Unraveling the Reign of King Analytic: A Journey Through Data Dominion

The reign of King Analytic marks a pivotal epoch in the evolution of governance and decision-making. His court is a crucible of data-driven deliberations, where every edict is forged in the fires of statistical rigor and predictive modeling. In the kingdom of King Analytic, empirical evidence reigns supreme, and conjecture is banished to the dungeons of ignorance.

At the heart of King Analytic's realm lies the sacred tome of data, wherein the chronicles of the kingdom are inscribed in bytes and bits. Every transaction, every interaction, every heartbeat of the populace is recorded and scrutinized with meticulous precision. From the ebb and flow of market trends to the whims of public sentiment, nothing escapes the gaze of King Analytic's all-seeing eye.

But King Analytic is not merely a custodian of information; he is a master of interpretation. Like a sage unraveling the enigma of the stars, he discerns patterns where others see chaos, extracting nuggets of wisdom from the digital deluge. Through the alchemy of analytics, he transforms raw data into actionable insights, illuminating the path forward for his subjects.

In the court of King Analytic, meritocracy reigns supreme. No decree is issued without consulting the oracle of data, and no decision is made without weighing the evidence. It matters not one's lineage or pedigree; in the kingdom of King Analytic, prowess in analysis is the currency of influence, and logic is the language of power.

Yet, for all his wisdom and insight, King Analytic is not immune to the pitfalls of hubris. Like the fabled Icarus, who soared too close to the sun, he must tread carefully lest his ambitions outstrip his capabilities. The allure of big data beckons with promises of omniscience, english premier league match predictions but the path to enlightenment is fraught with peril. Privacy concerns, ethical dilemmas, and the specter of algorithmic bias loom large on the horizon, casting a shadow over the kingdom's aspirations.

And yet, despite these challenges, the reign of King Analytic endures, fueled by the inexorable march of progress. With each passing day, new technologies emerge, new methodologies evolve, and the frontiers of knowledge expand ever outward. The kingdom of King Analytic stands as a testament to humanity's insatiable thirst for understanding, a beacon of enlightenment in an age of uncertainty.

I've hit the perfect balance of sensory stuff but today that means writing, doodling, and listening to the same song on repeat all at once and it certainly isn't ordinary!

I think it's interesting that some fans seem to think that Dany won't even land in Westeros until ADOS given that she has a lot of story to wrap up to even be ready to invade Westeros. Do you think it's possible that the one who comes to fight at Winterfell against the others is Aegon and not Dany? And that Jon kneels, not for her help, but after Dany attacks KL and kills Aegon. This would mirror Tohren Stark's dilemma and make Jon's kneeling understandable. Or maybe Aegon agrees to come but is

(2) is killed first by Dany and THEN Jon kneels to prevent destruction but also secure her help?

Hi there!

I think this is an interesting idea and I like it. Aegon has a role to play and it certainly would have a lot of impact if Jon learning about his parentage would influence his interactions with Aegon. If he had come to terms with it only to be drawn into another Dance of Dragons.

I am not so sure if Dany will stay long in Essos. To me the whole point of her arc there is that she does not wrap up the mess. She had a chance in Meereen to work slowly for real peace but by the end of ADWD she abandoned that project and embraced her inner dragon. I think she will collect an army and will make for Westeros before any of the issues in Essos are solved. The people who pray for her as a saviour as we have seen in Tyrion's PoV pray in vain, and that is imho the whole point.

I think we'll also get a Euron - Dany alliance and there might even be pressure on Euron's side involved to get Dany to Westeros. I think we will see Dany freeing herself from Euron and his dragon-binding horn and maybe this will be staged as a moment of triumph that will hide Dark Dany for a bit longer. Because Euron is so creepy and full of hubris that he practically begs to be taken down.

That does not mean that the events in Westeros could not play out like you think.

I think that we'll get better explanations and motivations than on the show, that's for sure.

I still think that Political Jon was a thing on the show as well. And if you look at Jon's actions from that angle, it makes sort of sense at least until episode 4 of season 8.

If Jon will have a good relationship with Aegon or a good start, his death will hit even harder and it should give the readers a hint towards what Jon really feels about Dany.

Thanks for the ask.

As we're waiting for season 2, I try to see in which direction the show would go regarding HWR's dilemma.

I think a common misunderstanding is that HWR has a point, and that a global multiversal war is worse than a peace obtained by force.

But there is one major flaw in this reasonning. The problem isn't freedom in itself, it's that some poeple (Kangs, but if it wasn't them it could be someone else) are willing to abuse their freedom and cause destruction.

HWR didn't solve the problem. He only put the world in stasis, making sure none of the timeline he had selected would deviate. This is not solving an issue, it's avoiding the issue altogether.

Maybe the solution would be to allow each timeline to deal with its potential tyrans. Where there is a Kang, there are Avengers, Fantastic Fours... HWR's hubris led him to think he was the only one able to save the world, but it's wrong.

Trust is the key. Trust and cooperation. A single person cannot save the world.

I am not in MW's shoes, but I think this could be a good way to solve the dilemma in a classic MCU way, while giving a positive message to the public.

Would love to hear about your beefs with Lucas because I have beefs with Lucas

(Sorry it took me three thousand years to answer this, anon.)

They mainly fall under a few headings, with the third being the most serious and the thing that I am genuinely irl furious about at least biannually (and feeling unable to adequately sum up The Problem with it after yelling about it so often is a huge part of why this post has been in my drafts for such a long time):

1. His self-mythologising and the subsequent uncritical repetition of his bullshit in the fandom. Obvious lies like that he had some master plan for 10 films when it’s clear he did not have anything like a plot outline at any point. We all know the thing was written at the seat of various people’s pants, it’s blatantly self-evident that’s the case. There’s also plenty of public record about how the OT was written. Even dumber, more obvious lies, like that Anakin was ‘always the protagonist’ and the entire 6 films were his story from the beginning. This is preposterous and every time someone brings it up (usually with palpable smugness) as fanboys ‘not understanding star wars’ because they don't get that ‘the OT is not Luke's story’... Yeah, I just... I cannot.

Vader wasn’t Anakin Skywalker until ESB, it’s a retcon. It’s a brilliant retcon and it works perfectly, it elevated SW into something timeless and special it otherwise would not have been, but you can tell it wasn’t the original plan and there’s proof it wasn’t the original plan. Let’s not pretend. And Luke is the protagonist. No amount of waffling about such esoteric flights of theory as ‘ring structure’ is going to get away from the rigidly orthodox narrative and the indisputable fact that it is Luke’s hero’s journey. Vader’s redemption isn’t about his character development (he has almost none) and has no basis in any kind of convincing psychological reality for his character, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s part of Luke’s arc, because Vader is entirely a foil in Luke’s story. It’s a coming-of-age myth about confronting and growing beyond the father.

All attempts to de-centre Luke in RotJ just break the OT’s narrative logic. It’s a character-driven story and the character driving is Luke. Trying to read it as Anakin’s victory, the moral culmination of his choices rather than Luke’s and putting all the agency into Anakin’s hands just destroys the trilogy’s coherence and ignores most of its content in favour of appropriating a handful of scenes into an arc existing only in the prequels. The dilemma of RotJ is how Luke will define ethical adulthood after learning and growing through two previous films worth of challenge, education, failure, and triumph; it’s his choice to love his father and throw down his sword which answers the question the entire story has been asking. Vader’s redemption and the restoration of the galaxy are the consequences of that choice which tell us what kind of world we’re in, but the major dramatic conflict was resolved by Luke’s decision not the response to it.

And, just all over, the idea of Lucas as an infallible auteur is inaccurate and annoying to me. Obviously he’s a tremendous creative force and we wouldn’t have sw without him, but he didn’t create it alone or out of whole cloth. The OT was a very collaborative effort and that’s why it’s what it is and the prequels are what they are. Speaking of which.

2. The hubris of the prequels in general and all the damage their many terrible, protected-from-editors choices do to the symbolic fabric of the sw universe. Midicholrians, Yoda fighting with a lightsabre, Obi-wan as Anakin's surrogate father instead of his peer, incoherent and unmotivated character arcs, the laundry list of serious and meaningful continuity errors, the bad storytelling, the bad direction, the bad characterisation, the shallowness of the parallels which undermine the OT’s imagery, the very clumsy and contradictory way the A/P romance was handled, the weird attitude to romance in general, it goeth on. I don’t want to re-litigate the entire PT here and I’m not going to, but they are both bad as films and bad as prequels. The main idea of them, to add Anakin’s pov and create an actual arc for him as well as to flesh out the themes of compassion and redemption, was totally appropriate. The concept works as a narrative unit, there are lots of powerful thematic elements they introduce, they have a lot of cool building blocks, it’s only in execution and detail that they do a bunch of irreparable harm.

But the constant refrain that only ageing fanboys don’t like them and they only don’t like them because of their themes or because they humanise Anakin... can we not. The shoddy film making in the prequels is an objective fact. If you want to overlook the bad parts for the good or prioritise ideas over technique, that’s fine, but don’t sit here and tell me they’re masterworks of cinema there can be no valid reason to criticise. I was the exact right age for them when I saw them, I am fully on board with the fairy tale nature of sw, I am fully on board with humanising Anakin- the prequels just have a lot of very big problems with a) their scripts and b) their direction, especially of dialogue scenes. If Lucas had acknowledged his limitations like he did back in the day instead of believing his own press, he could have again had the help he obviously needed instead of embarrassing himself.

3. Killing and suppressing the original original trilogy. I consider the fact that the actual original films are not currently available in any form, have never been available in an archival format, and have not been presented in acceptable quality since the VHS release a very troubling case study in the problems of corporate-owned art. LF seizing prints of the films whenever they are shown, destroying the in-camera negatives to make the special editions with no plans to restore them, and doing all in the company’s considerable power to suppress the original versions is something I consider an act of cultural vandalism. The OT defined a whole generation of Hollywood. It had a global impact on popular entertainment. ANH is considered so historically significant it was one of the first films added to the US Library of Congress (Lucas refused to provide even them with a print of the theatrical release, so they made their own viewable scan from the 70s copyright submission).

The fact that the films which made that impact cannot be legally accessed by the public is offensive to me. The fact that Lucas has seen fit to dub over or composite out entire performances (deleting certain actors from the films), to dramatically alter the composition of shots chosen by the original directors, to radically change the entire stylistic tone by completely reinventing the films’ colour timing in attempt to make them match the plasticy palate of the prequels, to shoot new scenes for movies he DID NOT DIRECT, add entire sequences or re-edit existing sequences to the point of being unrecognisable etc. etc. is NOT OKAY WITH ME when he insists that his versions be the ONLY ones available.

I’m okay with the Special Editions existing, though I think they’re mostly... not good... but I’m not okay with them replacing the original films. And all people can say is ‘well, they’re his movies’.

Lucas may have clear legal ownership in the capitalistic sense, but in no way does he have clear artistic ownership. Forget the fans, I’m not one of those people who argue the fans are owed something: A film is always a collaborative exercise and almost never can it be said that the end product is the ultimate responsibility and possession of one person. Even the auteur directors aren't the sole creative vision, even a triple threat like Orson Welles still had cinematographers and production designers, etc. Hundreds of artists work on films. Neither a writer nor a director (nor one person who is both) is The Artist behind a film the way a novelist is The Artist behind a novel. And Lucas did NOT write the screenplays for or direct ESB or RotJ. So in what sense does he have a moral right to alter those films from what the people primarily involved in making them deemed the final product? In what sense would he have the right to make a years-later revision the ONLY version even if he WERE the director?

Then you get into the issue of the immeasurable cultural impact those films had in their original form and the imperative to preserve something that is defining to the history of film and the state of the zeitgeist. I don't think there is any ‘fan entitlement’ involved in saying the originals belonged to the world after being part of its consciousness for decades and it is doing violence to the artistic record to try to erase the films which actually occupied that space. It's exactly like trying to replace every copy of It's a Wonderful Life with a colourised version (well, it's worse but still), and that was something Lucas himself railed against. It’s like if Michaelangelo were miraculously resuscitated and he decided to repaint the Sistine Ceiling to add a gunfight and change his style to something contemporary.

I get genuinely very upset at the cold reality that generations of people are watching sw for the first time and it’s the fucking SE-except-worse they’re seeing. And as fewer people keep physical media and the US corporate oligarchy continues to perform censorship and rewrite history on its streaming services unchecked by any kind of public welfare concerns, you’ll see more and more ‘real Mandela effect’ type shit where the cultural record has suddenly ‘always’ been in line with whatever they want it to be just now. And US media continues to infect us all with its insidious ubiquity. I think misrepresenting and censoring the past is an objectively bad thing and we can’t learn from things we pretend never happened, but apparently not many people are worried about handing the keys to our collective experience to Disney and Amazon.

4. The ‘Jedi don’t marry’ thing and how he wanted this to continue with Luke post-RotJ, so it’s obviously not meant to be part of what was wrong with the order in the prequels. I find this... incoherent on a storytelling level. The moral of the anidala story then indeed becomes just plain ‘romantic love is bad and will make you crazy’, rather than the charitable reading of the prequels which I ascribe to, which is that the problem isn’t Anakin’s love for Padmé, it’s that he ceased to love her and began to covet her. And I can’t help but feel this attitude is maybe an expression of GL’s issues with women following his divorce. I don’t remember if there’s evidence to contradict that take, since it’s been some time since I read about this but yeah. ANH absolutely does sow seeds for possible Luke/Leia development and GL was still married while working on that film. Subsequently he was dead set against Luke ever having a relationship and decided Jedi could not marry. Coincidence?

There’s a lot of blinking red ‘issues with women’ warning signs all over Lucas’s work, but the prequels are really... egregious.

Love, Conquering

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3m9nkNm

by MaskoftheRay

Thirty years ago, after depleting its and its colonies’ resources, an attempted military coup, as well narrowly escaping the devastating consequences of scientific hubris, Krypton entered a new expansionist era. Dru-Zod was cast out, and ordered to redeem himself by bringing new worlds under empirical control. Five years ago, Earth became a Kryptonian colony. But not without a fight.

Now, with the planet’s future and freedom still at stake, the resistance’s work remains incomplete. Batman, forced to adapt to and work within the invaders’ regime, secretly provides the rebels with information. But when his extraterrestrial colleague— the Kryptonian Cultural Minister— begins to take a personal interest in him, Bruce finds himself in uncharted territory. Because Kal-El is not the cruel, domineering overlord Batman assumed him to be.

Pre-written with weekly updates.

Words: 5754, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: Batman - All Media Types, Superman - All Media Types, Wonder Woman - All Media Types, Justice League - All Media Types

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories: M/M

Characters: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Alfred Pennyworth, Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Original Kryptonian Character(s), Dru-Zod, Kara Zor-El, Diana (Wonder Woman), Faora Hu-Ul (mentioned), Justice League members, Jor-El (mentioned), Lara Lor-Van (mentioned)

Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne, Diana (Wonder Woman) & Bruce Wayne, Diana (Wonder Woman) & Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne & Kara Zor-El, Clark Kent & Kara Zor-El, Clark Kent & Jason Todd, Bruce Wayne & Dru-Zod, Dru-Zod & Clark Kent, Background Kara Zor-El/ Original Female Kryptonian Character(s)

Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Angst, Kryptonian Culture & Customs, Alien Biology, Kryptonians Invaded Earth, Whump, Science Boyfriends, Comic Book Science, Alternate Universe, Not Canon Compliant, Krypton Survives, Clark is Kal-El for most of this but he gets there eventually, Major Character Injury, Kryptonite, Worldbuilding, Action/Adventure, Hurt/Comfort, Anal Sex, Alien Invasion, Tired Bruce Wayne, Protective Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne Has Issues, Power Dynamics, Ethical Dilemmas, Vomiting, Poisoning, Fortress of Solitude, Angst with a Happy Ending, Alien Technology, Non-Human Genitalia, Alien/Human Relationships, Blood, Colonialism, Beta Read, Male-Female Friendship

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3m9nkNm

can we get the stories to the possible results of your quiz I’m intrigued

Alright so there are four possible results to my quiz:

1) Emily Axford calling herself a work of art

This happened after I tweeted about my dilemma of wanting to draw Emily for my portfolio but being unsure because of the wording of the requirements. But she assured me that she is in fact art and thus can be included in a portfolio

2) Emily and Caldwell singing to my lizard

Sadly I have no video of this but, it happened during the stream where Emily and Caldwell were drawing peoples pcs. Caldwell starting drawing a zard and I happened to be chilling in my bed w my zard. Naturally I informed them that my zard was watching with me and Emily noticed this and they sung a zard song. The above interaction happened after I posted photos of spike watching on Twitter for them to see.

3) Lou Wilson reading my essay.

This one actually happened over on insta. Basically I had to write an essay for school about an example of hubris and nemesis in contemporary media. Naturally I chose everything Fabian does on Leviathan. About halfway through writing the essay I realized that this was an essay about daddy issues. As a joke I put it on my insta story bc I thought Lou might see it and chuckle. Instead he dmed me asking to read the essay when it was finished. Also Yes I did cite Chungledown Bim in APA format, and yes I left in the part where he says I’m going to shit in your mouth.

4) The Chester Cheeto incident

I don’t know how to explain this except that this was in response to me asking if Caldwell would still like to get cucked by Chester Cheeto and he responded in minutes

what’re your top two favorite cats of each clan (excluding your own), as of right now? :3c

how could you……………….make me pick…………………… ((cracks my knuckles)) 

Keep in mind that my favorites change with the tide, these are just the cats I’m especially vibing with atm! For the sake of Everyone’s dashboard, I’m putting my answers under a Read More,

NettleClan:

Squirrelwhisker! I am absolutely biased because I have Daisytooth, his brother, but I never fail to have a lot of fun rping with Squirrelwhisker! I’m always laughing my ass off with him because he gives me an excuse to do the absolute most ridiculous things using Daisytooth, but that’s not the only reason! I feel like he’s a really consistent character, and despite how he tends to have thoughts of heroism and idealism when it comes to presenting himself, he feels grounded and realistic! He’s just a good guy who’s trying to make the best of the hands dealt to him/his family/his Clan. 

And Badgerstep! I really do have a soft spot for boys that are just…. good. Badgerstep has always been a sweet man with a big heart and lots of love to share, I feel like he should really be a good role model for the young cats of NettleClan! He’s been going through really tough times recently, but he lets his friends and family help him. He’s always been a feel-good character for me, even from the beginning of FogClan! 

CreekClan:

ohhh man this was hard to narrow down to just two… I’ll go with 

Currentstar! At least from what I’ve seen of ThreeClan’s leaders since I’ve joined, this mans provides a fresh new perspective and feel to the role! Though I love lenient leaders, modern leaders, it’s super interesting to see a cat who is clinging hard to old traditions that he grew up abiding by– especially in such tumultuous times as the generations of the Clans that are growing after The Great Journey. When tradition has never been more challenged and questioned, he’s trying his best to find a sense of normalcy. But all the while, he’s a very sympathetic character who has been thrust into leadership very quickly and struggled to settle down and feel right in his own skin. He’s developed a lot so far, it shows that he’s getting more confident in himself with a few bumps in the road, but I respect him immensely! I also have a crush on him 

Aaaaand Carpfang! I’ll be honest, i NEVER expected to enjoy Carpfang near as much as I do now. Rough and cold characters are really not my favorite type by far, and I tend to get frustrated with them and their attitudes, but Carpfang has always been so much more than that. She’s hard on the outside, but she has true depth to her character beyond her reputation (and Marigoldpaw ((who is my third favorite)) has done amazing at helping her develop!). She’s not incapable of having trusting and intimate relationships, even if it takes a minute to get through to her, she has really realistic (imo) motives for feeling and acting the way she does, given her family history… She’s real, she’s relatable, she’s well-meaning for much of what matters, and she’s a real bad ass. I love a gal 

JaggedClan: 

MANTISSTAR MANTISSTAR MANTISSTAR MANTISSTAR MANTISSTAR!!!! She is my WIFE, my LOVE. I really don’t think that I’ve met another character who embodies literally all of my weaknesses, everything that I personally love to see in an OC. Mantisstar comes from a more than troubled origin, where she’d been coerced into an ugly side of history, a victim of circumstance but one who knew that being a victim didn’t excuse her from a certain responsibility of wrongdoing. She rose above the sum of her parts, helped to make right what bad things had been done despite her, a hero from humble origins– and from that, she developed this heroic complex, a NEED to do right, terrified of hurting others despite her intentions. It’s so interesting to see her struggle with making the right choices when things are never so perfectly black and white, even if it breaks my heart when she finds herself getting lost. She is a genuinely good person, she’s wise and kind- forgiving, but just. But she isn’t untouchable. She’s so tangible and real, she reminds me of real people that I’ve idolized in my own life, and I LOVE her. Not only is she my favorite JaggedClan cat, but she is my favorite ThreeClans character! 

Then there’s Magpiestorm. Honestly, I feel a Bit similar to her as I do about Carpfang. Though Magpiestorm is arguably more antagonistic and… unstable? than Carpfang is, she’s a whole different take on the hardass girl with troubled family and trust issues, and I honestly took a long while to warm up to her. Again, like I need to feel about all of my favorite characters, she feels developed and truer than just the tropes she happens to fit into. She’s really complex! Though she puts up these barbed wire laden walls all around her, feels obligated to no one but her sister, she has this clear struggle with an innate need for connection. She doesn’t enjoy the way that she acts, she wants to be able to do more, be better, but stubbornness and pride keeps her from letting go of her demons. For a little while she might begin to let those walls down, she might begin to seek out other cats and let other cats in closer to her, but then something will happen that pushes her right back into her own headspace in a cyclical internal struggle… It leaves me guessing, leaves me wanting more, makes me want to see which path she finally makes a commitment to! 

FogClan: 

By all means, Duskfang. I am so happy that the OC who shares my name is THIS FUCKING GOOD. Duskfang is probably one of the most complex and meticulously developed characters that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing from their conception to their present. She had this ambiguous, mysterious origin that has been perfectly pieced together over time, not near so much from OOC talk, but through revelation and parallels set up almost Too perfectly for her in the ongoing plot line. She, herself, started off mysterious and ambiguous– which, I’ll be honest, turned me off at first. I was expecting an almost… stereotypical secondary-antagonist role to come out of the Fang and Flicker duo, but we got so much more than that. Duskfang has struggled and struggled hard in every aspect of her existence since she’s joined FogClan. She’s had dilemmas and choices that no other cat could hardly dream of having to face, and she has made some very horrible decisions along the way… and I’ve never felt more sympathetic for someone else who’s done the equivalent of what she has? Because I’ve never been able to see exactly what a character is thinking, and exactly why they’re having the thoughts that they are, and how they could be made to feel such raw and powerful emotion that has been brewing and bubbling since the very first day they were ever written. Duskfang’s entire character just feels perfectly planned and perfectly executed, and I couldn’t have ever expected to get what she gives us! 

Another popular choice, I’m sure- but Foxflame! Another biased choice? Perhaps! Bramblefang loves him, so I’m just obligated to feel the same…. No, but really, Foxflame is another character that has given me a very pleasant surprise! I’ll be honest, he had my attention from the get-go because bubbly characters really are my guilty pleasure… I would have been satisfied if he just stayed a bubbly guy, a sweet person. No, but then we had to be introduced to the reasons Why they try so hard to make others smile, to make others happy. We had to get into the nitty gritty, his fears, his shortcomings, a need to protect his loved ones even at his own sacrifice. They can definitely be a bit of an airhead, too caught up in the strings of their own heart to listen to their head when they might need to, but that just makes them who they are! They’ve made some really questionable calls for the sake of their heart- he’s gone through the motions of a well-rounded character with beyond two dimensional motivations, and it’s always a pleasure to see him written in the good and bad moments! 

Tribe of Twisted Tunnels: 

Hehe these might be some interesting answers, if I can talk without giving too much away…. I’m gonna start off with: Aspen Snow. Man, tough girls really have been more my type than I was ever prepared to admit, but I’m not ashamed of it! I’m NOT! I’ve always watched Aspen Snow with a healthy intrigue from afar from when she was a to-be, but it wasn’t until the Tribe’s suffering was coming to a close that she really began to catch my attention. She was a scrappy to-be, full of spunk and a very, very unhealthy dose of youthful hubris. She was fun to read! But after her brother left the Tribe with Raven, it started off an arc that I really wasn’t prepared to see her through- in a good way! The pure hurt that she felt caught me by surprise. I wasn’t prepared to see just how much losing her brother, feeling betrayed by him, abandoned, would break her down. Nor was I expecting the way in which she pieced herself right back together, with fangs and claws and all. She grew bitter, became resentful of not only her brother, but much of the Tribe, its leaders. She needed others to blame, and she clung hard onto that. But then, with Spark Feather’s companionship, she began to ground herself more again. She coped better, she moved on for the sake of herself and others’ betterment instead of just pure spite…. And now? Ohoh. Now. There’s a lot going on with her now, like a relapse into those horrible moons passed, and I’m as scared as I am excited to see where it leads her! And now, the reason that this might be an interesting answer to insiders– Patched Petal. I am going to be straight up, at the same moment that she occupies my top two favorite’s spot, I resent her in her entirety. I am mad at Patched Petal. I am hurt by her and indignant completely on Aspen Snow’s behalf for what Patched Petal has done and is doing to her, things that she’s said to and felt about her own daughter. I resent her, but I’ll be damned if I’m not enraptured by it. Patched Petal has always been a difficult character for me to place– she’s never been very pleasant, but she’s also not been entirely disagreeable- before now. She was a stubborn mother with a fire in her heart that could only be tamed by her children, and after losing her son? It was all downhill from there. I feel like she has made every wrong decision that she could have made in regards to her remaining daughter, after Maple/Flickerclaw left. She’s closed herself away from Aspen Snow, she’s pined for her son to the point of ignoring her daughter, and she’s grown more and more resentful because Aspen Snow has decided that she doesn’t want to wait up for her any more. And now, her most recent development? I could strangle the woman, but it’s such an engrossing conflict that I can’t take my eyes off of this trainwreck…. Patched Petal, you are Something Else. And thus concludes my 2 top favorite cats in each group! My fingers hurt!

@squirrelwhiskr @nicks-cats @currentfangs @crowfalled @swanface @cinderstar @boulderstep

* In your spec on VKM 11 you mention PBs being unhappy because of running away from responsibilities and refusing to accept their duties. What are those responsibilities and duties? And how could they help prevent Pureblood Depression? Also, loved your little section on Ichiou: Evil or Misunderstood? Would you go more into him?

Oh these are great questions, my friend! =) You’ve probably been sitting on them for awhile, so I’m sorry I took so long to reopen my askbox!

Okay to answer this one properly, we have to go into a bit of philosophy. To live a productive and good life, you have to accomplish two things: 1.) find purpose and 2.) embrace the suffering in your life willingly to escape the inevitable the descent into nihilism. Finding #1 helps you bear #2. If you can’t find #1, #2 will consume you.

This is the foundational problem with purebloods. Because they are infinite beings, they’re not bound by the rules and limitations of finite beings like humans. As such, their suffering and potential descent into nihilism is potentially limitless because they cannot escape it. So if they are to bear their suffering and avoid nihilism, it’s incumbent upon them to find a purpose great enough to be worth enduring endless eternal suffering without becoming destructive. This is a tall order, I know, but unfortunately it’s the only option they have if they want to live in the world in a meaningful way. 

So this brings us to how on earth people find purpose in this world. I’m going to expand on this idea in a future post, but the long and the short of it is that purpose is found by searching for whatever it is that is worth suffering for. The answer to this, unfortunately, is individual to every person–for some, love is what is worth suffering for, for others a great cause, for others a creative endeavor. Whatever it is, finding it is the first step. The second step is to think of what is best for you now, and you in the future, and your loved ones now, and your loved ones in the future, and your community now, and your community in the future, and your world now, and your world in the future. The greatest, hardest, most difficult challenge you can think of that will make the world a better place if you accomplish it should be the responsibility you willingly choose to bear in your lifetime. 

The problem with purebloods is that they want to skip the “bearing the suffering” step and zip right on over to the “having purpose and meaning” step. This simply isn’t possible for anyone who exists in the world. What we see purebloods do time and time again is the same cycle: obsess over one dimension of reality (usually a failed love interest), fail to actualize themselves as individuals, fail to form a sense of community with other purebloods or nobles or humans, perceive themselves as higher/greater beings, isolate themselves, fail to find happiness or meaning because of the isolation, and then descend into nihilism, leading inevitably to destruction, chaos, and a failure to bring any good into the world. Purebloods become myopically self-interested, and that’s exactly the wrong way to find meaning and purpose–meaning and purpose are found outside of oneself, within a life of service to others. 

We can see this easily by comparing the Hooded Woman to the other purebloods.

The Hooded Woman holds a lofty goal as her life’s purpose (protecting humans while also finding a way for purebloods to live freely), but it is built on solid foundations rather than her own hubris. She has good self-esteem, she loves her parents and her friends, and she wants to form a community where both purebloods and humans can live freely and happily. When we see her in Kaname’s flashbacks, she’s not despairing or bemoaning her plight–she is taking it head on as a challenge and is cheerfully bearing the brunt of a grueling battle for a higher goal. She does not waste time whining about her fate or the lack of love in her life–instead her life is full to the brim with activity and purpose and love because she chooses to offer her love without thinking about what she’s getting in return. 

Contrast this with all the other purebloods we see after her. All of them fail to accomplish what she does because they only focus on one solitary dimension of life, usually a child or a love interest. Just take a look at all of them:

Rido is miserable because he tries to make Juri the end-all-be-all of his life and loses his grip on himself.

Juri fails to find lasting happiness because she makes freeing her child from being a pureblood more important than making a life worth living for her and her family.

Haruka fails to accomplish anything meaningful in his life because he’s obsessed with Juri at the expense of all else. 

Kaname fails twice to accomplish anything meaningful first because he’s ignoring his own feelings in order to pursue his desire to die (so he loses his opportunities with the Hooded Woman) and second because he tries to make Yuuki the end-all-be-all of his existence, which was too much of a burden for her to bear, and descends again into nihilism like Rido when Yuuki’s feelings for Zero don’t magically disappear like he wants them to.

Shizuka tries to make a human she turned into her slave the source of meaning in her life. 

Sara fails to find any meaningful connections with anyone and merely drifts around in chaos.

Isaya `just gives up on life entirely and lives like a dead man.

None of these purebloods learned the lesson the Hooded Woman’s life taught. None of them learned that the only way to truly find happiness as an eternal pureblood is to aim for the highest good you can conceive of and work tirelessly to achieve that good. This is a goal that can span lifetimes and eons, something easily worthwhile for a pureblood. But instead of picking up their crosses and bearing them, the purebloods just lazily sit in their mansions and play politics and fight over petty issues or make pathetic attempts at causing chaos. They’re overgrown children who throw tantrums because they’re not getting what they want.

Does it suck that humans and lower level vampires worship them and they can’t easily form true connections with them? Of course it does. Does it suck that all the people they love who aren’t pureblood will eventually die while they live on? Of course it does. Does it suck that they may fall for someone who won’t love them back? Of course it does.

However, none of this is an excuse to shirk their responsibility to their communities to work toward the highest good they possibly can. Instead, what we see (and we see this in Haruka and Juri as well) is that purebloods have all this power and ability, and rather than do any good in the world or help solve the large problems of the world, they sit around in their mansions accumulating wealth and being of no use to anyone while they whine about how unfortunate they are. We never see purebloods doing productive things like starting building projects or writing or making music or engaging in scientific enquiry or working on finding ways to solve their dilemmas. Kaname’s the only one who even gives a half-hearted attempt at this, and even he fails in comparison to the effort the nobles put in. Juri’s “productive” activity is to run around waving her scythe at people, which is hardly meaningful or useful. Haruka doesn’t do anything productive at all other than stalk Juri. 

Purebloods are gifted with charisma and beauty and wealth, but they apparently have no drive or intelligence or discipline. They’re all too busy being the largest babies on the planet to use their considerable gifts for the good of the communities of people who depend on them. Their “despair” is simply because they’re too self-absorbed to look outside of themselves and see that life is bigger than they are. Perhaps this is the price for immortality, but the Hooded Woman’s example indicates that the failing is within the purebloods themselves rather than anything exterior. Regardless, if they truly wish to find happiness, they’d shoulder their suffering willingly and find ways to be helpful and useful to the people around them in spite of their suffering, even if those people can’t help but fawn over them due to their charisma and power. Maybe if they’d try to do that rather than whining on couches about how tough they have it, they’d find avenues that lead to meaning for them. 

Okay, I’ve sort of rambled on and run out of space for Ichiou, but I honestly don’t have too much to say on him. I think he was a misguided old man who came to the same conclusion most of the hunters and even Kaname and Yuuki came to–purebloods were a menace and should be eradicated. I can appreciate that Ichiou wanted to be free of pureblood control, but the way he went about it was a.) hardly effective and b.) reprehensible. But Ichiou didn’t exactly care about humans, so he wasn’t a particularly great person anyway. 

Anyway, this became a bit of a ramble, but I hope ! Thanks for dropping by!

the best thing about Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers is all the opportunities he takes to dunk on George Kennan

In later years Kennan would represent his conception of containment as a political strategy of limited geographical application—not a call for worldwide armed activity, as charged by Lippmann, a rare early critic—and contrast it as a stance of prudent defence with the adventurist notions of ‘rollback’ advocated by Dulles, and ‘flexible response’ by Kennedy. Legend has since canonized the image of a sober adviser whose counsels of moderation and wisdom were distorted into a reckless anti-communist activism that would bring disasters against which he spoke out, remaining true to himself as a critic of American hubris and intransigence. The reality was otherwise. Unstable and excitable, Kennan lacked the steadiness of his friend and successor Nitze, but in his days of power in Washington was a Cold Warrior à l’outrance, setting the course for decades of global intervention and counter-revolution.

[In the extravagance of his fluctuations between elated self-regard and tortured self-flagellation—as in the volatility of his opinions: he would frequently say one thing and its opposite virtually overnight—Kennan was closer to a character out of Dostoevsky than any figure in Chekhov, with whom he claimed an affinity. His inconsistencies, which made it easier to portray him in retrospect as an oracle of temperate realism, were such that he could never be taken as a simple concentrate or archetype of the foreign-policy establishment that conducted America into the Cold War, his role as policy-maker in any case coming to an end in 1950. But just insofar as he has come to be represented as the sane keeper of the conscience of US foreign policy, his actual record—violent and erratic into his mid-seventies—serves as a marker of what could pass for a sense of proportion in the pursuit of the national interest. In the voluminous literature on Kennan, Stephanson’s study Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge, MA 1989 stands out as the only serious examination of the intellectual substance of his writings, a courteous but devastating deconstruction of them. An acute, not unsympathetic, cultural-political portrait of him as a conservative out of his time is to be found in Harper’s American Visions of Europe, pp. 135–232. In later life, Kennan sought to cover his tracks in the period when he held a modicum of power, to protect his reputation and that of his slogan. We owe some striking pages to that impulse, so have no reason to complain, though also none to take his self-presentation at face value. His best writing was autobiographical and historical: vivid, if far from candid Memoirs—skirting suggestio falsi, rife with suppressio veri; desolate vignettes of the American scene in Sketches from a Life; and the late Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875–1890, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.]

At the outset of his career as a diplomat, [Kennan] had decided that the Bolsheviks were ‘a little group of spiteful Jewish parasites’, in their ‘innate cowardice’ and ‘intellectual insolence’ abandoning ‘the ship of Western European civilization like a swarm of rats’. There could be no compromise with them. Stationed in Prague during the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, his first reaction was that Czechs counted German rule a blessing; later, touring occupied Poland—he was now en poste in Berlin—he felt Poles too might come to regard rule by Hans Frank as an improvement in their lot. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he told his superiors that, from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, Russia was everywhere feared more than Germany, and must bear the ‘moral consequences’ of Operation Barbarossa alone, with ‘no claim on Western sympathies’.

[Under Nazi rule, ‘the Czechs enjoyed privileges and satisfaction in excess of anything they “dreamed of in Austrian days”’, and could ‘cheerfully align themselves with the single most dynamic movement in Europe’, as the best account of this phase in his career summarizes his opinion. In Poland, Kennan reported, ‘the hope of improved material conditions and of an efficient, orderly administration may be sufficient to exhaust the aspirations of a people whose political education has always been primitive’: see David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 71–3. For Kennan’s letter on 24 June 1941, two days after the launching of Hitler’s attack on the USSR, described simply as ‘the German war effort’, see his Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1968, pp. 133–4, which give no hint of his initial response to the Nazi seizure of what remained of Czechoslovakia, and make no mention of his trip to occupied Poland.]

After the war, promoted to Deputy Commandant of the National War College, he declared that if Russian military industry should make faster progress than American, ‘we would be justified in considering a preventive war’, unleashing nuclear weapons: ‘with probably ten good hits with atomic bombs you could, without any great loss of life or loss of the prestige or reputation of the United States, practically cripple Russia’s war-making potential’.

[C. Ben Wright, ‘Mr “X” and Containment’, Slavic Review, March 1976, p. 19. Furious at the disclosure of his record, Kennan published a petulant attempt at denial in the same issue, demolished by Wright in ‘A Reply to George F. Kennan’, Slavic Review, June 1976, pp. 318–20, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of his documentation of it. In the course of his critique of Kennan, Wright accurately observed of him: ‘His mastery of the English language is undeniable, but one should not confuse gift of expression with clarity of thought’.]

At the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, and as consigliere to Acheson, he initiated covert paramilitary operations in Eastern Europe; advocated, if need be, US military intervention in Southern Europe and Southeast Asia; urged support for French colonialism in North Africa; supervised cancellation of reforms in Japan; endorsed repression in Latin America; proposed American seizure of Taiwan; exulted when US troops were dispatched to Korea.

[Taiwan: ‘Carried through with sufficient resolution, speed, ruthlessness and self-assurance, the way Theodore Roosevelt might have done it’, conquest of the island ‘would have an electrifying effect on this country and throughout the Far East’: Anna Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, New York 1983, vol. III, PPS 53, p. 65. Korea: ‘George was dancing on air because MacArthur’s men were mobilized for combat under auspices of the United Nations. He was carrying his balalaika, a Russian instrument he used to play with some skill at social gatherings, and with a great, vigorous swing, he clapped me on the back with it, nearly striking me to the sidewalk. “Well, Joe,” he cried, “What do you think of the democracies now?”’: Joseph Alsop, ‘I’ve Seen The Best of It’. Memoirs, New York 1992, pp. 308–9. Alsop, with prewar memories of the young Kennan telling him that ‘the United States was doomed to destruction because it was no longer run by its “aristocracy”’, reminded him tartly of his excoriations of democracy only a few days earlier: pp. 274, 307. Two million Koreans perished during an American intervention whose carpet-bombing obliterated the north of the country over three successive years: see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War, New York 2010, pp. 147–61.]

Containment was limited neither in its range nor in its means. It was an Ermattungskrieg, not a Niederwerfungskrieg, but the objective was the same. America could hope that ‘within five or ten years’ the USSR would be ‘overwhelmed by clouds of civil disintegration’, and the Soviet regime soon ‘go down in violence’. Meanwhile ‘every possible means’ should be set in motion to destabilize Moscow and its relays in Eastern Europe.

[David Foglesong, ‘Roots of “Liberation”: American Images of the Future of Russia in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953’, International History Review, March 1999, pp. 73–4; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956, Ithaca 2009, pp. 6, 29, 180, who observes: ‘There would be no delay: containment and a “compellent” strategy would be pursued in parallel, not in sequence’.]

In their intention, containment and rollback were one from the start.

he keeps going

Kennan, an admirer of Schuschnigg and Salazar, rulers who showed that ‘benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good’ than democracy, argued on the eve of the Second World War that immigrants, women and blacks should be stripped of the vote in the United States. Democracy was a ‘fetish’: needed was ‘constitutional change to the authoritarian state’—an American Estado Novo.

[‘Fair Day Adieu!’ and ‘The Prerequisites: Notes on Problems of the United States in 1938’, documents still kept under wraps—the fullest summary is in Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, pp. 49–55. For a cogent discussion of Kennan’s outlook in these texts, see Joshua Botts, ‘“Nothing to Seek and … Nothing to Defend”: George F. Kennan’s Core Values and American Foreign Policy, 1938–1993’, Diplomatic History, November 2006, pp. 839–66.]

After the war Kennan compared democracy to ‘one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin’, and never lost his belief that the country was best governed by an enlightened elite immune to popular passions. Acheson dismissed ‘the premise that democracy is some good’, remarking ‘I don’t think it’s worth a damn’—‘I say the Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish’.

[Acheson: interview with Theodore Wilson and Richard McKinzie, 30 June 1971. Johnson was cruder still: ‘We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr Ambassador’, he told an envoy, after drawling an expletive, ‘If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long’: Philip Deane [Gerassimos Gigantes], I Should Have Died, London 1976, pp. 113–4. Nixon and Kissinger could be no less colourful.]

Such confidences were not for public consumption. Officially, democracy was as prominent a value in the American mission to the world as in the time of Manifest Destiny.

and going

Japan, surrounded by sea, was secure against the risk of Soviet invasion. There, where the US was the sole occupying power, American political control was tighter and economic assistance less than in Europe. Postwar reforms were abruptly cancelled after a descent by Kennan had installed the Reverse Course, preserving the zaibatsu and reinstating the prewar political class with its Class A war criminals, as was not possible in Germany. The Occupation, he remarked, could ‘dispense with bromides about democratization’.

[Confident that he had ‘turned our whole occupation policy’, Kennan regarded his role in Japan as ‘the most significant constructive contribution I was ever able to make in government’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, pp. 299–303. Miscamble—an admirer—comments: ‘Kennan evinced no real concern for developments in Japan on their own terms. He appeared not only quite uninterested in and unperturbed by the fact that the Zaibatsu had proved willing partners of the Japanese militarists but also unconcerned that their preservation would limit the genuine openness of the Japanese economy. He possessed no reforming zeal or inclination’: George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, Princeton 1992, p. 255. The PPS paper Kennan delivered on his return from Tokyo called for the purge of wartime officials to be curtailed.]

and going

Elsewhere—principally Italy and France—covert American funding of parties, unions and periodicals helped the anti-communist cause. Military intervention, though on standby, was not required.

[See, for such contingencies, Kennan’s cable to Acheson, 15 March 1948: ‘Italy is obviously key point. If Communists were to win election there our whole position in Mediterranean, and possibly Western Europe as well, would be undermined. I am persuaded that the Communists could not win without strong factor of intimidation on their side, and it would clearly be better that elections not take place at all than that the Communists win in these circumstances. For these reasons I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war, which would give us grounds for reoccupation of Foggia fields and any other facilities we might wish. This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to a deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas’: Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, p. 99.]

and going

Covert operations against Russia had a pre-history under Wilson, who preferred clandestine to overt means of overthrowing Bolshevik power, and made ample use of them, bequeathing both methods and personnel to their renewal thirty years later. Set in place two years before NSC–68 by Kennan, such operations escalated through the fifties, in due course becoming the public objective of a strategy of rollback, depicted by Dulles as a tougher response to Moscow than containment. 

[For Kennan’s role in introducing the term and practice of clandestine ‘political warfare’, and launching the paramilitary expeditions of Operation Valuable into Albania, see Corke, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy, pp. 45–6, 54–5, 61–2, 84; and Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 110–1: ‘Kennan approached covert operations with enthusiasm in 1948 and does not appear to have made apparent any sentiment on his part that covert operations would be limited in extent. Nor did he display any reservations concerning the extralegal character of much of what the OPC would undertake’. For the recruitment of ex-Nazis to its work, see Christopher Simpson, Blowback, New York 1988, pp. 112–4. Kennan’s connexions to the underworld of American intelligence, foreign and domestic, went back to his time in Portugal during the war, and would extend over the next three decades, to the time of the Vietnam War.]

and going

Military encirclement of the Soviet bloc was practicable, political intervention was not. That left ideological warfare. The United States was defending not capitalism—the term was carefully avoided, as vocabulary of the enemy—but a Free World against the totalitarian slavery of communism. Radio stations, cultural organizations, print media of every kind, were mobilized to broadcast the contrast.

[The front organizations set up by the CIA for cultural penetration at home and abroad—the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the like—were another initiative of Kennan, an enthusiast for this kind of work: see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, Cambridge, MA 2008, pp. 25–8.]

and going

As Communist advances from base areas close to the Soviet Union accelerated, direct American intervention in such a vast country looked too uncertain of outcome to be risked. The loss of China could not be stopped. To planners in Washington at the time, the victory of the Chinese Revolution, heavy a blow as it might be, was still strategically a sideshow.

[Kennan, whose opinions about China skittered wildly from one direction to another in 1948–1949, could write in September 1951: ‘The less we Americans have to do with China the better. We need neither covet the favour, nor fear the enmity, of any Chinese regime. China is not the great power of the Orient’: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 45. There was no doubt an element of sour grapes, along with blindness, in this pronouncement, at which Spykman might have smiled.]

and going

Financing the French war had been cheaper for Washington, and domestically less conspicuous, than fighting it. But the upshot was plainly shakier. If the South had been kept out of the hands of the Vietminh, there was no DMZ to seal it off from the North in future. The Republic proclaimed by Ho in 1945, before the French arrived back to reclaim it, had extended throughout the country, and enjoyed a nationwide legitimacy that the DPRK, founded after division in 1948, had never possessed. Elections in the South, supposedly scheduled at Geneva, had to be cancelled in view of the certain result, and a weak Catholic regime in Saigon propped up with funds and advisers against mounting guerrilla attacks by the Vietminh. There could be no question of letting it go under. As early as 1949, Kennan had urged American support ‘to ensure, however long it takes, the triumph of Indochinese nationalism over Red imperialism’.

[Kennan, ‘United States Policy Towards South-East Asia’, PPS 51, in Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. III, p. 49. See, on this document, Walter Hixson, ‘Containment on the Perimeter: George F. Kennan and Vietnam’: Diplomatic History, April 1988, pp. 151–2, who italicizes the phrase above. In the same paper, Kennan explained that Southeast Asia was a ‘vital segment in the line of containment’, whose loss would constitute a ‘major political rout, the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia’ [sic]. Kennan would later support Johnson’s expansion of the war after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, endorsing the massive bombing of the DRV—Operation Rolling Thunder—in February 1965 as a weapon to force, Kissinger-style, the enemy to the negotiating table. Though increasingly critical of the war as damaging to the national interest, it was not until November 1969 that Kennan called for US withdrawal from Vietnam. At home, meanwhile, he wanted student protesters against the war to be locked up, and collaborated with William Sullivan, head of COINTEL-PRO, a longtime associate, in the FBI’s covert operations against student and black opponents of the government. See Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War, New York 2009, pp. 221–2—a characteristic exercise in New Yorker schlock, by a staffer who is Nitze’s grandson, that sporadically contains material at variance with its tenor.]

and going

British and French colonialism had perforce both enjoyed unstinting support in Southeast Asia, once they were battling communism, the former with ultimate success, the latter—faced with a much more powerful movement—with failure requiring an American relay. For two reasons, Dutch colonialism was another matter. Relatively speaking, beside Britain or France, the Netherlands was a quantité négligeable on the European chequerboard, which could be given instructions without ceremony; while in the Dutch East Indies, unlike in Malaya or Vietnam, nationalist forces put down a communist uprising during the anti-colonial struggle.

[The presence of communists in the anti-colonial struggle had been cause for acute alarm in Washington—Kennan deciding, in typical vein, that Indonesia was ‘the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin’. Its fall would lead to nothing less than ‘a bisecting of the world from Siberia to Sumatra’, cutting ‘our global east–west communications’, making it ‘only a matter of time before the infection would sweep westwards through the continent to Burma, India and Pakistan’: Miscamble, Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, p. 274.]

and going

From the last years of the nineteenth century to the Great Depression, the US had dispatched troops and warships to crush strikes, put down risings, oust rulers or occupy territories in the Caribbean and Central America, with uninhibited regularity. Since then there had been no obvious call to do so. The US had made sure of the allegiance of a Latin American cortège—numerically the largest single bloc—in the UN before it was even founded, with the Act of Chapultepec in early 1945. The Rio Treaty of Inter-American Defence followed in 1947, capped by the formation of the Organization of American States, headquarters in Washington and expressly devoted to the fight against subversion, in 1948. Two years later Kennan, warning against ‘any indulgent and complacent view of Communist activities in the New World’, made it clear that ruthless means might be required to crush them: ‘We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors’, he told US ambassadors to South America summoned to hear him in Rio. ‘It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists’.

[See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, New York 1993, p. 109. On getting back to Washington, Kennan hammered his message home: ‘Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of the communist attack, then we must concede that harsh measures of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedures; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternatives, to communist success’: see Roger Trask, ‘George F. Kennan’s Report on Latin America (1950)’, Diplomatic History, July 1978, p. 311. The Southern hemisphere, in Kennan’s view, was an all-round cultural disaster zone: he doubted whether there existed ‘any other region of the earth in which nature and human behaviour could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of life’.]

there’s actually more of this, but I got tired of copying it down

Perry Anderson has convinced me that George Kennan single-handedly won the Cold War, so kudos to Kennan

I changed my theme so I would write more

today i heard theawkwardyeti say in one of his videos on instagram that if a creative person does not do creative work for too long, it will feel like something inside of him is about to explode. 

i am about to explode. and so i decided i would write. 

awkwardyeti also said that we have to play to our strengths, i.e., don’t try to make a living singing if you can’t sing. or something like that, but in kinder words. 

but i don’t think that advice applies to me because i’m really not trying to make a living from anything creative. in any case, awkwardyeti also said that it’s never about the money to begin. you must first begin, because you want to, and not because you want to make money from your creative endeavours. 

writing is not for money. writing cannot be for money (both because: (1) i don’t write enough and have never had enough courage to write a novel or anything close to one, and writing short stories feels so frustrating because a short story never feels complete - so, you see my dilemma - and (2) i do other types of writing for money and that already takes up most of my day such that issue (1) gets in the way all over again. so maybe it’s really just one issue - i don’t write enough.)

that doesn’t mean that i don’t like writing. clearly, i like the sound of my own voice, teehee. and there is always something therapeutic about hacking away at the keys and putting something out there, even if you know that no one is going to read it. maybe because you know no one is going to read it, but it’s out there anyway, in case anyone ever does. 

one of the greatest joys of consuming art is when you realise that you’re not alone because someone else has exactly described the very feeling you’ve felt before. and that’s what i want to do here. be raw, and share exactly what i’m feeling and thinking. because i’m sure someone, out there, will have felt and thought the same way, too. 

i guess i’ll end this post soon. but before i do, i just wanted to say that lately i’ve been thinking about the futility of life. maybe it’s because i’ve been reading Ecclesiastes. probably. right now, in our 20s, we look forward to 60 more years of life. and that seems like a long time. but what happens when you’re 40? does 40 years still seem like a long time that you’ve got left? what about when you’re 60? 

i’ve read somewhere that humans want to believe in a god or an afterlife because we’re too full of hubris to simply accept that our lives are meaningless and short and that we should just make the most of the time we can see now, before our eyes. but is it hubris, or is it fear? we’re scared that on this earth, every thing we do will amount to nothing when we die. we want to know that we’re living for a reason, that it doesn’t all just end when we’re 80 or before that. you can’t hate someone for being scared. i guess i’m scared too, but perhaps i’m also stupid and too young, skeptical, doubtful to fully know what i want to do about that fear, just yet.  

Maybe it's because I never see anyone talking about Flash because I don’t follow the right blogs and anybody who had has lost interest in favor of Legends of Tomorrow, or save their complaints for Supergirl, but elsewhere on comic articles about the show, or on forums I visit and sometimes contribute, I see this continuing West Siblings hate that has not died down from the last seasons.

This next part isn't necessary directed at anyone in particular, but it's a trend I see in this fandom a lot: Iris gets blamed for Barry acting stupid because she's not 100% on board 100% of the time and yet that's all people complained about in the beginning of the season, but shriek the few times she has doubts, or disagreements. Barry as written in this show for three seasons is always wrong in his approach to everything, time travel, dealing with villains, sacrifice, except when it's dealing with Iris's life then she better do exactly as he and Joe says. He doesn't want to tell her his secrets in season 1, she better lump it and cheer him on in support. Even when she suggests Barry not try to save her this season, it's "he's trying to save your life you ungrateful b-", but then it turns into this loop of "why can't Barry let her die as it's supposed to play out."

I don't know, because fate and destiny should be a thing to overcome, not succumb to by evil forces, like Savitar, but whatever, the writer's made these rules that speedforce knows best because Barry clearly doesn't because they don't know how to write Barry as the fate defying hero he should be so he always makes the wrong choices according to some cosmic laws of metaphysics and gets away with it before being punished. How's he different from Wally again? The show's basically given up and says as much, but Iris still better do what he asks. You all think Barry's not in the right, but Iris better have his approval so you can all complain she doesn't have agency, or do anything, but support Barry. Gee I guess this stuff can play out, but replace Iris with Patty, or Linda and it will finally be Barry to blame for not making it work.

Sorry to further bring home the point, but other complaints from this fandom about the West siblings:

"Why doesn't Iris do her job, she just hangs out at Star Labs all day doing nothing, but giving Barry pep talks?"

Iris decides to take her own life into her hands for a story.

"Why is Iris getting in the way of the Plunderer to write a stupid story? Barry's trying to keep you alive, why aren't you staying put at the apartment?"

Watches her get attacked in her apartment by that death touch guy without a codename. There, that's why. She's safer nowhere, certainly not at Star Labs with awful security. Not at Joe's where Wally and Henry were grabbed up by Zoom last season. Not in her own home this season, maybe she needs to risk her life more often since she's running on borrowed time instead of waiting around, but hey I don't blame her if she's feeling complacent in such an anxious predicament. I would, but then some days I fail to react because I’m having two opposing forces ask me to do two different things that contradict one another.

"Why is Wally an arrogant jerk? How dare he treat superheroing as a fun endeavor? How dare he like his fans. This is not a game."

I don't know why does Barry still think he can change the timeline? Why hasn't he listened to Jay? To the speedforce last season? Remembers people's complaints about Barry seizing to have fun with superheroing ever since it's turned into one martyr mission after another.

"Why is Wally outpacing Barry? That's not fair?"

I don't know because he was created by Savitar to speed up to his levels in Flashpoint? We still don't know if Wally's behavior is also a result of the cocoon since many noncriminals like Edward Clariss, Magenta and Julian have a state disassociation and criminal activity now. This would have been an easy explanation for Caitlin Snow too, if they weren't so sure she had to be a pediatrician in Flashpoint. This would explain a lot and Wally to a smaller extent, if he's not Savitar himself. For whoever keeps complaining that nobody, but Caitlin has turned evil for their powers, I give you the Flashpoint metas. Those people forget Cisco's season 2 dilemma of being bad like Reverb too, so maybe Caitlin isn't overreacting, but that's another issue.

"Why does Barry need Wally to save Iris? Such a joke, this is his show. So much for being Fastest Man Alive."

Barry thinks Wally's constant improving is useful to stop Savitar. Watches Wally get defeated by his own hubris and then Barry realizes that using him to take on his burden to stop Savitar was selfish. That's why. Because of story. Because Wally's having a growing arc. In the comics whether it's Wally son of Rudolph West, or Wally son of Daniel West, he's been a kid who's been in a broken home, usually Iris is his salvation, this time it's Joe, he's a good kid, but he has annoying flaws that he overcomes as he heroes long enough. The way I see it is, Barry's meeting arrogant Wally during his Mike Barron run instead of as a child before life got worse for him. There's the gradual Messner-Loebs-Waid-Johns development ahead, but it will be different. Barry's not dead, Iris isn't his aunt, Linda's not his lightning rod, Hartley and Chunk aren't his friends, so the Star Labs gang replaces that instead. Jessie may replace Linda and that's fine. They should have never cast her as a Barry love interest and hope it will work out for Wally down the road. That's a mistake. They cast her with no indication that she would ever interact with Wally West. They cast Wally West probably without screen testing with her since she’s not a show regular so he ends up having sparks with Jessie. They screen tested Barry against Felicity and then Iris against Barry. They didn’t bother with Linda and Wally.

"Barry's so gracious, Wally needs to die, or leave the show."

Okay so when Barry learns from his mistakes he's human, but when Wally goes through a similar arc, he's just a brat who needs to die?

Honestly I think people really just hate Barry, except when he's dating Felicity and Patty (where I find him unbearable) but are stuck with him as the protagonist so they use Iris as the focal point of their hatred because she has no superpowers, isn't an action badass strong girl caricature, or has science, or child prodigy credentials (which is my issue with Jessie, it's one thing to be good in several fields at sixteen, but does she have to have that major that she can replace Caitlin at her own job?). As the designated girlfriend it makes it easier for these anti-shipper to put all their hate on Iris when Barry messes up. Did people hate her when she was with Eddie? Probably because Barry wanted to write her off as an ally off the bat and keep secrets, while letting Eddie in on it and yet it's not okay when Barry, or Joe pull that with Patty? Just saying.

Biden Shows Putin Weakness

lLOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), June 13, 2021.--Three days before his Geneva summit with 68-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin, 78-year-old President Joe Biden shows why he’s never made a good diplomat, continuing the insults and threats.  Calling Putin an “autocrat,” Biden shows who’s the weak one heading into Geneva.   Since becoming president, Biden has insulted Putin calling him a “soulless killer” March 16, pushing U.S.-Russian relations to the brink.  What Biden doesn’t get is that no one in Europe accepts him as the “leader of the Freed world,” preferring to let the U.S. continue its futile Cold War with the Kremlin.  Biden said that “autocrats would define the 21st century,” something without any insight but rehashing old warn out slogans.  Biden thought the G7 meeting in Carbis Bay, Corwall would generate interest in taking on Biden’s antagonistic attitude toward Russia and China.     

        Biden’s limited cognitive capacity puts the burden on State Department bureaucrats and intel officials, telling Biden that Putin interfered with U.S. and elections and democracy, leaving him to make the cardinal mistake of insulting Putin.  Putin calls the shots all over Europe and the Middle East, something the U.S. should use as leverage for U.S. national security.  Biden says he wants to help Ukraine but NATO has turned a cold shoulder on 43-uyyear-old Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Zenensky has practically stood on his head trying to get a NATO membership.  NATO wants no part of any country currently involved in military conflict with the Russian Federation.  Biden’s best shot of helping Ukraine, especially in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, is to get along with Putin, not threatening more sanctions or, worse yet, potential military intervention.  

          No one in Europe wants Biden’s fight with Putin, telling him at the G7 that the European Union will proceed with its own relationship with Russia and China.  “Autocrats have enormous power and they don’t have to answer to a public and the fact is that it may very well be if I respond, as I will, that its doesn’t dissuade him—he wants to keep going,” Biden said, sounding incoherent.  Biden found out March 18 what happened in the Anchorage summit with China where his 58-year-old Secretary of State Tony Blinken and 44-year-old National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan insulted Beijing. Biden’s on a collision course with antiquated hubris that the U.S. can threaten the Russian Federation with more sanctions.  Biden doesn’t get that Putin has the clout where it counts, not the U.S.  Putin isn’t going to react well to Biden’s accusations about interfering in U.S. elections or democracy.   

          Biden was former President Barack Obama’s Vice President when Putin invaded Crimea March 1, 2021.  Biden’s, or Western leaders for that matter, don’t admit that a CIA-backed coup ousted the Kremlin-backed government of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych Feb. 22, 2014.  Biden knows that the Crimean Peninsula houses Russia’s warm water fleet in Sevastopol.   Putin hosted the Sochi Winter Olympics watching the coup take place in Kiev.  Yet Biden condemns Putin as the aggressor, ignoring the CIA-backed Kiev coup that prompted Putin to annex Crimea.  “Russia has its own dilemmas, dealing with its economy, dealing with Covid and deal with not only the United States and Europe writ large, and in the Middle East,” Biden said, continuing his incoherent analysis.    

         Biden keeps insisting that Russia has violated international norms, referring to recent hacking of SolarWinds software, Colonial Pipeline, and, more recently, JBS meatpacking.  “Russia has engaged in activities which we believe are contrary to international norms, but they have also bitten off some real problems, that they’re going to trouble chewing on,” Biden said, raising concerns about his fitness to summit with Putin.  U.S. government has a lot to be concerned about letting Biden continue to influence U.S. foreign policy.  Putin will watch Biden at the Geneva summit say things he regrets, largely because he’s too old to deal with complex events like U.S. foreign policy and national security.  Going into the summit accusing Putin of hacking and violating human rights of 44-year-old Russian dissident Alexi Navalny won’t help improve U.S.-Russian relations.  

           Biden’s in a defensive mode dealing with Putin because he’s not in a place to find common ground on issues that affect world stability.  Biden wants to accuse Putin of being an “autocrat” because he doesn’t comprehend how the two nations can coexist without continuing to make threats.  Putin won’t react well to Biden’s threats, largely brushing them off as inconsequential or a bluff.  Biden has zero support from NATO allies to start a confrontational Cold War approach toward the Russian Federation.  Biden was told clearly at the G7 that the U.S. is on its own trying to confront the Kremlin.  Europe buys some 40% of its energy from Russia, just completing a $12 billion Nord Stream 2 Pipeline to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany.  Biden doesn’t see that his confrontational approach to Russia and China isn’t backed by the EU, NATO or any major Asian country

About the Author

  John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma. 

Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX): The Legislation and The Ethical Mechanism, by McCalla, Christine Ann, MBA, MS, CBME, CAHR, CBDE, CTW, CPA

See Link,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rSERLtNQLdD2Ba2AzPDD9gfFl7mPPM2BaeRK3XzAFcI/edit?usp=sharing

Assess the Effectiveness of SOX Legislation

MGT7109-7

Christine Ann McCalla

Dr. J. Scott

08/20/2017

 Prepare a paper in which you address the following:

Identify and explain the key ethical components of SOX.

Explain why financial fraud and abuse still occurs despite the passage of SOX.

Recommend potential improvements of the SOX legislation based on your research.

Recommend measures, beyond the scope of SOX, that organizations can implement to prevent financial statement fraud and abuse.

Support your paper with a minimum of five scholarly resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources, including older articles, may be included.

Length: 5-7 pages, not including title and reference pages

Your paper should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University's Academic Integrity Policy.

Upload your assignment using the Upload Assignment button below.

The evaluation of the ethical cannot be done as a stand-alone mechanism, but must be evaluated in concord with criminalities as often the process begins with the attribute of ethics, or lack thereof. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is a legislature that was designed and intended to minimize fraud and abuse within the financial statement process with the support and decisiveness of the management team.

Winrow and Winrow (2015) identified the key ethical components of SOX as, (1) standards and policies to prevent future frauds; (2)  required disclosure in regards to representation of a code of ethics that applies to the user's principal executive officer, principal financial officer, principal accounting officer or controller, or persons performing similar functions; (3) facilitate the availability of a code of ethics; (4) timely communications, reporting, and disclosures of financial and supplemental information; (5) compliance with applicable governmental laws, rules and regulations to include measured delegation and deterrent on non-legitimate activities; (6)  prompt internal reporting of violations of the code to an appropriate person or persons identified in the codes resulting in corporate social responsibility; (7) accountability for adherence to the code to include detection, reporting, and punishment / disciplinary mechanisms including whistleblower's policy, non retaliation policy, conflict of interest policy, and disclosure of conflicts of interest, and conflict interests on a minimum of annual basis.

Albrecht, Holland, Malagueño, Dolan, and Tzafrir (2015) presented the classical fraud theory  which explains the reasons individuals become involved in financial statement (or any type of) fraud. Albrecht, et al.'s (2015) classical fraud theory are analyzed as three factors often represented as a triangle and consist of perceived pressure, perceived opportunity, and rationalization as was supported and presented by Chinniah (2015) in fig. 1.

In addition to the fraud triangle are the dynamics of collusion, coercion, bias, the five different sources of social power, and the inner circle resulting in further manipulation and unethical behavior, with the numerous interactions and their relationships described in fig. 2 (below). Albrecht, et al. (2015) further elaborated on their presentation of the five different sources of social power, which are coercive, reward, expert, legitimate, and referent power (admiration and adoration as a result of identification with the person).  

Johansson and Carey (2016) addressed the management of ethical and criminal issues through the use of anonymous reporting channels (ARCs), so that the behaviors can be addressed in a timely manner and often include the whistleblower's policy. Johansson and Carey (2016) defined an ARC is part of a control system designed to detect fraud in an organization, and in control with other mechanisms including internal control and audits can be be effective in keeping the firm ethical and far from the criminal.

Financial fraud and abuse still occurs despite the passage of SOX because of the agency relationship, where the goal of the manager is to profit through compensation from the corporation and often at the expense of the corporation due to short term interests in profitability. Albrecht, et al. (2015) argued that under the agency theory, top managers act as ‘‘agents,’’ whose personal interest do not naturally align with company and shareholder interest as management is typically motivated by self-interest and self-preservation resulting in conflicted interest.

Andrade (2015) argues, prima facie, employees owe loyalty to the organizations they work for: on commencement of employment with an organisation, the employee’s duties and obligations towards the organization will be laid out in their employment contract, specified inter alia in the job description, code of conduct and the corporation’s various policies and procedures. Albrecht, et al. (2015) also argues that executives will commit fraud because it is in their best, personal, short term interest. Albrecht, et al. (2015) also noted, in order to limit financial statement fraud and other forms of organizational corruption, a statement of fraud and other forms and definitions of organizational corruption, organizations should provide employee incentive that better align management behavior with shareholder goals which can be done through stakeholdership.

Banerjee, et al. (2015) argued scandals that precipitated Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and related changes are usually attributed to poor governance and unethical behavior, they were likely exacerbated in many cases by managerial hubris. Andrade (2015) argued that conflicting loyalties become most apparent when the would-be whistleblower must decide whether to make his/her disclosure to an internal or external recipient. In this case, he must decide whether to act and face the pressures of the organization and its stakeholders and stakeholdership, or alert the organization and its related systems and networks of the damage to be controlled and risk being victimized by numerous parties. One potential improvement to the SOX legislation would be a solution to this dilemma in which the adoption of policies in which the maximum optimization of efforts attained by the choice of disclosures to internal or external whistleblowers resulting in prima facie and duty above conflict, (Andrade, 2015).

Another potential improvements of the SOX legislation is through the adoption of policies and procedures including clearly defined organizational charts confronting and addressing uncertainty mimicing Andrade’s (2015) ‘network perspective’, which focuses on the organizational, interdepartmental, individual, and cohort interactions based on the numerous levels. Furthermore, Andrade (2015) continues with the analysis of the overall structure of the patterns of the networks and their interactions which create opportunities and constraints based on specific actions and their outcomes.

Recommended measures organizations can implement to prevent financial statement and abuse includes Gates, Prachyl, and Sullivan (2016), (1) acceptance that the financial magnitude of fraud is significant and remains a problematic issue for businesses worldwide; (2) address corporate governance, internal controls, and auditor/accountant responsibilities for detecting and preventing fraud; (3) increase personnel / staff awareness of fraud schemes, detection methods, and prevention tools; (4) hire more trained personnel / staff; (5) identify where the most fraud occurs and what is the cost associated with it; (6) create anti-fraud and anti-corruption measures including whistleblowers and non-retaliatory policies (Brown, Hays, and Stuebs’, 2017) ; (7) respond promptly and urgently to King and Case’s (2014) communication to the audit committee matters including significant accounting policies and practices, critical accounting policies and practices, and critical accounting estimates preventing Chinniah’s (2015) creative accounting; (8) Brown, et al.’s (2017) reduction of the opportunity for fraud by strengthening and reinforcing controls to become more effective, reducing opportunities for circumvention of authority and controls at all levels including governance, and management’s ability to override controls; (9) understand, implement, and manage Chinniah’s (2015) steps to detecting and deflecting fraudulent financial reporting. Chinniah’s (2015) steps are (A.) Senior management must create the right culture (i.e., tone at the top); (B.) Establish and promote an effective whistle-blower program; (C.) Question financial results that are always on target; (D.) Question auditor changes; (E.) Have sceptics on the board of directors; (F.) Question extraordinary or complex transactions; (G.) Analyse accounts receivable; (H.) Question when cash flow does not match revenue growth; (I.) Analyse swings in assets or liabilities; (J.) Continue to educate yourself and urge others to do the same; (10) include in the culture the value of scepticism which is a questioning mind-set and an attitude that withholds judgment until evidence is adequate (Chinniah, 2015); (11) The final recommendation is to implement a well-defined code of ethics with prominently promoted ethics manager / officer, (Chinniah’s, 2015).

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is an effective and efficient legislature to reduce the probability and possibility of financial statement fraud, abuse, and related organizational malfeasance. The legislature can only be as effective as the management and governance of the organization charged with the implementations of the numerous mechanisms. Documentation and implementation is not enough. Management’s tone at the top must be one of support, implementation, and enforcement.   

Albrecht, C., Holland, D., Malagueño, R., Dolan, S., & Tzafrir, S. (2015). The Role of Power in Financial Statement Fraud Schemes. Journal Of Business Ethics, 131(4), 803-813. doi:10.1007/s10551-013-2019-1

Andrade, J. (2015). Reconceptualising Whistleblowing in a Complex World. Journal Of Business Ethics, 128(2), 321-335. doi:10.1007/s10551-014-2105-z

Banerjee, S., Humphery-Jenner, M., & Nanda, V. (2015). Restraining Overconfident CEOs through Improved Governance: Evidence from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Review Of Financial Studies, 28(10), 2812. doi:10.1093/rfs/hhv034

Brown, J. O., Hays, J., & Stuebs Jr., M. T. (2017). Modeling Accountant Whistleblowing Intentions: Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Fraud Triangle. Accounting & The Public Interest, (1), 28-56. doi:10.2308/apin-51675

Chinniah, A. (2015). A Conceptual Study on an Effectiveness of Ethical Standards for Preparers of Financial Statements and Fraud Risk Management. CLEAR International Journal Of Research In Management, Sciences & Technology, 5(10), 1-17

Gates, S., Prachyl, C. L., & Sullivan, C. (2016). Using report to the nations on occupational fraud and abuse to stimulate discussion of fraud in accounting and business classes. Journal Of Business & Behavioral Sciences, 28(1), 106-115

Gorski, S. (2015). IX. Whistleblower Protection Under Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley: Interpretative Developments from 2014. Review Of Banking & Financial Law, 34478

Johansson, E. E., & Carey, P. P. (2016). Detecting Fraud: The Role of the Anonymous Reporting Channel. Journal Of Business Ethics, 139(2), 391-409

King, D. L., & Case, C. J. (2014). Sarbanes-oxley act and the public company accounting oversight board's first eleven years. Journal Of Business & Accounting, 7(1), 11-22.

Winrow, T., & Winrow, B. (2015). Interaction between Sarbanes-Oxley and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Franklin Business & Law Journal, 2015(2), 19-32

Armatos Colosseo

read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2ER7Fxz

by Darkrealmist

Lightning philosophizes the inherent superiority of AI over humans during his Duel with Blood Shepherd.

Words: 1001, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 4 of Yu-Gi-Oh! Antagonist Prose

Fandoms: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Greek and Roman Mythology, Christian Bible, Christian Bible (Old Testament), Christian Bible (New Testament), Jewish Scripture & Legend, תנ"ך | Tanakh, La Divina Commedia | The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri, Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure tri., Digimon - All Media Types, Magic: The Gathering, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: Lightning (Yu-Gi-Oh), Kougami Kiyoshi, Kusanagi Jin, Doujun Kengo, Fujiki Yuusaku, Homura Takeru, Zaizen Aoi, Bessho Ema, Revolver | Kougami Ryouken, Spectre (Yu-Gi-Oh), Ai | Ignis, Earth (Yu-Gi-Oh), Flame (Yu-Gi-Oh), Aqua (Yu-Gi-Oh), Windy (Yu-Gi-Oh), Bohman (Yu-Gi-Oh), Durante degli Alighieri | Dante Alighieri, Atlas, Icarus, Prometheus, Hackmon, Erebos (Magic: The Gathering), Loki (Marvel), Thanos (Marvel)

Additional Tags: Abandonment, Acceptance, Action, Action/Adventure, Adventure, Air Force, Airplanes, Amputation, Ancient Rome, Anger, Animal Metaphors, Animals, Anime, Apocalypse, Apologies, Apples, Armageddon, Armor, Army, Artificial Intelligence, Asian Character(s), Assassins & Hitmen, Bad Ending, Battle, Bees, Bets & Wagers, Biblical References, Big Brothers, Biology, Blood Shepherd Died in the Snap, Bombs, Books, Boredom, Bounty Hunters, Bows & Arrows, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Backstory, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Captivity, Car Accidents, Card Games, Castles, Chains, Challenge Accepted, Character Death, Character(s) of Color, Character Study, Chess Metaphors, Christianity, Civil War, Complete, Computer Programming, Computers, Computer Viruses, Confessions, Confrontations, Constructed Reality, Cowboys & Cowgirls, Creation, Creation Myth, Criminal Masterminds, Crimes & Criminals, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Cruelty, Crusades, Cybercrimes, Daggers, Death, Death Wish, Denial, Despair, Destiny, Destruction of Earth, Devotion, Druids, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, Duel Monsters, During Canon, Eavesdropping, Emotional, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Manipulation, Emotions, End of the World, Enemies, Epic Battles, Episode Related, Escape, Ethical Dilemmas, Ethics, Evil, Evil Plans, Evolution, Execution, Existential Crisis, Existentialism, Experimental Style, Experimentation, Explosions, Extinction, Family, Family Feels, Fanfiction, Fantasy, Fate, Fate & Destiny, Female Character of Color, Forgiveness, Free Will, Fruit, Gates of Hell, Genetics, Geniuses, Genocide, God Complex, Guilt, Guns, Hacking, Half-Siblings, Hatred, Helicopters, Hell, Historical Fantasy, Historical Metaphors, Holy Roman Empire, Hope, Hope vs. Despair, Horseback Riding, Horsemen, Horses, Hostage Situations, Hubris, Human Biology, Human Experimentation, Humanity, Human Sacrifice, Identity, Identity Issues, Illegal Activities, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Imprisonment, Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity Gems, Inheritance, Inspired by Music, Internal Monologue, Internet, Intimidation, Irony, Japanese Character(s), Judaism, Judgment, Justice, Kings & Queens, Knights - Freeform, Languages and Linguistics, Latin, Law Enforcement, Leadership, Literary References & Allusions, Logic, Loyalty, Machines, Male Antagonist, Male Character of Color, Manipulation, Metaphors, Military, Military Jargon, Military Ranks, Military Science Fiction, Mind Control, Mind Games, Mind Manipulation, Monsters, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Morality, Morally Ambiguous Character, Mortality, Mutation, Name Changes, Names, Nationalism, Nature, Oaths & Vows, One Shot, Organized Crime, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Origin Myths, Origins, Pain, Pandora's Box, Philosophy, Physiology, Planet Destruction, Plans For The Future, Poetic, Poetry, Portals, Postmodernism, Post-Suicide Mission, POV Antagonist, POV First Person, POV Male Character, POV Nonhuman, Pride, Prisoner of War, Protective Older Brothers, Protective Siblings, Pseudonyms, Psychological Warfare, Psychology, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Punishment, Puppeteer, Puppets, Quantum Mechanics, Questioning, Rare Characters, Reading Aloud, References to Canon, Religious Fanaticism, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Restraints, Robots, Role-Playing Game, Sabotage, Sacred Trees, Sacrifice, Sadism, Saving the World, Scheming, Science, Science Experiments, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Self-Denial, Self-Destruction, Self-Sacrifice, Shock, Shooting Guns, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Love, Sins, Sins of the Father, Social Commentary, Social Experiments, Social Issues, Social Justice, Social Media, Social Networking, Soldiers, Solitary Confinement, Spears, Speciesism, Step-siblings, Strategy & Tactics, Strong Female Characters, Subterfuge, Summoning, Summoning Circles, Surprises, Suspense, Surveillance, Survival, Swords, Team, Team as Family, Team Bonding, Team Charge, Team Dynamics, Team Feels, Team Human, Technology, Temporary Character Death, Terrorism, Terrorists, Theology, Threats, Thriller, Thunder and Lightning, Tragedy, Trees, Tricksters, Truth, Unconsciousness, Unethical Experimentation, Unhappy Ending, Urban Fantasy, Video & Computer Games, Villains, Virtual Reality, War, Watching, Weapons, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Western, Wolves, Wordcount: Over 1.000, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Wordcount: Under 10.000, World Domination, Worry

read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2ER7Fxz

Villain Archetype: Nuclear Nightmare

[I need a quote from an Atomic bad guy.] The Nuclear Nightmare is an incarnation of modern fears concerning atomic energy, an evil version of the heroic Master of the Atom. EXAMPLES: Radioactive Man (Marvel); Plasmus, Neutron (DC); Nuclear Man (film: Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) RELATED ARCHETYPES: Ultimate Villain, Foreigner, Master of the Atom POWERS AND ABILITIES: Radiation and atomic energy can be used to explain a great many powers, but the Nuclear Nightmare is not just a villain who traces his origin back to some kind of exposure to radiation. Rather, he personifies The Bomb itself. He may have Energy Control (adding a radiation-based Affliction or an Aura to the base Blast effect), Alternate Form (Energy or Explosive), or else great Strength and Invulnerability. He is immune to radiation (Life Support or Resistance) and may be able to Detect its presence. Sophisticated Nuclear Nightmares can alter an object's atomic structure using the Transformation power. OTHER QUALITIES: The purest versions of the Nuclear Nightmare are impossible to control, possessed of great power, and terrifying, with a hideous appearance. Most are green -- always a popular color for villains, but especially ones of this sort. He is referred to as a "mutant," not in the superheroic sense seen among the X-Men, but as the victim of unchecked and unfortunate mutation caused by radiation exposure. Because the Nuclear Nightmare has its origins in the Cold War, he is often a Foreigner, an embodiment not of nuclear power, but of the nuclear arsenal held by rival nations. England and France have long been American allies, so the remaining two members of the "nuclear club" -- China and the Soviet Union -- were the spawning ground for the original Nuclear Nightmares. In the decades since, however, the number of nations with access to the Bomb has grown to include North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel, while Iran, Iraq, and other nations have continued to pursue nuclear weaponry. GMs reluctant to wade directly into political issues can create a fictional surrogate for a place like North Korea or Iran instead. Nuclear Nightmares thus become representatives of their home nation, and embody the dilemma which those governments face: nuclear nations have more influence on the world stage and may be driven to seek nuclear power out of national pride, but they also risk becoming global pariahs and a means by which terrorist forces acquire nuclear bombs. A Nuclear Nightmare might be considered a hero within the borders of his nation, but a villain outside of it. STORIES: The key story of the Nuclear Nightmare has changed as American attitudes towards nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have grown more complex. At first, atomic weapons were good so long as they were American; it is from this era that characters like Radioactive Man and his fellow Foreigners appear. Radiation could do anything in comics and, as the ultimate weapon, the Bomb was also a good explanation for the Ultimate Villain. In the wake of Three Mile Island, fears over the safety of nuclear power increased and the Nuclear Nightmare could again be an American. This time, he was a scientist doomed by hubris and certain that the awesome power of the atom could be controlled, or else the victim of a tragic accident. He was a symbol not of the Bomb, but of the problematic peaceful uses to which nuclear energy might be directed. Americans had gotten more used to living with nuclear energy, and it lost some of its association as the ultimate force. Finally, after the Cold War, the Nightmare has become banal. So many action films hinge on a nuclear bomb that the threat of one is something of a yawner. Nuclear Nightmares have been supplanted in their Ultimate status by new characters fueled by the latest science-fiction buzzwords. The world's energy hopes are now pinned on solar, wind, and other renewables, though occasional catastrophic nuclear accidents like Fukishima and, before it, Chernobyl, continue to remind us of the threat posed by nuclear power. This has led to the Nuclear Nightmare becoming something of a Cold War relic; once he was a hero to his nation and feared around the world, but now he's a second-stringer. This can create an opportunity for redemption stories, in which the former-Nightmare shows that he was only trying to do what he thought best for his nation and his people, and if he got caught up in the pointless brinksmanship of the Cold War, well, he was hardly alone. His inner nobility can earn him a new role as a wise mentor to the younger generation, or can lead to a heroic self-sacrifice. If you want your Nightmare to remain a bad guy, then he instead resolves to prove his relevance in a 21st century world, probably with some grandiose extortion threat or the takeover of a small nation. A heroic Master of the Atom can often slide back and forth, in and out of this archetype -- when Doctor Manhattan is surrounded by civilians who fear exposure to him will lead to cancer, or when the Hulk is on a rampage through the New Mexico desert, we are getting a glimpse of the Nuclear Nightmare.