#Rest in peace to all the victims of the Holocaust. Which DID happen.

[cyarskj1899]

this tweet about full stop on supporting kanye before he likes Hitler has unfortunately aged well.

[lacewise]

The same time the Brits caused the chaos that happened in 1948, the rest of the Middle East saw as an opportunity to expel their Jewish populations to Israel (to oversimplify, think about the reservations in Canada and the US—that’s how they envisioned Israel and how they expelled Jewish people while seizing all their belongings. A huge part of the reason many Middle Eastern countries are mad is Israel thrived anyway.)

Poland got rid of their Jewish population by literally committing the Holocaust

When you say, “Israel shouldn’t exist” or “Jewish people need to go back to Poland” what I hear is “we can have world peace if all Jewish people die” which is straight out of the “Protocols of Elders of Zion” (think “Birth of a Nation”) and “Mein Kampf”—this is also where ideas about Jewish people or a theoretical state of Israel wanting to “take over” the Middle East come from (they don’t, and you guys are ignoring actual Middle Eastern colonial empires engaged in society-wide human trafficking to scapegoat Jewish people. It’s weird, and I’m sure the victims find your callous disregard creepy, because they’ve actively said so—they would not feel safe in a room alone with you. Consider why that is.)

I have no idea if you guys realize you sound exactly like Adolf Hitler (who was inspired by “Protocols of Elders of Zion”) or Donald Trump (who kept “Mein Kampf” on his bedside table for years)

I’m frankly scared to ask

You cannot discuss Nakba without also discussing expulsions of Jewish people from both Europe and the Middle East—it’s disingenuous and I will not only assume you also support the Trail of Tears, I will tell other people you support the Trail of Tears

Think long and hard about if that’s something you want to be associated with, because I promise you, if other people look it up, they will see the similarities—they’re glaring—and they’ll also probably start asking questions like “why are you downplaying the Holocaust? Isn’t that Holocaust denialism?” (The answer is yes, by the way)

Depending on what else you say, I may also assume you support the enslavement of Black people by the tribes

Argue with your mirror, not with me

Regardless of what you know, some of the most prominent voices on antisemitic Tumblr and TikTok have almost certainly read “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and have been promoting hateful and baseless conspiracy theories found there, and either you haven’t noticed or you agree.

One of the main organizers is implicitly pro-other genocides and constantly spreads barely concealed hatred and bad paraphrases of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as threats directed at specific Jewish people and organizations. I have no idea how you all missed that, but I’ve always found people filled with gleeful hatred are easily distracted from both the particulars and the main facts

And you know what they say about Nazis—if one Nazi is welcome to a seat at your table, it’s a table of Nazis

The Nazism is not misguided. The calls for the death of every living Jewish person are not accidental. The flags calling for genocide did not appear out of overzealousness. It’s the point. Nazism, theocracy, fascism, and eugenics do not value mercy, and they will not give any to you, no matter how much you beg them. If you don’t quickly find your way out, you’ll find yourself dragged down, the rest of your actions discarded as tainted, and your names inscribed in the history books next to the rest of them. Decide if you want to be the shame of your families and cultures for decades to come.

May the memories of all those lost be a blessing, and may we find a way to stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

—signed a non-Jewish woman who knows how to read. You should really try it sometime.

Find a way to deradicalize yourselves.

P.S. In my offline research, I’ve found that in almost every subject, the popular information going around online is not just misinformed, but counterfactual. Especially on social media, it is the exact opposite of what every respected expert and researcher says. It’s often exact opposite of what primary sources say. If you’re getting a lot of your information from the internet, then the first thing you need to do is find offline sources. I didn’t have the information literacy to recognize how terrible the situation actually is before I started, and chances are, you don’t either. I would also recommend talking to people who spend time offline and getting some hobbies.

[mrragerthesoloone]

Kanye is cooked. DONE. Like idk how he can come back from this if at all. It’s so fucked up to see. Like his brain is so broken that he’s teaming up with Nick Fuentes (who is a KNOWN WHITE SUPREMACIST, HOLOCAUST DENIER) and is just being anti semitic as hell.

Praising Hitler too? Are you kidding me man? Like I mean….SERIOUSLY? We’re going there? The man who killed FACTUALLY 6 million Jewish people. And approximately 5 million more. So around 12 MILLION people dead cause of Hitler and the Nazi regime and this undisciplined FOOL decides to go out and kill his legacy some more.

I had to take his albums off my wall and replace them with something else. And it’s crazy because im not even Jewish. But my lord, it makes no sense to me WHY Kanye can’t just shut up. Even the Kanye West subreddit has banded together to become a holocaust awareness subreddit momentarily. HOW there are STILL holocaust deniers who exist is beyond me. I was taught that in 5TH GRADE. I thought it was common knowledge that it indeed happened. There’s LITERAL VIDEO EVIDENCE OF IT. LIKE THERE ARE VIDEOS OF BULLDOZERS PUSHING THE DEAD BODIES INTO MASS GRAVES. They skinned some of the bodies and made soap out of their skins and bones as well. It’s just so fucking sickening really what Kanye is saying. And apparently he is refusing to go to the Auschwitz camp museum too. But I guess not. 2022 is quite possibly the WORST year in the history of Kanye West’s career. Like the “slavery was a choice” remarks were REAL bad (obviously), but THIS takes the cake. And you know you’re losing your mind when you make ALEX JONES (known Sandy Hook denier who now owes the families over 1 billion plus dollars and has officially filed for bankruptcy) seem normal and the voice of reason. When HE seems to be uncomfortable, it’s already over.

Fuck Kanye West.

Fuck the conservatives.

May Nick Fuentes burn in hell.

Rest in peace to all the victims of the Holocaust. Which DID happen.

What a shame. An actual shame.

[southeastasianists]

When Youk Chhang started writing letters to Zaha Hadid, it seemed like a quixotic mission. Chhang was beseeching the world’s most celebrated architect to help him build a genocide museum and research center in a small, wounded country. Eleven years later, books full of Dame Hadid’s designs for the center rest in his Phnom Pehn office, like precious secrets. Chhang has made significant strides in his quest, though the most important step remains.

The fact that Chhang made it to this point—that he even is alive—is a triumph. Like many other Cambodians from his generation, he suffered through horrors during the Khmer Rouge regime: He was tortured for picking mushrooms, and watched as his pregnant sister was cut open and killed under the suspicion that she had stolen rice. The teenager escaped to the Thai border in 1982, as fighting continued, then to the Philippines, and eventually the United States. He finally returned to Cambodia in 1992, where he worked as a UN election observer as the nation began to recover from over 20 years of genocide, brutality, and war.

A world away, Hadid was having a career breakthrough. Years after gaining attention in the architectural world for her creative designs, none of which were ever built, the architect finally found clients to realize them. Her first landmark building, an angular concrete fire station later used as an exhibit space, was completed in Germany in 1993, beginning a long run of success.

In 1995, Chhang became the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam. In his time there, the nonprofit group dedicated to remembrance and reconciliation has GPS-mapped 20,000 mass graves, interviewed 10,000 victims and perpetrators, and collected more than a million documents about the genocide. DC-Cam’s work provided evidence for Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunals and helped Cambodia acknowledge the trauma it suffered through.

DC-Cam also created plans for a genocide center, dubbed the Sleuk Rith Institute, that would combine a museum, policy center, and school. The effort is as much about the future as the past. “It should be a place to heal, a place to commemorate. A beautiful place to look forward. We will turn a horrible past into a better future,” Chhang says. He wanted to break from the usual pattern of big genocide memorials around the world: depressing, heavy, and overwhelmingly male, both in terms of their sensibilities and who conceived them.

Chhang long dreamed of approaching Hadid to design Sleuk Rith, which means “the power of leaves,” referring to religious texts written on palm leaves, many of which were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. Hadid had a record of making celebrated modern buildings with inventive, dramatic curves, and Chhang saw that as a way to break away from the sharp, masculine angles and doleful sensibility of many museums related to acts of genocide around the world. (When told that someone liked the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., its designer, James Ingo Freed, was quoted in The New York Times saying, “You’re not supposed to like things like that. So I say: ‘Oh, yes, you did see it? Too bad for you, it was such an awful experience.’”) Hadid was born and raised in Iraq, and Chhang thought might help her understand Cambodia's situation, he says.

She also happened, by then, to be one of the most famous architects alive.

So Chhang, like a starry-eyed fan, began writing letters to the London office of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), asking if she would consider designing the institute. The firm saw requests from people around the world and could only accept a tiny number of them, so Chhang turned up the charm. “I made her a birthday card with a picture of Angkor Wat. I sent her folktales from Cambodia and a story I heard from a woman in a small village,” he says. He implored her secretary to make sure his letters found their way to Hadid personally.

Eventually the architect invited Chhang to the firm’s London studio. He flew there by himself, stayed with a friend to save money, and met with Hadid and about 15 other architects. Impressed at the pitch, the firm accepted the project and sent a team to Cambodia to learn about the country to inform their work.

In 2014, after two years of work, the firm unveiled a design based on five intersecting “volumes,” or sections, each dedicated to one main function: a library holding DC-Cam’s documents, a graduate school on genocide and human rights, a research center to influence policy and discourse, a media center, and an auditorium. The primary building material is wood, which helps distinguish it from similar sites, usually made from stone, metal, and glass. “There was a deliberate intention not to follow a typical path of memorial architecture as it’s normally or historically expressed—the heavy austere monumentality that’s in some ways depressing,” says Craig Kiner, a senior associate at ZHA who helped lead the design process. “It’s much more light and uplifting and delicate, which is something we talked about at great length with Youk and the team. It represents tranquility and hope and healing—for everyone in Cambodia but also for everyone who visits the building,” he says.

Unfortunately, Hadid herself will never get to see the building realized. She died of a heart attack in 2016, leaving a grand legacy and a number of designs that, like the Sleuk Rith Institute, are yet to be completed.

DC-Cam is now trying to turn the striking plans into a real place. Raising money for construction is a central need, but it is one that Chhang reframes. “It’s not a question of cost. It’s a question of the principle of engagement. We want it to be for victims and survivors. They [developers] want it to be a business.” Chhang says that the developers he’s negotiating with want to put Sleuk Rith on a small property, but Chhang insists that it needs about 15 acres, so it has a peaceful environment. “I think it needs a landscape. For them a landscape is a waste of villas.”

It would be easy enough to find space for the institute in the countryside, but Chhang insists on it being in Phnom Penh, close to the country’s political center, accessible to everyone from Khmer Rouge victims to Cambodian officials to international leaders and tourists. Finding a big-enough plot within the city limits is an as-yet-unmet challenge. As for whether the institute will look suitably dignified in a bustling city going through an often chaotic development boom, Chhang is unworried. “When you are beautiful, it doesn’t matter what you wear,” he says. “I like competition. I’d like to see a nearby casino compete with Zaha’s design. Let’s see who’s the winner. I have complete trust over Zaha’s design.”

Chhang says he’s confident DC-Cam will reach an agreement with developers and funders and get the center built, possibly one “volume” at a time. “People have talked about Sleuk Rith costing $55 million or $65 million. But there were two million lives lost. The cost is almost nothing,” he says. Projects like this often take a decade or so, he says, and DC-Cam has put six years into realizing Sleuk Rith, though he declines to adopt a specific timeline. “We work on this every day. I work on the costs every day,” he says.

Kiner says ZHA is working with DC-Cam to smooth the building process. “It’s something that we’re very committed to delivering,” he says.

Though Hadid’s name and reputation attract a lot of interest from developers and the public, not everyone appreciates the center’s approach. “Like almost every project in Phnom Penh, these images simulate that the building rises majestically from the lower structures around, embedded in a lot of greenery,” says Moritz Henning, a Berlin-based architect who studies Cambodian postcolonial architecture and published a guide to Phnom Penh architecture last year. “Why does every project have to be unique, stand out from its surroundings, or better: rise above its surroundings?” he wrote in an email.

“For me, the architecture refers much more to religious buildings, to Gothic cathedrals (and in this respect it fits, people there also wanted to make people small) than to Cambodian architecture,” he says. “Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not against the Sleuk Rith Institute. I think it would be great to have a place like this in Phnom Penh. But I’m very skeptical if this is the right way to go.”

Chhang sees the design-forward but still monumental approach as a way to draw the world’s attention to Cambodia and, likewise, connect the country with humanity as a whole. “The genocide center isn’t just about Cambodia. It’s about Armenia, Bosnia, Burma. That’s why I chose contemporary design, why I chose Zaha—to bring Cambodia out into the globe,” he says. “In Cambodia, there were lots of young girls like Anne Frank. There’s a lot of ways you can see the similarity. Why? Because we are all human beings.”

[cyarskj1899]

Seriously FUCK. HIM. FUCK !!! HIM!!! Talmbout because of what Adidas is doing and what the media is doing he knows how it feels to have a knee on his neck. Gtfoh!!! Ye deservedly losing his billionaire status because his mouth has nothing to do with someone being killed by getting choked to death for nothing more than twenty dollars! How dare he, everyone who witnessed the murder when they were watching it on tape or was there the moment where it happened, How dare he dehumanize someone who was killed by someone so cruel so inhumane so thoughtless and think that it’s the same thing as losing your deal with adidas how dare he say that. I’m pissed! By this and talking greasy about Virgil somebody gonna catch him

If anything Kanye put his career in a deadly chokehold

this is truly one sick negro. continually fucking around and finding out.

[americanredragger]

A Letter to My Mother (That I am too scared to send)

Okay. We’re having this talk now. I have been putting it off because there’s never been a way for me to keep my cool long enough to say it straight. I’ve been nice, I’ve been polite. I’ve walked away from conversations rather than address this directly because I don’t want to lose my mom.

Yesterday was unlike anything in American history. There is no both-sides-ism to be taken here. There is no even vaguely similar violence unleashed by the Left. This isn’t to say that NO violence has ever been unleashed by the left, it can and does happen. But nothing like this. This is unprecedented in both it's scope and audacity.

Unless you can point to an instance in which a Democrat president (or Senator, or Governor) whipped up a riot and unleashed those rioters on the Seat of Government of the United States of America, causing it to be breached and overrun by a hostile force for the first time in 207 years, the things don’t equate at all.

Unless you can point to a riot held by alt-right wingers in which the police cracked down on them HARD to the level of being condemned by the International Criminal Court as bordering on war crimes, the things don’t equate at all.

This was a direct assault on our government by a crowd whipped up by a sitting president. This has never happened before.

The Capitol Police removed the barricades and guided the insurrectionists in.

They chatted and took selfies with them. Exchanged fist bumps with them.

The seditionists were allowed to leave with few arrests, just… gently guided out once the barbarian hordes had their fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaPTjQZBLhQ

And yes, Trump (eventually) told them to go home, but refused to condemn what they'd done and finished his speech with "We love you. You're very special." and continued to refer to his political opponents as "evil".

This is quite literally unprecedented in American history. As in, nothing comes close. That's what "unprecedented" means.

If this had been BLM, the response would have been entirely different. DC would be on lockdown. The police would be bringing WAR to the streets. There would be helicopters, APCs, and beat cops dressed like the US Army rolling into Baghdad in 2003. The DC area hospitals would be overwhelmed with rioters suffering from horrific head and spine injuries from trigger-happy use of rubber bullets and night-sticks. Hell, Trump tear-gassed ACTUAL peaceful protesters last summer just so he could stage an awkward photo op in front of a church, which even the Clergy called him out on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzBhYhu7NYI

Don't you DARE equate the two.

I'm tired of the whataboutisms. I'm tired of ignoring the evidence right in front of you. Donald Trump is the single most corrupt, evil man America has ever elected to the presidency. He has worked hard to transform the Republican party into something that actual Holocaust survivors and experts have called "Neofascist" and even less flattering terms.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/16/its-not-wrong-to-compare-trumps-america-to-the-holocaust-heres-why/

https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/2020/10/25/holocaust-survivor-fears-rising-tide-ugliness-blames-trump-opinion/3740781001/

https://forward.com/scribe/455507/100-year-old-holocaust-survivor-compares-trump-to-hitler/

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article223718330.html

Historians and victims of fascism the world over point to what Trump and his transformed Republican party have been doing as president when asked how the Weimar Republic fell and the Nazi regime rose.

The overwhelming amount of terrorist attacks in the last five years have been Trump supporters (Well over half stemming from that singular cause, with the rest divvied among a MASSIVE swathe of motives), but none more so overwhelmingly so than yesterday's.

There is no left wing equivalent for this in America until you go all the way back to the Weather Underground bombings, and even they were not goaded on by the incumbent politicians of a party.

Your party has been STOLEN from you. The Party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is no more. And now it’s stealing you from your children as we have watched you and dad drift further and further into the Hannity-Limbaugh-Carlson echo chamber.

88 years ago next month, right wing extremists set fire to the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic. Over the next few days, they seeded reports that it was actually the communists, maybe socialists, no, it was definitely anarchists… or was it trade unionists? Either way, it HAD to have been The Left who burned down the Reichstag.

This was used to expand and hold onto the power of the Chancellor, a man who need not be named. The next few years proved to be sorrowful for everyone.

That same blame-shifting is already happening again, but it's not in some far away country, it's happening here, where we all thought it couldn't.

This sort of event is unprecedented in the United States, or it was until yesterday. It is not so unprecedented elsewhere.

The only difference is that this attempt failed.

The attempt was made because Trump’s own administration found that this was the most secure election in American history, and Trump’s lawsuits to the contrary were laughed out of court by Trump-appointed judges, including his Supreme Court justices, and his exceedingly incompetent and well-documented attempts to get state officials to overturn a legitimate election all failed.

I still believe you and dad are good, honest people. Patriots who want America to do well in the world.

You can not-like Nancy Pelosi, or Obama, or Biden, or Hilary Clinton. That’s your prerogative, and we’ll agree on plenty in that regard. You’re well within your rights to believe that my preferred economics don’t work. We’ll disagree heartily, but that’s normal for families, especially between parents and their kids.

But your party has been hijacked by neofascists, malignant narcissists, and white supremacists.

I am on my knees BEGGING you to see what so many experts and victims have been warning you about for years.

The Left did not do this.

Trump did.

You have been led astray by an vain, selfish, greedy demagogue, a well documented honorless grifter who embodies everything Christ opposed, and uses people until they have nothing more to give him and discards them. He has cloaked this latest grift in the American flag and set a cross upon it, the only way Fascism ever COULD take root in America, as we saw with Joe McCarthy in the Second Red Scare.

It’s changing you. You can’t see it because it’s happening to you, but those around you can, and it’s scaring us.

Please, finally, truly see this. I want my parents back. You’re going down a path I can’t follow and it’s breaking my heart.

In 2016, I broke from the Republican Party because I saw calamity coming in the nomination of Donald Trump. Only 4 years later, and history has soberingly showed me that I was more right than I could have ever guessed, and my world view has never been the same since. I have looked back at the political opinions I wrote and posted then, and they were so selfish and hateful that it was physically painful for me to put myself through that review. I was a puppet. I couldn’t have seen it at the time because I was at the center of it, and I still live in dread of the monster I would have become if I’d kept to that path. I see that same kind of speech coming from you now - the jingoism, the recycled talking points, the Orwellian denials, and the near-unquestioning loyalty to the stars of the Republican Party and their mouthpieces at Fox, OAN, Newsmax, and the AM Radio circuit. I see the most selfish parts of who I used to be, and I know that deep down, you are not that person because I still see you constantly striving to be a good mother, a good Christian, and a model human being.

I’m imploring you to finally look at the evidence, the boundless clear and present evidence, and see what men like Gingrich, McConnell, and Trump have turned your party into. What they are turning you into, the same as they tried with me.

I know you wouldn’t be happy as a Democrat - I myself am only begrudgingly a Democrat because the system doesn’t allow for a viable alternative (and that’s a whole different issue that deserves it’s own library of articles). I’m not trying to convert you. I just need to know that you can look at the evidence with your own eyes like I did and see that you’ve been played for a sucker by men who cry wolf and distract you by having you chase shadows while they line their pockets with money and power. Please stop listening to these monsters, stop swallowing their poison. I know how easy it is to be in that world because I myself have lived in it for most of my life. I fully understand the appeal: there are easy answers for everything, you always know who the enemy is and who your supposed allies and benefactors are. But I also left that behind, and yes, it hurts. It hurts a lot, and frequently. But despite the pain, I know I am better off for having done it.

Yes, I have to question the people who claim to represent me more. I have to question EVERYTHING more because I now know that nothing is as clear cut as I thought it was - once removed from Plato’s Cave, I no longer had the luxury of a simple world. And yet I am still happier because I am so much more my own person now. Yes I falter, and worse still, some days I fall back into the old ways of thinking, but now I recognize that for what it is and it is easier to deal with.

You’ll always be a Conservative, Mom, but I see you on the path that I was on, a path that nearly robbed me of my critical thinking and objectivity, and one which would have weaponized my sense of patriotism to benefit people who are not me. You have kept that course far longer than I. Please put aside the whataboutisms, the both-sides-isms, and finally see the evil, ravenous monster that killed your party from the inside and now wears its skin to deceive you into feeding it further.

I don’t ask that you agree with my politics or economics. I AM begging you though to split from this political machine which is changing you into something I no longer recognize. I want the parents I used to have, the ones who could look at things objectively and form their own opinions instead of repeating talk show buzz lines.

Please, recognize the shadows on the wall of the cave that wicked men are showing you are NOT reality. Please, join me in the truth of the world outside.

[remazdo]

The Golden Sprial

As always I am never quite sure where one of these posts is going to lead me, whether into the waiting jaws of trolls and critics, or into a place where I am heard by peers and my words carry some weight. Lately I have found myself pulled in many directions as many different injustices are committed within my own country, let alone the world as a whole. And being the kind of person that I am, I have no tolerance for such things, but my words are so small in comparison to those that hold power that I feel they are drowned out at times. Nevertheless, I find myself sitting here at three in the morning, writing, hoping that something I say may bring some change in someone somewhere.

I recently read an article I would like to share with anyone willing to read it. My finding this article was due to yet another facebook argument. Something I detest. I still have an aversion to them, but I am no longer able to just keep my mouth shut. Someone had shared a news post that read that President Trump was going to change the definitions of mental illness and he believed that those with a mental illness should be forcibly contained to protect the public due to the recent mass shootings that took place here in the states. My response was simply..

“Okay, can I just ask, how much more dystopian does the world need to get before we recognize it as a dystopia?”

Again, I felt this to be harmless, just a question, however I had someone who said that this was needed to get “help” for the homeless and it was the right move to make. My response was that in essence what was being said here was that if the definition of mental illness was changed to include anxiety, depression, homosexuality, and even disagreeing with the words of those in power, that they could forcibly contain anyone at any time. This seemed dystopian, and while probably not how it would be intended to be used, it is still a huge policy shift, just as the shift to make abortions illegal, or the shift in immigration policy, or the shift when it came to the pipeline that went through Native American lands, or the shift to stop trying to find green energy to stop climate change. So many little shifts have happened, and I decided it was time to do some research, as I do. The following quote is from an article by a David Tollerton of the University of Exeter, the link to the article will be below.

“When it comes to an event as ultimately extreme and emotive as the Holocaust, we should of course be wary of blunt and counterproductive comparisons. In this regard Lipstadt’s article offers a powerful corrective. But this is not the end of our task.

It is the task of historians to draw parallels, however uncomfortable. Nazism didn’t immediately descend into fully fledged terror in the Germany of the 1930s, it came in a series of legal and policy shifts. There were those, in Germany as well as in the rest of the watching world – who strongly objected from the start to the laws that took away Jewish rights and protections and continued to oppose Hitler and his supporters as the nightmare unfolded. But there were also many people in whom Nazi rhetoric found all-too fertile ground.

A similar dynamic is in operation today. The gradual “othering” of migrants to the US – and, indeed, of refugees in Europe and elsewhere – has the same feeling of an incremental downward spiral in the public’s humanity, and it is here that historians have a duty to draw comparisons rather than simply seeking to police the border between historical events.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/comparisons-between-us-immigration-policy-and-the-nazi-period-may-not-be-helpful-but-they-are-hard-to-avoid-98879

This caught me off guard. I was doing my best to not correlate the events of today with nazi Germany, and while the events themselves are not the same, the fact that the parallels are there is terrifying. So what do we do when the world is falling down around us? Is this not something that could be seen in a dystopian novel by a notable author such as Phillip K. Dick? And if we are already in dystopia, what do we do next?

A wise woman said to me recently that the revolution must start within us. I do believe that is a great start, that the individual can make the difference. And so I try to start a revolution here and now, not by writing something saying that we should stand up. When you hear the words “gun violence” your mind immediately goes to the word “gun”, and then we decide without them the shootings would stop. But what if the word we should be looking at is “violence”? What if every single person planted something helpful to the planet once a month? What if we simply said we weren’t going to go to work until women had complete rights to their bodies? What if every time you saw a person being harassed because of the color of their skin you walked over and put yourself between the attacker and the victim?

I have decided that I will make changes where I can, I have decided that the revolution is already upon us, and I have decided not to sit down anymore, to ignore a comment on facebook from someone who doesn’t agree with my morals just because it is uncomfortable, to not post something just because it may upset someone. If I want change in the world, I need to be that change. It’s the Fibonacci sequence, if I can inspire one other person, and then another, and then two more, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. In this endeavor I have decided to try to post some videos in the near future of things I have done or will be doing. They may not be often, they may not be long, but they will be there. And the first of which will include this…

This is my first attempt at a hydroponics system. The plant I have chosen is the peace lily because of its ability to scrub the air around me, and I will be expanding this system as time and finances allow. I will document how I did it, and what I will be doing to it as time goes on, and I hope it might allow some revolutionaries or young activists to feel that they can do something for this planet, even if it is small.

Thank you for reading this rather long post yet again my valued readers. I know I can get long winded and even ramble, but I am tired of waiting for the hat to drop, and I don’t want to be standing on the sidelines when it does. Let us be proactive rather than reactive, and let us be the golden spiral and watch us all grow.

[douxreviews]

The Princess Bride Review

[This review includes spoilers.]

Grandson: "Has it got any sports in it?" Grandfather: "Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles..."

The Princess Bride is often described as a fractured fairy tale, but I don't think that's accurate because it's so much more. In his original book, William Goldman took the standard elements of a fairy tale and twisted them off center into something exceptionally funny, while still retaining all of the elements that made it an enjoyable fairy tale. And then Rob Reiner took Goldman's story and translated it into a movie that was just as good and did the same thing, which is a remarkable achievement. The Princess Bride is a satire, a tale of true love, a touching story of bloody vengeance, and it's hilarious. It's unique, and defies categorization.

It's difficult to launch directly into a fantasy world, so Goldman cleverly encapsulated the fairy tale into a story that a grandfather (Peter Falk) is reading to his sick grandson (Fred Savage). I've always loved the skillful way it goes back and forth ("Is this a kissing book?" "She does not get eaten by the eels at this time"). Because the grandfather clearly loves the story he's telling, and at the end, his grandson does too, it bridges the generational gap between them. Lovely.

But it's the fairy tale that's important, and I love every minute of it. I want Buttercup and Westley to live happily ever after. I want Inigo to avenge his father and find peace at last. And there are so many scenes that are absolute gems. The duel at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity is probably my favorite because of the way the Man in Black and Inigo bond as they're trying to kill each other. The duel of wits with the iocane powder is priceless. I love the shrieking eels. I love the R.O.U.S.'s in the fire swamp. Inigo's duel with the six-fingered man is just wonderful, a perfect emotional climax to the movie.

The performances are also gems. Westley (Cary Elwes) is gorgeous, dashing, and ridiculous. Buttercup (Robin Wright) is earnestly beautiful and beautifully earnest, the perfect straight woman. Inigo's story is the most compelling, and Mandy Patinkin brings perfect comic timing as well as pathos to the role. It's not easy to pull off a line like "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" not just once, but many times, and to give it so much impact each and every time.

I can't say enough good things about Wallace Shawn as Vizzini; practically every line he says in this movie is terribly funny. Andre the Giant imparts such sweetness to the role of Fezzik, while still being physically imposing. Honorable mention to Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal and Carol Kane. And Peter Cook as the minister, who made one small scene unforgettable; I start laughing even before he opens his mouth. "Mawwidge. Mawwidge is what bwings us togedder today."

The sight gags are special, too. The climb up the Cliffs of Insanity. Vizzini laughing maniacally before keeling over. Inigo leaning against the tree. Practically every scene with Westley after they give him the pill. The men standing guard in front of the gate makes me laugh every time I see it. But my favorite has always been this one:

"We are but poor, lost circus performers. Is there a village nearby?"

If I have any complaint at all, it's that while Andre the Giant is well cast, Fezzik's lines are sometimes difficult to understand. The scene with the holocaust cloak in particular is almost incomprehensible without subtitles. Okay, I've always hated Inigo's hair, too. Small things, though. And I can't imagine The Princess Bride without them.

I still laugh out loud every time I watch this movie, even while I know the lines so well that I repeat them with the actors. It's that good. William Goldman is probably best known for writing one of the great movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I love that movie. But I love The Princess Bride more.

Quotes:

I wanted to put half of the movie in the quotes section, but I restrained myself and just listed my absolute favorites. So if I missed a line or two that you love, feel free to add it to the comments.

Westley: "This is true love. Do you think this happens every day?"

Vizzini: "And you! Friendless, brainless, helpless, hopeless! Do you want me to send you back to where you were? Unemployed, in Greenland?"

Inigo: "Fezzik, are there rocks ahead?" Fezzik: "If there are, we'll all be dead." Vizzini: "No more rhymes now, I mean it." Fezzik: "Anybody want a peanut?" I love the way Inigo indulges Fezzik in his rhyming. It's so sweet.

Inigo: "You are sure nobody's follow us?" Vizzini: "As I told you, it would be absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable ... Out of curiosity, why do you ask?" Inigo: "No reason. It's only I just happened to look behind us and something is there." Vizzini: "What? Probably some local fisherman, out for a pleasure cruise, at night... in eel-infested waters..."

Vizzini: "He didn't fall? Inconceivable!" Inigo: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." The most quotable line in the movie. I use it a lot.

Fezzik: "You be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted."

Inigo: "I do not mean to pry, but you don't by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right hand?" Man in Black: "Do you always begin conversations this way?"

Fezzik: "Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid, or something like that?" Man in Black: "Oh no, it's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future."

Man in Black: "I do not envy you the headache you will have when you awake. But for now, rest well and dream of large women."

Vizzini: "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia', but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line'!"

Buttercup: "You mock my pain." Man in Black: "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

Westley: (looking around the Fire Swamp) "It's not that bad. (Buttercup looks at him) Well, I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely."

Humperdinck: "Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work. But I've got my country's five hundredth anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped."

Inigo: "Offer me money." Rugen: "Yes!" Inigo: "Power, too. Promise me that." Rugen: "All that I have and more. Please!" Inigo: "Offer me anything I ask for." Rugen: "Anything you want... " Inigo: "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!"

I'm not much for hobbits or Harry Potter, so this is my favorite fantasy movie. I love every scene and every line. Am I being too effusive? Inconceivable!

Four out of four white horses,

Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

[roman-catholic-mass-readings]

22nd June >> Mass Readings (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Saturday, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

    or

Saints John Fisher, Bishop, and Thomas More, Martyrs

    or

Saint Paulinus of Nola, Bishop

    or

Saturday memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Saturday, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

(Liturgical Colour: Green)

First Reading

2 Corinthians 12:1-10

'My power is at its best in weakness'

Must I go on boasting, though there is nothing to be gained by it? But I will move on to the visions and revelations I have had from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who, fourteen years ago, was caught up – whether still in the body or out of the body, I do not know; God knows – right into the third heaven. I do know, however, that this same person – whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know; God knows – was caught up into paradise and heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language. I will boast about a man like that, but not about anything of my own except my weaknesses. If I should decide to boast, I should not be made to look foolish, because I should only be speaking the truth; but I am not going to, in case anyone should begin to think I am better than he can actually see and hear me to be.

In view of the extraordinary nature of these revelations, to stop me from getting too proud I was given a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan to beat me and stop me from getting too proud! About this thing, I have pleaded with the Lord three times for it to leave me, but he has said, ‘My grace is enough for you: my power is at its best in weakness.’ So I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast so that the power of Christ may stay over me, and that is why I am quite content with my weaknesses, and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and the agonies I go through for Christ’s sake. For it is when I am weak that I am strong.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 33(34):8-13

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

The angel of the Lord is encamped

around those who revere him, to rescue them.

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

He is happy who seeks refuge in him.

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Revere the Lord, you his saints.

They lack nothing, those who revere him.

Strong lions suffer want and go hungry

but those who seek the Lord lack no blessing.

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Come, children, and hear me

that I may teach you the fear of the Lord.

Who is he who longs for life

and many days, to enjoy his prosperity?

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Gospel Acclamation

Matthew 4:4

Alleluia, alleluia!

Man does not live on bread alone,

but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Alleluia!

Or:

2 Corinthians 8:9

Alleluia, alleluia!

Jesus Christ was rich,

but he became poor for your sake,

to make you rich out of his poverty.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 6:24-34

Do not worry about tomorrow: your holy Father knows your needs

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘No one can be the slave of two masters: he will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You cannot be the slave both of God and of money.

‘That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? And why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of these. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field which is there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will he not much more look after you, you men of little faith? So do not worry; do not say, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? How are we to be clothed?” It is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things. Your heavenly Father knows you need them all. Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these other things will be given you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

—————————-

Saints John Fisher, Bishop, and Thomas More, Martyrs

(Liturgical Colour: Red)

(Readings for the memorial

There is a choice today between the readings for the ferial day (Saturday) and those for the memorial. The ferial readings are recommended unless pastoral reasons suggest otherwise)

First Reading

1 Peter 4:12-19

If you can have some share in the sufferings of Christ, be glad

My dear people, you must not think it unaccountable that you should be tested by fire. There is nothing extraordinary in what has happened to you. If you can have some share in the sufferings of Christ, be glad, because you will enjoy a much greater gladness when his glory is revealed. It is a blessing for you when they insult you for bearing the name of Christ, because it means that you have the Spirit of glory, the Spirit of God resting on you. None of you should ever deserve to suffer for being a murderer, a thief, a criminal or an informer; but if anyone of you should suffer for being a Christian, then he is not to be ashamed of it; he should thank God that he has been called one. The time has come for the judgement to begin at the household of God; and if what we know now is only the beginning, what will it be when it comes down to those who refuse to believe God’s Good News? If it is hard for a good man to be saved, what will happen to the wicked and to sinners? So even those whom God allows to suffer must trust themselves to the constancy of the creator and go on doing good.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 125(126):1-6

R/ Those who are sowing in tears will sing when they reap.

When the Lord delivered Zion from bondage,

it seemed like a dream.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter,

on our lips there were songs.

R/ Those who are sowing in tears will sing when they reap.

The heathens themselves said: ‘What marvels

the Lord worked for them!’

What marvels the Lord worked for us!

Indeed we were glad.

R/ Those who are sowing in tears will sing when they reap.

Deliver us, O Lord, from our bondage

as streams in dry land.

Those who are sowing in tears

will sing when they reap.

R/ Those who are sowing in tears will sing when they reap.

They go out, they go out, full of tears,

carrying seed for the sowing:

they come back, they come back, full of song,

carrying their sheaves.

R/ Those who are sowing in tears will sing when they reap.

Gospel Acclamation

Matthew 5:10

Alleluia, alleluia!

Happy those who are persecuted

in the cause of right,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 10:34-39

It is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword

Jesus instructed the Twelve as follows: ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be those of his own household.

‘Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me. Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

——————————

Saint Paulinus of Nola, Bishop

(Liturgical Colour: White)

(Readings for the memorial)

(There is a choice today between the readings for the ferial day (Saturday) and those for the memorial. The ferial readings are recommended unless pastoral reasons suggest otherwise)

First Reading

2 Corinthians 8:9-15

He was rich, but became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty

Remember how generous the Lord Jesus was: he was rich, but he became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty. As I say, I am only making a suggestion; it is only fair to you, since you were the first, a year ago, not only in taking action but even in deciding to. So now finish the work and let the results be worthy, as far as you can afford it, of the decision you made promptly. As long as the readiness is there, a man is acceptable with whatever he can afford; never mind what is beyond his means. This does not mean that to give relief to others you ought to make things difficult for yourselves: it is a question of balancing what happens to be your surplus now against their present need, and one day they may have something to spare that will supply your own need. That is how we strike a balance: as scripture says: The man who gathered much had none too much, the man who gathered little did not go short.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 39(40):2,4,7-10

R/ Here I am, Lord! I come to do your will.

I waited, I waited for the Lord

and he stooped down to me;

he heard my cry.

He put a new song into my mouth,

praise of our God.

R/ Here I am, Lord! I come to do your will.

You do not ask for sacrifice and offerings,

but an open ear.

You do not ask for holocaust and victim.

Instead, here am I.

R/ Here I am, Lord! I come to do your will.

In the scroll of the book it stands written

that I should do your will.

My God, I delight in your law

in the depth of my heart.

R/ Here I am, Lord! I come to do your will.

Your justice I have proclaimed

in the great assembly.

My lips I have not sealed;

you know it, O Lord.

R/ Here I am, Lord! I come to do your will.

Gospel Acclamation

Matthew 5:3

Alleluia, alleluia!

How happy are the poor in spirit:

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Luke 12:32-34

It has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘There is no need to be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom.

‘Sell your possessions and give alms. Get yourselves purses that do not wear out, treasure that will not fail you, in heaven where no thief can reach it and no moth destroy it. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ

———————————

Saturday memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary

(Liturgical Colour: White)

First Reading

Genesis 3:9-15,20

‘The offspring of the woman will crush your head’

After Adam had eaten of the tree the Lord God called to him. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden;’ he replied ‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.’ ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ he asked ‘Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit, and I ate it.’ Then the Lord God asked the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.’

Then the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this,

‘Be accursed beyond all cattle,

all wild beasts.

You shall crawl on your belly and eat dust

every day of your life.

I will make you enemies of each other:

you and the woman,

your offspring and her offspring.

It will crush your head

and you will strike its heel.’

The man named his wife ‘Eve’ because she was the mother of all those who live.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

1 Samuel 2:1,4-8

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

My heart exults in the Lord.

I find my strength in my God;

my mouth laughs at my enemies

as I rejoice in your saving help.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

The bows of the mighty are broken,

but the weak are clothed with strength.

Those with plenty must labour for bread,

but the hungry need work no more.

The childless wife has children now

but the fruitful wife bears no more.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

It is the Lord who gives life and death,

he brings men to the grave and back;

it is the Lord who gives poverty and riches.

He brings men low and raises them on high.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

He lifts up the lowly from the dust,

from the dungheap he raises the poor

to set him in the company of princes

to give him a glorious throne.

For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,

on them he has set the world.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

Gospel Acclamation

cf. Luke 1:28

Alleluia, alleluia!

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!

Blessed art thou among women.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 1:1-16,18-23

The ancestry and conception of Jesus Christ

A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham:

Abraham was the father of Isaac,

Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah, Tamar being their mother,

Perez was the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

Ram was the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

Salmon was the father of Boaz, Rahab being his mother,

Boaz was the father of Obed, Ruth being his mother,

Obed was the father of Jesse;

and Jesse was the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

Solomon was the father of Rehoboam,

Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa,

Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat,

Jehoshaphat the father of Joram,

Joram the father of Azariah,

Azariah was the father of Jotham,

Jotham the father of Ahaz,

Ahaz the father of Hezekiah,

Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh,

Manasseh the father of Amon,

Amon the father of Josiah;

and Josiah was the father of Jechoniah and his brothers.

Then the deportation to Babylon took place.

After the deportation to Babylon:

Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel,

Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,

Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud,

Abiud the father of Eliakim,

Eliakim the father of Azor,

Azor was the father of Zadok,

Zadok the father of Achim,

Achim the father of Eliud,

Eliud was the father of Eleazar,

Eleazar the father of Matthan,

Matthan the father of Jacob;

and Jacob was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary;

of her was born Jesus who is called Christ.

This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph; being a man of honour and wanting to spare her publicity, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’ Now all this took place to fulfil the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son

and they will call him Emmanuel,

a name which means ‘God-is-with-us.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.

[moontheoretist]

Yeah, well Falcon and Winter Soldier made me think. A lot.

Watching The Falcon and The Winter Soldier first episode made me thinking. Like literally a lot about how quick America is to forget the atrocities committed by their heroes as long as their heroes have "America" in their hero name. Ok, so, fighting Thanos, may or may not redeem him in the eyes of the people. "He fought for us after all" and all this shit, and he also had a semi-normal life during the Blip, because nobody cared anymore, but it doesn't change anything. He fucked up the life for every enhanced there was with his Civil War stunt and then when everything was over, he threw everything away, all responsibility for the shit he had done and just went and disappeared into the past, where he very much OOCed himself by sitting on his ass for 70 years doing nothing, while his defining feature is basically that he cannot sit on his ass for 5 seconds. And you know what? I cannot feel differently about it than seeing MCU making Steve's life easier and at the same time undermining Tony's sacrifice. Steve gets his dream life by abandoning the future, and then is praised and his museum is opened and all that jazz, as if to spit in Tony's legacy's face, because MCU couldn't sacrifice Iron Man and let him be a lone hero for once, no, they had to kick off Steve, so everybody would feel sad that Steve is no longer there too. And it is seemingly a tragedy that he isn't there anymore. No, America, it is not tragedy. The tragedy is that he run away from facing the consequences of his actions ONCE AGAIN, and on top of that this time abandoned Bucky to have his peace of mind. It just spells to me that Steve is a highly selfish person who doesn't care about anybody else than himself. You were fooled that he cared about Bucky, but then the moment he had the occasion to run, he kicked Bucky to the curb and said "sayonara, buddy, you gotta live without me now" even though he made the mess of everything around him, because of Bucky in the first place. Do you think Bucky wouldn't feel awful knowing that Steve fucked everything out for him and then chickened out and left him, so he wouldn't have to live with it, but Bucky has to instead?

Honestly there is nothing more grating on my nerves than honoring Captain America, goddammit Steve Rogers after all the bullshit he had done. I hate this goddamn museum. I hate that Rhodey was there to honor him as if he didn't lose Tony just a few months ago and had more important shit to do than honor a guy who fucked up his friends mental health and made his life and work even worse after the Civil War. I hate it so much I wanna scream, and I think Rhodey feels so too, judging by his reaction to the SHIELD being put on display when Sam rejects it (he just makes this face as if he felt conflicted about the legacy of the SHIELD and as much as he felt bad that Sam didn’t accept the mantle, because to Rhodey Sam would probably be better Captain than Steve was, he probably also saw the shield as the tool which was used to hurt and shame his dead best friend), but I appreciate that he is there to supports Sam. I just don't appreciate this American bullshit of licking the butt of Captain America even though it's completely in character for America as a goddamn country, because they cannot be critical of themselves and their heroes for a goddamn five seconds. And don't even make me start on how infuriating seeing Steve Rogers as a hero of WW2 is to a polish person. America and Captain America are hailed as the heroes of the day, while people who fought all this time and didn't have even a choice to sit on their butts doing nothing as long as America did, don't get shit. People of Poland are basically raised with knowledge of WW2, what happened at the time to us, how we were treated (bur ofc we miraculously like to forget how we treated Jews at the time, because polish people are that hypocritical to cry foul when anybody accuses them of antisemitism even though there are historical records to prove it) and how we fought, how our underground army fought with the Nazis and Soviets, but the only thing people outside of us know about this is that “you were liberated by Russia/America, so be grateful”. Thanks America for once again undermining victims of holocaust. Steve may be created by Jewish people, but Captain America is as much an ideal aryan-look-alike superhuman fighting against Nazis, the mockery of the Nazi ideals as he is made to completely spit in the face of the people who suffered, had Nazi Germany conquer them and murder them, because he erases the stories and the struggle of those people and focuses the attention of the viewer on “mighty America saving the day” instead of those people, as they are seen as “victims in need of help”. MCU Steve doesn't even know about the fucking Death Camps and what happened there, because he fell into ice before 1945 when camps were discovered by America.

Also, lol. Bucky is a total brat on his sessions. And it’s funny to see him like this, while fandom was mostly imagining him as the one who would want the therapy, who would behave, most of the time, and Steve was seen as the one who was the bratty one in therapy instead. Yes I am talking about this part of the fandom which knows Steve isn’t an angel and doesn’t excuse his CW bullshit.

Also, why I have the feeling that Bucky picked Yori to be his friend, because 1. His old age reminds him of the past Steve, the sickly one. 2. His stubbornness reminding him of Steve being a goddamn hell of a person, always picking fights and stuff. Like. I saw the interaction, and it was like the first thing I saw, Bucky from Brooklyn stopping his friend from hitting people, which reminded me a lot about how he saved Steve in this alleyway and told him to stop picking fights with people bigger than him.

Bucky Barnes. A guy who tells a woman he wears gloves for “poor circulation” XD Ok, this is goddamn funny, but also sad, because he knows she may get scared of the metal arm or even of the very mention of the prosthetic, because ableism is rampant, and who knows it better than Bucky Barnes, Steve’s buddy?

You know this whole scene about the loan? My family was there. We are so poor that even with steady income no bank wants to give the loans, so I get it. But if I see anybody blaming Sam’s financial situation on Tony or Pepper I will scream and start throwing daggers a’la Loki. The person, or people, who are responsible for this, are those who DIDN’T put ANYTHING in place for the possibility of Blipped people coming back. And Tony WASN’T one of those people, because he already got accustomed to living in the world without all those people. He lost hope, and he wasn’t planning to bring them all back until Steve and the rest shown up and guilt-tripped him into doing something. If he had hope, he would prepare charities and funds for those who were blipped, but he didn’t have the hope Blip will be reversed, so the responsibility lies on the officials who after the Blip was reversed didn’t put into place regulations and funds for all those people who may have various issues due to being Blipped and then coming back. It wouldn’t be really that hard to come out with an idea what to do with the loan regulations for those who were Blipped, like implementing some special exceptions to help those people or something. And ofc instead of helping people who were Blipped with their family issues, America cares more about making a stunt and appoint new Captain America “to protect them”. Who will protect America from America though?

Also, Sam is stubborn. Yes America should do better by the Blipped people and their problems, but we all know how America is, how heartless and uncaring it is to human suffering. Sam here is just stubborn, he wishes to keep something which reminds him of family (which is important ofc) over saving the family he has now, because nostalgia over “good old days” is more important to him than what happens now. Not to mention that he has a faulty belief that him being Falcon changes something about the world around him, and he can get away with getting things which he knows he wouldn’t get if he wasn’t Falcon. He is very similar to Steve in that regard. Stubborn, stuck in his own idea of how world should work and chasing after the past instead of looking into the future. Not to mention that according to his sister, he kinda run away from family issues, Steve’s style, while his sister did everything she could to keep them afloat. Also fans are right. If he asked for help, Rhodey or Pepper would help. You cannot help someone if you don’t know they have issues. People are NOT mind readers. He has to ask for help first to get it.

[children-of-war-blog1]

  A while ago, in English class, we were asked to start thinking about what we were interested in the most and start a blog about it. why i chose this topic in particular was because, Through the Amicitia Interact club, I met two Syrian families, one with four children and one with three. Two of the children I met were very quiet and did not even look up. That was when it hit me, in a matter seconds my life could become just as terrible as theirs. Which then got me thinking, the younger generation hasn’t done anything to do deserve this; none of the war was their fault. So I to started my blog about how badly war effects children,

 because no child should be part of war. Ever.  

  Most accounts of war have attempted to portray the military competition with the civilians on the sidelines. But while the majority of civilians are not direct participants, many are direct victims. In fact, the overwhelming majority of victims are civilians. A much truer depiction of war is given by viewing the conditions that civilian war victims are in, especially the children, because in most parts of the world, the most vulnerable groups are the hardest hit. War tears apart economies, destroys land and ruins relations between countries. But the most devastating effects of war, are its effects on children that are long lasting and horrific.

  Ed Cairns of the University of Ulster found that being separated from a parent was one of the most stressful experiences for war-effected children. Cairns states that, because young children rely on their families for protection and coping, a torn apart family can leave a child feeling afraid and hopeless. The loss of a parent can result in fewer resources like food, water and shelter, which prevents a child from growing up in a safe and healthy environment. Orphaned kids must work to feed themselves, meaning they do not have the opportunity to obtain an education and  have a playful childhood.

  According to Fuaad Mohammed Freh," War and terrorism have emotionally and psychologically affected generations of children and young people for the rest of their lives. A study has estimated that one out of three children who live in war zones could be vulnerable to develop some form of PTSD, psychopathological symptoms, and lower psychosocial functioning levels during their life time, which points to the volatile and violent environment they are living in.”

 “ Among those children exposed to war-related stressors for a longer period, it is generally estimated that the prevalence of post-traumatic stress symptoms varies from 10 to 90%, manifested by anxiety disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric morbidities including depression, and disruptive behaviors."

  A real example of this is a refugee story I came across online about a girl named Nour. When she and her family fled their village in Syria, they didn’t know they would be amongst the 50,000 Syrian refugees who now call an 8m x 4m tent ‘home’. But they did know they had to leave, fast. Travelling by foot, at night, Rana, Nour's mother, Nour and Hiba (then a baby) made their way across the hills. But those hills were home to a militia group, who kidnapped the family. Held captive for 5 days, they were beaten, cut, starved and separated from each other. Rana sobbed as she shared how she tried to stay strong for her girls. Released, through negotiation by extended family members, they again set off on their journey from Syria. And again, they were kidnapped. By the age of six, Nour had lived through war, fled from her home in the middle of the night and been kidnapped by an armed militia group twice.

  Nour is traumatized; she sat silently and rarely registered any emotion on her face. "She was such a kind, friendly girl, but I watched her go crazy. She was always alone. She wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t eat. She’d wake the neighbors with her nightmares. It was like the fear stopped her mind. She was too shocked to have a personality anymore." said Rana, Nour’s mum.

  The physical, and emotional violence to which these children are exposed shatters their world. War undermines the very foundations of children’s lives, destroying their homes, splintering their communities and breaking down their trust in adults. Therefore, international aid must include emotional assistance to the young victims of war along with the food and medicine it currently provides, or else there will continue to be a large number of aggressive and traumatized children with nowhere to turn.

   I think that the most devastating part though, is that war is not a new phenomenon and children have always been effected by war. But instead of learning from our past mistakes of letting children get effected, we choose to repeat the exact same mistakes. Take the Holocaust for example, this manifestation of World War Two, destroyed the lives of millions of children, and nowadays the exact same thing is happening all over the world. Everyone mourned over the loss of the millions of children that died in the Holocaust, but when war started in Syria, for example, millions of children got negatively affected all over again. In fact according to the UNICEF, 14 million children in Syria and Iraq are now suffering from the escalating conflict sweeping the region. These 14 million children were the future of their countries. And without any help, who knows what the future of their countries will even be like?

  Even if we cannot convince adults to not use force to resolve differences, it must be hoped that we can at least protect our children from the scourge of this behavior. If we cannot do this then not only the combatants, but also the whole international community, has surrendered the last glimpse of hope for a future generation that can live, in peace.

[crookedmediatranscripts]

Pod Save the World

2017.09.20

Crisis in Burma

“Tommy talks with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof and Nexus Fund Executive Director Sally Smith about the ongoing ethnic cleansing happening right now in Burma.”

[MUSIC]

0:00:01 

Tommy Vietor: Pod Save the World is brought to you by The Great Courses Plus.

Jon Lovett: The Great Courses Plus. You know, Tommy, we made a joke about The Great Courses when we were talking about the fact that Donald Trump is basically in school at UNGA learning about foreign policy.

TV: UNGA is his Great Courses Plus, Ruining the World. There are invaluable lessons, though, to be learned from our past, Jon. That’s why it’s so important to keep learning. And that’s what The Great Courses Plus is all about. They work with award winning professors and experts and make them available to all of us in their video lecture series. Get unlimited access to learn about anything that interests you in politics, world history, psychology. You could even learn a new language and you could stream or download the videos to watch any time you want, from wherever you are.

JL: Look, you’ve signed up for Tommy Vietor to help you understand foreign policy, so we know where your standards are.

[Laughter]

JL: Think about how much higher they could be with The Great Courses Plus.

TV: That’s why everyone should check out The Great Courses Plus series on history’s greatest military blunders and the lessons they teach. We’re maybe walking into another one in North Korea. We can highlight military successes, but there’s so much to be learned from studying our failures.

JL: Life lesson.

TV: That’s why you should check this out.

JL: Life lesson.

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0:01:31

[MUSIC]

0:01:33

TV: Welcome back to Pod Save the World. Today’s episode is about the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Some people call it Burma, the names are gonna be used interchangeably throughout the interview. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group that practices Islam in the Rakhine State, which is one of Myanmar’s poorer states. They have their own languages, they have their own cultural practices, and unfortunately are the victims of some of the worst discrimination you can imagine. This discrimination comes in a number of ways. The Rohingya are attacked and oppressed by the Buddhist majority for being Muslim, based on their religion. They’re also being falsely accused of not being from Myanmar. It is a truly vicious version of the familiar nationalism that’s turned deadly in so many different countries. Samantha Power, who was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations and wrote a Pulitzer prize winning book about mass atrocities and genocide, told me that this was a degree of prejudice that she had rarely seen in all of her travels. In recent weeks, this situation has exploded. And to be honest, I didn’t have any idea how bad it had gotten until I started researching for this episode. My experience working on Myanmar had been very different. I visited the country with President Obama back in 2012. He was the first sitting U.S. President ever to visit the country. I was there when he met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was considered by many to be the Nelson Mandela of Myanmar. We were at her lakeside villa where she had been kept under house arrest for many years. The day he met with activists, organizers, dissidents, he gave a speech at the University of Yangon, it felt like the opening of a new era for the country and the people of Myanmar and it truly felt historic. It still may turn out to be a historic opening and visit. But the situation today is far from hopeful. It is in fact horrific. The military is driving hundreds of thousands of innocent Rohingya men, women, and children from their homes. They’re burning down their villages, they’re indiscriminately slaughtering them along the way. It is undoubtedly ethnic cleansing and some are calling this a modern genocide. So today’s episode is based on interviews with two experts who helped me understand the situation on the ground. We recorded the interviews separately, but edited them together to give you multiple perspectives on the situation. You’ll hear from Sally Smith, the executive director of the Nexus Fund which is a non-profit organization Sally founded to prevent mass atrocities, and Nick Kristoff, a Pulitzer prize winning for the New York Times who has spent his career documenting human rights abuses and injustices around the world. It’s not easy to read or hear about some of the things that are happening. It’s not easy to hear this episode. But the violence is happening right now. And there’s still time and there’s still a chance for the international community to put pressure on the government of Myanmar and force them to stop. And there’s time to raise money to get aid to people who are suffering and who desperately need our help. For more information about the situation and how to help, go to the Pod Save The World Facebook page or go to the Nexus Fund website at www.nexus-fund.org to donate. Thanks for listening, we start with Nick Kristoff.

0:04:23

TV:  I’m familiar with the Rohingya, they are a Muslim minority group who lives in Burma, or Myanmar. I was aware of the history of discrimination they faced and some of the awful treatment. But it wasn’t until I read a piece you wrote, a couple weeks ago now, about just how bad things have gotten, that I truly understood the degree to which they were suffering and being driven out of their country. Can you talk a little bit about what has happened recently that has gotten this crisis to such an acute level?

Nick Kristof: Sure. So the Rohingya have been persecuted for years and years and years. And disenfranchised and this gradually radicalized them. And so an armed group appeared among them with a somewhat crazy idea that they were going to find back against the Myanmar government. And so a year ago, half-heartedly, and then in August, more vigorously, they attacked Myanmar government institutions – police stations and an army base. And it wasn’t effective at all as an insurrection. But it did lead Myanmar to mount a brutal scorched-earth attack on ordinary Rohingya civilians. And the upshot is that 400 thousand of the Rohingya have been driven out of Myanmar across the border into Bangladesh. Countless homes have been burned and villages destroyed. The, I believe, that the Myanmar government itself said that 60% of the Rohingya villages have now been abandoned. And many, many, many people – we don’t have a good count – have been killed in the scorched-earth operation. And women raped, accounts of infants being flung into lakes to drown, this kind of thing. It is about as brutal as an ethnic cleansing can get.

TV: When you read about these atrocities, the military beheading 6-year-old children, it is -- I think for a lot of people -- incomprehensible. The idea that a military force, human beings, could do this to another. But, I mean, how do you think this happens? Like why do you think that they go to these extreme lengths to terrorize a group of children?

Sally Smith: Because they- there’s a few reasons. They don’t see them as human. You know, in every mass atrocity situation you have an escalating level of dehumanization by the perpetrators. And so they start using the words like, they’re cockroaches and rats. We’ve seen this in the holocaust, in Darfur, in Rwanda. And, when you start doing that and you start saying that and you start thinking about people that way, it means that it’s time to exterminate them and that, again, you’re doing a good thing by killing them. Now to kill a child, obviously, it is incomprehensible, but it does happen because they don’t want them to grow up into the Muslims that they fear today. So, you know, this is nothing new in human history. It’s not like, let’s be so shocked. It’s horrendous, but I think that what happens when you’re shocked or it seems incomprehensible is that you become paralyzed and then you don’t take action. And right now, what they need more than anything is for the rest of the world to take action.

TV: Do you think this was the Myanmar government or military waiting for an opportunity to take actions against a minority group they have long despised? Or was this actually in response to this insurgent activity?

NK: I think that, to some degree, it probably was in response to this insurgency which, of course, they had helped create with their earlier repression. There have been these periods of brutal repression of the Rohingya and then, then there tends to be an outcry, the government tends to back off a little bit, allow a little more outside humanitarian help. And then there is some other episode that sets them off. But, you know, one of the really troubling things, I think is the way democratic politics have affected this. And -- obviously, I’m in favor of democracy, obviously you are -- but one of the- the challenges in Myanmar has been that as it has become more democratic, one of the rallying cries to win votes has been, “How much do we hate Muslim minorities?” And, “How much do we want to drive out the Rohingya?” So, democracy in effect has created, not a break in this kind of repression, but rather perhaps a spur to it.

TV: Do you think it was a mistake by the Obama administration to restore relations with Burma too soon? And relatedly, do you think the world made a mistake by putting too much hope on one person, Aung San Suu Kyi?

NK: So, I think that engagement is almost always worth it, and so I think that the Obama administration was right to engage with Burma, to make those trips. I do think that the Obama administration then got into the position where it was regarding Myanmar as one of its great successes at a time when it was under a lot of criticism for problems in the Middle East and elsewhere. And that, perhaps that made it too reluctant to speak out about what was going on with the Rohingya. And in any case, I think it- I don’t fault the engagement with Myanmar. I do fault, I mean the administration, they did speak out but I think they could’ve spoke out more forcefully and made it clear to the government that if, if they did the kind of things they’re doing now, that there would be a real price to pay for that. And indeed, yeah, I think we were all a little bit too starry eyed about Aung San Suu Kyi. She was an amazing fighter against the military regime and we all celebrated when she won the Nobel Peace prize. We were inspired by her words. But, you know, it turned out that she meant to apply those words and those aspirations largely to the Buddhist ethnic majority in Myanmar and does not seem to think that those words apply equally to the Rohingya minority.

TV: Yeah. Nearly 400 thousand people, as you reported, have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh in just a few weeks. That’s like moving the city of Cleveland or the city of New Orleans to another country in a matter of days. Is there any sense that Bangladesh is ready to support that massive flow of refugees?

NK: So, historically Bangladesh has done a pretty poor job of accommodating the Rohingya and there, there have been huge flows of Rohingya in the past and Bangladesh has put them up in camps, offered them few education or job opportunities. In general, I’d say, has not handled them very well. One thing that is a little bit different is that today the expulsion of the Rohingya, the repression of the Rohingya, has attracted a huge amount of attention in the Muslim world all around the globe, including the Arab countries. And so, I think that there may be somewhat greater flows of money to help Rohingya refugees than there have been in the past. I think that Bangladesh, there may be more attention and publicity in ways that will lead Bangladesh to do a better job. But, unfortunately the other side of the coin is that there is also indication that there will be more foreign fighters, perhaps flowing into Burma, to join these rebel forces in fighting the Myanmar government. And, you know, this is just a prescription for disaster. If there is a civil war there, in Rakhine State, it won’t be good for the government. It also certainly won’t be good for those Rohingya who were left behind there.

TV: Sally, what can people listening do to help?

SS: People really need to get there, and get there now, to help Bangladesh. Because they don’t really have the resources and the infrastructure to handle this amount of people. I mean this is a biblical amount of people that are flooding into this country. And from the estimates of my- our partners, Fortify Rights, who are on the ground and at the border -- they say it could be upwards of a million within a week. They want them to leave, right. They’re doing this on purpose. And they’re shooting at men, women, and children – civilians. Civilians. Shooting at them as they flee into Bangladesh as well. So killing as many as they can, getting rid of the rest.

0:13:05

MUSIC

0:13:11

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[Laughter]

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0:14:33

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JL: Is there a Vietor option?

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0:16:14

[MUSIC]

0:16:18

TV: How concerned are counter-terrorism experts you talked to that the actions of the Myanmar government and military are gonna set the stage for ISIS to come in and really radicalize a generation of Rohingya who are being treated in the worst possible way by their government?

NK: So, I mean, what we don’t know about the Rohingya and Rakhine State could fill volumes. I mean, it’s really- this isn’t an area where we know a lot. It’s been very difficult to get in there and travel around. I managed to make two trips into Rakhine State, but I couldn’t get to large swaths of it, especially in the northern part. And you hear a lot about ISIS and Al Qaeda but I do think that in the past it’s mostly been talk. And in general, I’d say that people have responded to their desperation more by paying human smugglers and trying to leave to go to Thailand or Malaysia to try to start over, rather than to try to fight back. You have the sense that in the last year or so, that is changing and what will really change it is if you end up getting a pipeline of money and guns into Rakhine State. And there are some indications that is now happening. And people are just so outraged, you know, I mean they- they’ve seen family members raped, they’ve seen children drowned, they’ve seen these villages burned. And the refugees on the Bangladesh side, they can look across and they see smoke filling the skies as their- their villages -- and these huts all have thatch roofs so they burn very easily -- they see these fires from their own villages and of course they’re furious about it. And a lot of them wanna fight.

TV: It’s probably not great to speculate if ISIS might come in. What we do know is that the worst things imaginable happen to people in the most desperate situations and you see human trafficking and all sorts of assorted horrors come along with situations like this. Are there aid organizations that are providing relief or support to refugees that you think Americans listening should support today to try to do something?

NK: Yeah, so there are a lot of aid groups that are on the Bangladesh side of the border -- International Rescue Committee, the- you know the whole lot of them are there. And they- and because the issue is getting a lot of attention so they’re active there. The real problem is for the 600 thousand or so Rohingya who are left on the Myanmar side. And they’re not getting help. There are a little more than 100 thousand who are in effectively in a concentration camp in the city of Sittwe. They’re locked up there. They’re not allowed to go to schools, they’re not allowed to get easy medical care. On my- on one of my visits there was a woman who was in obstructed labor, she desperately needed a C-section to save her life and the life of her baby and, you know, she could not get it. The only medical support she had was from a pharmacist and, so those folks- they get a little bit of help from- those folks who are in this concentration camp, they do get some visits by some aid groups, including International Rescue Committee. But outside of Sittwe, and especially in the northern part of Rakhine State, aid groups just are not allowed to move. There is no humanitarian access whatsoever. And I think that has to be one of, you know, one of the first things we have to do -- to pressure the Myanmar government to provide that access. And so- and I’d say that in general when people ask me today, what they can do to help. I would put less emphasis on the need for provision of services and more for advocacy because- there are groups like Fortify Rights that are focused on advocacy for the Rohingya because what we need is to get that access by aid groups to get into rural parts of Rakhine State so they can begin to provide services.

TV: Sally, what is your nonprofit, the Nexus Fund, do?

SS: So the Nexus Fund is dedicated to preventing mass atrocities around the world, which includes genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity. And our model is actually based on, you know I came out of the Obama campaign ’07, ‘08 and I really believe in empowering locals. And I think what we’ve been doing in aid is going into other countries and telling them- basically putting a project on top of their lives and saying, you know “here’s a bunch of money for this project that we’ve decided because I went to Brown and I got my masters, you know, and I’ve read about you.” And you know what I figured out over the last 10 years or so is that, that doesn’t work, right? And I think the aid community is actually coming to that conclusion as well. So our model is really about going in, finding the locals, talking to them about who is addressing the risk factors for genocide and mass atrocities in their communities. And then supporting them. So whatever that means. Whether that’s through, you know, funding resources or training or connecting them with other people in the world who have already been through what they’re going through, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. For anything that I care about, I have four words that I always keep in mind: knowledge, social, time, and money. So knowledge is, you’ve done it. Pat yourself on the back. You’re listening to this podcast. You’re learning about the Rohingya. Social is share with people, you know like, in person when you see people, bring it up on your Facebook and Twitter. Like, please talk about it. The more it actually gets talked about, that is important. And then time and money is, you know I would say normally it’s like volunteer time but we’re not gonna fly everybody over to Burma. What we really need is your donations. And I know Save the Children could use your donations, so I’m not just here to pitch my own organization. But this is- what’s crazy to me, Tommy, is this is an orphan cause. There are zero donors working on this cause. At a full time.  There are donors that give a little bit here and there. The pie isn’t big enough. You know there’s not enough money to go around. People’s resources are stretch really thin. And I’m not saying that to say that, you know, everybody’s just swimming in a pool of their money. There’s a desperate need and we really need the pie to get bigger, so one of the things I’m really trying to do is bring more funders into this field and into this issue in particular. Cause I think there’s an assumption that people are funding efforts that need to be done and helping, and they’re not.

0:22:57

[MUSIC]

0:23:03

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JL: TommyJohn.

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JL: Yeah.

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[Laughter]

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0:24:59

[MUSIC]

0:25:02

TV: So, the UN general assembly is this week. Aung San Suu Kyi was supposed to come to New York but now is not gonna come. Do you have any sense that there will be efforts to take some sort of meaningful collective action to either highlight the treatment of the Rohingya or put pressure on the government to, you know, allow access like you said or stop with this horrific ethnic cleansing?

NK: So, there certainly will be more attention on it, and the Muslim world is very concerned about this. It’s getting a lot of attention in the Arab press and Indonesia and so on. I don’t think that there is likely to be effective UN action. Partly because in the Security Council, China is going to protect Burma. I think China to some degree sees this and an opportunity to peel Burma away from U.S. orbit and into its own orbit. And there’s been some competition over the last 20 years between China and the U.S. over who will be Burma’s protector down the road. In the past the U.S. had been winning that and this may be an opportunity for China to make strides, in the most cynical way. So I don’t think the Security Council has a very tool box given China’s resistance. And the UN agencies haven’t been terribly effective. Partly because they tend to work in a fairly collegial way and they’re…not good -- except for the High Commissioner on Human Rights-- about standing up and using the bully pulpit.

TV: You know you sort of have a choice, you can look away say there’s nothing we can do and throw your hands up. Or you can decide to raise awareness, to call members of Congress, to support aid groups doing great work, and support journalists who are covering these stories. So, thank you for what you’re doing to bring the world’s attention here.

NK: Yeah, let me mention a couple of things that are- you know- you mentioned Congress, so there is a Senate resolution that is in the works, sponsored by Senator Durbin and Senator McCain that indeed does call on Aung San Suu Kyi to try to live up to her values on the Rohingya. It’s a way of applying a little bit more pressure. Similar pressure led Senator McCain to take a measure out of a bill and thus make it more difficult for weapons to flow to the Myanmar military, which I think is a useful signal to them. And I’m glad you mentioned journalists because, you know, this- this to me is just a- a great example of why we need people out in the field including, maybe above all, photographers and video journalists documenting this kind of thing because once it’s projected into our living rooms and on to our laptops, it’s really hard to turn away. And I think it’s those images that are gonna galvanize us and, I hope, lead to some kind of improvement in the situation.

TV: Sally, how can people encourage the United States government to put pressure on Myanmar to stop this ethnic cleansing?

SS: International political pressure is…so paramount right now. So please do pick up the phone and call your member of Congress and tell them- just say, “I care about the issue of the Rohingya, what are you gonna do about it?”

0:28:17

[MUSIC]

0:28:19

TV: Thank you for listening to Pod Save the World and for caring about this issue. Again, if you want more information, go to the Pod Save the World Facebook page. We’ll have links for all the places you can donate and all the groups that are helping. You can also go to the Nexus Fund website at www.nexus-fund.org to donate and to sign up to help out Sally’s cause. So, thank you again.

[MUSIC]

0:29:02

[umichenginabroad]

Cambodia - My Favorite Travel Experience

This weekend I had the most incredible opportunity to travel to Cambodia. Out of all the places I’ve been in Southeast Asia, and probably all over the world, Cambodia has been my favorite. From the four short days I was there, I quickly realized how kind every person I met there was. This post is long and heavy at times, but I feel that it’s important to share what I experienced and learned. 

We arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital, early Thursday morning after sleeping on the floor of the Kuala Lumpur airport the night before. This was to save on plane tickets, like typical broke college students. In Phnom Penh, the first activity we planned was to visit the Killing Fields. To explain, in the year 1975 the Khmer Rouge, an agrarian communist group headed by Pol Pot, took control of Cambodia and began a genocide on the Khmer people. They targeted the educated, those living in cities, foreigners, and the minority Christians and Buddhists. The people in metropolitan areas were forced to the countryside to work in labor camps, under extreme conditions with little food or water. Many people that weren’t taken to the work camps were sent to the Killing Fields to be executed. This went on for 4 years until 1979, and by then an estimated three million people or 25% of the Cambodian population had been killed. The pictures below are from the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, one place where prisoners were sent to be killed by Pol Pot’s military forces. 

When we visited the Killing Fields, it could immediately be felt how solemn the atmosphere was. There are no guided tours, but rather audio tours with headsets which better suited the quiet environment. At the middle of the field sits a large Buddhist stupa to commemorate the people who lost their lives in these fields. 

As we made our way through the tour, we learned how mass graves in this field had been uncovered after Pol Pot’s regime had ended. I can’t imagine the horror of discovering what had happened in these fields, which before the genocide had been a peaceful apple orchard and Chinese graveyard. 

The Khmer Rouge often used extremely brutal and terrible means to kill the prisoners, including beheading, and killing with axes, shovels, and crowbars because bullets were too expensive. 

I had seen the tree where infants were murdered on a travel show on TV, but seeing it in person was an extremely hard moment for me. I had a tough time holding back tears. 

The hardest part of this tour was when I arrived to the part where they described that no one was spared, not women, not children, and not babies. The reason for this was to get rid of all the children, because they feared they would grow up and come back to avenge their parent’s death. Infants were murdered by beating them against this tree, and they were buried in mass graves as well.

The audio tour concluded at the stupa again. Inside holds many of the skulls that were unearthed in the 80s at the Killing Fields. These were studied for cause of death and they tried to piece together who they had belonged to. There are still many thousand that remain un-excavated. Those are being left where they lay to keep their peace, although every year more bones and bone fragments are unearthed due to heavy rain storms. Maintenance on the grounds includes picking up bone fragments and clothing from those victims forty years ago. We saw a large bone in a path of dirt, possibly a femur, that had been pushed to the surface. 

The hardest part of all of this is how very recently this had all occurred. We said never again after the Holocaust, but then thirty years later another atrocity happened. I don’t know if this was confirmation bias, but I distinctly recognized a lack of older Cambodian people as we traveled around the country. We couldn’t stop thinking about how our parents had been alive during this, and wondered why the rest of the world didn’t realize what was happening in this small Asian country. The wounds of this genocide are so deep and so recent, but I was shocked how amazingly kind the people were to us. 

One example of this when we stopped to get smoothies after visiting the fields. and the young lady serving us brought over a paper with some words written. We were confused at first, but realized she wanted our help spelling English words - she said she was practicing her English. I was happy to see the Cambodian people’s willingness to welcome visitors to learn about their history, and to hopefully prevent this from happening to anyone ever again. 

I realize this is a lot and very heavy, but I want people to know how deeply important learning as well as traveling is. I don’t think there could be any way for me to understand these events as well as I did going there and learning from the people that it actually happened to. 

After spending the day in Phnom Penh, we took the overnight bus to Siem Reap, a city in the North of Cambodia. We hopped off the bus at 5am and immediately took a tuk tuk (a small carriage pulled by a motorcycle, the Cambodian version of a taxi) to Angkor Wat. 

We had the incredible experience of watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat. 

Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world, and was constructed in the early 12th century as a Hindu temple, but was later converted to a Buddhist temple when Buddhism took over Cambodia. Unfortunately, many of the ancient Buddha statues had their heads cut off and sold to Thailand by Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge era. 

Inside the top of the main temple, I’m wearing a sweatshirt and leggings because in temples women are not allowed to wear tank tops or shorts. Also, it was a little chilly at 5am before sunrise. 

There are three main areas in the complex, all are great examples of Khmer architecture. These pictures are from the main temple, but there are also smaller temples down the road which are great examples of ancient monument restoration. Some of the temples have been restored to allow people to see the original architecture, but some have been left to grow into the forest to show the age and wonder of the complex. 

Almost every surface is limestone carved with religious murals and stories. 

Devin and Emma (mechanical and chemical engineering students) have a Michigan moment

Where Tomb Raider was filmed, can you picture Lara Croft here?

Andrea (a Michigan industrial and operations engineer) and I had a monk at Angkor Wat give us a water blessing, it’s said that we will be blessed until the bracelets he tied around our wrists fall off. 

The next day we visited the Floating Village Kompong Khleang. The floating village is about an hour outside of Siem Reap, and the people here have built their houses up on stilts to accommodate the change of water levels of the Tonle Sap lake. 

A young boy who seems very strong for his age helps dock the boat we will ride on. 

There seemed to be a lot of children working, I told myself that it was a Saturday so maybe it was his day off from school, but this is probably not the case. Our guide told us there was one primary and one secondary school in the village, but for 900 families that does not seem like a lot of schools. He also said 95% of the families are Buddhist or Hindu, which seems to be close to the general demographic of Cambodia. 

The flood season is in the fall, but now is the dry season, so the houses were all up on stilts and you could walk the streets. 

Fishing is one of the major occupations in the villages, our guide said they catch tiny shrimp in the river and lake, cook them, then lay them to dry on the dusty street. Our guide was very helpful in answering questions, he said that many families either get their water from wells or from the river - which was troubling because the river is also where all the waste is dumped. Electricity is run only at night from a generator in the temple. 

Shrimp cooking over a fire on the side of the street.

To conclude the day, we took a boat ride through the mangrove trees surrounding the large freshwater lake that the city sits beside. Overall, it felt very strange to go through someone’s town and take photos, but I thought that overall it was positive because they receive money from the tourism and donations and we get to learn more about their life and their history. 

I noticed all the boat drivers were women, some even had their babies on their lap. I thought this was good that they were able to make money for their families while staying close to their young children. 

One thing that still troubles me is the amount of children we saw working, from the little boys running our boat, to the little girl that helped her mother cook my food at a roadside cart coming home from a late night out. I’m stuck between wanting to help the extreme poverty I witnessed in the floating village, and not wanting to change the way these people have lived for many years. 

We concluded the evening by watching the sunrise over the huge lake, it was definitely an amazing view and a great way to reflect on what we had experienced and learned in the past few days. 

Overall, I’m so grateful to be able to have this experience. Truly every person I met was so kind and willing to accommodate foreigners who had come to learn about the history of Cambodia, both the beautiful masterpiece that is Angkor Wat and the more troubling lesson of the genocide.

When I was in middle school, we read a book about a refugee family who came to America from Cambodia called Children of the River. I found myself thinking about this experience a lot while I was in Cambodia. It had been great that we read about refugees, but I wish that children were taught more about Cambodia’s history and why we need to help the refugees of the world whose own country has turned against them and left them no where to go. 

When I had read this book as a child, Cambodia and even Southeast Asia seemed so far away, and I still can’t believe I’m actually here now. Going abroad has given me a chance to see things I’ve only read about as distant destinations. I realized in Cambodia that I had never seen a rat (that isn’t someone’s pet) until I came to Southeast Asia, I’m so lucky to have grown up where I did and also be able to experience the world. 

- Reilly Wong

Computer Science Engineering

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 

[gracewithducks]

#blessed (Matthew 5:1-12)

I am so glad to be back with you all today. I’ve been feeling a bit of whiplash, though, making the transition from a week with my family in the happiest place on earth… back into the real world. We spent several days rubbing shoulders with families from all over the world, where we heard many languages spoken, where my girls lit up with wonder to see that It’s a Small World after all; we spend a week in a place where – for all the tantrums, and yes, there were plenty – a place where nevertheless we were surrounded by people who smiled at us, who helped us, who went out of their way for us, who treated my children like royalty, who did everything they could not just for our family but for every family there.

 And then we came home… we flew home on Inauguration Day, and it quickly became apparent that things are changing and changing quickly. I don’t know about you, but my head has been spinning – trying to keep up with “alternative facts” and executive orders and gag orders, hearing the voices of neighbors fearing for their immigration status, families terrified of losing their health care, couples wondering if their marriages could be overturned, not to mention the sheer number of people who do not see the painful irony of closing the doors to refugees on the very same day of a “pro-life” march and remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.

 And what hurts my heart the most are the number of our Christian brothers and sisters who don’t see it. I keep hearing in my head the echo of Paul’s words to the Galatians: I am astonished that you are turning away from the truth of the gospel, that you are being fooled by a false gospel – because that’s what we’re seeing. So many pastors, so many of our neighbors and colleagues and friends, are falling in line behind and preaching a gospel where might makes right, where God’s favor can be earned, where riches are a sign of God’s blessings, and only the strongest survive.

 That’s not the gospel I know; that’s not the gospel Jesus preached… that kind of gospel is really only “good news” to the rich and the powerful – and a gospel that is only good news to the rich and the powerful is one Jesus wouldn’t recognize at all.

 That is, I think, why these familiar words from the Sermon on the Mount, why they are so profound and radical indeed. What’s happening here is, it’s very early in Jesus’ ministry. He’s been tempted in the wilderness, he’s just called his disciples, and then he went on a tour through the area of Galilee. And this area, it wasn’t the richest area. It was an area populated by fishermen and their families, by farmers and their families, by working people just trying to take care of one another. Jesus went through the area teaching, and giving good news, and healing many who were ill. And the news began to spread, that there was a new young teacher in Galilee who spoke good news and offered healing, so that people started to travel from all around to find him, bringing their sons, their daughters, their parents, their neighbors, themselves, looking for relief from pain and possessions and all the suffering that they faced. And Jesus welcomed those desperate people, and he healed them, and this large crowd of those looking for help and those who’d found it, this large crowd started to follow him.

 And Matthew says, when Jesus looked at the crowd, that’s when he went up on the hillside and he started to teach. As he looked out at the crowd of local families and foreigners, the crowd of hurting and sick and poor and grieving people, the crowds of people hungry for bread and hungry for hope – Jesus started to speak. And he said,

 “Blessed are the poor in spirit…

“Blessed are those who mourn...

“Blessed are the meek…

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

“Blessed are the merciful…

“Blessed are the pure in heart…

“Blessed are the peacemakers…

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, lie and say all kinds of evil about you, because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward.”

 Those crowds, just like the crowds today, had long been told that they didn’t matter, that they weren’t important. They’d been taught that God’s blessings came in the form of money and power – and because they had neither, they didn’t matter to God, and they didn’t matter to the world, either. They were nobodies. They were expendable, bit players in the corner of the global stage, and while the high priests and the caesars were off shaping the world, they were forgotten; no one saw them, no one heard them, no one even knew their names.

 Jesus looked out at those crowds – and he didn’t see nobodies. He didn’t say, if you just worked harder, if you just tried harder, if you had enough faith and did all the right things, then God would bless you, because God helps those who help themselves.

 No, Jesus said:

 You are already blessed.

 You are already blessed, when you can’t help yourself. You are already blessed, when you can barely get out of bed in the morning. When your heart is breaking, when you’re alone and afraid, when you’re hungry for justice, when you’re just plain hungry – God has not forgotten you. You are not abandoned; you are not forsaken. God doesn’t look at you and see a nobody; God looks at you and says, You, I love; You, I know; You are mine, and you are blessed.

 Is anybody on Twitter at all? Basically, Twitter is one a way that, if you have something you want to say, you can “tweet” it – you put it out on Twitter and send it into the universe. And there is this thing on twitter called a hash tag. What you can do with a hash tag is put a tag, a label, on your post, so that everyone who’s interested in a certain topic can find what people are saying about them. People hashtag politicians, they hashtag disasters and popular TV shows, they hashtag #MissUniverse and #WomensMarch and #love and #cute and #SuperBowl.

 And this week, I decided to see what people were saying that they chose to label with the hashtag #blessed.

 Let me give you just a sample of what I found:

 The very first thing that popped up was this – someone posted, “Got pulled over doing 42 in a 30. Told the police officer I’m in a rush [because] Popeyes closes at 9:30 and he let me go. He a real one #blessed”

 Many of the posts were similarly – we might say, trivial? Like the college student who tweeted, “I just realized I only have one class tomorrow… at noon #blessed”

 Or the food fan who posted, with a picture, “There’s a twenty-layer rainbow crepe in Queens #blessed.”

 One young lady gushed, with an ad for a clothing store attached, “I have this sweater in pink and its my favorite thing and now they’re 60% off (hearts for eyes emoticon) (crying my eyes out emoticon) #blessed”

 How about the – I hope sarcastic? – post: “I have lived to see the era of Artisanal Pop-Tarts #blessed.”

 Ah, yes, I remember well when Jesus said, “Blessed are you when your artificial breakfast pastries are slightly less artificial, for yours is the breakfast of heaven.”

 There are, of course, plenty of #blessed posts about boyfriends and girlfriends and spouses and children; I found a surprising number celebrating the blessing of snowdays and school delays. There were the obligatory folks bragging about days on the beach or trips-of-a-lifetime, and others giving thanks for new jobs or promotions or raises. But there were also many about make-up and mac and cheese and new cars and cups of coffee… And it really, really amazed me to discover that, at this time of year, more than half of the #blessed posts have to do with offers to play college football. I lost track of how many times I read “I am committed to play at” or “Proud to have an offer from” (insert university name here) #blessed.

 Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to be said for celebrating the good things in our live, the big ones and the small. There’s something healthy about celebrating hard work paying off with good grades or scholarship offers; there’s something healthy about celebrating friendships and relationships; and there’s something healthy about being thankful for the little things, for favorite socks and a good cup of coffee. I get that.

 But I just can’t help but think that, when Jesus said, “Blessed” – that’s not what he meant. Could you even imagine what those tweets would look like?

 They say God won’t give me more than I can handle, but I don’t even know where God is any more #blessed

My mother just died; I am heartbroken and don’t know how I’m going to live the rest of my life without her #blessed

Got yelled at at work again today; I know it’s about them not me, but I still cried in the bathroom #blessed

I am so hungry, my check doesn’t come in until next Friday, feeding my kids ketchup sandwiches while my stomach rumbles again tonight #blessed

Tried to make peace at family dinner but plates were still broken, hurtful words were yelled, and I ended up alone again #blessed

Going to lose my job because I told the truth #blessed

I am so lonely #blessed

I can’t get out of bed today #blessed

Crying so hard, it’s hard to breathe #blessed

 But that’s what Jesus says: you’re blessed when you’re mourning, when you’re feeling weak, when you’re hungry for justice, when you’re thirsty for truth, when you can’t make ends meet, when you’re good to those who don’t deserve it, when you’re trying to make peace, when you’re lied about, when you’re losing the fight, when you’re feeling alone… when you’re feeling cursed, that’s when you’re blessed.

 Which begs the question: What does “blessed” mean? – does it mean happy? Lucky? Privileged? Fortunate? Favored?

 It can’t be the same as our usual understanding, where being #blessed has to do with escaping speeding tickets and catching footballs and eating desserts. Jesus never says happy are the rich, happy are the popular, happy are the powerful and the comfortable… He says, happy, blessed are the mournful, the poor in spirit, the hungry, the peacemakers and the meek.

 And there are lots of theories about what Jesus means when he says that, but I think what he meant was – as he looked out at that crowd that day, the crowd of people who’d been forsaken and overlooked and ignored all their lives, he said: you, and you, and you are blessed. I see you; God sees you. You are blessed, right in the middle of your mess – not because everything is easy, but because it’s real, and it’s in the real stuff of living that God meets us. You are blessed, because it’s in the real mess of life that Christ chooses to be. God didn’t send a king, an emperor, or a president to save us; God sent a child, born to two poor parents, born in a barn, raised in a modest home, taught to work for a living – God came as someone who knows what it is to be ordinary, to be overlooked, to struggle to make it through.

 Jesus said, if you look for me, look among the poor and the hungry and the naked and the sick and the imprisoned, look with the immigrants and the refugees and the outsiders, and I’ll be there.

 When we feel as far away from #blessed as we can be – that’s when we need to know that God is still with us, God see us, God loves us, God chooses us…

 Which means we have two questions before us today:

 First, do we really believe that God is with us, that we are beloved by God, even when we’re struggling, when we’re suffering, when we’re weighed down with grief and doubts and pain? Dare we call ourselves “blessed” when nothing comes easy, and it really takes an act of faith to do it?

 And the second question is, dare we call others “blessed” too? Are we making room at our table for those whom God has called beloved and blessed? Do we welcome the hungry? The struggling? The ones who are filled with difficult questions? Do we welcome the strangers, the immigrants and refugees? Do we welcome those who try to walk the narrow middle road, to make peace? Do we welcome those who speak truth and call us to justice?

 Do we really want to be blessed? Do we want to be with those whom God called blessed? Are we willing not just to “serve” but to be served? Will we listen, will we learn, trusting that as we do, we will get a clearer picture of the heart of God?

 Especially in the world we face today, we need to be brought back again and again to the real good news: God is not on the side of the loudest or the most powerful; God is not on the side of the rich insiders of the world. God is always on the outside; and when we feel left out, God is there with us; and when we see others being left in the cold – God is with them, and God challenges us to be with them, too.

 God’s grace, God’s love, God’s blessing is big enough for us all.

 You are blessed today. You are blessed, you are beloved, you are welcome, you are wanted, you are seen, you are heart, you are loved.

 Let us know that we are blessed; let us bless others, in the name of the God who loves us still.

  God, you challenge us today. You challenge us to reconsider how our priorities line up with yours. We long to be comfortable, to be safe, to be happy; we want things to be easier – but you remind us that you are closest to us in the midst of the struggle. Comfort us as we mourn today; teach us humility, and make us hungry for justice and thirsty for what is right. Help us to show mercy, to love not just the people we agree with, to help not just those whom we deem worth – but to love as generously and help as graciously as you do. Show us how to be peacemakers, and when the path leads us to persecution, when we struggle, when we stumble along the way – bless us with your love, bless us with your strength, bless us with your courage and your grace once again. Help us to make peace; help us to have peace. May we be blessed; may we be blessings. In Christ’s name we pray; amen.

[wwbnews]

The sound of justice The original records of Nazi atrocities are at risk of being lost — but it’s not too late to save them By November 21st, 1945, Adolf Hitler was dead, but the Nazi chain of command he left behind was sitting in court. In the ruins of the German city of Nuremberg, inside the Palace of Justice, Room 600, they faced charges of conspiracy, waging aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Behind the Nazis stood a line of American military police in gleaming white helmets. The Nazi defendants picked up translation headphones from the armrests beside them and placed them on their heads. In the center of the courtroom, Robert Jackson, an American, walked up to a lectern and placed his opening prosecution statement in front of him. Jackson had skipped college and spent only a year at law school, but he nonetheless went on to become an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Now, he was chief prosecutor in the world’s fragile first experiment in international justice, which was made possible, in part, by an unprecedented audio system. Every tale of atrocity, every victim’s raw testimony, and every revelation that exposed the upside-down logic of the Nazi system flowed through the headphones of a man along the wood-paneled wall of the courtroom. He rested his fingers lightly on a volume dial, as audio from the trial was filtered through a dozen language interpreters. His name was Philip C. Erhorn, and as the chief technician at Nuremberg, he cobbled together a sound system that relayed and recorded the voices in the courtroom. He did it mostly on his own, despite the team of technicians that was assembled to help him. “They didn’t know what end of the screwdriver to use,” he later told his wife. no one had attempted to record the audio for such a complicated court case Erhorn was an audio specialist hired by the US Army Signal Corps who grew up fascinated with hand-crank radios. When he went to Lehigh University, he got special access to a room of music records, which touched off a lifelong obsession for recording things. Sometimes when he babysat his neighbor’s kids, he raided their tape collection for even more music to record. As Erhorn listened on the first day, a judge pushed himself toward a microphone on the bench and beckoned Jackson to begin the prosecution’s opening statement. Someone coughed, then there was silence. “The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world poses a grave responsibility,” Jackson said into his microphone on the lectern. Erhorn sat in his green officer’s uniform, intensely focused, listening, as the microphone sent the sound through his mixer and into a maze of wires and recorders. What followed was what some consider to be one of the most important speeches of all time. It entered Erhorn’s audio system, to be saved forever. General Rudenko from Russia made the final prosecutor’s statement after the British and French took their turns. Interpreters translated on the spot. The system fed the translation audio into a now-antique recorder called a recordgraph, which looks more like an old movie projector than an audio device. Meanwhile, the prosecutor, witnesses, and defendants were recorded in whichever language they spoke, verbatim. The words of their native tongues were relayed to a hi-fidelity gramophone recorder, and a stylus etched the sound waves into the surface of circular black disc records. The grooves the stylus traced contained the voices of the Nuremberg trials. The plan had always been to preserve these moments so that the crimes of the defendants would never be repeated. But in the years ahead, the record collection fell through the cracks. In 1945, no one had attempted to record the audio for such a complicated court case, nor had anyone tried to translate a multilingual meeting in real time. For centuries, Western diplomacy was conducted solely in French. Nuremberg, however, required English, German, Russian, and French to be translated simultaneously. To keep things simple, anyone listening in the courtroom needed to be able to find their native language simply by flipping between four channels. The end product, a simple audio record of each speaker, took an extraordinarily coordinated effort to produce. Photo: Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images Erhorn and his fellow technicians bought a new IBM machine called “the Translator,” which was shipped by plane from New York to Nuremberg. It was based on an experimental system that had been used in a court case in South America. When the Translator arrived in Nuremberg, the technicians had to wire the court. The whole production started at the point where the human voice went into the system: the microphone. The eight judges had four microphones to share, the prosecution had one, the witness stand had a microphone, another sat at the front of the courtroom, and then there was a “roving microphone” for the Nazis to pass around their court dock. The sound traveled from the microphones to Erhorn’s amplifier, which he carefully monitored for the translators. There were four teams of translators separated by glass partitions who were deeply focused, listening to every word. Each team had three to four interpreters specializing in a single language. They could take Russian, for example, and translate it accurately into English, French, and German immediately. When anyone spoke into the microphones too quickly and the court got too far ahead of the translations, the interpreters raised a yellow card in distress, signaling “slower.” If the translators were totally overwhelmed, they raised a pleading red card, signaling “stop.” A red card meant the entire trial, no matter the gravity of the moment, came to a halt. A complete backup team of translators waited on standby, should a rescue be needed. The entire system used at least 500 headphones, half used by the technicians, and the other 250 for listeners in court. In a two-month scramble, Erhorn and his team of technicians invented the translation system the United Nations still uses to this day. In the weeks before Erhorn assembled the system, he and his colleagues heard classical music echoing through the rubble nearby Nuremberg. They followed the sound and could soon discern that it was Wagner. When they found the source, it was a tape player, which Erhorn had not seen before, possibly because it was developed by the Americans for “clandestine telephone tapping purposes” during the war. Immediately, Erhorn decided to use the technology in the trial to record the translators. The interpreters’ voices were recorded onto embossed tape for the stenographers to match their court transcripts against and argue over the quality of the translation. Embossed tape, a clear-colored film also known as Amertape (as in “America”), was a precursor to 1980s-style magnetic cassette tape. Soundwaves of a recording were carved directly into the Amertape with a needle. One Amertape collector said his tapes from the D-Day invasion in 1944 are still playable, but it’s unclear how gracefully the Nuremberg translation Amertapes aged. “It can decompose into a nasty jelly,” one expert says. Some archives preferred to transfer embossed Amertape recordings onto magnetic tape, which has its own problems: it degrades after 30 years. Today, these tapes are likely irretrievably expired, and their location is unknown. Then there was the verbatim audio, which skipped the translation phase and went off in a wire outside the courtroom to a studio. There, the original voices were recorded onto black disc gramophone records with a cellulose trinitrate lacquer surface and aluminum core made by the Presto Recording Corporation. Nitrate-based films and lacquers also have problems: they’re flammable. Luckily, the aluminum core of the gramophone record “acts as a heat sink if the record catches fire,” one archiving expert says. But if the nitrate lacquer has deteriorated into a reddish powder, “tiptoe away and call the bomb disposal squad.” The longer the records sat, forgotten in The Hague, the less likely they could be preserved When the trial ended and Hermann Göring and several other Nazis were sentenced to hang to death, 1,942 Presto gramophone discs with at least 775 hours of the trial recorded on them were packed into wooden crates. What exactly happened to these crates is subject to debate. They may have become an overlooked line item in an archive in The Hague, Netherlands, or they may have been forgotten. The International Court of Justice, which is located in The Hague, says the collection was part of the Nuremberg archive and is so physically large that they would be impossible to lose track of. But the cellulose trinitrate lacquer on the Presto records put them at risk. The lacquer can shrink over time and crack, destroying the record. The longer the records sat, forgotten in The Hague, the less likely it became that Erhorn and his team’s recordings could be preserved. In Switzerland, there is a city of red roofs built along stone cliffs and woods where the Schiffenensee River runs. It’s an old city called Fribourg, and it’s where Ottar Johnsen, a silver-haired Swiss professor of signal processing lived and worked for most of his career. He specialized in the electronic transfer of images and audio technology. In the event that the Nuremberg records were remembered and pulled out of their archive, the trajectory of his research could save them from deterioration. Johnsen is imaginative and willing to try any idea. His Swiss-French accent curls Rs in his throat when he speaks his very fluent English. As he likes to jest, “I perfected it in New Jersey.” Johnsen’s career really took off when he joined the Bell Laboratories research complex in rural New Jersey. The place was a centrifuge of scientific innovation. It pulled from various fields and theories to invent things like transistors, lasers, the Unix computer operating system, and programming languages like C, C++, and S. At Bell Laboratories in the 1980s, Johnsen discovered new ways to compress images so they could quickly be sent electronically. Soon after, he returned to Switzerland to work at the University of Fribourg, which was when, in the twilight of his career, a colleague from the Swiss National Sound Archives approached him with “a completely strange idea.” Photo: Central Press / Getty Images The colleague was Stefano Cavaglieri. The premise of Cavaglieri’s idea was that when you look at a vinyl record, the sound is etched into the physical surface of the grooves. Cavaglieri wondered, why not photograph the physical surface and try to extract the sound from the image? “It will never work,” Johnsen thought, “but it is a very interesting project to do with a student.” Johnsen found an enthusiastic PhD student named Sylvain Stotzer who wanted to research the idea. In only a few months, they had already extracted their first sounds from a picture of a record. It sounded bad. “Then, we discovered we needed to reverse it,” Johnsen says. The sound they extracted was backward, but it worked. After it was fixed, Johnsen and Stotzer knew they had something. They called the technology Visual Audio. Right away, archivists pointed out that the technology could make crucial rescues. Records that were too delicate or damaged to be read with a conventional record player needle could have their sound extracted visually. Then, serendipity. “In 2006, I got a call from Radio Netherlands [Worldwide],” Johnsen says. The radio producer had talked to a librarian at the International Court of Justice, and they had found the Nuremberg recordings. “They had, in a way, been forgotten, not lost, but forgotten somewhere in the archive,” Johnsen says. “So I was astonished when I heard about it.” Employees of the International Court of Justice arranged to meet Johnsen at the University of Fribourg to do a test run on the records using his Visual Audio process. They had no idea if the recordings were any good. The discs were forgotten, but miraculously well-preserved They met Johnsen with a box. He pulled a disc from one of its waxy paper sleeves and inspected it, finding them “forgotten but very well-preserved.” Johnsen and Stotzer began the process. First, they took film pictures in a dark room. Inside the dark room, they developed the negative of the first photo of the first record. Then, they took the negative and placed it inside a specially-designed high-resolution scanner. As the scanner prepared to take an image, it spun the negative like a top. They put the image on a computer and used an algorithm that Stotzer had written to read the sound in the picture. “The sound is contained in the depth of the groove or the position of the groove. At the microscopic level, you can see how the groove is moving,” Johnsen explains. The sound output “will look like a sine wave.” The wobbly undulations in the surface were captured in Johnsen’s pictures of the disc. The priceless record was untouched. It worked. He listened to Erhorn’s recording of Chief Prosecutor Jackson delivering his opening statement on the first day of the trials. “It was very, very clear,” Johnsen says. Compared to the transcripts of the trial, there was something different in hearing it, the momentousness of the moment imbued Jackson’s voice. “It was important for him to get the message out about the bad things they did. It was as important as the procedure of judging the criminals,” Johnsen says. He could hear both, and he couldn’t wait to digitize the entire collection. Photo by Fred Ramage / Getty Images But things did not go as expected. Johnsen did a sample Visual Audio extract of 10 records and gave the International Court of Justice an estimate of $190,000 to digitize the entire collection. The archives found it difficult to cut a check to Johnsen if he didn’t have a company assembled to do the work. There are very strict procurement procedures. They went back and forth over the course of hundreds of emails. Johnsen started to get nervous. Things went quiet. For years, he heard nothing. He retired from his university before any final word came in. When he left, he gathered all of the samples of the Nuremberg recordings that he made and brought them home for safekeeping. “So many things disappear when people retire,” he says. He even made up his mind that he would come out of retirement to digitize the recordings if it was necessary. Johnsen continued to worry about it. Cost is a constant problem among international organizations. The public tends to imagine institutions like the United Nations as incredibly wealthy and far-reaching. But some run on a relative shoestring budget. Take the International Criminal Court, for example. In 2013, the prosecutor’s office that was tasked with hunting down war criminals anywhere in the world and building credible cases against them ran on about $150 million. It may sound generous, but it’s roughly equivalent to the combined budget of the District Attorney’s office in New York City and Washington, DC. We have the technology to preserve the records, but not the budget No action was taken on Johnsen’s offer. Back when Johnsen inspected the records for the first time, he had suggested they test a recording needle on the first few seconds of quiet at the beginning of each record when it’s only people walking into the courtroom and shuffling chairs. Those moments weren’t as important, and they could be played to test the discs’ durability under a record needle, even if they got damaged. That was good advice, it seems. In 2017, the archives at the International Court of Justice decided to use a company in France that uses a record needle to play the records and digitize them. Johnsen thinks it should work. But as Johnsen points out, “It’s like painting a wall: some of the paint comes off with the brush.” The needle will work, but it also might damage the records. “When there are more than a thousand records, maybe a few of them would be damaged or difficult to play again,” Johnsen says. If that’s the case, Johnsen’s technology is always available to perform a rescue. The International Court of Justice hopes to have the records digitized in 2019, but they may not be made available to the public yet. Employees of the International Court of Justice describe the institution as “a very deliberate organization.” One of the reporters in Nuremberg covering the trials for the Stars and Stripes military daily was Norbert Ehrenfreund. He was deeply affected by what he saw. Years later, he became a federal judge in California and wrote a book about Nuremberg. In it he wrote, “Soon all of the survivors of the Holocaust will be gone. Then there will be no human voice to tell the authentic story of the genocide, the tortures, the gas chambers, the concentration camps.” With what seems to be relief, he also wrote: “But the authentic, official record is the trial transcript.” It appears he, like many others, sees the transcript of the trials and the voices of the victims as two separate documents that cannot be merged. This is the power of Nuremberg recordings: it’s both. Erhorn and Johnsen saw the power of the sound and resolved to preserve it for future generations. “When you have the sound, you feel you are in the middle of it,” Johnsen says, his voice conjuring a world suddenly accessible to the imagination. Then, his tone hardens. “When you have just the transcript, you are outside it.” #Newsytechno.com #Latest_Technology_Trends #Cool_Gadgets

[ehyeh-joshua]

Nope. Catholics were not persecuted by the Nazis. Hitler's first foreign treaty of all was with Pope Pius XII in 1933. Instead of condemning this thug, Pope Pius offered Hitler his full backing and support. All through the 1930s, the Vatican never once explicitly protested the Nazi persecution and killing of the Jews. It saw its job as defending Catholic interests only.

This just in people - you can be pretty much banned from public office, have thousands of clergy and laypeople imprisoned in concentration camps, with a section of Dachau being made specifically for Catholic priests, be forced to take down religious symbols and put pictures of Hitler in their place, you can be forced to change liturgy to support Hitler, be banned from having your own children attend services with you, have cardinals suffer assassination attempts, have bishops for forced to swear oaths of fealty to the state, have over 300 churches ransacked and looted, and it doesn’t count as persecution because of a peace treaty made under duress with a man who was elected precisely because of his disregard for such things, held to a standard that no nation on earth passed as no nation condemned the killing of Jews by Nazi Germany in period referred to (largely due to ignorance) all because some Irish person wants to carry on the legacy of Eamon de Valeraand Charles Bewley and the whole Irish Republicanism moderate approval of Nazi Germany (mostly enemy of my enemy, but there were ideological factors, especially within the IRA, with Russell’s campaign funded by Nazis and Nazi sympathisers in America, and in his 1940 visit to Germany offered to use IRA assets as part of offensive action during Operation Sealion) while being unable to get basic facts right. (Pius XII was a cardinal in 1933, and never gave support of Hitler; 70 times he went and pointed out how the Nazis were ignoring the Concordat, and he stated to the British ambassador after signing that he did so with a gun to his head)

Not one nation seriously condemned the treatment of Jews in the pre-war period. None. Some copied elements of the Nuremburg laws, as generally there was admiration for Hitler and a desire for a strong Germany as a bulwark against Soviet Russia. The Polish government in exile tried to draw attention to the Holocaust from 1941, but they were ignored until 1942, at which point some nations in Europe (not even all the Allies) condemned it. Most of this was because of ignorance of what was happening, but not all of it; exemplified by the fact you attack a group who were already in a compromised position by virtue of being located within a fascist state aligned with Nazi Germany. (whether Mussolini could have gotten away with attacking the Vatican is a separate question)

Most of the pre-war era was spent enabling the Holocaust as nations all over the world refused to take in Jewish refugees, but that gets a free pass from you, as does the fact your nation’s head of state issued a condolence letter on Hitler’s death becoming known. (which did attract international condemnation)

Using the Nazi definition of Jew, if you apply the same standard to the other victims of the Holocaust, then the overwhelming majority of those other victims were Catholics. And most of the rest were Protestants. Your open with blatant lies; as stated, Pius XII was not Pope in 1933. Not until 1939. And he did condemn Nazi Germany - “Mit brennender Sorge” 1937, which he spent at length condemning the policies enacted into law in Germany the previous year. By the time he was Pope, he was exceedingly limited because of the danger of reprisals if he acted too strongly. And rightly or wrongly, the Nuremburg trials established that the defence of establishing that you were facing being killed if you refused to comply was acceptable. Yet again, you are holding the Catholic church to standards that no other nation was held to. Could he have done more? Maybe, maybe not, we don’t know - never the less, by toeing the line and ensuring the survival of the church thousands of Jewish lives were saved as a result of acts from his administration. Which is rather different to the alternatives of full compliance (which was NEVER done, that was resisted at every level of church heriarchy from a priest in a chapel right up to Pius XI and Pius XII) or destruction, which would have been the probable result of continuing Pius XI’s anti-Nazi policies.

The only bit you get partially right is “It saw its job as defending Catholic interests”, because yes, when facing existential threats that is what you do. You don’t seek death (you accept matyrdom if it happens, but you don’t seek it) you try to survive. Especially when you have no military power to defend yourself the classical way and an enemy who thinks nothing of destroying nations.

You have lied, and you maintain double standards by insisting that the Catholic church at a governmental level does what other nations did not do. In particular, your nation faced no threat from the Nazis, because they would have had to take down England first. What did happen in fact, was your nation’s offered assistance and approval to them while pretending to be neutral, and terrorist elements offered to aid them by attacking England at a time when the Northern Irish peace process was still a bomb waiting to explode. (thankfully we have moved on from that, and for the first time in almost a thousand years - not that the Celtic independence years were peaceful - we have a peace process in Northern Ireland. I have no quarrel with modern Ireland in this matter, and the way Ireland was treated by the Empire and in the centuries of occupation before that is utterly reprehensible as stuff went on just as comparable to what the Nazis did, but none of that changes that history is complicated and with WW2 in particular, right and wrong very quickly breaks down into acts of personal valour and self-sacrifice by a few good people, generally getting them killed, while nations speak rhetoric but in the end care only for survival as other idiots in powerful countries try to carry out the European dream of building an Empire like Rome’s)

Right, I have to cut this short, so this’ll do, I’ll come back to it later.