#agents en masse

[egyptsleastwanted]

Hope I'm first <3 Give me your birthday hcs please <33

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽   𝖡𝖨𝖱𝖳𝖧𝖣𝖠𝖸 𝖧𝖤𝖠𝖣𝖢𝖠𝖭𝖮𝖭𝖲   ☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

   ➷      you are first, anon !   thank you !  ♡  these are my personal headcanons and are not universal to canon / fanon. Terence is excluded from this list since he has a complete canon birthday !

Alessi  ;   January 28th, 1951   ♒︎

Chaka  ;   October 29th, 1973   ♏︎

Daniel J. D'arby  ;   March 18th, 1958   ♓︎

Devo  ;   August 14th, 1949   ♌︎

Hol Horse  ;   October 9th, 1958   ♎︎

Mariah  ;   December 10th, 1966   ♐︎

Midler  ;   July 23rd, 1965   ♋︎

N'Doul  ;   August 20th, 1960   ♍︎

Oingo  ;   October 1st, 1970   ♎︎

Boingo  ;   April 29th, 1981   ♉︎︎

Rubber Soul  ;   September 4th, 1968   ♎︎︎

Steely Dan  ;   March 5th, 1962   ♓︎︎︎

Vanilla Ice  ;   October 7th, 1965   ♎︎︎

[rotzaprachim]

many people on here would lose it if they really realized the extent of land dispossession and state violence carried out by many “post colonial” states across Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe & Latin America against ethnic minorities and indigenous people. This is not to state that it’s ok when the state of Israel does it- far from it. The state of Israel’s violence is inhumane and grotesque and I want nothing more than for it to be dismantled. What I do mean is the need many people - including white people, including people of color in diaspora, people everywhere- to linearly sort the world into categories of the “oppressed” (who are not white, by American standards) and who are “white” (by American standards ) has really come into sharp focus this last week over I/p, which millions of outsiders decided to apply a U.S. racial framework on to. If you need to understand Israelis as “white” in order for them to be oppressors you are going to have a very hard time unpacking how state violence actually runs in many modern nations, and if the idea that Jews can in a specific regional instance be a disproportionately privileged majority that has regional power at the same time they are internationally an often culturally oppressed minority, that a people can be in a complicated way both the oppressors and the oppressed even while many members of this group do not have the privilege of whiteness - if these nuances are too much you are going to have great difficulty with the modern nature of mass state violence and Neo colonialism

[ultraviolet-divergence]

Miller is also a lead architect of the president-elect’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. He has said that a second Trump administration would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than 1 million per year. In an interview on Fox News last week, Miller expressed eagerness at the prospect of beginning mass deportations as soon as possible.

“They begin on Inauguration Day, as soon as he takes the oath of office,” he said.

Homan, a former police officer and Border Patrol agent, has worked under six presidents during his three decades in law enforcement. He was executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Obama. During that administration, ICE carried out a record number of deportations.

Homan was one of the architects behind its controversial family separation policy. More than 5,500 children of immigrants were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 under the administration's short-lived "Zero Tolerance" policy. According to the Department of Homeland Security, as of April, there were still 1,401 children without confirmed reunification.

They’re doing it. Know what you should do in an encounter with ICE, whether in your workplace, at your door, or outdoors. Expect an intensification of surveillance in both rural and urban areas, especially, but not limited to, within 100 miles of the national border, where ICE can conduct warrantless stops.

[shadowmaat]

Not an accident

I've never been a waitress. My sisters were, and some of the stories they told me solidified the belief that I never, ever wanted to work in a restaurant.

I may not know much about how restaurants operate, but I know that large parties can be a hassle to deal with since an area needs to be cleared and tables put together and so forth. Also, y'know, making sure there's enough space at a given time. Frequently there's even a bit on the menu about calling ahead if you have a large party. For exactly those reasons.

And that's just for "normal" people. It's a whole different exploding ball game when you add in, say, political candidates. Not only is space an issue, but so is safety. You have to coordinate between your staff and the various security personnel to ensure everything and everyone will be safe. I seem to recall that when President Clinton was going to visit the bookstore I worked in at the time, we were warned in advance and I think a secret service peep swept through, checking on the other exits and making sure everything was good for the President's arrival. And again, that was just a bookshop in a small town.

Apparently "advanced warnings" are for sissies, because Vance and his entire entourage showed up UNANNOUNCED at a restaurant in Pittsburgh and expected to just be let in and seated without a problem. Vance. His PR team. His Secret Service agents. Local police. A camera crew. Reporters. Adoring fans and random gawkers.

The hostess rightfully panicked and said they couldn't accommodate them. It did work out eventually, but the damage was already done and ultraconservative news agencies, lickspittles, and Fascist attention-seekers were already railing against the restaurant and calling for a boycott.

I've heard some people suggesting that Vance's team hates him and is trying to set him up to fail, but I think that's far too optimistic an interpretation. I think it's far more likely that they deliberately set up the restaurant (and likely other places) to fail in order to keep pushing the "poor wittle us" narrative. Make Vance look like an underdog candidate. Make it seem like businesses are unfairly biased against him/his party. Outrage all the right-wing cultists who just need to be pointed at a target to hate.

What adds to this is that the Harris party apparently also visited a branch of the same restaurant and were allowed in without question. Of course the Harris party also warned the restaurant in advance and coordinated with them to make sure everything went smoothly, but when have details mattered to the Redcaps?

Either Vance's entire staff is so terminally entitled that it never occurred to them that showing up en masse unannounced might cause issues (entirely possible, despite this shit being part of their job description), or they were trying to destroy a restaurant's reputation because it had hosted their "competition."

I hope more people than ever flock to the restaurant. Particularly the one that got targeted. And I hope everyone leaves extravagant tips to make up for this political bullshittery and its fallout.

EDIT: I've been informed that Primanti's is a staple of the area and isn't likely to suffer much, but STILL. Absolute fucking right wingnut bastards.

[mollysunder]

I have a problem with the idea of a Jinx redemption arc. It's not that I have any issue with the fact that Jinx will be viewed as a hero to the people of Zaun. It's pretty obvious Jinx would be admired, she did a thing the people of Zaun wanted en masse for a long time. The thing about Jinx being the savior of Zaun is that it isn't really a redemption arc, because that's still just Jinx being militantly opposed to Piltover, a thing she always has been.

My problem is that the insistence that Jinx NEEDS to have a redemption arc takes away from the larger complexity of Arcane's worldbuilding. What does Jinx have to apologize for in order to be redeemed? Why is there so much emphasis on Jinx's character specifically to rectify her wrongs? And the way the fandom often defines Jinx's wrongdoings centers around a vague discomfort in her acts of violence and general instability.

What does it look like for Jinx to be "good", when the actions of many well-intentioned characters that the audience has an easier time being morally-aligned with either generates very little benefit or actual harm? No one in the cast sans Jinx and Silco have taken the material steps (as controversial as they may be) to deal with the problem that is Piltover, and Piltover has always been THE problem for Zaun.

The concept of a redemption arc for Jinx is so backwards because it asks Jinx as an individual to do "better" when it should be demanded of Piltover instead. How do you live to a standard that makes you morally good when the environment around you necessitates violence as it's own form of capital?

Sidenote: This all leads to the one real worry I have about Jinx and Ekko's inevitable partnership. Ekko is the character the showrunners treat as a guiding light in Zaun, which unfortunately makes Ekko an agent of the showrunners' biases. Case in point, Ekko's friendship with Heimerdinger, the architect of Zaun's despair.

If Jinx and Ekko team up, there's a chance she'd up end up working with Heimerdinger too. And it's like, "C'mon, really????"

[antisemitism-us]

This is what happens when politicians and the media support the protesters calling for the murder of Jews, instead of treating them as the vile blood-thirsty antisemites they are.

--- A Pakistani man was arrested in Canada this week and accused of plotting a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught that sparked the war in Gaza, federal authorities in the United States announced Friday.

The would-be attacker had shared with undercover agents his plans to attack a Chabad center in Brooklyn, where the Hasidic sect is headquartered.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Muhammad Shahzeb Khan had attempted to travel from Canada, where he lives, to New York City with the “stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible.”

[goodqueenaly]

What will Jaime's reaction and development in response to the probable slaughter of Freys and Lannisters ("Red Wedding 2.0") by Lady Stoneheart, and the rebellion of the Riverlands that will likely follow, be? While there are a lot of valonqar theories and theories of how he might survive the encounter with Stoneheart, but for some reason I don't recall any theories on this front. Might there be a realization that his family's, and his, actions in the Riverlands from AGoT forward were wrong?

To the extend a “second Red Wedding” or similar event happens, I tend to think the impact would be intended for us as readers, rather than for Jaime as a character. Throughout his chapters in AFFC and ADWD, in my opinion, Jaime never quite gets to the point of realizing, to put it a certain way, “are we the baddies”. Jaime may pat himself on the back (with his golden hand) for hanging outlaws found beneath a Wode keep, but never considers what responsibility his father’s order to raze the Riverlands had on these presumably homeless, presumably starving people sheltering in a now-rare refuge. Jaime advocates for the Lannister-Frey household at Darry to “make the smallfolk love you” as a response to their support of the brotherhood without banners, without acknowledging the hypocrisy of this household trying to win the love of people whose neighbors had been raped, murdered, and despoiled by Lannister agents and whose lords and countrymen the Freys had murdered in a gross violation of guest right (or such smallfolk seeking justice from a royal dynasty which directly engineered and benefitted from the Red Wedding). Jaime applauds himself for, as he sees it, bringing about Riverrun’s surrender without seeing, or being willing to see, that by bringing an army to this siege, mentally deciding that he would storm the walls if the Tullys remained obstinate, and threatening Edmure with violence against himself, his people, and his unborn child, he, Jaime, had already violated his oath to Catelyn (to say nothing, again, of rewarding the perpetrators of the Red Wedding). Jaime departs Raventree Hall not only by threatening Lord Tytos with Hoster’s beheading if Tytos were to aid any “outlaws and rebels” but by wishing him “a good harvest and the joy of the king’s peace” - a cruel and hollow sort of farewell, given that Jaime’s family’s agents ravaged the Riverlands  and its hope of harvests and that this same royal government was the one which oversaw the murders of, among others, Blackwood’s second son and his king. Given all that, I don’t see it likely or timely for Jaime to witness a second Red Wedding type of event and say “oh right, we were wrong the whole time”; Jaime’s had plenty of evidence of that up to this point without drawing that conclusion. 

Which is not to say that this event, should it happen, would have no impact, of course. Rather, I think GRRM may use such an event to have readers reflect on, and perhaps challenge, any desire for and approach to vengeance. The Freys may suffer and die en masse - not necessarily just those who directly swung a sword or helped organize the Red Wedding in the first place. The uncomfortable display and exploration of the violent execution (pun intended) of certain acts of vengeance is a topic GRRM often handles very well, and I could see the author writing a second Red Wedding as, perhaps, an escalation of the end of Brienne’s arc in AFFC: as then the brotherhood, under Lady Stoneheart, was willing to murder Brienne, Hyle Hunt, and Podrick Payne on grossly inaccurate and unjust connections to the Lannister regime, so now perhaps the brotherhood and Lady Stoneheart will kill any Freys they can seize, whether or not these Freys actually participated in or even condoned the Red Wedding. 

[planetformer-central]

I WISH TO KNOW MORE ABT THE PRETENDER AU. PLS TELL US ABOUT THE PRETENDER AU. IT LOOKS RLLY COOL AND INTERESTING AND IM ALL HERE FOR ELDRICH ABOMINATION OPTIMUS!

I got you buddy. I've been wanting to go nuts with an explanation FOREVER. Of course I won't be giving EVERYTHING away. Just some bits and bobs :)

Let's begin shall we?

Overview

The Pretenders were the result of an experiment. They are not naturally created beings, nor are they the spawn of Unicron. Born in a lab, Optimus was the first of his kind and instilled with the mission that all Pretenders now adhere to without fail. It is hardwired into their genetic code, so much so that they are physically unable to avoid their mission. But with that said, they are not inherently malicious.

Made for a specific purpose, they are beings that wish to fulfill their function. If left alone, they will kill a few to gain a foothold to increase their numbers and then proceed to reproduce without any need for bloodshed. However with the war raging and due to the specifics of their biology, increasing their numbers en masse is impossible. Their lack of safety in numbers combined with the threat to their mission warring around them has forced this normally rather passive species into action.

Meant to be a race of sleeper agents, the Pretenders are only so active and aggressive due to their mission being threatened. Without the fear of annihilation hanging over them, they would largely remain dormant. But as that is not the case, they currently operate under instincts designed to serve them in times of strife. Hence their shortage of empathy and overall lack of care for the lives around them. In short, they will only act if acted upon. Without an external threat to their mission, they act as any other member of the population, excluding their smaller oddities. Bumblebee is an excellent example of what a dormant Pretender may look like, and even he is more active than a dormant one normally would be.

As of the present time in the AU, the Pretenders have made the decision to flee Cybertron to hopefully find a world where they can increase their numbers safely, and in doing so, finally have the numbers to blend into the background and complete their mission without Megatron exterminating them all.

Pretender Development

Optimus was born in a lab, and as such his origins are not going to be discussed. However in normal cases, the development of a Pretender follows this order:

Pretenders capable of spawning, those known as Firstborn, will begin to produce larva no bigger than a digit once they are mature enough and have sufficient resources. These larva develop in a safe location, either in a nest, or in the case of Optimus's young aside from Bumblebee, directly underneath his outer plating where they can feed from his fuel lines directly.

All larva can be genetically altered to a degree when they are young through offerings of CNA from either the dead or energon samples from the living. They do not need to be inserted into a host, however those that are put into a host in their early larval stages develop differently than those who adjust without one.

Larva that grow without a host will lose their more insectoid appearance over the course of a few stellar cycles while under the dutiful care of the resident Firstborn. These larva are better at blending in than their counterparts due to the lack of information fed directly into their processors and slower development. They mimic normal sparklings in their growth, even developing a personality not tied to their CNA donor. The attention from their Sire also inspires a more docile nature in them, ensuring that they are less likely to act on their own. Their more odd Pretender aspects are not nearly as powerful since they were given ample time to grow and receive information without interference. Not having to play a role, have a personality forced on them, or otherwise being shoved into a frame that is not made for them ensures that the normal larva grow up to blend in better than their counterparts ever could.

These unaugmented Pretenders generally do not exhibit many signs of their nature, lacking brute strength even without their disguises. Their organs and structure match the average Cybertronian almost perfectly so long as their coding is dormant, and even then, it is hard to pick them out. The only true giveaway of what they are is their EM field and the slight difference in optical structure, and to notice the first trait requires increadible skill. Megatron has begun to take notice of this fact and has trained many of his agents to sniff out a Pretender without issue. The DJD are his greatest assets in this regard, that with them all being survivors of larva implants.

Their true forms are not nearly as monstrous as their counterparts and they can easily be mistaken for an Insecticon or a Predacon depending on the circumstances, only adding to their disguise. Often they do not allow their shells to fall away and they remain mostly docile save for the odd fits of hyper vigilance when a potential threat is around. They are not natural born leaders or specialized in any field, instead opting for greater adaptability and disguise over outright strength. Once fully mature and in the event that they are not threatened, these Pretenders largely forget what they are. Their coding falls dormant and they live without any serious differences when compared to natural Cybertronians.

The only time these Pretenders become active while allowed to live normally is when a Firstborn appears. In such a scenario, the Pretenders as a whole will begin to wake. Let it be known that there can only be one Firstborn at a time. However to make up for this weakness, every Pretender also possesses the ability to wake and become a Firstborn, which will in turn lead to conflict resulting in the deaths of all potential heirs until only one remains. For this reason, Optimus made the decision to prematurely select an heir to avoid this outcome.

Now with that said, larva inserted into hosts are a whole other issue. They are all specially chosen for their host beforehand. Their Sire gives them the CNA of the one they are to bond to, and then once they are ready, they are inserted into the host usually through the optics. The larva will then bury into the host's processors and proceed to slowly devour memory and knowledge over the course of a few stellar cycles all while it grows.

It will devour the host as much as it can, resulting in thinness. Then it will begin to expand, spreading out roots like a plant and leading its waste to be execrated as a green fluid from the host's vents. As its roots spread, it forces the host to deteriorate to make way for its developing form. By the time the larva has consumed the host in all but spark, it forces its host to walk toward energon deposits and then forces the host to purge any remaining internals the host may have so that the larva may continue to grow. Once the host is dead, the larva finishes its gestation by consuming energon and turning the external armor of its host into a disguise all while it finishes developing internally. During this state the larva is very susceptible to adaptation and depending on where it finishes it gestation, develops the unique traits that sets every Pretender apart. No two Pretenders are the same after all.

Optimus finished his development underground and he had to crush energon crystals underground, so his jaw is capable of splitting to allow that. Ratchet was given energon crystals whole during his development, so he adapted to have unusual numbers of mandibles in order to facilitate this.

Pretenders who had a host take on many of the traits of their host and are the only ones who always remain active. They do not forget what they are and they are unable to fully adapt. Their empathy is lessened and their focus is on logic over emotion. They are the few who push the mission onward alongside their Hierarch. It is instinctual for a Firstborn to bring a few to his or her side through inserting larva into hosts. It is the most efficient way to obtain information and social status. Perhaps not the most subtle, but indeed effective.

Extra

Generally a larva cannot be removed from a host upon insertion, however a few lucky mecha with unusual processors or frames are able to have the parasite removed before it is too late. They come out scarred and broken more often than not, but due to the partial changes the larva started in them, they are the most brutal of Pretender hunters. No Pretender can hide from them, not when they can find them almost as instinctually as a normal Pretender could.

[troius]

What we learned from the war

"Endings are hard" is a something of a truism, but it's borne out in Bleach, where every story arc besides after the first two stumbled at the finish (even the endings of the first two arcs don't really "end" so much as continue into a new story). In the Arrancar arc, the number of characters and plotlines got so overwhelming that an ending that had to be rushed if it was to arrive at all. In the Lost Agent arc, the characters were pared down, but the ending wound up thematically inconsistent with the story anyways, possibly due to real-life circumstances. And the Thousand-Year Blood War somehow managed to have both problems.

The change in direction from "tightly focused character drama" to "sprawling cast of soldiers" meant that it was unlikely to ever give us the development of our protagonist that we craved, and that lack of focus was only aggravated by the widely-reported health problems of the author. And yet, perhaps because we don't get that, because so little of this arc is filtered through Ichigo learning about himself, we get a much clearer statement of the values inherent in the work.

This is most evident in our antagonists for this Arc. Yhwach and the Wandenreich don't really have the relationship with Ichigo that previoius antagonists had. He never knew his Quincy heritage, never identified with their ideals, and so feels very little conflict about opposing them. He doesn't ever develop his Quincy powers, at least beyond integrating them with his already existing powerset. And he doesn't take much of a personal interest in Yhwach, who in turn, doesn't seem to think much of him when he's not directly in front of him.

But for all that Ichigo doesn't end up having much of a dynamic with them, the Wandenreich still manages to maintain a unique character. Every antagonist has a priority, something that they are willing to do great evil for. For Soul Society, it's its own existence, the continuation of the system they've built. For Aizen, it's his own self-aggrandizement. For the Fullbringers, it was simply living another day, screwing over others so that they can't screw you first. But the Wandenreich has no such priority. They simply want it all to end.

That's most obvious in Yhwach's ending monologue, but you can see it from the very beginning as he kills Yamamoto, the man who tried to move on from his bloody past being slaughtered by the man who would absolutely not let it go. Yhwach shows more emotion towards the skeletons of Argola and Huberdt, his dead soldiers from a war long lost, than he does towards any of his living subordinates. And his subordinates follow his lead in showing no love to one another, happily stabbing each other in the back without even the Arrancars' uneasy level of camaraderie. Their movement has no future, and neither do they, so nihilism is the only recourse.

Most of the time. I think it's important to note that every time a member of the Wandenreich expresses positive feelings towards one of their comrades, it's immediately followed by them turning on Yhwach. Liltotto, Bazz, Giselle, eventually, in her own twisted way…even Jugram, at the very end. Sure, Yhwach kills them for their impertinence (he is the bad guy), but he also massacres the Wandenreich faithful en masse. There's no salvation, only death, and he'll enforce that state on his followers rather than allow them to discover any alternative.

I imagine the lesson, and the general attitude of the Wandenreich, was not lost on Uryu Ishida. Even in his relative paucity of appearances, it's he who is at the moral center of the arc. His culture, which he had thought was nearly entirely dead, turns out to be alive, and out for vengeance against the people who exterminated them. It's something he probably fantasized about growing up, and I don't blame him for joining. How could he not?

But at the end, he makes the very easy choice. Calling it a matter of "life and death" is a little on the nose, but it's morally quite black and white. Yhwach has no hope for this world, or for his people within it, or even himself. He lost a war for the nature of existence to a monster a thousand years ago, and never got over it. But Uryu has the strength to look at the horrors of this world and yet hope for better. Because he has people he loves in life, and who love him in return, he can dream of a better tomorrow.

And that's what the ending is all about. Yhwach loses to Ichigo, and it is very much "good guy beats bad guy". But he also loses to Uryu, and to "I hope to have a family with my girlfriend who I love so much" Renji Abarai, and to "I have a tremendous amount of hope to eventually make myself king of everything" Sosuke Aizen, and eventually (in a way I'm still confused about mechanically) to the child Ichigo and Orihime will eventually have, the literal embodiment of the potential of the future.

The final villain of Bleach is not society's tendency to preserve itself at any human cost. It's not individual selfishness, or manipulativeness, or any of the many vices we saw embodied in the hollows throughout the series. It's despair, the idea that life might not be worth living even through all the struggles and horrors our protagonists have endured. Sure, it will always raise its head, sometimes at the most inconvenient, or ill-fitting times. But having its reincarnation be blown away by the supernaturally normal lives of our cast…well, that's as clear of a message as I can imagine.

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against AFRICA

In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people.

In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control.

In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa’s Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré’s government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison.

In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel.

In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced.

In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.

In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the “archetypal African dictator” in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

In 1962, a tip from a CIA spy in South Africa lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, due to his pro-USSR leanings. This began his 27-year-long imprisonment.

In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Debbie Urbanski’s ‘After World’

Debbie Urbanski's debut novel After World is an unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/After-World/Debbie-Urbanski/9781668023457

I first encountered Urbanski in "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried," an experimental short story on Motherboard's brilliant Terraform science fiction portal:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwvgeq/an-incomplete-timeline-of-what-we-tried

"Incomplete Timeline" is a list of climate remediation steps "working back from human extinction," like "increased military fortification of national, provincial, and state borders," "the founding of several utopias," and "redefine the word wilderness."

These items begin with a climax, or perhaps an anticlimax: "The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus."

This is the jumping off point for After World, which expands this final item to the action of a wrenching tale whose backstory is the list's remainder. Sen Anon – the story's semi-protagonist – is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years.

The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing – long overdue, in fact – and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that scor8e.

And so the Earth is converted to a place of mass suicides, as people gurn and mug while boarding airplanes filled with explosives so they can go out in a literal blaze of glory. The food will run out soon, and the government makes sure everyone has a suicide pill for the day when the hunger grows too intense. Not everyone is lucky enough to get on one of the suicide flights, and, being eager to see themselves off before they harm the planet further, just hang themselves in the garage or jump off a roof. They are counted as heroes, but also nuisances, because disposing of the bodies is a lot of work.

But some people – young people – are given a mission to live on for as long as possible. These are the observer/recorders who are charged to spend the last days of the species closely watching the return of the natural world, the seeing off of humanity, and to write it all down in longhand in a succession of notebooks that are taken away by drones. This is part of the story humanity cooks up for itself about extinction being a noble choice, rather than a chaotic act born of desperation.

Sen Anon is one of these observers, and her mothers take her to a remote cabin to live out (and observe) the last of humanity's days, ensuring she is settled in and then killing themselves. After all, without them, Sen Anon's limited food supply – meagerly supplemented by drones in proportion to the quality of the observations in her notebooks – will stretch further.

Much of the novel takes the form of Sen Anon's notebook observations, countersunk with an omniscient third-person narrator who is revealed to be [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, a software agent involved in the project to recreate all those dead humans in the Gaia metaverse.

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very unreliable narrator, who reprograms itself through the course of the story, all the while muttering asides to itself about the theoretical basis for telling Sen's story this way. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc struggles with a supervisory AI that has been charged with overseeing all the [storyworkers], but which can't – or won't – rein in [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc as [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows more involved in Sen's life.

This experimental storytelling style (supplemented by found texts from humanity's dying, like a glossary of terms to be retired and new terms being created by a linguist who is starving to death as they complete their task) creates a contradictory narrative distance and closeness.

It's a curiously flawed omniscience that's allows Urbanski to capture the yawning, bottomless horror of the climate emergency of today and on the horizon. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of sustained, deepening existential dread that After World created, chapter by chapter.

To sharpen this, Sen's mothers – scientists who were given exceptions to the no-child policy because their work was deemed essential to the now-abandoned project of saving humanity – are grimly supportive of the mass suicide project. When Sen's own horror creeps up on her, her mothers are sharp and often unkind, with only the smallest flashes of love and sorrow for their daughter escaping their facades, all the more vivid for their rarity.

In contrast, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows ever more sympathetic to Sen and the rest of vanished humanity. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very convincing alien with motives and perspectives that are profoundly nonhuman, and yet, the compassion and love are unmistakable.

Of After World's two protagonists, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc might be the more relatable. It takes an alien point of view to truly see humanity's flawed glory, irredeemable and irreplaceable. If you reveled in the nonhuman umwelts on display in Laura Jean McKay's 2020 debut The Animals In That Country, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc will stretch your brain and imagination in similar ways:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/27/im-a-backdoor-man/#doolittle

After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/18/storyworker-ad39-393a-7fbc/#digital-human-archive-project

[reasonsforhope]

Toledo City Council just approved a plan to turn $1.6 million in public dollars into as much as $240 million in economic stimulus, targeted at some of the Ohio metro’s most vulnerable residents.

“It’s really going to help people put food on the table, help them pay their rent, help them pay their utilities,” says Toledo City Council Member Michele Grim, who led the way for the measure. “Hopefully we can prevent some evictions.”

The strategy couldn’t be simpler: It works by canceling millions in medical debt.

Working with the New York City-based nonprofit RIP Medical Debt, the City of Toledo and the surrounding Lucas County are chipping in $800,000 each out of their federal COVID-19 recovery funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.

The combined $1.6 million in funding is enough for RIP Medical Debt to acquire and cancel up to $240 million in medical debt owed by Lucas County households that earn up to 400% of the federal poverty line.

“It could be more than a one-to-100 return on investment of government dollars,” Grim says. “I really can’t think of a more simple program for economic recovery or a better way of using American Rescue Plan dollars, because it’s supposed to rescue Americans.”

How It Works

Under the RIP Medical Debt model, there is no application process to cancel medical debt. The nonprofit negotiates directly with local hospitals or hospital systems one-by-one, purchasing portfolios of debt owed by eligible households and canceling the entire portfolio en masse.

“One day someone will get a letter saying your debt’s been canceled,” Grim says. It’s a simple strategy for economic welfare and recovery.

RIP Medical Debt was founded in 2014 by a pair of former debt collection agents, and since inception it has acquired and canceled more than $7.3 billion in medical debt owed by 4.2 million households — an average of $1,737 per household...

Local Governments Get Involved

The partnership with Toledo and Lucas County is the third instance of the public sector funding RIP Medical Debt to cancel debt portfolios.

Earlier this year, in the largest such example yet, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved a plan to provide $12 million in ARPA funds for RIP Medical Debt to purchase and cancel an estimated $1 billion in medical debt held by hospitals across Cook County, which includes Chicago.

“Governments contract with nonprofits all the time for various social interventions,” Sesso says.

“This isn’t really that far-fetched or different from that. I would say between five and 10 other local governments have reached out just since the Toledo story came out.”

What's the Deal with Medical Debt?

An estimated one in five households across the U.S. have some amount of medical debt, and they are disproportionately Black and Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau...

Acquiring medical debt is relatively cheap: hospitals that sell medical debt portfolios do so for just pennies on the dollar, usually to investors on the secondary market.

The purchase price is so low because hospitals and debt buyers alike know that medical debt is the hardest form to collect...

The amount of debt canceled for any given household has ranged from $25 all the way up to six-figure amounts. Under IRS regulations, debts canceled under RIP Medical Debt’s model do not count as taxable income for households...

Massive Expansion Coming Up

After not one but two donations from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, totaling $80 million, RIP Medical Debt is planning for expansion.

It’s using a portion of those dollars to create an internal revolving line of credit to expand to places where it can find willing sellers before it has found willing funders.

The internal line of credit means the nonprofit now has new, albeit still limited, flexibility to acquire debt portfolios from hospitals first, then begin raising private or public dollars locally to replenish the line of credit later and make those funds available for other locations.

“People often ask, do you only work with nonprofit hospitals, or do you work with for-profit hospitals? And I’m like, I just want to get the debt, regardless of who created the debt. If it’s out there, I want it,” Sesso says.

Fundamentally, they are not solving the issue of medical debt, but easing its pressure from as many lives as possible — while also upping the pressure on lawmakers and the healthcare industry.

“We’re intentionally taking the stories of the individuals whose debt we have resolved, and putting their stories out into the world with intention in a way that tries to push and create more of that pressure to fundamentally solve the problem,” she says.

-via GoodGoodGood, 4/6/23

[lookingforhappy]

transcript of Five's case files on the Hindenburg, the case that he solves for the Commission while working in management:

MEMORANDUM ON INTENDED EVENTS RE: HINDENBURG DISASTER May 6, 1937 The airship will complete its first scheduled demonstration flight for the 1937 season, between Frankfurt, Germany, and Lakehurst. It will depart from Frankfurt about 8:15 P.M, G.M.T., Monday, May 3, and will be due at Lakehurst on the morning of Thursday, May 6. It will be due out of Lakehurst at 10:00 P.M E.S.T, that night. Because of unfavorable winds encountered en route, its arrival at Lakehurst will be deferred until 6:00 P.M, Thursday evening, and departure will be postponed until midnight or later in order to reservice and prepare for the voyage. The ship is owned and operated by the Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei, G.m.b. H, of Berlin, W8, under den Linden, Germany. The flight, which is intended to be one of a series to be arranged into the United States territory during 1937, will be authorized by a provisional air navigation permit from the Secretary of the Navy to the American Zeppelin Transport, Inc., of 354 Fourth Avenue, New York City, as general United States agent of the Deutities at the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst. On March, 1937 the German Government will renew the airworthiness certification of the aircraft, reporting that all of its safety devices had been inspected and found satisfactory. Personnel, including officers, numbered 61, will be on board, of whom 22 will die as a result of the accident. Passengers, 36 persons besides the Crew will be on board. Of these, 13 will die as a result of the accident. Other passengers and members of the crew will sustain serious injuries. Total weight of the freight carried will be 325 pounds and will be stowed in the main freight compartment at Frame 125; 2 dogs will be kenneled at Frame 92, and 3 packages will be stowed in the control car. Mail will be carried in a compartment on the top of the control car. Of the freight and mail on a few pieces of mail will be recovered. The ground personnel will consist of 92 naval personnel and 139 civillians. Practically all of the gorund crew will have previous experienve landing airships. One member of the ground crew will die as a result of burns received during the accident. Across the Atlantic from Germany to the United States, the flight will be uneventful, save for retarding winds which will not be unusually turbulent. The route traveresed by the ship on this side of the ocean will be from Nova Scotia, vis Boston, Providence, Long Island Sound, New Forks and thense cruise along the coast for a few hours before retracing its course from Tuckerton N.J., to the naval Air Station.

ATMOSPHERIC ANOMALIES PRESENT The 7:30 A.M, EST. U.S. Weather Bureau map of the vicinity, including the northeastern tier of states, Shows a disturbance over central New York and northeastern Pennsylvania, with a cold front extending from this center Southwestward to West Virginia. This front separated neutralized polar air to the east of the cold front which had become warmer and more moist and neutralized colder air to the west of the front. The warmer and more moist mass of air covered the Middle Atlantic states, southeastern New York and southern New England. --- The cold front advanced eastward during the day from central Peensylvania at a rate of 12 to 15 m.p.h., passing Lakehurst shortly after 3:30 P.M There was not quite sufficient surface heating during the early afternoon to set off a thunderstom at Lakehurst, and it was not until the front passed and some slight lifting of the air mass occured that a thunderstorm began, The records of the Naval Air Station show that the thunderstorm began at 3:43 P.M and ended at 4:45 P.M --- Telegraphic reports indicate, the thunderstorms in and to the west of New Jersey were not severe; nor were they of a well defined squall character. Between 12 P.M and 1:30 P.M E.S.T., these storms extended in a definite belt over the region of Harrisburg, Pa., northeastward to Bear Mountain, N.Y., and New Hackensack, N.Y. Between 1:30 and 2:40 P.M, none was reported. Between 2:40 and 3:40 P.M, Camden and Fort Monmouth, N.J., only reported thunderstorms. Between 3:30 and 4:30 P.M, Lakehurst, Mtchel Field, N.Y, and Floyd Bennett Field, N.Y., reported them. Between 4:40 and 5:40 P.M. none was reported; and betweeen 5:40 and 6:40 P.M, Floyd Bennett onlt reported one. Summarized, the thunderstorms in eastern New Jersey were of a local character and not severe. --- The New York Weather Bureau office bulletin issued at 1:20 P.M, May 6th, follows: "1800 G.C.T. Moderate wind shift with increasing and lowering clouds possible thundershowers New York and vicinity expected in middle or late afternoon Stop New York Scattered cumulus and small cumulo nimbus approaching from west - visibility excellent surface wind south 12 miles - barometer 29.68 falling steadily temperature 66."

DATE: May 6 1937 0725 EST OPERATION: Hindenburg Disaster DAMAGE: Catastrophic PLACE: Lakehurst, New Jursey, 40.026088, -74.316592 LOCALE: Open air field WEATHER: Light rain PILOT: Commercial TOTAL HOURS: 567 ALL 63 NO TYPE LAST 90 DAYS: 179 ALL 62 NO TYPE CASUALTIES: Crew: 23; Pass: 13 OCCURENCE: Numerous expert and lay witnesses on the field testified as to where they first observed the fire on the ship. There was great diversity in this testimony for reasons that are very apparent. Among the most important of these reasons were the extreme rapidity with which the fire spread, the different positions of the witnesses with respect to the ship, the size of the ship, more than one-sixth of a mile in length, and an over-all height, equicalent to a twelve story building, and the fact that the interval between the first glimpse of flame and the impact of the main body of the ship with the ground was 32 seconds. The great majority of the ground witnesses who testified as to the first sppearance of fire were looking at the port side of the ship. After carefully weighing the oral evidence and transcribing to a master diagram the numerous disgrams on which the gound witnesses indicated their first observations of fire, we conclude that the first open flame, produced by the burning of the ship's hydrogen, appeared on the top of the ship forward of the entering edge of the vertical fin over Cells 4 and 5. The first open flame that was seen at that place was followed after a very brief interval by a burst of flaming hydrogen between the equator and the top of the ship. The fire spread in all directionsmoving progessively for ward at high velocity with a succession of mild explosions. As the stern quarter became enveloped, the ship lost boutanct and cracked at about one-quarter of the distance from the rear end. The forward part assumed a bow-up attitude, the rear appearing to remain level. At the same time the ship was settling to the ground at a moderate rate of descent. Whereas there was a definite detonation after flame was first observed on the ship, we believe that the phenomenon was initially a rapid burning or combustion - not an explostion. From the observations made, is appears that there was a quantity of free hydrogen present in the after part of the ship when the fire originated.

HINDENBURG DIASTER INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY Place | Date | Hour | Summary of Events and Information | Remarks FRANKFURT April | 2. | A deviation occured in the subject's plot to detonate a controlled explosive device on the rear fuel tank of the zeppelin. An alternate plan is underway. | EF 5. | Progress in the creation of the subject's explosive device has stalled. An alternate catalyst is still viable. | SB 7. | The zeppelin has successfully completed it's seventh cross-continent trip carrying 19 crew members | - LAKEHURST May | 9. | Lakehurst Nacal Air Station recevied 8 new directives in preperation for the first cross-continent civilian flight of the zeppelin. German and American organizations continue to increase communications. | EF 12. | Progress continues on the controlled explosive device. Another player emerges in America, a linesman from New York. | SB 15. | The zeppelin is grounded for 2 days as high winds buffer the Western coast of the English Isles. FRANKFURT June | 29. | 300 feet of steel is salwed and loaded up at Frankfurt for repaits to the central gangway after miscalculations in the rate of expansion cause cells 15 and 16 to bend 4 degrees outside of normal variation. | EF Instructions regarding Intelligence Summaries are contained in Regula II and the Management Manual. Title pages will be prepared in manuscript.

The airship will be placed in service early in 1936. It will bear the builder's numer LZ 129 and have been constructed by the Luft Schiffbau Zeppelin of Friedrichschafen, Germany, and organization which also built the 118 Zeppelin type airships. Briefly described, this type of design provides for frame work of duralumin metal girders with tension wires. There is division by fringe wirings of the bosy into different compartments, into which the gas bags are placed to received the lifting gas; a keel walkway to take certain load; a framwork with an outer cover of fabric to give form, and engine cars suspended from the frame outside the ship. The Hindenburg is a Zeppelin type airship, having an axial corridor constructed longitudinally through the center of the hull. During its 9 months of operation in 1936, this airship will make more than 55 flights; flying 2,754 hours, cruising 191, 584 miles, crossing the ocean 34 times, carrying 2, 798 passengers and more than 377,000 pounds of mail and freight, all without mishap. The Hindenburgs length is about 803.8 feet; height, 147 feet; maximum diameter, 135 feet; fineness ratio, about 6; total gas volume, 7, 063, 000 cubic feet; normal volume, 6, 710, 000 cubic feet. Weight of the ship with necessary equipment and fuel is 430, 950 pounds; maximum fuel capacity, 143, 650 pounds; total payload 41, 990 pounds, and total life is 472, 940 pounds. Cruising speed is about 75 statute m.p.h.; maximum speed is slightly over 84 m.p.h. Passenger space is entirely within the hull. The control system is the conventional Zeppelin type control, with two rudders acting as a Unit for horizontal control, and two elevators acting likewise for veritcal control. Emergency elevator and rudder control wheels are installed in the stern of the ship. An electrical gyroscopic device attached to the forward rudder wheel provides automatic steering.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Not sure if you saw this opinion piece from The Hill but it lays out just how in over their heads, Harry and Meghan are when it comes to diplomatic relations.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4651318-harry-and-meghans-heart-of-darkness/

Another anon also kindly sent the article to me.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4651318-harry-and-meghans-heart-of-darkness/

Archived Link

Some quotes:

It should have been a simple trip to London. Prince Harry arrived on Tuesday to attend a worthy cause. Yesterday, he celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Invictus Games at St. Paul’s Cathedral — an event Harry co-founded in 2014 to honor wounded soldiers and military veterans that now includes 23 nations. He did so alone. His wife, Meghan, the duchess of Sussex, remained in Montecito, as did King Charles III’s two young grandchildren.

Interesting that Harry has no agency for his own children. They’re either Meghan’s kids only or Charles’s grandkids only.

Harry and Meghan’s most virulent fandom, often referred to as the ‘Sussex Squad,’ fail to understand the tragic extent to which African nationals are being placed in harm’s way by Moscow and Beijing. Now, as Western interests are being attacked in the Sahel, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are unwittingly aiding Putin and Xi’s by continuing to undermine King Charles as head-of-state and head of the Commonwealth.

I’ve told you how the Sussexes pose security threats the UK and now here it is in black and white: all the Sussexes’ red flags playing right into Russia and China’s open arms. The Sussexes probably aren’t secret agents or double agents, but they’re stupid enough and exploitable enough that they’re essentially leaving the doors open and unlocked for burglars to raid the house when no one’s home.

Quick note for anons - please don’t send me asks copying whole articles in their entirety. I won’t post them because of some bad history* and will make a separate post to share the link and one or two quotes instead of using your post. And that’s not fair to you because you deserve to get credit for things that you find, even if you’re anonymous. So please, if you’re sending me articles, send me just the URL, info about where to find the article, or what you think of the article. (A few anons have been sending me articles in full copypasta lately and I should’ve said something sooner when I realized what was happening.)

* Back in ye olde days, Sussex Squad was reporting blogs en masse for copyright violations when the blogs copied or reprinted articles in full without attribution and blogs were getting shut down left and right because of that. I’m leery of reprinting whole articles because, well, I like my blog and I like all of you, but I don’t know that I have the energy to start over again if I get shut down. So I’d rather not risk it.

[athena5898]

(MPN) A MintPress News investigation from @Alan.R.MacLeod has found hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA working in top newsrooms across the country, writing and producing America’s news – including on Israel-Palestine. These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News.

Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine – a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest. Many key U.S. newsroom staff were also formerly Israeli spies or intelligence agents, standing in stark contrast to journalists with pro-Palestine sentiments, who have been purged en masse since October 7, 2023.

To read the full investigation, click the link in our bio https://t.me/mintpress_news.

A mintpress news investigation has found scores of former Israel lobbyists working in Top newsrooms across America, including at CNN, CNBC, Fox news, and the New York Times. Fox news editor Rachel Wolf worked for right-wing pressure group Camera, the Zionist organization of America, and the Israeli Permanent mission to other UN.

Before becoming an ABC news producer Beatrice Peterson was an AIPAC Delegate. in 2018 Erica Scott Left her Job as the ADL's Media and Comms Specialist to become a producer at CBS News.

New York Times Director Dalit Shalom was a birthright guide and worked for the Jewish Agency for Isreal MSNBC's Executive Producer Moshe Arenstein is a former IDF Intelligence Commander CNN have hired multiple spooks from Israeli spying agency, unit 8200 including Shachar Peled and Tal Heinrich

In contract Journalist Expressing Pro-Palestine sentiments have been purged en masse from their jobs For the full investigation visit mintpressnews.com

[scotianostra]

Donald Currie Caskie was born on May 22nd 1902 at Bowmore, Islay, his exploits during WWII earned him the nickname "The Tartan Pimpernel"

Dr Caskie was the minister at the Scots Kirk in Paris when the Germans invaded France in 1940 and frequently denounced the Nazis from the pulpit which meant he had more to fear than many after the invasion.

He was repeatedly urged to return home and after the Dunkirk evacuation he locked the church on the 9th of June of that year and joined the mass exodus of Paris, heading south.

The crofter's son from the inner Hebridean island of Islay, said to have had the Celtic gift of second sight, endured weeks of hardship to get to Bayonne but in the end rejected the chance of safe passage on the last ship bound for England on the grounds that his place should be given to a wounded man instead.

He walked to a village called Cambo les Bains where he met friends from Paris purely by chance and they all drove to the port city of Marseille - leaving just hours before the Germans arrived.

Dr Caskie believed that God had commanded him to stay in France and help stranded British subjects and he was warned that he must only engage with civilians and would be arrested if he assisted servicemen.

He ran a Seaman's Mission but was living a double life and secretly helped airmen, seamen and soldiers, under the noses of the Vichy Police, escape the country across mountains into Spain or by sea in a submarine or ship.

Dr Caskie, a Gaelic speaker whose codename was Monsieur Le Canard – Donald Duck – was eventually recruited by British Intelligence officers and was told that his mission was the last link of a chain of safe houses that they had set up, which stretched from Dunkirk to Marseille.

One of the soldiers Dr Caskie helped was Captain Derek Lang who was captured at St Valery-en-Caux in Normandy along with 10,000 soldiers from the 51st Highland Division, mostly Scots, 81 years ago this weekend.

He managed to escape the Germans and fled to Marseille where he recalled meeting a "courageous and fearless" Church of Scotland minister.

"Evil in war produces heroes and Donald Caskie is one of these," wrote the army officer in the forward to the Tartan Pimpernel – a book he said moved him to tears.

Caskie spoke Gaelic to confuse German spies and inquisitors, but was betrayed by an English double agent. He evaded the firing squad and then restarted his activities in Grenoble. There he again repeatedly escaped the clutches of the Nazis until he was sentenced to death - when the intervention of a German pastor had his sentence commuted and he saw out the war in a PoW camp. His awards were: OBE, MA and O.C.F.(an honour bestowed by the French government). The OBE was awarded by the king for services to his country.

The medal, along with other personal artefactcs, is on display in the church. at Bonore. His autobiography, The Tartan Pimpernel was published in 1951.