This Is One Of The Many, Many Infuriating Things About Disingenuous Constitutional Originalism In Right-wing

This is one of the many, many infuriating things about disingenuous constitutional originalism in right-wing legal thinking. The whole point of America is that it was supposed to be a work in progress. The people up there with no dots knew it, and the ones with yellow dots realized it. That's why there are amendments. That's why there were immediate amendments. The Constitution was always supposed to be a first draft of a political system.

“This country was founded by a group of slave owners who told us that all men are created equal. To my mind, that is what’s known as being stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit.” - George Carlin

…PolitiFact going through history to fact check this guy was like that time CNN went through history to dig up dirt on Bernie, and all they found were videos of him planting trees, and telling kids that racism is bad.

... what about more like 450k of slowburn? #deusex #askingforafriend

Sometimes with 2 characters, I don't ship them a such but I'm still open for any 300k slowburn longfic willing to make a solid argument. Convince me.

WIP Wednesday

For anyone who thought the Deus Ex prequels needed more realism, more Pritchard and Malik, more interrogation of the experience of being turned into a bladed death machine, and more FINISHING THE PLOT AND CONNECTING IT TO THE ORIGINAL GAMES (Embracer are private-equity vultures and I hate them), allow me to present Gods of Blood and Iron! Following Reconstruction, about Jensen's recovery from his original augmentation, and Et Resurrexit, covering the events of DX:HR with very slight canon divergence, we have now come to Custos Custodium, which approximately covers Black Light and DX:MD with rather more canon divergence. Below is a snippet from the most recent chapter:

“I’m letting him in,” Jensen whispered. “Maybe he’ll overbalance.” She nodded, and he opened the door. A fist like a piledriver hissed through the air and he cut down on it with all his might, right where he had gouged the wrist before. He got another half-inch of depth. Vande put a round in Hermann’s chest, then another, and a third, her augmented hand holding the boxy little Walther rock-steady.

“Bah—unglaublich! I thought we had a gentleman’s agreement, Herr Jensen: single combat! Apparently I was wrong!” Hermann shouted as his sword slid from his arm. He struck at Jensen’s face, his left arm still outside the locomotive. Jensen blocked it and cut at the underside of the big Aug’s right wrist as the only meaningful target. Hermann grunted and bore down with his sword, forcing Jensen’s arm lower. He skipped back, disengaged, and brought his left blade over and down again at the same point. It sank in and caught. The shield blurred through the doorway and smashed him from his feet. He felt his clavicle snap. With a thump, he landed heavily on his ass beside Vande. Hermann loomed triumphantly in the doorway. Jensen saw victory in his eyes and wished he could disagree.

Then he looked at the train controls, seized by a mad idea. It was terrible, idiotic, but it might just offer a way out. And what did he have to lose? He sure as hell wasn’t letting the Illuminati take him alive to do mad science on him. As Hermann navigated his bulk through the doorway, Jensen rammed the manual throttle forward and snapped it off at the end of its range. Then he scanned the instrument panel and drove a blade through the governor module that read track characteristics ahead. It failed with a shower of sparks and the reek of burning insulation.

The big man froze. “What is this?” he growled.

“Zero-win, Hermann. This train is jumping the tracks on the first downhill curve, in about… forty-five seconds, if I remember the pass correctly. No augs for anyone. You can stay here and die, or live to fight another day. It’ll take you longer than that to drag me out of here alive. Forty.”

Over his infolink, he abandoned any pretense of cool and shouted subvocally, “Vega! Need a pickup at that first hairpin! Train’s coming off the tracks, and I’m coming with it, with one injured and about half an Icarus!”

Hermann stared at him. He swallowed. “Thirty-five.”

The shield whisked in on itself and away. The sword rose in salute, perhaps ironic, before it too withdrew. Hermann stepped casually off the side of the train, a flicker of golden lightning following him down the cliff face.

“Uh, I dunno about that vector, Jensen.” Vega’s voice shook. “Two of you and half an Icarus are gonna come out pretty damn steep. I’ll be there, but…”

“All I can ask.” He grunted as he hauled himself upright and took Vande’s hand in his left. The right might not bear weight with the clavicle destroyed as it was—he’d need repairs to the titanium sheathing. “This is gonna hurt,” he warned her. She nodded, expression closed, braced against the pain to come. He knelt and hauled her across his shoulders so her limbs dangled down in front of his chest. Holding her wrists and ankles, he lurched to his feet. Vande screamed through lips pressed tight and spasmed against his shoulders. What was the count? Twenty? Less?

He staggered onto the platform at the back of the locomotive. They were headed downhill and gathering speed. He saw the turn ahead, saw the hovering VTOL. She was right. It was a shitty goddamn angle. They weren’t going to make the jump.

Then another voice sounded in his link. “Whoever you are, get outta my airspace—I’ve got this,” and a dove-and-rust VTOL swooped up the ravine.

Jensen stared in disbelief. “Malik?”

“What? Who says? This is my op!” Vega snapped back.

“I said, get clear!” The other VTOL skidded inside Vega’s, closer to the train, and the cabin door fought its way open against the slipstream as the interloper matched velocity with the hurtling locomotive. It was definitely the Bumblebee.

Vega’s bird swerved away. Jensen heard a couple of Spanish obscenities before she dropped out of the channel.

“I got you,” Malik said, calm but focused, like she was talking to the tower. “Wait for it. Jump on my mark. Three… two… one… mark!”

He jumped. The Icarus struggled valiantly against the weight of two tall, muscular humans and the metal bolted to their skeletons, but all it did was flatten their arc a hair. The Bumblebee rolled all the way up on one wing and sideslipped, slower than they fell, and they tumbled through the door and slid across the steeply tilted floor and slammed into the overstuffed couches.

And they were in. The VTOL leveled out and fought for altitude. A wingtip screamed across the cliff face, and then they looped up and away, the train plunging to its doom as he watched through the closing cabin door.

Born too early to participate in a distributed cyberdemocracy where every nutcase with a brain implant gets a vote in the Cislunar DigiCongress, born too late to watch a guy get run through with a spear at the Althing :/

if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

More trains!