#In spirit I believe in all weathers but I just don’t have the infrastructure to support it

[septembersung]

Me: I should shake things up and get out of the house today.

The world: um. It’s -7.

[notsogoodangel]

Finally done: Children of Dead AU AKA an SBI Royal/Antarctic Empire AU which actually includes both Fundy and Kristin. More info under the cut

also ignore typos in the drawing, I did the text at like 2 am

The Antarctic Empire seemed to pop out of nowhere, and just as fast as it appear, it became among the most prosperous and wealthiest (and most dangerous) kingdoms in the world. The world was in shock figuring out how an adventurer, who first came into view from a pathetic death, became the ruler of such a prosperous empire. Although once meeting the royal family, one begins to understand. Emperor Philza, also known as the Angel of Death, a man later became known for his wisdom and bravery. He will always raising to the occasion, of course, if he believe in it, and destroy anything that stands in his path. The empress is Death herself, always kind to everyone who doesn’t run from her and her touch and to be feared if you ever go against her. They formed a family that almost seems too perfect for running the place the call home. The oldest son is almost perfect soldier, seemingly never loosing a battle and always knowing how to plan to their next expansion of their territory. The crown prince has a way with words that makes everyone listen, always trying to get the upper hand and his pride always seeking what’s the most optimal outcome during a meeting. The youngest of the emperor and empress children is a loud young man that is never afraid to speak his mind, fight for any occasion to protect the empire and his family, trying to improve any injustice that may ever plague the kingdom. The crown prince’s son is focused on making the empire structurally stable, always focusing on the infrastructure and improving the technology.

Secondary characters

Ranboo: 

He was taken in by Phil when he was 15, but he really seems to be adopted by Techno than by him.

Not an official prince, but under the protection of the royal family.

Still half enderman and half something else.

He is the same age as Tommy, and they get along well-enough.

Tubbo: 

He is not adopted by the royal family, but might as well be.

Even though he is a citizen of Manberg, he spends most of his time in the empire, specially hanging out with Tommy, Ranboo, and Purpled.

Son of Captain Sparklez, his uncle is Schlatt and Puffy, and Dream is his cousin.

Half goat and half sheep (that’s the couple horn).

Purpled:

An ex-child soldier, rescued and taken in by Ponk and Punz (his biological-older brother).

He was REALLY good at his job, and still continues the mercenary work, but he actually makes money out of it.

He is an alien hybrid, which is among the rarest hybrids, and has very little drawbacks.

He hangs out in the castle because he can and nobody can stop him.

Sam: 

A prince with so many brothers that is near impossible for him to become a king, so he moved to the empire and helps in the building of it with the help of Foolish.

A raccoon-creeper hybrid, and connected to Tommy very fast because of it.

He is in a relationship with Ponk, and lives with him, Purpled and Punz.

He can explode, and tries his best to control his angel... and he is scared of cats, which works out because Ponk is allergic to them.

Schlatt

Phil’s old adventure buddy (look, I love their Hexxit series, fight me)

President of Manberg, although not for long because he dies near the end of his first term. After that he haunts, Quackity, Tubbo and Phil, although mostly Quackity. 

He has the Revive Book, because his family is cursed and all males died young and he is looking for a way to stop it or extended the dying.

He is Sparklez’s and Puffy’s cousin, although he did help raise Tubbo since they travel a lot.

5up: 

Fundy’s childhood friend (and later boyfriend)

He is a nature spirit, specifically a radish. All nature spirits are connected to a plant, and this helps him to stay connect to this realm because again, he is a spirit. 

He tries to spend as much time in the empire with Fundy but the weather is hard on him, and staying in another realm can be hard.

Minor characters

Sally: A fish-hybrid that comes to the empire when the water is not frozen solid, and despite that, she is married to Wilbur and gave birth to Fundy, making her the princess of the empire.

Squid kid: A squid-hybrids that comes to the empire year-round and helps Techno keep his crops when he knows he is going away for a battle for an extended period of time. Techno only does this because he hates machines, and prefers manual labor. 

Ponk: A dreamon-hybrid (hides it) mercenary and doctor who keeps an eye in Punz and specially Purpled. Usually the middle man between any hits someone may request.

Punz: A alien-hybrid (recessive) mercenary and ex-child soldier. While he lives under Ponk and Sam’s roof, he doesn’t really listen to them as he is only there because he cares about Purpled... also he doesn’t listen to anyone unless you pay him.

Extra info: 

Tubbo, Dream, Puffy, Sparklez and Schlatt are all biologically connected. The “C” on Tubbo and Schlatt’s name stand for Captain, which is the family name. Don’t ask why is in the beginning of their names, they don’t know either. Their curse consist in that all males in the family will die young, usually tragically (Sparklez drowns in one of his travels and Schlatt dies alone from a heart attack). While the females will start to forget things if they are not consistent, for example, they will remember how to garden if they are a farmer, but they will forget they have a child if they live alone for an extended period of time.

Dream is the rules of the Greater SMP, although he hates the idea of being the face of the country since he hates people being up in his personal business, doesn’t like attention, he has personal beef with Techno and Tommy and that is not good for public relations when you hate two of the princes of one of the most powerful empires in the world; and his uncle runs a country that is not connected to his at all (aside from being to war in the past, but Schlatt wasn’t president then). So he still rules, but put Eret as a figure head as he has good personal relations with Wilbur and they actually like the attention.

There’s a small secret revolution against Wilbur going on the Antarctic Empire run by Blop and Oreli and many other of the people Wilbur used as experiment and torture during his “rebellious” phase. They mostly just want to torture and no-canonically kill him.

Hannah and George are also nature spirits. George is a mushroom spirit and Hannah is a rose one. George lives in Kinoko Kingdom with Karl (not a hybrid, but just a straight up an interdimensional being) and Sapnap, a fire-demon hybrid, and they are visited by Dream, who’s a sheep-dreamon hybrid, Quackity (a duck hybrid) and BBH (straight up demon and Sapnap’s dad). Hannah, on the other hand, lives on the Empire in a green rose, and works as a mercenary with Purpled. They sometimes work together, but most of the time they just train together.

Quackity is the vice-president during Schlatt presidency, and takes the mantle of presidency when he dies. He wants to run, but he after entering in a relationship with Karl and Sapnap he stops and moves to Kinoko. 

[balioc]

Your ideology -- if it gets off the ground at all -- will start off with a core base of natural true believers.  These are the people for whom the ideology is made.  Unless it’s totally artificial, they are the people by whom the ideology is made.  It serves their psychological needs; it’s compatible with their temperaments; it plays to their interests and preferences.  They’re easy to recruit, because you’re offering something that’s pretty much tailor-made for them. 

This is the level at which ideological movements are the most diverse, in terms of human qualities.  Natural true believers are heavily selected, and different movements select for different things.  A natural true radical feminist is a very different creature from a natural true fascist, and neither of them looks very much like a natural true Hastur cultist. 

Life in a baby movement, populated entirely (or almost entirely) by natural true believers, can be pretty sweet.  You may not necessarily be getting a lot done, but you’re surrounded by kindred spirits, and that’s worth a lot by itself.

One of the most common ideological failure modes involves imagining that expansion is tantamount to “transforming outsiders into natural true believers.”  It’s not.  The population of natural true believers is a limited and precious resource, and while it’s theoretically possible to make more...if you have some truly gifted cultural engineers...it’s a difficult, costly, and failure-prone process at the best of times.  It doesn’t work at scale. 

You can grow, but the growth process necessarily involves attracting other kinds of people to your ideology.  And then it won’t be the same. 

Success, I think, requires some understanding of what growth is actually going to bring you, and being able to roll with those changes.

**********

The first outsiders to flock to your banner will be the perpetual seekers -- or, to put it less charitably, the serial converters.  These are the hipsters and connoisseurs of belief, the people who join movements because they really like joining movements. 

They’ll think that you and your doctrines are amazing, at least for a little while.  They’re primed for that.  But they get bored easily, and they like chasing after the high of new epiphanies.  Unless you figure out how to hold their attention in a sustained way, which requires constant work, they’ll drift off. 

This is the second-most-common way for a movement to die (after “never really getting anywhere in the first place”).  You attract a few interested seekers, but not enough of them to give you a foothold in less-accessible demographics, and after a while they just give up and move on.  If you’re lucky, they leave you with something like the original core of natural true believers, sadder but wiser after their experience trying to go big.  If you’re unlucky, they cause lots of drama and shred everything on the way out. 

These guys can be very annoying to natural true believers, but if you want to expand, you 100% absolutely need them.  If you’re smart, you’ll take precautions to make sure they don’t walk off with key pieces of your infrastructure.

**********

If you display some serious growth potential, you start getting the profiteers, who don’t much care about your doctrine or your happy vibe but do care about that growth potential.  These are people who see your movement as a vehicle for their private ambitions, who want to sell you to the world and ride you all the way to the top.

...I’ve used some mercantile language here, but they’re not necessarily merchants trying to get rich, although that’s the prototype case I have in mind.  They may be going for political power, or simple fame, or all sorts of things.  Whatever it is they want, they think that you can help them get it, because your star is rising. 

In the long term, even the medium term, the profiteers can utterly wreck you if you’re not careful.  They tend to amass a lot of movement-internal power very fast, because they have big plans, and they promise concrete rewards quick.  But they usually don’t get whatever-it-is that the movement is really about, and even if they do get it, they don’t care as much as you do.  Their instinct is to make your Whole Thing as bland and generic and palatable as they can, so that they can sell it to the widest possible consumer base in the shortest possible timeframe.  This is a miserable and degrading experience, of course, but it’s also bad strategy in an eating-your-seed-corn kind of way.  The world gets a constant stream of bland generic palatable Hot New Things, and it chews through them fast.  There’s a future in being something genuinely weird enough to change the world; there’s no future in being last year’s fad.  The profiteers, however, aren’t interested in being careful shepherds of your movement’s power and credibility.  The arc of an individual’s career is not that long.  Consciously or otherwise, they are happy to burn you up as fuel for themselves.

In the short term, the profiteers are super awesome.  They will work tirelessly to help your movement grow, and they will do so in a very effective and practical-minded sort of way, without getting bogged down in the dysfunctions and the arcane abstract concerns that (probably) dominate your natural true believers.

Yes -- these first three groups map roughly onto the geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths of that one Meaningness essay.  There’s a lot of applicable insight in there.  It’s important, however, that if your group is built around a serious ideology rather than a consumable toy, standard-issue Members of the Public aren’t going to come flocking to you during these early stages.  Members of the Public don’t adopt new ideologies that easily.  Your weirdos will be able to attract only other, different kinds of weirdos. 

**********

Close on the heels of the profiteers, you will get the exploiters.  Where the profiteers are trying to sell you to the world, the exploiters are trying to sell themselves to you; where the profiteers are trying to make your movement grow (for their own purposes), the exploiters see you as an environment that’s already big enough for them to thrive in it. 

Some of them are hucksters and con artists.  Some of them are, yes, sexual predators in the classic mold, going after a known population of unusually-naive unusually-vulnerable people who let their guard down around anyone speaking the right shibboleths.  (That describes pretty much any ideological movement at this stage.  Sorry.)

And some of them are just lonely people desperate to belong to something, who think that they’ve found your movement’s cheat codes for belonging.  Some of them are fetishist-types who don’t have the whatever-it-takes to be one of your natural true believers, but who admire or desire that thing, and hope that they can be around their favorite people and get a Your Movement GF or whatever. 

Often they’ll be harmless.  Sometimes they really, really, really won’t.  There will be more of them than you expect.

At the very least, they’re a marker of success.  Apparently you’re worth exploiting!

**********

You’ll know that you’ve really made it, as a movement, when you start getting the fifth wave of converts: the status-mongers.  They’re joining up with you because they think it will be good for their social lives or their careers -- not in an “I’m going to be the guy who gets rich off of this” kind of way, but in a much lower-key “this makes me look cool or smart or moral, this is good for my reputation” kind of way.  They want the generic approval that comes from being on the forefront of the zeitgeist, and apparently the forefront of the zeitgeist is where you are, now.  Congratulations.

The arrival of the status-mongers represents a crisis point for your ideology.  There will be a lot of them; they’ll soon outnumber all your other people by an order of magnitude or more.  (Status-mongers attract more status-mongers, as each one makes it clearer to the world-at-large that your ideology is in fact cool.)  They will become the general public’s image of your movement, whether you like it or not.  Most of them definitely will not get your Whole Thing, not really.  They are interested mostly in being comfortable, in showing off to unenlightened mainstream audiences, and in using your doctrine as a cudgel to beat on their personal rivals. 

At this point you don’t really have to fear disappearing into obscurity, but you’re in more danger than ever of losing your way and becoming something totally alien.  The status-mongers will be doing their level best to make that happen.  You will also start attracting enemies far more powerful and dangerous than any you’ve known before.  Anything truly popular and high-status represents a threat to someone big.  You need to start prepping for persecution, culture war, and other varieties of large-scale social conflict. 

**********

If you can weather all that and come out on top, you finally get the sixth wave of converts, the big prize: the normies.  People will join your movement because that’s what everyone else is doing, because that’s what they’ve been taught, because they don’t want to stand out or make waves, because they don’t really care and you represent a plausible default. 

Most of the people out there are normies. 

That’s the endgame, the victory condition for an expansionist ideology: that you are the normies’ choice. 

**********

These are the groups that are out there.  This is what you’ll get, when you turn your gaze toward the path of growth.  This, and not whatever visions of radical social transformation dance before your eyes when you look at your beloved allies who are just like you.

Brace yourself for it.

[bluraaven]

Broken Few

Chapter 1

Despite it being earlier than the time they'd agreed upon, Dismas was not the first to arrive at the former bus station, a few miles outside of Arlip's center.  It was a squat grey shelter, but beneath the concrete roof one could at least find refuge from the pouring rain.  The outdated schedule and map in the back reminded of an era when what was now called the Old World still had had an infrastructure.  On weekends, the line 1614 would take passengers from the suburbs to the big city in hourly intervals.  These days, weeds and saplings grew out of the cracks in the pavement, and the smiling faces on a nearby advertisement poster had long since faded to colourless outlines.  

              Dismas' employer, a woman called Suki Hanou, already sat on one of the rusted benches.  A backpack that was close to bursting at the seams and two large suitcases were piled around her feet.  The young journalist was furiously typing away on a notebook that sat in her lap, only reaching up from time to time to brush away a strand of hair that had escaped her neat ponytail.  As far as bosses went, Dismas had had worse.  

              By Suki's side sat a man who – well hello there!  He had a handsome, tanned face framed by a short beard and a mop of brown, wavy hair, the tips of which were lighter, bleached by the sun.  A Southerner, then.  

              But then Dismas' gaze wandered lower and he saw the man's getup: He was dressed in full battle gear, including a bulletproof vest.  A sun was stitched to the sleeve of the jacket he wore underneath and a heavy-duty helmet rested on his knees.  Add the assault rifle slung over one broad shoulder and the fucking sword on his belt, and Dismas briefly considered turning around and legging it right back into the city. 

              As that would mean having to spend more time in the downpour, he decided against it and walked up to the two of them, unceremoniously dropping his own duffle bag on the free bench.  

              "Really?" Dismas asked in place of a greeting.  "I know you said you had contacts, but where on this scorched earth did ya find a Crusader, lass?"  

              "Secret of the trade, I'm afraid," Suki answered, then looked up from her notes and shrugged at Dismas with a smile.  "Glad you made it.  Dismas, meet Reynauld – Reynauld, this is Dismas."  

              Reynauld gave the new arrival a once-over.  The man looked like a vagabond.  His clothes were shabby, and he wore a heavy coat that was patched in at least a dozen places, contrasting with the slightly antiquated but clearly well maintained six-shooter on his hip.  

              Dismas had the face of a man who had spent his entire life outdoors; gaunt and weather-beaten, and with deep-set black eyes that were currently regarding Reynauld in a calculating manner.  

              The soldier noticed how the other man's gaze caught on the Order's badge, before quickly flittering away.  Reynauld thought that Dismas had the air of someone who attracted trouble and enjoyed starting fights.  At least according to his broken nose and crooked jaw.  

              The soldier turned to watch the road again.  The bus was late.  

              Since 'Reynauld' stayed quiet, Dismas nodded at the man and took off his coat to shake it out properly.  "Let me guess, she pulled ya out of that Abbey near the main square?"  

              "At least she didn't pull me out of the dumpster," Reynauld responded coldly.  Whoever had punched Dismas must have had good reason.  

              "Oh, it talks," Dismas huffed, but the rest of his retort was interrupted from behind by a new voice with a thick northern accent.

              "Easy now, gentlemen."  

           Another person had jogged through the rain towards them.  When Dismas turned, he looked at a middle aged man with a bag in one hand and a leash in the other.  His shaggy blond hair and beard, both greying with age, gave him an uncanny resemblance to the huge and equally shaggy hound by his side.  The stitching on the dog's protective harness had been ripped off, but Dismas recognized a K9 cop unit when he saw one.  

              Suki however, smiled and got up for a friendly handshake.  "Glad you made it in this weather.  So let's see.  Everyone, this is Sergeant Brodhan McAlister, an old friend."

              "Mornin'.  The smelly missy here's Laika," the man rumbled, upon which the dog started to shake water out of her pelt.  

              "Pleasure," Dismas said in a tone that indicated it very much wasn't.  A cop and a Crusader?  The fuck did he get himself into?  

              Suki either missed or ignored his rude demeanour and looked down the rainy road.  "That means only Nora is missing.  Well, she and the bus."  

              Reynauld gave the officer a nod, without offering handshakes.  This was already more people than he was comfortable with having around him, enough to make him want to reach for the small tin can he kept in a breast pocket out of habit.  But that was for emergencies only.  The addition of another companion, a lanky blonde woman with a ridiculously oversized hat who trotted over a couple of minutes later, was anything but.  The drive, however, would be another matter.  

              "Sorry I'm late!  Couldn't find a ride with half of Arlip under water."  The woman gave them all a big, broad smile and a wave.  "Pleasure to meet you lot.  Bus not here yet?"  

              "Nora, you made it!"  Suki answered, filling in for three brooding men.  "Nah, though it's not surprising in this weather.  Reynauld, Dismas, and Brodhan are already here, so the only thing left is to hope we get there in one piece.  It's not like anyone's doing much roadwork these days."  

              "There's worse things on the road than mossy potholes, lass," Dismas replied and gave the new arrival a closer look.  Finally, he liked what he saw.  Over the years Dismas had learned to recognize a kindred spirit.  "Love the hat, sweetheart," he grinned.  "Saves you the trouble of an umbrella."  

              "Maybe you should have chartered a boat, Suki."  Nora laughed and sat down next to the man her friend and employer had introduced as Dismas.  "Love the scarf, hun.  Didn't have a towel at hand?" she shot back, tongue-in-cheek.  Then, she slightly inclined her head in the direction of the guy in full combat gear with a lifted eyebrow, as if to ask 'what's up with him?'  

              "Nah, red's just my colour," Dismas replied.  Yeah, at least with her he'd get along fine.  At her silent question, he shrugged and warningly tilted his outstretched hand a few times where none of the others could see it.  Be careful with that one.  

              When the man did glance over to them, Dismas gave him a leery grin.  "Don't worry, love, your outfit is very pretty too."  

              Meanwhile, completely oblivious to their exchange from showering Laika with love, Suki raised her head and promptly jumped up.  "Look!  The bus – I think.  Shit, how does it even drive?"  

              Everyone else turned their heads when Suki pointed down the road; and indeed, there was a bus headed their way.  It was so old and run-down, Reynauld should consider himself blessed to witness the miracle of it still driving.  Instead, he only felt sick to the pit of his stomach.  

              With several worrying noises, the bus came to a halt right in front of their small shelter and the front doors opened to reveal the driver – a man who looked just as ancient and fucked up as the vehicle he was driving.  Even Dismas, who'd seen plenty of crazy and feral folk in his time, both on the road and in prison, raised a silent eyebrow.  

              For a few awkward seconds, the old codger just stared at them until he spotted Suki, then his face split into a wide, toothless grin and he climbed out of his seat with surprising agility.  Dismas instinctively clutched his bag tighter, resting his hand on his colt.  

              "Miss Hanou, yes? Oh, a pleasure, a true pleasure to meet the heiress!  Yes, yes, I'm the Caretaker!  You see, I drive, I clean, I take care."  His weird cackle confirmed Dismas' 'complete nutcase' theory.  

              "I'll take care of your bags too, I will!  Please, please, this way."  The Caretaker reached out for their luggage with bony hands.  

              "This guy is craaaazy," Nora whispered to Dismas in a singsong voice.  "Let's go!"  She grabbed her own bag – no way she was letting that... that Caretaker get his gnarled, warty hands on her possessions, and hurried after the soldier who'd had the right idea storming the bus, sitting down.  

              "No thanks, m'good," Dismas mumbled at the increasingly disappointed madman, and tightly clutched his duffel bag to his chest, before following Nora onto the bus.  He picked a pair of seats right by the middle door, which guaranteed him a quick way to get out if things went to shit.  

              Suki had handed the Caretaker her own bags with a nervous smile  and sat down near the front, the sergeant and his dog joining her.  The cop had kept his bags as well and gave Dismas and Nora a suspicious look before sitting down.  Meanwhile, the Crusader made himself comfortable in the back row.  Fucker.  

              "Hey, is it ok if I sit with you?"  Nora had come up to Dismas, pointing at the seat next to him.

              "All yours, sweetheart," Dismas grinned and took his legs off the cushions to make room for her.  "At least until I wanna grab some shuteye."  

              With a vicious screech the doors closed and the Caretaker returned to his seat behind the wheel, twisting around to look down the aisle.  "Last stop is the Hamlet!" he cackled and started driving, though none too gently.  

              "Do you play cards?" Nora asked once she'd caught her bearings over their sudden and rather bumpy departure.  

              "I sure do.  My deck or yours?"  

              "Mine of course!" she replied with a cheeky grin.  "I stacked it in my favour!"  

              "'Course you did!" Dismas replied – he'd done the same to his own.  But she was polite enough to let him shuffle the cards under her watchful eye.  

              "So," he finally asked, after he'd dealt out and they'd passed the first watchpoint along the road.  "How'd the girl drag you into this?  I daresay you ain't of the same make as that cop and the huffy Holiness in the back."  

              "I'm an archaeologist," Nora answered.  "If there's ruins to be discovered, you can count me in."  

              "Mhm," Dismas grinned, not believing a word of it.  "Plenty of ruins expected outside the New Cities.  Though I can't say I ever met an archaeologists that carried that much edge around with 'em."  He'd caught a glimpse of several throwing blades on the inside of her jacket when she'd placed her bags in the overhead compartment.  

              "True.  But some of these are also crawling with nasties, so it pays to come prepared.  I'm mean with a spade."  

              "With a spade?" Dismas snorted.  "Well, as far as weapons of choice go, at least it's solid and handy."  He didn't push the matter of legality further – not like he was in any position for it.  "So let's see, apart from me, we have a journalist, an archaeologist, an ex-cop and a Crusader, probably 'ex' too.  Feels like the start of a bad joke."  He briefly glanced to the back of the bus before looking at Nora again.  "Honestly, I have no idea how that girl manages her sources.  What do you make of the Holy Armour back there?"  

              Nora too chanced a look back, but the topic of their conversation thankfully had his eyes closed.  "Honestly, I'm a bit scared of him.  Man runs around with a rosary and an assault rifle, well... ," she tapped her temple lightly and shrugged.  

              Dismas silently nodded in agreement.  "I guess we'll find out soon enough just how sane he is – and how well he handles that rifle.  And that damn sword."  He shook his head.  "Crusader in this part of the world means trouble, I say."  

              "Think he's," Nora leaned forward so the man behind them couldn't overhear, even though that was unlikely with how the bus rattled and creaked.  "Spying?"

              "For whom?" Dismas shrugged, though the thought wasn't entirely ridiculous.  "His order ain't exactly the subtle type.  They're the vanguard, heavy hitters who also make sure all reclaimed land has the proper amount of abbeys littered across.  And the Light don't actively persecute 'heathens' anymore, far as I know.  I mean, it's not entirely unlikely, but he looks more like a deserter to me."  

              "As far as you know," Nora repeated sweetly.  "But yeah, you're right.  He looks a bit rough."  

              "I guess we'll find out soon enough," Dismas conceded wearily.  "I hope you keep that spade close by, sweetheart."  

              "I always do," she assured him.  "I always do."  

              The bus passed the last watchpoint that marked Arlip 'safe' perimeter.  Out of habit, Dismas turned his face away from the eyes of the patrolling guard.  Beyond the gates, the open road stretched out before them.  It was mostly wild lands with a few minor settlements between here and their destination.  At the familiar sight, Dismas couldn't help but let out a small sigh of relief, a tension he hadn't even noticed falling off his shoulders. This was his terrain, his home. Fuck the cities, he needed open roads and wilderness to feel safe.

              "Ah," Nora sighed, watching the small military base and its electric lights and fences disappear in the distance.  She pulled a bottle of whiskey from her pack, raised it and took a swig from it.  "Here's to the butt end of nowhere."  

              Dismas grinned and pulled out a flask of his own, clinking it against hers before taking a gulp as well.  "Let's hope it stays boring until we reach that Hamlet."  

               After a while though, the bus drew to a stop at a shoddy little station.  A family of four sat there, huddled together under the small shelter.  Although they seemed to be going in the same direction, none of them got in when the Caretaker opened the door.  Instead, fearful eyes pointedly looked away, and the young mother pulled her two children closer to her herself.  The Caretaker just smiled in that creepy way of his, closed the door and drove on.

              "Did you see their faces?" Nora chuckled.  "I bet we had the same looks when that old codger jumped out of the bus."

              "Yeah, can't exactly blame them," Dismas agreed.  "He don't have the most inviting nature – or the most reliable looking bus."  As if on cue, they hit a pothole and Dismas winced when he hit his elbow on the window.  "Still, it's a popular route, at least the first part of it.  You'd think they'd take the chance to get out of that piss."  He nodded at the window.  

              Nora shrugged.  "What do I know?  Maybe we don't look like the most inviting bunch either.  She saw your mug and decided she prefers the rain."  

              "What, my mug not to your liking?" Dismas gave her an amused smirk.  "And here I thought you were the only decent company around."  

              Nora broke out into a cackle, then whispered, "Oh, but I am.  How long did they say the drive was again?"  

              "Bit longer than twenty-four hours."  

              Nora groaned.  "Sounds like fun."  

              Dismas sighed, then handed her the card deck back with an apologetic smile.  "Which means I'll use the time to get some rest.  And since the gentleman back there is currently occupying the only decent bench for himself, you gotta get your own bed, sweetheart.  I wanna stretch my legs some before the next round."  

              Nora snorted, but took back her cards, got up, and wished him sweet dreams.  

              The rest of the day went by in a rainy, boring haze.  Dismas killed time by sleeping, talking with Nora or playing cards with her, all in changing intervals.  The bus stopped several more times for other passengers, but not once did anybody get on it with them.  Eventually, the bus stops became rarer and rarer as the countryside became more

              Around mid afternoon Suki had walked up to the Caretaker to ask for a break and they stopped at an abandoned roadside full of picnic tables.  Apparently, Laika needed her walkies, but Dismas welcomed the pee-break as well.  

              Everybody except for the soldier in the back was getting up, eager to get out, even if it was only for a couple of minutes.  "He looks like he's out cold," Dismas commented towards Nora when a glance at Reynauld confirmed the crusader was still lying on the back seats.  "Think we should wake him up?"

              "You go right ahead, I'll be cheering you on from the sidelines," Nora said, stretching and knuckling her back.  

              "Figures," Dismas huffed but went down the aisle nonetheless, leaning against the second last row of seats to get a look at the man.  He did appear to be fast asleep, hands clasped around a dark wooden rosary, because of course they were.  When a quick check for earbuds showed that he didn't have any, Dismas loudly cleared his throat.  He knew better than to touch an armed, sleeping man unless absolutely necessary.  

              The bus had stopped moving, but this time it did not start immediately after like it had before.  Then there was a feeling of being watched, and when Reynauld opened his eyes, the trash-talking gunslinger was standing over him.  

              "Oh good, you're up!"  Dismas swung away from the seat he'd been leaning on and clapped its headrest twice.  

           Reynauld's breath caught in his throat, and for a split second it wasn't Dismas looking at him, but another man, a ghost from his past.  

           Hey!  Hey, Rey!  

           Hm?  Reynauld remembered turning away from his pack, momentarily blinded by the unforgiving desert sun.  

           Guyot was kneeling on the seat before him, drumming a beat on the headrest with the palms of his hands.  But there was something not right about the picture.  His hair has been auburn, and his eyes green and not black, not at all like those of the man before him now.  Gone were the freckles, the cheeky grin, and then the sun, as if extinguished by some higher power.  It took Reynauld a moment to realize Dismas was still talking.  

           Dismas had already been partway into an explanation of their current whereabouts when he stopped, took a closer look at the Crusader and realized that the man wasn't actually listening.  There was a blank look on his face, one that spoke of him being miles away.  Great. He better be more focused in a damn fight. Dismas gave the man a calculating look and carefully started over.

           "Pee-break, thought you wanted to take the opportunity to stretch your legs and whatnot.  It's still raining though."  

           Reynauld searched for an answer, but sometimes the words, although so simple and already formed in his head, just wouldn't come.  Most of the time he had little to no energy for any form of social interaction anyway, the White wasn't helping in that regard, and he was still fighting off the vision of his best friend being incinerated in the explosion that had spelled the end of his career and was directly responsible for him being here.  

           In the end, he simply nodded and got up, leaving behind his backpack but not his weapons.  Reynauld followed the others to a small and overgrown picnic area, the relief from being out of the vehicle instantly washing over him despite the fact that Dismas had been right; the weather was just as disagreeable as it had been throughout their trip.  The novelty of rain had worn off rather quickly and Reynauld wished for a hood to pull up as he wandered off in search of a spot where he could relieve himself in peace.

           Oh well.  Dismas smiled and left the man to his business.  He'd get him to talk eventually.  Until then, he didn't mind watching him leave all that much – those combat pants were rather flattering, and who was he to ignore a nice ass when he saw one?

           Silently, Dismas had to admit that the rest of the soldier didn't look too bad either.  He'd gotten a better glance at the man's face while he'd been sleeping and taken some time to admire it: Full lips, relatively unmarred skin, a strong jawline… seriously, his face reminded Dismas more of one of those Old World movie actors or models, rather than a battle-worn soldier. He looked young though, even the slightly scruffy beard couldn't hide that  – if pressed, Dismas would guess Reynauld to be somewhere around thirty years old. But even with sleep softening the man's features, one could see the effects of battle and trauma in the sunken eyes, the lines on his forehead and the tightness of his mouth.  It made him wonder just what kinda things the soldier had seen down south.

           By the time Dismas realized that he was still thinking about Reynauld's damn face while staring after his ass, the soldier had already left the bus.  Dismas forcefully pulled himself back together and shook his head like a dog shaking off water to get rid of those thoughts.  Caught up on a pretty face and ass like he'd never seen either.  The fuck was wrong with him?  It wasn't like he'd had much of a dry spell during his week-long crawl through Arlip's bars, pubs and fight dens, so why did he get so hung up on it now?  Well, whatever.  No harm in looking, after all.

           As he passed Nora on the way to relieve himself, Dismas winked at her.  "You know, he's almost prettier than you, sweetheart," he teased.  "For a maybe-deserting, AR-wieldin' zealot, at least."  

           "The impudence you have!" Nora gasped, one hand resting on her décolleté, mimicking shock.  She waited until Reynauld had returned from his trip to nature loo so she could form an educated second opinion, then bent closer to Dismas to hum an affirmative.  "I'd totally tap that if it wasn't so... angry."  

              "Ah, I bet he's a proper gentleman behind all that jaded soldier demeanour.  Maybe even a shy virgin," Dismas laughed.  "Come on, Caretaker's back.  Seems like the break's over."  

              Nora snorted.  "If you say so.  Alright, can't wait 'till we're finally there."  

              "Don't expect too much, lass," Brodhan huffed after calling Laika to his side.  "It ain't much to look forward to," he said as he lined up behind them.  

              "Can't be worse than the bus," Nora answered.  "My brain's still rattling around in my skull from that one pothole."  

              "Well, from personal experience I can tell ye it's an unsecured backwater shithole so... take yer pick," the unkempt man huffed once they were back inside the Rustmobile, and flopped down on a free bench while his dog hopped on the one behind him.  

              "And apparently, I now own the place," Suki sighed as the bus sped up again.  

           The back row wasn't a good place to be, but it was better than the other available ones, with the rest of the group scattered all over the bus and none too close, and his backpack repurposed as a backrest.  Reynauld pulled out his rosary again, running his thumb over the beads which were smooth and shiny with wear.  

           He would have liked to sleep, to just pass out and wake up when the ride was over, but unfortunately that was out of the question.  White Noise was keeping him awake, and the best way for him to get some manner of rest was to close his eyes and say the Light's Grace, and any other prayer that he could think of.  The repetitiveness was soothing, and it kept his mind from wandering.  

           And then, from one second to another, everything crumbled.  

           An explosion shook the bus, the book mixing with screams and the sound of screeching tires.  

              "Ah, FUCK!" Dismas had just gotten halfway comfortable in his early evening snooze when the bus suddenly made a wild swerve and came to a screeching halt, so suddenly that he banged his head against the seats in front of him, falling halfway into the leg space.  He wasn't the only one.  He could hear Brodhan and Nora cursing wildly, and even the dog yipped in surprise.  Then it was silent again, the bus having come to a standstill.  Immediately he sat up, colt drawn and peaked out of the window for any possible ambushers.  Nothing.  

              "What the feckin' hell, man?!"  Brodhan asked the Caretaker who'd turned off the engine and stumbled out from the driver's seat.  

              "Terribly sorry I am, terribly sorry," he mumbled.  "The wheel, I think.  Weak, weak wheel!"  

              Dismas slowly calmed down and, after exchanging a look with Nora, glanced back to the Crusader.  Who looked anything but good.  "Hey," he called out.  "You alright?"  

           Reynauld didn't understand what was going on.  People were milling about, but no one took charge, gave any matter of orders when they had to form up and move out to fight back the enemy.  He'd been shot at and bombed enough times, so he knelt down, and readied his gun with a sick feeling in his stomach and his heart in his throat.  

           "Shit!" Dismas cursed when he saw the soldier ready his gun as if on autopilot and he looked at Nora.  "Get them all out of here, I think he's a goner.  Go!"  

              "Who– oh.  Shit!"  Brodhan now saw it too.  "Laika! Out, go!"  

              Careful to show his face and hands at all times, Dismas slowly walked down the aisle, weapons where the man could see them.  "Hey, holy guy – Reynauld, right?"  Dismas knelt down in front of him.  "You with me?  Come on, deep breaths."  

           They were leaving now; good.  If the bus blew up they'd burn.  Reynauld could almost feel the heat of the flames, see that orange glow behind his eyelids.  

           Guyot's smiling face was in there too, somewhere.  Hey, Rey!  

           He should have died too that day, but the Light had not seen fit to bestow such mercy upon him.  There was a part of him that recognized the lack of screams, and fire whether real or from guns, but there was no fighting the part that had spent the last seven years this very thing.One stayed behind.  Injured, or in shock, or  Before the other man could flinch he had him in a lockhold and was getting them both out – his pack, the rest of the belongings,  none of it mattered.  

           "What the– hmpf!"  Dismas had no time to react when  suddenly two strong arms had effectively pinned his limbs and then the soldier was dragging him down the aisle with only half-surprising strength.  "Fucking– HEY!  Let me go!"  It was to no avail.  Panic welled up before Dismas pushed it down again, noticing how the Crusader did nothing more than evacuate him by force.  

           They made it out, and Reynauld was hit by an icy shower.  Now that – that was wrong.  It was enough of a shock for him to pause in confusion for a moment.  When it rained, it was just few warm drops that evaporated as soon they hit the parched earth, not this – not a torrent of cold water that turned the ground into mud.  He wanted to ask where he was and what was happening, but the words, although fully formed in his mind, wouldn't make it past his lips.  

           Apparently the rain did the job and the Crusader stopped dead in his tracks, slowly coming to his senses.  Dismas risked a look up at Reynauld's face – he was deep in thought and obviously haunted by the memory of something, but at least he seemed to be more receptive to the outside world again.  Still, Dismas remained where he was, refraining from elbowing him in the head for now.  

           "There, good! That's it, stay calm, take a few breaths.  You with me, soldier?  You're about a day's drive north of Arlip, it's, what, nine at night?  You're safe.  There's no attack.  Can anyone else explain what happened by now?"  The last part Dismas yelled at the lot of miserably drenched onlookers, who huddled together under the one small umbrella Suki had wisely grabbed upon evac.  

           Reynauld was trying to fit the pieces together in his head, but they wouldn't make a complete picture.  The guy was talking again; his lips were moving.  Reynauld wished he'd stop as it was pointless anyway.  He jerked violently at the shout though, scanning his surroundings, bracing his gun.  The other people were not soldiers.   Civilians?  They looked scared.  Slowly it began to sink in that this was one of those times.  When everything was a confusing jumble of events he could make no sense of.  

           Dismas could feel the soldier wincing and cursed under his breath.  Right.  No shouting then.  He glared at Brodhan who'd curled his hand tighter into Laika's neck and had placed a hand on the shock baton at his hip.  

           In the soldier's confusion, Dismas managed to wriggle one arm free and place it on the one still squarely wrapped around his neck.  "Right, let's try contact.  Can you talk to me, Reynauld?  Come on, it's pouring, let's have a meltdown somewhere dry, alright?"

           Reynauld looked at the man, really looked, and realized he knew him… fleetingly.  He tried to recall his name.  They'd been introduced.  Suki had introduced them.  He focused on that and after a while he remembered.  Dismas.  It was something.  Something to hold on to.  Reynauld shook his head and tapped his ear.  Other sensations were beginning to filter in as well.  The ache from his locked up muscles.  His hair, plastered to his head from rain this time rather than sweat and blood.  

           There was probably still the blood rushing in his ears.  Dismas sighed and nodded, deciding to wait a little longer.   "Can you talk?" he eventually asked.  "You with us again?"  Sooner or later, he'd just have to knock the soldier out if he kept being unresponsive. It wouldn't be the easiest feat, but they needed to move into cover.  While there had been no actual attack so far, they were sitting ducks out on the road and Dismas really didn't like it.  He never liked it when his professional experience kicked in from the side of the prey, not the hunter.  

           Reynauld repeated the action of shaking his head and tapping his ear.  At least everything else around him was becoming more focused, more real.  He realized he was still holding the guy – Dismas – and let go of him, reaching into his pocket for the rosary he always kept there, before stumbling away from the group on legs that were stiff and unresponsive.  

           Dismas simply slumped over, hands on his knees, feeling very relieved all of a sudden.  It was still a fucking terrible situation, but it could've gone a lot worse.  

           "Fucking hell, how do comfort plushies deal with that on a daily basis?" he wheezed out, but then pulled himself together and, carefully, gave chase.

           Reynauld rounded the bus; it smelled of exhaust fumes and hot brake pads, and he felt like being sick, which he might well have been if he had eaten breakfast.  Small mercies.  He sank down a little ways off, waiting for the shakes to start.  Having expected them unfortunately didn't make them any more pleasant.  

           Brodhan, meanwhile, had ordered his dog to follow as well, and the animal understood well enough.  Oh his sign, Laika sat down next to the startled Crusader and pressed her wet nose into his free hand.  

           Reynauld prayed, each beat a prayer, over and over again, the repetition of it bringing him down to a point where he no longer felt like he was drowning.  His breathing turned ragged but regular, and all the while the dog sat with him, licking his hands and panting.  

              "Shit.  Should we – should we do something?"  Suki carefully held the umbrella so both Nora and Brodhan could get at least some amount of coverage – the latter smelled as much of wet dog as the actual dog.  

              Nora shrugged and kept watching Dismas who seemed to be doing just fine.  "Maybe let's give them some space?" she suggested.  

              "You're probably right," Suki agreed.  "I'll go see if our batshit chauffeur needs a hand.  Umbrella's yours."  

              In the meantime, Dismas carefully stopped beneath a tree, a few metres away from the collapsed Reynauld.  Near enough that the man could sense his presence, but far enough so as not to crowd him.  And despite his instinctive dislike of the cop, he was sure glad they had that dog on board.  

           "Are you good to talk?" Dismas asked after a while, when Reynauld's breathing had calmed enough to for it to return to a regular rhythm.  

              Reynauld turned his head so he could hear better, and after a moment, gave a slight nod.  Perhaps even worse than the actual panic of believing himself to be under attack was dealing with the aftermath.  There was always the question of what if he had hurt someone, the guilt.  The anger.  The shame.  He'd be a long time praying for it to ebb again.  

              "Good."  Dismas carefully approached and sat down next to Reynauld in the tall grass.  He was already drenched to the bone so it wouldn't matter much.  "Let me guess – frontline deserter?"  

           Reynauld had to suppress the initial urge to punch the other man in the face.  At least it was harder to be panicking when you were furious.  "We were on our way from Bakhar to Tirna," he told Dismas in a tight, controlled voice.  "The bus got bombed."  He had survived only because the blast had knocked him through the bus's back window.  "I was discharged."  Presumed dead.

              "Well, shit."  Dismas closed his eyes with a sigh and leaned his head against the back of the bus.  "My condolences."  A pause went by, filled with nothing but the splatter of the rain, then Dismas continued.  "Look, I guess it don't really matter how you got out, only that it happened.  But you gotta talk to the Hanou girl about this."  

              Shit.  A fitting word to describe the whole mess of a situation.  Maybe given enough time with people who knew how to treat this.  But he had neither, and had to make do.  

              Reynauld let his head hang between his knees, breathed, and waited for the wave of exhaustion to crash over him.  

              "So how are you holdin' up?" Dismas eventually asked.  "Right now I mean, 'cause we gotta get moving."  He gave the man an intense look.  "There ain't no sweettalking this. Out here, either the rain'll get us or an actual ambush.  Can ya pull yourself together for a little longer; just so we can get out of the wildlands?"

              Reynauld considered the question but the truth was there was no getting back on the bus for him.  "Could you get my things from the bus?  You can go straight away; I'll walk."  

              "Wha– are you fucking kidding me?!"  Dismas had his patience, had remembered his lessons but even he had a limit and he'd reached it with the crusader.  "Look, I get the 'no bus' thing and I get the 'avoid people' thing but if you think we're just gonna let an utterly unstable Crusader with an assault rifle and a fucking sword run around alone through the wild, well think again, Sunshine! You wouldn't last through the night!"  

              "Don't call me that!" Reynauld growled, bristling at the derogatory term often used for soldiers of the Order and at Dismas' overbearing way in equal measure.  He had walked over two thousand miles from the Blessed Lands, at least one third of it through enemy territory and active war zone.  He'd survive some trees and mud.   Reynauld climbed to his feet.  

              "Hey, HEY!  Where do you think you're going?!"  Dismas jumped up and so did Laika behind them, shaking water out of her pelt.   "Stop being stubborn, it'll get you killed, especially in this state!  No way you're walking alone through the night!"  

              "Actually," Brodhan had heard the last bit and he sounded as pissed as he looked.  "It seems like we're all going to be walking.  That old codger's got no spare wheel and if we stay here we'll have bandits swarming us like wasps before dawn.  Get your bags, both of you.  You alright there, soldier?"  

              Perhaps relief was the wrong emotion to feel upon learning that they were practically stranded out here with the threat of an ambush looming over them, but nonetheless that was all Reynauld felt at that moment.  The danger allowed him to become functional again.  He gave the officer a nod and the dog a pat, and once more asked Dismas to get his effects.  Going back on that bus was not an option, not yet.

              "Yeah, yeah, I'll get the damn bags," Dismas grumbled and went to work.  He'd been choked, drenched and almost shot before they'd even reached their destination.  He took the time to change into somewhat drier clothes on the bus first and finally slip into his jacket – he hadn't had the time to take it with him before getting dragged out by the scruff of his neck.  At this point, he was proud of himself for not having stabbed anyone yet.

              Reynauld picked up his bag.  Its contents were pretty much unchanged from his army days, and most of it was ammo, clothes, and what was necessary for survival  The others would have to sort through their belongings, leave behind what was unnecessary or at least redistribute the weight.  

              Suki wasn't actively showing it, but the reporter was furious while having to reduce her spare clothes and media gear down to what would fit into her backpack.  She could only hope the Caretaker would get the bus back on track and that nothing would go missing by then, but she highly doubted it.  

              Bag slung over her shoulder, she joined Brodhan and the old driver at the tip of their little group.  "Everyone ready?  Then let's go before the mould starts to set in!" 

AN: Co-written with @kriladoodles; the first chapter of our modern AU DD story is now up! 

You can find it on AO3! 

[sarahinzhuhai-blog]

Week 2: I can't think of a title

Friends, family, strangers, what’s poppin? Week 2 in 中国 has come to a close and it was a wild one. This blogging on Sunday thing is really great for my procrastination-loving heart, and really bad for actually remembering things, so bear with me. You might notice this is getting posted on Friday, and not Sunday. Well, that’s because of some ~~fun~~ circumstances that you can find out about in next weeks post! Sorry! // 周一（zhōuyī，Monday): Monday started off without a dictation, because 车老师 is a wonderful person who doesn’t believe in weekend homework. Class was, as usual, an information overload, but still fun. We played a new game in class (where people have a verb or noun on their head and you have to ask questions, etc to make them say the word or do the action). Another thing: in Chinese, there is a particle, “了”， that has always confused me (it has many different uses, and I’m not sure when to use it and when not to). So I decided to ask my 语伴. This turned into a conversation with 车老师, the TAs, other 语伴s and on Tuesday, another professor. The question asking went an extra half hour into lunch and then I ended up eating with 车老师， one of the TAs and my 语伴。 I didn’t leave my question asking behind in America, I guess. I was very tired all day because I was up so late blogging the night before 👀…oops. At the end of the day, instead of meeting with our 语伴s (yǔbàn，language partner) for 30 minutes, we met for community service. The project they have selected for us to do this year is to help raise awareness about and reduce plastic bag usage and waste, which is a huge problem in China. To give you some context, Zhuhai is considered one of the cleanest cities in China, but the beaches are riddled with trash. It’s shocking. The plan for our projects was, on Monday we would write a survey and have our 语伴s help us translate it, on Tuesday we would go out and survey people on campus, on Thursday we would plan out our "propaganda” campaign and later in the month we would go out and talk with the public and get people to pledge to change their actions (with the pledge varying with each groups different approach to the issue). My group is me, Richa, Zack and Garrett. Monday was pretty rough. I was really tired and irritable, and I felt like a lot of responsibility was falling on me but I felt that way because I wasn’t sharing responsibilities….anyways, Richa and I talked afterwards so we’re all good now. We finished using the questions and I took the bus home with Matthew after hitting up the supermarket with Matthew and Anthony. // My sister had four of her finals today, and she said they went well, so I went out to dinner to celebrate with my mom and sister. It was so, so good. Pork, goose, noodles, vegetables, fried rice, watermelon, guava...all delicious! It was my first time trying goose, and I have mixed but mostly positive feelings. // Afterwards, we went to 笑笑’s friends house. I got to meet the friend, her little 9mo brother, the mom, dad, and grandparents. I held the brother (who was SO CUTE and very fascinated by me), talked a little bit with the family, helped the mom translate a work email, got a tour of the house, ate lychees and gave my little sister and her friend a ballet lesson. It was so much fun, and definitely lifted my mood from earlier in the day. I walked home in high spirits. // 周二（zhōuèr，Tuesday): Tuesday was the 4th of July! I told my mom in the morning and she offered me a white rabbit candy, which I thought was pretty funny but thoughtful at the same time. Got the 了question figured out at the beginning of lunch (I’m so grateful that literally everyone involved in the program is so willing to help). After lunch, we played a version of Monday’s game with all verbs (it was sort of a mess, a lot of English was spoken, but we had a good time). Chris, BBC and Queen Isabel joined us for that–-in the end, it boiled down to people forcing Shayley to take a selfie with them. I was eliminated early in the game when I flashed a peace sign. // Community service was very interesting. It started off with Grace and Emily getting us all watermelon to celebrate the 4th, which was very thoughtful! Since we are still in the thick of monsoon season, the weather continues to alternate between rain so hard it could flash flood up to your ankles (this happened to my 语伴）and hours of sunshine. Consequently, we decided to survey people who were inside major buildings on campus rather than walking around. My group picked the library. Since only half of the 语伴s came to help with the day's activities, Outing and Chris had to help another group, so learned how to say “traitor" in order to tell Outing how betrayed I felt. // Surveying people was fun, but a challenge…we split our group in half, so Garrett, me and my 语伴 formed one team. We interviewed about 8 people (could have been 9 if the police officer had agreed), and unless we were asking the simpler questions, I couldn’t understand a lot of what they were saying…but I got the gist, and the gist was that most of them were aware of the problem and did some things to cut down on their waste (some more than others…one guy was just totally unaware), but often didn’t have convenient access to recycling services. This is definitely a problem I have run across these few weeks. That being said, we don’t have the means to change city infrastructure, so my group decided that our focus would be encouraging people to use reusable bags and bottles, cutting down the waste at the source (it’s common for people to use 1-2 plastic bottles a day here). // After community service concluded, we were originally planning on going to a Starbucks by the beach and seeing the lovers post office (a famous site here), but the rain cancelled those plans so we settled on KTV instead. Unfortunately, the canteen KTV was closed, so Chris took us to a KTV in the middle of nowhere (aka Huitong, I think) near the edge of campus. On our way there, Alec and Anthony blasted music out of the speaker they bought at Gongbei. The most memorable moment of the walk was dancing to YMCA on the median (and everywhere else tbh we listened to the song like 20 times) and getting filmed by a police officer who thought it was funny. Also practicing my angry Chinese and making a guy who walked by laugh. KTV was really fun--we sang lots of American songs (we belted out Party in the USA more than once) and had a blast even though the program didn’t appear to have any song from after 2010. There was no Lana del Rey, so BBC and I sang Adele instead. While I did enjoy myself, my fun was sort of ruined by the fact that I was in the middle of having what I would describe as not-quite-an-anxiety-attack-but-getting-there because of a dog that we passed that was in really, really bad shape. I won’t go into the details again but I’m constantly frustrated here by the low standard for animal care and the lack of humane societies, etc…I understand that it’s not a priority at the moment but that doesn’t make it any less saddening, frustrating, etc. Queen Isabel and several of my friends (shoutout to Grace, Lexi, Josh, Alec and BBC...y'all are the best) helped me through it and I still managed to enjoy the evening. I had a few McDonalds fries (which was concerning because I had told my parents I was going to eat a full dinner), and Chris helped me and Alec call a cab to get home. // Once I arrived home, my mom brought out some mussels (? Some sort of shell thing) and told me that I had to eat it right now or it would go bad. So we had mussels, apples, bread and milk. A very confusing dinner but very good nonetheless. My sister asked me if I wanted to watch a certain TV show and at first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then I realized it’s actually a show I watch online in the States and got h y p e d // In the middle of the show, my mom yelled really loud and then my sister started yelling too. At first, I was really confused but I soon found out that my sister was one of three in four hundred to get 100% on her exams. Then I started yelling too. I understood a few things my dad said for the first time (which surprised BOTH of us) and generally had a good evening. My dad told me I should call my actual mom and dad every day, so I called my actual parents before bed and ended up staying up super late again. Oops (are you seeing a pattern here?). Anyways, it was a roller coaster of an evening but everything turned out alright! // 周三（zhōusān, Wednesday): Classes were alright as usual. We’ve started “learning” song lyrics during the after lunch class. Oh yeah, one thing I forgot to mention is that I found out two of the TAs (one of whom I was very intimidated by before) are big kpop fans! They played a song on Tuesday on the projector (车老师 commented that the only kpop group she knew was BIGBANG), which was already a bop, but on Wednesday I found out that Ruby and I are both major BTS fans (specifically, I described them as my favorite group on the planet and she agreed). I did one of the dances I learned for her (she filmed it 😂) and she then immediately added me on multiple social media platforms. You can make fun of me all you want, but Kpop has been the common interest that allowed me to bond with many people here (we’re talking 30-50% of all the Chinese people I have made friendships with). Anyways, after having a fun time in class (we also did calligraphy practice today), we headed to culture class. This week we learned 空竹（kōngzhú， aka Diabolo aka Chinese Yoyo). The class was the most fun after I accepted that I was going to do terribly and focused on having a good time and getting a solid grasp on the basics. My group was Garrett, Sydney, Abigale and Outing as our 语伴（so I stopped calling him traitor). By the end of class, I was definitely still in the bottom 3 but I could do several tricks. After class, Alec, Maya, Garrett and I went to McDonalds at the transfer station (which is waaayyy better than McDonalds in America) and got green tea soft serve. It was really good (especially knowing that, just like on America, McDs ice cream machine se are perpetually broken here), but Garrett said he would never order another matcha flavored thing in his life. Afterwards, we took the bus home together...Maya took the wrong bus. // Feeling content, I got home to an empty house. My mom came home briefly, and imagine my surprise when she pulled out two pieces of apple pie and offered me one. Oops, not a good day to have a gigantic ice cream after school (and a small one at lunch). So I had the pie, then she made dinner (I’m confused about the order too…) and left again. // I decided to give my friend 朱明亮 a call and we talked for the better part of an hour. It was so nice to actually be able to speak and understand Chinese…maybe it’s the accent in Guangdong or maybe I’m just bad at Chinese but I never know what people are saying and it’s incredibly frustrating (I especially can’t understand guys..maybe because of the lower register). While we talked, I practiced my left hand chopstick skills...we don't need to talk about how that went. After the conversation, I practiced piano for Saturday (more details on that in a sec), did my homework (sort of) and went to bed. // 周四（Zhōusì, Thursday): Thursday’s classes were hard. We covered a LOT of grammar points and it was a lot to take in. This whole week was a lot to take in in terms of course material…this class moves almost 3x the pace of my normal class at school. Since this weekend's cultural excursion would be a visit to Guangzhou, the TAs gave us a class on the history of Guangzhou and some cool places to visit there. Then they presented the stamp winners for the week. This week, stamps were kept in a public place, so I got a little more competitive. My efforts paid off, however, because I got that #1. // After class, it was time for community service again. My group wrote our campaign, Chris helped us create a slogan and we designed t-shirts. Since our group wasn’t focused the whole time and we talked a lot about what we were doing, we haven’t actually translated the elevator pitch to Chinese but that’s okay. Also, I definitely didn’t write the wrong character in the slogan on the back of the shirt...I don’t know what you’re talking about. Zack got w o k e about plastic pollution in China and our final slogan is: “笑笑改变，大有不同 - Cleaner Zhuhai, Brand New City” (Translation: “A small change can make a big difference"which is already apparently a phrase charged with environmental connotations according to Chris, so that’s good). After community service, Maya and I definitely didn’t go do ballet in a studio on campus. Nope. I definitely wasn’t instructed to keep that on the DL (which is equally fun to say in Chinese, as it turns out). Other things that definitely did not happen: 1) being super out of shape and barely being able to do a grande plié 2) Having a really awkward conversation when two university students who were actually supposed to be there came in to use the room. After not-dancing, Maya took the wrong bus so she could ride with me, and I headed home to practice piano, pack up for Guangzhou, and otherwise prepare. // 周五（zhōuwǔ，Friday）: On Friday morning, we met up at the hotel and took the bus to Guangzhou. I tried to sleep a bit on the way there, but the scenery outside was really cool (SO different from the US omg) and the kids sitting in the back of the bus were blasting music (YMCA made a comeback), but the music was good so I can’t complain. My favorite was when they played "Empire State of Mind” but sang “Guangzhou” every time Alicia Keys said New York. Our first stop was the American Consulate in Guangzhou. After getting through security, we entered the building and I immediately felt like I was in America again. Maybe it was the super strong AC. Maybe it was the bathrooms (which not only had the first western toilets I had seen in two weeks but TP, soap and paper towels. I literally did a celebratory dance. There were several witnesses). Maybe it was the diplomat who spoke with us’ southern accent. Or maybe it was the fact that technically we had returned to America (apparently the consulate is considered American territory? According to Anthony). Anyways, after speaking with a Foreign Service Officer about his job, the role of the US embassies in China and of the Guangzhou consulate in particular, we bid our farewells. Leaving the consulate and returning to daily life in China was a weird and unexpected shock to my system. I don’t know what happened inside that consulate but it was like a weird mindset shift. Anyways, soon enough I was back to normal. Our next stop was a restaurant called Panxi. This was, no exaggeration, the most amazing restaurant I’ve been to in my entire life. Not because of the food (although the food was good), but because of the building itself. We entered into a courtyard where there was a waterfall (not a baby one but like 14+ feet) flowing into a koi pond, lanterns hanging from the wooden roof over the walkways, and several pathways leading to different rooms where we could eat. Our room was not only overlooking a pond, but appeared to be over the pond. It was absolutely gorgeous, and I had a great time chatting with friends as we watched the monsoon rain pelt the surface of the water. We also watched construction take place on the building, and construction is terrifying here. They use bamboo scaffolding, and it seems really unsteady and no one uses harnesses, even if three stories high. I have seen this in both Zhuhai and Guangzhou and it is very impressive but very nervewracking. // After lunch, we went to two museums–the Thirteen Hongs museum and the Liwan museum. The former was a museum that talked about the history of the Thirteen Hongs, which were a group of businessmen/companies that were the only ones licensed to do business with foreign countries during the Qing dynasty (the last dynasty before the Republic of China). They did their trading out of Guangzhou, and the museum was full of items that were traded,old maps, information, paintings, everything you can imagine. Guangzhou has a history of combining East and West (because of the Thirteen Hongs situation, I think), and this manifested itself in very interesting ways. One of the most interesting things I saw at the museum (although everything was absolutely stunning; the intricacy and care that went into every product was overwhelming) was a shell carving that had been done by a Chinese artist of the Last Supper and other Biblical scenes. Guangzhou also has a much higher foreigner population than Zhuhai (I saw more there in two days than in my entire time in Zhuhai). The second museum, called the Liwan museum, was a replica of a typical Xiguan house, which were a group of people that often did business with/interacted with foreigners. As such, several architectural elements included Western components. That being said, a lot of the house was built with traditional Chinese beliefs (and some specific to Guangdong/Guangzhou, e.g. Things related to how words sound in Cantonese), which was very interesting. Afterwards, we were given time to explore this very pretty little area of town. Richa and I paired off and saw a shrine, traditional opera, passed by a beautiful lake (which had some boats underwater that were clearly there on purpose but for no apparent reason), several vendors, and met some people who were very excited to say Hello to us. We also might have gotten followed briefly but 没关系。We were supposed to get dinner on our own, but we didn’t realize where we were supposed to go (up this one road) so we quickly walked over there, got 包子 and milk tea (I was very proud of us for successfully ordering both in Chinese and surviving when the 包子store owner tried to hold a conversation with us…I have a feeling neither of us were understanding each other but that’s pretty standard for my conversations here so I’m not worried about it). After, we rode the bus to a ferry stop by the Pearl River and were given time to walk around. Grace, Maya and I walked together. The experience started off by me getting yelled at at full volume by a old guy on a bike with some baskets because I didn’t realize I was in his way. Some bystanders found this hilarious, I did not. After our walk up and down the river, we ran to make it back on time and got on the ferry. The ferry was ~awesome~. We got to see the lights of the city at night (and on the water), and got to go up close to the Guangzhou tower (which is the seventh tallest building in the world, apparently). It was absolutely gorgeous (I’m not doing it justice with my words here). Also, after helping these people take a picture, they asked to take a picture with me which is the first time I’ve been asked for a picture in China (yay?). I also got to talk to Grace a lot which was really nice, she is very similar to me and I enjoy her company. After the ferry, we headed to the hotel. For this trip, I roomed with Tully. Before room checks, after a failed attempt to go to the roof, we all met up in Garrett’s room. Matthew was spooked because the room across (next to?) his and Josh’s was room 444 (which is, like, the worst and most unlucky number possible here…I’m actually surprised the hotel has one) and then their lights went out, so he was doing martial arts. It was very intimidating. Josh, Maya, Anthony and I then spent the hour stretching (or in Josh’s case, struggling and suffering) and goofing around. The stretching was prompted by Katie showing all of us that she is RIDICULOUSLY flexible (after which I encouraged her to take up ballet), which made Garrett look physically pained just from watching. After curfew, Tully and I talked, which was mice because I don’t see her or talk to her a lot, and we went to sleep without showering because the room was kinda gross. // 周六（zhōuliù，Saturday): Saturday was just as wild as Friday, if not more so (which I didn’t think was possible). The first order of business was breakfast. Fully, David, Abigale, Shayley, Maya, Reyna, maybe Zack (sorry I forgot) and I went to a local shop to eat 肠粉 (chángfěn），a Guangdong specialty. It’s a dish that they make by pouring out rice batter (that’s definitely the wrong word) in a thin layer on a sheet, adding veggies and/or egg and/or meat and then cooking it (I think they steamed it). Then they roll it all up and cover it with a sauce. I had the veggie one and some chocolate bean milk thing (as far as I know) and it was very delicious. Then we were off to a local elementary school. They gave us an orchestra performance using traditional Chinese instruments and these kids were crazy good. They were between ages 7 and 11 and they had been selected to join this orchestra. Saturday was their first day of break but they all seemed happy to be there. After a few traditional songs, they let us go up to kids and have them teach us how to play. I tried out the guzheng (which was super cool), the erhu (which I was terrible at but had fun with) and another instrument whose name I forget right now (you use hammers to hit strings and I was very very confused and bad at it). Most of the kids I talked to were practicing an hour or more a day, and were very very good. One kid who stood out was a guy who could play both the hammer+strong instrument and a Chinese drum. When they went around and introduced all the instruments to us, kids did solos on each instrument and he did the drum-it was stunning. He played so quickly and precisely!!! Then, it was time for us to perform for them. I played the Rachmaninoff Prelude (a shortened version), but I sort of botched the performance and I’m not sure why. Then we all sang the chorus of “对不起” (the song about our Chinese being bad) and the kids played more traditional music and a western classical song adapted to their orchestra (which was really cool). After, I was feeling kind of crappy about my performance when we went down to the bottom level and goofed around on the playground before taking some pictures with the kids and heading out. Imagine my surprise when one kid asked for my autograph, and then suddenly a group of kids all wanted me to sign things and give them my WeChat username. That was quite literally my 15 minutes of fame! // After heading out, we spent a few minutes in a square nearby (some of my new elementary school friends were there) and then headed to lunch. Lunch was not as good, which was probably not helped by the fact that there were several older guys smoking inside. This is one of the things I’ve had a lot of trouble getting used to here–there are a LOT of smokers here, and while I often see signs inside that say no smoking, I also have gotten used to seeing ashtrays inside those very same rooms. The toilet experience there was….unpleasant, and then we were off to a tea house. // As we got off the bus and began to walk to the tea house, rain was POURING. I was wearing my rap jacket (I forgot my umbrella at school, oops) and by the time we entered the tea house, my entire lower half was drenched. I spent the first few minutes awkwardly wringing out my dress and using tissues to attempt to dry myself off. // This teahouse was very different from the one my mom took me to; rather than one table, it had three stories, multiple side rooms, and many many many different kinds of tea (for a significant price). One of the coolest things was getting to talk to the owner about his company (he also owns a tea bank and apparently a mountain? I heard he rents the mountain? Not super clear), getting to see this big wood fourpostbed-looking thing that people would drink tea at from the Qing dynasty, and getting to have a conversation (entirely in Chinese) with one of the ladies about the different tools used at the table. The latter was a bit stressful because I couldn’t understand a lot, but I had to help my friends. We got the gist of what was going on, so all was well. Afterwards, we headed down for the tea ceremony. I have always thought of drinking tea as a quiet affair, but there were three guys there who were really loud and an absolute RIOT. One of them really hit it off with Alec and Isabel, and I will cherish the memory of them all loudly yelling 干杯(gānbēi，cheers, coincidentally one of this weeks vocabulary words) and making everyone on our half of the gigantic wooden table toast (and then them taking selfies together), which I’m pretty sure isn’t traditional tea protocol 😂 After tea, they gave us each a bag that had information and a teacup in it (!), which was super generous, and we were swept back onto the bus. // A few hours later, we were back in Zhuhai. Everyday Zhuhai feels more and more like home, so I am getting more and more sad at the thought of having to say goodbye. But returning to Zhuhai didn’t mean my excitement was over for the day. My sister had a piano recital, and I was in charge of getting myself there. My mom had sent me directions for which bus stops to take, and the first ride went perfectly. But then, there were no busses coming any time soon to my intermediate stop, so I had a problem. My mom told me to take a taxi, and if I couldn’t figure it out, to ask someone at the station to help me. No one was at the station. Now, in case you were wondering, here’s a list of things I have never done: 1) Taken a taxi by myself 2) Completed a taxi transaction in an unfamiliar place in the middle of China 3) Completed a taxi transaction in Chinese. Well, I’m proud to say that I managed to do all 3, and I even had a conversation with the driver about how long he had been driving, how long he had been in Zhuhai, how long I had been in China, etc. He helped me find my building, and my journey was complete! My mom was very proud/impressed/surprised that I had successfully navigated (I was a little concerned at how surprised she was), and I was greeted with a good old fashioned fast food dinner of French fries, a chicken sandwich and soda. That was a little bit of a shock to my system (the first "American” meal I’d had since I arrived) but a welcome taste from home. After, we headed upstairs to watch the recital. //The recital was my little sister and a bunch of high school students, and some of these kids were really good. One girl was 15 and played 4 songs, including a full sonata and the Revolutionary Etude. I was floored by her talent. At the end of the show, I ended up befriending her and a few other students. I’m excited to have some friends that are around my age! I goofed around on one of the pianos outside during intermission (aka poorly played Rachmaninoff and Chopin) and some people started filming me…not because it was really good, just because I’m a 外国人 . I don’t mind, it’s just a little odd when people take pictures of you/film you without ever talking to you or asking permission. // 周日（zhōurì，Sunday): After the excitement of the past few days, Sunday was a welcome rest. I woke up a little later than usual and my family and I went out to 早茶(zǎochá）, which translates to morning tea but is actually like lots of small dishes that you can eat for breakfast or lunch or in our case, brunch. We had 早茶 in this really cool restaurant where the top floors were hotel rooms and the bottom floors were like hotel rooms but for eating. Each party gets its own room with a table and very nice bathroom. The bathrooms had western toilets, toilet paper AND soap so the restaurant definitely got my stamp of approval. Okay, back to the food. We had everything from red bean buns shaped like pigs (which were SO CUTE) to squares of what looked like super fancy layered jello (I would say the flavor but I have no idea what the flavor was). It was very delicious but my stomach got a little overwhelmed by how many sweet and oily things there were. When I declined sugar in my warm milk drink, my mom declined it for me first and told my dad (in Chinese) that I was afraid of getting fat and so I wouldn’t want any. I retorted that I was not in fact afraid of getting fat and that I just didn’t want sugar in my drink. I think she thinks this because I don’t eat a lot, but I DO eat a lot (I was literally never hungry the first week because I am constantly being fed or having more food put on my plate). Confusing remarks aside, I had a really nice meal and this was the first time our whole family sat down at the same table to eat together, so I enjoyed the morning. Then, my dad, sister and I took the train that goes alongside the road home, which was very nice and a fun new experience. // After getting home, my sister and I both worked on homework. She asked me to help her translate the English text she was reading into Chinese, but my Chinese wasn’t good enough so I was pretty useless there. Her homework and mine made me so tired I fell asleep (that’s my homework strategy in America too…I’m a consistent student). After I woke up, Maya and I decided to meet up to hang out in TangJia. I took the bus over and had a really nice time walking in the park and goofing around on all the exercise equipment with her (despite the weird looks we got from some police officers). It was also nice to have a long, peaceful conversation with a friend after such a whirlwind of a week. I came home for dinner, watched TV with the fam, and started writing this blog post!// Okay this last part is going to be a little TMI, so if that’s not your thing, catch you next week. For you brave souls, I have a few more comments to make. 1) Being a girl and dealing with all the bodily functions that come as a result of that is Not A Fun Time in China. It’s annoying and inconvenient and has made me like squat pots less. 2) Having some stomach emergencies during your sisters piano recitals intermission and then running out of tissues in the land of no-TP-in-public-restrooms is an experience you won’t and can’t forget. // Okay, that’s it for this week! ✌️️

[mergersacquisitionsadvisory]

The Bluest, Clearest Waters On The Oregon Coast Shopping

Check out some extra the reason why you have to visit Palawan within the Philippines (residence to some of the finest beaches on the planet), here. Malaysia’s seashores have an enormous amount to supply, whatever it is you’re looking for. check this out

Travel Contests & Sweepstakes: Win Luxury Holidays!

Built in 1850, the Sankaty Head Light is well value a wander to the northern tip of the beach (it is hardly ever open to climb, besides on particular days—the next one being Sunday, June sixteen, 201`9). Best of all, though, is the ‘Sconset Bluff Walk—with the strong Atlantic on one facet and a row of multi-million-greenback homes on the opposite. Waves listed here are rough, even in summer, so bundle up for a long winter walk should you're on the island during the off season. Banana Beach has a backdrop of impossibly-green jungle and appears out on crystal-clear water—all part of a national park and marine preservation area (30 minutes by boat from Chalong Pier on Phuket). Banana Boat rides are popular, therefore the name, as is snorkeling, sea kayaking, and parasailing.

Boracay White Beach, Philippines

The waters are calm and excellent for sunfish crusing between anchored boats and out to Fort Berkeley, constructed in 1704 by the English Royal Navy. At the japanese most flank of the island, Siasconset can be reached from city via a six-mile bike journey on the Milestone Road path (or, in the summertime, on a NRTA shuttle bus). Food and restrooms may be discovered close by within the adjacent historic village of 'Sconset.

Meeru Island, North Atoll, Maldives

This is a seashore that is popular worldwide for the grand waterfall that varieties a part of the beach and flows into the ocean. Now, I don't mean a small, cute man-made waterfall like many resorts have. The waterfalls at Dunn's River are a whopping one hundred eighty feet excessive feat of nature that circulate over limestone rock to meet a cerulean ocean down beneath. Since the river flows proper into the ocean, many beachgoers float leisurely down the cool water anticipating the moment when the cool water will meet the warm ocean for a uncommon expertise. Those who need to make like Tarzan, can climb the swings that hang over the river and swing carefreely whereas making an attempt to spot the elusive supply of the melodic chirps coming from the trees.

Bingin Beach, Bali, Indonesia

As a result, there are about a hundred and fifty rescues every year, the very best number in Sydney's southern beaches. It is claimed to be the most harmful patrolled seaside in all of Australia. The beaches alongside Sydney's south side are a few of its most famous and exquisite, but one specifically is best enjoyed with maximum warning.

Find Your Next Beach Getaway

It is getting simpler for Americans to journey there, as this reportin the New York Times Points out. Experience distant and unique before the beautiful fantastic thing about this stretch of sand becomes extra widespread information. Don’t confuse it with one other unbelievable seashore by the same name in Tulum, Mexico.

The stings of a few of the varieties of jellyfish, like the Irukandji and Chironex fleckeri, could be fatal to humans. This seaside is rumored to be among the greatest surf spots on the planet, however few actually try and ride its legendary barrels to shore. The surrounding space is peppered with navy amenities, although that's not what makes these waters dangerous.

When you’re right here (and of course, depending on the place you’re staying some beaches value trying out here are Cove Beach, Liku Beach, and Vatulele Island). With its 333 tropical islands and over 500 islets, there’s plenty to explore – which is especially great when you discover that spending all your time on a beach isn’t your idea of an ideal holiday.

Whether they are backed by impressive rock formations, rugged cliffs, or gently swaying palm timber, these lovely seashores actually have to be seen to be believed. It's practically unimaginable to choose a favorite seaside in the Maldives—what with over 1,200 to select from—however we're drawn to the North Malé Atoll, and Reethi Rah specifically. Eight good strands of sand circle this bigger-than-average island, each seemingly higher than the subsequent—and with just one resort here, it by no means feels crowded.

With minimal infrastructure, and one restaurant constructed out of bamboo, this can be a great, much less-than-crowded spot to park your self for the day in the solar. It's less of a swimming locale, however you'll have plenty of photographs to publish on Instagram. Survival International also introduced that authorities on India’s Andaman Islands have failed to end human safaris to the vulnerable Jarawa tribe by their self-imposed deadline of March 2015. he Andaman Administration promised to open a sea route to the Islands’ hottest tourist destinations, which might cease tourists needing to drive via the Jarawa’s reserve.

But a rising occurrence of jellyfish assaults (there are more than 1 tonne’s worth of jellyfish right here!) means its seashores are best loved from a distance. The Bahamas has a few of the Caribbean's most spectacular, idyllic seashores. This beach accommodates the largest focus of tiger sharks on the planet, and ranks as one of the planet’s top 10 most shark-infested seashores. Tamarama Beach is wedged between two sandstone headlands, and the excessive-depth waves make sure that two rips are present on the seashore.

Adventure junkies and budding mermaids can explore the country’s beautiful coast by scuba diving (or if you’re not certified yet – by snorkelling). There are plenty of different kinds of beaches right here so that you’ll undoubtedly find one thing to make you very happy if you visit. Despite the nation’s rising recognition, there are a selection of quieter beaches tucked away simply waiting to be explored. Seek out hidden gems like Gunung Payung or Pandawa Beach to benefit from the Bali coast away from the crowds.

In fact, I’d go as far as saying many people plan our holidays round beautiful seashores (stunning seashores do have a tendency to come back hand-in-hand with beautiful weather so there’s a rationale behind those choices). The Costa del Sol region in southern Spain, within Andalusia, is a very stunning stretch of European coast (Malaga, anybody?).

With its steep hillsides, pink sands and glittering ocean, Komodo’s magnificence is almost as fierce because the world-famous ‘dragons’ that roam the island. It’s a world-class place to dive, and with its tiny inhabitants of just 2000 locals, the environment is authentic and laid-back.

Lying on Mexico’s Caribbean shoreline, Tulum is not only residence to one of many country’s greatest-preserved Mayan ruins, however considered one of its greatest seashores too. Tulum was built around 1200 AD when the Mayan civilization was already in decline and therefore lacks the magnificence of another famous sites. The tropical beach backdrop nevertheless makes this one of the most in style vacationer destinations in Mexico that could be a heaven for the photographer or artist.

Boa Viagem Beach has one of many highest shark attack rates in the world – fifty six within the final 20 years, with a death fee of about 37 %. Sharks use the ditch off the coast as a migratory route and do their searching within the surrounding shallows. A development boom has worsened the state of affairs, disrupting marine life and leaving sharks trying to find new sources of food. Third – “Kauna’oa Bay, Hawaii” – That photograph is definitely the Berjaya Resort in Langkawi Island.

Western Australia is house to some critically critical creatures, and Cable Beach in Broome has a particularly large concentration of scary animals. On land there are toxic snakes and spiders, and within the water, lethal field jellyfish and white pointer sharks roam. Cairns, in North Queensland, may be the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, but its waters maintain far more than that. The time between November and June is notoriously known as "stinger season" because of the jellyfish that infest the area’s waters.

From the desert-island-really feel of Playa de Ses Illetes on the Balearic Islands to the spectacular rock formations of Playa de las Catedrales in Ribadeo, Spain’s shoreline is one that just keeps on giving. Australia is a big nation (the 6th largest on the earth by space) with an enormous quantity of shoreline, so it comes as no surprise that it’s residence to a number of the finest seashores on the earth.

The hazard lies beneath the waves, the place old nuclear submarines lay on the bottom, slowly leaking radiation. Dumas Beach within the state of Gujarat, along the Arabian Sea, is taken into account to be some of the haunted seashores on the planet. Originally a cremation ground, it's reportedly home to spirits that proceed to roam its shores. What’s not to love a couple of beach where crystalline water meets sugary sand? Fortunately, there are greater than 600 islands in Micronesia, so if the destination is in your travel bucket record, you can opt for an island that is extra like a Tahitian paradise and less like Chernobyl.

Fringed with coconut timber, virtually all lodge buildings usually face toward the beach. Diving-fishing facilities and boat tours to close by islands could be arranged.

The pure Doctor's Cave seaside sits in Montego Bay the place most guests to Jamaica discover lodging. As if the presence of a picturesque waterfall isn't magical enough, visitors to this beach get to really explore the waterfalls by becoming a member of guided hikes up into the waterfall. A hike takes you past naturally shaped cool pools earlier than encountering the more highly effective sections of the waterfall. Dunn's River Falls and Beach, located in the town of Ocho Rios is a should for anyone who truly loves nature.

[dailyaudiobible]

07/14/2019 DAB Transcript

1 Chronicles 16:37-18:17, Romans 2:1-24, Psalms 10:16-18, Proverbs 19:8-9

Today is the 14th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is a pleasure. It's awesome to be here with you turning the knob and opening the door and stepping through the threshold into a brand-new, shiny, sparkly week here in the middle of the summer or the middle of the winter depending on where you are in the world. No matter what the weather though, I’m glad that we can continue the rhythm of our lives day by day step-by-step as we interact with God's Word and allow it to speak into our lives inform us, change us, direct us, guide us, lead us into all truth, which is the promise. And, so, with this brand-new week out in front of us we’ll read from the New Living Translation. And, of course, will be picking up where we left off. Today first Chronicles chapter 16 verse 37 through 18 verse 17.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word. And as we have spent the weekend and now kind of moving into this new week beginning the book of Romans we invite Your Holy Spirit to lead us, to guide us into all truth, to help us to understand how it is we came to believe what we believe and help us to see the argument Paul is laying out as we move through this letter. Yesterday we certainly read of all kinds of debauchery, all kinds of evil sins that people had fallen into because they simply ignored the fact that signs of Your love and guidance and presence are everywhere. And, so, we can read those words of condemnation, but we fail to ever get to chapter 2 where we are instructed to not judge because we’re all guilty. And, so, right out of the gate, we see that the apostle Paul has his sights aimed squarely at the religious infrastructure and obviously at the time of this writing he's aimed at Judaism at the Jewish religious infrastructure in the same way that Jesus was. And yet, as we read this letter and apply it to our own Christian faith infrastructure, we see that there are plenty of things that we must pay attention to and that we must change. Come Holy Spirit lead us forward into all truth we pray. In the name of Jesus we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it’s home, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here. So, of course, stay connected. Find out what’s afoot.

The Daily Audio Bible Family Reunion is coming up…I was going say September…it’s August 31st through September 2nd as you probably know. Registration is open for that. It’s almost full. Looking forward to a great time together. So, you can find out about that at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253, is the number to dial.

And that is it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi beautiful family of God, I trust that all of you enjoyed your long walk on the 7th of July, Sunday. I was so privileged and blessed to be at __ for the July 4th weekend and just wanted to share a little experience I got to enjoy. While deep in the forest all you hear is the sound of birds chirping, all different sounds. And we got to see these beautiful royal blue woodpeckers picking at tree trunks and we also spotted lots of different birds sitting on the deck of our cabin. And it just reminded me of God’s constant love for us. And as they take flight from one branch to another __ absolutely not a care or fear or worry about this absolutely huge dense forest. It’s just so amazing how they balance on a tiny leaf or a little twig. And I thought to myself, how even if one of them has to fall to the ground Jesus sees them and He knows them and every move they make and how He watches over them. Same with us. He cares. As God cares for the birds of the air and the trees in the forest how much more valuable are we? And I can just imagine how God cares for us and watches over our every movement. So, something just to think about today and to encourage someone that, you know, lost all hope. Recently a lady called to say she’s lost all hope…

Hi neighbors it’s Lisa the Encourager I hope you all are having a wonderful day. I’m calling today because I was very excited to hear that Jesse and his wife are doing better in their marriage and I’m so happy for you and I’m so happy that you called and I’ll continue to pray for you Jesse, you and your wife. And I’m also praying, calling in today to pray for Tara and her ovarian cancer and I really wanted to devote my entire time to pray for Tara in that she’s facing this real life challenge with the ovarian cancer. So, let’s all go to the Lord together. Dear God I thank You so much for allowing me the opportunity to pray for Tara Lord and I just pray as if I were with her right now at this moment and I was able to lay my hands on her abdomen Lord and I just lay my hands in the way of being the hands and feet of Jesus and nothing more, nothing less God and that You will take this ovarian cancer from her and take it away and just let it not impact her life at all Lord. And I pray Lord God that You would just intervene and make this just…just a very small little thing in her life that doesn’t have to be her life or doesn’t have to impact her life or her daughter’s life in any way God. And I pray Lord Jesus that You will give her comfort in knowing that You are right there with her every step of the way and that she feels Your presence God through every decision, through every communication that she has with her daughter, with every communication she has with the doctors. And I pray God that You will just be with her holding her hand…

Hi, this is Valerie calling from south of Atlanta. I just wanted to call in and pray for the sweet lady who called in on the…I believe it’s the 9th…who sounded helpless and hopeless and looking for God’s will. Dear heavenly Father I just want to pray for this sweet lady Lord. I pray that You’ll just grant her an extra measure of peace Lord. I thank You that You gave her the confidence to call into the Daily Audio Bible and to express her deep longing to know Your will Lord and to open up herself to the rest of the believers so that we can all come to her aid Lord and lift her up in prayer in front of her throne. Lord I just again just pray that You will make Yourself known in a miraculous way to her Lord. I pray that You will reach down and wrap her in Your arms, and she’ll feel Your comfort as a tangible presence and know Lord that You hear her, You love her and You’re there for her. So many times, Lord we can’t understand why we’re going to things or see where to put the next step Lord but if we can just hold on a little longer and have trust and have faith we know Lord, we know that You are guiding our steps the same way Lord that You’re guiding Paul. Even though times seemed dim with him being in prison and everybody telling him don’t go to Jerusalem and he went anyway and God is using him in a miraculous way through this time of trial while he is being held captive just like our sister right now is being held captive by fear and doubt and unbelief and struggling. We pray Lord that You’ll just give her enough strength to make it through to the next day and then the next day and then the next day and then she’ll look back and know Lord that You were always in control. It’s in Your name we pray. Amen.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family, I am a new, I’ve only been listening for two months and I guess I’ll go by Zion Lion for now. This is hard for me to do because I’ve never asked anyone to pray for me before, but I’ve been reading the Scriptures and I know we are encouraged to share our hearts with our fellow believers and to pray for one another. Listening to all of you, especially Rebecca has given me the courage to ask for help from you brothers and sisters and confess my heart. I’m 32 years old and for my entire life I have been abused in my relationship with my parents. Because of the abuse I’ve had to estrange myself and one-year-old son for my parents. I’ve been estranged multiple times since I was the age of 19 but now it’s permanent. I have such a hard time with this Lord because I know You want us to love and forgive but I cannot put my son in danger or let him to be as abused as I was. I have so much anger and pain in my heart Lord and I don’t want it there. I want to be able to forgive my parents especially my mother. I also want to know Lord that it’s really okay from me to protect myself and my son and that I am not breaking a commandment or not being a child of Christ. I don’t want to feel guilty because even though they have hurt me Lord I know they too are hurt too, and I do feel sad for them. Please help me find peace and forgiveness and let go of this anger Lord and please help them. Lord I thank You. Thank you everyone for listening to me and for your prayers. This community is changing my life. I love you all. Blessings to each of you. Zion lion.

[its-lifestyle]

Rohana Angah is 12 years old but you could easily mistake her for a five-year-old girl. The orang asli child weighs 12.4kg and is only about 80cm tall because she suffers from malnutrition. Her eyes are dazed and distant, her mental impairment a result of a fit caused by an electrolyte imbalance in her body last year.

Sadly, her stunted body is not that unusual where she lives.

Rohana is an orang asli living in an interior village called Pos Kemar in Gerik, Perak. She is the third and shortest among seven siblings, but her brothers and sisters are also stunted to different degrees, signalling generally poor nutrition.

“All we have to eat is tapioca and rice,” her father, Angah Ajin, 39, tells us in Malay. (Photo above is of Rohana, second left, with her family, from left, sister aged 16, father, siblings aged eight, seven, and four, and mother carrying a one-year-old baby.)

There isn’t enough food to feed the children, according to Angah, a cry that is echoed by the Temiar in all four of the villages we visit while accompanying a relief mission organised by non-governmental organisation Persatuan Kebajikan Saudara Perak (PKSP).

According to the women who do the cooking, meals typically consists of rice with salt and the occasional addition of produce collected from the forest.

Located deep in the jungle about 35km south-east of Gerik, the Pos Kemar resettlement scheme consists of 15 orang asli villages of between 50 and 200 people each, making up more than 4,000 people within the area.

Since June 2018, three blockades have been established in the area – in Kampung Tasik Asal Cunex, Kampung Ralak and Kampung Cenawing – as the orang asli fight to protect their ancestral land from being logged.

Despite cries that logging companies are threatening both their heritage and livelihood, trees continue to fall.

Perak Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Ahmad Faizal Azumu has reportedly defended the state’s logging activities, saying that the protests will hurt the timber industry.

Volunteer pediatrician Dr Lee Kim Seng checking on Rohana in her village.

Double Threat

Orang asli, who make up only 0.6% of the Malaysian population, have the smallest carbon footprint but are the hardest hit by the threat of deforestation and a slow economy. These twin troubles are hitting them where it hurts most: in their tummies.

Due to rampant deforestation, there is little left of their food bank, the jungle. Traditional hunter-gatherer orang asli have relied for generations on the jungle for food, medicine, clothes, and building materials. Rivers, their only source of water, are also threatened by deforestation, as silt from denuded land ends up in waterways, making them shallower and murkier.

Once self-sustainable, the orang asli now have no choice but to be reliant on rice purchased from the “outside”.

Many of the jungle-dwelling tribesmen manage small government-sponsored rubber plantations, but this is no longer a viable economic option. Falling commodity prices means they can’t earn enough to buy the food they need.

The Temiars we meet tell us they sell their raw rubber for between RM1.60 and RM1.80 a kilogramme; generally, and depending on their collection, they can only take home a meagre RM200 a month.

PKSP volunteer paediatrician Dr Lee Kim Seng says that while there is a trend of malnutrition, it has yet to reach severe levels – “but if they continue their lifestyle like this, definitely it will compromise their health” in the long term. (See story on vaccinating the orang asli.)

Don’t Say ‘Elephant’

It has not always been this way, of course. Aleuj Tengah, 78, the former Tok Batin (village elder) of Kampung Ralak, remembers a time when food was abundant.

“When I was 18, we had enough to eat. Our plantation was not a joke, we had padi, potato, banana, sugar cane, everything was growing here,” says Aleuj (he is named after the creator spirit in Temiar folklore).

“Now, if I plant banana trees in the morning, in the afternoon the orang besar (VIP) will come, rip out our trees and eat our bananas.”

Like his fellow villagers, Aleuj uses the code “orang besar” for elephants. Mentioning the animal’s name is taboo as the villagers believe it will attract it to their homes.

“Just last night the orang besar came and stomped on our rubber seedlings, everything is gone.

“What can we eat now? This is our hardship, we are starving. But where can we run? We live with them.”

Every villager we speak to has a tale about competing for food with elephants. Aleuj’s wife pulls some grass up to show the arid soil underneath.

“The orang besar have destroyed everything. The weather is so hot, our crops are not growing, the river and jungle are empty.”

However, Aleuj doesn’t actually blame the elephants. He might not use words like “deforestation” or phrases like “loss of natural habitats” that force wildlife to invade human spaces but he knows where the blame lies: “It’s not the orang besar’s fault, it’s the loggers fault. The mountains are now empty, smooth as far as the eyes can see.

“And all our ubi asal (wild yams) are gone, so what do we eat now?”

Life in villages like Kampung Senagit Dalam doesn’t suit all the orang asli and some have decided to return to their ancestral lands and traditional ways – which puts them at odds with state authorities.

Conflict Of Interest

Scientists from Management and Ecology of Malaysian Elephants (MEME) say the orang asli’s increasing vulnerability to elephants is connected to a resettlement scheme known as Rancangan Pengumpulan Semula (RPS).

(MEME works with the Department of Wildlife and National Parks Peninsular Malaysia.)

In the 1980s, during the second communist insurgency from 1968 to 1989 (the first was the Malayan Emergency, from 1948 to 1960), the government moved orang asli into RPS areas. There were two reasons to do so: To stop the orang asli from helping the communist hiding in the jungles and to allow the government to provide healthcare, education, economic and infrastructure development.

There are a total of 17 RPS areas in Peninsular Malaysia with six in Perak, seven in Pahang, three in Kelantan and one in Johor.

According to human-elephant conflict researcher Lim Teck Wyn, traditionally, the Temiars would not live in one place for very long as they practised shifting cultivation and lived in small communities. Swiddening – the practise of slashing and burning to prepare land for cultivation – had allowed them to avoid the elephants but conflict is unavoidable now that they have settled in one fixed location, he says.

Elephants have learnt that these villages have abundant food for them, often returning to the same villages.

“The growing population in the RPS has also increased the risk and frequency of

conflict with the elephants,” Lim says, adding that the government encouraged farming and discouraged the orang asli’s traditional economic activity of collecting and selling forest produce.

“Now, the elephant is constantly in contact with people, the elephant is becoming braver and more aggressive towards people.

In a way, the scheme, while meant well, is actually responsible for creating a situation where the orang asli are more vulnerable to elephants physically, financially and economically, Lim claims.

A makeshift washing area with a pipe connected directly to a nearby river in one of the orang asli villages in Pos Kemar. Rivers, the only source of water, are getting shallower and murkier because of deforestation.

Failed Scheme

“The very fact that the orang asli are complaining about a lack of food, poor access to food sources, and malnutrition simply says the RPS scheme has failed,” claims Colin Nicholas, founder of Centre for Orang Asli Concerns.

Nicholas says while the RPS has decreased mortality rate and increased healthcare and education, orang asli health statistics are still far below the national average. (“Orang asli children are not being vaccinated” – see story here.)

The Orang Asli Development Department (Jakoa) website confirms that the socio-economic status of most orang asli communities still lags behind in various fields when compared with other races in Malaysia.

Nicholas says when the RPS programme was first introduced, the orang asli were willing to relocate and give it a try but around 2014, some groups decided to “go back home”, as they didn’t feel the scheme was benefiting them.

“RPS has not been designed to address a number of things, including the expansion of communities and the interest of the orang asli.

“A number of policies that were put in place along the way, such as agriculture, are actually working against their interests,” Nicholas says, adding that it took away their autonomy.

Nicholas says at least four communities in Gerik have left the RPS scheme to re-establish their communities on ancestral land.

“Some who have left are even doing better than they did at the RPS.”

However, this puts them at odds with the state authorities, as the state considers the customary land state land and that it has the legal right to exercise full ownership over it.

One of them is Kampung Tasek Asal Cunex, which is in the spotlight for the ongoing Cunex blockade.

“I’m aware that some groups are leaving their RPS to reclaim their ancestral land,” says Jakoa director-general Datuk Ajis Sitin, attributing this to an issue of space.

He says the design of the RPS did not foresee a growing population, adding that the department has intentions to extend the size of the settlement area.

“Now, some RPS areas are becoming crammed, the population has grown so there is not enough housing, not enough food or farmland,” he says.

He acknowledges that human-elephant conflict is prevalent in Hulu Perak and Hulu Kelantan, but pegs it as a logging and development issue.

“The forest area is getting smaller due to expansion of agriculture land, the elephants have nowhere left to roam and so they are entering the villages.”

Ajis, who is from the Semai tribe in Pahang, says as long as orang asli ancestral land is not defined in the Aboriginal Peoples Act 1954 (Act 134), the dispute between the respective state governments and the orang asli will persist.

“The Act needs to be reviewed so orang asli ancestral land is recognised,” he says.

“The orang asli in Malaysia are not B40 (lower income group), they are B0.6, they are the hardcore poor,” Ajis adds, referring to the fact that orang asli make up 0.6% of Malaysia’s total population.

As new logging signboards continue to pop up in the jungles of Gerik, the orang asli grow increasingly worried about their future.

“We are living with half our lives, not to our fullest,” village elder Itam Aman from Kampung Penseg says.

“Our living place is difficult to live in, food is difficult to find…. We feel that in the future, we may go extinct.”

from Family – Star2.com http://bit.ly/2LpXZhx

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/on-federalism-its-the-economy-stupid/

On federalism: It's the economy, stupid!

This may be a trivial deviation from political strategist James Carville’s campaign handle (“the economy, stupid”) for former US President Bill Clinton during the latter’s successful bid to defeat then-sitting president, George H. W. Bush in 1992. But the phrase now becomes relevant to the ongoing public debate on whether we should abandon the 1987 Constitution to change our present form of government from presidential to federal.

Our economic managers, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III and Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia, seven influential business groups and several economists, have warned the government against the dire economic effects of the shift if the proposal of the Consultative Committee (Con-Com) is ratified without undergoing rigorous vetting. Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana also chimed in saying that the draft proposal “is confusing,” to say the least.

From a monetary standpoint, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Nestor A. Espenilla Jr. told BusinessWise that  federalism is an economic gamble. He explained that the main risk, if not clearly addressed, is how to maintain fiscal sustainability by properly apportioning revenues and governmental responsibilities: “If the proper balance is not achieved and fiscal sustainability cannot be secured as a result, then monetary control will be compromised in a desperate effort to finance deficits. We risk chronic hyperinflation and debt crisis. For federalism to have any chance, the ground needs to be carefully prepared so there is proper governance in all aspects.”

Unless those who are trying to convince President Duterte to ram federalism down the Filipino people’s throats succeed in the next few weeks or months, their dream of “conquering Imperial Manila” is dead in the water. Con-com is proposing to divide the country into 18 federated regions. Each state is given the power to raise its own revenues, determine its own legislation and choose its own economic-development models.

Such idea springs from a flawed belief among those in the South that their region has long been unkempt. Former Sen. Aquilino Q. Pimentel Jr., the main proponent of the shift, believes that prosperity awaits these regions if and when Manila’s “stranglehold” on the national coffers is broken and distributed to the country’s “neglected” fringes.

Dominguez, during a hearing conducted by the Senate committee on finance, could not give an exact estimate of the total cost of the exercise. “How can we compute?” he asked. “We don’t [even] know what the final road map is going to look like…I had a long discussion with them and, quite frankly, I was more confused than when I started.”

The Con-com has already submitted to the Senate and the House of Representatives the proposed federal Charter for approval.  While the price of federalism has yet to be allocated under the proposed 2019 national budget, Pernia in the same hearing gave a ballpark figure  of P120 billion in direct costs.

What this means simply is that we’d have to spend way beyond our means or, if you want the more idiomatic version, we’re being asked to bite more than we could chew. To be even doable at all, the government has to raise taxes to back-breaking levels.

Imagine this: In order not to fall into an economic quicksand just to maintain our current deficit target of 3 percent, the federal government will have to do either or both of two things: scrimp by P560 billion its expenditure program, which could lead to the national government laying off 95 percent of government workers, or skim off the funds for Duterte’s “Build, Build, Build” program by 70 percent.

Dominguez himself said that the draft federal Charter “could lead to massive job losses in the public sector, reduce funds for the government’s ambitious infrastructure program, widen the budget deficit and downgrade the country’s credit ratings. The possible repercussions could result in dire, irreversible economic consequences”

The significance of credit ratings, which measure the creditworthiness of a government could not be underestimated. As the solidity of state assets is closely hewed to the country’s performance, credit scores serve as the nation’s economic barometer. The country at present enjoys investment-grade credit ratings from the top three debt sentinels, namely Moody’s Investors Service, Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the fiscal facilities described in the draft Charter were to be executed, the federal government would suffer a shortage of 6.7 percent, leading to a credit rating downgrade, and thereafter, higher interest rates.

According to Dominguez, “Our investment-grade credit ratings, which make it cheaper for the country to borrow money may go to hell, while interest rates could [skyrocket] under the very confusing fiscal provisions of the draft federal Constitution.”  It doesn’t help that the economy is already in tatters. Our economy has slowed down, with growth rates hovering low at 6% and inflation rates soaring to more than 5%.

Business has also weighed in on the federalism debate, expressing alarm on the costs and risks associated with the proposed shift.

The Cebu Business Club, Employers Confederation of the Philippines, Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, Makati Business Club, Management Association of the Philippines, Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Philippine Exporters Confederation in a joint statement expressed their concerns over how the government would implement and fund the proposed shift.

They pointed out the “alarming cost” estimated by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies at P72 billion, and the P130-billion projection of the National Economic and Development Authority. “The fiscal deficit is estimated to reach 6.7 percent of the GDP, which is way beyond the sustainable 3-percent target of our fiscal managers—a prudential limit also observed by the European Union for its member-countries,” they said.

The majority of Filipinos are also lukewarm to the shift, which even provoked a hostile response from among the informed public. A recent survey by Pulse Asia found that 67 percent of Filipinos oppose the change, while only 18 percent were in favor and the other 14 percent were undecided. Another survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations revealed that only 1 out of 4 Filipinos know what a federal system of government is all about.

As for Con-com’s Fr. Ranhilio Aquino and Presidential Communications Operations Office’s Mocha Uson’s spirited defense of federalism, let me just point out how insignificant their views are to the level of discourse that the issue of such magnitude demands.

For comments and suggestions, e-mail me at [email protected]

Source: https://businessmirror.com.ph/on-federalism-its-the-economy-stupid/

[digicomgroup]

No Fair Blaming Lewisville Dam Problems on the Bible. It’s You and Me, Babe.

EXPAND

Corps officials told a small army of reporters that this eroded site on the Lewisville Dam is totally under control.

Jim Schutze

North Texas journalism professor George Getschow’s piece in The Dallas Morning News on dangers in the Lewisville Dam managed to put urban flooding in Texas in what I have always believed is the most useful framework — the Bible. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for safety of this 6-mile earthen dam in the midst of vast suburban sprawl, was quick to assemble a press event after the Getschow story broke to assure the public that nothing biblical was about to ensue. I guess that was fair enough for their part, even if their assurances did seem kind of heavily cross-hatched with caveats about our luck holding out and the creek not rising.

But those assurances did nothing to allay the true core impact of the Getschow piece, which was to wake people up to the full dimension of the danger. Even if we trust the Corps to manage that danger, it’s healthy for us to understand the size of the urban flooding risk where we live. That’s where biblical comes in.

EXPAND

Officials of the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quickly assembled a press event to tamp down fears spawned by a story saying Lewisville Dam was in trouble.

Jim Schutze

We think of bodies of water like Lake Lewisville as reservoirs — huge containers of drinking and lawn-watering water. But the Corps builds them as flood safety measures, to hold the runoff created by suburban sprawl during wet months until that water can be safely released during the dry months. The urban flooding we are beginning to see more frequently, as well as worn-out infrastructure like Lewisville Dam, are indications that our flood control measures are beginning to be overwhelmed.

If the Corps can’t stay ahead of that game — if Lewisville Dam were undermined by invisible seepage and broke loose without warning one night — then we could be talking about the potential for thousands of deaths in Dallas and an amount of property damage almost exceeding our ability to count.

So maybe while we’re on the topic anyway, we might actually devote a little bit of thought to how this risk has been created — how did these enormous risks pile up against us and what might we be able to do about reducing them?

There is a pretty general consensus among people who study 21st-century flooding in the built environment that the number one driver of flooding now is suburban sprawl and the sealing of formerly permeable land — land nature designed to soak up rain — with a stubborn hardscape of concrete and rooftops. The only meaningful way to address that risk is by reforming building codes and land-use policies.

And, in fact, efforts to do just that are underway at the federal level. Congress is considering raising the amount of elevation above a floodplain considered safe for residential development. The proposed change, from a so-called 100-year flood level to a 500-year level (just think higher) matches what major reinsurance companies are calling for in the private sector. 

But especially here in Texas, that kind of talk butts up against ferocious opposition from the real estate development interests and the town promoters. Nicholas Pinter, professor and chair of applied geosciences at the University of California-Davis, talked to me about the proposed new standard, still on the drawing board in Washington: “You know what, if that had been implemented last May when all the Central Texas flooding occurred south of Austin, a lot of the damages that happened then would have been avoided.

“Just weeks before that flooding,” he said, “a letter authored and co-signed by a number of (state and federal Texas legislators) was submitted to the president vocally opposing the new flood-risk standards. It’s ironic that the legislators whose own constituents were so heavily damaged, whose own constituents would have been safe had that standard been in place earlier, were among those most vocally arguing against a more robust safety margin in U.S. floodplains.”

In the letter Pinter refers to, Congressman Pete Olson, Republican of suburban Houston, told the president the proposed new standard would “likely dry up economic investment in these areas.”

That’s not a response to stricter flood control that should surprise anybody, at least not in Texas, according to Kevin Simmons. He’s an economics professor at Austin College who studies the economic relationship between damages from natural disasters and efforts to mitigate those damages with regulation.

Simmons says the anti-regulatory climate in Texas needs to be understood in terms of spirited competition for local growth dollars:

“Let’s say you’re a city on the edge of the metroplex. You’re just in northern Collin County or in Denton County, something like that, which probably is going to be a part of the metroplex in the next 10 years.

“You want developers to come and build in your city as opposed to a neighboring city,” Simmons says. “You want to be the next Frisco.” 

Upcoming Events

“Do you want to give these developers stringent guidelines that would inhibit development in some areas of your city, or do you want to do things that would encourage them to build in your city?”

But the absence of meaningful land-use controls to control flooding — turning developers loose to build what they want, where they want — is exactly what piles up those huge risks and huge potential costs that somebody is going to have to pay some day when some dam or levee breaks in a densely developed area.

Somebody is you. The taxpayer. Pinter at UC-Davis points out that the costs for massive flood damage fell back on the taxpayers even when the taxpayers tried to protect themselves by setting up a national flood insurance program. (And remind us again: Who was it who thought an insurance company run by congressmen was a good idea?)

“The flood insurance program has been overgenerous with the result that we taxpayers are now $24 billion dollars in debt to the U.S. treasury,” Pinter said, “because pervasively across the country we have yielded the floodplains, inch by inch, acre by acre to these pressures to develop them.”

Maybe the most interesting thing to think about in all of this is not the doom and gloom, however. Simmons at Austin College co-authored a study in Moore, Oklahoma, published this year, not about flooding but tornadoes, the more frequent bane of that long-suffering community. Simmons looked at a tougher building code adopted by Moore officials after a tornado in 2013 killed seven children in an elementary school, the third catastrophic tornado to hit Moore in 14 years.

What they found was that if all the homes in Oklahoma had been built to the new Moore standards, the extra cost would have been about $3.3 billion, adding an average of $2,000 to each new house. But the savings in wind damages that Oklahoma could expect in the next 25 years would be about $11 billion. Not a bad trade-off.

I asked Simmons about the cost of running off developers by imposing stricter standards versus the benefit of attracting more people to Oklahoma because they’re less afraid of getting blown away with their little dog, Toto. He said it’s too early to tell. I think what he really meant was, “Only reporters ask things like that,” but he was too nice to say it.

There’s maybe one more strand of this puzzle that I hear from people — a very tangled version of the climate change debate. Some people say to me — and I could swear they’re the same ones who deny climate change at other times — that the increased flooding we are seeing in urban/suburban areas is not the result of development but of changes in rain patterns.

I don’t know what that means in terms of policy. Go ahead and develop where you want, because we’re all doomed anyway? But I did find one person with both academic and official standing to address it, John W. Nielsen-Gammon, a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University and the state climatologist of Texas. His studies of weather in Texas over the last half-century have found evidence of robust aggregate increases in the intensityof downpours but not in stream flows.

Nielson-Gammon says the evidence confirms climate change but not enough to make it a primary driver of the increased flooding we are seeing in urban areas.

“It is not obvious and probably I would say unlikely that changes in rainfall are the biggest driver in changes in flooding over the historical period,” Nielsen-Gammon told me. “I think land-use changes are probably the biggest driver of increases of flooding in urban areas.”

Why is that important? Well, going back to Getschow’s piece and the biblical catastrophe we face if that dam ever breaks loose, maybe it’s time to stop blaming it on the Bible. We created this mess. We continue to make it worse every day, when each new acre of permeable land falls beneath a shroud of rooftops, swimming pools, tennis courts and shopping malls.

The fascinating point in the work of Simmons at Austin College is the indication that tougher regulation is not necessarily an economy-killer. There is money to be saved and profit to be gained in common sense measures. Every little hick cow-patch town competing to become the next going-and-blowing big suburb may well be an economy-killer ultimately, not to mention loss of human life.

None of us is surprised when another dude in a heavily starched shirt and cowboy boots runs out on stage to promote his own cow patch as the next great suburban Nirvana. Any one of us might be tempted to do the same thing if the same size bag of gold were sitting on our own table just beyond our own grasping fingertips.

But for a society to be basically sane, some people have to be the grownups. That’s what I like best about the Getschow story. I read it, and I see Noah standing on his boat with his hands on his hips, telling us, “Hey, enough is enough, OK?”

The post No Fair Blaming Lewisville Dam Problems on the Bible. It’s You and Me, Babe. appeared first on Digicomgroup.

Read full post at: http://www.digicomgroup.com/2017/03/06/no-fair-blaming-lewisville-dam-problems-on-the-bible-its-you-and-me-babe/