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gallusrostromegalus · 2 years ago

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How does trash pickup, Recycling centers, &/or Hazardous Material Disposal work for Soul Society in AEIWAM? Is there a Kido-based ritual to break things down into Reishi? Are there Tech Repair Shops?

Sewage in Soul Society works really well but very dangerously because those fucking idiots built the city directly on top of an active supervolcano.

Let me back up:

There isn't a good consensus on how big the Seireitei is (Yoruichi says it takes 10 days to walk 1/4th of the way around the circumference, but whether that's her speed, the average person's or how long a patrol group takes is unclear), Or any real maps of the place, but it's generally agreed that

the city is LARGE. Yoruichi says it would take her and the kids ten days to walk to the next gate 1/4th of the way around the city. Maybe that's 8 hours average human walking speed minus 'trying to herd a bunch of teenagers' but that's still a long trip!

Even before the Seki-Seki stone wall was put up, the city was pretty much circular.

Unlike pretty much every real city, there's no river running through it. Where are they getting their water?

There is a Small but substantial and TOTALLY ISOLATED mountain in the middle of the city made of apparently hard-to-mine rock. A Lonely Mountain, one might even say.

The only visible natural sources of water I've seen evidence of are hot springs in both the Yoruichi/Urahara Super Secret Training Ground/Love Nest and the first division grounds.

Soul Society is run by jackasses and if there's a stupid way to do things, that's the way they're doing them.

In fact, the Soul Society as a whole is almost suspiciously Amestris-shaped, but instead of nefarious alchemy, it's negligent civil engineering

...all this leads me to believe that Seireitei is built DIRECTLY ON TOP OF the caldera of an enormous supervolcano. The city gets it's water from the aquifer of rainwater that's collected in the underground cracks and fissures of the Caldera, and the seki-seki stone wall is set up around the really convenient geographic barrier made by the rim of the caldera.

"Hey!" I hear some of you nerds objecting "Aren't calderas usually concave? Seireitei is convex, if anything!"

You're right! Most Calderas are concave! But they will absolutely fill in with sand and dirt over the true floor of the caldera over time and develop Mounts like the thing at the central part of the city and start to rise WHEN THEY'RE ON THE VERGE OF A CATASTROPHIC ERUPTION.

So yeah! The Gotei-13 has an almost infinite supply of hot water, and probably less than a century to figure out what to do before The Big Kaboom.

Anyway, back at sewage:

There's been a city where the Seireitei is since time immemorial, and even though it's done the istanbul-not-constantinopple shuffle a few times, very little of the actual infrastructure has changed. Empires rise and fall but the desire paths stay the same.

This is especially true in Seireitei, because unlike very nearly every major IRL Municipality, it doesn't have a river running through it, something that usually necessitates Sewer updates By Force. But compared to a river which is constantly moving around in it's bed, a volcanic aquifer doesn't move much until it moves a whole fucking lot real fast, so the undercity of the Seireitei has really had time to... Develop isn't quite the right word.

"Ferment" is closer.

Above-ground waste management is the provenance of the actual local city government- yes, there is a Mayor of the Seireitei that the Gotei-13 has to pay property taxes to. Yamamoto maintains a lot of goodwill with the Mayor by dint of sentencing ill-behaved shinigami to shore up the municipal labor pool, and by knowing the mayor's family for the last millennium. So you'll see Shinigami doing things like trash collection and street-sweeping, but they're just there on probation.

-But nobody wanted to deal with the undercity. It's got a soul of it's own. Washington DC, which is less than 500 years old as a city and on top of a swamp, has an undercity that goes down over half a mile. Imagine how deep the sunken buildings, abandoned secret tunnels, and sewer system of a city that's millenia old, not sitting on actual mud and constantly subjected to high levels of magical background radiation might develop.

An Appetite, for one thing.

The 11th likes to talk a big game, but the reason the 4th is in charge of sewer maintenance is because the only people with the guts for it were people who got degrees rummaging in the guts of living people. Sewer maintenance really is a lot like abdominal surgery, if you were able to walk around inside the patient.

It was Retsu Unohana's idea, actually. Chigiri was a battle medic and aged rapidly for a shinigami. She was old when the court guard finally went from "Yamamoto and his gang of assholes" to "A for-real governing body". Her successor, Kirinji was more interested in traumatic injury recovery than preventative medicine, for obvious reasons- his triage was constantly full of combat casualties and early kido experiment victims Blood Loss was still his #1 Killer.

But Retsu had been reincarnated in and spent her youth in South 80, in the utterly undeveloped conditions there, and held deep, personal grudges with Dysentery and Cholera. For all his talk of healing waters, Kirinji had no sense of the importance of water sanitation, and it was a continuous point of contention between them for her apprenticeship.

"FINE!" He shouted one day after a particularly nasty row. "IF IT'S SO GODDAMN IMPORTANT TO YOU, YOU HANDLE IT! FORM NOW ON, YOU'RE IN CHARGE OF SEWAGE, SLUDGE QUEEN!"

She made her first descent the next morning.

She did not return for six weeks, and Kirinji almost thought he'd resloved that particular problem when she reappeared from the depths, a changed woman. That long in the darkness, alongside the buried secrets and skeletons of the city, with the horrors that did not dare brave the sunlight- it would change anyone, and most would come up looking at least mildly haunted.

Retsu Unohana is not most.

She looks radiant, almost like The Kenpachi again, covered in the horrors of the underground as she used to be covered in blood. She thrives on a challenge, and excels at the art of purification, and now, she has been given the single greatest challenge of purification in history. There is something beautiful and terrible in her eyes as she explains that it does down at least five miles, look at this, she thinks it's from the neolithic era, and there are incredible boneyards of thousands of skeletons, and fungi the likes of which she's never seen before- She is ecstatic- a creature kept in captivity, finally released into it's natural habitat.

It's hardly a surprise, if you consider Minazuki. Stingrays are benthic creatures, right at the bottom of the river, deep in the muck and decay.

It's been a little over eight hundred years into her tenure as a medic, and she has tamed much of the beast. The upper levels are well-mapped and have been made clean and well-lit, enough that even the civilian sanitation forces of the city can regularly enter and work in them without any particular unease. Infant and preventable disease mortality has dropped astronomically. Nobody's had cholera since the 1800's . While they have other jobs, all members of the 4th division are required to take at least one tour in the depths of the undercity.

Horrors still lurk in the depths.

They're pretty sure they lost Tokagero Kenpachi chasing one of those, shortly before Unohana became captain, and she's been reluctant to let other divisions assist since then. The Fourth Division's Fourth Seat, rumored to be the unluckiest post in the entire Gotei-13, is permanently stationed underground, and she loves it that way.

It's only recently that the 11th has been allowed to come along on descents, after Zaraki vanished for two days and then emerged victorious from a manhole in the 5th division with a tentacled horror she'd been tracking for decades that lived at least three miles down. He apologized- he had meant to come up in the 4th to present it's corpse to her directly, but well, you know what his sense of direction is like. Anyway, I saw it scuttling around in the rain aquifers and we don't need it tracking literal shit into the water supply so I went after is and d'ya think maybe I can take the lads down sometime? They' get lazy between deployments and you have a triage up here to manage.

Charmed, she agreed.

---

Hm. I just re-read that ask and it's actually about dry waste managment.

Sorry. I got very excited about the sewers.

I am now about to get worse about trash.

I don't think they have plastic in soul society- given how bug-themed the 12th division is, I'm pretty sure the casing on Rukia's soul pager is made of Chitin, and if you break it, it bleeds. Also it makes people with shellfish allergies break out in hives.

Since pretty much all the waste in Soul Society is either recyclable or organic matter, I think those trash pits Yumichika and Ganju were fooling around with are really more like Kido-enhanced composting centers. All waste goes into them and the bottom of the pit is pulled out in a tray, like with a vermiculture tower, if the worms were eighteen and a half feet long and hungry enough to swallow anything that falls in the pit, because Mayuri is incapable of making anything that is not at least slightly awful.

The compost is then shaken out for any spare glass or metal that made it into the compost and that's sent off to the 12th division forges to be recycled. it's baked to kill any dangerous pathogens and Giant Garbage Worm Eggs so they don't breach containment, and measured for nitrogen, phosphorus and other important plant nutrient content. Based on it's composition, it's then shipped out to farmers in the upper districts of the rukongai because "Free, A+ grade fertilizer if y'all don't start revolutions, pay your taxes and give us first dibs on crops" is an amazing incentive for rural farmers to not start backing the local warlords.

It was 12th division founder Uhin Zenjohji who came up wth the scheme- he remembered the lengths upper-district farmers were willing to go through to make sure their land remained fertile, what kind of demand Nitrogen was in, and the ravages of phosphorous runnoff, so he could kill two birds with one clod of shit by supplying farmers with 'free' fertilizer that kept them loyal to the court and was tailored to that area's nutritional needs and watershed capacity.

The fact that it kept a lot of swamp and waterway areas pristine so he could indulge his birdwatching hobby was a nice benefit too :).

NORMALLY, those pits are covered, clearly marked, and usually the site of a major traffic jam because that's the local collection point, but when Ichigo and friends arrived, Aizen had whipped everyone into believing they were being invaded by an elite force of super-assassins and not like. 4 high schoolers and a furry. All the street signs and markings came down, civilians shuttered themselves inside, and generally made the Seireitei as difficult to navigate as possible.

I wonder how much Zaraki's rotten sense of direction was exacerbated by that.

ANYWAY! That's my thoughts on trash! Deep undercity horrors and giant compost worms over an active volcano!

#AEIWAM #an elephant is warm and mushy #bleach #bleach fanfic #Retsu Unohana #zaraki kenpachi #tenjiro kirinji

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dontforgetukraine · 6 months ago

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Twitter Thread by Dmytro Kuleba

To those who have missed the previous 30 years, here is a short list of the results of negotiations with Russia that it never respected: 1. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Russia agreed to “respect independence, sovereignty, and the existing borders of Ukraine” as well as “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”. Breached by Russia invading Crimea in 2014. 2. The Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and “reaffirmed the inviolability of the borders” between the two countries. Russia breached it in 2014. 3. The OSCE Istanbul Summit in 1999. Russia committed to withdrawing its troops from Moldova’s Transdniestrian region and Georgia until the end of 2002. That never happened. 4. The 2008 Georgia ceasefire agreement following Russian aggression against the country. Russia agreed that “Russian military forces must withdraw to the lines prior to the start of hostilities”. That never happened. 5. The Ilovaysk “Green Corridor” in August 2014 and other “humanitarian” death corridors. Russia pledged to let Ukrainian forces leave the encircled town of Ilovaysk in the east of Ukraine, but instead opened fire and killed 366 Ukrainian troops. In the following years, Russia attacked numerous humanitarian corridors in Syria. 6. The “Minsk” agreements of 2014 and 2015. Russia agreed to cease the fire in the east of Ukraine. There had been 200 rounds of talks and 20 attempts to enforce a ceasefire, all of which the Russian side promptly violated. On February 24th, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 7. The 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative. Russia pledged to “provide maximum assurances regarding a safe and secure environment for all vessels engaged in this initiative." It then hindered the initiative's operation for months before withdrawing unilaterally a year later. NB: I am only focused on deals made with Russia to address specific issues and conflicts. I am not mentioning almost 400 international treaties that Russia has breached since 2014. There are no conclusions to be drawn here, except that no one can seriously use the words "Russia" and "negotiations" in the same phrase. Putin is a habitual liar who promised international leaders that he would not attack Ukraine days before his invasion in February 2022. Russia's tactic has remained consistent in its many wars over the last three decades: kill, grab, lie, and deny. Why would anyone genuinely believe that Russia in 2023 is any different from Russia in 1994, 1997, 1999, 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2022?

#Ukraine #Dmytro Kuleba #russia is a terrorist state #Putin #twitter Thread

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year ago

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In Istanbul, a flotilla of ships is preparing to depart with 5,500 tonnes of aid and around 1,000 medics, lawyers, senior politicians and human rights observers. Its destination: the Gaza Strip. On Sunday, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla will begin making its way to the besieged strip, its fifth voyage in 14 years. While the journey would normally take three to four days, it is expected that the flotilla – initially comprising three vessels, one cargo and two passenger ships, with further vessels expected to join later – could be waylaid by Israeli forces.

[...]

The flotilla is organised by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), which brings together 12 national groups from Canada, Malaysia, Italy, Norway, the US, Sweden, Spain, Turkey, South Africa, New Zealand, the UK and France. Altogether, delegates from over 30 countries will be represented on board. The flotilla’s crew and passengers – among them Che Guevara’s daughter Aleida and Nelson Mandela’s grandson Zwelivelile – will be unarmed. Their peacefulness will not guarantee their safety, however, as the Israeli state has a long and bloody history of targeting humanitarian groups. The flotilla’s first voyage to Gaza in May 2010 was a bloodbath: Israel sent a naval ship to meet it, killing 10 crew members (all of them Turkish, including one Turkish American dual national) and injuring 30. A UN report later found that Israel appeared to have executed at least six people in an “extra-legal, arbitrary and summary” manner; a Turkish state autopsy found that five had been shot in the head at close range. Israel subsequently apologised to Turkey for the raid and agreed to compensate the bereaved families $20m. Further voyages in 2015, 2016 and 2018 saw Israel seize the FFC’s ships and detain and deport those on board. Israel has also targeted humanitarian workers on land. Earlier this month, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) food aid workers, among them three British citizens, in a drone attack on a marked convoy whose movements had been coordinated with the IDF. An Israeli investigation blamed “grave errors”, a finding WCK rejected.

#palestine #israel #gaza #Gaza Freedom Flotilla

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ladykailitha · 6 months ago

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Around the World Part 9

And here we are at the end of the story. There is one more story left to be told. And that's "The Rise of The Fallen" which is scheduled to come out on Sunday. Then the second and final part will come out on Tuesday.

In this one, we get the reactions from Steve's other friends and Murray appears for a final fuck you to Nancy. With another sweet cameo from Vickie.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

They made their merry way through Europe, Murray keeping his eagle-eye out for fans and paparazzi alike, all while Steve took pictures of Eddie different outfits. His personal favorite was of Eddie standing next a group of Corroded Coffin fans at ‘The Shining” motel in Germany.

His hair was tucked up under a hat and he wore a baggy jeans and wore a fuzzy blue-grey sweater. He still had his scruff and the sunglasses almost made him look more like Johnny Depp, then Eddie Munson.

Eddie was sure to steer clear of blacks and leathers and to keep his hair out of his face. He even wore a bright orange wig in Romania and Vlad the Impaler’s real castle and not the one Hollywood used for their movies.

Everyone agreed he looked dreadful in the wig, but they couldn’t deny the damn thing’s effectiveness.

They parted with Murray in Greece. He had found a lovely little cottage to settled down in and so they bid their travel partner farewell.

There in while they were viewing the Hagia Sophia in Turkiye because Chrissy expressed an interest, they met Gareth and Shane.

“Eddie!” Gareth cried and ran into his arms for a big hug.

Robin and Steve were treated to the same bear hug from Shane. Steve held Shane at arms length and smiled. His twin looked good. There was a sparkle to his eyes that had been missing on the tour.

“You look great!” he enthused to Shane’s bemusement.

“Don’t I always?” Shane teased.

Steve laughed. “Of course you do, but you look...”

“Healthy,” Robin supplied.

Then Shane truly blushed. “Thanks. Someone suggested that maybe Muslim countries might be the way to go to avoid certain vices...”

“And how is that working out for you?” Steve asked with a smile.

“Good,” Shane said, “great even.”

They decided to tour the rest of Istanbul together. Just taking in all the beautiful sites.

Steve led Shane away from the group as they were saying their goodbyes.

“What’s on your mind, twin?” Shane asked, leaning up against the railing that looked out into the city.

“Eddie asked me to marry him.” Steve fiddled with the necklace as he spoke.

Shane gently took it from his nervous fingers and smiled. “What’s the charm on his necklace, then?”

“Wings.”

Shane’s smile widened. “Because of course it is. He’s going take good care of you, you know?”

Steve blushed and nodded his head. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Good,” Shane said with a soft smile. “Now tell me all about how he proposed.”

So he did. He launched into the whole story, including the mess in Venice.

“Nice to see he isn’t Mr. Perfect,” Shane said with a huff of laughter. “But good on him realizing he done fucked up, though.”

“Yeaaahhh,” Steve said with wry smile.

They walked back to the others and Eddie looked up at Steve and smiled. Steve smiled back.

Their tour through Asia saw them seeing haunted forests and beautiful tombs. They saw the Terracotta warriors and the Great Wall of China, Himeji Castle and Aokigahara in Japan, the Chaukhadi Tombs in Pakistan. Finally they arrived in beautiful India.

They stood in front of the one of the most well known tombs in the world. The Taj Mahal. It was even more beautiful in person than it was in pictures.

Eddie turned to Steve. “When I die are you going to build me as beautiful a tomb as this?”

“Yeah, babe,” Steve said, pulling him close. “Everyone will know the resting place of Eddie Munson, rockstar and best boyfriend in the world.”

Eddie blushed and ducked his head, his hair tucked away as had become the norm on this trip. “Shucks, Stevie. I thought you were going to say no.”

Steve laughed, giddy. “Never. Maybe we should start building it now, like the pyramids in Egypt so you can be interred with your guitar collection.”

Eddie’s went wide. “You do love me!” He wrapped his arms around Steve and kissed him soundly.

“The things they allow in public these days,” huffed a fond female voice behind them.

The four of them turned to see Nadia, Spence and a couple of well dressed young men that must have been Nadia’s brothers.

“Nadia! Spence!” Robin squealed and ran over to give them huge hugs. She even included the brothers in her enthusiastic greetings.

“These are my brothers, Indra and Jai,” Nadia said introducing them. “This is Spence’s friend, Steve, his boyfriend Eddie and Chrissy and Robin also Steve and Eddie’s friends.”

They all greeted each other.

“You know,” Eddie said with a huff of laughter. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say Stevie’s friends were social media stalking us as we’ve met up with everyone at this point.”

“You saw Simon and Shane, too?” Spence asked, tilting his head to the side. “I knew you guys were traveling the world, but Italy and Turkiye, as well?”

“We’ve been having a blast!” Robin said throwing her arms out. “Chrissy and I are heading back to the States after India, but Steve and Eddie are going to continue with Australia, some Africa and a couple places in South America before coming home to California.”

Spence bit his lip. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” He waved vaguely at Eddie.

Eddie grinned. “We’ve been taking the proper precautions and we wanted to extend our trip out a little bit more.”

Spence looked to Steve who nodded.

“Well,” Nadia said with her own huff of laughter. “If the biggest thing that happened was Boston and that was almost two months ago and you haven’t been spotted since, I think they’ll be just fine.”

Spence looked down at her with a broad grin. “You’re right.”

“You best get used to that,” the younger of the two boys, Jai said, “she is always right. Even our mom agrees with her most of the time.”

“It’s frightening,” Indra said, with a nod.

Nadia just smiled up at Spence with find amusement.

“Yup!” Spence said, pressing his lips together. “Learning that lesson fast.”

Steve let out a laugh and soon everyone had joined in.

They toured India a little more with suggestions from Indra who was also a spooky fan and then they moved on.

Everywhere they went, Eddie had tried on a different look. Often blending in with the locals. There were exotic locales and spooky hotels. And in each place, Steve took a picture of Eddie incognito.

Steve laughed more in those four months then he had since he started being Abbadon in The Fallen.

Eddie was right, being a normal guy had its perks and getting to spend that with Eddie? Really made it all worth it.

Far too soon they were lifting off the runway in Mexico City on their way back to their lives.

“Well, Stevie,” Eddie said with a smile, “you ready to go back home?”

Steve nodded. “Yeah, I loved traveling the world. Especially with Chrissy and Robin. Seeing the guys doing so well. It really made it all worth while. But I want to sleep in my bed. I want to start writing again. I really didn’t that much while we were traveling. I learned so much out here about me, I almost can’t wait to be Abbadon again.”

“I learned a lot about me, too,” Eddie agreed. “I’ve rarely had a chance to be myself in the last ten years that I almost forgot where I came from. I’m not the leather and chains. I’m not the heavy metal rockstar. I’m just a poor schmuck from Hawkins, Indiana who got so fucking lucky.”

“You think you’re next album is going to reflect that?” Steve asked as he rummaged in his backpack for his book.

“Probably,” Eddie huffed in amusement. “After the third solely dedicated to you.”

“Only a third?” he teased. “Dustin was sure it was half.”

Eddie buried his head in his hands. “Why do we tell that butthead anything?”

“I figure it’s that open and round face of his,” Steve groused. “It just screams ‘trust me’.”

Eddie cocked his head to the side and then nodded. “Yeah, that tracks.”

Steve’s first stop after getting off the plane was straight to Vickie’s office. He needed to clear something with her before he went nuclear.

Vickie raised her head and smiled when Steve knocked on her door.

“Nichole said it was okay to just come in,” he said with a smile.

“And Nichole would be correct,” she said indicating the chairs in front of her, “have a seat. Tell me all about your lovely vacation. Thank you for sending me pictures by the way, it helped me and my team keep up on all the goings on and keep fan reactions to a minimum.”

“You’re welcome!” Steve said brightly, closing the door behind him. “So this is about the pictures, actually.”

“Oh?” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Do tell.”

So Steve did.

At the end of his explanation and question Vickie grinned. “I think that’s a beautiful way to do it. I’ll make sure she’s served before you send out the message and you’re all good to go.”

“I have an idea on who should serve her, too,” he said, grinning back at her.

“If you’re thinking of who I’m thinking of,” she said slyly, “then it’ll be perfect.”

Steve just smiled.

There was a knock on the door and Nancy went up to get it. She had just finished applying for schools to change her career from being an agent to a journalist. The thought of really getting to the heart of a story like she had on the school newspaper all those years ago, really lit something in her.

She opened the door and there was a short man with thick, wire glasses and a sneering grin.

“Wait, you’re Murray Bauman, right?” she asked. “Had I know you were coming I would have opened a bottle of wine to commiserate with. Both of us having been discarded like trash when Corroded Coffin was done with us.”

Murray shrugged. “It was time. I needed the push to retire. Got myself a lovely little cottage in Greece now.”

She blinked at him for a moment. “Then why are you here?”

“This!” He handed her a large manilla envelope and waved goodbye.

Inside was a cease and desist as well as a notification that she may have violated an NDA.

“Shit.”

There was another paper in the envelope and when she pulled it out, her heart sank. She slumped against the wall and let the picture fall to the floor. It was a picture of the London Eye in the background with Chrissy and Robin on one side and Steve and Eddie on the other and in the middle smiling up at the camera, clearly taken by someone else, was Murray Bauman.

Steve and Eddie were snuggled up on Steve’s bed, Eddie curled around Steve.

Steve hit send and put the phone down to wrap his arms around Eddie. “There. All posted across all social media. I’ve put us both on mute and Vickie is going to handle the next forty-eight hours.”

“I wish I could have seen her face when she saw the picture,” Eddie huffed with a grin.

“Me, too.”

Steve’s phone lit up once to confirm the post of: “Traveling with a rockstar is like playing hide and seek with fans. How many of you saw him but didn’t realize you were standing next to Eddie Munson?! Also, to the 'fan' who outed us in Boston, we know who you are and an NDA maaaayyyy have been violated. You'll speak to our lawyers soon! “

Eddie and Steve soon drifted off to sleep, content with their lives.

Tag List: CLOSED

1- @rozzieroos @itsall-taken @redfreckledwolf @zerokrox-blog @beelze-the-bubkiss

2- @gregre369 @a-little-unsteddie @chaosgremlinmunson @messrs-weasley @cryptid-system

3- @maya-custodios-dionach @goodolefashionedloverboi @val-from-lawrence @carlyv @wonderland-girl143-blog

4- @irregular-child @bookbinderbitch @bookworm0690 @forgottenkanji

5- @anne-bennett-cosplayer @yikes-a-bee @awkwardgravity1 @littlewildflowerkitten @genderless-spoon

6- @dragonmama76 @ellietheasexylibrarian @thedragonsaunt @useless-nb-bisexual @disrespectedgoatman

7- @counting-dollars-counting-stars @tinyplanet95 @ravenfrog @swimmingbirdrunningrock @lingeringmirth

8- @gutterflower77 @a-lovely-craziness @just-a-tiny-void @w1ll0wtr33 @sticknpokelightningbolt

9- @scoops-aboy86 @kurofuckingshi16 @watermelonmite @eyehartart @dreamercec

10- @little-birch-boy @yearningagain @micheledawn1975 @blondie1006 @sadisticaltarts

#my writing #stranger things #steddie #ladykailtiha writes #rockstar au #rockstar steve harrington #rockstar eddie munson

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eretzyisrael · 1 month ago

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by Douglas Murray

And since Hamas had always insisted that there must not be one Jew in such a state – that it must be, to borrow a sinister term from history, Judenrein, or cleared of Jews – then that meant the Jews must all either be killed or forcibly evacuated.

None of the student protest leaders or their followers ever put forward any non-genocidal plan for the removal of the Jews of Israel, so it is not a stretch to say that the chant was genocidal.

The same went for the cry of 'Intifada' – holy war. There was considerable debate as to whether this was inflammatory.

But to anyone who was Jewish, the slogan could not have been clearer. Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than 'Sieg Heil' is a phrase that simply means 'Hail victory'.

Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an 'Intifada' against the Jewish state, and these turned out to be among the bloodiest periods in Israel's history.

For years, terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis.

On a beautiful summer evening in Tel Aviv in 2001, scores of young Israeli women queuing to get into a beach-front nightclub were targeted.

A Hamas suicide bomber killed 21 of them. Sixteen were teenagers. Limbs were strewn across the road; bodies lay in piles.

A student from the University of Bristol pictured at their pro-Palestine encampment in May 2024

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As they called for 'Intifada', did the protesters at American colleges know this? Equally, when they accused Israel of being an 'apartheid state' did they realise that almost a fifth of the population of Israel are Arabs and enjoy the same rights as Jews?

Probably not, because two months after the Hamas massacres, an opinion poll revealed that while 81 per cent of respondents of all ages backed Israel in its fight against Hamas, among 18 to 24-year-olds an extraordinary 60 per cent thought the October 7 attacks were justified and 51 per cent in the same age bracket agreed that Israel 'should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians'.

It is bewildering that these opinions come from the exact same generation of students who were brought up to believe that words are violence and that silence is violence. Yet calls for genocide appear to be just about the only thing that is not violent.

But, though the campus protests made little impression on Western government, one set of leaders was taking a keen interest.

In May 2024, a Hamas leader addressed a conference in Istanbul hosted by the Muslim Brotherhood and expressed his thanks for 'the great student flood' that had emerged at American, British and other Western universities.

What students on these campuses were doing was all part of Hamas's plan and had been factored in. A plan that led direct from campus demonstrations in America to jihad on the streets of Israel.

The endorsements kept coming. The supreme leader of the Iranian revolutionary Islamic government, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote praising the students of America.

'You are now part of the Resistance Front,' he told them, 'and you have begun a dignified struggle under the ruthless police pressure of your government that evidently defends the oppressive and brutal Zionist regime.'

There's more than one irony in this, but in the years since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, have killed, tortured and imprisoned thousands of Iranian students, especially when they have come out and protested against their own government as the American students were now doing.

In one crackdown in 2009 the government's security forces openly shot student protesters on the streets, then ordered the digging of mass graves for the bodies of those who were murdered and tortured.

Students who were detained in the regime's prisons in the aftermath of these protests attested to having been raped with batons and bottles.

But the Ayatollah wasn't going to allow something like his own track record to get in the way of destabilising America.

In his letter to American students, Khamenei talked about a changing situation, consciences awakening and history turning a new page.

He concluded his salutations with citations from the Quran and said: 'I empathise with you, young people, and I respect your steadfastness.'

The fact that 2024 saw a record surge in executions inside Iran was left out of his letter, as was the fact that his regime publicly executes people convicted of homosexuality by hanging them from cranes and throwing them off high buildings.

Khamenei was clearly pleased with the ignorance of America's students and his own ability to foment dissent in a country he describes as 'The Great Satan'.

#hamas #gaza #douglas murray #student protests #privileged students #on democracies and death cults

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theladysherlock · 3 days ago

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Then, all in a flash, Deryn understood. Alek had made another trade. Just like in Istanbul, when Malone had been about to reveal the revolution's plans, and Alek had agreed to tell his life story in exchange for the man's keeping silent.

But this time he's given up his secrets for her.

"Oh," Deryn said softly.

"'Oh,' indeed," the lady boffin said. "That was rather slow, Mr. Sharp. Are you sure you didn't bump your head along with your knee?"

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP

WE GOT A WHOLE-ASS FANFICTION "Oh..." MOMENT ARE YOU KIDDING MEEEEEEEEEE

#most of the time I do try to be professional but sometimes I just gotta start hollering. you know?#lily liveblogs leviathan 2024 #leviathan series #leviathan trilogy

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dragoneyes618 · 3 months ago

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Romania was already fervently antisemitic even before Hitler’s rise to power. The new government elected in 1937 not only sanctioned official antisemitic laws, but also acquiesced to widespread antisemitic violence in the country, particularly during the interwar period, and antisemitism on the eve of WWII was about as rampant in Romania as in Germany. On September 6, 1940, King Carol abdicated, and the passionate antisemite Ion Antonescu, who had been minister of defense in the previous government, came to power. His police were organized with the help of the Nazis and the S.S. and an ensuing period of antisemitic terrorism began with the confiscation of Jewish-owned shops and went on to arresting and torturing Jewish leaders and the mass murder of Jews.

However, the Struma, a small iron-hulled ship only 148.4 feet long, had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered luxury yacht. Restructured with an undependable second-hand diesel engine, it was carrying cattle on the Danube River under the Panamanian flag in the 1930s when the Mossad LeAliyah Bet first considered using it as a refugee ship. That plan was abandoned when the Germans entered Bulgaria, but the manifestly unseaworthy vessel was ultimately commissioned by the Revisionist Zionist organizations in Romania, particularly Betar, to carry 769 passengers fleeing Axis-allied Romania to Eretz Yisrael under the British Mandate during World War II.

The Russian submarine Shch 213

Originally designed for about 150 passengers, the Struma was retrofitted to carry almost 800 people, such that its sleeping quarters lacked space for the passengers to even sit up. The ancient engine had been recovered from a wreck on the bottom of the Danube River and the vessel was little more than a pile of junk. As such, it could not have come as a monumental surprise that when the Struma set sail from the port of Constanta on the Black Sea on December 12, 1941 – as the last vessel to leave Europe to escape the Holocaust – her diesel engine died several times before her arrival in Istanbul, including a failure on the very day she set sail. A tugboat had to tow her out of Constanta and, since the waters off the coast were mined, a Romanian ship shepherded her clear of the minefield before abandoning her to her fate, as she drifted overnight while the crew tried, but failed, to start her engine.

The Struma broadcasted distress signals but, when the Romania tugboat returned the next day, its crew refused to repair her engines without payment. After a superficial examination of the engine, the mechanic declared that he was prepared to fix it for three million leu, an extortionate and unimaginable sum, particularly given that most the refugees on board had been robbed blind by customs officers and spent their last penny buying their way out of Romania and paying an exorbitant fee just to secure passage on the Struma.

He finally agreed to accept 250 gold wedding rings and other family heirlooms in lieu of cash but, on December 15, 1941, only three days later, the engine died again near the shores of Turkey, so the Struma was towed into the quarantine section of Istanbul harbor – where she sat anchored and isolated for more than two months. There, the refugees learned for the first time that a reprehensible fraud had been perpetrated upon them and that the immigration certificates into Eretz Yisrael that had been promised to them never actually existed.

In a particularly heinous act which earned him everlasting infamy – and which led the Jews to refer to him as “Haman” – Sir Harold MacMichael, the British High Commissioner of Palestine, not only refused entry to the Struma, but also urged the Turks not to permit the Jewish refugees to disembark. Consistent with their hateful White Paper (1939), the British remained determined to eliminate Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael; the Romanians did not want to take the Jews back; and the Turks, still neutral at the time, carefully walked the line so as not to risk alienating any country – particularly since most of the passengers bore Romanian, Hungarian, or Bulgarian passports, all countries hostile to Great Britain during the war whom the British claimed might be Nazi agents. The entire world left “the floating coffin” to sit rotting in the water during one of the coldest winters in decades and with its starving and freezing passengers abandoned. The situation became even worse for the Jewish refugees aboard the Struma, sailing under a Panamanian flag, when Panama declared war against Germany in January 1942.

When the Turkish deadline for some international resolution of the “Struma problem” passed with no action being taken, Turkish Prime Minister Refik Saydam sent a small party of police to board the ship on February 23, 1942, but the refugees repelled them. A force of some 80 police followed soon thereafter and, surrounding the ship with motorboats, forcefully overcame passenger resistance, boarded the Struma, and attached her to a tug, which towed her through the Bosporus and out into the Black Sea, where the Turkish authorities abandoned the ship without food, water, or fuel. As the vessel was being towed, passengers enthusiastically began singing Hatikvah and signs were hung over the sides and visible on the banks of the water that read “Save Us.”

On the morning of February 24, 1942, the Russian commander of the submarine Shch-213, who had standing orders from Stalin to sink all neutral ships in the Black Sea to prevent supplies from reaching Germany, torpedoed the Struma. The ship – which had no life vests and was equipped with only two small decrepit lifeboats – quickly sunk, killing 768 men, women and children, making it the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. More than 100 passengers actually survived the original bombing, as they clung to pieces of wreckage in the icy water, but no rescue came and all but one of them died from drowning or hypothermia. The lone survivor was 19-year-old David Stoliar, who hung on in the frozen waters for over 24 hours before a Turkish fishing boat appeared and picked him up. Unbelievably, after a week in an Istanbul hospital, he was transferred to a Turkish jail and was held for 71 days for being in Turkey “illegally.”

The Yishuv mourned the drowned refugees and felt anger towards the British, due to their policy of closing the gates of Palestine to Jewish refugees. Following the sinking of the Struma the Jewish National Council (the Vaad HaLeumi) declared a day of mourning, and an internal curfew. Shown here is a flyer distributed throughout Eretz Yisrael in the wake of the sinking of the Struma:

With the frightening news we have received of the sinking of the Struma and the refugees on it, the National Committee has decided to declare a general work stoppage and internal curfew throughout the land, today, Thursday, the 9th of Adar [February 26,1942]: All agriculture, industry, and trade work – from noon; and all transportation from 1:00 p.m. The following workers shall continue to work: army camps, health services, electric company, post office, telegraph, and train system. The Jews shall be confined to their homes and shall not go out to the street from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. No work until midnight. On this day, the Yishuv expresses its heavy mourning for the hundreds of sacrifices of our immigrant brothers who drowned at sea, and our strong bitterness at the hardening of the heart and disinterest from the higher Jewish institutions in Jerusalem and London, who were warned of the expected dangers to those Jewish refugees who successfully escaped from the claws of the Nazis; and (expresses) our strong demand to all the nations with whom the Jewish nation together stands in the war against the evil government of Hitler and his partners, to recognize their duty to extend a saving hand to the escapees and to facilitate the reception of the refugees into the Jewish Yishuv.

The Yishuv’s Petition

We are calling upon the people of Britain, their elected officials, and their government:

Provide refuge to Israel’s migrants and its refugees in their national home and their homeland.

Let the fate of those fleeing Nazi persecution not be like the fate of the people of the “Salvador” and the “Struma” – drowning at sea.

The story of the disaster must be investigated before a parliamentary committee.

Liberty must be declared for the people of the “Darien” and homecoming and redemption be provided to all the survivors.

My voice, along with the voice of my brothers, that are calling for refuge.

The Rock of Refuge

For months, the sinking of the Struma became a rallying cry for Jews worldwide and it generated protests, a general strike in Eretz Yisrael, death threats against British officials, and responses by Turkey and Britain that voiced regrets but denied responsibility. The British government eventually decided to grant an exception and to permit Stoliar to make aliyah – over the strenuous objections of the loathsome MacMichael, who argued that permitting the entry of the sole survivor of the Struma would somehow open the “floodgates” to Jewish immigration. In a public response to the tragedy, MacMichael stated: “The fate of these people was tragic, but the fact remains that they were nationals of a country at war with Britain, proceeding direct from enemy territory. Palestine was under no obligations towards them.” MacMichael had also been responsible for the deaths of 260 people on the Patria, who were killed by a mine in Haifa harbor after he denied them entry. The Struma sinking, along with the Patria disaster which had preceded it, became a rallying point for the Irgun and LEHI Jewish underground movements, encouraging their violent revolt against the British presence in Eretz Yisrael.

Stoliar (1922-2014) was born in Kishinev, Romania, to Yaakov, a textile manufacturer, and Bella (née Leichiman); the two divorced when he was ten. He moved with his mother to France and returned to Romania in 1937 at age 15 to live with his father. After graduating from high school, he studied for a year at the Polytechnic Institute before being expelled because he was Jewish. In the summer of 1941, the Romanian authorities sent him and other young Jewish men to a forced labor camp at Poligon on the outskirts of Bucharest and, after several months at hard labor, his father paid a bribe to secure his release and purchased a ticket for him to sail on the Struma to Eretz Yisrael.

On January 21, 1941, the Iron Guard had launched a pogrom against Bucharest Jews, looting and burning Jewish homes and synagogues and some 200 Jews were rounded up, tortured, and murdered in a slaughterhouse; others were hanged like cattle from the slaughterhouse iron hooks, tagged with signs reading “kosher meat,” and were chopped up while still alive. The sole survivor remaining after the Romanian mass murder of at least 13,266 Jews was Rav Zvi Gutman, the Rabbi of Bucharest. On the day that Stoliar left Bucharest for passage aboard the Struma, his father took him to visit Rav Gutman, who cried when he was asked for a beracha. As Stoliar tells the story (his testimony is preserved in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem):

He blessed me to the effect that I would reach Eretz Yisrael safely. I was very moved by this encounter. When I left the provisional synagogue that the Rabbi had established, I didn’t say a word to my father, but we both felt that we had fulfilled a sacred duty to G-d… Something within me changed. Courage filled me, and my belief that I would indeed reach Eretz Yisrael strengthened.

Stoliar’s identity papers and belongings were punctiliously checked before he could join the other “illegal” immigrants on the train from Bucharest to the port of Constanța on the Black Sea. As he later described it:

Sometimes, the inspector would wickedly take something out of the backpack and turn to his friend, asking, “Perhaps you have some newspaper to wrap up these shoes? I just got them as a present.” People didn’t protest, and let themselves be humiliated… It wasn’t important. At that moment, they were leaving the firetrap of Satan, whose reach had spread over all of Europe… They boarded the trains… The cries of those parting from them – Write as soon as you arrive! Take care that you don’t catch cold on the ship! Be well! – were swallowed up in the rattling of the wheels. Almost 800 people were leaving the land of their birth, their homes, their childhood and adolescent dreams, to escape the chilling threat of death. The passengers underwent further inspections at Constanța. The security police checked their names in the joint passport, and they had to hand in their Romanian documents. Only one man, whose name had been removed by mistake from the list, was turned away. In vain he cried and begged them to let him travel, but the border personnel didn’t give in – he received his life back as a gift! The passengers’ luggage was examined again by the tax officers, who confiscated many items, and by clerks from the Romanian National Bank, who appropriated money and jewelry. The passengers were undressed, and painstakingly examined. There was a ban on taking precious metals out of Romania, and they were only allowed to take their wedding rings with them. The amount of money permitted to take out of the country was also confiscated.

As Stoliar describes the journey to Istanbul, the passengers were instructed to try to keep the vessel in balance and not to move, lest too many people on one side of the deck endanger the ship. As such, there was no way for them to wash themselves or to clean up, with the situation getting increasingly worse as time went on. When the ship reached Turkey, the authorities refused to permit the passengers to disembark, leaving them on board in dire conditions for ten weeks. According to Stoliar, the passengers began to get used to the misery, dirt, overcrowding, lack of food and the cold, and they would remove bugs from their shirts with a knife or razor because they no longer had any change of clothing. Thanks to Dr. Hora Löbel, whose pregnant wife stayed behind and planned to join him in Eretz Yisrael after their child was born, a group of thirty doctors and nurses was organized that provided all the sick passengers’ needs, as far as was possible in light of the lack of basic medical materials, but the diabetics’ plight became particularly dire because the Turkish authorities forbade anyone to bring insulin to them.

The Turks permitted nine passengers to disembark, eight of whom had entry permits to Eretz Yisrael and, after much pleading, one female passenger who started to severely hemorrhage was taken off the ship and brought to a hospital.

Describing his personal experience on the Struma, he says:

We were eight km from the Turkish coast… Shortly before 9:00 a.m. we heard the thunder of bombardment and saw flames coming from the Turkish coast, and a second later, everyone on deck saw a torpedo speeding towards us. A deafening explosion ripped through the ship… I only remember that a superhuman force lifted me into the air; after a few moments I fell back down and landed in the water. From the moment of impact, no more than a minute passed before the vessel disappeared without a trace. It was literally swallowed up by the waves in the blink of an eye… Just a few planks of wood floating on the surface remained of the Struma… There were a few dozen people in the water, men and women who tried to save themselves, but the screams and cries for help dissipated and vanished amidst the vast expanse of the sea… The waves were cold as ice, and my limbs lost all feeling… I managed to lay my hands on a large piece of driftwood and to climb up onto it… Not even four hours had passed before I comprehended that I was the only one who remained.

Spotting a floating piece of the ship some 40 yards away from him, he exerted the last vestiges of his strength to reach it. When night fell, he found the ship’s second officer, Bulgarian Lazar Ivanof Dikof, floating near him in the water, and he lifted him up onto the float:

[Lazar] says that the only way we can survive is really by us shouting all the time so that we don’t fall asleep, because if we fall asleep we will never wake up. So we were sitting back to back and yelling all night. And as the day came along, we were already exhausted of yelling. And then we stopped, and then I felt that he is not any longer on my back. I turned around and his head was in the water, like on his belly. In other words, he could not possibly breathe any longer. He was dead… but he was very close to me, but just a corpse.

Left alone and desperate, Stoliar tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists but, lucky for him, his fingers were too numb to release the blade from his jackknife. After some 24 hours in the freezing water, he was spotted by a Turkish boat – Stoliar maintains that they waited until they could be reasonably certain that all of the Struma passengers were dead and he specifically remembers that the sailors seemed amazed to find a survivor – and taken to a small fishing village, where he was wrapped in blankets. Following two days in which he teetered between life and death, he was interrogated by Turkish policemen, during the course of which he fainted and was taken to a hospital by ambulance:

I was in hospital for 14 days. On the first day, I was visited by Mr. Simon Brod, President of the Istanbul Jewish community, who had received special permission to come and see me. [Brod was deeply involved in locating Jewish refugees, rescuing and caring from them, and working to gain their entrance into Eretz Yisrael.] He visited me every day, sometimes twice a day… Two days later he came with a Jewish doctor, who immediately gave the order to bandage my fingers and toes with camphor dressings and to change them several times a day. Thanks to the prompt and dedicated treatment I received, my fingers and toes were spared gangrene and amputation.

Stoliar was incarcerated in a small cell, where he was held as a political prisoner for 48 days and interrogated daily until he was finally released on April 23, 1942, when Brod informed him that all his papers were ready, including the British permit; thus, of the 770 permits that would have had to be issued were it not for the disaster, one permit was issued. Stoliar departed the next day under Turkish guard for the Syrian border, and Brod helped to transport him to Eretz Yisrael, organizing a train to Aleppo, Syria and a car from there to Tel Aviv. A few months later, on September 1942, Stoliar’s mother, Bella, was deported from France to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Original Palestine emergency document issued in 1946 to Stoliar after his release from duty in the British Army during WWII.

In 1943, approximately a year after he reached Eretz Yisrael, Stoliar, who was fluent in eight languages, enlisted in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and fought as part of the Eighth Army of the British Army on the North African front, serving in Egypt and Libya. In 1945, he married Adria Nachmias, a Jewess born in Alexandria (1924), in the synagogue in Cairo and, upon his release from the British army in 1946, he and his wife came to Israel, where he lived in Haifa, joined the Haganah, and fought in Israel’s War of Independence as a machine gunner on the northern front. After the war, he worked for the Esso oil company (now Exxon) and helped his father, who had survived the Holocaust, and his stepmother to make aliyah. Following Esso’s closing shop in Israel, he became vice president of the Japanese Mitsubishi Shoji, an import-export firm, living in Japan for 18 years and, after the death of his wife and his remarriage, they founded a shoe manufacturing company (that, in its early years, dominated a new show company called Nike) and opened a bakery and baking school in Oregon.

The story of the Struma has, sadly, been largely forgotten. MGM considered making a film about the story, but decided against it when Stoliar, the sole survivor, declined to participate. However, after years of silence, he told his story in an interview with the New York Times in 2000; he appeared in a 2001 documentary about the Struma by Canadian director Simcha Jacobovici; and reluctantly provided critical assistance to Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their reconstruction of the Struma tragedy in their book, Death on the Black Sea (2003). His second wife, Marda, reported that every time her husband reluctantly agreed to be interviewed about the Struma Affair, he would spend the following week plagued by nightmares that kept him screaming in his sleep.

Struma memorial in Israel: Ashdod.

Interest in the Struma was revived in 2000, when Greg Buxton, a Briton whose grandparents had died on board the ship, organized a successful search for the vessel, although others question whether this was actually the Struma. On September 3, 2000, a ceremony was held at the site to commemorate the tragedy, with attendees including 60 relatives of Struma victims, representatives of the Turkish Jewish community, the Israeli ambassador and prime minister’s envoy, and various British and American delegates. (Stoliar could not attend because he was suffering from cancer – although he fought hard against the disease and lived for another 14 years.) Not surprisingly, there were no delegates from the former Soviet Union. Today, there are several streets in Israel named for the Struma, as well as a synagogue in Beer Sheva which bears the ship’s name.

#history #jewish history #jumblr #frumblr #antisemitism

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