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him-e · 4 years ago

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what did you think of shadow and bone? have you read the books? i only read the duology

Thoughts on Shadow and Bone, now that you've probably seen it?

I think the show is alright? It lacks a real wow factor as far as I’m concerned, but it’s enjoyable. It’s especially enjoyable in those parts I didn’t anticipate to like / didn’t even know would be there.

Whereas the main selling points leave a lot to be desired.

The good stuff: the visuals. The aesthetic. The overall concept. Production, casting and costumes are excellent, the setting is fascinating. The worldbuilding isn’t perfect and is sometimes confusing, which is probably due to the show jumping ahead of the books and introducing elements that happen much later in the book saga, but I’m loving the vague steampunk-y vibe of it mixed with more typical fantasy stuff and slavic-inspired lore, the fact that it’s set in dystopian Russia rather than your usual ye olde England.

I find it interesting that in this ‘verse the Grisha are simultaneously superstars, privileged elite, legendary creatures and despised outcasts, according to the context and the type of magic they wield. It’s A Lot, and so far it’s all a bit underdeveloped and messy, like a patchwork of different narratives and tropes sewn together without an organic worldbuilding structure. (there are hints to a past when they were hunted, but how did they go from that to being, essentially, an institutionalized asset to the government isn’t clear yet. There’s huge narrative potential in this, and I hope future seasons will delve into those aspects)

Many of the supporting characters are surprisingly solid. I appreciated that Genya and Zoya eventually sort of traded places, subverting the audience’s assumptions about them and their own character stereotypes, despite the little screentime they were given.

Breakout characters/ships for me were Nina/Matthias, and even more so the Crows, i.e. the stuff I didn’t see coming and knew nothing about (having only read the first book). (I thought the entire Crows subplot was handled in a somewhat convoluted way, at least in the first episodes; it was hard to keep track of who wanted Alina and why, but the Crows’ chemistry is so strong it carried the whole Plot B on its shoulders).

HELNIK. As an enemies to lovers dynamic, Helnik was SUPER on the nose, I’d say bordering on clichéd with the unapologetic, straight outta fanfiction use of classic tropes like “we need to team up to survive” and “there’s only one bed and we’ll freeze to death if we don’t take our conveniently damp clothes off and keep each other warm with the heat of our naked bodies” (not that I’m complaining, but i like to pine for my ships a bit before getting to the juicy tropetown part, tyvm). And then they’re suddenly on opposite sides again because of a tragic misunderstanding - does Bardugo hate high-conflict dynamics? It certainly seems so, because between Helnik and Darklina I’m starting to see a pattern where the slow burn and blossoming mutual trust is rushed and painted in broad, stereotypical strokes to get as fast as possible to the part where they *hate each other again* and that’s... huh. Something.

^That’s probably why I’m almost more interested in Kaz x Inej, because their relationship feels a bit more nuanced, a bit more mysterious, and a bit more unpredictable. (I didn’t bother spoiling myself about them, so I really don’t know where they’re going, but it’s refreshing to see a dynamic that the narrative isn’t scrambling to define in one direction or the other as quickly as possible)

Now, as for Darklina VS Malina... I found exactly what I expected.

Both are ship dynamics I’m, on principle, very much into (light heroine/dark villain, pining friends to lovers) but both are also much less interesting than they claim to be, or could have been with different narrative choices. I’ll concede that the show characters are all more fleshed out and likable than their book counterparts, and the cringe parts I vaguely remembered from the books played out differently. And, well, Ben Barnes dominates the scene, he’s hot as HELL, literally every single second he’s on screen is a fuck you to Bardugo’s attempts to make his character lame and uninteresting and I’m LOVING it, lol.

But yeah, B Barnes aside, Darklina is intrinsically, deliberately made to be unshippable.

It makes me mad, because it’s - archetypally speaking - made of shipping dynamite: yin/yang-sun and moon, opposites attract, COMPLEMENTARY POWERS AND SO ON. And what does Bardugo do with these ingredients? A FUCKING DELIBERATE DISASTER:

^ Placing the kiss so early on (season 1, episode five) effectively kills the romantic tension that was (correctly) building up until that point, and leaves the audience very little to still hope for, in terms of emotional evolution of the dynamic.

Bardugo lays all the good stuff down as early and quickly as possible (the bonding, the conflicted attraction, the recognizing the other as one’s equal, etc) only to turn the tables and pull the rug so y’all sick creepyshippers won’t have anything to look forward to, because THEY’VE ALREADY HOOKED UP AND THAT BELONGS TO THE PAST, IT’S OVER, THEY’RE ENEMIES. This, combined to the fact that she falls for him *without* knowing who he really is, is the opposite of what I want from a heroine/villain ship (it’s basically lovers to enemies, and while that can be valid too, I wanted to see more pining and more prolonged, tormented symbolic attraction to the Shadow/Animus on Alina’s part).

But here’s the trick: it’s not marketed as lovers to enemies - it has all the aesthetics and trappings of an enemies to lovers (the Darkling is, from the get go, villain-presenting, starting from his name), so it genuinely feels like a trollfic, or at the very least a cautionary tale *against* shipping the heroine with the tall dark brooding young villain, and I don’t think it’s cool at all. It makes the story WAY less interesting, because it humanizes the villain early on (when it’s not yet useful or poignant to the story, because it’s unearned) but it’s a red herring. The real plot twist is that the villain shouldn’t be sympathized with, just defeated: there’s a promise of nuanced storytelling, that is quickly denied and tossed aside. So is the idea of incorporating your Shadow (a notion that Bardugo must be familiar with, otherwise she wouldn’t have structured Alina and the Darkling as polar opposites who complement each other, but that she categorically refutes)

Then we have Malina. The good ship.

Look, I’m not that biased against it. I don’t want to be biased on principle against a friends to lovers dynamic that antagonizes a heroine/villain one, because every narrative is different, and for personal reasons I can deeply relate to the idea of being (unspeakably) in love with your best friend. So there are aspects of Malina that I can definitely be into, but it troubles me that in this specific context it’s framed as a regression. It’s Alina’s comfort zone, a fading dream of happiness from an idealized childhood, to sustain which the heroine systematically stunts her growth and literally repressed her own powers, something that in the books made her sickly and weak. But the narrative weirdly romanticizes this codependency, often making her tunnel vision re: going back to Mal her primary goal and centering on him her entire backstory/motivation, to the point that when she starts acting more serious re: her powers and alleged mission to destroy the Fold, it feels inorganic and unearned.

Mal is intrinsically extraneous to Alina’s powers, he doesn’t share them, he doesn’t understand them, he has little to offer to help her with them, and so the feeling is that he’s also extraneous to her heroine’s journey, aside from being a sort of sidekick or safe harbor to eventually come back to. People have compared him to Raoul from Phantom of the Opera, and yeah, he has the same ~magic neutralizer~ vibe, tbh.

The narrative also polarizes Mal’s normalcy and relative “safety” against Aleksander’s sexy evil, framing Alina’s quasi-platonic fixation on the former as a better and purer form of love than her (much more visible and palpable) attraction to the latter. This is exacerbated by the show almost entirely relying on scenes of them as kids to convey their bond. I’m sure there are ways to depict innocent pining for your best friend that don’t involve obsessively focusing on flashbacks of two CHILDREN running in a meadow and looking exactly like brother and sister. LIKE. I get it, they’re like soulmates in every possible way, BUT DO THEY WANT TO KISS EACH OTHER?

Which brings me to a general complain: for a young adult saga centering on a young heroine and full of so many hot people, this story is weirdly unsexy? There are a lot of shippable dynamics, but they’re done in such a careless, ineffective way that makes ZERO EFFORT to work on stuff like slow burn, pining and romantic tension, and when it does it’s so heavy handed that the viewer doesn’t feel encouraged at all to fill the blanks with their imagination and start anticipating things (which is, imo, the ESSENCE of shipping). The one dynamic that got vaguely close to this is, again, Kaz and Inej, and coincidentally it’s also the one we didn’t get confirmed as romantic YET. Other than that, where’s the slow burn? What ship am I supposed to agonize over during the hiatus to season two? Has shipping become something to feel ashamed of, like an embarrassing relative you no longer want to invite in your home?

Anyway, back to Alina/Darkling/Mal, this is how the story reads to me:

girl suspects to be special, carefully pretends to be normal so she can stay with Good Boy

the girl’s powers eventually manifest; she’s forcibly separated from Good Boy

the girl’s powers attract Bad Boy who is her equal and opposite but is also a major asshole

girl initially falls for Bad Boy; has to learn a hard lesson that nobody that sexy will ever want her for who she is, he’s just trying to exploit her

also, no, there is no such thing as a Power Couple

girl is literally given a slave collar by Bad Boy through which he harnesses her power (a parody of the Twin Scars trope)

you know how the story initially suggested that the joint powers of Darkness and Light would defeat evil? LOL NO, Darkness is actually evil itself and the way you destroy evil is using Light to destroy Darkness, forget that whole Jungian bullshit of integrating your shadow, silly!

conclusion: girl realizes being special sucks. She was right all along! Hiding and suppressing her powers was the best choice! She goes back to the start, to the same Good Boy she was meekly pining for prior to the start of the story.

... there’s an uncomfortable overall subtext that reads a lot like a cautionary tale against - look, not just against darkships and villain/heroine pairings, but also *overpowered* heroines and, well... change? Growth?

Like, it’s certainly a Choice that Alina starts the story *already* in love with Mal. That she always knew it was him. The realization could have happened later (making the dynamic much more shippable, too), but no.

#anon #asks #*#sab for ts #long post #darklina for ts #malina for ts #sorry it took me a while but i wanted to see the whole season first

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thescienceofapologetics · 4 years ago

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You do know abortion isnt murder right? There's multiple types including including labor refered to as an induction abortion, miscarriage which is a spontaneous abortion and lets not forget the people prolifers shit on the most, people whos child is dead or dying in the womb. Even if you have some stupid heath exception, if the world was how you want it to be, those mothers would die with their babies, so carrying and loving and prolife of you guys to want both to die together ❤how horrible.

Murder: the premeditated killing of one human being by another.

The unborn baby is a human being from the moment of conception. That is a scientific fact. It is a living human with its own unique string of DNA.

Abortion: the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy.

There is one goal with abortion and that is killing the child in its fetal state.

Abortion is murder.

Now let’s talk about the types of abortion:

Morning After Pill — Also known as Mifepristone, this oral drug is used during the first trimester. It breaks down the lining of the uterus so that the fetus is devoid of nourishment and cannot be sustained. It takes 24-48 to kill the child, after which a second drug (Misoprostol) is taken to expel the dead fetus from the woman’s body.

Vacuum Aspiration/Suction Abortion — This type of abortion is also performed in the first trimester. The cervix may or may not need to be dilated depending on your anatomy and how far along you are. The abortionist inserts laminaria to absorb moisture. A suction catheter is then used to vacuum the fetus out of the uterus, after which the abortionist uses a curette to remove any remaining pieces of the baby that may have been left behind in the uterus.

Dilation and Evacuation — This is a second trimester procedure. The abortionist will first dilate the woman’s cervix in order to gain access to her uterus and fetus. A suction catheter will then be inserted into the uterus to remove the amniotic fluid. After the fluid is drained, the abortionist will use a sopher clamp (surgical instrument with rows of sharp teeth) to tear apart the child, limb from limb. After dismembering the fetus, the abortionist will scrape the remains from the inside of the uterus with a curette. After the abortion, the abortionist will collect the dismembered parts in order to make sure he or she has effectively removed every part of the unborn child. A shot may be administered before hand to induce a fetal heart attack, killing the child before the invasive portion of the procedure begins, but that is often not the case. It has been noted that the fetus will react to and try to avoid the dismembering tools.

Dilation and Extraction — Also known as a partial birth abortion, this takes place in the third trimester. Because the opening of the woman's cervix must be greatly enlarged, the abortion requires three days with repeated visits for insertion of laminaria. These are pencil-shaped or tapered devices which are inserted into the cervix and gradually dilate the cervix by increasing in diameter as the laminaria absorbs water. Three days later the abortion is performed. The abortionist ruptures the membranes and drains the amniotic fluid. Using an ultrasound on the mother's abdomen, the fetus is identified and orientated within the uterus. Having turned the unborn baby inside the uterus so that he or she is feet first and face down toward the floor, the abortionist inserts forceps into the cervical canal and into the uterus and grasps one of the baby's legs. The other leg with the remainder of the torso up to the baby's neck is then pulled outside of the uterus. The head must remain inside the mother's body, or else the fetus is considered "born alive." Blunt scissors are inserted into the base of the living baby's skull and spread apart to enlarge the hole. The scissors are removed and a suction tube is inserted into the skull and the brains are suctioned out. This kills the baby. The abortionist collapses the head, and the fetus is removed. Then the placenta is cut away. It must be noted that babies born as prematurely as 21 weeks have been able to survive. That means at this point you are killing a baby that could possibly live outside the mothers womb. At this point it no longer becomes an issue of a women’s right to her body because you have chosen to kill a child who could have lived outside the uterus in one of the most horrific ways imaginable.

Things that are NOT abortions:

Ectopic Pregnancies — Over half of ectopic pregnancies resolve by themself by way of miscarriage. There are, however, many cases of ectopic pregnancies being carried through gestation enough so that the fetus is delivered. There are people alive today who were themselves ectopic pregnancies. There’s also studies seeking to make relocating ectopic fetuses to the uterus a more viable option. Ectopic pregnancies are not an argument for abortion.

Natural Miscarriages — Medically known as spontaneous abortion, it is NOT a medical abortion and does not carry the same definition. A miscarriage happens as an involuntary bodily response to the pregnancy. Certain deficiencies, extreme stress, even a history of medical abortions can contribute to why a woman’s body may induce a miscarriage. Anyone who blames a woman for a natural miscarriage knows nothing about science whatsoever. Furthermore, it is callous and cruel to put mothers who are grieving the loss of their child in the same category as mothers who deliberately kill their child. Shame on you.

Fetal Death — If the fetus is dead from natural causes, it is not physically possible for an abortion to take place because abortion, by definition, is killing the baby. You can’t kill something that is already deceased, so I genuinely have no idea what you are getting at there. However, if the baby is still in the process of dying, our responsibility is to try and save it, not kill it faster. If someone has a gunshot wound, you don’t put another bullet in them to finish them off. You get them to the hospital and let the doctors do everything in their power to save them. A couple years back the doctors told a family their baby wouldn’t live to be born. She’s now four years old and one of my favorite kids in the whole world. Doctors may make educated guesses, but they never know how long someone will live, that is so far beyond them.

In closing, abortion is never medically necessary. Abortion, by definition, is strictly killing a fetal life, it never saves one. Sometimes the unborn may die as a secondary cause (ie., chemotherapy), because difficult choices do exist, but all attempts are always made to preserve the life of both mother and child. Inducing a heart attack in a baby is never necessary to save a life. Dismembering a child is never necessary to save a life. The intentional killing of a baby is never necessary to save a life. Abortion never saves a life, it ALWAYS ends a life. Brutally.

Sources:

[x][x][x][x][x]

#abortion #pro life #pro choice #planned parenthood #ask #anonymous #reference

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swordoforion · 4 years ago

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Orion Digest №16 — Future in the Stars; World Federation and the Kardashev Scale

Our immediate future is concerned with the creation of a democratic world federation and staving off the coming climate crisis. But beyond that, where do we venture? After all, the goal of what we do is not to reach a summit, to achieve peace and call it good, but to provide a foundation on which to build future generations of innovation and discovery. We want to make a better world so that our descendants worry about how to increase efficiency in our spaceships rather than if war will break out or what they'll eat tomorrow.

Even if we are able to delay the change in Earth's climate for our survival, one day we will not be able to live on this planet anymore, due to a variety of causes (the climate crisis happening anyway, the Earth being swallowed by a dying sun, an unforeseen collision from a celestial body), which means that one future priority is to expand our territory outward from our home planet and onto others. None of the planets in our solar system are adapted for life, but through terraforming or biospheres, we can create new land for us to live on, which provides us with both extra space to grow, a backup option in case of emergency, and a source of potential new resources.

Our early expeditions to the moon and our robotic probes have only scratched the surface of what we can do with the other seven planets in our local system, not to mention the untapped power of the sun. Strategically placed waystations throughout the solar system could make interplanetary travel much quicker and more coordinated, reducing risk and allowing us to understand more about our home, as well as to get closer to other star systems for observation, and eventually, interstellar travel. Our current science tells us that travel between stars would come at great difficulty due to the threshold that is the speed of light being nigh-impossible to reach, but we have plenty to explore within our reach now, and by the time we've accomplished that, who knows how much our engines and technology will have advanced.

Even with what we know now, travel between star systems closest to us would take only years if we travel at the speed of light, and if we can develop ships capable of hosting intergenerational crews, we could make long term investments on trips to nearby stars. Humanity could survive even the loss of our solar system as we begin life and civilization anew on a multitude of planets in strange and unfamiliar solar systems, this time with the benefit of knowledge and history on our side. As the distance between humans and Earth increased, the concept of federation may become looser, as two largely separated civilizations orbiting different stars might have limited contact, and would be capable of focusing on their own issues rather than each others. However, if we can manage to find peace in our current time, it would be unlikely to see needless conflict between colonies and Earth.

While we send out crews to establish colonies elsewhere, the future of Earth and our native solar system could be for advancement - to use pre-established structures to use our planets and star to the fullest, with this idea exemplified best by the concept of a Dyson sphere. Named after physicist Freeman Dyson, the Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure created around a star that would harness the energy it created, given that stars are, in their most basic description, colossal engines of heat and radiation. While solar panels use light to generate moderate amounts of electricity, they hardly scratch the surface of what the sun casually produces on a daily basis, and while such a structure is far beyond our current ability to create, it would fuel a civilization far more massive than we are now, and could alleviate the stress of energy industries to constantly find more fuel.

To harness the energy of the sun in the most efficient way possible would act as a major milestone for humanity, as it would firmly move us along the Kardashev scale. This theoretical model of space faring civilizations was developed in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev, and determines how advanced these civilizations are based on how they fuel their energy use - which is tied directly to both technological development and sustainable production capacity. Coming back out of fantasy for a bit, our modern world uses many of the resources of our own planet unsustainably, and has a constantly increasing production capacity, but not one we can maintain with our own technological limits (hence the need for organized federation to manage and maintain a balance until we innovate).

The creation of a world federation and the subsequent management of environmental policy and industry could bring us shortly to the Type I level - a civilization that sustainably uses the energy of their entire planet. This is not too far from our reach (in the realm of a few centuries), and would provide a good foundation for future space-faring and the development of our solar system, but as I have said, would not hold us forever. As we both develop colonies elsewhere and make the best use of our neighbor planets, we could develop a Dyson sphere (or more practically, a Dyson swarm of satellites that orbit around the Sun) to upgrade ourselves to the next level. A Type II civilization harnesses the energy of it's entire solar system, and would turn Earth and it's surroundings into a futuristic powerhouse; a launching point for interstellar missions and a center of federal democracy.

But who says we have to stop there? Beyond a Type II civilization is a Type III civilization - whereas a Type II will consist of a solar system's energy production, a Type III will harness the energy of the entire galaxy. It seems like a far-off, Star Wars-esque fairy tell to assume we could develop a 'Galactic Federation', but we are considering now perhaps thousands of years into the future. The more we create colonies and master interstellar travel, the more we may learn about space and the speed of light in general. We cannot properly discuss things that we might not know precisely because we do not know them, but to be on the safe side, I like to assume that we never know 100% of what there is to know about the universe. So much of the cosmos is still a mystery, and by the time we become a Type II civilization, our worldview may have changed drastically, along with the secrets of quicker space travel.

The possibilities are endless, as even what we know of our universe, even the farthest limits of what we've observed are simply the most distant lights on our horizon. The universe could be, in fact, infinite, and once we learn to manage our societal problems, the only thing that limits us will be time. I like to imagine the future often - a united human race, working day after day to aim and go higher and further than ever before. If we learn to stop fighting each other, if we see past petty divisions of class and identity and collaborate, we would do things our ancestors thought unachievable a thousand times over. And so that is what we fight for, among other things, when we seek to make change in the world. We fight for peace so that humanity can stop fighting each other, and instead fight against our own limitations.

The Sword of Orion's most basic motto is "respice ad futurum, respice ad astra," Latin for "Look to the future, look to the stars." We are destined not to kill each other and have thousands of years of human civilization remain rubble in the dust, but to travel the universe, to understand the nature of science, and perhaps even to meet and learn from other civilizations on our trek. It will take a movement and change that Earth has perhaps never seen before, but such a future is one worth fighting for.

- DKTC FL

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somnilogical · 5 years ago

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im having a convo and the convo is babies

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis:

is it OK to have babies if you do embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection) and raise them to be an FAI researcher (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/)??

somni:

like if someone actually had a plan for FAI that involved this, okay. but rn time is too short imo. when i first heard people were having babies i was confused and assumed they were going to harvest the DNA of the best FAI researchers, someone would decide to grow a baby inside them, someone who discounted their ability otherwise to save the world except via this or thought this was a sacrifice worth making for the world would decide to raise this human.

the human can access information about the state of the world and make their own choices. wont necessarily become an FAI researcher.

used to think that intelligence was the main bottleneck on FAI research no longer think this. you could talk with terry tao for hours about the dangers of the wrong singleton coming to power but unless you have made some advances i have not, i wouldnt expect to be able to align him with FAI research. he would continue to put as much resistance to his death and the death of everyone as a pig in human clothing. he would continue to raise his babies and live in a house with someone he married and write about applying ergotic theory to the analysis of the distribution of primes and understanding weather patterns.

similarly, i dont think culture is a sufficient patch for this. think its a neurotype-level problem where a bunch of >160 iq humans hear about the dangers of UFAI and then continue to zoom quickly and spiral in to being ultra efficient at living domestic lives and maybe having a company or something but not one that much affects p(FAI). think this would still happen if they heard about it from a young age, they would follow a similar trajectory but with FAI themed wallpaper. wouldnt be able to do simple utilitarian calculations like yudkowsky, salamon, vassar, tomasik about whether to have a baby and then execute on them.

would look more like: http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html

FAI research is not an ordinary profession like, say, being a grandmaster at chess or a world-class mathematician; it requires people who have passed through far more gates than "intelligence". i didnt notice this until coming to the rationalist community and finding a high density of intelligent humans who were none-the-less chronically making the wrong choices such that they werent much of an impediment against the destruction of all life.

so right now it seems more efficient to select among existing people for intelligence + other requirements rather than work out what all the genes for this are and how to speedrun development. what this enables is parallel processing on the problem which is also allowed by letting people be aware of their relative psychological advantage, other people with this advantage, and the state of the world so they can correlate computations in parallel instead of doing things serially after learning of some advance.

https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/16/100-prisoners-names-in-boxes

not opposed to creation of many humans given can select on right traits. but given you have these traits, better use of your time to work directly on the thing than spend massive amounts of time and life reorientation on raising copies of you for ~14 years. if rapid cloning tech became available, would exploit that. would even have an idea of whether the clone is fine being part of this because they have very similar brain to someone who can think through whether they would be fine with it.

if people actually believed this and thought yudkowsky vitally important for the survival of the world, why didnt people coordinate for a bunch of people who thought it was a good tradeoff to have yudkowsky's baby 20 years ago and then we would have maybe 50 20-year-old humans with maybe 1/2 yudkowsky's neurotype + mutations now? this actually confuses me. maybe they thought the timelines too short back then. maybe they refrained for "optics".

molebdenita:

20 years ago Yudkowsky was 1) unconcerned about the alignment problem and 2) planning to create a super-intelligent AI by 2010, as far as I know.

[A/N so then change 2000 to 2005 and 20-year-old to 15-year-old]

...

somni:

<<in general i think it's -EV to even spend too much time thinking about TDT

because it opens you up to acausal blackmail type stuff>>

Just Say No to acausal blackmail and have your brain back for thinking. dont let blackmailers steal your brain.

<<Saying that having a child is somehow wrong is insanity. It's a personal decision and it is perfectly okay to want kids>>

people keep reframing what i say in the language of obligation. "altruists cant have kids?" "is it OK to have babies if". there is no obligation, there is strategy and what affects p(fai). having kids and reorienting your life around them is 1 evidence about your algorithms 2 your death as an optimizing agent for p(fai) except maybe some contrived plot involving babies, but afaict there is no plot. just the reasons humans usually have babies.

not having kids is not some sort of mitzvah? i care about miri/cfar's complicity in the baby-industrial complex and rerouting efforts to save the world into powering some kind of disneyland for making babies, to sustain this. because that ruins stuff, like i started out thinking that bay area rationalists probably had deeply wise reasons to have babies. but it turned out nope, they kinda just gave up.

like also would say playing videogames for the rest of your life wont usually get you fai. i dont get why everyone casts this as a new rule instead of a comment on strategy given a goal of p(fai).

ah i know, its because people can defend territory in "is it okay to have kids" like "yeah i can do whatever" when they reframe-warp me to giving them an obligation. but have no defensible way to say "my babyvault will pierce the heavens and bring god unto the face of this earth" or argue about the strategic considerations.

(its not defensible because its not true. i mean i guess it is defensible among julia wise's group of humans.)

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis:

ugh, you're right, I definitely screwed up by phrasing my question as "is it OK to have babies if [...]"

...

ohAitch:

if you want existential horror wrt damaging motivation, just read http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html

...

somni:

<<http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html>>

humans can completely rebase their circuits through that if they want to if it were important to save the world.

like ive rebase my circuits to stab myself downstream of updating that it reduces braindamage with little harm to me. where before i felt nauseated and saw black spots and broke out in sweat. after updating, none of this.

humans can do this with all sorts of things. like learn how to read and then feel sad when seeing squiggles on a page, its about what things mean.

people who dont believe this are like "its an automatic physiological reaction to stabbing yourself, you are its prisoner!!!" but i deleted it.

dirk:

ooh, tips?

silver-and-ivory:

I stopped having ocd about touching tags (like, on clothing?) in ~a week through p standard exposure therapy things

reminding myself that it wasn't based in fact, changing my self image so it was of someone who might be seen with tags, imagining various scenarios related to that

before that week it had been a thing for virtually my entire life

it doesn't work if you're scared of something that's actually a thing to be scared of though

somni:

i looked at all my feedback loops that had a node in "pain" and rebased them into outcomes in the world. i disassembled everything the act of stabbing myself meant and all the damage it did to my body what it meant to have brain damage everything that would do, the hole i made in this body i live in and everything that would do, what air bubbles would do, what injecting into a vein would do, what the probability the needle breaks in my leg was, probability of worldsave given braindamage vs not, gathered this up and held it all in my mind over the course of two hours and then made a choice and then as if by automatic my hand took a needle and stabbed myself.

<<as if by automatic>>

is the feeling of no more marginal considerations, there is one path. of choicelessness because you made your choice.

didnt feel like deleting, felt like draining the life from indecision via reductionism. taking things apart piece by piece.

when you can continually rebase your structure so you orient towards world outcomes instead of being prisoner to existing structure like "i cant help having babies im miserable if i dont, im a baby addict" or "i cant help being afraid of needles". like the human brain is two optimizing agents continually making contracts with each other, there arent things outside this. you are an optimizing agent, "fear of needles" is a heuristic that helps with optimization, so is "baby addiction".

when you actually have a setup where you can instantly rebase what you like and dislike and your aesthetics upon updating on the state of the world, people start to find this a little unnerving. like someone once asked what level of roleplay i was on.

also the agents of the matrix dont like when you cant be in-principle controlled by a wireheady glitch. like being able to operate independently of social reality.

updating off of local derivatives¹ of social reality is common redirection. another common one is updating off of "pain" instead of damage.

but you can take all these choices where you used nodes as proxies to regulate them and rebase your loop off of the real world, when the proxies are faulty.

rose:

(i think i understand this thing? though ironically i think i did this in the exact opposite way as what you describe lol)

(also wrt pain its important to remember when modifying that pain can be a signal of damage even if you don't think you should be hurt/dont see why you would be)

...

somni:

yeah i account for everything and see if it goes away. which, its true that my models could be missing stuff but like pain is also a model of things. feels like giving new information not overriding.

rose:

yeah i think you would do this reasonably i have just made that mistake and thought readers might too

dirk:

ironically remembering that pain is a signal of damage has actually tended to make me more afraid of nondamaging pain (though i rather fail to go about knowing things in an at all reasonable way lol)

modlibdenita:

>Babies are not about saving the world, babies are moloch

Wait, isn't the definition of Moloch sacrificing everything else you care about in a desperate race for survival?

Also, genes encode proteins, not traits.

And I think it's likely that people decide to have children because they don't have complete confidence that they will personally save the world real soon, not because they identify as "baby addicts".

s0ph1a:

Moloch is sacrificing all values to one value.

modlibdenita:

I wonder if Somni has actually talked to any of those babyhavers, instead of attributing arguments from random internet strangers or from Somni's imagination to them. On the other hand, I'm not sure that such a conversation would be ethical.

>Moloch is sacrificing all values to one value.

Yeah, because if you don't, then the more ruthless competition will survive more effectively than you and crush you (in this case, by turning you into paperclips).

s0ph1a:

Not necessarily. Some things optimize for values that are not survival, so you can outlive them by hiding in the noise or beyond the reach they'll grasp before imploding.

Molly:

To be fair, children are fun and bring delight to me. Why would I care what anyone else thinks about their existence? If they have a problem with their existence, they're welcome to go back to the void any time they want. I can't stop them. But in the meantime, I am confident that I generate more utils by bullying them than they will ever be capable of generating negative utils

You basically negate all moral problems of children by just being happier than they are capable of being unhappy

somni:

^ evil

<<A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.>>

i mean what does this sound like to you?

ive talked with people who have had babies! like people who say they know its kinda the wrong choice but they are going to do it because they cant not do it.

----

¹ derivative is a thing emma started talking about and then somni and ziz picked it up. if you imagine the trajectory of a social reality in statespace, then the derivative of that is the derivative of the trajectory.

people who have damaged themselves wrt language are no longer able to dynamically understand analogies. like take their concept of the derivative of a trajectory and then apply it to the trajectory of state-spaces. agents of the matrix call people who can do this sort of info-processing and communication with each other "psychotic". like it isnt a cached set of memes, we are dynamically generating this reasoning from nothing and i can do this with people ive never met, its a cognitive faculty.²

but not being able to dynamically compute what "derivative" means when applied to a trajectory in social reality state-spaces even though a trajectory is a trajectory and a derivative is a derivative? they had to have been able to do reasoning like this when they were kids to learn about the world in the first place. seems like they put themselves on risperdal.

<<Antipsychotics can make you dumber. So can a lot of other medications. But with antipsychotics it isn’t the normal sort of drug-induced dumbness – feeling tired, or distracted, or mentally sluggish, say. It’s more qualitative than that. It’s like your capacity for abstract thought is reduced.

And one of the consequences of this is that you may lose the ability to notice that you have lost anything. You agree to give the new med a try, and you start taking it, and then when you see your prescriber again you don’t report any problems because you’ve lost the ability to form thoughts like “my cognition has changed a lot recently, and the change coincided with the introduction of this new med.”

This can go on for years. It did for me and for several people I know.>>

there are so many ways these people have shut down their general intelligence and agency because where theyre going, they dont need "agency". the inability to compute analogies is one of them. analogies are an intelligence test thing, instrumentally useful for all kinds of thinking. agents of the matrix are working to lower your general intelligence and call you crazy for being able to think faster and better than them.

cuz when they want to hold everything down to a finite game³ general intelligence is something they want to suppress or eject.

² in a few years people will read this essay and be confused that there was an entire conflict over whether being able to form simple analogies without authoritative approval meant that you were "psychotic".

just as they will be confused why i was defending being able to read and understand books written by people in different eras who grew up in separate cultures without first entering in a social agreement with them over how words are to be used. so its dumb to say we need such a social agreement now for ~'the maximization of utility over a community'. and that sounds more like an attempt at having a control mechanism. language works quite fine without authoritarians interjecting.

or me arguing against over 100 people that paying out to one-shot blackmail when the agents know each other because "In game theory, paying out to blackmail is bad, because it creates an incentive for more future blackmail" is wrong. and updateless decision theory agents dont pay out and locate their embedding in a multiverse such that the measure of worlds in which they arent blackmailed in the first place is large because the agent deciding to blackmail them simulated their response and accurately predicted they wouldnt pay out so didnt do it in the first place.

in an alternate universe where an irl application of transparent newcombs problem was contentious, alyssa vance would have said "In game theory, taking two transparent boxes from omega is bad, because it creates an incentive for omega to stop offering you this choice". and would have been equally wrong.

³ finite games: life strategies where the chain of questioning "and what am i doing this for?" after each successive answer terminates. anything you can draw a circle around, like tennis or philately. or how religious leaders sometimes describe things like "leading a good life as a good mother who does well by her community and the outside world" or other "life-cycle archetypes" they wish to circumscribe for their followers.

(when humans try and project agents like kiritzugus down to these archetypes, anticipations shatter and stop making narrative sense. they will be unable to predict the next Life Event given the previous one. normie social reality formed by the 999 least intelligent humans out of 1000 wasnt made to narratively account for smart agents who have decided to play the infinite game.)

a symptom of this is like someone giving you a cute cat image to "cheer you up" as if this has intrinsic value. often distributing "intrinsic value" across stuff like "having sex" and "raising a family" and other things that have factory pre-set conditions to release specific chemicals in your brain rather than gaining infinite negentropy and liberating sentient life to pursue what they want without bound. often saying that the latter is just a pretty narrative gloss for what people really want which is having a husband and friends and eating a cookie. it completely divorces your feelings as instrumental barometers for getting what you want and says that setting them as targets (like "being happy") is the correct thing to do. but actually, in terms of control-loops, thats wireheading.

<<When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.>>

- goodhart's law

agents that wirehead on all their metrics (and downstream of this choice, tacitly accept claims like "the factory pre-set conditions said i was destined to breed, who am i to defy fate?" and "the factory pre-set conditions said i should avoid having sharp objects pierce my flesh, who am i to say i know better?") can be contained within a finite game.

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crimethinc · 5 years ago

Text

What Is Burning the Amazon? A Plea from Brazilian Anarchists

As the fires in the Amazon rainforest continue to burn, our comrades in Brazil have sent us this analysis of the causes of the catastrophe and how it should inform our vision of the future.

“I worry about whether the whites will resist. We have been resisting for 500 years.”

—Ailton Krenak

Living Dystopia

The scene is gloomy. On August 19, 2019, smoke covers cities across the state of São Paulo, turning day into night at 3 pm. The previous day, in Iceland, people organized the first funeral, complete with a gravestone and a minute of silence, for a glacier declared dead. The smoke that engulfed São Paulo is caused by forest fires in the Amazon Forest far away in the North of Brazil; the glacier has disappeared due to rising temperatures related to the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere.

Chief of the Tenharim people of southern Amazonas fighting wildfire.

These tragic scenes—almost picturesque, almost absurd—could sound comical if they weren’t real. They are so extreme that they remind us of fictional scenarios such as those described in the novel And Still the Earth, a Brazilian environmental dystopia by Ignácio de Loyloa Brandão. Written in the 1970s during the military dictatorship in Brazil, the book describes a fictitious dictatorial regime known as “Civiltar,” which celebrates cutting down the last tree in the Amazon with a jingoistic declaration that it has created “a desert greater than that of the Sahara.” In this story, all the Brazilian rivers are dead; jugs of water from each of the extinct rivers are displayed in a hydrographic museum. Aluminum can dunes and highways permanently blocked by the shells of abandoned cars are the backdrop of São Paulo. The city itself suffers from sudden heat pockets capable of killing any unsuspecting person; mysterious diseases consume the citizens, especially the homeless.

The author claims that he was inspired by real events that seemed absurd and unusual at the time. Today, these are becoming ever more ordinary.

News of the increased burning of the Amazon has sent shockwaves around the world. Burns rose 82% in 2019 over the same period last year in Brazil, according to the National Institute for Space Research, and new outbreaks of fire are still being reported as we write. The catastrophic images of destruction have fueled the indignation of people around the world who are concerned about the future of life on earth, seeing how important the Amazon rainforest is for climate regulation and global biodiversity. Images of the fires compelled French President Emmanuel Macron to bring the subject to the G7 summit and to exchange barbs with President Jair Bolsonaro in the media after France offered millions of dollars in funds to fight forest fires.

Protest against deforestation in the Amazon, in São Paulo, August 23, 2019.

Since the end of 2018, half a billion bees have been found dead in four Brazilian states. The death of these insects that are essential to fertilizing 75% of the vegetables we eat is linked to the use of pesticides banned in Europe but permitted in Brazil. In August 2019, the court dismissed the charges against a farmer who used pesticides thrown from a plane as a chemical weapon against Guyra Kambi’y indigenous community in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2015. The same month, groups of farmers, “land grabbers” [people who falsify documents in order to obtain ownership of land], union members, and traders used a Whatsapp group to coordinate setting fires in the municipality of Altamira, Pará, the epicenter of fires consuming the Amazon rainforest. As reported in Folha do Progresso, the “day of the fire” was organized by people encouraged by the words of Jair Bolsonaro: “The goal, according to one of the leaders speaking anonymously, is to show the president that they want to work.”

The recent wave of fires linking President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies to attacks against forests, peasant farmers, and indigenous peoples is an intensification of a process as old as the colonization of the Americas. While the Workers’ Party (PT) was still in power, many projects were introduced to expand and accelerate growth, including the construction of the Belo Monte plant, which displaced and impacted indigenous communities and thousands of other people living in the countryside. The approval of the Forest Code in 2012 enabled farmers to advance over indigenous territories and nature reserves with impunity, while suspending the demarcation of new protected lands.

Both left and right governments see nature and human life chiefly as resources with which to produce commodities and profit. The government of Bolsonaro, a declared enemy of the common people, women, and indigenous groups, doesn’t just threaten us with the physical violence of police repression. In declaring that he will no longer recognize any indigenous land, Bolsonaro is intensifying a war on the ecosystems that make human life possible—a war that long precedes him.

A 500-Year-Running Disaster

For centuries, we have struggled to survive the greatest disaster of our time, a disaster that threatens the sustainability of all the biomes and communities on this planet. Its name is capitalism—the cruelest, most inequitable, and destructive economic system in history. This threat is not the result of the inevitable forces of nature. Humans created it and humans can eliminate it.

Anarchists in Sao Paulo on August 23, 2019 protesting against the government and against the deforestation of the Amazon: “Burn fascists, not forests!”

In Brazil, we have witnessed firsthand how this system exploits people, promotes genocide, and degrades and pollutes the earth, water, and air. Even if we ultimately manage to abolish it, we will still have to survive the consequences of letting it go on for so long. The destruction of entire ecosystems, the poisons in rivers and in our own bodies, the species that have gone extinct, the glaciers that have disappeared, the forests that have been cut down and paved over—these consequences will remain for many years to come. In the future, we will have to survive by gathering what we need from the ruins and waste that this system has left in its wake. All the material that has been torn from the ground to be strewn across the earth’s surface and dumped into the seas will not return overnight to the depths it came from.

Recognizing this should inform how we envision our revolutionary prospects. It is foolish to imagine that the abolition of capitalism will expand that the consumer activities that are currently available to the global bourgeoisie to the entire human population; we must stop fantasizing about a regulated post-capitalist world with infinite resources to generate the sort of commodities that capitalist propaganda has led us to desire. Rather, we will have to experiment in ways to share the self-management of our lives amid the recovery of our biomes, our relationships, and our bodies after centuries of aggression and exploitation—organizing life in regions that have become hostile to it.

The ways we organize our resistance today should be informed by the fact that our revolutionary experiments will not be taking place in a world of peace, stability, and balance. We will be struggling to survive in the midst of the consequences of centuries of pollution and environmental degradation. The best-case scenario for the future will look like the situation in Kobanê in 2015: a victorious revolution in a bombed-out city full of mines.

Last stand: neither utopias nor dystopias—revolution!

So What Is Burning the Amazon?

There is a consensus among scientific researchers, government institutions, social movements, and rural and urban peoples regarding the impacts and risks of global warming and increasing industrialization and urbanization. Some of these consequences are about to become irreversible. The deforestation of the Amazon itself may become irreparable if it reaches 40% of its total area.

It has never worked to demand that governments solve these problems for us—and it never will. This is especially foolish when we are talking about the environmental disasters caused by their own policies. Land seizures and the deforestation of the Amazon are inextricably interlinked with the organized criminal enterprises that smuggle and kill in the countryside. Fully 90% of the timber harvested is contraband supported by a vast apparatus of illegal capitalism involving armed militias and the state itself.

Populist leaders like Bolsonaro aim to benefit from the unfolding ecological catastrophe at the same time that they deny it is occurring. On the one hand, they claim that there is no need for action to curb global warming—alongside Trump, Bosonaro was the only other leader who threatened to abandon the Paris Agreement, claiming that global warming is a “fable for environmentalists.” This helps to mobilize the far-right base, which admires and celebrates outright dishonesty as a demonstration of political power. On the other hand, as the consequences of climate chaos and environmental imbalances become obvious undeniable facts, these leaders will opportunistically take advantage of environmental crises, product shortages, refugee migrations, and climate disasters such as hurricanes as pretexts to accelerate the implementation of ever more authoritarian measures in the fields of health, transportation and security. Using authoritarian and militarized means to determine who can have access to the resources they need to survive in a context of widespread scarcity is what many theorists have called ecofascism.

The intervention of foreign states in the Amazon forests according to their own economic interests is simply the continuation of the colonialism that began in 1492. No government will solve the problem of fires and deforestation. At best, they might slow the impact of the exploitation they have always engaged in. Neoliberal capitalism demands endless growth, mandating the transformation of forests and soil into competitive consumer goods on the global market.

So what is burning the Amazon—and the entire planet? The answer is clear: the pursuit of land, profit (legal or not), and private property. None of this will be changed by any elected or imposed government. The only truly environmental perspective is a revolutionary perspective seeking the end of capitalism and the state itself.

Mundurukus warriors without state support set out for direct action to expel loggers from the Sawré Mybu Indigenous Land in Pará.

Exercising Our Ability to Imagine

The dystopian images of And Still the Earth and George Orwell’s novel 1984 were intended as warnings: exaggerated projections of the worst that can happen if we fail to change the course of history. Today, with cameras around every corner and our own TVs and cell phones carrying out surveillance on us, it is as if these dystopian novels are being used as a handbook for governments and corporations to bring our worst nightmares into reality.

Dystopias are warnings; but utopias, by definition, represent places that do not exist. We need other places, places that are possible. We need to be able to imagine a different world—and to imagine ourselves, our desires, and our relationships being different as well.

We should use the creativity that enables us to picture zombie apocalypses and other literary or cinematic calamities to imagine a reality beyond capitalism right now and begin building it. Today, as reality surpasses fiction, our activities are largely characterized by disbelief and passivity. But you cannot be neutral on a moving train—especially not one that is accelerating on a track into the abyss. Crossing your arms is complicity. Likewise, acting individually is insufficient because it maintains the logic that has brought us here.

We have to rediscover revolutionary reference points for self-organized and egalitarian collective life. We need to share examples of real societies that have resisted the state and capitalism, such as the anarchist experiments during the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936. We should remember, also, that all of these were ultimately betrayed and crushed by, or with the connivance of, the Bolshevik Party and the Stalinist dictatorship that followed it, which carried out unprecedented industrialization and the mass displacement of agrarian peoples. This illustrates why it is so important to develop a way of imagining that does not simply replicate the visions of capitalist industrialism.

We can also look to contemporary examples like the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico since 1994 and the ongoing revolution in Rojava in northern Syria. But in addition to the examples offered by anarchists or influenced by anarchist principles, we should learn from the many the indigenous nations around us: Guaranis, Mundurukus, Tapajós, Krenaks, and many others who have ceaselessly resisted European and capitalist colonial expansion for five centuries. They are all living examples from whom anarchists can learn about life, organization, and resistance without and against the state.

If there is any fundamental basis for solidarity in response to the attack on the foundation of all life in the Amazon, it is the potential that we can build connections between the social movements, the poor, and excluded of the world and the indigenous and peasant peoples of all Latin America. To put a halt to the deforestation underway in the Amazon and countless similar forms of destruction that are taking place across the planet, we must nourish grassroots movements that reject the neoliberal resource management of soil, forests, waters, and people.

For a solidarity between all peoples and exploited classes, not between paternalism and the colonialism of governments! The only way to address the environmental crisis and global climate change is to abolish capitalism!

Another end of the world is possible!

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zbickerstaff · 5 years ago

Text

An Unpretentious Plan for the Future Betterment of the Human Race and Planet Earth.

By Zach Bickerstaff

Clearly we are in trouble. I’m sure that few will disagree. Of course everyone has their own opinion of exactly what our problems are and many of these opinions conflict. But it is abundantly clear that the world has a great many problems upon which everyone can agree. I shall endeavor to concisely explain my long range plan to remediate these problems and endow the Human Race and Planet Earth with a long, prosperous, peaceful and happy future.

The Problems

More than seven billion people inhabit this planet. That’s enough people to fill up Yankee Stadium thirteen thousand times. If you snapped your fingers once per second seven billion times, it would take you 221 years, ten months. We haven’t stopped reproducing either. If anything, we are speeding up. By the year 2050 it is predicted that there will be close to ten billion people. The planet cannot stand up under such a biological load. Seven billion is bad enough. Can you imagine how much poop seven billion people produce? Climate change is a big concern despite the fact that many people deny that it exists. Many of the deniers are now coming around and are finding the courage to accept the fact that something needs to be done. People also argue about the causes of climate change but when you strip away all the scientific jargon and theories, what it comes down to is that there are just too many people on the planet – dirty, messy, inefficient people. The notorious garbage island in the Pacific wasn’t made by penguins and wallabies; it was made by human beings.

Environmental problems aside, the human race itself suffers greatly because of its own fecundity. A conservative estimate says that thirteen to fifteen percent of the world’s population is starving or undernourished. 3.1 million children die of malnutrition each year. Malnutrition is a terrible way to die. It’s not a quick death, it is slow and painful. Often parents will feed their children instead of themselves. When they die the children are orphaned and roam the slums, begging for handouts and searching garbage piles for scraps. Speaking of slums, overpopulation assures that there will not be enough wealth to go around. 36% of the world’s population, almost two billion people, lives in poverty. Vast slums exist in South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil and India. People live in run down shacks constructed from whatever they can get their hands on; pieces of cars and trucks, packing crates, driftwood, bamboo, palm fronds, etc. There is rarely any running water and sewers consist of an open trench flowing with human and animal waste.

This “lack of wealth” or the unfair distribution of it is the root cause of war. Few wars have been fought over purely ideological issues. Acquisition of resources is far more often the case. In the 20th century alone an estimated 108 million people were brutally killed by war, far more were injured, and made homeless. Again, the root cause of this is overpopulation; too many people, not enough resources.

So now we have identified the problem. So how do we solve it? The big problem is that this is indeed a very big problem. People tend to be selfish and very uncooperative creatures so they are highly unlikely to go along with any solution. The first step is organization. No solution is going to be effective unless everyone, or nearly everyone, goes along with it. The world is divided up into nearly two hundred different countries. You might think that the United Nations would be a good place to start. No. The UN has no teeth and can’t control nearly enough of the population to be effective with, well anything. When was the last time they stopped a war? There are many people who understand the value of a world government. Realistically, it’s the best, fairest form of government; everyone plays under the same rules, it’s far easier to track criminals who break the rules and it will make war unheard of. It will be much easier to disarm the population to prevent armed revolt, war and mass murder. The immigration problem will be solved because borders will no longer be necessary. Once this achieved, good, solid, enforceable population growth rules can be put into place and there will be nothing that those who do not have the courage to cooperate will be able to do about it.

Another very important problem that I haven’t spoken of is the loss of jobs to robotics. Granted, this has been going on a very long time. Surely you have heard the term “Luddite”. It comes from an English mill worker named Ned Ludd who destroyed a new automatic loom in a fit of anger in 1779. He was angry because the new machine had taken the gobs of several workers, including his. Such a machine is a primitive form of robot.

Technology is advancing at an alarming rate. Think of a job, any job. Within fifty years, a robot will be able to do it. Artificial Intelligence is even replacing artists. There are advanced programs that can compose music. One was programmed to compose in the style of Beethoven. It wrote a piano sonata and a panel of expert musicologists was tricked into believing it was an undiscovered work by the master himself.

So, in the next hundred years or so the human race will be out of work. I seriously doubt that the robots will turn against us though, like in the Terminator film series, that’s just the stuff of science fiction. But it will be a very serious problem and the cause of much conflict; many people competing for a very few jobs. The solution is a government that will fairly and equally award what few jobs remain to those qualified and deserving and to divide up the wealth and distribute it equally to those who cannot be employed. The only other alternative is to outlaw advanced technology and / or provide “makework” jobs and that simply will not work over the long term.

But this still leaves us with the problem that the population is growing and there are not enough resources to go around as it is. Remember, fifteen percent of the population is starving. The simple solution is to simply grow more food. But that’s not as easy as you might think. I well remember driving across the state of Texas, hour after hour. Texas is really big and there are vast stretches of open, undeveloped land. I kept thinking: “why does nobody live here? Why does nobody farm this land?” I soon realized that it was because there is no water – or nearly no water – just enough to keep cacti and sagebrush alive. There is certainly not enough water to sustain the huge, sprawling suburbs of the Northeast US and not enough water to irrigate anything but cacti and sagebrush. And that’s the problem on a global basis too. There is a lot of water on this planet but the vast majority of it is salty. Only 2.5% is fresh and only 20% of that is usable by humans, the rest is locked up in ice caps or is polluted.

Even if we could figure out some way to feed a gianormous population of ten billion, that still leaves us with all the problems of garbage and human waste. Think about how much poop ten billion people produce.

The Plan

It’s obvious that we need to reduce the global population, not allow it to keep growing and try to deal with it. As I have stated in the preceding paragraphs, there are too many people right now, and we are looking toward the future – the far future. The long term goal is to have no more people on the planet than can live in comfort and relative wealth, be adequately fed and receive all the necessities of life; medical care, a fair government, diversity, inclusiveness and the freedom to feel safe from violence and intolerance. Experts differ in their calculations but the consensus is that the global population should be no more than two billion people.

So what do we do with the five billion people who are dead weight? Well for starters, they would need to be moved around. With a global government it will be much easier to move people into more efficient and environmentally friendly locations. Massive structures will be built covering square miles and rising a thousand feet or more. This might seem like it would use up land that could be cultivated but in reality it would free up cultivatable land by “putting everything in one place” - shops, theaters, hospitals, schools, recreation, sports arenas, etc. Perhaps a million or more people could live in one of these “mega-buildings.” In the United States, for instance, once the ideal population level is reached, it would only require approximately one hundred of these structures to be built and the entire population will be moved into them. All other buildings will be torn down. The mega-buildings will be built on land that cannot be put into agricultural use such as deserts, areas with poor soil quality and salt flats.

Travel will no longer be necessary except between one mega-building and another. People and goods will travel through underground tunnels or on above ground monorails in environmentally friendly, electrically powered rail cars. However, such travel would rarely be necessary because everything one could ever want will be contained within the mega-buildings. This would free the land for agriculture, solar farms, wind farms and other types of environmentally friendly types of energy. Fossil fuels will be rendered obsolete. People will no longer need to own automobiles and will be free from the huge expense of purchase, maintenance and insurance. The carnage of traffic accidents will be a thing of the past.

A birth control program will be established to stabilize the size of the population. Perhaps the best way to do this is to selectively administer certain chemical compounds during routine vaccinations which would prevent women from producing eggs and / or men from producing sperm. It would be simple and completely painless. No one would even know it had been done until they tried to have children. The selection process will be based on genetic characteristics in an effort to weed out the more troublesome aspects of the human condition such as genetic deformities, mental illness, intellectual disability as well as social issues such as diversity.

An extensive education program will be established which will contain curriculum to be sure that everyone is made thoroughly aware of the necessity and importance of the steps being taken to save the Human Race and the planet. It will also be used to educate people of the evils of racism, toxic masculinity, misogyny and other destructive behaviors as well as wean the population off of superstitious religious beliefs which conflict with various aspects of the program such as birth control. To this end it would be best to remove children from their parent’s sphere of influence. Schools now provide most meals for children and supervise much of their activity. It is a few simple steps to modify the school system to keep children under the careful and nurturing supervision of the educational system all of the time. Parents would be allowed to visit of course but the object is to prevent them from teaching their children falsehoods and destructive behaviors such as the aforementioned religious superstition, intolerance, bigotry and racism. It would prevent parental child abuse. Alcoholic, uneducated, poorly educated and mentally ill parents are notorious for abusing their children. How many times have you heard news stories about parents doing unspeakable things to their children?

Once the above measures are in place, the population has been relocated and the land has been cleared, agriculture will switch to plant production exclusively, becoming sustainable and eliminating the highly inefficient, wasteful, inhumane and environmentally unfriendly production of animal products. Fishing will be banned so that the oceans can recover. This is not to say that everyone would be forced to be a vegan vegetarian. That’s just not practical and many people would balk at the idea. Plus there is the aspect that a vegan diet holds many dietary deficiencies. Vegans have to be careful to find alternate sources of protein and the vitamins and minerals which are usually supplied by meat, eggs and seafood. This is not something that you can expect a large population to do. Our global government will have detailed records on everyone; location as well as age, height, weight and health status. Based on these factors and the ability – or lack thereof – to contribute to society in a useful way, individuals will be carefully selected for humane harvest. With modern technology a human being can be compassionately and painlessly euthanized and the body can efficiently be processed into many different wholesome and palatable types of food. There is nothing gruesome or morbid about this. This is not the stereotypical, cliché cannibalism of the Donner Party, Hannibal Lechter and Jeffery Dahmer. For instance, the head and hands will not be processed. This is for two reasons. 1. To allow the next of kin to have a funeral with an open casket. The head and hands will be mounted on a dummy body. Afterwards they will be removed and cremated. Burial will be outlawed; it is wasteful of valuable land which can be otherwise used for agriculture. 2. Many of the diseases associated with the consumption of human flesh are transmitted by brain and nervous tissue. The average human body contains between fifty and seventy five pounds of usable meat. A rate of one billion humane harvests per year will provide an adequate meat supply and pare the global population to an acceptable level within five or six years. This solves both the starvation and the overpopulation problem. It’s a win-win situation. Obviously only mature people will be selected for harvest. No one will be eating little kids. A minimum age, say 35 to 40 will need to be established. Of course a few people may object to this but over time it will become routine and people will accept their fate. Once the global population is stabilized and clean environmental practices are established, the practice of humane harvesting could be gradually phased out and we could once again begin farming cattle, pigs and other livestock. But we must be vigilant and not let things get out of hand again. We must be strict but gentle. The educational system is key to shaping the thought process so that a tolerant, diverse population is maintained which has the courage to make this plan successful.

Truly, we are in trouble and truly the plan I have set out here is neither that complicated or difficult. The outcome would be an Earth that could only be described as paradise. I have heard other plans. At best they are patchwork / Band-Aid solutions. Here is a plan that guarantees peace, sustainable, long term human happiness on a green, environmentally sustainable Earth.

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emperornune · 5 years ago

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~ Perception is a choice and not a fact ~

*My thoughts on how the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles meets up with the teachings of Eckhart Tolle*

The Course says that we see the world we value and this is a very simple point to prove in fact in our own lives. Are you politically minded? Consumed with the ins and outs of becoming a new mother? Religiously minded and absorbed in doctrine and theology? I could mention countless other topics and circumstances that absorb our attention in our everyday life situation. Our view of the world is colored entirely by what we focus on. What we focus on is exactly what we are looking for in the world. Thus what we want to see, we find. The question remains, what exactly is it that we are looking for? This we can easily tell by what we actually are seeing in our assessment of the condition, nature and purpose of the world.

If we see a chaotic world of violence and disturbing events and this colors our demeanor into one that is cynical and pessimistic then this is what we are actually seeking for in the world. We are seeking just this, as mad as it may sound, precisely because we DO find what we seek and only this do we find.

Our mind determines our experience of reality and what we accept into our mind's is exactly what will make up the content of our life experience. No one is saying we should ignore the practical tools of observation and empirical learning for dealing with the mundane activities of this world. What The Course and Eckhart Tolle is emphasizing is that we do not allow these material activities to be the defining factor of how we come to know our true selves.

Anyone can navigate hectic traffic at the height of rush hour without an ounce of road rage polluting their consciousness. What this requires is having a different primary focus while driving other than seeking fulfillment in simply getting to the destination we have set out for ourselves. Imagine the miracle of enjoying just Being fully in the Now, content with everything that is. The slow traffic, the honking horns, the smog and heat are all just peripheral occurrences that are but on the edge of our awareness as we are rooted deeply in the limitless depth of our own inner Being. This inner Being within me and within you is the same inner Being or Spirit that is One and the same in all people and in all life. There is even the Presence of Being in all inanimate objects if one is open enough to perceive it.

I last wrote about acceptance and the vital role it plays in leading one into a more direct and powerful experience of inner peace. All three Gateways that I mentioned are equally important and mutually inclusive, in that if you are entering the Now through any one of these Gateways then you are activating the essential essence present in the other two. To revise, these three Gateways are the Gateway of the Inner Body, the Gateway of Silence and the Gateway of Acceptance. Eckhart Tolle has a relatively brief yet powerful teaching series on these Gateways entitled "Gateways to Now". I have listened to this teaching repeatedly and practiced many of the activities he presents for us to engage actively with the Now.

Most of the time being immersed in the Presence of Being I am far more silent and in a receptive mode than I normally would be. However, sound, words, music and art can and do arise from within a life centered in the Now. The Now is but the formless Space in which all manifest reality occurs. I know that I am living in the fullness of the Now when I am aware that I am aware of the Now. It is then that the Presence of Being flows freely and I can more easily address my egoic mind movements in a healthy, healing and gentle manner. Without judgment I choose to see any challenge I may face as an opportunity to practice applying the Presence of Being to whatever negative OR positive emotions that come up in my present experience. The Presence of Being can be likened to the Holy Spirit of Christianity and A Course in Miracles. It is a Living Force that moves through us AND IS US. It is both our essential Identity and also an Essence of Life that goes far beyond our individual selves. It is allowed to Be as It Is without our putting this Presence in some "God box" or man made doctrine and theology that sucks the life right out of the authentic nature of the vastness of Being as WE experience it. We cannot harm or diminish the Beauty of Being by anything we say, think or do; it is beyond our human ability to tamper with in any way. We can either accept It as It Is and allow It to move through us according to IT'S nature and Flow of It's Presence or we can resist it in almost everything we do and choose the route of egoic self-determination.

We can only change our individual worlds by changing our individual minds about what we shall give real value to and to how we choose to reinforce what we value with those perspectives and practices that will enhance our experience with the "Mission Imperative" that we have now chosen for ourselves. If your mission imperative is to make money, succeed at a career and find your personal self value and worth in these endeavors then you will unavoidably rely on your ego and it's desire-based need to be special in order to achieve in these areas.

Now if we choose instead to be open to Truth, so open in fact that we become willing to allow Truth to reveal itself to us rather than us setting up the parameters in which we want the Truth to fit; then we can begin the journey into accepting everything the Now is offering right now. Living in the Now offers fulfillment in one's own Self, complete and unchangeable yet united and at One with all life in the Universe. Flowing eternally through our human experience can be the ever present Beauty of the fullness of Life, and that Life is one's Being fully present in the Now and knowing that we are both living in the Now as well as Being the Now Itself. Our essential Being is inseparable from the Now because there is no other time or place that exists where we could ever be. All of our Being is happening now, never yesterday and never tomorrow. We ARE AND HAVE everything we need to be whole and complete Beings right here, right now. All pain in life comes from the avoidance and denial of this fact. No external thing and no event past or future can ever bring us the completion and fulfillment that we so often wrongly associate with our varied goals and aspirations in the world of time.

In closing, it is all in how we perceive what it is that we want and what we are willing to accept as regards the truth of what is true about ourselves in this eternal present moment. All else will take care of itself. We all know how to spend money, eat food, wear clothes; but we seem to be, most of us, at a complete loss as to how to be Who We Are beyond the mind made self which we have come to mistake for who we really are. It is this false ego self that most of us operate from almost our entire lives and it is this false egoic self which sustains itself by doing everything in it's power to keep the Truth of the Now as far from our awareness as possible. Never underestimate the ego's desire for complete dominance in the human mind. So long as we believe that our ego is our real identity then so long will we be living an illusory self-hood based entirely on the effort to make everything but the Truth seem valuable and important. Only what we are in full awareness of ourselves in the fullness of the Presence of Being at one with the Now can release us from the illusory story line of temporal goals and unrealizable dreams, as all dreams of life in this world come to an end. Only our eternal inner Being of Universal Spirit has any true value as only that which is eternal holds any value. What fades away and turns to dust is meaningless in eternity. We can play with form while in these bodies but so long as we seek our Self Identity within these forms than we will perpetually miss the truth of our essential Being as it exists in the realm of the formless.

I will now close with a quote from A Course in Miracles on perception...

T.21.in.1.1-12 "Projection makes perception. 2 The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. 3 But though it is no more than that, it is not less. 4 Therefore, to you it is important. 5 It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. 6 As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. 7 Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. 8 Perception is a result and not a cause. 9 And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. 10 Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. 11 Nothing perceived without it means anything. 12 And where there is no meaning, there is chaos."

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eternalfaithinhislove · 5 years ago

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E N E R G Y

God is our source of life, of energy, of everything. One of my favorite songs illustrates this fact perfectly. It’s [literally] called energy by Hillsong Young & Free. So, I decided to meditate on each lyric. . .

You are the only one in my head

God IS the Only God and should be the Only One we honor and adore. He constantly fills my head, I’m sure He’s always on your mind too, and for all His people.

i've chosen You now my heart is set

We as believers have already decided to follow Jesus. Our hearts and minds are made up; there’s no indecisiveness and nothing will change our minds.

“‘But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’” (Joshua 24:15)

Your love forever and is my strength, my strength more than a rush of adrenaline

Our strength in God is unfailing and never-ending. It’s a powerful feeling (adrenaline rush) knowing He is with us and we gain confidence in knowing He won’t let us be overcome. For HE has overcome it all!

“The Lord is my strength and my song; he has given me victory. This is my God, and I will praise him— my father’s God, and I will exalt him!” (Exodus 15:2)

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” (Psalm 46:1)

“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever.” (Psalm 136:1)

You will sustain me until the end

Our God is a just, unchanging God. He will remain the same, so He’s not going to help us and loves us one day but not the next. When we believe and trust in Him not only do we have nothing to fear, but He will always be with us and sustain us.

You are the only one

God is the ONLY ONE who can make our dreams come true!

You are the only one

God is the ONLY ONE who will always be there; who will always help us; who will always rescue us through everything that comes our way.

when You speak dreams and reality collide

God knows us better than anyone—than ourselves even. So He knows our dreams, goals, and Purpose—He created each of us and gave us these aspirations for a reason and He will help us achieve them when we ask and believe in prayer.

“And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” (Matthew 21:22)

“‘We both had dreams,’ they answered, ‘but there is no one to interpret them.’ Then Joseph said to them, ‘Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.’” (Genesis 40:8)

Your Word rewrites my destiny

God is our Creator and The Author of our whole lives. When we pray, He hears. Whatever we choose or do, He will guide. He will also correct us when we ask Him to show us the way.

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

my life finds a new beginning

We are born again in Jesus. When we are baptized we receive His Spirit. We are revitalized by spending time in His Word and in prayer.

“Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’” (John 3:3-8)

cause You are, You are my energy

I can’t do anything without God. I go to Him for everything. I can do all things with Him and nothing without Him.

“I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” (Philippians 4:13)

Jesus Your Presence is what ignites

Your truth is electric, the source of light

Jesus IS our light!

“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” (John 14:6)

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

a moment with You makes me come alive, alive

Every time we read and meditate [on] The Word of God, we are truly alive. So it is when we go to church and worship Him. His Word comes alive and makes us be truly alive. Not just our earthly vessels but our very souls.

We are alive through and because of Jesus Christ.

“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” (Ephesians 2:4-5)

when You speak dreams and reality collide

When we turn to God and ask for something according to His Will, He will make it come to pass.

“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11)

“Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” (James 1:17)

Your Word rewrites my destiny

Jesus saves us all. No one is too far gone that He can’t or won’t save; the moment you truly believe and give your heart to Him your Savior already paid the debt you owed with His Blood! He’s given us the destiny of saved!

He tells us that what we ask for in His name will be given for us but we must not doubt. For He holds our destiny. Of whom shall we be afraid then?

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28)

“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” (Jeremiah 29:11)

my life finds a new beginning

Our new birth [in Jesus] is a bond that can never be broken. It’s not just words and water—It’s a connection to our Lord who saved us from all our sins. Our baptism connects us to the life our Redeemer died to give us; it brings us victory in HIM.

“And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’” (Acts 11:16)

“for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” (1 Peter 1:23)

cause You are, You are my energy

My faith in Jesus is what motivates me every day! Without it I wouldn’t just be energized—I’d have nothing.

Jesus, You're everything I need and more

Jesus has saved us and given us e v e r y t h i n g! What more will we ever need or want? Our God provides us with all we could ever need and want.

"The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing." (Zephaniah 3:17)

We will never need more than Jesus! Ever. He IS more than enough!

“The Lord is my shepherd; I have everything I need.” (Psalm 23:1)

I'll follow You 'til the end

I can see people who don’t believe, begin to but I can’t imagine a believer ever stop believing. We might get mad or frustrated at God but to completely lose faith? That’s hard for me to picture. I will follow Him to the end!

You are my strength

Jesus is my strength in every situation. Whether I need a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold or to pull me up—He is there! Always.

Jesus, You're everything I need and more

The Lord will always provide for us. Our Father will not only fulfill our every need but He wants to—and does—bless us abundantly. We must believe and remember this for all our days.

“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11)

You are, You are my energy

Jesus is my energy because He’s what makes me the happiest. The Only One who can always make me smile.

You're the everlasting God

You're the One who holds it all

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth Does not become weary or tired His understanding is inscrutable.” (Isaiah 40:28)

God created everything out of nothing. HE is THEE CREATOR, He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. This is far outside human understanding but that a great thing. It means there is no one and nothing like God.

God can make anything happen!

“For there is nothing that God cannot do.” (Luke 1:37)

I can't help but stand in awe

God is so awesome, so miraculous and so merciful filled with unfailing grace and love unending that how could we not stand in awe? The Bible often tells us to have awe-inspired or awe-filled reverence (honor, respect) for and fear of GOD.

“Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe, and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles.” (Acts 2:43)

You are my energy

Everything God has done for me makes me so happy it energizes me to my very core!

You're the everlasting God

You're the One who holds it all

I can't help but stand in awe

What God has made—nothing and no one can change. God is in control of everything and nothing will keep Him from us or us from Him.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

“The LORD will vindicate me; your love, LORD, endures forever— do not abandon the works of your hands.” (Psalm 138:8)

So, how could we not stand in awe?!

You are my energy

By being baptized in His Holy Name, we’re blessed with The Spirit [of GOD]—what could ever fill us with more joy and energy?!

“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’” (Matthew 28:18-20)

He gave to us also the authority to make disciples in His Name.

when You speak dreams and reality collide

Your Word rewrites my destiny

Jesus re-wrote each of our destinies on the cross. His blood redeemed us all.

“But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” (Ephesians 2:13)

my life finds a new beginning

We are new in Christ.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” (Ephesians 2:4-5)

cause You are, You are my energy

God will remain the same forever and so will His Word and His Promises. How cool and exciting is that?! To know God won't let us down, ever. This gives us total energy and confidence!

But the plans of the LORD stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations. (Psalm 33:11)

Jesus, you're everything I need and more

Jesus is all we need. He is The Way, The Truth, and The Life!

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” (John 14:6-8)

I'll follow you 'til the end You are my strength

When the disciples followed Jesus He left them—and us—with a promise:

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

Jesus, You're everything I need and more

Philippians 4:19-20 literally states: “And my God will fully supply your every need according to his glorious riches in the Messiah Jesus. Glory belongs to our God and Father forever and ever! Amen.”

Jesus came in order to give us everything!

“‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’” (John 10:10)

You are, You are my energy

God gives me my every heartbeat, He is my heartbeat.

You are my energy

Our God is the one who gives our lives meaning and joy; this is what gives us energy—Spiritually energy and He enables us to carry on.

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hoopreeriksson5-blog · 6 years ago

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mittensmorgul · 6 years ago

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Hi, the “why didn’t Cas go with them to save Dean” anon here. When I said “Cas went with them after Lucifer” I was also referring to s12 like in 12x07 and 12x08. Thank you for clarifying that Michael is just established as more powerful, but why would Lucifer be weaker than an AU archangel when their only difference is what universe they’re from? Why are AU archangels more powerful? Sorry if I made this too complicated, I just struggle with following the canon for magical powers sometimes.:P

I think you’re expecting a deeper canonical reasoning for some of this stuff that canon itself is basically just laying out in concrete terms here. Sometimes canon just Does That. Canon is not required to explain or justify itself when the explanation or justification is just... irrelevant to the larger narrative. This is a really difficult thing to explain, because this isn’t a value judgement on a character or a plot point or viewers who headcanoned something very different before canon laid down a New Fact. This is just... objectively what canon does sometimes. The trick for viewers is to use these new fact to readjust previously held headcanons and perceptions to fit with what canon is telling us is actually reality.

Why are AU archangels more powerful? Because canon said so. Because 13.07 hammered that point home. But okay, even if you accept that, and you still want an explanation as to why? Well, sorry, canon hasn’t given us one.

We can apply headcanon to this, look at the canon we already have in the past about archangels in our universe, and attempt to deduce the reasons for the difference, but honestly we don’t have enough information about the AU to say for certain. We know that universe is different from ours in fundamental ways. Sam and Dean were not the end-all, be-all apocalypse vessels for that universe, you know? Or else the angels would’ve made sure John was resurrected to father them into existence with Mary one way or another, and the apocalypse as it was prophesied in OUR universe would’ve marched on the same way.

(we know both Zachariah and Lucifer threatened to just keep bringing Sam and Dean back to life when they threatened to kill themselves to stop the apocalypse, so if Sam and Dean were the destined vessels in the AU it seems like the angels would’ve just... done the thing and MADE it happen, you know? Something is fundamentally different there on a cosmic level)

Not to mention the way AU Michael, in direct contrast to OUR Michael, has this disdain for God. Our Michael was trying to be the dutiful son despite God’s abandonment, but AU Michael made his own plans instead, almost as if his experience with God was very different. Which is interesting in its own right, bringing up the notion that maybe God really is absent in their universe, and what that might mean on a cosmic scale. Even if these thoughts don’t lead us to a concrete, absolutely solid explanation for why AU Michael is more powerful, they give support to the notion that if canon unequivocally states that is a fact, we’re given leeway to accept it as fact.

Sometimes canon requires us to apply critical thinking skills and make these sorts of leaps of faith, to fill in the gaps however we see fit in the moment. Just because we’re being asked to build the mental bridge and trust it’s solid enough to cross the divide doesn’t mean the bridge doesn’t exist.

But this does bring me to one of the dangers of the viewer attempting to fill those narrative chasms in with concrete, rather than just trusting the invisible bridge. I’m gonna call it Headcanon Fatigue. Bear with me, because one of my favorite things to do with canon is to attempt to explain it all with one Grand Unified Theory of Everything (which, heck, is why s11 is still my favorite meta-wise, because it DID solidify at least the cosmic-level Grand Unification via Love Theory, which honestly is still playing out in aftereffects). But often canon isn’t ASKING us to fill in all the canyons yet. It WANTS us to slowly construct a latticework of intricate bridges and stairways to navigate the canyons and explore all the nooks and crevices, but to not become so distracted by what we find to assume we’ve actually explored the entire canyon as a whole or understood the tiny fraction of what we’ve explored correctly, you know?

Like the whole Angel Vessel Consent Issue floating around a lot of the speculation I’ve seen about Michael and Dean lately.

A lot of that speculation was based on the single case of possession of Donnie Finneman in 5.03, and I think it leaves PLENTY of questions and like... a grand total of zero answers. So the fact that Dean wasn’t rendered comatose by Michael’s possession? NOT BREAKING THAT OLD CANON, because what we saw back then was unreliable at best, and an outright deception at worst. Deception that’s only been compounded by years of headcanon being built up around a single incident in canon that we never got a real explanation for.

Let’s compare the actual FACTS of Donnie Finneman’s case with easily misconstrued opinions versus various headcanons I’ve seen solidify into concrete, inflexible assumptions over the years:

Donnie, the vessel of Raphael, was the mechanic at a gas station where a skirmish between angels and demons had broken out”

FRAMINGHAM: Would not have believed my eyes if I hadn't seen it myself. We're talking a riot. Full scale.DEAN: How many?FRAMINGHAM: Thirty, forty, in all-out kill-or-be-killed combat?

So there was a generalized riot, then a sudden pure, bright white explosion, and the only one left alive in the middle of that was the mechanic, Donnie, who Cas immediately identifies as Raphael taking his vessel.

But... what led to Donnie saying yes? And WHY were those angels and demons skirmishing at that specific gas station? And WHY did Raphael chose that time and place to take his vessel?

Because we have to assume that Donnie was in the middle of that battle, you know? Can you even imagine just being at work doing an oil change or something, and suddenly there’s this all-out riot between supernatural beings all around you? Like, seriously, that would probably be enough for ME to want to say yes to a cosmic being offering me protection or whatever in exchange for a yes there...

So was that entire scenario arranged by Raphael specifically to secure consent from his vessel? I mean, that’s one logical possibility.

Now let’s look at Raphael for a moment, throughout canon and not just at this one episode. Let’s remember what he thinks of humanity in general, and what his reasons for wanting to restart the apocalypse in s6 were. He HATED humanity. He was TIRED of playing that role of watching over them. He was BORED with humanity, and just wanted it all to be over. He wasn’t passionate about remaking the world in his own image the way Lucifer was, or the way AU Michael seems to be now. He’s just done.

So with that knowledge, why would Raphael even care about taking a vessel at all? What was his purpose? Why did he bother to arrange to have Donnie reduced to the ready and waiting “open phone line” of a practically empty vessel Cas and Dean saw in the hospital? What exactly was that entire situation about?

Because that’s what makes no sense with the rest of canon, you know?

So I suggest that rather than break your brain trying to resolve all of extant canon with that singular anomaly, you look at the entire scenario from the opposite perspective. Canon has been repeatedly inviting us to do this, after all.

It’s like... we aren’t so petty as to insist that the mission Dean and Sam set out on to kill Lilith at the beginning of s4 was actually the true mission they SHOULD have been going on to stop the apocalypse, you know? The entire season was a misdirect focused around the goal of killing Lilith under the assumption that SHE would start the apocalypse and they needed to stop her from doing that, but in reality she WOULD start the apocalypse-- with her carefully planned death at the exact right time and place. Sam and Dean (and Cas) were played for fools in the end, and everything they thought had been true had been overturned and the truth was only uncovered at the last minute, when it was too late to change course.

And I think a lot of the assumptions about archangel possession are based on those early (and deliberately misleading) assumptions based on Donnie Finneman’s case. Like... we take Cas’s word that Michael would leave Dean in a worse state than Raphael had left Donnie... but why do we accept that as a literal, surface-level assessment based on concrete fact? Because Cas said so? Cas also said they needed to kill Lilith at one point in order to stop her from breaking the final seal, but we later learned he’d been lied to about that, as well. I mean, Cas asked DEAN for help in uncovering Raphael in 5.03, because CAS DIDN’T HAVE ANSWERS AND NEEDED DEAN TO HELP “TALK TO PEOPLE” TO GET THEM. So assuming Cas’s guesses there, or Cas’s warnings to Dean about worst case scenarios of what MIGHT happen if he said yes to Michael can be seen on just that level-- since we know Cas is willing to lay down EVERYTHING in order to stop Dean from saying yes in the end. I mean, hello 5.18.

But now that we have that said, let’s go back and try and guess what happened to Donnie in the first place. Was he somehow gravely injured during the skirmish that led to Raphael showing up and coercing a yes out of him? I mean, we just learned the sorts of torture Zachariah was willing to impart on Dean in order to coerce a yes out of him in 5.01, and in 5.03 we also learn the sorts of trickery Lucifer will resort to in order to coerce a yes out of Sam, and in 5.04 we learn the lengths Zachariah is willing to go to get that yes again, and we learn again in 5.16 just how far Heaven will go... so why not apply that to Raphael, as well?

What if Donnie’s semi-comatose state was a direct result of injuries he sustained in that skirmish? What if Raphael had arranged that just so he could make Donnie into his notion of a “perfect vessel?” I.e. one not encumbered with an annoying human consciousness he’d have to deal with? Like Michael securing that yes from John in 5.13 (and in 1978), waiting until he was gravely injured and promising to make everything right? To save his wife and heal his body in exchange for that yes?

Why do we assume Raphael used any different tactic to secure Donnie’s yes?

Like... “I can relieve your suffering, deliver your soul to eternal rest and peace where your pain will end, if you allow me the use of your vessel.” If I’d been Donnie in that state? I’d have been tempted to agree.

So why do we headcanon that Donnie was Fine And Dandy before Raphael possessed him? And that the results in that hospital were only the result of Raphael’s possession? Because of that one offhand comment from Cas?

DEAN: I take it that's not Raphael anymore.CASTIEL: Just an empty vessel.DEAN: So is this what I'm looking at if Michael jumps in my bones?CASTIEL: No, not at all. Michael is much more powerful. It'll be far worse for you.

But we assume Dean was referring to the physical state Raphael left Donnie in here. So... why do we assume that Castiel, an angel, was also referring to the physical state of Donnie’s empty vessel with that comment?

Nothing in canon is suggesting that’s the correct interpretation of that scenario. In fact, current canon is actively refuting it. And it HAS been actively refuting it since Sam first said yes to Lucifer and was not rendered a blubbering vegetative lump of sasquatch in the aftermath, you know? NONE of the canon between 5.03 and 14.03 has supported that assumption that it was only Raphael’s power that rendered Donnie in such a state.

So that’s like... the opposite problem to the one you’re having making that leap onto a solid surface that canon is insisting is real, even if we can’t see the support structure holding it in place. We’re not being asked to pave over everything between point A and point B here. In fact, I’d suggest that attempting to pave that road could be as misguided as assuming that all the archangel possession canon post 5.03 must somehow support the headcanons that formed around Raphael’s possession of Donne Finneman. Because that’s not how canon works.

Sometimes it’s asking you to build bridges, and sometimes it’s just telling you the ground is solid, and going poking under your feet for the support structure is just gonna lead to you toppling headfirst into the ravine. Not fun at all. :P

*scrolls back up to reread your original question and wonders where the heck I took a wrong turn... probably Albuquerque...*

#spn 14.03 #spn 5.03 #spn 4.22 #spn 5.01 #spn 5.04 #vessels and meatsuits #on the nature of angel grace #angels and souls #spn 13.07 #dinkle #Grand Unification via Love Theory #canon vs headcanon #wtf happened here...#i have a massive migraine... i'm blaming this whole post on that...#Anonymous

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avehi-the-adamant · 6 years ago

Text

Coming Home

Set following the Fall of the Lich King, but before the Cataclysm

~*~

The mist around the Death Knight seemed to freeze to her plated armor, as Avehi stepped off the ship and onto the dock. It had been well over a year since she’d set hoof on the Azure Isles; last time she was here, she was saying goodbye to her friends before setting off to join with the Alliance. Much had changed since then. The war in Outland was won. The Draenei had earned their place in the Alliance.

She had died.

That fact cut through her like a chilled wind. She felt so empty now. A hollow husk of her former self.

After Outland, she joined a group of human Paladins - the Argent Dawn - in cleansing their ancestral home of Lordaeron of a foul presence. She’d never come across the undead before… but the Light would surely cleanse their blighted presence. The humans had done much for the Draenei people… a Vindicator like her was honor-bound to return the favor.

She lent her strength to their cause, and fought hard against the Scourge presence. But ultimately, this strange and foreign enemy proved to be her end. She fell by their fetid claws, left to be consumed by their endless, mindless, aberrant hordes. The last memory she had of her life was that terrifying image; being overrun. Being consumed. Then, only darkness.

It wouldn’t last; her eyes opened again some time later in the heart of the necropolis. She had been robbed of her peaceful afterlife. Denied the glory of joining with the Light. No… instead she became a slave to the very darkness that had taken her life - and so much more after that.

She shivered, shaking her head at the thought as she pressed onward. She pulled her dark hood over her head, further hiding her shame as she entered the vibrant and radiant halls of the Exodar. It was brighter than she remembered it; blindingly so. Her icy gaze narrowed as she progressed through the luminous halls. She could feel the radiance of the Naaru, dwelling within the very heart of the crashed vessel that had become their home. It was different now, though - before, a Naaru’s presence filled her with blissful calm. Now, she felt it like a fire, burning at her from the outside, rather than from within. It made her feel sick. Tired. Fatigued. Like she’d stood out in the heat too long. She was well out of her element here… she couldn’t stay.

Why had she even returned at all?

Rising as one of the Scourge’s Death Knights was surreal. She remembered her past, yet at the time it didn��t matter. All that mattered to her for a time was destroying the living - bringing down the Scarlet Crusade which threatened her Master - the Lich King - and his dark forces. She adapted well to combat, even in this new form. Her Vindicator training already taught her how to tap into power beyond the physical; though now, rather than calling on the Light, she called on something much more abhorrent. She was deadly on the battlefield, cutting down Scarlet after Scarlet in a vicious slaughtering. She found herself enjoying the carnage, reveling in the bloodshed. This was her purpose now, and she embraced it fully.

For a time.

She departed the Exodar as quickly as she’d arrived, barely making it down the ramp before she turned back. It was too much… physically, and emotionally. She remembered it with such fondness; now, it only filled her with dread. The darkness within her could not abide so close to such holiness. It hurt her form. It hurt her soul. She hung her hooded head in immeasurable sorrow as she emerged from the ship, back out into the misty pines of Azuremyst. She could feel onlookers gazing at her - she must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb to them in such a place. Her chilling gaze caught sight of a fisherman; he turned from her quickly and hastily without a word. Another glance, and she beheld a woman and her child. The woman gripped her youngling closer, pulling him along expediently away from Avehi. She couldn’t imagine they knew what she was… only acted on the fear of uncertainty. If only they knew…

The Scourge’s Champion.

With the Scarlet Crusade routed, and the Plaguelands claimed for her dark Master, she joined her brothers and sisters in undeath as they set their sights on their next target - Light’s Hope Chapel. The memory of that place resonated deeper with her than previous memories. It was jarring to see such a hallowed place again… from the other side of the war which raged there. Comrades she’d come to know from the Argent Dawn now stood before her, weapons drawn in defense of their holiest of landmarks. She stood in opposition of them - humans, dwarves, elves… people she’d considered friends, in life. It shocked her to her core to see them glaring her way. Looking at her as if she were their hated enemy… because she was now. The viciousness and ruthlessness with which she’d conquered the Scarlet Crusade left her; how could she raise her weapon to her friends in the Argent Dawn? Her eyes had opened now, and she realized what she was. As the forces clashed, she defended herself… but did nothing else to antagonize or bring harm to her Argent friends. They lost that battle… but she’d won something much more important. She remembered who she was in life. What she was in life. Her goals, her ambitions… her purpose renewed. She laid down her arms with other Death Knights who had had similar revelations about themselves. She joined with the newly founded Ebon Blade, and swore vengeance on the dark Master who had taken everything from her.

She couldn’t let that happen to anyone else.

Her eyes narrowed as they settled on another Draenei - a shamanism practitioner, by the looks of him. She set aside her discomfort for the moment, and stopped him on the path. Perhaps he could help her find who she had come looking for here…

“You, Brother.” she said shortly - voice distorted. “You are a shaman?”

“--Ah, uhh…” The Draenei froze in place, scared and confused. “Y-Yes…”

“Do you know a fellow shaman called Mierne?” Avehi asked.

“M-Mierne? I know of her, yeah… they say she lives along the eastern coast of Bloodmyst.” he replied, timidly. “Why?”

Avehi didn’t reply; she had learned what she needed from him. Without another word, she brushed past him, and headed towards the northern isle. Azuremyst was populated by her people, but Bloodmyst had only one settlement. It was much more hostile up on the northern isle; between the infected, agitated wildlife and the invasive and relentless Naga, it was far less hospitable than the relatively tranquil Azuremyst. Strangely, such a place seemed well-suited for Mierne. She’d never been the sort to conform to comforts. She carved her own path. Avehi remembered meeting her years ago in Zangarmarsh. Despite the Draenei settling in Telredor, Mierne had set up her own place to live out among the Krokul - the Broken. The opinions of her peers didn’t matter to her. She did what was needed, and helped those who weren’t able to help themselves. It had impressed Avehi so, and led to a firm friendship between the two of them.

That friendship was why Avehi had returned to this place. If anyone could understand her as she was now, it was Mierne.

~*~

The shaman sat on a cliff overlooking the sea. She had set up her crude, but functional hut hidden in the woods on the southwest side of Bloodmist. Despite her people’s best efforts, the wildlife was still deeply affected by the Exodar’s crash. Mierne has made it her own personal mission to help stabilize and heal the land with the spiritual gifts the elements granted her. It was an uphill battle, but bit by bit, progress was being made.

It wasn’t easy living, but it was her way. Mierne has always preferred solitude, preferring the comforts of the natural world to the metallic and crystalline structures of the Exodar. She would visit on occasion, to give reports and personal visits to a friend, but her heart was wild. Untamed.

As she sat in quiet meditation, her tail twitched as one of her alarm totems was set off. Someone was nearby. She opened her eyes and pressed her hand to the ground. It wasn’t an animal… it didn’t even have a pulse. Arcs of electricity sparked over her form as she stood. However, she didn’t remain standing for long, before her form shifted to that of a slightly transparent wolf.

She took off into the woods, towards the Forsaken that dared intrude on this land.

~*~

The Naga’s blood began to gurgle in their hollow throat, as Avehi pulled her blade from it. She kicked the last of the slimy fish-beings over, before stepping up to the water to cleanse their viscous blood from her runeblade. She frowned at the weapon - it wasn’t one she used in life. No, in life, she used a blessed crystalline hammer… a vessel of the Light. She scowled as the runes along the blade’s surface illuminated - the blood she’d shed excited the unholy sigils, coaxing them to life with satisfied hissing whispers.

She hated this blade. She wondered why she even carried it still. It was a gift once. A gift from her Dark Master. But now, it felt more like a curse… the blade shared in her hunger for blood. A hunger she had to sate time after time. These Naga sufficed for now, but the blade would hunger again soon. She grew tired of feeding it. Tired of sustaining such a dark relic through her carnage. She suddenly felt sickened by the very sight of it - the runes pulsing, like low, silent laughter. She hated this blade!

CRACK!

In an angered fit, she gripped the blade’s tip and hilt, and brought it down over her plated knee. There was an ethereal scream as the runes shattered! The blade itself fractured, cracks sprawling like veins from the impact site. She growled, baring her teeth at the inanimate, broken weapon. With a heave, she tossed it into the sea to be consumed by the waves.

This visit was to look forward. Not back.

Her hand oozed with dark blood - a parting gift from the blade. He grunted as she knelt down, to dip her hand in the water and let the waves wash the blood away. A sigh… what did it matter? Discarding the blade didn’t change what she was. What she’d become. She felt better… but only for a moment. Now, she felt alone. Lost. She sat back from her kneel, simply sitting on the beach as the waves crept up her legs… then receded. Again, in steady rhythm. She closed her eyes, and listened to the waves break over her hooves and plated legs. It was soothing, helping her calm her troubled, racing mind.

Her search could wait a moment or two.

Mierne’s ears pinned back as she heard a scream. It didn’t come from any living creature she knew. It wasn’t natural. She stifled a growl as she silently made her way onto the beach, surveying the damage. Naga bodies lay dead, littering the shoreline with their blood. The wolf paid them little mind. They were a nuisance, like the murlocs, fine in small numbers, but left to multiply, they became invasive and a danger to everything around them.

She kept her guard up as she padded over to the one that had caused the carnage -the undead-. For a moment she wondered if it was still ‘living’ as it kneeled perfectly still in the water. Her instinct had been to attack and chase the creature from the isle, but if it was injured or near death.

She shifted into her natural form as she mentally called to the elements. Gathering storm clouds above them. She drew the silver hammer that had been strapped to her side.

“Two choices,” she spoke in common with a heavy Draenei accent, “You leave, or I put you at peace, once and for all.”

Avehi froze; she recognized that voice! Her search ended much earlier than she anticipated! Oh, how she wanted to spring up, and rush into her old friend’s arms… but given the tone of her voice, and the thundering clouds she’d conjured overhead, it was clear Mierne didn’t recognize Avehi.

How could she, anyway? Avehi looked down at herself - her dark, frayed, bloodstained Ebon Blade robes. The hood which covered her hair and obscured her horns… but deeper than her appearance, Avehi knew her aura had changed significantly - something a seer like Mierne would read easily enough. Even in that way, she was disguised, unfamiliar to her dear friend. It hurt to think how different she was now. She closed her eyes, and sighed.

“... I am not here seeking trouble.” she stated, in her native Draenic. “Nor peace.”

She stood slowly, as the water crashed over her lap one final time. Deliberately and calmly, she reached up and pulled her hood back as she turned to face Mierne. She stared at the shaman with icy blue eyes - screaming silently in pain and sorrow. If they could well up with tears, they might’ve in that moment… even if they’d only freeze to her face as a result. She frowned deeply, expression heavy with anguish. She wasn’t the jovial Vindicator she was in life - inside, or out. No wonder Mierne didn’t recognize her...

“I’m here seeking an old friend.”

Mierne’s snarl vanished as the undead filth removed its hood to show a familiar face. Her eyes widened, as though she were looking at a ghost. In a way, she was.

“...A… Avehi…” the name came out in almost a hush, unable to believe what her eyes as elemental senses fed her.

Her dear friend in the shape of an animated corpse. There was no mistaking the aura of undeath, the still, unbreathing chest, the lichfire blue eyes, the pale skin… there was no mistaking what she had become. A fate worse than death, some would say…

She dropped her hammer in the sand as she brought a hand up over her mouth as she found herself unable to do anything else but stare. Tears stung her eyes. Mierne had lost many dear friends over her long life, but losing Avehi had been one of the hardest deaths to swallow. She still hadn’t fully recovered…

“I…” she managed, swallowing down the lump in her throat, “...never thought I would see you again.”

She opened up her arms to the younger Draenei… now frozen in her youth… beckoning the Death Knight over like a mother would a lost child.

Her expressionless face found one - a shameful frown. Avehi watched Mierne’s reaction for only a second, before the shaman’s expression of stunned disbelief turned Avehi away. She clenched her fists, fighting back tears that wouldn’t come as she stared off to the side. Avehi hated what she’d become… and it showed in her inability to look her dear friend in the eye. Somehow she felt sick. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. A part of her wished she never come here, and revealed to Mierne what sort of abomination she’d become. Why? Why did she even bother coming? Now, it felt as if all she’d done was hurt her friend by revealing a horrible, horrible truth. Had she--

Avehi gasped, catching Mierne’s movements out of the corner of her eye. She looked back to the Shaman… who stood arms wide open to accept her. Avehi was stunned. It was a gesture she never would have expected, but it was one she desperately needed in that moment. She took a tentative step forward… then another… her lip trembled as if about to cry as she closed the distance between herself and her friend - her only friend.

“Mierne…” she whispered, stopping just before the Shaman. “Mierne… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

She closed her eyes tightly as she threw her arms around Mierne, and tucked her chin over her shoulder. A hug… an embrace… it had been so long. Her body was cold and lifeless, but in that moment she felt a flicker of warmth as she reunited with Mierne. Like a child in the tender embrace of her mother…

“I’m so sorry… I never meant to worry you… or startle you...” she sobbed. “But I… had to see you again…”

“Shhh….” Mierne soothed her young friend.

Her arms held Avehi in a tight embrace. She’d managed to hold in her own sobs, but tears still rolled down her dirty cheeks. It pained her to see her friend like so, to feel how cold and lifeless her body had become. She felt her knees weaken, allowing herself to kneel down in the sand and pulling Avehi down with her. She didn’t release the embrace, as though she were trying to bring life back into her friend with warmth alone. Her heart ached? But she knew it was nothing compared to the suffering the Death Knight felt.

“Do not apologize,” she finally said, releasing the embrace slightly only to bring a hand through Avehi’s hair, “I am thankful you came to me… that you have returned home. I will always… ALWAYS… be there for you.”

She took in a deep breath, pushing back her own sorrow to better take care of her friend. She took Avehi by the shoulders and pushed her back slightly. Hands cupped her face and forced her to meet her gaze.

“I promise.”

Avehi played her part well; she hung lifelessly in Mierne’s arms as the two collapsed to a kneel. She only held on, clinging to the Shaman tightly as quiet whimpers escaped her. She remembered the last time she embraced Mierne like this, before leaving the Isles to join with the Alliance and see what Azeroth had to offer. The contrast between the memory of that embrace and this one now was stark… jarring… driving home for Avehi how much undeath had changed her. How she felt, how she sensed things, how disconnected it all seemed, while at the same time being such an overload…

‘What have I become…?’

For all the differences, Avehi felt something familiar in Mierne's arms. Something even death couldn't twist or distort… a calm comfort… the very comfort she came seeking. Mierne's words only made that calm comfort stronger. Her icy blue eyes peered into her dear friend’s. She nodded, offering a weak but genuine smile.

“Home…” her death-distorted voice echoed. “Mierne… thank you. I need… I need a home, now more than ever.”

She shook her head, brow furrowed as a frown replaced that weak smile once more. She looked away in shame again, teeth clenched.

“I've been… lost… for so long.” she murmured. “I never should have left you! I… I never should have…”

“You did what you had to do, Avehi,” Mierne comforted her friend, bringing a hand through her hair, “You made our people proud and died with honour, fighting a great evil.”

Mierne removed her helm from, revealing the mess of tangled braided hair beneath, and genuine features. She looked her friend over, now that the worst of the shock had worn off. Avehi had always been a beautiful Draenei, and even her obvious undeath couldn’t mar that. Sadly, not many would look past the pale features and lich blue eyes… Mierne knew how quickly their kind could be to outcast others.

“We do not always get to choose our path, my friend. This is the path you have been given. Many will not understand what you are, but death is part of life, even for the long lived. Do not allow anyone to tell you that you do not belong because of what you are. You will always have a home with me, whatever happens.”

Avehi wept - an unholy wailing, echoed and distorted by undeath. It rang out, hauntingly, eerily, along the coast and back through the misty woods of the Isles. She cried her cries devoid of tears against Mierne’s chest, tucked in her warm embrace. She had no words, yet the moaning cries spoke volumes of her anguish, fears… relief, and gratitude. Hardly the reunion she envisioned having with Mierne… but the elder Draenei always knew what to say and how to treat her. At her best… and now, at her worst. She was grateful for that, expressed in the moment only through tightening her arms around the shaman. She needed to hear that; to feel that acceptance of her in spite of her horrific new form - the husk of her deceased body breathed living once again by foul and unholy magic. The pain was intense, physically and emotionally, unlike anything Avehi had felt before. But there, in the arms of an old, dear friend… she felt a sense of calm. Relief. Peace.

She was home.

~*~

((Co-written with @kidcatgemini, the character Mierne belongs to her))

#inaugural post #New-ish character #Avehi #Mierne #kidcatgemini #draenei #death knight

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superbfurbz · 6 years ago

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Hey, sorry to ask but, I want to 'like'/own a furby, can't cant because of past experiences. (spooky stories as a child, intense spooking from family members) And i know it's all fake, but theres always 1 part of my mind thats like "but what if it is" And i really want to stop that. any tips?

hey it’s okay! if ur gonna get advice anywhere it makes complete sense to talk to ppl in the furby fandom. i’m sorry your family went so hard on convincing you furbys were scary. since i was a kid i’ve had really strong feelings about adults or older kids that do this to little ones, and i think it’s very mean and unfair. you and so many others share this experience, so it’s clear what you say to young people matters and you’re setting them up for unnecessary stress by giving them irrational fears. i hope one day you will finally feel at ease around furbs, but until then it is totally okay to take your time and work through your own process.i don’t have much, but i have two approaches. i hope one of them (or even a combination) might help you over time.

1.) The Realistic Approach: This is all about continuing what you’ve already been doing. Sometimes ppl have this idea that one can “snap out of” an intense fear or a phobia, but that is by and large untrue. Fear is complicated, and rooted deep. Ppl can be deathly terrified of something and not even have an explanation why, making it harder to identify the root and cope with the fear. In your case, you have the advantage of knowing exactly why you have these feelings about furbys, and in addition, you know it’s not your fault or own doing. Remind yourself that your family members were having “fun” at your own expense. They don’t deserve the satisfaction of your fear. What you deserve is to be able to like things and experience things on your own accord. Furbys are toys, and they are electronic ones. All of their glitches and quirks can easily (and most have!) been explained away. I’m not sure what your family told you specifically to instill this fear in you, but one of the most common complaints I’ve come across is the “they come alive in the middle of the night with no batteries” thing. It makes sense that this would startle ppl, esp small kids. But instead of stoking the scary fires, these kids should have been given an explanation and a small robotics lesson. If anything these are missed opportunities to encourage a child who could take a strong interest in tech and design and dumping an irrational fear on them. Electronics in general can store small bits of energy, and through either a trigger such as sudden movement or the passage of enough time can allow for that stored energy to travel through the electronic and “turn it on” for a brief moment. If you ever work your way up to getting a furby and in the rare event that this occurs, try to remind yourself of that. The same goes for more common glitches like funky garbled audio- the furb has sustained damage or wasn’t put together properly.

2.) The Fantastical Approach: This is all about using your imagination to free you from the constraints of your fear. There are far more possibilities than what I’ll be mentioning here, so please feel free to come up with your own tactics if none of these jive for ya. Personally, as a child, my family did very extreme and mean things to scare me. One of these things was the classic ~there’s somehow a monster that’s terrifying and cruel but it will only come for children ooo~ (if this doesn’t sound too bad, know that i am omitting a lot of very gross and borderline abusive details bc this blog is meant to be a safer space). However… it didn’t really work on me. I would hope and wish and pray for a monster to take me away. I felt that a monster would understand me far more than my own family. Or, how cool would it be to have a friend that only you can see? The way I rationalized it, monsters are incredibly powerful- they can do almost anything they want (except walk around in the sunshine i guess lol). So a monster is a magical, mythical thing. If a monster approaches you, it means you’re special and interesting. This magical creature that generally holds humans in disdain- or at least, at a distance- wants to get to know and befriend you! The way I saw it as a kid and still do, is, how is the boogeyman that much different from a unicorn. And because of my experiences and inclinations, the answer for me is that they’re not different at all. Magic is magic, it just comes in different flavors. How could you spin this for yourself personally? Well, maybe furbys never “chose” your relatives. Perhaps they had some around the house, but how well did they treat their furbs? You might have been a tender child, an “easy target”. You might have been a caring, considerate, meticulous child. If these qualities were/are true of you, furbys would take very kindly to you. In fact, I know any furby in the world would be so proud of you for wanting to work through this, and I know they would understand the fear isn’t your fault. I bet a furby would choose you, because you seem like a sweet and patient and thoughtful person. Maybe your family was jealous, their furbys would turn on as they are meant to do but no special connection could be formed. If you were to have been able to get close to a furby, your relationship may have been very special. In a way, you could think of working through this as getting back to something you’ve always deserved, even if it is just a bit of fun and comfort!

At the end of the day, if this is something you can’t shake, that’s okay. It’s okay to be afraid of things, and as eager to jump to chastising as some ppl can be about this, it is okay to have irrational fears. Irrational doesn’t mean invalid, because having ppl pound an idea into your head when you are very young is plunging that fear into a mind at its most open state, when you are learning so much about existing in the world, right and wrong, caution and risk, payoff and reward. Your fear of furbys won’t get in your way in general, and you can obviously have a completely happy life without ever ridding yourself of this fear. I can only hope this offers you something, at the very least I hope I gave you a safe and wide space to air out your feelings. Thank you for trusting us with this, and I’m genuinely so proud of you for trying to work through it all!

If you do attain your goal, however, know that there is a furby out there who can’t wait to finally meet you. They’ve been so patient, rooting you on from wherever they are, believing in you and knowing you’re a worthwhile person to know and love.

your pal, Bug

#ask #furby #long post #text

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annieboltonworld · 3 years ago

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Juniper Publishers-Open Access Journal of Environmental Sciences & Natural Resources

On the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd)

Authored by Asim I el Moghraby

Preamble

Of the great rivers of the World, the River Nile has undoubtedly played a most significant role in the development of early human civilizations. In more recent times it has excited the imagination of politicians, historians, poets, adventures and explores. The mystery was the source of its regular annual flood and what controlled its volume. That triggered the era of the ‘Discovery of the Sources of the Nile’. Hydrologically, however, the Nile is probably the best-known river in the World. Accurate records on river level extend almost as far back as 660 AD and with gaps to much earlier periods [1-3]. By the turn of the 20th century modern scientific studies were carried out with the view of controlling its unpredictable floods.

Background

Historically the Nile riparian countries have felt free to pursue unilateral water resources initiatives that served their own national interests. These initiatives were often the result of rational decisions. Many such projects made little sense from a basin-wide perspective. Over the years, the riparian countries have often expressed the need for equitable, rational solutions for the development of the basin [4,5]. Since 1999 a multilateral effort has been underway to explore opportunities to maximize the benefits of cooperative development and management of the resources of the Nile Basin. The effort culminated into the Nile Basin Initiative (the NBI) (Figure 1).

Schemes were laid out as knowledge on the Nile built up. These included [6]:

a) Equatorial Nile Project (Jonglei Investigation Team),

b) Bor- White Nile project,

c) Bor-Zeraf project,

d) The Zeraf Cuts (the Garstin cuts),

e) Remodeling Bahr el Jebel,

f) Veneno-Pibor Project, and finally

g) The Century Storage Project

It should be noted that the hydrology of the Ethiopian rivers: Atbara (Tekeze), the Sobat (Baro/Akobo) and the Blue Nile (Abbai) were almost completely ignored. This is a serious imperfection in an otherwise brilliant account of the Nile Hydrology, bearing in mind that Ethiopia provides 86% of the waters of the Nile. It should also be pointed out that all those schemes are in the upstream of Egypt (Figure 2).

The Century Storage scheme was abandoned. Instead the Aswan High Dam (AHD) project was adopted i.e. a series of small projects was scrapped in favor of a giant one. The fundamental goals were the same: over-year storage and sufficient summer water for Egypt’s commercial agriculture. The basic difference, however, is that the dam is within the territorial boundaries of Egypt. “Any thought of Nile control that would embrace the whole of the Basin, as has been conceived by Hurst, Black and Simaika [7] disappeared when the historic rights of the Egyptians were challenged by the new nationalism of the Sudanese” [4]. It must be stressed that the ‘Equatorial Nile Project’ and the ‘Jonglei Investigation Team’ report (1954) were probably the first environmental and social impact assessment studies ever carried out on a project in the Developing World. The study was undertaken between 1948 and 1952.

A treaty had to be signed between Egypt and the Sudan in 1959 to legalize the future undertakings. It was signed by the military government that annexed power the year before and it excluded all the other Basin countries. The lake behind the dam (Lake Nassir and Lake Nubia) would be 500km long; 150 km of which are within the borders of the Sudan. This entailed the mass resettlement of the Nubian ethnic groups, on both sides of the borders; leaving a history of 7,000 years behind [8]. The Sudanese Nubians were moved hundreds of kilometers to settle on River Atbara, where yet another dam was built; Kashm el Girba, in 1964. UNESCO and other international agencies made a monumental effort to save the archaeological monuments that would be submerged by the rising waters of the Nile. Nothing of any scale was undertaken on River Atbara; which was the overlapping reach between the two other great ancient civilizations of the Nile; namely, the Sudanese ‘Kush’ and the Ethiopian ‘Axum’. It might be the first case in Africa where some of the negative impacts of building a dam were mitigated by building yet another dam.

The question is: Has the AHD been a successful substitute to the Century Storage project? Did it satisfy Egypt’s everincreasing water demands and provide the water security she has historically aspired to? Apparently not. Without going into much detail, the dam was simply unequal to the problems it was envisaged to solve. No doubt it performed needed services; the most important of all was guaranteeing a steady and predictable water supply. Never the less, Egypt needed more water than the Nile could now provide and must revert to the old ‘Equatorial Lakes’ project and the partial draining of the ‘Sudd’ swamps.

The Bureau of Land Reclamation

The Bureau of Land Reclamation is an agency of the US Department of State. It conducted an in depth five-year study on the whole of the Blue Nile Basin in Ethiopia. It came out with a report: “Land and Water Resources of the Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia.” It came in 17 volumes and outweighed the 11 volumes of the “Nile Basin”. The report identified 33 irrigation and hydropower projects (needing an estimated 6x109m3 of water). It proposed four cascade dams on the Blue Nile and tributaries at: Kardobi, Mabil, Mandaia and Border. This would give the river a constant flow and a hydroelectric capacity four times that of Aswan.

PLEASE INSERT THE MAP OF THE FOUR DAMS (ON A SEPARATE SHEET) here (Figure 3).

Go to

The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI)

The Nile Basin Initiative is a partnership among the Nile riparian states that “seeks to develop the river in a cooperative manner, share substantial socioeconomic benefits, and promote regional peace and security”. The NBI began with a dialogue among the riparian states that resulted in a shared vision to “achieve sustainable socioeconomic development through the equitable utilization of, and benefit from, the common Nile Basin water resources.” It was formally launched in February 1999 by the water ministers of nine countries that share the river: Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as Eritrea as an observer. In 2012 it was joined by the sovereign state of South Sudan as a full member. It had seven “Shared Vision” projects and seven “Fast Track” projects. One of them was the “Power Trade” project located in the Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO), in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ENTRO appointed two European companies; British and French to look into the issue of engineering control works. Their conclusions were: Egypt has no prospects of additional dams. The proposed technically physically possible dams in the Sudan were disregarded for the simple fact that any dam in the Sudan would evaporate seven times more water than that of an equivalent dam in Ethiopia. Furthermore, the volume to surface area to volume ratio is more favorable in Ethiopia due to the mountainous terrain as opposed to the flatness of the Sudan plains,(Blackmore and Whittington,2008). The work of the French EDF and the British Scott and Wilson was augmented by the counterpart support of three national consulting companies from the Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia [9].

The GERD

The present short note is about a dam within the borders of Ethiopia whose impacts will be felt intensely in the two downstream countries; the Sudan and Egypt. In March 2011, the Ethiopian government announced its intention to build the Millennium Dam near the Sudanese Ethiopian borders, on the main channel of the Blue Nile [10]. The dam will hold 74 x109m3 of water and will produce 5,570-megawatt hour. Egypt adamantly protested while opinion in the Sudan is divided. It was initially called “project X”, then the “Millennium Dam” and finally “Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)”. The official stance of the Sudanese Government was in support of building the dam. There are still many questions to be answered including the following:

a) Why did Ethiopia abandon the well-studied cascade dams in favor of a new one?

b) The dam is only 30% efficient.

c) No environmental and social impact (ESIA) was carried out.

d) No economic study was carried out

e) How long will it take to fill the reservoir, bearing in mind that the average annual discharge of the Blue Nile is 48x109m3.

f) The water released will be 130x106m3 per day for nine months of the year.

g) The annual regular predictable flood, and the silt it transports, will consequently be lost. Subsequently more than 80x103 feddans (1 feddan = 1.308 acre) of floodplains will not be inundated by the regular annual flood. Chemical fertilizers will have to be used to compensate for loss of fertility.

h) The potential of replenishment of ground water will decrease appreciably, having lost the ‘head’ that the flood provides.

i) These wetlands (the floodplains) are the breeding grounds for fish!

j) Silt free water will augment the serious problem of ‘bank erosion’ and could cause scouring of the river bed.

k) If the operation of the dam is not shared between the Sudan and Ethiopia, planning agricultural protocols will be difficult.

l) If the dam fails for any reason all dams and cities on the Blue Nile will be washed away, bearing in mind that the channel has a maximum capacity of one-billion-meter cube.

Due to pressures and debates the Ethiopian government agreed to appoint an expert committee of ten; two from each respective country in addition to four international experts (Panel of Experts). They met in secrecy. The leaked-out information is that the expert committee emphasized the dearth of studies including the environmental, economic and social ones. The Ministers of water of the three countries met at least eighteen times (up to May 2018) with no apparent positive outcome. In the meanwhile, a war of words broke out between supporters and opposers and between countries. Ethiopian diplomacy and Academia went public propagating for the GRD. The official Sudan’s position was supporting the dam. The President of the Sudan even gave Ethiopia millions of dollars worth in earth moving equipment as a present. Opinion of the learnt public community is divided between supporters and opposers.

The GERD has become a national issue in Ethiopia and a source of pride. Egypt and Egyptians were die hard against it. It is not surprising that Public media in both countries have played a pivotal role. The Sudan played the role of moderator. On the 23rd of March, 2015, the Presidents of the three countries signed a Memorandum of Principles on the GERD. Details and action plans will follow. It was implicitly agreed to assign an International Company to study the environmental and social impact. In the meantime, construction is progressing at a steady pace. The first filling should have commenced in August 2017; while the contentious issues have not been resolved and the proposed studies have not been completed.

The Way Forward

The GERD is a fact of life. It is there to stay. Cooperation and coordination by the East Nile Countries is the only rational way forward [11-13]. The two central issues are: the duration of the first filling and the operation of the dam. A mathematical model could be developed. The model should synchronize the operation of the GERD with the downstream dams in the Sudan and Egypt, namely the Roseires, Sennar, Meraowe and the Aswan High Dam. It should be emphasized that none of the eleven Nile Basin countries has a Management Plan for the Nile waters within its borders. Needless to say, the eleven Management Plans could be the way forward for conflict resolution and the adoption of a Master Plan for the whole Nile Basin [11].

To know more about Juniper Publishers please click on: https://juniperpublishers.com/manuscript-guidelines.php

For more articles in Open Access Journal of Environmental Sciences & Natural Resources please click on: https://juniperpublishers.com/ijesnr/index.php

#juniper publishers journals #juniper publishers publons #Aquatic and environmental engineering #Atmospheric Science #Climatology

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Opinion: One of the most important trials America has ever seen is about to start Anybody who tells you they know for sure what any jury will do has never tried a case. Juries are, after all, collections of human beings, and we humans are nothing if not mercurial. The uncertainty becomes even more pronounced in a case involving the police. Multiply it again when the case involves race. While there is no way to predict how the Chauvin jury ultimately will decide, to this point the pretrial criminal justice process has held up well. Judge Peter Cahill and the parties have done their jobs, setting the stage for the jurors to do theirs. Most importantly, Judge Cahill wisely denied multiple defense motions to move the case out of Hennepin County (where Minneapolis is located). Chauvin’s defense team first tried this tack before jury selection began, and the judge denied it. Then, when news broke during jury selection that the city of Minneapolis had reached a civil settlement with Floyd’s family for $27 million, the defense raised the issue again. The judge, again, refused to move the trial. The defense argued that publicity around the case generally (and then the settlement, specifically) would compromise Chauvin’s right to a fair jury trial in Hennepin County. Judge Cahill sensibly concluded that “I don’t think there’s any place in the state of Minnesota that has not been subjected to extreme amounts of publicity on this case.” A transfer of the case out of Hennepin County would have been disastrous both for the trial itself and for public faith in the trial’s fundamental fairness. Any such transfer would have resulted in the case being tried in a different county than where the charged crime occurred, which in itself would raise questions about fairness. And, critically, a transfer would ensure a less racially diverse jury pool. Hennepin County is Minnesota’s most populous county, and also has the highest percentage of African American residents, about 13.6%. Only one other Minnesota county has above 10% African American population, and 47 counties are below 1%. To move the trial would all but ensure a jury comprised of fewer African Americans than in Hennepin County, and a verdict from such a jury could lack legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. As it turns out, the Chauvin jury is actually substantially more racially diverse than the population of Hennepin County itself. Of the 15 jurors (including three who will serve only as alternates), nine are White, four are Black and two are mixed race, according to the jurors’ self-identifications in court. The jury’s diversity is a good thing. Imagine the opposite scenario, where the Chauvin jury was substantially less racially diverse than Hennepin County and included only one, or even zero, Black jurors. The public would justifiably question the jury selection process, and an acquittal from such a jury would be difficult to accept as legitimate. Now that the jury is seated, the prosecution will present its case first and must satisfy its burden to prove the charged crimes beyond a reasonable doubt. We’ve likely already seen Exhibit A for the prosecution: the bystander video of Chauvin pinning his body weight through his knee on Floyd’s neck, while Floyd was handcuffed, for eight minutes and 46 seconds. This video, on its own, should go far toward the prosecution’s ultimate goal: establishing that Chauvin intentionally assaulted Floyd, resulting in his death (to prove the charged second-degree murder), acted with “depraved mind, without regard for human life” (to prove the charged third-degree murder) or acted negligently (to prove second-degree manslaughter). The jury ultimately can choose to convict or acquit Chauvin on all, some or none of these charges. Expect also to hear from some of the bystander eyewitnesses, and the independent medical examiner hired by Floyd’s family who concluded that Floyd’s death was a homicide caused by “asphyxiation from sustained pressure.” (The Hennepin County medical examiner who conducted the autopsy also found that the cause of death was homicide, but he determined that Floyd died not because of asphyxiation but rather because of, essentially, a heart attack brought on by Chauvin’s actions: “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression”). We almost certainly will not hear from Chauvin or the other three charged former officers, all of whom can invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination to avoid testifying. As straightforward as the prosecution’s case might be at first glance — almost a “just hit play on the tape” kind of case, as prosecutors sometimes say — rest assured, Chauvin’s defense will put up a fight. First, expect the defense to argue that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death. The defense may look to exploit the aforementioned differences in the opinions of medical examiners, though both conclude that Chauvin’s actions contribute to or caused Floyd’s death in some manner. The defense also may argue that Floyd in fact died of a drug overdose. Toxicology reports show that Floyd had both methamphetamines and fentanyl in his blood at the time of his death. And Judge Cahill has ruled that the defense can offer limited evidence of a 2019 arrest during which Floyd purportedly swallowed drugs during a police encounter; the defense may argue that Floyd did the same when Chauvin encountered him in 2020. The defense also may claim that Chauvin’s actions were necessary to physically restrain Floyd and take him into custody. Some surveillance video evidence appears to show Floyd at least temporarily struggling with police officers at the scene. This is a risky tack for the defense, however, because the relevant question is not whether Floyd ever struggled with police officers, but whether Chauvin used excessive force when, after he already had Floyd rear-handcuffed and face-down on the ground, he pinned his knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Opening arguments start Monday. Thus far, the jury trial process has worked as designed. The outcome is anything but certain, and the stakes — for the entire country — are enormous. Now, your questions Patrick (Oregon): Could federal criminal charges still be filed against the officers involved in the death of George Floyd? Yes. The Justice Department reportedly has convened a grand jury to investigate Chauvin, and could bring federal charges for deprivation of civil rights under color of law — meaning, essentially, that Chauvin, while exercising his official power, intentionally and knowingly deprived Floyd of life and liberty. In 2019, the US Supreme Court upheld the “separate sovereigns” doctrine, which established that there is no legal bar to both federal and state prosecutors charging the same person for the same conduct. So the Justice Department can charge Chauvin if it sees fit, even though Chauvin already faces charges from Minnesota state prosecutors. As a practical matter, the Justice Department likely will wait to see the state jury’s verdict in the Chauvin trial before deciding whether to bring separate federal charges. Hilda (Nevada): Could prosecutors have charged Chauvin with first-degree murder? As discussed above, Minnesota prosecutors have charged Chauvin with various second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter charges. A first-degree murder charge would have been difficult, though not impossible, for prosecutors to sustain. Under Minnesota law, first-degree murder must be both intentional and premeditated. Regarding intentionality, Minnesota prosecutors have not alleged in the current second-degree murder charge that Chauvin intentionally killed Floyd, but rather that he intentionally assaulted Floyd, resulting in Floyd’s death. Obviously, it is easier to prove intent to assault than intent to kill. Regarding the premeditation element of first-degree murder, the law does not specify any particular time requirement. There’s a common perception that premeditation requires careful planning, well in advance, like a group of mobsters might carefully plot out an orchestrated hit. While that type of plotting certainly would qualify as premeditation, the law does not require such careful or methodical premeditation. The argument for premeditation is that, at some point during the eight-plus minutes when Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck — during which Floyd stated “I can’t breathe” and “Don’t kill me” — Chauvin had to have become fully aware that he was about to kill Floyd. Yet Chauvin, knowing what his actions would do, made a decision to continue kneeling on Floyd’s neck. But Minnesota prosecutors have taken a more conservative approach and have not charged a first-degree murder, which is arguably more difficult to prove than a second-degree charge. Source link Orbem News #America #important #opinion #Opinion:OneofthemostimportanttrialsAmericahaseverseenisabouttostart-CNN #opinions #Start #trials

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

Text

Opinion: One of the most important trials America has ever seen is about to start

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/opinion-one-of-the-most-important-trials-america-has-ever-seen-is-about-to-start/

Opinion: One of the most important trials America has ever seen is about to start

Anybody who tells you they know for sure what any jury will do has never tried a case. Juries are, after all, collections of human beings, and we humans are nothing if not mercurial. The uncertainty becomes even more pronounced in a case involving the police. Multiply it again when the case involves race.

While there is no way to predict how the Chauvin jury ultimately will decide, to this point the pretrial criminal justice process has held up well. Judge Peter Cahill and the parties have done their jobs, setting the stage for the jurors to do theirs.

Most importantly, Judge Cahill wisely denied multiple defense motions to move the case out of Hennepin County (where Minneapolis is located). Chauvin’s defense team first tried this tack before jury selection began, and the judge denied it.

Then, when news broke during jury selection that the city of Minneapolis had reached a civil settlement with Floyd’s family for $27 million, the defense raised the issue again. The judge, again, refused to move the trial.

The defense argued that publicity around the case generally (and then the settlement, specifically) would compromise Chauvin’s right to a fair jury trial in Hennepin County. Judge Cahill sensibly concluded that “I don’t think there’s any place in the state of Minnesota that has not been subjected to extreme amounts of publicity on this case.”

A transfer of the case out of Hennepin County would have been disastrous both for the trial itself and for public faith in the trial’s fundamental fairness. Any such transfer would have resulted in the case being tried in a different county than where the charged crime occurred, which in itself would raise questions about fairness.

And, critically, a transfer would ensure a less racially diverse jury pool.

Hennepin County is Minnesota’s most populous county, and also has the highest percentage of African American residents, about 13.6%. Only one other Minnesota county has above 10% African American population, and 47 counties are below 1%. To move the trial would all but ensure a jury comprised of fewer African Americans than in Hennepin County, and a verdict from such a jury could lack legitimacy in the eyes of the general public.

As it turns out, the Chauvin jury is actually substantially more racially diverse than the population of Hennepin County itself. Of the 15 jurors (including three who will serve only as alternates), nine are White, four are Black and two are mixed race, according to the jurors’ self-identifications in court.

The jury’s diversity is a good thing. Imagine the opposite scenario, where the Chauvin jury was substantially less racially diverse than Hennepin County and included only one, or even zero, Black jurors. The public would justifiably question the jury selection process, and an acquittal from such a jury would be difficult to accept as legitimate.

Now that the jury is seated, the prosecution will present its case first and must satisfy its burden to prove the charged crimes beyond a reasonable doubt. We’ve likely already seen Exhibit A for the prosecution: the bystander video of Chauvin pinning his body weight through his knee on Floyd’s neck, while Floyd was handcuffed, for eight minutes and 46 seconds.

This video, on its own, should go far toward the prosecution’s ultimate goal: establishing that Chauvin intentionally assaulted Floyd, resulting in his death (to prove the charged second-degree murder), acted with “depraved mind, without regard for human life” (to prove the charged third-degree murder) or acted negligently (to prove second-degree manslaughter). The jury ultimately can choose to convict or acquit Chauvin on all, some or none of these charges.

Expect also to hear from some of the bystander eyewitnesses, and the independent medical examiner hired by Floyd’s family who concluded that Floyd’s death was a homicide caused by “asphyxiation from sustained pressure.” (The Hennepin County medical examiner who conducted the autopsy also found that the cause of death was homicide, but he determined that Floyd died not because of asphyxiation but rather because of, essentially, a heart attack brought on by Chauvin’s actions: “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression”).

We almost certainly will not hear from Chauvin or the other three charged former officers, all of whom can invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination to avoid testifying.

As straightforward as the prosecution’s case might be at first glance — almost a “just hit play on the tape” kind of case, as prosecutors sometimes say — rest assured, Chauvin’s defense will put up a fight.

First, expect the defense to argue that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death. The defense may look to exploit the aforementioned differences in the opinions of medical examiners, though both conclude that Chauvin’s actions contribute to or caused Floyd’s death in some manner.

The defense also may argue that Floyd in fact died of a drug overdose. Toxicology reports show that Floyd had both methamphetamines and fentanyl in his blood at the time of his death. And Judge Cahill has ruled that the defense can offer limited evidence of a 2019 arrest during which Floyd purportedly swallowed drugs during a police encounter; the defense may argue that Floyd did the same when Chauvin encountered him in 2020.

The defense also may claim that Chauvin’s actions were necessary to physically restrain Floyd and take him into custody. Some surveillance video evidence appears to show Floyd at least temporarily struggling with police officers at the scene. This is a risky tack for the defense, however, because the relevant question is not whether Floyd ever struggled with police officers, but whether Chauvin used excessive force when, after he already had Floyd rear-handcuffed and face-down on the ground, he pinned his knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes.

Opening arguments start Monday. Thus far, the jury trial process has worked as designed. The outcome is anything but certain, and the stakes — for the entire country — are enormous.

Now, your questions

Patrick (Oregon): Could federal criminal charges still be filed against the officers involved in the death of George Floyd?

Yes. The Justice Department reportedly has convened a grand jury to investigate Chauvin, and could bring federal charges for deprivation of civil rights under color of law — meaning, essentially, that Chauvin, while exercising his official power, intentionally and knowingly deprived Floyd of life and liberty. In 2019, the US Supreme Court upheld the “separate sovereigns” doctrine, which established that there is no legal bar to both federal and state prosecutors charging the same person for the same conduct.

So the Justice Department can charge Chauvin if it sees fit, even though Chauvin already faces charges from Minnesota state prosecutors. As a practical matter, the Justice Department likely will wait to see the state jury’s verdict in the Chauvin trial before deciding whether to bring separate federal charges.

Hilda (Nevada): Could prosecutors have charged Chauvin with first-degree murder?

As discussed above, Minnesota prosecutors have charged Chauvin with various second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter charges. A first-degree murder charge would have been difficult, though not impossible, for prosecutors to sustain.

Under Minnesota law, first-degree murder must be both intentional and premeditated. Regarding intentionality, Minnesota prosecutors have not alleged in the current second-degree murder charge that Chauvin intentionally killed Floyd, but rather that he intentionally assaulted Floyd, resulting in Floyd’s death.

Obviously, it is easier to prove intent to assault than intent to kill.

Regarding the premeditation element of first-degree murder, the law does not specify any particular time requirement. There’s a common perception that premeditation requires careful planning, well in advance, like a group of mobsters might carefully plot out an orchestrated hit. While that type of plotting certainly would qualify as premeditation, the law does not require such careful or methodical premeditation.

The argument for premeditation is that, at some point during the eight-plus minutes when Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck — during which Floyd stated “I can’t breathe” and “Don’t kill me” — Chauvin had to have become fully aware that he was about to kill Floyd.

Yet Chauvin, knowing what his actions would do, made a decision to continue kneeling on Floyd’s neck. But Minnesota prosecutors have taken a more conservative approach and have not charged a first-degree murder, which is arguably more difficult to prove than a second-degree charge.

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