text:
HUBERT “CUBBY” SELBY JR. (July 23, 1928 – April 26, 2004) was an American writer. His best-known novels are _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ (1964) and _Requiem for a Dream_ (1978), exploring worlds in the New York area. Both novels were adapted later as films, and he appeared in small roles in each.

Selby wrote about a harsh underworld seldom portrayed in literature. His first novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom and banned in Italy, prompting defences from many leading authors such as Anthony Burgess. He was highly influential to more than a generation of writers; for more than 20 years, he taught creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived full-time after 1983.

Biography

Early life and education

Hubert Selby was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, to Adalin and Hubert Selby Sr., a merchant seaman and former coal miner from Kentucky. Selby and his wife Adalin had settled in Bay Ridge. The boy attended public schools, including the competitive Stuyvesant High School. His childhood nickname, “Cubby”, accompanied him through his life.

Selby Jr. dropped out of school at the age of 15, to work in the city docks, before becoming a merchant seaman in 1947.[1] That year, while at sea, Selby Jr. was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis (“TB”) due to the cows on board, which had bovine tuberculosis; doctors predicted that he would live less than a year .

He was taken off the ship in Bremen, Germany, and sent back to the United States. For the next three and a half years, Selby was in and out of the U.S. Public Health Hospital (part of a system of hospitals originally established to care for merchant seamen)[2] in New York for treatment. Antibiotics had not been available and TB was widespread.

Selby went through an experimental drug treatment, streptomycin, that later caused some severe complications. During an operation, surgeons removed several of Selby's ribs in order to reach his lungs.[3] One of his lungs collapsed, and doctors removed part of the other. While the surgery saved Selby's life, he had a year-long recuperation and chronic pulmonary problems for the rest of his life. Selby was given painkillers, among them morphine, because of the severity of the surgery, and he became addicted. He struggled with substance abuse for decades.

Becoming a writer

With no qualifications, no work experience aside from the Merchant Marine, and his poor health, Selby had trouble finding a job. He had married his wife Inez V. “Tiny” Taylor and they had two children, whom he raised while his wife worked in a department store.

For the next ten years, Selby was mostly bedridden; he was frequently hospitalized with a variety of lung-related ailments. The doctors offered a bleak prognosis, suggesting he was unlikely to survive long because he “just didn't have enough lung capacity”. Gilbert Sorrentino, a childhood friend who had become a writer, encouraged Selby to write fiction. Unable to have regular work because of his health, Selby decided, “I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.”[4]

He later wrote:

  I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.[5]

With no formal training, Selby used a raw language to portray the bleak and violent world that was part of his youth. He has said, “I write, in part, by ear. I hear, as well as feel and see, what I am writing. I have always been enamoured with the music of the speech in New York.”[6]

Little concerned with proper grammar, punctuation, or diction, Selby used unorthodox techniques in most of his works. He indented his paragraphs with alternating lengths, often by simply dropping down one line when finished with a paragraph. Like Jack Kerouac in his “spontaneous prose”, Selby often completed his writing in a fast, stream-of-consciousness style. He replaced apostrophes with forward slashes “/,” which were closer on the typewriter, to avoid interrupting his flow of writing. He did not use quotation marks. He might present a dialogue as a complete paragraph, with no denotation among alternating speakers. His prose was stripped down, bare and blunt.

Aspects of his experiences with longshoremen, the homeless, thugs, pimps, transvestites, prostitutes, homosexuals, addicts and the overall poverty-stricken community, is expressed in _Last Exit to Brooklyn_.

Early works

Selby started working on his first short story, “The Queen Is Dead,” in 1958. At the time, he had a succession of day jobs, but he wrote every night. During the day, he worked as a secretary, a gas station attendant, and a freelance copywriter. The short story developed slowly for the next six years before he published it.

In 1961, his short story “Tralala” was published in the literary journal _The Provincetown Review_. It also appeared in _Black Mountain Review_ and _New Directions_. His unstructured style and coarse descriptions supported his portrayal of the seedy life (ridden with violence, theft and mediocre con-artistry) and the gang rape of a prostitute. A number of critics attacked the subjects and harshness of the story. The journal editor was arrested for selling pornographic literature to a minor. The journal was used as evidence in an obscenity trial, but the case was later dismissed on appeal.

On 24 October 1964, Selby married Judith Lumino, but the marriage soon fell apart. As he continued to write, his longtime friend LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the poet and playwright, encouraged him to contact Sterling Lord, then Kerouac's agent. Selby combined “Tralala”, “The Queen Is Dead” and four other loosely linked short stories as part of his first novel, _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ (1964). The novel was accepted and published by Grove Press, which had already published works by William S. Burroughs. In November 1964, New York Times literary critic Eliot Fremont-Smith described the novel as “a brutal book,” concluding that it “is not a book one 'recommends'--except perhaps to writers. From them, those who wish to read it, it deserves attention.”[7]

The novel was praised by many, including the poet Allen Ginsberg, who predicted that it would “explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” But, at a time when literature excluded much that was harsh, not everyone wanted to read his detailed depictions of homosexuality and drug addiction, as well as gang rape and other forms of human brutality and cruelty. In 1967, the novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom. The notable British writer Anthony Burgess was among a number of writers who appeared as witnesses in its defense. The jury's conviction was later reversed on appeal. The novel was banned in Italy.

Although he wrote all his work while sober, Selby continued to battle drug addiction. In 1967 he was arrested for heroin possession and served two months in the Los Angeles County jail. After his release, he moved from New York to Los Angeles to try to escape his addictions and finally kicked the habit. He stayed clean of drugs but continued to battle alcohol abuse for the next two years. Also that year, Selby met his future wife, Suzanne Victoria Shaw, at a bar in West Hollywood. The couple moved in together two days after they met. They married in 1969, after Selby and his second wife, Judith, had finalized their divorce.[8][9] For the next decade, Suzanne and Selby traveled back and forth between their home in Southern California and the East Coast, settling permanently in the Los Angeles area in 1983. They had two children, daughter Rachel and son William.

Life after _Last Exit to Brooklyn_

In 1971, Selby published his second novel, _The Room,_ which received positive reviews. It featured a criminally insane man, locked in a room in a prison, who reminisces about his disturbing past. Selby described _The Room_ as “the most disturbing book ever written.” He said he could not read it for decades after writing it.

Selby continued to write short fiction, as well as screenplays and teleplays at his apartment in West Hollywood. His work was published in many magazines, including _Black Mountain Review_, _Evergreen Review_, _Provincetown Review_, _Kulchur_, _New Directions Annual_, _Yugen_, _Swank_ and _Open City_.

In the 1980s, Selby met punk rock singer Henry Rollins, who had long admired the writer's works and publicly championed them.[10] Rollins helped broaden Selby's readership, and also arranged recording sessions and reading tours for Selby. Rollins issued original recordings through his own 2.13.61 publications, and distributed Selby's other works.[11]

For the last 20 years of his life, Selby also taught creative writing as an adjunct professor in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California.

A film adaptation of _Last Exit to Brooklyn_, directed by Uli Edel, was made in 1989. Selby appeared in _Brooklyn_ in a brief cameo as a taxi driver. _Requiem for a Dream_ (1978) was adapted as a film of the same name released in 2000. He had a small role as a prison guard taunting Marlon Wayans, suffering through forced labor while withdrawing.[12]

The last month of his life, Selby spent in and out of the hospital and died in Highland Park, Los Angeles, on April 26, 2004 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He refused morphine on his deathbed, although he was in pain.[13] _The New York Times_ published his obituary the next day.[14]

Selby was the subject of the 2005 documentary, _Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow_[15]

Works

Fiction

-   _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ (novel, 1964)
-   _The Room_ (novel, 1971)
-   _The Demon_ (novel, 1976)
-   _Requiem for a Dream_ (novel, 1978)
-   _Song of the Silent Snow_ (short stories, 1986)[16]
-   _The Willow Tree_ (novel, 1998)
-   _Waiting Period_ (novel, 2002)

Spoken word

-   _Our Fathers Who Aren't in Heaven_ – Compilation by Henry Rollins. 2xCD set (1990)
-   _Live in Europe 1989_ – Spoken word with Henry Rollins. CD. (1995)
-   _Blue Eyes and Exit Wounds_ – Spoken word with Nick Tosches. CD. (1998)

Filmography

-   _Jour et Nuit_ – Screenwriter. France / Switzerland (1986)
-   _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ – Writer and actor. United States/Germany (1989)
-   _Scotch and Milk_ – Actor (Cubby). United States (1998)
-   _Requiem for a Dream_ – Screenwriter and actor. United States (2000)
-   _Fear X_ – Screenwriter. Denmark / United Kingdom / Canada (2003)

Documentaries

-   _Memories, Dreams & Addictions._ Interview with Ellen Burstyn. Special feature on _Requiem for a Dream_ – Director's Cut DVD release. (2001)
-   _Hubert Selby Jr.: 2 Ou 3 Choses..._ (A Couple of Things About Hubert Selby Jr.) by Ludovic Cantais, France (2000)
-   _Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow_ (2005)

Unfinished and unpublished

At least one work-in-progress remained unfinished and unpublished at the time of Selby's death: _The Seeds of Pain and the Seeds of Love_. Excerpts from this work are heard on the _Live in Europe 1989_ CD.[17][18]

In popular culture

-   In 1972, David Bowie said that two novels influenced him greatly: Jack Kerouac's _On the Road_ and Selby's _Last Exit to Brooklyn_. According to an article in the New York Times published in 1973,[19] Bowie had “confessed that he had formed a desperate identification with” the latter novel.
-   Selby's first work, “The Queen Is Dead” (appearing as a chapter in _Last Exit to Brooklyn_), inspired the name of an album by Manchester alternative rock group The Smiths.[20]
-   In the book _Was This Man a Genius?_ by Julie Hecht, the comedian Andy Kaufman is quoted saying that his favourite book is _The Demon_ by Hubert Selby (p. 159).
-   _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ inspired the name of Sting's first band, Last Exit.
-   The Manic Street Preachers song, “Of Walking Abortion”, from the album _The Holy Bible_, begins with a quote from Selby: “I knew that someday I was gonna die. And I knew that before I died, two things would happen to me, that number one: I would regret my entire life; and number two: I would want to live my life over again.”
-   British band Alt-J composed a song entitled “Fitzpleasure”, inspired by the short story “Tralala” from _Last Exit to Brooklyn_.
-   In the Nicolas Winding Refn film _Bleeder_, a character enters a book store asking for a Hubert Selby Jr. work.
-   The block of East 10th Street between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan (where Selby lived in 1964 with his second wife, Judith, and her son, James) is mentioned at Chapter 23 of Tom Robbins's 1976 novel, _Even Cowgirls Get the Blues_, being described specifically as the place where “Hubert Selby, Jr., wrote _Last Exit to Brooklyn_.”[21]

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[16] _Song of the Silent Snow_ is a collection of fifteen stories spanning more than two decades of writing.

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title: Hubert Selby Jr.

question: What does the text say about Selby and tuberculosis?

answer: Selby contracted tuberculosis from cows while working on a ship. He went through an experimental drug treatment that caused severe complications. During surgery, he has some ribs removed as well as part of his lung since it collapsed. He survived but had to go through a year-long recovery, chronic pulmonary problems for the rest of his life as well as drug addiction.

question: What does the text say about Selby's style of writing?

answer: Selby has no formal training and used raw language to write his violent books. With little concern for grammar and punctuation rules, he wrote in a stream of consciousness style, his repose being bare and blunt.

question: What does the text say about Selby's drug addiction?

answer: Due to his surgery and tuberculosis, Selby became addicted to morphine. He battled drug addiction for decades. In 1967 he was arrested for heroin possession and served two months in jail. After his release, he moved to L.A. and kicked off the addiction. After that, he stayed clean of drugs, even refused morphine on his death bed.

question: What does the text say about Selby's non-fiction books?


split: test

text:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham[]Lindsey Olin GrahamGraham says Stacey Abrams 'conned' Georgia GOP into helping Biden win Chris Cuomo on Lindsey Graham: 'You don't mean save the country. You mean save your ass' Momentum stalls for COVID-19 relief bill MORE (R-S.C.), a close ally of President Trump[]Donald TrumpBiden and Harris named Time's 2020 'Person of the Year' US to sanction Turkey over Russian defense system: report Federal government executes Brandon Bernard despite last-minute appeals MORE, says he never took seriously the possible charges of obstruction of justice raised by special counsel Robert Mueller[]Robert (Bob) MuellerBarr taps attorney investigating Russia probe origins as special counsel CNN's Toobin warns McCabe is in 'perilous condition' with emboldened Trump CNN anchor rips Trump over Stone while evoking Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting MORE’s report.

Graham says he was more concerned about charges that Trump and his senior advisers may have colluded with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign, something that Mueller’s report failed to find.

“I didn’t care about the obstruction of justice stuff. What I cared about was were you working with the Russians?” Graham told reporters Thursday in response to a question about whether he thought there were any significant findings in the Mueller report.

Graham’s statement reflects the views of other Republicans that Trump can’t be impeached for obstruction of justice if the special counsel failed to find an underlying crime.

Attorney General William Barr[]Bill BarrBarr knew about federal probes into Hunter Biden's financial dealings in spring: WSJ Trump official subpoenaed by House panel for Census documents Cotton calls for special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden MORE wrote in a letter to Congress in March that the lack of evidence showing that Trump was “involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference” weighed heavily on his determination that the president was not guilty of obstructing justice.

The findings of the Mueller report are getting a second look on Capitol Hill after the decision by Speaker Nancy Pelosi[]Nancy PelosiVeterans healthcare fight snagging government funding deal Pelosi warns of 'danger' as Republicans supportive of QAnon poised to join Congress Hawley introduces bill for second round of stimulus checks MORE (D-Calif.) to launch a formal impeachment inquiry in the House. House Democrats are most focused, however, on allegations that Trump pressed Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden[]Joe BidenBiden and Harris named Time's 2020 'Person of the Year' US to sanction Turkey over Russian defense system: report Federal government executes Brandon Bernard despite last-minute appeals MORE for his own political gain, and whether he withheld aid to that country.

Graham, who served as a prosecutor in the Senate’s 1999 impeachment trial of then President Bill Clinton[]William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonThe case for a weaker presidency Doug Jones seen as leading contender as Biden attorney general: report Kneecapping the Biden White House MORE, says the Democrats’ impeachment push against Trump is bogus.

“There is no high crime or misdemeanor from the Mueller report and this whole transcript is a joke,” Graham said Thursday, arguing that neither Mueller’s 448-page report nor a transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky provide grounds for impeachment proceedings.

Graham said if Mueller found that Trump or his senior advisers colluded with Russia, it would have been a deal-breaker. But he noted that was not found to be true after an exhaustive investigation.

“I’ve told him to his face that if you’re working with the Russians, that would be it for you with me,” Graham said of his conversations with the president. “I’ve said that to the whole world. I didn’t know what Mueller was going to find. I supported the Mueller investigation to its completion.

“If there had been real collusion between Trump and the Russians to get an advantage over his opponent, that would have been disqualifying,” Graham said of the 2016 election. “I think all this other stuff is politically driven.”

question: What does the text say about Trump's views on immigration?

question: What does the text say about Lindsey Graham?

answer: Lindsey Graham is the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman. He was concerned about charges that Trump and his senior advisers may have colluded with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. Graham served as a prosecutor in the Senate's 1999 impeachment trial of former President Bill Clinton. He is a Republican Senator and ally of President Donald Trump who claims to have told Trump to his face (and apparently, the world), that if the President was working with the Russians, it would be the end of their alliance.

question: Summarize Lindsey Graham's views on the Mueller report and the Democrats' impeachment push against Trump.

answer: Graham only cared about whether or not Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 campaign. His view is that Trump can't be impeached for obstruction of justice if Mueller failed to find an underlying crime. Graham says that the Democrats' push to impeach Trump is bogus because there was no high crime or misdemeanor from the Mueller report, making the whole transcript a joke. He says that he didn't know what Mueller was going to find and supported the investigation to its completion despite being a Trump ally. Graham thinks the allegations against Trump are politically motivated.

question: What does the text say about the Mueller investigation against Trump?

answer: Special Counsel Robert Mueller launched an investigation into the possible collusion between President Donald Trump and his senior advisers with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. The Mueller investigation failed to find anything significant against Trump due to the lack of evidence showing that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. Since there was no high crime or misdemeanor and the President was not guilty of obstructing justice, there were no grounds for impeachment. However, the Democrats pushed for an impeachment anyway as the Mueller report's findings were getting a second look on Capitol Hill after a decision by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

question: Summarize everything in the article that isn't related to the Mueller investigation and impeachment complaint against Trump.

answer: Lindsey Graham accuses Stacey Adams of 'conning' the Georgia GOP into helping Biden win. Momentum stalls for the COVID-19 relief bill. Biden and Harris named Time's 2020 'Person of the Year'. The U.S. will sanction Turkey for installing a Russian defense system. Despite last-minute appeals, the Federal government executes Brandon Bernard. Attorney General William Barr knew about the federal probes into Hunter Biden's financial dealings. Veteran's healthcare gets funding from the government. Speaker Nancy Pelosi warns of "danger" as Republicans supportive of QAnon are poised to join Congress. Hawley introduces a bill for the second round of stimulus checks.


text:
Published on

Thursday, September 26, 2019

by

The Thursday morning release of the official whistleblower complaint at the heart of a controversy which has triggered an official impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump intensified concern among Democrats and outside critics who say the complaint goes beyond a single phone call by alleging a wider White House conspiracy to cover it up.

"Sounds like the cover-up and the crime are both impeachable," tweeted _Sludge_ reporter Alex Kotch.

"Instead of hiring burglars to investigate political rival Trump asked a foreign government to do it for him and then tried to cover it up."
—Ari Berman, _Mother Jones_

As _Common Dreams_ reported, the scandal stems from a July phone call between Trump and Zelensky in which Trump asked the Ukrainian president for a "favor"—to investigate Biden's son Hunter's employment by Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019.  A memorandum of a condensed version of the conversation was released Wednesday.

During a Thursday hearing of the House Intelligence Committee featuring Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said that the complaint indicates that the cover-up is aimed at concealing the knowing criminal behavior of the administration.

"The whistleblower complaint has exposed a criminal effort to extort political dirty work from a foreign government, and a massive cover-up orchestrated by the White House," said Castro.

The complaint (pdf) alleges that, after the call, White House officials moved to put a word-for-word transcript of the conversation into a server separate from the normal one reserved for such matters.

"In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to 'lock down' all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House situation room," the whistleblower writes in the complaint.

Particularly, the complaint claims, intervention came from the administration's legal counsel.

"The public deserves to have full transparency regarding Trump's abuse of office."
—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

"White House officials told me they were 'directed' by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization and distribution to Cabinet-level officials," says the whistleblower.

Specifically implicated in the complaint are the president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General William Barr.

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"They knew the President had violated his oath of office," said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fl.).

The cover-up is "as bad, if not worse, than Watergate," _Mother Jones_ writer Ari Berman said.

"Instead of hiring burglars to investigate political rival Trump asked a foreign government to do it for him and then tried to cover it up," said Berman.

_New Yorker _writer Susan B. Glasser wrote Thursday that the phone call is part of a pattern of behavior:

  The Ukraine scandal is, among many other things, a portrait of American foreign policy gone terribly wrong, hijacked by a President who has shredded the vast U.S. national-security apparatus in favor of a rogue operation looking out for his own interests and overseen by his personal agent, Rudy Giuliani. To anyone who has been paying attention, this has been the President’s approach to foreign policy from the start: it has been all Trump, all the time.

Trump's pattern of behavior, and the current scandal being simply a part of it, was a point that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also made in a statement Thursday.

"This whistleblower complaint is only the tip of an iceberg of corrupt, illegal, and immoral behavior by this president," said Sanders. "What the House must do is thoroughly investigate Trump's cover-up of this call and his other attempts to use government resources to help his re-election campaign. The public deserves to have full transparency regarding Trump's abuse of office."

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said on Twitter that Congress must act as soon as possible to stop the president from continuing to use "the Oval Office as his campaign office."

"We cannot let the occupant make a mockery of our Constitution any longer," said Omar. "Congress must cancel the upcoming recess so we can finally impeach this president."

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question: What does the text say about Giuliani?

answer: Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer and personal agent, is specifically implicated by the whistleblower complaint. In addition, Giuliani oversees the rogue operation Trump has been using to look out for his own interests instead of the U.S. national-security apparatus.

question: What does the text say about the whistleblower complaint?

answer: Thursday morning, the official whistleblower complaint which is now at the heart of a controversy which has triggered an official impeachment inquiry against President Trump was released. Democrats allege the complaint shows a wider White House conspiracy to cover the matter up. The complaint alleges that, after the call, White House officials moved to put a verbatim transcript of the phone call into a separate server from the normal one used for such matters. In particular, the complaint claims that the intervention came from the administration's legal counsel, and it specifically implicates Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.


text:
LYNDA CLARK (born 29 October 1981) is an author and creator of interactive fiction. Her short story, “Ghillie’s Mum” won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada in 2018,[1] and was shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award in 2019.[2] Her debut novel, _Beyond Kidding,_ was published by Fairlight Books in October 2019.[3]

Biography

Born in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Clark completed a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.[4] Following graduation, she worked as a bookseller at Waterstones for several years, before moving to Dundee where she works as a Research and Development Fellow in Narrative and Play at InGAME.[5]

Clark has the rare neurological disorder, Spasmodic Dysphonia, an incurable condition which affects speech.[6]

[1]  Commonwealth Writers|date=2019-03-05|access-date=2019-11-14}}

[2]

[3]  Fairlight Books|date=2019-10-09|access-date=2019-11-14}}

[4]

[5]

[6]

title: Lynda Clark (author)

question: What does Lynda Clark do?

answer: She is an author and creator of interactive fiction.

question: Has Lynda Clark ever won an award?

answer: Yes. Her short story won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada in 2018.

question: Where was Lynda Clark born?

answer: She was born in Nottingham, UK.

question: What kind of disorder does Lynda Clark have?

answer: She has a rare neurological disorder called Spasmodic Dysphonia, an incurable condition that affects speech.

question: Write a ~4 sentence summary.

answer:
Lynda Clark, born in Nottingham, on 29 October 1981, is an author and creator of interactive fiction. She won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada in 2018.

She worked at Waterstones as a bookseller for many years before moving to Dundee as a Research and Development Fellow in Narrative and Play at InGAME.

Lynda Clark has a rare neurological disorder called Spasmodic Dysphonia, an incurable condition that affects speech.


text:
You hear this one a lot: “The definition of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results.”

That isn’t true.

No, that’s not insanity.

I had a friend once. We’ll call him Jason. Sure, Jason. One thing you need to know about Jason is that he was a chronic nail-biter. He was the type of kid who you rarely saw without his hand up to his mouth, chewing. Just gnawing on the tough protein covering his fingers. I remember when we were very young his mother would paint his nails with clear Thum nailbiting polish that would leave a peppery and bitter taste in his mouth. But Jason didn’t care. He’d grit and bite the polish right off. He just did not care. His poor mother put that polish on his nails every single day, but he outlasted her. She eventually stopped once she realized Jason was starting to actually like the taste.

They were perpetually moist, his fingers. Jason near constantly bit his nails. He bit them right down to the epidermis and until his teeth couldn’t get a grip on the nail itself, or until it bled. It wasn’t a nervous thing, it was just a Jason thing. When you first got to know Jason you’d politely ignore it but eventually you’d get annoyed and disgusted. Then you learned to ignore it.

Jason wasn’t your average nail-biter, though. This kid never, not even once, spit out a chewed up keratin remnant on the ground. He told me the habit was disgusting enough, and he didn’t need to ramp it up by spitting nail all over the carpet. So he pocketed them. Each one. He’d chew and gnaw and bite and peel and once he had shaved off just enough of the nail to tear it off, he’d put it in his pocket.

Aside from this admittedly common habit, Jason was by and large average. We played sports together, soccer league. My mom would babysit him after school sometimes. He liked his sandwiches cut diagonally. One time I went over Jason’s house to spend the night.

Your nails grow at an average of 3 millimeters a month. They’re a form of hair, not many people know that. That’s why when you file your nails, that unmistakable smell pierces your nose, crinkling the minuscule hairs deep inside your nasal cavity. The speed in which they grow all depends on the length of the terminal phalange, so your index finger grows the quickest. In the summer, your nails grow faster. It’s true.

Every young kid has been in a situation where their friend falls asleep first at a sleepover and they don’t know what to do with themselves. On foreign territory, you’re on your own to either entertain yourself quietly or force yourself to fall asleep. On this night at Jason’s house, that kid was me. Jason was sound asleep on his bed and I was on the floor next to him in a sleeping bag, wide awake.

Bored out of my mind and doing anything to keep myself occupied before I got sleepy, I start feeling around the darkness of underneath his bed. It was very dark and I could only make out darker blobs of some number of objects tucked away under the safety of his mattress. To get a better reach, I turn myself on my stomach and turn my head flush against the carpet, unable to see what I was grabbing at now.

Jason wasn’t your average nail-biter. I reached my arm further under the bed and wrapped my fingers around what was surely some sort of glass jar. Still on my stomach with my head turned to the side, I slowly moved my hand up the jar’s opening. A mass of something cold and wet my fingers feel. Like tiny, wet wood chips. Like chewed up sunflower seeds. Like chewed up nails.

I jerk my hand back, moving my head back in position to see under his bed. Still, the darkness shrouds the jar I was feeling at. I get on my chest again and use my middle finger to delicately roll the jar out from under the bed and into plain sight. As I rolled it closer, the contents of the jar were clear.

An entire jelly jar’s worth of chewed up and spit out, *and pocketed*, nail fragments lined the inside of the glass. Half moon crescents of nail stuck to the inside walls of the jar, stained purple from scraped out Smucker’s grape jelly. Without a lid, a mass of chewed nail clippings was near dribbling out the exit of the jar, moist with saliva. Pocket lint was scattered throughout the mess. The smell is a thing difficult to describe but for fans of black licorice I’ll spare you the thought.

I look under the bed once more, seeing three, four, maybe even five more dark cylinders. More jars. More jars full of nails. I reach under again and touch glass. This jar wasn’t as full as the last. A new collection.

Gagging on the smell and desperate to hide my intrusion I roll both jars back to their original resting place. A wet glob of nails knocked loose by my jostling of the jars just lay on the carpet, moistening the plastic fibers. The lump of finger protein almost seemed to be taking the form of the original contents of the glass jar. I dig the side of my palm into the carpet and grit my teeth, scraping part of Jason’s nail collection back under the bed.

The side of my palm now wet from the spit that covered the nail shavings, I wipe it on a dry section of carpet. Making every effort going to sleep, I feel like I’m laying on a bed of nails. No pun intended.

You do any one thing enough times, over and over again, it begins to become ritual. More than ritual, even. It starts to become who you are. Doesn’t matter what it is. Washing your hands obsessively. Making sure every straight edge is aligned perfectly. Cracking your knuckles repeatedly. Biting your nails. Storing them in jars. Over and over. Over and over. Never expecting a different result—but enjoying the power of knowing it.

That’s insane.

title: INSANITY

question: What does the text say Jason does with his bitten nails?

answer: Jason bites his nails so frequently that spitting them out would be too obvious. Instead, Jason bites his nails and puts them in his pocket. After that, Jason apparently empties his pockets of the nail fragments and puts them in jars which he stores under his bed.

question: Describe Jason's father's response to his nail-biting.


text:
HICKMAN COUNTY is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2010 census, the population was 4,902,[1] making it the third-least populous county in Kentucky. Its county seat is Clinton.[2] The county was formed in 1821.[3] It is the least densely populated county in the state and is a prohibition or dry county.

History

Founded in 1821, Hickman County was the seventy-first in order of formation. It was named for Captain Paschal Hickman of the 1st Rifle Regiment, Kentucky Militia.[4][5] A resident of Franklin County, Kentucky, Hickman was wounded and captured at the Battle of Frenchtown in January 1813 and was killed by Indians in the Massacre of the River Raisin.

Columbus, Kentucky, in the northwest of the county and located on the Mississippi River, was the original county seat. A log structure built in 1823 served as the courthouse. In 1830, the county seat was moved to the more centrally located Clinton.

In 1861, early in the American Civil War, the Confederate Army established Fort de Russey on the strategically located bluffs at Columbus across the river from Belmont, Missouri. Confederate General Leonidas Polk knew it was important to control the river, and wanted to extend a massive chain across the Mississippi to block Union forces from going downstream. (This was never achieved.) The fort was garrisoned with several thousand troops and a six-gun battery was installed; a smaller force was based at a Confederate camp in Belmont.

Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant moved troops from his base at Cairo, Illinois, and attacked Belmont in November 1861, his first battle of the war. He was ultimately defeated by Confederate troops sent from Columbus across the river to reinforce the Confederate defense; they were led by Polk.[6][7] The former site of the Confederate fortifications near Columbus, Kentucky is now the Columbus-Belmont State Park, commemorating all the actions of the day that led to Union defeat here.[8]

Geography

[The Mississippi River, viewed from Columbus-Belmont State Park] According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which is land and (4.3%) is water.[9] The elevation in the county ranges from to above sea level. The county's western border is formed by the Mississippi River, nearly a mile wide here, with the state of Missouri on the other side. Some portions of the county are landlocked to Missouri west of the Mississippi.

Adjacent counties

-   Carlisle County (north)
-   Graves County (east)
-   Weakley County, Tennessee (southeast)
-   Obion County, Tennessee (south)
-   Fulton County (south)
-   Mississippi County, Missouri (west)

Demographics

As of the census[10] of 2000, there were 5,262 people, 2,188 households, and 1,542 families residing in the county. The population density was . There were 2,436 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the county was 88.35% White, 9.90% Black or African American, 0.29% Native American, 0.06% Asian, 0.17% from other races, and 1.24% from two or more races. 1.03% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There were 2,188 households, out of which 28.20% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 56.50% were married couples living together, 10.80% had a female householder with no husband present, and 29.50% were non-families. 27.60% of all households were made up of individuals, and 13.00% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.34 and the average family size was 2.82.

In the county, the population was spread out, with 22.10% under the age of 18, 6.90% from 18 to 24, 26.70% from 25 to 44, 25.90% from 45 to 64, and 18.50% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 41 years. For every 100 females there were 91.30 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 88.90 males.

The median income for a household in the county was $31,615, and the median income for a family was $37,049. Males had a median income of $28,438 versus $18,506 for females. The per capita income for the county was $17,279. About 14.20% of families and 17.40% of the population were below the poverty line, including 27.70% of those under age 18 and 13.80% of those age 65 or over.

Communities

-   Clinton (county seat)
-   Columbus

Notable people

-   Robert Burns Smith, third Governor of Montana[11]

Politics

  Year                               Republican                                  Democratic                                  Third parties
  ---------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ---------------
  style=“text-align:center;” |2016   style=“text-align:center;” |76.8% _1,657_   style=“text-align:center;” |20.8% _449_     2.4% _51_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2012   style=“text-align:center;” |66.9% _1,431_   style=“text-align:center;” |32.1% _686_     1.0% _22_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2008   style=“text-align:center;” |62.5% _1,406_   style=“text-align:center;” |36.1% _812_     1.4% _32_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2004   style=“text-align:center;” |59.6% _1,395_   style=“text-align:center;” |39.5% _926_     0.9% _21_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2000   style=“text-align:center;” |54.2% _1,151_   style=“text-align:center;” |44.3% _940_     1.6% _33_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1996   style=“text-align:center;” |32.0% _695_     style=“text-align:center;” |56.1% _1,220_   11.9% _258_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1992   style=“text-align:center;” |35.0% _861_     style=“text-align:center;” |52.8% _1,296_   12.2% _300_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1988   style=“text-align:center;” |49.3% _1,142_   style=“text-align:center;” |50.0% _1,158_   0.7% _15_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1984   style=“text-align:center;” |56.6% _1,380_   style=“text-align:center;” |43.0% _1,049_   0.3% _8_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1980   style=“text-align:center;” |42.8% _1,143_   style=“text-align:center;” |54.6% _1,456_   2.6% _69_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1976   style=“text-align:center;” |21.5% _585_     style=“text-align:center;” |74.9% _2,035_   3.5% _96_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1972   style=“text-align:center;” |56.7% _1,430_   style=“text-align:center;” |38.7% _976_     4.7% _118_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1968   style=“text-align:center;” |23.2% _623_     style=“text-align:center;” |32.8% _880_     44.0% _1,183_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1964   style=“text-align:center;” |22.1% _613_     style=“text-align:center;” |77.5% _2,149_   0.4% _12_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1960   style=“text-align:center;” |30.8% _968_     style=“text-align:center;” |69.2% _2,176_   0.0% _0_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1956   style=“text-align:center;” |24.8% _785_     style=“text-align:center;” |74.8% _2,367_   0.4% _11_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1952   style=“text-align:center;” |30.4% _871_     style=“text-align:center;” |69.4% _1,988_   0.2% _6_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1948   style=“text-align:center;” |12.3% _326_     style=“text-align:center;” |80.6% _2,143_   7.2% _190_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1944   style=“text-align:center;” |22.6% _588_     style=“text-align:center;” |77.1% _2,005_   0.4% _9_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1940   style=“text-align:center;” |15.1% _490_     style=“text-align:center;” |84.7% _2,758_   0.2% _7_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1936   style=“text-align:center;” |13.0% _385_     style=“text-align:center;” |86.3% _2,548_   0.6% _19_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1932   style=“text-align:center;” |11.8% _446_     style=“text-align:center;” |87.8% _3,327_   0.4% _16_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1928   style=“text-align:center;” |26.1% _767_     style=“text-align:center;” |73.7% _2,163_   0.2% _6_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1924   style=“text-align:center;” |21.3% _618_     style=“text-align:center;” |78.1% _2,270_   0.6% _17_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1920   style=“text-align:center;” |22.0% _866_     style=“text-align:center;” |77.4% _3,045_   0.6% _23_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1916   style=“text-align:center;” |21.1% _539_     style=“text-align:center;” |77.4% _1,982_   1.5% _39_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1912   style=“text-align:center;” |17.7% _365_     style=“text-align:center;” |74.5% _1,540_   7.8% _162_

  : PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS RESULTS[12]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6] Hughes, Nathaniel Cheairs, _The Battle of Belmont: Grant Strikes South_ (Univ of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 184.

[7] McGhee, James E. “The Neophyte General: U.S. Grant and the Belmont Campaign” , Civil War in St. Louis

[8] _The Kentucky Encyclopedia._

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

title: Hickman County, Kentucky

question: Summarize the 2000 census population breakdown of Hickman County.

answer: Hickman County is the third-least populous county in Kentucky. The racial makeup of the county is 88.35% White, 9.90% Black, 0.29% Native American, and the rest. The median income for a household is $31,615. The county has a total of 2188 households - 56.50% of those are married couples living together. The average household size is 2.34 with an average family size as 2.82


text:
The Intercept's latest report, based on an unclassified but highly sensitive government document, tells a troubling tale of our national security state. Ryan Devereaux and Jeremy Scahill brought to light a "secret government rulebook" used for determining which names get added to expansive US terror watchlists.

The 166-page leaked document meanders from the paranoid to the absurd. From it, we've learned that neither "concrete facts" nor "irrefutable evidence" are required to add a name to a terror list. Indeed, one needn't even be alive. "The rules permit the deceased spouses of suspected terrorists to be placed onto the list after they have died," reports The Intercept.

One detail noted by Devereaux and Scahill seems worthy of further highlighting. While the very idea of terror watchlists suggests a process of selecting individual names for monitoring, a loophole in the criteria enables "entire categories" of people to be summarily designated as terrorists. As The Intercept reports, a "'threat-based expedited upgrade' gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to elevate entire 'categories of people' whose names appear in the larger databases onto the no-fly or selectee lists." The authors rightly point out that this is nothing short of profiling.

ANIMAL-CRUELTY WHISTLEBLOWERS ARE FIGHTING LEGAL GAG ORDERS. READ MORE HERE.

This particular power aligns with the sort of counterterror policies that allow for drone strikes based on "dispositions" or "signature" behaviors, or that permit entire mosques to be designated as a terror organization to enable surveillance. It's the sort of preemptive policing that prefigures certain groups as threats and, as such, is inescapably discriminatory.

Following The Intercept's report an official at the National Counterterrorism Center insisted to the _Washington Post_ that the loophole which can elevate categories of individuals to the no-fly list was “very rarely used” and “applied to people who are already in the broader category of known or suspected terrorists.”

  This extraordinary power is not vested with elected representatives. It is not determined by committee. It falls entirely in the hands of one individual.

I submit that this is no defense at all. "Very rarely" is enough to cause concern when it is not even made explicit, as The Intercept notes, what a "category" even means to government eyes. "It is not clear, for example, whether a category might be as broad as military-age males from Yemen," the authors report. And we know all too well at this point that the categories of "already" suspected terrorists is dangerously broad — consider the NSA's targeting of prominent Muslim-Americans.

Furthermore, perhaps the most troubling detail about the categorical upgrade is who gets to determine the "very rare" occasions when it is used. This extraordinary power is not vested with elected representatives. It is not determined by committee. It falls entirely in the hands of one individual. The power is, The Intercept notes, "vested in the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, a position formerly held by CIA Director John Brennan that does not require Senate confirmation."

WITH THE NSA REFORM BILL, PRIVACY IS NOT ON THE MENU. READ MORE HERE.

This is truly executive overreach par excellence. It is the very meaning of a state of exception — a "threat-based" scenario — in which the suspension of normal legal process and policy is normalized and inscribed into law. In this, our vaunted democracy, one unelected official has the power to instantaneously constrain the movements of an entire group of people. Whether this power is used "very rarely" or regularly is no more than a matter of incident. What matters more is that it exists at all, tucked into a secret government document.

This detail reflects the authoritarian circumstances edified as legal and permissible in the boundless War on Terror. So long as officials can appeal broadly to "threat," then democracy can collapse into dictatorship with the assumption of extraordinary powers. In this way, US counterterror policy invokes an almost medieval sort of sovereignty, in which an unelected body is able to rule over who lives and dies (with, say, drone strikes), who has the freedom to travel, and who gets marked as the "enemy." Sovereign powers are not determined by how regularly they are used. What matters is that they can be invoked and used with or without popular knowledge, let alone consent.

_Follow Natasha Lennard on Twitter: @natashalennard_

_Image via Wikimedia_

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question: What does the article say about the secret government rulebook?

answer: It is a 166-page leaked document that is used for determining which names get added to an expansive US terror watchlist. Ryan Devereaux and Jeremy Scahill brought it to light. There are no clear criteria for placing someone on the list. A 'threat-based expedited upgrade' gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to elevate entire 'categories of people whose names appear in the larger databases onto the no-fly or selectee lists." The power is vested in the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism.

question: What does the article say about how many people are placed on the list?


text:
President Donald Trump responded to several news outlets calling the 2020 election for President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday with an inaccurate and desperate-seeming statement, claiming that his campaign will start “prosecuting our case” in court come Monday — in what would effectively be an attempt to overrule the will of the American people.

“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” the president said in his statement. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner in any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts.”

All states will certify their results in the weeks to come; and the projections made by Decision Desk and others who call elections were made based on current counts, which are not expected to significantly change between now and when that certification occurs later in November.

The statement also falsely claimed that election observers were not allowed to observe the vote count in several states. Not only were they, but in some cases these observers disturbed the count; others can be seen watching counters on livestreams.

The president’s words aren’t surprising, as he’d suggested ahead of the election that he would not accept its results. And, true to form, he has not.

In many ways, the official statement is a more formal version of the baseless allegations of voter fraud the president made in a series of tweets Saturday morning, in which he appeared to desperately grasp at any whimsical conspiracy theory necessary to keep power.

In those tweets, Trump lied about votes being “illegally received” in Pennsylvania “and certain other states.” Despite the fact, of course, that all states have counted only ballots submitted according to their guidelines. Some states, like Pennsylvania, allowed mail-in ballots received after Election Day — but with a postmark from Election Day, or earlier — to be counted. There’s nothing illegal about this, however; in fact, states are legally obligated to count ballots that are submitted in accordance with election law.

Trump also lied on Twitter about election observers not being allowed in counting rooms in “numerous states.” As noted above, this is false.

The tweets were flagged by Twitter as “disputed” and potentially “misleading.”

  ....This would ALSO change the Election result in numerous States, including Pennsylvania, which everyone thought was easily won on Election Night, only to see a massive lead disappear, without anyone being allowed to OBSERVE, for long intervals of time, what the happened...

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020

  ....Bad things took place during those hours where LEGAL TRANSPARENCY was viciously & crudely not allowed. Tractors blocked doors & windows were covered with thick cardboard so that observers could not see into the count rooms. BAD THINGS HAPPENED INSIDE. BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE!

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020

Overall, there is no evidence of voter fraud or tampering with vote counting. As Vox’s Aaron Rupar explained, the Trump campaign is making wild allegations of impropriety now and hoping to find evidence for them later:

  Their strategy is to make allegations first and HOPEFULLY FIND EVIDENCE FOR THEM LATER. This state of affairs was thrown into stark relief late Friday morning during a Fox News interview with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. During it, Fox News hosts appeared to be out of patience with her evidence-free insinuations that the election was somehow stolen from Trump.

  “We just haven’t seen it. It hasn’t been presented. There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the internet, but when we look into it, it doesn’t pan out,” anchor Bret Baier told McDaniel, as she failed to explain how her technical gripes about election observers in Michigan could possibly affect the result in a state Biden appears poised to win by well over 100,000 votes.

Trump took these falsehoods to a new level Saturday, concluding his morning tweets with a incorrect statement that he actually won the election, writing “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!”

  I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020

It’s concerning that the president of the United States is just outright lying about an election he lost, and that he has refused to concede now that it is clear he has lost. Perhaps even worse is that several high level Republican lawmakers have joined in on spreading doubt about the accuracy of the election results. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), along with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, all appeared on Fox News to repeat the false assertion that Trump won the election.

What lawsuits come Monday remain to be seen. But it is clear that Trump expects the courts to save him. However, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, that’s not a strategy that is likely to bear fruit. And whether he concedes or not, Biden will be sworn in as the next president of the United States in January.

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

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question: What does the text say about Donald Trump's response to the election?

answer: Donald Trump is accusing Joe Biden of falsely posing as the winner of the presidential election. He claims that Biden has not been certified as the winner in any state and accused some states of illegally receiving votes. Trump then falsely claimed to have "won the election by a lot".


text:
Grey light sank into the cell, revealing the other occupants -
An old woman, cradling her head between her knees, rocking feebly.
A teenage boy with a bloody nose, who mopped at his face half-heartedly.
A man, ashy beard and blackened face, who only stared up at the light with mouth hanging open. All at once a cough would rattle his chest and then he would fall still again.
And there was me, in my own corner of the cell, reeking in the same clothes I had been abducted with two weeks ago. Ambushed in the hospital after my bite, quietly commanded to dress, leave my things, I wouldn't need them where I was going. The men, three of them in military ware, each had the butt of a gun jutting from his belt. You can't argue with that.
And now I was their prisoner, a quiet concentration camp for the bitten. We were infected, more men in sullied commando gear insisted. They looked on us like rabid dogs, gun barrels following us wherever we turned.
The first three nights I railed against the cell door, splintering wood and making iron sing until my hands bled. The other occupants just watched me with hollow eyes. My son, you can't keep me from him. You can't lock me up, treat us like animals.
You were bitten, they hissed through the bars. You're not a man anymore.

title:
Bitten
(1)

question: What bit them?

answer: Unclear but they will 'turn' into what bit them soon

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: The narrator was abducted because he was bitten. He is now trapped in a cell with others who were also bitten as their abductors wait for them to turn. The narrator protests that he needs to be with his son but the abductors tell him since he's been bitten, he is not a man anymore.


text:
[]
Was former Obama aide Ben Rhodes in control of anti-Trump media? People in the Trump White House seemed to think so. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Sometimes when you hear people in the Trump administration, or congressional Republicans, or conservative media, muttering about “deep state” conspiracies against Trump or whole agencies planting dirt on POTUS while thwarting his will, it’s hard to know if they believe this stuff or are simply putting one over on credulous MAGA people who will believe anything about Trump’s many enemies.

But Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow of _The New Yorker_ have published a report suggesting that at least within the Trump White House, believe in outlandish conspiracy theories has been widespread:

  In early 2017, some of Donald Trump’s advisers concluded that they faced a sophisticated threat responsible for “coordinated attacks” on the new Administration. They circulated a memo, titled “The Echo Chamber,” which read like a U.S. military-intelligence officer’s analysis of a foreign-insurgent network. Instead of being about enemies in a distant war zone, however, the network described in the memo consisted of former aides to President Barack Obama …

  It called the network the Echo Chamber and accused its members of mounting a coördinated effort “to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy” through organized attacks in the press against Trump and his advisers. “These are the Obama loyalists who are probably among those coordinating the daily/weekly battle rhythm,” the memo said, adding that they likely operated a “virtual war room.”

Now, anyone actually familiar with how media works would immediately be suspicious of any claim that anyone was coordinating “the daily/weekly battle rhythm,” so to speak. Even among media outlets hostile to Trump, nobody’s going to take direction from people who lost their juice the minute the Obama administration ended. So perhaps it shows how green — and/or paranoid — the Trump people entering the White House in 2017 really were. The memo in question was totally unambiguous about the conspirators:

  The memo lists Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to President Obama, as “likely the brain behind this operation” and Colin Kahl, Vice-President Joe Biden’s former national-security adviser, as its “likely ops chief.”

Sounds like people who travel by night and leave no prisoners, right?

But then the story gets stranger: More or less the same conspiracy theory has popped up in documents prepared by a private-sector Israeli intelligence firm with the ominous name Black Cube (famously hired by Harvey Weinstein to collect dirt on Weinstein’s enemies). And there were earlier reports that “Trump aides” or people in Trump’s circle had hired an Israeli firm — which Ronan Farrow identified as Black Cube — to get dirt on Rhodes and Kahl in connection with Trump’s goal of reversing the Iran deal.

It seems that perhaps the Trump people and/or their Black Cube friends were not only taken in by but blew up to fantastic proportions Rhodes’s own boasts about manipulating journalists during the Iran fight in a famous 2016 New York _Times_ Magazine profile of the foreign policy staffer, which aroused widespread derision at the time. Apparently Black Cube believed it all, or wanted its client or clients to believe it:

  The firm compiled a list of nine reporters and commentators it claimed were part of the Echo Chamber, including _The Atlantic’s_ Jeffrey Goldberg, the New York _Times’_ Max Fisher, and NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell. Fisher is described as having “heavily advocated” for the Iran deal and “placed himself at the service of Rhodes’ ‘Eco-chamber,’ ” while Mitchell is at one point identified as being a “vessel for Rhodes’ ‘eco-chamber.’”

With presumptions like this, no wonder the Trump White House was a hotbed of belief in a deep-state netherworld encompassing the FBI, elements of the Justice and State Departments, and of course the Enemy of the People, the media.

It’s all a bit grotesque, as one alleged instrument of the Echo (or “Eco”) Chamber, Jeff Goldberg argued:

  This is one of the stupider conspiracy theories circulating through a city currently drowning in stupid conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy Theory on Obama Aides Circulated in White House

question: What is the memo titled "The Echo Chamber" detail?

answer: The Echno Chamber memo describes a supposed network of individuals who maintained a coordinated effort to undermine President Trump's foreign policy through organized attacks in the press.

question: Who is Ben Rhodes?

answer: Ben Rhodes is a former deputy national-security adviser to President Obama, and is alleged to be one of the brains behind the Echo Chamber operation.

question: What is Black Cube?

answer: Black Cube is a private-sector Israeli firm that has mentioned the Echo Chamber theory in documents that it has prepared.

question: Why did Trump aides want dirt on Rhodes and Khal?

answer: They wanted to reverse the Iran Deal.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: This article briefly describes the Echo Chamber memo, a document that details a conspiracy theory that alleges a network of individuals coordinated attacks to undermine President Trump's foreign policy.


text:
BIOSOPHY, meaning _wisdom of life_, is “the science and art of intelligent living based on the awareness and practice of spiritual values, ethical-social principles and character qualities essential to individual freedom and social harmony”.[1] It stands in relation to biology, which can be broadly described as the _understanding of life_.

History

The term _Biosophy_ was probably first used in 1806 by Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler, a Swiss philosopher whose early works followed F. W. J. Schelling. It was later used by other philosophers like Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990), who used biology as the foundation of his philosophy. Zapffe first set out his ideas in _Den sidste Messias_ (en. _The Last Messiah_) (1933). Later Zapffe gave a more systematic defence in his philosophical treatise _Om det tragiske_ (en. _On the tragic_) (1941). The Biosophical Institute claims that Frederick Kettner (1886-1957) was the founder of Biosophy.[2] Kettner was himself originally inspired by the organicism of Constantin Brunner.

Contemporary biosophers include Jong Bhak, who defines Biosophy as a “new way of performing philosophy generated from scientific and biological awareness”.[3] Bhak developed his theory of Biosophy while studying at Cambridge University in 1995 and afterwards. The main difference of Bhak's biosophy from other philosophy is that his biosophy is a computable philosophy. It borrows Bertrand Russell logicism and extends it to a computational set of ideas and knowledge. One ultimate aim of biosophy is to construct a logical thinking machine that can do philosophy for human beings.[4]

Biosophy Program

The Biosophy Program was presented on the internet by Anna Öhman and Svenolov Lindgren in January 1998.[5] They noted that “the term biosophy was previously used by Zapffe (1941) in a literary context for the analysis of human social life based on philosophy of existence and biological facts. Such a narrow circumscription of biosophy is in our opinion no obstacle to widen the definition to encompass all systematic thinking on biological issues.”

The Biosophy Program was intended to circumscribe and systemize biological studies in a philosophical framework to support teaching at courses on philosophy and courses on biology. The biosophical thinking is defined by Öhman and Lindgren in five philosophical fields and discriminated from Næss’ ecosophy.

Objectives

-   To create biosophical groups for character and peace education where the individual has opportunities of self-improvement.
-   To encourage integration among individuals based on their mutual interest in a spiritual purpose in life.
-   To network with other groups and organizations interested in character and peace education working cooperatively with them.
-   To replace the blind acceptance of theological beliefs, superstitions and dogmas with the cultivation of spiritual intelligence as the basis for the Religion of Freedom and Friendship.
-   To create a world-fellowship of peace-loving human beings who have overcome religious, national, racial and social prejudices who can work creatively for the growth of democracy, spiritual personal growth and world peace.
-   To work for the synthesis of religion, philosophy, science, education and art.
-   To perpetuate and advance Kettner's principles and work for the development and cultivation of the character and peace nature in young people.
-   To create a Peace Department in national governments headed by a Secretary of Peace, and to establish peace universities.
-   To establish a world-fellowship of thinking human beings who can work creatively for the growth of spiritual democracy and world peace.
-   To cooperate in the advancement of humanity from civilization to the age of “soulization”.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

title: Biosophy

question: What are the goals of Biosophy?

answer: Biosophy seeks to realize spiritual democracy, and to integrate spirituality and science. It also wishes to establish Peace Departments in universities and governments around the world. In modern times, its aim has been connected with building a logical thinking machine which can do philosophy for human beings.

question: What is the origin of "Biosophy"?

answer: Biosophy means "the wisdom of life." The term was coined by Troxler, a follower of Schelling. It was later used by philosophers like Zeph, and the modern founder of Biosophy was a man called Kettner, who created the Biosophical Institute.

question: What is the role of logic in biosophy?

answer: The contemporary philosopher Jong Bhak defines Biosophy as a new way of performing philosophy generated from scientific and biological awareness. He claims that its aim is to construct a logical thinking machine which can do philosophy for human beings. Bhak's biosophy is a computable philosophy.


text:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau[]Justin Pierre James TrudeauThe Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Facebook - Congress moves to avert shutdown as virus talks stall again Canada preparing to administer COVID-19 vaccine this month Canada not ready to lift border restrictions with US as COVID-19 spikes MORE announced on Tuesday that Canada — along with the 10 other remaining countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — would work toward creating a revised trade agreement.

Trudeau said in a statement that the countries involved — not including the U.S. — finished talks in Tokyo on a "new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)."

In the statement, Trudeau said that "strengthening Canada’s economic relationship with countries in the large and economically fast-growing Asia-Pacific region to support prosperity and create jobs for our middle class is a priority for Canada."

He said Canada had always said it would agree to a deal that is in Canada's best interests.

"To that end, Canada has been working very hard on the new CPTPP, from spearheading the first meetings of officials in May 2017 to proposing several suspensions and changes to secure better terms for Canadians throughout this burgeoning region," he said in the statement.

He added that Canada has shown it "can and will work hard to set the terms of trade so the middle class can compete and win on the world stage."

According to The Associated Press, those involved are hoping to sign an agreement by early March.

The move comes about a year after Trump signed an executive order announcing his plan to withdraw the U.S. from the TPP trade deal.

After signing the order last year, Trump said leaving the 12-nation pact is a "great thing for the American worker."

[TheHill.com]

The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax

The contents of this site are ©2020 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

question: What is the main focus of this article?

answer: The focus of the article is Canada's involvement in the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

question: Who is Trudeau?

answer: The Prime Minister of Canada.

question: When do the countries involved hope to sign an agreement?

answer: They hope to sign it by March.

question: Who said that leaving the TPP is a "great thing for the American worker."?

answer: Trump

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: The focus of the article is Canada's involvement in the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).


text:
CHRISTINE SCHRANER BURGENER (born Christine Burgener in 1963) is a Swiss diplomat currently serving as the United Nations Special Envoy on Myanmar. She previously served as an ambassador to Germany and Thailand.[1]

Personal life and education

Burgener was born in 1963 at Meiringen, Switzerland.[2] She grew up in Tokyo, Japan with her father, a Swissair technician.[3][4] She graduated from the University of Zurich with a degree in law.[5]

Schraner Burgener is married to the diplomat Christoph Burgener (born 1962), the former Swiss ambassador to Myanmar. The couple has a daughter and a son. Schraner Burgener is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland.[6]

Career

She joined the diplomatic service in the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in 1991, first as a stage in the International Law Section, then in 1992 as an attaché at the Swiss Embassy in Rabat, Morocco.

Back in Switzerland, she was deputy head of the human rights section from 1993 to 1997. During this time, she dealt with the establishment of the human rights dialogue with the People's Republic of China, lectured and published on the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and attended the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing as a member of the Swiss delegation. Afterwards, she was embassy counselor at the embassy in Dublin , sharing employment with her husband. From 2001 to 2003, she was also in employment with her husband, in the DFA head of the section on human rights policy, then employee of the department head Human Security. [Swiss Embassy in Bangkok, 2009]

From 2004 to 2009 she was Deputy Director of the International Law Directorate and Head of the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Department. As of 2007, she had the rank of ambassador there. She was Secretary-General of the International Humanitarian Investigation Commission (IHEK), coordinator of the Counter-Terrorism Working Group in the FDFA, member of the Anti-Trafficking Coordination Unit (KSMM) of the Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP), co-chair of the Cluster on Clustering Convention 2008 in Dublin and President of the FDFA section of the Union of the Federal Association of Employees (PVB).

Schraner Burgener had her first ambassadorship from 2009 to 2015 as the Swiss ambassador to Thailand, succeeding Rodolphe Imhoof. She was responsible for Thailand from 2009 to 2012 in the area of employment with her husband, and opened a Swiss embassy in Myanmar for Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar until 2012, when her husband was an ambassador. The principle of division of labor was supported by the then Swiss Federal Councilor Micheline Calmy-Rey . According to statements of the then German ambassador to Thailand Rolf Peter Gottfried Schulze, she is the only diplomat to have maintained contact with both camps during the 2013–2014 Thai political crisis.[7]

[1]

[2]

[3] . Artikel vom 22. Mai 2015 von Christoph Reichmuth von der Luzerner Zeitung im Boten der Urschweiz (PDF)

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

title: Christine Schraner Burgener

question: Who is Christine Schraner Burgener?

answer: a Swiss diplomat currently serving as the United Nations Special Envoy on Myanmar

question: When was Christine Schraner Burgener born?

answer: 1963

question: Who is Christine Schraner Burgener's husband?

answer: Christoph Burgener

question: When was Christine Schraner Burgener's first ambassadorship?

answer: 2009 to 2015 as the Swiss ambassador to Thailand

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: Christine Schraner Burgener is a Swiss diplomat currently serving as the United Nations Special Envoy on Myanmar.


text:
POSTHUMOUS

Deep in an advanced biological warfare laboratory, a virologist working to develop a weaponized version of the Marburg virus succeeds in creating a viral strain that is airborne, impervious to extreme heat and cold, and is 99% communicable. The results of infection by this virus are not what the virologist intended, though. After rigorous testing she confirms the effect with certainty. What is the effect? Absolute immortality, no exceptions. Once the infection takes hold, the recipient can not die.

The virologist decides that after years of crafting nothing but death, she will undo the damage that she has done over her (quite successful) career. She smuggles a vial of the virus out of the lab and makes her way to the nearest international airport, knowing that this will be an effective ground zero with possible vectors of contagion being worldwide.

The vial is opened and the virus is released. Unfortunately, due to the stresses of her actions the virologist has a heart attack and dies before the virus has a chance to take hold in her body.

As time goes on, her crafting of the virus is forgotten, but she is (in a way) immortalized as the last person in the world to die.

(5/1/16)

title: [SP] Posthumous

question: Describe the virus.

answer: The virus is used as biological warfare to create immortality, and can survive most conditions with 99% communicability.

question: What does the virus cause?

answer: The virus causes immortality.

question: Who are the main characters in the story?

answer: The main character is the virologist.

question: Is there a vaccine for the virus?

answer: That information can't be found, but it doesn't seem that there is an intended cure for the virus.

question: Write a ~4 sentence summary.

answer: A virologist creates a contagious virus intended to cause worldwide immortality. When the virus is released, the virologist has a heart attack due to the stresses of her actions. The virus doesn't take hold in her body. She is forgotten, but immortalized as the last person in the world to die.


text:
It was a chilly spring day in Vancouver. “Hurry up we have to get going to the town center soon, breakfast is downstairs,” Adams wife stood at the bedroom door. She had dark black hair that drooped down her face and pale white skin much like Adam. He got up out of bed to change into his black jumpsuit; the same jumpsuit that everyone wore except his had a unique number, it read 77689. Towards the bathroom, he walked with a slouched back and a slight limp following a factory accident he had a month ago. A feeling of anger came over him but quickly subsided; he remembered the doctor telling him to control his thoughts and emotions.

“Breakfast looks good,” he said with a cold smile, it was a hot metal bowl of oatmeal and honey. The same food everyone got for their rations, the government provided the food, everyone got equal treatment. At the table sat Adams only son Tim, a gaunt ghoulish boy with razor-sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes.

“I hate this food,” Tim said spinning his spoon around the bowl, making a horrid screeching sound.

“Stop that,” his mum groaned looking as equally fed up of the cuisine.

“Don’t complain about the food, we should be thankful that we’re eating a hot meal,” Adam insisted, something inside of him didn’t feel right but he carried on slurping up the oatmeal. He looked past the drab and grey walls into the window where the sun stood far out of reach. “Let's get going, we don’t want to miss the news,” Adam sighed, as he got up the old wooden chair screamed being dragged across the wood floor.

The door creaked open as the family stepped out, the smoke-filled air heated up Adams throat drying it up like an Arabian desert. His lungs now used to the air no longer rejected it instead suffered from every burning breath. The taste was like burning hair which dried up the mouth. Stark houses stood only meters apart to accommodate the growing population. Now at the Town Center, he looked at the posters which hung up on telephone poles ‘Vote for Venessa Cooper 2078’, the same burning anger from earlier crept up his insides but like a fire extinguisher was put out by an irrational wave of fear. The endless sea of people stood around them, a flowing river of bodies. EEEEEEE the siren screeched, and silence quickly came to take its place. The silence hung in the air like a heavy fog but was disturbed by a flash.

“This is not your daily news broadcast, we call ourselves M0XERS,” the huge screen which usually displayed the news now projected a man with a deep monotone voice. He looked different as his face was not gaunt but was instead colourful and round, he had a dark brown beard that resembled a rainforest, his bare head scrunched up when he spoke. “We are here to liberate you from the prison you live in,” he declared, his tone so serious but warming. All eyes were on the screen then a group of dark masked figures abseiled down the screen. As people watched in curiosity the red paint quickly made out the word ‘freedom’.

The heavy silence was pierced by the yelling and hissing of people chanting “This is the hate of the old age!” The man on the screen looked in horror, suddenly the door behind him opened with a loud bang. Flashing white was followed by the sound of gunshots and screams. Silence once again covered the town center like a blanket of fog, when the dust cleared all that was left were bodies. A soldier dressed in all white appeared on screen then all went blank.

“We need to get out of here,” Adam said as he pulled his family away from the sea of people. Gunshots could be heard as a large military truck the size of two school buses plowed through the group of masked individuals. Gas was thrown at the crowd to disperse them. Everything slowed down, it felt as if someone stabbed him and pulled out his stomach. People were running and screaming as people began getting caught in the crossfire, he looked back and froze.

Breaths began coming to him but only in slow rattling gasps. His breathing would stop only to emerge like a drowning victim coming up for their last breath. His family still life clawed out of them into the cold hands of death. He looked at the word freedom now barely visible, covered in blood like a 1st graders painting.

“Go home or you will be shot!” the speaker blasted; this startled all the people still frozen in place to run like birds from a rock. Adam ran to in fear of his life, was he a coward to do so he thought. Nausea clawed at his throat he felt a strong contraction in his stomach, a vile acidic taste filled his mouth as he looked down only to see vivid yellow bile with chunks of oats.

The door creaked open and the coldness from the house felt like nails down his spine. His crying was both ferocious and noisy. He blinked briny tears from bloodshot eyes, his thick lashes stuck together in clumps as if he'd been swimming. The tears made wet tracks down his face and dripped from his stubbled, wobbling chin. He lay down needles sliced through every inch of his body the pain was too much, his eyes felt heavy like warm blankets.  He let his consciousness ebb away into the escape which was the darkness.

title: [RF] School short story can't think of a title and need help with grammar :)

question: What does the text say about Tim?

answer: Tim is the son of Adam and his wife. He was a gaunt, ghoulish boy with razor sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes. This seems to hint at malnourishment. His breakfast is the same food everyone gets from their government rations, a bowl of oatmeal. He tells his father that he hates this food, and scrapes his spoon in the bowl. Later on when the citizens of Vancouver are terrorized by the military, it seems implied that Tim dies in the mix of it all.

question: Summarize what happens to Adam's family at the end of the story.

answer: After the M0xERS claimed to be liberating the people of Vancouver, they were seemingly killed by the military. The military then turns on its citizens, with gunshots, gas and a large military truck plowing through masked individuals. It seems that Adam's wife and son get caught in the crossfire. While he is affected by the gas, he sees them trying to claw their way out of death. It's implied that they die.

question: What does the text say about the M0XERS?

answer: On the news, the M0XERS take over the daily broadcast. The M0XER who is speaking looks different compared to the malnourished citizens of Vancouver. His face isn't gaunt, but colorful and round. He also has a dark brown beard. He claims the M0xers are there to liberate the people from the prison they live in. Masked figures display the word "Freedom" in red paint. Right after, the M0XERS doing the broadcast are presumably shot and killed by the military.

question: Summarize how Tim gets away from the violence.


text:
Click.

It is the sound of a Cherry MX Blue--arguably the best keyswitch for typing. Arguable because maybe you don't need the whole house to know that you're typing. Best because there is a little tiny gavel in each one that--no matter how gingerly you caress the key--hammers down with the force of 2.4*10^-19 atomic bombs. "I'm not sure whether the key actually got pressed," said nobody ever while typing on Cherry MX Blues.

Despite being absolutely, positively, the sound that a Cherry MX Blue would make--a sound whose whole point is to have no duration, to mark a single moment and only that moment--the scientists assure us that it is still happening. Not like the "click click click click," which is what is coming from the keys at my fingertips as I type this, but like "clicccccccc....." on for ever. Except that there never really was a "cli..." and maybe there will never really be a "..k."

The whole click is there in the signal, but the front and back of it, they say, are "non-local". Usually, when they say this, they are pointing at a pair of graphs, one of whose axes appears to be approaching a vertical asymtote according to the other. They make about as much sense of it as they ever do.

Apparently, if you're on a finite timeline, and you have a deadline tomorrow, you can just hang a left. Your new time axis runs parallel to the deadline, so they never intersect, and you never have to go to work again. The math all checks out, we're told--it's just that nobody has figured out how to actually do this. Not even the guy that pressed the big omnipresent MX Blue in the sky--he's non-local too. Whatever happened when he pressed that key, it may have set our clocks on a path where they would never see his deadline, but there's no reason to believe that it will save him.

What is he writing?

Some say that he had been up all night writing the laws of physics into a computer program, and that the click that we're hearing is the enter key that God pressed to start the universe running. This is, unsuprisingly, the position of the scientists who discovered the signal. Newton would have been one of these, had he live at the right time--Plato too. Little has changed for them, they're still bickering with the mathematicians about which language the universe is written in, and whether we'd notice if the program halted.

Others think it's a work of fiction. Well, fiction for him at least. The more optimistic of these think it's his first keystroke--a shift key to make the 'O' in "Once upon a time..." Whether it's a story about them, and whether they turn out to be a hero or a villain, comes down to how hero-worthy or villain-worthy their life turns out to be.

Hundreds of variations of the "which key?" story have emerged. Each, like these, comes equipped with its own particular philosophical--and ultimately political--overtones. Fractures appeared among even the most cohesive societies: The debate over whether the pope had the right to chose the church's favored key has bumbled on awkwardly for years now. It has become apparent that the two-party system is unstabe in a universe that thinks it was created on a 105-key keyboard. The last thing we all needed was yet another thing for schoolchildren to form cliques over.

Three years ago, the largest sensor array on the planet was completed and powered on--we needed to know. It was theorized that despite the non-locality of the click as we hear it, there would be other objects in the author's world that it was local to. If there was any delay at all when our world forked off orthognally to the author's timeline, the sound should have reflected off of the neighboring keys. With a good enough sampling of the signal, we might be able to build a map.

Almost immediately they ruled out the possibility of the click having come from a spacebar--but nobody was suprised by this, spacebars sound much different than other keys due to their shape. Since then, the facility has remained silent--aware of the societal impact of an announcement, they have promised to keep quiet until they were absolutely sure.

That is, until today. The world is scrambling to make sense of the result. Apparently, it's a backspace. The talking heads are still working at adjusting their worldviews so that they can have been right all along. It will probably only take a few hours. But until that happens, the world is quiet except for a small handful.

105 keys, 9 billion people--somebody was bound to be right. According to them, everything to the left of the cursor is unchangeable to us. There it is written that the speed of light is about three hundred mega-meters per second, and pointed out that farts are funny. Moments before the backspace happened, there was also text describing what we were all going to do next. Perhaps not for the rest of eternity, but long enough that we would have no choice but carry it out for the time being.

When the author backspaced over that text, he freed us from his plans. We are the potentiality that he decided against--and at the moment of deletion the burden of experiencing us transfered from his mind, to ours. Our reality, according to the backspacers, is where that particular fiction went because it failed to stick to the page.

I probably should give this more time to sink in, maybe sleep on it, but I'm delerious with the concept. In a certain sense it has always been known that you could create a universe in your mind and then capture it on the page, but to think that all of the alternative worlds--worlds created by every edit, every time you forgot to save--would continue on without you... It's fantastic.

Now, it might be nothing, but there is a rumor that began circulating a week before the announcement. The rumor correctly predicted both the timing of the announcement and the announced key. According to the rumor, they found something more. Supposedly there's a second signal, and "it looks like text."

Now, I have a deadline coming up, and I don't know how to make the kind of left turn that avoids the arrival of tomorrow. Not for myself at least. Before I get to work, I'm going to backspace over this entire story. If it shows up in your cosmic background, I'll have no way of knowing, but you'll know that I went to work so that you could keep on being a dream.

And if you feel like it, write me into some unfinished fiction of your own, even if only for a moment. With a bit of luck, we'll build an even bigger sensor and discover your story written on our sky.

title: Click [SF]

question: Summarize what Cherry MX Blues are.

answer: Cherry MX Blues are keyswitches for keyboards. Keyswitches determine the user experience when pressing keys on a keyboard, and in the case of the Cherry MX Blue, it makes such a resounding click sound and tactile reaction that gives the user an absolute confirmation and feedback that a key has indeed been pressed. The narrator exaggeratingly likens the sound to be as strong as an exponential volume of atomic bombs.


text:
BOONE COUNTY is a county in the U.S. state of Nebraska. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 5,505.[1] Its county seat is Albion.[2] The county was organized in 1871[3] and named after Daniel Boone.[4]

In the Nebraska license plate system, Boone County is represented by the prefix 23 (it had the 23rd-largest number of vehicles registered in the county when the license plate system was established in 1922).

Geography

According to the US Census Bureau, the county has an area of , of which is land and (0.1%) is water.[5]

Major highways

-   [] Nebraska Highway 14
-   [] Nebraska Highway 32
-   [] Nebraska Highway 39
-   [] Nebraska Highway 45
-   [] Nebraska Highway 52
-   [] Nebraska Highway 56
-   [] Nebraska Highway 91

Adjacent counties

-   Madison County – northeast
-   Platte County – southeast
-   Nance County – south
-   Greeley County – southwest
-   Wheeler County – northwest
-   Antelope County – north

Demographics

As of the 2000 United States Census,[6] there were 6,259 people, 2,454 households, and 1,700 families in the county. The population density was 9 people per square mile (4/km²). There were 2,733 housing units at an average density of 4 per square mile (2/km²). The racial makeup of the county was 99.25% White, 0.05% Black or African American, 0.05% Native American, 0.03% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 0.30% from other races, and 0.29% from two or more races. 0.89% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 54.6% were of German, 8.2% Irish, 5.9% Polish, 5.3% Norwegian and 5.1% Swedish ancestry according to Census 2000.

There were 2,454 households, out of which 33.90% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 60.80% were married couples living together, 5.50% had a female householder with no husband present, and 30.70% were non-families. 29.10% of all households were made up of individuals, and 16.50% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.50 and the average family size was 3.11.

29.10% of the population is under the age of 18, 5.00% from 18 to 24, 24.20% from 25 to 44, 21.40% from 45 to 64, and 20.40% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females there were 99.10 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 96.40 males.

The median income for a household in the county was $31,444, and the median income for a family was $38,226. Males had a median income of $26,779 versus $18,438 for females. The per capita income for the county was $15,831. About 8.30% of families and 10.40% of the population were below the poverty line, including 11.70% of those under age 18 and 11.60% of those age 65 or over.

Communities

Cities

-   Albion (county seat)
-   St. Edward

Villages

-   Cedar Rapids
-   Petersburg
-   Primrose

Census-designated places

-   Loretto
-   Raeville

Unincorporated community

-   Akron

Politics

Boone County voters have been strongly Republican for decades. In only one national election since 1936 has the county selected the Democratic Party candidate.

  Year                               Republican                                     Democratic                                  Third Parties
  ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ----------------------------
  style=“text-align:center;” |2016   style=“text-align:center;” |79.1% _2,299_      style=“text-align:center;” |14.3% _414_     6.6% _192_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2012   style=“text-align:center;” |76.2% _2,138_      style=“text-align:center;” |21.9% _615_     1.9% _53_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2008   style=“text-align:center;” |72.0% _2,042_      style=“text-align:center;” |26.2% _742_     1.8% _52_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2004   style=“text-align:center;” |79.8% _2,309_      style=“text-align:center;” |18.9% _546_     1.4% _40_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2000   style=“text-align:center;” |76.7% _2,196_      style=“text-align:center;” |20.1% _575_     3.2% _91_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1996   style=“text-align:center;” |57.6% _1,695_      style=“text-align:center;” |27.4% _806_     15.0% _440_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1992   style=“text-align:center;” |50.2% _1,589_      style=“text-align:center;” |19.1% _604_     30.7% _972_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1988   style=“text-align:center;” |68.6% _2,160_      style=“text-align:center;” |31.0% _976_     0.4% _14_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1984   style=“text-align:center;” |78.0% _2,508_      style=“text-align:center;” |21.5% _690_     0.5% _17_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1980   style=“text-align:center;” |72.1% _2,598_      style=“text-align:center;” |21.3% _769_     6.6% _236_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1976   style=“text-align:center;” |59.2% _2,035_      style=“text-align:center;” |38.7% _1,329_   2.1% _73_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1972   style=“text-align:center;” |73.2% _2,406_      style=“text-align:center;” |26.9% _883_     style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1968   style=“text-align:center;” |64.0% _2,179_      style=“text-align:center;” |27.4% _934_     8.6% _291_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1964   style=“text-align:center;” |49.8% _1,893_      style=“text-align:center;” |50.2% _1,905_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1960   style=“text-align:center;” |64.5% _2,809_      style=“text-align:center;” |35.5% _1,547_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1956   style=“text-align:center;” |70.3% _3,021_      style=“text-align:center;” |29.7% _1,277_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1952   style=“text-align:center;” |72.9% _3,453_      style=“text-align:center;” |27.1% _1,283_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1948   style=“text-align:center;” |55.7% _2,235_      style=“text-align:center;” |44.3% _1,778_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1944   style=“text-align:center;” |63.3% _2,865_      style=“text-align:center;” |36.8% _1,665_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1940   style=“text-align:center;” |62.3% _3,334_      style=“text-align:center;” |37.7% _2,014_   style="text-align:center;|
  style=“text-align:center;” |1936   style=“text-align:center;” |45.3% _2,728_      style=“text-align:center;” |51.4% _3,095_   3.4% _202_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1932   style=“text-align:center;” |29.6% _1,862_      style=“text-align:center;” |69.3% _4,360_   1.1% _69_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1928   style=“text-align:center;” |62.6% _3,816_      style=“text-align:center;” |37.1% _2,260_   0.4% _23_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1924   style=“text-align:center;” |36.4%''' _2,013_   style=“text-align:center;” |32.2% _1,782_   31.5% _1,742_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1920   style=“text-align:center;” |66.0% _3,108_      style=“text-align:center;” |31.0% _1,461_   3.0% _142_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1916   style=“text-align:center;” |37.0% _1,225_      style=“text-align:center;” |60.6% _2,005_   2.4% _78_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1912   style=“text-align:center;” |19.3% _570_        style=“text-align:center;” |46.1% _1,360_   34.6% _1,023_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1908   style=“text-align:center;” |49.1% _1,580_      style=“text-align:center;” |49.2% _1,583_   1.6% _52_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1904   style=“text-align:center;” |63.7% _1,823_      style=“text-align:center;” |16.5% _471_     19.8% _567_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1900   style=“text-align:center;” |52.3% _1,524_      style=“text-align:center;” |45.8% _1,336_   1.9% _55_

  : PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS RESULTS[7]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7] http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS

title: Boone County, Nebraska

question: Discuss the income inequality in Nebraska

answer: Women earn considerably less than men with men earning $26,779 and women $18,438. The household median income is $31,444 but 10.4% of the population live below the poverty line with youth and the elderly forming the greater part of those below the poverty line.