Seven
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In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

I wrote a post yesterday about an embarrassing situation that happened between my wife's best friend who is currently staying at our house. I was not sure how to bring it up to my wife and you guys really helped me a lot in understanding the urgency of telling my wife. I also got some cool ideas on how to bring up the subject without making it awkward for anyone. For everyone saying Ana was doing it on purpose, I did not agree with it as I am an extremely average looking person and woman don't chase me. However, things since last night have been just crazy and I think I am spiraling a bit. Sorry for the long post.
So, I decided to tell my wife last night as soon as she came home about the incident. I liked the idea of jokingly bringing up casually so that we both can laugh about it and then forget it. Last night, when my wife came home, I made sure I stayed in our bedroom. I asked Ana if she could stay with my kid downstairs. As my wife was changing, I asked her if Ana still borrow her clothes. Ana had to borrow them regularly when she first moved (long story). My wife told me yes and she has told Ana she can take anything from her closet if she needs it. I asked my wife if Ana told her about the funny incident from Friday. My wife said no, and I told her the whole story about how I came home early, and Ana came in the room almost naked to get her clothes, and how embarrassing it was for both of us.
As my wife was listening to this, she completely froze and turned pale. She started murmuring in Spanish (which is her and Ana's native language). I don't understand Spanish really well, but I understood the words "hombre casado" and "orta vez". I asked her if she is ok, and she sat next to me and asked me to explain everything in detail. I just told her it was nothing and she must have not heard me coming in. I was trying to laugh it off, but my wife had water in her eyes. I kept on telling her it was not a big deal, but she kept on asking me for more details. She asked me how Ana talks to me. I told her that Ana barely talks to me since she moved in except few words here and there.
My wife then asked me about three weeks ago when my wife had gone to visit her parents for four days. Ana did not want to go with her and stayed back. I told her that Ana was just acting normal. She or I would cook dinner after I got home from work while the other took care of the kid. The only thing different was Ana generally spending her evening in her room. However, when I was sitting in the living room watching TV after the kids slept, Ana came and sat on the sofa next to me but did not talk to me. I asked her if she wants me to change the channel or stream something she likes, and she just said she wanted to get out of her room. However, she did not flirt with me or do anything unusual. I kept on telling my wife that it was just an accident, and I really did not understand why she reacted so emotionally to it. My wife refused to answer and just said ok and agreed with me. However, she told me I should have told her about the incident sooner and should not keep any secrets from her and gave me a big lecture. I told her that I did not think it was a big deal and thought Ana would tell her, but glad I brought it up.
After dinner, my wife messaged Ana to join us, and she came out. While talking, my wife brought up the incident and told Ana that I mentioned about the incident, and she does not need to feel embarrassed. Such things happen when we are all in the same house and is not a big deal. Ana was firstly taken by surprise, but then told my wife she was just scared to tell her because she thought my wife would judge her because of her past. My wife gave her a stare, and she quickly changed the topic.
At night, I asked my wife what the hell was going on. I told her to please not keep any secrets from me, and if she does not tell me, I will directly ask Ana about what her past has got to do with anything. My first guess was Ana might have had a thing for me before we got married or something. But my wife was very reluctant to answer and kept on trying to change the subject and cuddle. However, I kept being persistent, and she finally spilled the beans.
Apparently, when Ana was in her early 20s, she was in relationship with a married coworker who was twice her age. It was a kind of sugar daddy relationship, and he told her that he was in an open relationship (or that's what Ana told my wife) and he would leave his wife in few years once the kids go to college. This makes sense now, because Ana is very pretty (like Miss USA level), and I never understood why she was single for most of the time I knew her. She eventually ended that relationship and started dating her boyfriend Jim, who turned out to be an abusive asshole. My wife said she suspects Ana was still involved with the older guy while in relationship with Jim, which explains why he kept on accusing her of cheating. That is why my wife became emotional when I told her what Ana did because she was worried Ana has no boundaries regarding married men. My wife said that Ana always looks up to us and praises me for being such a loyal partner and how lucky my wife is. My wife was a worried initially when she brought Ana home, but her actions from the time when my wife was away clearly show that she respects the boundaries, and it must have been an accident. My wife told me she is grateful I let Ana live in our house and observe what a healthy and happy marriage looks like.
Today morning was even more weird. I got up early as I could not sleep well and went down for a cup of coffee. After 5 minutes Ana walked into the kitchen and told me she was relieved my wife did not overreact to Friday incident. She said I am a good husband and gave me a hug and peck on the cheeks. She has never hugged me in the last 6 months. She seemed to be in a happy mood and was making small talk with me while having coffee.
I cannot believe my wife did not tell me such a huge detail about Ana for all these years. It's completely possible she cheated all through the relationship with Jim, and my wife is just covering for her all along. She even kept it a secret from me (after giving me a lecture about how we should never have secrets), and I don't know what else she is hiding. Everything just seems very confusing at this point. I feel angry at my wife for lying to me all these years for Ana. I also now see Ana differently. I am also worried that me trivializing the incident to my wife might have sent wrong signals to Ana.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/may/16/dead-hand-of-the-immovable-glazers-keeps-strangling-manchester-united
In February, the NFL players’ union carried out its second annual survey of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and let’s just say it wasn’t pleasant reading. Tampa Bay players reported that the changing room was “not clean, constantly smelly and has a persistent bug issue”. The sauna was described as “dirty and/or mouldy”. This barely a decade after an MRSA outbreak infected three Buccaneers players, two of whom never competed again.
In addition, players complained about being forced to pay $90 (£72) for childcare on match days (most teams offer this for free), being charged $1,750 a season for the privilege of having their own hotel room on away trips and being made to sit at the back of the plane while club staff travelled first class. Most of the blame for this state of affairs was laid squarely at the team’s ownership, whom the survey ranked 29th out of the 32 NFL franchise owners, and who go by the name of the Glazer family.
The Glazers’ non-exiting exit of Manchester United is the way of the future Aaron Timms Read more Bear in mind this is how the Glazers – some of the wealthiest people on the planet – treat their most valuable employees, the ones who put their bodies on the line and make the spectacle, people they know and meet. How do you reckon they regard Manchester United fans, a bunch of regular people on the other side of an ocean who they will never encounter in their lives? Perhaps we got a strong indication of this on Sunday afternoon, as the heavens opened and so, in large part, did the Old Trafford roof.
As a piece of pathetic fallacy it was almost too perfect, too cliched, too obvious. And yet much of the subsequent commentary focused on the sodden humiliation of Erik ten Hag, cowering in his tan suit. Or the embarrassment of Sir Jim Ratcliffe on the day he hosted the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, in an attempt to make the case for a publicly funded redevelopment of the Old Trafford area.
Ratcliffe, understandably, has attracted most of the attention since securing a minority stake in the club late last year. There have been star hires such as Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox, as well as the pursuit of Dan Ashworth. There have been stern internal emails about working from home and the cleanliness of club offices. There has been talk of transfer targets and new coaches, an assertive media presence, plenty of friendly interviews and briefings.
Ratcliffe’s 27.7% stake – due to increase to 28.9% by the end of this year – gives him certain levers over footballing matters, as well as a couple of seats on the board. But the Old Trafford deluge was a timely reminder of where the power still resides at United, where it has resided for the past two decades and where it may well reside for the next two decades as well. For all the talk of revolution and reinvention, this is a club still firmly labouring under the dead hand of the Glazers.
In a way, the Ineos deal has entrenched them even more firmly: giving them a handy form of public cover, a lightning rod for the club’s many failings and a huge injection of capital that might otherwise have to come from their own pockets. They are under no obligation to sell any further shares and, indeed, should they wish to offload the club to a new buyer at a future date it is Ratcliffe who would have to forfeit his stake in order to facilitate this.
Why are the Glazers so intent on retaining control of a club in which they seem so disinclined to invest their money or time and where they are roundly despised? There is a buzz phrase in macroeconomics known as “the asset economy”, which basically holds that in Anglo-capitalist societies, the primary determinant of social class and life chances is no longer your job, but what you already own. With wages stagnating while asset prices continue to rise, a growing societal and political rift has developed between those working to survive and those who can simply live off the inflationary proceeds of their existing assets.
“Nothing changed since I left,” observed Cristiano Ronaldo of his return to Manchester United in 2021. “The pool, the jacuzzi, even the gym. I thought I would see new technology, new infrastructure. I saw things I saw when I was 20.” The former chief executive David Gill remembers that the Old Trafford roof was leaking a decade ago, but because the club were champions no one noticed.
According to the football finance blog Swiss Ramble, in the past decade United have spent less than Fulham and Leicester and barely more than Brighton on infrastructure development. Meanwhile, against a backdrop of chronic underinvestment and net debt of about £773m, the Glazer family has made about £1.3bn from share sales and dividend payments since taking over at United. This is how the asset economy works: the asset itself becomes your paycheque and everyone who needs it essentially works for you.
It’s easy to see why the Ratcliffe non-takeover takeover has generated such fevered optimism in United circles. It offers the illusion of control in an uncontrollable landscape, the illusion of simplicity in a bewilderingly complex situation, the illusion of renewal when in reality very little has changed. You can’t get the Glazers out. You can’t see or contact them. You can’t afford to buy their shares, and even if you could you can’t force them to sell. And you can’t overturn the culture of parasitic rentier capitalism that allows them to operate or detonate the regulatory structures that render it legal.
But we can froth about the arrival of Wilcox and Graham Potter, and fixate on levels of internal email traffic, like any of this matters. Perhaps, given the torrent of negative publicity this week, we may even be treated to a ceremonial fixing of the Old Trafford roof. I’m thinking photo-ops, I’m thinking North West Tonight, I’m thinking Quinton Fortune in hi-vis holding a golden hammer.
Meanwhile, the turnstiles keep clicking and the assets keep sweating. After all, at a club as lucrative and popular as United, you never need to repair the roof because the sun is always shining.

As the last orange light of day drained from the sky, the living dead in Club Vlad rose. Max the skeleton and Jessie the…not skeleton…sewed up the gaping Y-shaped incision on Dom’s chest under Merrick’s direct supervision. Dom sat there, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. He’d woken with a headache and a feeling of cold, and even now, he could feel the dull throb above his left eye. It felt like someone was tearing his brain apart with a fork. He had told Merrick, and Merrick had nodded sadly. “Is my brain rotting?”
“Most likely,” Merrick had said.
There was a certain peace in the idea of losing his cursed humanity. As Merrick had said, he would feel no pain, know no quandaries. He would live only for the night and for his master. On the other hand, watching someone like Matt sit and stare into the distance, drool coursing down his chin and nothing happening behind his dead eyes, scared Dom. He didn’t want to be a braindead idiot. He didn’t care about keeping his emotions, he just wanted to function.
Like Merrick.
There wasn’t much he could do, however. He was dead and that was the end of it.
Once Dom was patched up and dressed in a pair of jeans and a hoodie, Merrick called his children before him. “I have done my best to love and protect all of you,” he began. “Jessie, you were miserable with your grandmother, were you not?”
“Yes,” Jessie said tonelessly.
“You were depressed, bipolar, and cut yourself. Now you’re happy.”
“Yes,” she replied again.
“Joe, you were a two bit nobody staring down a ten year stretch in jail.”
“Yes.” Thin yellow liquid dripped from his nose.
“But now you are free.”
“Yes.”
“You appreciate what I’ve done for you.”
“Yes.”
Merrick flashed then, slamming his fist onto the arm of his wheelchair. “Then why do you keep fucking up? The police were here earlier. They have messages between you and Jessie. I told both of you to delete those. Then I find out that you bit someone and turned them despite my orders. We have an endless supply of blood here but you still went off on your own. How many are there?”
“Just one,” Joe said.
“Are you being honest with me?”
“Yes.”
Merrick sagged back in his chair, looking somehow older. “Joe, take Matt and go to her. Bring her back here before she causes any more problems. God alone knows how many people she’s changed. Too many vampires without a father will bring heat on us, and you know what happens in that case? We get pieces of wood shoved in our chests.”
Turning to Dom, Merrick said, “I have a job for you and Jessie. We’re nearly out of embalming fluid. You haven’t had your first dose and the rest of us are starting to get ripe as well. I have a contact at a funeral home. He texted earlier that the order he placed on my behalf has come in. I want you to pick it up and to pay him.”
Dom had never been picked for anything in his whole life. No one had ever wanted him on their team and no one had ever placed their trust in him the way Merrick was now. He was honored, proud, and would do anything to not let Merrick down.
“That cop who came here might be a problem,” Merrick went on. “We may have to deal with him, but we’ll leave that for another night. In any case, I want this place cleaned from top to bottom. If the police come, I want them to see nothing out of the ordinary.”
Now that everyone had their marching orders, they dispersed. Merrick handed Dom an evelope stuffed with cash, and Dom slipped it into the pocket of his hoodie. The other team - Joe and Matt - left, while the remaining vampires began tidying up.
A fleet of vehicles waited in the parking lot behind Club Vlad. Dom and Jessie took a black pedo van with no back windows. They drove in silence, the radio off. Dom did not want to hear music, nor did he wish to speak to Jessie. Their kinship was one of blood and circumstance, not one of words and emotions. He had no questions for her and wished to answer none of his own. The only thoughts he had were of the mission ahead and of the growing pain in his skull. He thought of the staring stupid Matt, of the decayed Max, and a shiver went down his spine.
What was left of his humanity recoiled at the idea of becoming like them.
The pain grew hotter, more intense. He forced it away and focused on driving.
The funeral home was on North Allen Street, next to a restaurant called Pepperjack’s. A tall, white house with dark shutters and a sign out front, it looked like a quiet, peaceful place. “Pull around back,” Jessie said.
Dom pulled the van around back and parked under a balcony, killing the headlights. They got out and went to the back door, Jessie in the lead. He assumed that she had done this before and that the seller would recognize her. She knocked, and a few moments later, the door opened. A youngish man with a shaved head appeared, wearing an apron and gloves. He saw them and tensed a little. Dom could smell, rather than sense, his fear, and his throat panged with thirst. “Come on,” the man said quickly. He stepped aside and allowed them to enter. Dom noticed that he walked behind them, wary of putting his back to them. “Do you have the money?”
“Do you have our order?” Jessie countered.
“Yes,” the man said, “I’m really risking my neck for this. They don’t just give embalming fluid away, you know. They keep track of it and if they realize I’m over ordering, someone from the state’s going to come down here and check.”
He led them into an embalming room. Three boxes sat on a table. Dom gave the man his money, and he and Jessie carried the boxes outside, loading them into the van. The whole time they were there, the man was edgy, like he was afraid they were going to attack him. Dom would be a liar if he said that the hot smell of the man’s blood didn’t excite him. Perhaps once his brain rotted away, he wouldn’t be able to control himself, but for now, he could.
A lightning bolt of pain shot through his head and he nearly dropped the last box onto the ground.
Once the man was paid, Dom and Jessie drove back to Club Vlad. In fifteen minutes, they were drinking side by side from two passed out partygoers, their reward for a job well done.
Meanwhile, across the city, Joe and Matt weren’t doing as well. They were standing outside of Heather’s apartment. Joe, slightly annoyed (anger being another emotion vampires could feel, along with fear) pounded on the door. He knew she was in there; he could smell the putrid odor of decay. “Let us in,” he said. “We won’t hurt you.”
Joe could barely remember changing her. He didn’t mean to, it just…happened. Like an unwanted pregnancy. You can bite someone as much as you want and drink as much as you want, but if you take too much at once and they die, you get the vampire equivalent of a baby. Joe liked the hunt. It was exciting. Having his meals brought to him Club Vlad didn’t arouse the same level of excitement. It was like shooting an animal tied to a tree. Or hiring a prostitute instead of wooing someone. No real satisfaction to it.
That was probably his greatest downfall. He had lured Jessie the same way, though Merrick was indeed interested in rescuing her from her grandmother. People you have saved obey just as well as people with no brains.
He felt fluid on his upper lip and sniffed. “Come on, let us in,” he said.
No response.
He looked at Matt and nodded to the door. Together, they rammed their shoulders against it. It shook in its frame. They were both dead and weak, but modern American architecture is even weaker, and the door eventually slammed open. The apartment beyond was dark, messy, and reeked of death. They searched high and low, and eventually found Heather huddled in a corner, trying to hide. She was naked save for a pair of panties, her body bloated and beginning to turn black. Her skin hung from her frame and her eyes were filled with blood and fear. It was a wonder no one had called the police yet. The smell was overpowering. “We’re here to help,” he said. “You have to come with us.”
She shook her head and trembled. Maybe she remembered that he was the one who did this to her. Maybe her memories had rotted away. Those were usually the first to go. Then your emotions, then your personality. Finally, your capacity for higher reasoning. “I’m sorry I did this to you,” he said. That was a lie. He was not remorseful. Nor was he proud, for that matter. It just happened. Like rain. “But I want to help you. We can fix you.”
No amount of coaxing or conjoling could induce her to move. Joe weighed his options. He doubted anyone would call the cops even if they heard the door coming down - people who lived in places like this rarely called the cops, which helped Joe and his cause immensely. Even so, there was the possibility. Every minute they spent here was a minute that something could go wrong, and Joe had a lot to lose.
So, too, did Merrick.
Giving up, Joe took out his cellphone and called Merrick. “She refuses to come,” he said simply.
The line was quiet for a moment, then Merrick’s voice came back. Cold. Calculating. “Then do what you must.”
That was the go ahead.
Hanging up, Joe looked around the apartment and found a wooden chair in the kitchen. He lifted it over his head and slammed it on the counter, shattering it into a million pieces. He selected the longest, sharpest, and sturdiest looking one. He went back into the room and directed Matt to hold her down. She fought, kicked, and spat, but she was weaker than even they were. They had been embalmed. She hadn’t.
Matt pinned her hands above her head and Joe straddled her. Animal terror filled her eyes and she whipped her head from side to side. Joe lifted the makeshift stake with both hands, and brought it down as hard as he could, driving it deep into her heart. Her eyes bulged from their sockets and a high, otherworldly scream ripped from her throat. She bucked, thrashed, and kicked her feet. Her resistance began to ebb away until she was twitching…until she was still.
Heather from OKCupid was dead.
Truly dead.
Joe couldn’t help wondering what it was like.
Pulling the stake out, he tossed it aside and got to his feet, Matt doing likewise. A soul petrifying scream might be cause for even the tightest of lips to start talking. “Let’s go,” he said. And together, he and Matt fled, leaving the poor, dead body of Heather behind.
***
As it turned out, one of Heather’s neighbors did call the cops. At 10;13pm, Vanessa Rodregiez arrived with two patrolmen and found the front door of Apartment 237 knocked down. Guns drawn, they entered, Vanessa at the head. The first thing she noticed was the smell. It jammed itself into her nostrils, shoved its tongue down her throat, and violated her - all without even buying her dinner first.
Vanessa hadn’t been at this as long as her buddy Bruce had, but she knew a dead, rotting body when she smelled one. They searched the premises, and sure enough, they found a vic in the bedroom, lying in the gap between the bed and the wall; it looked like the former had been moved, perhaps in a struggle. Vanessa knelt down to check the vic’s pulse, but stopped.
There was no need.
The vic - who looked like a female but could have been an overweight male - hadn’t had a pulse in a very long time.
Examining the body, Vanessa found a wound in the chest, just above the heart. Black, stinking goo leaked from it, and Vanessa gagged. She fisted her hand to her mouth, retched, and then ran for the kitchen sink. Her partner for the night, Jim Walsh, stared down at the stiff before him, and his face turned a sickly shade of green. He avoided puking because he didn’t nose fuck the wound like Vanessa had, but he wasted no time in getting out there, dry heaving in the hallway where the air was somewhat fresh.
After leaving her lunch in the sink, Vanessa radioed back to headquarters, and before long, the place was crawling with cops. The assistant medical examiner - who had taken over after Ed Harris quit the previous night - knelt over the body and studied it. A solidly built black man with a mustache, his name was Leon and he knew death just as well as his old boss, so when he said the vic had been dead nearly two weeks, Vanessa accepted it.
That begged the question: Who broke in and screamed just now? A relative? The caller clearly heard screaming and peeked out her door to see two males fleeing on foot. Maybe they found the vic and freaked out? Or maybe they were the killers returning to the scene of the crime. After all, the vic had clearly been murdered.
In fact, they found a likely murder weapon. A long sliver of wood soaked in black goo. Blood turns black after a while, but there was something different about this stuff. “What is it?” Vanessa asked Leon.
“I’m not sure,” Leon said and pulled off a pair of Latex gloves he’d donned to examine the vic, “could be blood or…”
“Or what?” Vanessa asked.
“Or something,” Leon said. “Give me a few hours.”
And a few hours it was. Just before 1am, Leon called Vanessa at her desk. “I think you should come down here,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later, Vanessa stood over Leon as he pulled the vic’s chest open with a pair of tweezers. “That’s the heart,” he said, “whoever stabbed her scored a direct hit, but this…this is what concerns me.”
He prodded a furry lump with the tip of his scalpel.
“What is it?” Vanessa asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “it looks like mold.”
That word - mold - triggered a memory in her brain. “Ed said something about mold last night. He found it in -”
“The Mason boy,” Leon finished.
“Yeah. The one who got up and ran off.”
Leon turned away from Vanessa and looked at the dead woman - for it was a woman. Vanessa got the impression that he didn’t want her to see his expression. “I’ve known Ed ten years. I know something happened last night, but a stiff getting up and walking off? I thought he was confused. Now…I don’t know. That makes two bodies in 24 hours. And get this. The chest wound? It was done post-mortem. I can’t find a cause of death anywhere. Except maybe blood loss but it’s hard to tell at this point. And speaking of blood…”
“What?” Vanessa asked quickly.
“When I opened her stomach up, a whole shit load of blood spilled out. And a lot of it was a lot fresher than she is.”
Vanessa furrowed her brow in confusion. “You mean…?”
“It’s not hers,” Leon said. “I can’t be 100 percent sure until I run tests, but I’d put money on it.”
Vanessa’s head spun with information both new and old. You know that full, heavy feeling you get when a poo is brewing in your guts? That’s kind of what Vanessa was feeling, only in her head instead of her stomach.
Leon was just as mystified by the whole thing as she was and stayed up late to run a few preliminary tests. By sunrise, he had confirmed that the blood inside of Heather’s stomach was not hers. In fact, it had come from at least three different sources. “Is it human?” Vanessa asked over the phone.
“Yes,” Leon said, sounding troubled, “it’s human.”
In the cobalt hour before sunrise, Vanessa sat at her desk and tried to piece this whole thing together. They had:

1. A corpse that (allegedly) woke up and dipped out
2. A dead girl who’d been stabbed in the heart with a piece of wood after somehow ingesting the blood of three different people.
3. Some missing kids
4. Oh, and both bodies - the girl’s and the runaway corpses’ - had the same weird fungus in their heart cavities.

All of this - even the missing kids, Vanessa felt - was related. She just didn’t know how. The only answer that half way fit was that both of those bodies were vampires. Like…what’s a vampire but a dead body that gets up and walks around at night? And how do you kill a vampire? Why, you drive a piece of wood through its heart.
The idea that vampires were real was dumb, but the more she turned it over in her mind, the more she became convinced that it was at least an option. A lot of things people thought were fantastic and made up turned out to be real, so why not vampires too?
Shortly after 8, Bruce came in. He was just sitting down when Vanessa came in and slapped her report on the desk. “Buckle up, bitch,” she said, “things just got weirder.”
He stared up at her with one of those grumpy - but cute -expressions he was so good at putting on. As he read, however, his brow knitted. “Jesus,” he muttered to himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a weary sigh.
“I have a theory - kind of,” Vanessa said, “but I don’t want to say it.”
“You might as well,” Bruce said. “It can’t be more kooky than reality these days.”
“Okay,” Vanessa started, “what if - and I’m just thinking out loud here - what if there are vampires in Albany?”
She expected Bruce to give her a dirty look, but he chewed it over, actually taking it seriously. “And those missing boys are victims?” he asked finally.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “That girl’s been dead two weeks. Maybe she bit Dominick Mason and he came back for revenge after realizing he was cursed to be a goddamn shit sucking vampire forever.”
Bruce nodded. “Yeah, but who turned her?”
“I don’t know,” Vanessa said, “I don’t know.”
***
Before dawn painted the eastern sky, Merrick Garvis sat in his chamber like a withered king, a mess of IVs hooked into his arms and neck. The vault was silent save for the soft noise of the machines as they filtered out the old embalming fluid and replaced it with new embalming fluid. Embalming fluid always made him spacy, like a drug. The others had gone first, and even now lay near comatose around him like addicts in an opium den.
As far as he knew, Merrick was the oldest vampire in the world, perhaps, even, the oldest vampire to ever live. Though he was not fully honest with Dom, he was not lying when he said that vampires rotted like any other dead thing. Conditions considered, you had a few weeks tops if left untreated. There may be living vampires in remote corners of Egypt or the northern most reaches of Russia, where the climate preserved dead things, but unless you made it to one of those places, you were pretty well fucked.
Merrick was not a proud man, nor was he concerned with saving face - the dead have no need for that. He was being truthful when he said that he feared death. What’s more, he feared being helpless. Deep down, vampires are people, and people don’t exactly have the greatest track record with caring for their infirm. He read once that the first sign of a civilization was a broken leg that had healed, as it showed that someone stayed with and cared for a fellow human long enough for them to get well again. In Merrick’s opinion, that was true…and thus there was no civilization. Merrick was fifty-one when he died in the year 1982. In his lifetime, he had seen The Great Depression, World War II, and a million small acts of cruelty and selfishness in between. He’d seen beggars starving in the streets, abused children shuffled out of sight and out of mind, and disdain for the poor and the weak.
The living were awful, and the living dead were no different. Once their humanity rotted away, they cared only about filling their stomachs. They were like ticks - they would drink until their bellies literally ruptured…and then keep on drinking.
That left him in a precarious position. He was old, his body was weak. He couldn’t stand unassisted and if left to fend for himself, he would decay into a pile of bones within days. He would be cursed to lay in one spot for all eternity, aware and hungry, little more than a ghost tethered to a black and still beating heart.
He refused to let that happen to him. Thus, he had created a family, a clan of vampires loyal to him and to him alone. He did this through acts of simple kindness and understanding…but also through deception. He knew, for instance, how to preserve the brain. He’d figured out how to do it early on - you pickle it. Like a fetus preserved in a jar. He sawed off the top of his own head and filled it with a special solution that kept his brain - and his intelligence - intact. It slowly drained out through the nose and ears in a thin, yellow liquid, but it worked well enough. He couldn’t save everything, however, and had lost vital things in the process, such as most of his human memories, his sense of humor, and some motor functions. He shared this secret with only Joe, and a few others before, because he needed a strong captain. He kept the others in the dark because vampires - like people - are easier to control when they don’t think for themselves.
Right about now, however, Merrick was beginning to regret sharing the formula with even Joe. Joe had brought him nothing but grief. Joe, you see, could think for himself. He could make decisions. He could go behind Merrick’s back. Joe had something called free will, and free will is a worse affliction than vampirism. Free will is messy, free will is dangerous.
Free will could very well turn Merrick into a pile of bones.
That was, of course, if they weren’t discovered first. Joe had made several mistakes lately, not least of which was the turning of Heather. Sitting there in the predawn hour, attended by Tony, his gay bartender and human familiar, Merrick decided to have Joe killed. There are only two ways to kill a vampire: The stake and the flame. The latter seemed somehow appropriate in this case. After Joe, there would be no more captains, only him, one father with absolute power. That was how it had to be. One man, one vision. Democracies didn’t work. That was especially clear today. Everyone was so divided and nothing ever got done. If the humans had one strong leader, they might go in the wrong direction, but at least they would go somewhere. Instead, they stagnated.
Merrick didn’t particularly look forward to killing Joe, but it had to be done. To protect the family. To protect him.
And Merrick would do anything…anything at all…to protect himself.
***
Vampires.
Bruce kept coming back to that single wor, hoping each time that he would chuckle at the absurdity of it.
But he never did.
Did that mean he believed it? Not necessarily, but damn it, he considered it a possibility, and that alone was enough to make him feel like a fucking clown. All the evidence he had pointed to vampires, but then again, it might point to other things as well. Like aliens.
But let’s say the whole vampire thing was real. Who, like Vanessa asked, was patient zero? Who started this whole mess?
A name came to mind.
Merrick Garvis.
He had not had time to check into Garvis the previous day, but by God, he was going to do it now. He ran his name and social through the system and everything seemed to check out. Merrick Garvis was born on June 31, 1963 in -
Wait a minute. Weren’t there only 30 days in June?
Bruce checked, and there were, indeed, only 30 days in the month of June. Hm. Bruce did a little digging and found something out. Before 1987, social security numbers weren’t issued at birth. You had to sign up, using other forms of ID. Merrick Garvis applied for his in April 1984 and the date of birth on his state issued driver’s license was June 31. Bruce spent an hour on the phone with the DMV and learned that they had never issued a license to a Merrick Garvis. He then spoke to the Social Security Administration, and after much wrangling and frustration, he managed to get a photocopy of the license Garvis used to get his social security number. It was dated 1983.
The face staring back at him was almost exactly the same face he’d seen at Club Vlad, except maybe a touch less stiff and waxy. Though not as rough looking, there was no way in hell Garvis was 20 in that picture. It had to be a fake,
Bruce thought back to the events of the previous two days. Missing bodies, staked corpses, hearts that still beat after death.
Vampires didn’t seem like such a crazy explanation.
And if anyone was a fucking vampire around here, it was Merrick Garvis.

Season 0402
"It's great that you're dating. But when a new client calls, you just have to randomly assign them to a sales person. You can't base who gets new clients on who you're sleeping with that week, OK?"
I actually think this is fair - Pam would have been likely to give new clients to Jim

So, I live in SC. My ex-wife (28F)(we will call her Kate) and I (34M) and a daughter (5F) together. My ex-wife has been dating this guy (42M)(we will call him Jim) since January. They met at a playground and started dating. She started living with him just a few weeks into their relationship. She took my daughter to live with him too. I learned that Jim is still married. His wife (35F)(we will call her Tiff) only left him back in September due to Jim's inability to remain sober from drugs and alcohol. Jim and Tiff have 3 boys all under the age of 7. Jim is really good at putting on a good show for everyone and making them believe he's sober. Ever since I met him, I've had a bad feeling about him and my daughter being around him. Kate is very easily manipulated especially by whoever is giving her validation in her life.
For a little background on the involved parties, I am a paramedic, Tiff is a nurse, Tiff and I have been in the medical field for several years, Kate isn't able to hold a steady job, she always finds a reason to quit every job she has that doesn't allow her to work from home, she is now (since she started seeing Jim) a personal trainer and life coach, Jim is a personal trainer, life coach, and more motivational speaker.
So, Tiff and I ended up crossing paths on accident. After talking with her, I learned that Jim has been relapsing every year or so for the last 13 years. He relapsed about a year ago. Tiff found mini alcohol bottles in their laundry room. When she called Jim out he blew up on her and tired to deny it. Tiff requested a drug and alcohol test to which he blew up again and refused to do either. Tiff finally reached her breaking point and left Jim last September. She realized that after 13 years of Jim relapsing over and over again she doesn't want to continue to put herself or her children through that kind of life style. Tiff said that Jim refuses to be in any kind of recovery program like AA or N.A. due to he believes that he is above programs like that and he is better than the people who attend those programs. Tiff stated that at one point Jim overdosed in their own home and that if she hadn't got home when she did he would be dead and that he almost didn't survive in the end. Jim has done whatever he's needed to in order to fill his addiction.
I also learned that Jim has felony convictions and spend time in jail and on probation. Jim was convicted and arrested for B&E after her broke into the home of a client of his in order to steel the client's narcotic pain medications.
I also know, because Kate informed me, that at one point all 4 children were left unsupervised in the upstairs of Jim's house and the children, including my daughter, started showing each other their private parts. Tiff informed me that it was brought to her attention by her oldest that her middle child told my daughter to show him her private parts and then proceeded to touch my daughter. At the time, I wasn't aware of the living arrangements expect for my daughter was at Jim's house. Tiff told me that all 4 of the children were sleeping in the same room and my daughter was sharing a bed with her youngest son. When Tiff learned this, she immediately confronted Jim and told him that this is inappropriate and unacceptable. At that point Kate and Jim had to come up with other arrangements for my daughter. My daughter is now sleeping on the floor in Jim's office on a mattress.
I am trying to decide what to do at the moment. Neither Tiff or myself have any desire to stay living in SC long term (just so we are all clear, Tiff and myself are not seeing each other). Neither of us feel comfortable with our children being cared for by or being around our ex's. My daughter and Tiff's oldest have on multiple occasions told us that they do not want to go home to the other parent's house. My daughter cries almost every day when I talk to her because she misses me and wants to come home to me. We are both very concerned for all of our children's wellbeing both physically, mentally, and emotionally. Both Kate and Jim are not mentally stable. They both cling onto anything that gives them validation and they are both extremely controlling and manipulative.
Does the legal community of Reddit think I have a case to petition the court for full custody of my daughter while only giving my ex visitation right? I don't want child support from her. I don't want to keep our daughter away from her. I just want my daughter to be safe. And I do not believe that living with Kate and Jim is providing a safe environment. Tiff agrees with me and has also offered to testify for me if needed against her husband and my ex.
Also, our divorce/custody paperwork doesn't have the standard restraining orders in it. So, I'm wanting to make changes to that. Some of the changes that I want to make are as follows:
-Neither party is allowed to have 5F around anyone that isn't family by birth or marriage that has a felony conviction/record, and regardless of relationship, isn't allowed to have 5F around anyone that has any violent felony conviction/record.
-Neither party is allowed to have 5F around or introduce 5F to a romantic partner that they have been seeing for less than 6 months.
-Each party has to introduce a meeting between the New Romantic partner and their other parent prior to allowing 5F to be introduced to the romantic partner.
-Neither party is allowed to have 5F spend any overnights at the residence of a romantic partner unless they are married to the person in question.
-If living with or spending overnights with a romantic partner at either party's residence, 5F will have a bed and living arrangement that will not be in the same room as someone of the opposite sex of the child are/or isn't related to the child.
I'm also planning to have something put in there that will allow me to be able to move back home to be closer to my family without Kate being able to stop me. I don't have any family that lives near me and Kate's parents are the only family she has in the area. They are also getting up in years too and not in the best of health.
And just so you know, I'm already shopping for attorneys in my area. And no one knows that Tiff and I know each other. And we are planning on keeping it that way until we have no other choice.
So, do I have a case? Do the changes, overall, seem reasonable? What other considerations do I need to consider? Plus, any advice will be amazing. Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Lol now ihub punk is asking “What is the current sales pipeline for Lightwave Logic's polymer modulators and other products? Can you share any details on the size and timing of potential deals with the 20+ major corporations that have viewed the technology demo?"
"When do you anticipate Lightwave Logic will achieve its first $1 million revenue quarter? What milestones need to be hit to reach that level of quarterly sales?"
"What is the company's plan to become cash flow positive and profitable? When do you expect Lightwave Logic to reach profitability?”
Punkin has come a long way, he used to say that it could never be done, now he keeps falling back, apparently trying to hold the line, lol, now he is asking questions about revenue and dang even invoking God to help humanity as his reason for posting in his credentials. Even if one thinks that they are right that is quite a statement, typically something that a reasonable person keeps to themselves a life's effort is something between them and their creator. I have no idea where this technology will lead or what it will solve, my goal is an investment, certainly not divine, I have no clue in the end who it will truly benefit but the medical thing does have potential.
Today I'm happy with thousands of modulators on a foundry produced wafer. And thousands of modulators from a few ounces of Perkinamine. These modulators Triple the speed, reduce the power and are 1/30 the size of today's modulators. Lebby will fill us in on what we need, he is far more intelligent than anyone on this board.
Read on folks.
Oh and do not forget about those that sold early (or didn’t sell early) that purport to be long and like to consistently complain every single time the price drops. Let me try to explain it this way, this is not a sports game, this is a technology, so unlike sports, points can be literally be taken of the scoreboard by simply borrowing and selling shares (shorts). Remember though that those shares must be purchased back and until then the actual score of the game is not known. So the shorts agenda is to sell it down then try and convince folks to sell them shares at that discounted price. Some longs do not understand that they are helping the shorts at their game. That being said, there are currently 17% more shares sold than exist. They have borrowed those shares and pay interest daily and have sold them to us with the hope of buying them back at a reduced price (Some purported longs even try to help them) apparently, they think that if they complain it will force an NVDA, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon to reach an agreement with Lightwave sooner. Well, it will not change the speed of the adoption of the technology, I’m all for doing a tier1 agreement, but a few quick little agreements could force their hand so the Tier1’s do not have to have to honor those agreements should the company be taken over. Some seam to forget that until now Silicon photonics could keep up, but no more and with AI we just entered a new world, where the pace set by Moore's Law for silicon photonics is leisurely compared to this new demand. AI is totally on a sprint, with its computational power doubling not every two years, but approximately every six months.
Let me look at what the shorts have said over the years basically throwing spaghetti at the wall and have been proven wrong. Patents were filed in 2020, 2021, ALD I think was 2022. Patents were not made public, the shorts were babbling meanwhile Lebby had not only solved it but wrote and submitted patents.
Here are the 10 top B.S. short myths, trying to suppress the stock so they could try and cover I also think that there are a few purported longs that sold prematurely that are now helping to push the shorts game forward, meanwhile with the next deal announcement the dam is about to burst.
I’d love to see Punkin hold a conversation with Lebby one on one for 5 minutes, it would be hilarious,
Shorts and those paid by the shorts to act like they “know something” won't even tell you when they are short, they just say, no not short just here to spend my life 7 days a week helping folks that I have never met. Well, here they are, you tell me guys.
1.) The shorts had worked for months to try and convince investors that Lightwave had a problem poling. Then low and behold Lightwave unveiled 2 patents they submitted years prior solving that issue.
2.) The shorts claimed for years Lightwave could not protect the device in anything other than a gold box, then Lightwave unveiled the ALD patent that they had acquired. Basically, hair spray over the finished chip is all that is needed. The foundries are using the same thing over the electronics side of the chip. Understand that even if someone else invents an EO Polymer Lightwave Owns the Patent on ALD over Polymers. Comprende?
3.) The shorts claimed Lightwaves material was not stable, Wham Bam blown out of the water yet again.
4.) Shorts said that Lightwave could never get this under 1 volt, well Lightwave did, in fact Lightwaves polymer is so sensitive that their modulators can function without the aid of driver to boost the voltage. Basically the electrons in the 1's and 0's rolling off the silicon can embed themselves into the laser using Lightwaves polymer. Oh and by the way, Lightwave also owns the patent on a driverless Polymer Modulator. Even if someone perfects a stable sensitive EO polymer when the want to do direct drive, they have to come knocking on Lightwaves door with cash in hand.
5.) For the 6 months leading up to last years annual shareholder meeting the shorts stated Lightwave could not close a commercial deal all the then like now trying to convince us that the sky was falling and once again Lebby delivered.
6.) For months the shorts said Lightwave could not use anything other than gold on their electrodes, well guess the F what, yup, once again (at the shareholders meeting) Lebby put up a slide of successful foundry runs and when asked by me if the contacts labeled AL on the slide stood for Aluminum Lebby said “yes, we use that any many other materials as well”. I asked about aluminum corrosion, the response was, X (you idiot) that is what the ALD will also protect.
7.) The Shorts were trying to convince longs that the foundry had not made progress on PDK’s, Lebby certainly blew them out of the water on that as well. As info PDK’s are process development kits, it is how the foundries make Lightwaves devices available to the public so when an NVDA’s, Amazon (AWS), Cisco or Fujitsu are designing devices they can check that box and add that to their device in the foundry. 2 weeks ago lebby said the foundries have thousands of modulators per wafer. On question that I need to understand is that with thousands of devices on a wafer how many of those thousands of modulators are affected by the kerf when dicing (sawing or scribing?)
8) The shorts used to say that it couldn’t me done now as you see Pumpkin is asking Yes but “What is the current sales pipeline for Lightwave Logic's polymer modulators? Can you share any details on the size and timing of potential deals with the 20+ major corporations that have viewed the technology demo? When do you anticipate Lightwave Logic will achieve its first $1 million revenue quarter? What milestones need to be hit to reach that level of quarterly sales? What is the company's plan to become cash flow positive and profitable? When do you expect Lightwave Logic to reach profitability?” Lol, Lol and again Lol It sounds like Pumpkin is finally being honest, perhaps it is by divine intervention on his posts
9) As info the institutions now own 26% of the shares, The shorts would have us believe that is irrelevant, wait what?
10) I like this, Ted who also has another ID said that he gets his info from the internet because everything on it is true. When asked why he does not use first-hand information he said that he is not good at reading people, lol and yet he watches every video with baited breath.
I know some do not see it but as evidenced by their latest efforts the shorts are worried and it is obvious that whomever they got their info from was consistently years behind making up issues that had in fact already been solved. I would not want to have been an advisor to the shorts.
Lightwave is finally at the stage where they have the patents in place, moved into additional lab space, hired additional lab personnel for making larger quantities of perkinamine, (a few fluid ounces can make thousands of devices) the new lab will be equipped to test larger quantities of chips coming back from foundries, work on new polymers for additional devices (they even have another polymer available for licensing) produce data sheets, standardize bulk testing, they have even hired a dedicated deal maker, oh also a V.P. dedicated just to working with foundries that are actively running wafers. Now they have added a former Intel deal maker to the board of directors.
Soon this thing will in fact snowball because the industry's "go to" good old silicon photonics has hit the wall it simply cannot run faster. Lightwaves material when added applied to Silicon triples the speed and because it is so sensitive it is 30times smaller and uses 1/10 the power all at a time when AI is pushing the amount of data processed by the data centers through the roof.
~Some of us were wondering why the Lightwave employees were still in town (apparently held over) for an extra 2 days over after the OFC San Frisco meeting, now we see that there were no less than 20 companies that apparently requested an unscheduled impromptu demo on a holiday week (good Friday) after the convention was over. Not only did Lightwave employees not go home but it sounds like a bunch of Tier 1’s and such saw it as important enough to see ASAP. And yes while many on here say that NDA’s do not exist, LOL I’ll bet that not only were NDA’s mandatory but I bet that every demo was “private” by scheduled appointment only and also attended by the various expert employees at Lightwave to get the most bang for the buck.~
Lightwave makes the thing that makes the component better anyone communicating using fiber optics needs it, the entire industry needs it. Think if BASF produces a chemical that makes paint last longer. Why would the paint manufacture tell its competitors what makes their paint so durable. Lightwave is going partner with many and they will simply sell devices that are faster and require less energy, those companies are not going to tell the competition what they do to make that happen. Lightwave will quietly market to the tier1's and they will insist on it in their data centers and devices. The one exception that I see is that if the foundry runs were paid for by Lightwave Logic (vs. say an amazon or facebook etc) Lightwave would do joint public PR of where the industry can order chips with Lightwaves Perkinamine on it (It is called checking the box on the PDK).
The shorting situation will be solved by additional Partnerships and look out when those Partnerships are accompanied by a dividend in a new 3rd party company licensing say the ability to develop the Lidar device market or for the biotech crowd a medical sensing partner, wham short situation solved in short order. Remember that currently they are only talking about Telcom 2km to 10km market but there are so many more.
Currently 1k difference between the buys and sells changed it 1 penny. Folks this is just normal trading without any pressure on the price. This time next week we’ll either be in the lab or in the meeting.
Still trying to digest the effects of T+1 on the shorts especially the foreign exchange rate, Fails To Deliver, Naked shorting etc. it is coming the Tuesday after Memorial Day (Holiday in the U.S., which is the weekend after the Shareholders Meeting), Finra Settlement Date 5/31 which then will mean a trade date of 5/30.
Short Game, Market Maker Game, Institution Game, changing technology
Check it out rainy day so I thought I’d look Punkin “I never said any of those things in that context. I’m just here doing Gods work” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174419282 That was in reply to JimJet218’s statement. 1. Couldn't be poled. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169035142&txt2

1. Needed a gold case. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170733222&txt2
   
2. Would never be less than 1 volt. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=144502197&txt2 Pumpkin claims to be doing “Gods Work”.
   

Xster Rainy day so I thought I'd spend few minutes today,
Getting spanked so far today.

Hey Everyone
I've kicked the dust off my microphone annd started getting content back out again after about a year break. If you don't know me I run the Redcaps Podcast, it's a podcast that started off as a collection of short episodes giving primarily DM/GM advice in OSR games and last year transformed more into an interview show with guests big and small from the TTRPG space.
Thought I'd do a quick post showing some of the things that have been released and stuff that is coming out soon. Youtube should be up to date with all the interview episodes of the podcast as well if you prefer to listen there.

Released:

• John Johnson & Lets Quest - Let's Quesat is a non-profit that helps schools setup gaming groups
• Mythic Mountain RPG & Folk Gaming - A gaming group from KY, USA that has embraced the OSR and folk gaming
• Harmony Ginger & 1:1 with Braunstein - Harmony has been experimenting with 1:1 time and Braunstein and shares her thoughts

Upcoming:

• Hammer City Games & Earth after Death - A Canadian gaming company has a Kickstarter going on for a post-apoc OSR title.
• Redwyrm & The 7yo DM - Dan tells about how he has been running games for kids and how his young one runs them.
• RPGMatch & The Tinder of gaming - Jaoquin talks about developing RPG Match, merging with RPG.net, and some neat metrics.
• Glynn Seal & The Midderlands - Glynn talks about the creation of the Midderlands setting, zine design, and the creative process.

Later this month / early June:

• James "Grim Jim" Desborough
• Rui Albino & Sea of Infinity

Things that will likely end up on youtube:

• Videos of me learning and testing things with DragonBane and Foundry
• Solo play of the above
• Recreation of some of the old podcast episodes GM/DM tips into video format

Call to action:

• If you can follow or let me know what you like or dislike about the interviews / content
• If you are or know of someone who would be interested in coming on the show reach out

Links:

• https://www.theredcaps.net/
• https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theredcaps
• https://www.youtube.com/@theredcaps
• https://theredcaps.substack.com/

Hey Everyone
I've kicked the dust off my microphone annd started getting content back out again after about a year break. If you don't know me I run the Redcaps Podcast, it's a podcast that started off as a collection of short episodes giving primarily DM/GM advice in OSR games and last year transformed more into an interview show with guests big and small from the TTRPG space.
Thought I'd do a quick post showing some of the things that have been released and stuff that is coming out soon. Youtube should be up to date with all the interview episodes of the podcast as well if you prefer to listen there.

Released:

• John Johnson & Lets Quest - Let's Quesat is a non-profit that helps schools setup gaming groups
• Mythic Mountain RPG & Folk Gaming - A gaming group from KY, USA that has embraced the OSR and folk gaming
• Harmony Ginger & 1:1 with Braunstein - Harmony has been experimenting with 1:1 time and Braunstein and shares her thoughts

Upcoming:

• Hammer City Games & Earth after Death - A Canadian gaming company has a Kickstarter going on for a post-apoc OSR title.
• Redwyrm & The 7yo DM - Dan tells about how he has been running games for kids and how his young one runs them.
• RPGMatch & The Tinder of gaming - Jaoquin talks about developing RPG Match, merging with RPG.net, and some neat metrics.
• Glynn Seal & The Midderlands - Glynn talks about the creation of the Midderlands setting, zine design, and the creative process.

Later this month / early June:

• James "Grim Jim" Desborough
• Rui Albino & Sea of Infinity

Things that will likely end up on youtube:

• Videos of me learning and testing things with DragonBane and Foundry
• Solo play of the above
• Recreation of some of the old podcast episodes GM/DM tips into video format

Call to action:

• If you can follow or let me know what you like or dislike about the interviews / content
• If you are or know of someone who would be interested in coming on the show reach out

Links:

• https://www.theredcaps.net/
• https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theredcaps
• https://www.youtube.com/@theredcaps
• https://theredcaps.substack.com/

JEFFERSON CITY — The Missouri General Assembly met its constitutional mandate to pass a state budget Friday, sending to Gov. Mike Parson a $51.7 billion package that funds essential services like the state’s health care and public education system.
The final number is about $1 billion under what the governor proposed at the beginning of the year. He has the power to eliminate specific spending items.
Here are four key numbers you should know about the Fiscal Year 2025 state budget.
— $6,760 —
The state adequacy target is the baseline per pupil funding provided to school districts by the state. It was unchanged for four years until this year, when it was bumped to $6,760 from $6,375. The funding has failed to keep pace with inflation over the last 17 years. In 2007, the target established by the legislature was $9,575 per pupil after adjusting for inflation.
A major education bill raising minimum teacher pay to $40,000 a year and expanding charter schools to Boone County, among other provisions, passed this session. It comes with a hefty $468 million fiscal note once fully implemented and will cost around $200 million a year for the next few years.
House budget chair Rep. Cody Smith, R-Carthage, said that the steep increase in education spending required going forward wasn’t factored in while composing the FY 2025 budget. None of the mandates in the bill are connected to a funding source, meaning if the state can’t afford them, it would be on local governments to do so.
It’s unclear the likelihood of that possibility. At the beginning of the year the state projected a 0.5% decrease in general revenue over the rest of this fiscal year and the next one. Yet, up to date revenue receipts have shown a different picture. As of April, general revenue collections are up 2.7% year over year.
— 6 —
Six departments requested funds for programs or practices that involved diversity, equity and inclusion in some way. Republicans have targeted DEI in the appropriations process for years. Last year, the House defunded DEI in its version of the budget, but the Senate approved it, keeping it in the budget.
Sen. Denny Hoskins, R-Warrensburg, who introduced the DEI amendment last year, again proposed an amendment to ban state spending on DEI several times while the budget bills were on the Senate floor. It failed by bipartisan votes each time.
Blocking funding to DEI isn’t the first time Republicans have attempted to legislate through the budget bills. The 2022 budget included a provision preventing any Medicaid reimbursements going to Planned Parenthood because it has affiliates in other states that provide abortions. That provision was later struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Even as DEI was protected in the budget, a provision was added by Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer, R-Parkville, to prevent any money from going to a city that has a sanctuary city policy that protects the identity of immigrants.
After failing to block state funds for Planned Parenthood and DEI in the budget process, Republicans have turned to changing statute. The governor already signed a bill passed this session to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. A bill banning funds spent on DEI programs in state agencies got initial House approval last week.
Only six agencies have offices relating to diversity, equity and inclusion. Planned Parenthood is unable to provide abortions in Missouri because of the state ban on abortions. No city in the state has a sanctuary city policy.
— 0 —
No public comment was taken throughout the four-month budget process. In an effort to have the budget completed earlier, the process began sooner. Instead, the budget was completed three hours before the constitutional deadline, and the public wasn’t privy to the process’s inner workings.
Smith unveiled his budget plan mid-March, two months before the bills were constitutionally mandated to be passed. In a 30-minute hearing he laid out a $49 billion spending plan and gave committee members a few days to review the whole package and come up with amendments.
About a month later, the Senate held a hearing unveiling its own package without receiving public comment. Its version of the budget bills was unveiled less than two weeks before the budget due date.
A 41-hour filibuster by the Freedom Caucus on the federal reimbursement allowance, a bill that funds a large portion of the state’s healthcare system, further cramped the timeline.
With the clock ticking, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, and Smith decided to finalize the budget process themselves instead of in a public conference committee.
The new bills created by the budget chairs were brought before the Senate and House with no time for prior review by elected officials or the public.
Republicans and Democrats alike criticized the budget. Gov. Mike Parson said his office wasn’t privy to any of the budget discussions and called the process “problematic.” He also said that he didn’t want a large supplemental — when the legislature has to appropriate funds to departments to continue day-to-day operations.
Rep. Peter Meredith, D-St. Louis, who has served on the budget committee for eight years, said it was the least transparent process he’s ever seen.
— $558 million —
UM system got about $558 million in this year’s budget: $509 million of that is baseline funding for the system, with about $50 million appropriated for various university projects. The overall appropriation is a 3% increase from last year.
$10 million was put forward to complete a $25 million meat laboratory on MU’s campus. $6 million was appropriated for a workforce incentive grant at MU. Around $5 million was given to the State Historical Society. That’s about $2 million more than last year. Hough is proud of the budget despite the transparency concerns.
“It’s been an odd year, but it’s been a good year and I think the end product is something we can be proud of,” Hough said after the bills passed the Senate.

This winter I started dating 30m who I met from Hinge. I have been single for many years and have gone on too many dates and usually do not click with people. I was so excited to hit it off with Jim. He was caring, fun, thoughtful and we had very similar interests. Overall I could really see myself with him long term.
Problems arose when I started to learn more about his family. I learned that his sibling was going through a very bad divorce and was living at home with his parents with her daughter (4). During our time dating he had to go home to help his parents watch his sister and she was going through a very tough mental situation and was unable to care for herself or her daughter. There are more issues with his family such as him bringing up helping his sister buy a house since she is dependent on his parents, him paying for Babysiting and some of his moms therapy. While I find this all very admirable it brought up concerns that his sister would be dependent on him for living expenses for awhile and concerns over what his sister will do long term. Other relevant information is his sisters husband (starting divorce) treated her very bad and also has not started paying any child support.
I have always been somewhat who runs anxious especially around money. I grew up middle class but heard my parents fight/ discuss money in a way that has made me anxious to discuss it and sometimes more frugal than I need to be.
Because of everything going on with his family I decided to end things with 30m after 3 Months of dating. I was having very bad anxiety and didn’t want to add stress to the situation by making him discuss his plans for finances with his family. Looking back I should have discussed it while we were still dating. At first when I ended it I felt relief but as time has passed I have questioned my decision. I don’t know it if would be a bad idea to reach out and share more about what my concerns were or if I should just leave it be and force myself to move on. It has been about 2.5 months.
After reading everyone’s comments I agree reaching out is a bad idea and I need to look into my money / relationship anxiety more.

The novel begins September 3, 2006, a Sunday. In "physical time," our reality, Andre Agassi played and lost his final match of his career. Steve Irwin, the croc hunter, would die the following day from a stingray's three barbed venomous spinal blades puncturing his heart. Senator Barak Obama was still denying he was intending to run for President (he would announce in February 2007.) The number 1 song in America and the UK is Sexyback by Justin Timberlake. Egypt warned of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis vacationing in Sinai. Charlie Sheen turned 41. 200 Taliban are killed in a major battle in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Iraqi leaders announce the capture of the #2 leader of Al Qaeda. Europe's space agency purposely crash-lands a lunar probe into the moon.
In short, nothing, on balance seems to have happened in the world that has any particular world-historical or even US-historical import. Just a day. Even searching back 4 extra days from September 3 - since we are told that the man viewing the art installation is now on his fifth straight day in the museum - nothing all that *important* seems to have happened on any of those dates, the way saying a novel is starting on June 6, 1944, or (obviously) September 10, 2001, or July 16, 1945 or November 22, 1962 would be of course trying to tell us something.
Q: why is Delillo's purpose (is there one?) for telling us this specific date? Why is it important that the man is there on September 3, 2006 watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a31q2ZQcETw over and over.
Q: who is the man? Delillo himself? Just a random unnamed character? Is it definitely Finley and Elster who are the two men who come into the room? The description of the older man "long white hair braided at the nape" [p.7, Scribner] certainly seems to suggest it is Elster, described in Ch. 1 as a man "with silvery hair, as always, was braided down into a short ponytail." If it is definitely them, what does it mean they attended a museum show together? Anything?
This is not the first Delillo novel to open with a scene where a movie, and anonymous characters' responses to watching it, is central to the narrative - Players opens with a movie being shown on a plane that is basically a silent movie of a terrorist machine-gun attack on waspy golfers, only accompanied by a pianist (yes a pianist) in the airplane bar filling in the suspense with improvised show tunes - and it is not the first to open with an examination of an art installation - Underworld, after the fantastic baseball game section - opens at Klara Sax's airplane bomber art installation commune. But this opening seems to introduce two characters obliquely, and of course only if you've paid close attention to the description of Elster's hair could you think back to it being him, perhaps.
"The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it." "The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw." [p.5, Scribner]
Q:Who is this person watching and why should we care?
Q: Did the opening sequence provide you any insight other than , perhaps, confusion? Something other than "what the hell did I just read?" What? Does your reaction to the opening sequence change when you know (if you did before this post) that the Psycho installation was and is real?
Moving on to Chapter 1 [p. 17, Scribner], we learn that we are on Day 10 of a 12-day period of time that relates the initial relationship between Elster and Finley. Finley, who is probably in his early to mid-30s and 73-year-old Elster are spending time at Elster's house in the desert to record a one-take movie of Elster's testimony of what it was like to serve in an administration that went to war under less than honest circumstances.
Our narrator is Jim Finley, a documentary filmmaker who has made exactly one film about Jerry Lewis's telethon appearances - Lewis, a "rampaging comic" to whom Elster would merely be a "straight man." [p.27] Elster, who Finley also describes as "not a man who might make space for even the gentlest correction," [p.22] is a non-political theorist being brought in to an administration to provide narrative to their war. I've seen references to him being based on Paul Wolfowitz, the political scientists who became Deputy SecDef in the Bush II Administration who famously nearly swallowed his comb to wet it to comb his hair in an image that likely sealed his fate in D.C. as unserious and ridiculous who was then shuffled off to the World Bank, but would Delillo ape the man AND mention him in the narrative? If so, that seems clumsy.
Q: Do you even take Elster serious as a character or believable as a "brain" behind the narrative of an administration going to war? A man who speaks in bad koans and aphorisms like "Time becomes blind." [p.23] and who reads Louis Zukovsky into the night? (Zukovsky famously worked on an epic poem called "A" for over almost 50 years, finally finishing it a few years before his death in 1978.)
Finley tells us: "To Elster, sunset was human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder." [p.18, Scribner]. Elster has come to the desert to seek - something - we know not what and are not told definitively - but his narrative of what his role was in Washington was to create a interpretation of the "closed world" for the "plotters, the strategists" [p. 28] and ends up delivering to Finley what I think Finley was after - the cynical idea that Elster was giving form and shape to the government's bullshit narrative - "The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability."
Q: Is Elster ultimately right? Did the country have a "shadowy need" [p.34] for such a narrative? See, for instance: "Let's roll." [probably in reality, "Let's roll it" referring to a beverage cart to break into the cockpit.]
"Shock and awe." "Global War on Terror" "Slam dunk" "WMDs" "The Surge" And perhaps most infamously "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"
At the ends of the chapter, we get what counts as a cliffhanger in this slim novel: Elster's adult daughter would be coming for a visit, Jessie who was "otherworldly" [p. 36].

I didn't want to post here but I didn't really have a choice so i am just gonna cut to the chase. My older sister is dating my nephew. It sounds weird but please read. They both are under 18 so I wont use real names. First, I will start with explanations about my family. My other older sister I will call her Hope) who is 30 at the time of this post is married to my brother-in law. My brother in-law's brother and his wife was caught doing "Illegal things" (Sorry Its still an ongoing case atm). So brother in-law's other brother and his wife decided to take their kids in but they were still living with Hope and my brother in-law and one of those kids were my nephew who I will name Lee was one of those kids.
(By the way, when me, Pou, and my other older sister who is a year older than me were in foster care. When we were, my brother in-law and Hope took us in and this was when I was five or six. Hope, my other sis whom I'll call Alin and me walked in on Lee and Pou cuddling. That was when Pou was eight or seven and Lee was 9 or 10. )
My sister whom I will call Pou started acting strange when we were folding boats for their grandpa whom recently passed away. Folding boats for our loved ones is part of our tradition. Pou and Lee were acting strange because they were glancing at each other as if they were elementary children.
That's when my suspicions started. Not to be creepy or anything but every movement they made and every small action I was watching as I did with everyone else. To be honest watching and reading people's face wrinkles and actions became a habit when I was 11 and right now I'm 14 so three years of experience was screaming "Somethings happening" So I will list things that stood out and rose my suspicions.
1.Lee's Actions: Lee is a quiet guy just like my brother in-law and they both are talkative to people they know. So during spring break we went to spend time at Hope's house to help with the kids and to hang out. Suddenly Lee came into our room and decided to hang out with us. Usually when we are over Lee stays in the basement. Even Hope said that. I didn't think much of it and thought he had a change of heart.
2.Pou's Voice: Pou is a confident talkative girl and her voice is like Jim Carrey, Drake, and Jennie if they were in one voice box. So that same day where Lee cam into the room to hangout, Pou was acting strange and I noticed Lee being distant from me and Hope. So when Pou would start talking its like she was summoning the snow white out of her soul. So of course that made me realize, "Yea, something is goin on here"
3.Pou's Actions: Usually when it comes to Hope's house Pou wouldn't really be that enthusiastic when going. So when we were about to come back home from Hope's house Pou said."To be honest, I kind don't wanna go home." We had to anyways because we had school the next day. She also would use the bathroom in the basement where Lee sleeps. (The basement is not messy its actually a bar, gym, and bedroom.) Usually Pou would be reluctant to use the bathroom in the basement because that bathroom was cramped and the door couldn't close properly. So when she did I was already convinced she was seeing him.
Lee wanted to wrestle me and Pou or so I thought. My other nephew whom I'll name Leo loves to wrestle me and Pou because I'm a workout freak and Pou for her natural strength. So when Lee wanted to wrestle I was tryna warm up but Lee and Pou were already goin at it. They were gentle and giggling. Its like they were teasing each other.
Next is Confirming My Suspicions
During her visit to the basement she was taking too long so I decided, "Lets see if I'm right." So I tried sneaking down in the basement but my dam flip flops were slapping my feet and the stairs would creak so they hear me coming down. When I opened the door Lee was pretending to be asleep and Pou coincidentally "finished" using the bathroom. A few things stood out

1. Pou was out of breath
2. She was smiling and looking to my left.
3. I looked at her direction, she didnt look like she came around the corner where the bathroom was at. it looked like she just turned around from going to the direction of the bathroom.

I asked her, "Why do you talk in that voice whenever Lee is near?" and she got defensive on me telling me not to get the wrong idea.
Yesterday, we were watching a horror movie named Exhuma and babysitting. Me, Hope, Pou, and Alin were there and we were gonna use the bathroom one by one since we are watching our 1 year old niece. Pou wanted to use the bathroom in the basement since one of our nephews was taking too long. Once he was done, Me, Hope, and Alin had already used the bathroom. We waited and waited on our phones. I was honestly in a good mood since I had predicted the movie's outcome but Pou was killing the suspense of the movie so I told Hope and Alin that I was going to check on her. This time instead of trying to sneak, I decided to run down as it was a habit and when I burst opened the door, Boom, them rushing to get away from each other. Lee was laying on his stomach and face on the pillow, Pou standing up in shock, eyes wide, one hand on her waist and the other covering her mouth. The only thing I thought was, "So I was right." I told her that I had a suspicion and tried to confirm it earlier. Honestly the only real emotion I could get out was a laugh. I didnt really feel anything about it but how funny it was.
How They Feel
Pou told me that she feels that she's truly in love with him and so is he. She told me things how they started falling for each other and by the information it sounds like Lee was the one in love first. It was a romantic story but she told me it was forbidden love. To me it seems more like Illegal love. For the record we come form a strict Asian house hold and culture. In our culture reputation is money, power, status, life. She told me that she loved him because he wasn't a brain-rotted 17 year old guy. Yes Pou is 16 and Lee is 17. Lee was healthy. He worked out just like me and was somewhat productive. She said that Lee was the only one who like her cranky and funny personality. He embraced her body like it was a statue. He didn't just like her, he loved her, and they loved each other. She said that she loved his voice, his protection, and his way of affection. She loved listening to him like he was a melody on the beach. It was addicting and calming to her in my opinion. She cried. She didn't trust me. I understood why.
Just a little information. I was mature for my age. I knew many things, and had many secrets and secrets of others. I used these secrets to get information of other people or use it to my advantage. In public I used an Innocent face, voice and personality. With family, neutral and tried to make others smile. Alone is when I express myself. I use information from others around me to blackmail or just to see their expressions because it was entertaining. I hurt people who hurt me and one of those were Pou.
So I understood why she didn't trust me. If I met me, I wouldn't trust me either. In all the conversations and stories, I felt like I related. I was also wondering what I would do if I lost someone close to me and I did, we all did. She told me that he was the reason she could live, losing him would mean losing herself. She told me to keep it to myself till the day I die. She couldn't trust me to the point she started eating less.
I'm not begging for her trust if anything I didn't want to get involved but curiosity drives me nuts.
I don't know if this is even legal. My strict parents would kick her out and my elders would give her a nickname to gossip about. I'm just a kid relying on internet people I truly don't know. I know its stupid but I cant anyone. My parents would disown her, I would get yelled at and my sis Hope would get shamed on by my brother in-law's elders. I'm supposed be the mediator in these situations but ever outcome I can think of leads to nowhere that everyone is good.
Hope is a good person and she is my main concern. Me and Leo are close and his nephews and nieces love me and I love them too. If I ruin their relationship, it would affect Leo, Hope, Lee, my nieces and nephews and my brother in-law. She's my sister who has never hurt me.
Adults or anyone experienced in things like this could help me, I truly don't know what to do, advice would be nice.

There is a growing realization among a handful of observant bible prophecy watchers around the world that Donald J. Trump perfectly fits the descriptive criteria for the end times beast/antichrist given to us in both the old and new testament of the Bible. At present, no other AC candidate comes close to fitting all of the criteria like Trump does.
If the millennial day pattern prophecy is true, 30-33 AD (Christ's crucifixion) + 2,000 years (church age) - 3½ or 7 years (tribulation period) = 2023-2026 (Rapture?).
Assuming this chronology is roughly correct, the Beast/Antichrist must be alive and breathing on earth today, if he is to fulfill his important role in the end times.
The exact day or hour of Christ's return will never be known, but we are told in scripture that we will know the season of His return, and that it won't catch us off guard like it will for unbelievers. I strongly believe for multiple reasons that we are in the final moments of the church age. We must continue to prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually for what's coming.
On the 14th of June 1946, during a blood moon, Donald J. Trump was born in the New York City borough of Queens. On that same day, Infamous cabal occultist Aleister Crowley sent a letter to fellow Thelemite occultist John McMurty that the members Jack Parsons, L Ron. Hubbard, and others were producing a "Moon Child"; the Freemasons "Chosen One", that is, the biblical Beast/Anti-Christ.
In the following decades, masonic movie directors in Hollywood have released many iconic movies featuring arcane esoteric references to Donald Trump, as well as other related events of deep occult significance.
Donald Trump appears to have peculiar numerological connections to the magic numbers 88, 777, 911, and 1776.
700 days after Trump's birth, the prophetically significant rebirth of the modern state of Israel would occur on 5/14/1948.
Further, 70 years, 7 months, and 7 days after his birth, he would be inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.
Seven months after his inauguration, the first Great American Solar Eclipse would occur on 8/21/2017, with the moon's path of totality dividing the continental USA in half, entering over the 33rd state, exiting at the 33rd parallel. This eclipse also passed over seven towns with the name "Salem". Trump himself infamously observed this eclipse with the first lady from the White House balcony, briefly looking up at the sun without eclipse shades.
Precisely two years to the day after the first solar eclipse, on 8/21/2019, Donald Trump made the odd proclamation "I Am the Chosen One" and also sent out a tweet likening himself to the "second coming of god" and the "king of Israel", which is blasphemy to God.
In another strange coincidence, exactly halfway between the dates of these two eclipses (December 14, 2020), the first mRNA covid vaccine was administered to a patient in the USA.
In 2018, a secret 80-minute cell phone recording recording was taken during a Washington, D.C. donor dinner with President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman in attendance. Parallels are drawn between Trump and the Jewish Messiah using gematria. Parnas then presents a unknown gift to Trump from “the head rabbi of Ukraine” and "some rabbis in Israel". He explains that according to Jewish numerology, known as gematria, the letters in Trump’s name add up to 424, which is the same total attributed to the long-awaited Messiah. (watch here)
On 10/15/2017, Donald Trump made a cryptic remark: "Maybe this represents the calm before the storm". When asked by a reported what he meant, he said "You'll find out" and winked his eye.
Donald Trump has also narrated the cryptic "Snake Poem" at countless rallies. The final line that Trump emphasizes after the woman receives the viscous bite is: "You knew damn well I was a snake, before you let me in!"
When Trump is asked by political commentator Frank Luntz in a now infamous video if he ever asks God for forgiveness, he coldly responds: "that's a tough question," proceeds to say that he identifies as a "Protestant," and his pastor was "the late great Vincent Peele" (who incidentally turns out to be a 33rd degree Freemason). Trump then continues dodging the original question, so Luntz asks him once again if he asks God for forgiveness. Trump then looks at him smugly and finally admits that he doesn't, and that he simply moves on from his sins without repentance and "tries to do better" on his own accord.
The sinister Qanon cult movement began in the murky depths of the web during Trump's rise to power on the campaign trail. It has since become a worldwide grassroots movement, with fervent and fanatical followers perceiving Trump as a messianic figure who is the one that is destined to "take down the Satanic pedophile globalists" and save America - even the whole world itself.
On 4/29/21 Donald Trump proclaimed himself "The father of the vaccine". Under Trump's term as president, Operation Warp Speed sent untold billions to pharmaceutical companies to rapidly develop and produce the mRNA covid vaccines. Trump likened this project's significance to that of a "2nd Manhattan Project".
Trump also has a remarkable obsession with nuclear weapons, which was demonstrated during his "big button/little button" threats made against North Korea, as well as the occasional remark such as his suggestion to nuke incoming hurricanes to stop them and more recently against Iran with WW3 looming in the horizon.
https://www.gq.com/story/the-cult-of-trump

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS NUMEROLOGY DECODE

Since we all know exactly who and what Spongebob is, I am going to do a Numerology decode.
When it comes to Numerology, there are many different things you can look into. I am going to look into the letters, patterns, and Numerology personality numbers.
SPONGEBOB has a personality #6. 6 is the number of compassion, work ethic, criticism, cleanliness, and productivity. In the funny show, we see that Spongebob is a workaholic. He has a 5 destiny number which shapes who you are overall. 5 is connected to youthfulness which explains the silliness of the Spongebob character. He is always laughing and doing things funny. The 5 energy indicates this. 5 also points to people, places, and things that are unique. He has an 8 soul urge which explains his undying ambition and creativity.
We can see that SPONGEBOB has 2 O's which has the numeric energy of 15 and numeric value of 6. 15 is the creative use of energy for productivity. Again, 6 is the number of routine, work ethic and productivity goes with this. This energy is not only his personality number, but also it is within his name. It's really in him.
SPONGEBOB HAS DOUBLE NUMERIC VALUES IN HIS NAME WHICH ARE, 7,6,5, AND 2. This explains why he is able to show his emotions and have moments of sensitivity(2). Very compassionate(2) but also childish and silly(5) and able to come up with plans that work(7). Since these #s has double influence, we must considered what they equal. 7 twice equals 14/5 which shows how he is responsible and can make work fun even though it is a duty(6). 6 twice equals 12/3 which shows his social skills, life, and creativity. Another youthful energy as well. 5 twice equals 10/1 which points to his bravery and capability to take action. 2 twice equals 4 which is home,family,responsibility, and structure on the home front and he would make everyone feel comfortable for the most part.
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​
​

i have been keeping a list of recurring jokes / inside jokes in the office and i have a lot, things i think the writers had as inside jokes, and i knowww i'm missing bunch. please contribute!
here's what i have so far: im listing the joke and then (the episodes). sorry my formatting is all over the place it's a working document

1. Jim hurting Phyllis w soccer ball: 5:22 dream team -the convict (3:9)
   
2. cotton swab hurts Andy: The incentive ep where he gets a butt tattoo (8:2) Cafe disco when Kelly is gonna pierce his ear (5:27)
   
3. Oscar and the hardwood floors : -when dwight shoots the floor (7:24) -when they do the espresso tasting and redo the office (9:11)
   
4. “Stay out of this you” -season 3 michael scott and Andy sales episode -early season Halloween michael has a cutout of himself -s4 EP 8 - money part 2 —- 2:51
   
5. Naming types of clothes -(3:22): in Victoria’s Secret michael keeps asking angela if e wants a t back or a .... -(3:3) when Dwight goes behind Michael’s back and talks to jan and asks if she got a teddy camisole t back - the coup
   
6. upturned broom w a bucket for a head - instead of new boss, Stanley (beach day!) (3:24) Old vacuum cleaner that’s broken for manager - Pam on dwight in the coup (3:3)
   
7. Do you need us for any of this?” JIM to michael in an office meeting —- crime aid when hes describing how the Springsteen tickets seem too good to be true And “a head of an egret, with the body of a...””-- fun run
   
8. Kevin & Dwight with fireworks End of the ___ EP Right before Pam & Jim’s wedding - Kevin asks about the fireworks
   
9. Dwight giving rousing communism speech season 6:3 - when Jim is the manager and they’re putting beans on everyone’s faces and dwight tries to get everyone to rise up When he’s public speaking giving the award (2:17)
   
10. “Why are you limping” michael in season 6 EP 9 - michael limps after the slap Andy in where dwight shoots the floor and his ear is ringing (7:24)
    
11. Also Kelly piercing Andy’s ear? Cafe disco & niagra? kelly andy dance-off AND ear pierce? (5:27) /// (6:4)
    
12. YouTube being an entity that can film things Product recall: “and then YouTube gets a hold of it” s3 EP 21 The roast of michael scott - make sure youtube comes down to tape this (5:15)
    
13. actually letting the air out of the tires to get people’s attention. -dwight to Phyllis - 5:5 -michael to everyone (3:20)
    
14. michael saying something a lot to make people think it: 6:16 - he keeps saying manager to get jo to make him manager ???; when he's flirting w the bar manager when she's coming in to buy a printer he keeps saying ____ to make her think sex ?
    
15. Michael falling asleep unexpectedly in the car Pam & Jim’s wedding EP #1 - driving dwight (6:4) When Daryl is drivin holly to Nashua and he screams “was I saying anything interesting?” Not really (5:6)
    
16. Who is it michael? Who is it? Who? Who?” - Pam to michael. the lover (6:7) “Where dwight? Where?” It seems like you already know where —- Oscar to dwight (5:12)
    
17. Jim : I just need more time “I can stop this, I just need a week, maybe two” 6 : 9 double date Also Jim: after their honeymoon trying to get Pam to not go into Michael’s office with the gift. Can I think about it over the weekend? (6:7)
    
18. “I NEED COMPLETE SILENCE!!!” Andy doing DDR : s6 EP 17 -8:10 D’Angelo doing his juggling routine - (7:23)
    
19. Kevin sitting on you will kill you the delivery part 2: s6 EP 18 —- I don’t want anyone to die “just don’t let him sit on you” EP where michael is santa / Jesus (6:13)
    
20. michael talking about stevie wonder -benihana christmas "are you telling me stevie wonder doesnt love his wife because he doesn't know what she looks like?" (s3:11) when he burns his foot - would you have left stevie wonder? no we love stevie wonder (2:12)
    
21. michael not sleeping in a hotel room: 6:5 niagra - dwight has a room 5:8 business trip - the concierge sleeps in the room
    
22. "i'm not like you pam" angela to pam - 3:13 erin to pam - michael's last dundies (7:21)
    
23. pam's mom and michael (4:14) "who are you writing" your mom michael dates her mom
    
24. pam being obsessed w new chairs (4:14) chair model the surplus
    
25. i was just walking by your desk -andy about dwight in 3:13 ~23 minutes -also when jim gives pm the house "i got peepers like an eagle"
    

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only way I think we can get another legitimately good show about Sheldon would be to wait about 15 years and then do an "Old Sheldon" series with Jim Parsons. I've heard people wanting a series focusing on Sheldon and Amy set a few years after TBBT. I've heard people wanting a series on Sheldon after he leaves Texas, but before meeting Leonard. I truly believe an Old Sheldon would be the superior spin-off.
They could go so many routes with the idea, as there is no existing lore to have to write around. Sheldon could have his genius grandchild dumped off with him because their parent (Sheldon's child) thinks he is the only person smart enough to mentor Sheldon 2.0. Sheldon could be at his wits end because his grandchild is giving him all the troubles that he used to give his own family. Maybe the genius grandchild is more akin to Paige, where they don't indulge in the rest of geek/nerd culture and it makes Sheldon struggle to relate. I could see him consulting missy (or even Paige) for advice on dealing with a "normal child" who wants to have fun and get in trouble when not nose deep in a physics textbook.
They could also ditch the grandchildren story beat and have Sheldon retire. Retirement would NOT suit Sheldon well, and the series could be about his struggles leaving the professional scientific community. Amy would plan a retirement vacation for Sheldon and the gang, which wouldn't go as expected because Sheldon keeps trying to sneak off to conduct science experiments. The gang would try to cover for him, all while things go comically wrong.
There is so many possible story beats and ways to make the original cast shine again, but in a different light.
-Penny checks on Sheldon while Amy is out of town to find him in the shower with a broken ankle. "Well, I guess I owe you," she'd say and she has to help dress a wrinkly old Sheldon and drive him to the hospital. She'd help care for him and sing him soft kitty (even though soft kitty is only for sick). Howard builds Sheldon powered wheelchair (at Leonard's request) so Penny doesn't have to dote on him hand and foot. Calamity would ensue as the wheelchair malfunctions.
-Instead of the Cal-tech cafeteria as a regular group hangout spot, they could all gather at a hospital cafeteria while waiting for Sheldon's doctor to come tell him he's not dying, just getting old. This will be a near-weekly occurrence.
-Raj could be the next Neil DeGrasse Tyson, where he goes in front of huge audiences and talks about astrophysics. He could have his selective mutism re-triggered, but towards large audiences instead of women. There could be a coupe funny episodes where old Raj has to have a few drinks before going on stage, which results in a big "back in my day" rant.
-Howard could go full mad scientist with all sorts of crazy, dangerous inventions that he freely hands out to his grandkids to retain the status of "cool grandpa." You could have a story beat where one of Howard's adult children takes his DeLorean time machine replica for a joy ride to impress a girl. Like any good sitcom, the car gets damaged. Howard gets angry about it, but ultimately uses it as a bonding experience when Howard's son discovers that Howard used to crazy stuff to try to impress women.
-Sheldon teaches physics at Cal-Tech after the passing of Steven Hawking. We find Sheldon at the point where HE is the old man scoffing at these new scientific ideas and calling them science fiction, and getting made fun of by new scholars in the field. He would be in the same position as Dr. Linkletter and Sturgis in the current season of YS.
The possibilities are endless.

Date: 05/13/2024

Reading time: 4 minutes, 894 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

DRI: Police Actions Illegal and Disproportionate

Democracy Research Institute, a local watchdog, said the facts of physical retaliation by the police against the peaceful rally participants cannot be considered “legal police measures” The watchdog observes that despite the peaceful nature of the protest, the police still used force, clearing the area around Zhvania street near the Parliament.

CivilGe, Riot police leave the streets

Georgian PM says foreign official’s arrival at protests against foreign influence bill “manifestation of crude attitude” towards country’s sovereignty

Georgian PM Irakli Kobakhidze criticizes Lithuanian Parliament member's visit to Tbilisi. He said the visit was a “manifestation of crude attitude” towards the sovereignty of the country.

AgendaGe, The action against the "transparency of foreign influence" bill at the parliament continues, The Legal Affairs Committee supported the draft law "On transparency of foreign influence" in the third reading., Riot police leave the streets, After one-minute review, Legal Issues Committee supports the draft law “On transparency of foreign influence”, Georgian Dream debates “Russian” law in the 3rd reading as protest continues, Georgian Dream debates “Russian” law in the 3rd reading as protest continues, Students protest re-introduction of “Russian Law,” refuse to attend lectures

PM: Ivanishvili “Refused to Meet” with Assistant Secretary O’Brien, Cites Blackmail and Threats

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jim O'Brien requested a meeting with the honorary chairman of the Georgian Dream party Bidzina Ivanishvili, but that request was rejected. No legal or financial sanctions have been imposed on Ivanishviili by the U., the European Union or the U.'S. According to the Prime Minister, the issue of "sanctions" is at the heart of the problem.

CivilGe, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairs of EU Member States Visit Georgia, RFE/RL: EU Top Diplomats Ask for Commission’s Oral Update on Foreign Agents Law Effects, MEPs Ask HVP Borrell for Targeted Sanctions Against MPs if Agents’ Law Adopted

EU “Strongly Condemns” Assaults against Protesters, Politicians, CSOs, Media

EU Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Spokesperson Peter Stano condemned ‘acts of intimidation, threats and physical assaults” against anti-Foreign Agents Bill protesters, media, politicians and CSOs. Stano called on the government to ensure the people’s right to protest, and urged the authorities to investigate possible misconduct and violations.

CivilGe

Public Defender calls on MIA not to use excessive force or retaliatory measures against protesters

The Public Defender of Georgia has called on the Ministry of Internal Affairs to act within the framework of legislation. The use of force must be necessary and proportionate, must be aimed at carrying out a specific legal measure, and in no case should it turn into targeted violence/retaliation against citizens.

GeorgiaToday

After all-night protester vigil, special police surround Rustaveli Avenue en masse

Thousands of special force police encamped by thousands of protesters to allow MPs to debate foreign agents law. Crowds are at the gates of Parliament shouting ‘Pigs! Pigs!” at gates shouting “Pigs!'” Police in masks brutally attacked a number of peaceful protesters.

GeorgiaToday

The Minister of Defense of Russia, Sergei Shoigu, will be replaced by Andrei Belousov

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu will be replaced by Andrei Belusov, who was the first deputy prime minister in the government of Mikhail Mishustin. He will take the position of Secretary of the National Security Council of Russia. He has been the Minister of Defense since 2012.

EuroNewsGeorgia

💵 Economy

Georgia’s Foreign Trade Down 2.7% in January-April 2024

Georgia's external merchandise trade decreased by 2.7% in January-April 2024 compared to the corresponding period of the previous year, amounting USD 6,563.7 million. The trade deficit amounted to USD 3,036 million, representing 46.3% of the overall trade turnover.

CivilGe

Date: 05/12/2024

Reading time: 0 minutes, 170 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Interior Minister says “appropriate, proportional” measures will be taken against “violent, unlawful assembly”

Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri said the right to peaceful assembly in Georgia was ensured at “a high standard” in Georgia. He said in case of “violent and unlawful” assembly the state was empowered to take “appropriate, proportional measures”

AgendaGe, PM Vows to Adopt Foreign Agents Law, Pledges to Punish Violent Protesters

President Warns Law Enforcement Officials Against Resorting to Violence and Repression

President of Georgia tells protesters not to resort to violence against them. Calls on the government to withdraw the law and not to use it against the protesters.

CivilGe, PM Vows to Adopt Foreign Agents Law, Pledges to Punish Violent Protesters

Georgia’s “Europe March” of thousands sends a definitive message to the government

An estimated 20,000 Georgians and Georgia-supporters filled the streets of the capital city to protest the ruling party’s plans to bring in a foreign agents’ transparency law, commonly known as the “Russian Law.”

GeorgiaToday

Date: 05/11/2024

Reading time: 1 minutes, 349 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Man Severely Beaten in Car in Another Case of Police Brutality

A video went viral on May 10, showing a citizen being severely beaten in his car by a group of police in the presence of his wife. The incident occurred as the man was driving up a street in central Tbilisi and encountered a police bus moving in the opposite direction on the one-way street. The Special Investigative Service said on May 11 that it had opened an investigation under Article 333 (3b) of the Criminal Code, which deals with exceeding official authority by using force or a weapon.

CivilGe

29 U.S. House Members Threaten Sanctions If Agents Law is Not Dropped

29 members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a strongly worded joint letter to Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze on May 10. The Representatives stress that the Georgian authorities face a choice between hearing the voices of the Georgian people, and continuing to move on the “dark rode” towards “Russian-style authoritarianism” The letter comes as the ruling Georgian Dream readies to pass the bill.

CivilGe, US congressmen wrote a letter to Irakli Kobakhidze

According to the US President's adviser, Georgian parliamentarians are facing a critical choice

Jake Sullivan, adviser to US president on national security issues, on social network. Sullivan: "We are deeply alarmed about democratic backsliding in Georgia"

EuroNewsGeorgia

MP Maka Botchorishvili on the “Foreign Agents” Bill and Georgia’s Chances at EU Integration under Georgian Dream Leadership

Georgian Dream MP Maka Botchorishvili discusses the widely contested “Foreign Agents” law (Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence) and what it means to her party and for Georgia’s future. The interview has been redacted for clarity.

GeorgiaToday

International Reactions to Intimidation, Violence Campaign Against Civil Activists, Opposition Politicians over Foreign Agents Law

Diplomatic missions in Georgia urge the government to take preventive measures and thoroughly investigate these incidents. British Embassy in Georgia called on government to prevent unlawful intimidation of protesters and to investigate all rights abuses. German Ambassador to Georgia, Peter Fischer, stressed that “The rule of law must prevail. Democracy requires non-violence”

CivilGe

🎭 Culture

TSU Students Announce Academic Boycott over Foreign Agents’ Law

A part of the students of Tbilisi State University announced the boycott of the academic process. They will refuse to enter the lecture halls from Monday, May 13. The students say they will stand at Rustaveli Avenue instead at 9 o’clock in the morning.

CivilGe

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I have a theory that the Papas are corrupted versions of various prophets from the Bible. I will make sure to list my reasoning as such.
Papa Emeritus Nihil = Adam: Papa Nihil is the first Papa, just as Adam was the first man.
Papa Emeritus Primo = Abraham: Abraham is seen as the first Prophet of God; Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are dubbed Abrahamic. Papa 1 is the first Papa we are introduced to, and all albums follow Opus Eponymous.
Papa Emeritus Secondo = Moses: This similarity is drawn due to the compilation of the 13 Commandments, a reference to the 10 Commandments of Moses.
Papa Emeritus Terzo = John the Baptist: John the Baptist is often forgotten in Christianity. He is seen baptizing people in the music video for "He Is." John started his sect before Jesus did since he was the one who baptized Jesus. Terzo and John also share another important characterization: decapitation.
Cardinal Copia/Papa Emeritus IV = Jesus Christ of Nazareth: This might be a stretch, but I'm a fan of the Antichrist theory of Copia. He's the most important Papa we have to date. Plus, the recent merch of Copia is depicted with a crown of thorns.
Now, we move from the Papas to some other characters.
Sister Imperator = Eve/Virgin Mary: If Nihil is Adam, then Sister would have to be his Eve. I also see her as the Virgin Mary due to her association as Copia's (alleged) mother.
Mr. Saltarion: I can't get a read on this guy. There isn't enough about him to put anything on him.
Father Jim DeFroque = Simon Magus: Who? Simon Magus was a man who tried to sell the power of God. It sounds like what happens not only with Father Jim but with many American Christian Churches in the country.
Ghouls = disciples: The Ghouls follow Papa Emeritus around, doing the bidding of whoever the reigning Papa is.
If you have any ideas and opinions on my theory, let me know!

SO and I have been together for 14 years. Engaged, but never married (ala Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn). We are both in our mid-50's and have a child each from a previous marriage.During our time together, we have had some pretty good blow-ups. Most notably was one in 2013 (we started dating in 2010) when we were at his house in a different state, we got into an argument and he literally kicked me out with no where to go. I had to get an earlier flight back home. We ended up getting back together and throughout the years have had some fights, but that one has stayed with me.
Fast forward to January 2023 and we had another huge blowup. This time he completely moved out and to another state 5 hours away. Among other things, I wasn't making him happy because I had stopped sending him love letters. He said I stole money from him (I didn't -- he offered to pay off a $3k credit card for me and said I never paid him back which means I stole from him). I never asked for the money. He OFFERED and then turned the whole thing around. He said I didn't bring anything to the table. Then he got mad at me because he went back and read very old Yelp reviews (from before we even knew each other) where I was clearly dating someone else based on my review. One was a review for a hotel and the other was for a waxing appointment. He said I should have basically deleted everything from my past that didn't have to do with him and what kind of person am I to even put that stuff out on the internet to begin with. During that argument, I ended up deleting my entire Yelp profile at his request.
Over the last 18 months, we have tried working on things. He still lives in another state. His biggest thing is he needs the ooey, gooey love letters like I used to write to him in the beginning of our relationship. But for whatever reason, those things just don't come naturally to me anymore. I do love him (and tell him so), but I am not the super gushy person I was 10+ years ago. And he says he NEEDS that to be happy. He needs me to tell him regularly how much I love him, how great he is, how I want to spend forever with him. In my head, all of that is assumed. We are together. We talk about future things, but I don't gush.
He, on the other hand, is overly over-the-top with compliments. So much that it sometimes makes me uncomfortable.When I say something nice to someone or do something nice for him, I want it to come from my heart. I don't or say things because I have to, but it seems like this is the path we are heading now. I do love him. He has trust issues with me even though I've never done anything to create those issues. We are not friends on any social media (never have been - he's not an online kind of guy) and he will occasionally ask me, "So, who is Jim Smith? I see that you're friends on FB/Insta/etc. How do you know him? Have you ever dated him?" This has happened 3 times in the last few months and it's frustrating for me. He's free to ask me whatever he wants because I am not hiding anything, but it doesn't feel good to not be trusted when I KNOW I've not done anything for him to feel that way.
I feel like I am being a jerk for not giving him what he wants (the ooey-gooey love letters), but I just can't bring myself to do it because it feels so forced. Aside from telling him that I love him, I do other little things to show I care like buying him his favorite foods or sending him surprise treats in the mail (since we live a few hours apart).
TL;DR: For those that have been together over 10 years, do you still regularly tell your significant how wonderful they are?