.

One of Chirac’s greatest gestures at home was to reconcile the nation with its history by acknowledging that France as a whole was responsible for the roundup of some 76,000 Jews sent to Nazi death camps during the second world war. His vow that the “criminal folly” of the German occupation was “assisted by the French people, by the French state” lifted the last taboo of the occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime. His apology was the first time a postwar French head of state had fully acknowledged France’s role.

Chirac will be remembered above all as a master in the art of political seduction. For decades he charmed the public with his endless handshaking, patting of cows’ backsides and shaking of dogs’ paws on his tours around France – a beer-drinking, Gitanes-smoking man of the people who was able to eat five lunches in one afternoon on the election trail.

He shook so many hands while criss-crossing France that he used to plunge his fingers into a bucket of ice at the end of the day or wear plasters to protect from the blisters he got from his powerful grip on pensioners and farmers. He had a visceral need to reach out and touch people – whether it was hugging an elderly voter or flamboyantly kissing the hand of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Chirac was much mocked, often satirised and once nicknamed “Superliar”. After a historic trial in 2011, he became the first former president to be convicted of corruption following embezzlement charges in a party funding scandal when he was mayor of Paris. Yet he was seen to embody the French president’s role as republican monarch with a kind of panache that Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande would later be found by the public to be lacking.

Politically he was known as the “weathervane”, for his ability to shift as it suited him. He went from championing state control in the 1970s to Ronald Reagan’s free-market liberalism in the 1980s. When he was elected president in 1995, he shocked the world by resuming nuclear testing in atoll explosions in the South Pacific, then took to the stage as an eco-champion at the 2002 Earth summit, warning: “Our house is burning while we look elsewhere.” He went from virulent eurosceptic in the late 1970s to staunch euro-defender 10 years later.

During more than 43 years in politics, Chirac was described as a “bulldozer” and “killer” of rivals. Born to well-off but progressive parents in Paris, what really marked him was his military service on the frontline during the Algerian war – he was the last French president to have direct experience of combat and it left him both a fan of military strategy and cautious about war.

He was a figure in French political life from the early 1960s, starting as an adviser to the prime minister George Pompidou, becoming an MP in rural Corrèze and then a minister. Before he finally became president in 1995, he founded a political party, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic, served twice as prime minister and failed twice at a presidential election. It was his ability to take knocks and get up again that proved part of his charm.

When Chirac became president in 1995, he promised to heal the “social fracture”, the crippling unemployment, division and inequalities that plagued France. But instead, his government’s contested pension reform and planned austerity package of social security cuts prompted up to 2 million people to take to the streets, paralysing France in the worst strikes since May 1968. His term was then hamstrung by his disastrous decision to call parliamentary elections in 1997 in a bid to boost his support. The Socialists won, forcing Chirac into uncomfortable power-sharing.

In 2002, he was re-elected president with 82% of the vote after the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the nation by getting into the final round run-off. Chirac won because much of the leftwing electorate voting for him in order to stop the far-right leader. He later said one of his biggest regrets was not having formed a mixed national-unity government with ministers from all political sides. Instead, he stuck to his own brand of centre-right politics. In 2002 he agreed common agricultural policy payments with Germany, securing his popularity.

At home, he was most criticised for failing to steward change in France, avoiding reforms, and allowing inequalities to fester, symbolised by the 2005 urban riots on housing estates across France. The same year he called a referendum on approving the proposed EU constitution but then failed to sell the idea to the electorate, who voted no. It was a devastating blow. His popularity ratings near the end of his term were the lowest of any president since the war.

Among his success stories in office was his fight to improve road safety which was calculated to have saved 8,500 lives in four years. He ended compulsory military service and reduced the presidential term from seven years to five.

He was a lifelong source of barbed quotes and digs, famously asking in reference to Margaret Thatcher: “What more does the bag want, my balls on a platter?” He once said of Britain: “You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that.” But he also made comments he would regret. “Africa is not ready for democracy,” he told a group of African leaders in the early 1990s. When mayor of Paris in 1991, he made a controversial speech about immigration and talked of French people being disturbed by “the noise and the smell”, sparking outrage.

Like François Mitterrand before him, Chirac wanted to leave behind a great cultural project and created Paris’s Quai Branly museum, a riverside monument to himself as the “great defender” of African, Asian, American and other indigenous cultures.

Throughout his presidency, he was dogged by the sleaze scandals from his days as mayor at Paris city hall. He claimed immunity as president, but when he left office he swiftly became the first former president convicted of a crime. Aged 79, he was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence after being found guilty of embezzling public funds as Paris mayor in order to illegally finance the right wing party he led.

His lawyer, Georges Kiejman, said at the time: “What I hope is that this ruling doesn’t change in any way the deep affection the French feel legitimately for Jacques Chirac.”

It was a mark of Chirac’s extraordinary life and luck that it didn’t.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Jacques Chirac

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ryttu3k · 6 years

Text

“At least it’s not Dutton!” yeah but like.

In December 2010, questioned the Gillard government on paying for relatives of asylum seekers who died in an accident to attend their funerals.

In February 2013, wanted increased police surveillance of asylum seekers who had committed 'antisocial behaviours'.

In September 2013, selected as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, where he:

launched Operation Sovereign Borders, aimed at stopping all refugee boats from entering Australia

asked for advice on how to refuse giving permanent visas to 700 refugees

slashed Australia's refugee intake from 20,000 to 13,750

was found by the Australian Human Rights Commission to have failed in his responsibility to act in the best interests of children in detention, with the prolonged mandatory detention causing significant mental and physical illness and developmental delays

has overseen conditions in Manus Island and Nauru so bad that self-harm, mental illness, attempted suicide, and actual suicide is endemic

passed a bill that gave himself the power to return refugees to their place of origin, detain them without charge, and refuse giving refugees who arrived by boat access to the Refugee Review Tribunal

In December 2014, selected as Minister for Social Services, where he:

claimed that new mothers were 'rorting' the system and 'double-dipping' by claiming both government and employer-paid parental leave schemes

In September 2015, selected as Treasurer, where he:

attacked 'do-gooders' who allowed Muslim children to sit out on singing the National Anthem during Muharram (a mourning period where joyful things like singing isn't permitted)

had a nice cozy lunch with Rupert Murdoch, Lord High Overseer of Australian media (and voted against measures that would prevent too much media ownership concentration)

claimed he had 'endured bigotry' due to refusing to allow same-sex couples to marry

brought in a lump of coal to parliament, saying, "This is coal. Don't be afraid. Don't be scared. It won't hurt you", and claimed that anyone concerned about the environmental impact of coal mining and burning to have "an ideological, pathological fear of coal"

proposed drug-testing sewerage to see if people on welfare were using drugs

got rid of penalty rates for people working on Sundays and public holidays

pushed out cashless welfare cards

voted against a Royal Commission into violence against disabled people

proposed an amendment to the marriage act which would allow parents to remove their kids from classes if they talked about 'non-traditional marriage'

rejected an increase on Newstart (unemployment), currently sitting on $560 a fortnight, because "my priority is to give tax relief to people who are working and paying taxes" (Newstart recipients currently get $14,560 a year; the poverty line is currently $22,152 a year)

has scrapped billions in funding for homeless and housing groups

supported Trump's Muslim ban and claimed it was a sign of the rest of the world 'catching up' to Australia

latest budget: tax cuts to the rich, reduction in social services to the poor, slashed the budget for environmental protection, the ABC, and foreign aid

Like yeah he’s not Dutton but he’s not a good alternative. Turnbull was a moderate who was constantly being stymied by hard-righters. Morrison is one of those hard-righters.

He’s xenophobic, homophobic, hates the poor and the environment, and is directly responsible for harm and deaths to people in detention, including kids. Nothing about this is good except the possibility that the Coalition is so irreparably fractured that we might get an early election and turf the whole lot out.

#auspol

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years

Link

The operation against Mayo — which was reported at the time but until now was not known to have been carried out by American mercenaries — marked a pivot point in the war in Yemen, a brutal conflict that has seen children starved, villages bombed, and epidemics of cholera roll through the civilian population. The bombing was the first salvo in a string of unsolved assassinations that killed more than two dozen of the group’s leaders.

The company that hired the soldiers and carried out the attack is Spear Operations Group, incorporated in Delaware and founded by Abraham Golan, a charismatic Hungarian Israeli security contractor who lives outside of Pittsburgh. He led the team’s strike against Mayo.

“There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I was running it. We did it. It was sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.”

The UAE and Saudi Arabia lead an alliance of nine countries in Yemen, fighting what is largely a proxy war against Iran. The US is helping the Saudi-UAE side by providing weapons, intelligence, and other support.

The press office of the UAE’s US Embassy, as well as its US public affairs company, Harbour Group, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.

The revelations that a Middle East monarchy hired Americans to carry out assassinations comes at a moment when the world is focused on the alleged murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia, an autocratic regime that has close ties to both the US and the UAE. (The Saudi Embassy in the US did not respond to a request for comment. Riyadh has denied it killed Khashoggi, though news reports suggest it is considering blaming his death on a botched interrogation.)

Golan said that during his company’s months-long engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible for a number of the war’s high-profile assassinations, though he declined to specify which ones. He argued that the US needs an assassination program similar to the model he deployed. “I just want there to be a debate,” he said. “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”

Spear Operations Group’s private assassination mission marks the confluence of three developments transforming the way war is conducted worldwide:

Modern counterterrorism combat has shifted away from traditional military objectives — such as destroying airfields, gun emplacements, or barracks — to killing specific individuals, largely reshaping war into organized assassinations.

War has become increasingly privatized, with many nations outsourcing most military support services to private contractors, leaving frontline combat as virtually the only function that the US and many other militaries have not contracted out to for-profit ventures.

The long US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have relied heavily on elite special forces, producing tens of thousands of highly trained American commandos who can demand high private-sector salaries for defense contracting or outright mercenary work.

With Spear Operations Group’s mission in Yemen, these trends converged into a new and incendiary business: militarized contract killing, carried out by skilled American fighters.

Experts said it is almost inconceivable that the United States would not have known that the UAE — whose military the US has trained and armed at virtually every level — had hired an American company staffed by American veterans to conduct an assassination program in a war it closely monitors.

One of the mercenaries, according to three sources familiar with the operation, used to work with the CIA’s “ground branch,” the agency’s equivalent of the military’s special forces. Another was a special forces sergeant in the Maryland Army National Guard. And yet another, according to four people who knew him, was still in the Navy Reserve as a SEAL and had a top-secret clearance. He was a veteran of SEAL Team 6, or DEVGRU, the sources told BuzzFeed News. The New York Times once described that elite unit, famous for killing Osama bin Laden, as a “global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.”

The CIA said it had no information about the mercenary assassination program, and the Navy's Special Warfare Command declined to comment. A former CIA official who has worked in the UAE initially told BuzzFeed News there was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: “There were guys that were basically doing what you said.” He was astonished, he said, by what he learned: “What vetting procedures are there to make sure the guy you just smoked is really a bad guy?” The mercenaries, he said, were “almost like a murder squad.”

Whether Spear’s mercenary operation violates US law is surprisingly unclear. On the one hand, US law makes it illegal to “conspire to kill, kidnap, maim” someone in another country. Companies that provide military services to foreign nations are supposed to be regulated by the State Department, which says it has never granted any company the authority to supply combat troops or mercenaries to another country.

Yet, as BuzzFeed News has previously reported, the US doesn’t ban mercenaries. And with some exceptions, it is perfectly legal to serve in foreign militaries, whether one is motivated by idealism or money. With no legal consequences, Americans have served in the Israel Defense Forces, the French Foreign Legion, and even a militia fighting ISIS in Syria. Spear Operations Group, according to three sources, arranged for the UAE to give military rank to the Americans involved in the mission, which might provide them legal cover.

Despite operating in a legal and political gray zone, Golan heralds his brand of targeted assassinations as a precision counterterrorism strategy with fewer civilian casualties. But the Mayo operation shows that this new form of warfare carries many of the same old problems. The commandos’ plans went awry, and the intelligence proved flawed. And their strike was far from surgical: The explosive they attached to the door was designed to kill not one person but everyone in the office.

Aside from moral objections, for-profit targeted assassinations add new dilemmas to modern warfare. Private mercenaries operate outside the US military’s chain of command, so if they make mistakes or commit war crimes, there is no clear system for holding them accountable. If the mercenaries had killed a civilian in the street, who would have even investigated?

The Mayo mission exposes an even more central problem: the choice of targets. Golan insists that he killed only terrorists identified by the government of the UAE, an ally of the US. But who is a terrorist and who is a politician? What is a new form of warfare and what is just old-fashioned murder for hire? Who has the right to choose who lives and who dies — not only in the wars of a secretive monarchy like the UAE, but also those of a democracy such as the US?

BuzzFeed News has pieced together the inside story of the company’s attack on Al-Islah’s headquarters, revealing what mercenary warfare looks like now — and what it could become.

The deal that brought American mercenaries to the streets of Aden was hashed out over a lunch in Abu Dhabi, at an Italian restaurant in the officers’ club of a UAE military base. Golan and a chiseled former US Navy SEAL named Isaac Gilmore had flown in from the US to make their pitch. It did not, as Gilmore recalled, begin well.

Their host was Mohammed Dahlan, the fearsome former security chief for the Palestinian Authority. In a well-tailored suit, he eyed his mercenary guests coldly and told Golan that in another context they’d be trying to kill each other.

Indeed, they made an unlikely pair. Golan, who says he was born in Hungary to Jewish parents, maintains long-standing connections in Israel for his security business, according to several sources, and he says he lived there for several years. Golan once partied in London with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, according to a 2008 Mother Jones article, and his specialty was “providing security for energy clients in Africa.” One of his contracts, according to three sources, was to protect ships drilling in Nigeria’s offshore oil fields from sabotage and terrorism.

Golan, who sports a full beard and smokes Marlboro Red cigarettes, radiates enthusiasm. A good salesman is how one former CIA official described him. Golan himself, who is well-read and often cites philosophers and novelists, quotes André Malraux: “Man is not what he thinks he is but what he hides.”

Golan says he was educated in France, joined the French Foreign Legion, and has traveled around the world, often fighting or carrying out security contracts. In Belgrade, he says, he got to know the infamous paramilitary fighter and gangster Željko Ražnatović, better known as Arkan, who was assassinated in 2001. “I have a lot of respect for Arkan,” he told BuzzFeed News.

BuzzFeed News was unable to verify parts of Golan’s biography, including his military service, but Gilmore and another US special operations veteran who has been with him in the field said it’s clear he has soldiering experience. He is considered competent, ruthless, and calculating, said the former CIA official. He’s “prone to exaggeration,” said another former CIA officer, but “for crazy shit he’s the kind of guy you hire.”

Dahlan, who did not respond to multiple messages sent through associates, grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza, and during the 1980s intifada he became a major political player. In the ’90s he was named the Palestinian Authority’s head of security in Gaza, overseeing a harsh crackdown on Hamas in 1995 and 1996. He later met President George W. Bush and developed strong ties to the CIA, meeting the agency’s director, George Tenet, several times. Dahlan was once touted as a possible leader of the Palestinian Authority, but in 2007 he fell from grace, accused by the Palestinian Authority of corruption and by Hamas of cooperating with the CIA and Israel.

A man without a country, he fled to the UAE. There he reportedly remade himself as a key adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, or MBZ, known as the true ruler of Abu Dhabi. The former CIA officer who knows Dahlan said, “The UAE took him in as their pit bull.”

Now, over lunch in the officers’ club, the pit bull challenged his visitors to tell him what was so special about fighters from America. Why were they any better than Emirati soldiers?

Golan replied with bravado. Wanting Dahlan to know that he could shoot, train, run, and fight better than anyone in the UAE’s military, Golan said: Give me your best man and I’ll beat him. Anyone.

The Palestinian gestured to an attentive young female aide sitting nearby. She’s my best man, Dahlan said.

The joke released the tension, and the men settled down. Get the spaghetti, recommended Dahlan.

The UAE, with vast wealth but only about 1 million citizens, relies on migrant workers from all over the world to do everything from cleaning its toilets to teaching its university students. Its military is no different, paying lavish sums to eager US defense companies and former generals. The US Department of Defense has approved at least $27 billion in arms sales and defense services to the UAE since 2009.

Retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal once signed up to sit on the board of a UAE military company. Former Navy SEAL and Vice Admiral Robert Harward runs the UAE division of Lockheed Martin. The security executive Erik Prince, now entangled in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, set up shop there for a time, helping the UAE hire Colombian mercenaries.

And as BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year, the country embeds foreigners in its military and gave the rank of major general to an American lieutenant colonel, Stephen Toumajan, placing him in command of a branch of its armed forces.

The UAE is hardly alone in using defense contractors; in fact, it is the US that helped pioneer the worldwide move toward privatizing the military. The Pentagon pays companies to carry out many traditional functions, from feeding soldiers to maintaining weapons to guarding convoys.

The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire mercenaries to carry out attacks or engage directly in warfare. But that line can get blurry. Private firms provide heavily armed security details to protect diplomats in war zones or intelligence officers in the field. Such contractors can engage in firefights, as they did in Benghazi, Libya, when two contractors died in 2012 defending a CIA post. But, officially, the mission was protection, not warfare.

Outside the US, hiring mercenaries to conduct combat missions is rare, though it has happened. In Nigeria, a strike force reportedly led by longtime South African mercenary Eeben Barlow moved successfully against the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in 2015. A company Barlow founded, Executive Outcomes, was credited with crushing the bloody RUF rebel force in war-torn Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

But over spaghetti with Dahlan, Golan and Gilmore were offering an extraordinary form of mercenary service. This was not providing security details, nor was it even traditional military fighting or counterinsurgency warfare. It was, both Golan and Gilmore say, targeted killing.

Gilmore said he doesn’t remember anyone using the word “assassinations” specifically. But it was clear from that first meeting, he said, that this was not about capturing or detaining Al-Islah’s leadership. “It was very specific that we were targeting,” said Gilmore. Golan said he was explicitly told to help “disrupt and destruct” Al-Islah, which he calls a “political branch of a terrorist organization.”

He and Gilmore promised they could pull together a team with the right skillset, and quickly.

In the weeks after that lunch, they settled on terms. The team would receive $1.5 million a month, Golan and Gilmore told BuzzFeed News. They’d earn bonuses for successful kills — Golan and Gilmore declined to say how much — but they would carry out their first operation at half price to prove what they could do. Later, Spear would also train UAE soldiers in commando tactics.

Golan and Gilmore had another condition: They wanted to be incorporated into the UAE Armed Forces. And they wanted their weapons — and their target list — to come from uniformed military officers. That was “for juridical reasons,” Golan said. “Because if the shit hits the fan,” he explained, the UAE uniform and dog tags would mark “the difference between a mercenary and a military man.”

Dahlan and the UAE government signed off on the deal, Golan and Gilmore said, and Spear Operations Group got to work.

Back in the US, Golan and Gilmore started rounding up ex-soldiers for the first, proof-of-concept job. Spear Operations Group is a small company — nothing like the security behemoths such as Garda World Security or Constellis — but it had a huge supply of talent to choose from.

A little-known consequence of the war on terror, and in particular the 17 combined years of US warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that the number of special operations forces has more than doubled since 9/11, from 33,000 to 70,000. That’s a vast pool of crack soldiers selected, trained, and combat-tested by the most elite units of the US military, such as the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. Some special operations reservists are known to engage in for-profit soldiering, said a high-level SEAL officer who asked not to be named. “I know a number of them who do this sort of thing,” he said. If the soldiers are not on active duty, he added, they are not obligated to report what they’re doing.

But the options for special operations veterans and reservists aren’t what they were in the early years of the Iraq War. Private security work, mostly protecting US government officials in hostile environments, lacks the excitement of actual combat and is more “like driving Miss Daisy with an M4” rifle, as one former contractor put it. It also doesn’t pay what it used to. While starting rates for elite veterans on high-end security jobs used to be $700 or $800 a day, contractors said, now those rates have dropped to about $500 a day. Golan and Gilmore said they were offering their American fighters $25,000 a month — about $830 a day — plus bonuses, a generous sum in almost any market.

dahlan is a real slick fucker. last i read he was going to replace abbas as head of the PLO under MBS’ decision-making, cause he’s beloved by the gulf states. apparently that didn’t work out. murdering people is what he does best though, so of course he’s pick up work in his area of expertise.

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yellowmechanicalcat · 5 years

Text

emotionally colorblind: plance in season 8

(part one of three)

In the series finale of The I.T. Crowd, one of the techs has started dating a girl from another department. (Yes, this is VLD meta, just stick with me.) He feels the relationship is going well and is very happy, and brags to his coworkers that his girlfriend recently told him he was “emotionally artistic” - which he interprets to mean he’s on the “artistic” emotional spectrum because he’s so in touch with her wants and needs. (At this point, it’s become clear to the viewer that his girlfriend has actually accused him of being “emotionally autistic” and believes him to be on the autistic spectrum.)

Later that day, his girlfriend calls again to tearfully ask if he’d accompany her to her grandfather’s funeral and abruptly hangs up on him when he cheerfully agrees. He’s baffled by her reaction until his manager rightly points out that his girlfriend was upset because the way he responded was completely off base from the subject matter, as his chipper tone of voice made him sound as if he’d just been invited to a music festival rather than having any sympathy for his girlfriend’s loss. Only then does it occur to him that his response was inappropriate because funerals are sad.

“‘Emotionally artistic’? You’re emotionally colorblind,” his manager mutters in disbelief.

Old news, but Season 8 isn’t what anyone expected

‘Emotionally colorblind’ - e.g., giving inappropriate responses to a topic because of an inability to perceive the nuances of a situation - feels like a pretty good description of Season 8, in which excellent animation is overwhelmed by moments in which characterization feels off, dialogue doesn’t seem to fit, or the plot clashes with what’s actually being shown on screen. Those moments - along with the conspicuous lack of reaction from the cast and EPs in the month since its release and cryptic criticism from crew members - have led many fans to conclude that the version of Season 8 released took the cast/crew by surprise. Posts by Aria C., a former DW intern while Season 8 was in production, suggest that the overall plot hadn’t changed dramatically since the scripts were being drafted, but that doesn’t mean that individual character arcs weren’t subtly adjusted along the way.

While it’s not clear exactly how much actually changed about Season 8 during production, we do know that many of the changes were made at the last minute. The most noticeable changes seem to have been in response to the backlash against how LGBT characters were portrayed, although this article covers many of the other pacing issues in Season 8 while some of the discrepancies between the audio description and what’s actually seen on screen are listed here. The single biggest last-minute change seems to be the epilogue (including the final few stills) which was approved extremely late in the production process and underwent additional changes after being leaked just weeks before the season’s release.

I strongly suspect that Pidge and Lance had an arc in Season 8 that was another casualty of the last-minute changes.

The End is the Beginning

Let’s take a look at the ending of the series’ final episode. One year after the final battle with Honerva, Pidge and Matt are working on building a humanoid robot that Pidge dubs Chip. Colleen interrupts to tell Pidge she should be heading out; Pidge looks serious and doesn’t respond, then recovers a moment later and makes Matt promise to wait for her to get back to finish. She leaves her glasses with Chip before heading off in the Green Lion, as Sam and Colleen both watch her leave.

Colleen: “Your father’s got the teludav all warmed up for you. Better get going, you don’t want to be late.”  Sam: (cheerful) “Have a good time, honey!” Pidge: (laughingly) “I will, Dad.”

The way they’re talking to her is the way parents would talk to a teenager who’s about to go to a party or on a date, peppy and almost teasing. Pidge’s serious expression suggests that wherever she’s going is somewhere she’s not entirely ready to be - she isn’t upset about needing to be somewhere, but she isn’t rushing out the door to get there, either. Maybe she’s nervous - we can’t tell.

We cut to Coran and Merla on Altea as they discuss preparations for “the first Celebration of Allura”, then over to Lance as he recounts the story of Allura’s sacrifice to a group of schoolchildren sitting by her statue, telling them that while he misses her, he knows she’s still with all of them. The Altean teacher, in a chipper tone similar to Pidge’s parents, informs the kids that “Paladin Lance has somewhere to be in a few doboshes.” Just then, a wormhole opens and Lance looks up as the Green Lion flies through. He turns away from the statue to watch Pidge land, a smile on his face.

The scene fades to the Paladins having dinner by the statue of Allura. Within moments, it’s obvious that their reunion is the feast Coran and Merla had been discussing earlier. The Celebration of Allura is the one year anniversary of her death. The paladins’ reunion is a memorial.

We’ve seen memorials in VLD before. In Season 7, Shiro visits the Garrison’s memorial wall for those KIA. Later, Earth has a giant memorial service for the victims of just one battle, as Shiro addresses the crowd: “There isn’t one of us here today who hasn’t experienced the tragedy of losing someone close. It truly feels like a light has gone out in our lives and the sun itself couldn’t reignite it. But that light, that fire, hasn’t gone out completely. It’s fueled within each of us by the memories and the love of those we’ve lost. …”

After the one year timeskip, we see Keith persuading the Galra to join the Galactic Coalition with Shiro and Hunk leading diplomatic negotiations on the Atlas; all three invoke Allura’s example as they work towards peace. Hunk even mentions the significance of that day being when they commemorate Allura’s sacrifice. What she did and why she did it aren’t secret. It stands to reason that the anniversary of her death - the anniversary of when Allura saved their reality and countless others - wouldn’t be a ‘celebration’ only for six people. Everyone, everywhere, should be taking a moment to remember her - especially those who fought at her side, like the Holts.

Instead, Sam and Colleen’s reactions in Pidge’s scene are jarring. While things may be different in Voltron’s future world, I doubt any parent would tell their child “Have a good time, honey!” as they go to a memorial dinner for their dead friend. Because as The I.T. Crowd pointed out, funerals are sad - and so is any reminder of someone’s death. You don’t have to be constantly moping and sobbing because you miss someone, you can still celebrate their life, but that kind of event still has a somber, bittersweet element to it. Telling someone ‘Have fun, don’t be late!’ as they head off to a memorial would definitely qualify as emotionally colorblind. It’s hard to believe the actors and voice director would have agreed to record the scene within the context we got onscreen.

Lance’s scene makes it even more complicated. Showing Lance turn to watch only Pidge land is a bizarre choice if the purpose of his scene is to emphasize how much Lance still cares for Allura before showing the other Paladins arriving on Altea. It only makes sense for Lance to turn away from looking at Allura’s statue and towards Pidge if Pidge and Lance are supposed to have a deeper connection.

If the focus is actually meant to be on Allura and this event - and on her family coming together to remember her - it would have made sense for Lance to look past Allura’s statue to see the Blue Lion in the distance, Red parked next to it, as Green, Yellow, and Black emerge from the wormhole to land beside them. If the animation had to be rushed for a last-minute change or the budget was stretched too far, they could have just used the same shot of the Lions sitting together at the end of dinner with daytime lighting instead of night, fading into dinner instead of fading out.

Pidge and Lance’s scenes would also have benefited from being re-recorded with slightly different dialogue and delivery. For example:

Colleen: (serious, but gentle) “Your father’s got the teludav ready to go. You don’t want to be late, Katie.” Sam: “Tell ’em hello for me.” Pidge: (a little reserved) “I will, Dad.”

Teacher: “I think Paladin Lance has some visitors to go meet, and you all have class…”  

VLD’s had to work around making the dialogue fit changes to the animation/plot before. Take The Feud, in which Keith sounds bizarrely calm compared to the others, which the EPs later explained was because Steven Yeun recorded his lines before the storyboards and script had finalized what the paladins’ reactions would be and he was too busy to re-record before the deadline, so they kept his first take. (I suspect that’s also the reason for Keith’s annoyed-sounding “Don’t miss” comment to Lance in Know Your Enemy, which doesn’t mesh with their otherwise more positive relationship at that point, although I have absolutely no proof) But Yeun’s situation isn’t the norm - in cases where the actor was genuinely too busy to re-record, the show either used soundalikes or wrote out a character where possible, replaced dialogue, etc. Any of those tactics could have been valid workarounds…. unless the change was made relatively last-minute and there just wasn’t enough time.

So if the ending is missing the context of an additional scene between Pidge and Lance, what else might have been cut? And why?

I’ll explain in part two.

#sarah forms voltron opinions #plance #flirtyrobot #pidgance #vld s8 #voltron critical #plance meta #been on a bit of a hiatus for the holidays #not much time for tumblr meant lots of time for theories #my non-fandom friends watched s8 over the holidays and i got swarmed with questions #which was a little validating because it's one thing for fandom to be nitpicky but if casual viewers are also watching and going 'uhhhh what #was THAT?' then maybe something really is off #i've been thinking a lot about cultural differences while writing this #obviously funerals are the biggest event but the first year usually has a memorial of some kind whether with a religious service or just as #a gathering of family/friends... if it's a family member the first few years usually involve doing something #just because it's hard to be alone #PSA: the i.t. crowd is a good show #long meta is long thank you for reading??

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dent-de-leon · 6 years

Note

Now that Romelle is here, what do you think they’ll do with her plot-line? Do you think there might be forced romance with her?

ookkkkaayy,,, I think I’ve gotten….I dunno, but Very Many asks about Romelle, in particular people being afraid of Romelle, everyone already worrying she will destroy x ship or y ship, people upset that she “wrecked” Lotor’s character development, ect, so…let’s just talk about Romelle for a moment, because I really do like her. Also prefacing everything with this: fans can enjoy whatever ships they want, regardless of the eventual outcome. And I don’t think anyone should be afraid of Romelle or hate her because of potential ships. Now, that said:

First things first, Romelle’s not the reason Lotor’s character is the way he is. There’s literally no rationalizing that–they didn’t write Lotor to suit Romelle’s character arc, they wrote Romelle’s backstory to suit his. Since episode one, there’s been buildup for Lotor’s character heading down this route. He was always going to fail his redemption arc. In one interview, the show runners even saw people comparing Lotor’s supposed redemption to Zuko’s, and they admitted their intention was always for him to end up going “full Azula” isntead. Before season 6, there was also plenty of talk about how, no matter your intentions, there’s just certain actions that go beyond redemption. Lotor was responsible for horrible things happening to Romelle in the original series too, so I think it’s fitting for things to end up this way–and for his treatment of Romelle and her brother to ultimaely be his undoing.

I really like the way Romelle was written in VLD, actually. She’s not a chosen hero like the others. She’s this very sweet supporting character. She can’t even fight, but she still has the courage to go chasing after Bandor and manages to escape from Lotor. She doesn’t have a weapon or even a shield, she’s just…herself. She doesn’t have that gift of Altean magic either, she’s not a great alchemist or healer like Allura is. And that’s just kind of refreshing in a series like this I think, that she basically had nothing but still had this drive to take down Lotor, as impossible as it seemed.

Her lack of magic seems to have even saved her–she’s denied access to the “new colony” because she doesn’t pass the test. If Lotor’s harvesting the “purest” quintessence, then I think his intention was to draw from Sacred Alteans–those that are more “magical,” like Allura and Lotor. So when you look at her character through that lens, I think it’s especially tragic. Her parents had the gift. Her brother had it. But Romelle alone isn’t a chosen one, doesn’t have the potential to be a Life Giver, and she ends up being saved because of it. The rest of her family might have been able to enter the paradise of Oriande, but instead they’re tortured to a slow agonizing death. Romelle might not have had that magical potential in her blood, but instead, she manages to do something no one else on the colony can–she sees the truth about Lotor.

Honestly, I also don’t think it makes any sense to bring in a love interest for a major character this late in the game. People have expressed fear about her ending up with Keith or Shiro especially, but both of those characters are also notoriously closed off from others, and I can’t imagine them so readily bonding with someone new. Not for anything, but if she were going to end up with either Shiro or Keith, then I think we would have at least gotten some buildup or indication of that. It seems to me that Romelle is really a side character–possibly she’ll end up being a little more important of a side character, like Matt, but for now she’s only spoken in a single episode.

She also wasn’t involved with Shiro’s resurrection at all, nor did she have a romantic coded sort of scene during the revival–which I would expect if they were going to push for a sudden love interest. I think fans also forget very quickly, but with Hunk and Shay, we saw that potential for them as a couple literally the first time they meet. Even Keith and Shiro’s first scene, as well we Lance and Allura’s first meeting–both of those scenes seem romantically coded. I mean, when Matt first sees Allura, he’s got the little heart eyes.

But Shiro doesn’t even seem to really notice Romelle, nor she him. Keith doesn’t completely hit it off with her either. I just think that this isn’t the way VLD would introduce the love interest for a major character. She didn’t seem particularly attached to Keith either, and just sort of follows Krolia around the castle instead. Then, rather than leaving the castle on Keith/Shiro’s Lion, she chooses to go with the Alteans–a nice touch, I think. I’m not sure why people are also incredibly afraid of some forced Shiro/Romelle thing because I mean…?? It’s not like VLD has ever tried to exactly replicate relationships in DOTU??

Keith/Allura was made a thing in the 80′s dub, but it’s clear Lance/Allura have all the romantic buildup in VLD. Zarkon/Haggar wasn’t a thing in DOTU either, and Keith’s mother wasn’t galra. Even if you think they’re going to copy Romelle’s romance from DOTU exactly, then–1, she never even met Takashi in the original, the person she knew was Ryou. And 2, in the dub, she ends up with ‘Sven’–who is literally already his own seperate character in VLD. So, yeah…I’m not sure why…everyone’s terrified?? Besides that, the show runners have already said they’re not going to force in relationships, that any romantic developments will be organic. Forced romance doesn’t really have a place in an action series like this anyway, at least, not with the way its few romantic subplots were handled in the past.

But it says a lot that everyone immediately fears how Romelle will affect ships when there are plenty of other possbilities for her character, such as the gift of Allura finally having another Altean to relate with. An Altean girl that’s more or less her own age too, that’s amazing!! I’d love to see Allura explaining to her what Altea and Orianda were like, or even just Romelle playing with the space mice. Learning how to build new Altean tech with Coran. There’s tons of potential there. Hell, it seemed that Bandor built that communicator, right? Maybe Romelle likes helping Pidge tinker with things because it reminds her of her brother. Maybe she asks Krolia to teach her how to fight so she can be part of the coalition. I just think there’s lots of options for growth if the writers want to take it–though again, I believe she’ll be a side character.

This isn’t even addressing what the show runners have said about Romelle, which is that she is essentially an entirely different character, because the original Romelle wasn’t what they needed for their story:

Lauren: “I always loved the character Romelle, and I was really excited to bring her back. And you know, we’ve really abandoned her being an Allura doppleganger. That wasn’t what we need in our show, so we were really able to differenciate those characters a lot more so we didn’t have two characters looking exactly the same. And that was fun. Bandor was also fun–they just kind of came from some crazy Grecian planet in Voltron.” (source).

So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that Romelle’s going to continue to be a character independent from both her DOTU and Golion incarnations. And I really don’t think fans should be so terrified of a romantic subplot added by DOTU, to be honest. Also, she’s very cute, and I adore her,,

#voltron #romelle #voltron spoilers #lotor

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jewish-privilege · 6 years

Link

A central tenet of anti-oppression work is that marginalized communities are the authors of their own experiences. Those who experience a specific oppression get to define it, and how it shows up in their daily life in big and small ways. I cannot possibly grasp all of the ways racism shows up throughout the life of a person of color. As much as I may try, my white privilege will inevitably blind me to how simple daily acts like driving my car, walking my baby in the park, or waiting in a Starbucks can quickly become dangerous. Conversely, my husband as well as male friends and colleagues may struggle to understand how gender shows up in my daily life, so they should listen to me when I describe what my experiences are and how they affect me.

Anti-Semitism, like most forms of systemic oppression, is difficult to see if you don’t experience it directly. If you have never been asked to leave an anti-war protest because you were wearing a Magen David necklace, you may not understand how we are pushed out of movements. If your house of worship does not require 24-hour private security, armed guards, and bag searches to enter, you may not understand how we move through the world. If your family doesn’t include people who were ghettoized, beaten, starved, and gassed to death in concentration camps, you probably don’t experience a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville—or “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators burning the Israeli flag and chanting for the deaths of Jews in Israel—the same way that we do. If a passerby has never screamed at a crowd of worshippers, or drawn swastikas or rats on your spiritual home, or accosted you in your workplace and started screaming about purported Israeli atrocities or “Likudnik” conspiracies, you will not understand our fear of being Jewish in public. If you’ve never spent an afternoon on the phone with an anti-extremism expert discussing whether or not being featured on a neo-Nazi website is cause for alarm, you don’t understand what Jewish writers regularly encounter during their workdays. If you have never been told to tolerate being called satanic or evil, or compared to an insect for the sake of coalition building or political unity, you may struggle to understand why many of us are so angry at the progressive movement. I have experienced all of the above.

...King does not face the consequences of the rising anti-Semitism he dismisses and excuses. We live it every day, as do our children. Jewish parents in the United States and globally are deeply concerned with the safety of our children within Jewish institutions, especially since synagogues, JCCs, and Jewish schools have been targeted by bomb threats, graffiti, and violent attacks. Because anti-Semitism is intersectional, and layers with other forms of oppression, these intersecting oppressions can have devastating impacts, such as the case of Nora Nissenbaum, who has suffered anti-Semitic and misogynistic threats at school so severe she is suffering from PTSD. While parents across the country fear for their kids’ safety at school, the intersecting identities of being female and Jewish put Nora at additional risk.

As we seek to protect ourselves from those who target us, we also face the added complexity of ensuring that security forces, both private and public, will protect our children and our institutions without endangering, intimidating or in anyway excluding Jews of color. During a time when so many historically oppressed communities feel under attack and marginalized, it is more important than ever that we listen and amplify voices describing how oppression is showing up in their lives.

King should have asked some of the many Jews of color in America how his rhetoric affects their lives, and how it puts our children at risk. He should have privately and publicly worked to rebuke hatred, build bridges and facilitate healing. Instead he has sought to silence, belittle, and justify our pain.

Read Carly Pildis’s full piece in Tablet.

King’s response was to summarily block Pildis and Elad Nehorai, a Jewish man of color who is a writer and activist who tweeted out the article.

#carly pildis #antisemitism #ignoring antisemitism #erasing antisemitism

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calligraphist-artemisia · 6 years

Text

Marks of the Soul (Chapter 4)

Summary: AU. Everyone has a mark somewhere on their body which corresponds to the moment they realize they’re in love with their soulmate, commonly referred to as a Soulmark or just a Mark. Even in space, so very far from home, the Paladins find themselves dwelling on their own Soulmarks and what their unusual forms might mean for them.

Pairings: Keith/Pidge, Lance/Allura, Hunk/Shay, and Shiro/Matt

Chapter 1 - Previous - Masterpost

Also posted on AO3 and fanfiction.net

Chapter 4

Thace found himself struggling to keep up with the young Marmoran as they dashed through the Castle they'd landed in. He clutched at his wound with one hand, hoping he could hold out until he could get proper healing. It throbbed with every step he took, slowly growing larger and larger.

It didn't take long for him to figure out why Keith was in such a rush. The slumped over form of the Black Lion told him all he needed to know – its Paladin was hurt, or worse.

Thace stopped a respectful distance away, watching as the other three paladins joined the one in red and they all boarded the Lion. Within minutes, there were more hurried footsteps behind him and he turned to face the newcomers, hoping they would recognize him as an ally.

He saw Kolivan first. His leader's imposing form was a welcome sight on a ship full of strangers. The pair next to him could only be the Alteans who had Zarkon so furious. And behind them...

“Ulaz?” Thace whispered the name, staring at his Mate's tall form as though he was looking at a ghost. He'd heard of the Thaldycon outpost and had assumed the worst, yet there he was.

Ulaz stared back at him, his mouth open slightly in surprise.

Kolivan looked mildly amused as he motioned for the Alteans to move out of the way, just in time for Thace to unfreeze and dart past them to get to Ulaz. His Mate eagerly wrapped his arms around him, keeping him close as they both basked in the feeling of being together again after so many years apart.

“I have missed you,” Ulaz murmured.

The tightness in Thace's chest eased the longer he stayed pressed up against him. It really had been too long. “I heard about your base. I thought I'd lost you.”

“You almost did,” Ulaz admitted, his voice heavy with guilt. “The green one saved me. Just as the red one saved you.”

Thace winced. He'd hoped no one else would learn about that. The injury he received from the druids was one that would cause a slow, painful death without the right treatment. At the time, death by explosion sounded like the better option.

“He is young to wield a blade,” Thace said, changing the subject.

“Kolivan put him through the Trial and he passed, with no training or guidance from us. He is... an unusual cub.”

Thace was aware of movement nearby and turned his head to watch the paladins disembark from the Black Lion, each of them with grave expressions. He focused on Keith in particular. There was something familiar about him, but he couldn't place why. He'd certainly never seen him before their meeting on Zarkon's main ship.

His wound throbbed in agony and he clung to Ulaz as his knees buckled beneath him.

Ulaz swore as he found himself supporting his Mate's full weight. “Thace! You should have said something!”

“You distracted me from the pain.”

Ulaz refused to be flattered by that and soon Thace found himself swept up off of his feet and whisked away to be healed. As they spun around to go, he caught sight of Keith's expression flickering from pure distress to something more like distressed confusion just long enough for him to place why he looked so familiar.

“Krolia?” he asked quietly.

Ulaz nodded.

Thace let his head fall against Ulaz's shoulder with an amused huff. “That explains a few things.”

He had a feeling they would be keeping a very close eye on the cub.

Lance felt as though he hadn't slept in months.

Eight days had passed since Shiro vanished from the Black Lion. Eight days of being tormented by nightmares – when he actually managed to fall asleep, that was. Eight days of watching Keith frantically search, snapping at anyone who dared suggest he take a break. Eight days of Pidge staring unblinkingly at a screen, using every tool at her disposal to try and determine the place Shiro had most likely ended up. Eight days of Hunk stress baking when he wasn't attempting to help Pidge. Eight days of Allura struggling to keep her composure without Shiro by her side to lift some of the burden from her shoulders.

Zarkon was defeated, but the empire remained, and so Voltron was still needed. There wouldn't be a return to Earth in the near future.

There was still so much they had to do. So much he hadn't considered.

Real life was never as easy as things were in stories. It wasn't as simple as “and so the heroes beat the bad guys and went home to live happily ever after”. There were planets still enslaved – full of people who needed their help. They were the only ones who could help.

“Ah, Lance! There you are!” Coran said as he popped his head into the room. Even he was sporting dark circles under his eyes. “Princess Allura would like to see you on the bridge. She and Kolivan have come up with a plan for freeing several nearby planets in this system.”

Lance slowly got up, his body protesting the simple movement. “Sure thing. I'll be right up.”

He couldn't even muster up the energy to be excited about Allura specifically requesting him. And while he doubted he'd find any of his old enthusiasm while Shiro was missing, he knew he had to try. Everyone had a role to play. Maybe his was boosting team morale?

Keith storming out at the very first coalition dinner didn't come as a surprise to anyone. To tell the truth, they'd all been wondering when the explosion would happen after it had spent so long building up.

It didn't make it any easier to see him in such pain.

Pidge wanted to follow the moment he stood up. Some part of her demanded it, but she didn't. Couldn't. She sat there with her head bowed, trying to stay strong for the sake of the team and to show their new allies she could keep her cool when things got hard.

From the corners of her eyes, she could see Thace slip out of the room after Keith. She wasn't sure why, but he and Ulaz had made it their personal mission to watch out for him. Knowing that one of them was going to try and help let her relax for the last few doboshes of the dinner, which felt as though it dragged on forever.

The moment she was able, she left to track them down. It wasn't hard to find him, especially with a little help from the Castle's built-in sensors.

“...don't know if I believe in any of that anyway.”

Pidge paused outside of the door at the sound of Keith's voice.

“Even Galra have Soulmates. It isn't something that we're given a choice in and platonic relationships are not unheard of. Are you certain you and Shiro are not-?”

“We're not,” Keith said firmly. “I know we aren't. And I don;t want him to be. Soulmates... they leave and that's it. That's the end. There's no coming back from that. I'm not...” He huffed angrily. “I don't need a Soulmate. I'm fine on my own.”

“You would deny the bond?” Thace asked, his voice rumbling with disapproval.

Keith's response was too quiet for Pidge to hear. She slowly backed away from the door, unsure of how to process what she'd accidentally overheard. It was something unthinkable, to deny a bond with your Soulmate. But at the same time...

Had she not had similar thoughts, upon learning her own was likely a member of the Blade of Marmora – and a Galra?

But what did Keith mean about Soulmates leaving?

Pidge frowned. She had a startling lack of knowledge about her fellow Arm of Voltron and she'd never really considered it a problem. He was just Keith – kind of a hot-head, but reliable and a decent conversation partner in the late hours of the night, long after everyone else had gone to sleep. But what else did she know?

He'd known Shiro for ages, that much had been obvious from the start. It was easy to see why someone would look at the close bond they shared and assume that they were Soulmates. She'd thought so too, at first, but all of those late-night conversations had her seeing that wasn't it at all. He had a great deal of respect and admiration for Shiro and there was no doubting the love they shared, but they weren't Soulmates.

Family. Shiro was his family. Like a brother. Like her and Matt.

There was something else about family. Tidbits she'd picked up on, but never dared to ask about. Stuff that felt too much like taboo.

Keith was part Galra, which meant one of his parents was Galra. He'd mentioned looking for family when they were discussing their plans for once they defeated Zarkon. If Keith's missing parent had left when he was younger – if they'd left behind their Soulmate and child...

What happened to the one left behind?

It was like being flung through the air and slammed into a wall hard enough to knock all of the breath from his lungs.

Allura stood before him, looking somewhat unsure as she held her helmet in her hands. Her armor – crafted for her new role as the Paladin of the Blue Lion – was something unexpected. Normally, Lance would have been thrilled that she'd picked him to be the first person to see her in it, but the sight of that symbol across her chest left him frozen.

Pink.

It was pink.

The same shade as the Mark imprinted on his thigh.

Pink for her armor.

Silver-white for her hair.

Blue for the Blue Lion.

He should have been delighted! There she was, even more incredible than he could have dreamed – his Soulmate.

Allura was his Soulmate! He wanted to shout it from the top of the Castle spires! He wanted everyone to know he'd finally found her! He wanted to tell her, to open his heart up to the bond they were meant to share!

But how could he when he only found out because of the horrible situation they were in?

Found only because Shiro was gone. Found because they had to pick a new Black Paladin. Found because when Keith stepped up to lead, he was chosen by the Red Lion, and then Allura was welcomed by Blue.

All because Shiro was gone.

Lance wouldn't cry. He would stay strong. It was important for Allura and he wasn't going to ruin her moment.

“Pink, huh?” he asked, hoping she couldn't tell how shaken he was.

One day he would be able to tell her, but it wasn't that day.

#voltron #kidgemas #allurance #hunay #shiroxmatt #soulmate au #fanfiction #soulmark au #have some thulaz as well #maybe I need to write a backstory fic with thace ulaz and krolia

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rhaeneystargaryen · 6 years

Text

milk&honey

I guess you could say this takes place in the same universe as all i want is you?

“We’re going to have a child,” Allura said in a faint whisper as she wrapped her arms around him.

The galaxy was celebrating the end of the Galra but the only thing that Shiro wanted to celebrate was this news.

He hugged her tightly and pressed his face into the crook of her shoulder and cried.

Alfor was born nine months later with a head full of gray hair and ears that ended in a sharp point. Shiro’s first born had his dark eyes, but it seemed as if he was going to take after Allura on everything else. Shiro didn’t mind, it was just one more beautiful thing that represented his wife.

“The citizens of New Altea are really wanting to see the prince, Allura,” Coran said as he stood before them, naming off the multitude of problems that the day would bring and that Shiro would have to deal with. Allura didn’t need the rest, but for the first few days Shiro wanted her to not worry about being Queen Allura.

Allura paced the room cradling Alfor to her. “It should be soon.”

“It'll be good for the Coalition,” Shiro said from where he was seated, his eyes following his wife and son.

“I know,” Allura said as she walked towards him. She gently placed their son in his arms and then snuggled up beside Shiro, her head resting on his shoulder. “I just like keeping him to ourselves.”

Their moment of quiet was interrupted by a loud ruckus entering the room.

“Little Alfor, time to meet Uncle Lance!” His voice vibrated around the room and the Voltron members ran up to Allura’s bed, ready to meet the little prince.

Hunk immediately threw his hands over Lance’s mouth, “The baby is sleeping!”

Shiro sighed and Allura just laughed.

Little Alfor was passed among the paladins and Shiro hovered around them, his child passing through his arms before being given to someone else. He continued until he was pulled away by Allura.

“They won’t hurt him, love,” Allura said, kissing a spot on his neck. She looked up at him, the biggest smile on her face. “Being a father looks good on you.”

Shiro cradled her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. “And mother looks good on you.”

Prince Alfor turned into a brother four years later. The birthing was shorter than when Alfor came into the world, but Allura wasn’t less tired.

Shiro sat at a chair near her bed, his new gray-haired son in his arms while Alfor sat on his knees and peered into the blankets. He had been born a few hours back and it seemed as if this was going to be their only chance to enjoy a quiet moment as a family. Soon Coran would come in with a list of duties while the paladins took turns winding in and out.

“He’s wrinkly, dad,” Alfor said with a scrunched up nose.

Shiro smiled down at him, “You were wrinkly too.”

“Momma,” Alfor said, turning towards his mother. Allura was watching the from her bed, her hair spread out and a soft smile on her face. “Was I wrinkly too?”

Allura chuckled, “Oh, you were the wrinkliest thing.”

“Ew,” was Alfor’s only response before he turned back to his little brother. “What’s his name?”

“Not sure, honey,” Allura’s voice came out soft and slurred, it seemed as if the events were finally catching up to her, “What do you want to name him?”

Alfor had been begging to name his brother, and his parents had decided to let him do it as long as the name he chose wasn’t something too extreme.

He stood quiet for a minute staring down at his brother’s face. “Jomei.”

“You want to name him Jomei?” Allura asked.

Alfor nodded and Shiro smiled at him, “Then Jomei he’ll be.”

III

After eliminating the Galra and wiping out their last remnants from the galaxy Shiro didn’t think there was anything that could pose a threat to his family, but it seemed as if the one thing that could threaten Allura’s life was something that came from them both.

Their last child had taken everything from Allura, to the point where she teetered on the brink of death. Despite the strenuous birthing they had pulled through and that was all that mattered now.

They were in their room now, Allura sleeping in the bed with Alfor and Jomei on each side while Shiro cradled their new child in his arms.

Their only daughter was a small thing, but she was the one who looked more like him with her dark hair and eyes. She reached a hand out and Shiro placed his finger in her little fingers.

Her fingers wrapped tightly around the metal of his hand and he felt his heart practically stop in his chest.

His daughter-their daughter.

Aeldra, named after the grandmother who died along with a planet.

Shiro looked to Allura sleeping on their bed, her hair spread out while Jomei and Alfor were wrapped around her. Allura’s arms held each of her children in her arms and Shiro couldn’t think of a more innocent and loving scene.

The baby in his arm made a soft sound and he looked down and smiled at her.

“Hello, Aeldra,” He whispered, “I’m your father, and I love you very much.”

Shiro’s had many names in his life. Takashi, Champion, Black Paladin, and Consort, but the only ones that mattered were the ones he was called now: father and husband.

#shalluraholidays #shiro #allura #shallura #voltron #i want them happy #and with a big family #if i dont write them with a family assume im dead #my fic

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techcrunchappcom · 3 years

Photo

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/covid-19-pandemic-news-live-updates/

Covid-19 Pandemic News: Live Updates

Here’s what you need to know:

President Biden at the White House earlier this month.Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

An international effort to speed up the manufacture and distribution of coronavirus vaccines around the globe got a boost Thursday on two fronts: White House officials said the Biden administration would make good on a U.S. promise to donate $4 billion to the campaign over the next two years and the pharmaceutical company Novavax pledged to eventually donate 1.1 billion doses of its vaccine.

Mr. Biden will make his announcement on Friday during a virtual meeting with other leaders from the Group of 7, where he is also expected to call on other countries to step up their contributions. The $4 billion was approved last year by a Republican led-Senate when President Donald J. Trump was still in office.

Public health experts often say that unless everyone is vaccinated, it is as if no one is vaccinated. One of the officials, who spoke anonymously to preview the president’s announcement, noted that the move was also in the interest of international security for the United States to help with efforts abroad to diminish the impact of the pandemic.

Countries like India and China are already using the coronavirus vaccine as a diplomatic tool; both are giving away doses to other nations in an effort to expand their global influence. The United States has yet to do the same, although the officials said that if it reached a point where it had surplus doses of vaccine — which seems likely by the fall — the Biden administration intends to donate them to countries in need.

But, an official said, the United States will not be able to share vaccines now, while the American vaccination campaign is still continuing to expand.

The international vaccine effort, known as Covax, has been led by the public-private health partnership known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the World Health Organization. It aims to distribute vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the W.H.O., with a special emphasis on to low- and middle-income countries.

The White House officials said the money would be delivered in several tranches: an initial donation of $500 million the near future followed by another $1.5 billion to be delivered in the near term. The remaining $2 billion will delivered by the end of 2022.

The president’s engagement in the global fight against the pandemic stands in stark contrast to the approach of Mr. Trump, who withdrew from the World Health Organization and disdained foreign assistance, pursuing a foreign policy he liked to call “America First.” Mr. Biden rejoined the World Health Organization immediately after taking office in January.

One of the officials said Mr. Biden would call on other nations to make significant pledges to Covax.

So far, the United States has pledged more than any other nation; the official said the goal was to translate the second tranche of $2 billion into as much as $15 billion — the amount the administration believes is necessary to boost the supply of vaccine around the world and to distribute it.

The Novavax announcement was greeted with enthusiasm by those leading the Covax effort. Dr. Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, said in a statement that the donation would help the campaign “close in on our goal of delivering two billion doses in 2021.” He said it would also expand the range of vaccines it can rely on to “build a portfolio suitable for all settings and contexts.”

United States › United StatesOn Feb. 17 14-day change New cases 70,176 –43% New deaths 2,471 –34%

World › WorldOn Feb. 17 14-day change New cases 430,138 –28% New deaths 13,299 –20%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Video

transcript

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transcript

Women Leaving Work Force Is a ‘National Emergency,’ Harris Says

In a meeting with women leaders, Vice President Kamala Harris said high numbers of women being pushed from the work force by the pandemic can be largely addressed by the Biden administration’s coronavirus relief plan.

“Our economy cannot fully recover unless women can participate fully. So I believe, I think we all believe, this is a national emergency — women leaving the workforce in these numbers, it’s a national emergency, and it demands a national solution. We do believe that the American Rescue Plan is a very big part of the solution to this issue. And in many ways; one, it will get immediate relief to women workers, including $1,400 checks to those who need it. And at least $3,000 in tax credits to parents for each of their children. And the beauty of the significance of this is by doing that, we will lift up nearly half of the children who are living in poverty in our country. The American Rescue Plan will also provide funding to help schools safely reopen, and make a big investment in child care to help providers keep their doors open. And it will get America vaccinated. So simply put, the American Rescue Plan will help get women back to work.” “Women are not opting out of the workforce. They are being pushed by inadequate policies. So we have an opportunity not just to throw money at a problem, but to build that architecture for the future. Use this as a moment to address the serious inequities that have been further exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.” “Do not underestimate the impacts from enhanced unemployment benefits, pandemic unemployment assistance and economic payments that have come directly into our families. They are a lifeline and we have to continue this.”

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that the 2.5 million women who have left the work force since the beginning of the pandemic constituted a “national emergency,” one that she said could be addressed by the Biden administration’s coronavirus relief plan.

That number, according to Labor Department data, compares with 1.8 million men who have left the work force. For many women, the demands of child care, coupled with layoffs and furloughs in an economy hit hard by the pandemic, have forced them out of the labor market.

The vice president painted a dire picture of the reality that millions of American women are facing during the pandemic. “Our economy cannot fully recover unless women can participate fully,” Ms. Harris said on a video call held with several women’s advocacy groups and lawmakers.

As part of its $1.9 trillion relief plan, the Biden administration has outlined several elements that officials say will ease the burden on unemployed and working women, including $3,000 in tax credits issued to families for each child, a $40 billion investment in child care assistance and an extension of unemployment benefits. Ms. Harris said that the package would “lift up nearly half of the children that are living in poverty” in the United States, a claim backed by a Columbia University analysis of the plan.

A recent Quinnipiac poll showed broad support for the Biden administration’s proposal. It has no Republican support in Congress, but Democrats aim to pass the plan using a fast track budgetary process, known as reconciliation, which would allow them to push it through the Senate with a simple majority.

Female employment began plummeting almost immediately once the virus took hold last spring, according to a report published last year by researchers at the University of Arkansas and the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California.

Non-college educated women and women of color have been disproportionately affected. Another report, published last fall by the Brookings Institution, showed that nearly half of all working women have low-paying jobs, which are more likely to be held by Black or Latina women and in sectors, including dining and travel, that are among the least likely to return soon to a degree of normalcy.

People arrive to get vaccinated at the Maccabi Health vaccination centre in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.Credit…Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Israel has raced ahead with the fastest Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the world, inoculating nearly half its population with at least one dose. Now its success is making it a case study in setting rules for a partially vaccinated society — raising thorny questions about rights, obligations and the greater good.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted this week to open shopping malls and museums to the public, subject to social distancing rules and mandatory masking. For the first time in many months, gyms, cultural and sports events, hotels and swimming pools will also reopen, but only for some.

Under a new “Green Badge” system that functions as both a carrot and a stick, the government is making leisure activities accessible only to people who are fully vaccinated or recovered starting from Sunday. Two weeks later, restaurants, event halls and conferences will be allowed to operate under those rules. Customers and attendees will have to carry a certificate of vaccination with a QR code.

Israel is one of the first countries grappling in real time with a host of legal, moral and ethical questions as it tries to balance the steps toward resuming public life with sensitive issues such as public safety, discrimination, free choice and privacy.

“Getting vaccinated is a moral duty. It is part of our mutual responsibility,” said the health minister, Yuli Edelstein. He also has a new mantra: “Whoever does not get vaccinated will be left behind.”

Four million Israelis — nearly half the population of nine million — have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and more than 2.6 million have gotten a second dose. But about two million eligible citizens aged 16 or over have not sought vaccines. The average number of new daily infections is hovering around 4,000.

Israel’s central government — eager to bring the country out of its third national lockdown without setting off a new wave of infections — was spurred into action by local initiatives. Chafing under the country’s lockdown regulations, an indoor shopping mall in the working-class Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam threw its doors open last week for customers who could prove that they had been vaccinated or had recovered from Covid-19.

In Karmiel, the mayor made a similar decision to open his city in the northern Galilee region for business. Other mayors want to bar unvaccinated teachers from classrooms while some hoteliers threatened unvaccinated employees with dismissal.

Mr. Edelstein, the health minister, said on Thursday that vaccination would not be compulsory in Israel. But his ministry is now proposing legislation that would oblige unvaccinated employees whose work involves contact with the public to be tested for the virus every two days. And he is promoting a bill that would allow the ministry to identify unvaccinated people to the local authorities.

A line for coronavirus tests in Los Angeles. The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans grew during the pandemic to six years, the largest figure since 1998.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Life expectancy in the United States fell by a full year in the first six months of 2020, the federal government reported on Thursday, the largest drop since World War II and a grim measure of the deadly consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

Life expectancy — the average number of years that a newborn is expected to live — is the most basic measure of the health of a population, and the stark decline over such a short period is highly unusual and a signal of deep distress. The drop comes after a series of troubling smaller declines driven largely by a surge in drug overdose deaths. A fragile recovery over the past two years has now been wiped out.

Thursday’s figures give the first full picture of the pandemic’s effect on American expected life spans, which dropped to 77.8 years from 78.8 years in 2019. It also showed a deepening of racial and ethnic disparities: Life expectancy of the Black population declined by 2.7 years in the first half of 2020, after 20 years of gains. The gap between Black and white Americans, which had been narrowing, is now at six years, the widest since 1998.

“I knew it was going to be large, but when I saw those numbers, I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Elizabeth Arias, the federal researcher who produced the report, said of the racial disparity. Of the drop for the full population, she said, “We haven’t seen a decline of that magnitude in decades.”

Still, unlike the drop caused by the extended, complex problem of drug overdoses, this one, driven largely by Covid-19, is not likely to last as long because virus deaths are easing and people are being vaccinated. In 1918, when hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the flu pandemic, life expectancy declined 11.8 years from the previous year, Dr. Arias said, down to 39. Numbers fully rebounded the following year.

Even if such a rebound occurs this time, the social and economic effects of Covid-19 will linger, researchers noted, as will disproportionate effects on people of color. Some researchers said that drug deaths, which began surging again in 2019 and 2020, may continue to lower life expectancy.

Dr. Mary T. Bassett, a former New York City health commissioner who is now a professor of health and human rights at Harvard, said that unless the country better addressed inequality, “We may see U.S. life expectancy stagnate or decline for some time to come.”

She noted that life expectancy here began to lag behind other developed countries in the 1980s. One theory is that growing economic disparities affected health. Life conditions that have exacerbated Covid-19 rates, like overcrowded housing and inadequate protections for low-wage workers, will only add to that trend, she said.

In Thursday’s figures, Black and Hispanic Americans were hit harder and the fatalities in these groups skewed younger. Over all, the death rate for Black Americans with Covid-19 was almost twice that for white Americans as of late January, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the death rate for Hispanics was 2.3 times higher than for white non-Hispanic Americans.

The 2.7-year drop in life expectancy for African-Americans from January through June of last year was the largest decline, followed by a 1.9-year drop for Hispanic Americans and a 0.8-year drop for white Americans.

Dr. Bassett said she expected life expectancy for Hispanic people to decline further over the second half of 2020, when Covid-19 death rates for that demographic continued to rise even as they dropped for white and Black Americans.

A woman waits for her vaccination in Bates Memorial Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., on Friday, the first day that Norton Healthcare offered shots in predominantly Black areas of the city.Credit…Jon Cherry/Getty Images

Rates of vaccination in Black and Latino communities in New York are lower than rates in largely white communities, new data shows, the latest evidence that suggests they aren’t getting equal access to vaccines, even though they have been disproportionately been affected by the coronavirus.

The picture is hazy because accurate national data on race and ethnicity is lagging. But experts and leaders in these communities say the data shows that Black and Latino Americans are being vaccinated at lower rates because they face obstacles like language and technology barriers, disparities in access to medical facilities and getting to a site.

Some Black and Latino Americans face other problems, too, including social media misinformation and hesitancy to get the vaccine because of mistrust in government officials and doctors.

Data released on Tuesday on the 1.3 million vaccines administered in New York City showed lower rates of vaccination in predominantly Black areas. New York State also reports Latino and Black residents to be behind in vaccination totals.

President Biden has repeatedly said that racial equity is at the center of his response to the coronavirus pandemic and he appointed an adviser, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, to tackle that. The Biden administration announced a program last week that began to ship vaccines to federally funded clinics in underserved communities.

The federal government also sent one million doses to about 6,500 retail pharmacies beginning last week. But researchers who did a county-level analysis, which included community pharmacies, federally qualified health centers, hospital outpatient departments and rural health clinics, found that more than one-third of U.S. counties have two or fewer of those facilities.

This makes access to vaccines more difficult, according to the study from the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and West Health Policy Center.

While vaccine hesitancy may play a role in Black and Latino communities, Sean Dickson, the director of health policy at the West Health Policy Center, said that the study shows evidence of effects from systemic health infrastructure issues.

“It’s important that we don’t rest on vaccine hesitancy as a crutch,” Mr. Dickson said, adding that it could sometimes be used to blame Black and Latino communities. “If we don’t do anything to better affirmatively distribute the vaccines in these communities, then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

In the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, Renee Muir, the director of development and community relations at the BMS Family Health Center, said she is developing a survey to gather evidence of the challenges affecting the community. Many residents have been deeply affected by the virus because of adverse health conditions and unemployment.

“Now you’re talking about people making decisions to spend $6 round trip, or eating, or paying a phone bill,” Ms. Muir said about residents traveling to get a vaccine.

On messaging platforms like WhatsApp and on social media, Latinos have been exposed to vaccine misinformation, said Dr. Valeria Daniela Lucio Cantos, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University. She has been working to help Latinos understand the vaccine and make appointments.

“There’s this emphasis on the risk and not enough on the benefits of the vaccines,” she said.

But while many older Americans struggle with the online system to register for a vaccine, sites only available in English presented an additional barrier, Dr. Cantos said.

“It feels like the system built for vaccine distribution did not have the Latinx community in mind,” she said, using the gender-neutral term for Latinos. She added that vaccine sites asking for Social Security numbers or insurance numbers made it difficult for undocumented immigrants to feel safe.

As vaccine supplies ramp up, Dr. Paulina Rebolledo, an assistant professor at Emory, hopes that officials begin to rethink their approach by mobilizing with organizations within Black and Latino communities that are trusted by residents and speak various languages.

“We, on the provider side or the health care side, can try to do more to reach patients and have them hear our voices,” she said. “It’s their overall health we’re trying to work on, and this is just an integral part of the movement.”

Lorraine Wilner, a 78-year-old retiree with metastatic breast cancer, at her home in Lancaster, S.C. Instead of making longer drives into North Carolina as frequently, she can now have her blood drawn at a lab near her home and review the results with researchers over a video call.Credit…Travis Dove for The New York Times

When the pandemic hit last year, clinical trials took a hit. Universities closed, and hospitals turned their attention to battling the new disease. Many studies that required repeated, in-person visits with volunteers were delayed or scrapped.

But some scientists found creative ways to continue their research even when face-to-face interaction was inherently risky. They mailed medications, performed exams over video chat and asked patients to monitor their own vitals at home.

Many scientists say this shift toward virtual studies is long overdue. If these practices persist, they could make clinical trials cheaper, more efficient and more equitable — offering state-of-the-art research opportunities to people who otherwise wouldn’t have the time or resources to take advantage of them.

“We’ve discovered that we can do things differently, and I don’t think we’ll go back to life as we used to know it,” said Dr. Mustafa Khasraw, a medical oncologist and clinical trial specialist at Duke University.

According to one analysis, nearly 6,000 trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov were stopped between Jan. 1 and May 31, roughly twice as many compared with non-pandemic times.

Remote trials are likely to persist in a post-pandemic era, researchers say. Cutting back on in-person visits could make recruiting patients easier and reduce dropout rates, leading to quicker, cheaper clinical trials, said Dr. Ray Dorsey, a neurologist at the University of Rochester who conducted remote research for years.

The shift to virtual trials could also help diversify clinical research, encouraging more low-income and rural patients to enroll, said Dr. Hala Borno, an oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco. The pandemic, she said, “does really allow us to step back and reflect on the burdens that we’ve been placing on patients for a really long time.”

But virtual trials are not a panacea. Researchers will have to ensure that they can thoroughly monitor volunteers’ health without in-person visits, and be mindful of the fact that not all patients have access to, or are comfortable with, technology.

And in some cases, scientists still need to demonstrate that remote testing is reliable; homes are uncontrolled environments. “Maybe there’s a cat crawling on them or grandchildren in the next room,” he said.

A rare winter storm that dumped a foot of snow on Seattle couldn’t keep Fran Goldman from her first appointment for the coronavirus vaccine on Sunday.Credit…Ruth Goldman/Ruth Goldman, via Associated Press

To get her coronavirus vaccination last weekend, Frances H. Goldman, 90, went to an extraordinary length: six miles. On foot.

It was too snowy to drive at 8 a.m. on Sunday when Ms. Goldman took out her hiking poles, dusted off her snow boots and started out from her home in the Seattle neighborhood of View Ridge. She made her way to the Burke-Gilman Trail on the edge of the city, where she then wended her way alongside a set of old railroad tracks, heading south. Then she traversed the residential streets of Laurelhurst to reach the Seattle Children’s Hospital.

It was a quiet walk, Ms. Goldman said. People were scarce. She caught glimpses of Lake Washington through falling snow. It would have been more difficult, she said, had she not gotten a bad hip replaced last year.

At the hospital, about three miles and an hour from home, she got the jab. Then she bundled up again and walked back the way she had come.

It was an extraordinary effort — but that was not the extent of it. Ms. Goldman, who became eligible for a vaccine last month, had already tried everything she could think of to secure an appointment. She had made repeated phone calls and fruitless visits to the websites of local pharmacies, hospitals and government health departments. She enlisted a daughter in New York and a friend in Arizona to help her find an appointment.

Finally, on Friday, a visit to the Seattle Children’s Hospital website yielded results.

“Lo and behold, a whole list of times popped up,” she said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I went and got my glasses to make sure I was seeing it right.”

Then came the snow, which would ultimately drop more than 10 inches, in one of Seattle’s snowiest weekends on record. Wary of driving on hilly, unplowed roads, Ms. Goldman decided to go to the hospital on foot. She took a test walk part of the way on Saturday to get a sense of how long the trip might take.

And on Sunday, she trekked all the way to the hospital to get her vaccine.

“I hope that it will inspire people to get their shots,” she said. “I think it’s important for the whole country.”

The rollout in Washington State, like many around the country, has been complicated by failures of technology, shortfalls in equity and a persistent imbalance of supply and demand. State officials have struggled to set up the infrastructure necessary to schedule and vaccinate the millions of people who are already eligible.

Ms. Goldman is scheduled to receive her second dose of the vaccine next month. She plans to drive.

Lawmakers in California on Thursday proposed a $12.6 billion package to fast-track teacher vaccines and provide incentives to public schools to reopen classrooms by April 15.

The legislation, which is virtually assured of passage early next week, would restore about 10 weeks of in-person class for the regular school year, and then only for elementary and special needs students. In most districts, California’s school year ends in late June.

But it would also include money for summer school. More important, the plan would establish California’s clearest road map yet for restoring in-person instruction. Most of the state’s large school districts, including the Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco districts, have been operating remotely for the vast majority of students for nearly a year.

Mr. Newsom had called for schools to reopen this month under a similar incentive structure, citing federal guidelines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new guidelines saying that teacher vaccination need not be a prerequisite to reopening schools, as long as other health measures were enforced.

However, teachers unions have demanded greater workplace safety, including vaccinations, surveillance testing and extensive improvements to ventilation systems. The 300,000-member California Teachers Association, a powerful player in the state’s Democratic-dominated Capitol, aired statewide television ads this week calling for “safety first” in classrooms and warning that the pandemic is “still a threat.”

Under the legislative plan, $8 billion in state and federal money would be distributed to districts willing to provide in-person teaching by April 15 for students in kindergarten through sixth grade and for high-needs students through 12th grade.

Those districts — and their local health authorities — would be required to offer vaccines to teachers and staff before they returned to classrooms. Schools would also have to comply with strict distancing, masking and other safety requirements. Families would be given the option of remaining in distance learning.

The state would also make available $4.6 billion to underwrite summer school, tutoring, extended school days and other remedial efforts to make up for the academic toll of the pandemic.

Districts that failed to reopen by April 15 would be required to return the funds.

“These clear guidelines from the state will help reopen schools in the safest way possible,” the superintendent of the Los Angeles school district, Austin Beutner, said in a statement.

Mr. Newsom, who is facing a Republican-led recall movement fueled, in part, by the pandemic-related school closures, had no immediate comment about the legislation, but has said repeatedly that he wants to reopen schools.

A subway station platform in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn earlier this month.Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

After warning that draconian cuts to public transit could be on the way, including a 40 percent decrease in subway service, New York transit officials on Thursday announced that they had avoided major reductions for the next two years after a new infusion of federal aid and better than expected tax revenues helped steady the system’s finances.

The improved financial outlook is a major dose of good news for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, buses and two commuter lines and has seen fare revenues plunge after the pandemic emptied public transit of riders.

The agency had been warning of drastic reductions, not just to the subway but also to buses, in part to pressure Congress into providing more help. The $1.9 trillion stimulus package President Biden is pushing Congress to approve includes as much as $30 billion for public transit.

Of that, the M.T.A. can expect to receive at least $6 billion, according to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is now the Democratic majority leader and who played a critical role in securing financing for transit agencies during stimulus negotiations last year.

While the agency said it would avoid major cuts in 2021 and 2022, it still faces an $8 billion deficit over the next four years and the possibility of cuts in the near future without additional federal aid.

“In the short and midterm there is significant relief, but we still have a long-term structural, fiscal problem that we have not dealt with,” said Andrew Rein, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a financial watchdog. “The bottom line is we are not out of the woods, but we can see the light through the trees.”

The latest round of federal aid, which directed around $4 billion to the M.T.A., provided more money for day-to-day operations and freed the agency to commit more toward its capital plan for major upgrades. The agency also received around $4 billion from the first federal emergency relief package last year.

Still hanging in the balance is the agency’s sweeping $54 billion plan to modernize the system, including replacing an antiquated signal system that is a major cause of delays and disruptions. That plan was suspended after the pandemic hit but parts of it will be revived this year, according to transit officials.

Making the system more reliable is a crucial step to luring back riders as New York struggles to recover from the financial crisis set off by the outbreak.

Empty syringes wait to be filled with the coronavirus vaccine. Apple is removing the drops of blood at the end of its syringe emoji.Credit…Jon Nazca/Reuters

As millions get vaccinated, Apple is making a design change to its syringe emoji, swapping an image with drops of blood at the end of the emoji’s needle for one that looks more like a vaccine.

The redesigned emoji is available only to members of the company’s beta program but will be publicly available with iOS 14.5. While new emojis are more difficult to approve, changing an emoji’s design can enact a similar result on a faster timeline, according to Keith Broni, the deputy emoji officer at Emojipedia, a service that archives the design and usage trends of emojis.

The syringe emoji dates to 1999 and had been used mainly to illustrate blood donations in Japan. The emoji was often used in discussions around blood donations and even tattooing, Mr. Broni said.

“When you provide someone with a communication tool, they will use it as they see fit,” Mr. Broni said. “We’ve seen many different emojis take on many different connotations.”

Mr. Broni said he had started to notice a spike in the usage of the emoji late last year, and saw that the conversations people were having on Twitter while using it had pivoted to talk about coronavirus vaccines.

Mr. Broni said he expected the change from Apple to be a permanent one, and that other technology companies would be likely to follow suit. He said the emoji that resembles a vaccine injection could be used more readily and that removing the blood would make the emoji more flexible and less intimidating.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic has created a rift with state lawmakers, including some fellow Democrats.Credit…Pool photo by Mary Altaffer

The Democratic leaders of the New York State Senate are moving to strip Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of unilateral emergency powers granted during the pandemic, setting up an unusual rebuke by members of his own party.

The measures, which could come to a vote next week, underscore the deepening division between Mr. Cuomo and state lawmakers since he acknowledged having intentionally withheld critical data on virus-related deaths from them.

The F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York have opened an inquiry into the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic. The inquiry, which was confirmed by three people familiar with the matter, is in its earliest stages, and it is not clear whether it is focused on any individual.

The inquiry, first reported in The Times Union of Albany, was another indication of the shift in Mr. Cuomo’s position since March, when he emerged as a prominent national voice in a crisis through his daily briefings. Now, much of that good will has evaporated.

The Senate’s action also illustrates fatigue in the Democratic-controlled State Legislature over his use of powers that gave him broad control over the state’s response to the virus, from ordering shutdowns to managing vaccine distribution.

Lawmakers discussed limiting his powers earlier this year but did not take any steps. On Wednesday, State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat and chairman of the health committee, said it was now time for action. “We need to remind them that state government is not one big branch: There’s three of them,” he said.

The tension was out in the open on Wednesday, with Mr. Cuomo attacking critics, singling out Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat, who said the governor had threatened him last week — an accusation the governor’s staff called a lie.

Earlier this week, a group of State Assembly Democrats circulated a letter seeking support for revoking Mr. Cuomo’s powers and suggesting the administration had broken federal law — an accusation the governor denied on Wednesday. That came less than a week after 14 Senate Democrats signed a statement saying that “it is clear that the expanded emergency powers granted to the governor are no longer appropriate.”

Senate leaders now intend to pass a bill that would limit the governor’s ability to supersede state laws and would establish a commission of state lawmakers to evaluate future pandemic-related directives and suspensions of laws.

The last month has been one of turmoil for Mr. Cuomo, who is known for his combative politics. After a scathing report from Letitia James, the state attorney general, that suggested the death toll at nursing homes had been undercounted, the official number of residents of nursing homes and similar institutions was increased from about 8,500 to more than 15,000.

As the virus claimed the lives of thousands of nursing home residents, the state count had left out those who had died in hospitals rather than at the homes.

The governor acknowledged on Monday that there had been “a delay” in releasing the full story.

Nicole Hong and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

Among the people who will be able to sign up for a vaccine on Thursday are grocery store and manufacturing workers. As many as 160,000 people with certain medical conditions could be newly eligible next month.Credit…Alex Edelman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Washington, D.C., residents employed in grocery stores or manufacturing were added Thursday evening to the roster of workers who can sign up for a Covid-19 vaccine, and city officials said inoculations will soon widen further to cover people with a range of medical conditions.

The next expansion, on March 1, is for people of any age with a covered medical condition, including asthma, sickle cell disease, cancer, developmental disabilities, some heart conditions and more. It could make as many as 160,000 more people eligible for the vaccine, Dr. LaQuandra S. Nesbitt, the director of the city’s health department, said at a news conference.

Dr. Nesbitt said officials were optimistic that they would be able to handle the influx of eligible residents. Earlier this week, New York State expanded its criteria to cover people with chronic health conditions, leading to a flood of calls from New Yorkers seeking appointments, some of whom had trouble getting one.

Washington’s newly announced rules also cover pregnant and obese people, but they do not include smokers or people who are overweight, two groups that had previously been considered for this phase of vaccinations, The Washington Post reported.

Dr. Nesbitt indicated that health officials were trying to balance the need for vaccinating at-risk populations with the fact that vaccine doses are limited.

About 23 percent of city residents may have medical conditions that will make them eligible, though Dr. Nesbitt noted that some may have already been able to get a vaccine under the criteria of earlier phases, such as if they are older than 64 or an essential worker. People will “self-attest” to their medical conditions when they register or while at the vaccination site, Dr. Nesbitt said.

In addition to grocery store employees, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser said, Thursday’s expansion will also cover outreach workers in the in health and human services or social services fields and people who work in food packaging.

A man gets the coronavirus vaccine at an outdoor vaccination site on Wednesday in Bradenton, Fla.Credit…Chris O’Meara/Associated Press

It was meant to be a feel-good event, like the two or three that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida holds around the state each week: a pop-up coronavirus vaccination site where the governor could show how his administration was getting the shots to people 65 and older.

But when Mr. DeSantis arrived on Wednesday at the site in Manatee County, he faced sharp questions from local reporters about why his staff had chosen to do it in Lakewood Ranch, an affluent and mostly white community developed by a Republican political donor.

The Bradenton Herald reported that the vaccinations in Lakewood Ranch would be limited to residents of two ZIP codes — the two wealthiest in the county — at a time when vaccination rates in less affluent Black communities in the state were lagging far behind.

Florida’s population is nearly 17 percent Black, but only about 5.4 percent of the more than 2.4 million Floridians who have gotten at least one of the two required vaccine doses so far have been Black, according to data from the Florida Department of Health.

Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, defended the site’s location. He said the state wanted to concentrate on communities with many retirees, especially in counties where the share of older people who have already been vaccinated is less than 42 percent, the statewide average.

“If Manatee County does not like us doing this, we are totally fine with putting this in counties that want it,” he said, citing several nearby counties in southern Florida: “If you want us to send to Sarasota next time, or Charlotte, or Pasco, let us know. We are happy to do it.”

Late on Wednesday, additional reporting by The Herald revealed that Vanessa Baugh, the county commissioner who had helped organize the vaccination site, had created a V.I.P. list of vaccine recipients that included herself and the developer of Lakewood Ranch, Rex Jensen. Mr. Jensen also helped organize the vaccination site, along with Patrick K. Neal, a local home builder who has donated $125,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s political committee since 2018. Last week, Mr. DeSantis visited a pop-up vaccination site at Kings Gate, a community in Charlotte County developed by Mr. Neal.

Ms. Baugh told The Herald that she did not get vaccinated or receive an appointment. Ms. Baugh and Mr. Jensen did not immediately respond to interview requests from The New York Times on Thursday. A spokeswoman for Mr. Neal declined to comment and directed questions to the governor’s office.

Florida was one of the first states to open up eligibility to everyone 65 and older. It has also offered vaccination to some people with underlying health conditions, and to frontline health care workers. But unlike most other states, it has not yet begun vaccinating other categories of essential workers like teachers or grocery workers, a policy that has drawn some criticism.

Mr. DeSantis opened another pop-up site on Thursday, this time in Pinellas Park, a largely white middle-income community near St. Petersburg. Before he spoke to reporters there, a man yelled, “Shame on you, Governor!”

Mr. DeSantis said questions about any preferential treatment in Lakewood Ranch should be directed to officials there, saying that the state merely identifies the pop-up sites, leaving details about who will be vaccinated to local leaders.

“We trust them to be able to sign people up,” he said.

Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts toured a sports arena in Worcester in December as it was being readied for use as a field hospital during a peak period of the pandemic.Credit…Pool photo by Nancy Lane

Thursday was supposed to be a great day for Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, whose vaccination effort was beginning to hit a stride after stumbling badly in January.

At 8 a.m., almost a million more residents of the state — those between 65 and 75, and those with two or more medical conditions — were to become eligible to book vaccinations online.

Except — not.

When the big moment came, instead of getting appointments, many thousands of users received a message that the state’s new web application, vaxfinder.mass.gov, had crashed.

Overwhelmed by volume, the site intermittently returned to life over the next three hours — but it turned out that, because of the website problems, the state had not been able to post 50,000 of the 77,000 newly available appointments.

Not for the first time, Twitter became a clearinghouse for widespread frustration.

Using the Massachusetts vaccination website is like feverishly clicking on Ticketmaster with millions of other people, except instead of trying to see Beyoncé you’re trying to keep parents alive in a pandemic.#mapoli pic.twitter.com/8kWnAs5NeZ

— Travis (@travtufts) February 18, 2021

Governor Baker said on Thursday that website technicians “did a lot of scenario work” in advance, but “obviously it didn’t prepare the site.”

“My hair is on fire about the whole thing,” he told WGBH, a Boston public radio station. “People are working really hard to get it fixed.”

He added, “People did a lot of work preparing for this, but clearly they didn’t do enough.”

He has said federal vaccine supply constraints were holding back the state’s effort, and said on Thursday that he was considering sending National Guard troops to Kentucky and Tennessee to pick up shipments that may be stalled there because of bad weather.

A popular Republican who spent much of his career as a health care executive, Governor Baker came under intense public criticism for the slow, patchy availability of vaccinations in the state in January.

The state gave priority to workers in hospitals and nursing homes, but many of them refused the shots, so much of the state’s initial stockpile of doses sat unused in cold storage. Six weeks into the effort, Massachusetts trailed most of New England, and ranked below average nationally, in the share of its population that had been vaccinated by that time.

The state opened mass vaccination sites in February and quickly improved its performance, rising to rank ninth in the country, according to a New York Times database.

Expanding eligibility was a sign of that progress, since Massachusetts did so after crossing an important threshold, with more than half its residents over 75 having received at least one of the two required vaccine doses. Last week the state also began a first-in-the-nation experiment, offering vaccinations to those who accompany people who are 75 and older to mass vaccination sites.

Still, lawmakers criticized the effort as inequitable, increasing the advantage of wealthy families with working cars and free time to transport elders to be vaccinated at distant sports stadiums. The Democratic-controlled legislature has scheduled oversight hearings on the vaccine program later this month.

global roundup

A line for coronavirus testing in Hong Kong on Wednesday.Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

The Hong Kong government said on Thursday that it had approved Sinovac’s coronavirus vaccine, a drug manufactured by a mainland Chinese company that has faced scrutiny around the world over shipping delays and spotty data disclosures.

Hong Kong’s health authorities said the first million doses of the vaccine, called CoronaVac, would arrive on Friday and that vaccinations would begin next week, starting with essential workers and people over 60.

The announcement is notable because Hong Kong is one of only a few governments in Asia to have approved CoronaVac for use. Several other countries have said they would only do so after receiving full trial data from the manufacturer.

Malaysia and Singapore, for instance, have both ordered doses from Sinovac. But officials in both countries have had to reassure their citizens that they would approve a vaccine only if it had been proved safe and effective.

In January, officials in Brazil said that the efficacy rate of CoronaVac was just over 50 percent, barely above the World Health Organization’s threshold for an effective Covid-19 vaccine. The company said the efficacy rate was weaker than expected because the trial had been conducted among health care workers, who had a higher risk of contracting Covid-19, and included people with “mild symptoms.”

Sinovac has given government-appointed experts in Hong Kong late-stage trial data for CoronaVac showing a 62.3 percent efficacy rate after two shots, Lau Chak Sing, the spokesman of a coronavirus vaccine advisory panel, told reporters on Tuesday. The advisers reviewed the data and determined that vaccine’s benefits outweighed the risks, he said.

Sinovac did not release the data publicly.

Pitching CoronaVac to the Hong Kong public could be tough: A recent poll conducted by the University of Hong Kong showed that fewer than three in 10 residents would take it, because of worries about its weak efficacy. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had the highest level of acceptability, at 55.9 per cent.

Hong Kong’s health authorities approved the Pfizer vaccine in late January, and the first doses are expected to arrive in late February.

Beijing officials once hoped that Sinovac and other Chinese-made vaccines would burnish the country’s global reputation. At least 24 countries, most of them low and middle income, signed deals with the Chinese vaccine companies because they offered access when richer nations had claimed most of the doses made by Pfizer and Moderna.

Now Beijing is on the defensive, and China’s state-run media has been waging a misinformation campaign against the American vaccines, questioning their safety and promoting the Chinese ones.

In other news from around the world:

India will require travelers arriving from Brazil and South Africa to undergo a coronavirus test, to prevent variants from spreading. The Health Ministry said on Thursday that India had recorded one case of the variant circulating in Brazil, four variant cases from South Africa and 187 from Britain. India has recorded nearly 11 million cases during the pandemic. Its death toll of 156,014 is the world’s third-highest after the United States and Brazil, according to a New York Times database.

Nepal on Thursday approved a vaccine manufactured by Sinopharm, a state-owned vaccine maker from China. The Sinopharm vaccine is the second to be approved for emergency use in Nepal after Covishield, the Indian-made version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Nepal, which borders both China and India, is one of the places where the two countries are competing to distribute vaccines. Nepal approved Sinopharm’s vaccine days after the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, had pledged to donate 500,000 doses. India has already sent a million Covishield doses. As of Thursday, more than 400,000 frontline health workers and other essential workers had been vaccinated.

China has begun requiring that travelers isolate for 14 days before flying in from some countries in Africa and Asia, according to notices posted on Chinese embassies’ websites this week. Places affected include Egypt, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. China already required anyone entering from abroad to quarantine for multiple weeks upon arrival, as do numerous other countries. Mandatory quarantine before travel appears to be far rarer.

Spectators were allowed back into the Australian Open on Thursday, hours after the state of Victoria ended a five-day lockdown it had imposed to contain an outbreak in a Melbourne quarantine hotel. The tennis tournament’s director, Craig Tiley, said that 7,477 fans would be allowed in for each session, about half capacity. Fans are required to wear masks while indoors or when they are unable to socially distance.

Zimbabwe began its first vaccinations using 200,000 Sinopharm doses donated by China. The country’s daily new cases have slowed down after a recent wave, and the government relaxed some lockdown rules on Monday. Zimbabwe has recorded 35,423 cases and 1,418 deaths, according to a New York Times database.

Almost a year since the country’s first confirmed case, New Zealand on Friday began its first vaccinations, which went to the health workers who will inoculate people working at airports and in quarantine hotels on Saturday. The country last week received around 60,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the only one approved by the government so far.

Rita Alba, right, a registered nurse, directs Alba Carrasco to the recovery area after giving her the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine at a pop-up vaccination site at the Bronx River Addition NYCHA complex in January.Credit…Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

A little-known program that allows New Yorkers to get a Covid-19 vaccination if they volunteer at vaccine distribution sites has stopped accepting new applicants who do not have experience in health care.

Vaccine distribution began in New York State in mid-December. To fill out staffing shortages, New York City had enlisted its Medical Reserve Corps, a volunteer network that responds to public health emergencies. Without fanfare, the agency recruited volunteers — medical and nonmedical staff alike. In exchange for 36 hours of service, volunteers were eligible to receive their first dose of the vaccine.

On Thursday, the Medical Reserve Corps told The New York Times in an email that it would only accept health care professionals going forward. “The NYC MRC has traditionally been used for medical/health care volunteers. As the number of volunteers swelled — including city employees serving in the hubs — we went back to limiting MRC to recruitment of healthcare professionals,” the agency said.

Volunteering was a way for many New Yorkers who are not yet eligible for vaccination to jump to the front of the line, as receiving the vaccine has proved elusive. According to data gathered by The New York Times, about 10 percent of 11 million eligible New Yorkers have received their first dose.

The task of vaccinating is daunting: A single vaccination site might require people to act as administrative employees, security officers, medical greeters, translators, emotional support staffers, schedulers, traffic monitors and, of course, vaccinators.

Some volunteers bristled at the idea of working three 12-hour shifts without receiving a single penny from the city, even if they did receive the vaccine in exchange.

Others, though, thought they struck gold. “I thought that it was the best deal in the world, the three shifts,” said Seth Rosen, the director of development at the National LGBT Bar Association. He volunteered in the South Bronx. “I was happy to do that in order to be vaccinated.”

But nearly all volunteers complained that signing up was opaque and convoluted.

Enrollment instructions on the city’s website are targeted only to licensed clinical professionals. In response, a number of unauthorized documents outlining the sign-up process for general staff began popping up on the internet: circulating around social media or forwarded among friends.

Adam, a filmmaker who did not want to use his last name because volunteers were told not to speak to the press, registered for his volunteer service after receiving an unofficial document. It detailed the steps required for registration over four separate websites, each one requiring different accounts and passwords. Users were taught how to create an account on the city’s official website; then how to register on ServNY, the state’s volunteer program; then how to register with the state’s Department of Health Public Account Management System; and, finally, how to create an account for the Public Health Responders program.

In all, it required 32 steps.

“It was so bureaucratic — right out of Kafka,” said Adam.

And now it’s over.

The city Medical Reserve Corps sent an email to volunteers on Thursday saying general staffing roles were “at capacity for the foreseeable future.”

“Leadership has decided that NYC staff will be filling in the gaps moving forward,” the email said. “Given where we were with staffing four weeks ago, having this role entirely covered is a significant accomplishment — and a relief. Once again, thank you.”

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