I'll pin a comment with highlights as the day goes on.

Watch at 1 pm eastern on C-Span or Youtube

Impeachment schedule

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reached an agreement yesterday for the impeachment trial schedule, which officially kicks off at 1 pm eastern (pdf).
The first day will focus on the constitutionality of impeaching Trump, with two hours of argument allotted for each side. A vote will be taken on the matter, which is expected to allow the trial to continue.
If either Trump’s defense or the Impeachment Managers wish to call witnesses or subpoena documents, they must file their motions by Wednesday morning (see section below on witnesses).
Then, each side gets up to 16 hours, spread between two days, to present their arguments for and against conviction.
Uncertainty exists around the schedule for Friday-Sunday due to Trump’s lead attorney requesting time off to observe the Sabbath. He withdrew this request after the Senate leadership released their agreement. It is likely the Senate will amend the agreement to hold trial over the weekend.
UPDATE: The Senate will convene every day, including Friday through Monday, for the trial.
The senators next get 4 hours to question the House managers and Trump’s lawyers, followed by time to debate and vote to subpoena witnesses and/or documents.
Finally, each side is given 2 hours to make closing arguments. The Senate must then vote on the article of impeachment. A total of 67 votes are required to convict the former president. A vote to bar him from holding future office is only possible if conviction is successful.
TLDR: Without witnesses and if the Senate decides to hold the trial Friday and Saturday, the final vote to convict or acquit Trump is expected early next week.

Trial briefs

In their first trial brief filed last week, the House impeachment managers laid out their case that former President Donald Trump is "singularly responsible" for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. Starting with his claims of mass voter fraud before the election, the filing explains that Trump “spent months using his bully pulpit” to undermine democracy, “seeking to convince supporters that they were victims of a massive electoral conspiracy that threatened the Nation’s continued existence.” Following the Electoral College vote, the impeachment managers continue, Trump “aimed” his supporters “straight at the Capitol” and failed to “take swift action to stop the violence” on Jan. 6.

”It is impossible to imagine the events of January 6 occurring without President Trump creating a powder keg, striking a match, and then seeking personal advantage from the ensuing havoc.”

A large portion of the brief deals with rebutting the argument put forward by Senate Republicans: that an official no longer holding office cannot be impeached and/or convicted. To do this, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s team go back to the beginning of our nation and examine evidence that the Constitutional framers intended for impeachment to be available after a president is out of office.

”It is unthinkable that those same Framers [of our constitution] left us virtually defenseless against a president’s treachery in his final days, allowing him to misuse power, violate his Oath, and incite insurrection against Congress and our electoral institutions simply because he is a lame duck. There is no “January Exception” to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution. A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last.”

Yesterday, Trump’s new legal team responded to the charges brought by the House, accusing them of engaging in “political theater” to pursue an unconstitutional goal. As evidence that Trump did not incite the violence of Jan. 6, his lawyers stipulate that the former president “used the word ‘fight’ a little more than a handful of times” and only “in the figurative sense”. Furthermore, Trump’s team raises objections to the quick pace of the impeachment, the House’s use of Trump’s words prior to Jan. 6, and the inclusion of the rioter’s garb and stated goals.

In a brazen attempt to further glorify violence, the House Managers took several pages of their Memorandum to restate over 50 sensationalized media reports detailing the horrific incidents and shocking violence… There was no investigation. The House abdicated that responsibility to the media.

Trump’s lawyers dedicated over 30 pages of the 74 page brief to arguments that Trump’s speech preceding the insurrection is protected by the First Amendment. Their position hinges on the belief that Trump did not incite violence:

”There can be no dispute that elected public officials engage in protected free speech when they speak out on investigations of voting regularity and fairness… a difference of political opinion...cannot be punishable where all that was done was to encourage investigation of voting irregularities and peaceful political speech.”

Finally, the filing concludes with an argument we saw during Trump’s first impeachment trial: that impeachment requires a crime be committed.

”House Democrats’ theory on insurrection collapses at the threshold because it fails to describe any violation of law whatsoever.”

Witnesses

So far, the biggest questions involve the details of how the Impeachment Managers intend to make their case. Rep. Raskin has been fairly vague on their overall plan in public statements. Ultimately, however, the decision to call witnesses and subpoena documents is up to the senators themselves.

"If managers decide they want witnesses, there will be a vote on that, which is the option they requested," Schumer said.

The minimum 51 votes required to approve a motion to present witness testimony are not guaranteed, as members of both parties have expressed a desire to see the trial ended quickly.

“This is based on a public crime,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “His intent was unhidden and so I think there’s a danger as there always is for a trial lawyer and prosecutor to over-try, to add more witnesses that prove the obvious.”
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) compared the situations this way: “Imagine if the Ukraine call were streamed on the Internet." And given how dug in most members of both parties are, he observed: "It’s not clear to me that there is any evidence that will change anyone’s mind.”

Some possible witnesses to call include: The aides who planned the rally (Caroline Wren, Megan Powers, Maggie Mulvaney); Brad Raffensperger, who Trump tried to pressure to “find” votes in Georgia; Capitol rioters who said Trump motivated their actions; constitutionality experts.
One line of Trump’s defense brief caught my attention in particular: his lawyers claim there’s no evidence that he didn’t act to stop the riot and didn’t condemn the violence for hours, as the media reported. The time directly preceding and following his speech seems to be the most unknown to the public. White House aides like Mark Meadows would have key information on Trump’s words and actions during this window, which would go a long way towards proving intent to incite an insurrection.
Edit to add: Aides to the House Managers have given some statements to Politico this morning...

The aides, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe mechanics of the Senate’s trial, emphasized that they intend to present a visually gripping version of events that draws on the personal experiences that will resonate with many of the lawmakers who fled the violent insurrectionists.
“It’ll be more like a violent crime criminal prosecution, because that is what it is,” one of the advisers said. “It will tell the story, the full story of … how the president incited it. Jan. 6 was the culmination of that incitement with his conduct leading up to it giving meaning and context to his words.”
...The arguments Tuesday will be led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the lead House manager, followed by Reps. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) and David Cicilline (D-R.I), key members of the House Judiciary Committee.
The managers plan to name-check Chuck Cooper, the longtime GOP-aligned lawyer who wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Senate has the authority to convict Trump even though he is now a private citizen.

Based on this, I'm assuming video evidence is a large part of the case the House will make. The aim is to make the vote to acquit as painful and damaging as possible; to make it clear what exactly senators are saying is acceptable from a president.
In my opinion, Republicans are going to use the constitutionality argument as a way to "justify" acquitting Trump of the charges. We'll probably see a few in favor of conviction - Mitt Romney comes to mind - but not enough to reach 67. I hope I'm wrong, that's just my prediction at this point...

Soooo... I accidentally started a cult 😬

I took an introductory psychology course last semester, and I learned a lot about human social behavior. We even learned a bit of basic information about cults, which has been a lifelong interest for me. Particularly the kinds that seem to form around conspiracy theories. I guess it would be an oversimplification to say I wasn’t aware of any of this stuff before, though.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen acquaintances, friends, and even family fall for misinformation that could be pretty easily debunked with a quick Google search. I’m only eighteen… if I can parse fact from fiction, why is this such a thing these days?
Even with what I’ve learned in class, I’m amazed at how this continues to play out in “real life”, outside of academia and cold, clinical laboratory environments. Time and time again, I’m stunned by how many rational, seemingly “normal” people accept blatant lies as fact.
Not only do they accept it, but they spread it.
Eventually, I started to ask myself… how does this happen? Is it that people are just… so bored with their own lives that they are compelled to seek entertaining explanations for what is so clearly laid out in front of them?
Then I asked myself, how far could it go?
What kinds of things will people believe with little to no actual proof?
The explanations in my textbooks were not enough for me. I wanted to find out.
Almost half a year ago, I started a social experiment. I joined a lesser-known discussion forum—I’m not going to name it here, because I don’t want anyone going over there after what happened—and pulled up the page to submit a post.
I put my fingers to the keys, eager to start my experiment. I ran into my first problem right there, in that first moment. I stared at the blank text box, zeroing in on the cursor as it blinked almost mockingly. It sounds stupid, but I wasn’t creative enough to come up with an idea to base my conspiracy theory on.
There were a few things I did know then, though. A few very important things, I think. I knew that people like a common villain to take a stand against. In a world full of grey area, people like black and white problems, a clear-cut “evil”.
In addition, I knew that people like to be in on a secret, to feel like they’re somehow aware of a problem that is hidden in plain sight. And people like problems that they don’t really have to do anything about, a problem that they don’t need to solve with anything other than “raising awareness”.
I’ll admit it—it took me several days of thinking before I figured out what to base my first post on. And when I finally landed on that idea, it didn’t even come from my own creativity.
I was watching a documentary, one about a rather infamous bloke. He was a murderer, both of man and animals. Cats, to be exact. The documentary seemed to focus mainly on the cats; all the awful things he did to those poor animals, and the great lengths to which complete strangers went to in order to stop him from hurting any more of them.
There was very little information about his human victim, which stunned me. I’ve since read he was an incredibly compassionate and intelligent person… he was living abroad and lonely, just looking for friends when he met his terrible end. On a personal note, I think of him, his family, and his friends daily. I feel a great shame for all that I’ve done that could continue to perpetuate their grief… and an ever-increasing horror for what may still be to come.
While I was struggling to understand this discrepancy in coverage, a thought hit me almost immediately—people fucking love cats. Even if you’re not a cat person, you probably think anyone who hurts a cat should suffer tenfold themselves. It was exactly the black and white problem I was looking for.
I was a little stoned, but I decided to give it a go right then. I popped open my laptop and started a post.

Most of the world’s stray cats vanished virtually overnight yet the truth remains unknown by the masses. L tried to tell us the truth. We refused to listen. Police refused to investigate. Media refused to publish the truth. MASSIVE SCALE COVERUP TO HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOV/SOCIETY. The truth is hard to look at but you’ll never unsee it… once you open your eyes.

I fell asleep soon after publishing the post but checked the thread first thing in the morning. I was expecting one or two responses at most, so I was absolutely floored by the amount of replies present once I refreshed the page.
One hundred and sixty-two comments.
Some of the users laughed me off as expected, but their comments were greatly outnumbered by those vehemently agreeing with me and pressing me for more information. Almost desperately. People wanted to know how they could help save the cats.
Even more surprisingly, users worked together to decode portions of my message. They worked quickly until they accurately identified the subject of the documentary that I’d seen just the other night. I had barely given any information, but they figured it out.
Honestly, I was… amazed. I was proud.
It was a strange feeling.
Still, people wanted more.
I gave them what they wanted.

Cats once recognized as gods. Now “pussy” means WEAK… this is PURRPOSEFUL. Innocent, helpless kittens rounded up to fulfill the SICK and DEPRAVED needs of the world’s mega-rich elites. To harness their inherent power. Look hard at the world around you. Ask yourself: where did the cats go?

Snickering, I posted the comment. I figured that, with the escalation of the absurdity in the “information” and my pure audacity in inputting a cat pun, it would all be over then. Part of me wanted it to be over then, to finish as soon as it had started, but I’m ashamed to admit that a deeper, darker part of me wanted to ride this out for as long as possible.
That part of me became increasingly impossible to ignore as the comments flooded in.
Xxxxx1583: ty for this, HD. about time ppl woke up to the harsh truth.
Xxxxxx212: WHERE DID THE CATS GO?????????????
Xxxxx2999: HD, you should make your own board. We need more information. We need to know the truth so we can help you put an end to this.
Xxxx33333: SAVE THE CATS
Xxxx00011: down with the elites, sick fuks
The third comment stuck out most to me… I followed their advice and created my own board. I titled it “WDTCG?”, short for what seemed to be the first rallying cry associated with my faux conspiracy theory. Users flooded into the board, joining at a rate that left my jaw on the floor. I was nearing one thousand members by the end of that first day, all ears for whatever I would say next.
I decided to wait before posting any new “info”. I needed time to think. I closed my laptop that night, feeling oddly… powerful. I had more people hanging on my every word than I could have possibly imagined before all of this. All it once, it hit me—the realization that I needed to be careful with what I said. Any wrong move could cost me what I’d manage to build in such a short period of time.
The next couple months went by smoothly, with my interaction and reader base growing steadily. Some days the number of followers would spike almost exponentially. They started calling themselves the Cat Crusaders, which I found oddly endearing.
Often times, they’d make connections that I hadn’t even thought of beforehand. I’m embarrassed to admit that sometimes I even wondered if I’d accidentally stumbled upon the truth, if I knew more than I… knew. If—by some fantastical coincidence—my fabricated “conspiracy theory” was actually true.
They combed through pop culture and media, picking out instances that could align with WTDCG. A user who I came to recognize as my most active, loyal follower—Xxxxx2999, the one who had suggested I start my own board in the first place—posted a particularly jarring thread about that song WAP.

Wet Ass Pussy—popularly abbreviated as “WAP” to downplay its horrific hidden meanings—is clearly about drowning cats. The elites and their spineless lackeys in the media are rubbing the truth in our faces, inoculating us with it in our everyday lives so that REALITY seems farfetched. When will the people wake up???

The Cat Crusaders quickly added anyone associated with the song to the list of the “elites” they suspected as part of “cat torture rings” to a running list. Suspicion quickly turned to undeniable fact in their minds, and the list quickly grew into the hundreds.
In conversation, members termed these elites “wolves” … a known predator of cats. Some of the zanier members began to assert that the wolves were actual wolves, either humanoid werewolf type creatures, or wolves in human “skin suits”. A few even insisted that they could tell the difference, that their human appearance was almost believable, but not enough to trick them.
I dropped new info posts fairly regularly, making sure to give members time between each to work out any hidden meanings. They continued to make more and more connections, uncovering any acronyms or other word puzzles I utilized. I didn’t want to give everything away all at once so that they could decode either on their own, or—more often—as a team.
Working together seemed fun for them. It was fun for me, too… it was like a game that we were all playing together.
Things went from funny games to something much worse almost overnight.
When the lockdown started, I saw a massive increase in numbers. People were bored at home and grasping for some understanding in such increasingly incomprehensible circumstances. Members began downplaying current events, claiming that the media was distorting reality.
They used snappy one-liners as a point-black denial of real problems that fostered real injustices. I watched, sick to my stomach, as comments like, “anti-mask, anti-vax, but pro-cats” and “cat lives matter!!” became normal and even celebrated.
After all, if the wolves had to take such tremendous measures, if they had to pull so many strings to “stage” such extreme scenes… it only meant that they were on the right track. Or that we were on the right track.
Even more troubling still, some extreme viewpoints started popping up. It went from “save the cats!” to “DEATH TO ALL WOLVES” in the blink of an eye. There were a lot of wolves on the list by that time, and these severe and violent sentiments both deeply sickened me and stoked a sudden fear of what I’d created… what the Crusaders might become or do.
Those viewpoints only represented a small minority of users, however, so I figured the best thing to do was to abandon the experiment altogether. To stop adding fuel to the fire, as they say.
I went dark for a month or so, ousting any lingering thoughts of WDTCG as soon as they came to mind. Considering how much time and thought I’d put into the experiment, forgetting about it was a struggle. I never honestly forgot about it, not even for a second. It overtook my thoughts entirely, even when I was away from the forum.
“Forgetting” only became more difficult as time went on, and I started noticing some troubling signs.
At first, I thought I was just being paranoid—I’d spent months practically forcing myself to adopt a hyper-paranoid mindset, after all. But with each passing day, and with each additional reminder, it all became impossible to ignore.
WDTCG was starting to go mainstream.
I spotted posts on “normie” social media sites that seemed entirely innocent on first glance. Image posts decrying high rates of animal abuse started to pop up on my feeds. This felt normal enough—of course people are sympathetic to this cause—right up until the hashtags. My stomach must’ve finally given into that fear ulcer I’d been brewing for months when I read it: #WDTCG?
Fuck.
Ignorance was never bliss in this situation, but I knew then that it wasn’t really a viable solution either.
With fearful, shaking hands, I logged back into my account. Part of me expected that the rest of my followers would have gone dark with me, that the board would have withered and died without me to lead them… that they would’ve understood that if I suddenly stopped posting new information, that the information must not have ever been real in the first place.
That part of me was optimistic, the part of me that engaged in wishful thinking. That part of me was also greatly overshadowed by a more realistic version of me, the part of me that knew what I’d done and what to expect when I logged back on.
That part of me was right.
In my absence, the board had absolutely exploded. Not only in the overall member count, but also in activity. The front page was cluttered with threads posted just in the last day or so. The top post had reached over a thousand comments, and the rest were in the hundreds… and counting.
I skimmed the first thread. Then the next one. And the one after that. I scrolled down, read more. If only to convince myself that what I was reading wasn’t true, that all of this was fake. Just a funny game for all of them, like it was for me.
Fear twisted my gut as I was forced to confront the truth: they all thought this was real.
Isolated in a perfect echo chamber, members of my board had only further reinforced their outlandish beliefs. Any opinion that branched even slightly away from their dogma was quickly dogpiled. Any measure of doubt or questioning, regardless of the intention behind it—I believe these questions were raised by members who only wished to strengthen the claims of the larger group—were snuffed out in an instant.
It was a metaphorical circle jerk in every possible way.
And what was left after dissenting opinions were squashed was the worst version of the conspiracy theory, the most extremist and hateful version. The version that only represented a minority of users before I left. I scrolled through users’ fervent calls for justice and retribution, really a thinly veiled euphemism for violence, for vengeance.
I thought—or, rather, I hoped—that if I stopped feeding them information, then they would forget about WDTCG. I hoped that, if I stopped acting as their “leader”, that they would cease to exist without my guidance.
It was only then that I faced a sickening reality… one in which they didn’t even need me to anymore at all.
I knew I had to at least try to stop them, so I did the only thing I knew to do. I posted.
Knowing I had to move quickly, I started a live chat thread. Comments quickly flooded in as users welcomed me back with open arms. They wanted to know what had happened to me. Had my mission been compromised? Had I been taken captive by the wolves? Did I have anything knew to share with them?
Because, they said, they sure as hell had a lot to share with me.
I was welcomed warmly, like a war hero returning back to his people… right up until I finally did the right thing, the thing that anyone with respect for their fellow man would do. I told them the truth.
hisdestruction: None of this is real. I made it all up.
I waited a few moments, slowed by agonizing fear, before I hit enter to send the message. The following seconds were even more terrifying as I watched the “…” appear at the bottom of the chat. Then, responses came in, one after the other.
Xxxxx9302: I call bullshit
Xx321: theres no way u could’ve made this shit up dude, any1 with eyes can see whats happening
Xxxxx92: you’ll be executed with the other wolves then on judgment day
Xxxxxxxxxxxx1: haha, funny joke HD.
Again… fuck.
I started fact checking my past info posts, meticulously disentangling their core beliefs that had resulted from misinformation I’d provided. I started small because I thought I’d get less push back, but I was wrong. Again.
When they refused to listen to reason even on the more superficial lies that I’d spread, I tackled the most fundamental, underlying info: my first post. I explained that, if they were indeed seeing fewer stray cats in their neighborhood, this was likely due to catch, spay, and release programs or better animal shelters. Perhaps a combination of both.
I tried to explain that it was even more likely that nothing had changed at all, but their perception of the outside world had been altered by reading my lies.
They didn’t like that one, either.
As a last-ditch effort, I typed in a sentiment I’d tried to communicate from the start… perhaps fearing from the very beginning that everything that I was seeing would occur.
hisdestruction: This movement is about peace and love. It is about saving innocent animals, not violence and destruction.
It didn’t take long before the replies materialized. Each confirmed my deepest fears.
Xxx001: no, it’s about JUSTICE
Xxxxxx22: ur just a FAKE and a SELLOUT
Xxxxx99: DEATH TO ALL WOLVES
It went on like this for minutes, each reply more hateful and horrific than the last. Finally, the barrage of extremism was broken by a single reply from a user I immediately recognized. When I read his words, I could no feel anything other than terror.
Xxxxx2999: Hold on. Sorry. HD is watching, communicating with me now.
Xxxxx2999: Yeeep. Just as I suspected. Account compromised. Await further instructions.
That motherfucker.
Fury eclipsed fear in that moment, and I put my fingers to the keyboard, fervently typing a counter response. Right as I hit send, I received an error message. I refreshed the page, only to find that my account had been logged out. And I couldn’t get back in.
Eventually, I managed to join the board again, but I could never get back into my old account. I don’t post anymore… I just watch my own lies spread further, deeper. I’ve reported the board a number of times… it’s even been deleted twice. It always comes back, though, and they’re picking up new ways to avoid the ban hammer. They removed the list of “wolves”, they learned to speak in coded language that sounds harmless but is anything but.
I’ve tried to communicate with law enforcement, but there’s really nothing they can do at this point. They’re right—the Cat Crusaders haven’t really done anything yet… but I fear what they will do in the future.
And I’m starting to see even more troubling signs.
It happened slowly at first, but it’s only gotten worse. I’ve been searching for it now, so I may be biased, but the signs are clear.
One or two animal shelters recently reported being flooded with anonymous phone calls that have taken away their time and resources to address animal welfare. The callers demanded that they concentrate their efforts on saving the cats from the elites.
Then a few reports of higher instances of catnapping, even to the point of animal hoarding.
And there’s the ever-escalating fury on the board, the calls for the blood of wolves.
Someone else is posting from the hisdestruction account now… I don’t know who it is, but I have my suspicions. They release info posts that fit with the new, extremist conspiracy theory that became the majority view in my absence. The Cat Crusaders lap it up eagerly, use it to further fuel their hate.
I was wrong about it from the beginning, I was wrong about them. They aren't stupid or gullible... they're incredibly clever and quick and most of all, dedicated. They're just dedicating themselves to a made-up issue because they were deliberately misled. It's all my fault.
I’ve officially lost control of my experiment... and now I fear what I’ve created.
X

Gamestop Big Picture: The Bigger Picture

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch. Also, full disclosure, I hold a net long position in GME, but my cost basis is very low, and I'm using money I can absolutely lose. My capital at risk and tolerance for risk generally is likely substantially different than yours.
I'll cover many things that I think will be generally beneficial for newer traders and investors first, but if you're just looking for my current observations on GME, write about it and the end, so feel free to skip the wall of text in the middle if that's what you're here for :).
One thing I would suggest for newer traders, particularly following the Robin Hood fiasco, is to transition to a more powerful brokeplatform. As I've mentioned a few times, I use TD Ameritrade's thinkorswim platform (see very recent review here). They don't pay me to promote it or anything, other than that I can say that my portfolio performance has been greatly enhanced by the capabilities the thinkorswim platform provides.
I've gotten many questions and comments requesting guidance on educational materials. I haven't responded because I am honestly not the best person to ask about that. I will say that the resources listed in this sub (to the right of the list of posts) look to be fairly comprehensive and excellent in quality.

Awareness, Ideas, Thesis, Due Diligence

Most common question I got since my last post about my process for identifying trading and investing opportunities.
At a high level, it all starts with awareness and various ideas about how the world around us is likely to change, and what the market currently anticipates (you will commonly hear phrases like 'X is already priced in', or 'the market is already discounting the fact that', etc.).
Regarding GME, the idea I had was that some struggling retail and other businesses, which had been left for dead by the market, would actually rebound fairly quickly, and perhaps benefit from pent-up demand as the vaccines rolled out.
Ok, that makes sense, but how, in fact, do you take your awareness of the world, take some of those ideas, and actually do something with them?
I tend to start with running a screen (screen as in a sieve, not screen as in what you're staring at right now) in thinkorswim. Other platforms have similar tools. tradingview.com is also excellent for a web-based tool. These allow you to filter stocks by various types of criteria.
As an example, I might start by filtering for:

Stocks in the retail sector
Market cap >65mio, <3bn (I find that to be a good range for minimally stable micro cap to smaller mid-cap that is likely insufficiently covered by analysts, and therefore more likely to be substantially mis-rated by the broader market)
PE < 7 (nothing magic about 7, that's just what I decided to use as a relatively but not ridiculously low PE multiple)
Fixed Charge Coverage Ratio >1 (i.e. they can cover fixed costs out of earnings, so imminent bankruptcy risk is likely lower). Note that if you're looking ultra deep value you might actually specifically want to find companies at risk of bankruptcy at first glance, to dig through in detail to find ones that look more likely to turn themselves around from the brink for some reason.

Etc. It takes longer to think about what kinds of filters to use than anything else. Once I've set those criteria up, you just run the scan (click a button in thinkorswim) and out pops a list of stocks that match the criteria in less than second. On 2/6/2021 running the above scan gives me 9 names (of which, funny enough, Express--apparently another meme stock short squeeze play based on just looking at its chart for 2 seconds--is one). For those who are curious, the list I got was: ANF (Abercombie & Fitch), GES (Guess Inc), PLCE (children's Place), DBI (Designer Brands inc), GCO (Genesco), CAL (Caleres Inc), CHS (Chico's FAS INC), CATO (Cato Corp), EXPR (Express Inc)
At that point I might quickly check the charts to see what the daily action has been like for the past year, looking for patterns that might be interesting. I'll pick PLCE for this example, since it is breaking out strongly, and looks to be about to smash through resistance of the price on the eve of the pandemic crash. It also apparently blew out its last earnings estimates, which doesn't hurt.
At this point I might proceed to check their SEC filings (lots of insider buying a few days ago, Blackrock increasing stake, recently new CFO, etc.), whale wisdom, company news etc. I found an interesting article from earlier last year that seems particularly positive--they have apparently been a leader in the retail sector in developing their digital omnichannel, with a large and foresighted investment made over 3 years ago, which made them particularly well-positioned to deal with the challenges of the pandemic (at least as far as bricks and mortar retail goes) and indicates very good things about the strategic vision of their management team and board.
It was a ridiculous bargain in November, but may still have room to run even today. Not an endorsement or telling you to go buy some of the stock, but that's my quick read.
With the above 30 minutes of research done, I might make the decision that it warrants further investigation.
As you dig deeper, you start to build a working thesis or theory on how the company is going to deliver performance, or get enough attention from the investment community to warrant a re-rating outsized gains in share price (the bull case). Then you try to find all the reasons and evidence as to why that isn't going to happen (the bear case).
From that point on you iterate as many times as seems prudent to you, depending on how much of your portfolio you intend to invest. Since we're all here already, summarizing and posting your due diligence to this sub seems like a no-brainer. It is very likely you'll get good feedback to help you refine your thesis even further, or perhaps stop you from making what might be a big mistake.
Even if I decide not to make an investment at the moment, at the very least I might add that stock to a watch list, etc. I can actually set thinkorswim to give me an alert if any new companies pop up that match those criteria from now on. This type of feature is pretty common with screening tools. This might happen if, for example, a struggling retailer gets its cash flow in order and crosses from <1 FCCR to >1 FCCR.
A process very much like the above is how I found GME to begin with, and subsequently found my way to Reddit since there was so much GME-related traffic.
The Market is so much bigger than GME, so I highly encourage you to use the knowledge, tools, and techniques you've learned about or been exposed to to explore that bigger picture.

You, The Market, The Trade

If you've found something that looks interesting enough to warrant actually investing, it's worth spending some time to further think about precisely how you think you should do so before you just hit the buy button.
If your thesis and time horizon are longer-dated, then stocks are likely your best bet.
If instead you have a very specific time window in which you're interested, or have reason to believe the stock will move by a certain date, then options might be much more capital-efficient with a higher return (though a much higher risk of greater or total losses as well).
There are many ways to express your ideas or bet on your thesis. In fact, your thesis about a particular company might lead to trades on an entirely different company. If your due diligence on a key industrial company that primarily supplies parts to a certain car company shows major investment in technology and production efficiency, that might also bode well for their customer, and thus warrant an investment there as well or instead. My DD on oil storage capacity getting full back in April led to me taking some speculative positions in oil tanker stocks, as another example.
You may also modify the way you position your trade based on market conditions. Jon Najarian (a CNBC regular who focuses on options trading) recently described how he is transitioning his portfolio using a stock replacement strategy. This means using various options strategies to try to mimic the performance of stocks, but without holding stocks directly. The reason for this is that he is increasingly concerned that we may have a large market correction in the near term, and would like to have a defined limit to potential losses (a feature of many options strategies). I don't know if he's correct, but his moves make sense as a way to address his concerns.
Another thing I've referenced a few times in my post is writing cash-covered puts to essentially bet against the price falling vs betting that the price is going to rise. This comes with the added wrinkle that 'losing' (i.e. the stock price in fact falls below the strike price of the put) comes with the added feature that you end up owning stock. For this reason I commonly use this as a strategy on high-confidence stocks as a way to gain some revenue if the price goes higher, and effectively buy the dip if it goes down first.
How you express your thesis in terms of the specific trades you make can greatly impact the likelihood and magnitude of your returns, and the profile of your risk. Buying the stock you like, while straightforward and with a very intuitive risk/reward profile, may not be the best way forward.
That being said, it is critical that you do understand the trade before you execute, so I would highly recommend practicing via papesimulated trading--which, by the way, is a built-in feature of thinkorswim--before you execute a complex multi-leg option play. Ok, I'll stop shilling for the rest of this post at least :).

Back to GME

On Thursday and Friday what I believe we saw was despair-driven selling compounded by the tug of war between shorts that entered at $150+, and shorts still piling into the trade.
Overall short-side sentiment is more cautious at this point than at the highs despite supposed sentiment among short-side players that GME is a $10 ($20 at best) stock. This is reflected in Ortex data showing utilization dropping below 100% for the first time in months (i.e. shorts are no longer borrowing every single share they can get their hands on), and short interest stabilizing over the past few days. As of Thursday utilization was 69.3%, and free float on loan was at 44.1%. Data for Friday should become available just before Monday market open.
The reason for the above, I believe, is that while shorts seem to believe current prices are still a good entry point, they need to be concerned about getting blown up if a short that entered at the squeeze highs decides to cover and lock in profits. The removal of restrictions on GME by Robin Hood adds another element of risk.
The lower the price, the likelier that deeply profitable shorts cover, spiking price while doing so at the expense of the newest shorts, and the easier it is for retail sentiment to move price, so we're in a sort of very fragile equilibrium until the larger shorts that entered at the higher price points have covered.
I'm not sure how to estimate when this would be, other than to say that the lower the price goes, and the more days that pass, the lower the incremental profit potential and higher accumulated interest cost for the short position holders, so I don't expect them to hold those squeeze high short positions for very long. It is possible that the spike on Friday was a push to cover a fair bit of those positions before the weekend. I would also expect that they will move to cover if somehow momentum seems to turn to the long side, which would accentuate and accelerate the the inflection of momentum greatly.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my last 130 shares of GME at this point. It's possible I hold them for a while to watch how things play out for the next few weeks, but I wanted to give everyone reading my post fair warning that going forward I may make an intra-day decision to sell part of all of the position. I will, however, keep open the cash-secured put position, as an automatic entry back into GME at an effective $30 price point if the price is <$40 by April. I may open new positions based on developments as well.
On a different note, I took some time to once again review my thoughts and decisions over the course of the trade. While doing so I was reading back through my posts from 12 days ago (only 12!? feels like it's been at least 3 weeks...) reminding me that I had previously begun building a position in AMC as a value play (via a couple of march $3 strike calls) on rumors of imminent rescue/turnaround financing. I was originally planning to build a better position once I had time to study the potential trade structure better, but instead unloaded them at ~1000% profit for a net ~$2000 gain to concentrate further on GME when I was re-positioning my portfolio, not even realizing at the time that AMC was another stock with a legitimate short squeeze momentum thesis (LOL, I really should pay more attention to social media). I just glossed over the profit as about what I was expecting off the bounce from market rerating the stock from "bankruptcy is imminent" to "holy cr*p, the studios need AMC for their movies to make money!". I should have realized when I was getting so many messages from people asking me to do for AMC what I was writing for GME. I didn't even do any DD on the short interest there(!) and ignorantly advised people that they should only pay attention to the value thesis as I channeled my inner Charlie Munger.
I guess it just goes to show that you only have time to look so far into so many things at once. As I've mentioned previously, trading is a hobby of mine, and something I do in my spare time. I'm not sure if I would have been able to coherently manage momentum trading two stocks that were basically printing money in overdrive at the same time to take full advantage of either trade, especially while writing daily posts. Try to keep that in mind if you choose to pay attention to what I write :).
Also, apologies if you've messaged me and haven't gotten a response. I will sometimes try to respond if I have time (and a good answer), but if you have a good question it would probably be better to either post as a comment or your own post so that you can get a broader range of responses, and also so that the responses can be seen by (and therefore benefit) everyone.
Hope you're having a good weekend, and good luck in the market on Monday!

First Contact - Fourth Wave - Chapter 412

[first] [prev] [next]
The system was old, fading. The red sun had expanded until it had devoured all the lesser planets, like an insane god devouring its children. Then it had slowly retracted, pulled back, until it was a dim purple thing. It was old, at the end of its life span. Its orbits were dark, it put out little light, little radiation. Even the pressure inside of it had lessened.
There wasn't enough left of it to go nova, much less supernova.
For millions of years it had swept along with the rest of the stars, even as younger stars had been born, even as other stars had gone out with a flicker or an eruption.
The stillness should have lasted forever.
Instead, where the fading gravitational flux caused a small eddy there was an increase in gravity, in stellar force. It twisted, intensified, and got thicker. It began to lengthen, deepen.
Not in realspace.
It was swirling down and into somewhere else.
By the way Terran scientists measured the multiverse, is was funneling 'downward' through the other universes.
Past N-space.
Past Subspace.
Past Deadspace.
Past Darkspace.
Even below what Terran science theorized was the bottom of the 'multiverse'.
Into a universe that was beyond dead, beyond dying.
The 'funnel' twisted. With a flash in N-Space one end suddenly widened out, stabilizing in a whirl of energy and protomatter.
Ships appeared in the energy, moving out of the energy and into N-Space.
Strange, twisted ships. Ships made of exhausted matter, using exhausted energy. That barely had the fuel, the energy, to reach the place in N-Space around the dying star.
Great solar sails, looking more like wings of some foul unborn creature, unfurled, drinking in the light from the dying star. The ships arranged themselves around the tear in space, the larger end of the 'funnel' and linked to one another. They began putting out energy, adding the vast quantities of energy available to just anyone who sought to gather it to the twisting gravity.
The opening grew wider. The twisting funnel began to stabilize.
More ships came through.
These took up orbit around the ancient and fading gas giants. They set to work, siphoning off the gasses, siphoning off the rare materials. Fabricating the tools and structures needed to create things in N-Space, where it was so different from where they were from.
It had taken centuries, eons, to develop methods to balance the energy from N-Space particles to the particles from the nearly exhausted beyond-dead universe.
The ships set about it.
The ships moved with dark purpose around a dying star, their ships heavily shielded from the bright light of the red star. The ships stayed far out, where the gravity from the star would not weigh upon them so much, so they could dwell in comfort. They had used the vast gravity of the star to slow things down outside, increase speed inside.
A trick of temporal mechanics that they and they alone had mastered.
They built more ships. More fabrication stations, even as more of their own kind made the passage through the wormhole connecting a dying universe to an energetic mature one. They butressed and fortified their system, long solar rotations passing as they built their ships, built their war machines, and prepared.
True, adjusting the temporal flow was bleeding off the energy of the star, decreasing its lifespan by centuries for every year that was accelerated within the bubble created by those who had arrived from the rotting corpse of a universe long surrendered to entropy.
They did not care.
After all, weren't the resources theirs, and their alone?
Finally ready, the beings created new ships, fast ships, stealth ships, and crewed them with carefully created crews.
Those who commanded the ships sent ships to a far off place.
They doubted that it was intact, but one could never tell.
The ships, all three of them, returned.
It was intact.
From the vast breeding farms, to the fabrication scaffolding, to the matter and energy storage, it was all intact. Several constructs were nearly finished. There was plenty of life still existing that had been developed, nutured, and husbanded by those who had created the ships.
The ships returned with the news.
The beings within the ships rejoiced coldly.
The resources, gathered for long aeons, were still in place, still in use, still being put toward the program.
The leaders of the beings looked out at the stars, twinkling painfully bright in the sky.
You belong to me, each of them thought as one.
--------------
The girl was different than her classmates.
Her classmates had spent weeks or months in shelters, listening to the rumble of combat above them. Surrounded by walls, protected by security, with plentiful food and medical care, holding tight to their families as they huddled inside the bunkers and shelters and redoubts.
Months ago they had been allowed on the surface, to emerge from the shelters blinking and shading their eyes from the sun, which blazed in the sky undiluted by the ozone layer that atomic weaponry had torn away like a gauze curtain before a fuel air charge.
They had been back to school, back to normal life, for months before the girl had arrived.
Some had seen her initial arrival, when she had stepped through the metal detectors and they had gone off. She had been patted down, walked through again, only for the detector to beep. She had been taken into a private room and then released.
Several times she had been caught drinking alcoholic beverages during school hours. Each time her fellow students waited with the glee of the drama-addicted to hear how she had been suspended or worse.
Each time she was sent to the counselours. Not the normal ones, but the ones who saw some of the teachers. Each time she was allowed to return to class the same day, usually within an hour of being caught drinking in some isolated and off the path location.
As for the girl herself, she was quiet, rarely speaking. She often just stared at her fellow students, often just acted as if she did not hear the person speaking, watching around the speaker rather than the speaker herself.
Pranks and teasing did little. She either ignored them or avoided them. Some of her fellow students noticed she seemed overly aware of her clothing, her locker, her possessions, and where people were located.
She stood out in gym class. Working hard, almost maniacally, to the point where she had better scores and could perform better than the males her age.
She stood out in other ways too.
The scars.
The scar across the top of her head, starting just above and between her eyes, extended across the top of her head and down the back, almost to the base of her skull. Those who had gym class with her had seen other scars on her. Scars that did not have the gentle smoothing of surgery. Thick upraised keloid scars that were angry red and purple mixed in with her fur. When asked the girl simply did not reply or answered with 'it doesn't matter' to the questions.
Her coloration was normal, but seemed almost washed out somehow sometimes. She was often poorly groomed, not seeming to care beyond making sure her fuzzy fur was clean.
Her clear eyes constantly moved, more than her peers, seeking out exits, where her peers and teachers were standing, any fast movement. Her stare was intent, making other nervous when it focused on them, but was often seeming to be focused on something far away.
Within a month her fellow students ignored her and left her alone.
They could tell that the ostracization, which worked every time to bring someone acting abberantly back into the fold, was fine with the girl. She seemed to be fine with not having friends, not having peers, to stand outside everyone else by her lonesome.
But it was more than just the girl.
Several girls her age had siblings that went to school with her younger siblings. The tales told by the younger siblings seemed incredible, like lies of adventures that surely the younger siblings were making up to shock and impress their fellow students who had hidden in shelters. Her little brother often showed off the scar he claimed was from where he had cut his hand boning fish and where he had cut his foot chopping wood. The little sister showed the scar on her hand where she claimed that she closed a shotgun wrong and pinched her flesh, a scar on her arm where she claimed that the knife slipped when she was skinning a harvonk.
They all talked about how the rain had been black and sticky. How the snow had been black more than once. How the night sky used to light up with bright flashes on the horizon.
The teachers shushed them.
A few girls asked their parents if it was true, what their younger siblings said the girl's younger siblings talked about in school.
Their parents told them that some people had had it rougher than those who had been in the shelters.
And to mind their own business.
But it was more than her looks, more than her siblings.
It was how she acted, how others treated her.
The girl didn't react to the teasing about her scars. She seemed uninterested in the attempts at seduction and romance put forward by the boys her age or even older. All too quickly the boys, even the older ones looking to put another notch in their ears, gave up, listing her as a lost cause.
Some students noticed that the teachers were careful with her. That she was escorted to the counselors two or three times a week.
The school did an emergency practice alert, to ensure the children knew how to get into the shelters quickly and safely, to make sure that everyone knew what to do.
The strange girl grabbed her backpack and ran from the school. She had dragged her siblings off the playground. A teacher had tried to stop her and she had struck him twice. A short sharp blow to the diaphram followed by a chop to the back of the head before she had caught up to her siblings, who had not slowed down, who had kept running.
Lawsec had caught her nearly two miles outside of town in a stolen car, speeding down the highway.
The gossip ran fast and thick for the week she was gone. That she had been shot by LawSec. That she was in jail. That she was a criminal. That she would never be back.
Instead, the girl returned to school.
Silent.
Watching.
Uncaring.
Some of the more observant students noticed that the next two emergency drills the teachers took the girl aside and sent her to the counselors office.
They remembered their parents words.
Some people weren't lucky enough to be the shelters. Now mind your business.
Most of the students had bonded over the 'shared trauma' of being locked in cramped shelters for weeks or months. How it was miserable, how there was no privacy, no room to run, how everything was monitored and watched carefully, how it was frightening.
A few knew the girl hadn't had that luxury.
One girl, of the highest social status in the school, asked her parents if the strange girl had been in a surface refugee camp. If she had been inside the walls that the Terrans had built and guarded. Her uncle had been present, her uncle that she used to enhance her own status as he had been on the surface the entire time, even when the Terrans were fighting. Some said her uncle had actually fought during the long war. Had fired weapons.
Had taken lives.
The girl had asked her parents if the strange girl had been in the refugee camps, had described the scars.
Her parents did not know, they told her over dinner.
Her uncle had called her over. Had pushed up the sleeves of the long sleeved shirt like he always wore.
Like the strange girl wore.
He had shown her scars. Thick upraised purple scars. Angry scars that rose up out of his fur.
Like the girl had.
"Down there, it was worry and being crowded," her uncle had told her as he pushed up his sleeves. When the young girl had seen the scars on her uncle's arms she looked him and swallowed. He nodded slowly. "Up here, my beloved niece, it was war."
The girl, of high social ranking, where the knives were words, rumor, and innuendo, had hugged her uncle and gone in to do her homework.
The next day the word was out.
The strange girl was to be left alone. Be polite, but leave her alone. The boys were to leave her be, not to disturb her, to let her be content.
Those that disobeyed would face the queen bee and all of her power.
The students, even some of the teachers, got the message.
The girl was left alone.
Which was fine with her.
---------------
The ships had left during yesterday's tomorrow, making a risky translation.
The red giant had intersected the Place at one time.
The whole reason for entering N-Space at that point.
The ships made the translation because to their drives, yesterday was tomorrow today and the two points were the same.
This time the Place was nearly empty.
Only howling radiation and expanding waves of particles.
Nothing remained, only shockwaves.
The beings couldn't believe it.
Even worse, there was no moving forward or backward, something had anchored the temporal stream so it could not be altered.
That was more infuriating than the Place, and all of its valuable resources, being obliterated.
The beings were furious that someone had dared interfere in that which the beings viewed as the domain of themselves and themselves alone.
Worse, they had to return the long way. Not through the proper and esoteric method of moving from one place to a place that had intersected with that place or would intersect with it.
It did not matter. It just meant that it would take longer.
They increased the inverted gravity well of the star, making it so that time moved faster inside the system, that it moved at a speed enough that they and they alone could do what must be done before those outside could.
They needed to ensure that the time dilatation was working correctly.
They sent a ship crewed, not by servitors or lesser ones, but by a full quorum.
Outside the temporal dialatation effect they could feel it.
Other temporal zones.
They returned to warn their fellows.
The beings paused, considering things.
One zone was important, it vibrated and pulsed with aggression, with malevolence.
Before they could come to a decision the other places released their temporal holds, their temporal mainpulations.
The beings managed to interrupt the other one.
Hold it in place.
Change it.
However, it wasn't enough.
They knew now that they faced an enemy who could fight them on their own terms, who could not only conceive of the attacks they preferred, but counter them, prepare for them, even wage war on the same battlefield.
The beings sent forth an armada, moving to the system they desperately needed. One of many, but one they had been to before.
An enemy who had been attacked and managed to drive off the attackers would not expect to be attacked again.
The armada left the bubble.
-------------------
Melinvae watched the video presentation with boredom. She could remember seeing it before the Slorpies came.
She had turned to look out the window, toward the sports field outside, when she saw it.
The strange girl arced in her chair, her hands coming up to claw at her own chest. Her eyes had rolled back, her ears were straight up as she went backwards onto the floor.
Melinvae jumped from her chair while everyone else was still exclaiming in shock or trying to figure out what was happening. She had learned first aid in the shelter, had helped staff the medical clinic, she knew a seizure when she saw one.
She pushed the desks away, clearing the area around the strange girl.
The girl's eyes suddenly opened and her hands came up to grab Melinvae's shirt. The strange girl pulled her close.
"They're coming," she gurgled. "Again. They're coming again. I can see them. They've coming."
She lapsed into unconsciousness.
The nurse ran in, taking over, letting Melinvae know an ambulance was on the way.
Melinvae moved into the hallway, stepping outside the zone that the datalinks were set to intraschool only.
She placed a single call.
To the one person she knew would listen.
"Uncle Erylve. That girl?" she said. "She says they're coming."
"Who says, Mally?" her uncle asked.
"Dambree."
[first] [prev] [next]

[Video Games] "Too many swordsmen, are there?" The drama over Byleth joining the roster of Super Smash Bros Ultimate

What's Smash?

One of the premier fighting game franchises of all time, Super Smash Bros is a party series published by gaming giant Nintendo which sees characters from their various franchises (alongside several third-party characters) coming together for some family-friendly violence. Beginning with the original title in 1999 for the Nintendo 64, Smash has seen several outings in the years since, such as the iconic Melee for the Gamecube, Brawl for the Wii, the unoriginally named Smash 4 for the WiiU and 3DS, and the most recent title, Ultimate, which released on the Switch in 2018. Ultimate was seen as a huge celebration for the franchise, boasting that EVERYONE IS HERE- all seventy + fighters, ranging from staples of the original game to guest fighters and DLC, were in the launch roster. Helmed by Masahiro Sakurai, Smash is a household name and staple for parties worldwide, with Ultimate being one of the highest-selling fighting games in the world at over 12 million units sold.

What's Fire Emblem?

Fire Emblem is Nintendo's forray into strategy- a turn based fantasy seires that's one of the longer-running staples of the company with its roots in 1990 for the Famicom. Despite a lot of pushing from Nintendo, Fire Emblem failed to take off in the West for many years, with the future of the franchise being uncertain after several successive commercial flops in the 2000s. With the franchise risking cancellation if it failed to find a market, the team made a Hail-Mary pass of epic proportions thanks to Fire Emblem Awakening in 2013- a launch title for the 3DS that finally marked the series getting a foothold in the West. Since then, the series has released three big games: Fates, which wasn't very good due to pulling a Pokemon and cutting the game into three separate releases and having an awful story, Heroes, a free to play mobile game, and Three Houses, which saw the series move to the Nintendo Switch. In Three Houses, you play as Byleth, a mercenary hired to teach one of three classes in a military academy that are all led by House Lords- Edlegard, Dimitri and Claude. Three Houses combined Persona-style time management for social interactions with the tactical gameplay of the series, and was a critical success for the company, selling over 3 million units.

Smash and Fire Emblem's shared history

Fire Emblem and Smash have a tied history, due to Smash being part of the reason the series even began releasing in the West (Fire Emblem had such a small presense before this that a lot of people unironically thought Marth and Ike were original characters made just for the game). Two characters, Roy(Who's also our boi) and Marth, were playable in Melee, with their popularity leading to Nintendo beginning localisation efforts of the other games. Since then, Fire Emblem has gotten consistent additional represetation in each mainline title:

Brawl added Ike, protagonist of Path of Radiance and its sequel, Radiant Dawn. His massive two-handed sword and battle cry of "GREAT AETHER" made him stand out as a fun battler, with high damage potential but a weak mobility selection to balance him.
3DS/WiiU would bring back Marth, Ike and Roy, alongside newcomers Robin and Lucina from Awakening and, post-launch, Corrin from Fates as a DLC fighter. The Mii Fighter would also get an outfit themed on Awakening's co-protagonist Chrom as DLC.
Ultimate would launch with all prior Fire Emblem characters as part of the launch roster with a new addition- Chrom making the transition from Mii Fighter to Echo Fighter (the game's term for characters who are moveset clones, in this case for Roy while Lucina was officially made an Echo Fighter for Marth). Ultimate also saw a large collection of music from the series being available alongside three stages.

Perhaps one of the largest showings of how tied together the two series are, especially regarding FE getting off the ground in the West, can be seen in the announcement trailer for a re-release of Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the first game in the series as part of 30th anniversary celebrations. The trailer shows two young boys playing Melee and wondering where Roy and Marth are from, leading to them discovering Fire Emblem at large.
It's at the launch of Ultimate, before the DLC released, that I'd like to dovetail and cover some of the tensions between Smash and Fire Emblem, alongside the post-launch support Ultimate got.

Smash fans vs Fire Emblem Fans: A Short History

Smash fans and Fire Emblem fans don't get along a lot of the time, it must be said (though Smash fans don't get along with anyone very well). Many Smash fans blame FE as the reason for Smash's roster being stereotyped as "Anime swordboys," due to Nintendo almost entirely drawing from the sword-fighting leads of the series instead of an axe or lance fighter. (Hector from Blazing Blade is often called an example of what a more atypical Smash rep would be due to wielding a large axe). While most of the fighters try and do different things mechanically (Robin is almost entirely a spellcaster for instance, while Corrin can turn into a dragon), that Chrom and Lucina were both moveset clones didn't help this perception.
Many other Nintendo franchise fans aren't happy additionally at how Fire Emblem gets blatant preferential treatment by Nintendo. While it is justified as them wanting to show off the new FE games in each Smash title, that Fire Emblem is all but guaranteed to get new Smash rep every time a new game releases has embittered fans of older franchises that Nintendo hasn't given as much love lately (especially F-Zero, Metroid, Golden Sun and more). Sakurai being an open Fire Emblem fan hasn't helped the perception of an inherent bias for FE, though this is usually countered by the low representation for the Kirby and Kid Icarus franchises despite Sakurai's own roles in them.
By Ultimate, a growing sentiment is that Fire Emblem is getting over-represented, as with the addition of Chrom it was now the third-most represented series in Smash after only Mario and Pokemon. Given FE's niche status in the West for most of this time, fans weren't very happy at this, partly for the aforementioned reason of wanting their own favorite franchises to get a new fighter (Metroid fans at least got a bone when Ridley joined the Ultimate roster and when Dark Samus became an Echo Fighter for Samus).

Ultimate's Fighter Pass 1: HOES MAD

Following Ultimate's launch, Nintendo released a season pass for five characters who would be added post-launch. Smash getting new fighters is notable not just because it means a new fighter and that franchise getting the prestige of saying it got into Smash, but because it means new music that can be used (unless you're Cloud) during matches. For the most part, the DLC fighters got really positive reactions due to the majority being unexpected third-party choices. Case in point, most players never saw it coming when during the Game Awards 2018, the first fighter would be revealed to be Joker from Persona 5. He'd be followed in 2019 by three more reveals: Dragon Quest's Hero, representing the more iconic protagonists in the legendary JRPG franchise, Banjo and Kazooie from the cult Microsoft series, and Terry Bogard from the SNK franchise (shout out to Sakurai's history lesson that's pretending to be a showcase for Terry, which also involves Sakurai's story of how they got 50 tracks from the SNK games into Smash)
Also Sans from Undertale got in. This unironically led to an increase in Mii Gunner mains.
Terry and Hero would generate some salt in the West due to perceived antiquity and lack of pedegree/mainstream appeal (Hero being "another anime sword boy" didn't help), leading to a mocking response of HOES MAD from Hero's fans especially, though Terry's got in on the fun thanks to the pun involving Terry's home series, Fatal Fury.
Thanks to the four characters seen thus far, the expectation was that Fighters Pass 1 would be made entirely of third party characters, and as January 2020 rolled around the expectations were high as to who would get in. Sora from Kingdom Hearts was a popular choice, alongside Geno from the Mario RPG series. Some dumbasses even wanted Tracer from Overwatch, partly thanks to Blizzard all but openly begging Nintendo for a Smash invite. The one with the most consistent support was Dante from the Devil May Cry series. And a few accidental coincidences boosted the idea of Dante getting in:

Dante's first three games had been ported to the Switch during Fighter Pass 1, with Devil May Cry 3 releasing in February 2020 soon after the final character was announced.
Brian Hanford, who played V in Devil May Cry 5, had a slip of the tongue where he talked about Dante in the context of Smash (“to be part of Marvel Vs Capcom, or Super Smash Bros., would be huge, which is what Dante is gonna be,”), leading many to believe Brian had leaked Dante as the fifth fighter.
Dante was experiencing a large-scale renaissance in popularity thanks to DMC 5 launching in early 2019, leading to him being on everyone's minds when it came to him joining the roster. Adding in his experience in fighting games already thanks to the Marvel vs Capcom games, it seemed set in stone that Dante would join the hallowed halls of Smash.
To hype up the final character, Sakurai posed with three fingers outstretched. DMC fans took this as a hint of Dante, given that DMC 3 would be coming soon to Switch.
On the same day as the character reveal, Capcom had planned a DMC announcement (it turned out to be an announcement that the game would have a co-op mode for Dante and Vergil in Bloody Palace).

With expectations set high, everyone tuned in on January 16th 2020 to see the final Season 1 character... and it was Byleth, the player character of Three Houses.
Another fucking Fire Emblem rep. The internet took it well, as you'd expect. Dante's fans just resorted to sad memes and jokes about one of Byleth's alt skins being "close enough" to let them pretend Byleth was Dante.

Smash likes to date around, and Fire Emblem is that girl that he always goes back to.
Byleth Joins The Roster: The Salt Mines Floweth

Byleth's announcement generates some of the most negative reactions to a Smash fighter yet seen, boasting the largest like-dislike ratios of Ultimate's DLC, and only matched for disliked announcements across the entire franchise by Corrin.
A lot of people weren't happy at Byleth's inclusion, suffice to say, though like Terry and Hero the HOES MAD crowd came back for another go around. It didn't help how utterly predictable it was given it was a historical recreation of Corrin's inclusion in WiiU/3DS. While Byleth had been predicted, many expected the mechanical variance would be that Byleth would function similar to the Pokemon Trainer (who swaps between the Gen 1 Pokemon) in that Byleth would command Claude, Dimitri and Edlegard from the sidelines. Instead, Byleth had four weapons- three representing each of the House Leaders alongside their own custom whip-sword, the Sword of the Creator. That being said, at least Nintendo were somewhat self aware about it this time, given the reveal had supporting character Sothis mock Byleth for losing a fight by going "Too many swordsmen, were there?" as a way to reveal that Byleth's female variant would join the roster.
While Byleth did offer some mechanical variety from the other FE reps, some were disappointed that Byleth specifically was representing Three Houses, due to Byleth's personality not being one of their selling points. Perhaps it would have been more preferable to have one of the House Leaders instead represent the game, but given how any one being selected would have been seen as favoritism of the Leaders (and the arguments about said Leaders being quite vicious), Byleth was the safest choice, if perhaps the most predictable. Fans of Xenoblade 2 were also unhappy at clear bias on Sakurai's part, given he'd previously said Rex, the MC, was from too new a game to qualify for a roster slot in Ultimate. In comparrison, Sakurai admitted in his presentation of Byleth that he pestered the developers to get early access copies of Three Houses to get to plan out Byleth's moveset, which only helped the idea of Fire Emblem operating on different rules from other series.
Overall, Byleth was seen as a disappointing inclusion to wrap up the Fighters Pass, with the announcement honestly being more notable for the memes about the salt over the character themself. (My favorites were the ones about Joker adding yet another teacher to his harem) After the shock reveals from relatively niche series such as Persona and SNK, Byleth was generally felt to be an overwhelmingly safe option to close on. While Sakurai did announce Fighters Pass 2 in the same event, promising six more DLC characters for Ultimate, a lot of fans from different franchises were still let down given how unpredictable the first wave had been.

Fighters Pass 2 and the Byleth aftermath

Byleth would launch a few weeks later and the reception was largely "Yeah they're fine," after an initial launch of "Yeah you're fuckin' overtuned and overpowered." They got some people who main them, others swore off them, much like any other DLC character in a fighting game, and the salt gradually diminished.
In February of 2020, Sakurai would tacitly admit during a Famitsu article about Byleth's development that he was aware of the criticism about the addition, saying that he doesn't have as much power over roster choices as people like to believe (Byleth apparently snubbed a fighter he was much more enthusiastic about) but that he agreed that there were a few too many sword fighters and Fire Emblem representatives specifically in the game. Given Sakurai has said Smash will never have a roster as large as Ultimate again, it's likely some of Fire Emblem's representation will be cut down in future games as part of this culling.

That being said, I understand. First and foremost: there are too many Fire Emblem characters; and what’s more there are too many sword-users.

So far, three of the six planned characters for Fighter's Pass 2 have been released, with Min-Min from the Arms series coming first, Steve from Minecraft literally breaking Twitter (Steve's addition could be a post of its own with how much salt he generated) and the OG Anime Sword Boy, the One Winged Angel himself in Sephiroth being announced at the Game Awards 2020. We're still waiting for updates on when the fourth fighter will be revealed and who they may be, but regardless of who it is, there will always be a few mad hoes in the background.
Also Geno finally got into Smash!... As a Mii skin which led to the character's fanbase collectively reaching for a noose. These hoes weren't even that mad, it was mostly just sad.
Still. At least it's better than whatever the Walluigi mains are up to.
Thanks for reading.

Aphria CFO Explains the Aphria/Tilray Merger share conversion ratio (1 Aphria share -> 0.8381 Tilray share)

My take:
I've seen a lot of confusion recently about the Aphria/Tilray merger and the share conversion ratio of 0.8381 Tilray share for every 1 Aphria share.
A common narrative I've seen in discussions is investors feeling like they're getting "Less shares" or somehow losing money since they'll have a lower number of shares in the end but this is not the case. Remember that Tilray has about 165million outstanding shares and Aphria has 322 million outstanding shares which is almost 2x as much. In short Tilray company + Aphria company are becoming one company (Basically Tilray+Aphria company under the name Tilray)
Imagine this:
0,8381 share of [Tilray company] for every 1 [Aphria company] share
As the following:
0,8381 share of [Tilray+Aphria company] for every 1 [Aphria company] share.
I've included the full explanation by the CFO of Aphria Carl Merton below (Direct copy paste):
Part I – I don’t like the exchange ratio, why wasn’t it flipped?
This question is effectively rooted in the belief that share price is more important than market cap. And closely rooted to the belief that because an investor had a full share before the transaction but will not have a full share after the transaction, they are somehow disadvantaged (multiple investors have emailed us claiming this is the same as taking shares away from them). I know that share price is much easier to find but it isn’t nearly as relevant as market cap. Market cap establishes the value of the company or how big a pie the company is. Share price is just a function of how many pieces of the pie are available, so how big your piece of the pie is.
If two companies are worth $5 billion each and otherwise equal but one company has 5 billion shares and the other company has 100 million shares, that means company #1 has a share price of $1 and company #2 has a share price of $50. Just because company #2’s share price is $50, doesn’t mean that company #1’s share price should be $50 as well and could “moon” to that amount. That would make it worth $250 billion! They are both worth $5 billion.
When one company decides to buy another company with its shares, one of the most important negotiating points is how much dilution is there going to be in the new entity. This is determined by how much of the new company, each of the old company’s shareholders receives. This decision gets made based on several factors providing rough fence posts, including the respective market caps, cash provided to the combined entity, sales provided to the combined entity, assets provided to the combined, profits provided to the combined entity, future prospects to the combined entity, etc. Once the fence posts are established, a value in between them can be negotiated. In our case, after thoroughly exhaustive negotiating efforts it was determined that the appropriate split was 62/38. Once this value is known, the legal acquirer (in this case Tilray) is considered to be the fixed variable (their shareholders keep 1 share for each share they own). Given that Tilray had 165.4 million fully diluted outstanding shares at the time of the announcement, this translated to 38% of the combined entity. This math means that Aphria shareholders would get 62% of the fully diluted shares or 269.9 million fully diluted shares (165.4 million / .38 = 435.3 million total fully diluted shares less 165.4 million Tilray diluted shares = 269.9 million fully diluted shares for APHA holders). This figure is then compared to Aphria’s actual outstanding fully diluted shares of 322.0 million and we have to adjust those 322.0 million shares to down to equal 268.9 million (268.9 million / 322.0 million = 0.8381 – yes, I rounded, and it doesn’t exactly equal, but you should get the point).
So, what is the takeaway? 62% of the company is the most important variable, but the fact that the number of outstanding shares for Aphria exceeded the number of outstanding shares for Tilray played just as important part in the calculation. If shareholders really want APHA shareholders to get more than 1 share of TLRY, we could always do a share consolidation of 2:1 first. That would double the exchange ratio to 1.6762. It doesn’t change anything though. You are still getting 0.8381 shares for each share you own.
Before we look at your scenario of a flipped exchange ratio, I feel it is important for investors to understand all the various pieces of information reviewed in considering the appropriate allocation of ownership in the combined entity. There were reviews and analyses of (i) selected publicly-traded companies, including both cannabis and non-cannabis companies; (ii) Aphria’s discounted cash flow analysis; (iii) Tilray’s discounted cash flow analysis (in both cases as prepared by management and as adjusted by the other side); (iv) contribution analyses (sometimes referred to as “football field analysis”); (v) implied exchange ratio analyses; (vi) give & get value creation analyses; (vii) current trading metrics; (viii) historical trading price ranges; and, (ix) analyst share price targets. The amount of diligence and work done by both sides was significant.
Now let’s look at your scenario of a flipped exchange ratio and work our way back to the split in ownership.
In your scenario of 1 APHA share equals 0.8381 TLRY shares, 322.0 million fully diluted shares for APHA would be combined with 138.6 million fully diluted shares for TLRY (165.4 times 0.8381) resulting in 460.6 million fully diluted shares. Which results in APHA shareholders owning 70% and TLRY shareholders owning 30%.
Based on the market caps (what the investing universe believed APHA and TLRY were worth at the time), the split in market caps was roughly 67%/33%. But one of the most important things to remember when comparing market caps, is that by definition the market cap of a company is what investors believe it is worth in total, IF you own a minority interest. If you can own a controlling interest in a company, investors will pay a premium to acquire control. That means that the 33% needs to be increased and the ratio shifted to reflect the premium that the company who is being acquired demands in order to give you control of their company. That is how 33% moved to 38%. But more importantly, it is why you could never get a deal done where the 33% moved down to any number, let alone 30%, if the company was ceding control to the other entity.
It is also important to understand that in the period leading up to the announcement the 67%/33% ratio was moving up and down, sometimes by a point or two in a given day. Eventually, the two sides needed to pick an allocation then have it stick until the announcement.
Part II – The Merger was a Bad Idea and My Investment has been Downgraded
On December 15th, the day before we announced, APHA’s stock price closed at $8.12. On Friday, January 22nd, APHA’s stock price closed at $12.92. That is an ~60% increase in less than 40 days.
Part III – Why Did Aphria Decide to Do This Merger
We decided to combine APHA & TLRY because we believe that meaningful synergies are available to shareholders through cost leadership and scale in the Canadian cannabis market. It allows us to offer a full portfolio of brands (including 2.0 products) with a portfolio covering all market segments. In the US, SweetWater and Manitoba Harvest together represent over CAD$120 million in U.S. sales. More importantly, both brands provide leverageable opportunities to introduce our cannabis brands to different consumer markets in advance of federal legalization. In Europe, we will be able to take advantage of a rapidly emerging legal cannabis market through Europe’s largest GMP production footprint while taking advantage of our existing distribution system. Lastly, APHA & TLRY form a company that immediately becomes the international market leader making us more attractive to capital markets due to our scale, cost structure and the strategic opportunity to attract institutional and strategic partners.
In making this decision, APHA established an investment thesis with which to evaluate potential business opportunities, including: (i) meaningful synergies; (ii) improved strategic positioning for the US; (iii) maximizing opportunities globally; and, (iv) optimal positioning within capital markets. There was also consideration of the risks associated with any transaction, including (i) integration of two major corporations; (ii) likelihood of achievement of the projected synergies; and, (iv) the diversion that a major transaction creates for management. I believe that the TLRY+APHA combination achieves the investment thesis while protecting and minimizing the potential impact of the risks.

TDC - deeper DD as promised

The Case for a Coherent US Strategy in Yemen

Resubmitting with a less ironic title. Please continue your arguments here.
Biden announcing he is pulling support from Saudi Arabia's conflict with the Houthis in Yemen was the inspiration for finally finishing this post, as I believe is the first major bad decision of his administration; but the problems with US policy in Yemen are much broader than the couple weeks he has been on the job, and this post is more about the need for a broader US strategy towards the country.
Who are the Houthis?
Throughout this post, I will use the term "Houthi" to refer to one of the major factions in the Yemeni Civil War because that is what they are generally called, but its not quite accurate. The term "Houthi" specifically refers to a tribe based primarily in Northwestern Yemen, most of whom are followers of the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam. The faction in the civil war generally referred to as the Houthis is actually called "Ansar Allah". Most members of Ansar Allah are members of the Houthi tribe, and most of them are Zaydi, but there are non-Houthis and non-Zaydi Yemenis who support the movement, as well as a substantial number of non-Yemeni backers who I will get into later. This article gives a much more comprehensive overview of the topic.
OK then, who is Ansar Allah?

God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam - slogan of Ansar Allah

Ansar Allah (hereafter referred to as the Houthis), are largely a bunch of not great dudes, in case the blatantly obvious anti-Semitism in their slogan didn't give it away. They have fought a series of conflicts against the UN recognized government of Yemen, with the most recent episode leading to substantial success, enabling them to capture the capital, and now effectively control a substantial portion of the country even outside of their traditional heartland. During the course of this conflict, they have committed nearly every war crime that exists, including torturing and raping female activists who criticize them, kidnapping children at gunpoint so they can train them to be soldiers, blocking humanitarian aid, using food supplies as a weapon against starving populations, attacking medical workers including MSF, using artillery to indiscriminately shell civilian neighborhoods and are ~~perpetrating a genocide against Yemen's Baha'i population.~~ edit: after some subsequent research, I am not confident in calling this a genocide, but its still a pretty bad situation.
Note that nothing I am talking about here are crimes they may be committing against the Saudis and their other foreign allies, but crimes that they are actively perpetrating against their fellow Yemenis.
OK the Houthis aren't great, but isn't everyone else involved in the conflict kinda shitty?
Yeah, basically. The Saudis are not the world's greatest country for observing human rights on their best days, and some of their actions in Yemen have been pretty horrific, and their other coalition allies are also pretty bad. Furthermore, the UN recognized Yemeni government and their frenemies in the Southern Secessionist Movement have also committed numerous war crimes. And that's before getting into ISIS and Al Qaida, who control substantial portions of the eastern part of the country, and form a sort of third major faction, who attack the others and occasionally each other.
The Houthis are closely aligned with Iran, who provide them weapons in defiance of UN sanctions, training, financial support, political cover, and direct combat support. The Iranians are pretty bad in their own right for a litany of reasons I don't really feel like getting into right now (but if you really feel the need I can put something together), but honestly, compared to the Houthis they may be the lesser evil (for example, the Iranians are a lot more tolerant of their Jewish population than the Houthis are ).
As part of Iran's Axis of Resistance the Houthis also receive varying levels of support from other Iranian aligned groups, including Lebanese Hizballah, Iranian aligned Iraqi militia groups, and Iran's Fatemiyoun Division, a group comprised primarily of Afghan refugees who have been blackmailed into serving as cannon fodder for the regime's various foreign adventures.
So if we stop backing the Saudis, at least we can end the conflict right?
What most westerners don't grasp is the scale of the importance of the conflict to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis view Iran as their primary geopolitical rival, and one that is an existential threat, much like the US did with the USSR during the Cold War. And having an existential threat set up a proxy state on your border, and loading it up with missiles that are capable of (and are) hitting your capital is a pretty substantial crisis for them, akin to their version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US nearly triggered a war capable of wiping out humanity in that scenario, can you imagine what our reaction would have been if the Cubans had actually started lobbing missiles at DC? So I am incredibly skeptical that the US can alone force Saudi Arabia to ignore the threat and back out of the conflict. It is theoretically possible that if we could get the rest of the world to refuse to sell them weapons, that they would be forced to terminate, as the Saudis do not have a huge amount of domestic weapons manufacturing capability, but it would be a frozen conflict at best, and more likely just a transition to a cold war.
Only, that's not what will happen, because there are a number of countries who will happily continue to sell the Saudis weapons without giving a single shit about human rights concerns in Yemen (mostly because they do not give a single shit about human rights concerns even in their own countries ). And the Saudis recognize this fact, and have already begun preparing for a scenario where they are not able to rely on the US. And if you think Saudi caused civilian casualties in Yemen are bad now, just wait till they switch from using primarily US precision weapons (target the house or even room you think a Houthi leader is in) to ballistic missiles with a CEP of 350 meters (target the city block you think he might be in).
Even more concerning however is what would happen if a Saudi Arabia less concerned with appeasing western sensibilities reduced/stopped its humanitarian aid shipments to Yemen, as they are the single largest provider of humanitarian aid to a country desperately in need of it.
So we would potentially be making the conflict substantially worse, while driving a traditional US partner and lynchpin of US regional strategy straight into the arms of our biggest adversaries.
Well, what if we just do nothing, and stay out of the whole clusterfuck?
That's definitely an option. A pretty bad one given the scale of Yemen's humanitarian crisis, but maybe less bad than some of the others. And honestly, its not all that different from what we are doing now.
Current US policy in Yemen
I will be mostly talking here about the Trump admin and previous admins, as it is not yet clear what implications the Biden admins policies have for the various actions here. Since the USS Cole bombing in 2000, US policy in Yemen has been primarily reactive, and narrowly focused on counterterrorism. It loosely falls into 5 bins, but without much in the way of coherence between them.

Counterterrorism: You have perhaps heard that the US is bombing Yemen, and this is true, and has substantially accelerated under the Trump admin. However, while often conflated with the Saudi-Houthi conflict, this is actually pre-dates it, and was initially primarily about countering Al Qaeda in Yemen (one of their more capable branches) and although it has expanded to include ISIS, it still has very little to do with the Houthis (it wasn't in fact till the last days of the Trump admin that they were designated a terrorist organization, something Biden may revoke).
Counter-Iran: This is primarily an element of a broader strategy to limit Iran's ability to destabilize the region. Its less kinetic in nature, mostly focused on limiting the flows of advanced weapons to Iranian proxies. Given the lack of substantial US presence on the ground in Yemen, its mostly being conducted via naval enforcement of UN sanctions.
Freedom of Navigation: With Iran's assistance, the Houthis have been increasing their ability to threaten freedom of navigation through the Red Sea and conducting attacks on international shipping, particularly in and around the Bab al Mandeb Strait, a critical chokepoint for global trade. This is actually the one area where the US gotten directly kinetic with the Houthis, striking several of their radar sites after they fired a missile at a US Naval Vessel. In addition to the problems it poses for global trade, the Houthi attempts to restrict on shipping in the region have substantial environmental implications.
Counter-Ballistic Missile: This is primarily about helping Saudi Arabia defend itself from Houthi and Iranian ballistic missile attacks, including the deployment of US Patriot Batteries to Saudi in addition to the substantial number we have sold directly to the Saudi Military. It also includes intelligence sharing to help the Saudis strike those threats before they launch. I think (but am not certain), that this is primarily what the Biden admin is looking to shut down. I think that would be a substantial mistake, as part of what we are doing is also helping the Saudis identify no-strike areas, and cutting this access would not stop strikes, but would make them more likely to kill civilians.
Humanitarian Aid: The last major element is trying to coordinate for and facilitate the shipment of humanitarian aid, something that requires rather close coordination with the Saudi-led coalition since they control most of the relevant ports, as well as the Sea/airspace (and since their coalition includes the legal government of Yemen). I am assuming Biden is not stupid enough to be shutting this down, but if he is it would of course be an enormous mistake.

The key thing you will notice here is that there is the lack of a coherent plan to end any of these crisis, just trying to keep them at a somewhat manageable level. Nor is there any real unified plan behind them with a lead for implementation, you have the State Department doing some things, Treasury doing its thing, the DoD doing other things, and the CIA doing its things.
So what should we do?
I am going to argue that we should actively intervene in Yemen, with the intent of actively working to reduce these problems under a single unified strategy. If you do not believe US intervention can ever improve a situation, well, I am not going to try to convince you. However, if you do believe there are situations where it can be beneficial, I am going to make the case for why Yemen is one of them. You will perhaps remember the drama here recently about whether or not we should intervene in Myanmar over their recent coup, and the many good reasons for why that would be a bad idea. If we look at all the reasons why an intervention in Myanmar would be bad, we can see that for most of them, Yemen is on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Support from the government: In Myanmar, any intervention would be against its government and thus have no valid standing under international law, unless you got UNSC approval (which you wouldn't). In basically any conceivable Yemen intervention, we would be there at the invitation of the UN recognized government of Yemen, legally no different than our intervention against ISIS in Iraq. Also importantly, this means we would not be on the hook to create a new government from scratch, and then engage in decades of nation building to ensure it remained stable.
Geography of the problem: Myanmar is about 50 thousand square miles larger than Yemen, and has nearly twice as many people. Basically all our partners in the region around Myanmar would be opposed to our intervention there, and without their support, any effort would be substantially harder, while jeopardizing our larger strategy in the region. Additionally, it is not particularly near any relevant US military bases (to say logistics would be challenging would be an extreme understatement). In Yemen, we would have the support of pretty much all the relevant neighboring countries, with several US logistics bases already pre-staged nearby.
Culture: The US has extremely limited awareness of the cultural situation in Myanmar, which makes any intervention far less likely to succeed. On the other hand, we have spent the last two decades fighting and/or deployed in Arab/Islamic majority countries, which has lead to a lot of institutional knowledge on those environments to bleed into the military, intelligence community, and even the US community at large.
Risk of larger conflict: A US intervention in Myanmar would be viewed as a substantial threat to China, who would almost certainly respond with some level of direct military support to the Myanmar government, probably leading to a Korean War type scenario at best, WW3 at worst. As previously mentioned, China cares far more about its relationship with Saudi Arabia than the Houthis. And while Russia is slightly more sympathetic to the Houthi cause due to their overall ties to Iran, they have no core interests in Yemen that would drive a military response to US intervention. Iran would of course be strongly opposed, but they are far less of a threat than Russia/China, and are largely already doing all they can to support the Houthis short of conducting overt war against Saudi Arabia and its allies (and Iran doesn't care enough about the Houthis to risk overt war with the US).
US interest: Other than preventing genocide/human rights abuses and promoting democracy, the US has no real strategic interest in Myanmar. We have almost all the same interests and lots more in and around Yemen (freedom of navigation through the BaM, countering the spread of Iranian malign action, countering ISIS/AQ, demonstrating our commitment and value as a security provider to our regional partners, etc...)

A loose outline of an intervention strategy
Prior to any military intervention, we should sit down with our regional partners and lay out some baseline conditions: If they want US assistance, the US will become the lead for the military intervention, with all ROE being set by the US (meaning Saudi is no longer allowed to just blow up whatever they feel like). The Yemeni government must commit to holding elections within a certain timeframe after the intervention, as well as allowing referendums for both the Houthi and Southern Transitional Council controlled area to secede if a majority of their population supports it, and the other regional partners must agree to recognize these referendums as valid if they go through.
In exchange, the US military and its coalition allies will go in to more or less enforce keeping the battle lines where they are now, and attack anyone who violates those lines. We will occupy/secure the ports, border crossings, and key roads to ensure the uncontested flow of humanitarian goods and more active enforcement of UN sanctions prohibiting transfer of weapons to any of the Yemeni factions. We will set up a safe zone in the vicinity of Hudaydah (the site of some of the most contested fighting) setting up refugee camps and allowing in anyone willing to set aside aside their arms. We will also secure an access corridor from Harad district to Hudaydah in order to allow the refugees trapped there to escape. Ideally, this would also be coupled with US policy to greatly increase the number of Yemeni refugees the US takes in, and our pressure our allies to adopt similar policies.
We will not adopt a policy of overthrowing Houthi governance over areas they control (which would require a much larger commitment of US forces, resources, and time), but if they continue to attack other actors, we will take actions to destroy their military power projection capabilities.

Lost in translations

The human gazed at the aliens around him and knew, just knew, he was in a LOT of trouble.
They were not much to look at. Small. Furry. Possessing faintly rodent like features. Their powerful hindlegs had them leaping quite large distances. When humans first encountered this species their initial impression was of some kind of hybrid of Kangaroos, harvest mice and Hobbits.
Their gentle and passive nature and their habit of communal sleeping had led humans to call them ‘Dormice’ out of affection.
The human wanted, very much wanted, to go back home and inform his fellow humans that this was a bad idea. A very bad idea.
The Yucani did not appreciate the term. The Yucani did not appreciate a lot of things. Mostly, right now, this group of about 400 of them did not appreciate him.
Their angry chirps and trills grow in intensity as they hopped angrily around him. Younger males would seemingly leap towards him at high speed, before landing close with a furious hissing noise. While the human could speak Yucani, he could barely understand them as they trilled so quickly. He held up his hands in what he hoped was a universal sign of surrender.
The human may not have been an expert on Yucani culture, but he was fairly sure he knew what a lynch mob looked like. The mass of small creatures had cornered him against a wall and continued to gaze at him balefully. Each passing moment they seemed to increase in anger, in their aggression, in their potential for violence.
A stone slammed into the wall besides him.
Three things happened immediately. The human saw the stones arrival seemed to give the Yucani the idea that this was a brilliant innovation.
Oh crap! They are going to stone me!
The largest Yucani in the mob, stood about seven feet away from him, suddenly removed a vicious looking knife, with a long serrated edge.
It’s gonna stab me!
And a roar of a Yucani constabulary patrol ship suddenly was heard, its distinctive sound causing many of the small creatures at the back to turn their heads.
The police! They’re gonna save me!
As the vechicle moved closer, more and more of the mob heard it and the human was very relieved to see that they didn’t start picking up rocks and the one with a knife, his large brown eyes filled with fury and rage, slowly returned the knife back to his clothing.
The craft landed, and six Yucani got out; their green uniforms were armoured, which made them look actually impressive (the human had long ago realised that only the larger members of the race were ever chosen for their constabulary).
They slowly hopped towards the mob, who had now turned and were trilling and squeaking in high pitched tones towards the newly arrived officers.
The human gulped down a breath of air. The sense of relief and gratitude he felt was immense. He was saved. As the officers made their way towards him, the crowd parting, he felt his legs go weak. He wanted to collapse. But he managed to hold it together long enough, to offer a grateful smile as one finally made his way towards him, dividing his fellow Yuanci like the Moses before the Red Sea.
“I am very happy to see you,” says the human, smiling down at the Yucani constabulary officer. It responds by removing a short grey metallic pole and jabbing it into the humans leg.
Pain. SO much pain. A searing, agonising, exploding pain that begins in his leg and races through every single nerve cluster in his body. The human convulses and screams, his bladder empties and he almost instantly drops into unconsciousness from the agony. He falls into a crumpled heap against the wall. The Yucani officer, ignoring the little cheer that had began from his fellow species, gazed down at the human with contempt and spat.
Two months later…
The young human, manacled and bound is thrown into the small conference room the aliens had built for this meeting. His eyes glance up and fall upon the first human face he had seen in many weeks.
“Oh God, thank you. Are you here to save me?”
The other human was in his fifties; his eyes bore the look of a man who had seen many things, perhaps too many. His suit was well made, sensible, if not slightly on the conservative side.
In response to the question he smiles gently and says, “Kid, I’m fairly sure only God can save you. But I am here to try and help with the mess you are in.”
Relief, mixed with wild joy fill the prisoners face. The younger man spots a chair to sit in (the room had the familiar setting of two human shaped chairs and a desk between them), and falls into it in a heap, his manacled hands landing heavily upon the table.
“Oh, thank you! You need to get me off this planet. The conditions I’ve been kept in have been awful. I am totally isolated. A hole in the ground with a large vent in the ceiling. They throw food down to me. The place stinks.”
The older man raises an eyebrow, “That’s good. You getting off lightly.”
“Lightly? The entire thing stinks like a sewer.”
“That’s because it probably IS a sewer,” shrugs the older man, reaching for a briefcase by his side.
“What?”
“Yucani prisons. They don’t incarcerate anyone but worst offenders on their world. The closest they have to prisons are specially made sewers.”
“That’s…”
“Tell me, have random Yucani been coming along and urinating and crapping into your cell as they pass?”
“What? No. That’s horrible.”
As the older man places his briefcase upon the table between them, he smiles a cold, tight smile, “The Yucani word for ‘prisoner’ literally translates into English as ‘Eaters of Our Shit’. I think the fact that they are throwing you human food and not pissing on you qualifies as light treatment.”
The younger man’s jaw just drops. A stunned look of absolute horror crosses his face. The older human uses this as an excuse to open his briefcase, remove a heafty file in a manilla cover out (it lands on the table with a satisfying heavy sound), closes the briefcase and places it on the floor besides him.
“Are you from the Embassy?”
“No. I just arrived in-world an hour ago. Four days at warp. My guts feel mushy.”
“Oh. Are you a lawyer?”
“I afraid not. Formally the excuse the Embassy will give you is there are no humans conversant in the intricacies of Yucani jurisprudence to be able to offer effective advice. Off the record? No lawyer in the entire solar system would touch your case. So, they sent me. I’m a specialist.”
“What in?”
“Apparently being human,” says the older man, who opens the folder and begins scanning the pages underneath. The younger man is too confused to say anything which suits the older one just fine. He glances up into the scared eyes of the prisoner.
“Andrew Montgomery Eversham, born 2118, Britain. British? Should have figured. Father was an engineer on Ares station, mother was… French. Well that explains much.”
“What does my mother have to do with anything?”
The older man gazes him up and down and asks, “Only child huh?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Thought so. Right, Mr Eversham. Do you know what they are charging you with?”
“No one has told me anything at all. I was performing, and the next thing I know I was being chased by a mob of angry Dormice, and then one of their police…”
“Yucani. Not Dormice.”
“What?” Eversham’s eyes widen, and he nods, “Yes, right. I know. I figured that out. But you know its just us here.”
“Saying Dormouse to describe a Yucani is like being home and using the word ‘Kike’. It’s a derogative term. An insult. Maybe not enough to get you punched, but we don’t do that.”
“Alright. Yes. I understand. I will try. Good job you ain’t Jewish eh?”
“Bad news I’m afraid. I am.”
“Oh.”
The older man scans through the documents and frowns.
“You are charged with a multitude of offenses. The first of which is Causing Great Disgust of Public Morals; Crude and Offensive Language; Heresy towards the Gods of the Yucani; Causing a Disturbance of the Peace… what were you doing?”
“I was doing my routine.”
“Routine?”
“I’m a comedian. Stand up.”
There was a raised eyebrow.
“You are comedian?”
“Yes.”
“And you caused this reaction?”
“Apparently.”
“Gonna say Kid, I’d work on your act.”
Eversham blinks and his face contorts with frustration, “Are you here to help me or not?”
The older man however just gazes at the file before him, “As well as the above you are charged with Inciting a Yucani to Wish to Commit Violence- this is a serious offense by itself, but they have charged you with inciting every individual in the crowd who heard you. So that’s 496 separate charges. And given each one carries a possible death sentence…”
“Death sentence? I could die?”
The older man smiles coldly across the table, “And we haven’t even gotten onto the serious allegations yet. So far, its just been the warm up. Now it says here that you perform under a different name.”
“Yeah. Abe Froman.”
“What?”
“Abe Froman. You know from that old movie.”
“What old movie?”
“A 20th century classic. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The character of Abe Froman- the Sausage King of Chicargo? You must have heard of it?”
The older human raises his eyebrows high.
“No ‘Abe’ I haven’t. Neither have the Yucani. Which means they arrested someone called Abe Froman, only then to discover his real name is Andrew Eversham.”
“It’s my stage name.”
“The Yuctani don’t have concepts for ‘stage names’. All they know is a human arrived on planet with one name and then started using another name once here. And THIS is why they have charged you with espionage.”
“ESPIONAGE!!?”
“Yes. Specifically, because of the two names thing. And THEN because they think you are some kind of human agent, but don’t know what exactly you could have been up to, they assume the worst and charged you with everything they think you COULD have been here to do. That’s what the rest of the folder is.”
Andrew gazes at the thick pages with a look of absolute terror. The older humans eyes begin scanning; “So, from the top, ‘Suspected of Wishing to Assassinate the Emperor of the Yucani; Suspected of wishing to Assassinate the Chancellor of the Emperor of the Yucani…”
He moves forward a few pages.
“Suspected of wishing to put poison in the water supply of the cities of Heshis and Jebin…”
“But I…”
The older man lifts up more pages and smiles, “Suspected of seeking to violate the sacred virginity of the High Priestess of Rho- that’s impressive.”
“Are you serious? This is a joke.”
“Deadly serious,” hisses the old man, who closes the file with a loud thump. He fixes Eversham with a fierce stare.
“I gotta tell you ‘Abe’- you are in so much trouble right now that EarthGov is an inch away from washing their hands of you, throwing you to the Yucani and letting them take dumps on your for the rest of your short life. I am, literally, the only hope in hell you have of surviving and if I’m being honest- it aint much of a hope.”
“But it was just a few jokes,” mews Eversham, his eyes welling up with tears.
“Who thought it would be a good idea to travel to another planet and do stand up comedy?”
“My agent.”
“Your agent? What did you do? Sleep with his wife?”
“No,” comes the panicked reply.
“Didn’t you even do some basic research on what the Yucani considered humour?”
“No. I thought it would be more interesting to just turn up and see how they reacted to human jokes… you know… see the raw reaction.”
The older man is briefly speechless. He takes a breath and says quietly, “Gotta admire your chutzpah Kid. Not smart but that’s a LOT of chutzpah…”
“Why would EarthGov throw me under the bus? I don’t understand. I screwed up sure, but…”
He stops as the older man just holds up a hand. He gazes into his eyes as the first human he has seen in months speaks very quietly.
“Here’s the deal. As far as we can tell, a couple of months ago, this young human leaves Earth and flies to Yucani homeworld. He passes customs, checks into a Yucani version of a hotel and asks if they have versions of ‘clubs’. He discovers that, being social creatures, Yucani do indeed have these places where they gather to be entertained. Brilliant says he. The human goes to one of these. This human, he is not entirely ignorant- he’s learned basic Yucani. Not much, but enough to converse conversationally.”
The older mans stare nails the young man to his chair.
“So he goes there and meets the Yucani in charge. Explains that he is a ‘human entertainer’. Asks if he can perform. The Yucani, like the rest of his species? They get on well with us. We share similar traits. We have had good relations since the Treaty of Commerce and Travel was signed fifteen years ago. Sure, he says. He announces this human. Who gets on stage. But does not sing. Doesn’t dance. He talks. He talks to them. He says some pretty damn insulting things about them. He ignores their obvious growls of displeasure.”
“I thought they were laughing!”
“You thought wrong kid. The crowd sat for about twenty minutes getting madder and then decides enough is enough. They chase him out of the club, across two streets and corner him outside of his hotel. Where he is arrested and not lynched because the club owner rang the constabulary. Have I missed anything out?”
“No,” says Eversham quietly.
“So the EarthGov embassy gets informed of all this and do what they do and move to smooth ruffled fur. It’s just a misunderstanding they say. It’s an easy mistake they say. Their records show he is JUST a comedian. But here’s the thing kid. Yucani don’t have comedians. They don’t get it. So the Ambassador tries to explain it to them. Which in turn leads to a discussion about a very unique trait we humans have that Yucani do NOT have. Know what that is?”
“A sense of humour?” Eversham says, literally unable to help himself. He is surprised at the response.
“Well spotted. They have one but it is nothing like our own. They became fascinated at our sense of humour and then in quick measure, horrified at it. They find the very essence of human humour to be offensive, aggressive, cruel and vicious. Their government is considering tearing up the Treaty between our two races. Literally, your little stunt has caused the MOTHER of all diplomatic incidents.”
“I… I had… no idea,” stammers the Englishman.
“That comes as no surprise to me whatsoever,” comes the hissed reply. The older man sighs and rubs his eyes and continues. “Now the GOOD news is, given the severity of the charges you face, the nature of the issue, and the sheer monumental insanity of this whole thing, the Yucani have decided to not bother with all the minor courts, judges, appleant proceadures. You are going to be tried by the top court on the planet. The Ultimate Court. One trial, one hearing, one.”
Eversham just nods.
“The bad news is, it won’t be you alone on trial. It will be the entire human species. And our sense of humour. Somehow, just somehow, we have to convince these creatures that actually our sense of humour isn’t just an awful trait that they find offensive. And that means somehow, just somehow, I’ve got to defend human comedy in front of a species who has no concept of comedy at all.”
The older man sighs.
“And I thought raising my eldest daughter was tough!”
There is a silence. The full weight of the moment clearly hits the young man. He lowers his head and fights back tears. Eventually, without looking up, he says quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure you are kid.”
“I’ve been a fool.”
“This much EVERYONE can agree upon.”
“I never meant to cause this…”
The older man sighs again, “I know you didn’t kid. Everyone knows you didn’t MEAN it. Doesn’t make it any easier for folks back home.”
Andrew Eversham nods. Displaying the stoicism his nation was famed for, he remains very quiet. Tears drip off his nose but he makes no sound. The older man just looks at him, an iota of sympathy creeping into his sad eyes. Moments pass. Eversham finally speaks.
“It… maybe it would be better if everyone just wrote me off. Said I was insane. Aberrational. Throw me under the bus. Let everyone get on with it?”
A small sad smile crosses the older mans face.
“To be blunt, that is what a LOT wanted to do back in EarthGov. A lot still do. But it’s too late for that. The whole race is in the mix now. Like it or not, we gotta jump on this ride and see it through to the end. And this is why they sent me. Because some fool thinks that if anyone can win this, can somehow get you off, its me.”
“Are you a diplomat?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“So why did they send you?”
“Beats me kid. I mean I have a rough idea, but really? I think they sent me because they are desperate.”
“What do you do for a living?”
A smile.
“For my sins? I’m a Rabbi.”
Four Days Later; The Grand Chamber of the Yucani Ultimate Court
Rabbi Johnathan Cohen had to admit- it was impressive. For such a small race, the Yucani could do ‘grand’. As he looked around the chamber of the highest judiciary on their planet, he could imagine it being used for an equally impressive purpose back on Earth. Of course on Earth the décor and colour scheme would be a tad different. More imposing.
Regal even. This?
It reminded him of the garish interior of some Western Bordelo from the 1890’s if he was honest. Still, the gold and purples and reds didn’t distract from the gravitas of the assembly or the importance of the room.
Or the size of the crowd.
EarthGov told him it was going to be a big show. They were not kidding. The five judges (known as a ‘claw’ the standard designation in all Yucani trials apparently) were looking impressive in their yellow robes of office, but they were upstaged by everyone else. The importance of the nature of this trial had demanded that anyone who was anyone would be here.
Rabbi Cohen could see the heir to the Yucani Empire had arrived (representing his father and 83 siblings); the Minister for Relations With The Hairless Ones (the formal designation for the poor Yucani official who dealt with humans) was also there, talking to him in hurried trills.
There were delegations of all the great and the good of this species, including The High Matron of the Sacred Priestesses of Rho, whose arrival caused him to smile inwardly. And it wasn’t just the Yucani who were here.
The unique nature of the diplomatic spat had caused interest from a half dozen other species. He saw the Ambassador of the Tu-Kek sitting within a glass encased sphere; the Emissary of the Golden Hive, which sat unmoving upon a perch, witnessing all that it relayed to the collective hive mind of the crew of the colony/ship that had arrived in orbit a few days before.
There was even a Frosh there, hovering enigmatically in its encounter suit, and the Frosh didn’t seem interested in anything except fractal mathematical equations most of the time. None of the species knew a damn thing about them- highly advanced but utterly abstract.
And there were the other humans. The Ambassador was there looking nervous (he was partly to blame for messing up the aftermath of the event- his job was on the line); the Commodore of Human Forces in the nearest sector was to his right, looking bored (only here because EarthGov was slightly worried this could end in a war). The attractive secretary (who everyone whispered the Ambassdor was sleeping with), sat on the other side of the Commodore, his handsom eyes glancing at the proceedings nervously.
And this ignored the several hundred normal Yucani who had managed to gain attendance to the trial. Rabbi Cohen took a sip of water and muttered to himself, “No pressure then Johnathan…”
“What?”
He turned to the rather pathetic figure of Andrew Eversham besides him. He wasn’t chained, and he had been issued new clothing, but his eyes were sunken and he looked the very image of a broken man.
“Nothing kid,” he says kindly, “you ready for this?”
“No,” comes the dispondant reply. For some reason Johnathan smiles at this.
“That’s the way. Honesty is always the best policy.”
The beating of a gavel is enough to start the proceedings. Ear pieces to allow fluent translations of all sides words are donned, and Rabbi Cohen takes a deep breath. Yucani trials followed a slightly differing format than humans- but the jist was roughly the same. The ‘prosecution’ he noticed was a grey furred alien, whose somewhat rotund body revealed him to be a corpulent and well fed member of his species. No doubt some great legal mind.
The trial passed quickly enough- the facts were not in dispute and indeed the defence case being as it was (the human in question was ignorant of any harm he could cause and meant no malice) was not even seriously contested by the state. No, in truth the real reckoning lay in the deeper issue of human sense of humour, and how in would colour future Human-Yucani relations.
Eventually, after about an hour, the rotund alien hopped back towards his table and began trilling in low, dark tones. In Cohen’s ear the translation came across clearly.
Which leads us, most supreme claw, to the crux of the issue. The human’s case rests upon a simple defense; he was innocent of any illwill towards our peoples, but sought to ‘entertain’ us with an example of human ‘humour’. This has led to our people investigating this aspect of the aliens personalities, and what we have found is disturbing indeed.
Johnathan watched closely as little creature trilled and squeaked in strong tones, his brown eyes forever gazing around him; while he was no expert on Yucani bodylanguage, Cohen knew showboating when he saw it. The little fat furball was playing to the crowd, playing upon the sensibilities of his race.
We have found humans delight in mockery; in lampooning; in deriding. They claim they do the same to themselves, as if this excuses them, as if it gives them the writ to inflict such things upon the rest of the galaxy. For a human, mockery of their institutions and their leaders is to be expected. But as we all KNOW- such things are anathema to we Yucani; where the familial bonds of love and honour are as natural to us as breathing…
The Rabbi tried hard not to roll his eyes. The prosecution was laying it on thick. Really thick. He watched as the creature hopped and trilled, waving its little arms about, modulating its voice expertly. He could see every Yucani in the room moved by this; their noses twitched, eyes welled up, their tails would go back and forth violently.
Carefully the Rabbi listened as the little creature moved onto the mainstay of his argument.
Is it not said by the Goddess Rho, that ‘all things shall be in its natural place, from star to planet, from ruler to bondman’; does not Rho teach us that there is only joy to be found in ‘careful appreciation of the natural order of all things’? Is it not said within our most sacred texts that ‘The ONLY path towards elevation of a soul, is through acceptance of its time within the body’? These are the foundations of our very society, our very civilisations…
The prosecution begins waxing lyrical about the virtues of the civilisation of the Yucani, but Johnathan was only half listening. There was a religious aspect to this after all?
As he mused on the sacred words of the Rho, part of him wondered if the wiley President of Earth was smarter than he liked to appear. Did the old guy KNOW this was going to be their approach? Is this why he sent him?
His thoughts are broken as the prosecution brings his long and somewhat vaudevillian diatribe to its conclusion…
…which bases itself upon mockery, and lampoon and cruelty towards living things are ideas we Yucani cannot afford to allow infect our civilisation. They gnaw at its roots. They will in time infest our nests. Supreme Claw, I must ask, no implore, no BEG of you, to issue an edict which petitions our Emperor to reconsider allowing these humans access to our world. Lest one night, one terrible night, the scenes we saw, where a single voice defiles the virtues of our culture are repeated… but this time by one of our own children.
Cohen takes a breath and smiles to himself. He glances over at the ambassador who looks back nervously. Besides him the quiet voice of Andrew Eversham says, “I really screwed this all up didn’t I?”
“Yes kid. But look on the bright side?”
“There’s a bright side?”
“It’s not everyday you get to be accused of defiling an entire civilisation. Think about how it will look on your CV?”
Rabbi Cohen stands as his opposing side sits down heavily. He picks up a small card wherein the correct honourifics needed to address the court are clearly printed and runs through the formalities quickly enough. That done he gazes at the five judges for a moment, and shrugs.
“The human sense of humour. Where do I, one of our species, even BEGIN to start describing this complex thing that lies at the heart of who we are, to your most Supreme Claw? There are great minds on Earth who have wondered about this for many centuries and reached no conclusion. And yet it is clear, I must. So let me try and break this down into a way I feel the Yucani can understand and I hope, accept it, for all its imperfections.”
“It is a question often asked by us humans- what makes us laugh? What is the source of our humour? The prosecution would have you believe it is cruelty and mockery. And from the surface it would appear so. But allow me to illustrate that human humour is complicated and made up of many levels.”
He strides out from behind his table, keeping his voice low and his eyes focused on the judges.
“The starting point is incongruity. We humans like you Yucanti had an issue with incongruity. Evolutionary speaking our ancestors, like yours, lived lives fearing predators; both our species in our ancient past? We would gaze, eyes to the horizon, forever searching for danger. We learned well the safety in patterns, the formal, fixed nature of our surroundings. Anything out of place, incongruous, we would be drawn to. It spelt danger, it spelt threat.”
“For my species, long after we had evolved past the need to spot such things, we had this trait inherent still within us. Why do I stress this? When humans spot an incongruity in nature, when it does not threaten us? We laugh. An exclamation of relief. Identical to what Yucani call the ‘musk of fear ending’. For your species it is natural and normal. Same with ours. Yours is scent. Ours is sound. Identical reactions. A thing we have in common yes?”
A few aliens nod at this. A good start.
“However this is not the full basis of our humour. Incongruity cannot be the full extent of our humour. If I was to find a shoe in a dishwasher, or you were to find Gurnix inside a Flubuton, that in itself would not be the cause of humour to us. It would be odd, but not humorous. The key for us humans is that incogurity has to be of a correct kind. For humans it has to involve a shift of perspective. The great human psychologist, Koestler, pointed out that for humans this shift is all important. An example would be…”
He nods to one of the technicians and displayed in the air in both languages are words.
When is a door not a door?
When it is a jar!
“This is an example of that type of humour. Incongruity presenting a perspective shift.”
There is utter silence from the audience and he scans the translation and smiles.
“Of course the joke does not translate at all to your race. The play on contexts and language is entirely lost to you. But notice how my fellow humans did not laugh either. Such things are primitive; plays on words, sudden perspective shifts. Proto-Jokes almost. I raise it to establish the baseline of our humour.”
“We humans have many of these jokes. We call them things like ‘knock-knock jokes’ and ‘lightbulb jokes’. They are not truly appealing to our humour, the highest compliment they can get is to be called clever, for you see they are missing a particular element of humour which the prosecution has done well to highlight.”
“What they miss, is a degree of cruelty.”
The little rotund advocate for the state stands and begins trilling in high pitched tones. Cohen waits for the translation to come through.
So you admit that humans revel in cruelty?
He smiles, “No.”
But you just said that your humour needs cruelty!
“A certain type, yes. But not the type you described.”
Semantics! Your supreme clawness, I urge you end this nonsense…
We will hear the human defence, intones the oldest, long whiskered judge, As we are curious as not how they will justify this.
“I thank the indulgence of the court,” smiles Cohen, and he takes a breath.
“There remains, there always will, an aspect of human behaviour that is mistaken for our humour but is not. This is how we humans use laughter. Laughter is a physical response to things. Mostly to humour yes, but also, and this is where the prosecution made their mistake, it can be a sound of triumph. At such times the sound is indeed dark and unmistakably cruel. Many have observed that for all the love we have of the sound of laughter it is by volume and in ferocity, an aggressive sound. And there exists many examples of our species using laughter when committing acts of cruelty.”
He shrugs, “It was only a few centruies ago that it became unfashionable to visit the places we kept our psychically and mentally disable for the purpose of laughing at them. We thought it good sport to look upon their pain. All of human history contains accounts of how public executions were raucous affairs, we would attend and celebrate the killing of one of our own, often with laughter as the guillotine came down upon them…”
Rabbi Cohen sighs heavily, “When I was younger I once saw a picture. Germany. The 1930’s. A small child, a Jewish boy, was being forced to clean the street on his hands and knees. Around him stood adults and they were laughing. This isn’t human humour, it’s cruelty. There are countless episodes of torturers laughing as they inflict pain. Of laughter being heard from mass shooters, from soldiers in war, at our most darkest moments. These things I do not refute. But point out a similarity of experience between our species.”
“Every species in the galaxy knows Yucani are fastidious in cleaning, how they value healthy and clean fur. No Yucani would ever dose another in urine for example. What then of your treatment of prisoners? Are we to take that as indicative of Yucani finding such things acceptable? Of course not. It is a certain, dark aspect of your society, misunderstood except BY your species. This is the same as using laughter by humans in moments of cruelty. It is separate FROM the debate about humour.”
He takes a breath and a sip of water before continuing.
“No, to say human humour is incognuity mixed with cruelty is too simplistic. It has to be the right type of cruelty…”
What do you mean the right type of cruelty? asks the supreme judge.
Johnathan Cohen thinks for a moment and smiles, “On Earth, a wise man called Mel Brooks once asked the question- what is the difference between tragedy and comedy?”
What was his answer?
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down a manhole cover and die.”
The Ambassadors secretary bursts out laughing, the sound carries across the room, ALL eyes fall upon him. Hurridly he covers his mouth, going red in the process.
“And you see the very nature of it right there. A sudden juxtaposition of incongruity and a certain element of cruelty, producing an involuntary response. Laughter.”
He pauses for a moment and says quietly, “In our distant past, in the year 1991 of our calander, a human writer called David Barry said the following, “The most important humor truth of all is that to really see the humour in a situation, you have to have perspective. ‘Perspective’ is derived from two ancient Greek words: ‘persp’ meaning ‘something bad happens to someone else’ and ‘ective’ meaning ‘ideally someone like Donald Trump’.”
At this all the humans bursts out laughing and Rabbi Cohen holds up his hands, “Again- the involuntary reaction. I won’t bother to explain it your honours, just to say that last statement was a joke designed to highlight something.”
“The core cruelty here is that someone must lose dignity. As we humans say be brought down a peg or two, or be knocked off a pedestal. It can be used by the mob as a weapon, and YES, it does have a subversive power. One of our ancients, a man called Plato, thought humour was destabalsing to the state and should be banned from it, which for us humans? Tell us much about the kind of guy Plato actually was.”
See? This is my allegation Supreme Claw. The human ADMITS what I am saying is true…
“What we do you got right, WHY we do it you got wrong. I heard you speaking about how Rho says we must appreciate the time our souls connect with our bodies correct?”
The prosecution’s whiskers twitch a little, and carefully it says Yes
“Well, the most basic, the most universal, the most raw and successful brand of comedy, the one my clients version was but a verbal variation of, the one that transcends the many human languages, is humour based upon just that. The realisation that there is a split between the soul, the essence of a human, and these dull, mundane frail bodies we exist in. What a psychologist once called the ‘dualism of subtle mind and inert matter’. “
“We call that humour, slapstick.”
He grins to himself.
“The core of all slapstick is the ‘the blow and the fall’. It can be as simple as a human slipping on the skin of recently eaten fruit. Or elaborate and detailed, but at its core is something very important. We understand, totally, the immortality of the soul, what the Goddess Rho holds to essence of being, but we also recognise the limitations of the body. Your species finds solance in holding to the immutable structure of the universe to reconcile this correct? We reconcile it by finding humor when we are reminded that these frail bodies cannot match the perfection of what lies within.”
“All of this is just by way of explaining this…”
An image appears on screen. It is a small human infant, wearing a sundress, maybe aged about 2 or 3 years old. Walking towards them is an image of Rabbi Cohen. He smiles at the child, and walks towards her and then, suddenly, slips and lands on his backside, a look of mock shock on his face. And at that, the court room is filled with the sound of the small child laughing, laughing hard; uncontrollable laughter, a sound that makes every human in the room smile. The image ends.
“Your honours, THAT is the most beloved sound on my home planet. The sound of an innocent child laughing. It transcends cultures and languages, transcends time. It delights us like NO other sound. We can spend hours just trying to get children to make it.”
“Consider then what you just saw? An innocent- capable of no higher functions of thought; an infant. It’s reactions are primal. But what DID you see? An infant is able to identify itself as a being, and me as a separate being. It saw the classic imposition upon my being by this mundane body. I tripped and slipped on my tuchus. A sudden juxtaposition of incongruity. One second I am stood, the next I am not. Mixed with the RIGHT kind of cruelty. Misfortune happening to another. But notice my reaction- my mock smile? My grand daughter realises that it is not hurting me and responds with a spontainious reaction of laughter.”
“THIS is at its base, the core of ALL human comedy and humour; it is based on empathy, and innocence. Not for her convoluted explanations involving cruelty and mockery. Just instinct. As we grow we develop more sophisticated methods to find humour but at its core? That is it. Is that not a demonstration of how our humour is as identical as your veneration of the soul within the body? The acceptance of the duality of body and spirit?”
Rabbi Cohen smiles, gently and turns to the Judges.
“Your honours, I urge you to dismiss this case. And I urge you to do so because let me tell you what will happen to the defendant. He will be released. He will return home. And when he does? He will become the subject of many, many jokes. He bore no ill will in his heart towards your race- but he was a schmuck.”
What is a schmuck?
“It’s a certain type of human. For the Yucani? A schmuck will forever be my client.”
In his chair the stand up comedian opens his mouth and then closes it. Defeated.
“He will return home and we will make stories about what he did. We will laugh at his foolishness, his ignorance, his pride….”
And we so gonna have fun with you little fat gerbil, he thinks but does not say as he eyes the prosecutor.
“And our ambassador will sit down with the Crown Prince and they will add a provision to the Treaty of Trade and friendship that says, based on the psychological underpinnings of our two species, and given we recognise that we share in common a belief of the duality of our existence and indeed of the existence of the soul, that human humour is a natural byproduct of our evolution like musk scenting is part of yours. Neither of our species share these traits, so lets not inflict it upon the other huh?”
“That would seem to me to be a most equitable and fair solution.”
The judges consulte one another, the Yucani remove their translation devices, but Johnathan can see their chirpings are appreciative. He may not have convinced them humans are FUNNY… but he may have convinced them to let this slide. He sits down at his table, gathers up his case note and begins to place them inside his briefcase.
Besides him, the comedian gazes over and sees there, amidst the papers in the briefcase, a hard backed book… ‘On the origins of humor: why Neaderthals can’t take a joke’ by Dr Johnathan Cohen, and a sudden realisation crosses his mind and he whispers, “You wrote that?”
“When not studying the Torah, I dabble in evolutionary psychology. It pays the bills.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey kid, what we gonna do? Let aliens say we bad for liking to laugh? What’s next? We are sinful because we breath?”
As the court recesses, and the judges leave to make their judgement, Rabbi Cohen stands and turns to make his way over to the Ambassadour when he is stopped suddenly. There, before him, stands the representative of the Frosh. It’s towering form, its huge encounter suit, obscuring the being from within. It’s cold black visage, plain glass of some kind, looms balefully over him.
In all the hustle of the Yucani leaving, no one notices this member of the most elusive and obscure of all the alien species, make his way to stand before the human. Johnathan clears his throat and goes, “Hello?”
The alien just stands.
“Can I help you?”
The black screen suddenly flashes brief, fractal images upon it, who flare in and out of existing as quick as a human blink. At the same time a warbling high pitch noise emits from deep in the chest area.
The Rabbi blinks and says, “What?”
The images and the noise is repeated again. Realisation dawning, Rabbi Cohen places down his briefcase and picks up the translator device he was using back on the table.
“Say that again please?”
The images flash and the noise is made and two seconds later words form in the humans ear… a simple message…
Pull my finger.
There is a silence. Around them the Yucani chitter and trill but Johnathan Cohen begins to smile…

difference between leader manager and follower video

Being an effective follower is one route to becoming a leader. Followers are often thought of as sheep, yes-people, or cheerleaders, and some do play those parts. But realizing a vision and addressing compelling causes cannot be accomplished by the leader alone. 5 In fact, there would be no leaders without followers. Manager, leader, follower: different roles. But the complexity of organizational dynamics does not allow for clear separation of these roles. At the best, people are not only leading, or managing, or following. These activities ebb and flow in the same person, depending on the situation, the people, and the choice of the person. A dynamic dance. When you are promoted into a role where you are managing people, you don’t automatically become a leader. There are important distinctions between managing and leading people. Top 5 differences between being a leader and being a follower Are you a leader or a follower? NO.1. Leaders are willing to step up and take control of a project or task. They enjoy a challenge and embrace change as they know it will benefit them in the long term. Followers have to be forced to drive a project by their boss. A leader and the manager is that a leader has followers while the manager has the employees. A manager avoids conflicts. On the contrary, a leader uses conflicts as an asset. In light of my experience and the continuing scandals - NSA/Prism and Lloyds PPI complaint handling - I have been reflecting-grappling with the leadership, accountability, and integrity. As such I wish to share with you my take on the seven key differences between effective and ineffective leaders. 1. Effective leaders are clear on what matters,… The leader focuses on people while a manager focuses on the Process and Procedure. A leader aims at the growth and development of his teammates while a manager aims at accomplishing the end results. In Summary. As you can see form the examples we have quoted above, there are plenty of ways of looking at the difference between a leader and manager. 1. A leader leads by example a follower depends on others. If there is not a set path a true leader will blaze new trails to reach their goals. A follower will remain idle until given explicit directives. 2. A leader depends on his courage, a follower struggles to find a spine. To lead others you must be decisive and willing to make the hard ... Many people make mistake to separate leaders and followers. I think that no matter what position one has within an organization, he/she is playing a follower’s role to support someone else. Great leaders of an organization are following the profitable goals of their stakeholders. For a survival business, followers need to be effective and supportive for… A true leader influences others to be their best. Leadership is about social influence, not positional power. You don’t even need to have people reporting to you to be a leader. A janitor can influence people and lead just as a CEO can. Likewise, anyone can become a follower, even while holding a leadership position.

What Are the Key Differences Between Manager and Leader?

difference between leader manager and follower

difference between leader manager and follower - win

I want to talk about a few things that happened on January 28

Second Impeachment Trial of Donald Trump: Day One