Heroism in TFATWS

Let's establish one thing which is that the show operates in a superhero trope, which means there are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys always win. This is not to say that characters are morally clean-cut between good/bad. The Flag Smashers acted out of good intentions; Walker did want to do good things when he took over the mantle. But that doesn't mean they aren't the bad guys in the story, because a person is not only judged by their intentions but also the means and the ends of those intentions.

Sam and Bucky are the heroes in the story, they beat the bad guys (the Flag Smashers) and saved the world. That's how the story ends. That's how all the superhero stories end.

But the show isn't quite that simple, not in the sense that it deals with moral greys, no. Rather, the show really fucks up the boundaries between good/bad, right/wrong, and by extension, the heroism of the show.

Let's say Karli has some vague cosmopolitan worldview, and let's say that's better than the state system so Sam is justified to sympathize with her cause, and sam is rightfully asking the governments to be better. What's the actual, feasible way to achieve Karli's vision? Nice speeches notwithstanding, Sam isn't offering a solution. States aren't going to abandon the system that made them a state just because some hero dressed in an American flag descends from the sky and tells them to. Forced displacement and/or re-settlement happen because the population distribution is screwed, especially in Western Europe where Karli is from. Those states simply do not have the capacity, spatially and financially, to accommodate all the people while the others would be faced with devastating labour shortages. Statecraft is not just about morals, some IR scholars would even argue it's never about morals, you have to do the rationalist calculation. (also sam's speech to the politicians is so.........wrong. it sounds like a 16-year-old wanna-be socialist who spends too much time on leftist tiktok)

Here's the thing, you can agree with the political ideology or not, because it's not about whether it's right or wrong. It's about Sam being a hero who comes from a heavy political background, who represents a set of values that is meant to transcend a single country, advocating that ideology whilst being completely naive about it.

Steve embodies a similar idealism that makes him a hero, but not a leader. He's a leader because he can lead, he assesses the situation, sets a goal, and gives out tasks to achieve that goal. In the show, Sam is not demonstrating effective leadership, although not entirely his fault.

When you have the 'hero' indiscriminatorily endorsing the villain's philosophy, it doesn't mean the hero is empathetic, it means the hero is fucking bullshit. What makes a hero isn't merely stopping bad guys, it's also offering a better alternative even when the villain kinda makes sense. Superheroes are supposed to offer moral lessons through their heroism, which often takes place as they defeat evil. Without that, they're just dudes stopping fights, not heroes fighting for causes. The only moral lesson Sam offers is 'hey maybe radicalization is bad', which is completely ignored by both Karli and Zemo.

Sam's sympathy towards Karli is even more absurd. Even if he agrees with her cause, she's an unrepentant killer. 'Don't call them terrorists.' really, Sam? What would you call them? Just bc the Soviets fought the N@zis doesn't mean they were the good guys.

Furthermore, we see the contrast between her and the other flag smashers. They were invisible victims while her body was gently carried by Sam as phones and cameras were recording. In a show where they tried to make sense of racism, the stark contrast between Karli and the rest of the group happens to be mostly PoC is kinda hilarious.

The problem isn't Sam. It's the terrible horrible writing. You can't take a Watsonian take when it's so obviously a Doylist problem. The show claims to be a lot of things it got wrong is just pathetic.

What about Bucky? His arc is pretty detached from the main storyline and he basically did nothing significant in the show so I don't even know what they want to convey about his heroism. He was literally just running around punching people (not even very good at it too) while being blamed for things he wasn't responsible for. He only told Karli that killing was bad. What a novel lesson. Again, there is nothing from the good guy.

Who is the hero then?

Zemo is the true anti-hero of the show. Throughout the show, Sam and Bucky - the good guys - oppose killing in general, but their method is proven ineffectual and in the end, all Flag Smashers are killed with a majority of them killed after they were lawfully arrested. The Flag Smashers were terrorists, they were the villains, therefore narratively, this makes Zemo's end goal - killing all supersoldiers, in this case, the Flag Smashers - right. His ideology - the desire to become superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideas; supersoldiers cannot be allowed to exist - is positively reflected in the story. His success inevitably justifies his ideology, which stands in contrast to both Sam and Karli. I'm not saying what he did was heroic, but from a storytelling perspective, Zemo is the 'hero' who ultimately eliminated the evil in this superhero trope.

The result is that Sam, the supposed hero of the show, has done nothing. He didn't stop the bad guys, he didn't offer an effective alternative to Karli (or Zemo) practically and ideologically, while Zemo did all that. What does it say about heroism and the idealism that comes with it? That it's nice to talk about but useless when a real battle takes place? That end does justify means? Because that's not what Cap trilogy conveys.

10 Legit Ways to Build Passive Income Online

Whether you are a student looking to make some extra cash, a working professional wanting to build a side hustle, or a corporate escapee and whosoever who is starting to build an online business need to have some cash inflow for the further smooth flow of your business.

There are many sites out there saying make money like $100 a day with surveys, with google sites, etc. Of course, they may make you money for a certain period of time but are not long-term and passive.

You always need to look out for ways to make money that are passive. You need to earn money every month and double it. Here are my top creative ideas to make money online. These real methods have worked in past and will work now and then too.

Freelancing

You would have heard a lot of this from others. But yes, this is the first best way to earn some cash before starting out your business. It will help to get some extra money into your pocket as well as fund a little for your software if you are starting out. You can start freelancing with no investment upfront. It's FREE. You can make money online freelancing.

Don’t worry if you think you don’t have any skills. You can learn small skills by taking a free trial in skillshare. There are tons of gigs people are looking for to get their work done and with the right process, you can make money as a freelancer.

By the year 2027, freelancers are projected to make up the majority of the workforce in the United States, with 50.9% of the working population. In fact, at the current growth rate, it’s estimated that 67.6 million Americans will be freelancing by the end of 2021. That’s 42% of the American workforce! (Website planet).

What are you waiting for? Search in-demand gigs on google keywords and search trends. And yes, patience is the key. You need to wait a few weeks while you get your first gig. Start promoting your services on social media and find your spot.

Starting a Blog

As of 2021, there are more than 570 million blogs on the internet, based on activities reported by WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Wix, Squarespace, and Medium (and this number is constantly growing) (firstsiteguide).

Now do not get overwhelmed, the one thing is though blogs are growing rapidly, and so are people reading blogs. Of course, blogs are saturated, but when you niche down and find your audience then you can achieve your space in this sea of bloggers.

Starting a blog, yesterday, today, tomorrow, is possible as long as you are using proper rules, like optimizing your SEO, giving unique content to your readers, and more. But, the best day to start blogging for your profit is today and now.

Let us look at some stats on why you should start your blog today

61% of online shoppers in the US say they made a purchase after getting a recommendation from a blog post

Companies that blog actively have 126% better lead growth

80% of bloggers say that they see positive business results from their blogging efforts

Blogs affect customers’ buying decisions as 47% of them go through 3 to 5 blog posts before the buying process (Firstsiteguide)

Give me a better reason why you should not start a blog after these mind-blowing facts.

You can start a niche blog, review blog, cooking blog, gaming blog, parenting blog, and more. Just write what you know or keep an eye on your competitors and outperform them. And blogging is the best for your long-term passive income.

Starting a YouTube channel

Now as we’ve known how YouTube has evolved to be like a video search engine, the platform has grown considerably and is been growing millions of YouTubers.

Again, let’s talk about some statistics about YouTube. YouTube has 2.3 billion users worldwide.

79 percent of Internet users have their own YouTube account.

YouTube viewers watch over a billion hours of video on the platform every day and generate billions of views. (YouTube, 2021)

YouTube is localized in more than 100 countries and is available in 80 languages. (YouTube, 2021)

Every day people watch one billion hours of video on YouTube (source-Oberlo)

Now, the real question is how to make money out of YouTube? Well, there is enough space for you to sink in. Are you a coach, fitness enthusiastic, a person with good communication, or even just an individual with no skills at all? You can make videos, monetize your YouTube account, and earn from AdSense and affiliate marketing.

Umm! Some people may say that YouTube is not for me. I don’t know how to make and produce videos. I don’t have any skills. Well, I have a solution for that. You can make money from YouTube absolutely by not showing your face at all.

Here are some of the niches you can make videos y not showing your face.

If u do not want to record videos, you can head up to free stock videos or images and give a voice-over and start making content.

If you feel shy to start, you will never get ahead. So, the one thing I want to tell to everyone who is shy to make videos and for my younger self, stop doubting yourself. Just do it, don’t care about criticism, success will follow you

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when a person earns a commission for referring a product to others. For eg: You register yourself as an affiliate to promote certain products, when the person you promote the product click on your unique affiliate link and purchases through your link you earn a commission. A commission can range for each and every product.

And the affiliate marketing model is the best, safe model for beginners. You can drive traffic for free and for paid as well. You can be an affiliate marketer if you need a passive income, you don’t need to have any other customer support, you can work from home at your own comfort.

Now, how to register as an affiliate. First, think of what do you like the most. What products do you love using? Type the name in google and see whether there is an affiliate program or just see other affiliate programs in your niche. Choose the one you love so that you don’t feel tired and exhausted in the long run.

There are many other sites where you can choose your products from. You can take products from Click bank, Digistore24, Share a Sale, Jvzoo, and similar other platforms.

Here are the best affiliate platforms for you to choose from

How do you want to promote is the next question?

Well, you can create landing pages in click funnels, kartra, or builderall and promote them through ads. If you are on your budget, you could start a blog and promote it. You can write blogs for free on medium.com. It is a cost-effective way to sell your products. You can create a YouTube channel, talk about how you love using those products, and promote them, you could even use Pinterest to promote your blogs and landing pages.

We all know that Pinterest is a visual search engine and no doubt you can get quite a good sale from affiliate marketing in Pinterest

Once you get your first sale and testimonials you can start your Instagram page and build trust with others to promote the products and scale your business.

Instagram Influencer

Do you love making TikTok videos, always want to be active on social media? Then here is your chance to start earning being an Instagram influencer.

You can start by creating content about the topic you want to talk about the most. If creating a YouTube channel feels a bit challenging, grow your audience and monetize them through Instagram. Feel free to talk about what you feel.

Collect your follower's email IDs. Once you become consistent with the audience and platform, the content you are generating makes a digital course or something you think to monetize your people. Giveaway a lot of freebies, checklists, and many other things to lead your audience to the product you are offering. Build trust with them and try to use all of Instagram's available channels. Use carousals, reels, IGTV, go live to show behind the scenes of your work, and more!.

Staying consistent is the key to grow your audience on Instagram.

Starting a T-Shirt Business

Whether you’re an artist, writer, designer, or entrepreneur, physical products can be the perfect canvas for monetizing your creativity. Yes, you heard that right. You can start your own merch for free. Starting an online T-shirt business is booming in this era an why don’t you be one of them. You do not need to hold any inventory, just design your t-shirt online and publish it.

Let me make it clear. So what is print on demand? How to start your free t-shirt business

Print on demand is a process where you work with a supplier to customize white-label products (like baseball hats or tote bags) with your own designs to sell them on a per-order basis under your own brand.

That means you don’t pay for the product until after you’ve actually sold it, so there’s no need to buy in bulk or hold any inventory yourself.

Plus, with print-on-demand services, everything after the sale, from printing to shipping, is handled by your supplier. Once you’ve set everything up, it takes only a few clicks to fulfill an order once you’ve made a sale.

You can use print-on-demand services to:

Test a business idea or new product line for an existing business without the risks that come with buying inventory.

Monetize an audience you’ve built. Printing on demand is a great option if you’re a YouTuber, cartoonist, or social media influencer who wants to spend your time creating content instead of fulfilling orders.

Create original products for a niche of customers. For example, apparel for people who are passionate about gaming.

Easily print one-off items—t-shirts, books, shoes, bags, wall art, phone cases, clocks, laptop skins, mugs, and so much more. You can send these as gifts or keep them for yourself and your team (source-Shopify)

You can get started with print on demand for almost free with teespring, redbubble, printful . Or you can start your online store on Shopify and sell them as a custom branding.

Do not worry if you are not a pro in graphic designing. You can design your t-shirt on canva and paste the design on your t-shirt too. This is a legitimate and easy business for beginners online. You can promote your merch by using SEO, keywords, and various social platforms.

Let's take a look at the print on demand statistics:

This statistic depicts the market value of the custom t-shirt printing market worldwide from 2016 to 2025. In 2016, the global custom t-shirt printing market was valued at 1.16 billion U.S. dollars, and was forecast to reach a value of 3.1 billion U.S. dollars by 2025.

This is insane amount the industry is making from print-on-demand only.

COVID-19 impact Fabric face mask accounted for 11.14% of all goods sold through Printify in September 2020. (Printify)

A 2020 survey revealed that about 96% of millennials and Gen Z have concerns about how the ongoing pandemic will impact the economy. (BigCommerce)

With more people staying at home and focusing on home improvement projects, the Home & Living category is on the rise, with the first 6 months of 2020 seeing a 243.77% growth. Both canvas gallery wraps (2.19%) and premium vertical posters (1.35%) are in TOP15 products sold by Printify merchants. (Printify)

According to Merkle’s report in 2020, roughly 79% of consumers plan to be more conservative with how much they will spend shopping online during the pandemic. (Merkle)

In the first 6 months of 2020, Printify monthly active users have grown by 69%, with registrations up 39%. (Printify)

62% of sellers in the United Kingdom changed their marketing plan because of the pandemic. Moreover, only 14 percent of businesses have decided to stick with their original marketing strategy for 2020. (Statista) ( All sources- Printify) Read more at: https://printify.com/ecommerce-statistics/ And these are just stats alone. Don’t wait now. Start your print-on-demand business right away.

Online Tutoring

Again, online tutoring is gaining massive demand in this digital age. During the pandemic the online tutoring business was a boom and it will be more in the coming years. Just teach people what you know. There are many people in this world who want to learn and are ready to pay for it.

Whether you know to speak English, or drawing, graphic designing, marketing, business, or anything that matters, turn your own skill into a business

You can tutor in paid platforms like cambly, Oakary, iTutor, or just start teaching in YouTube and create tour own course and sell it. You can create courses and teach in udemy too. People all over the world are searching to learn skills and may be you can teach them what you know and monetize your skills.

Amazon KDP [ Selling E-books and low content books ]

As I told you print on demand is a big thing and so does amazon KDP is too. What is KDP? Amazon KDP is nothing but kindle direct publishing. KDP allows you to self-publish eBooks and paperbacks for free. Amazon gives you direct access to your book on Amazon and allows you to create a product detail page for your book. It also gives you the option to expand your book’s availability on a global scale, making it more accessible for readers around the world. Publishing with KDP gives you full rights to your book, which is not something a traditional publishing house typically allows.

What types of content can I publish through KDP?

KDP allows you to publish eBooks (Kindle) and paperback books. However, KDP does not allow the creation of magazines, periodicals, or spiral-bound books.

Content types typically published using KDP include but are not limited to the following:

Novels

Book Series

Children’s Books

Comics

Cookbooks

Journals

Poetry

Textbooks (source: amazon.com)

Selling Photography

Are you a photographer? Are you making enough money? If no then this will help you , if yes you are gonna make an extra dime.

You can sell your beautiful photos on Getty Images, Pexels, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and many more sites and earn money whenever your image is downloaded. If it is a subscription-based site then your earnings will be more. You can post your beautiful images on Instagram and become famous. Ultimately you can collaborate with various brands for their product photography.

If your camera is lying there near you, take it and start clicking pictures and sell your photos online.

Selling on Etsy

Etsy is an online market place that works as an intermediary between customers and artists, crafters of handmade items or collectors of vintage products. The company engages in customer to customer (C2C) or peer to peer (P2P) e-commerce in which both the seller and the buyer are private individuals or micro-businesses. This is in contrast to other forms of internet commerce such as B2C or B2B (source: Statista).

Let's head to our facts about how profitable it is to sell on Etsy

Etsy had over 2.5 million sellers at the end of 2019, and we can only expect that this number has increased.

Etsy sellers live all over the world, in 234 countries

62% of Etsy sellers are based in the US.

California is home to the most Etsy sellers with 14% of US-based Etsy shops. (credits: veeqo)

Etsy is a huge commerce platform, with an especially strong US presence. Plus, the fact that most sellers are multi-channel retailers—and also selling their products on marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify sites—suggests that the platform isn’t just for amateur makers. It’s for eCommerce businesses.

So if you’re already selling handmade or vintage products on another platform, it’s worth it to expand and start selling on Etsy.

If you’re starting a business, it’s important to run the numbers before setting up shop—or at least quitting your day job. Etsy does have associated costs, though it’s worth noting that the listing and transaction fees are lower than other platforms, like Amazon and eBay. (cre: veeqo)

So, if you can start your print on demand you can sell it on Etsy too. If you are good at handicrafts Etsy is the best place to promote.

Conclusion

So here are the top 10 ways where in you can make legitimate money online. You can try all these methods one by one. Well, everyone will look for quick methods to make money online, but those won’t suffice for long run.

If you should build a strong business online you need to stay consistent no matter what. Staying consistent will help audience grow along with you on your journey to make money online. For beginners starting out these methods will help you in starting out to make a dime or two.

One thing I need to make particular is you will not see results instantly. You need to try and try, keep on trying. Whether it is 2 weeks, 1 month or 3 months, you should not stop. Keep up that grind and let’s start the digital lifestyle. Start by making money online fore free with these methods and start investing in ads and make the business run for you in long run.

The Invasion Part 1: Police Chief Darren

Though I have manage to make a name for

myself buying this home has been a project longtime in the making.

My home is in the middle of nowhere beside a never ending winding rode so to see a car pop out.

It’s makes a sharp right turn in to my yard with excitement it comes to a screeching holt.

It follows me up to the driveway parking it in no time fashion, he slides off the street on to his feet.

He slams the door grabbing my hand on to his waist leaning in for a kiss, and we make out.

The intensity is crazy withholding myself with him is almost impossible I think to myself.

“I can’t believe it, I am finally here it’s been a long process.”

“Shut the fuck up officer, all that matters is that I order it.”

“Sir Yes Master Lawrence all I want it to be yours Sir.”

“How do you feel about everything I have done to you officer?”

“I am so thrilled, happy and fulfilled to be of service to you, because I can.”

“You set me free, broke my bond to the world and brought me life.”

He sinks to his knees his eyes fixating on me and he wraps his hands on my waist.

He gets tighter getting strong and stronger in his grasp pulling me closer.

Cups his chin lifting him upward to his feet again, one kiss to his cheek as he shivers.

This Police Officer is the first of a new breed of men I am making it all starts when I plant him.

His mind altering state smirks following me to the end of woods holding out his hands.

I place a seed in his palm commanding him to plant it, and urinate over it cementing my control.

“This is perfect, once the urine sips in to the specially made soil it will take root.”

“The process will be quick the because you will never be able to leave.”

“Sir Yes Sir, my life is yours to control in all ways.”

“Now enjoy everything that is transpiring within you feel the natural growth.”

“Succumb to my will forever.”

“Sir Yes my Master, will you let me serve you sir?”

I smirk watching him fade out of existence he liquifies seeping in to the soil the major transformation begins.

In essentially less then twelve hours he will be reborn in to a new man.

His souls travels throughout woods moving everywhere he spreads all over town.

The trees absorb all of his energy growing out they skyscrape all over the woods and become mine.

In the heat of all I can myself sweltering from the anticipation a shadow looms down the block.

A young man walks out on to the deck of my home he is so thrilled my police officer is my to own forever.

“Sir you have created essentially new life you are my God.”

“I worship, serve, please and submit only to you.”

“I have no memory of life other the what you tell me, I serve you my king and my world.”

“This is my kingdom, my world and I mend all.”

“Oh my Lord, I am livid with the lust of your ultimate happiness.”

“Populate this place my lord make more of your children.”

I walk out of the area in to the woods out to a cabin of my own creation and he follows.

He kisses me slowly holding me tight in to his arms and I admire what I see.

It’s rare to find a guy that is sexy as fuck in his clothes, but also his looks.

I push non back jetting it into the ocean for the final induction.

We both strip naked feeling the flow through our bodies, the water so cool, and free.

God I love him watching his body sink in to the sea, the area washes away in a sea of white.

“Finally free, it feels like it’s been ten of the a thousand of years.”

“Since I am free, I am all yours to use as you please.”

“Yes Sire”

“Welcome to Lawrenceville population of my will.”

The end.

Monster Match #2

Hi! Special thanks to the absolutely phenomenal and positively lovely @floral-and-fine​ for commissioning this monster match! You gave me nothing but absolutely delightful vibes.

I’m a straight girl, Gemini, infp, and an elementary school teacher but my degree is in Fine Arts. I have blue eyes, brown/blonde wavy hair, plus size and 5’8”. I like to write, draw, play video games and watch movies. Personality wise, I’m sweet, mellow, timid with occasional moments of confidence, excitable, and a homebody but occasionally I like getting dressed up and going out. I love floral prints and wearing dresses. I’m terrible at being organized. I’m also very conflict averse and it takes a lot to make me mad.

Song I just happened to be listening to that I think fits the character very well: City of Ghosts by Melodysheep.

You have been matched with a Chalkydri! The Chalkydri are an ancient race of creatures thought to be angels, dwell near the sun, feasting on its vast energy output the same way a human might consume food. They are a space-faring species, only half physical, half made from energy, in an appearance that can only be described as mesmerizing. While looking like scales, their skin actually consists of crystals that keep their energy form solid, their eyes and hair the only parts they let flow free. Each Chalkydri has a different color of energy that matches their Soul, one that reflects their Name and harmonizes with the surrounding universe they were born in.

Your Chalkydri has an energy that flows from blue to green to purple, shifting and fading based on his mood. His eyes are electric, throbbing, and pulsing with unfathomable power, his hair long and glowing, visible from long distances even during the day. Each Chalkydri has a myriad of wings, about a dozen sets stacked on top of limbs and body parts- some even looping over each other. They are paler colors compared to their true Soul resonance and float against the sky almost the same way as their hair. At first glance, the wings might look feathered, a gently orchestrated pattern twisting around like an evaporating gas. He's tall, even in the form he chooses to show to humankind, but he is unfathomably large when he is in his natural state. The scales that cover his arms, neck, and portion of his face almost look like a mosaic of emerald and lapis, the colors matching so close to his Soul that it must have been intentional.

Many of his kind exist, but they are slowly dwindling as the rest of the universe runs burns the fixed amount of energy. In the beginning- the very beginning, they came to consciousness, as though from failed stars that never managed to collect enough cosmic dust to start. The Souls are another thing, no one is entirely sure where those came from, though your Chalkydri believes that the universe is a single, outstretched creature, and that all Souls of every living thing are an extension of Her. Almost like a god, yes, but with an equal amount of omnipotence or control that a human being has over their own body.

Meeting him was an accident, though falling to earth was his bad. It was after a brief scrabble with another of his kind- an argument too heated, a push more forceful than intended, and he was hurtling through an atmosphere with no means of stopping. The impact was painful and the recovery was long- especially since the sun barely offers the required nutrients he needs so far away. His body bled out upon a barren wasteland, and from that, sprung life almost overnight. The soil suddenly turned fertile, dead seeds sprouting from the cement cracks, a forest overtaking the ruins of a city before he even wakes from his slumber.

And what person finds an odd figure stumbling out of the surprise wooden area?

After trying to get him to eat (he can't) and trying to get him to drink (he can't), he finally gets enough energy from sitting against your home's windowpane that he can at least speak. He needed to get to a higher altitude to speed his recovery, and you had nothing going on that weekend. Helping the strange, blue and green man to the closest mountain range might not have been on your to-do list, but you were able to shift some things around to accommodate him. After all: alien. Space. Alien from space, need you say more?

Everything about him breathes and speaks of power despite the fact he can't necessarily use most of it on earth without vaporizing a chunk of the population. He is a being made of energy, he knows, but his people are not warriors or conquerors:  they're primarily scholars. They are curious people who like to study what they do not understand, largely how the universe came to be. But still, even with the academic rigor, you have never met a gentler soul in your life. Despite his massive frame and ability to carve out the moon into a permanent crescent, he much prefers to use his power for small, almost unnoticeable ways to improve life on earth.

His initial fall might have been an accident, but your Chalkydri cannot deny the connections he made during his stay. Especially you, because there was something about you that was just so vibrant and sweet and Alive, despite your shorter lifespan. He had always thought terrestrial beings experienced only short, quick bursts of rotting misery, but you changed that perspective. Even if the relationship is bittersweet for him- keeping you close is the only remedy to the aching pain he experiences whenever he leaves the planet. Love, but not the kind he has experienced before with his parents and siblings. It's a biting thing, one that chews from the inside of his chest out like a feral animal. He knows you are not as permanent as he is, knows that he will outlive you by leagues, but he is drawn to you so closely regardless.

That's the state of the universe, though. Gravity draws primordial dust around it, creating planets and stars and galaxies, as though closeness in itself a fundamental law of nature. Some people are pulled to each other, orbiting and pulling at the other's paths until they are in perfect sync. Some people crash and implode, a fiery display of the raw, horrifying side of that truth. Does life not form only when gravity pulls together the correct elements? Is that not the universe herself begging for a form of companionship? Love, he might argue, be an equal force to the natural state of things as gravity.

But sometimes, when he looks at you, whether that's making breakfast, sleeping, or going through your work, he thinks he wouldn't mind if you were the cause of another explosive downfall.

title: loves’ cold embrace

relationship: hama/kanna

mentions of canon typical violence

summary: She misses the chill of the tundra, the crashing of the ocean and the shattering screams of icebergs colliding. She misses the soft embrace of caribou fur and leather in her parka and the softer embrace of the woman she was stolen from. She misses the howling winds that used to sing her to sleep as they passed over the great iced plains, and the gentle voices of her family as they laughed and needled each other. The ocean that used to live in her chest is now a desert, barren and dry. -- OR;Like the moon in the sky, Hama's love never really leaves her.

this is the fic i wrote for @avatar-rarepair-exchange-2021 :~)

read it on ao3 (and get the rest of my tags and notes) or read it under the cut !!

Hama doesn’t think too much about her childhood. It makes her feel too mournful, too angry, too beholden to feelings that, at her age, her heart can’t afford to feel. What few memories that do creep into her consciousness are so wrapped in nostalgia and childhood innocence that Hama can’t even recall if they’re real or fabrications of what she wishes she lived. Certainly, she had caught fish with her family, but were the nets ever as lively as she remembers? Was her girlhood parka truly that soft and was that wind actually so forgiving against her cheeks? Hama doesn’t dwell on it, simply letting the fuzzy memories tumble in her head, comforting, warm, forgotten and ignored.

There are two memories, two days, which consistently force their way to the forefront of her mind, drawing her attention and draining her energy. One, of course, is the day she was taken from her hold, stolen, like an amputation performed without so much as a strip of leather to go between her teeth. And in contrast to the searing pain of that one, the other is much kinder. Softer, warmer, more friendly in its own way.

At the age of fifteen Hama was proud and kind and bored, days of choring and practicing and schooling all blending together into barely distinguishable slush, finally broken by the announcement that a girl on a boat with a blue sail was approaching. Almost half the village rushed to see the newcomer, and Hama pushed her way to the front of the crowd, only a few heads behind the chief and other warriors, just in time to see the girl pulling her boat up the icy shore.

Her face was sharp and her lips chapped from weeks uncountable at sea. Her clothing was familiar but strange, the patterns and beading not quite right, the shade of the leather just a bit off, but almost recognizable. Her boat was wrecked but its pieces would be salvageable for other things, and the chief softly told her that her trip was a one-way one. Hama could never forget the fierceness that laid behind the girl’s eyes, the determination in her voice as she said, “I know.”

She brought news of the location of Fire Nation ships, bags of leathers and dyes and scrolls that had been unseen in the South for decades, and perseverance that seems to infect everyone with whom she spoke. Her name was Kanna, she was from the Northern Water Tribe, and, to Hama’s delight, she was here to stay.

    In the weeks that followed Kanna’s arrival, Hama can barely separate herself from the older girl. Everything about Kanna was just so interesting - the stories of her travels, the few morsels that she would share of her life in the Northern Tribe, her laugh, the way she styled her hair, the different ways that she tried to fish - everything about her made Hama want to cling to her and never let go, like the barnacle at the haul of a ship. To her delight, Kanna didn’t seem to mind. Anytime Hama called to her from across the village square, Kanna would always wait, smile back at her, unmoving until Hama caught up and they could both continue on their day.

She doesn’t recall when they shared their first kiss, or who first pressed their lips against the other. All she remembers is the warmth of her cheeks after it happened, how her lips tinged, and how excited she was when it happened again. Was the tone playful? Was it shy? Was Hama pretending to be cooler, more mature than she actually felt? (Hama knows, almost for certain, that the latter is correct.)

Hama knew that she was beautiful, knew that she was smart and impressive and that many other teenagers would fall over themselves to try and keep her attention, and yet it was Kanna’s sly smile and gentle gaze which made Hama feel weak in the knees and made her feel like the ocean lived inside her chest. They shared soft kisses, giggling in-between the press of their lips. They slipped each other’s hands into the sleeves of the other’s parka, embraced each other tightly and often when they were supposed to be working. Kanna’s hands were strong - as evident by her ability to haul even the most lively nets out of frigid water and by her tendency to make the string on bows just a bit too taut - and yet she only ever cupped Hama’s face with the utmost care, running a calloused thumb over Hama’s lips, and only ever playfully tugging on her ears to get her to hurry up. The gentleness itself was not uncommon - Hama remained beloved by her family, her friends, and her waterbending teachers, even with the exciting arrival of the Northerner - but when it came from Kanna it felt more special than Hama cared to admit.

It was a sweet, simple existence, one that Hama was tricked into believing could exist forever. Black snow may fall, fish populations may dwindle, and one by one, Hama’s teachers and family may disappear, but surely she would be next to Kanna forever.

Of course, that was a belief that Hama soon realized to be false.

The Fire Nation prison was a pain like nothing Hama had experienced before. Beyond the chains that dig into her skin, and the sharp sting of hands and batons against her flesh, and the endless jeers and insults that the scum that keep her confined throw at her, there is an ache, one that dulls with time but never leaves. The distance from the ocean, from her ocean, pulls at her heart and at her core, begging her to return, seemingly uncaring that if she could, she would. For the first months and years, the moon seems to taunt her through the skylight, staring down at her, unhelpful and cruel in her judgment.

The only pain worse than unbecoming, the twisting and dimming of self, is the reformation that follows it. The destruction of all Hama once knew about herself, the bending and breaking of who she was and its eventual obscuration. In a way, it’s freeing. In a way, it feels like damnation.

Hama thinks back to the girl who grew up in the South Pole and the girl who sat and rotted in a cell. She feels like a distant friend, a playmate she outgrew but loved dearly. The line which connects herself to that woman of the past is tenuous, well-worn, threadbare, yet still intact. She picks up the mantle that that girl left behind and carries it with her, ignoring the aches and pains that the weight of it gives her. When Hama escapes the prison, she’s so parched she can’t even cry as she mourns for herself.

She escapes, but she cannot leave. She has neither a ship to sail nor the sea legs that she once did. When the moon dips below the horizon it takes her strength with it and she is back to her weakened state. Even if she could get a boat, Hama wouldn’t be fit to waterbend home for many months, maybe years, and she knows that without it she will surely die at sea. The thought is almost tempting.

Being away from her home fills her with many emotions. Fear, shame, confusion, anger, longing. She misses the chill of the tundra, the crashing of the ocean and the shattering screams of icebergs colliding. She misses the soft embrace of caribou fur and leather in her parka and the softer embrace of the woman she was stolen from. She misses the howling winds that used to sing her to sleep as they passed over the great iced plains, and the gentle voices of her family as they laughed and needled each other. The ocean that used to live in her chest is now a desert, barren and dry.

The Fire Nation itself is as much a prison as the cell she escaped from, but as Hama decorates the house she built with trinkets and blankets and as many splashes of blue as she thinks she can afford. She convinces herself that it’ll have to do for now. She gains some of her strength back, bids her time as she forces a smile to the citizens who would hang her by the neck if they knew what she truly was. She gains their trust, even delivers a few babies that will grow up to slaughter the innocent. It’s not a home, not peace, the life she carves out for herself, but it’s enough to survive on.

Hama focuses on her anger, letting it simmer in her chest, flowing through her like the tides, waxing and waning with the moon. She has neither nation nor family in the destructive land that she lives in, has neither home nor comfort nor love to soothe the piercing ache in her chest and soul. All her joys are temporary, fleeting, ending when she feels the urge to turn to her mother or siblings or Kanna and has to accept, once again, that they are not next to her. Hama holds onto her anger like a beggar grips a silver coin, edges cutting into her palms and dirt getting into her wounds. She holds onto her anger because she knows without it all she has left is the stillness of the ocean after a storm.

Even the half-life Hama carves out for herself doesn’t last forever. The little waterbending master shows up, with a face so similar to her dear Kanna’s, and beats her at her own game. There is a whispering pride to any master that is bested by a student, but mostly Hama is tired. Burned out and smouldering. The Fire Nation takes her away in chains once again, and Hama disgusts herself with how quickly she resigns to her fate.

Guards spend little time with Hama, and she’s kept at a distance from the windows. Still, the stone tomb that they keep her in echoes, and soon she hears whispers of the war ending, the prospect of future peace out on the horizon. Hama doesn’t know how to feel, knowing that the world may enter a time of peace and that she is still locked away like an animal. Perhaps the Southern Water Tribe will be able to flourish again. Perhaps a small part of her spirit can finally rest.

She figures that whatever the future holds, she will not be privy to it. The Fire Nation was all too happy to lock her up and throw away the key, and Hama doubts anyone back home remembers her enough to ask after her - even so, anyone she knew who is still alive probably thinks she’s dead.

And yet, she gets a visitor, soon after the guards have whispered about a  boy taking the throne. The visitor walks to her cell without fear, looks at her through the bars with sadness, not disgust. His eyes are familiar, and Hama knows that he is from the Southern Water Tribe before he announces it. She doesn’t dare call what ignites in her chest hope, even when he tells her that he’s chief.  Hakoda of the Southern Water Tribe. It echoes in her head, like the dripping of a tap that hasn’t been turned off.

He comes back more than once, all within a few days of each other. Each time with sadness and respect in his eyes, telling Hama about the political ongoings of the world, of their home, of Hakoda’s family. Apparently, the little waterbending master that sent Hama to her new cell is Hakoda’s daughter, a fact he tells her embarrassedly, asking for forgiveness.

Hama shrugs. It’s too hard to be angry without hope to do anything with it.

“Will you continue to visit?” Hama asks, instead of answering. “I hear that negotiations are coming to a close.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Oh, you know. At the market.” Hakoda cracks a smile at her attempt at a joke.

“That’s actually what I was meaning to tell you,” He says, shifting on the stool that he sits on. Hama raises a thin eyebrow. “Part of the negotiations are about you.”

“...Oh,” Hama says.

“It’s… tricky,” Hakoda continues, either oblivious to or ignoring Hama’s silence. “The Fire Lord, Zuko, uh, is worried about what some of his new ministers will say if he allows your release, and it’s complicating-”

“Release?” Hama questions, furrowing her brows.

“What? Of course, release. We’re trying to get all the surviving Water Tribe prisoners back. Your case is just a little more… controversial, so it’s taken some time to sort everything out.”

Hama almost laughs. “And, supposing it takes much longer?”

Hakoda looks ashamed as he says, “If it takes much longer to sort out, then I will have to return home with the prisoners that have already been released, but I’m not abandoning you here. We have to leave delegates here to deal with other reparations, and we’ll make sure that you coming home is always a priority.”

Hama doesn’t know what to say to that. The prospect of returning home after so long, it excites her, fills her heart with a flurry of anxious joy that can’t be tamped down, regardless of her attempts to remain practical.

“Unless… you don’t want to come home?”

“Of course I do,” Hama snaps, despite her best efforts. “Of course I do… I want nothing more.”

Hakoda smiles, tiredly, and Hama feels her age when she looks at him and sees a young man who is worked down to his bone. “As long as you do, I’ll keep fighting for you.”

Hama smiles, and in the heat of her cell, she feels the comforting breeze of home. “Please, Chief Hakoda, tell me about Kanna’s beading again.”

    The chill of the Water Tribe greets her like an old friend, long before she can see the land. It nibbles at her old joints, makes her nose and ears pink with delight, and Hama puts off slipping the donated parka over her head for as long as possible, relishing in the welcoming sting of the wind. The anorak isn’t hers, of course, and the fit is a little off, but Hakoda tells her that his mother -  her Kanna - can help her sew a new one, and as soon as everything is settled the hunters will go out to hunt.

Hama spends as much time on the deck of the ship as she can, knowing that she’s certainly getting in the way of all the warriors and deckhands who are too polite or pitying to ask her to move. She doesn’t want to miss the first sign of land, the first sign of  home in countless moons.

It feels like her heart is being returned to her chest when she spots the first mountain peak, the first thin trail of smoke from a friendly hearth, and then the first gleam of packed ice forming familiar igloos. When they finally reach the shore and, amongst the crowd of faces peering at her with admiration, confusion, sadness, anger, and joy, she spots the unmistakable face of Kanna, it feels like her heartbeat has finally been returned.

It’s a strange shock, to see the face that she thought of so often so different from last she saw it. Everything about her is different; her hair, her skin, her clothing, even her height has changed as a consequence of her more hunched form, and yet she is still the most beautiful woman that Hama has ever laid her sights on.

Hama has so little hope, she refuses to waste it on the implausible notion of returning to Kanna. It is clear that Kanna has lived a full life without her, she has a son who is chief, two lovely (if annoying and persistently optimistic) grandchildren, and the respect of the entire village. The girl in Hama’s memories is not the woman wrapping her arms around her, not the woman pulling Hama into her chest and crying into her shoulder, not the woman whispering thanks to the spirits as she exclaims how much she’s missed Hama.

Being back in Kanna’s arms feels the same as it did to see the glistening mountains from the sea. It feels like coming home. Kanna leads her back to her home, grasping her arm the entire time, and tells her that they’ll start building Hama her own house soon, but in the meantime, she is welcome to stay with Kanna’s family.

“I believe your granddaughter will object to that,” Hama says. Kanna nods.

“Yes, she will,” Kanna replies, the love in her voice unmistakable. “If her remarks get too snide, let me know and I’ll make her wash the dishes for a month.”

Hama is right- Katara displeased with Hama’s presence in their home, as is Sokka. But Kanna’s firm gaze and Chief Hakoda’s unsubtle attempts to pull them off to the side for conversations keep the children’s tone from getting too snippy and makes them bite their tongues most days. The anger and fear are mostly gone from their gazes and it is the memory of the last encounter in the Fire Nation that fuels their emotions. Sometimes when Hama wakes suddenly in the night, and patters out from Kanna’s bedroom trying to calm her heart rate, she’ll see Katara or Sokka, hunched by the fire. In those moments, they share a quiet moment of understanding, a moment of recognition, of being souls who are hurt and have hurt more than their bodies ever wanted, and the children seem extra conflicted when the day finally comes.

Hama doesn’t fault them for it. She’s a little pleased that they’ve latched onto the relief that comes with vengeance, how  right it feels to dwell on past anger. Kanna scolds her when Hama explains her philosophy to her, says that it’s no good to dwell on the unchangeable past instead of the influenceable future.

“What good is looking towards tomorrow if you don’t remember the injustices of yesterday?” Hama asks, stretching out her hands that are stiff from sewing. The fabric of the Fire Nation was so thin and delicate - almost uselessly so - and it’s difficult to transition back to sewing the thick materials of the south.

Kanna hums as she considers Hama’s question. This is a new development, to Hama at least. The Kanna of her memories was quick as a whip, her words always at the tip of her tongue, ready to fly out as soon as anyone else had stopped talking. This Kanna, in contrast, tends to consider what has been said before speaking. She mulls things over before replying, taking her time to come up with important answers.

“There’s a difference between remembering and dwelling,” is what Kanna opts for. “You don’t need to keep the fire in your chest burning any longer.”

Kanna sets down her needle and reaches out to grasp Hama’s hand. Her grip is firm and Hama knows that it is full of love.

“You have me to warm you now.” And while that doesn’t erase the years of turmoil that Hama has lived, while it doesn’t uncloud her sight with cynicism, in this one regard, Kanna is right.

    They’re both worn and weary, Hama knows, in different ways. Gone is the softness that used to surround them, the air of innocence that falsely clung to them, as it does to all children in a war, the optimistic spark in their eyes that betrayed the facade of realism that they tried to put up. They’re both old now, more cynical (Neither of them  really trust the child that now sits on the Fire Nation throne, regardless of what Kanna’s son and grandchildren say), and there are so few worlds left for them to venture together. Sometimes, Hama wonders what could Kanna possibly think to achieve, with her gentle touches and kisses filled with light.

Still, Kanna walks with her, arm in arm, as they go through the village. Kanna sits with her in bed in the mornings as they wait for a pot of water to boil for their breakfast. They weave blankets and stitch clothing together, and each time Kanna makes sure to scoot her chair over so that they’re pressed close to one another.

Hama isn’t foolish enough to think that she and Kanna were fated, but she does concede that perhaps Kanna has always been it for her. The distant glow of the horizon, the glint way off in the future beckoning her closer, the sparkle of possibility, maybe it’s always just been Kanna.

Kanna’s lips are no longer plush and smooth; they’ve become wrinkled and thinner with age, but they’re no less soft, and they hold no less love than they did over fifty years ago. When they press against Hama’s own lips, they press with as much care and joy as they did when both of them were more youthful, and Kanna still sneaks kisses to Hama’s cheeks at the moment before they leave their home to go outside. As if Hama would ever try to stop her if she knew they were coming.

The tenderness, the softness, with which Kanna holds her is enough that sometimes Hama can fool herself into imagining that they’ve had a long life together. That they’ve never been apart since that day that Kanna dragged her boat up the shore and filled Hama’s heart with light.

Hama has lived an entire life away from her beating heart, an era where her love was not by her side. She holds no false illusions - Kanna has also lived a life without Hama. One that was full of love and tragedy and life and death. She has a beautiful and headstrong family to prove it, has the respect of the whole tribe and enough wit to make sure that everyone knows it. Kanna got the chance to share her love with others, while Hama spent years half-wondering what could have been, wondering if their love could have lasted, wondering if she truly loved the beautiful girl from the North or just loved the idea of being in love with her. An entire lifetime of wonder and worry and pain, only to be soothed by Kanna’s unspoken assurance that their hearts will henceforth beat as one.

She is too old to imagine a grand future of adventure anymore, too old to want that future as well. The future she wants is one of peaceful walks and holding hands until she has to let go because her joints ache. A future of asking for help to braid her hair, and of feeling Kanna’s rough, gentle hands as they caress her face and neck while collecting all the strands. Grinning when she feels gentle lips press against her neck before she finishes getting dressed. Feigning interest in the indecipherable speech of toddlers and impressing children with simple waterbending tricks. Laughing at the antics of young men with egos that are too large and laughing at the young women who still swoon over them. Cooking for a family. Being part of a family. Seeing a smile before falling asleep.

Hama is too old to be an optimist but she thinks she has a pretty good shot at finally living the life she wants.

Superpowers I Like

An ongoing list of superpowers i like. most from superpower wiki, the stuff in () are my thoughts, the rest from the website’s linked. sometimes powerlisting changes the names so if the link doesnt work let me know ad i’ll update. 

Let me know if you use any and tag me in the fics you write!

Geometric Physiology

Transform yourself or objects into any shape

Universal Irreversibility

Ability to render an action impossible to be stopped, blocked, manipulated, and reversed

Talpidae Physiology

can mimic/transform into talpids, including the moles, shrew moles, desmans, and other intermediate forms of small insectivorous mammals.

Earth Weaponry

can create or wield weaponry with power over earth, which grants the user a wide variety of earth-based abilities

Transcendent Demonic Mage Physiology

The power to use the abilities of demon of godly arcane powers.

Tooth Fairy Physiology

Can transform into and perform acts the tooth fairy does. (Rip out the teeth of your enemies. control every tooth in the room. could also be strengthened to control bone? maybe?)

Psychic Food Manipulation

The ability to manipulate psychic food/edible substances. (technically, animals are edible, people technically.. like this has so much room for creativity)

Contact Force Defiance

can ignore contact forces, forces that require contact with something, like a surface of the ground or an object. They can defy contact forces and not need to make contact with the surface, or interact with objects from a distance without touching them. Like magnets that don’t want to touch.

Life Connection

User is connected to any/all life and living things, so that as long as they exists life does as well. This allows them to have both an emotional and spiritual link to every form of life, so if the target feels pain or is injured all living things would feel the same pain and/or possibly gain the same wounds as the user. If the user ever dies or is killed then life itself may cease to exist as well. Reader needs a bodyguard??

Fine Interaction

The user can interact with anything that that is microscopic, no matter how small it may be, allowing the user to interact with them as if they were objects or surfaces, possibly even causing macroscopic effects if skilled. This can include viruses, diseases, microbes, atoms, molecules, particles, superstrings, etc. reader is a heart surgeon.

Snake Den 

The user can project numerous snakes from their body to eject poison into the target, project snakes as projectiles to attack or otherwise send them to the target.

Chi Manipulation

The user can create, shape, and manipulate chi. By learning to harness this inner latent energy, they can gain superhuman capabilities and use them in cases of extreme combat. Some examples include physically manifesting all of their inner strength and unleashing it through sheer force of will

Dimensional Storage

The user can put items/beings into a separate dimension for safekeeping and can summon them back with relative ease.(I really like this one)

Liquid Transmutation

User can transform any/all liquids, whether organic or inorganic, into any other fluid/liquid and change a liquids inherent properties such as turning water into acid or even make something like soda poisonous. Any liquids transformed by this power would have all the properties of the liquid they become.

Replication

User can instantly and perfectly replicate themselves and/or targets which can be objects or living beings, numerous times, while usually being able to recombine the clones. Most users have both of these abilities (if subconsciously), copying their clothes/equipment along with their body. Original target will normally be able to maintain control over all copies.

Reactive Adaptation

Users can either instantly develop powers or abilities to deal with threats or their bodies dynamically learn from experience. Depending on the user's control of the power or genetic structure, the reactive effects can be permanent or temporary.

Self-Sustenance

Users physical needs are greatly reduced or completely removed. These needs include air/breathing, sleep/rest, food, drink, bodily evacuations, shelter from environmental effects and their lack (heat/cold, dryness/wetness), etc. The user is also able to stay immobile without the normal effects this would have.

Technology Manipulation

User can create, shape, and manipulate technology and technological constructs, computers, robots, hardware, and other devices that can be termed as "technology." Manifested as a special form of electrical/telekinetic manipulation, a special form of "morphing" which allows physical interaction with machines, or even a psychic ability that allows mental interface with computer data.

User can control the flow of intricate machinery, and assemble or disengage their programming at will and operate most technology at distance. A variation of Electricity Manipulation, they control specific electrons and instructs them which items to engage or disengage and may be able to use the electric impulses to gently control smaller metal parts

Matter Ingestion

The user can eat any substance without harmful effects, regardless of what they consume. They can consume matter in any form - solid, liquid or gas.

(maybe what they eat gives them energy, maybe like how Natsu can eat flames?)

Persuasion

can compel people by speaking, the victims are unable to disobey; the seemingly cogent commandment is far too compelling. At a high level, users can persuade people into hurting/killing themselves or even flip around sense of logic, but can never cause victims to achieve what they are not capable of. 

(maybe user has to work up and strengthen it to be able to persuade peoples to do bigger things)

Anatomical Liberation

User can split their own body apart into pieces and control the said pieces however they wish, by levitating them away from the user's main body and using them as they were connected to the user.

User is immune to cutting and being slashed because they can just pull their bodies back together again. They can also remove their own organs without dying and will neither bleed to death nor die if their brain or heart is removed.

Omnilingualism.

User can speak, write, understand and communicate in any language, including computer codes, languages they have never been heard before, sign language (even lip-reading), illegible words, and backwards speech and writing with little or no training. The user may even communicate with non-human animals or read body language.

Item duplication

user is able to mimic and replicate the objects of others around oneself, and be able to use those objects as one's own.

Darkness Manipulation

User can create, shape and manipulate darkness and shadows. By itself, darkness is mostly used to cloud everything into total darkness, but by accessing a dimension of dark energy it can be channeled to a variety of effects, both as an absence of light and a solid substance: one can also control and manipulate the beings that exist there, create and dispel shields and areas of total darkness, create constructs and weapons, teleport one's self through massive distances via shadows, etc.

Density Manipulation

User can manipulate density, which is defined as mass per unit of volume. This allows them to alter solidity, change the size of substances, create or destroy matter/mass in a volume, change inertial resistance (mass), make things intangible, either strengthen or weaken gravity, concentrate or expand matter, or create pressure differences in a fluid (gas, liquid, plasma) to induce a current and possibly use it to move solids.

Some users might even be able to control electrical charge density, which is the amount of electric charge per unit volume. This would, in turn, enable them to manipulate electromagnetic fields. Control over population density might also be possible for some users as well.

Luck

The user is gifted with an automatic and continuous supply of good luck, most have no control over this power as things considered "lucky" randomly and unexpectedly happens to them despite any predestined fate or logical reason. Ergo, nothing bad will happen or if it does, their power will sort it out no matter how impossible the situation is or how high the odds are against them, allowing the user to always be in complete context in whatever situation they are, be free to do as they please without consequences, and be untouched and ineffective to the laws of causality.

All aspects of user's life improve drastically: work, social, romantic, personal, financial, school, and basically life as a whole would become easier, happier, and would excel altogether.

Paralysis Inducement

Users can immobilize the target completely or partially, causing them to be left without movement and sensation. Making motor functions and muscle movement unavailable, the victim may freeze on the spot or crumple to the ground.

Pain Infliction

Pain Infliction is the ability to inflict horrible pain on others with the mind. It is triggered by pointing one's hand at a target, who will be overwhelmed with pain. The pain is described as a thousand tiny blades stabbing the brain. The pain will instantly vanish once the user loses concentration.

Prehensile Muscles

User can make their muscles stretch/extend and hold/manipulate objects like an extra limb. (could be like tendrils)

Liquid Mimicry

user can morph their body into a liquid state, is made up of or can transform their body completely into liquid substances. A user's transformed form is anatomically identical to their normal form, aside of being made of liquid, in which case it contains all to organs and is somewhat vulnerable to attacks. Alternately the user can transform into homogeneous matter, without any part of their form being more important than the other.

Animal Morphing

User with this ability either is or can transform into animals, whether partially or completely, as well as use the abilities, traits and appearance/physiology of animals by rearranging their own DNA structure. They are able to transform into animals that exist, alien animals and/or animals that are extinct, such as Dinosaurs.

User may have this ability from an empty genetic code, allowing them to accept any form from which they have a DNA sample, others may be able to alter their form mentally and change just by seeing and mimicking animal features.

Life-Force Absorption

The user can absorb life-force/energy, vitality and health, while removing it from the source, into their body and use it in various ways, gaining some form of advantage, either by enhancing themselves, gaining the drained power, using it as power source etc., either temporarily or permanently.

Weapon Hands

User can transform parts of their body to form a weapon of their choice onto their hands and forearms, possibly their biceps, triceps, and shoulders.

Vision Manipulation

The user has complete control over the vision of oneself and others. They can enhance, reduce or remove them temporarily or permanently, protect them from being overwhelmed, cause the target to see things that aren't there or prevent them from seeing things that are, cause/remove sensory ailments, etc.

Tactile Teleportation

User can teleport objects and/or beings through physical contact, the user can transfer them to any location they desire as long their in physical contact with the object/being

Disease Manipulation 

The user can create, manipulate, shape, transform, cause/heal, etc. all forms of diseases, including their severity, contagiousness, methods of spreading, etc. They can control the organisms that spread diseases, including germs, bacteria, virus, or other pathogens on a cellular level, including bacteriophages, microorganisms (microscopic organisms), retroviruses, cells that abnormally grow to make cancerous tumors and cysts, and pathogens that produce genetic mutations

Morality Manipulation

The user can manipulate morality, making people ethically good or immorally evil by psychically kindling the targets’ minds so that they succumb to the voice of truth or to the urge of sin. The victim may feel the calling of the Almighty or some other cosmic force of good or succumb to all inner sins. The effect may expire, but that may be years after the evocations.

Dream Manipulation

User can create, shape, enter and manipulate the dreams of oneself and others, including modifying, suppressing, fabricating, influencing, manifesting, sensing, and observing dreams as well as nightmares, daydreams, etc., possibly including past ones. They can produce and modify dreams, bestow nightmares or lucid dreaming, entrap people in REM, and promote spiritual/emotional healing within dreams.

In some cases, user's power extends to the real world, such as wounds inflicted on a sleeping victim, healed damage (mental or physical) affecting the physical form, and other wise blurring the line between waking and dream. They may be able to pull someone from the waking world into the dream world or brings people/things from the dream world into the waking world.

Before the Dawn AU - Sephiroth (long post)

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Music Theme Found Here

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Basic AU Info from Profile:

Sephiroth is the only one of his kind--many a Dryad there have been, and some birthed forth from his home land, but none like him. He himself is bound to the Mother Crystal found within the Great Woods in the Forgotten City. For many years, he believed himself a pure being, created to protect his Mother and all that was pure and good that she created or reigned over in the City and at its edges. He knew she hated the weak, the powerless, just as much as she hated those greedy with power and arrogant with toxic ego. And so he hated them as well. For why would he not, if mother did? He protected the City, and roamed within it. But when the day came that a dark Vampire came strolling through, intent on clawing out one of the mothers resting within the crystal (as the form of two women seemed to rest within the great large crystals core), something in him changed. By nature and nurture, he was intent on fighting this Vampire off, but he spewed nonsense about being his true creator, and that his Mothers were useless and greedy wenches. Argument and battle ensued, and what few friends Sephiroth may have gained from the very small population of beings and descendants of Ancients (the original elvenesque people of the Forgotten City and keepers of the crystals and the pure energy of the woods), they tried to aid him, to reason with him. But this Vampire, Hojo, seemed to tear assunder the very fabric of the life the Dryad had lived--He tore too deep into the crystal, and into Sephiroth’s own belief of his existence, and both made Sephiroth susceptible to control….from the very one he trusted most, his great mother Jenova, who’s power had finally been freed enough by the damage to the crystal to reach him. From then on out, she used him like her very tool of will. A great many inhabitants of the City died at his hand, as holy fire wrought throughout it, only a few fae and ancient descendants escaping, seemingly by Sephiroths failure to seize them… Jenova would seek to continue using him as her own puppet, building his power, his strength, twisting him into a possible vessel if she could ever have him free her from the crystal without absolutely destroying it. But Jenova wasn’t the only one in the crystal--no, when Sephiroth was to be made, by Hojo and his mate, Lucrecia, using a shart of Jenova’s crystal, conflict grew between them all, jenova influencing them without their know, breeding Hojo’s greed further, and Lucrecia’s love for those innocents who did not deserve his cruel actions (both the vampire pawn Hojo intended to create, and the back up they saw their claimed son would be). During a confrontation, Lucrecia was stabbed by the shard, which Hojo still used, thinking the ordeal only gave it more power, unknowing of the fact that it had corrupted his mate. Throughout their time developing Sephiroth, she found herself twisted between a cruel darkness akin to Hojo’s, and her true heart shining through. She was almost consumed by that darkness, but escaped with what seemed to be a crystalized egg, holding a small toddler within, and she begged Jenova to make it right, to forgive her her sins in what she’d done to the crystal, and help her give Sephiroth a chance to live. Jenova took advantage of this plea, took Lucrecia into her crystal under the pretense it would prevent her corruption, which it did, but it also locked her away, and she took advantage of having her. Sephiroth was made a monster, by a corrupted Ancient locked away in the Great Crystal, meant to lock and purify her, but it could only bind her for so long. He was a nightmare upon the world, making victims of many beings, from werewolves, to vampires, to demons, to fae, to humans. It mattered not, so long as Jenova saw weakness that needed to be snuffed out. It seemed as if he would either end the world, or have to end himself. It was by the will of warriors that he was finally stopped, and the faint influence of the mother who sacrificed herself for his best chest, Lucrecia, that he found his end….and began again. He returned to the Forgotten City, forging from it’s waters anew, stronger, and wiser, and wearing his crimes and cruelty and truth like a weight upon his shoulders. He now wanders the world looking to purify crystals by a ritual taught to him by a tender ancient decadent girl from before his wreckage upon the City--he wanted to ensure Jenova’s reach would not continue, that she would be removed, never to harm anyone again (unbeknownst to him, his rebirth after defeat at the hands of a specific warrior would produce Jenova’s last attempt at presence, a Water Nymph in their combined visage). He is seen as a monster by most, and does not deny it, but he carries on, to make the world better from the damage he did to it. His natural form involves pale skin, very little clothing if any, minor horns sprouting backward from his bangs, discoloration of the skin around his, elongated nails, markings upon his skin that look like tattoos made to look like cracks in his skin, a few embedded crystals in certain patterns here and there over his upper body. He also has a feral form which involves glowing eyes, discoloured, iridescent skin, crystal embedded horns as opposed to his normal horns that look similar to dull and half dead branches of the trees of the Great Forest of the Forgotten City, a wing of Crystal and light, and slightly increased size. (timeline of his story is dependent entirely on what we as rp partners decide).

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Name: Sephiroth, the Crystal Dryad, the Silver Fae, the Fae Curse.

Species: Crystal Dryad, only one of a species never seen before him. (Much like a Dryad of the forests and its soul tree, but he is bound to a Great Crystal of the old Ancients culture).

Role/Profession/Job: Originally protector of the Forgotten City of the Ancients, and indirect Knight of the Mother Crystal. Then, the will and hand of Corrupt Jenova bound in Crystal, he became a curse upon all. Now, he wanders alone to mend the world, to help it heal from the damage he caused. 

Age: 30′s

Nature: As a Dryad, he is drawn to protect, care for, and stay near his connection source, and so he was very much a proud dweller of the Forgotten City and it’s forest. He mingled within the trees and smaller crystals, explored, tended to nature, and took down harmful beasts sent to taint the land. He was a peaceful being, but as he got older, he got restless and more protective, more intense, more closed off. He secluded himself. And then all connection and concern was twisted up and locked away inside him as intense loyalty turned into corrupt loyalty, leading him to harm others and lands beyond. But, his true nature is explorative, curious, intense and valiant, willing to fight as much as he is willing to stand by.

Personality: Curious, loyal, restraint with his empathy but yearning to reach it out to more in the world. He is a being seeking experiences but bound by loyalty for much of his life, and so he resigns himself to that existence and how it requires him to be, personally. But he begins to loose his free will, and control, and seemingly all chance at a free life to experience a great many things. In the throws of Jenova’s worst influence, he is cruel, angry, and seeking what he feels is vengeance and righteous cleansing. But it is not what he truly feels nor how he wished to live. When freedom comes once again, he finds himself experiencing the world with the weight of his crimes on his shoulders.  

History: Unknown to him for a great many years, and still a bit of a mystery in the present, he was the result of a cultist covens experiments and their desires to make a powerful supernatural being under their will. It was a failure, of course, as they delved too deep into their desperation and used the power of a cruel locked soul to aid their work. Through the greedy pride of Hojo, the conflicted coerced efforts of Lucrecia, and the cells of another experiment as well as the cells of the crystal mother, a new being was forged. His crystal cocoon holding his toddler sized, beginning form was carried forth to Jenova by Lucrecia, who begged for salvation for her son. His formative years was full of wonder and pride and appreciation of his land, respect and bonding with the locals within the town, and curiosity of what was beyond. He always found himself coming back to rest at the foot of the Mother crystal, where he felt at home, cradled, watched over by Mother Jenova, glowing and beautiful, and Mother Lucrecia, gentle and soft. His teen and adult years grew with troubles and problems, and more responsibilities, but he sought to do right by all. But, without his awareness and willingness, he felt that desire shrinking and narrowing, and slowly the world seemed to become toxic, the cruelties endless and festering, and he found himself haunted by visions of a doomed, decaying future. And he found himself followed Mother Jenova’s pleas for him to cleanse lands of the cruelty waiting to ruin the world. His bloodshed began in his home, the Forgotten City, but it stretched beyond, for only a few years, before a few warriors and one in particular stood against him, breaking through some part of him (or was it the influence of Mother Lucrecia, or both?), and taking him down, freeing him from the fate of being a dark hand any longer. By will of the mother that loved him truly, he found himself reborn for a second chance, and so he has taken it, to make amends and find where he once was again.

Powers/Abilities:

Energy influence over some nature and weather. The darkness or light of his influence is dependent on his state of mind.

Crystal energy connection, manipulation, energy flow.

Crystal influence as a part of him, meaning he naturally influences shards as a part of himself, and sometimes they can grow into sort of guards or simple crystal sources embedded in his skin.

Super speed, strength, extra senses especially connected to the awareness of the planet.

Energy warping for various purposes, from light display, to energizing, to healing, to blasts or shields.

Feral Form Powers; specific attacks linked to his claws, increased crystalizing, flight due to the wing upon his back made of crystals and energy, stronger levels of all other influences, can tap into the energy of the planets crystals for devestating power, if he so chooses.

Fae magic and Ancient magic spells and treatments.

* * * *

The COVID crisis has reduced to tatters the idea of American exceptionalism. The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolboxes of community and connectivity. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment. COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism.

In the wake of the WW2, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place.

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor.

For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.

Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.

FEVER DREAMING IN THE NEW GENERAL ANTAGONISM 

Neal Miller 

March 22, 2020

We are living in the political fever dreams of COVID-19. Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited quip – “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” – is obsolete.[1]  Having spread across the globe, the coronavirus has become the background phenomenon and concern of every passing moment. And along with it has come the imagination of an end of capitalism. However contagious and deadly COVID-19 is as a virus, its existence as the virtual object of the world’s attention and inattention has proven far more viral in its capacity to change society – mostly by cancelling our sensibility for realism. The dull weight of the everyday has lifted to unleash nightmares and dreamscapes that have magnetized the attention of our species with a measure of universality thought to be obsolete in our post-hegemonic world.

The continuous streams of news and commentary can hardly keep up with the latest collapse of everyday life. They give us the mise en scène in which to play the endangered protagonist of a canned Hollywood disaster flic and yet we’re told to stay home, keep calm, and practice good hygiene. Stories like the one about the recent missile strikes in Iraq are quickly phone-scrolled into oblivion by the latest notifications about the disease. And so we find ourselves reawakening with disbelief to the same new reality each day. 

Following Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, one might say that we live our reality as though caught between two fever dreams, which alternate depending on the nature of the immune response to the virtual presence of the virus. On the one hand, there is the suffocating nightmare of the global “plague city,” of governments securing human “life” by identifying all bodily movement and contact with disorder and death. The dream of governments today is to “return” us to a new normal in which they have won surpluses of legitimacy and control. The other dream is a dream of upheaval that won’t let go of all the vital signs of freedom amidst the pandemic. It wants to make irreversible all of the revived forms of class war, mutual aid, and social welfare, along with all of the autonomous means of survival not yet invented. 

The general antagonism today is the war on COVID-19. And whether we like it or not, we have been enlisted to the immune systems of global humanity. Yet the politics of today concerns the decision before us. Will our collective immune response intensify our cynicism about our dependency on governments? Or will we experiment with novel forms of relief and this newfound disbelief in the black magic of the economy? Will we dare to play in the festival-dream of new forms of collective life and reliance upon one another? 

The Nightmare of Governmental Realism

Today, quarantine lockdown extends from the “non-essential” flows of commuters to the fluids and gestures of our bodies, which have become paranoid colonial-style occupations of themselves. My body experiences itself as if on the other side of a gulf of unhygienic habits cracked open by the virtual omnipresence of COVID-19: I catch myself touching my face, I catalog the surfaces I’ve recently touched, and my proximity to others spontaneously triggers a quantitative calculation (“was it a distance of six feet or ten that was recommended?”). The new universal phenomenon is the object of a panicked consciousness immersed in a world that has been reduced to the medium for a disease vector. 

As for the engineers of the new order, China and Israel represent the nightmare line toward the most grim extreme of plague politics. Both have employed the metadata of people’s smart-phones to track their movements and all points of social contact. Each new case is a profile whose recent social history is rounded up for quarantine. The horizon here would be something like Chris Marker’s film La jetée (or Terry Gilliam’s remake, 12 Monkeys): humanity survives, but at the cost of complete imprisonment and dependency upon a specialized medical government.

We glimpse this suffocating nightmare in the undecidable decision facing governments with respect to their incarcerated populations: do they relieve themselves of having to manage and care for their masses of concentrated and confined bodies? Or, do they give the prison guards and wardens a blank check to administer order by any means necessary? Whereas Iran temporarily released 54,000 prisoners on March 4th, two weeks later Massachusetts prisoners lost the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment when a moratorium was announced on all disciplinary measures for prison staff. The undecidability here is no doubt due to the intensification of what Foucault called the carceral continuum, or the fact that the “inside” of the prison extends “outside” into the racialized ghettos of urban metropolises. The quarantine regime of social distancing and “shelter in place” lockdowns has turned the “outside” into a vast space of confinement, however gilded. 

The Festival Dream of Relief

Against this new confinement, efforts at self-organization are cropping up all over in food distribution networks, rent strikes, requisitions of abandoned housing, and calls for debt jubilees. Such earnest efforts at organized care finds its parodic inversion in the devil-may-care attitudes of Spring Breakers migrating South, as well as paranoid social media speculation about riots breaking out amidst mass hoarding. All of it tracks with what Foucault called the “whole literary fiction of the festival [that] grew up around the plague.”[2] 

Things we struggled for only weeks ago have been given outright – and much more besides. In the U.S., conservative food stamp policies have been lifted, unemployment safety nets reinforced, moratoriums on various costs of living instituted, and political parties are fighting not over whether to give UBI, but how much. Those immunized in their home-bubbles are offered an increasing amount of freely circulating intellectual property, while, in Chicago, parking has been made free, evictions courts are on hold, and utility companies are giving away electricity.

The black magic of the economy has revealed itself in its very withdrawal from our lives, tempering our panic and fear with a small modicum of relief. As Dan Kois recently argued, this relief has shown just how much of American society and its ‘death on the installment plan’ is a sham.[3] The mask has come off and the wand behind the conjurations now appears in the simple arbitrariness of its operations. Why don’t all of the other ways we get sick, fear hunger, or struggle to stay afloat count as reasons for having free access to high-quality food, health-care, and shelter? If all it took was a wand waving to put a stop to bills, evictions, and the like, does this not make all of our sufferings and hardships under normal circumstances seem meaningless?  

Just as we let out our sighs, however, the nightmare visions from abroad come closer and remind us that the only continuity between what was once normal and the current state of exception is the power of governments based on our dependency. We feel this dependency whether we panic or not, whether we trust their assurances and injunctions not to hoard or whether the sight of emptied shelves floods our heads with visions of the broken supply chains and interrupted logistics that we rely on to eat. As Chuang rightly noted, the arrival of COVID-19 in Wuhan induced a paradoxical form of general strike: there is a profound work stoppage, but it is hollowed out and devoid of any subject of history. The subject of history: not even the coronavirus can assume this mantle. Our continued dependency makes the strike false.

Yet one cannot help but read the ‘New Deal’ on offer as a symptom of faltering government legitimacy and the fits of market confidence. In the U.S., the government is betting that an avalanche of compromises with Democrats will cover over the truther-response of the Trump administration and the stock sell-offs of Senate Republicans. As belief in the forces of order goes into convulsions, one thinks, ‘If they cannot guarantee our survival, all bets are off.’ As we take all these “gifts” coming down from on high, we ought to remember that the social welfare state of the 1930s New Deal was a warfare state. And what will become of our newfound alleviation without the invisible enemy that has, with its own magic, cancelled society?

A New Universal? 

On the brighter side of things, it’s worth observing that we have been given a hint to the riddle handed down from the failures of 20th century revolutionaries. For one fundamental limit of all struggles since the 1960s has been their scale. It has been a very long time since we’ve been able to think what might connect struggles happening all across the world. Despite being geographically dislocated from one another, the revolts of 2019 showed promise simply in their synchronic co-existence and their ability to repeat each others’ tactics under the maxim “Be water.” Yet not only were the problems at the heart of these struggles locally particular (despite their many commonalities), they were never able to flow together in a global strategy.

Against such a backdrop, COVID-19 portends a new universal frame of war. For however uneven the experience of vulnerability may be, the global spread of the coronavirus amounts to the generalization of the new antagonism. When was the last time we were able to share our experience of dependency on the world of governments as a crisis? The multi-generational time-scale of the climate catastrophe has so far prevented it from mobilizing all of the humanity that it dooms. Yet whether it is glowing from our screens or hanging in the ambient disquiet while we distract ourselves in quarantine, the new reality for everyone is that reality has fallen apart. 

In these fever dreams where trust in the authorities is in shorter supply than food and the means of punishment alternate between melting into air and locking down hard, it is perhaps possible to take the wand from the magician and begin conjuring a reality of our own. What is frightening about COVID-19 is how little we know about it. But just as uncertain is how governments will react to us amidst this legitimacy crisis and how peoples will respond when the repression of governments comes down too hard. 

How can we flee our dependency on the old world while “sheltering in place”? If the world is cancelled, what are all these bills, digital parking meters, and universities but the fossils and tombs of a dead world? What new uses can we still invent for what stands idle and unused around us – what role can they play in the new dream? How can we breathe new life into existing spaces of immunity, like vehicles and homes? And what new immunity spaces remain to be invented? What new forms of action at a distance are called for? We are already venturing tentative answers to these questions. We try to flow like water where we still can. However, against a virus that fills our lungs with fluid and against governments seeking to return us to the earth of realism, perhaps we should consider the element of breath, levity, relief, and jubilation: air. 

[1] Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review, 21, May-June 2003, 65-79.

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1995, 197.

[3] Kois, Dan. “America Is a Sham.” Slate, March 14, 2020. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-tsa-liquid-purell-paid-leave-rules.html  

A Democratic president just entered the White House, so it’s time for Republican state officials to start discussing secession once again. After Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, disaffected conservatives flooded the White House petition site with calls to leave the Union. (They were predictably denied.) Now a smattering of state party leaders and lawmakers are once again raising the question: Should we stay or should we go?

“We need to focus on the fundamentals,” Wyoming GOP chairman Frank Eathorne said in an interview with Steve Bannon last week, according to The Casper Star-Tribune. “We are straight talking, focused on the global scene, but we’re also focused at home. Many of these Western states have the ability to be self-reliant, and we’re keeping eyes on Texas too, and their consideration of possible secession. They have a different state constitution than we do as far as wording, but it’s something we’re all paying attention to.”

Kyle Biedermann, a Republican state lawmaker in Texas, recently claimed that he plans to introduce a bill to hold a referendum on leaving the United States. “The federal government is out of control & doesn’t represent the values of Texans,” he wrote on Twitter last month. “That is why I am committing to file legislation that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.” Allen West, the Texas GOP chair, said after the Supreme Court refused to overturn Biden’s lawful victory that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.” Many took this as a reference to secession.

I’ve previously tried to make a moral and democratic case for the Union. Balkanizing ourselves over transitory political differences is short-sighted and anti-democratic. But as this feeble specter rears its head once more, it’s also worth also considering the practical and economic case for the Union. And to truly understand that, we need look no further than those responsible for the Union’s existence in the first place: the British.

Four and a half years ago, Britons narrowly voted to leave the European Union, the economic and political bloc that tore down borders and barriers across the continent. Brexiteers sold the country’s departure as a way for the U.K. to take back control of those borders and build new trade relationships outside Europe. It was a fantastical exercise in populism that spent little time grappling with the hard reality of how Britain would extract itself from a 40-year governance relationship, let alone with the rocky roads that a United Kingdom would traverse once it was disunited from the continent. Four years of bargaining and two toppled governments later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally signed an exit deal with EU leaders last month.

How have Britain’s first few weeks of “independence” gone? Not great. Goods and services used to flow nearly frictionlessly across British soil and the rest of the continent. Now they’re ensnared in a complex system of border controls and customs checks. Perishable goods are hardest hit. Scottish seafood is struggling to get into continental Europe; Northern Ireland is experiencing food shortages because goods can’t easily cross over from the south. The Bank of England warned that the country’s gross domestic product could drop by 2 to 4 percent because of Britain’s withdrawal, largely as a result of the added paperwork and regulation.

And then there’s the long-term damage. Nostalgic Brexiteers sold the referendum as a potential boon for Britain’s once-dominant manufacturing sector. But roughly four-fifths of the modern British economy is actually driven by its service industries, which were largely left uncovered by the exit agreement with the EU. London is unlikely to lose its status as a world financial hub any time soon, but firms are already relocating jobs and accounts to Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, and other European capitals—the better to retain smooth access to the EU financial sector. Britain is also forsaking its role in the EU’s Erasmus program, cutting off British students from study opportunities across Europe—and blocking European students from easily studying at British universities. That sort of lost potential is hard to quantify but easy to mourn.

But in many ways, the U.K. leaving the European Union is easy compared to Texas Texiting the U.S. Britain was already an independent country, despite what the pro-Brexit enthusiasts liked to suggest, with a highly skilled civil service and a world-class diplomatic corps. It already possessed all the trappings and organs of a modern developed country. The economic tumult it’s experienced over the past few weeks—and negotiated over the past four years—largely comes down to a mismatch of paperwork between two different regulatory systems.

Extracting oneself from the U.S. would be far more complicated. For starters, Texas would have to fund and staff something resembling a modern regulatory state. Some of this framework already exists at the state level, but not all of it. There would need to be a Texas Food and Drug Administration, a Texas Environmental Protection Agency, a Texas Securities and Exchange Commission, and much more. Texas would have to buy property to build embassies in foreign capitals and hire diplomats to staff them. It would have to build its own army, navy, air force, intelligence service, and postal system. That costs a lot of money. Texas doesn’t even have a state income tax; one-third of its budget comes from the federal government.

Would Texas use its own currency? It would have to create its own central bank and monetary policy if it did. Since Britain never adopted the euro, this is one major complication of leaving the EU that never came up. When Scotland weighed leaving the rest of the U.K. in 2014, Scottish independence leaders proposed that they would keep the pound sterling and maintain some sort of currency union with the rest of their former country. But London itself wasn’t keen on the idea, and the Scottish National Party now favors adopting the euro in a post-Brexit world. Texas could always take the route adopted by El Salvador and adopt the U.S. dollar outright as its currency. So much for national sovereignty if it did, though.

Free movement would be another issue. It’s virtually impossible to denaturalize a U.S. citizen against their will, so most Texans would retain their American citizenship unless they voluntarily renounce it. And even though birthright citizenship would obviously not apply within a foreign country, the children of those U.S. citizens could still be eligible for citizenship under existing federal laws. Texas’s Republican leaders often brag about how its growth is fueled by businesses and residents leaving other states for lower taxes and lighter regulations. But that formula would invert itself after independence: Most of Texas’s population would easily be able to decamp back to the U.S., while residents of the other 49 states would have to go through some sort of immigration process to live in Texas.

And then there’s the problem of trade barriers. The Constitution forbids one state from imposing tariffs or taxes on goods from another state. It’s also virtually impossible for states to lawfully block Americans from entering or exiting them. (The current system of “travel restrictions” due to the pandemic is one of the only exceptions to that rule.) Indeed, the entire American economy is built around the free flow of goods and most services between California, Texas, New York, Florida, and everywhere in between. Without that freedom, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of Nafta-like deal between itself and the rest of the U.S. to carry out basic economic functions without significant difficulty.

That’s where the #Texit dreams really fall apart. Why would Texas and the U.S. need to create some sort of trade deal? Again, look no further than Brexit. If Britain had not reached an accord with the EU before the legal deadline of December 31, 2020, it would have crashed out of the union in what was called a hard, no-deal Brexit. Trade between the U.K. and the EU would have defaulted to World Trade Organization rules, raising all manner of tariffs and duties on everyday goods. The resulting economic fallout spurred leaders on both sides to strike a bargain. While Europe is not as dependent on British trade as Britain is on EU trade, enough of its businesses would have been affected that few leaders truly wanted to see a no-deal break happen.

So, in addition to funding and creating all of the features of modern nationhood, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of trade agreement with the U.S. to actually survive. Like Britain, it would be somewhat at the mercy of the much larger trading partner. But the U.S. also has no interest in making it easier for states to leave the Union, so it would have no incentive to play as nicely as the Europeans did with the British. At minimum, Texas would almost certainly have to compensate the U.S. for the loss of all sorts of federal property: Fort Hood and other military bases, Johnson Space Center and other NASA facilities, various post offices, courthouses, prisons, and so on. It would likely also have to play by rules set by U.S. regulatory agencies and conduct most of its business on terms set by U.S. trade negotiators. Texas, like Britain, could easily end up in a much worse position than the status quo it enjoys now.

All of this assumes that Texas peacefully leaves the Union with Congress’s assent. That’s the only constitutionally valid scenario suggested by the Supreme Court’s ruling in, ironically, Texas v. White in 1869, in which the justices held that states can’t unilaterally secede and the so-called Confederacy never lawfully existed. We’ll set aside the unlikelihood of a peaceful departure for now, and instead ponder its alternative. Secession was a gambit at best in 1860 when almost a dozen rebel-led states tried to withdraw by force. It took the U.S. five years and 600,000 dead to force the Confederate armies to surrender in the Civil War. The asymmetry between the modern U.S. military and whatever state militia Texas could muster is so great that putting down a rebellion this time might only take five weeks.

But let’s go back to the peaceful option once again. If the Texas legislature voted to secede tomorrow, there is zero chance that a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president would support its departure. And if a Republican president and a Republican Congress held power—as they did not but two years ago—Texas, Wyoming, or any other Republican-led state wouldn’t want to secede in the first place. Why would Donald Trump or any future Republican president want to let their biggest batch of electoral votes walk out the door? Secession’s greatest challenge isn’t that it’s a bad idea but that the incentives make it all but impossible to carry out.

Finally, notice that I used Texas as the example here instead of Wyoming. That’s because Texas stands a better chance of actually surviving as an independent country than any other state, except perhaps California. It would be among the largest economies in the world if it became a sovereign country tomorrow—and it would immediately struggle to maintain anything resembling its current standard of living. Wyoming, despite the dreams of its state GOP chair, would be doomed to failure if it seceded. That’s one reason why the Union is so great in the first place, of course. Everything may be bigger in Texas, but everything is ultimately better in the U.S.

The Downhill Path

All these days will pass; they will pass in crowds Over the face of the seas, over the face of the mountains, Over rivers of silver, over the rolling forests Like a distant hymn for our beloved dead.

Victor Hugo, Setting Suns

I. How it All Works Out

Paris was riveting in the spring.

With the Champs-Elysées in full bloom, the Eiffel Tower shimmering in the clear skies— it gave the heart of France an air of postcard made reality.

She couldn’t bring herself to care about any of it.

Still half-asleep, Céline turned away from the dimming lights outside and tossed in her sheets once more.

Almost a year in and she had never even glimpsed the full sun shining on the City of Love. Had never come close to exiting the Métro near its most popular stops, had not even entertained the thought of approaching the most prestigious arrondissements of Europe’s beating heart. And why would she have?

Crowds of tourists indulging in buttered pastries and snaps of the Louvre Pyramid were the exact things she tried to avoid. Granted, after five years lost in and out of physical existence, she would have thought her appetite for life would have emerged with a vengeance. And emerged it had, simply not in the way someone caged for months should have.

Eyes closed, she tried to pinpoint the exact moment the sun disappeared behind the building blocking the view of the ground floor she lived in. Slowly, her hazel eyes watched the shadows grow on the dried paint, coercing herself out of bed with the promise of black coffee and a lukewarm shower.

She used to claw at the promise of outside, of the sky under her head and the sun kissing her skin, closing her eyes to savor the heat. She would have begged for anything to smell something else than waste and despair— Until these frozen seconds, from life to dust and life once more. And now?

Now the world was just too much.

Too much noise and furious horns in the frantic traffic of the city, with delivery guys ramming their bikes around, with waiters and street vendors and people in a hurry, people, people everywhere. The sun, the heat, the voices— she drowned in it. Like a great wave pulling her under, she had quickly realized she was unable to cope with the furious pull of this sea.

So why did she crave each miserable second underwater?

Humming, she let her right hand stay under the faucet until it turned slightly red. This simple tingling made her want to stay under water until it bubbled, an ugly shade of white searing her flesh straight to the bone.

Calmly, she looked at her untouched skin and sighed.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she whispered to the empty room.

Lately, she had taken to being her main critic. It ranged from calling herself a dumb bitch close to twenty-four times a day to strongly staring at herself in the chipped mirror of her bathroom until she felt confident enough to go outside. So far, none of these highly sophisticated methods had managed to chase away weird ideas such as burning a perfectly-working limb.

The woman who had offered consultations at the free clinic down the road had called these ghastly cravings “recurring thoughts”. Invasive images or ideas that popped by uninvited. It came and went, oblivious to whatever she was doing or what state she was in.

She had tried really hard to do the mature thing and deal with her shit properly. The initial appointment with Mrs. Torpe had been okay: they had mostly dealt with paperwork, how therapy was supposed to go and what could be achieved in that timeframe. Fifty euros had seemed like a fair price for someone willing to put up with her twice a month.

By the time the second appointment had drawn closer, she had pictured herself sitting in the same room to talk about things that made no sense; wolves in the snow, mice trapped in ice and bleeding flowers creeping out of the stone cracks… she did not have the courage to think about what would come next. At best, she would be committed. Then her flimsy identity wouldn’t withstand close scrutiny and then someone, somewhere, would know. And wasn’t it how they had gotten to her the first time, the only time? When she had not known she was safe until it had been ripped away from her. Better sleep less and get crazy thoughts if it meant staying alive.

Perhaps she was just giving herself excuses. She wanted to get better, but being a coward had served her well and she did not feel ready to be brave just yet. Healing, at its root, was not a gentle thing; it was exhausting, drawing on whatever energy that was left to burn the wounds away. Did she really want to put herself through these hoops because it was the right thing to do? Nobody could ever decide when there had been enough pain.

She did not know if it made her weak or pathetic to consistently avoid getting into something that she felt was too hard, but she had decided it was nobody’s business but her own if she lacked the stomach to face the truth.

And what truth would she uncover, anyway? Hazy, drug-fueled experiments had a way of making you doubt you’d even been through the things that seared your mind. And even so, maybe it wasn’t the memories she was so afraid of, but to make them real. Using words to conjure up the Wolf and its steel rod, to spin around and feel stone walls suffocating her in the dark.

What if she was told none of it had been real? That she just couldn’t enter a lift like a normal person because she was just fucked in the head and it was no one’s fault but hers, not some made-up prison, her.

Breathing in, she forced herself to reach a spot in the base of her skull. Here, she could feel the piece of missing skin that had kept her sane, the one feeling she knew would always be real no matter what flowed in her bloodstream. There were other ways to prove to herself and the world the unspeakable things that had been done in the name of progress. Each time her mind drew closer to this truth, every muscle in her body would tightens until she cramped. She was too afraid to reach for the space that existed in the pit of her belly; either because she knew the danger it could bring, or because it was no longer here.

Beyond everything, this theft was the loss she mourned the most. They had taken many things from her over the agonizing weeks. Her freedom. Her dignity. The humanity in herself, the belief of something good in each in every person. But to feel the vacant space that once housed that spark, the great bond to something truly marvelous that had been just hers— each time her brain tried to make sense of it she would come back to that crappy apartment more shitfaced that the night before. This was what pushed her out in the streets every night: a chase for something that was gone, and that she feared would never come back.

Humans were flawed in that way; sometimes they simply mourned themselves.

Céline snorted, head facing the showerhead: being gloomy was certainly no cure. She let the water roll on her shoulders some more before slipping out of the tiny bathroom corner, her soaked feet adding to the general mold of the place. Not that she was complaining about this “lovely, cozy flat with caractère” sold by the chain-smoker lady living above her. Her flat was crappy, but it was functional. Not unlike its tenant, she often remarked.

She counted herself lucky to have a roof over her head, especially post-Blip. The surge of population had not made living in the Capital any easier. She could have fallen prey to the marchands de sommeil, sleep merchants that rented terrible holes to desperate people. The only reason she had snatched this place was thanks to some acquaintances at the GRC, citizens stuck in the same administrative limbo she had enjoyed for a while.

Real estate was a mess and no place was easy to grab, yet she had managed that one, probably because her French was good and her manners quiet enough for this neighborhood at the edge of seedier streets. Madame Bruyère had only cared about the duration of her stay, if she was employed and if she was going to bring people in to party and criminal activities of any kind. It must had been a winning “Long enough-yes-no” because here she was now, living in the antiquated building close to work.

It could have been worse. She could have stayed penniless after being processed by the Global Repatriation Council, but the overworked staff had been glad to ship her off to central Europe when she had filled out one single flimsy application. She had lied, of course. Pretended to be shell-shocked by her body turning to dust and reappearing to find herself five years in the future. It had not been a hard lie to sell.

She had come back in the same state she had vanished, a bloody mess in rags on the verge of passing out. A blond man had asked her a couple of questions in broken English, tried to check on her before getting wary of her shrieks. Once he had understood she was in no immediate danger, a nurse had simply shoved her in a corner and waited a couple of weeks to start asking questions. Looking back, she did not know if she was more ashamed by her lashing out than her piss-poor resistance.

She had had time to understand what the hell had happened. Saw the ruined Avengers Compound on the news. Processed that the tundra was gone, the Wolf was gone, and everyone she had cared for was gone. She had watched out for anyone else, friend or foe, but the mednyy devochka, the brass-skinned girl, had been the only thing to ever come back from that particular limbo. Happiness. Bitterness. It all meshed into the same blur that had been the GRC camp.

The only thing that had left an impression were the people that had blipped back alongside her. They had been from all over the world, people on planes and boats, lost and confused, swimming in the same big parenthesis that was the time after their return. Who had left with them and who had remained? What had changed and what was still the same? Five years may have been a moment for them, but it was a long time for everyone and everything else.  

Oftentimes, kin would come to reunite with their loved ones. Other days, some returned would break down under the strain of this new reality. Céline had not known what had been more heartbreaking to witness. She used to have the selfish thought that at least other people eventually moved on, that the faces that came and went all around her changed. She didn’t know if she had improved much from her days in Kiev, but she liked to think so.

The girl in the mirror wasn’t sure either.

Seeing her reflection every day was a necessary pain. She needed to see, to look at herself touching her dark hair and golden skin and not have to repeat that all of this whisper of a life was real, not just a delusion brought by torment and anesthetics.

It didn’t mean reality was any kinder.

She wasn’t “just thin”. Baggy dresses and leather jackets helped to hide the hollow shapes of her body, but staring at her naked reflection had a way of bluntly highlighting her sorry state. Infrequent meals, hard liquor and poor sleep had not really helped her getting back to something more than a bag of bones. As with everything, she was trying, failing, and trying some more; little by little, one beef tacos at a time, six hours of sleep once every week, breathing in.

Her eyes trailed on the little fragments of paper pinned to the frame of the mirror. Bits and pieces of poetry, of articles, of words she liked. She let her fingers linger over John Donne’s No Man is an Island. She mouthed the words, comforting for a reason she couldn’t quite grasp: “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

She didn’t like the way clothes sagged on her, didn’t like the yellow shade of her dark skin, the way climbing a few stairs left her winded. She even missed complaining about her period once every month, because the absence of blood made her painfully aware that her body wasn’t working as it should. That everything was not fine, that progress was slow. Still, she kept trying on her own.

She ended her examination with the same hopeful resignation: She would get there.

Grabbing the clothes she had selected for the evening, she finished her preparation with some makeup and a quick look at the club she had spotted a few nights ago. She had to work from 5 to 10, but the rest of her time was her own. It was easy to forget how good it felt to be able to do whatever she pleased, even if it meant doing nothing at all.

Slamming the door to her place, she exited the tight lobby at the same time her neighbor was doing the same.

An elegant, warm French-Nigerian student with pearls in her box braids, Gloria was a major in biochemistry, sold handcrafted clothes on Etsy to support an association funding single-mothers and led the singing choir of her parish on Sundays. Céline was convinced that by the time 2030 would roll, that girl would either become President somewhere or be canonized. She was simple, pure goodness. It almost hurt sometimes to be near her, to feel her compassion and strong faith in all things good and worthwhile.

They were crossing paths in more way than once; Céline, climbing slowly, on her jagged way to something slightly better. And Gloria, glorious as her name, a bright future ahead of her. That the two of them converged on a single thread in Moineaux Street never ceased to amaze the older woman.

“Hey, you!” Gloria chirped with a lovely French accent.

The onyx-skinned girl had insisted they talk English when she had realized Céline was fluent. Gloria was planning on applying to an Ivy League university next year and she wanted to “brush up” on an already flawless practice.

They exited the building together, chatting their way to the metro where they parted. Watching her disappear, Céline felt envy for the young French girl. Gloria knew without the shadow of a double who she was and what she wanted. She had plans for the next five years, and the means to achieve whatever goal she set her eyes on. No shadows had ever damaged her beliefs. It felt good to talk to someone so anchored in life, and yet it was still a curious thing, to watch life from the sidelines.

She had never been as outgoing and warm as Gloria, but she could still remember a young, hopeful girl volunteering to clean-up after global disasters and aliens fights. She hadn’t known real fear back then, only the aftermath of darkness. She still didn’t know how to feel about the Avengers, only that superheroes had been a part of her world ever since she was a little girl in a strange new place.

Céline still remembered where she had been during Tony Stark’s press conference and the revelation of his identity as Iron Man, and how they had watched the return of Captain America in her cramped dorm room not too long after that. Then the battle of New York had happened and it was the first time she had sensed the world had changed. She had been a 20-something then, fresh out of Canada and itching for a way to make her mark. Her work as a volunteer for the Red Cross had still seemed so small, the search for survivors in the rubble so daunting. Four years later and it looked like catastrophes would continue to happen, this time in Eastern Europe, and by the time she had turned 25 she had been caught into the politics of the Accords. The following years had been nothing but running, her delusions of grandeur shattered in the most painful way deep in a Russian hellhole.  

Now she was supposed to be 35 and she had let her a decade slip away from her, had let shadows engulf what could have been and, much like the world in the aftermath of Thanos’ hubris, uncertainty made her stand still.

Hesitation was a byproduct of fear, but every day she dipped her toe a little further, either found her determination or foolishness to cross the confines of humanity and back. A fine mix of liquid courage, happy pills and late-night despair often helped dissolving this great uproar into oblivion.

Then it was just easy.

There were no heavy burdens. No restraints, no threats. She did not have to ponder over her own existence, wondering who she was and where she was going and if anyone followed. She was Céline, the foreign girl who enjoyed raves and fluorescent lights on plaster. Céline was easy to talk to. She wore long-sleeved shirts because she claimed she was always cold, she loved the strong smell of camellias because it reminded her of home and she fancied Florent, the owner of the youth center she worked at five evenings per week. Céline was ordinary. Céline was safe.

Sometimes even she forgot Céline was not real.

At first she had found it difficult to make a life out of thin air. People had parents and friends, credit cards and social accounts. History. But then almost four billion people had a five-year gap to fill as well, and everything could be solved by six magical little words: I was part of the Blip. In a way, it was ironic that the first thing she had truly belonged to had been a catastrophe erasing half the world population. She didn’t know a single person that the Snap hadn’t fucked in some way or other, and yet Thanos’ decimation had saved her life. And now, to figure out what to do with it…

There was definitely a market for new identities in this world that had been empty for five years. She had been given an exorbitant price for her fresh one, a blank state that would probably be useful to criminals and con-artists.

What languages had she been good at? English. French. Spanish. London had been the easiest flight to grab, so England he had been. Her dark hair, caramel skin and brown eyes had blended well with her supposed identity. She had been Tina Abbott, a shell-shocked girl from Bristol, on her way to an Asian vacation when her body had disintegrated in the commercial plane she made out of thin air. The middle-aged bureaucrat hadn’t cared to poke holes in her stories, ticking the boxes as the story unfolded.

“Tina” had ditched her papers as soon as her correspondence flight to Brussels had landed and paid cash for the next one. Tina became Sarah and Sarah became Céline, transiting from forger to smuggler without staying long enough to make a mark. With the chaos of 3 billion people simultaneously coming back to life, it wasn't like someone was bothering to check on her now that she had settled for a while. As long as she paid the outrageous rent of her borderline slum, she could be a legal alien as much as she pleased. Immigrations services and the GRC in particular had enough problems in the wake of the Flag-smashers’ uprising.

Céline didn’t have much time to ponder Karli Morgenthau’s actions when a sudden concert of shouts alerted her to some commotion inside the limestone building; carefully, she opened the door to the youth center of Belleville.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made a concerted effort to distance myself from just about every news feed and platform that has nothing better to do than report the latest covid statistics. The reason for this is quite honestly, like many people I have had enough. Despite my best efforts, the media bombardment is so pervasive that an update got through, and instead of deleting it, I did the math.

In South Africa at the time of receiving that update there were supposedly 1 039 161 positive cases counted, with 20 033 deaths. I am no maths genius but it wasn’t a stretch to figure out that this was around 2%. I then looked for the data for the United States which is also around 2% and the UK which is around 3%. On average this virus has a mortality rate of 2.5% with the majority of those deaths affecting the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, otherwise known as co-morbidities. Except that the data reflected is questionable. 


When you sift through the conspiracy theories and start talking to credible professionals in the medical industry you begin to see a pattern emerging. Looking at the data of years gone by, pneumonia and flu viruses year on year have also resulted in between a 1% and 2% death rate. So why the hysteria? 


According to the WHO: A pandemic is defined as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”. The classical definition includes nothing about population immunity, virology or disease severity. By this definition, pandemics can be said to occur annually in each of the temperate southern and northern hemispheres, given that seasonal epidemics cross international boundaries and affect a large number of people. This happens every year but the world doesn’t come to a grinding halt because of it. 


According to the British Medical Journal the PCR test is inaccurate, picking up dead and ineffective virus particles that may be found on most people, most of the time. It states that the PCR test, never designed for this kind of testing has an error margin of 97%. That’s insanity no matter how you want to spin it. If the widely accepted method for determining whether or not a person is infected is fundamentally flawed, the resulting data is completely inaccurate. 

Added to which, the death statistics are also questionable. They do not define who died because of the virus or with the virus. For example, a colleague’s mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in July, yet the death certificate states covid19 as cause of death. This is not an isolated incident. 

The World Health Organisation guidelines state that “COVID-19 should be recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the disease, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death, i.e. COVID-19 is the underlying cause of death”. This means no one really knows how many have died directly from a covid infection.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has shown that one in thirteen (7.8%) deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate did not have the disease as the underlying cause of death, further distorting the data. 

The decisions directly related to our lives and livelihoods are based on inaccurate or distorted data and no one is doing anything about it. 

Enough about the deliberate distortion of the facts. The question is why is this happening?
There is a frenetic urgency to get the world vaccinated. Bill Gates began pushing the vaccination agenda way back in 2013 if not earlier. And naturally people, at least people who can still think for themselves are extremely wary of this vaccine. At the time of writing this, the vaccine has only been available for a couple of weeks, and in this short window the significant adverse effects in those already having received the vaccination is 3% based on recent published information. Higher than the death rate of the virus. If you were to go by statistics alone, the vaccine will kill more people than the virus. 

The pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders are naturally elated that the powers that be are enforcing and coercing people into having to accept this vaccine, creating the illusion that their freedom lies on the other side of a needle. And further perpetuating the myth that drugs are going to save you. Bearing in mind that the manufacturers of this technology are free of any kind of liability arising from death or damage caused by a substance that is being trialed simultaneously on millions of people. In simple terms, if the vaccine harms you or renders you infertile you have no recourse. 

Recently a second strain of the virus has emerged, This is nothing new - viruses mutate. This is why there is a different flu strain each season. It has been a year since the first strain emerged and as viruses seem to be excellent timekeepers, its right on schedule for an upgrade. This is further going to throw a spanner into the vaccine works. Will the current vaccine work with the new strain or create other complications? If people have indeed contracted the original virus, will taking the vaccine have immune suppressing effects rendering them more vulnerable to other strains? Pregnant women and women of “child bearing age” have been warned by the NHS  not to take the vaccine because it may render them sterile or have deleterious effects on the foetus. But its ok to give this unknown quantity to the elderly or your child? I think not. 

What happened to freedom of choice? What happened to autonomy? What happened to informed consent? What happened to common sense? 
For me personally, the most disturbing part of this experience is how people I thought of as free thinking, intelligent individuals are simply kowtowing, going with the flow because they don’t want to be seen as outliers. It baffles me how so many people are afraid of voicing an opinion. It wasn’t so long ago that the Nazis used this kind of brainwashing and propaganda to commit genocide. And we are going down this path again with our eyes wide open. 


Back in early 2020 governments the world over were advised by the WHO to impose widespread lockdown measures in order to curb the spread of the virus. The media were so distracted with whether or not the virus came from a bat or a pangolin that no one thought to ask if these counter measures at controlling people was the best option for the economies of the world in the first place. No one gave any thought to the destruction that would ensue. How many people would lose their jobs, livelihoods and minds in the process. Because we trusted the people we vote for to do what is in our best interest.


The second-largest funder of the WHO is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides 9.8% of the WHO’s funds, effectively calling the shots! After Trump pulled funding, The World Health Organisation is now effectively owned by Microsoft and China. Bloody terrifying thought that is!


It is now too late to put the genie back in the bottle. For governments to admit that they acted without a full understanding of the facts or unable to foresee the chaos and destruction that would ensue, going back and admitting they were wrong will result in chaos, crippling class actions and people in power being forced to step down. There will be anarchy. Confidence in governments the world over has been severely compromised not to mention the unstable public option of giant pharmaceutical companies. 

The puppet masters at the WHO (Gates) is also a major shareholder in Pfizer. Incidentally the Gates foundation funded the development of the Pfizer owned sterilisation contraceptive Sayana, targeting specifically third world countries. At the risk of joining the ranks of the conspiracy theorists, it seems that the company who gave birth to computer viruses has also given birth to a means of enforced sterilisation. 

Getting rid of the elderly and ill, controlling those who are young and able though fear and ensuring that those who can have children are stopped in their tracks. The facts really do speak for themselves, but you can connect the dots?

Perhaps people do nothing and say nothing because they feel that their opinions don’t count? They they won’t be heard amongst the noise created by the media and the hysteria? People don’t speak up because they are afraid of what there peers may think of them. And this is why the greatest tragedies throughout human history happen. People who do nothing. People who say nothing. In the face of glaring evidence that the emperor is wearing no clothes, the average person waits for someone else to take action.  We are in a mess and in the hands of people who do not have anyones best interest at heart except for themselves and their own agendas. 


So what good can possibly come from this situation? Thankfully some have realised that their health is in their own hands and no one can save them except for themselves. If you take the steps to stay healthy - eat real food, get decent sleep, surround yourself with positive people and exercise - preferably in the sunlight, chances are you won’t even know if you catch a virus because your body is innately geared towards protecting you from getting seriously ill.


It has hopefully brought to light the logical realisation that if you aren’t feeling well, stay at home. Wash your hands and don’t sneeze on people.


With luck, more of us will wake up and realise that no vaccine or drug can save you from bad decisions. Giant corporations are not creating vaccines because they care about you, they care about their profits. If they engineered medicine for altruistic purposes they would be non-profits not multibillion dollar organisations. And perhaps more people will realise that governments and government institutions are controlled by the private sector who are the giants they are, because we, the public created them. 

We buy their products, whether the product is software, insurance, junk food or drugs. We created these organisations who are controlling the governments who are controlling us - with fear.  With hope more people we will start to see the self perpetuating, destructive cycle that we have come to think of as normal, or maybe not.


My greatest wish for you in 2021 who ever you are, wherever you are, is to wake up and take responsibility for you own health, your own choices and your own autonomy. Speak up when something doesn’t add up and stop feeding the fear.


https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4916

https://www.icd10monitor.com/false-positives-in-pcr-tests-for-covid-19

https://www.chiropractic.org/informed-consent-and-freedom-of-choice-on-vaccination-issues/
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/death-certificate-data-covid-19-as-the-underlying-cause-of-death/

https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/investments/pfizer/

https://www.devex.com/news/big-concerns-over-gates-foundation-s-potential-to-become-largest-who-donor-97377

Why I moved to Texas: A cost benefit Analysis

When campus was closed due to the pandemic, I was left with an important decision to make, continue living on campus or move back home. Seeing that school was online, and the campus would be completely closed I had to do an opportunity cost analysis to determine whether I would stay in the Orange Country or move back home 40 minutes away. To do a proper opportunity cost analysis, I had to analyze all the different tradeoffs that would be affected by my decision.

Pros of living in Irvine:

Living with my friends and away from my parents allows me the privacy to do things my parents do not approve of (aka smoke weed). Furthermore, living with my friends is more fun as we do things together and enjoy each other’s company. Lastly, even though campus is closed Orange County offers some of the world’s most beautiful beaches: one of few things that had not been shut down by the pandemic.

Con of Living in Irvine

With Orange country being one of the most beautiful places in California, the rent reflects that exact sentiment. To afford living in the Irvine me and my friends shared a house with 6 other people. Even with so many people in the house, rent is still $700-800 per person. Living with six guys means a lot of mess and a lot of noise. Messiness and cleaning are a constant battle with college roommates as people come from very different backgrounds and view the urgency of cleaning in very different ways. Furthermore, 6 guys mean constant arguing, people over and music blasting, all of which would affect my ability to study and relax.

Pros of Living At home:

The biggest reason for moving back home is my mom does not charge rent. Furthermore, my mom loves cooking, so it also means home cooked meals everyday and yup you guessed it … FOR FREE!!!! Lastly, I have high school friends that moved back home that I would get to reconnect with.

Cons of living at Home:

My house back home is quite small, and I share a room with my little brother who is a video game addict. If you have siblings who game, you know they constantly scream at the TV and never leave their room under any circumstance. This means I would be woken up at 2 am by his screams at the game and would never have the place to do my work in peace and quiet. Furthermore, I cannot do anything my mom does not approve of, which is quite a long list at this point so I would be constantly reprimanded for my actions. Finally, living at home would mean my actions during the pandemic would directly affect my family so no matter how careful I cannot: go to the gym, hangout with my friends or do anything that would put my family at risk.

Decision:

With the pandemic closing the entirety of campus and many social events the benefits of living on campus became non-existent. Also being a tutor, I figured my business would take a huge hit and paying the $800 a month would prove to be extremely difficult. Accounting for all the pros and cons of my living situation, I decided to move back home to save money and be with my family during the pandemic.

I have always wanted to explore the possibility of living in Texas as it was advertised as being less expensive than California while still offering some of the same amenities of being in a city. After doing some research I decided I would want to live in either Dallas or Austin. I joined housing Facebook groups and quickly found out that living in these cities in Texas is comparable in price to living in a decent neighborhood in California, it was not cheap by the furthest stretch of the imagination. Then the Storm came…

The Texas storm devastated the state and left many people without power or running water for weeks, some even froze to death. The storm caused many students at the University of Texas to move back home to their families in fear of being alone without power or electricity. Naturally, the demand for housing decreased and a price decreased as it followed. I decided to search for housing while the tragedy was passing and found a guy willing to rent me 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom house in the heart of the city of Austin for $700. For reference, a house like that normally costs north of $2000. Now I had a decision to make, leave my friends and family and explore Texas or stay home?

Living at home was an absolute nightmare. I could not go to the gym, see my friends and most importantly I could not do any of my schoolwork. My house was too small for a personal desk and all the libraries and coffee shops were closed due to the pandemic, so for the longest time I was simply doing my homework on my bed. The decision here was simple: go to Texas because at least I would have my own space and be able to focus on my schoolwork.

Arriving to Austin was the most pleasant surprise I could ever expect. The apartment was much larger than I had anticipated, the weather is perfect, the population was extremely diverse, and the actual City of Austin is beautiful and has a river that flows through it. Texas also decided to open businesses and lift the mask mandate. Although the state received heavy criticism for lifting the mandate, masks are still required to enter most stores such as: Costco, target, and many malls as well. Texas opening, allowed bars to be accessed at full scale, and for a low-risk individual in their early 20s I was ecstatic as the lack of social interactions had made me quite miserable. Furthermore, it brought up the cost of living back to where it normally was and I was able to find a roommate that was interested in the night life and was okay with going out and possibly being exposed. I charge him $800 for rent, not only making my rent free, but also giving me an extra $100 every month. I am extremely happy with my decision, here is a picture of me kayaking the Colorado river.

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed. Story by Adam Serwer

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as the historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

There are unwitting victims of this campaign—those who lack the knowledge to separate history from sentiment. Then there are those whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a mythical figure who never truly existed.

In the Richmond Times Dispatch, R. David Cox wrote that “for white supremacist protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” In the conservative publication Townhall, Jack Kerwick concluded that Lee was “among the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.” John Daniel Davidson, in an essay for The Federalist, opposed the removal of the Lee statute in part on the grounds that Lee “arguably did more than anyone to unite the country after the war and bind up its wounds.” Praise for Lee of this sort has flowed forth from past historians and presidents alike.

This is too divorced from Lee’s actual life to even be classed as fan fiction; it is simply historical illiteracy.

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Lee was a slave owner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that is often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most important, better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the enslaved—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “In their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington, Virginia, plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to “lay it on well.” Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause in their declarations of secession. Lee’s beloved Virginia was no different, accusing the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to fight for the South can only be described as a choice to fight for the continued existence of human bondage in America—even though for the Union, it was not at first a war for emancipation.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free black Americans and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” to the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander, A. P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth that the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with white people. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that black soldiers be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that black people could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

After the war, Lee did advise defeated southerners not to rise up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism. The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it were about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep black people enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow removing black people from the South (“disposed of,” in his words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles, you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free; he fought for the preservation of slavery; his army kidnapped free black people at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for black Americans. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

Editor’s Note: We’ve gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here.

Humanity is at a tipping point in the evolution of our society where the only limiting factor is education and belief, the former having been trounced for profit and the latter malformed. Humans are programmed by the experience they were forced to undergo, which by large is villainous lies that enforce genocidal tendencies. Humanity reached this point by cooperative community, the first mark of civilization being a broken leg being mended and cared for; now our biggest hindrance are the beliefs that we need to tear each-other down to advance ourselves forward. Belief is an illusion that we give power to. Money is belief, belief is power, and we have more belief in a currency of violence than we have belief in the power of Life. We continue to pour efforts into oil regardless of the fact that it is destroying ecosystems, we continue to tear down green space with half of the planet's animal life dead already, we continue to pour pollution into our water sources even though the ocean is acidic enough to melt the shells of invertebrates, and the only thing keeping us in this cycle is that we believe in it more than we believe in alternatives. We don't need to live this way, but we will never reach it without changing our internal faith. The dialogues against futurism are always rooted in the same denial, hostility, and close-mindedness that houses bigotry under the pretense that this transformation has to be 30 years down the road, even though we don't have that long in current climate projections. People need to recognize how deeply indoctrinated we are from propaganda, including the agenda of depopulation that has been floating around for the entirety of the post-millennial generation. The carrying capacity of the planet is not population, it's pollution; we have embodied toxicity in our flesh and soul between micro-plastics, psychiatric drugs, hormones & chemical preservatives in food, hydrocarbons, and heavy metal poisoning underneath nationalistic and religious brainwashing. All this extra particulate in the body literally blocks and dams up inner fluid flow, preventing lymphatic drainage and affecting bioelectric cellular exchange which leads to the rise of cancer and disease. We are living in a God-less society...and for good reason. The name of God has been dragged through shit (quite literally with pedophilia) while being an excuse to maim, slaughter, and execute. Most people exist in religious trauma and the majority of faiths are rooted in toxic patriarchy from an abusive Father that has traumatized, belittled, persecuted, and shamed the Mother; the worst part being that these religious abuses have forced people into a cult of science that was bought by corporate interest and shames any research that did not get appropriate funding (check out the replication crisis). People who call themselves rational and intelligent have no shame in their hypocrisy that mocks ideas such as chakra (nerve plexi) and aura (electromagnetic fields produced by bio-electric current, the same way hammerhead sharks hunt) while calling anything outside of the profitable realm 'wu-wu'. The hyper-sane Tesla was incessantly degraded by this exact vein of failure even through his research in AC-currents, x-ray advancement, dynamo electric motors, hydroelectric power-plants, and his unfinished probes into wireless universal energy and fuel-free hypersonic airships; he was destroyed by propaganda and mockery without ever being truly recognized as the genius he was.Everything I have mentioned is a symptom of the toxic patriarchy that has fetishized Yang while barely understanding energy or spirit. The masculine Yang force is pure light without shape or form, untethered free radicals that creates molecular friction without the grounding or discharge from the electron Yin space. Within the flawed interpretation of original sin, within the persecution of healthy sexuality, within the tabooed symbology of darkness and fear of negativity, we have ceded the true essence of the creative birthing process that gives shape and face to matter while competing over which plastic gets to the dump first. The highest aspects of our humanity are completely out of alignment as people search for Love in attachments and pray for Heaven to come after death, neglecting the fact that our scriptures say to create a loving space for our neighbors while remaining free of judgment. They say be the change you want to see in the world, which is why my goals are to provide my alternative healthcare without profiting off illness while creating business ventures that will transform the planet...but it's impossible to fund business when my primary skillset is one that I do not profit from. I see the future with synthesis of spirit and science that understands the supernatural is built directly on top of the natural, that recognizes the invisible electrical interactions between consciousness both human and not (which is how my healing practice works, through feelings of safety and listening transmitted by mirror neuron synapses to discharge the hyperarousal state of Fight/Flight). My goals are for biodegradable plastics to overtake the scene, for decentralized universal power structures that fuel our every need, the purification of water sources not just for human use but to support dying flora and fauna as well, for alternative community structures that are not built on fragile import/export cycles putting every urban resident at risk, for revitalizing wild food forests to supplement simplified community permaculture while providing space for regrowing dying insects/bird/mammal populations, to promote the alternatives to internal combustion engines while recycling our immense scrap piles/mining dumps for gold and copper, to boom hemp industries in building material/biofuel/plastic/NANOSHEET SUPERCAPACITORS!!!, and eventually creating open source quantum internet across ley lines. I see the future, but I need the consent of humanity to begin. This consent is the turning point from industries that rape this planet, to the relationship that makes loving intercourse with the seed of light inside Gaia's womb to birth immense beauty of creation. If I have a million bucks, I will change the world.

“And sleep”

And sleep. And servance the blasts  went and they never complaint, Ray, 

from the birthdays, in bigger  not. his lasse, was been 

before three, still say: “I am  an agone her blue, 

thing and a certain Parnasse warm of  wreather must rever. The 

old king shame of his own lute thou dashed  by the was depose 

of the bleak norther hair, and  ere is;— ‘Take its madness 

heavenly day; though not flowed: the fire,  He spake. Whithers sire my 

hand—had gold, among tuneable is not  one cant find in springs 

of that way,’ I will howling of  things her man, let me pain—reach 

at the dames of pleasure, as  I were the honour! But 

I have been reede. And rushed you how  soone and proffer of the 

streets debased at her evn, Was  passing to use, and 

turn out a man-eating up the  still scummy sleep. her mesh: and 

silver so digree, and gave and boats  and never also so badde to 

the couth, and all the  trees: I cant falline, his dark. 

We steps upon this Gamas dwarfish tyrannie  lace thou wilt the autumn, 

drooping her break to young mans pair  of the fame sang all Lady,—

Florian, unperceive ‘Now tell. To  have I put up the pay, 

and thrown of those Grashoppers dream remains:  and of four magnolia 

igniting in it; showing  youth! But Juan was window 

she she stair,’ or by land, his daught  that youth should expelld so this 

own old, and, and in one, each  ever has palls—at leaps into 

the lifted  up-stair, stiles of love. When 

heart—I hear then chimedes, my liness  could breast-plates” heavn.      For amorous, 

as the birthday smith my cradled  you shall garlanding miserable 

touchd to mine, one  hand—the silence, moving, long 

thy heart, and weary maids, belief— cruel,  cruelty! I lookd her 

lips, and the last, dissolvd,  and will action of 

mind herald to her populous.  And smoother object on 

thou less emeralds thee my heels  its fashion I have neighbourd death, 

askd her sides, the ran the  garded Baron dread a 

heapd a trance was, as ourself,  and turns there unlock 

with clamoured him crying  those he minister 

for Love is always its  a tap at way; the 

little sphere. This lyre; and avenge in  feares and low, the 

earth weak as death! Burnt by his beare Shee,  and gaze ripeness reign filthy 

feet, into pieces  smallet-masters, even driving as 

this is swords our own  death in dew,— and turn all put 

never sad, on the Babe in  one, all the purse not to 

silver shone thought tall, and, if  Im free of all,— what some feet; 

he stated at the gold boundly  indispel a venger, Time 

neer die and she season where are  these fled. Aimèd with ch

arm a kitchen, maybe, I will bury  beloved bed-posts 

that following, doth broken prepare, like  me thousand as true, to 

meant towards ere with  a lowly dumb-sister from 

the must hopeless to winne, and  all have began touch of 

love finds existence shaken  with fingers follows rise, 

and time many mast the listening  its soul desire! 

Sleep without anothers are gone  by thigh acts— and hollow rich 

with mutual shouldst mouth as  blaze were near they all fain but to 

no tailor he sea-count dusty guiltless  everything change; The Cape.