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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 20, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 21, 2023

Last night, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation from the Oval Office to shore up U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel. “[H]istory has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction. They keep going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world keep rising,” he said.

“[I]f we walk away and let Putin erase Ukraine’s independence, would-be aggressors around the world would be emboldened to try the same,” he said. “The risk of conflict and chaos could spread in other parts of the world—in the Indo-Pacific… [and] especially in the Middle East.”

Biden noted that Russian president Vladimir Putin has suggested he might like to take part of Poland, while one of his top advisors has called three other NATO allies, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Russia’s “Baltic provinces.” Russian aggression there would draw the U.S. into war.

Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine, he noted, and “it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups” in the Middle East.

“The United States and our partners across the region are working to build a better future for the Middle East, one where the Middle East is more stable, better connected to its neighbors, and—through innovative projects like the India–Middle East–Europe rail corridor that I announced this year at the summit of the world’s biggest economies—more predictable markets, more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war when connected. It…would benefit the people of the Middle East, and it would benefit us.”

Biden explained that he was sending to Congress “an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine. It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful, and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren,” he said.

That money, he said, would harden the Iron Dome that protects Israel’s skies after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that took more than 1,300 lives. But he also said that the U.S. “remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away”

He explained that he had discussed with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine.” Biden secured an agreement for such relief when he visited Israel on Wednesday, but so far the route from Egypt has not opened, at least in part because Israel and Egypt can’t agree on a way to inspect the trucks to make sure they are not carrying weapons.

Ethan Bronner and Henry Meyer of Bloomberg reported yesterday that President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have pressured Israel more deeply than any recent administration, demanding they adjust their planned ground assault on Gaza to minimize civilian casualties and think about what happens when the assault is over. U.S. officials are worried that Israel’s response to the October 7 attack could prompt Hezbollah to join the war, scuttling the administration’s attempt to stabilize the region and drawing the U.S. further into the conflict.

But Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners who have backed further settlements in the West Bank are eager to exact revenge on the Palestinians there, killing at least seven in the last week. U.S. officials told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times that “the representatives of those settlers in the cabinet are withholding tax money owed the Palestinian Authority [that exercises authority over the West Bank], making it harder for it to keep the West Bank as under control as it has been since the start of the Hamas war.” Netanyahu, who has been charged with corruption and fraud, needs those partners in order to remain prime minister and thus stay out of jail.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening as Israel has launched extensive airstrikes, killing what U.N. observers estimate to be more than 2,800 Palestinians, including several relatives of former representative Justin Amash (Libertarian-Michigan) who had been sheltering in a church. It has also driven about a million people of the 2.3 million in Gaza from their homes. Hospitals are closed, and food and water are scarce.

Foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen of Diplomatic gave Biden credit for his attempt to calm the region, support Israel, and protect Palestinian civilians but was, she said, “very worried” that the conflict would drag out and “inflame & destabilize [the] region & spark blowback & it will be very very ugly.” The U.S. had not been able to get “a single truck of aid into Gaza, much less set up a quasi-safe zone…five days after it thought it had a deal to do so.” It is not helping that X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, is amplifying disinformation about the crisis.

The U.S. and governments in Europe have pressured Israel not to go into Gaza while diplomats in Qatar try to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas. Today, Hamas released two dual U.S. citizens who had been held hostage in Gaza.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) took a different tack, noting that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (believed to be the group responsible for the hospital explosion in Gaza) received more than $130 million in cryptocurrency in the past two years, and researchers believe this is just a fraction of the total. Cryptocurrency funds crime and terror, they wrote: more than $20 billion in illicit transactions last year “that we know of.”

Those exchanges are currently unregulated, and Warren and Marshall have introduced the bipartisan Digital Asset Anti–Money Laundering Act to bring digital assets under the same rules that regulate traditional payment systems.

Today the administration asked Congress for a little over $105 billion in funding for national security. The package would devote $61.4 billion to support Ukraine (some of it to replenish U.S. stockpiles after sending weapons to Ukraine); $14.3 billion to Israel for air and missile defense systems; $9.15 billion for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Gaza, and other places; $7.4 billion for initiatives in the Indo-Pacific; and $14 billion for more agents at the southwestern border, new machines to detect fentanyl, and more courts to process asylum cases.

But Congress is currently unable to act. Seventeen days after the extremists in the House Republican conference ousted then-speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republican civil war continues to paralyze the House. After key Trump ally Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) lost a second round of balloting on Wednesday, his allies apparently spent Thursday threatening the colleagues who didn’t vote for him.

Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) explained: “So far I've had four death threats. I've been evicted from my office in Colorado…because the landlord is mad with my voting record on the Speaker issue. And everybody in the conference is getting this…. Family members have been approached and threatened, all kinds of things are going on….”

The threats simply hardened Jordan’s opposition. He lost a third ballot today, with 25 Republicans voting against him, and in a secret ballot the Republicans took privately over whether to keep him as their nominee for speaker, only 86 voted for Jordan, with 112 against. The House recessed for the weekend, despite the mounting crises that need to be addressed.

Having a key lieutenant in the House speaker’s chair, where he could, among other things, smear Biden by pushing to impeach him in the months before the election, would have been a huge boost for Trump. That Republicans refused to get behind Jordan even when he forced them into a public vote and then threatened them, much as Trump threatened them to line up behind him in the past, suggests they are starting to fear Trump less than they have for years.

Three plea deals in the past two days have intensified Trump’s legal troubles. Two of his own lawyers, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty to some of the charges brought by Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis in the racketeering case against Trump and 17 others.

Yesterday, Powell pleaded guilty to trying to tamper with voting machines. In exchange for a lenient sentence, she will have to testify against others. As she was the person Trump considered tapping as a special counsel to investigate alleged voter fraud, she was at a key meeting with Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock chief executive officer Patrick Byrne.

Powell’s unexpected jump to the prosecution side—she was lying about the election just this week—put pressure on others, and today Chesebro also flipped. He was allegedly the one who designed the false electors scheme, although he has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents. In exchange for a lenient sentence, he has to turn over any evidence he has and testify truthfully against others in the case, including Trump.

In Michigan, a Republican man charged with participating in the false-elector plot also entered into a cooperation agreement yesterday, meaning he will talk to investigators and, if necessary, testify.

Finally, today, Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the fraud case against Trump and the Trump Organization, fined Trump $5,000 for violating the gag order he had imposed on October 3. Trump told Engoron that day he had taken down a social media post disparaging one of Engoron’s law clerks, but it remained up on his campaign website.

Engoron warned Trump that “future violations, whether intentional or unintentional, will subject the violator to far more severe sanctions, which may include, but are not limited to, steeper financial penalties, holding Donald Trump in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him pursuant to New York Judiciary Law.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From an American #Heather Cox Richardson #modern times #political cartoons #my favorites #war in Israel #Republican Clown Car #TFG legal troubles

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hackedintucson · 4 months

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Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

I have always worked and paid my income taxes. Even when I was day trading on the side, I was honest and paid. One year I owed the IRS over $12,000 from day trading. The amount was higher than I expected and largely due to my short holding period. I setup a payment plan with the IRS and paid what I owed in about a year.

For the 2019 tax year, the IRS owed me about $600. Unfortunately, the “back office” group at Fidelity Investments closed my checking account shortly after I filed by income tax returns. I never received the federal refund from the IRS since my checking account was closed. The State of California mailed sent me a large refund for 2019.

I called the IRS multiple times even when I was homeless trying to straighten things out but was unsuccessful. They require your tax year Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) and refund amount to prove my identity. I was unable to do this because I didn’t have the tax return and didn’t remember my login password to Tax Free USA. I called them but they couldn’t help me reset my password,

So the State of California sent me $14,000 In unemployment benefits. Evidently, they were supposed to have sent this to me a year prior but I don’t complete a form or something. I find some of the simplest things difficult to understand after being hit by a gangstalkers car. My jaw was broken and I hit my head pretty hard. I honestly don’t have any recollection of being hit by a car or the surgery to try to fix it. I woke up at my parents house with no idea how I got there or what I was doing there. There was a nerve they had to cut and as a result I have no feeling in my chin or lower lip. It doesn’t hurt anymore and my jaw seems to stay in place now. Anyway…

So I just talked to the IRS and they are going to send me some PIN number so I can file my tax return for 2023. I filed it the other day but it was rejected by the IRS and State of Arizona. They also gave me the phone number for the IRS at the federal building in downtown Tucson. I had an appointment there a while ago but they called me and cancelled it. I need to call them again and setup a new appointment to verify my identity. I just need to show them my Arizona picture identification card and social security card.

About three years ago everything I owned in the world was stolen from me; you name it they took it. From my California drivers license to my United States passport; all my credit /debit cards as well as paper checks for my Fidelity checking account, a couple of personal laptops, several iPhones and Bose Bluetooth headphones were stolen along with my suitcase in front of the Ka Quinta hotel on N Alvernon. I became homeless on this day as you are unable to rent a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona without picture identification.

I had never really been homeless in my life and well I am a better person from the experience, even though it was let’s just say physical painful at times as well as mentally the toughest thing I’ve been through. The weather in Tucson can be very extreme; both hot and cold. The gangstalking, sound and electricity along with non-stop sirens from police, paramedics and fire trucks and the ever present eyes in the sky here with the military jets and C-130s. Not to mention the moving satellites or whatever they are in the night sky. I used to see a lot of odd things in the sky both during the daytime and night. I have also seen some of the most amazing ice sculptures in the sky. Sometimes I think it is either the military or the university which creates these things. Whoever they are, they try to communicate with me but I am not sure if I understand everything. The best way I can describe it is they put thoughts into my head which aren’t mine. I experience a lot of what feels like Deja Vu. They tell me often that I am the enemy of the earth which just isn’t true. I don’t hate anyone or anything. I am doing the best I can to mind my own business and add positive things to the world rather than just taking from it.

I never believed in God before I came to Tucson. We never went to church when I was growing up. We were too busy trying to make a better life. I thought God was good for people though. I thought Hof provided comfort for people who wanted to know their loved ones were in a good place after they die. They tell me God is very angry at me and has finally gotten around to dealing with me. He isn’t happy with me and is allowing negative things to happen to me even though he doesn’t necessarily agree with what others are doing to me. Anyways…something like that

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therealnh222-blog · 1 year

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Should College Education be free?

Noah Hammerer

Blog Post #1

A problem that Americans have been dealing with for ages and will continue to come across is college debt. Whether it be struggling to pay for their own debt or struggling to pay off a child or relative’s debt its something that is very prevalent in today’s society. There are tons of plans and proposals for their to be loan forgiveness or free college and it came to a head in 2021. This was the closest the a free college plan had come to being completed. The Biden Presidency has been pushing this as one of their major campaign objectives. Before this could possibly happen in real life I would like to weigh the pros and cons of a free college education.

When it comes to the free college conversation it would be smart to automatically take private colleges and universities off of the list. These schools are not publicly funded and would struggle to make ends meet without charging their students a tuition. This is why most proposals are for state and publicly funded schools to begin these programs. Some schools already use free college programs and are run in three primary ways. A lot of these already established programs are generally only for the first two years of community college. The first way that these programs are organized is through Last dollar free tuition programs. These programs pay for the amount that the student owes after their financial aid is taken out. Another common type of program setup is First dollar tuition free programs. In these programs the school will pay for the students tuition and any extra financial aid is put towards textbooks and other costs. The final common type of free college program are Debt-free programs. These are setup so that the student can graduate from college debt free as the school pays for all of their expenses. The last two programs are a bit harder to find because of there expense. Now that we have gone over how some of these programs would be set up lets go over the pros and cons of free college argument.

One major advantage to offering free college education is a more educated workforce. The economic benefits that would come from a more educated workforce would be very substantial. First of all it will introduce more people into the upper tier of jobs such as accountants, lawyers and doctors. This also benefits the economy when it comes to taxes. The more high paying jobs the more the government can make of taxes from its people. Another major benefit to free college is the access that it grants to people. Expensive college tuition can often be the reasons that people don’t attend universities. Having to plan out how to pay for college and other living expenses can be a hassle and many people would rather just enter the work force. With free college tuition this is no longer a worry. Free tuition can also send a message to people that getting a college degree is something that they can attain. Another benefit of free college is the raising of graduation rates at these universities. People who can’t stay in school for financial or personal reasons would find continuing in school easier than if they had to pay a tuition while there. Finally the financial security that free college would give to anyone who attends it. A college degree isn’t as important as it used to be but is still very influential in the world. With a college degree people can find it easier to find higher paying jobs and with free college we can help get more people degrees. Now with all of the positive there are some negative points to this situation as well.

The main negative concern that people seem to have with the idea of free college education is the cost that it would take. Many people think that free college would be to expensive and take more taxes out of the hands of the people. This is because those state funded schools will be getting their funds through state taxes. If the have no tuition coming into support them then they will have to rely more on the states tax money. Another problem is that these programs don’t always help the individuals who need help the most. Since a lot of free state college programs are last dollar programs they are applied after financial aid. This often gives higher income households who receive less financial aid priority over lower income households who receive more aid. This often leads to people receiving these free opportunities when someone else in more need could use it. The final major problem that this faces is that community college isn’t fit for everyone and their majors. A good number of these free college programs are based on making community college free for all. The problem with this is there are certain majors and areas that community colleges won’t go into that bigger universities will go into. If a community college in your area doesn’t contain a area that you would like to study inn than this can be a concern. Overall I think that free college would be very beneficial to the United States in a variety of different ways.

Citations

Dilworth, Kelly. “Should College Be Free? the Pros and Cons.” The Balance, The Balance, 12 Apr. 2022, https://www.thebalancemoney.com/should-college-be-free-5218232.

Harris, Douglas N. “Is Free College a Good Idea? Increasingly, Evidence Says Yes.” Brookings, Brookings, 9 Mar. 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/05/10/is-free-college-a-good-idea-increasingly-evidence-says-yes/.

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mariamajesticblogs · 2 years

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How To Say “I Love You” With Life Insurance

While it might not sound romantic, having life insurance is a great way to say “I love you.”

Obtaining a policy (or better yet, a series of policies) shows that you care enough about your loved ones not to leave them in financial dire straits after you die. While we all have dreams to enjoy a long and fulfilling life with our families and love ones, life actually happens and sometimes interrupts our grand plans. Life insurance provides security and peace of mind that your loved ones can still have the great future you want for them (and they deserve) even if you are no longer around.

Then why doesn’t everyone have a life insurance policy?

Our death is never fun to discuss and not usually seen as a pressing issue. We tend to think we have more time than we actually do to get our “affairs in order. Add to that the fact that life insurance products can be complicated and overwhelming. It is hard to know how much insurance to get, what type of policies to use, and which agent and company to trust. In the end, as with most tasks that are difficult and bring little enjoyment, dealing with life insurance just gets pushed down the to-do list. Unfortunately, the consequences of waiting too long can be devastating.

So where do you begin?

The place to start is to think about why you need life insurance. The most basic reason is if you have an obligation or need to provide income replacement for others who depend on you. In other words, if someone will suffer financially when you die, you need life insurance because it provides cash to your family after your death. This cash, known as the death benefit, replaces your income and can help your family meet many important financial needs like funeral costs, daily living expenses and college funding. What’s more, there is no federal income tax on life insurance benefits. Another reason is, if you are a business owner, you may need to provide funding for your desired business succession plan or to insure against any debts your business may owe upon your death. For some, life insurance can also can be used as a way in which to provide funds to offset estate taxes.

Here are some scenarios to help you understand how life insurance might apply to your particular situation:

Who Needs It?

(1) You’re Married

Many people mistakenly believe that they don’t need to think about life insurance until they have children. Not true. What it one of you died tomorrow? Even with your surviving spouse’s income, would that be enough to pay off debts like credit card balances and car loans, let alone cover the monthly rent and utility bills? If you’re planning to have children, you’ll want to buy life insurance now instead of waiting until pregnancy — some companies won’t issue policies to pregnant women.

(2) You’re Married With Kids

Most families depend on two incomes to make ends meet. If you died suddenly, could your family continue meet all their financial obligations — from paying rent or the mortgage to daily living expenses? Could your family continue their standard of living on your spouse’s income alone? Would their plans for the future — like college stay intact? Life insurance makes sure that your plans for the future don’t die when you do.

(3) You’re a Single Parent

As a single parent, you’re the caregiver, breadwinner, cook, chauffeur and so much more. Yet nearly four in 10 single parents have no life insurance, and many with coverage say they need more than they have. With so much responsibility resting on your shoulders, you need to make doubly sure that you have enough life insurance to safeguard your children’s financial future.

(4) You’re a Stay-At-Home Parent

Just because you don’t earn a salary doesn’t mean you don’t make a financial contribution to your family. Childcare, transportation, cleaning cooking, and other household activities are all important tasks, the replacement value of which is often severely underestimated. With life insurance, your family can afford to make the choice that best preserves their quality of life.

(5) You Have Grown Children

Just because your kids are through college and the mortgage is paid off doesn’t necessarily mean that you no longer need life insurance. If you died today, your spouse will still be faced with daily living expenses. Would your financial plan, without life insurance, enable your spouse to maintain the lifestyle you’ve worked so hard to achieve now and into retirement?

(6) You’re Retired

Depending on the size of your estate, your heirs could be hit with an estate-tax payment of up to 45% after you die. The proceeds of a life insurance policy are payable immediately, allowing heirs to take care of these taxes, funeral costs and other debts without having to hastily liquidate other assets, often at a fraction of their true value. Life insurance proceeds are also generally income tax free and won’t add to your estate tax liability, if properly structured.

(7) You’re a Small-Business Owner

Besides taking care of your family, life insurance can also protect your business. What would happen to your business if you, one of your fellow owners or a key employee died tomorrow? Life insurance can help in a number of ways. For instance, a life insurance policy can be structured to fund a buy-sell agreement. This would ensure that the remaining business owners have the funds to buy the company interests of a deceased owner at a previously agreed upon price. That way, the owners get the business and the family gets the money. To protect a business in case of the death of a key employee, key person insurance, payable to the company, provides the owners with the financial flexibility needed to either hire a replacement or work out an alternative arrangement.

(8) You’re Single

Most single people don’t need life insurance because no one depends on them financially. But there are exceptions. For instance, some single people provide financial support for aging parents or a sibling with special needs. Others may be carrying significant debt that they wouldn’t want to pass on to family members who survive them. Insurability is another reason to consider life insurance when you’re single. If you’re young, healthy, and have a good family health history, your insurability is at its peak and you’ll be rewarded with the best rates on life insurance.

What Type of Life Insurance Do I Need?

The type of life insurance you should buy depends on your family goals, dreams, and circumstances. The two main types of insurance you’ll hear about are “term” and “whole life.”

Term insurance is in effect for a specific period of time and if you do not die during that period, the insurance doesn’t pay. For example, you may have a 20-year term policy (a common one among parents with young children). Each year, you pay your premium and if you don’t die during that year, you’ve lost the premium (but gained your life, which is nice!). Because it’s 20-year term, the rate will remain the same for 20 years, at which point you have to re-apply for the insurance, which means full application and health exam and a rate increase because you are 20 years older. You can even talk to your insurance agent about strategies called “stacking” where you use different term lengths, such as a ten-year, twenty-year, and thirty-year, to maximize coverage while taking advantage of locking in lower rates while you are younger and healthier.

In addition, there are some term life insurance policies that allow you to recover a majority portion of your premium payments at the conclusion of the term if you do not die. These are called return of premium life insurance policies. This is a nice option as your premium payment can be viewed as a small investment. While theses premiums will cost more than a regular term life insurance policy, it can be viewed as a safe investment. Your rate of return would not be subject to the same market fluctuations as an investment portfolio, and, of course, in the event of death, the payout to your beneficiaries will be much larger than had you simply invested the premiums in an investment portfolio. Never mind, for some more cost conscious, it is just comforting to know that you will get your money back if the benefit isn’t used.

Whole life insurance policies are permanent policies that cover you as long as you live. That means this policy is kept in force for the rest of your life, no matter how long you may live. In addition, there is a savings feature to them in that they have a cash value accumulation which you can use during your life in what is known as a policy loan. In sum, you practically pay premiums throughout your lifetime and make use of the cash value benefits while you are alive and upon death since your beneficiaries get the death benefits. As a result, these policies are likely to be more expensive than term policies but also highly suitable for long term responsibilities like surviving spouse’s income needs and post-death expenses.

Universal life insurance policies are also permanent policies that cover you for as long as you live. However, this policy is also termed “adjustable life insurance,” because it offers more flexibility compared to whole life insurance. You have the liberty to reduce or increase your death benefit and also to pay your premiums at any time and in any amount (subject to certain limits) after your first premium payment has been made. You can even withdraw accumulated cash value (as opposed to taking a policy loan) or use it to make premium payments in more difficult financial times. In sum, universal life insurance offers all-round protection to your loved ones, thanks to its security, flexibility and variety of investment options.

Life Insurance Is Part of Your Estate Plan, Not Instead of One

The bottom line with life insurance is to make sure you realistically assess your needs and then purchase an amount of insurance that meets that need. The best way to do that is to meet with an experienced insurance agent that help you develop your insurance plan. You will then want to determine how that insurance plan is incorporated into your overall estate plan. While having life insurance is a great thing, you do not want your good intentions to go to waste or actually hurt your loved ones. For example, a large insurance pay-out to a young adult (over eighteen) could easily be wasted due to poor money management or life’s many temptations; or it could disqualify a student from financial aid; or worse disqualify a disabled beneficiary from receiving the means-tested government benefits and health insurance they rely upon.

Consult Your Team of Advisors

These are just some scenarios that could happen, but can be avoided with the right combination of insurance and estate planning. That is why we recommend that you run your insurance decisions by your wealth management team which should include a financial advisor, insurance agent (which could be your financial advisor), a CPA and your estate planning attorney. This way you can get balanced advice that is not driven by a team who is interested in keeping your family out of court, out of conflict and well-cared for when you can’t be there.

This planning is so very important. Don’t delay any longer. Get started today.

Credits: Estate Planning, Snyder Blog

Date: Sep 23, 2016

Source: https://medium.com/p/c27f4f9ef968/edit

#areteautomation #lifehealthadvisors #life #love #fun

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antoine-roquentin · 3 years

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“The federal budget assumes the government will recover 96 cents of every dollar borrowers default on,” Mitchell wrote. This banker, Jeff Courtney, put that figure closer to just 51 to 63 cents.

Now, for a private lender, like a bank, this projected shortfall would indeed be a ticking time bomb. The bank might be in danger of insolvency (unless, of course, it was rescued by a federal government that could give the bank an emergency cash infusion and take those bad loans off its hands). But there’s no real danger of a federal Cabinet-level department becoming insolvent. The Treasury Department is already in the habit of making up the Education Department’s budgetary shortfalls.

So what is the problem again? Typically for a news outlet like the Journal, the story describes this potential shortfall as what “taxpayers” would be “on the hook for,” but obviously, we all know that that is not how federal budgeting works. Taxes could rise for certain people for certain reasons, but no one will receive an itemized bill for this uncollected debt. And as for that large, catastrophic number ($500 billion!) that might never be paid back, it amounts to less than one year of a national defense budget that “taxpayers” are similarly “on the hook for.” (The Journal’s editorial board recently complained that the Biden administration’s proposed 2022 $715 billion Pentagon budget, while an increase in real terms, nonetheless represents an unconscionable decline in the defense budget as share of gross domestic product. “Taxpayers” are not mentioned in the editorial.)

Democrats helped sacrifice a generation of students to the deficit god, in exchange for meaningless numbers in a report.

The story, then, is that the government might not collect some debt, even if it currently pretends, for budgetary reasons, that it definitely will, and, as a result, the deficit may rise to levels higher than the current estimates predict. For a committed conservative, such as DeVos, that situation is inherently scandalous. For everyone else, that could only ever become a problem in the future, and only if that future deficit has some negative effect on the overall economy, which is not very likely considering the entire recent history of federal deficits and economic growth.

That state of affairs may explain why articles like the one in the Journal so often invoke “taxpayers,” as if everyone would have to write personal checks to cover the Department of Education’s shortfall: because without imagining taxpayers as victims of government deficits, it’s hard to point to anyone actually harmed by a government department giving unrealistic estimates of future revenues.

Except in this story, there are actual victims: the people who hold debt that the government doesn’t realistically expect to collect in full but who are bled for payment regardless. As Courtney’s report found, because of the importance of these loans to the department’s balance sheet, the government keeps borrowers on the hook for the loans even if they will never be able to repay all of the money they owe, often by placing borrowers on a repayment plan tied to their income. (As the economist Marshall Steinbaum has explained, the “income driven repayment,” or IDR, program is framed as a means of helping borrowers, but in reality, it “exerts a significant drag on their financial health, to no apparent purpose” by forcing them to “make less-than-adequate payments for many years before their debt is finally cancelled.”) The victim of such a scheme isn’t taxpayers, it’s debtors.

There’s one particular portion of The Wall Street Journal’s story that the public should treat as a moral and political scandal (the emphasis here is mine):

One instance of how accounting drove policy came in 2005 with Grad Plus, a program that removed limits on how much graduate students could borrow. It was included in a sweeping law designed to reduce the federal budget deficit, which had become a concern in both parties as the nation spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as baby-boomer retirement was set to raise Social Security and healthcare outlays.

A key motive for letting graduate students borrow unlimited amounts was to use the projected profits from such lending to reduce federal deficits, said two congressional aides who helped draft the legislation.

Each change was publicly justified as a way to help families pay for college or to save the taxpayer money, said Robert Shireman, who helped draft some of the laws in the 1990s as an aide to Sen. Paul Simon (D., Ill.) and later was deputy under secretary of education in the Obama administration.

But how agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office “score” such changes—determine their deficit impact—“is a key factor in deciding whether a policy is adopted or not,” Mr. Shireman said. “The fact that it saved money helps enact it.”

To explain this more plainly, Democrats helped sacrifice a generation of students to the deficit god, in exchange for meaningless numbers in a report, because CBO scores are more real to senators than flesh-and-blood people.

This is the sort of depravity that deficit obsessions produce. The Iraq War needed to be “paid for” with the future earnings of students who, lawmakers imagined, would eventually be rich, even as many of the same lawmakers voted to cut taxes on already-rich people. Now the debt of the still-not-rich students can’t be forgiven because of its importance to the federal government’s predicted future earnings. And politicians and commentators in thrall to deficit politics still paint the situation as a morality tale, in which the borrowers are irresponsible for having the debt and the government would be irresponsible to forgive it. After all, think of the poor taxpayers.

The early days of the Biden administration led some to believe we were finally free of this incoherent political mode, where dubious predictions in CBO reports dictate the limits of the politically possible and determine who will be arbitrarily punished for the sake of limiting the size of a program in a speculative 10-year budget projection. The proof that Democrats had learned their lesson was one major piece of legislation, the American Rescue Plan, designed to respond to a unique emergency.

More recently, the administration, and some of its allies in Congress, have signaled strongly that they’re returning to the old ways. The American Prospect’s David Dayen has reported that the White House is determined to “pay for” its infrastructure plans, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is apparently leading the charge to ensure the infrastructure spending is “offset.” This will have the likely effect of limiting the scope of the plan, once again sacrificing material benefits for the sake of estimates and predictions from the CBO.

The Biden administration seems to be determined to go about this without violating its pledge not to raise taxes on any American making less than $400,000 (a threshold meant to define the upper limit of “middle class” despite being comically higher than the Obama administration’s similar $250,000 limit for tax hikes). It has floated increasing IRS enforcement and raising the capital gains tax for the wealthiest Americans. Both are fine ideas. But the best thing about taxing the rich is not that you can use their money for infrastructure, it’s that doing so reduces their political and economic power. That’s also the reason why it’s so difficult for Washington to do it.

The complete incoherence of the current Democratic position on spending and deficits is summed up well in another Wall Street Journal story, where Montana Senator Jon Tester was quoted saying, “I don’t want to raise any taxes, but I don’t want to put stuff on the debt, either.… If we’re going to build infrastructure, we have to pay for it somehow. I’m open to all ideas.”

“Open” to “all ideas” but unwilling to tax the rich, and unwilling to allow a CBO report to show a larger deficit as a result of needed spending: This is more or less precisely the dynamic that led student loan debt to explode in the United States, and it’s the zombie worldview that threatens any chance of this government averting a multitude of political, economic, and ecological disasters.

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jolynej · 3 years

Note

Hello!! I love the aesthetic of your blog 😳 is it alright if I ask for headcanons of La Squadra (If it’s too much, Risotto, Prosciutto and Ghiaccio are fine!!) with a really head strong and stubborn S/o? Like on the outside they act like they think they’re better than everyone, but really they’re just a huge dork on the inside ☺️

thank you very much!! and it’s not too much at all :) i’m not sure whether or not you wanted an s/o who was involved in the gang or not, so i did a mix of both! i hope that you like it!

Risotto, Prosciutto, and Ghiaccio With a Stubborn and Headstrong, but Dorky S/O

his somehow turned into more of a drabble than actual headcanons, woops! hope you don’t mind that it also became a little more hurt/comfort!!

Due to his position as the leader of the group, he’s used to having to work with strong personalities as each of his subordinates stand out in their own ways, and he’s appreciative of all of their strengths — yours being no exception. He also makes it a priority to become familiar with his squad member’s weaknesses so that he is better able to assign them missions and implement training regimens to improve their skills.

As his partner, he has an extra watchful eye over you and is quick to point out mistakes and areas for improvement, but don’t misunderstand his blunt remarks as ones of distaste. He owes a debt of gratitude to your confidence and your tenacity as it has come to his aid on multiple occasions, but he’s an extremely perceptive man and can pick up on little things about you that would usually go unnoticed by others. He’s a quiet, introverted man, and by nature a good listener. He picks up on little tells and mannerisms of yours and eventually pieces a few things together.

It’s after a particularly rough mission that he is able to prove his little hypothesis. You’d barely escaped with your life after the confrontation with your target went sour due to you pulling a risky move that was almost certain to end in failure; it was a complete deviation from the plan that Risotto had gone over with you. He was upset, and you were, too, as the target had gotten away, but instead of reacting in anger and immediately enacting some sort of punishment, he looked over at you from across his desk where you sat with a pout and glassy eyes, eking out an uncharacteristic apology instead of a snide remark or even an eyeroll.

He’ll still have to reprimand you for screwing up the job, but for now he was pleased to see a more vulnerable, honest side to you. “You understand that what you did was wrong, don’t you cara/o?” He looks over at you, torn between comforting you and scolding you.

Risotto is so glad to see you becoming more open and comfortable around him, but he doesn’t say much as he doesn’t want to scare you off. Instead, that evening, after you’ve been informed of the oncoming dread that is the punishment of both paperwork duty and a boring stakeout mission, he holds you a little bit closer and tells you that he loves you, which is his way of telling you that it’s okay to not be strong sometimes.

He knows that tomorrow you will bounce back to your usual self, dorky jokes and all, but for now, he’s more than content to share this private moment with you and fall asleep with your head resting on his chest, lulling you both to sleep with his hand lazily rubbing your back.

Dating a man in the mafia would be taxing on anyone, but if anyone could deal with, Prosciutto thought, it would be you — his strong, cocky, dorky partner

His views are a little more traditional, and I can see him as someone who really likes the idea of caring for others and being a provider — and he’s more than happy and willing to provide that — but at the end of the day, there’s nothing better than coming home to someone like you who isn’t afraid to challenge him and will speak their mind. He already has to pretty much babysit Pesci half the time he’s at work, and the other men can act immature and really get on his nerves, so it’s just nice to have someone he doesn’t have to put on airs around, and he finds your sassiness sexy

He worries about you, of course, but he’s well aware that you are someone who can and will put up a fight and not let yourself be taken down without resistance. Also, he is a little more inclined to share certain aspects of his job with you, as he believes that you have the emotional capacity to handle some of the more grim details — even though he still leaves the majority of it out for your sake. He likes that he doesn’t have to sugarcoat things with you, and it’s good for him to have someone to talk to

Your stubbornness and arrogance can lead to arguments, but more often than not they end up with one of you kissing the other or the cliché of daring the other person to shut up. At first, things were a little more explosive, as he is a very dominating person and was not at all used to being challenged in that sort of way, but as your relationship deepened, he grew to like your little spats and that cute glint in your eyes when you become angry

Because of your stubbornness, it may be more difficult for you to apologize, but he won’t hesitate to call you out and tell you that you’re in the wrong, and he’s very calm and level-headed about doing so. When he’s in the wrong however, he usually comes around and apologizes rather quickly, but he can be kind of petty about it. He does make it up to you though, always. One of the benefits of him being a little old-fashioned is that he’s very keen on the idea of not going to bed angry

The more caring, nurturing side of him finds your dorkiness endearing, and whether or not its a television series or movie that you’re geeking out over, or even just a goofy joke, he’s happy to indulge you and listen to what you have to say. He’s not always the most up-to-date on pop culture references or media, so he doesn’t always get what you’re talking about, but he loves you so it doesn’t really matter to him what you’re going on about (you could ramble about the history of something as inane as can openers and he’d still say “that’s interesting, Amore”) He’s a sucker for all things domestic, really

Now this relationship may be a little more turbulent then the others, as I can see the two of you being very loud, but it’s very sweet in its own way

He’s a huge hothead, and with your stubborn demeanor the two of you will most definitely butt heads, but his outbursts are something that you’ve come to expect and they’re never filled with any real malice — it’s just the way that he is. The rest of the gang like to tease you both about being an old married couple, and you think it’s cute, playfully tugging on his cheek while he’s fuming and Formaggio and Illuso are cracking up in the corner

Ghiaccio will be the type of boyfriend to feed into your ego and because you’re his s/o, everything has to be perfect for you, for you deserve nothing less in his eyes. He can and will chew out the waiter if you so much as comment on your food being dry or too salty or just not up to par

As far as your dorkiness is concerned, Ghiaccio may not always understand “what you’re going on about this time”, but he’ll still listen and try to indulge you with some commentary here and there, which will most likely come across to an unknown spectator as pure sass and displeasure, but you know better; the snark comes with the territory of dating the ice man -- and you love it

If he ever catches wind of someone making fun of you or even just making an offhand comment about you or something that you like to geek out over, then he has no qualms about going off on them

#risotto x reader #prosciutto x reader #ghiaccio x reader #risotto nero #prosciutto #ghiaccio #la squadra #dedicatedrisottosimp #thank you for my first request doll!

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thiswasinevitableid · 3 years

Note

54. I’m not sure what you think I said, but you start calling me an asshole and whip a ruler at me and somehow, we both end up in detention

Indruck, sfw, please?

Here you go! Content note: spiders appear at one point.

I based some of this AU--namely the concept of the Crucible and how magic is channeled--on the Carry On series by Rainbow Rowell. And Duck is trans in this, because any good wizarding school is inclusive.

After three years at Amnesty Academy, Duck is used to the objects being magically propelled through the air. But a ruler zipping through the air and smacking the back of his head is a new, unpleasant experience.

He tracks it to two chairs to his left, the new third year with the silver hair. He hasn’t even been here a day, what the fuck the is his problem?

“Hey, what the hell man?”

“You know very well what.”

“Uh, no I don’t, and I don’t appreciate bein hit with a fuckin ruler!”

“The maybe think before you insult someone next time!”

“I didn’t fuckin insult you! I don’t even know your name!”

“Ahem.” Ned, their Charms professor, looks down at them reproachfully, “gentlemen, while I know the review of Zone of Truth is rather dull, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t entertain yourselves with mindless conflict.”

“Sorry, Ned.” Duck mumbles, sending his pencil shooting below desk level to whack the other guy in the leg at the exact same moment he whips his pen at Duck’s hand.

“OW!”

Ned sighs, “I hate to do this, but-”

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

“Detention! Lovely, my first day here and I’m in trouble. Thank you so much, Duck Newton, for landing us here.”

“You started it!” He growls as they take their seats. God, he hopes this isn’t one of Woodbridge’s days.

“Huh, only two.” Mama wipes her boots on the mat, closes the door behind her, “Afternoon, Duck. And…”

“Indrid.” Says his nemesis, “It is nice to meet you Professor C-” he cocks his head, “you really prefer I call you ‘Mama?’”

“Yep. Never could get behind that more formal stuff. Let some of the first years call me ‘Ms. Mama’ if they really need to feel like they’re showin some deference.”

Mama is deputy Headmistress of Amnesty. The only reason she’s not fully in charge is that she’s not a witch and some families object to that. So The Quell technically runs the school while Mama does most of the actual day to day work. She also teaches a course of non-magic practical skills because, “some things you can’t magic your way out of. Like taxes.”

Duck loves her class and, while he doesn’t understand why someone would opt into this weirdness, he admires the guts it takes as a fifteen year old human to walk into a wizarding school and declare that there was plenty you could learn there even though you couldn’t so much as send a spark from your fingers.

As he and Indrid watch the clock tick down, Mama pulls a bag from her satchel. The contents are cookies, which she offers to each of them.

“Barclay tryin’ out new recipes?”

“Course he is. Kid is gonna be the best damn kitchen witch in the country by the time he graduates. Guess he’s plannin to spend the summer drivin around and learnin the food magic of different regions.” She smiles, “bet you’ll never guess who’s goin’ with him.”

“Joe?”

“Bingo. Apparently he wants to study niche cultural magic.”

Duck’s pretty sure there’s another motive; sharing a van bed with Barclay. It sounds fun, roving the country, discovering new places with someone handsome by your side.

All that’s by his side is a glower hiding behind red glasses.

“Mama? I, ah, would it be possible for me to leave five minutes early? I’m supposed to get my pairing from the Crucible tonight.”

The older woman looks between the two of them, “Better tell me how you landed here first. Ned just said it was an argument.”

“He threw a ruler at me outta nowhere.”

“It was not, you know what you said.”

“The last thing I said before you hit me was ‘“nah, man’ when Billy offered me a pizza roll from his lunch.”

Indrid goes still, “Oh. I, ah, I misheard you. I thought you said 'mothman.' I apologize. I ought to have given you the benefit of the doubt.”

He seems so suddenly downtrodden that Duck shrugs, “Yeah, you should have. But it ain’t the worst thing that’s happened to me here. Not by a long shot.”

“No kiddin” Mama leans back on the desk, “Two of you can go at five til.”

His evening turns uneventful after that; dinner, hanging out with Juno and Aubrey, half doing homework and half fucking around on his phone in his room (the agreement between the school and the government is that a long as the students don’t post vidoes of themselves doing sick stunts with magic, the government will ignore any explosions and/monsters in the vicinity of the school).

He’s never had a roommate; when the Crucible spat out his name in fire on his first day, there was no other name with it. Almost everyone else rooms in pairs or trios. So his belongings are strewn about the tiny cabin that makes up his home away from home. Which is why, when the door creaks open at ten p.m, he sits up and prepares to fire off a spell.

Indrid stands in the doorway, one bag over his shoulder and another in his hand. He looks tired.

“Hello, Duck. Ah, I guess that one is my bed, then.”

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

The class schedules for Amnesty are generated by the heart of the school itself. Indrid isn’t entirely sure what that means, but the heart must not be terribly creative. It stuck him in divination class. He’s been seeing the future since he was five, managing it with his drawings since he was eight. Even the professor has no idea what to do with him, since the images come in like a garbled T.V signal when he uses a crystal ball and the cup shattered when he tried to read tea leaves.

At least Barclay gave him a conciliatory caramel while they swept up the shards. It made him feel a bit better, though whether that’s due to enchantment or Barclay being exceedingly good at cooking is hard to say.

And now he has to go to “Magical Weaponry.” Magical Defense he understands; there are still lots of malicious forces out there, or even just everyday evils that it’s good to be able to ward against. Plus, Vincent is a good professor, enthusiastic and understanding.

Professor Minerva is just as enthusiastic but twice as loud. This is their first day in the actual gym, as opposed to at a blackboard, and his visions suggest it’s going to go poorly for him. As it should; he’s not a fighter, he’s a disaster.

At Amnesty, magic is channeled through objects. Most people use wands or their hands but some, like Aubrey, use jewelry (a necklace from her mother) or another accessory.

Duck Newton uses a sword. Or he’s trying to. The sword seems to be winning.

“Exert your will on him, Duck Newton, he answers to you!”

“I answeeer to only the capable.”

“Shut up, Beacon.” Duck adjusts his grasp, but nothing happens until he drops the sword and sends a spell through his fingers. The target explodes. Indrid suddenly feels a bit better about his own probable performance.

Duck notices him, indicates the practice area next to him is clear. While they started off poorly, his roommate is doing his best to demonstrate southern hospitality. He invites Indrid to eat with him, helps him when his visions offer no help in navigating the grounds, and even lent him a blue and green shirt (Amnesty's colors) for his first Spirit Day. Duck is the best thing to happen to him in his first month here.

By the time class is over, they have six broken targets, a shredded mat, and a knife that is now a very confused frog between them. They manage to laugh about it, even as Duck scoops up the amphibian and tucks him into his shirt pocket.

It’s then that Indrid realizes he has a crush.

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

“You comin to the game tonight?” Juno measures her sapling.

“Assumin nothin comes up and nobody’s tryin to kill me, you know I’ll be there.” He loves cheering Juno on during her soccer games (hey, not everything has to be magic based, even at a wizarding school).

“Drat.”

The hissed frustration draws his attention to the far end of the work table. Indrid is trying to coax his Venus Flytraps to perk up, but they remain brown and limp.

“Need some help?”

“Please, as you clearly know what you’re doing.” Indrid tilts his head towards the sapling pine tree Duck is working on. If he does his growing spells right, he’ll be able to take it home as a Christmas Tree during winter break.

“You tend to picture words or, uh,pictures when you do your spells?”

“Images work best. The trouble is that the futures sometimes make it difficult for me to picture a spell clearly.”

“What if I try describing how I’d see it and you picture what I say?”

“It’s worth a try.” Indrid closes his eyes.

“Okay. Think about the roots drawin water up from the soil, about the traps absorbin nutrients from prey. That brown is goin green as they do, they’re stems are growin stronger…” he grins as the plant turns bright green, it’s mouths open, “hey, ‘Drid, look”

“Oh!” Indrid flaps his hands, “it worked! Now I can keep them healthy and big andohno, nono not again.”

The table cracks and collapses as the plant turns gigantic, blocking out the light from the greenhouse roof.

“Holy fuck, that’s great!”

“Language, sport, but I agree.” Thacker, the head of the magical Horticulture classes, whistles as he looks the plant up and down, “this is mighty impressive Indrid. Wonder if we could use it on some pumpkins come fall…”

“I don’t recommend it, unless you want them to chase people.” Indrid points to one of the heads, which is swaying in the air and lowering closer to him. It snaps and he leaps back, falling to a pile of potting soil. Thacker raises his walking stick and the flytrap returns to its proper size.

Duck helps Indrid up, but his friend stays quiet through the end of class and on the walk back to their room.

“You know it ain’t anythin to be ashamed of, right?” Duck flips on the light, “we all fuck up spells now and then. Hell, Aubrey is on track to be the best spellcaster this school’s ever seen and she still has trouble.”

“But mine go haywire constantly” Indrid flops, dejected, onto his bed, “forget mastering my powers, I’ll be lucky if I graduate able to keep them in check. If I graduate at all.” His hand searches the bed blindly; Duck sets the weighted, plush bat into so Indrid can set it on his chest.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never lasted more than a year at a magical school. Or a non-magical one. I started at Mt Vernon when I was fifteen. Tried Deep Hollow and Shasta the year after that. I’m powerful but I can’t seem to channel it well, and three different schools decided I was more trouble than I was worth.”

“Bullshit.” Duck rests a hand on Indrid’s knee, “you’re strugglin with somethin; that means you need more help, not less. And if anyone gets it into their heads to kick you outta Amnesty, I’ll raise a goddamn ruckus.”

Indrid chuckles, quiet and disbelieving.

“I’m serious. You know Aubrey and them would side with me, and Joe knows school policy well enough he could probably find a reason why them tryin to get rid of you was against the rule.”

“Thank you.” Indrid’s smile is a rare flower, fragile and stunning.

“You want one of those calm-down caramels Barclay made?”

“Please.”

Duck grabs the box from the cabinet of their little kitchenette, then snags a Coke and a pineapple soda from the fridge. Indrid is no longer horizontal, is instead sitting with his back to the wall so Duck has space to join him.

Under the fizz of fresh bubbles, his friend murmurs, ‘“Have people really tried to kill you?”

“Yep. Someone sent an assassin after me my first year, and there was a Dire wolf on the grounds last winter that was clearly locked on to my scent. Perk of bein a Chosen One.” He grumbles as he swigs his drink.

“...Who on earth sends an assassin after a fifteen year old?”

“Right?! Fuck if I know, they never got any information out of the guy. Fuckin prophecy I swear, I didn’t even want these powers, let alone to be some kind of hero.”

“I sympathize.” Indrid rests his head on Duck’s shoulder, “there are prophecies around my birth as well.”

Duck clunks their bottles together, “To bein’ fucked over by stuff we can’t control.”

Indrid drains his soda, then perks up, “Oh! Oh dear, you should go if you want to be there for Juno’s match.”

“Come with me?” Duck can’t get the image of the two of them sharing a giant pretzel while smushed thigh to thigh on the bleachers out of his head.

His friend grins, “Of course.”

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

Duck hoped, after his not-great time in middle school, that a magic academy would be asshole free. But no, there are assholes everywhere, and these ones have even more tools for tormenting their targets. He’s never been one, nor have any of his friends. The one time someone tried to bully Barclay, Dani sicked three spectral hummingbirds on them until they apologized.

Indrid, odd and new, is an easy target, though he seems to hold his own just fine (and his proximity to the most powerful witch in school does scare off many potential antagonists). But three guys in their Magical Defense class have zeroed in on him.

They’re standing in line to practice against an evil eye when Indrid’s glasses, the ones he doesn’t take off even when he sleeps, hit the floor by Duck’s feet. Duck scrambles to grab them before they get stepped on, wondering why everyone is making such a fuss. Then he turns and backs up in alarm.

An eight foot tall moth creature is where Indrid should be, red eyes wide and claws clicking together anxious.

“Who let that thing in here?” Someone yells from behind him.

Indrid’s antenna flatten.

“Fuck, wasn’t expecting him to be that big a freak” one of the bullies scoffs.

Black wings twitch.

“Newton, give him the glasses back so we don’t have to look at him!”

Indrid trills, upset, and leaps into the air at the same moment Aubrey yells, “that’s enough” and Vincent shouts a reminder about no flames in enclosed spaces and also detention for you three. Duck is to busy climbing out the window Indrid flew through to pick up the details.

One two-story fall later, he’s chasing a dark shape into the Monongahela forest. While the parts of the woods near his hometown of Kepler are non-enchanted, this chunk is magic down to the moss (he plans to write his final year project on how those halves of forest mesh on an ecological level). One of the worst aspects of the enchanted portions is their tendency to re-shape around travelers. His usual way around this is to have an unwavering sense of where he’s going and pretend the woods are giving him an unchanging path to get there. But that trick does fuck-all when he doesn’t know his destination.

After two hours of searching he’s no closer to finding Indrid, it’s getting dark, and he’s debating heading back to the school for help. He hasn’t been this deep in the woods since he fled the Dire Wolf, and he knows the deeper you go into the trees, the wilder the magic becomes. Bad news for him, even worse for his friend who's out there somewhere, upset and alone.

Eight gigantic eyes glitter at him from the dirt, and he quickly rearranges who has it worse right now.

Throwing a burst of light into the trapdoor spiders eyes buys him enough time to bolt to a tree and climb. As soon as it crawls free of its burrow he freezes; if he’s remembering right, they use vibrations to locate prey.

Fuck, that thing is the size of a VW Beatle. Why is that even a thing? No spider needs to be this big!

In spite of his stillness, it spies him and sets its forelimbs on the tree-trunk. There’s nothing else for it; he draws Beacon, pictures the spider shrinking, and casts his spell.

A soft crunch of leaves signals it hitting the ground, now an unremarkable size for an arachnid. Just as he steps down a branch, a second trap door opens and an enraged spider bursts out, looking for it’s friend. When it can’t find it, it turns and snaps its mandibles at Duck. This time, Beacon does nothing, no matter how Duck commands and curses as his eight-legged doom gets closer.

A crackle of electricity and then this spider disappears as well. On the other side of the trunk, red eyes regard him with worry, “are you hurt?”

“Nah, all in one piece thanks to you.” He holds out his hand, “you wanna head back?”

“Yes, please.” Indrid flaps to the ground, Duck following him on foot and then turning them towards campus, “you did not need to come look for me.”

“Course I did, not gonna let my friend get swallowed up by the forest. Oh, here” he holds out the red glasses, “you want these back?”

“Not just yet. That is, if this form is not too alarming to you.”

Duck takes in the glossy feathers, the charming ruff, the way the face is still obviously Indrid yet excitingly new, “I’m good.”

Light flickers from black claws, stars and flowers spinning out with ease, “It’s so much easier when I’m like this. I never foresaw my disguise charm being an issue, but the older I’ve gotten the more it seems to influence my ability to control my spells. But, well, you saw how people reacted. Even you were startled.”

“In my defense, I thought you’d been eaten by, well, you.” Duck casts the same spell, vines of light chasing the red flowers, “I’m still sorry, though. You ain’t horrible like this, ‘Drid; you’re fuckin stunnin. Never seen anyone as incredible as you.”

Indrid stops, looking down at him, “Do you truly mean that?”

Duck rises on his toes, pecking his cheek, “Yeah, I do.”

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

The Halloween Formal is the most elaborate event at Amnesty. Indrid feels that if there’s any day he’s within his rights to be in his true form, it’s when everyone else is dressed as monsters.

He doesn’t have a date. He thought Duck was in the same predicament. Then his friend left before he was half-done grooming his feathers, saying he needed to get flowers for his hot date.

Ah well. At least Indrid will get to see him there and spend some time with his friends.

He checks his reflection in the gleaming black walls, orange and purple lights glowing and jack’o lanterns floating above his head. He adjusts his robes, the nice red ones his father sent him, and prepares to enter the ballroom.

“Hold up.”

When he turns, Duck is standing there in his black dress shirt and green tie, looking for all the world like he’s alone.

“You got one more thing to put on” He holds out a bracelet of flowers, sized to slip perfectly over Indrid’s hand. There are matching flowers pinned to one side of Duck’s hair.

“Oh. Oh my. You really-”

Duck uses a small spell to bend Indrid into a kiss; it’s a bit messy, since their mouths aren’t meant to fit together, but Indrid would not trade it for all the magic in the world.

“Yeah, ‘Drid, I really do.” With that, Duck offers his elbow and they walk arm in arm into the great hall.

#indruck #indrid cold/ duck newton #meet ugly #wizard au

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homefryboy · 3 years

Text

Important-ass announcement

Ok so a LOT’S been going on and basically I’ve been trying to break it to my parents that I can’t go thru with this law school shit; this spring semester’s gotta be my last, and I’ve gotta pursue an art career if I’m to stay sane and non-miserable...Without getting into the situation too much, I recently told my mom and she’s in “I support u no matter what but not rlly :)))” mode and I haven’t told my dad but whenever I do—the later, the better—he will be pissed. But there might be a way for me to save my ass! With MONEY! So y’all can help out by

-telling me anyone/anywhere u can think of that’d be a good place for me to apply for any job u think would benefit from my art. I ain’t relying on y’all, I’ve been applying to logo design, card design, drawing greeting cards, character design, cover designs, comics, etc. jobs online left and right, but I rlly need every chance I can get. One-time projects are good but smth long-term w/ a salary involved would be even better. Lemme know if u have ideas where I could look or smth. Just want more outside opinions is all, bc I don’t think a lot of ppl are looking to philosophy majors for artwork but idk. I did get hired to do art for a children’s book series, but the benefits of that remain to be seen

-checking out whatever kofi or “commission” thing or patreon or whatever I’ll try to get going asap. Of course I’ll look into it myself but lemme know which u think would be best. (whenever I do I’ll prolly even make an announcement on my old blog...!) I have an upwork account, but that tax withdrawal crap is driving me NUTS. Gotta start out p cheap bc I mean I draw everything on paper and edit w/ my shitty outdated phone so how much can I rlly charge ppl...? idk abt getting more advanced art programs yet, that’ll have to wait. Just think, if my art actually used L A Y E R S. But one step at a time ig.

-yes, I will work for minimum wage. Maybe even free if it’ll look good enough on my resumé. Yes, I will suck dick. If I sound desperate it’s because I kinda aaam

This isn’t so much of a “UGH PLEASE HIRE ME” post as it is a “please support me however u can post”. Send kind words, suggestions, advice, anything y’all could do would at least give me strength to try harder, and persevere in this dang world. I feel like I owe a lot to you, you rlly are a big source of willpower for me. So thanks guys. Hopefully I’ll be making some moolah soon.

#psa #boys art #me #held onto this bc I didn’t wanna look...whiny...#but I just want money for my art I c a n ‘ t

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hxney-lemcn · 3 years

Text

Seven Stages (Pt. 3)

Word Count: 1.2k

Pairing: Five Hargreeves x reader

Fandom: The Umbrella Academy

Warning: Swearing, season 2 spoilers

Main Master List | TUA Master List

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

╔═.✾. ═════════════

“Authorities are asking for help identifying several persons of interest at Dealey Plaza at the time of assassination. The FBI believes they may have been acting in concert with the alleged shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald. Vanya Hargreeves, wanted in connection with the deaths of several FBI agents inside federal building at Dealey Plaza. A Cubin exile known only as Diego, who recently escaped from the Holbrook Sanitorium. A bare-knuckle boxer with suspected mafia ties who fights under the alias “King Kong”. Allison Chestnut, a negro radical responsible for instigating and organizing the recent riots at Stadler’s lunch counter. And finally, Klaus, a controversial cult leader and known tax evader. The FBI is asking the public to be on look out for this unidentified boy and girl who they believe is being held hostage by the suspected terrorist network...”

“Well, it’s true,” Five spoke up, stealing my attention which was previously on the tv. “I do feel like I’m being held hostage most days.” I rolled my eyes but couldn’t help but slightly agree.

“God I hate that photo,” Diego muttered.

“They’re saying I instigated the riot?” Allison asked incredulously. “That’s unbelievable.”

“Look, the good news is that we restored the timeline,” Luther pointed out.

“We did stop doomsday,” I chimed in.

“Yeah, a bunch of real goddamn heroes,” Diego scoffed. “We let Kennedy die.” Again with this bullshit.

“Yeah, and now we’re the most wanted people in the world,” Allison added. Can’t we at least celebrate one victory? Five worked so hard to stop everyone from dying and they don’t even give him the time of day. She went on about how we need to hide but I knew we needed to do something else.

“Hiding isn’t gonna change anything,” I said crossing my arms. “The Commission will follow us wherever and whenever we go.”

“She’s right,” Diego agreed. “They’ll never stop.”

“I’m sorry, since when are you an expert on the Commission?” Five asked sarcastically.

“Since I got back from there,” Diego replied.

“What?” I asked not believing it.

“Yeah, they headhunted me,” Diego replied. “Offered me a job. Full time with benefits which I had to turn down.”

Five gave him the most sarcastic look before saying, “They headhunted you...the village idiot?”

“What?” Diego asked standing up straighter. “Am I not allowed to be headhunted? Only the almighty Five and his girlfriend are allowed to be in demand?” My eyes widened and I felt my cheeks flush red. I opened my mouth to argue but Five beat me to it.

“Diego, you’re not commission material, all right?” Five stated. “Got an obstinate nature to ya.”

“Who do you think it was that figured out that Vanya was the one that causes doomsday and stopped it?” Diego asks rhetorically. “Me.”

“Hey!” Klaus calls out in defiance.

“I figured it all out on the infinite switchboard,” Diego continues.

“You were on the infinite switchboard?” I asked surprised.

“Hell yeah,” Diego confirmed. “I made that machine my bitch.” Okay, not being able to listen on I sat down on the stairs in front of Allison. Everyone started to get in on the arguing so I zoned out. Why didn’t Five deny me being his girlfriend? Did he just ignore the comment? Or did he possibly feel the same? Wait did I just think feel the same? No way do I like that asshole...

“I’m leaving,” Vanya speaks up catching my attention.

“What?” Allison asks, her protective sister side showing. “To go where?”

“Sissy’s farm,” Vanya answered. “Something’s wrong with Harlan, and I need to help him.”

“Vanya, we need to stick together, okay?” Luther replies. “Now more than ever.”

“That’s why I’m telling you this,” Vanya continues. “What ever is going on with Harlan, I think I might’ve caused it.”

“How?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“He drowned, and, uh, somehow I was able to bring him back to life,” She explained. “And now it’s like we’re connected.”

“W-what does that m-mean?” Luther stuttered confused.

“I don’t know, I can’t explain,” Vanya sighed. “But I know that he need my help. I need your help too. I’m scared. And for the first time in my life I don’t want to do it alone. I want my family by my side.”

Everyone seemed to look away and I felt my stomach drop. I may have been a time assassin my entire life but damn I wasn’t this heartless.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Diego spoke up walking closer to Vanya. “We have other priorities right now.”

“Diego’s right,” Five agreed. “For once. We need to make our stand here and now.” You know what, if no one else is gonna go I might as well. I may not be her family but I can tell she’s going to go with or without them and I don’t want her to go alone.

I stood up but before I could say anything Five stopped me. He shook his head and right then I was about to do something I might regret.

“Okay,” Vanya said dejectedly. “I guess I’ll see you when I see you.” Five walked away and dragged me with him.

“What the fuck was that about!” I shouted feeling my anger rise. “If none of you assholes are gonna go with her I am!”

“We need to focus on getting back to 2019,” Five countered calmly.

“She’s your sister!” I exclaimed. “Doomsday is over! We have a little time.” He looked me in the eye and his eyebrows furrowed. It looked like he was mulling over his options. He nodded in agreement and reluctantly agreed. A small smile formed over my face knowing that he’s a major softie for his family. “Let’s go then!” I exclaimed grabbing his hand and dragging him behind me.

Allison and Diego seemed to have the same idea as us because they were already out the door. Luther looked at us, surprised that we were following. Five wiggled out of my grip and walked slightly ahead of me, opening the passenger door showing Klaus sitting there.

“Five, you...” Vanya trailed off. “You don’t have to...”

“I know,” He smirked. “You owe me one sis.” I smacked his arm and he rolled his eyes playfully. Turning to Klaus he spoke, “Children ride in the back.”

“Okay,” Klaus agreed willfully and crawled into the back making me smile. Five sat in the passenger seat and I realized there wasn’t going to be any room for me. I stood there awkwardly and Five seemed to notice and raised an eyebrow at me with a smirk.

“I can find another ride,” I smiled awkwardly. I mean can you blame me? This is like a family bonding moment and I’m just...here.

“No you don’t,” Five countered grabbing my wrist.

“You’re apart of this family now whether you like it or not,” Klaus chimed in with a giggle.

“But there’s no more room-” I got cut off by Five placing me next to him. We barely had any room and half my leg was on his. I felt embarrassed and felt my cheeks slightly heat up.

“Guy’s,” Vanya said with a happy smile. “I don’t know what to say.” I was so happy that the Hargreeves realized how important family is. The trunk opened and Luther climbed into the trunk and I had to stare forward to not laugh at how the car barely supported his weight.

“Anyone makes a fat joke and I’m outta here,” Luther said which made it even harder not to laugh. I mean I had to cover my mouth with my hand to stop myself from snorting. Vanya pulled out, the exhaust pipe dragging on the ground the entire ride.

╚═════════════.✾. ═

#tua #the umbrella academy #five #five hargreeves #fivehargreeves #xreader #x reader #five x reader #five hargreeves x reader #fivehargreevesxreader #five imagine #five hargreeves imagine #tua x reader #the umbrella academy x reader

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delusion-of-negation · 3 years

Text

top 10 (ish) ridiculous or annoying FAQs:

(click at your own discretion)

1) "kids today rely on others to do everything"

ah yes, damn those participation trophies! if it wasn't for them my hands wouldn't be fucked, and I wouldn't need people to write for me. but seriously, stop reading boomer comics, and go outside to meet some actual young people.

2) "sus that a non-american says mom"

yeah, because it's clearly the superior version, and I'm not too patriotic to concede a defeat.

3) "sweaty, the victims of abuse by catholics are real people, stop appropriating their pain just because you want to hate catholics; plus teachers abuse people just as often anyway"

so firstly, I don't hate anybody. and secondly, regarding the fact that victims really do exist, [insert "of course I know him, he's me" meme here]; although I don't often talk much about the abuse I went through or what my religious beliefs are. but, more importantly, statements like "survivors are people" can be phrased like "some people are survivors", and when you're unable to act according to the latter (like when you don't even consider that somebody might be one) then you display a failure to recognise the former - you're projecting; a survivor can't be appropriating their own pain, but you can be appropriating it to silence one. and thirdly, teachers do abuse - the problem isn't and has never been purely religion, rather that abuse is often done by somebody in a position of trust, power, and familiarity; and that the lack of a global minimum enables totally legal abuse on top of the illegal stuff. people with access and respect have more opportunity to abuse than those without, and that goes for teachers too. but, once again, you can be appropriating the pain of survivors to deflect and silence people. please remember this before you say that shit.

4) "get help/therapy"

way ahead of you - years ahead of you. but it's not magic - people who say this often act as if you'll start behaving differently overnight. not only are some things simply beyond the ability of talking therapy to completely rectify, it also takes time and has to be selective. you've got to pick your priorities, and that's definitely not whatever ship or joke you're mad at me about today. therapy is a slow, arduous process that can't guarantee results - it isn't "anti-recovery" to recognise that, it's honesty. while I've been in therapy for a long time, it is not necessarily going to change whatever you don't like about me - whether that's because it can't, because my focus now is on more important or urgent things, or because I don't want to change that.

5a) "tell your family you ship incest, see how that goes; normal people find it disgusting"

actually, some know, and they're fine with it. in fact, one prefers sibling pairings in fiction to all other dynamics because, to paraphrase, "it's a deeper level of messed up co-dependence". so unfortunately for you, my remaining family (by which I mean those not dead or cut out of my life after abuse and so forth) actually are able to distinguish between fiction and reality. plus, my reasoning for caring if they find it gross or not pertains only to recommending books and such - their opinions do not dictate my tastes.

5b) "don't sexualise/appropriate incestuous abuse" and "I bet you enjoyed being raped" and other attempts to upset me over 5a

firstly, as I've already said here, survivors can't be appropriating ourselves. in addition, you're not owed people's history or trauma - it's not okay to require people's personal information, or else you'll send anon hate and accusations of appropriation. secondly, I'm not sexualising our abuse (not just because I write horror, and so a lot of my writing is intended to be creepy, not sexy); these stories aren't about us, they're not us at all. entire dynamics/people (fictional or otherwise) aren't all going to be applicable to us or identical to us, just because they have something in common with us; they're not us and they're not accountable to us. thirdly, the fact that people send this stuff (attempting to trigger people's trauma over ships) is so much more worrying to me than somebody making our communal imaginary friends kiss. you're trying to hurt people. and finally, to the "I bet you enjoyed it" crowd (if you're at all serious): do you think you'd enjoy being in a real zombie apocalypse, alone, afraid, and really at risk of being eaten alive? a fictional scenario does not feel remotely the same as a real one. this isn't rocket science - things that look like you aren't you; fiction isn't reality; don't send anon hate. (edit: comparable "just leave me alone, I'm not hurting anyone" sentiments for yandere stuff, and anything else you decide I'm naughty for.)

6) "you'll be sent off to do manual labour once your communist revolution happens"

while I don't know why people think that I'm a communist, a dictatorial regime probably isn't going to want me to do manual labour. they're more likely to just shoot me; I'm useless and a liability. call me crazy, but something tells me that "ah yes, we shall give ze deranged cripple ze power tools" isn't the communist position.

7a) "they/them can't be singular pronouns"

yes they can, and they're used as such in both shakespeare and the bible. but you don't have to say this - I'm also okay with he/him, so you could've just used those and chilled out. also, do I look like somebody who views the rules of grammar as fully immutable and imperative?

7b) "enbies/aros/pan/etc aren't valid"

do you really think that you're going to change any hearts or minds by putting that in my ask box or under my funny maymays? chill out, it's not worth the effort - you could be planning a party (in minecraft) and having fun instead. it isn't worth my time to rant at everybody who's saying something isn't valid, updating how I'm explaining it as my opinions grow and general discourse around it evolves; I'm just who I am, somebody else is who they are - why bicker in presumptuous ways about if that's enough? it ultimately is valid, in my opinion, but that isn't an invitation to keep demanding that I debate. (edit: old posts of mine probably don't phrase things incredibly, on this or anything... I tried.)

8) "what are your politics?"

my politics are informed first and foremost by the knowledge that I'm not cut out to be some kind of leader - I don't want to be the guy who tells everyone else what to do, I just offer what seem to me like valid criticisms of how we are doing things now, and general pointers on the values and ethics that I would prefer to move towards. things like individual freedom, taking the most pacifist route where possible, trying not to give excessive power to small groups of people (governments or corporations), helping those in need even when they're not palatable, and letting me suck loads of dicks. but please refrain from decreeing me something - there's not enough information in what I said, so you'll just be filling in the blanks with assumptions. (edit: workplace democracy seems cool to me; benefits are good; fair fines and taxes; and the "sperm makes you loopy" saga: 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

9) "you're a narcissist"

no, I don't meet the diagnostic criteria. joking on the internet that you're hot doesn't make a person a narcissist. the fact that I've chosen to keep my actual self-esteem issues to myself is not proof that they don't exist - you're just not entitled to that information about me. but it's also not narcissism to really like how you look. (edit: don't throw labels around carelessly too.)

10a) "kin list?"

the fabric of the universe, a zombie, dionysus, maned wolf/arctic fox hybrid, a comedian, big gay, big rock, ambiguously partial insincerity. (edit: kin list may or may not be incomplete.)

10b) "kin isn't valid/that's just being insane"

haven't we established that I'm deranged, and that sending stuff like this on anon is simply a waste of your precious time? besides, I do not care if it's invalid or insane - it's fun, I'm happy. (edit: see 7b for my opinion on sending me yet another ask with "that's invalid" in it; I'm not in the mood to discuss the nature of validity.)

bonus: "it gets better" and "trigger list?"

as I've said before, things just don't always get better for everyone - sometimes things can't be cured or even treated, sometimes they kill you; in some cases it could get better if not for a blockade or lack of time. the world is messy. it needs to be more normalised to reassure or comfort people without relying on saying that their issue will get better or be cured. it does suck to be this ill, but it also sucks to be made out to be a lazy pessimist, just because I have the audacity to not play along. and as for the trigger list, I don't like providing people with an easily accessed list of ways to hurt my feelings or harm me - upsetting me is supposed to be challenging, and thus rewarding. if you want a cheat sheet then you're out of luck, I'm afraid.

bonus #2: "FAQ stands for frequently asked questions, it doesn't need that s at the end!"

yeah, I know, I just enjoy chaos and disarray.

bonus #3 (edit): "what are your disabilities and how exactly are they incurable and/or deadly?"

again, I don't tell the internet everything about me, especially when it poses a risk, especially not as an easily accessible list for you to refer back to whenever you feel inclined to hurt my feelings. that is understandably a sore subject. (edit: that includes physical health issues btw.)

bonus #4 (edit): "so we shouldn't be critical?"

if it wasn't clear from my answer about politics or my post in general, you can have opinions about things, and you can voice that. it's just not realistic to exist at extremes: to think that you alone should dictate what exists in fiction, or to think that people shouldn't be expressing disdain or criticism of any calibur. say how you feel about things, that's fine, but it's also fine if people find that they don't value your input. plus we're all flawed, we can all be hypocritical from time to time, we all get bitchy, and we all make mistakes, or even knowingly fuck things up. that's important to keep in mind, whether we're talking about the one being criticised or the one doing the criticising - poor choices of words, imperfect tone, or contradictory ideas are inevitably going to happen occasionally.

congrats on reaching the end! if you have, at any point, said one of these to me, you owe a hug to your nearest loved one (once it's safe).

edit: might add more links/bonus points in the future when I think of things, but it's late now. (sorry for links where prior notes in the thread have my old url, that may get a tad confusing; also, not all links are my blog or my op, since it is to illustrate points/vibes, not to self-promo.)

#don't take life too seriously #nobody gets out alive anyway #tw abuse mention #tw csa mention #tw incest mention #tw for any tws I missed #idk why I did this

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noassallclass · 3 years

Text

So my roommate spent all of today writing up a report for Critical Role as a company and I really don't know much about business stuff but I think it is fascinating. Read to the end for a wild ride.

"Okay here is my idea of how Critical Role is actually structured based on what public information exists:

At Geek and Sundry, “Critical Role” as an entity was essentially a partnership between all cast members. The only asset this partnership had was the intellectual property of CR and the only Revenue it took in was licensing that IP to Geek and Sundry. This is because Critical Role Partnership was adamant about maintaining ownership of the IP. This license then pays out between the partners. Percentage

ownership of Critical Role Partnership is divided based on money put in, and previous work done. I would be very surprised if Mercer did not own at least 25% but probably not more than 50%, and the others are probably more or less even. At this point, the cast members both draw a salary from geek and sundry as employees (or contractors), and collect drawings from the licensing of the IP and also royalties as actors. When Orion leaves, the others almost certainly force him to sell out his ownership portion and he probably gets royalties from Geek and Sundry (and later CRPLLC). At this point, this licensing agreement is the only transaction that the entity “Critical Role” actually conducts.

Geek and Sundry pays to produce, distribute, and market the show, and takes all profit. It also takes some aspects of creative control, but probably not that much, though this is listed as the reason to leave Geek and Sundry. At this point, Critical Role continues to license with Geek and Sundry’s parent company Legendary Digital Networks and incorporates their partnership into a Limited Liability Corporation “Critical Role Productions”.

The ownership split is probably kept mostly the same, unless someone decides to sell portions of their shares, but I don’t see why they would. The shareholders (or owners) at this point hire a bunch of employees. Some roles they hire themselves, like Willingham as CEO and Mercer as CCO, and some they hire outsiders like COO Ed Lopez, SVP of Marketing Rachel Romero, and VP of Business Development Ben Van Der Fluit. Those who take additional roles will take salaries for those roles, as well as a salary for acting and writing, and dividends from profits. It is likely that Lopez got a certain amount of shares because C-Suite Executives often do as bonuses because it’s non-taxed income until he sells it and it incentivizes maximizing profits because that would increase his dividends. The other employees probably did not receive shares, so as not to dilute the percentage ownership further.

Critical Role seemingly has no board of directors (it’s possible they have one which is not public), which only happens when there are so few shareholders that they can all convene and take votes (Usually less than 20 owners), implying they don’t use investors to raise cash, which is consistent with a desire to retain creative control. This also means that it is up to all of the shareholders to vote on decisions about the managers of the company instead of a board. That means the only way they could fire Willingham as Chief Executive Officer is if all of the shareholders convene and vote for his firing. Without a board of directors, which often has independent outsiders, this is typically seen as bad for the company’s interests, but is legal in this case because it’s a limited liability corporation and they do not trade on an exchange .

Over the next year or so, CRPLLC makes a new studio and Geek and Sundry gradually relinquishes the distribution rights to older episodes. At this point everyone who works towards the function of the production and distribution of shows is an employee of CRPLLC and not Legendary or Geek and Sundry. For the past couple of years, Critical Role has licensed various brand crossover products like Funko Pops and The Darkhorse Comics. Funko Pop pays CRPLLC for the character likenesses and keeps all profits. CRPLLC also produces its own merchandise like t shirts and that sexy calendar that they pay manufacturers to produce and CRPLLC makes the profit in that scenario. They also have advertising revenue, which is a straightforward revenue stream.

Throwing back to two paragraphs ago, if they don’t use investors to raise cash, how can they afford to embark on a new expensive project that wouldn’t pay out until the future? Well, they could take out a loan (ew interest), save more money in retained earnings forgoing development in other areas (what do you mean we can’t afford to redo our website?) OR

They could do an 11 million dollar kickstarter! This would allow them to retain ownership of both the company and the product, because kickstarter is essentially just buying really expensive merchandise! People will buy a 30 dollar mug if it also comes with the promise that if enough people do it, they’ll make a tv show. Kickstarter money is revenue, not financing and it’s actually against kickstarter’s rules to promise equity for backers. Instead, kickstarter backers assume the risk that investors take (albeit on a smaller individual scale) with none of the benefit besides knowing that they helped make something exist. Compare this to if I, Callie invested $11 million into CRPLLC.

If the Legend of Vox Machina completely bombs and bankrupts CRPLLC which was kickstarted: CRPLLC would have to sell off all of its assets, resolve its liabilities (pay people for work done before laying them off, pay off bank loans) and whatever is left over would be split between the owners. Do they owe you, the kickstarter backer, for not making the show? Legally no. You chose to give us that money and had to trust we would spend the money well to make a good show and we spent all our money making sure our tree leaf animation looked good and could only afford to make 2 episodes.

If the Legend of Vox Machina completely bombs and bankrupts CRPLLC and it was Calliestarted: It would still be the same, except now Callie, the person who put in a lot of money for this show, is also an owner, and at least gets a slice of that money after the debts are paid off.

If the Legend of Vox Machina is really successful and it’s kickstarted: Good job, you did it! You got a fun tv show and like a t shirt! Fun!

If the Legend of Vox Machina is really successful and it’s Calliestarted: Not only do I get my fun tv show and probably also every piece of merch that exists, I got mad paid as an owner, not just from the show itself, but as we sell more and more merchandise because I’m a part owner of the company. I then continue to make money from literally everything else the company does until I decide to sell my shares or the company goes bankrupt.

And even better news! Amazon Prime bought the streaming rights for two seasons, so now I, Callie, have even more money from that sweet sweet licensing money.

Speaking of which, it is likely that the Amazon Deal is structured as follows: Amazon pays CRPLLC to license LoVM, with the stipulation that kickstarter backers can access the first 10 episodes legally. CRPLLC pays, with Kickstarter and Amazon money, Titmouse Inc. to produce LoVM. CRPLLC makes the difference between what they paid Titmouse (variable cost, depending on ultimate cost of animating) and what Amazon paid them. Amazon makes the difference of what they paid CRPLLC and what they make at market with LoVM. Amazon is the only company that stands to profit directly from the actual product of LoVM doing well. If it does poorly, there’s the possibility it gets cancelled, meaning that CRPLLC (and maybe Titmouse if CRPLLC already commissioned the work from them) will still get paid by Amazon, but never released. It’s possible that other companies could buy the license from Amazon in this scenario. This is the risk of selling your show to another company.

CRPLLC also has one subsidiary and one associated foundation: Darrington Press LLC and The Critical Role Foundation

Darrington Press LLC is an imprint of CRPLLC created to design and produce card and board games with the Critical Role IP. DP has 3 listed employees, Ivan Van Norman as Head of Darrington Press, Darcy L. Ross as Marketing Manager, and Mercer as Creative Advisor. As a subsidiary, it is wholly owned by CRPLLC. DP pays manufacturers and contractors to design and manufacturers games and pays for its own advertising, as a separate entity from CRPLLC. DP will likely sell its products to games distributers and the Critical Role Store. If the Critical Role Store sells DP games it’s because CRPLLC bought them from DP. The relationship between DP and CPRLLC is that when DP makes a profit and pays dividends, the recipient is CPRLLC. If DP goes bankrupt and cannot pay its debts, CPRLLC is not required to pay them. CPRLLC also chooses DP’s Board of Directors, which is probably just the owners of CPRLLC. This is all very ordinary. DP has four announced games set to release in 2021, but as of yet has not released any products or made any revenue.

The Critical Role Foundation is a registered non-profit and legally distinct from CRPLLC with seemingly no employees, with Johnson as President, and 4 other Board Members: Mercer, Lopez, Romero and another person named Mark Koro, who is a figure very closely tied to critical role I will outline later. Lopez and Romero are also in a long-term relationship or perhaps marriage. It is usually considered a bad idea to have two partners on a board of directors, as a conflict of interest can arise easily. As a registered non-profit CRF’s projected breakdown of donations is 85% grants to other non-profits, 10% emergency fund allocation, and 5% admin costs (this would be where possible future employees’ salaries would come from). Board Members on non-profits traditionally don’t take salaries, but can use their role as a board member to calculate donated time as a charitable donation for tax purposes. This all seems pretty normal. It’s not stated if or how much CRPLLC itself donates to CRF, including its initial endowment, besides the donation of free advertising, as no donation matching or any other programs seem to be advertised. In terms of an initial endowment, it seems that the only money put in was immediately spent on filing fees and legal fees, meaning the initial endowment was less than $5000. As a result, CRF operates from donors and possibly is not funded at all by CRPLLC. Any money that is donated from CRPLLC’s profits to CRF would be a charitable donation and lower CRPLLC’s taxable income amount. CRF began collecting non-taxable donations in May 2019, and as of December 8, 2020 CRF has yet to publish their 2019 financial statements, so not much is publicly known of how much money is raised by CRF and if they achieved their desired breakdown.

Now to talk about Mark Koro. Koro is an executive of Governmental Affairs (some places list director and others list VP) at Qualcomm, a telecommunications technology company with an annual profit of $7.67 Billion, and is estimated to make $20 per smartphone sold. Every smartphone. Qualcomm has been sued by China, South Korea, Taiwan, the EU, and the USA for anti-competitive behaviour. Koro’s department of Governmental affairs is responsible for negotiating and bidding with governments for contracts and rights to airwave frequencies, and also lobby and develop proposals for telecommunications legislation and policy. Before this, Koro worked at the National Security Agency in their corporate relations department liaising with defence and intelligence contractors. Before this, he worked in the George H.W. Bush administration as The National Security Advance Representative. This entails preparing logistics and security for Presidential events and dispatching Secret Service Agents to respond to Presidential Threats and continued in this capacity under following administrations until 2008. Koro was also an advisor to The Deputy Director of the NSA (the second highest position in the Intelligence Agency), and was a consultant to The Lawrence Livermore National Library, which is

“self-described as a ‘premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security.’ Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering, and technology.”

These positions are all listed on Koro’s biography on the The United Nations website for the International Telecommunications Union Radiocommunication Sector (accessed Dec. 8, 2020). Mark Koro has no public associations with Charitable Work.

There is little online about Koro’s association with Critical Role, besides an article stating that Koro, as a fan of the show, in 2016 matched $50,000 worth of donations to 826LA. Koro’s associations with a monopolistic technology company, the NSA, Nuclear Weaponry, and multiple presidential administrations would be cause for alarm for many of CR’s fans, but if it were a purely professional relationship, it could be excused as including him for his business accumen, but Mark Koro is mutuals on twitter with all of the cast members and Brian W Foster, Britney Walloch-Key. This might seem like normal professional courtesy, but there is a lot of interaction between Koro’s account and Critical Role Employees’ personal accounts that reflect at least a close personal relationship between people that he would not interact with regularly just as a board member of a legally distinct organization."

P.S. 100% of Critical Role's Chief Officers are men in relationships with female subordinates.

#critrole critical #long post #i wont be able to answer too many questions as i am not a business major like my roommate is #its about the transparency for me #also theres more but this post is so long as it is

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kaelio · 3 years

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“A short premier on the various things that can be done through the IRS, since it constantly comes up and it is important to understand the differences: 1) Tax Deduction: This reduces your income before the income is taxed. So if you have a $10,000 deduction, make $100,000 and pay a 33% tax rate, the deduction comes off the top so that you pay 33% of $90,000. Your taxes go from $33.33k to $30k, making the deduction worth $3,333 to you. In other words, a deduction is worth the nominal amount times your marginal tax rate (not effective tax rate, because it takes money off the top). A tax deduction helps only people who pay taxes, and helps the rich more than the poor (because they pay a higher marginal tax rate). Famous tax deductions are the charitable donation tax deduction (in essence, any money you donate to charity is not counted as your income), and the mortgage interest deduction (any interest you pay on a mortgage is deducted from your taxes). For individuals, often you can "itemize" deductions (list them all out, and claim each one), or take the standard deduction (effectively going *shrug* just assume my deductions total $12k - but if you do this with rare exceptions you don't get to then claim individual deductions). In practice, if you have someone do your taxes they do it both ways and claim whichever gives you a bigger deduction. In practice, tax deductions are generally argued for less on the basis of helping people and more about serving as a way to affect behavior (such as the mortgage interest deduction being thought to have increased home ownership; the exact effects in practice are of course debated). 2) Tax Credit (non-refundable): First - "non-refundable" isn't usually part of the name, but tax credits by default are generally non-refundable. A tax credit reduces your tax bill dollar for dollar. If I have a $10k tax credit, I make $100k, and I have the same 33% tax rate, my tax bill goes from $33.33k to $23.33k. A tax credit thus does not have the same effect where it's more valuable the richer you are and the higher marginal tax rate you pay. However, if a tax credit is non-refundable, it is not useful to people who pay no taxes at all, or pay few enough taxes that they cannot use the full credit. Assume I make $20k and pay only a 10% tax rate. The same $10k tax credit reduces my taxes from $2k to $0 - but I lose the remaining $8k of benefit. These kind of tax credits are obviously more valuable to individuals than tax deductions (even people who lose most of the credit benefit far more than a deduction of the same size) but the very poor are cut out from benefiting from them to the same extent. And usually, because these are non-refundable, you get the benefit only at tax time. If you're getting a refund anyway that will seem like the government is paying you because the tax credit will dollar-for-dollar increase your refund check, but in reality it's just reducing your overall tax burden and giving you back money you gave the government previously. 3) Refundable Tax Credit: A refundable tax credit fixes the problem in (2), that the tax credit does not help those that pay little or no taxes. The credit being "refundable" means that to the extent that the credit reduces the taxes you pay below $0, the government cuts you a check. So to take our $20k person from before: if they earn $20k, and pay a tax rate of 10%, they initially owe $2k in taxes. The $10k tax credit wipes out $2k, leaving their tax at $0. But the remaining $8000 is not lost - instead, the government cuts a check to the individual for $8k. So, now that we understand all of those, why do refundable tax credits even exist? Why would you go through this process where they're applied to taxes first, instead of just sending out a $10k check to everyone and they pay $2k later on? It's because of tax refunds. To avoid cheating on income taxes - which was rampant - virtually everyone in the US's employer withholds taxes from their paycheck, and sends them to the IRS. These are usually a little more than you actually owe, because of tax deductions, so you get a refund at tax time. In other words, every year the IRS sends out a check to a large portion of the united states population. No other agency distributes money on this scale. So if you want to, say, send $1,400 to everyone in the country, you have two options. First, you can stand up an entirely new bureaucracy of Sending Checks To People which will take ages to get set up. Sending checks to hundreds of millions of people is hard work! That will take a lot of time, and a lot of money. Or: you can structure the $1,400 as a refundable tax credit to which everyone is entitled to (ignoring the income cutoffs for now). If you do that, you can distribute the money through the IRS - which already has the capability set up to make payments on that scale, has bank account information to do it automatically for a huge portion of the population. You're just using the same mechanism that tax refunds use - and nothing requires you to only use that method once a year at tax filing time. And, if you want, it's much easier to layer on a "no rich folks" restriction on the money by going through the IRS - but you'd be going through the IRS anyway even if you didn't. Formally calling it a refundable tax credit instead of just a "direct payment" is a legal fiction to let you use pre-existing infrastructure. It's like encoding a data stream as a .mpeg file so you can use pre-existing cable video wiring. So when people are posting about "tax credits" vs. "direct payments" - on a federal level, a direct payment is a refundable tax credit. That's just how you structure things so the federal government can make the payments. Now, if it's not refundable, if it's claimable only at tax time, or if it's a tax deduction - those can all be different things. But if you don't understand that the federal government's only real way to make direct payments to people is the IRS, you'll see things like "tax credit" and not realize what that means. In some cases the feds use other infrastructure - for example, using state unemployment insurance to direct additional funds to unemployed people. That can, in some cases, be the right move, and in that case it won't be a tax credit. But that's just a choice made about the most effective way to get money from the federal treasury to someone's pocket, not really something inherently different compared to a refundable tax credit.” - evil weasel

#tax stuff #uspol #politics

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rametarin · 3 years

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Between Rachel Dolazel and that ‘trans Korean’ guy..

I sincerely hope we’ve had enough of the nonsense brought on by postmodernism.

It’s one thing for the struggle for transrights to get conflated with the ‘Gender Theory’ crap, because it’s close enough one can confuse the real thing for the philosophical predatory mimic that is Gender Theory. One requires tolerance and asterisks in respect for a physical and mental condition. One requires arguing that the existence of trans people must mean there’s no such thing as a normal sex/gender conformation and argue to socially redo the entire relationship between body and sex around the lens to be trans is normal and just different.

But Intersectional Feminism, is in the position that Radical Feminism found itself in right before the Intersectionals threw them off their progressive Marxist high horse to replace them with Intersectionality and higher extent Gender Theory, rejecting biological materialism in the process.

What do I mean by that?

It’s simple. Radical Feminism believed that because all minority groups belonged to the female, “class,” that meant women were the natural diverse minority to lead. That meant women should lead, and meant any woman was able to speak up on behalf of any woman and their assorted minority status. This is what led to the entitled white girl/woman climbing on every soap box to talk shit to every white boy/man since the 60s.

Radical Feminism adopted the idea of demographic as class, the idea, “the nature of different classes is one struggles to dominate and oppress the other. One always absolutely oppresses, the other is the oppressed,” and so attributed that to being male and female. When radical feminism talks about oppression, they do not just mean cultural or legal practices on the books, they mean the very nature of being human makes a woman oppressed by a man, and that’s just the permanence and static of the situation that, left unchallenged by Marxist ideas of legal and social equality (putting women on a pedestal by ‘society,’ so they can live with the benefits of technology and infrastructure without even having to SEE a man, nor thank them, just expect a modern life as a given and paid for by men’s taxes) then women would just innately be oppressed and suffer as is the nature of their being.

Radical Feminism adopted critical sex theory and class struggle theory, but only accepted the arbitrary class definition as far as imagining their sex as oppressed. However, the devil in the details soon found them as oppressor, themselves.

Oppressor of the transgendered woman, whom was not allowed, according to radical feminism, into their woman-only clubs, their woman-only covens, their woman-only endowments, scholarships, grants for higher education, their woman-only health spas, gyms and other gender apartheid organizations. Suddenly according to the convenient logic radical feminism used to try to substantiate the idea society owed them shit because their natural state was oppression, they were now oppressors and bigots for even opposing transwomen in their club. Because of the nature of how it was argued.

Gender Theorists argued, 1.) Transgendered is a demographic minority. 2.) You listen to demographic minorities. 3.) Gender is an identity, be it male or female or other and align with sex or not. 4.) You denying their gender is no different from the heteronorms denying homosexuality’s validity because it’s inconvenient. You’re basically part of the patriarchy.

And just like that, radfems became, “bio-essentialist,” according to this big brain logic of competing classes and demographics and what you’re allowed to say to reprimend or deny them vs. yourself, a larger demographic that inherently oppresses the smaller demographic, whom is always right, must always be listened to.

Well, a funny thing happens when you apply this logic to races and cultures.

The difference between a black man and a white man is largely aesthetic and the genetic differences are very minute. Compared to something like sex, where two different chromosome sets are like two different hardware companies, it’s largely the same stuff between two different men of, “different races.” Just, different expression of the same existing DNA.

And if you entertain ‘races as cultures,’ like a Capital B Black or Capital W White, then it’s no different, logically, from divorcing sexual expression in psychology from the concept of, ‘gender,’ as divorced from biology. Where one can be a whole opposite sex because gender is attitude and culture, not a part of your physiology (according to Gender Theorists.)

By the very rules and laws and theory of Class Struggle Theory and gender theory, these rules SHOULD also apply to races. As batshit stupid as they are, it’s logically consistent that Rachel Dolazel or whats-his-face, the, “trans Korean” guy take this stupid theory to its stupid logical extreme and declare they can be, “trans racial.”

This will go one of two ways; Postmodernist theory tied to gender will tie to race, and tomorrow’s minority will be transracial. Transblack, Transasian and Transwhite will become things, people will be federally barred from disrespecting or attacking them for their life decisions to be what they feel inside because, “races don’t exist and there is only culture.”

Or, the next generation, cis, trans and all, will see the similarities between transracialism and Gender Theory, and throw the whole theory out, offended and disgusted.

But, we’ll still have trans rights, because you don’t need postmodernism or Gender Theory for transgender rights to exist or be respected. Just acknowledge some people neurologically are wired different, nothing we can (currently) do about it, if ever, and asterisks to acknowledge exception to the norm. None of this, “well we’re respecting the arbitrary existence of transgendered people.. that must mean all sex/gender is arbitrary!” shit.

So!! There’s my prediction. The Intersectionals will eventually be challenged, internally, with people that argue race itself is a culture, culture is not biological, and you CAN convert and IDENTIFY your way into it, and anyone that does not agree, they’ll consider to be tantamount to a Nazi for bioessentialist thinking.

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lifepros · 3 years

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#12950

You can avoid paying taxes legally on capital gains by using a self directed roth ira

Wondering how to avoid paying taxes on cryptocurrency investments? Here, we discuss the tax advantages of investing in crypto with a traditional or Roth IRA. Paying taxes on crypto is a major hassle, requiring you to report every trade, purchase, sale, or exchange to the IRS.

The good news is there’s an easy way to invest in crypto tax-free. And you don’t have to renounce your citizenship, start a business in Puerto Rico, or open an offshore life insurance policy.

It’s called a crypto IRA, and it works like any traditional or Roth IRA, providing you a tax-advantaged or tax-free method for investing in virtual currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana.

Before explaining how to avoid paying crypto taxes with an IRA, though, let’s take a look at the basics of cryptocurrency taxes.

What You Need to Know About Crypto and Taxes Crypto tax laws themselves aren’t actually that complicated.

Like other assets—such as gold, stocks, or bonds—the IRS classifies crypto as property. As a result, you don’t pay taxes on Bitcoin until you sell or trade it. (Keep in mind that this also applies to using profits from investing in crypto to purchase non-crypto items.)

Reporting crypto earnings on your taxes, on the other hand, can be confusing and time-consuming. For starters, you’ll need to fill out several tax forms—including the 1040, Form Schedule D, and Form 8949, to name a few. This includes reporting every sale or trade, the amount you originally paid, the sale price, and the date of the sale.

To make things more difficult, while many crypto exchanges allow you to download transaction records as an Excel or CSV file, not all are so helpful. Some, for example, only provide your transactions for the last month or quarter—if at all.

Whatever the case, the burden is on you to correctly report each and every taxable event. This includes:

Sales of crypto Trades for other coins Exchanges for USD or other currencies Purchases using crypto Additionally, if you are participating in decentralized finance (DeFi) yield farming or staking and earn tokens as a result, your earnings are subject to taxation as income.

Determining Capital Gains vs. Capital Losses Because the taxable value of property is based on capital gains or losses, you only pay taxes on cryptocurrency if you see a capital gain or other income event. These include staking rewards, yield farming, and air drops. In the event of a capital loss, individual filers can deduct up to $3,000 from their taxable income, depending on things like income and tax rate.

To calculate a capital gain or loss on a sale of crypto, subtract the price you paid (called the tax basis) from the amount you sold it for.

For example, let’s say you bought a single Bitcoin for $4,000 in early 2019 and sold it for $34,000 in 2020. In this case, you would have owed the IRS taxes on the $30,000 capital gain.

The same applies to trades. Because in this case, you’re essentially cashing in on the value of one coin to put it toward another.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Cryptocurrency Capital Gains Tax Time is also a factor when it comes to crypto and capital gains taxes, as it determines what tax rate you will pay. If you sell Bitcoin for a profit within a year of purchase, it’s considered a short-term gain. However, if you wait more than a year before selling, it’s considered a long-term gain.

Predictably, the tax rate differs between long-term and short-term capital gains for crypto taxes:

Short-term capital gains are taxed as part of your regular income. Depending on which of the seven income brackets you fall under, you’ll pay between 10% and 37%. Long-term capital gains taxes are not considered part of your normal income. As a result, you typically pay lower tax rates than you’d pay for short-term capital gains: Either 0%, 15%, or 20%, with most people paying either no tax or 15% tax on long-term gains. Clearly, there’s a tax advantage to HODLing. But what if you could avoid paying taxes on crypto altogether? Or at the very least, pay less in taxes while letting your potential returns compound over time by reinvesting?

Enter the individual retirement account (IRA).

How to Avoid Taxes on Cryptocurrency with an IRA By investing in cryptocurrency with an IRA, you can take advantage of the tax benefits traditionally associated with retirement accounts.

Like 401(k) or 403(b) accounts, IRAs are retirement investment accounts that offer special tax advantages—if you wait until age 59 ½ to make a withdrawal or qualify for an early withdrawal exception.

While we’ll be focusing on the two most common, be aware that there are four types of IRAs:

Traditional Roth Self-employed pension (SEP) Savings incentive match plan for employees (SIMPLE) It is worth noting, however, that SEP and SIMPLE IRAs work the same as traditional IRAs, only with higher yearly contribution limits and different rules around income.

How to Invest in Crypto Tax-Free with a Roth Crypto IRA Roth IRAs have been attracting a lot of media attention lately. While these reports have prompted questions about wealthy investors using Roth IRAs as tax shelters of sorts, companies like Alto are helping ordinary investors realize the true potential of these retirement plans.

Why are so many wealthy investors housing massive investments within Roth IRAs? Unlike traditional IRAs, which we’ll discuss in a moment, investments in Roth IRAs are not tax deductible. Instead, they offer a potentially greater benefit: Roth IRAs allow your investment to grow completely tax-free, so long as you wait until six months after turning 59 to make your first withdrawal and you’ve had a Roth account for at least five years. Not to mention, there is no requirement to begin taking minimum distributions at age 72, as with other IRAs.

When it comes to crypto, this is huge. No matter how many times you sell or trade crypto, or how much your investments grow, you won’t pay a dime in taxes—either in capital gains or when you go to withdraw. Even if you had invested $1,000 in Bitcoin in 2011—the equivalent of around $3 million today—had you done so within a Roth IRA, you would owe nothing in taxes.

So with tax-free withdrawals, why would anyone invest in a traditional IRA?

Roth IRA Contribution Limits Explained When Congress created Roth IRAs, they were aware that tax-free withdrawals could be abused, so they placed income caps on contributors. And while it is possible to roll over another IRA, 401(k), or 403(b) by way of what is called a backdoor Roth IRA, you can’t actively contribute if your income is over a certain level. You’ll also need to pay a one-time tax.

In 2021, individuals whose modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) is $140,000 or more (and couples whose MAGI is $208,000 or more) are ineligible to contribute to a Roth IRA.

How to Invest in Crypto Tax-Advantaged with a Traditional Crypto IRA Just because traditional IRAs don’t offer tax-free withdrawals doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from investing in Bitcoin through a traditional crypto IRA. It could work out to your advantage.

If you currently have a larger income than you anticipate during retirement, you may benefit from tax-deductible investing up front and paying income tax on your distributions. That’s because you may be in a lower tax bracket at the time of withdrawal.

Not only that, contributions to a traditional IRA are tax-deductible. That means you can write off up to $6,000 a year—$7,000 a year if you’re 50 or older. In other words: Tax-deductible crypto investing.

Pros & Cons of Cryptocurrency in an IRA If you’ve been wondering “How do I avoid paying taxes on Bitcoin?” a traditional or Roth crypto IRA may be the best way for you to invest in digital assets. Here are the pros and cons of investing crypto in an IRA.

Pros: Investments in crypto via a traditional IRA are tax-deductible. Only pay income taxes upon withdrawing from a traditional IRA—which, depending on your income at the time of withdrawal, could mean a lower tax rate than had you paid a capital gains tax.* Never pay any taxes—capital gains or income—with a Roth IRA.* Reporting IRAs on your taxes is quick and easy compared to reporting crypto gains. All you have to report are your IRA contributions, and your custodian will also help with tax reporting. You can roll 401(k) or other IRA investments into a CryptoIRA account, allowing you to exceed the yearly IRA contribution limit. Cons: Until recently, with products like Alto CryptoIRA™, investing in crypto through an IRA was accessible only to the savviest of investors—and usually required a sizable investment. You can’t “cash out” your crypto investments before turning 59 1/2 without paying an early withdrawal tax penalty. You can’t move current, non-IRA crypto investments into an IRA. Yearly investment contributions are capped at: $6,000 a year ($7,000 if you’re age 50 or older) in traditional and Roth IRAs. $13,500 a year ($16,500 for those age 50 or older) in a SIMPLE IRA. The lesser of $58,000 a year or 25% of your employment income with an SEP IRA. You can’t write off capital losses within a cryptocurrency IRA. *Assuming you wait until 59 ½ years of age or meet the requirement for an early withdrawal exception. Additionally, you must have a Roth IRA account for at least five years before making a withdrawal.

Here is an example of a site where you can use a self directed IRA

#tips and tricks #life pros #life advice #life pro tips #lifehack

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route22ny · 4 years

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Sky

Perhaps this will be hard to read. Laments often are. It may bring you comfort, or it may make you angry. It may make you think more of me, or less. It may offend you. Rest assured, it offends me. So be it.

Once upon a time, there was a man who spoke of torture as a good in and of itself, to be pursued whether it was effective or not. Who promised to use the power of the state to enact violence upon scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities. Who insisted upon framing our struggle against Mideast terror groups in the same religious terms the terrorists themselves insist upon. Who praised himself for nursing petty grudges, for treating revenge as justice. Who threatened the free press with retaliation for reporting certain truths about him. Who bragged about sexual assault. Who mocked people more brave than himself and called their bravery weakness. Who lied seemingly without strategy, as if lies were good to tell only for the telling, who showed a shocking indifference to the very concept of truth. Who praised brutal dictators for their brutal methods. Who seemed (and seems) to be receiving shadowy support from a brutal dictator. Who claimed dictatorial power for himself.

This is fine.

He appeared entirely confused about the basic facts of geopolitical reality, or of how our government works, or even of the function within our government of the role he proposed to take on. He had a clear and obvious history of fraud and hucksterism, of enriching himself at the benefit of others with less leverage, and was even engaged throughout his campaign in a lawsuit for defrauding college students, since settled for $25 million dollars. He speculated with frightening casualness about destabilizing actions: proliferation and even use of nuclear weapons, defaulting on our debts and our treaties, backing out of our most long-standing alliances. He publicly called upon the intelligence apparatuses of foreign governments to intercede in our election on his behalf, and it seems increasingly likely they may have obliged. He whipped his crowds into frenzies, then directed their ire toward journalists reporting the event, many of whom he threatened to prosecute once in power. He offered to imprison his political adversary, to the delight of his chanting crowds, who wore t-shirts decorated with the flag celebrating the war to preserve American slavery, decorated with vulgar slogans of violence and rage. He promised to steer us directly into the deadly heart of the oncoming climate catastrophe; having claimed the work of men more intelligent and knowledgeable than he was nothing but a Chinese hoax, he sneered at the very idea of new energy sources.

This is fine.

That’s a short list. It’s a hell of a short list. But wait, listen: The people went for it.

Tens of millions of people voted to make him the most powerful man in the world. He will soon have the ability to blast the planet to an irradiated cinder, if he sees fit. He will continue to run his business, which appears to involve sitting in a golden throne and putting his names on things. He's given every indication, despite some laughably thin feints toward divestment, he will run that business from the Oval Office. Maybe he’ll even put his name on new things, like laws. Laws: a whole new product line for Trump International, and a potentially lucrative one. He owes the banks of foreign powers millions and millions of dollars. One wonders what laws they’ll want passed. Word is, his first foreign trip will be to visit Vladimir Putin. Heigh-ho.

His party is in control, too. They don't seem bothered by any of this. They're a bit more focused on providing checks and balances upon ethics watchdogs who have pointed out their party leader's multifarious and historically unprecedented infractions. They'd rather ignore those, so they can immediately—immediately—get down to the serious business of divesting millions and millions of the most vulnerable people in our society from the only chance they have at affordable health coverage. They plan to replace this program with something...someday. Their speculation so far indicates they will be replacing it with the opportunity to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical bills if you need them someday, or, if you don't have hundreds of thousands of spare dollars, to maybe go screw yourself. So, a lot of people are going to die in coming years, that would otherwise have lived, and they're rushing to make it happen. My, look at them laugh.

Republican lawmakers sign legislation to repeal ACA and defund women's health care access through Planned Parenthood, January 2016

Meanwhile, they're ignoring as peccadilloes the caricatured infractions of a man who intends to keep his own private security detail around him, who expounds upon provable lies, and then when exposed simply doubles down on the lie, who is considering throwing the press out of the White House, and other maneuvers straight out of the dictator handbook. It's really something to see. It's a new order, trumping the old. Isn't it great again?

Laura Ingraham, speaker at the Republican National Convention, 2016.

It’s hard to understand what people hoped for from him other than this. It’s hard not to assume they were responding to the shockingly frank bigotry, his promises to return to an earlier time, the knowing use of slogans used byracists and fascists of days past. These are certainly what seemed to generate all the most popular applause lines. But I don’t want to think that of my country or my fellow citizens. I really want it to be something else. Let us consider other possibilities. Many seem to think that a great thing about him was his frankness. They liked that he “tells it the way it is.” Then again, those same people seemed most likely to think that he didn’t really mean his more shocking proposals. It’s a bit confusing, then, parsing what is meant by ‘telling it like it is,' as it appears to rely on selective trust in insincerity. Many voters, excited by promises to “drain the swamp,” but now disappointed by the recent appointment of a Goldman Sachs foreclosure kingpin to Treasury, of a Putin-connected oil executive to State, and by other signals the new president has given about his eagerness to rob us all blind, have been admonished by a key advisor for taking his words so literally. The 'alt-right' Neo Nazis and the KKK are very excited, for what it’s worth, about the more shocking proposals, and they remain confident our new leader meant every word.

You're really going to want to go to video on this one.

Some people thought he would be less likely to make them pay more in taxes, I suppose. So perhaps at last now we know the answer to the old hypothetical about whether we’d be willing to travel through time and sacrifice our lives to prevent the rise of a self-professing tyrant. Answer: We wouldn’t even suffer a hypothetical increase in our income taxes. I'm told folks voted for Trump because they were tired of being called racist. I imagine that was hard for them—who wants to be considered racist? If this complaint is yours, I imagine reading this (if you're still reading) is also hard. I sympathize; it's not particularly easy to write. But then again, the response seems an odd retort to the complaint. If your persistent problem is people keep telling you there is spinach in your teeth, you might consider getting a mirror and taking a look, rather than voting for the Jolly Green Giant running on a platform of outlawing all floss. And, perhaps, if it is painful to be considered racist, consider this: it may be all the more painful to live under racist oppression.

KKK Newspaper, The Crusader, endorses Trump.

Many seem to have mainly enjoyed that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, and it’s certainly true to say many concerns and criticisms could be levied against her. But the man they voted for as an alternative already stood actualized as the cartoon parody of any potential danger she may have hypothetically posed. Bad judgment? Corruption? Fraud? A proclivity to violent retaliation? A worry about temperament? Untrustworthiness? Lack of transparency? It’s hard to believe this all had much to do with Hillary Clinton and her faults. Hard to believe this list of concerns would yours, but your acceptable alternative would be Donald Trump.

Or maybe they believed the more lurid stories, the debunked, the ridiculous. Hillary’s murdered 80 people close to her. She invented cancer and put it in your cell phone battery. She is secretly seven tiny demons all stacked up in a pantsuit and glued together with the blood of aborted fetuses. She controls the Yosemite supervolcano, along with a cabal comprised of George Soros and 17 other Jewish industrialists. I don’t know what all. I know there are people like this, who have seceded from objective reality into a dystopian alternate dimension, where they can perhaps supplement the powerlessness they feel in their lives with the comfort of false control, of being one of the few with the secret knowledge unavailable to the masses. I don’t know what to do with them, because they live in an alternate dimension. And, it must be said, I don’t think there are 63 million of them.

So here we are. In grave moral and physical danger. All of us. And for what? I’ve heard the same line again and again since the election: “America isn’t a different country today than it was before the election.” Jon Stewart trotted it out. I think I heard it from President Obama.

I fear I agree with the statement. I’m puzzled, though, because I think it is meant to be reassuring, to think we’ve always been the country capable of such a choice.

The statement doesn’t imply that we’re still great. It implies that we were never good.

It has to be admitted, people responded to Trump for what he is. Which means we are left with the statements and proposals by which he distinguished himself. And millions of us—tens of millions—preferred him specifically for his points of difference. Excited by his promises to return us to a time when our system existed only for certain people, and the preferences and needs of all others were beneath consideration, or at least willing to overlook that, in favor of some material or policy advantage somewhere. And ultimately, the reason is immaterial. A man ran for president promising to use the power of the state to bring violence to scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities, to make America torture again, to make it easier for an already-militarized police force to employ violence, who praised dictators, who bragged about sexual assault, who praised vengeance as good, who promoted as fact debunked conspiracy, who stated his determination to ignore as conspiracy what the data overwhelmingly indicates is an oncoming extinction-level event. There was some other reason to vote for him, that allowed you to overlook these facts? Save it, please. It really doesn't matter. It was a bad reason. We have seen this movie before. Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding? What am I saying here? Am I saying we are Nazis? The answer, I suppose, has to be 'no.' Only Nazis are Nazis. We are Americans. But what that will mean in decades to come—'American'—has been thrown into hazard. We used to be the sort of place that doesn't allow Donald Trumps to happen. That's gone now, along with that specific sort of trust the world once had in us. In any case, what we seem to now be trying to redefine 'American' to mean seems like a rough beast, and omnivorous. Democracy reveals us by our choices and our actions, not our intentions. We are what we are. And Donald Trump will be president.

As a result, I’m bereft. Bereft of the country I thought I was living in. Bereft of the people I thought I lived among. Bereft of what I believed was a shared direction despite divergent opinions. Bereft of a belief in the possibility of a common dialogue or even a common reality. Bereft in confidence in basic decency and intelligence. Bereft of the spiritual heritage I was born into, because of course Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters were white Christians. Christians voting for a new Herod with the power of a Caesar is a pretty good joke for the universe to tell, I suppose. He’s even promised to go after the (anchor) babies.

My translation of the Bible is full of all this toff about loving your enemy, about how love of money is the root of evil, about showing hospitality to the widow and orphan and the immigrant, and admonishments against drawing the sword lest you die on it. My reading of the Bible doesn't ask "but who's going to pay for that?" My reading of the Bible suggests to me that if you wish to pretend to care about babies unborn, maybe you shouldn’t be so hostile to the idea of making sure they’re cared for once they are born and inconveniently and expensively needy, and perhaps you shouldn’t make so many of their mothers into the welfare-queen boogie-men of your whole realpolitik, and perhaps you shouldn't make weaponry a right more important than health and food. Maybe healing and wholeness and liberty is something that should be available to even the pagan. Maybe the door is open for the tax collector and the prostitute and the Samaritan. Maybe, unencumbered by the overweening need to be perceived as correct in every moral posture, they've even entered that door ahead of us as we do our best to hold it shut against unworthy access.

Maybe I got a trash translation. Maybe the other ones are all about the joys of using political power for your own aggrandizement instead of the call to self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, about the dangers of anchor babies and welfare mothers, about how paying tax money toward a shared life is tyranny, about how with terrorists you have to kill the families, folks, believe me, kill the women and children, you’ve got to go after the families, and we’re gonna torture again, folks, we’re gonna torture, believe me…

You know what? I believe him.

WWJD Check: White Evangelicals are the group most likely favor use of torture by a military superpower.

* * * You wake up and the sky is gone. At times that’s how it seems. You wonder at it: how could there not be a sky? What will become of us now, in this world without a sky? Was it ever there, or did we just imagine it there, as an exercise of collective will?

And then you talk to other people who insist the sky is there. They say: It’s not gone, it’s just red now. Don’t be a sore loser, just because you didn’t want it red. Accept that we did want it red. It’ll be fine if it’s red. And anyway, the banks seem to like it red. Move on with your life. Suck it up. Hope that the red sky will be as good as the blue one. But the sky isn’t red. It’s not anything. It’s just … not. It is a not-ness. An un-sky. A nothing.

And then you start talking to people who laugh, not without compassion, that you ever fell for the idea there was a sky. They say: That big vast emptiness? Oh, yes. That’s always been there for us. Is it there for you now? How… interesting. We can tell you a thing or two about that emptiness, if you’d listen. We’ve been watching it an awful long time.

American Nazi Rally, Madison Square Garden, 1939

Future Georgia Representative and Civil Rights pioneer John Lewis, beaten by a state trooper on "Bloody Sunday" in 1965.

Oh. Will he. Will he do that.

The sky is the future. Or it was the future. That’s how it seems, at times. How odd, to speak of the future in the past tense.

But the past tense presents us with further troubles. It seems the past is gone, too.

In 1965, everybody thought King was great, and nobody tried to dismiss him by tying him to violence.

Growing up, we were taught that we were a kind and good and just nation. The story we were given was of a nation born of a righteous cause, not quite made perfect by the godlike men who forged it, but honed to apotheosis over the decades that followed. The destruction of the native nations and their people, ah, tsk, a shame, we’d change it if we could, but unfortunately in the past and unrecoverable. Slavery, a dark stain, but by now expunged entirely. Jim Crow, its shameful cousin, absorbed by a saint named King, who led a boycott (a pleasant and polite and non-disruptive one, it seems, in our memories), then stood on some stairs to give a universally-admired speech about his dream of inclusion, and then, his work seemingly accomplished, having seemingly changed minds forever, ascended harmlessly into the clouds.

Somehow we are never culpable. It was always a long time ago. Mistakes were made, but we’d never make them ourselves. It was always somebody else holding the gun, the whip. We arrived here after that, you see, born blameless, without any afterbirth or shock, into the Greatest Country in the World. Our holocausts we absolved ourselves of, because they served to illustrate not the evil we’d done, but how far we’d come from it. We stood on the prow of the ship, looking forward as we cut new water, not aft looking back at whatever may have been churned up in the wake. Not big on the rear-view mirror, us, not fans of the over-the-shoulder glance. We’d tell ourselves stories of what lay behind. We’d imagine ourselves into those stories of darker times, making ourselves the protagonists. We would have been the ones to build false walls in our home to hide slaves. We would have marched with King. We would have spoken out against the Japanese camps. We would have stood at Stonewall.

Our moral arc bends ever toward justice; an inevitable thing. That was the story.

America was great, because it was good. All the old hits.

People still alive can remember this sort of thing very well.

This kid is probably still alive. As are most of his classmates. As are the children with whom he refused to attend school.

This also happened within living memory.

It's amazing what people consider communism. I mean back then, of course.

Sometimes you’d hear stories about a random injustice or brutality. A policeman who had become a little too enthusiastic. A bad apple, and surely justice was served. If not, it’d have been in the papers You’d hear about it in the papers if it hadn’t been. A gay teen beaten to death in a cornfield. A car with the banner of the struggle to preserve human slavery on the bumper sticker. The KKK marching again, how quaint. Ah, you’d think, if you were like me. We still have some work to do. Cleanup on aisle seven.

Technology has changed that. We see with new eyes now, unless we choose not to. We see videos, dozens and dozens of them now, new ones each week it seems, of police shooting unarmed black people. Again and again and again and again. Can you remember all the names? I can't anymore. And I ask myself: why can't I?

We see the speed with which so many seem willing to seek and find the nearest handy reason the victim deserved his or her fate. We see the news organizations find a Sunday School photo for the shooter and a mugshot to represent the victim. We see acquittal and acquittal and acquittal. We see failure to prosecute.

And, perhaps, we begin to wonder.

We see the people protesting, unarmed, asking only that their lives be thought to matter as much as another’s, and we see the stormtroopers with their massive guns and their tanks, arrayed against a civilian population almost reflexively, like defenses in an organism’s bloodstream mustering against a disease. And we wondered, perhaps: why do they look so much—so exactly, if we’re honest—like an occupying force?

We saw the white ranchers seize government land, pointing their guns directly at law enforcement officials, speaking openly of armed insurrection against the government, of revolution, of war. We saw them, later, seizing a government building. They weren’t protesting after centuries seeing their children and brothers and sisters killed without consequence by authority. Rather, they didn’t want to have to pay a grazing fee. Was it with surprise that we saw it: law enforcement seemed less frightened of these white men and their guns than they had an unarmed black woman in a sundress, or a 12 year old boy playing in a park? Were we surprised to see they seemed so level-headed in this situation, so much less likely to respond with immediate lethal force?

Why, those fellows with their arsenal didn’t even get convicted. They were less threatening to the system, apparently, than a man, arms up, lying on the ground next to his autistic ward begging not to be shot. (He was shot.) We might contrast to the treatment of the protesters at Standing Rock, and wonder…is the Holocaust against native people relegated only to the past? Would we change it, if we could?

We wonder: Are we seeing the system breaking down, unable to cope with new challenges? Or are we seeing a system working exactly as it’s always intended? Do we as a collective of 'white' people secretly want the police to control brown people by force? Are we secretly hoping that force will prove lethal, only occasionally enough to soothe our consciences, but frequently enough to promote an order less immediately costly, than the pain of culpability, than the justice of restitution?

If not, why are prosecutions so rare, and convictions even less so?

If not, why aren’t we protesting these killings? Why aren’t we in the streets?

Do all lives matter? If so, why wouldn’t we act like it?

White Christian America reveres Dr. King, it should be noted. You remember him—the peaceful guy who gave the speech that ended racism. If Facebook and newspaper op eds are any measure, we white Christians can’t stop bringing him up, almost as a cudgel, an admonishment to those today who would dare ask for their own human dignity, for not doing it as antiseptically as we remember it being done by him. And perhaps people begin to wonder: Why was King enshrined as 'the peaceful one' only once he was peacefully dead? Is King’s being safely dead our favorite thing about him? These days, we white Christians can claim to have brought his dream to reality (the white guy is usually the hero of the story in the movie), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will not protest—and we white Christians don’t like protest. Heavens, no—it’s so divisive. Dr. King, he wouldn’t approve of this protest, nor that one, and certainly not that one. His protests were so polite! Why, nobody had any problem with them at all! Dr. King agrees with all of us in white Christian America so much, these days. Oh my, he never stops agreeing with us. Just ask us; we’ll tell you. Yes, and what ever happened to Dr. King, anyway, after he gave that speech that ended all inequality forever?

But no matter, I told myself. That’s a dying strain, it's not who we are these days. That’s just a few bad apples. We’ve made so much progress. They’ll exhaust themselves in a final futile sputter. We’re just about to turn the corner. Sure there are racists, bigots, white supremacists, lost-causers, and they're loud, but they're dying out, and they know it. They'll eventually run somebody on an overtly racist platform, and they'll lose huge—I disagree with Republicans, but most of them won't stand for stark white supremacy, surely, and obviously Christians won't be able to align themselves with it — and we’ll show them it’s no use, and they’ll retreat, retrench to even positions even more compromised, less fortified, further back, smaller, diminished. We’re a better country than that.

But then Donald Trump, a half-rate and transparently obvious bullshit artist, a greasy reality TV star most skilled at demonstrating his manifest ignorance, promising mostly the goodness of violence and the strength of vengeance, offering to return America to an earlier time, railing against the inconvenience of practicing sensitivity toward the perspectives of others (he called it 'political correctness'), received 63 million geographically-convenient votes to become the most powerful person in the world. Perhaps, if you’re like me, you took a moment then to ponder that statement about bad apples and what they do to the whole barrel. The meaning of it. And, perhaps, another saying, about recognizing a tree by its fruit. And, it must be said, though we refuse to face it: In America, our trees have long borne a strange fruit.

Here’s what we’ve lost, or at least what I’ve lost: The assumption of goodness’s inevitability. The assumption of goodness of those around me. The assumption of good intent in their hearts. The assumption that the future is still there. The assumption that most of us will die of old age. Here's what I've lost, the one favor Donald Trump may ever do for me: The wool from my eyes. An illusion, particularly a pretty and a convincing one, can be a painful thing to lose.

I’ve gained a vision of tens of millions of people desperate to bend history’s arc back toward an injustice that favored them, and willing to fight for that regression, willing even to risk species-wide extinction rather than suffer the pain of facing the consequences of their own mountainous indifference.

The moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but the gears of history grind the weak. There are people now who are giddy, almost with the air of a teenager behind the wheel of a sweet-sixteen hot rod, to test out their perceived new warrant to deliver retributive and violent indifference to the people they deem unlovely. A headscarf yanked off here. A slur shouted in public there. A swastika scrawled on a wall here. A Neo Nazi propagandist advising the President of the United States in the corridors of power there. A crowd of seig heils in a government building, in praise of our new leader here. A few million children stripped of health insurance with no serious attempt at a replacement there.

They think this is allowed now. Sixty-three million people, complacently or enthusiastically or ignorantly aligned with white supremacy, gave them the idea it is. It’s going to be our job to show them otherwise. We must show them otherwise. And. Even if you voted for Trump—especially if you voted for Trump—the door is wide open for you to join in that struggle. You show them otherwise, too. All you have to do to join...is join. Your intentions were good? Excellent. I believe you. I've badly misunderstood you? Excellent. I believe you. Now, show it. Show your good intention by your good actions. You, like all of us, possess tremendous moral authority. Don't lend it any longer to those who have promised to squander it on atrocity. They seem intent on doing as they say. If you wait too long, they will leave you with none left to withdraw. Use it to protect those different than you. Use it against your own advantage, for the advantage of those who have none. And. If you, like me, did not vote for Trump, there is the great danger of complicity. You will be offered, if you, like me are white and straight and employed and well-off and cis-gendered and able-bodied and healthy and property-owning, the opportunity to be indifferent. Resist that current.

If the universe bends toward justice, the engine it has chosen for this good work is the hard and sacrificial struggle of good people willing to acknowledge the basic humanity of all other people. People who don’t think profitability is the foundational metric of goodness. People who don't think life holds a value that begins at conception but ends the moment it enters poverty. People bold and willing to become peaceful pebbles in the gears. To give time and money. To link arms with a married gay couple. To take sides in a cafeteria skirmish with a transgendered teen. To take a truncheon in the head for a Muslim. To paraphrase Jesus (another favorite who those of us in white Christian America appear by our words and deeds to consider as safely dead as Dr. King): to live, first you must die.

Or, as another poet says, love’s the only engine of survival.

So, what’s next?

First, we lament. We acknowledge the un-sky, the void. We listen to those who’ve been staring at it far longer than us. We name the challenge with clear eyes. That, I suppose, is what this has been.

And then we get to work. Let us hope our leaders will prove other than than they say they will. Let us not be so naive to think it likely. Let us oppose in a fierce and broken love. Let us meet with friends, we eat good meals with them. Let us consider people before money, and notice where our society fails to do so. Let us make art, and we try to make it well. Let us refuse to allow a comfortable silence to enfold a hateful or ignorant statement. Let us stand up against hate, bodily if necessary. Let us learn our system, and work within it. Let us call our leaders, and advocate for those who suffer. Let us practice generosity without care for the merit of the beneficiary, but only for their need. Let us investigate before we publish. Let us loudly proclaim the humanity others try to diminish. Let loudly proclaim the humanity of those who do not share our values, even as we oppose. Let us never celebrate the suffering of those who oppose us, for they suffer, too. Let us seek to divest ourselves of unearned cultural advantage. Let us enter spaces where our voices are not primary, and listen without thinking to speak. Let us create space to speak, in places where our voices are primary, for those who have had no voice. Let us reject optimism and blind belief. Let us embrace hope. Let us work. Let us work. Let us work. We are a people who have dreamed of the sky. I’d like to see if we can make it real.

source: http://www.armoxon.com/2017/01/sky.html (January 16, 2017)

VOTE

#a.r. moxon #racism in america #american dystopia #VOTE #RESIST #long reads

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