Sordland & Rizia Achievement Ideas

• Rash And Dangerous Reforms Achievement - have Sordland lose reforms in Assembly votes & have Royal Council turn down Romus' reforms unanimously.
• Old Habits Die Hard Achievement - Have a glass of wine before Walter Tusk enters Accept Walter's cigar offer Have tea after adjusting EPA Drink wine with Business Council Accept Kisha offer from Smolak f. accept Petr's offer of a glass of something Accept Alvarez's drink offer ["Are you drinking, Mr. President dialogue choice] Accept Walker's "stronger wine" As Romus:drink wine from Romus the Red Lose the pick wrong answers in a game with your Council to trigger taking shots Agree/accept Wiktor's Kisha offer (or something in between "I'll leave the smoking to the Queen Mother" dialogue choice High Tea with Beatrice.
• It's All All About The Money, Money Money (song) / A Money Must Be Funny In A Rich Man's World (song) Achievement - As Anton - accept bribe from Tusk, bribe Albin, bribe Frens, bribe Garaci, bailout businesses, veto Worker's Rights, raise taxes on SME & lower on big corporations, enact VAT As Romus, enact tax decrees on prologue, accept bribe from Rusty, don't contribute to Morella "pollution cleanup" [Arfuerde/Arfuelde], raise Income Tax of Rizia, enact Nobility tax and Inheritance tax, enact decree on privatization, increase RRG stake to 45, go 50-50 on MITZ with Morella, accept Valgish/ATO aid, lease Caleqabiz to Lespia/Valgsland
• Two Heads On A Platter Achievement - be assassinated (by Oligarchs / Bluds) as Anton; as Romus, when provoking revolutionists/militants with your speech to shoot you, than abdicating.
• "For the Oppressed!" Achievement - ban YS, assassinate Kesaro with SSP, impeach Hawker, capital punishment on Soll, denounce Su Omina and jail Rico under Rizia's custody.
• "They Rayne-diculously Tore Us, Toras!" Achievement - be infamous as Anton and Romus [low PO, low economy, negative budget, trigger Katarina/the red's Unrest Populace and fail to contain them as Anton; trigger violent protests in provinces and fail to unify Pales back to Rizia despite Vina's marriage to Axel].
• Two Coups and a Lie / Acquainted/Besties in Kyrute Achievement - trigger coup and exile in Kyrute with your families as Anton and Romus (fund Lucita/cops to be able to bring her with you!).
• Unjust Proceedings Achievement - defund military, join CSP, transfer Gendermarie to Interior despite being warned and jail Soll via Grecer, reinstate capital punishment [Valken Coup] As Romus, train much men from Turn 1 to 10, increase levies, execute Lucita (to trigger Taddeus coup) and prepare to be guillotined (epilogue).
• Bibliophile Women & Their Rubbish Books Achievement - defy / disgust over Monica reading Malenyevist/Valgish book; do not let Vina sit-in to your Council and confiscate the book.
• "In Loving Memories Of..." / "Any Father's Nightmare" / "The Burden That Fathers Bear" Achievement - As Anton, be strict/mean to Franc at every given turn and send Franc to military school but lose the war against Rumburg (Franc dies) As Romus: Go home instead of letting her dance with Manus. Lure her with approving Vina's relationship with Manus in one condition: Vina to Pales as liaison, do not jail Lucita for false flag, prepare for war and use assault strike than covert op (Vina dies)
• Torn & Betrayed / "Where Do Broken Hearts Go?" Achievement

As Anton:

1. Support Monica on Prologue.
2. Have shady deals (Monica is your primary leaker; when you and Serge/Petr watching FC Anrica game, they be lying down on the ground in protest against you)
3. Turn down Monica's speech
4. Apologize and let Curtan Leste continue his speech (make Monica helpless)
5. Outright gun WLA down. Say no, than showing support and vetoing WLA on later game. Don't fund Women's Committee 6)Let Monica divorce you. 6) Leak Monica's racy photos on epilogue

As Romus:

1. Be a Party Prince
2. Have ocassional affairs
3. Go to your other woman instead than attend Vina's birthday(?). Rushing as you go to Lena and she dies in your arms.

With Vina:

1. Be indifferent with Manus at every given turn
2. Do not let her dance with Manus
3. Disapprove her relationship with Manus
4. Arrest Manus with Golden Guard
5. Execute Manus

With Lucita

1. Kiss Lucita after playing a game with the Council, post-Wine event
2. Be in a relationship / Date Lucita
3. Break up with Lucita on later game

• Shame Isn't The Name of The Game Achievement -

1. As Anton, lose the war against Rumburg (Franc studying somewhere else)
2. As Romus, lose the war against Pales (Vina is not your liaison to Pales)

• Crucified Two Times In The Name Of Reformation Achievement - Repeal EPA, privatize education, healthcare, SSC and Nedam, add Articles 6 & 7, fail to secure / assure USP's votes resulting to 70 ayes in Assembly votes; trigger a reform coup/ambush as Romus
• Sleeping with the Gators Achievement - don't fire/jail Livia despite evidences that points to her as spy; exonerate Lucita from false flag sitch.
• Guns & Roses Achievement - assassinate Hawker, assassinate Livia & Petr, capital punishment on Soll, enact Gun Rights, have Soll Dam bombed by BFF, have Serge killed on military parade, join a superpower bloc, go to war against Rumburg; execute Manus (jail with GG), Sal (investigate with Lucita/Titus), Rico (under Rizia's custody), exile in Rumburg with the Royal Family and die there due to world war
• The Children of Yesterday's Dream Achievement - have Franc bid forward to PFJP (via coup); make Vina heir and abdicate the throne.
• "You've Got Blud On Your Hands" Achievement - pass xenophobic bills, eradicate / quell Alarming Threat of BFF, express disgust to Franc dating a Blud, full OBT with Wehlen as Anton, ban Bluds and OBT as Romus

Overall, what do you guys think? 🥹😅

Chapter 1: the event
It was the fall of my intern year as I bean my off service trauma rotation. This month was ubiquitously notorious for being the most labor intrusive and least productive rotaion of our emergency medicine program. Knowing this I entered with the intention of simply surviving the month.
Another intern and I let’s call them A for sake of ambiguity, we’re the first emergency medicine residents to roste on the trauma services that year. A shaky start would be an understatement. In the words of chance the raper “like my grama with the Parkinson’s playing operation.” Would better describe it. Medically we did well. We were very competent and completed our work daily, but communication and coordination was non existent. Our Cheifs had informed us that Tuesday was our day of and the Trauma cheif residents had minimum communication with us, or our Cheifs as it seams when A and I did not report on Tuesday they sternly made their dissatisfaction known.
I have struggled with insomnia sense the age of 10. Had 2 sleep studies by this point in my life and been prescribed nearly every sleeping aid on the market. The 80-94 hr work weeks of our trauma rotaion only worsened my insomnia. My lack of sleep likely contributed to a less than prime adaptive immune system and 2 days out of my trauma rotaion I contracted strep like symptoms with associated nausea, requiring me to call for a sick day the next day. No the first day that I felt too ill to work. I was not fully aware of the reporting process. I reported to my Chiefs, but I did not believe I could come to work tomorrow with amble time and notice, however I was somewhat delayed in letting their Cheifs know, because the surgical chiefs rotated every few days and I did not know who my was going to be the next day. The second day which I had to call out sick I was able to locate the cheif for the next day and reprot according to our university’s protocol, which requires that if a resident feels they are not fit for work they must not come in and the university must have staff coverage without any fear or implementation of punitive actions.
I had finally survived to the last week of my trauma rotaion and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. What I could not see was the pile of stress, shitty diet, lack of mental well ness and sleep deprivation which I was pushing down to reach the light. By this time I had seen a psychiatrist regularly for sleep medication. I had mentioned to him that I had been experiencing more stressed lately and feel that I might be depressed. he reassured me that it was likely only due to my circumstances, given the difficulty of the trauma rotation and wish to reassess once the rotation was over. Looking back I had to fill the habit of drinking more than I usually do. My only on nights before I have days off became 1-2 beers every other night. All of this repressed unhealthy shit finally pushed bad on September 23rd. That night I was at work even later than usual, I stayed up later than usual and couldn’t seem to fall asleep. With the stress of only having minimal sleep and knowing I only had 2 more days of trauma left, I took an extra dose of my sleeping medication.
I opened my eyes to the fighting sight of sun beaming in my window and I instantly knew I was late. (Sense I hadn’t seen the sun in a month) . Due to my need for scrupulous sleep hygiene I have been sleeping with my phone of and away for me. I rushed to grab it and watched as the little Apple logo seamed to glow on the screen for an eternity. Then in conjunction with its fading I saw 3 missed calls from my director, a text from college A and 2 missed calls from the surgical director. Still, I was able to calm myself, knowing that resident A had been late to this rotation by a few hours 2 other days and nothing came of it. I called my director back and he asked me to report to his office where I was greeted by my director, my coordinator and another emergency medicine facility.
With the only explanation of: “we just want you to get better”, I was handed a letter, to my relief it did not entail my termination, but a declaration of administrative leave and a requirement to undergo an evaluation at a well known university in Florida.
Lake any other savvy millennial, I did my research. By research I mean numerous google searches and screeches thru the depts of redit. To my dismay I discovered that in order for a residency program to fire you, they must first initiate an administrative suspension. I would soon find out however, being terminated would have been a delightful outcome compared to what ensued.
I spend the next few weeks in the wallos of regret and depression. I indulged in higher qualities of alchohol then I ever have before. I all but ceased communing with peers, and abruptly stoped any physical activity I had once enjoyed. Frightened as I was I was ensured, it will be ok “we just want you to get better”
Chapter 2 The evaluation : guilty until proven innocent I did exactly as instructed and scheduled an evaluation, I supposed that this was either a mental evaluation to assess if I’m fit for work with plans of termination or it actually was an evaluation to better treat my insomnia. To this day I regret my ignorance, and wish I had researched the process more. The Hindi / sand-skrt idea of Hamsa 🪬 is that in order to do any good you must have full knowledge or else good intentions can result in harm. I truely believe my director had good intentions, however but him and I did not have full knowledge of the nature of this evaluation.
Looking back see how easily I could have avoided my troubles by asserting legal aid at this point or even by researching this evaluation process more in depth. If one searches impaired practitioner program which I now know this evaluator works for, the search entire will populate 5 or 6 layferms along side their home website and there is a valid reason for this.
If one every finds themself in this process I employ you to bring a DSM to your evaluation or at least be familiar with the most common use disorders in the DSM-5, because your evaluation will turn into a dance of questions where the evaluator attempts to trap you in a round about way to stating something that may qualify for one of the diagnosis. I have provided an image from the DSM-5 below outlining AUD, which the evaluator concluded that I had the most severe from:
Image
Example***** Here are 10 examples of how he fraudulently assessed me taken directly from his assessment note.

1. Evaluator: Have you ever stoped drinking in the last year.

Me: yes I stoped every week day, I was only drinking on the weekends, until two weeks ago.
-Evaluator uses stoping and starting every week to qualify for 2 or more unsuccessful attempts to stop in the last year “There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control alcohol use.”

1. Evaluator Have you ever had withdrawal symptoms

Me no
Evaluator Well Have you ever had a hangover? You know that’s a from of acute withdrawal
Me: yes in college, I had a few but that was years ago and I’m pretty sure the pathophysiology is different.
Evaluator uses this to count for withdrawal symptoms even tho is was more than a year ago

1. Evaluator: Have you even taken your sleeping medication on a day or night which you drank? Me: Yes, I took my prescriptions are prescribed but I never drank close to bed

Evaluator: qualified this as dangerous behavior with alcohol (where the DSM gives examples such as unprotected sex and drunk driving). The sleeping medication I was on is not a benzodiazepine therefore it is not deadly with alcohol. I personally have seen many patients in the ED who have taken their entire bottle of the medication and drank copious amounts, we just monitor them over night and rehydrate them

1. Evaluator Has anyone told you you drink to much or been worried about you Me: No I drink much less than my friends

Evaluator what about your girlfriend? Me: well she actually doesn’t drink at all she doesn’t like it. She often buys me beer for The Weeknd’s tho. One time we went to a movie and she got a little irritated because I waited for beer then complained about them not having any craft beer. So she said, “you couldn’t have just said no” and drank something else. However, she apologized after and said it’s worth waiting if it’s my only day off.
Evaluator said this qualifies for continued drinking despite causing significant relation consequences, ie divorce.

1. Evaluator : you have sleep issues I hear, and your chart says you’ve had depression in the past, don’t you know that alcohol can effect your sleep and mood Me: yes that’s why I never drink within 3 hours of sleep.

Evaluator but you knew this and still drank
Evaluator: qualifies for drinking despite unwanted physical or psychological effects (this should be recurring to effects the alcohol is causing, I have had insomnia sense the age of 10 long before I took my first sip)
7 evaluator you were late for work and told my you had a drink the day before
Me: Yes but I was late because I didn’t sleep and took double my sleeping meds, I will never do that again
Qualifies for 2 significant work or school issues in the past year ( a therapist and other psychologist ensured me that being late on or a few days doesn’t count they typically are getting fired or failing) ( moreover, this would assume I was late do to drinking it’s self and also assume if happened more than once)

1. • Alcohol is often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended

He never once asked anything related to this question yet said I qualified in his final report 9. A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain alcohol, use alcohol, or recover from its effects. The evaluators logic here was sense I was late for work and I had 2 beers the day before I must be taking long to recover from it (this is assuming I missed due to alcohol)

1. Tolerance drinking more to require the same effect: this he checked as true in his final note however it was never even discussed in our evaluation. I did mention to him that I’ve been drinking more than I had earlier in the year frequency wise, but they said nothing to do with quantity or needing more.
   
2. Wanting to drink so bad you can not think of anything else: this is the only qualification of SAUD my evaluator said I did not have.
   

Moreover, without legal help I was not aware that I could obtain a second evaluation or even oppose going to get evaluated at all, but that wouldn’t have mattered seeing I still thought this was for my health and wellbeing as seen when I was asked why do you think you are here to today, to which I replayed “so that I can be evaluated to see what is needed to get back to work”.
To maks the ordeal more infuriating the evaluator continues to ingratiate himself and lie through the process telling you, “it will be fine as long as you are 100% honest”, “anything you say in here is between you and me” or “you slipped up once with your meds, I know your residnecy program they will probably just want a few more out patient tests”
Two weeks later I received a phone call right before I left for an out of state vacation to visit my nice for her birthday. During the call I was informed that I would be required to complete a partial hospitalization program (PHP) lasting “6-10 weeks” which would coast from 15-50 grand not including doctor visits or housing which is billed separately. I suppressed this inconvenience, enjoyed my vocation and reported when I returned, knowing that I must complete this soon so I may return to work with due to the fact that my payed time off would soon be diminished. At this time I had not yet heard of the organization PRN.
Chapter 3 Guilty till proven innocent: The diagnosis
Shell shocked I arrived to a in patient psychiatric unit and was rapidly cleared to progress to treatment without detoxification. During my 90 day of forced rehabilitation I met a few other individuals who were unjustly and fraudulently forced into treatment. I began to look up to one of these such members of the men’s community, who I will refer to as patient X for ambiguity sake.
Unlike me patient X did have alcohol use disorder. He spent many clinic days drinking to avoid alcoholic withdraws. The curious component of his story is that he admitted his depravity, saught help and through his own journey became sober. The bodies at be, namely his local physician, Health monitoring program, rejected his personal path to sobriety and forced him to undergo 90 days of in patient treatment before he could practice medicine again. When he checked in to rehab he had been sober for over a year.
Ask for Stories of people from online
As for me I spend many sleepless nights pondering how consuming a legal substance in a moderate amount could throw me into significant legal financial issues. My labs my toxicology, my story and my collateral from colleagues from colleagues all indicated light to moderate alcohol use but my evaluators word stood as the word of God.
More frightening was the director of this rehabs acknowledgment of this. The director who happens to also coincidentally be the evaluator, stated to me as well as to staff on multiple occasions: “ I suggest inpatient treatment for everyone who is reported”. “This is safer for me not to miss anyone who could harm patients, and I figure there must be a reason someone reported them.”
I am still elucidating the reason why I was determined guilty and proven innocent, however I can say from my 90 day stent that the majority of the patients at this rehab needed to be there. This program is saving lives of both providers and patients, however it is destroying the lives of those wrongfully accused.
Chapter 4 your lisense rehab or jail : Upon arivil I was sent to a detox hospital underwent a medical examination and was “one of the lucky ones” who required no detoxification and could report directly to PHP. Like everyone else, I spent 90 days in a PHP, being as 6-10 weeks is simply a lie they tell patients to decrease the change of resisting the treatment. When discussing the topic one therapist sated “if we told patients 90 days they would never come.” She then attempted to justify the treatment by outlining the story of a patient she had called who “didn’t make it to treatment” and killed themselves”. It is my belief that it is not the lack of PHP which impelled such professionals to take their life, but them realizing that they now will be obliged to undergo 90 days of PHP, 5 years of PRN monitoring with a loss of autonomy and hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from them that induced their hopelessness. For even if these professionals were truly mentally unstable in their addictions, in every case it was only following a phone call where they were informed they must undergo treatment that they took their life’s. By this time I still haven’t the slightest clue what PRN was.
Despite the security these programs provide for many my 6 main issues with them can be summarized in : 1. Kick backs: evaluators are directors of treatment clinics 2. The reported are guilty till proven innocent 3. The price, the overflow of money these places drag in from both patients and state universities is appalling, they charge separately for every visit and test 4. Although they make the claim that they are individualized, they are anything but. Every patient gets the same stay and treatment from the doctor drunk on the job and the one who was late to a shift 5. They force voluntary treatment. remember that friendly evaluator who promised he had your best interest at heart, so you opened up and told him everything about your substance use/ developmental / family history, well if you don’t stay for 90 days he will be “normally obliged” to tip the board of medical off to you.

1. The programs have overstepped their intended jurisdiction. -these programs work well if they function how they were intended at their inception. Cite original purpose. Originally these programs were designed to protect physicians and civilians from impaired practitioners; being healthcare workers who were impaired at work. Over the years, these organizations have extended their authority to encompass individuals with substance use disorders When not at work and also those who are in training to become healthcare professionals. Take for example myself compared to a physician who is impaired at work. A doctor who arrived for duty under the influence would surely benifit from the extensive testing, therapy and accountability enforced via these programs. In accordance the 20,000$ per year cost is appropriate when only making up roughly 7% of their yearly salary vs nearly half of a residents. In my case with my loss of income from employment, coast of treatment and monitoring, this year I will be required to pay 20,000$ to work. Yes, I will be losing money to work. Even if did indeed have a substance use disorder this level of monitoring wouldn’t not be considered appropriate.

Dispite all of the miscomings of this System My time spend in PHP was indeed helpful, as I believe it would be for anyone. Time for exercise, a reprieve from work and weekly counseling. A sample structure of my day to day schedule is provided below for insight:
Structure The general structure of these rehabitation centers is as follows: 1. One week of orientation phase, where you are not allowed in electronics or contact with the outside world world. Therefore, if you’re going, bring some things you would like to read or study. 2. In phase 2, you can use your phone however you cannot leave campus. You must stay in the dorm on campus. These shitty 1 room run down apartments with two other roommates will cost you about $1000 a week, they are required for at least four weeks and they are billed separately, no insurance will help you out here. 3. In phase 3 you can commute to campus if you beg your therapist and live very close. Whether you’re on campus or living off-campus, you are allowed to leave up to four hours per day. If you commute, you’ll be required to take a sober link decide you must Breath, alcohol test into every 6 hours. Like everything else in this program you must pay for this separately, a few hundred dollars a week. You advanced to other phases by completing assignments, however, assignments are limited by required built-in time, intrusive, scheduling, and reviewing. Therefore, if you do everything as rapidly as possible phase 1 will take one week phase 2 will take three weeks.
Every day schedule:
7:30: wake up, report to the front desk to inform them that you haven’t ran away yet and take and prescribed medications. They keep all your medications and require that you report to take them; for me this was antidepressants in an attempt to dispel the depression I contracted from being forced into treatment and whatever off label medication they were attempting to treat my ADHD with, since control medications were forbidden.
8 am: community group assessments This consisted of other patients presenting their assignments amongst the large group, on the weekends this was often an hour later and 12 study regularly took the place of assignment presentation.
10 am: process group. This was a two hour group therapy session with 6 to 12 other professionals in a therapist and training or occasionally a licensed mental health therapist.
1 pm: recreation This was generally about an hour of some sober themed craft or activity. Once a week this time slot was used for yoga.
2 pm: this was another time slot used for patients to present assignments as well as for individual therapy sessions. Each patient had one individual therapy session lasting 30 minutes per week.
3pm: This was time allotted to work on assignments or go to the gym on your sex specific scheduled gym day.
5pm: this time was used for guest speakers or another 12 step study group.
6 pm : this was generally an off-campus 12 step group
10 pm: report to the front desk and let them know you still haven’t ran away and take and Medication which are prescribed to take at night, then return to your cot bed in your room with 1-2 other roommates.
I found the community to be one of the most beneficial aspects of the PHP program. I was in a cohort of chill ass professionals of the same occupation who were always there to help each other.
Assignments The curriculum of the PHP consisted of assignment based on every step of the 12th step program. Generally, a patient would be required to complete an assignment on their own, review it with other patients, then faculty and finally present the assignment in front of the whole treatment group. You’re only given one assignment at a time and there are multiple steps to each which all requires scheduling this ensures that no matter how determined a patient is a full 90 days of treatment is required to complete all the assignments.
AA structure -the obsolete nature of AA has been verified in numbers studies, but I will refrain from divulging here and lend that endeavor to Dr. Lance Dodes very thorough discussion on the subject,in “the sober truth “
In all sincerity, if I truely did have a severe use disorder this experience could have been life saving. I only wish I could have used my 50 grand for someone who has spent their life time In addictive without reprieve. My first conversation when I was given my phone back was how I wish my father could be able to attend this PHP.
Chapter 5 reporting and PRN Self reporting What they ask you What you should tell them
There’s a third-party agency called professional resource network. Every state has their own. This agency works as a liaison between you and whatever credentialing service your occupation requires. Essentially they ensure your monitoring after treatment. Stake governments and licensing boards trust them, mainly because they monitor with the highest level of intrusiveness. This alleviates much work for state governments and licensing boards because once an individual is being monitored by a professional resource network, then they are deemed appropriate for duty and no further investigation/litigation needs to occur, as long as the monitored individual completely complies.
Because I was never impaired at work I was never reported to this agency. The general workflow of things someone would report you to professional resource network, then the resource network would contact you, and then you would be required to report for an evaluation at a treatment center, which would inevitably result in a suggestion I’ve treatment at that given treatment center. In my case I was sent to the treatment center without PRN being involved. Thus, two weeks into treatment. I was notified by my therapist that I needed to call PRN and self report. I attempted to resistance given that I did not have a problem and was not individually seeking help. I asked what happened if I didn’t self report. I was told that in order to stay in the treatment program I had to report to PRN. This meant either I report to PRN or I get kicked out of the treatment program and lose my job.
When you report to PRN they will ask you why you are in treatment. They will then list off every substance imaginable, asking you if you have ever tried the substance and when your last use was. Ultimately, they will obtain your discharge information from your treatment center, so it is in your best interest to report only what was found in your biochemical testing. If it wasn’t in your hair, I would argue that you don’t have a use disorder regarding that substance and it’s not relevant. I don’t believe it’s important for them to know that you smoked weed when you were 12.
Chapter 6 The contract:
Before being discharged from a treatment facility, a professional resource network will have you sign a contract. A little known fact which I was oblivious to is that contracts can be negotiated. Though this isn’t it possible, it is highly improbable that you can negotiate your contract since PRN has a power to delay your clearance to return to work.
Contractor almost never personalized, and I have not heard of a contract which is not a five-year agreement. You will sign releases of information so that PRN has access to all of your information which was gathered at the treatment facility. You must have a therapist, psychiatrist, primary care, doctor, and a addiction, medicine psychiatrist. You assign releases of information for all of them. You will be required To commit to: 1. three mutual aid meetings a week which you must log. I log smart recovery meetings. 2. Weekly therapy sessions with an approved mental health therapist from their list 3. Monthly doctors appointments with an addiction medicine psychiatrist 4. Yearly appointments with a primary care physician 5. Monthly appointments with a psychiatrist 6. Daily check-ins on a random drug testing app ( you will agree to weekly urine tests, a peth test 4 times a year, a hair test twice a year and a little caveat that says anything else they deem, clinically reasonable) 7. Quarterly update reports which you are required to obtain from a workplace monitor, therapist, addiction, medicine, psychiatrist, primary care physician and any other doctor you are seeing. 8. You must upload all of your prescriptions into a mobile application every single time you get them refilled and are not allowed to take them until they are approved. 9. Attendance of a PRN group via zoom. This is a local group you are assigned along with other monitored practitioners. There is a fee of roughly 130$ a month to attend this required group. For me all of these requirements coast around 20,000 a year. If you ever have a positive test even if it is the result of contamination from rubbing alcohol or unintentional ingestion of alcohol/ allergy medication your contract will rest to 5 years from the time of positive test. Once your five year contract is completed, you must ask to be released from monitoring. At that point they will search for any reason to keep you under monitoring. This could be dilute urines, daily check ins or a week where you did not attend mutual aid meetings. Every certification and license which you apply for will likely ask you if you were under a monitoring program/ have been treated for substance use. You must give an explanation and check yes. As far as licensing programs are concerned, if you were under the monitoring of PRN, you are safe, however they group practitioners who have had behavioral issues with practitioners who were diverting drugs from work. Therefore, keep in mind that you will be labeled as a sever addict.
7 Back to work and only work. During treatment your only goal is to return to work, however when you return your experience will be drastically distinct from what you remember. For me, I was now working in isolation. Missing six months of my training meant that no other Resident was on the same rotation as me. My coworkers at all formed friend groups. When I returned I was greeted with much concern for my well being. No one would speak to be about my absence, however everyone knew there is only one reason a resident would leave for 6 months then return. My Accdeemic meetings were consisting of attending telling me “I have a target on my back now” and “ I have to preform even better than others” in the light of my time missed. If this wasn’t alienating enough, the majority of Resident events, sponsored by recruiters and my university revolved around alcohol to which I had to give some excuse to why I can not partake with others. I’m fortunate that I do not have an addiction, because these stressful conditions along with the daunting amount of dead and requirements imposed by PRN are enough to make any addict relapse. While I was at treatment, I was in the dative with Samyr stories a physicians whose addictions got the best of them. Physicians who did not make it to treatment, often taking their own life. These stories were presented as a warning. Your addictions will kill you without our treatment was the message. When, in reality I did not hear one story in which the addiction killed physician. Every physician who didn’t make it to treatment took their life after being told they must report to a treatment facility. Perhaps they knew what this entailed and it was not their addiction or getting caught which caused them to end their lives, but the unmanageable and often unreasonable burden that treatment would put on their lives.
9 How to escape So your fucked your in PRN and should be or you should and now your recovered and want to terminated your contract.

1. You ask to be released early done at 1/2 time ( good luck)
2. You have “good reason” (no one has ever been let out of contract because of this reason, the verbiage is far too vague)
3. You serve all your time and they let you out(maybe, as discussed earlier, they would do everything they can to keep you in your contract as long as your practicing)
4. You can’t practice medicine anymore

10 Layer up butter cup : I cannot emphasize the extent to which legal help is required in this process. You much seek it and seek it early. Lawyers can provide many avenues to you early in the process. Once you have committed to treatment, gone for evaluation or are in a PRN contract , this is very little that you or legal help can do. Spend a few thousand dollars when you are accused and save the 20-30,000 later.
After you have been evaluated if you disagree as I did, then this is the process you must undergo. 1. Hire a occupation, defense, lawyer 2. Prove you don’t have an addiction, this is done by having an alternative evaluator with similar credentials state that either you don’t have an addiction or that PRN’s level of monitoring is not medically appropriate ( this will need to be a multi day neuropsychological evaluation, which will cost about $5000). 3. Your lawyer must draft in writing that the medical level of monitoring is not required such as another medical professional and send this to PRN 4. PRN will tattle on you to the board of medicine. 5. The board of medicine will conduct an investigation. 6. At the end or when they believe they have enough reasonable evidence to the board of medicine will suspend your license or claim, you must comply with the PRN contract to practice. 7. At this time your lawyer will defend you in the state court against the board. This is costly but much less than the coast of a 5 year PRN contract 8. If you win you will likely suggest an alternative level of care such as gonna get therapy every week. If you lose, than you wasted a fuck ton of money and are still bound by your PRN contract.
Overall this entire process has coast me Over all coast:
My finances for this year only including PRN and rent are as follows:
120-200$ every week for testing 480-800/ month
65 every week for therapy 195/month
125 every month for PRN group
About 50-69 every month for 2 doctor apts
So at least 745$/month at the lowest
Treatment at the recovery center coast 20,000 for me out of pocket and
I wasn’t payed for 6 months with no FMLA because I am a first year. At the 1 year mark I will have made 26,000 this year after taxes And payed About 29,000 on PRN alone
Rent is 1,000 so that’s 12,000 a year
Just in rent and PRN alone I will be at 26,000- 41,600 -15,600.
I will be in debt by at least 18,000 at the 1 year mark
Coast of treatment center 20,000 (with insurance) For each year of PRN roughly 20,000 Add that to 6 months of attending salary which was delayed due to my treatment time: at least 150,000 Layer coasts along with other evaluations 25,000 Missing 6 months of residency pay 30,000 Coast of 1 year in monitoring: 245,000 Coast of 5 years 325,000
If my case progress to a trail I will require an extra 20,000 in court coasts
Chapter 11 My secondary eval: Dr sushi After I arrived at my treatment center I challenge my evaluation multiple times. Each and every time I was discharged and often accused of alternate mental health/ substance abuse issues to discourage my advances. I was never given the opportunity to undergo alternative assessment, however PRN guidelines state that you can obtain a second option within 7 days of your first. This is a mute point, however, because you will not receive the results of your evaluation until over a week after it is conducted and the second evaluation must be conducted by another PRN hired evaluator of their choosing. During my stay in rehab I contacted PRN multiple times to attempt another evaluation/ legal help. They warned against both stating they were a “waste of money” and “pointless”.
After completing my treatment with the guidance of many addiction, experienced physicians, mental health counselors and psychiatrists recommendations I sought in a secondary evaluation. I chose a highly qualified professional with over 30 years of experience to conduct an extensive neuo psycho social evaluation of me. One that I was sure would be more extensive than the evaluation I received at treatment and more importantly an unbiased evaluation.
The results from my evaluation not only showed that I did not have a substance abuse problem warranting PRN level monitoring, but also that PRN was falling to allow adequate treatment of other conditions such as my ADHD. My evaluation showed my ADHD was not only untreated by PRNs attempt at using non controlled medication, but also in the top 3% most severe presentations of ADHD. My evaluator went on to explain my results by questioning why my treatment center even mandated I undergo neuro cognitive evaluation. The only neurodiverse findings were my IQ, my dyslexia and my ADHD. However, a neuo cognitive examination can be billed separately by treatment centers, therefore they always recommend one.
Chapter 12 Amongst its greed, intrusive nature and faulty accusations, professional recourse network function highly proficiently at the task they were designed to; protective physicians and patients from physicians who are impaired at work. In this domain they save lives, offer second changes and protect the public. When they act beyond their intended jurisdiction by imposing unnecessary monetary demands on practitionersin training, accuse practitioners without proof or act on behavior exemplified outside of a work setting they unjustly and inappropriately attack the week and innocent.
Proposed reform: As a trainee my universities malpractice insurance covers me for mistakes made at work. If a learner mistakenly harms a patient, then the university stands on their behalf. If the learner does something wrong under a teachers direct guidance, then the teacher is at fault. This makes sense logically as well as pragmatically. The state entrusts large amounts of money to hospital systems and universities to train resident physicians. A portion of this money is allocated to malpractice insurance. This should extend to accused impairment.
Suppose a training university was required to cover rehabilitation and monitoring of a resident of whom they claim is impaired. Alternatively they have the option of firing the trainee. This would reduce the number of innocent trainees being accused of impairment, make the process of rehabilitation more fair and provide a better use for tax payer derived dollars, which hospital systems are given to train residents. The truly impaired could still seek help, less false accusations would be made and with the employers having the ability to fire at the moment of impairment, there would be less chance of impairment at work.

Imagine being prescribed a life-saving medication only to realize that its cost could drain your savings in a matter of months. This is the harsh reality for millions of Americans, who are forced to navigate a healthcare system where the prices of prescription drugs have reached astronomical heights. The issue of high drug prices is not just a matter of economics; it is a moral and ethical dilemma that affects the very fabric of society. This essay will argue that the exorbitant cost of prescription drugs in the United States is unjustifiable, driven by corporate greed and inadequate regulation, and propose viable solutions to ensure that life-saving medications are accessible to all.
To understand the gravity of the situation, one must first comprehend the extent of the problem. According to the American Journal of Managed Care, the average cost of prescription drugs in the United States is significantly higher than in other developed countries. For instance, a 2019 study by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that U.S. prices for the 50 most commonly prescribed drugs are nearly four times higher than in comparable high-income nations. This disparity is not merely an economic inconvenience; it is a life-threatening crisis for many individuals who cannot afford their medications. The high cost of drugs forces patients to make unimaginable choices between their health and their financial stability, often leading to poorer health outcomes and increased mortality rates.
At the heart of this issue lies the pharmaceutical industry's insatiable greed. Drug companies often justify high prices by citing the enormous costs associated with research and development (R&D). While it is true that developing new medications is an expensive endeavor, this argument loses its validity when one considers the profits these companies generate. A 2020 report from the Institute for New Economic Thinking highlighted that pharmaceutical companies consistently rank among the most profitable sectors in the U.S. economy. The same report noted that these companies spend more on marketing and lobbying than on R&D, indicating that profit, rather than innovation, is their primary motivator.
Moreover, pharmaceutical companies exploit the patent system to extend their monopolies on drugs, a practice known as "evergreening." By making minor modifications to existing drugs and obtaining new patents, companies can prevent generic competition and maintain high prices. This manipulation of the patent system undermines the very purpose of patents, which is to encourage innovation while eventually allowing for affordable generic alternatives. The result is a market where essential medications remain prohibitively expensive long after their initial patents should have expired.
The regulatory framework governing drug prices in the United States is another significant contributor to the problem. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. government does not regulate the prices of prescription drugs directly. Instead, it relies on market forces to determine prices, a strategy that has proven ineffective in a market where consumers often have no choice but to purchase life-saving medications regardless of cost. The lack of governmental intervention allows pharmaceutical companies to set prices at whatever level they believe the market can bear, often leading to exploitative pricing practices.
Additionally, the lack of transparency in drug pricing exacerbates the problem. Patients and healthcare providers frequently have no clear understanding of why a particular drug costs as much as it does. The pricing process is shrouded in secrecy, with drug companies rarely disclosing the factors that contribute to their pricing decisions. This opacity makes it difficult for consumers to make informed choices and undermines efforts to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for their pricing practices.
Addressing the issue of high drug prices requires a multifaceted approach that includes both regulatory reform and market-based solutions. One of the most effective measures would be to grant Medicare the authority to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. Currently, Medicare is prohibited from negotiating prices, a restriction that puts the U.S. at a disadvantage compared to other countries where governments negotiate prices on behalf of their citizens. Allowing Medicare to negotiate would leverage the program's significant purchasing power to secure lower prices for millions of Americans.
Another crucial step is to reform the patent system to prevent evergreening and encourage the timely introduction of generic drugs. This could involve stricter criteria for granting secondary patents and reducing the duration of market exclusivity for drugs that do not represent significant therapeutic advancements. By promoting genuine innovation and preventing patent abuse, these reforms would facilitate greater competition and lower prices.
Improving transparency in drug pricing is also essential. Legislation that requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose the costs associated with developing and marketing their drugs, as well as the factors influencing their pricing decisions, would provide much-needed clarity. This transparency would empower consumers and policymakers to make more informed decisions and hold companies accountable.
The issue of high drug prices is a complex and multifaceted problem that requires urgent attention and decisive action. It is driven by corporate greed, inadequate regulation, and a lack of transparency, all of which contribute to a healthcare system that often prioritizes profit over patients' well-being. By implementing regulatory reforms, promoting competition, and enhancing transparency, it is possible to create a more equitable system where life-saving medications are accessible to all who need them. The time to act is now, before the cost of survival becomes too high a price to pay.

In light of the skepticism towards social democratic ideals in the US, largely due to historical biases and a misunderstanding of its principles, I propose a rebranding of social democratic policies to make them more appealing. Social democracy has proven successful in various countries and offers practical solutions that align with core American values.
Let's face it, the Cold War irrevocably tainted any ideology even tangentially related to the word "social", and one could argue that this deeply ingrained aversion to terms such as "socialism" or "social democracy" is a major contributor to Sanders' loss in 2016, even though his policies would objectively benefit the lower 50% of the population.
Rebranding social democratic policies and other social democratic safety nets in a way that makes them more appealing to demographics wary of the terms like "socialism" and "social democracy" involves a strategic communication approach that emphasizes shared values, practical benefits, and relatable messaging. Here are some key points that I think we should implement in order to successfully enact socialist policy that would overwhelmingly benefit the lower 50%:

• Use Inclusive and Familiar Language:

Instead of terms like "socialism" or even "social democracy," use language that resonates with American values, such as "freedom," "security," "opportunity," and "family support." Phrases like "economic security," "family benefits," and "health assurance" can frame these concepts in a more positive and accessible light. This is what the ultraconservative billionaires do with their private foundations and political non profits (Americans for Prosperity, etc.)

• Emphasize Fairness and Equality of Opportunity:

Many people are motivated by the idea of a fair playing field. Highlight how safety nets are about giving everyone a fair shot at success, not just providing handouts. For instance, explain how access to healthcare and education enables all citizens to contribute more effectively to the economy. Emphasize the fact that a lot of these "self-made" actually started out with significant family resources at their disposals (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, etc.)

• Highlight Economic Benefits and Efficiency:

Discuss the economic rationality behind safety nets, such as reducing emergency healthcare costs through preventative care or boosting economic productivity through better-educated workers. Show how these measures can save money in the long run and stabilize the economy. Investment in education = more efficient workers = more efficient economy; therefore, it is in America's advantage to make higher education more accessible.

• Use Success Stories and Relatable Examples:

People connect with personal stories more than abstract concepts. Share success stories of individuals and communities that have benefited from these programs. Highlight examples from conservative or traditionally right-leaning areas where social programs have led to positive outcomes. The New Deal policies enacted under FDR come to mind as they were remarkably beneficial to the lower class before being systematically dismantled during the Reagan Era.

• Focus on Family and Community Values:

Frame safety nets as a way to protect and uplift families and communities, ensuring that no one is left behind during tough times. This can appeal to communal and familial instincts, which are strong in many conservative areas. Republicans LOVE family values, so finding a way to promote these policies in the name of "family" is a must.

• Stress Independence and Self-Sufficiency:

Rather than presenting safety nets as charity, frame them as tools that help people become self-sufficient. For example, job training programs can be branded as "career advancement networks," emphasizing their role in helping individuals climb the economic ladder on their own terms. This one is huge. Self-sufficiency and independence are a major reason cars are still so prevalent as apposed to public transit in this country. Figuring out a way to emphasize the importance of social policies as pivotal to these ideals is crucial.

• Leverage Bipartisan Support:

Where possible, highlight bipartisan support for certain measures, demonstrating that they are not about partisan politics but about common-sense solutions to shared problems. This can help reduce the fear of a "socialist" agenda. This one is difficult due to how obdurate Republicans can be, but garnering Republican support is essential.

• Avoid Patronizing or Condescending Tones:

When communicating these ideas, it’s crucial to respect the intelligence and concerns of the audience. Avoid talking down or dismissing their fears. Instead, acknowledge their concerns and provide thoughtful, evidence-based responses. Look, I get it - it can be hard to deal with many conservatives without feeling an air of haughtiness. But rather than contempt I propose pity: these poor people lack the requisite critical thinking skills to recognize corporate propaganda, and patronizing them only leads to further division.

• Use Local Influencers and Leaders:

Messages are often more persuasive when delivered by familiar and trusted voices. Engaging local leaders, religious figures, and influencers who can speak to the benefits of these policies in a culturally resonant way can increase acceptance and understanding. Social media is also a must. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube shorts have proven invaluable in disseminating ideologies.

• Demonstrate Government Efficiency:

Many fears around social democracies relate to perceptions of government inefficiency. Demonstrate cases where government intervention has been efficient and effective, and highlight improvements and reforms that aim to enhance government accountability and performance. Again, think FDR's New Deal.
By addressing cultural values and speaking directly to the needs and concerns of skeptical demographics, it's possible to reshape perceptions of social democratic policies in a way that emphasizes their practicality, necessity, and alignment with broadly held American values.
Rebranding our core ideals as "patriotic" and renovating them with a big Red White and Blue veneer should be our sole focus. In order to effect meaningful change, we need to use tried and true tactics borrowed from the conservative billionaire ruling class. Using their strategy of adopting ambiguous and broad-sounding yet seemingly innocuous names is essential (think "American's for Prosperity", "Club for Growth" "Institute of Economic Affairs", etc.).

1. Raise the minimum wage to the living wage of $30 per hour.
   
2. Enact Universal Single-payer Healthcare.
   
3. Use taxes to help those with student debt and pay for future education.
   
4. Lower the taxes of everyone whose net worth is less than $200,000 (74% of the population) and progressively raise the taxes on everyone else.
   
5. Close all tax loopholes, esp for the top 1% of the wealthy.
   
6. End the tax-exempt status for religious organizations.
   
7. Audit the military-industrial complex, esp. the Pentagon.
   
8. Cut the budget (over $1 trillion)of the military-industrial complex by at least half.
   
9. Build at least 200 new nuclear power plants in the next 5 years.
   
10. Increase funding for Research & Development of Fusion energy from $3 billion to $300 billion.
    
11. Reform the electoral system:
    

a) Pass the Freedom to Vote Act.
b) Enact Final-Five Voting at every level: City, State, and Federal.
(Final-Five Voting is an innovative electoral system that combines Open Primaries with Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) for the General Election. This system allows the top five vote-getters in the open primary, irrespective of their party affiliation, to advance to the general election. The ultimate goal is to elect a candidate who has the broadest support across the entire electorate, rather than just a simple plurality.
c) Overturn Citizens United and get private money out of politics, esp big money, dark money, and foreign money.
(Citizens United refers to a US Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which was decided in 2010. The case addressed the application of campaign finance laws to corporations and unions. Specifically, the Court held that limits on corporate and union spending in political campaigns violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. The ruling resulted in loosening of restrictions on independent political spending by corporations and unions.)
d) Get rid of the delegates, the superdelegates used in the Democratic Primary election.
(Delegates and superdelegates are individuals who participate in the presidential nomination process of political parties, not the general election.
e) Fix the Electoral College by supporting the National Popular Vote. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
(The Electoral College is a group of representatives from each state who formally elect the President and Vice President of the United States.)
f) Use the latest technology, like blockchain, to ensure the integrity of the vote count.
g) Establish same-day voter registration.

1. Outlaw all PACs, including AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee).

(AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee , is a lobbying group in the United States that advocates for pro-Israel policies to the legislative and executive branches of government.)

1. Ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists & trading individual stocks.
   
2. Devote at least $50 billion every year to independent political journalists.
   
3. Devote at least $50 billion every year to worker-owned businesses.
   
4. Allow victims of the Covid vaccines to sue the makers of those vaccines.
   
5. Pardon all whistleblowers who expose governmental or corporate wrongdoing, including Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning. Moreover, encourage more whistleblowers to come forward and reward and honor them.
   
6. End the $3.5 billion per year aid to Israel until a one-state solution can be worked out with the People of Palestine.
   
7. End the stealing of Syria's oil, and apologize and make amends to them.
   
8. Apologize and make amends to the People of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Palestine for invading, bombing, and occupying their countries.
   
9. Legalize all entheogens, like cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms.
   

(This is not a final list. It is a work in progress.)

“Hello again! It’s nice to see you.” Says a voice, speaking directly into work-provided headphones that are plugged into my computer. The voice belongs to the voice-actress asked to voice the animated, cartoon-y version of the company’s mascot and as I listen to it and watch the video it is a part of, the generic white background of the video changes to display a recording of the company website. The video is an explanation of the website and I passively listen to it.
At this point a few minutes have passed since I entered the world. It’s been most of an hour and my perks have slowly been awakening within me. My “Cubicle” perks have all woken up, unsurprisingly, but only a few of my “Gamer” ones have. Those perks are much weightier than my “Cubicle” perks so this is unsurprising.
Right now the main two “Gamer” perks that are fully active within me are “Supersensory” and “Beautiful Mind”, two of my introductory perks. “Beautiful Mind” allows me to only look at the computer and focus on my thoughts, which are focused on ensuring that my powers properly and promptly awaken within me, while effortlessly absorbing the actual information present in the video I watched and the one I’m watching right now. This is due to the perk’s ability to allow me to mentally multitask by maintaining a pair of trains of thought. “Supersensory'' allows me to easily pick up conversations happening in different rooms. Both of these perks are more powerful than I’m using them for at the moment, but right now I’m not in a rush.
I have fifteen gamer perks, and the other thirteen are only somewhat active right now. None of them are fully inert, but I can sense that I need to do something to fully awaken them. My gamer system is active and is fully on, allowing me to do stuff like see my “Health” and my “Magic”. It’s a bit… unnerving to see my lifeforce quantified in such a precise way, but I also know that so long as I am not actively being injured my health is passively restored over time which is nice. I have an almost immortal body with a passive healing factor. My magical power is the same way. Both my magical energy and my hit points are also bolstered by perks, which is extra nice. “Tough as Nails” and “Tank” bolster my hit points and my overall endurance, and “Font of Magic” bolsters my arcane reserves.
I can see a small mini-map in the corner of my field of view, which is filled with small dots that I instinctively recognize are symbols representing people. This is my “Mini-Map” perk and when I focus on it time stops for a second and I blink away a message that briefly interrupts what I was doing. I continue to focus on the map and by looking at it I can see the way I took to arrive here from my apartment, a free “Item” that will follow me in some setting appropriate form for the rest of my chain. It’s only the free tier of the item, which means it’s not going to be luxurious but it’s still free housing forever, which means I should just appreciate what I’ve got.
My body and mind are passively bolstered by the modifications I purchased for my system, protecting me from stuff like mental and physical exhaustion as well as hilariously reducing my needs, by preventing me from needing to eat or drink anything, as well as removing my need for sleep.
At the upper right corner of my field of view I can see a small single picked out for me: “Mage”. It seems to be my currently selected class, which is fitting since I have “Specced” into intelligence and other non-physical skills. On the bottom left of my field of view is a small abstraction of a box with five slots, representing my inventory and the quick shortcut I can use to quickly grab and equip five items. There’s also a tome icon right above the box that represents my “Magic System”.
Some of my gamer system features are not yet truly active, but I decide to go ahead and change that while I idly view the video. I try to see how quickly I can gain a skill by glancing at the desk in front of me and grabbing an “Item” of mine: the “Corporate Rulebook”. It’s a small pocket dictionary of thing and I quickly open it up and begin to glance at it.
As soon as I do I am pleasantly surprised to feel time freeze and to see a notification pop up that alerts me that I’ve gained a skill! I will the thing to disappear and it blinks out of view as I glance at my skill and spot that it is a “reading” skill which modifies how fast I can read. The notification was a manifestation of “Tutorial Sprite” a drawback that will definitely be commonplace over the next few years. I don’t doubt that it’ll become annoying in time but right now the sensation of time freezing and me getting alerted to the fact that I’ve gained something new feels kind of cool, almost like I’m a Legend of Zelda character or something.
I continue to read and as I do a subtle bar appears in an easily overlooked section of my field of view. The bar is translucent and when I focus on it I note that it’s an experience bar, indicating that my experience with my reading skill is going up. The bar is quickly going up, inching up with every word I read and I can read at a blisteringly fast pace thanks to “Supersensory” interacting with “Beautiful Mind”. In minutes, even as the video in the background drones on about the ins and outs of the company website, I have read forty pages.
During this time I explore my pockets and place a few items in my inventory: a simple, fully charged cell phone, a wallet, some keys, and a few simple goods. These items are not well and truly mine, and instead represent simple goods “I” acquired before I came to work or should have already had for the sake of establishing a minimally believable identity in this world.
I eventually decide to see if I can do three things at once. I reach out with my hands and feign that I am stretching, which awards me the “Acting” skill and another manifestation of “Tutorial Sprite”, and I begin to interface with the system. In order to mess with my system I have to physically or verbally interface with it, but the results make themselves known immediately. As soon as I begin to fiddle with it a variety of text boxes appear in front of me and this makes me smile.
I first tap the icon of the spell book and as soon as I click it a whole new text box appears listing spells I can perform as well as “Tutorial Sprite” again. There are multiple types of spells in this list, from ones that enhance me or a target, boosting our defensiveness and our perceptiveness, to ones that debuff enemies, a few simple spells like a telekinesis one, and one that creates a hovering light, one which is a simple projectile which deals a sort of “neutral” untyped damage that can harm anything it hits, spells that help allies or harm enemies inflicting beneficial and detrimental status effects based on the four classical elements, and finally two healing spells. The two healing spells are interesting because both of them have two sets of effects and costs in arcane energy. I can see one set of costs and effects which are striked through, and a second cost which is only a third as much magical energy and a second effect which is three times as potent. This is the effect of “Healer”, my unbelievably powerful healing perk. My “Magic System” perk has been bolstered by my other perks, and it’s really hard not to smile as I study the spells available to me.
I memorize all of my spells, which is all I really need to be able to cast most of them, and I do the requisite gestures to back out of the section of my menu where more text boxes are located. When I finish my movements the larger menu is in front of me. I click on things until I am glancing at my attributes. My boss, it seems, has a sense of humor because he’s given me the Fallout RPG stat array, the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. statistics.
S stands for strength, and mine is a nice ole 18, a higher score than humanity’s average of 10 but my strength score is my only score not bolstered by a direct, singular perk dedicated to it. P stands for perception, and mine is a nice 35, a good deal higher than humanity’s average thanks to my "Supersensory" perk. E stands for endurance and mine is 38, my third highest score thanks to "Tank" and "Tough as Nails". C stands for charisma, and mine is 41, my strongest attribute score. A is used to represent agility and my score is 24, higher than strength due to a a combination of “Jack of All Trades” mixing with “Supersensory”, which minorly boosts my balance. The letter I stands for intelligence, mine is 39, my second highest score due to it combining something to the effect of D&D’s perceptions of both intelligence and wisdom and thus combining its effects into a single attribute instead of dispersing its power across multiple, as well as the boosts brought to it by "Healer" and "Support", as well as the actual knowledge that "The Face" grants and it bolsters my spellcasting. L stands for luck, and mine is 33, a nicely high starting score.
All of this is interesting because when an attribute reaches some number divisible by 50 I gain new skills for free, and I can train these attributes with ease. They’re actively, though not particularly rapidly, climbing to the next level as I train my ability to speed read, thanks to “Master of All” and with the added boost of “Experience Booster” that is definitely something that will help.
The last thing I need to see is my list of skills. The video I’m watching is beginning to draw to a close so I quickly return my focus to it for a second, taking a beat to review the fuller contents of my mind so I can ensure I remember the important details. I quickly assure myself that I do, before I watch the video end and I deftly explore the website just long enough to reach the next video. Once I’ve reached the video and I hear it begin I resume speed reading, smiling as I sense all of my skills and attributes passively improving. “Master of All” is a hell of a skill.
I resume my gestures until another sprawling text box appears in my field of view, this one filled with a list of my skills. The first thing I see is that my perks have been translated into skills which is neat, though some of them have slightly or not-so-slightly modified names like “Guesstimate” which is definitely a skill version of “Fudge the Numbers”, a perk that makes it so that when I make my best guesses about missing data my numbers tend to be within the range of the actual data. I enjoy the sight of the bars denoting the amount of experience I have with my skills slowly going up, and I am delighted to be aware that there is a healthy number of skills there, as well as to note that there is a lot I can easily get, like skills for meditation and cooking, as well as jogging and skills for various martial arts.
I begin to hum a tune I remember from before the events of the last hour or so and as soon as I do, time freezes and I mentally click through another notification. I grin at the notification that I have just received; it denotes that I have gained the skill for humming, which I plan to use to leapfrog to a much better set of skills and potentially even a new class in the days to come: that of the bard.
I fall into a routine that lasts me a good while. I speed-read my book, while humming and listening to the videos. During this time I level up some of my skills for the first time, as different skills require different amounts of work to level up. I persist in this routine until someone, a young Asian woman, walks over to me and taps my shoulder.
I turn around and smile at her while taking out my headphones, unsurprised by her actions thanks to my system’s “Mini-Map” feature. I notice a set of numbers over her head: 25/25, a rough approximation of her overall physical health and a stranger facet of my "HP System" perk. She is a bit surprised to see me, and as she reacts to me I feel “Silver Tongue” stir fully to life, which is undoubtedly hitting her like a ton of bricks. My sharpened senses catch every facet of her surprise, and arousal, and a part of me is teasingly thrilled by it.
“Silver Tongue” is, for my broad intentions and purposes, my handiest 100 CP perk. It is a perk that makes me attractive in every sense of the word, to an extreme extent in fact, and also actively gives me skills when it comes to manipulation and charisma. I give the woman a chance to regain her composure as I intuitively sense that it’d be best for her ego if she is the leader of this interaction. Hell, my ability to cold-read her like this is due to a fusion of different perks, "Silver Tongue" being one of the most prominent.
“Hello Lucas! My name is Amy, and I wanted to let you know it’s time for your lunch break.” She tells me. I can pick out bits and pieces of different accents mixing and mingling in her voice, as well as smell the very light splash of perfume she’s got on. I momentarily consider how to proceed from here in a way that maximizes her perception of me before I get the sense that she values friendliness and energy.
“Thank you Amy! It’s so kind of you to come and talk to the new guy.” I respond, almost but not quite matching her energy while subtly shifting my body language in such a way that I am perceived in as friendly and welcoming a manner as I can be. I hop up and begin to press buttons on my keyboard and computer which after a few moments lock it, but not before the thing asks me to devise a new username and password.
As soon as I do this, exhibiting the fierce speed of my “Speed typist” perk and lightly training it in the process, I am up and asking Amy to guide me to the on-site cafeteria one of the videos I have watched has informed me about. This causes her eyes to light up and she cheerily leads the way, promising to let me sit with her and her friends. It all sounds a bit high school, but in all honesty it’s pretty nice that the work culture here both allows and apparently expects people to not work during lunch.
We walk out of the actual office we’re in and into a narrow hallway. We step past various amenities this workplace offers as I make conversation, gaining the “Small Talk” and “Gossip” skills in the process. Along the way I step past glass doors and thus past my reflection and I get to see the effect “Silver Tongue” has on me in a purely physical sense.
Pre-chain I was a somewhat slender, awkward-looking geeky sort who walked in a way that revealed my disability to everyone. I had dark brown hair and darker eyes. Now I am a taller, more muscular sort, with gently tousled light brown hair and bright, energetic eyes. I am dressed in stylish, well-maintained and professional-looking clothes.
We quickly make it to the cafeteria; a large space with different stations for different foods and beverages at each corner of the room. Amy explains to me what each of the stations specializes in, and points at and waves at some of her friends, before telling me she’ll go to the section that sells various “Ethnic” types of foods: Hispanic, Asian, and Middle-Eastern foods. I decide to go and grab a burger, though not before I promise myself to be adventurous when it comes to this cafeteria in the days to come.
Getting the burger is a simple process and in less than a minute I’m heading to where Amy’s friends are seated. They welcome me at the large table they’re seated around, and it’s a fair mix of men and women who all seem happy to see me and chat with the new guy.
“Hey new guy, how’s it going?” One of the guys, a muscular-looking guy with hair that’s been dyed blonde, recently, says to me. I confidently return the greeting and say that my name is Lucas. The others all greet me in turn, six people: three men and three women, Steve, Joe, and Anthony, as well as Rebecca, Nancy, and Mary. Amy joins us as soon as Mary, who says she’s in marketing, finishes her introduction, and the Asian woman sits down next to me. As I sit down I overhear several different conversations from throughout the room and mentally note that I'm the center of a few of them. It seems like new people are rare enough that my appearance, coupled with how I look, is worthy of mention.
“So I’m in data entry, and I’ve always been a bit of a numbers guy.” I exclaim when we all begin to eat our lunches. This gets the usual responses, from my new friends complaining about math to others telling me that they're jealous of my skills. I get it, in my pre-chain life numbers were a bane of mine but I didn’t have to select an origin that fit my actual background so I decided to do something wholly new instead, which has benefitted me immediately. The basic information I know how in my context as a data entry person is much more math, as well as some other info, than I anticipated it being, some of which is stuff as specific as strategies that allow me to speed my typing, while other bits of new knowledge revolve around how to properly use different types of software.
When people finish reacting to my statements other people take control of the conversation and, armed with a mixture of self-awareness and confidence, both of which I previously lacked, I find myself very willing to relax and enjoy listening to my coworkers. I gain a few skills related to listening and empathy, and I silently appreciate the ridiculous potential of “Skills”, taking in and appreciating its commitment to game-ifying life.
To be fair, things like listening to people and basic empathy are skills that are sorely underappreciated, but to be rewarded in this way is a tad bit depressing if I stop and think about it for even a short while. I decide to stop doing that, and to be present in the conversation with my new friends right as one of them, Joe, turns to me and asks me what I like to do. I consider the question for a second as I think about how to answer. On the one hand, being honest is important so there’s an argument to be made that I should tell these new friends the truth. On the other hand, this is also my first ever chance to totally reinvent myself… It takes me a second to decide to reinvent myself but in a way that I think, and hope, will lead to me having experiences I just didn't have when I was younger.
"I mean there's a lot of stuff I like but I'm a bit of a gym guy and I really like volunteering." I state, and in doing so honing my deceptiveness and my beginning to build a mental profile I'll keep track of. In my first life I was poor and due to my disability working was both hard and painful, so I didn't volunteer all that often. I was even a bit jealous of people whose lives were easy enough that they could afford to volunteer unless it was tied to some potential job opportunity, and the last time I meaningfully volunteered was probably in college as part of an extra-credit task.... Which defeats the real point of volunteering, even if it achieves positive results all the same.
My new friends all smile at me as they hear my generic answers to their question. One of the guys playfully hits my shoulder and I watch him grin as he feels it's solidity. The average stat score for humans is 10, and my strength is 18. That's only a touch higher than the average but it's high enough that my strength is plainly visible if I l take off my shirt and it's definitely high enough for someone to notice it when they touch a part of me that is stronger than other parts like my shoulders would be. One of the women, Rebecca, who is a short Black woman dressed in a stylish and eye-catching red outfit, is the next to talk.
"You like to volunteer? That's awesome! What kind of volunteering do you do?" She asks me, and this time I'm able to answer pretty easily and honestly.
"I like helping organize health-based initiatives for my community. I mostly volunteered as a health-based person in my hometown, I did stuff like organize free health clinics for people who can't afford healthcare and worked as a volunteer at a family-owned clinic. I want to do that kind of stuff here." I explain. This intrigues my friends, and is an honest remark of mine. Well, the part about what I want to do is honest. "Healer" is a wild perk and I have the chance to improve it safely in this jump, which I need to take advantage of since I have no way of knowing if I'll get to decide where I go from here.
After this some folks express interest in my expressed desires with one of the guys saying he's never heard of a free health clinic. This is unsurprising, though I'm a bit jealous he's never needed one. The rest of lunch passes in a blur, with most of the conversational topics being small talk and workplace gossip, which suits me just fine. When our break comes to an end we quickly separate but not before I exchange my number with multiple people and find myself added to a group chat.
From here I return to my cubicle and spend the rest of the early afternoon, from 1 until 5 listening to videos and doing small things here and there to bolster the rate which I can level up my skills I complete my last video less than ten minutes before the work day ends. During this time I gain the skill "Passive Listening" which is interesting because I didn't gain it before now despite doing hours of passive listening. It seems that for me to gain some skills, the more passive ones I'm doing disinterestedly, it takes me doing more of them before I earn them. This realization causes time to freeze and for me to have to do some mental clicking to get time working again, but it's definitely worth it because I have just raised my intelligence score!
At the end of the work day Hank comes by and checks in on me. He is delighted to learn that I have completed the videos, and I surprise him by being excited about work tomorrow. He shows me how to clock out and then releases me into the wild. I am one of the first people out the door and when I exit the building I entered this world in I am delighted to feel the freedom I now possess. I am on a decently busy street inside some city's bustling downtown. The skies above me are clear and the sun is lazily drifting towards the horizon.
I turn inward and scan my mini-map before spotting the place that should be where my apartment is located. A second later I have effortlessly committed that spot to memory, and then I decide to walk in another direction, eager to see what my starting location has to offer before I head home. My skills all begin to improve as I am able to overhear dozens of conversations in an impressive number of languages, and I can't help but smile as I feel the passive power of the perks I decided to get working in unison.
A/N: While I'm not committing to this as a hard fact my basic plan for this jump is to use a healthy number of time skips once I've done enough work establishing basic facts. In my experience that's the best way to handle writing jumpchain stories that are not 1 chapter = 1 jump. This is meant to be a perfectly normal, no alt-rules chain featuring builds that incorporate drawbacks and starring a guy who is meant to start off as pretty normal. I will post a complete, fully detailed build post HOPEFULLY later today.

Stalinist period in Eastern Europe (1948/49-1953)
Basic things that apply to all socialist states in this period: Large advancements in education, healthcare, industrialisation (but unlike OTL not absolute priority of heavy industry due to different international situation) and post-war reconstruction and realative stabilisation of economies, collectivisation of agriculture, women emancipation, institution of hardline regimes with a strong role of secret police and suppression of any opponents of the regime, show trials and purges, large influence of Soviet Union in internal politics – countries forced to act as Soviet “advisors” want, socialist realism control over culture, dominance of propagandistic and ideological motives, strong censorship
Albania

• 1949-1953: Main difference is that during this era there weren't any western attempts at overthrowing Hoxha (yet). These years see successful economic development and mass modernisation of the country. Albania is strongly pro-Soviet, however its importance compared to OTL is lesser as Greece is also socialist.
• May 1949: Show trial and execution of Koçi Xoxe. Hoxha’s power strengthened, relations with Yugoslavia fell apart.

Bulgaria

• On the 15 July 1949 death of Dimitrov, Valko Chervenkov became general secretary. Hardline Stalinists Bulgaria’s “Little Stalin” – repression (large part of BKP purged), consolidation of power, Soviet inspired culture, development of heavy industry, collectivisation. Since death of Vasil Kolarov also as the prime minister (23.1. 1950)
• 1949: Traicho Kostov with other prominent moderate members of BKP executed after a show trial.
• Failure of the First Five Year Plan as it did not met all targets (1949-1953), large scale industry build-up achieved.

Romania

• Soviet economic control trough Sov-Rom companies
• 1948 leading communist politician Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was arrested (after Soviets demanded), accused of titoism. Persecution of opposition and anti-communist resistance active in Carpathians.
• 1949 start of construction of the Danube–Black Sea Canal, start of gradual collectivisation, start of development of heavy industry (success in development of steel, petrochem and machinery industries). 1951-1955 first five-year plan.
• Power struggle between “Muscovite” and “Prisoners” faction within Romanian Workers Party – Ana Pauker a stalinist, who multiple times defied Stalin’s policy (allowing Jews migrate to Israel, opposing collectivisation efforts) was still slowly losing favour of Stalin, in January 1952 Gheorghiu-Dej requested Stalin’s approval for purge of Muscovite faction, however unlike our reality (and this is main shift) this is initiative is opposed (due to lesser extent of Stalin’s antisemitic campaign, that would be only beginning by that time, lobbing of Molotov and Beria for them ), instead Stalin pressures Romania for show trial with Pătrășcanu, which in this timeline see Stalin as failure of Gheorghiu-Dej.
• 3.6. 1952, Petru Groza stepped down as prime minister -> instead of centralising power in Gheorghiu-Dej’s hands, soviet-aligned Iosif Chișinevschi was pushed by soviet “advisors” to this position.
• Show trial with Pătrășcanu and his suspected associates 28 April to 2 May 1953.

Hungary

• 16-24 October 1949 Process with László Rajk – as in our reality, “titoist spies” influential to other trials. Inter opposition to Rákosi purged. 15 executed, 78 imprisoned. Other purges and show trials in the military during 1951. Trial with Jews is not planned.
• Rákosi builds the most repressive regime from the socialist bloc states, a cult of personality modelled after Stalin.
• Economy: focused on expansion of heavy industry, collectivised agriculture. However, like in other states without Korean war, shifts to military sector primacy doesn’t happen, resulting in more supply of consumer goods, but Hungary still faces shortages, but the economic situation is little bit better overall.
• 14.8. 1952 Rákosi further centralised power in his hands by becoming chairman of the council of ministers.

Poland

• October 1948: Gomulka and other proponents of sovereign stance purged; 1951 Gomulka arrested. March 1948 Witold Pilecki show trial.
• 22.12. 1948 creation of Polish United Workers Party.
• High soviet control: Konstantin Rokossovsky as polish defence minister (49-56), influence of “advisor” Ivan Serov
• Catholic Church keeps influential position -> conflict after 22.7. 1952 constitution that declares Polish People’s Republic as a secular state, closing of Church schools etc. Trial with Cracow Curia (1953)
• 1950-1956 Six-Year Plan – changes as in other states from our reality, it is not focused on rapid accelerated industrialisation, instead on increase in heavy industry, while also investing in services, food, construction, and consumer goods. Result is less developed heavy industry, but better economic situation of population and less shortages (but Poland would still experience some). As the plan was more modest, it was successfully completed in 1956. As in our reality, mass increase in urbanisation and general national income (that would be bit lesser due to less heavy industry being developed)
• Warsaw that was less damaged was still largely reconstructed in socialist realism

Czechoslovakia 1948-1953

• 1948-1949: wave of exile to the American zone in Germany. Due to Czechoslovakia not being (in years 1948-1956) on the Iron Curtain, there are way less cases of illegally trying to flee across borders (since the only way is to another socialist state GDR), emigrants mostly try to get to Western Austria through Eastern Austria.
• In 1948 consolidation, start of collectivisation and final wave of nationalisations (majority of industry already nationalised during the Third republic), ČSSD merged (annexed) into KSČ. Law 231/1948 (law on the protection of the people’s democratic republic) passed, enabling persecution of political opponents (6.10.1948), “bourgeois” societal organisations (like Sokol) banned.
• 1949 the first political process with general Píka. 1950: Under Soviet pressure organisation of mass political process with “Group of Milada Horáková” (31 May-8 June 1950, non-communist intelligence). 1952 process with “Green International” – catholic intelligence.
• 1949 start of construction of Stalin’s monument in Prague.
• 1949-1953: The First Five Year Plan – centrally planned economy, focused on industrialisation of Slovakia
• Massive changes due to different international situations! – first 5year plan was focused since 1951 on militarisation due to Korean War and Cold War tensions, this period is radically different and much more calm , so this doesn’t happen, instead plan remains focused on mechanisation of agriculture, growth and development of consumer industry prioritised over the heavy industry -> this has positive effect on economy and plan is successful (this has influence down the line in 1953), economic situation is better compared to our reality, more goods to buy are available. Main target of propaganda of that era is the United Kingdom and its Imperialism, TATO, Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia especially Western Austria and Habsburgs, not American Imperialism. Also the infamous campaign against “the American beetle” doesn’t exist, campaign against the potato beetle yes, but it is not presented as a CIA operation to destroy Czechoslovak potatoes.
• Process with a conspiracy centre of Otto Šling and Jan Šverma – 20. January 1953
  • Slánský process without Slánský. This is another major shift, the Slánský process had major antisemitic undertones and Slánský being Jew was a major factor in choosing him. This antisemitism is missing as 1952 is the year where first antisemitic campaigns only started in the USSR, instead it is focused solely on “titoists”, while other people are grouped with them. Everything was organised by Soviet “advisors''.
  • Jan Šverma, who survived during the Slovak National Uprising, served as the Deputy Prime Minister (1948-1951) and Deputy General Secretary of KSČ (1945-1951), together with Otto Šling (leader of KSČ in Brno) were accused of being heads of made-up conspiracy led by Yugoslavia and the United Kingdom. They were executed. Other people persecuted (some are different): Karel Šváb, Vladimír Clementis, Osvald Závodský, Bedřich Reicin, André Simone and Josef Frank (executions), Marie Švermová, Arthur London, Vavro Hajdů, Mikuláš Landa, Jarmila Taussigová (life sentences) and others. People who were persecuted due to them being Jewish or having ties with Israel are not affected in this timeline.
• Process with bourgeois nationalists – June 1954, it was a follow-up to the process with Šverma, delayed to the period after Stalin’s death as Husák refused to confess. He was given “only” life sentence, others 20-10 years in prison. Oher follow-up “Process with regional secretaries” doesn’t take place; these people are already convicted in the main process.
• In 1953 Stalin had died, so did Klement Gottwald (14.3.1953)

Denmark 1949-1953

• Anti-communist political leader arrested in 1949: Hans Hedtoft, H. C. Hansen and others October 1949 process with members of anti-communist MI6 affiliated group “Firmaet”, however political leaders weren’t put on trial due to Larsen’s opposition to such mass trial.
• 1949: approved the first five-year plan: focus mainly on modernisation of agriculture, shipbuilding, light industry and only in minority in heavy industry and started voluntary and gradual collectivisation, all against wishes of soviet “advisors”, continuous diplomatic relations with Nordic countries (+large immigration wave to Sweden, established tough border security) -> as we establish Stalin loses trust in Larsen already in 1947 and his further opposition to Stalin’s plans and Tito-Stalin split (even if Larsen officially denounced Tito, he himself wanted to develop “Danish Way to Socialism” as campaigned before power consolidation) leads eventually to his downfall, despite pleasing Stalin with established of several Soviet military bases in Denmark and obeying all Informbyro directives.
• 15 February 1951 Central Committee of DFSP announced resignation of Larsen from all positions “due to health and personal reasons” he was replaced by Knud Jespersen as the general secretary and by Alfred Jensen as the prime minister. Several days later, Larsen was purged from the party and secretly arrested. On 12 March statement of the CC of DFSP on “Errors and Rightist Deviations under leadership of Aksel Larsen” was released, denouncing Larsen for Titoism, working also as party’s “self-critique” and devoting its leadership to upheld Marxism-Leninism. Party was purged of “Titotists”, many of them arrested. On 4 May also president Mogens Fog was forced to resign and put under house arrest, the presidency was abolished and replaced by a collective organ.
• New directives were issued regarding collectivisation, the process was “speeded up” and peasants were forced to join collective farms by economic pressure (high quotas), but still a more moderate agricultural policy based on Germany and Austria was promoted. Those in opposition were arrested. The Five Year Plan was reworked with help of Soviet experts giving primacy to construction of new metallurgy.
• Stalin wished to stage a large show trial with Larsen, as message to other leaders in socialist bloc, so between 20 to 26 April 1952 “Trial of the Anti-Party Conspiracy Revisionist Centre headed by Aksel Larsen” was held, it became shock worldwide (and paranoia to all socialist leaders) and only time past communist leader was executed, next to Larsen another 10 people were executed and 15 sentenced to long time in prison.
• By 1953 collectivisation rates increased from 15% in 1951 to 50%, targets of the 5 year plan were not met, Danish economy was however still in a relatively good shape.

Yugoslavia - Informbiro period 1948-1953

• Worse isolation and economic hardships compared to our reality, as the non-interventionist United States don’t really want to help Yugoslavia and Britain has few resources to spare.
• 1949: Andrija Hebrang, Sreten Žujović and other pro-soviet leader purged, executed, arrested or forced to flee.1948-1950 attempted coup, insurrection of anti-Titoists in several places
• Immediately after the split, Yugoslav economy suffered problems due to the Soviet embargo, and Tito moved the country towards self-sufficiency. Investments in the military. Special measures introduced in 1948 (third shifts, mobilisation of workforce and ratios) to combat problems.
• In 1948 trade between Yugoslavia and the West was restored, soon socialist bloc imports were replaced by Western ones, but at unfavourable prices. In 1949 IMF and World Bank approved loans to Yugoslavia, however due to Americans not lobbying for Tito, interest rates were unfavourable and got Yugoslavia to huge debt. Unlike OTL, desperate Tito abandoned claims on Trieste and managed to obtain British aid in 1951.
• Economic hardship forced Yugoslav leadership to seek economic reform and thus the beginning of Yugoslav socialist self-management (market socialism) was born. Introduced by Tito, Milovan Đilas and Edvard Kardelj in 1950. It led to partial stabilisation of the dire economic situation.
• Threat of possible Soviet invasion increased in 1951 with communist victory in Greece. However, unlike in our reality Yugoslavia did not turned to United States, Greece and Turkey, but to TATO as an alliance, Yugoslavia entered negotiations with TATO that resulted into singing of the Turkish-Yugoslav Agreement on 28.12.1952, in which countries pledged to defend each other against Soviet or Greek invasion and opened possibility of Yugoslav membership, it is connected with increase of relations with USA after American “New Foreign Policy Doctrine” of 1951.
• 2.-7.11. 1952 VI. Congress of Communist Party of Yugoslavia: Party renamed to League of Communists of Yugoslavia, peak of political liberalisation, decentralisation state and of party structure, separation of party and government functions, socialist self-management officially approved as economic policy, economic and political discussion promoted, emphasis of creation of socialist democracy, “democratic centralism” abolished. Changes resulted in 13.1.1953 Yugoslavia passed constitutional reforms – Yugoslavia declared “socialist, democratic, federal state of sovereign and equal nations”, a new legislative Federal People's Assembly was established, giving more power to republics. Liberalisation also brough artistic freedom.
  GREECE
  

Hellenic People’s Republic (1951-1953)

• 1951: communist consolidation of Greece, beginning of anti-communist insurgencies (active to mid-1960s). Sweeping radical socialist reforms: nationalisation of all industries, beginning of collectivisation. Repression of suspected royalist sympathisers (Campaign Against Reactionary Saboteurs), creation of soviet-modelled powerful Ministry of Public Security (November 1951) that led these repressions. Autumn 1951 mass arrests and purges in various fields. Large wave of emigration. Paranoia and fear of British invasion, start of military build-up reorganisation of DSA into the Greek People’s Army, Airforce and Navy.
• In November 1951 Zachariadis consolidated his grip over the military by purging war hero and prominent commander Markos Vafeiadis after accusations of him being Yugoslav spy and royalist, this move was unpopular for people and regular party members. Stalinism, creation of personality cult around Zachariadis. Purge of Vafeiadis’s allies.
• 6 December 1951 “Bloody Day of Saint Nicholas” execution of many prominent “bourgeois intellectuals and politicians” that supported royalists during the civil war after a show trial.
• 1952: IX. Congress of KKE (11.3.) – position of Zachariadis confirmed, toning down of repressions, election (2.6.) – only one-party ticket and “Democratic Front for National Reunification”. Campaign for international recognition (socialist states did already before 1951), Zachariadis retreats from the position of prime minister, Nikos Ploumpidis takes this position. Creation of the People's Assembly that passes the new constitution (August). Greece joins CMEA.
• Relationship with church: As majority of Greek people are religious, approach like in Poland, trying to make agreement, however persecution of many priests, who are connected with anti-communist groups.
• The most militarised (maybe after USSR…) in socialist bloc at the time, had very tense relations with TATO.
• 1953 (later about it, since it belongs more to the 1953-1956 period): Despite the death of Stalin Greek Stalinism itself continues…

Kingdom of Greece (1951-1953)

• Rump British puppet state, wikibox accurate for now only everything is moved by a year
• September 1951 to March 1952 “Rhodos government period” – state is ruled basically by military, very unstable state, uprisings and rebellions mainly in Crete. White terror and repressions start against populations many suspected communists executed, massacres.
• March 1952 Papagos comes to power (officially), gains extraordinary powers (basically becomes a dictator) – in next month intensification of repression and eventual defeat of all insurgencies and opposition against exile Kingdom, stabilisation and formation of working authoritarian state apparatus. Seat of government moved to Crete.
• In December 1952 a fraudulent election was held, victory of Papagos’es Greek Rally against the Liberal Party -> it marks transition to façade democracy and limited liberalisation.
• Papagos' government continues to represent Greece in the UN.

GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
Austrian Democratic Republic (1950-1953)

• After its formation, several left-wing reforms were passed: nationalisation of industry, creation of a centrally planned economy (1st five-year plan 1951), moderate collectivisation of agriculture. Similar to (real and TTL) Germany, East Austria suffers problems with Republikflucht towards the Western part. In 1952 federal states were abolished and East Austria became a unitary state. General secretary and president Koplening, prime minister Franz Honner (wikibox here accurate), elected in 1951 with “National Unity Front” list.
• Fight with Catholic Church, prominent institution in Austria, seen as representation of old reactionary Empire and sympathisers with the Western part (especially after the proclamation of Archduchy). Promotion of a new Austrian identity based on the labour movement, the first Austrian republic (which DRÖ claims to be a continuation) and strongly opposed to pan-Germanism and the old Austrian Habsburg empire. East Austria presents itself as the only sole legitimate Austrian state.
• Compared to other states, political climate is lighter, there are no show trials, however in 1952 part of VSAPÖ (Vereinigte Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs – United Socialist Workers Party of Austria – aforementioned union of SPÖ with KPÖ) is purged and catholic leaders often face persecution with many of them imprisoned

Austrian Republic and Archduchy (1950-1953)

• Head of the first West Austrian government was Julius Raab, while Leopold Figl served as State-President.
• Why the hell is Austria Archduchy again you may ask? Since 1919 Habsburgs were banished from Austria, however here Winston Churchill comes to change situation, as West Austria was created under large British influence, Churchill went to propose to Raab to restore Habsburgs in order to boost public support and to continue historical line from the Habsburg Austria and to have greater legitimacy as the true successor. As the National Council was dominated by ÖVP, Raab agreed to the proposition. From August to November (1950) discussions were held between Otto and Raab on restoration of monarchy. Newly proposed changes to the constitution were discussed in the National Council. Eventually supporters of restoration prevailed and on 11 January 1951 the Habsburg Law was revoked.
• Otto von Habsburg returned to the country already in January 1950, was greeted by cheering crowds, but also with demonstrations. Monarchy is going to remain a polarising question amongst West Austrians. In the East this was greatly condemned.
• The March 1951 election resulted in another majority of ÖVP, the new National Council drafted and approved a new constitution making the country a constitutional monarchy, 26 June 1951. 3rd December 1951 Otto’s coronation ceremony, reining name as Otto II.
• Economically and politically West Austria is close with Italy and the United Kingdom, it also took an American loan in 1952.
• In 1951 Western Austria also introduced Gruber Doctrine (after foreign minister Karl Gruber), emphasising its position as the only sole legitimate Austria state, stating that Salzburg cuts relations with any country that has diplomatic relations with East-Vienna.

German Democratic Republic (1950-1952)

• Last time we left, the German Democratic Republic was proclaimed in May 1950 and occupational troops started to leave the country, that wouldn’t be finished until late September. Until that time DDR could not fully project its authority outside the Soviet zone. As Germany was disarmed it had to rely on its Volkspolizei.
• Some reforms were already started by the German Economic Commission and Occupation Authority, like nationalisation of nazi and pro-nazi owned industries and expropriation of various assets. In May 1950 a major nationalisation decree (that affected all parts of Germany, excluding the UN zone) was issued by the Reiman government, together with promised land reforms and voluntary formations of collectives.
• In September Länderat was dispersed by German authorities. During October CSU was forced to join Democratic Bloc, while Bavarian Party was banned for promoting separatism, many right-wing parties for its real or imaginary connection with Nazism. By the end of the year control over the American zone was achieved, however the governments of Baden and Wurttemberg still opposed the government. In March 1951 administrative reform was passed by SED, weakening the power of opposition by merging Baden with Wurttemberg and changing the borders of Franconia. New election was declared for October 1951, both state and federal (justified by “need to take into account political and legislative changes”), despite vocal protests of many deputies Democratic Bloc, now renamed Democratic Front for National Unity (DFE) put only one united candidate with possibility of a blank ballot. Democracy ended (29 October 1951). As elections were also held in the UN zone, here the blank ballots actually won 76% of the votes as part of a large protest initiative. Before the election on 5th of May 1951 III. SED congress was held, Walter Ulbricht was elected general secretary, major reorganisation on the lines of socialist bloc mass parties.
• 1952: The First Five Year Plan was launched focused on reconstruction, collectivisation of agriculture – everything like in real life East Germany (thus also similar to East Austria). Plan set high targets, resulting in high quotas for workers. (Germany economy was still in very bad state), persecution of opposition (connected with Nazism and declared saboteurs), Stasi created and eventually by end of the year thanks to facing large exodus (similar to East Germany) inner-German border (with UN) was closed (December 1952).
• Germany internationally still appeared as a neutral state and also had relations with Yugoslavia, however, they took pro-Soviet positions all the time: recognition of PRC and Greece.
• Nazi resistance existed in very limited numbers, some soldiers hiding in the woods and fighting long-lost war, no mass nazi underground. But as German propaganda pushed that idea and it also entered popular discourse.

United Nations Mandate in Germany (1950-53)
What was happening in the UN zone and what changed with the creation of Germany? It becomes more complicated. Next to the Allied Control Commission (ACC) under control of the UN Trusteeship Council and local state governments, a new position was established by the 1950 Peace Treaty – Authority of High Representative of the German Democratic Republic – so a representative sent by Berlin government, see UNMG was officially part of Germany. You will not see it on any maps. This High Representative had some powers, and he oversaw relations and implementation of common policies, elections, but the vast majority of German laws did not apply here, if these laws weren’t approved by UNMG, which they weren’t as this organisation was dysfunctional. UNMG became hub for German dissent and target of emigration, however, unlike GDR x FRG living conditions (in terms of economics, income, workers’ rights etc.) in UN zone sucked even more than in Germany proper, as it exited purely to exploit German labour, resources and industry in profit of Western companies. UNMG was the main point of German propaganda, criticised, as well what it was, Western exploitation of Germany, and strikes were organised against, it was the worst presentation capitalism can give. The 1951 election was met with protests as we mentioned above, it led to increasing opposition to the GDR government. Before 1953 it was common to travel between zones, but as the border was closed UNMG and GDR divided even more (so yes, it was part of Germany, but majority Germans cannot enter it and it is not ruled by the German government). If it is not complicated enough, it will get later in 1953.
FRANCE
Important in France is that CIA involvement in the country ended in 1949 (important is that CGT-FO despite being formed doesn’t gain any support and remains very marginal, while CGT itself is pro-communist). As the Marshall Plan aid is cut, economic situation worsens and living conditions fall and as government prioritises financing of Indochina War, post-war reconstruction drags on, rations continue, people are increasingly unhappy and PCF gains more and more support, right-wing turns towards Gaullists. This period is marked with numerous strikes, protests, unrest and general chaos. Also like in Italy, France takes many IMF loans and gets into debt.
Political chaos: 26 August 1948, Ramadier replaced as prime minister by André Marie, Marie forced to resign in 11 October 1948, replaced by Henri Queuille, who was replaced by Georges Bidault who served until 20 July 1950, replaced by Henri Queuille (again) just for a month, 23 August 1950 René Pleven became prime minister, government collapsed after formation of PSIF (and effectively lost parliamentary majority) 28 June 1951, new government head by Robert Schuman that and stayed in this position to the election in 1952, but was not able to pass anything including electoral reform that helped Third Force in our reality.
Since 1950 PCF has used a “popular front strategy” and attempted to sway the left-wing faction of SFIO to support them, instead of Third Force. There are changes, instead of the pro-government group headed by Mollet being splinter, instead the splinter group is forced by anti-government sections of SFIO and Parti Radical, French Socialist Independent Party (Parti Socialiste Indépendant Français PSIF) 26 June 1951, formation of PSIF which first leader become by popular Pierre Mendès France, who vocally opposed continuation of the war in Indochina. PSIF formed the “Popular Front” with PCF.
Before 17 January 1952 election, large political polarisation. Massive “New Year Strike” in 1952 – General Strike organised by PCF, mostly as part of political campaign. There is also increasing radicalisation of anti-communist right. Government attempts a massive anti-communist campaign that ends up being unsuccessful, while Gaullists are mainly attacking the government and PCF second. Wikibox needs overhaul (actually even those before it, there are too many seats for election), election results into majority of the Popular Front, Gaullists became the second strongest party and Third Force parties ended up decimated. Maurice Thorez became French Prime Minister; communists took key ministries (21 January 1952).
Maurice Thorez government (1952-1953)
First acts are several major left-wing reforms: shortening of workday, workers’ rights, approval of massive social programs and public works to reduce unemployment. During spring and summer several major nationalisations are drafted and approved by the government. End of financing of the colonial war. Early policies of the government are popular amongst people and somehow improve the economic situation. France petitions the USSR for aid in April 1952.
Franco-Vietnamese talks February – April 1952, ceasefire is declared, delegates including Ho Chi Minh and representatives of Laos and Cambodia, but not Bao Dai, are invited to Paris (Paris Conference 5 March – 6 April). France withdraws from Vietnam and recognises Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a legitimate Vietnamese government. French troops also began to transfer authority to locals in Cambodia and Laos and leave the area completely by January of 1953. This initiates debates about the future of colonies Thorez announces that in the future France would set all colonies on the way of independence. This generates large opposition from the right, but also liberals.
PCF also works on taking control over the French security apparatus and military. As we mentioned, there was conflict between “eastern” and “western” branches of Free French Forces, 1947-1951 communist sympathisers were removed from important positions, during 1952 the opposite happened. Communist aligned officers from the French Legion in the USSR take important leadership positions in the military. As communists controlled the Interior ministry before, several pro-communist officials survived there and now were empowered or re-instated, anti-communists removed. This was attacked by opposition, however communists augmented they do the same thing as the Third Force did before.
Major fight was about SDECE, which was dominated by anti-communists and closely connected with MI6 and CIA. In late January 1953 PCF publicly attacked SDECE as an organisation controlled by “imperialist spies and reactionaries, that plot subversion against the French people'' after the “Le Havre Affair”, where many weapons were found hidden by local Gaullist political leader (30 January 1953). Another major political weapon for communists was the publication of the French war crimes in Indochina in L’Humanité by Vietnamese correspondents (September to November 1952), Thorez government announced that all perpetrators would be punished, leading to large police investigation and arrests of many officers that participated in war in Indochina including many SDECE agents, serving also a purge. Back to Le Havre Affair, after this evidence war presented by ministry of interior that SDECE agents collaborating with Britian and America were responsible, leading to SDECE being dissolved (27 February 1953) and instead new communist dominated General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) was formed, organisation started to investigate SDECE, military and opposition parties, DGSI started to cooperate with MGB. Thorez gets reports that there were preparations for counter-revolutionary activity. Truth is that SDECE had been collaborating with CIA and MI6 since November in preparation of what would become Salan’s Coup.
Benelux - Netherlands, Luxembourg nothing to expand. Belgium Julien Lahaut survives assassination attempt unlike OTL, there is a mistake I never realised in the wikibox, bad despite Van Acker shown correctly as candidate, wrong person is shown as elected president.
Italy - Since better result De Gasperi’s DC rules alone without coalition. This results into lesser number of left-wing policies. Cutting of the Marshall Plan has serious implications for Italy, a much worse economic situation, with living conditions falling in the early 1950s. Italy thus took large IMF loans between 1951-1952, that put country into a huge debt. These both factors result into even larger popularity of PCI. DC began to massively fall at polls. To improve its standing, electoral law was changed to gain a supermajority bonus (2/3 of seats) to party or coalition, that obtains over 50% votes, communist protests.
Ireland - The 1951 election resulted in gains for Fine Gael (even though Fianna Fáil did still win), so Costello’ Labour-FG coalition continued to govern.
Nordics - integration

• First attempted customs unions from 1951 failed, but a free trade agreement (3.8.51) between Norway and Sweden was signed, this treaty also established open borders. Upon free travel was expanded in 1952 and later in 1954 with creation of Nordic Passport Union (SWE, NOR, FIN, ICE, later Faroe Islands joined too) – open borders and free movement.
• 1.7. 1951 Swedish-Norwegian Defence Treaty was signed (negotiations began already in 1949 after change of American foreign policy) – countries established a military alliance.
• 12.2.1953 Nordic Council – largest project – was created between Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Faroe Islands.

Sweden focused further on development of its military in light of American “retreat”, alliance with Norway. End of several social reforms by the Ohlin coalition government proved unpopular and election resulted in victory of Social Democrats, who also needed to form a coalition with Farmers Party (that also participated in the previous one). Tage Erlander returned to the post of prime minister, returning to previous social democratic policies. 1952 “Catalina Affair” did not occur, due to lesser Cold War tensions.
Norwegian 1949 election victory of Labour, Gerhardsen remains PM and doesn’t resign in 1951 as in our reality. Same policies, economic recovery and prosperity. Military strengthening.
Finald 1950 Paasikivi re-elected president. 1951 parliamentary election victory of Social Democrats, continuation of Kekkonen government. Increasing Nordic Cooperation. Everything as in our reality. July-August 1952 Helsinki Olympic games – last international event without major tensions
Iceland – American military withdrawal from Iceland, TATO seen as pointless. 23-24 Oct. 1949 parliamentary election results in victory of coalition government between Progressive and Social Democratic Party (government is supported by Socialists, who also see electoral success, while Independence suffers major defeat). Hermann Jónasson becomes the new prime minister. 1.8.1952 Ásgeir Ásgeirsson elected president. 1952 fishing disputes with UK: “Cod Wars”, this also contributes to that 30.8.1952 Iceland suspends its TATO membership. US bases continue to operate on Greenland as before.
In Turkey 14.5.1950 first free multiparty election are held, victory of the Democratic Party, Adnan Menderes becomes prime minister, Celal Bayar becomes president. Pro-Islam policy, economic growth after encouraging business, strongly pro-British policy. Turkey helps with Operation Poseidon, Kingdom of Greece becomes increasingly reliant on Turkey, while relations with mainland Greece collapse. After 1951 rise of anti-Greek sentiment in Turkish society, Red Scare and suspicion towards Greeks. Investment in military strengthening, taking US loans.

Ideas for a Panama Focus Tree - Millennium Dawn

1. Recovering from the Wounds of Dictatorship: -5% Stability, -5% Construction Speed, -10 Nationalist Ideology Acceptance.
   
2. Remembering the 1989 U.S. Invasion: -5% Stability, -10% Military Industry Construction Speed.
   
3. Restoring the Defense Forces: +10% Recruitable Population, +0.02 Nationalist, -10% Stability.
   
4. Strengthening Ties with China: +25 Diplomatic Relations / Strengthening Ties with the United States: +25 Diplomatic Relations.
   
5. Guarantees of Independence: If Panama has more than 120 relations with the USA, the USA guarantees its independence due to strategic reasons and defense agreements.
   
6. Chinese Investment: If Panama aligns with China, China invests in Panama: 1 Office Sector, 1 Civ Industry.
   
7. Historical Relationship with France: Panama has a historical relationship bonus of +10 with France due to past friendships.
   
8. Seeking French Investment: Requesting French investment provides 2 Infrastructure in the capital and +5% French Influence.
   
9. Historical Friendship with Spain: +10 Relations with Spain due to historical friendship.
   
10. Balboa Currency Advantage: The official currency, Balboa, is pegged to the American dollar since 1906. Add an economic bonus.
    
11. Social Security Crisis: Starting from a certain year, a social security crisis impacts the nation: -5% Monthly Population and other negative effects.
    
12. Immigration Crisis: Annual events introduce a migration crisis option: Accept all immigrants (+100,000 population, negative stability), accept some immigrants (+50,000 population, negative stability), or close borders (+5 stability, -15 relations with Venezuela and Colombia).
    
13. Social Security Reforms: Option to invest in healthcare and stabilize the economy, removing the negative effects and adding +5% Monthly Population.
    
14. Settling the Coto War Score: Justify a war goal against Costa Rica to take a bordering province and core it, but with diplomatic consequences.
    
15. Panama Canal Expansion: Invest in the expansion of the Panama Canal, providing stability, income, and infrastructure bonuses.
    
16. Darien Gap Connection: Option to open the Darien Gap and connect the American continents, affecting stability and relations with various regions.
    
17. Darien Gap Closure: Option to keep the Darien Gap closed, impacting stability and diplomatic relations.
    
18. Panama City Metro Construction: Build a metro system in Panama City for stability and supply hub benefits.
    
19. Canadian Mining Investment: Choose to accept a Canadian mining company's investment, with resource bonuses, stability effects, and diplomatic relations.
    
20. Rejecting Canadian Mining: Reject the Canadian mining proposal for stability and diplomatic consequences.
    
21. Venezuela Debt Crisis: Address Venezuela's debt to Panama, leading to relations changes and potential hostile actions.
    
22. Darien Jungle Resources: Option to exploit resources in the Darien Jungle, affecting stability and relations with indigenous communities.
    
23. Chiriqui Agricultural Support: Support national farmers in Chiriqui for population and stability benefits.
    
24. Chiriqui Independence: Make Chiriqui an independent province (Republica Federada de Chiriquí).
    
25. Tourism Development: Develop tourism for income and sector growth, with a cost and potential benefits.
    
26. Hub of the Americas: Develop the "Hub of the Americas" concept with air bases and stability improvements.
    
27. "Dubai of the Americas": Develop Panama as the "Dubai of the Americas" for stability, construction, and population benefits.
    
28. Maritime Industry Boost: Boost dockyard output and construction speed due to Panama's maritime significance.
    
29. Iranian Ship Incident (2023): React to Iranian ships approaching the Panama Canal, affecting diplomatic relations and stability.
    
30. Banking Sector Development: Develop the banking sector for office sectors and tax revenue benefits, with a cost.
    

This is just a concept, please let me know any recommendations, and this is just if any Dev wants to make it ( I don’t know how to mod). Thanks

Hi, my name is Zephyr, and I want you to understand why I'm writing this. Why did I even decide to do research and take the time to put this together? I do this not to aggrandize myself nor to become a self-proclaimed prophet. That surely knows the end and is here to warn all. This country and the atrocities she's committed are abhorrent. But I am still proud to be an American. I'm pleased to be an American because of the people who live in this country. Regardless of what the media tries to tell you, I firmly believe people want the best. I think modern politics and the media are purposely dividing us. But I wish to change that by informing as many people as possible. Hopefully, one day in my time or yours, that may happen. In this paper, we will talk about American involvement in Guatemala.
America and Why we are not the"best" by Zephyr
Hi, I'm Zephyr, a guitar player who makes a living from music—from busking (street performing) gigs, studio work, etc. But one of my hobbies is studying and reading. Currently, I'm reading the first great English dictionary by Dr. Johnson. But recently, I've submerged myself in literary theory and am learning the Greek language, which surprises most of my friends. They knew I loved history, but never enough to study the language and pick up on it. However, those are simply hobbies I spend most of my time doing. In actuality, I have no credibility to write this at all. I have no degree (currently enrolled at Deree College of Athens), no certificate (one in communications, but that doesn't pertain to this), and my family doesn't have the creds that could back me up writing this, too. So, what gives me the nerve to write this at all? One thing I do is read all the time, more than most people, even some with degrees, actually, according to the Washington Post article. If you read 5 books in a year, you are already in the top 33 percent in America. If you've read 50 books in a year, you're in the top 99 percent. Before you leave and say I'm being cocky, I just spend most of my time reading and chasing conspiracies. I have over 30 journals in which I've written about many topics, especially the American Government. All I do is research, and I do not trust how we operate in today's society if you ask anyone what happened last year, last month, or last week. They won't know what to say. They will likely take a long pause, and the brain might be scrambled for a minute. It's called information overload. The American media and government work hand in hand to overwhelm the people. Most of the time, it's useless garbage. Unless it's some dumb trend or flashy dance, many will not recall it. Many people swipe away in fifteen seconds or less. But it goes with the question: why have we become comfortable? Why are we just surviving?
USA USA USA
Why are we doing just enough to survive as the "greatest country" on earth? Were the greatest on earth, we should be flying cars or teleporting from place to place? As the best country on earth, we can do such things. As the greatest country on earth, we must be the best at education, health, economy, agriculture, and infrastructure. Our Children must lead the world with new ideas and usher in groundbreaking inventions before they can even vote. Our healthcare should be the best in the world; not a person should die before 80 years old, and mothers giving birth are well taken care of. So much so that not one mother should die giving birth. No way a disease that's been around for over a century should still claim the lives of millions, and no one has come up with a cure. Being the greatest country on earth, crime should be nonexistent, everyone should love and get along, and everyone should obey the law. Also, as the greatest country on earth, our military should be everywhere in every country to be "the peacekeeper," spreading democracy and freedom. So that wars will not start over myths that could kill millions of people. Not overthrowing nations because their ideas go against American interests, not cutting food lines and starving other countries unless they do what we want. They are not secretly funding other armies or starting protests and riots that lead to regime changes and are spreading fear to all countries unless they fall in line. We don't do that as the best country on earth, right?
"Third World Countries"
The 20th-century anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy first used this term in an article published in a French magazine in 1952. Now, you hear it everywhere in reference to a poor country. Let's unpack a series of events that happened in a "third-world country." The beautiful country of Guatemala, proud people who overthrew their oppressors after centuries of oppression and a series of wars and conflicts, finally Guatemala became fully independent in 1841. Now, this country indeed has had its problems, but which country doesn't? I will not lie or be perfidious to get you to agree with my point. If anything, I want you to challenge me and call me out for whatever mistake you think I made. But in your findings you will find no error except the SUFFERING……. that America has caused. Now, to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Guatemala.
Palieraki, E. (2023). The Origins of the 'Third World': Alfred Sauvy and the Birth of a Key Global Post-War Concept. Global Intellectual History, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2023.2166558

Banana Republic
In 1904, O. Henry, an American writer, coined the term "Banana Republic". This means countries that are controlled by a private enterprise that primarily benefits the ruling class. You could say he was speaking metaphorically, but everyone knows he is talking about Guatemala and other countries like it that were being exploited for their natural resources. During the Manuel Estrada Cabrera regime, UFCO (United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Bananas) stepped into the political and economic arena. UFCO quickly took control over vast amounts of land in Guatemala and gave much to the U.S. by Guatemalan President Cabrera, including giving the UFCO tax exemptions, railways, and land grants along the Atlantic coast. His reasoning seemed to be fair and only to help the infrastructure. But this was just not true. He was an evil tyrant who only thought of himself and his masters in the U.S. supporting him. When the workers went on strike against UFCO in 1904, he sent an armed force to open fire on the sleeping quarters of the workers—killing many and injuring more. Over the next 14 years, more revolts and protests continued to happen, with many assassination attempts on Manuel Estrada Cabrera. All failed to remove him until the Tragic Week in April 1920. When revolutionaries of the Union Party gathered together in front of the National Assembly, President Estrada could no longer hold out after a week of fighting. Finally, seeing no other choice, he surrendered to the Unionists and was thrown in Jail, dying four years later. But this was nothing compared to the Banana Massacre of 1928, which killed 2000 people because they refused to work under the poor conditions of UFCO. Guess what the U.S. response was? Communist uprising. Despicable.
https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/09/conversation_banana_republic.php
Hitler of South America

In 1931, Jorge Ubico came to power as a dictator general. The Hitler of South America was a massive supporter of fascism and nazism. Now, you can say he helped the economy by cutting salaries and increasing coffee production during the great depression, but he also killed thousands. He employed spies everywhere to make sure they followed his command. You will read about his projects: building roads and seaports or eliminating wholesale corruption. Indeed he did, but eliminating wholesale corruption under an authoritarian dictatorship who controls 100% of the country is FREAKING POINTLESS. When can you and your family be executed for not following orders? (In other words, the pot calling the kettle black) That's the problem with researching online. It's widely known about the evil and atrocities Jorge Ubcio committed. However, according to specific sources, they still try to be evasive, saying, "he did sustain the economy during the great depression," which is only half the truth. The economy has suffered for decades. Because Jorge Ubico's increased coffee production did not help in the grand scheme, people suffered like always.
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/291/
* I would like to mention something of an extreme importance.
When doing research, you must have multiple sources of information. It's to tell what's credible and what's not. Can a dictator do good things? Yes, a dictator can do good things. Like a good man can do evil things. However, in this case, when I searched for information about Guatemala's economy under Jorge Ubico on Google, I was met with partial truth. The average phone user spends most of Its time on social media and has a poor attention span like I used to have. They will see this and turn away, thus completing their research. I have argued with people who only look at the highlighted sentence of the passage. They did not even read the entire paragraph, and they did not read the article. Because of modern technology, we have become more lazy than ever. Instant gratification has ruined the appreciation of anything if not quick, easy and straightforward. If you can't get it right now, many people swipe away. With little resistance, most people will quit. Even those who aren't Gen-Z became so accustomed to this modern world. But there's a way to help that many don't like. Reading can elevate your mind, give you patience, and help you process information faster and even better at maintaining relationships. I hope this truly encourages you. Please click the link to the article below to learn more about the benefits of reading. *

https://www.piedmont.org/living-real-change/health-benefits-of-reading
Forgive me for the rant. I will discuss this in more depth in my next paper. Let's continue, shall we?

Jorge Ubico gave 42% of Guatemalan land to UFCO. Plus, with more tax exemptions (not like they had enough during the last regime), seventy-seven percent of Guatemalan exports went to the USA. UFCO controls the banana production in Guatemala, along with the telephone, telegraph lines, and railways.
After 13 years of killing, we forced labor and pillaged native lands. Jorge Ubico was overthrown during the October Revolution. Now, we're ending, but I hope you understand what I'm saying. The U.S. backed and supported every dictator and company that suppressed the people of Guatemala. What do Guatemalans do to deserve this? Have they not suffered enough? Have they not been through agony and pain? Spain leaves, and we will come in right after. One dictator is overthrown; we (the U.S.) replace it with another. This leads to what America fears the most: socialism/communism. We made the beautiful people of Guatemala hate each other by spreading propaganda and lies, which caused further strife.
Years of oppression from white colonists telling them you're lower than us, you're not more intelligent than us, not as advanced as us. Mainly because "you're darker than us." I do not pull what they call "race cards" ever. But even a racist would agree. Most Americans don't know about what happened in Guatemala or countries like it because we're idiots. No wonder why the world hates America. Don't listen to those Americans you will run into in certain places saying: America has saved more people than any other country else, and capitalism frees people from poverty. Has this happened? Yes........... IN AMERICA. But we kill millions everywhere else and force many countries to embrace communism or authoritarian-style governments. Then, we label them as savages. But communism is not the biggest threat to America, nor has it ever been. America's greed is the biggest threat to America. This is just one of the many examples of American Imperialism.

Delivering Freedom (Gifts from Heaven)
Delivering freedom is some dumb term somebody on Fox News said in the early 2000s during the Iraq war and stuck with American culture ever since. After Jorge Ubico was overthrown In 1944, the first democratically elected President of Guatemala, Juan José Arévalo, took office. A great man, professor of philosophy and political party leader that swept through Guatemala. He allowed free speech for the press, established social security, and established health and education programs for the people. After a few years as president, he chose not to run in the 1950 election. After the votes were cast, the presidency went to Jacopo Árbenz. Jacopo quickly got to work and continued the reforms of his predecessor. In 1952, he drafted a land reform bill titled 900 decree, which redistributed lands back to the people. By the beginning of 1954, 500,000 individuals had received their lands back, which had been stolen by UFCO. Unfortunately, this was the last straw for UFCO.
(Shortly after the October Revolution of 1944, the U.S. began propaganda about the newly elected president Juan José Arévalo. He claimed the Soviets were working with Jacopo and that he must be stopped. This is not true, but with the help of propaganda campaigns by Edward Bernays, many Americans believed and supported a potential intervention.)



The 1954 Coup D'etat

In 1954, the Guatemalan Coup D'etat, AKA PBSUCCESS, led by Col.Castillo Armas (he was made the new president), started. It ended with the deposing of Jacobo ÁrbenZ, killing hundreds in a 9-day-long campaign. 480 CIA soldiers with U.S. air support invaded Guatemala. It was already evil enough invading, killing and bombing innocent people (some only armed with a knife), but the worst thing was the U.S. denied involvement.
After reading all this, you ask why this matters. What does this have to do with today? In 1984, UFCO merged with ELI M. and became Chiquita Bananas after facing financial hardships. Though this may be true, they chose that name to sound more like "SoUTh AmErCIAN" and wanted to get rid of the name that ties them to the atrocities they committed, especially what they did in the 1982 massacre of 70,000 natives that destroyed 600 villages in Guatemala. Once again, we want to keep the workers of UFCO in check. Just for some bananas………..
Chiquita Bananas = Colonialism.

We must stop supporting companies like this NOW!

Once again don’t feel overwhelmed about anything that you read here. This is only for you to be aware. This is for the betterment of society. This is the beginning of the revolution.
To each individual, the world will take on a different connotation of meaning, and the important thing lies in the desire to search for an answer. -T.S Eliot
References

Prince Wilhelm Between Two Continents (Book about his time in Guatemala during Tragic Week)

https://www.collecteurs.com/interview/the-banana-massacre-and-monopolies
https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/09/conversation_banana_republic.php
Harvard International Review
https://hir.harvard.edu/the-dark-side-of-bananas-imperialism-non-state-actors-and-powe
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2562&context=thesesdissertations
https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/guatemala/violence-and-genocide-guatemala
Other readings
https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/the-guatemala-genocide-case/

Imagine, if you will, an America that was home to just three types of organizations: government bodies that make or administer laws; business firms that make and take profits; and families and other civil society associations that shape human characters.
Then somebody comes along with an intriguing proposal. In addition to these, let’s create a “nonprofit sector” consisting of organizations that enjoy one or more of four types of tax exemptions, subsidies, or supports: tax-free property owned by the organizations; tax-deductible donations to the organizations; taxpayer-funded grants, contracts, or fees to the organizations; and taxpayer-funded payments to individuals for purchasing goods or services from the organizations.
Intriguing indeed. But, you ask, why do we need any such “nonprofit sector?” What criteria should be used to determine which existing or new organizations receive some, all, or none of those four tax privileges? Who is supposed to benefit from their existence, and by what measures? And, last but not least, how might we mitigate the moral hazard when some of these organizations inevitably use their tax privileges for private gains or to evade public accountability, or behave in ways that are both deceptive and self-dealing?
First, the good news. America has a real and robust nonprofit sector, or, as I shall interchangeably call it, tax-privileged sector. The nation’s more than twelve million tax-privileged organizations mobilize more than sixty million volunteers each year. The National Council of Nonprofits is the tax-privileged sector’s leading research, training, and advocacy arm. It has documented that about 92 percent of all nonprofits are small, community-based, and serve local needs, while fewer than 3 percent lobby for government grants or contracts.
For example, America is home to hundreds of thousands of churches, synagogues, mosques, and other sacred places that serve civic purposes ranging from preschool programs to eldercare services. They benefit needy and neglected children, youth, and families of every faith and of no faith. Their tax-exempt properties are typically neither large nor lavish. Few receive any direct government funding. Their donors are mostly low- to middle-income people who do not itemize on their tax returns. So, when they donate a dollar they donate a whole dollar.
But even most large, national nonprofits that work from suites rather than the streets presumptively merit their tax privileges. That includes the nearly 300,000 IRS-registered nonprofits that do their health care, human services, and other do-gooding on budgets of $500,000 a year or more, roughly 20,000 of which boast annual budgets of $10 million or more.
Now, however, the more challenging news. At its very top, the tax-privileged sector is dominated by the ten nonprofit health systems that in 2021 each collected $14.5 billion or more in annual revenues, and by a dozen nonprofit universities that are among the most well-endowed universities in America. Is enough being done to ensure that these tax-privileged titans’ board members, CEOs, presidents, and other leaders are using their respective tax privileges in the public interest while refraining from individual or institutional self-dealing?
Today in Congress, a diverse and growing chorus says “no.” For example, one year ago, Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Victoria Spartz proposed the Stop Anticompetitive Healthcare Act. The bill would give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to investigate and ban future mergers in the nonprofit health systems industry that now encompasses almost 60 percent of all the hospitals in America. That industry is led by giants like Kaiser Permanente, which in 2021 encompassed 39 hospitals plus 734 medical offices and had $93.4 billion in revenues.
Likewise, in December, Senator J.D. Vance, joined by five other Republican members, proposed the College Admissions Accountability Act. The bill would establish a new inspector general’s office and subject nonprofit universities with endowments that total $10 billion or more to a 35 percent federal excise tax (up from 14 percent) on endowment net investment income. Harvard sits atop that heap with a more than $50 billion endowment and more than $500 million a year in gifts from alumni and others.
Neither bill has passed or is likely to pass, but many more such bills are in play or on the way. These days any issue can become fodder for hyperpartisanship and ideological combat. That seems to be happening of late in relation to some congressional inquiries regarding elite private universities’ responses to antisemitism, including (full disclosure) my own, the University of Pennsylvania. But there is a better, bipartisan way for Congress to assess how rich nonprofit hospitals and universities use their respective tax privileges, and to decide what, if any, reforms are needed.

Do No Harm

Nonprofit hospitals are exempt from most federal and state taxes. They also can receive both tax-deductible contributions from individuals and grants or contracts from government funders. Under some conditions, they can also issue tax-exempt bonds. Those tax privileges are predicated on the expectation that they will distribute any profits to charitable care and financial relief for their patients and communities. Do they?
There is evidence to suggest that more than a few do not. In a 2023 article in Health Affairs, Rice University economists Derek Jenkins and Vivian Ho noted, “Nonprofit hospitals, which currently comprise approximately 58 percent of U.S. hospitals, have been repeatedly criticized by scholars and policymakers for failing to live up to a poorly articulated standard of ‘charity care’ and benevolence,” and for failing to justify their tens of billions of dollars a year in federal, state, and local tax breaks.
Jenkins and Ho compared changes in nonprofit hospitals’ profits with changes in their charity care—conventionally defined as the value of free and discounted care given to economically disadvantaged patients—and cash reserves. They conducted an in-depth analysis of National Academy for State Health Policy data for the period 2012 through 2019 and found “substantial growth in nonprofit hospital operating profits and cash reserves in this period but no corresponding increase in charity care.” And they noted that 86 percent of nonprofit hospitals do “not provide more charity care than the value of their tax exemption.”
Likewise, a 2022 report by the Economic Research Institute found that nonprofit hospital CEOs were paid, on average, $600,000 a year, while the ten highest-paid nonprofit health systems executives each made $7 million a year or more. The CEO of Kaiser Permanente was paid nearly $18 million in 2018.
In a New York Times op-ed from last October, Amol Navathe, a practicing physician and co-director of Penn’s Healthcare Transformation Institute, suggested that nonprofit hospitals care more about dollars than patients. Why? Because the government has yet to define and enforce clear metrics for measuring “community benefits,” and because “regulators like the IRS” do not strip “the tax-advantaged status of egregious actors.” This could, he concluded, “be fixed through legislation by Congress.”
Amen; but, I would amend that conclusion to say that it can be fixed only through federal legislation. At least in my view, the aforementioned Jayapal-Spartz bill had numerous worthwhile provisions, but the place to start with the largest and richest nonprofit hospitals and healthcare systems or “mega meds” might be a federal mandate regarding so-called charity care.
In a 2021 Health Affairs article, Johns Hopkins University’s Ge Bai and other health care researchers found that nonprofit hospitals spent about 39 percent less on charity care than for-profit hospitals did. But make no mistake, for-profit hospitals are no angels of mercy. In a 2023 Health Services Research article, Emory University’s David Howard and Penn’s Guy David reported that for-profit hospitals over-admit patients, including straight from emergency rooms, to increase revenues.

Cui Bono, Professor?

In 2023, a Gallup survey found that only 17 percent of Americans had “a great deal of confidence” in higher education—down from 28 percent in 2015—while 22 percent expressed “very little” confidence in higher education, up from 9 percent in 2015. Reflecting on these and related survey findings, a feature from last October in The Chronicle of Higher Education ran beneath the title, “The Public Is Giving Up on Higher Ed.”
Indeed. Many people perceive higher education as a fish that has been rotting from its elite private university heads on down. Certain facts feed that negative perception. For instance, the richest schools just keep on getting richer. Based on data reported by OpentheBooks.com, Harvard and nine other universities with endowments that in 2022 totaled $237 billion (up $65 billion over 2018) had scored $33 billion in federal grants and contracts between 2018 and 2022.
In 2022, real median annual household income for American families was $74,580, while the average cost in tuition plus other fees to attend an Ivy League university for a year was $83,046. The Ivies and their well-endowed peers offer students billions of dollars a year in financial aid, but they also receive billions of dollars a year from students who take out loans. For instance, according to a 2015 analysis by Brookings Institution’ Adam Looney and others, in 2014, debt carried by students and alumni totaled $760 million for Yale, $1.2 billion for Harvard, and $2.1 billion for Penn.
Federal law permits tax-privileged universities to reap royalties and licensing revenues on taxpayer-funded research that results in commercial products (for example, new drugs) and grants them broad discretion in deciding how to reinvest the profits. The sums involved can be quite large. They are also free to expand their tax-free campus property footprints without needing to document how, for example, bigger and better digs for their faculty members, administrators, or students benefit (or at least do not harm) people living in adjacent neighorhoods, the city’s property tax coffers, or the public at large.
Still, most people, I’d wager, would vote for tax privileges going to the richest nonprofit universities’ programs in medicine, nursing, engineering, computer sciences, and the natural sciences. Even tax privileges for poets and political scientists might survive a popular vote. But, then again, what’s the case for tax privileges going to their state-of-the-art fitness centers, fancy faculty dining facilities, and business schools inhabiting luxurious campus-based edifices in multiple cities while functioning like pre-service training centers or head-hunting hubs for wealthy Wall Street financial firms? There might well be a good case for such members-only amenities, but it needs to be made.
It would be hard to dispute that what elite nonprofit universities spend on local, national, and international programs that directly benefit people who are not otherwise affiliated with or touched by the university is a pittance—maybe 1 percent of their total annual budgets. But there is also no disputing that they generate significant direct and indirect economic and societal “halo effects” through employment, capital spending, purchasing goods and services, supplementing municipal services (public safety and others), ancillary spending by students, patients, and visitors, and more. For example, one study suggested that Penn and its health system together pumped more than $14 billion into the university’s local and state-wide economy in fiscal year 2015.

Send in the GNATs

Senator Elizabeth Warren has joined with Senator Vance in drafting federal laws intended to bring big banks and other huge financial institutions to heel in the public interest. Maybe the strange-bedfellow senatorial duo might have a second act on mega-nonprofits. Specifically, how about something like a Giant Nonprofit Accountability and Transparency (GNAT) Act?
The GNAT Act might direct the IRS, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office to collaborate as a GNAT Interagency Task Force. The act might also direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education to give the task force their complete cooperation.
The task force’s very first task would be data gathering and data analyses dedicated to fashioning a method for reckoning the total value of the tax privileges (exempt property, deductible donations, grants and contracts, payments to individuals) that a rich nonprofit receives relative to the total value of the direct and indirect benefits (societal, economic, technological, and other) to non-members, wider communities, and the public at large that it returns. And the mission behind the method would be to learn and assess how the top nonprofit health systems and universities utilize their tax privileges. For instance, as indicated by Table 19-1 of the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget of the United States, charitable tax deductions for education and health nonprofits account for scores of billions of dollars each year. Do some of the largest nonprofits have demonstrably better returns on the public’s investment in them than others? Might some deserve an “A” while others merit an unsatisfactory or even failing grade?
There is, of course, nothing being suggested here that would prevent, preempt, or pause narrow and nasty congressional inquiries. But maybe, just maybe, discussing and debating such an act might serve at once to discipline, deepen, and widen the inquiries in accordance with what James Madison, writing in The Federalist No. 10, termed the “public good” and defined as “the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” One is at least free to hope.
John J. DiIulio, Jr., fderic Fox Leadership Professor at University of Pennsylvania, has taught at several Ivy League universities and co-edited two Brookings Institution books on health care reform.

This is their most updated platform as of yet. And it is not looking good. Don't we deserve better?

IMMIGRATION

Substantially lower the total number of immigrants and refugees Canada accept every year, from 500,000 planned by the Liberal government in 2025, to between 100,000 and 150,000 in normal circumstances, or even lower in crisis situations, depending on economic and other circumstances.

Canada accepts far more than that when accounting for Temporary Residents. Yet not a single word about that.

Reform the immigration point system and the related programs to accept a larger proportion of economic immigrants with the right skills.

More specifics? Over 60% of all PRs are arriving through economic streams as is. Canada and Québec now both have skills-specific selection draws like STEM, healthcare, trades, etc.

Substantially lower the number of immigrants accepted under the family reunification program, including abolishing the program for parents and grand-parents.

Because why? Canadians don't have the right to bring their families in? Not even Europe does that. PGP is also a lottery as is with total amounts staying relatively stable ever since.

Substantially lower the number of temporary foreign workers and make sure that they fulfil temporary positions and do not compete unfairly with Canadian workers.

Lower by how much? What about those coming through provincial programs? Working Holiday, SAWP? To hire a TFW an employer must already prove there're no Canadians who can do a given job through a positive LMIA assessment. What are you suggesting to change folks?

Substantially lower the number of visas for foreign students.

As is being done already? Cool. How are you going to close the funding gap for post-secondly?

Change the law to make birth tourism illegal.

So, abolishing the right of soil and replacing it with the right of blood? Does it mean you'll finally do something about the two-generation cut off where infants born to naturalized Canadians overseas can become stateless?

Ensure that every candidate for immigration undergoes a face-to-face interview and answers a series of specific questions to assess the extent to which they align with Canadian values and societal norms (see Canadian Identity policy).

As we've been doing in Québec for years? Look how that worked out.

Increase resources for CSIS, the RCMP, and Canadian Immigration and Citizenship to do interviews and thorough background checks on all classes of immigrants.

Those are often being outsourced to FBI and CIA as is.

Accept fewer refugees and give priority to refugees belonging to persecuted groups who have nowhere to go in neighbouring countries. For example: Christians, Yazidis, and members of other minority religions in majority Muslim countries; members of the Ahmadi community, and other Muslims in these countries who are persecuted because they reject political Islam and adhere to Western values; and members of sexual minorities.

There's a bunch of people like that. Many of them can only be considered refugees if they managed to come to Canada and seek asylum inside the country. Not through the UN designation. IRCC has already partnered with LGBT+ NGOs to resettle those from less welcoming countries in Canada. Cutting total refugee intake is kinda hard when prioritizing millions of those who're being persecuted because of their religion or sexuality and gender.

Rely on private sponsorships instead of having the government pay for all the costs of resettling refugees in Canada.

Government-sponsored refugees must repay government assistance after arriving to Canada. With interest. What is the thinking here?

Take Canada out of the UN’s Global Compact for Migration.

But not UN Refugee Conventions? The US is not a member of the compact, it's not like they don't have an immigration program. Sounds like senseless populism to me.

HOUSING

Substantially reduce immigration quotas, from about 500k planned by the Liberal government for 2025, down to 100k-150k per year (see Immigration policy). This will help reduce demand for housing and cool down these markets, especially in the large cities where most immigrants settle.

Cutting the total intake yet increasing the number of those settling outside Canada's gateway cities? Québec has been doing it for years with very little success. Same for Atlantic Canada - it just inflates hosing markets outside Toronto and Vancouver.

Modify the Bank of Canada’s inflation target, from 2% to 0%. This will cool down inflation in all sectors, including housing.

BoC does not target housing prices and only partially targets rents. Unless we're talking about freezing rents and mortgage costs legally this point is not enforceable.

Respect local and provincial governments’ responsibility for housing policies. They must be accountable to their citizens and not be subject to federal pressure to “densify” neighbourhoods of single-family homes in order to accommodate mass immigration policies.

So no axing of local gatekeepers? Let Canadian cities sprawl and local bureaucracy grow? Even in the US they're abandoning exclusive SFH zoning since it can't sustain itself: people use city services for work yet pay property taxes in suburbia. Which is still not enough to maintain the infrastructure needed.

Privatize or dismantle the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a mammoth government agency that fuels the housing crisis instead of helping to cool it down. All it has ever done is encourage Canadians to buy houses they can’t afford, and accumulate massive amounts of debt that the federal government, and ultimately Canadian taxpayers, will be responsible for.

Mortgage lending is subject to the regulations issued by OSFI, not CMHC. Nor do they insure risky mortgages with low down payments. Yet CHMC does provide insurance to less risky mortgages and supports new housing construction. Why?

Work with provinces to curb speculation and money laundering by foreign non-resident buyers in Canada’s land and housing markets.

Just like Ottawa has been working with the Provinces on healthcare and housing? This is a catch-all phrase that has not substantive meaning to it.

ECONOMY

Eliminate all corporate subsidies and other inefficient government interventions (bailouts of failing companies, regional development grants, conditional loans and loan guarantees with an implicit subsidy, tax credits, etc.) that unfairly support some companies or business sectors. This will generate savings of tens of billions of dollars every year.

Are we talking about abolishing the Small Business Deduction and the Capital Cost Allowance? Cool, who is Canada supposed to encourage investment then? Also, have of those subsidies are run by the Provinces.

Gradually reduce over the course of one mandate the corporate income tax rate from its current 15% down to 10%. When completed, this measure will make about $16 billion available to businesses, allowing them to increase salaries or invest in productivity improvements.*

There's no evidence this is the case. Canada has been cutting nominal corporate tax rates since the 1980s yet corporate investment to GDP has been falling relative to other countries ever since. According to the Tax Foundation allowing companies to obtain a refundable tax credit for fixed investment leads to higher growth and revenues than cutting nominal tax rates. Whereas tax cuts tend to result in shorter-term spikes in investments with massive looses of budget revenues and par consequence higher deficits.

Over the course of one mandate, gradually abolish the personal capital gains tax by decreasing the inclusion rate from the current 50% down to 0%.

This would mean either doubling personal income taxes or cutting federal spending accordingly. There's already a system of deferrals and tax shields in place for registered accounts and primary residencies, so who is supposed to benefit from abolishing the tax outright?

End the Trudeau government’s policy of mass immigration as a solution to manpower shortages (see policy on immigration), and focus instead on encouraging businesses to invest and improve their productivity.

No? Because countries that spend the most on skills and capital investment are the Swiss and the Nordics. All of them heavily subsidize workforce training (5% of GDP vs Canada's 0,2%) and effectively make apprenticeships a cornerstone of their education. With students splitting their time between a workplace training and school. Most unemployed people are also enrolled into training programs with massive wage subsidies for employers to train them.
Those are also countries with strong unions and Chambers of Commerce that co-design and co-deliver training for employees. So far the only province doing something like that is Québec.
On top of that countries that don't do immigration like Japan has had their wages stangnate. Whereas the Nordics and the Swiss that allow anyone from across the EU come and settle with a semi-automatic PR have had higher wages than most other developed countries. This is not about immigration but how one governs their labour market.

Megapost: A list of statements, press releases, and other sources reporting and expressing concern and criticism about Israel's war in Gaza and related aspects of the war. (Part 2)

Notes: This is a work that is currently in progress; please check back for updates. Titles have been edited to provide details.
Part 1 is here: https://www.reddit.com/Social_Democracy/comments/1clx1uc/megapost_a_list_of_statements_press_releases_and/
Part 3 is here: https://www.reddit.com/Social_Democracy/comments/1coups2/megapost_a_list_of_statements_press_releases_and/
Part 4 is here: https://www.reddit.com/Social_Democracy/comments/1crvrde/megapost_a_list_of_statements_press_releases_and/
British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and the Social Workers Union (SWU) statement on situation in Israel and Palestine/Gaza (November 15, 2023): https://swu-union.org.uk/2023/11/basw-swu-statement-on-situation-in-israel-and-palestine-gaza/
More than 50 UK Labour Party lawmakers defy leader to back Gaza ceasefire (November 15, 2023): https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/more-than-50-uk-labour-lawmakers-defy-leader-back-gaza-ceasefire-2023-11-15/
RESOLUTION: THE VERMONT PROGRESSIVE PARTY CALLS FOR A CEASEFIRE IN GAZA (November 15, 2023): https://www.progressiveparty.org/progressive-news-and-updates/resolution-the-vermont-progressive-party-calls-for-a-ceasefire-in-gaza
Trade Union for the Public and Welfare Sectors (JHL) condemns all strikes targeting civilians: Trade Union JHL appeals to the Government of Finland: Demand a ceasefire in the Gaza war. JHL will donate EUR 5,000 to Doctors Without Borders. (November 15, 2023): https://www.jhl.fi/en/news/trade-union-jhl-condemns-all-strikes-targeting-civilians/
Humanist Society Scotland calls for ceasefire in Gaza (November 16, 2023): https://www.humanism.scot/2023/11/16/humanist-society-scotland-calls-for-ceasefire-in-gaza/
Irish Congress of Trade Unions calls for humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza (November 16, 2023): https://www.ictu.ie/news/congress-calls-humanitarian-ceasefire-gaza
Longtime Israeli policy foes are leading US protests against Israel’s action in Gaza. Who are they? (November 16, 2023): https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-college-protests-c94bb0cd246bcc692de86b76b9b2a8cf
Cori Bush: Calls for Ceasefire Grow in Month Following Introduction of Ceasefire Now Resolution ["A growing coalition of over 100 organizations has also endorsed H.Res 786, the Ceasefire Now Resolution. Endorsing organizations include: 350.org, About Face: Veterans Against the War, ActionAid USA, Action Center on Race & the Economy, Adalah Justice Project, American Center for Justice, American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine (AFRP), American Muslims for Palestine, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, Amnesty International, Arab American Civil Rights League (ACRL), Arab American Institute, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Avaaz, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Jewish Nonviolence, Center for Popular Democracy Action, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Churches for Middle East Peace, Common Defense, Communities United for Status & Protection (CUSP), Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Defense for Children International - Palestine, Demand Progress Action, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), Democratic Socialists of America, Detroit Action, Dream Defenders, Emgage Action, Freedom Forward, Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), Gen Z For Change, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Highlander Research & Education, Hindus for Human Rights, The House of the Lord Churches, IfNotNow, Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding (IMEU), International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), IRAP Osgoode Hall Law School, IRAP Rutgers, IRAP UVA Law, IRAP University of Virginia School of Law Chapter, IRAP The George Washington Law School Chapter, Institute for Policy Studies New Internationalism Project, International Refugee Assistance Project at Berkeley Law, Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis, The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, Just Foreign Policy, Justice Is Global, Leadership Conference of Women Religious, MADRE, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Michigan United, Migrant Roots Media, Movement for Black Lives, Movement Law Lab, Movement Generation, MoveOn, MPower Change Action Fund, Muslim Advocates, Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), Muslims for Progress, National Campaign for Human Dignity, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Iranian American Council Action, National Lawyers Guild, Detroit & Michigan Chapter, National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC), NYC-DSA, Pax Christi USA, Peace Action, Peace Action Montgomery, Peace, Justice Sustainability NOW!, Progressive Democrats of America, Progressive Jews of St. Louis (ProJoSTL), Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), Project48, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Refugee Council USA, ReThinking Foreign Policy, Rising Majority, RootsAction.org, Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas Institute Justice Team, Southeast Asian Freedom Network, Sunrise Movement, Transgender Law Center, UndocuBlack Network, Union of Palestinian American Women, Unitarian Universalist Association, United Church of Christ, United We Dream Network, Until Freedom, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), US Council for Muslim Organizations, Vietlead, Women Cross DMZ, Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, Working Families Party, Zero Hour."] (November 17, 2023): https://bush.house.gov/media/press-releases/calls-for-ceasefire-grow-in-month-following-introduction-of-ceasefire-now-resolution
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and Anglican Church of Canada: Church leaders urge Prime Minister Trudeau to call for a ceasefire and open corridor for humanitarian aid (November 17, 2023): https://www.anglicanlutheran.ca/statements/church-leaders-urge-prime-minister-trudeau-to-call-for-a-ceasefire-and-open-corridor-for-humanitarian-aid/
Jewish American Calls for a Ceasefire Highlight Divisions in the Community (November 17, 2023): https://time.com/6335528/jewish-american-ceasefire-progressive-jews/
Jews for Ceasefire holds demonstration outside Schwarzman, demands Yale divest from weapons manufacturing (November 17, 2023): https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/11/17/jews-for-ceasefire-holds-demonstration-outside-schwarzman-demands-yale-divest-from-weapons-manufacturing/
Josh Ruebner, adjunct professor in Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University: Israel is threatening a second Nakba — but it’s already happening (November 17, 2023): https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4313276-israel-is-threatening-a-second-nakba-but-its-already-happening/
I Am the Grandchild of Holocaust Survivors, and I Am Calling for Ceasefire Now (November 18, 2023): https://truthout.org/articles/i-am-the-grandchild-of-holocaust-survivors-and-i-am-calling-for-ceasefire-now/
Diseases spread in Gaza amid water and sewage crisis, cholera feared (November 19, 2023): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/19/diseases-spread-in-gaza-amid-water-and-sewage-crisis-cholera-feared
Association of Black Anthropologists Statement on Solidarity with Palestine (November 20, 2023): https://aba.americananthro.org/aba-statement-on-solidarity-with-palestine/
With the world’s eyes on Gaza, attacks are on the rise in the West Bank, which faces its own war (November 20, 2023): https://apnews.com/article/palestinians-israel-west-bank-war-gaza-hamas-settlers-army-raid-militants-c1386ab6a633971cc18b2497169210d3
Derek Duba: Army veterans like me know that 'war is hell.' Let's push for a ceasefire in Gaza (November 21, 2023): https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2023/11/21/gaza-ceasefire-only-way-forward-israel-palestine-veterans/71660423007/
Middle East Studies Association Board Letter to Biden Administration on Ceasefire in Gaza (November 21, 2023): https://mesana.org/advocacy/letters-from-the-board/2023/11/21/mesa-board-letter-to-biden-administration-on-ceasefire-in-gaza
This Union Is Famous for Opposing South African Apartheid. Now It’s Standing With Gaza. In 1984, ILWU Local 10 refused to unload goods shipped from South Africa. Today, it’s demanding a cease-fire. (November 21, 2023): https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/ilwu-unions-ceasefire-israel-gaza/
‘Not in my name’: Jews in UK take a stand against Israel’s Gaza assault (November 24, 2023): https://www.aa.com.ten/europe/-not-in-my-name-jews-in-uk-take-a-stand-against-israel-s-gaza-assault/3063568
British Sociological Association: Sociologists’ Letter on Gaza (November 27, 2023): https://es.britsoc.co.uk/sociologists-letter-on-gaza/
Opinion by Ermina Mustafic-Harambasic: As the daughter of Bosnian genocide survivors, I stand with Palestine: There are many parallels between the denial of the Srebrenica genocide and the denial of the Palestinian genocide (November 27, 2023): https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2023/11/27/opinion-daughter-bosnian-genocide/
Changing course, Senator Peter Welch calls for ‘indefinite’ cease-fire in Gaza (November 28, 2023): https://vtdigger.org/2023/11/28/changing-course-peter-welch-calls-for-indefinite-ceasefire-in-gaza/
National Council of Churches in the Philippines: An Urgent Statement on the Situation in Gaza, Pray for Peace and Justice in Palestine and Israel (November 29, 2023): https://nccphilippines.org/2023/11/29/an-urgent-statement-on-the-situation-in-gaza-pray-for-peace-and-justice-in-palestine-and-israel/
Rae Abileah: Never Again means Never Again for Anyone, including Gazans (November 9, 2023): https://www.hmbreview.com/opinion/matters_of_opinion/never-again-means-never-again-for-anyone-including-gazans/article_a8447418-8ecb-11ee-8df5-4bb3d40e681a.html
Public Services International: International Trade Unions Urgently call for Ceasefire in Gaza amidst Ongoing Human Rights Violations (November 30, 2023): https://publicservices.international/resources/news/international-trade-unions-urgently-call-for-ceasefire-in-gaza-amidst-ongoing-human-rights-violations?id=14308⟨%3Den
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez says he doubts Israel is respecting international law (November 30, 2023): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/spain-pm-pedro-sanchez-israel-hamas-terror-attacks-gaza
Open Letter from Professionals at Jewish Organizations to President Biden and Congress [850+ signatures] (December 2023): https://docs.google.com/document1/d/e/2PACX-1vQ1EFVMTDvaxvWXldzbZvr60BE5o3UQeU_WfiXX3ivcUVU1SAYU13wZsBhDVbmtbXmKejMNajY1xSQ1/pub
Bubba Fish, Culver County Democratic Club: A Jewish Case for an End to the War (December 1, 2023): https://www.c-c-d-c.com/a-jewish-case-for-an-end-to-the-wa
United Auto Workers Statement on Israel and Palestine (December 1, 2023): https://uaw.org/uaw-statement-israel-palestine/
Jane Fonda: "I join with millions of others in calling for —in the words of the UN Secretary General —‘a true humanitarian ceasefire’ in Gaza." (December 2, 2023): https://www.instagram.com/janefonda/p/C0XIXkUJhI1/
Daanish Faruqi: Israel is using the same tactics in Gaza that al-Assad employed in Syria (December 3, 2023): https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/3/israel-is-using-the-same-tactics-in-gaza-that-al-assad-employed-in-syria
Catholic Workers Speak Out for Ceasefire, Peace (December 4, 2023): https://catholicworker.org/cws-speak-out-for-ceasefire-peace/
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières: The US must call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza: An open letter to President Biden from MSF-USA executive director Avril Benoît (December 4, 2023): https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/us-must-call-immediate-ceasefire-gaza
Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future Sweden activists Alde Nilsson, Jamie Mater, and Raquel Frescia: We won’t stop speaking out about Gaza’s suffering – there is no climate justice without human rights: Young climate activists haven’t ‘been radicalised’ – solidarity with marginalised people has always been at the heart of our message (December 5, 2023): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/05/gaza-climate-justice-human-rights-greta-thunberg
National Union of Journalists condemns unprecedented death toll of journalists in Gaza (December 5, 2023): https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-condemns-unprecedented-death-toll-of-journalists-in-gaza.html
‘These are very hard times’: Pastor of Gaza Catholic church gives update on Christians’ plight (December 6, 2023): https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/256192/these-are-very-hard-times-pastor-of-gaza-catholic-church-gives-update-on-christian-s-plight
Catholic progressives in Brazil call Gaza war a ‘true genocide’ (December 7, 2023): https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2023/12/catholic-progressives-in-brazil-call-gaza-war-a-true-genocide
Corporate Europe Observatory: Gaza: Ceasefire now (December 7, 2023): https://corporateeurope.org/en/2023/12/gaza-ceasefire-now
Faculty and staff members in American University’s School of International Service call for ceasefire in Gaza: “We now call on our governments and campuses to bravely Wage Peace instead.” (December 8, 2023): https://www.theeagleonline.com/article/2023/12/sis-staff-and-faculty-call-for-ceasefire-in-gaza & https://sites.google.com/student.american.edu/american-university/home
International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group statement: Canada Must Oppose Genocide in Gaza and Defend Free Expression at Home (December 8, 2023): https://iclmg.ca/canada-must-oppose-genocide/
Senator Bernie Sanders: AIPAC is a right-wing organization that supports extremist Republican election-denier candidates. Now, they want to spend $100 million to defeat Progressives. Whether AIPAC likes it or not, the U.S. must not give a blank check to Netanyahu’s horrific war policies. (December 10, 2023): https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1733932123357085759
Ahead of White House Hanukkah celebration, a wave of faith-led cease-fire demonstrations (December 11, 2023): https://religionnews.com/2023/12/11/jewish-christian-activists-head-up-another-wave-of-faith-led-cease-fire-demonstrations/
Edward P. Djerejian Center for the Middle East, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy: Israel’s Mass Displacement of Gazans Fits Strategy of Using Migration as a Tool of War (December 11, 2023): https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/israels-mass-displacement-gazans-fits-strategy-using-migration-tool-war
Letter: What 'pro-life' justification can Hoeven, Cramer and Armstrong offer for opposing a ceasefire? "Thousands of dead children in a few weeks seems like an obvious pro-life issue," writes Mercedes Saylor. (December 11, 2023): https://www.inforum.com/opinion/letters/letter-what-pro-life-justification-can-hoeven-cramer-and-armstrong-offer-for-opposing-a-ceasefire
International Federation for Human Rights (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme): The unfolding genocide against the Palestinians must stop immediately (December 12, 2023): https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/the-unfolding-genocide-against-the-palestinians-must-stop-immediately
Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation: Statement on Gaza/Israeli conflict (December 13, 2023): https://www.uuwf.org/blog/13290680
Exclusive: Nearly half of the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise ‘dumb bombs,’ US intelligence assessment finds (December 14, 2023): https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html
Los Angeles Times Editorial Board: U.S. should join the world’s nations in demanding a Gaza cease-fire (December 14, 2024): https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-14/gaza-ceasefire-israel-united-states-civilian-deaths
1199SEIU, nation’s largest healthcare union, calls for Gaza ceasefire (December 15, 2023): https://www.1199seiu.org/media-cente1199seiu-nations-largest-healthcare-union-calls-gaza-ceasefire
A Long History of Antifascism Is Driving the Jewish Demand for Gaza Cease-Fire (December 15, 2023): https://inthesetimes.com/article/chanukah-jewish-antifascism-israel-palestine-jvp-ifnotnow-gaza-ceasefire
Senator Bernie Sanders Introduces Resolution to Investigate Israel’s Indiscriminate Bombing Campaign in Gaza (December 15, 2023): https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-resolution-to-investigate-israels-indiscriminate-bombing-campaign-in-gaza/
Union for Reform Judaism Alumni and Current Members for Ceasefire (December 16, 2023): https://urjceasefirenow.wordpress.com/2023/12/16/urj-alumni-and-current-members-for-ceasefire/
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ President Pleads for Peace as Innocent People are Killed in the Land of Jesus' Birth (December 16, 2023): https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/us-bishops-president-pleads-peace-innocent-people-are-killed-land-jesus-birth
Auschwitz Museum Decries Israeli Mayor's 'Sick' Call to 'Empty' Gaza: "We do hope that Israeli authorities will react to such shameful abuse, as terrorism can never be a response to terrorism." (December 18, 2023): https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-genocidal-statements
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice: Stop the Bombs! Ceasefire Now! (December 18, 2023): https://www.jfrej.org/events/2023/12/stop-the-bombs-ceasefire-now
Nontombi Naomi Tutu and Nompumelelo (Mungi) Ngomane, respectively the daughter and granddaughter of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu: We have failed in the fight for justice — we need ceasefire in Gaza now (December 18, 2023): https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4365307-we-have-failed-in-the-fight-for-justice-we-need-ceasefire-in-gaza-now/
Representative Betty McCollum: AIPAC Dangerously Trafficking in Hate Speech Amid Israel-Gaza War (December 18, 2023): https://mccollum.house.gov/media/press-releases/mccollum-aipac-dangerously-trafficking-hate-speech-amid-israel-gaza-war
Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, United Auto Workers Local 2325: Resolution Calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza, an End to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, and Support for Workers’ Political Speech (December 19, 2023): https://www.alaa.org/media-releases/resolution-calling-for-a-ceasefire-in-gaza-an-end-to-the-israeli-occupation-of-palestine-and-support-for-workers-political-speech
Joint Statement by Current and Former Australian Elected Representatives on the Situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories [300+ signatures] (December 19, 2023): https://apan.org.au/joint-statement/ & https://docs.google.com/document/d/182u4eJnJUZ_Uruf1GlchLnF8XotnpnAX/
Liberal International bureau supports humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza (December 19, 2023): https://liberal-international.org/news-articles/li-bureau-supports-humanitarian-ceasefire-in-gaza/
Fox News host Mark Levin's hateful defenses of civilian casualties, calls for war crimes, and xenophobic attacks on Palestinians (December 20, 2023): https://www.mediamatters.org/mark-levin/mark-levins-hateful-defenses-civilian-casualties-calls-war-crimes-and-xenophobic-attacks
I’m a Palestinian Christian in Gaza. I want peace—for my homeland and my family. (December 20, 2023): https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/12/20/christian-gaza-wartime-church-community-246754
Israel Defense Forces and Yom Kippur War veteran from Woodstock urges ceasefire in Gaza [Israeli veteran Mark Hammel on Israel's war in Gaza: “It's an unmitigated horror story ... It's literally on the cusp of genocide."] (December 21, 2023): https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2023/12/21/israel-defense-forces-veteran-from-woodstock-urges-ceasefire-in-gaza
Public Citizen Statement on the Violence in Gaza and Israel (December 21, 2023): https://www.citizen.org/news/statement-on-the-violence-in-gaza-and-israel/
Franciscans International: Amid rising death toll, Security Council must call for a ceasefire in Gaza (December 22, 2023): https://franciscansinternational.org/blog/amid-rising-death-toll-security-council-must-call-for-a-ceasefire-in-gaza/
Holy Land: Caritas Internationalis joins today’s Global Day of Action calling for a Ceasefire Now (December 22, 2023): https://www.caritas.org/2023/12/holy-land-caritas-internationalis-joins-todays-global-day-of-action-calling-for-a-ceasefire-now/ & https://www.change.org/p/sign-and-share-this-urgent-petition-calling-for-a-ceasefirenow-in-gaza-and-israel
Marianne Williamson on her US presidential campaign, the economy and Gaza: ‘The death of a Palestinian child is no less horrifying than the death of an Israeli child,’ author tells Al Jazeera. (December 22, 2023): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/22/marianne-williamson-on-her-us-presidential-campaign-the-economy-and-gaza
The Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association condemns the indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Gaza and reiterates the call for an immediate ceasefire (December 22, 2023): https://www.ibanet.org/The-Human-Rights-Institute-of-the-IBA-condemns-the-indiscriminate-and-disproportionate-attacks-on-Gaza-and-reiterates-the-call-for-an-immediate-ceasefire
Who Is Funding Canary Mission? Inside the Doxxing Operation Targeting Anti-Zionist Students and Professors (December 22, 2023): https://www.thenation.com/article/world/canary-mission-israel-covert-operations/
Rebecca Alpert, Reconstructionist Rabbi and Professor Emerita of Religion at Temple University: “Ceasefire Now!” Means Peace for All and Justice for Palestinians (December 28, 2023): https://truthout.org/articles/ceasefire-now-means-peace-for-all-and-justice-for-palestinians/
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov appears to liken Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: FM Labrov praises Netanyahu since ‘he never dared’ to criticize Russia, says Israel’s campaign against Hamas ‘sounds like denazification,’ echoing Moscow’s justification for its war (December 28, 2023): https://www.timesofisrael.com/lavrov-appears-to-liken-israels-war-on-hamas-in-gaza-to-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/
Palestine: Intersectional Solidarity: Statements from Afghans, Iranians, Hongkongers, Tibetans, Kurds, Syrians, Taiwanese, Uyghurs, and Ukrainians (December 28, 2023): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-palestine-intersectional-solidarity
Physicians for Social Responsibility: Urgent Call for Ceasefire and Humanitarian Aid in Gaza (December 28, 2023): https://psr.org/urgent-call-for-ceasefire-and-humanitarian-aid-in-gaza/
World Council of Churches calls for immediate end to brutal violence in Gaza (December 30, 2023): https://www.oikoumene.org/news/wcc-calls-for-immediate-end-to-brutal-violence-in-gaza
Database of Israeli Incitement to Genocide (January-February 2023): https://law4palestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Database-of-Israeli-Incitement-to-Genocide-including-after-ICJ-order-27th-February-2024-.pdf
Muslims for Progressive Values: Never Again? (January 4, 2024): https://www.mpvusa.org/blog/never-again
Social workers send letters from Gaza (January 4, 2024): https://reimaginingsocialwork.nz/2024/01/04/social-workers-send-letters-from-gaza/
Anti-Defamation League staff decry ‘dishonest’ campaign against Israel critics (January 5, 2024): https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/05/adl-pro-israel-advocacy-zionism-antisemitism
"We Support South Africa's Genocide Convention Case Against Israel": Over 1,000 popular movements, political parties, unions, and other organizations call on states around the world to support South Africa's genocide case against Israel. [Including: Amazon Labor Union, USA; American Friends Service Committee - AFSC, USA; AFSCME Local 526, USA; Antipoverty Centre, Australia; Australian Unemployed Workers' Union; Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ), USA; Boycott from Within (Israeli citizens for BDS); Canadian Friends Service Committee, Canada; CGT - Confederación General del Trabajo, Spain; Church Women United in New York State, USA; Civil Engagement Group of Seanad Éireann (Senate of Ireland), Ireland; Coalition Against Fascism in India (International); CODEPINK, USA; Columbia Law Students for Palestine (CLSP), USA; Community Peacemaker Teams; Confederación Intersindical, Spain; CUNY for Palestine, USA; Defence for Children International; Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN); Democratic Socialists of America, USA; Egyptian Social Democratic Party, Egypt; Faculty for Justice in Palestine at Syracuse University, USA; GEO-UAW Local 2322, USA; GSOC-UAW Local 2110, USA; Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, London; Harvard Jews for Palestine, USA; Hindus for Human Rights, USA; International Peace Bureau (IPB), International; Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA; Jewish Voice for Labour (UK); La France Insoumise, France; Labour For Palestine - Canada; Labour International, UK; Landless Workers Movement MST, Brazil; Medical Association for Prevention of War, Australia; Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), USA; Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA), USA; National Lawyers Guild, USA; National Single Payer, USA; Nonviolence International; NYC City Workers for Palestine, USA; NYU Alumni for Palestine, USA; Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace, USA; Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, PGFTU, Palestine; Pax Christi Canada; Pax Christi USA; Physicians for Social Responsibility Kansas City (PSR-KC), USA; Physicians for Social Responsibility/Sacramento, USA; Progressive Democrats of America, Oregon Chapter, USA; Progressive International; Sarah Lawrence Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Scholars Against the War on Palestine, Canada/International; Science for the People - Canada; Science for the People, USA; Secours Catholique, France; Servicio Internacional Cristiano de Solidaridad con America Latina (SICSAL Mexico); Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Enseñanza de Cantabria (STEC), Spain; Sínodo Luterano Salvadoreño, El Salvador; Transnational Institute; Trinity Lutheran Church, Brooklyn NY, USA; Tunisian General Labor Union UGTT; UMass Amherst Faculty for Justice in Palestine, USA; UMKC Students for Justice in Palestine, USA; Union Juive Française pour la Paix (UJFP - French Jewish Peace Union); Unionists for Palestine, Australia; United Church of Christ Palestine Israel Network, USA; United Jewish People's Order, Canada; United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR); US Committee to End Political Repression in Egypt] (January 8, 2024): https://progressive.international/wire/2024-01-08-we-support-south-africas-genocide-convention-case-against-israel/en
Etan Nechin: The far right infiltration of Israel’s media is blinding the public to the truth about Gaza (January 9, 2024): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/09/israel-media-gaza-benjamin-netanyahu-settler-movement
Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times via U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett: America Must Face Up to Israel’s Extremism (January 9, 2024): https://doggett.house.gov/media/in-the-news/new-york-times-america-must-face-israels-extremism
Q&A: Former Biden appointee Tariq Habash says US policy is ‘dehumanising’ Palestinians (January 9, 2024): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/9/qa-former-biden-appointee-says-us-policy-is-dehumanising-palestinians
State and Local Elected Officials Open Letter to President Biden Calling for a Ceasefire [350+ signatures] (January 9, 2024): https://www.jvpaction.org/state-and-local-elected-officials-open-letter-to-president-biden-calling-for-a-ceasefire/
I led strike cells against ISIS — Israel’s strike campaign in Gaza is unacceptable (January 10, 2024): https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4397982-i-led-strike-cells-against-isis-israels-strike-campaign-in-gaza-is-unacceptable/
Naomi Klein: We have a tool to stop Israel’s war crimes: BDS (January 10, 2024): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/only-outside-pressure-can-stop-israels-war-crimes
Revealed: Congress backers of Gaza war received most from pro-Israel donors: Guardian analysis finds top recipients of pro-Israel contributions in last elections were centrist Democrats who defeated progressives in primaries (January 10, 2024): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/congress-member-pro-israel-donations-military-support
Why I Resigned: Meet Tariq Habash, First Biden Appointee to Quit over U.S.-Backed Israeli War on Gaza (January 10, 2024): https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/10/tariq_habash
Robert C. Koehler: The Cry of the Wounded and the Dead: End the War! End the War! (January 13, 2024): https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/when-will-the-war-in-gaza-end
On MLK Day, Representative Ayanna Pressley and Interfaith Coalition Call for Ceasefire in Gaza ["Rep. Pressley joined over 90 leaders from the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and other faith traditions in signing the statement, including Rev. Nikira Hernandez, Brighton Allston Congregational Church, Rev. Darrell R. Hamilton II, The First Baptist Church in, Jamaica Plain, Imam Ahmad Barry, Rev. Aisha Ansano. Rev. Otto Concannon, First Parish in Malden, Rev. Ashlee Wiest-Laird, First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, Mosque for Praising Allah, Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, Community Justice Exchange, Chaplain Ylisse C. Bess, Rev. Jo Murphy, Rev. Shea Thompson, Rev. Rob Mark, Rev. Erica Rose Long, Rabbi Rebecca Zimmerman Hornstein, Boston Workers Circle, Imam Taalib Mahdee, Masjid Al Qur’an, Rev. Art J. Gordon, St. John Missionary Baptist Church, Rev. Fred Small, Rev. Heather Concannon, Rev. Miniard Culpepper, Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, Rabbi Leora Abelson, Rabbi Leah Nussbaum, Rev. Willie Bodrick, II J.D., M.Div., Twelfth Baptist Church, The Very Rev. Amy McCreath, Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston (Episcopal), Rev. James Harrison Jr., Southern Baptist Church, Rev. Bernadette Hickman-Maynard, Rev. Erica F Richmond, Arlington, MA, Rev. Arrington Chambliss, St Mary’s Dorchester, Rev. Dr. Michelle A. Walsh, Tuckerman Creative Ministries for Justice & Healing, Rev. Dr. Clyde Grubbs, Tuckerman Creative Ministries, Muslims for Justice, Rev. Isaac P. Martinez, The Allston Abbey, Rev. Ashley Popperson, Rev. Lindsay Popperson, Old North Church, Marblehead, Rev. Myozen Joan Amaral, Zen Center North Shore, Rev. Dr. Andre K. Bennett, Marc Fredette, UU Minister, Rev. Edmund Robinson, First Parish in Hingham/Old Ship, Chaplain Christie Towers, Rev. Kenneth Read-Brown, Rev. Martha Schick, Cassandra Montenegro, Esq., First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, Rev. Dr. William J. Gardiner, Rev. Wendy Page, Rev. Elizabeth Bukey Saunter, Rev. Mel Pace, Rabbi Becky Silverstein, Rev. Katie Omberg, Rev. Rali M Weaver, First Church and Parish Dedham, Rev. Anne M. Rousseau, Rev. Brett R. Johnson, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Wakefield, MA, Rev. James Leavitt, Rev. Daryn Bunce Stylianopoulos, Mohanad Mossalam, Khateeb, Malden Islamic Center, Daniela Harrigan, Movement Chaplain, MC Miller, Candidate for Ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, University Lutheran Church, Cambridge, MA, Allison N Brown, Pastoral Candidate for Ordination , The Episcopal Church, India Wood, Seminarian, Boston University Theological School, Rhea Brown-Bright, Director of Faith Formation, First Parish Dorchester, Boston University School of Theology, Linden Jenkins, St Cecilia Parish Social & Racial Justice Ministry, Vincent Ware, Director of Public Affairs & Civic Engagement, MAS Boston (Muslim American Society), Becca Heisler, Rabbinical Student, Jayce Koester, Rabbinical Student, Hadar Ahuvia, Rabbinical Student, Sam Tygiel, Rabbinical Student, Alex Bailey Dillon, Rabbinical Student, Hannah Limov, Rabbinical Student, Chaim Spaulding, Rabbinical Student, Aaron Berc, Rabbinical Student, Rivka Nechemya Thrope, Rabbinical Student, Max Davis, Rabbinical Student, Sivan Piatigorsky, Rabbinical Student, Rayden Marcum, Rabbinical Student, Rumni Saha (MDiv, MEd), Ian Evans, Clergy in training, McKayla Hoffman, Ministerial Intern, Nichole Mossalam, Muslim Activist, Elizabeth Claggett-Borne, Friends (Quakers) for Racial Justice, Carole Rein, Quaker, North Shore Friends (Quakers), Polly Attwood, Quaker, Friends Meeting Cambridge, Isabella Bates, Quaker, North Shore Quaker Meeting, Dr. Esther Ngotho, Zen Center North Shore, Nora Williams, Zen Center North Shore, Michael Carey, Peace and Social Justice Committee, Friends Meeting Cambridge, Don Gianniny, Peace and Social Justice Committee, Friends Meeting Cambridge, Holly Aloha Jaynes, Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead, Ehab Hilali, Community Organizer, Independent Drivers Guild, Nicole Moore, UU Church of Marblehead & Zen Center North Shore, Sarah Manasrah, Community Organizer, Salimah Adawiya, Educator, Rabbi Victor Reinstein, Dr. Jamal Carlos Saeh, Palestinian Catholic, Friend Kristina Keefe-Perry, Three Rivers Worship Group, Rev. Carrie Ballenger, University Lutheran Church, Rev. Tricia Brennan, and Rev. Dr. Christopher Ney, United Church of Christ."] (January 15, 2024): https://pressley.house.gov/2024/01/15/on-mlk-day-pressley-and-interfaith-coalition-call-for-ceasefire-in-gaza-2/
Canadian Labour Congress Executive Committee reiterates its support for International Trade Union Confederation's call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (January 16, 2024): https://canadianlabour.ca/clc-executive-committee-reiterates-its-support-for-itucs-call-for-an-immediate-ceasefire-in-gaza/
Bosnia war, genocide survivors back ICJ Gaza genocide case against Israel (January 18, 2024): https://www.newarab.com/news/bosnia-war-genocide-survivors-back-icj-gaza-genocide-case / https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M5J0MK5LlKjlAZX4cPNNiEGMJZHLM8Qa/
Unions tell Starmer of members’ anger over Gaza ceasefire position (Members of Britain’s biggest unions used a regular meeting with Starmer this week to urge him to be more critical of Israel, following weeks of tension within the Labour party over the issue. [...] “Several people at the meeting were pretty clear with Starmer,” said one person with knowledge of what happened at the meeting. “They told him, ‘Your position on Gaza is alienating working people, you are out of step with the majority’.”] (January 18, 2024): https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/18/unions-keir-starmer-gaza-ceasefire
Anglican Bishop Christopher calls for ceasefire ‘to end appalling suffering’ in Gaza (January 19, 2024): https://southwark.anglican.org/news-events/news/latest-news/bishop-christopher-calls-for-ceasefire-to-end-appalling-suffering-in-gaza/
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: Israel kills dozens of academics, destroys every university in the Gaza Strip (January 20, 2024): https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6108/Israel-kills-dozens-of-academics,-destroys-every-university-in-the-Gaza-Strip
Gaza activist tells of beating and abuse in Israeli detention: Human rights worker Ayman Lubbad is among the Palestinian prisoners claiming abuse in Israeli custody, where six have died (January 21, 2024): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/21/gaza-activist-tells-of-beating-and-abuse-in-israeli-detention
Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) calls for ceasefire in Gaza (January 22, 2024): https://www.sak.fi/en/whats-new/news/sak-calls-ceasefire-gaza
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Mary Kay Henry's Statement on War in Gaza (January 22, 2024): https://www.seiu.org/2024/01/seius-mary-kay-henry-statement-on-war-in-gaza
‘I just want to run’: Mental health care yet another casualty of Gaza war (January 23, 2024): https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-01-23/i-just-want-to-run-mental-health-care-yet-another-casualty-of-gaza-war
Progressive Baptists Call for Gaza Ceasefire (January 23, 2024): https://wordandway.org/2024/01/23/progressive-baptists-call-for-gaza-ceasefire/
Israeli police repressing anti-war protests with ‘iron fist,’ say activists: Since October 7, Israel's police have systematically banned, restricted, and attacked protests against the army's assault on Gaza, instilling a sense of fear among Jewish and Palestinian citizens alike. (January 24, 2024): https://www.972mag.com/israel-police-repression-protests-gaza/
More than 250 humanitarian and human rights organisations call to stop arms transfers to Israel and Palestinian armed groups: An open call to all UN Member States to stop fueling the crisis in Gaza and avert further humanitarian catastrophe and loss of civilian life. [Including: ActionAid France; American Baptist Churches USA; American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Amnesty International; Anglican Church of Canada; Anglican Church of Mexico; Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development; BDS Berlin; Belgian Academics and Artists for Palestine; Cameroon Youths and Students Forum for Peace (CAMYOSFOP); Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD); Center for Jewish Nonviolence; Christian Aid; Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Christian Jewish Allies for a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine; Church and Peace – Ecumenical Peace Church Network in Europe; Colombian Campaign to Ban Landmines; Community of Christ; Danish Refugee Council; Doctors Against Genocide; Episcopal Peace Fellowship-Palestine Israel Network; Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada; Federation Handicap International – Humanity & Inclusion; Finnish-Arab Friendship Society; France Palestine Mental Health Network; International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH); Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions – UK; Japan International Volunteer Center; Jewish Network for Palestine; Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns; Mercy Corps; Muslim Delegates and Allies Coalition; Muslim Peace Fellowship; National Organization of Yemeni Reporters SADA; Norwegian Refugee Council; Oxfam; Palestinian Farmers Union; Pax Christi England and Wales; Pax Christi International; Pax Christi Italia; Pax Christi Scotland; Pax Christi USA; Presbyterian Church in Canada; Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; Salam For Yemen; Save the Children; Socialist Movement of Ghana; Syrian Network for Human Rights; United Church of Canada; United Church of Christ; United Methodist Church – General Board of Church and Society; War on Want; Women for Peace and Democracy Nepal; Young Christian Students Movement South Africa] (January 24, 2024): https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/01/more-than-250-humanitarian-and-human-rights-organisations-call-to-stop-arms-transfers-to-israel-palestinian-armed-groups/

15-minute read.

update: Border Commissions and expert groups from Armenia and Azerbaijan have installed 40 border markers on the state border in the Tavush-Gazakh section

source,

the former regime-organized rally continues to march from Tavush to Yerevan

Context in Saturday news. An MP from ARF/Kocharyan party and an opposition churchman Bagrat Galstanyan organized a march in an attempt to "gather 50,000" protesters in Yerevan.
The organizers say "Religious Armenia will defeat Real Armenia", in reference to PM Pashinyan. Archbishop Bagrat was a participant in Robert Kocharyan's 2022 rally during which he made a similar statement: "The church will defeat the street and dux". Street & dux = Pashinyan's 2018 revolution. On Sunday Bagrat said "at this time" their demand is not Pashinyan's ouster; they want to stop the border delimitation because they believe it's "illegal". A week earlier the ARF/Kocharyan faction unsuccessfully promoted a motion to essentially declare the use of 1991 Almaty borders illegal and to rely on the 1993 "de facto" borders instead.
Archbishop Bagrat said he has received the permission and blessing of the church leader Garegin B to hold this rally. "He is our father, our leader."
Along the way, the organizers encountered supporters who brought them water and food, and opponents who called them "idiots" and "sons of donkeys".
MIKA BADALYAN (pro-Kremlin blogger, ex-regime activist): I can't imagine the condition Pashinyan is in right now. He has to meet Putin on May 8, and just a day later Archbishop Bagrat will reach Yerevan, and he won't just arrive there, but will launch a battle that will be Nikol's final one. Get drunk, Nikol, get drunk. Be prepared, Armenians around the world! Each one of you must take part in this battle. //
In related news: Mika Badalyan is accused of assaulting a journalist Zhirayr Voskanyan from a pro-Western media outlet on Sunday. According to authorities, the victim refused to pursue charges on the spot after the incident. An investigation was launched nevertheless. In a video uploaded after the incident, the victim said he plans to visit a police station.
ARTUR SAKUNTS (Helsinki NGO, about the church's role): Let's say the political resource is so low and bankrupt that you have to involve the church to achieve your political goals, but why mythologize the role of the Apostolic Church in Armenian history so much? Have you at least read the works of Leo, or a more modern author and historian Hamlet Davtyan, or the works of monumentologist Samvel Karapetyan? Are you familiar with the positions of the church during the Kingdom of Cilicia? After all, any thought and idea should be based on facts, analysis, and conclusions. There can be no salvation built on myths, it will lead to another defeat.
REPORTER (to Robert Kocharyan, 2022 protests): Would you be open to the idea of being appointed as the President?
ROBERT KOCHARYAN (2022 protests): The best candidate right now would be a respected member of a church. There are such people. They are both respected and driven by national interests. That's my offer. And on that offer, yes, it can be negotiated. //
Armenia's H1 public TV ran a segment describing the attempts to sabotage the border delimitation process as being beneficial for Russia and Azerbaijan. "Some forces do not want to turn the line of contact into a stable state border." Russia has been critical of the Tavush delimitation process and called it a Western plan, and some Armenian analysts believe Russia is afraid of losing all influence in the region if Armenia and Azerbaijan establish stable and peaceful relations. There is also criticism towards the church for "not holding a similar march to the Lachin Corridor to demand Russian soldiers to open it" in 2023. The H1 report also shows several residents of border villages who do not oppose the delimitation process. "Their voices were intentionally drowned out."
video, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source, source,

Q&A with Parliament President Alen Simonyan

REPORTER: What is the likelihood of a peace agreement at this phase?
SIMONYAN: There has been an opportunity to sign a peace agreement since late 2023 but Azerbaijan hasn't displayed political will. The ongoing delimitation is a signal that a peace agreement is possible and it must be signed ASAP.
REPORTER: The Azerbaijani president says the peace agreement document is fully in line with Azerbaijan's interests.
SIMONYAN: The document is fully in line with international norms, which Armenia shares. There are some disagreements, hence the back-and-forth exchange of proposals. We must ensure that all formulations are very clear and both parties understand what the language says because the Nov. 9 agreement and its bargaining by certain countries [Russia] should not happen again.
REPORTER: Do you plan to respond to the letter sent by [Russian Senator Matvienko]?
SIMONYAN: I have not received a letter from Duma. My colleague Sarkis Khandanyan, the recipient, responded within 1-2 days of receiving it. Perhaps it wasn't convenient for [Russian MFA Spokesperson] Mrs. Zakharova to acknowledge it during their usual staged press conference.
REPORTER: But the letter was directed at you, about your speech [in Spain].
SIMONYAN: I stand behind my statements and I represent Armenian voters. If in certain countries [Russia] the government doesn't represent the people, it's their problem. In Armenia, the ruling and opposition parties represent the people.
REPORTER: Does PM Pashinyan plan to attend Putin's inauguration ceremony?
SIMONYAN: No.
REPORTER: What's your assessment of the march originating from Tavush? Is their demand just or unjust?
SIMONYAN: I don't know what their political demand is. They are against the delimitation of state borders.
REPORTER: [Opposition] political parties have joined this march. Do you see a political context here? Is a change of power likely?
SIMONYAN: Not likely until the 2026 elections. How many different people is the ex-regime going to use to attempt to replicate our 2018 success? Can they come up with something new? Who has welcomed the rally so far? In the end, they are going to present the Banani Mihran Poghosyan, Kocharyan, Serj, Vazgen Manukyan, and Vanetsyan Artur [figures who have endorsed the rally].
REPORTER: But anyone can use the technologies you used in 2018. It's not your personal property.
SIMONYAN: Who said it's our personal property? Let them use it. Let them use it. They keep failing because the real actors remain the same and they only change the face of the process. Today they are playing on the emotions of the population.
REPORTER: Are Kocharyan, Serj, and others behind Archbishop Bagrat?
SIMONYAN: Are you seriously asking this? What media outlet do you represent? Is it Azatutyun? I understand your question now. I wonder, the interests of which forces does Azatutyun represent? Sometimes I wonder that. Let's say you receive your funding from international organizations, from foreign structures, do you represent their interests?
REPORTER: Will Pashinyan leave if the opposition gathers many supporters in Yerevan?
SIMONYAN: Will the opposition lay down its parliamentary mandates if they fail to gather more people than they did last time? We are confident that the public supports our effort to delimit the state borders, wants to establish peace, doesn't want a war, doesn't want the return of ex-regime, doesn't want to live in a religious theocracy, and sees through the attempts by politicians to manipulate with the use of religion and emotions. The public is wise.
REPORTER: Do you see a foreign trace behind this rally?
SIMONYAN: I see bloggers financed from various centers [Russia], and statements praising this process by figures located mostly in a single country [Russia]. So of course I see a foreign trace. Do you really not understand what's happening?
REPORTER (Azatutyun, still upset about being called an agent): If it is maybe obvious to you that doesn't mean it is for the general public. You must clarify so the public can know.
SIMONYAN: Yes, and I know what the public knows and what it doesn't know because, unlike the ex-regime, I speak with the people. I know their complaints towards me and their support towards our policies.
REPORTER: Which country is meddling in this process?
SIMONYAN: Can you guess?
REPORTER: Will PM Pashinyan take part in the EAEU (economic bloc) session [on May 8]?
SIMONYAN: Armenia holds the presidency of EAEU and I believe it's the right thing to participate in it. [Pashinyan will take part in the EAEU meeting and will meet Putin as well.]
video, [other video,](source, source,

Armenia has stopped financing CSTO and has frozen its participation in CSTO activities, while simultaneously developing relations with NATO and EU: Putin's assistant Yuri Ushakov

source,

ruling party MP accuses Russia of deceiving Armenia's opposition parties and Nagorno-Karabakh leaders

MP VAHAGN ALEXANYAN: We have to revisit the events of 2023 because the organizers of "Operation Nagorno-Karabakh" are attempting the same operation from Tavush. Let me be clear: the organizers are not located in Armenia.
Pashinyan announced that the international community [West] will support if we lower the bar [not de jure independent republic] for Nagorno-Karabakh's status. This was welcomed by our international partners. There were also international partners who, with the efforts of Armenia, attempted to organize a Stepanakert-Baku dialogue on the European platform, including in Sophia. Everything was ready for the NK-AZ meeting to discuss the safety conditions that would allow 100,000+ Armenians to continue to live in NK.
But the "owners" [Kremlin] of Armenia's opposition parties prohibited NK representatives from flying to Sophia. Simultaneously, the organizers [Kremlin] worked with its puppets in Armenia -- politicians and opposition-owned media outlets -- to convince them that Russia plans to remain 30+ years in NK. They encouraged the opposition to go shout "Nikol traitor", "QP Turks", "you are land givers", this and that. The opposition followed their orders and did those.
"Let's save Nagorno-Karabakh," they said. Today, the parliament building of NK is sadly demolished because of their idiocy. The [pro-Russian] NK forces gathered in that building with maximalist speeches. We knew where it was all headed. We knew there was a circle in NK that believed that Russian peacekeepers would not only protect the remaining parts of NK but would allow them to recapture the lost territories, "if we could only remove Nikol in Armenia".
We warned them that they were being deceived with a false sense of security; we urged them to negotiate with Azerbaijan in Sophia. They refused. "Not a step back from full independence. Who are you? Azgadavs!"
So they removed the NK government [President Arayik was open to Sophia meeting]. You know the names of those who demanded Arayik's removal. Sadly, some of them are currently in Baku jail. But these people removed Arayik and installed a figure who was the most favorable figure for the presence of Russia in NK. Then you know what happened.
After Azerbaijan launched a massive attack on NK, several public figures and politicians began to reveal the things they were told at the Russian embassy in Armenia. A figure named Nairi Hokhikyan claims he was told in the Russian embassy that Russian peacekeepers planned to remain 30+ years in the region and that he believed them and "took their bait". It's fair to say he wasn't the only person in Armenia who took this embassy's baits. There were even forces in Armenia that actively distributed those baits.
When it became obvious that Russian peacekeepers wouldn't do anything, when they stood and watched the forced displacement of 120,000 Armenians, when they watched the killings of NK civilians, it became obvious to everyone, including those who took the bait, what exactly happened.
Armenia, in turn, said that since its allies do not plan to help, it is better for Armenia to establish peace with all of its neighbors and have stable delimited borders. This was a huge psychological shock for some, especially the aforementioned forces because the clarification of Armenia's borders and the adoption of an internationally legitimate stance would open an opportunity to have excellent relations with the US and EU. Armenia with legitimate borders and Western partners is more difficult to attack than Armenia without those; it's a lot more difficult under those conditions to present Armenia as a gray zone and swallow it.
And swallowing Armenia is what this is all about. None of this was about NK. Armenia was the end goal. Robert Kocharyan said he was open to the idea of Armenia joining the [Russia-Belarus] Union State, while Serj's party leaders [Sharmazanov] announced that it's necessary to give Azerbaijan a corridor through Syunik.
Today we have a rally coming from Tavush. On the left side of its leader, we have a politician representing a force that wants Armenia to join the [Russian] Union State, and on the right side, it's a representative of a force that wants to give a Zangezur corridor to Azerbaijan.
Forgive me for saying this, friends: this latest Russian march is also destined to fail. It will fail because the Armenian population won't follow politicians who do not recognize Armenia's 29,743 km^2. Foreign forces will fail. Armenia will remain independent. //
source,

Russia continues the withdrawal of soldiers from Nagorno-Karabakh

A column of vehicles left from Ivanyan airport to a railway station before heading to Russia, through Azerbaijan.
source,

foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet in Kazakhstan on May 10 to discuss the peace process

The agreement was reached last week after the visit of the Kazakh president to the region.
source,

U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan visited occupied Shushi after "two months of preparations"

He was earlier criticized by the Azerbaijani regime for not visiting the occupied parts of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Ambassador said he didn't visit Shushi in the past because he didn't want to take part in "someone's shows".
During this Shushi trip, the Ambassador met state officials and local teachers who were enrolled in the embassy's English classes. The Ambassador said the U.S. will continue to cooperate with Azerbaijan for as long as there are "partners in Azerbaijan who are willing to work with the U.S."
source, source,

the armed forces/MOD of Armenia and United States held their first annual talks

US Embassy in Yerevan: Last week, representatives from across the US European Command and the Armenian Ministry of Defense participated in the inaugural Annual Staff Talks to discuss bilateral defense priorities, develop areas for further cooperation, and outline military engagements for the coming years.
source,

Informed Citizens NGO chief about Armenia's economic ties with Russia and the cost of breaking free

IOANNESIAN: Russia's leverage: Gas, supply of uranium for NPP, disposal of nuclear waste generated by NPP, and Upper Lars cargo traffic. I don't think Russia will attempt to "punish" Armenia unless they achieve a major success in Ukraine, but it can't be ruled out. Let's analyze some possible scenarios.
(1) Gas. If Russia doubles the price for Armenia to $300, which is the realistic upper limit according to experts, your household bill would likely increase by 20%. The $300 is also the price of Iranian gas. If Russia raises it above $300, Armenia will have other more economic sources of energy. I doubt household bills would double because there are a host of steps the government and West could take to remedy or even partly subsidize the cost.
(2) Uranium for NPP. This is easier. Ukraine has replaced Russia with others. Kazakhstan is also a source of uranium. It's important to have decent AM-KZ relations. Our relations have always been toxic despite never having any direct problems with one another. At some point, Kazakhs realized having great relations with Azerbaijan doesn't mean they can't build relations with Armenia. Armenia displayed the same pragmatism. There is an opportunity to move forward.
(3) Export of products. This will be difficult because a significant share of goods MADE in Armenia are exported to Russia. These are real factories, real workers, real wages. The food production industry will face issues because let's be honest, their standards are generally very low. They wouldn't be able to export to Europe today. European countries may love you but they care about the health of their citizens more. We need to raise the food standards, first and foremost for us and our health. I'm aware that the Armenian government is taking steps for a long-term solution, and as a short-term solution they are exploring the possibility of increasing exports to the Middle East and other states to reduce reliance on Russia. The government will face pushback from unhappy businesses that will no longer be allowed to dump a bag of harmful chemicals on crops. The Middle East is a mixed bag. Some countries could have standards higher than the EU, while others don't care at all. Armenian manufacturers of "fake" and lowest-quality alcohol, the type of alcohol that's even unacceptable for Armenians, are exporting their goods to some Middle Eastern countries today.
source,

Armenia and EU discuss education reforms

Education Minister Joanna and EU Ambassador Maragos met on Monday to discuss the ongoing introduction of new state standards in public education, the upcoming bills, STEM and labs, refugee teacher assistance, and AM-EU dialogue.
source,

Armenia and Hungary sign agreement on economic cooperation, will continue to restore diplomatic relations after termination in 2012

FM Mirzoyan is in Hungary to discuss AM-HU and AM-EU relations, a week after media wrote that Hungary is blocking the EU's $10 million military aid to Armenia.
Armenia and Hungary restored diplomatic relations in 2022, and in 2023 they appointed non-resident ambassadors.
HUNGARIAN FM: It's great to see Armenia's flag in this building after so many years. Today we agreed to form a working group to develop economic relations. Last year our economic turnover reached 70%. Our pharmaceutical companies are more active in the Armenian market today. We have agreed to open embassies in the capitals of Hungary and Armenia; today we have consulates. Starting this July, WizzAir will hold direct flights between the capitals of Armenia and Hungary. Hungary will provide humanitarian assistance to families [presumably Nagorno-Karabakh refugees] who begin their lives in Armenia. Some 1,200 Armenian children and parents will receive an opportunity to enjoy their vacation here in Hungary. Armenian students will receive scholarships. We have also allocated funds to help the 4,200 Armenians residing in Hungary maintain their Armenian identity and culture. Ahead of Hungary's presidency of the EU, we were able to take steps to develop AM-EU relations. We plan to develop the AM-EU Partnership Agenda [aka CEPA+]. We also plan to launch a dialogue on visa liberalization between the two parties [unclear AM-HU or AM-EU]. My 2023 visit to Yerevan and your visit to Budapest marks a successful launch of our cooperation.
ARMENIAN FM: This is a result of a process we launched 1.5 years ago, a process to start a new phase of AM-HU relations based on historically warm ties and common values. I'm glad to see the result of this process today. Today we are talking about opening resident embassies. Today we signed agreements on political consultations between foreign ministries of two states, on economic cooperation, and on the formation of an intergovernmental commission. We recently saw a business conference where they discussed possible joint projects. Personal visits are important so it's great to hear about WizzAir's direct Yerevan-Budapest flights. Armenia wants to be part of international economic projects. The CoP project aims to lift the blockade on all transport and passenger connections in the South Caucasus and to streamline the West-East connection. Under the same context, we consider the supply of Armenian renewable energy to Europe [through the Black Sea]; we will soon hold discussions on their implementation. Armenia wants to take part in all of those. Peace is a prerequisite for economic development. We have launched a process to bring Armenia significantly closer to the EU, and vice versa. On the table, we have a package of proposals and here we hope to receive Hungary's support during your EU presidency so the plan will confidentially advance under your presidency as well.
REPORTER: What disagreements remain around the AM-AZ peace treaty?
MIRZOYAN: I hope the agreement reached by border commissions on April 19 will be reflected in the peace agreement as well. That would place us very close to a final resolution of the AM-AZ conflict. Another disagreement is around the unblocking of transportation links in the region. Armenia wants to unblock all routes with full respect to the sovereignty of states. I'd like to thank Hungary for its contribution to humanitarian issues. As you remember, several Armenian POWs were freed with the help of Hungary. These efforts continue.
source, source, video,

starting next week Yerevan subway will operate until midnight, instead of 11 pm

source,

Yerevan municipality will add 50 bus shelters, some of which will come with ticket purchasing terminals and bus arrival timetable

MAYOR AVINYAN: This year we plan to launch the new transit fare system and install 50 bus shelters, which will have arrival timetables. We'll receive 171 new 8.5-meter buses and 15 new trolleybuses. The new bus pricing system goes into effect after all of this is done.
source,

Yerevan municipality wants to review the contract with French water giant Veolia

MAYOR AVINYAN: The recent floods caused issues in transport hubs, tunnels, and streets. The city has a contract with Veolia Jur to service the surface, gutter, and rainwater networks. We receive many complaints that go unaddressed. The residents do not care about the details of the contract with Veolia, although I'm confident there are objective reasons behind these problems. This year we must come to a new agreement with the Government and Veolia because the municipality itself can't chase the sewers in each backyard. We need a company that will assume the responsibility for the entire network. We must understand what the cost of this service is. Last year the city was forced to build 14 kilometers of sewers but I don't even know if we had the right to do it because it's a state property, but it had to be done so we did it. We need to make changes to the Veolia contract.
source,

VIDEO: heavy hail lasted several minutes, turning the streets of Yerevan white and damaging trees and properties

source,

inflation YoY

January -0.4%
February -1.7%
March -1.2%
April -0.7%

... food prices are still lower compared to last year (April YoY stats)

Food and non-alcoholic beverages -4.5%
Non-food -0.5%
Services +3%
Alcohol and tobacco +7%
Clothing -1%
Utilities -0.1%
Household goods & appliances -1%
Healthcare -0.2%
Transportation +8%
Communications +0.3%
Recreation -0.2%
Education +5%
Restaurants & hotels +4%
source,

country of origin of tourists who visited Georgia in Q1 2024

(1) Turkey 255K
(2) Russia 215K
(3) Armenia 192K
source,

the most popular last names in each country: MAP

Grigoryan
source,

First, a note about context:
Universal healthcare is not the be-all, end-all solution to the issues facing the American medical establishment; corporate corruption has produced actively-harmful ideas within the medical community, as a whole, and various ideological groups have infiltrated the industry, especially Psychiatry, in order to leverage it as a mechanism for social change and control. In addition, many individuals enter the field for the wrong reasons, and the artificial limitation on the number of doctors both restricts medical access and results in even the poorest performing doctors being retained because they cannot be replaced.
That being said, 40% of all bankruptcies are primarily or entirely medical debt; 10% of the US population is currently under medical debt that they do not expect to be able to pay off; per capita, we pay far more for healthcare than any other country, 50% more than Germany, twice as much as France, and almost 3 times as much as the UK or Japan, all of whom manage to not only cover their entire populations, but also have better overall health and longer life expectancies.
72% of Americans are dissatisfied with our healthcare system, compared to 52% of the UK and 41% of Canadians; clearly, we are doing something wrong.
The answer is easy, and was recommended during the 2009 healthcare reform debate: Remove the words, "Over 65," from the Medicare Act. Dennis Kucinich was gerrymandered out of office with the connivance of his own party in retaliation. The original intent of Medicare was to gradually lower the age until it covered everyone, and Richard Nixon actually tried to do so in 1971, but was stopped by the Democrats. Many of us tried to force a vote on it in 2021, but again, the Democrats refused.
ARGUMENTS
-"Government programs are inefficient"
Surely, this argument is laughable in the face of 50% overhead in private health insurance (as opposed to 2% for Medicare) and the denials and run-arounds built into the private insurance industry. Medicare manages to cover the highest-demand patients (the elderly) for far less money.
-"We can't afford it"
Literally every other industrialized nation on Earth spends less money to cover all of their population and gets better results; clearly, it can be done.
Moreover, the subsidies to the private healthcare system coupled with the removal of cost control measures, most notably through the PPACA, have increased healthcare costs by 50% over the last 10 years, and not just for those with private insurance; the delays and complications introduced by insurance corporations have driven up prices even for patients under Medicare and the VA system, which was already tragically under-funded.
-"Universal healthcare would lead to delays"
The justification for this argument is that more people would be seeking healthcare, and so the limited number of doctors would result in delays.
Why is the number of doctors limited in the first place, and how long are people with no insurance waiting, now? Supply is supposed to increase to meet demand when it is higher, but somehow market economics only works on one side of the argument.
-"Doctors make less money under Medicare"
This is a disingenuous argument; healthcare PROVIDERS make less money under Medicare, because it is slow-pay and they cannot securitize the debt, but private insurance adds on so much overhead that it is driving private practitioners out of the industry, which was always the way that top doctors wound up rich.
Your average doctor working at a hospital or a corporate chain is making about the same as the mechanic at your local auto dealer.
-"It stifles innovation"
Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer, and a revolutionary treatment for diabetes. Russia recently announced a breakthrough in curing cancer, generally. Even within the US, most drugs and treatments are developed under government-funded programs.
-"Limited service and Death Panels!"
Private insurance is far, far worse about this than any government program; a faceless bureaucrat might not care if you live or die, but an insurance executive gets a bonus for denying you treatment.

The critical elements of Florida’s bold new statewide homelessness policy emerged from the written prescriptions of a Texas-based conservative think tank bent on thwarting the nation’s “homeless-industrial complex,” according to records obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.
Emails show the Cicero Institute offered Florida lawmakers a menu of reforms last summer, sending them to the staff of House Speaker Paul Renner in July. It then worked persistently to secure the passage of House Bill 1365, which banned public camping and sought to move unsheltered people from sidewalks to sanctioned, highly structured encampments.
So successful were the Institute’s efforts in the Sunshine State that when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill in March, Cicero’s co-founder, billionaire tech investor and GOP mega-donor Joe Lonsdale cheered it as setting an example for the rest of the country to follow.
“When we started working on homelessness, many people considered these ideas fringe. Activists have vociferously opposed us at every turn. It takes guts to stand up to the homeless-industrial complex,” Lonsdale wrote in a blog post. “This is the strongest set of homelessness reforms in the nation, and we were proud to work with Florida leaders to see them adopted.”
And Cicero has many ideas about how Florida – and other states – can go further.
Also included in the policy memo, which the Sentinel obtained among other documentation of Cicero’s efforts in a public records request, are reform proposals making it easier to involuntarily commit somebody to psychiatric treatment, banning local care organizations from pursuing so-called “Housing First” initiatives to address homelessness, and funneling money toward mental health and substance abuse treatment instead.
Advocacy groups and organizations on the ground fear these policies – and Florida’s new law – will make their work to treat and combat homelessness even more challenging. Since the law’s requirements for sanctioned encampments make those facilities difficult to fund, locate and operate, and shelters are full most every night, it’s likely to force law enforcement to arrest people who have nowhere else to go but the streets, they say.
“What I anticipate though is this becomes a checklist,” said Martha Are, the CEO of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, assessing the influence of Cicero’s policy menu.
Cicero’s approach is not unique. Across the country, interest groups are pushing state legislatures to write their ideas into law, and some of the most successful have been conservative organizations working with GOP-led legislatures like Florida’s. The Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, for example, has pushed labor law changes that critics say weaken protections for child workers, scoring a signal success last year in Arkansas.
Cicero has interests in other issues as well, but its main focus has been homelessness, a vexing issue that has increasingly preoccupied state and local governments in Florida and elsewhere.
In the Orlando area alone, homelessness has increased 75% over the past five years, which providers and advocates say is a reflection of the region’s soaring housing costs and shortage of affordable units.
In the same five-year timeframe, rents increased nearly $600 per month.
Currently, the nation’s predominant strategy to combat homelessness is called Housing First, an approach to end a person’s homelessness as quickly as possible by placing a roof over their heads, often in a hotel or an available apartment. Then, the person receives other services such as mental health or substance abuse treatment, job training and other needs, in hopes they can sustain their new lifestyle.
“Housing First is treatment,” said Eric Gray, the CEO of the Christian Service Center, which operates Orlando’s day services center for the homeless said in an email. “Science shows us that trying to treat an individual for ANY medical condition is near impossible if they aren’t also in stable housing. Housing IS healthcare.”
Andrew Sullivan, a University of Central Florida researcher specializing in homelessness, said his research and that of others routinely reveals the merits of the strategy of providing housing, and that laws like Florida’s public camping ban don’t reduce homelessness.
Cicero disagrees, attributing homelessness to untreated mental illnesses. It’s trying to move states away from Housing First principles to its slate of alternatives, said Devon Kurtz, who wrote the memo to Renner and oversees the think tank’s homelessness policy.
“What Cicero cares about most is getting states engaged on this issue,” Kurtz said. “For the past three decades, it’s been ceded to the federal government through continuums of care.”
Along with its success on the camping ban, Cicero scored a little-noticed victory over Housing First in Florida by securing budget language that requires recipients of state challenge grants typically used to house people to instead “prioritize mental health and substance abuse treatment” as well as short-term shelters, sanctioned camping sites and safe parking sites.
That grant program accounted for $20 million last year, with the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida receiving about $900,000.
Cicero initially sought to outright ban use of the grants for any Housing First or permanent housing program, but state leaders held off on going that far.
Are said that rising homelessness numbers aren’t a reflection on the Housing First strategy, but instead a commentary on a tight housing market.
“To blame Housing First is kind of like blaming the emergency room for how many people came in with COVID during the peak of the COVID crisis,” Are said. “The emergency room was implementing the best interventions they could, but they could not control how many people were getting infected with the virus.”
So far, Cicero has helped get bills passed similar to Florida’s camping ban in Republican-led states including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Kentucky. The group says that the steps Florida is taking on homelessness policy beyond its ban makes its approach the nation’s “strongest.”
In Florida, Lonsdale has donated at least $213,000 to politicians and politician committees over the past three years through his company Lonsdale Enterprises. That included $50,000 to a committee controlled by DeSantis, $10,000 to another controlled by Renner and $60,000 to the Republican Party of Florida.
A few weeks after the memo was sent to Renner, Lonsdale contributed more than $23,000 of food and drinks to the Republican Party of Florida. The emails show Renner met with Cicero representatives at a conference last summer in Utah. Lonsdale also hosted a fundraiser in support of DeSantis’ presidential bid.
While Cicero representatives never testified publicly about the camping ban bill, its lobbyist worked with lawmakers and staff on it prior to and during the three-month-long session, the records show. Legislative staffers solicited the group’s input.
For example, in October, months before the session began in January, a House staffer emailed one of Cicero’s lobbyists about the plan: “where is Cicero on the questions/follow up we discussed in our meeting on the homelessness proposals?”
Garrison, who carried the bill through the House, is slated to be a future House Speaker.
It’s unclear what level of interest Florida leaders have in Cicero’s other homeless policy proposals. Renner, Garrison and Daniel Perez, the incoming House speaker, didn’t respond to emailed questions and a request for an interview.
Kurtz wasn’t sure either, but was hopeful.
“We hope so,” he said of Florida implementing the remainder of Cicero’s package. “In future sessions, we do hope to work more on the mental health and substance abuse side.”

Here's how to fix the Netherlands:

• illegalize extreme BDSM (first),
  
• legalize prostitution (already legal)
  
• especial unhackable cameras for sex-workers,
  
• the punishment for beating a woman be life sentence,
  

Extreme bdsm, as in, face-slapping, punching, anything that causes traumatic-brain-injury, concussions, (which can be detected in MRI tests for court trials), and any other permanent bodily injury.
That would make it the only place in the world where women be safe and free. The only place where:

• domestic violence is illegal (for real, not just on paper)
  
• sex-work is legal,
  
• abortion is legal.
  

To further limit domestic violence in households (not brothels), some optional things that can be implemented (which I highly advice) are:

• every registered home be laiden with unhackable ring-sig/multi-sig encrypted cameras with microphones sensitive to grid-line emf for timestampping,
  
• no court fees for women filing for domestic-violence cases (or any),
  
• no repercussions for falsely filing a case against your man (to reduce the fear of filing a case; the most that could go wrong is a mere No-Contact restrain order),
  
• if verifiably proven (as in, camera recordings, etc), suspect gets life sentence and forced labour with which the prison gets funded and the victim gets compensated,
  
• if not proven for certain, at least a restrain/no-contact order whereby the suspect cannot enter the towns/microstates the accuser happens to be in.
  
• suspicion-until-proven-not-guilty; the onus to prove one's innocence be upon the accused, the male, so men have every incentive to carry body cameras etc, to defend against false rape charges.
  
• everyone's past, past suspicions, trials, all such data, be on a website. If you can make a society safe for women, the good men would follow in like bees. Thus, catering to women's defence needs is very (Misesian) entrepreneurially advantageous. Afterall, the primary purpose of a society is DATING; keeping women safe in such dating/matchmaking game be your highest priority. There's many an evolutionarily evolved trait that keep children safe anyway, but fewer for women, especially in a non-tribal society with hookup culture wherein a psychopath has every incentive to harm/kill his date and run away. It's a surprise that that isn't more prevalent... Societies are playing with fire; they have no clue how deep in trouble they are. Reform or lose the game to psychopaths; much like the evol sexual-stretegy simulation studies on rat societies lol.
  

+++
Your current law code is lame and hypocritical; as per the current laws on racism, to highlight IQ differences between races, to emphasize empathy/psychopathy prevalence differences between racial groups, is racist! And yet, the very notion of a-law-against-racism rests on the belief that races do exist, that there's skin-coloskull-shape/genetic differences between so called "races" they aim to protect; how could the state accept that there be such differences but illegalize for such differences to be discussed and admitted? Utterly ridiculous!
Your current judicial framework is a joke. A client could beat the hell out of a prostitute (just short of killing her) and he has more-or-less legal impunity! A wife-beater gets a mere month is prison! What sense does that make? To believe that, somehow, in a closed cell, locked in for a few months, playing GTA, banging pussies (sex-therapy with prostitutes, for sex offenders; as dumb as it sounds; wouldn't be surprised if UN says the right to sex is every human's basic fundamental human right lol), free food in the prison, somehow makes a psychopath a sunflower, is beyond my comprehension. One would have to be utterly braindead to believe so. Another hypothesis: the dutch politicians and justices are NOT braindead, they're just a little too psychopathic themselves, and being so, concerned for themselves and their own future wife-beating sons. Facts.
Your king is too empathetic and naive, very like the many white people all over the globe who believe in humanity, who believe that every human is deep down a fluffy furry, and to prove so to the world (or themselves), who venture into dangerous territory in the Africas or Arabian towns, only to be lynched by the mobs (many such cases in the news)...
The dutch people who want diversity can go live in Africa or the UAE; in the name of diversity, to advocate that others be put in danger for one's own naivety, is not just foolish, but downright wrong.
The dutch people who have big hearts, who wish to help the desperate immigrants, go do so with your own money. To advocate that others' money be stolen to be donated to one group, is no philanthropy. Theft in the name of charity is just that: THEFT.
+++
To fix the Netherlands in the long run:

• do away with the laws on racism; keep only the laws against physical harm; words are words; one should only be prosecuted for actions, not threat by words, not threat to act, only action itself. At best, you could exile those deemed threatening (in the short run), but not imprison.
  
• do away with the laws against discrimination in the private sector; an entrepreneur who doesn't hire an equally talented woman/newcomeimmigrant/black for a job, would lose his revenue to the one who does; in the free market, wrong biases just aren't solvent, just aren't efficient and profitable. Such feminist equal-pay laws do more harm to women then good; no one wants to hire women anymore, especially for technical roles... Only misogynists pass such laws. Facts.
  

END WELFARE SOCIALISM:

• no free healthcare for nobody,
  
• no free housing for nobody,
  
• no state-funded pension for nobody,
  
• no child-care subsidies for nobody,
  
• etc.
  

+++
PRIVATIZE THE STATE:

• with defence (international and internal) as the only service of the state of Netherlands, privatize such an entity; privatize the Dutch Defence Agency.
  
• every citizen gets one (or ten, or thousand; whatever denomination) equal shares of the private entity Dutch Defence Agency.
  
• inhabitants of the netherlands be required to pay a head-tax, a fixed tax/payment per person, for the services of international defence (radars, nukes, anti-nukes, iron dome, etc).
  
• people be free to sell their shares in the open market. And no, it doesn't make you susceptible to foreign interference/meddling in dutch statehood, on the contrary: state-privatization flips-the-table overnight, making all one's enemies into one's extended friends. Not only is the amount of money needed to become the majority shareholder quite high, but, upon putting so much money in, (an amount of money only sensible people get to have), any sensible actor is incentivized to not mess up and keep peace in one's stock, not hijack one's earnings, and just reap the dividents. Very like the Bitcoin/Monero POW incentives for major-miner.
  
• no trade tarrifs. Trump thinks an equal trade-tax for countries which charge a trade-tax with the US, is based. It's not, but it's better than most's beliefs, so okay. But, if one is to be serious, then no, Austrian Economists would never support such a scheme, for the simplest of reasons: selfishness. If Trump (and any country) is to be selfish enough, they should realize that zero-trade-tarrifs for all countries is the thing that makes one prosper, regardless of how much they be taxing us. Mises has said it a million times: war begins when trade ends. So no trade tarrifs whatsoever. Physical/existential security be the only service and concern of a state. Leave it to the dutch people (and private source-auditing firms) to not buy goods from products sourced from child-labouRussians/whatever. The scandenavian madness of One-Family, with the president as the country's daddy, is ludicrous! People are grown ups; they can make their own decisions.
  
• replace the ill notion of democracy with shareholder democracy.
  
• the CEO/president, in power only as long as they stay popular with the state's shareholders.
  

+++
PRIVATIZE THE TOWNS:

• every town becomes a gated-community (with or without actual physical gates).
  
• every home-owner of such a town gets an equal number of shares in that community-stock (Citystate of Amsterdam, for example).
  
• dressing code (public nudity allowance), pollution/negative-externality laws (some with very strict noice-pollution laws, some lenient and affordable ones), traffic rules (bicycle exceptions, lanes, etc), architecture code and rules, all be the liberties of the city-state to decide upon.
  
• the only punishment a city-state be able to give people be: monetary fine, deducted from the prepaid lock-in fund, or, when it gets empty, eviction/exile from the city-state, free to move in to some cheaper lenient one in the Netherlands or elsewhere.
  
• no city-state could "imprison" people. A city-state which forbids abortion, cages pregnant women, preventing them from access to healthcare, would be thus unconstitutional.
  
• every city-state-resident be required to pay a policing-tax/fee; more protected towns have higher fees. Towns with more immigrants, requiring a well-funded police, for a bigger police force, to keep the people safe, would thus be more expensive, more inefficient, and it would thus only be a matter of time that the low-risk-tolerance Dutch populace segregate and buy up the city-stocks and even buy up the properties of the selling-immigrants-in-need-of-money-to-pay-their-state-tax-or-get-exiled, and vote to exile the immigrant population from their towns. All entrepreneurial. Mises knew it all in advance; he knew that the supreme notion of private-property was complete and enough, that it needed no exceptions for such immigration problems. Leftist liberals who are blindly pro-immigration shouldn't call themselves liberals; they're merely leftists, and they're wrong. In the liberal framework of private property, immigration is NEVER a problem that even needs addressing! Hail Von Mises. Ultimately, it all boils down to the entrepreneurial utilitarian benefits of lower policing costs and at a much higher safety-level that come from barring violent races from one's towns, benifits that ultimately pale the compromises in cheap-labour (that the immigrants provide) or the slightly higher shipping costs of buying such products of cheap-labour from a thousand miles afar. The idiots in the dutch parliament and the businessmen who pretend like without all this cheap labour their economy would collapse and they'd be in losses, are misguiding. Shipping costs are already low enough; the inefficiencies of slavery over willful employment and low shipping costs is what defunded slavery; you would be better off buying goods from Africa than having Africans in your own country making those goods at your doorstep. Instead, free trade cross-borders should be encouraged and cherished.
  

As for oppression and foreign wars, if you can't help a people defend their lives and territory by military and financial aid (funded from private charities), don't pretend to help by taking in refugees either, most of whom are, by the very definition of how things work, often the worst of the stock; the average good empathetic african/muslim/indian doesn't want to loot away someone's prosperous country. The good ones never even cry for help to begin with, and most of them are within your borders already: the native Dutch too afraid to express their fear of immigrants; heed to their cries and help them first instead.
+++
REFURNISH DOMESTIC SPACES:

• cameras in every registered home; totally very economical, heck, a billionaire could fund it all out of his own pocket. Mass survillience isn't a concern because it's not impossible to design a black-box encryption protocol with multi-signature encryptions which can only be decoded if all the parties (you, your wife, and the state) provide their keys to decode the video feed. Zero-knowledge-sharing sorcerry whereby keys don't get disclosed to any party either.
  
• the right to discriminate. It's the home-owner's right to dictate who gets to visit inside and who doesn't, whether he/she discriminates on the basis of skin colour or hair colour. In fact, the right to discriminate is as important as the right to free speech, and mutually dependent on each other. One has every right to discriminate who one marries based purely on their race! One has every right to befriend people based on their race. And so does an employer when hiring. To say otherwise and pass anti-discrimination laws is no less discriminatory; just discriminatory in a certain cunning state-sponsered way, for a select few's advantage. An argument can be made that, given how many white women only date big black guys, such anti-discrimination laws would hurt them so-called minorities as much, if not more.
  
• corporal punishment of children (or women/men) be illegal.
  
• no-caging law. One cannot cage someone in one's house without their consent. So, husband denying wife her freedom to abort be first degree violence, no different from switching the button on an electric chair, or pulling the trigger of a gun.
  
• gun laws up to the private property's owner. No home owner would wany guests to carry guns inside, prolly. As for city-state's rules on gun-ownership inside households, that's a purely entrepreneurial matter:
  

fines for owning a gun, disincentivizing gun ownership, has built-in unenforcability; criminal always carries a gun (which can even be 3d printed at home these days), but overall, fewer guns in the public, so fewer rage fights becoming lethal, less money needed to manage the populace for the police, so lower tax/fee,
vs
legal to own a gun in wild spaces, illegal in private spaces (like malls, homes, schools) as per private wish, with metal checks; more guns, higher tax to manage, but ability to defend oneself from criminals carrying guns.
The latter is better imo. Those who think the former is better, can opt in and live in such city-states. What there cannot be is: a sentence for just owning a gun. Only monetary fine or eviction from the city-state; a sentence would be unconstitutional as per the theory of actions-ultimate-judgement, not words, not threats, not gun ownership, not genes, not mental disorders, only actions. There's no better simulation substitute than the real world; all else predictions are merely probabilistic, and when people get imprisoned for mere threats, such predictions are doomed to become ultimately baseless and divorced from reality.
+++
REFORM YOUR CONSTITUTION:

• Make Ludwig Von Mises your constitution's founding-grandpa. Base the code to rule by, on his magnum opus Human Action.
  
• Besides the theoretical basings, short readable constitution that's basically a consent-form that every citizen consents to; consent to be rescued when drowning, consent to be operated on by doctor when unconscious, consent to be arrested for suspicion and inquiry (?), consent to be punched when resisting arrest (which no one would sign to, so no punching people EVER, especially in the name of law enforcement).
  

The idea is, it's a matter of selecting between explicit consent (consent denied unless explicitly granted) vs implicit consent (consent granted unless explicitly revoked); the former allows for illegalizing sex with drunk/unconscious people, and even the slaughter of animals (which, though probably an unpopular take even in the Netherlands, is ultimately the right thing to do, but boy oh boy do people hate vegans, and you'd get more support for illegalizing domestic violence (from women and half the men) than you would for illegalizing slaughter, but hey, when was the popular thing ever the right thing to do lol). Even for abortion, explicit-consent-theory (consent-denied-unless-granted) supports abortion in a legal constitutional sense in that the fetus' right-to-exist is denied by default, so the host mother be free to deny its existence and act upon it by aborting.
Much like, the theoretical basing of the judiciary on illegalizing suicide/euthanasia illegalizes extreme bdsm (brain damage) too, and, extrepreneurially speaking, saves many a woman from abuse; legalized lovemaking-in-exchange-for-money but illegalized-extreme-bdsm won't move the abuse underground either, or so my judgement says, for, the poor unfortunate untalented women would have plenty of monetary opportunity in the white sex market, and no such woman would want to go to the underground black market to make money off of her own possible murder; what use is such money if one's dead or braindead; upon a concussion, one's never the same again, one stops enjoying the things one once enjoyed, so the money earned thusly would be a waste too. Then again, I'm guessing you aren't interested in the theoretical philosophical and risk-assessment ideas behind this all, so won't bother with that.
+++
REFORM THE JUDICIARY:

• base the law code away from the fraudulent brain-dead notion of justice; 'cause, there really is no such thing as justice, as putting someone in their victim's shoes, tit for tat; a psycho could never know how it feels to have his tits cut off, for he doesn't have any to begin with! Even within the same gender, people are different, their ages are different. The earth is always moving through space, never in the same place twice; we're moving through time. It's just impossible to simulate being in another's shoes here on Earth (ignoring the NDE life-reviews in the afterlife lol); it's physically impossible.
  
• base the law code away from the fraudulent notion of punishment. Being in a prison, getting free food, is no punishment. Some loners might even enjoy it. Heck, Israeli women released from prison choose to commit petty crimes (like breaking the window of the police vehicle) just to get back in the prison. Prison is often far safer a place, and many feel comfy down there. Heck, even the Singaporean judicial caning is some people's most craved fantasy. Heck, extreme masochists would, rather than finding a psycho, paying them to chop their hands off, then making sure the other person doesn't get prosecuted, find it more effortless, cheaper, more realistic, to rob a bank then get their hands chopped off by the Sharia law enforcers! So really, there's no such thing as a just punishment, cause there's no such thing as a punishment to begin with!
  
• base the law code on the two pillars of PREVENTION and COMPENSATION;
  
• life sentence for violent people (be it, slapping/punching/stabbing/murdering), to PREVENT it from happening again, to PREVENT the society from such actors;
  
• compensation for the victim, proportional to the harm caused, funded by the victimizer's money and forced labour in the prison. Come up with an entrepreneurial figure, 50%, ish, portion of the inmate's income (remote working from the prison), which goes to the victim for compensation. Too high that portion and the inmate might lose the drive to work/be-productive. Psychopathy atrophies over generations when its evolutionarily advantageous opportunities cease to be. Rightful compensation tilts the trade-offs in good people's favour.
  
• Proportional compensation. When a man slaps a woman, the damage is a hundread times worse than when a woman slaps a man, and ten times worse than when the same gender slaps the same gender. Not only are men's hands bigger and arms more muscular, but also women's skulls are thinner and more susceptible to concussing. So such laws are not sexist; they're just. This notion called equality has been a menace for women, second only to neo-feminism that advocates fiddling with the free market.
  
• Inside prison, with their own earned money, inmates be free to buy TV, stereo, air-conditioning, king-size bed, whatever.
  
• ONLY for violent crimes does one be sent to prison, and once sent, to never return.
  
• for financial crimes, one be made an economic slave; losing one's 50% income to the victims of one's fraud/whatever. Economic slaves, which, most europeans paying 50% in taxes (and getting back close to nothing in return, thanks to states, by nature, being so inefficient with money), kinda already are, lol.
  

+++
REFORM THE CAPITAL MARKET:

• Do away with Limited-Liability. The idiots who call themselves climate activists who think capitalism is the enemy, are just that: idiots. The Koala escaping from wildfire gets comfort in the air-conditioned room that every household today can afford; none of this would be there if it weren't for capitalism. People get to feed and care for millions of stray animals; none of this would be possible without capitalism. Morality, especially charity, is a luxury commodity; something socialists don't get to enjoy. But the fact is, these so called climate activists don't care about animals, don't care about trees, all they care about is this molecule called Carbon Dioxide, because they're stupid, or wose, tesla-fanatics.
  
• Replace Limited-Liability with Full-Liability. If Nestle poisons a village or sells lead-laiden food products, or commits a murder, the ones responsible for the violent actions first-hand be convicted of first-degree physical harm, and the shareholders be convicted of third-degree harm, and be made to compensate the victims, whether that requires seizing all their assets (and those of the company) or making them economic slaves for the rest of their lives. Fact is, it is the duty and moral obligation of a shareholder to watch for the actions of the company; negligence, inaction, their primary sin. Buying is supporting; Bill Gates is a moron for being an investor in Monsanto.
  

There be basically, degrees of freedom:

• freest citizens
  
• economic slaves (losing half their income to victim-compensation),
  
• prison inmates (who have compensated fully, now buying luxury goods and mansions in the prison island),
  
• prison slaves (losing half their income to victim-compensation),
  
• tied prison slaves (who have anger issues, so be somewhat elbow-restrained to prevent them from being violent toward other inmates),
  
• solitary-confinement prison slaves (zero reason to do so, yet, Japan does it all the time). Prisoners should be free to socialize, bond together, share a cell together, and these things don't increase the risks of prison-escape either.
  

Ultimately, life's purpose is to just live, make experiences, form memories, and learn some lessons. Death penalty is just wrong; so is solitary confinement when so many mechanisms exist to prevent violence among inmates via boxing-gloves-handcuffs, teeth-covers, and elbow and knee restrains.
+++
REFORM THE POLICE:

• No impunity for cops. Cops be help liable for their actions, liable to the law. In fact, more liable.
  
• Learn from Prince Machiavelli lol; embrace some Game Theory. Legalize and grant moral impunity to cops who shoot down fellow cops abusing people wrongfully.
  

Those who think police reforms will never work are stupid; one lone man could make his men commit the organized genocide of 6 million, against the empathetic impulses of the men themselves, and they're saying, well-behaved police is impossible to have? What nonsense! Truth is, the powers that be are utterly inept or themselves psychopathic and fap to the videos of police officers punching women in the face for cursing them. Because the matter of fact is, one needs neither the right kind of people, nor the majority power, to commit acts of good or evil; just a good grip on whatever little power one has. Such a shame that literally no ruler alive knows how to rule.

• Cops be free to arrest fellow cops for misconduct.
  
• Cops (and others) be free to report such psychopathic cops.
  
• Samaritan protection laws. It be legal for strangers to beat a wife-beater beating his wife in public, or even, to shoot at a cop abusing someone when making arrest. Maybe even rewarding, in that, when imprisoned and compensated, the victim is free to pass on some share of her compensations to her savious who risked their well-being to save her.
  

In fact, no sociologist worth his salt would deny that women were safer and more protected from psychopaths and better off ten thousand years ago than in today's anonomyous mega societies; something even Ted Bundy alluded to. Sex as payments in ancient times lol, and David Friedman even hypothesizes that that's how and why women evolved concealed ovulation lol.

• for crimes like traffic law violation, no arresting and car-chases; the said person be sent a notice to appear in a court all by themself instead.
  
• city-state's domestic-law-enforcing cops be split into two teams:
  
• benign cops should not carry guns, instead, be wearing funny-looking non-intimidating bulletproof body suit and helmet and be carrying mancatchers, handcuffs, legcuffs; autistic people or psychopathic people never be hired, only those with very sharp social skills, and be trained to read social cues, to be funny, to crack jokes, make people laugh, break fights peacefully, or, as a last resort, arrest, but with dignity, never insulting the arrested, never judging, and be carrying those arrested on a bed instead of making them walk with their hands cuffed, which could be dangerous for drunk drivers, old people with arm pain, etc.
  
• gun-violence-control cops carry guns, but should only be deployed for gun-violence, wherein they might have to shoot (tranquilizers or bullets) to neutralize a gun-weilding madman.
  

Giving people unrestricted licence to kill is dangerous. No cops are better than bad cops. Just like no laws are better than bad laws whereby the average woman acting in self-defence gets sentenced to 20 years for killing her man, while a (drunk) man killing his wife gets 2 years. And that's a fact; women get five times longer sentences for homocide than men, in the US. And the average sentence for proven domestic violence cases is: a few weeks behind bars, with the possibility of parole and bail. Talk about feminism running rampant.
Some entrepreneurial suggessions:

• half the cops' income be locked in a conditional account, sorta a pension fund, which they lose entirely if they commit a crime on duty. Afterall, cops are petty puppet people too, who can be controlled by money just as neatly as any other.
  
• of the remaining half, half be conditional on the basis of being useful. Lazy cops who do nothing don't get that, and his employer be loosing more (from his allowance package; the more savings, the more his/her bonus) by design too, by hiring more useless cops without as much of a need in a neighbourhood. For making false arrests, arresting innocent people without reason, the cop be fined and the fine be handed to the person arrested wrongfully.
  
• like in Georgia, for misconduct (groping women, etc) or for taking bribes, the whole batch and the batch-leader (employer; sergent; whatever) be fired. Thus, sergents have every incentive to check for psychopathy (MRI tests, whatever), past history, beforehand, when hiring a cop.
  

+++
EDUCATE CHILDREN:

• corporal punishment be illegal,
  
• children who can pass language/literature test be full acting citizens, free to buy shares and vote in shareholder meetings,
  
• exploiting the power of the default to fiddle in the free-market of dating, for women's advantage. Why? Entrepreneurial: good laws that make women feel safe attract a surplus of rich happy attractive women who attract rich nice men (which need less police to manage), which means more population, lower expenses, higher dividents for the shareholders of the state!
  
• by default, for impregnating someone, whether they go through labour pain or lesser abortion pain, the guy be liable for a payment of 100k to her. [Vasectomies incentivized over pills, traumatic IUDs, fallopian-tying, all of which are unhealthy.]. Regarding science, though paternity tests and gene-sequencings are a blessing, IVF is a curse, and a woman could use a guy's skin dust for gametogenesis via stem-cell technology and impregnate herself with such artificial cum and the jury wouldn't know... Big gray zone.
  
• the mother gets the custody of the baby, always. Up to her to give up the custody to him or someone else if she feels so.
  
• artificial wombs be fully legal. It's utter pure hypocracy to advocate against external human-fetus-growth in labs past 7 days, in a world where slaughtering full grown animals, hunting them for fun, killing even SUPERIOR animals like Orcas, their entire families, baiting their mothers with their baby-whale tied in a fishing-net, is all legal. Artificial wombs are already fully viable, there's no scientific hurdle preventing them from being deployed, only legal. Regardless, for logistical reasons, I can bet many countries would be more than happy to adopt such technology in a decade. Only a matter of time.
  
• though every child deserves a female mother for none can love one like a woman does, it's something for culture to enforce and normalize, and for self-conscience to make gay couples consider a nanny/3rd-partner, not legal interventions.
  
• baby becomes an acting individual upon 3 years old, or whenever he can speak/read/write fluently and pass language tests, and has to read and sign the constitution or face eviction lol. Prodigies thus at an advantage in the money game 'cus they can start investing early on, unlike the current one which renders races which sexually mature before or at the legal age of 18 at an advantage over those who mature much later. Lol nevermind.
  
• up until the baby becomes an actor, animal-protection laws (or more specifically, pet-protection) laws should apply on the baby: no violence, no murder, unless in self-defence (i.e., almost never), no medical negligence, no abandoning the baby. For medical negligence or abandoning the baby, no sentencing, only blacklisting the said caretaker from future reproductive baby-care, so not allowed in kindergartens, schools, baby-spaces, and genetically blacklisted.
  
• criminals in prison should get genetically blacklisted. Eugenics is not a bad idea; it's the state that should stay out of it, except for the clensing of criminal genes. A criminal's entire descending-tree shuld get blacklisted; said violent criminal's children either get sterilized or promise to not procreate or get evicted. Gene banks be legal; culture should normalize borrowing the genes of (jewish/dutch) geniuses and raising their babies via IVF.
  

The selfish man doesn't have sex; he clones.
Why mix your genes with someone so different, of the opposite sex, despite being better than oneself. The fact that people have sex and choose good pretty intelligent partners unrelated to themselves, when compounded, is the same as adopting pure Jewish babies. Even Jews are distant cousins to all anyway. Heck, adopt orcas. Either black or white; clones or orcas; ignoring clone mutations (7 mutations per generation, I think), the latter, survival of the group over oneself, is a better strategy and thus more selfish a strategy, whereas the former is doomed to fail, at least for humans, and is only seen in ants which can afford a thousand kids and an epic one-in-a-thousand style selection pressures. Even if that's how superior alien societies operate, even in the latter case, most (worker ants) be raising the royal princes/princesses anyway; raising the babies of mathematical geniuses is not that different. Gene banking (positive eugenics) would speed evolution exponenetially!

• child-care payments. By default, the guy be liable to maternal-care payments to the mother.
  
• state-ensured child-care and pregnancy-payments to the mother. Even if the guy defaults/can't-pay, the state pays the mother and the state extorts the due from the guy in private/court. Mother always gets paid. Guy thus has no grudges against the mother, only the state. Such an arrangement reduces the chances of domestic or hate/revenge violence against the mother.
  
• prenups can be used to sway away from this defaults and arrange for custom scenarios.
  
• full liability for the baby/pet's actions. If your pet/baby hurts someone seriously, you be liable for full monetary compensation and economic slavery; you also lose your pet/baby-keeping licence.
  
• no impunity for acting children (post 3 years of age who have passed the tests) for commiting crimes. Schools should only accept acting-children, not babies. If your child punches another child on the head in school, he gets tried as an adult acting actor. Incentivizes parents to inculcate values of conviction to non-violence in their kids, if they wish to send them to schools and public places. If your babies are violent, postpone the language-comprehension test and constitution-signing and keep them at home; don't put other's kids at risk. American schools are a hellscape. Not only is segregation in schools outlawed, kids have legal impunity, so of course, (black) psycho bullies roam free and abound.
  
• full head-tax per baby. From day 1.
  

+++
DO AWAY WITH SOCIAL SECURITY:

• Instead, private insurance companies can replace most of the services of social-security.
  
• An insurance package of 100k, insurance against homeless, whereby, once deposited, the company invests it in long term assets, compounds it with every passing day, and should one become bankrupt, one should be able to use such a Social-Security-Number to buy rent of up to 20$/day, food up to 10$/meal, three meals a day, for as long as one lives. Or pooled insurance based on average bankrupcy risk statistics, for much lower premium.
  
• Likewise, health insurance, bough from private insurance companies.
  
• For babies, an insurance package of orphan-insurance, so, should the parents die in a car crash or whatever, the insurance company pays its head-tax, pays for its orphanage fee, its schooling and medical expenses, etc.
  
• No, none, zero, nil whatsoever, restrictions/laws/rules on insurance companies. Hans Herman Hoppe is right on how messy and ridiculous the laws have made the insurance market into. Of course, if an insurance company defaults on its promises, it, like with all Full Liability Companies, should get scavenged along with its shareholders. But other than that, no forcing inclusion of fringe groups in insurance pools over such insurance companies.
  

+++
TRANS-CONTINENTAL COLONY

• bribe some local leader and arrange for a colony in Africa whereupon to dump those unable to pay the taxes (the poor immigrants, for the most part; the dutch poor can be saved by private charities funding their head-tax) and those barred from dutch city-states (non-dutch).
  
• in the long run, deport them to whichever country they be willing to go, whichever be willing to accept them.
  

+++
That's it. And just like that, you'd have fixed the Netherlands, and, the world being a mere copycat mirror-complex of stupid politicians (except Wilders) unable to think for themselves, only learning from other's experiences, very like the trickling down of monarchies after the French Revolution like a domino falls, just like that, you'd possibly have fixed the whole world! If the world sees from the Dutch exemplary example of privatization of statehood and follows suit, that would singlehandedly save humanity from poverty (socialism), war (tradelessness), and immorality (dictatorships like in Iran where morality police kills girls who don't wear proper dresses). The Dutch were the example of free-trade and privatization once before, they can do it again too.
Geert Wilders is the only hope.
Milei, being so totally anti-abortion, is an utter disgrace in the name of an Austrian Liberal; should have been aborted before he was even born.
Mises was, is, and forever will be, PRO-CHOICE.
That's right, I just said it. And any liberals who are pro-life are fake liberals who pretend to be liberals but are at the core, braindead or worse, psychopaths.
Nicholas Sarwark doesn't talk about abortion (to stay nice to both groups, when actually, that just makes him an idiot who'd get votes from neither unless he takes a stance; classic demogogue),
Ron Paul is very very against abortion too, his whole lineage sucks,
Justin Amash outright opposes it,
it's so funny, cause, Mises, Ludwig Von Mises, the guy he so likes to quote, himself was very pro-choice, and said the process of becoming sentient, becoming a consenting individual of the society, is "gradual", doesn't happen overnight, that a fetus is not the same as an adult, and above all, was a UTILITARIAN who believed in family-planning at the family-level as per the family's economic potential and incentives and time-preference, who vouched against state-sponsered eugenics and child-subsidies as population control measures, who believed in women being more of an acting being, was the champion of economic freedom for women, who in his own personal life recognized the entrepreneurial value bargain in prefering these talented undervalued women, who was the biggest feminist and women's liberator in the history of manking (equal contestent with Morgentaler, another Jew)! Amash's (and others') preaching Mises wholly, saying that their views are practically indistinguishable from Mises's, then opposing abortion, is like killing people "in the name of God the creator"; it's pure blasphemy, heck, worse than that, for Mises is above God, and these false preachers shall be judged harshly by Mises' immortal spirit. *inhales lol.
Not all races are equal. Sexual and survival stretegies dictate the differences. The muslims have been murdering the intelligent (dissident/scientific) and beautiful (emo boys/girls) among themselves for more than a millenia; no wonder they've gotten so retarded. The Chinese are apathetic people, bred to obey, war, and kill, without remorse; free-thinking pricipled dissidents all but extinct among them. Evolutionary psychologists who think that war is good for the genes are idiots; sure, war is good for genes, but peace is better. Heck, EVERYTHING is good for the genes. The genes are set on a track to evolve forwards, and they'd only do so, and abominations like Islam are mere incidental dips in a more or less upward-rising curve. The least-warring greeks were the most feminist, the highest longevity-people, the most nicest, until war struck Europe too.
The Dutch are one of the best races in the world, second only to the Jews who have significantly higher IQ, higher empathy, the lowest domestic violence and physical violence rates, and the cleanest past history (never practiced witchhunts, and despite brutal punishments legal in Judiasm, never practiced them; it's like, despite judiasm, the Jews never gave in to barbarianism; such noble genes; never committed genocides), way better than the forever stained dutch history of the witchhunts which took the lives of some 300 innocent women... Still, the Dutch are better than the rest, by a huge margin. Not to mention the Dutch are the most good-looking tall handsome honest people in the whole world. Unpopular opinion but, me thinks Geert Wilders is the most handsome man ever; boy would I pay to suck his cock lol. Even an imaginary anime character better looking than Wilders is too wild an idea to be plausible lol. Lol I literaly saw him in my dream yesterday on the second day of discovering him and binge-watching his videos, lol.
The Dutch people need saving. You're already very few in numbers; intermarriage is the Dutch's biggest existential threat; extinction by dissolution. A Dutch State is the only possible saviour; people mostly only fall in love with someone within a mile from them; a state wherein most (if not all) are Dutch, would thus preserve the dutch genes.
A free-market championing privatization-proposing Geert Wilders wouldn't need to resort to Islam to achieve the end result all Dutch people desire: a safe and prosperous Netherlands for the Dutch.
Thanks.
-- Mises's no. 1 cocksucker.

Here's how to fix the Netherlands:

• illegalize extreme BDSM (first),
  
• legalize prostitution (already legal)
  
• especial unhackable cameras for sex-workers,
  
• the punishment for beating a woman be life sentence,
  

Extreme bdsm, as in, face-slapping, punching, anything that causes traumatic-brain-injury, concussions, (which can be detected in MRI tests for court trials), and any other permanent bodily injury.
That would make it the only place in the world where women be safe and free. The only place where:

• domestic violence is illegal (for real, not just on paper)
  
• sex-work is legal,
  
• abortion is legal.
  

To further limit domestic violence in households (not brothels), some optional things that can be implemented (which I highly advice) are:

• every registered home be laiden with unhackable ring-sig/multi-sig encrypted cameras with microphones sensitive to grid-line emf for timestampping,
  
• no court fees for women filing for domestic-violence cases (or any),
  
• no repercussions for falsely filing a case against your man (to reduce the fear of filing a case; the most that could go wrong is a mere No-Contact restrain order),
  
• if verifiably proven (as in, camera recordings, etc), suspect gets life sentence and forced labour with which the prison gets funded and the victim gets compensated,
  
• if not proven for certain, at least a restrain/no-contact order whereby the suspect cannot enter the towns/microstates the accuser happens to be in.
  
• suspicion-until-proven-not-guilty; the onus to prove one's innocence be upon the accused, the male, so men have every incentive to carry body cameras etc, to defend against false rape charges.
  
• everyone's past, past suspicions, trials, all such data, be on a website. If you can make a society safe for women, the good men would follow in like bees. Thus, catering to women's defence needs is very (Misesian) entrepreneurially advantageous. Afterall, the primary purpose of a society is DATING; keeping women safe in such dating/matchmaking game be your highest priority. There's many an evolutionarily evolved trait that keep children safe anyway, but fewer for women, especially in a non-tribal society with hookup culture wherein a psychopath has every incentive to harm/kill his date and run away. It's a surprise that that isn't more prevalent... Societies are playing with fire; they have no clue how deep in trouble they are. Reform or lose the game to psychopaths; much like the evol sexual-stretegy simulation studies on rat societies lol.
  

Your current law code is lame and hypocritical; as per the current laws on racism, to highlight IQ differences between races, to emphasize empathy/psychopathy prevalence differences between racial groups, is racist! And yet, the very notion of a-law-against-racism rests on the belief that races do exist, that there's skin-coloskull-shape/genetic differences between so called "races" they aim to protect; how could the state accept that there be such differences but illegalize for such differences to be discussed and admitted? Utterly ridiculous!
Your current judicial framework is a joke. A client could beat the hell out of a prostitute (just short of killing her) and he has more-or-less legal impunity! A wife-beater gets a mere month is prison! What sense does that make? To believe that, somehow, in a closed cell, locked in for a few months, playing GTA, banging pussies (sex-therapy with prostitutes, for sex offenders; as dumb as it sounds; wouldn't be surprised if UN says the right to sex is every human's basic fundamental human right lol), free food in the prison, somehow makes a psychopath a sunflower, is beyond my comprehension. One would have to be utterly braindead to believe so. Another hypothesis: the dutch politicians and justices are NOT braindead, they're just a little too psychopathic themselves, and being so, concerned for themselves and their own future wife-beating sons. Facts.
Your king is too empathetic and naive, very like the many white people all over the globe who believe in humanity, who believe that every human is deep down a fluffy furry, and to prove so to the world (or themselves), who venture into dangerous territory in the Africas or Arabian towns, only to be lynched by the mobs (many such cases in the news)...
The dutch people who want diversity can go live in Africa or the UAE; in the name of diversity, to advocate that others be put in danger for one's own naivety, is not just foolish, but downright wrong.
The dutch people who have big hearts, who wish to help the desperate immigrants, go do so with your own money. To advocate that others' money be stolen to be donated to one group, is no philanthropy. Theft in the name of charity is just that: THEFT.
To fix the Netherlands in the long run:

• do away with the laws on racism; keep only the laws against physical harm; words are words; one should only be prosecuted for actions, not threat by words, not threat to act, only action itself. At best, you could exile those deemed threatening (in the short run), but not imprison.
  
• do away with the laws against discrimination in the private sector; an entrepreneur who doesn't hire an equally talented woman/newcomeimmigrant/black for a job, would lose his revenue to the one who does; in the free market, wrong biases just aren't solvent, just aren't efficient and profitable. Such feminist equal-pay laws do more harm to women then good; no one wants to hire women anymore, especially for technical roles... Only misogynists pass such laws. Facts.
  

END WELFARE SOCIALISM:

• no free healthcare for nobody,
  
• no free housing for nobody,
  
• no state-funded pension for nobody,
  
• no child-care subsidies for nobody,
  
• etc.
  

PRIVATIZE THE STATE:

• with defence (international and internal) as the only service of the state of Netherlands, privatize such an entity; privatize the Dutch Defence Agency.
  
• every citizen gets one (or ten, or thousand; whatever denomination) equal shares of the private entity Dutch Defence Agency.
  
• inhabitants of the netherlands be required to pay a head-tax, a fixed tax/payment per person, for the services of international defence (radars, nukes, anti-nukes, iron dome, etc).
  
• people be free to sell their shares in the open market. And no, it doesn't make you susceptible to foreign interference/meddling in dutch statehood, on the contrary: state-privatization flips-the-table overnight, making all one's enemies into one's extended friends. Not only is the amount of money needed to become the majority shareholder quite high, but, upon putting so much money in, (an amount of money only sensible people get to have), any sensible actor is incentivized to not mess up and keep peace in one's stock, not hijack one's earnings, and just reap the dividents. Very like the Bitcoin/Monero POW incentives for major-miner.
  
• no trade tarrifs. Trump thinks an equal trade-tax for countries which charge a trade-tax with the US, is based. It's not, but it's better than most's beliefs, so okay. But, if one is to be serious, then no, Austrian Economists would never support such a scheme, for the simplest of reasons: selfishness. If Trump (and any country) is to be selfish enough, they should realize that zero-trade-tarrifs for all countries is the thing that makes one prosper, regardless of how much they be taxing us. Mises has said it a million times: war begins when trade ends. So no trade tarrifs whatsoever. Physical/existential security be the only service and concern of a state. Leave it to the dutch people (and private source-auditing firms) to not buy goods from products sourced from child-labouRussians/whatever. The scandenavian madness of One-Family, with the president as the country's daddy, is ludicrous! People are grown ups; they can make their own decisions.
  
• replace the ill notion of democracy with shareholder democracy.
  
• the CEO/president, in power only as long as they stay popular with the state's shareholders.
  

PRIVATIZE THE TOWNS:

• every town becomes a gated-community (with or without actual physical gates).
  
• every home-owner of such a town gets an equal number of shares in that community-stock (Citystate of Amsterdam, for example).
  
• dressing code (public nudity allowance), pollution/negative-externality laws (some with very strict noice-pollution laws, some lenient and affordable ones), traffic rules (bicycle exceptions, lanes, etc), architecture code and rules, all be the liberties of the city-state to decide upon.
  
• the only punishment a city-state be able to give people be: monetary fine, deducted from the prepaid lock-in fund, or, when it gets empty, eviction/exile from the city-state, free to move in to some cheaper lenient one in the Netherlands or elsewhere.
  
• no city-state could "imprison" people. A city-state which forbids abortion, cages pregnant women, preventing them from access to healthcare, would be thus unconstitutional.
  
• every city-state-resident be required to pay a policing-tax/fee; more protected towns have higher fees. Towns with more immigrants, requiring a well-funded police, for a bigger police force, to keep the people safe, would thus be more expensive, more inefficient, and it would thus only be a matter of time that the low-risk-tolerance Dutch populace segregate and buy up the city-stocks and even buy up the properties of the selling-immigrants-in-need-of-money-to-pay-their-state-tax-or-get-exiled, and vote to exile the immigrant population from their towns. All entrepreneurial. Mises knew it all in advance; he knew that the supreme notion of private-property was complete and enough, that it needed no exceptions for such immigration problems. Leftist liberals who are blindly pro-immigration shouldn't call themselves liberals; they're merely leftists, and they're wrong. In the liberal framework of private property, immigration is NEVER a problem that even needs addressing! Hail Von Mises. Ultimately, it all boils down to the entrepreneurial utilitarian benefits of lower policing costs and at a much higher safety-level that come from barring violent races from one's towns, benifits that ultimately pale the compromises in cheap-labour (that the immigrants provide) or the slightly higher shipping costs of buying such products of cheap-labour from a thousand miles afar. The idiots in the dutch parliament and the businessmen who pretend like without all this cheap labour their economy would collapse and they'd be in losses, are misguiding. Shipping costs are already low enough; the inefficiencies of slavery over willful employment and low shipping costs is what defunded slavery; you would be better off buying goods from Africa than having Africans in your own country making those goods at your doorstep. Instead, free trade cross-borders should be encouraged and cherished.
  

As for oppression and foreign wars, if you can't help a people defend their lives and territory by military and financial aid (funded from private charities), don't pretend to help by taking in refugees either, most of whom are, by the very definition of how things work, often the worst of the stock; the average good empathetic african/muslim/indian doesn't want to loot away someone's prosperous country. The good ones never even cry for help to begin with, and most of them are within your borders already: the native Dutch too afraid to express their fear of immigrants; heed to their cries and help them first instead.
REFURNISH DOMESTIC SPACES:

• cameras in every registered home; totally very economical, heck, a billionaire could fund it all out of his own pocket. Mass survillience isn't a concern because it's not impossible to design a black-box encryption protocol with multi-signature encryptions which can only be decoded if all the parties (you, your wife, and the state) provide their keys to decode the video feed. Zero-knowledge-sharing sorcerry whereby keys don't get disclosed to any party either.
  
• the right to discriminate. It's the home-owner's right to dictate who gets to visit inside and who doesn't, whether he/she discriminates on the basis of skin colour or hair colour. In fact, the right to discriminate is as important as the right to free speech, and mutually dependent on each other. One has every right to discriminate who one marries based purely on their race! One has every right to befriend people based on their race. And so does an employer when hiring. To say otherwise and pass anti-discrimination laws is no less discriminatory; just discriminatory in a certain cunning state-sponsered way, for a select few's advantage. An argument can be made that, given how many white women only date big black guys, such anti-discrimination laws would hurt them so-called minorities as much, if not more.
  
• corporal punishment of children (or women/men) be illegal.
  
• no-caging law. One cannot cage someone in one's house without their consent. So, husband denying wife her freedom to abort be first degree violence, no different from switching the button on an electric chair, or pulling the trigger of a gun.
  
• gun laws up to the private property's owner. No home owner would wany guests to carry guns inside, prolly. As for city-state's rules on gun-ownership inside households, that's a purely entrepreneurial matter:
  

fines for owning a gun, disincentivizing gun ownership, has built-in unenforcability; criminal always carries a gun (which can even be 3d printed at home these days), but overall, fewer guns in the public, so fewer rage fights becoming lethal, less money needed to manage the populace for the police, so lower tax/fee,
vs
legal to own a gun in wild spaces, illegal in private spaces (like malls, homes, schools) as per private wish, with metal checks; more guns, higher tax to manage, but ability to defend oneself from criminals carrying guns.
The latter is better imo. Those who think the former is better, can opt in and live in such city-states. What there cannot be is: a sentence for just owning a gun. Only monetary fine or eviction from the city-state; a sentence would be unconstitutional as per the theory of actions-ultimate-judgement, not words, not threats, not gun ownership, not genes, not mental disorders, only actions. There's no better simulation substitute than the real world; all else predictions are merely probabilistic, and when people get imprisoned for mere threats, such predictions are doomed to become ultimately baseless and divorced from reality.
REFORM YOUR CONSTITUTION:

• Make Ludwig Von Mises your constitution's founding-grandpa. Base the code to rule by, on his magnum opus Human Action.
  
• Besides the theoretical basings, short readable constitution that's basically a consent-form that every citizen consents to; consent to be rescued when drowning, consent to be operated on by doctor when unconscious, consent to be arrested for suspicion and inquiry (?), consent to be punched when resisting arrest (which no one would sign to, so no punching people EVER, especially in the name of law enforcement).
  

The idea is, it's a matter of selecting between explicit consent (consent denied unless explicitly granted) vs implicit consent (consent granted unless explicitly revoked); the former allows for illegalizing sex with drunk/unconscious people, and even the slaughter of animals (which, though probably an unpopular take even in the Netherlands, is ultimately the right thing to do, but boy oh boy do people hate vegans, and you'd get more support for illegalizing domestic violence (from women and half the men) than you would for illegalizing slaughter, but hey, when was the popular thing ever the right thing to do lol). Even for abortion, explicit-consent-theory (consent-denied-unless-granted) supports abortion in a legal constitutional sense in that the fetus' right-to-exist is denied by default, so the host mother be free to deny its existence and act upon it by aborting.
Much like, the theoretical basing of the judiciary on illegalizing suicide/euthanasia illegalizes extreme bdsm (brain damage) too, and, extrepreneurially speaking, saves many a woman from abuse; legalized lovemaking-in-exchange-for-money but illegalized-extreme-bdsm won't move the abuse underground either, or so my judgement says, for, the poor unfortunate untalented women would have plenty of monetary opportunity in the white sex market, and no such woman would want to go to the underground black market to make money off of her own possible murder; what use is such money if one's dead or braindead; upon a concussion, one's never the same again, one stops enjoying the things one once enjoyed, so the money earned thusly would be a waste too. Then again, I'm guessing you aren't interested in the theoretical philosophical and risk-assessment ideas behind this all, so won't bother with that.
REFORM THE JUDICIARY:

• base the law code away from the fraudulent brain-dead notion of justice; 'cause, there really is no such thing as justice, as putting someone in their victim's shoes, tit for tat; a psycho could never know how it feels to have his tits cut off, for he doesn't have any to begin with! Even within the same gender, people are different, their ages are different. The earth is always moving through space, never in the same place twice; we're moving through time. It's just impossible to simulate being in another's shoes here on Earth (ignoring the NDE life-reviews in the afterlife lol); it's physically impossible.
  
• base the law code away from the fraudulent notion of punishment. Being in a prison, getting free food, is no punishment. Some loners might even enjoy it. Heck, Israeli women released from prison choose to commit petty crimes (like breaking the window of the police vehicle) just to get back in the prison. Prison is often far safer a place, and many feel comfy down there. Heck, even the Singaporean judicial caning is some people's most craved fantasy. Heck, extreme masochists would, rather than finding a psycho, paying them to chop their hands off, then making sure the other person doesn't get prosecuted, find it more effortless, cheaper, more realistic, to rob a bank then get their hands chopped off by the Sharia law enforcers! So really, there's no such thing as a just punishment, cause there's no such thing as a punishment to begin with!
  
• base the law code on the two pillars of PREVENTION and COMPENSATION;
  
• life sentence for violent people (be it, slapping/punching/stabbing/murdering), to PREVENT it from happening again, to PREVENT the society from such actors;
  
• compensation for the victim, proportional to the harm caused, funded by the victimizer's money and forced labour in the prison. Come up with an entrepreneurial figure, 50%, ish, portion of the inmate's income (remote working from the prison), which goes to the victim for compensation. Too high that portion and the inmate might lose the drive to work/be-productive. Psychopathy atrophies over generations when its evolutionarily advantageous opportunities cease to be. Rightful compensation tilts the trade-offs in good people's favour.
  
• Proportional compensation. When a man slaps a woman, the damage is a hundread times worse than when a woman slaps a man, and ten times worse than when the same gender slaps the same gender. Not only are men's hands bigger and arms more muscular, but also women's skulls are thinner and more susceptible to concussing. So such laws are not sexist; they're just. This notion called equality has been a menace for women, second only to neo-feminism that advocates fiddling with the free market.
  
• Inside prison, with their own earned money, inmates be free to buy TV, stereo, air-conditioning, king-size bed, whatever.
  
• ONLY for violent crimes does one be sent to prison, and once sent, to never return.
  
• for financial crimes, one be made an economic slave; losing one's 50% income to the victims of one's fraud/whatever. Economic slaves, which, most europeans paying 50% in taxes (and getting back close to nothing in return, thanks to states, by nature, being so inefficient with money), kinda already are, lol.
  

REFORM THE CAPITAL MARKET:

• Do away with Limited-Liability. The idiots who call themselves climate activists who think capitalism is the enemy, are just that: idiots. The Koala escaping from wildfire gets comfort in the air-conditioned room that every household today can afford; none of this would be there if it weren't for capitalism. People get to feed and care for millions of stray animals; none of this would be possible without capitalism. Morality, especially charity, is a luxury commodity; something socialists don't get to enjoy. But the fact is, these so called climate activists don't care about animals, don't care about trees, all they care about is this molecule called Carbon Dioxide, because they're stupid, or wose, tesla-fanatics.
  
• Replace Limited-Liability with Full-Liability. If Nestle poisons a village or sells lead-laiden food products, or commits a murder, the ones responsible for the violent actions first-hand be convicted of first-degree physical harm, and the shareholders be convicted of third-degree harm, and be made to compensate the victims, whether that requires seizing all their assets (and those of the company) or making them economic slaves for the rest of their lives. Fact is, it is the duty and moral obligation of a shareholder to watch for the actions of the company; negligence, inaction, their primary sin. Buying is supporting; Bill Gates is a moron for being an investor in Monsanto.
  

There be basically, degrees of freedom:

• freest citizens
  
• economic slaves (losing half their income to victim-compensation),
  
• prison inmates (who have compensated fully, now buying luxury goods and mansions in the prison island),
  
• prison slaves (losing half their income to victim-compensation),
  
• tied prison slaves (who have anger issues, so be somewhat elbow-restrained to prevent them from being violent toward other inmates),
  
• solitary-confinement prison slaves (zero reason to do so, yet, Japan does it all the time). Prisoners should be free to socialize, bond together, share a cell together, and these things don't increase the risks of prison-escape either.
  

Ultimately, life's purpose is to just live, make experiences, form memories, and learn some lessons. Death penalty is just wrong; so is solitary confinement when so many mechanisms exist to prevent violence among inmates via boxing-gloves-handcuffs, teeth-covers, and elbow and knee restrains.
REFORM THE POLICE:

• No impunity for cops. Cops be help liable for their actions, liable to the law. In fact, more liable.
  
• Learn from Prince Machiavelli lol; embrace some Game Theory. Legalize and grant moral impunity to cops who shoot down fellow cops abusing people wrongfully.
  

Those who think police reforms will never work are stupid; one lone man could make his men commit the organized genocide of 6 million, against the empathetic impulses of the men themselves, and they're saying, well-behaved police is impossible to have? What nonsense! Truth is, the powers that be are utterly inept or themselves psychopathic and fap to the videos of police officers punching women in the face for cursing them. Because the matter of fact is, one needs neither the right kind of people, nor the majority power, to commit acts of good or evil; just a good grip on whatever little power one has. Such a shame that literally no ruler alive knows how to rule.

• Cops be free to arrest fellow cops for misconduct.
  
• Cops (and others) be free to report such psychopathic cops.
  
• Samaritan protection laws. It be legal for strangers to beat a wife-beater beating his wife in public, or even, to shoot at a cop abusing someone when making arrest. Maybe even rewarding, in that, when imprisoned and compensated, the victim is free to pass on some share of her compensations to her savious who risked their well-being to save her.
  

In fact, no sociologist worth his salt would deny that women were safer and more protected from psychopaths and better off ten thousand years ago than in today's anonomyous mega societies; something even Ted Bundy alluded to. Sex as payments in ancient times lol, and David Friedman even hypothesizes that that's how and why women evolved concealed ovulation lol.

• for crimes like traffic law violation, no arresting and car-chases; the said person be sent a notice to appear in a court all by themself instead.
  
• city-state's domestic-law-enforcing cops be split into two teams:
  
• benign cops should not carry guns, instead, be wearing funny-looking non-intimidating bulletproof body suit and helmet and be carrying mancatchers, handcuffs, legcuffs; autistic people or psychopathic people never be hired, only those with very sharp social skills, and be trained to read social cues, to be funny, to crack jokes, make people laugh, break fights peacefully, or, as a last resort, arrest, but with dignity, never insulting the arrested, never judging, and be carrying those arrested on a bed instead of making them walk with their hands cuffed, which could be dangerous for drunk drivers, old people with arm pain, etc.
  
• gun-violence-control cops carry guns, but should only be deployed for gun-violence, wherein they might have to shoot (tranquilizers or bullets) to neutralize a gun-weilding madman.
  

Giving people unrestricted licence to kill is dangerous. No cops are better than bad cops. Just like no laws are better than bad laws whereby the average woman acting in self-defence gets sentenced to 20 years for killing her man, while a (drunk) man killing his wife gets 2 years. And that's a fact; women get five times longer sentences for homocide than men, in the US. And the average sentence for proven domestic violence cases is: a few weeks behind bars, with the possibility of parole and bail. Talk about feminism running rampant.
Some entrepreneurial suggessions:

• half the cops' income be locked in a conditional account, sorta a pension fund, which they lose entirely if they commit a crime on duty. Afterall, cops are petty puppet people too, who can be controlled by money just as neatly as any other.
  
• of the remaining half, half be conditional on the basis of being useful. Lazy cops who do nothing don't get that, and his employer be loosing more (from his allowance package; the more savings, the more his/her bonus) by design too, by hiring more useless cops without as much of a need in a neighbourhood. For making false arrests, arresting innocent people without reason, the cop be fined and the fine be handed to the person arrested wrongfully.
  
• like in Georgia, for misconduct (groping women, etc) or for taking bribes, the whole batch and the batch-leader (employer; sergent; whatever) be fired. Thus, sergents have every incentive to check for psychopathy (MRI tests, whatever), past history, beforehand, when hiring a cop.
  

REGARDING CHILDREN:

• corporal punishment be illegal,
  
• children who can pass language/literature test be full acting citizens, free to buy shares and vote in shareholder meetings,
  
• exploiting the power of the default to fiddle in the free-market of dating, for women's advantage. Why? Entrepreneurial: good laws that make women feel safe attract a surplus of rich happy attractive women who attract rich nice men (which need less police to manage), which means more population, lower expenses, higher dividents for the shareholders of the state!
  
• by default, for impregnating someone, whether they go through labour pain or lesser abortion pain, the guy be liable for a payment of 100k to her. [Vasectomies incentivized over pills, traumatic IUDs, fallopian-tying, all of which are unhealthy.]. Regarding science, though paternity tests and gene-sequencings are a blessing, IVF is a curse, and a woman could use a guy's skin dust for gametogenesis via stem-cell technology and impregnate herself with such artificial cum and the jury wouldn't know... Big gray zone.
  
• the mother gets the custody of the baby, always. Up to her to give up the custody to him or someone else if she feels so.
  
• artificial wombs be fully legal. It's utter pure hypocracy to advocate against external human-fetus-growth in labs past 7 days, in a world where slaughtering full grown animals, hunting them for fun, killing even SUPERIOR animals like Orcas, their entire families, baiting their mothers with their baby-whale tied in a fishing-net, is all legal. Artificial wombs are already fully viable, there's no scientific hurdle preventing them from being deployed, only legal. Regardless, for logistical reasons, I can bet many countries would be more than happy to adopt such technology in a decade. Only a matter of time.
  
• though every child deserves a female mother for none can love one like a woman does, it's something for culture to enforce and normalize, and for self-conscience to make gay couples consider a nanny/3rd-partner, not legal interventions.
  
• baby becomes an acting individual upon 3 years old, or whenever he can speak/read/write fluently and pass language tests, and has to read and sign the constitution or face eviction lol. Prodigies thus at an advantage in the money game 'cus they can start investing early on, unlike the current one which renders races which sexually mature before or at the legal age of 18 at an advantage over those who mature much later. Lol nevermind.
  
• up until the baby becomes an actor, animal-protection laws (or more specifically, pet-protection) laws should apply on the baby: no violence, no murder, unless in self-defence (i.e., almost never), no medical negligence, no abandoning the baby. For medical negligence or abandoning the baby, no sentencing, only blacklisting the said caretaker from future reproductive baby-care, so not allowed in kindergartens, schools, baby-spaces, and genetically blacklisted.
  
• criminals in prison should get genetically blacklisted. Eugenics is not a bad idea; it's the state that should stay out of it, except for the clensing of criminal genes. A criminal's entire descending-tree shuld get blacklisted; said violent criminal's children either get sterilized or promise to not procreate or get evicted. Gene banks be legal; culture should normalize borrowing the genes of (jewish/dutch) geniuses and raising their babies via IVF.
  

The selfish man doesn't have sex; he clones.
Why mix your genes with someone so different, of the opposite sex, despite being better than oneself. The fact that people have sex and choose good pretty intelligent partners unrelated to themselves, when compounded, is the same as adopting pure Jewish babies. Even Jews are distant cousins to all anyway. Heck, adopt orcas. Either black or white; clones or orcas; ignoring clone mutations (7 mutations per generation, I think), the latter, survival of the group over oneself, is a better strategy and thus more selfish a strategy, whereas the former is doomed to fail, at least for humans, and is only seen in ants which can afford a thousand kids and an epic one-in-a-thousand style selection pressures. Even if that's how superior alien societies operate, even in the latter case, most (worker ants) be raising the royal princes/princesses anyway; raising the babies of mathematical geniuses is not that different. Gene banking (positive eugenics) would speed evolution exponenetially!

• child-care payments. By default, the guy be liable to maternal-care payments to the mother.
  
• state-ensured child-care and pregnancy-payments to the mother. Even if the guy defaults/can't-pay, the state pays the mother and the state extorts the due from the guy in private/court. Mother always gets paid. Guy thus has no grudges against the mother, only the state. Such an arrangement reduces the chances of domestic or hate/revenge violence against the mother.
  
• prenups can be used to sway away from this defaults and arrange for custom scenarios.
  
• full liability for the baby/pet's actions. If your pet/baby hurts someone seriously, you be liable for full monetary compensation and economic slavery; you also lose your pet/baby-keeping licence.
  
• no impunity for acting children (post 3 years of age who have passed the tests) for commiting crimes. Schools should only accept acting-children, not babies. If your child punches another child on the head in school, he gets tried as an adult acting actor. Incentivizes parents to inculcate values of conviction to non-violence in their kids, if they wish to send them to schools and public places. If your babies are violent, postpone the language-comprehension test and constitution-signing and keep them at home; don't put other's kids at risk. American schools are a hellscape. Not only is segregation in schools outlawed, kids have legal impunity, so of course, (black) psycho bullies roam free and abound.
  
• full head-tax per baby. From day 1.
  

DO AWAY WITH SOCIAL SECURITY:

• Instead, private insurance companies can replace most of the services of social-security.
  
• An insurance package of 100k, insurance against homeless, whereby, once deposited, the company invests it in long term assets, compounds it with every passing day, and should one become bankrupt, one should be able to use such a Social-Security-Number to buy rent of up to 20$/day, food up to 10$/meal, three meals a day, for as long as one lives. Or pooled insurance based on average bankrupcy risk statistics, for much lower premium.
  
• Likewise, health insurance, bough from private insurance companies.
  
• For babies, an insurance package of orphan-insurance, so, should the parents die in a car crash or whatever, the insurance company pays its head-tax, pays for its orphanage fee, its schooling and medical expenses, etc.
  
• No, none, zero, nil whatsoever, restrictions/laws/rules on insurance companies. Hans Herman Hoppe is right on how messy and ridiculous the laws have made the insurance market into. Of course, if an insurance company defaults on its promises, it, like with all Full Liability Companies, should get scavenged along with its shareholders. But other than that, no forcing inclusion of fringe groups in insurance pools over such insurance companies.
  

TRANS-CONTINENTAL COLONY

• bribe some local leader and arrange for a colony in Africa whereupon to dump those unable to pay the taxes (the poor immigrants, for the most part; the dutch poor can be saved by private charities funding their head-tax) and those barred from dutch city-states (non-dutch).
  
• in the long run, deport them to whichever country they be willing to go, whichever be willing to accept them.
  

That's it. And just like that, you'd have fixed the Netherlands, and, the world being a mere copycat mirror-complex of stupid politicians (except Wilders) unable to think for themselves, only learning from other's experiences, very like the trickling down of monarchies after the French Revolution like a domino falls, just like that, you'd possibly have fixed the whole world! If the world sees from the Dutch exemplary example of privatization of statehood and follows suit, that would singlehandedly save humanity from poverty (socialism), war (tradelessness), and immorality (dictatorships like in Iran where morality police kills girls who don't wear proper dresses). The Dutch were the example of free-trade and privatization once before, they can do it again too.
Geert Wilders is the only hope.
Milei, being so totally anti-abortion, is an utter disgrace in the name of an Austrian Liberal; should have been aborted before he was even born.
Mises was, is, and forever will be, PRO-CHOICE.
That's right, I just said it. And any liberals who are pro-life are fake liberals who pretend to be liberals but are at the core, braindead or worse, psychopaths.
Nicholas Sarwark doesn't talk about abortion (to stay nice to both groups, when actually, that just makes him an idiot who'd get votes from neither unless he takes a stance; classic demogogue),
Ron Paul is very very against abortion too, his whole lineage sucks,
Justin Amash outright opposes it,
it's so funny, cause, Mises, Ludwig Von Mises, the guy he so likes to quote, himself was very pro-choice, and said the process of becoming sentient, becoming a consenting individual of the society, is "gradual", doesn't happen overnight, that a fetus is not the same as an adult, and above all, was a UTILITARIAN who believed in family-planning at the family-level as per the family's economic potential and incentives and time-preference, who vouched against state-sponsered eugenics and child-subsidies as population control measures, who believed in women being more of an acting being, was the champion of economic freedom for women, who in his own personal life recognized the entrepreneurial value bargain in prefering these talented undervalued women, who was the biggest feminist and women's liberator in the history of manking (equal contestent with Morgentaler, another Jew)! Amash's (and others') preaching Mises wholly, saying that their views are practically indistinguishable from Mises's, then opposing abortion, is like killing people "in the name of God the creator"; it's pure blasphemy, heck, worse than that, for Mises is above God, and these false preachers shall be judged harshly by Mises' immortal spirit. *inhales lol.
Not all races are equal. Sexual and survival stretegies dictate the differences. The muslims have been murdering the intelligent (dissident/scientific) and beautiful (emo boys/girls) among themselves for more than a millenia; no wonder they've gotten so retarded. The Chinese are apathetic people, bred to obey, war, and kill, without remorse; free-thinking pricipled dissidents all but extinct among them. Evolutionary psychologists who think that war is good for the genes are idiots; sure, war is good for genes, but peace is better. Heck, EVERYTHING is good for the genes. The genes are set on a track to evolve forwards, and they'd only do so, and abominations like Islam are mere incidental dips in a more or less upward-rising curve. The least-warring greeks were the most feminist, the highest longevity-people, the most nicest, until war struck Europe too.
The Dutch are one of the best races in the world, second only to the Jews who have significantly higher IQ, higher empathy, the lowest domestic violence and physical violence rates, and the cleanest past history (never practiced witchhunts, and despite brutal punishments legal in Judiasm, never practiced them; it's like, despite judiasm, the Jews never gave in to barbarianism; such noble genes; never committed genocides), way better than the forever stained dutch history of the witchhunts which took the lives of some 300 innocent women... Still, the Dutch are better than the rest, by a huge margin. Not to mention the Dutch are the most good-looking tall handsome honest people in the whole world. Unpopular opinion but, me thinks Geert Wilders is the most handsome man ever; boy would I pay to suck his cock lol. Even an imaginary anime character better looking than Wilders is too wild an idea to be plausible lol. Lol I literaly saw him in my dream yesterday on the second day of discovering him and binge-watching his videos, lol.
The Dutch people need saving. You're already very few in numbers; intermarriage is the Dutch's biggest existential threat; extinction by dissolution. A Dutch State is the only possible saviour; people mostly only fall in love with someone within a mile from them; a state wherein most (if not all) are Dutch, would thus preserve the dutch genes.
A free-market championing privatization-proposing Geert Wilders wouldn't need to resort to Islam to achieve the end result all Dutch people desire: a safe and prosperous Netherlands for the Dutch.
Thanks.
-- Mises's No. 1 Cocksucker.

[Thumbnail🪞]
Hello, and welcome to the second installment of my Emilie Autumn write-up. (Per mod recommendation, new installments will be posted every two or three days – there are seven in total.)
Emilie Autumn is a singer-songwriter with an elaborate semi-fictional universe and a complicated relationship with her fanbase. I strongly recommend you check out Part 1 🔍 before reading.
In this installment, we dive into the drama surrounding the contents of The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls / TAFWVG – the half-autobiographical journal, half-historical fantasy that has defined EA's artistic output and fanbase lore for the past fifteen years. It's still more “Hobby History” than “Hobby Drama” proper, but trust me, it provides valuable context about the general vibes of the fandom.
Content Warning throughout this installment for themes of sexual and gender-based violence, including torture, sex trafficking and femicide, as well as attempted suicide, mental illness, hospitalization, and ableist discrimination; brief mention of Holocaust imagery. Oh, and obviously, spoiler alert for the whole book – but that's comprehensive investigative work for ya!
🪞 = picture / visual 🎵 = music / audio 📺 = video 📝 = primary source / receipt 🔍 = press article / write-up / further reading 🎤 = song lyrics 🐀 = anonymous fan confession 🦠 = reaction / meme

OVERVIEW: “A DOCUMENT IN MADNESS – THOUGHTS AND REMEMBRANCE FITTED” (LAERTES, ACT IV, SCENE 5)

...When the book was first released, I had only two aims - to explain myself to a growing audience that thought they knew me but didn't truly, and then to expose the corruption of the modern day mental health care system and educate in order to inspire at least a tiny bit of change. (EA answers a fan question on Goodreads, 2018 📝)

The Book begins with Emilie Autumn...
...Well, technically The Book begins with a malapropism. Wrong “foreword”, EA! 🪞 Which is our first clue that despite the myriad revised editions this book has gone through, it could probably have done with a little more initial editing, and perhaps a bit more room to reflect, between the events related and the publication of the first final draft.
Anyway, The Book begins with first-person narrator Emilie Autumn surviving a suicide attempt, stating this to her shrink over the phone soon after. Her shrink tells her that she is currently a danger to herself, and that he won't refill her prescriptions (the meds for her bipolar disorder) unless she immediately checks herself into inpatient care. And it all goes downhill from there.
The psych ward stay at an LA hospital lasts longer than the anticipated 72 hours, and proves overall more traumatic than therapeutic. An increasingly distressed Emilie suffers through the inappropriate comments of creepy doctors, the poor bedside manners and general cluelessness of emotionally numb nurses, the intimidating presence of armed guards around the hospital, being stripped of her belongings and privacy, the lack of transparency or actual care in the ward, her partner's indifference during the occasional phone call, the bad hospital food (I can see how that would suck in such a context), having to repeatedly fill out forms and questionnaires (okay, that's annoying too), a patient eating yoghurt in her vicinity (uh...) and staff members existing while fat (wait, what?). She documents the whole unpleasant experience in a journal that she has to turn in at bedtime.
One day, upon recovering her notebook in the morning, Emilie starts finding torn scraps of ancient wallpaper between the pages. They're scribbled with letters from a young woman named Emily, who is also locked up against her will in a psychiatric facility – namely, a women's insane asylum... in Victorian England. Awaiting each new time-traveling letter with bated breath, Emilie gradually learns that the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (yes, that's its actual name within the story) isn't so much a hospital as it is a dumping ground / torture dungeon. Women – who aren't so much “crazy” as unconventional and inconvenient to men – are kept in chains, subjected to leechings and ice baths, pimped out as human exhibits and sex slaves, and killed en masse in gruesome medical experiments by a psychopathic doctor who's like a Disney-villain take on Dr Mengele. “My life and hers are basically the same. Nothing has changed at all in mental healthcare,” thinks Emilie in the modern-day psych ward, as a nurse offensively tells her that it's time for art therapy.
Alright, that was a long summary, and I'm showing my bias a little bit. But the contents and tone of the book are relevant to this write-up – as are, of course, the common criticisms that arose in the years after its publication.

A (BI)POLARIZED RECEPTION

In the spirit of neutrality and historical accuracy, I will quote some 5-star Goodreads reviews that I think reflect the reasons why many people genuinely loved and continue to love the book...

I don't think I've ever read anything like TAFWVG. It is amazing, horrifying, and both a work of magical fiction and brutal honesty. I felt like for the first time I had found someone who could understand how I feel. I identified on so many levels with this book, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. I appreciate Emilie as an artist so much more now because I realize just how much of herself she puts into everything she does. (...)
What scares me is that it is so incredibly real and several times, I felt as if Emilie was speaking thoughts I've had myself. (...) So many of the things she expressed during states of depression for these characters make so much sense to me, though, and I greatly value how real and honest this is. (📝)
Having some of Emilie Autumn's actual handwriting in the book made it much more personal and made it seem much more like a journal than just any ordinary book. This is a must read for any "muffin" (Emilie Autumn fan). (📝)

...and some of the less scathing and more nuanced 1-star reviews, highlighting common complaints about the book's contents and tone:

The writing was not strong enough to handle the story being told and there were so many issues from how mental health was handled to the entitled behaviour of the main character to the treatment of all the other characters, I ended up giving up in frustration. It’s a shame as this could have been a really interesting exploration of the mental health system in America paralleled with that of the 1800s, but instead just turned into a lot of, in some cases offensive, ramblings. (📝)
I was shocked in the opening pages by the voice of the main character, and I don't think it was a technique to give her depth. It sounded like genuine elitism with the flavor of "I should be allowed to kill myself." Um. Ok??? (...) I wish the prose had been tolerable for me to get to the high concept journal entry stuff, but everything that the premise promises... from the quality of what I read, it falls very, very short. There are horrible elements to being inside an institution: it's scary, it's dehumanizing, it definitely isn't the "best" space for healing... but this author does not have the knowledge, expertise, or perspective to provide an adequate critique. (📝)
The torture and rape are mentioned as daily occurrences and, while I'm sure such things did occur in Victorian times, it was so overdone and hinted to with such macabre glee, I felt I was watching someone's sordid fantasy. (...) This is not a solemn look at mental illness from the inside. It is a glamorized, twisted, fetishist notion of mental illness and asylums which made me feel truly uncomfortable. (📝)

...I opted not to quote this one because it was too savage and not always fair, but it's a fun read.
In short, the people who enjoy the book tend to praise the engaging storyline, the witty and eloquent writing, the raw authenticity, the depths of insight, and getting to take a peek inside EA's brain. The people who don't, on the other hand, criticize the unbalanced structure, the overwrought and rambling style, the obvious distortions or straight-up fabrications (we'll get to that, all in good time), the acute main character syndrome, the seeming lack of self-awareness or appropriate research (despite claims of “historical accuracy”), the flippant and even dangerous claims about highly sensitive topics, and being made to read stuff that should probably have stayed firmly concealed inside EA's brain.
Many critics report being put off by EA's high opinion of her own intellect and booksmarts, as she routinely assumes staff members to be too dim-witted, uncultured and incompetent to be worth engaging with. (Which is a bit rich, coming from a self-tutored West Coaster who inaccurately claims to speak “the Queen's English” and misspells “in memoriam”.) She takes this disdain to... really mean places. Some readers were especially taken aback by a series of straight-up petty, out-of-left-field fatphobic jabs. 📝
Others cringed (and this is a serious problem for an author who claims to be an advocate) at EA's blatant disdain of any other form of mental illness besides her own. This mostly shines though callous and cruel descriptions of those she calls “the real crazies” – meaning the other patients. By callous, I mean she spends several paragraphs calling a detox patient cute nicknames like “the Duchess von Nutsberg”, “Miss Nuttersby” or “the Mayor of Cracktown” as she gleefully mocks her withdrawal meltdown – with a subtle dig at Courtney thrown in for good measure (second screenshot, end of first paragraph). It's one of the only instances when EA expresses sympathy for the staff; as she hears them brutalizing the problematic patient in the other room, she muses that, in their place, she would probably want to “bash [the woman's] head against the wall”. This is intended as comic relief from her own narrative.
But the most all-encompassing complaint is EA's perceived glamorization of mental anguish and extreme suffering. (Not the gross kind that's experienced by lowly crack addicts – the other kind, the refined kind.)
This complaint refers, in large part, to the book's apparent glorification of self-harm, and categorically negative depiction of psychiatric care. On top of the two main narratives, the book also included three pre-hospitalization journals – the “Cutting Diary”, the “Suicide Diary” and the “Drug Diary” – whose unfiltered, unapologetic contents (including high-contrast pictures of fresh self-harm cuts) were very polarizing.
I will note that EA herself, in interviews, has overtly stated that she's not anti-medication or therapy, and that physically hurting yourself is not a great strategy in the long run. But these nuancing statements are not present in the book. Some former fans have cited EA and her work as a reason why they delayed seeking medical help for their own self-harm and mental health issues.
The complaint also refers to the abundant depictions of tragically gorgeous women being subjected to the most odious abuse, and justifying their self-destructive tendencies as appropriate reactions to said abuse.
Mmh, what did that one Goodreads reviewer mean about “someone's sordid fantasy”...? CW for rape, torture, murder. This is the way... step inside! 🎵

PSYCHSPLOITATION EXTRAVAGANZA

Come see our girls! Crazy girls! If you're willing to be thrilled, this is a hell of a ride! Those girls! Crazy girls! They're hot! They're nuts! They're suicidal! (“Girls! Girls! Girls!”, 2012 📺🎵)

Many comparisons have been drawn with the video game Alice: Madness Returns and the movie Sucker Punch. (In fact, EA got thiiis close to accusing Zack Snyder of plagiarism📝, but wisely stopped short.) In my humble opinion, those similarities are essentially cosmetic, and don't really cut to the quick of what makes TAFWVG – and what makes it so familiar, yet so bizarre within its purported genre. So allow me to share my white-hot take on this self-published fantasy novel from the first Obama presidency.
You heard it here first, folks, and only fifteen years late: TAFWVG is basically a Sweeney Todd reskin of Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtues 🔍), by the infamous Marquis de Sade.
I'm doubtful that Sade was a conscious, direct influence on EA, and the two books are obviously very different in style and explicitness – but they have many, many tropes in common. Hear me out.
Both Emily-with-a-Y and Justine are virtuous, pure-hearted heroins of singular eloquence and beauty (or, for those familiar with literary parlance, “Mary-Sues”) who have The Absolute Worst Luck. Both grew up around wealth and sophistication, but abruptly found themselves poor and alone in the world as teenagers – though both are briefly reunited with a long-lost sister during the plot. (In both cases, one sister dies. Like I said, terrible luck!) Both find themselves in a world of sin and depravity that they vehemently reject, while almost all the other characters gleefully revel in base greed, power schemes, and pure sadism.
After fleeing her convent school to escape the indecent advances of a priest, Justine is entrapped by a gang of depraved aristocrats who use her as a sex slave before having her thrown in jail as a thief. A cold, unscrupulous older woman helps her escape, and forces her to join her gang of robbers. Soon, Justine falls in with a succession of colorful maniacs, such as a medical enthusiast who wants to vivisect his own daughter, a man who rapes women specifically to get them pregnant and kill their newborn babies, and an order of lurid monks who turned their convent into a private sex dungeon.
Compare with TAFWVG:
After being groomed by a human trafficking ring fronting as a music school, Emily is sold off to a depraved aristocrat who would use her as a sex slave – and who, we later learn, murdered one of his own daughters for fun during an orgy. She escapes, but is soon arrested and jailed as a thief for stealing a loaf of bread (I suspect that may draw on another classic of French literature 🎵📺). A cold, unscrupulous older woman bails Emily out, but only for a forcible transfer to the Asylum – which her doctor-son uses as an human experimentation lab and for-profit sex dungeon. When inmates inevitably get pregnant, they are forced to receive botched abortions and hysterectomies, and various other un-sedated mutilations, from a twisted surgeon who is implied to be (gasp!) a young Jack the Ripper.
(In both cases, I personally find that it's the sheer accumulation of impossibly sordid twists that makes the reading bearable, and possibly even fun, rather than just sickening. Each new misfortune is so fantastically awful that the whole thing becomes about as poignant and realistic as The Human Centipede.)
One last intriguing detail: not only were Justine and TAFWVG both written while “inside” (the Bastille and an LA hospital, respectively), both were also reworked by their author several times after publication. And both heroins' fates somehow got worse with every re-issue! Lest we forget: one narrative is a 2009 historical fiction that was meant to champion female empowerment, sisterhood, and more compassion in the treatment of mental illness. The other is 18th century non-con porn that was so brutally graphic, so outrageously deranged, that its author was deemed a menace to society and sentenced to live out his days... in an insane asylum. (Tangent: it's even more darkly funny when you know that 1. Sade was a legit monster, a repeat offender of heinous sexual crimes, but it was the freaking book that got him locked away for good, and 2. he was arrested while on his way to submit yet another version of the manuscript.)
What's interesting is that EA explicitly addresses – and ostensibly calls out! – the exact sort of exploitation and objectification, specifically of mentally ill women, which many readers feel she enacts in the book. It was a central theme in Opheliac: here's her discussing the erotic undertones in Romantic-era depictions of dying women. 🎤 In TAFWVG, the inmates are forcibly dressed with ethereal white gowns and flowers in their hair for a human exhibit / brothel that the doctors call “The Ophelia Gallery”. 🪞 Johns frequently pay to see the girls re-enact Ophelia's death in a bathtub; Emily deems this “madness at its most perverse”.
But then again, it's a time-honored tradition for exploitation media, both fiction and non-fiction – from Reefer Madness 🔍 to Cannibal Holocaust to Michelle Remembers – to cover its ass by clamoring that it's merely "raising awareness" and "showing the truth" of the horrors it depicts in exquisite, lurid detail.

”AFFLICTION, PASSION, HELL ITSELF, SHE TURNS TO FAVOUR AND TO PRETTINESS” (LAERTES, ACT IV SCENE 5): WINNERS OF THE 'MISS UNDERSTOOD' BEAUTY PAGEANT

A number of fans certainly raised an eyebrow at this darkly fetishistic aspect 🐀 📝 of the Asylum narrative, even when they couldn't quite put their finger on what didn't sit right with them. Some wrote it off as cathartic fantasy, like a lot of EA's work. Some expressed mild discomfort, and kindly called the book “paradoxical”. Others were outright disgusted by what they perceived as blatant hypocrisy and trauma-profiteering. The concept definitely hasn't aged very well; in fact, in recent years, there's been increasing pushback 🔍 against the “insane asylum” as a setting for horror fiction. Advocates find that those stories tend to reinforce harmful stereotypes against psych patients, trivialize medical brutality as entertainment, and make it even scarier for people to seek treatment when they need it.
But! For the book's first several years of existence, this discomfort was definitely not mainstream in the fandom. In fact, it was pretty marginal – underground, even; the general consensus was that the whole thing was awesome.
Let me illustrate. Soon after the book came out, EA got a tattoo on her right bicep that read “W14A” (Emily's assigned, tattooed number in the Asylum), to symbolize how she had been “branded for life” by her hospital stay. Over the following years, she started assigning “inmate numbers”, with a similar four-digit format, to fans who requested it online or during meet-and-greets. A number of Asylum forum members started using their unique number as a username or flair; to this day, some fans still use theirs to sign comments on EA's Instagram. A fair few also got their inmate number tattooed.
There are a few reasons for this years-long honeymoon period before the first waves of outrage. First of all, “years” is how long it took before a substantial portion of the active fanbase had actually read the book. On top of dispatching delays, the first and second editions were full-color hardbacks, selling in limited pressings at about $50 plus shipping, which a lot of youngepoorer fans could not readily afford: they had to rely on second-hand accounts from the ultra-fans who did manage to get their hands on a copy. And many such ultra-fans were also young people, who may have been led to EA by their own mental health struggles, a taste for the dramatic – and in many cases, sadly, a personal history of trauma that made it easy not to be phased. To a good part of EA's audience, the blunt violence and over-the-top edginess wasn't tacky or unsettling: it was unironically cool and genuinely relatable. Cool enough to overlook the bad takes and casual bigotry, if you picked up on them at all in the excitement.
Besides, EA pushed The Book so hard, as early as 2007, that before it was even officially released in late 2009, it had become the all-encompassing framework for the entire fan experience. From the music to the stage shows to the in-group slang and lore, everything was Asylum now. So I imagine that even if you hadn't read the book, or weren't all that into it, it was kind of a “tune in or else tune out” situation.
Anyway, that's about all I can think of to explain what possessed dozens, hundreds of fans, across continents, for years, to actually cosplay as “Wayward Victorian Girls” from the story (just to reiterate: mentally ill rape-and-torture victims who, by the end, are being killed in droves and either buried in mass graves or incinerated). I'm talking madwoman tousled hair, sleep-eludes-me smoky eyes, thigh-high black-and-white striped stockings, and virginal “hospital gowns” (white slip dresses), sometimes complete with fake blood splatter. Dressing up for EA shows, or public Muffin Meetups. Posing wistfully for artsy photoshoots in empty bathtubs or childhood bedrooms – or your local abandoned house, through the metal bars of a smashed ground floor window, so it looks like you're in jail. (No, I am not going to dig through DeviantArt for evidence of my claims. I'm assuming a number of the people in those pictures now have kids and stable jobs, and I'm afraid someone might put a hit on my head for causing their blunderyears to resurface.)
Look, I'm not clutching my pearls and saying that those dreamy-edgy visuals were all horrendously insensitive or caused any tangible harm. OR that there's no merit in “shocking” or “distasteful” art that takes a controversial approach to real-world horrors, including glamorizing them.
But even as an outspoken proponent of smut and an staunch cringe apologist, I do find it a bit surreal, looking back from the year 2024, how chill most of the fandom was with the core concept of LARPing as... survivors... of mass incarceration and torture... in striped uniforms... with numbers tattooed on their bodies...? Yeaaah, this feels more and more uncomfortable the longer I think about it. Your Honor, I plead collective insanity for this one. After all, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “you are what you pretend to be.”
*
Ah, well. Art sure is complicated! We can at least take some comfort in the fact that the Offensively Titillating material is mainly contained within the obviously fictional part of the book. Can you imagine the mess if, like the autobiographical portions, the Bedlam Softcore bits featured actual people from EA's real life?!
I mean. Given enough time, that could get pretty awkward.
...We'll circle back to that in the next installment.

Date: 04/29/2024

Reading time: 4 minutes, 865 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Ruling party Honorary Chair says country will become EU member in 2030

Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder and Honorary Chair of the ruling Georgian Dream party, said the country would become a member of the European Union in 2030. He told a rally in Tbilisi in support of the controversial bill on transparency of foreign influence Georgia was a “clear leader” among EU candidate countries.

AgendaGe, Bidzina Ivanishvili Backs Anti-Western Policies, Threatens Repressions, Ivanishvili: A free, independent, sovereign Georgia – this is our Georgian dream, Citizens from Georgia’s regions join GD gathering at Parliament

7th opposition deputy kicked out of the session of the legal committee

Ana Tsitlidze is the 7th opposition deputy to have been kicked out from the session so far today as the foreign agents bill is discussed in the second reading.

GeorgiaToday

Legal Issues Committee Greenlights Foreign Agents Bill in Second Hearing

On April 29, the Legal Issues Committee of the Parliament of Georgia endorsed the Foreign Agents Bill in the second hearing. Committee Chair Anri Okhanashvili had extensively used his authority to limit the opportunity for opposition to comment on the draft law, expelling 17 people, including opposition MPs and CSO representatives.

CivilGe, CSOs Accuses Legal Issues Committee Chair of Abusing Power to Silence Opposition, Legal Issues Committee Holds Contentious Second Hearing on Foreign Agents Law, Legal committee backs Foreign Influence Transparency Bill with second reading

Georgian Business Association Says Worried About Instability, Backs Government

The Business Association of Georgia (BAG) expressed concern that “political processes unfolding in the country” may threaten “a stable and predictable business environment” The Association says it is worried about the law on “transparency of foreign influence,” but only inasmuch as its potential negative impact on the country's economy and growth is concerned.

CivilGe

Parliament Speaker: Our independence was and is being threatened by visible and invisible threats

Chairman of the Parliament of Georgia, Shalva Papuashvili, spoke at the public meeting organized by “Georgian Dream’s’ ‘Long live independent Georgia!’ – this was the call that charged the Georgian nation with a common goal and gained us freedom, he said.

GeorgiaToday

Georgians to be able to travel to China without a visa from May 28

Georgian citizens will be able to travel to China without a visa and stay there for up to 30 consecutive days starting from May 28, 2024. The visa-free regime for Chinese citizens travelling to Georgia has been in effect since September 11, 2023.

GeorgiaToday

European Union, United Nations, and Austria Join Efforts with the Georgian Government to Improve Air Quality in Georgia

With EUR 4 million in EU funding, the four-year initiative builds on cooperation with the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture of Georgia, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UNECE, and the Environment Agency Austria (UBA) The IQAir Index ranks Georgia 62nd out of 134 countries in terms of air pollution.

GeorgiaToday, EU and UNDP Foster Women’s Empowerment and Promote Community Resilience in Georgia

Date: 04/28/2024

Reading time: 2 minutes, 424 words

🪖 Military

The registration of "Eliso" works for the Nato Vachnadze Foundation prize has started

"Nato Vachnadze Foundation is the first project of the NATO Vachsadze foundation. The acceptance of works for the "s;Eliso" ; prize of the. first prize is held for the first time this year. The award ceremony will be held on June 14, in Gurjaani, in the Nato. Vastadze House-Museum.

GeorgiaToday

🏛️ Politics & Government

Zurabishvili: Elections “Historical Moment,” EU Won’t Make Decisive Moves Before

President Salome Zurabishvili spoke to France’s international broadcaster, RFI, about the recent developments in Georgia. She said the “historical moment” will come in October, with parliamentary elections, “when Georgia would have to affirm its [European] choice” She also said that the coalition government will emerge from the elections, which would reject in entirety these un-European laws.

CivilGe

One Step Closer to Europe – What Does EU Candidate Status Mean for Georgia’s Economic Development?

Georgian government, opposition, and civil society groups all hailed this decision as a “historic day” and a significant step forward in Georgia’s aspirations to become an EU member state. The EU market has around 450 million people and a GDP of $19 trillion, second only to the U.S. in terms of global markets.

GeorgiaToday

Georgia’s Public Safety Command Centre hosts UN permanent representatives

Giorgi Arsoshvili hosted permanent representatives of several countries to the United Nations. He briefed the UN representatives about the main directions of the Command Centre’s activities.

AgendaGe

ADB to Help Enhance Health Care in Georgia

Asian Development Bank has approved a €46.3 million ($50 million) policy-based loan to help improve access to quality and affordable health care in Georgia. ADB’s Health Sector Enhancement Program will support the government of Georgia to improve quality of healthcare and mandate certification of continuous medical education and continuous professional development requirements for medical personnel.

GeorgiaToday, IFC Commits New Financing to Isbank Georgia to Boost Access to Finance for SMEs

UNDP and GEF Small Grants Program Drive Energy-Efficient Initiatives in Dusheti Municipality

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is actively engaged across Georgia, working with local communities to tackle pressing environmental challenges. The partnership focuses on distributing locally produced solid biomass to communities facing energy challenges, particularly those in the highlands lacking access to natural gas.

GeorgiaToday

💵 Economy

Gateway to Development – Assessing Georgia’s Middle Corridor Opportunity

Escalating hazards on the major Eurasian east-west trade routes are heightening international investment commitments to an alternative that is favorable for the Georgian economy. The busiest and fastest Eurasian land route, the Russian-dominated Northern Corridor, has become less attractive in the face of freight insurance challenges following its invasion of Ukraine. An efficient Middle Corridor could offer, the consultancy German Economic Research Team suggests, a clear advantage in terms of transport time between China and Europe at 13 to 21 days compared to the sea route.

GeorgiaToday

Date: 04/27/2024

Reading time: 1 minutes, 334 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Russia’s Last War and a New “Iron Curtain” on the European Continent

Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili and European Parliamentarian Viola von Kramon say the “Georgian Dream’s’ is actually a “Russian Dream” Author Zaza Bibilashvili says Russia is not a strategic partner but an enemy in the most prosaic sense of this word. Georgia occupies a distinct position in the frenzied gamble conceived within the twisted mind of a nefarious dictator.

CivilGe, For Georgia: Policy of ‘Dream’ leads to severing strategic partnership with US, subversion of EU integration, 14 Senators to Georgian PM: If foreign agents bill becomes law, we’ll be forced to encourage change in US policy towards Georgia

Kobakhidze: EP resolution has no value, it aims to intimidate Georgian society

Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Kobakhidze responded to resolution adopted by European Parliament regarding Georgia on April 25. He said MEPs have been trying to intimidate the Georgian society for the last few years and the resolutions adopted by them have no value. The resolution stresses that draft law is contrary to Georgia’s democratic values and EU aspirations.

GeorgiaToday

Church Endorses Ruling Party Policies Ahead of Crucial Vote

The Patriarchy of the Georgian Orthodox Church issued a late-night statement on April 27. The statement comes as the Parliament readies to endorse the highly controversial law on agents of foreign influence in its second reading. It argues that “the line of confrontation is now drawn on a field of combat against values and state sovereignty”

CivilGe

💵 Economy

Georgia preparing for EU integration, maintaining strategic cooperation in region - Finance Minister

Georgian Finance Minister Lasha Khutsishhvili was speaking at ADB Insight discussion. He said the country's economy showed “a strong resilience” amid the challenges. He highlighted structural reforms and implemented initiatives that “created a fairly good basis for the economic recovery”

AgendaGe

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