#and when china & north korea fell to communism

[gorillaxyz]

good fucking night gang ♥️ wish me luck on my amhis mock tomorrow. im gonna do so bad. i tried revising dates but idk a good way to do itttt i only remember alger hiss case when truman became president when the u2 crisis happened when the korean war started and ended... and orher foreign policy stuff like that. but also when to secure these rights was

i bet you the firsy question tomorrow will be abt the civil rights campaigns during each or both presidencies LOL kill me....... i know all the facts just not the daaaatessssssss😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[jacensolodjo]

This might be completely off but as a white gen z american i think that white gen z americans tend to see the idea that everyone gets paid enough to live and latch onto that so hard that we don't care about the implications of the rest of communism. Like we can't really imagine what another political system is like for whatever reason (for me it was a language disorder but ik there's something structural going on, same reason so many usually white americans forget that there are people in other countries). and we don't have relatives who survived communism so we're just like "hey, something that claims to give you livable income, it's different than what we have right now which sucks so fucking bad, i like that" cause we're not even told to read the communist manifesto. we're told what capitalism and communism are on paper and then asked which we would prefer (this was literally a history class exercise i had that took the whole period). Ik you don't need me to explain it to you since you've seen people defending it for so long and I'm DEFINITELY not trying to make excuses for anyone because there aren't any, it just clicked in my own head that this is a *trend*. It's fucked. We aren't told that you can consider or theorize a society outside of either system. So we don't. And then we're told to pick.

Yeah. See, I have a problem with that if true (and in fact it ISN'T the first time I've had someone say that because of a few key points about communism and it sounding better than the experience with capitalism it was decided hey we should all be commies). Because the problem with that is the same problem as deciding because a bunch of boomers hate communism, and clearly the Red Scare was a bunch of (often antisemitic) hogwash on top of that, that communism really isn't all that bad after all. Which then turns into 'we support any country that isn't the US through the virtue of not the US even if that country is a genocidal hellhole'. (See the uptick in support for China, North Korea, russia of course is an obvious one. All of them are guilty of genocide in the present day, none of them are innocent or worthy of support. Citizens of those countries have been begging Westerners to stop supporting them, in fact.)

You (general you not specific) probably know people who have dealt with a communist regime, they just don't talk about it for myriad reasons (it was traumatic, they've tried talking about it before and had people--children-- shout them out about how they're totally wrong about why communism was terrible to live under, they don't owe anyone knowing where they came from, etc., or the big one: they learned not to talk about their opinions and experiences because that gets you sent to gulag).

Or the fact communism didn't die when the Wall fell. Even if places like China are tenuously considered communist, they are still using the same playbook. You have the russkis now completely believing they're bringing back the USSR (missiles, tanks, etc., have had CCCP painted on them). Which is, uh, bad. And you got western teenagers cheering it at the literal cost of Ukr life.

And I promise I am not trying to be condescending. You have a great advantage over many previous generations: you have grown up entirely with the internet and the tools to search it easily and quickly. (This is, of course, the big divide between Millennial and Gen Z. We watched computers and tech become ubiquitous. You have never known a time without a computer in every home.) You rebel against so many other things 'the System' tries to get you to believe. School doesn't or won't offer sex ed, you learn it on your own time anyway. School bans books, you find them and read them on your own regardless. There is no difference in doing that with pure politics (since book banning is political but 'softer'). Hell, you already do. You shine a spotlight on bigoted politicians all on your own. You argue for better gun control. You have an entire demographic scared of y'all being at voting age.

So, yes. It's hard not to feel a little frustrated when we're told to "read a book" (or any other comment we receive from people desperate to make us believe we are actually wrong and pretending we are the ones who need more education). When we've read more than we've ever needed to because some of us have desperately tried to figure out why. Why this political and economic theory. Why so many had to die. Why we're being told the ends justified the means when those means were mass torture and murder. Why it seems to be easier to say you're a communist than a socialist. Why it's as hard as deprogamming a cult member when it comes to making people understand the blood staining the word 'communism'. To say nothing of the fact that we don't need to read something when we have the experiences burned into our collective memory.

I've made posts about it before specifically pleading that people do their own research. You can and should look at communism just as critically as you do capitalism. Hell I have even shown how they aren't all that different after all. Communism actually lies to you more than capitalism. At least capitalism we know is built to exploit and yes even to kill. Communism is too but hides it behind 'proletariat' and 'bourgeoisie'. Or euphemisms like 'liquidate'. (Which is often where I know the other party has failed to fully read the book they claim to worship. There was no corruption of the message, mass murder was baked into it in the first edition. Either that or they want me to believe liquidate means something more benign.)

I am only a first generation American because my birth mother fled the Ukrainian SSR. My adoptive father is a McCarthy flavor anti-commie, unfortunately. There is a scene in 'For All Mankind' where the commie cosmonaut starts scoffing at a Vietnamese American about how she only hates communism because of her (white, adoptive) father. She puts him in his place by pointing out no, it is because she put in the work to research it and she is also only in the US because of communism. (I think this is my third time referencing it because it is THAT good. It is a vindication of everything people like me have dealt with our whole lives. And I have literally been told on this very same website I only hate communism cause of what the US govt tells me, or Boomers, or whatever else. Nevermind I'm a 34 year old Ukrainian American.)

This is all we want from people. To put in the work. We know you can. We know why you say yes to communism and we know you deserve better than both communism and capitalism. You have everything you need right here on the world wide web. You have us, fighting to get the atrocities out in the open. You have millions of people from former Soviet bloc areas who show you just by their culture the damage communism has done. Especially where that means they have LOST a connection to their culture. Or people who have fled China, North Korea. People who escaped the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. Or floated in from Cuba.

(Note I am using 'you' in the general sense.) Also, there is something a tad bizarre to me about ascribing to a belief, an opinion, a theory, without doing your due diligence and learning about it as much as you can. I've mentioned it before about deciding communism is your political affiliation, and yet it seems you didn't look beyond a couple of bullet points in a presentation. We know you are capable of doing the research. So the question becomes: Why did you essentially stop? Didn't look any deeper after being given a short list of things communism does and capitalism does? That part is on you, not the education system.

It's like being told the Republican party says they believe in the safety of women and children in the bathrooms, lower taxes, and job security and since they all sound GREAT if laid out that way then Suzie Johnson who recently became voting age has decided she's going to be a Republican. But come to find out what they REALLY meant, which you'd find out after a bit of research is: they believe trans people shouldn't be allowed in the bathrooms that match their gender identity because 'rapists', they really mean they want to give tax cuts to people who don't actually NEED them and NOT Miss Johnson, and what they really meant by job security is that they want to make it so that anyone who isn't a cishet white man is less likely to get a job much less keep it. Essentially, only job security for the 'right' kind of person. None of that 'affirmative action crap'.

So essentially what I would and do say to any Gen Z (I also hesitate to just say 'white' because gosh I see so many kiddos of color who defend communism even tho statistically POC suffered so so much under communism just as much as capitalism and it isn't any better for them to defend it, either. Forever agog at 'you only hate communism cause you hate to see people of color winning'. It's been years and I'm still not sure what POC are 'winning' with communism) who labels themselves commie for the reasoning you mention: Do the work. Research the label you wish to attach to yourself. Ask questions. Do everything you already do for so many other things you rise up against. Don't politically label yourself something just because it might piss people off or because a couple things sound good. Because at best you look naive and at worst callous and uncaring about the victims of the people who shared the communist label. Which becomes heavily ironic when it seems the whole reason one decided to call themselves communist is they were told communism cares about the less fortunate and victims of people in power.

[mamamiriamxo]

You know you're chronically online when you start hating on capitalism so much that it borderlines on romanticizing communism/socialism.

Liberalism ≠ communism.

In an effort to stay woke and enlightened on the sufferings of marginalized communities, young people online (usually people who have never lived to see totalitarian dictatorships such as those, or seen the effects) have taken a liking to embracing socialism/communism instead, going as far as to say that USA is entering a "fascism era".

If you think that's fascism... you need to open a book again.

We live in a (mostly) "democratic" world, or at least the people who are spouting this dumb shit do. You are reading this on your screen right now, and whether you agree with me or not is only plausible due to the various personal beliefs you have been allowed to accumulate over the years. That would not have been possible in a socialist society, where you would have been fed only one source of information in order for you to stay in line and never question why you're living in such horrible conditions.

I'm not saying that what's happening in the US to marginalized groups, mainly trans people, isn't bad, but rather that the problem is something abstract that you can't point your finger to, like "the system" and not the actual people implementing these hateful messages as political strategies to get elected, which is exactly what they want you to do.

I was born in Albania. The last country in Europe to have abolished the communist regime, which ended in 1992. My country fell onto the hands of the murderer that was Enver Hoxha after the horrors of WWII, and was exploited greatly because of it, and we still live in extreme poverty and societal decline. Dozens, if not hundreds of people were tortured mercilessly during the regime, forced to endure grueling hours of manual labour in distant villages for the mere fault of complaining that you're hungry, or having known a relative that was "an enemy to the country".

You can't look at countries like North Korea and China, where the mere idea of something different gets you sent to an interment camp, then look me in the eye and tell me you'd rather have that.

And no, the situation hasn't gotten better because less people are trying to escape North Korea, it's because it's become harder to escape due to the tightening of borders.

(Pse, ata që vriten e shfarosen e torturohen andej nga Korea e Veriut vetëm që t'ia mbathin janë budallenj, ë? Ik lexo ndonjë libër aty se lë nam, turp i Zotit.)

[sleepysera]

11.4.22 Headlines

WORLD NEWS

Ukraine: President accuses Russia of ‘energy terrorism’ (AP)

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of engaging in “energy terrorism” after Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy network left millions of residents without power. About 4.5 million people were without electricity across the country, Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Thursday. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 450,000 apartments in the capital alone did not have electricity on Friday.”

North Korea: Rival Koreas scramble warplanes in extension of tensions (AP)

“South Korea scrambled about 80 military aircraft, including advanced F-35 fighter jets, on Friday after tracking about 180 flights by North Korean warplanes inside North Korean territory in what appeared to be a defiant show of strength.”

G7: Ministers rally support for Ukraine, suspicion of China (AP)

“Top diplomats from the world’s major industrialized democracies on Friday rallied support for Ukraine in its resistance to Russia’s invasion and coalesced around suspicion of China’s increasing assertiveness amid a panoply of global crises. Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven nations, wrapping up two days of talks in the historic western German city of Muenster, were set to release a statement asserting common positions on Ukraine, Russia, China and recent developments in Iran and North Korea, officials said.”

US NEWS

Abortion: Clinic that opened days after Roe fell is inundated (AP)

“When Planned Parenthood decided four years ago to open a new clinic in a medically underserved working-class neighborhood here, it envisioned a place that would save women living nearby from having to take hourslong bus rides to obtain birth control, testing or an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision overturning Roe v. Wade — four days before the clinic opened — changed all that. This clinic and other Planned Parenthood centers in Kansas have been doing their best to help by lengthening hours, hiring staff and flying in physicians. Still, they have only been able to take about 10% to 15% of the patients seeking abortions.”

Twitter: Layoffs begin 1 week after Musk takeover (AP)

“Employees braced for widespread layoffs at Twitter Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the social platform. In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.”

Politics: Biden to plug tech bill in California, campaign in Illinois (AP)

“President Joe Biden on Friday is set to tour a southern California communications company that is expected to benefit from his legislative push to bolster American semiconductor manufacturing — and he’s taking a vulnerable Democratic congressman with him. Biden will be joined by Rep. Mike Levin for the visit to Carlsbad-headquartered Viasat as he looks to highlight the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion legislative package, ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. The bill is one of the Biden administration’s most significant legislative achievements.”

[killingdazekrp]

settled on december 6th 2021, approximately 5 months after the zombie outbreak overtook the country of south korea. 

Located in Yeongju, South Korea within the province of North Gyeongsang. Due to it's distance from Seoul and other larger cities, despite being a city with a relatively small population itself Yeongju dilapidated much slower than much of the rest of the country. For the first two months of the outbreak, citizens were able to survive with a small military force by sheltering in place within the city hall. However much like the rest of the country and later the world, the zombies would reach the territory and penetrate the defenses no matter how strong. Survivors within the area scattered into several different locations and eventually, an ambitious few would bravely attempt to settle at buseoksa temple seeking refuge with the winter months ahead. Yeongju has four seasons a year, but the temperatures often veer more on the subtropical side. Meaning the summer temperatures are often hotter than the national average with heavier rainfall and intense humidity. As a result, the winters are much more forgiving, although freezing conditions will still occur. Shelter was a must, and they settlers did all that they could to turn the pre-existing historical structures into something inhabitable enough to get them through the frost.

When the weather had become more suitable for construction work, the process of repurposing the shelter into a large scale community moved relatively smoothly considering the abundance of resources nearby. In the matter of six months, the population of residents grew and a community with it's own way of life was finally established. What was once a peaceful place of worship was no a bustling safe haven, one that even after many challenges and set backs, has yet to be overtaken to this day by any band of raiders or hoards of the undead.

Buseoksa Temple was founded in the year 676 (though the structures now standing are from the 14th century) by Buddhist monk and scholar Uisang from the ancient kingdom of Silla. The tale of how Buseoksa Temple came to be, according to folklore:

A Korean folk story states that when he was young, Uisang fell in love with a beautiful girl, Myo Hwa ("Delicate Flower") but she was chosen by the king of Silla to be sent as a gift to the Chinese Emperor thus thwarting their relationship. This turned Uisang to the religious life and he became a monk. Myo Hwa in desperation tried to commit suicide on the journey in China by throwing herself in the river. However, she was rescued and nursed back to health by a family who subsequently adopted her. Many years later she met Uisang on his travels to China but he explained that he was now a monk and could not go back with her to Silla as she wished. However, he said he would visit her when his studies in China were complete. This he did ten years later. Unfortunately, Myo Hwa was not at home so Uisang left her a note and hurried to get his ship back to Silla. Myo Hwa returned and realized she had just missed him and ran down to the sea to try and catch him before he left. The ship however had already left the shore and in desperation she leapt in the water. As she hit the water she was magically transformed into a dragon by the strength of her love and she was able to follow the ship back to Silla. Safely arrived in Silla, Uisang went on to found Buseoksa, a temple in the Gyeongsangbuk-do (North Gyeongsang) mountains. The temple name means "Floating Rock" and is derived from an incident in which Myo Hwa, as a dragon, scares away some bandits by magically raising a boulder into the air. She is said to have transformed herself into a rock to continue protecting the site and her lover, Uisang. (Story related by Mu Soeng Sunim, 1987).

information has been sourced from wikipedia regarding the setting to save the admins time with lore building!

[tlsqudzoavm8]

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祚榮即並比羽之衆，恃荒遠，乃建國，乃建國，自號震國王，遣使交突厥，地方五千里，戶十余萬，勝兵數萬。頗知書契，盡得扶餘、 沃沮、弁韓、North Korea of the Joseon Sea。 Dae Jo-yeong soon joined the group of Geol Sabi-woo, believed in the far-off, founded a country, called himself the king of Jin, and sent envoys to communicate with the Turks. He knew how to write quite well, and obtained all the countries of Haebuk, including Buyeo, Okjeo, Byeonhan, and Joseon.

Zhongzongshi，使侍御史張行岌招慰，祚榮遣子入侍。睿宗先天中，遣使拜祚榮爲左驍衛大將軍、渤海郡王，以所統爲忽汗州，領 Liaozhou City. During the reign of King Jungjong, he sent an envoy to conciliate the governor, and Dae Jo-yeong sent his son to the emperor. During Yejong Seoncheon, an envoy was sent and Dae Jo-yeong was made the governor of Holhanju by deposing Dae Joyeong from the post of King Balhaegun, General Jwahyowi, and making the governing area into Holhanju. At that time, he abandoned the name Malgal for the first time and called it Balhae.

玄宗開元七年，祚榮死，其國私諡爲高王。 When Dae Joyeong died in the 7th year of King Hyeonjong's founding, the country called the posthumous king Gowang (高王). ㅡ『New Tang Book』卷219「列傳」Chapter 144 ‘Northern Man’ ㅡ 《Shindangseo》 Volume 219 114-Bukjeok-渤海，本號靺鞨，高麗之別種也。唐高宗滅高麗，徙其人散處中國，置安東國 Balhae was originally called Malgal and was a different species of Goguryeo. Gojong of Tang destroyed Goguryeo, moved its people to live in China, and established Andong Dohobu in Pyeongyang to rule over them.

Martial time, Wuhan attack northern region, Gaoyang xiao xiao xiao xiao xiao xiang long xi four dynasties, Bunwang high dynasties, Martial kings, Martial arts commanders, Martial arts commanders. 祚榮立，因并有比羽之眾，其眾四十萬人，據挹婁，臣于唐. When the Khitan attacked the northern border during the reign of Empress Cheukcheon, Daegeolgeoljungsang, a deviant of Goguryeo, fled to Liaodong with the Malgal chief Geolsabiu and divided the ancient lands of Goguryeo to serve as kings. , Geogeoljungsang fell ill and died. Joyeong, the son of Zhongshang, ascended the throne and joined Biyu's group, which numbered 400,000 and settled in Eupru and became Tang's subjects.

Emperor Zhongzong, Zhongzhuang Province, Yuan Yuan, Yuan Wang, Yuan Hei-yi Wang, Heihai Heo-yi, Heilongjiang, Xiangping Yuan, Kaiping Yuan, Guo Wang Da-shi, Liu Deok-yi. Joseon. In the reign of King Jungjong, he installed Holhanju, made Joyeong the governor, and installed him as the king of Balhae. After that, it was finally called Balhae. The nobleman's surname is Dae. From the first year of Gaepyeong (907), King Daein-seon dispatched envoys, and they always came and paid tribute until the end of the year of Hyeondeok. The country's local products were the same as those of Goguryeo.

諲撰世次、立卒，historical succession。 The records of the three generations of Inseon (諲譔), the year of enthronement (即位年), and the last year (卒年) [11] were left out by the officer. ㅡ New Five Generation History · Seventeen Four Seasons Chapter Three ㅡ 《Shinohdaesa》 Volume 74 Regarding the issue of the 3rd place of birth, it is not clear where Dae Jo-yeong came from or what kind of family he came from. It is often known as a slanderer and a father and son, but there is no way to even know if this is true. First of all, it is not clear that Dae Jo-young used the surname Dae during his father's days, as there was no record of it under the name of public award until the 2020s. This part also touches on the most troublesome issue of origin of Parhae, that is, whether Dae Jo-yeong is of Goguryeo or Malgal descent. The reality is that most of the background of his origin known today is only in the realm of speculation because the record of a person as a founding monarch of a country is so poor. This is covered in Parhae/Historical Attribution and Succession Recognition.

[thong-in-the-twist]

Chapter: Gwangju

//Gong Yoo (Kim Shin) x you

Summary: To atone for his sins he is forced to wander the Earth searching for her before it’s too late.

Prologue: Silla Goryeo Joseon Tamna March 1st

It's been three years since I updated this last. Exactly three years and 9 days, and I'm glad to be posting it. God it’s been so long I no longer remember how I used to format my entries. I don’t even remember my tagging system. A word of warning: modern Korean history is heavily marked with suffering and for the purposes of this story I needed "her" to go through... A lot. But there is only one chapter left, so hopefully, we won't be suffering a lot longer.

***

It was obvious to him that she was going to be reborn immediately. It worked like that for centuries, why this time it would have been different? So he started searching for her immediately, anxious. His land was crying, his people were suffering.

Forests were being cut down to fuel the new age, the industrialization age. Instead, the land was being converted into fields: rice, cereals, cotton. Colonizers were laying new roads, tarmac was flowing down the peninsula so similarly to cold mountain streams. All to fuel the new age, all to feed the great Japanese Empire.

Mines on the peninsula were running day and night, long shafts filled with exploited bodies. Names were being changed to Japanese sounding ones, men were forced to cut their hair, celibate Buddhist monks were forced to marry, kids were banned from learning Korean in schools, papers were censored, farmers forced out of their lands, his people were forced to worship Shinto, and to see the Emperor as a god.

Shamanistic rituals were even scarcer than during the reign of the Lee dynasty. People were no longer openly calling for him, but their thoughts thrown into the ether were reaching him. Pleas and begging, prayers and threats, all were filling his mind and heart. The burden was heavy. Not too heavy to carry, but it seemed harder than the sword he was carrying in his heart. It seemed heavier than the last memories of his other life, than the image of red on white stone.

She found her. Young girl in the seaside village, barely 20 kilometers north from the village where she was born as Binna, centuries ago. The village tree was still alive even if the village itself didn’t exist anymore. Kim Shin didn’t know what happened to it after he saw her sacrifice herself back then. Were it pirates, or wars, or famine that drew people out? There was no way of knowing it.

She was four when he found her. Back in Joseon she would have been found just in time, he’d have two years to convince her parents not to give her away. And then 11 years until she had to be wed. Her village was far off the beaten path. It was far from the capital and far from Japanese shores. People were hardened and down-to-earth but it was a tightly knit community. It was as safe as it could have been in that age and time.

Kim Shin spent his days under the Holy Tree, now surrounded by forest. He remembered the village square and colorful ribbons. He remembered tax collectors and their cart. He remembered Binna’s clothes and hair, and sword splitting her throat open.

Kim Shin visited her house by night. He hid in the shadows, not ready to be seen by her nor her parents. He watched her as she slept in the same room as the rest of her family. He watched her wondering what woman she would grow up to be. He hoped that he’d be able to shield her from any hardship that she was destined to face in her life.

While watching her sleep, he was reminiscing about her previous lives. Her bravery, her tenacity, her pride and her selflessness. The lives that were lived and ended for his people, the lives that were ended for him, the ones that were ended because of him.

Kim Shin was restless. He was used to waiting. He learnt to be patient after centuries of waiting and slowly working towards his goal. And yet, he was restless. Sitting by the Holy Tree he was restless and anxious. Her last life was sacrificed for the country. For this land, and for the people. And here he was waiting idly for her to grow up. She was safe.

The Holy Tree was old but strong, with new springs and bright green leaves. It was magnificent even without ribbons and paper talismans. It was safe, far off the beaten path.

Their people were not.

And yet, he was idly waiting for her to grow up and take away his burden, while sitting under the Holy Tree.

While their people were desperately begging for help.

She was safe. And he had time. He had enough time to present her the liberation of their people as a wedding gift.

And thus, Kim Shin was off once more.

*

Koreans were fighting on the peninsula, yes, but there were fighting abroad as well. Kim Shin supported the Provisional  Government of Republic of Korea in Shanghai, and aided students in Japan. When the empire invaded Manchuria, he was there fighting them off. He pleaded and negotiated with Chinese diplomats for them to move against the assailant before it was too late.

But the Central Kingdom waited too long, they were undecided way beyond what was safe. And thus, the Japanese attacked first.

The war that broke out drained the Korean peninsula even more. They were the ones to bear the brunt of feeding and supplying soldiers. And then, when Kim Shin was sure it couldn’t be worse, European war came to their lands, merging with the already raging Sino-Japanese conflict and bringing more players, more arms and more death into the equation. His people were forced into the Japanese army, forced to fight far away from their home – living and dying in China, Indonesia, Philippines.

He went where they were. It wasn’t their fight. They were farmers, artisans, teachers, workers – they weren’t warriors. He was. Kim Shin was back in the field, once more fighting for his homeland. Once more he took upon himself to be the most faithful agent of death. Immortal and determined, with unfamiliar weapon in his hand, but oh so familiar scent of blood, tears and fear clinging to him. The art of war changed through centuries but principles reminded the same.

But now it was harder to understand the purpose. It was harder to face dying foes. Every soul in his wake had hopes, and dreams, and dedication, and destiny – and yet he was invading the realm of the Divine, deciding who was to live and who was to day. What he did was to slaughter.

 But he was also fighting for his compatriots, forced to lay their lives for the occupant. He fought to save them and to bring them back to their land. He helped them escape, he cleared camps, he dealt with Japanese officers.

Japanese defeat was what they were hoping for anyway.

It was in Perek that faced his hardest encampment. It was in Perek that among Japanese officers and soldiers, and his people forced into ranks, he found others. It was in Perek that among male voices he heard female pleas.

It was in broad daylight that he marched through the camp, taking in the tents and appraising layouts and main locations. Where to get food, where to get supplies, where were the blind spots. It was in broad daylight that he heard a plea so similar to one he heard centuries ago in the Song Dynasty’s capital. So earnest and so broken plea of death.

After the first one came another, hurried and repeated like a mantra, like a prayer. And another, and another.

And another.

So familiar. So heartbreaking.

Here, so far from his homeland, he heard her begging for death. For an escape.

But she was safe. She was safe back in her village, on the shores of Eastern Seas. She was safe back in her village, so close to the Holy Tree.

And yet, it was her voice, strung thin and wavering, but unmistakably hers.

A taste of bile invaded his throat as he zeroed on a dilapidated building. Better than a shack only in the name, with dark walls and dirty windows barely containing the horrors inside. His surroundings seemed to disappear, sounds of the encampment dying out, the building his focal point.

He took his time. Waiting itself was horrible, pleas constant, it would have been so easy to just end it. End all of it, all of them, all of the oppressors, just raze the  camp to the ground. But he was afraid. Afraid of going inside and seeing that was happening, how they lived. It was easy to guess, and hard to understand. Justified rage was clawing his insides, not only for her, but for all of them. It wasn’t human to do, not that the occupant was ever human.

His fear was their prolonged suffering.

He fulfilled every one of their pleas. Every single one. Some wished for death, some wished for death for their oppressors. Some wished for health, some wished to never remember. Some wished for another chance in life, some wished for one last meeting with assailants and sharp object to meet them with. He did it all.

She wanted a knife. Sharp, and easy to conceal. She found it with glee and fervor. She wanted for her doors to be open and for night to be dark. She wished for rain, heavy and obscuring. She wished for that man to fall. To suffer. To know. To fear. To never forget.

Kim Shin watched her as she sneaked out of her room. He watched her back as she sneaked through the building, chastising himself for ever believing she was safe. It wasn’t even 15 years since he saw her last. He watched her as she found her prey. He watched her as she made sure that man would never do the same thing to another woman ever again.

His screams were muffled by a gag she made out of her sad excuse of a blanket. His blood was mixing with the falling rain, that matted her hair to her face. Her skin was ghostly, blush and looked paper-thin.

Once again he watched her as she raised her blade against herself. She was sure and focused,  and emanating finally found peace. She was quick and efficient, and he barely had time to catch her before she fell down. She was smiling when her head hit the cradle of his head and her open eyes were staring lifelessly at the rainy clouds.

Kim Shin sat there in the rain, holding her body, obvious to now quiet whimpers coming from the man laying a few steps away from him. Once more her life was filled with suffering. Was her childhood good? How did she grow up? How long was she here?

He didn’t cry – feeling like he did not deserve to. She wasn’t the only one of his people that went through this, and something was telling him that there were countless more suffering now.

*

Finding her was important, but making sure that the world she was being born into was better became urgent. Kim Shin knew he couldn’t deal with her suffering. All recent lives he witnessed ended in a tragedy. Queen trying to protect freedom, young girl fighting for it, and the one that saw it in death.

She deserved freedom, all of his people did.

And freedom came with pain, tears and even more death. Foreign powers fought over his land, influencing its growth and stagnation once again. His land was sold and divided even after its occupant lost the war. Both red and blue powers abhorred giving Koreans back their land and their freedoms, forcing their ideologies upon them.

And thus the greatest conflict shook the land once more. June 25th, the day when brother went against his brother. Three years. Three years of fights, civil war raging on the peninsula destroying what was left after 35 years of the occupation.

And even that conflict ended because outside powers decided so. Every death, every lost soul – it was all because foreigners decided to settle their differences right there on Korean soil. The wound left by the war was painful and still suppurating. Peninsula was divided into two, one nation was split and the border between them became a wall that separated families and broke people’s spirit.

He saw fourteen hundred years of conflicts and changes, and ups and downs, but the last hundred years were far the worst he had seen. For the first time in his long life he wasn’t sure how to go about finding her. If he even should. Every time he found her, he lost her just as quickly. She suffered so much.

But if he didn’t search for her, he was sure that the Divine would find another way to punish them. Like giving her knowledge of his existence and urging her to wait for him.

By now Divine schemes were somewhat readable. He’d find her where he’d least expect her – where she was supposedly the safest, yet in the biggest danger. People in the south were struggling, famine and corruption was rampant. North was getting help from other communist states and plotting expansion. And he couldn’t find her.

Just like when he found her on Tamna, she wasn’t here. She wasn’t within the borders of both Korean states. And that’s what horrified him. He looked in China, so many of his compatriots lived there. He looked in Japan among those who stayed after occupation. He searched in South East Asia among those who stayed after the second world war. He visited the United States of America, hoping to find her there. And yet, as if the Divine was shielding her from him, he couldn’t find her.

In Germany he saw the Wall. The Berlin Wall dividing one nation into two. The blue state and red state, just like his homeland, was divided. The Wall was fresh and imposing, newly built. A palpable sign of schism. A knife in a wound, cutting it more open with every breath. It wasn’t as protected as the inter-Korean border was but it served as a reminder of similarly painful division.

As Kim Shin walked by the Wall, on the western side of the border, he heard a cautious ask. Barely audible, fleeting.

The person was asking for a haircut. If he wasn’t over fourteen hundred years old, he’d dismiss it as an auditory illusion. What would be a Korean doing behind the Iron Curtain – asking for a haircut?

Kim Shin knew better. Kim Shin knew: she was there.

*

Finding his way into the USSR was easier than he thought it to be. As a citizen of the communist, neighboring nation, he was more than welcome. He travelled from Korea, surprised by the sheer numbers of Koreans on the USSR's eastern lands. But the closer he got to Europe the fewer they got. By the time he left Moscow, his head was clear and free of usual prayers. It was in Poland that he heard one more plea – a different voice, exactly the same ask.

Children. Who Kim Shin found were children. From 5 years old to 16. War orphans being cared for by people so vastly different from them.

She was among them, one of the oldest kids, happily chatting in weirdly hard language.

It took him quite long to understand why all the kids kept praying for a haircut. Their hair was neatly kept, just like their clothes, their rooms. There was something of military efficiency in the way they were being brought up, and Kim Shin understood that it was due to a few Korean supervisors that came here with kids.

Kids were cared for, but not exactly loved. That’s why they thought so fondly of getting haircuts. Hairdressers would pat and massage their heads – that was an extent of warmth they were getting.

*

She and the rest of the kids were sent back to Korea a few months later. She drowned in a river when she tried to escape back to her European orphanage for the third time. Yalu River was her undoing, just like those centuries ago cold waters of the sea took her away.

So much death. So much suffering. What for?

As the North's situation was getting worse, the South started fighting for its economy. Authoritarian governments in both Koreas were similar in goals but different in execution, and slowly their fates were changing. South Korea was coming out of poverty, just as North Korea started spiraling into it.

With newly found resources South Koreans were finally able to think and want – and what they wanted was freedom. Freedom through free choice and democracy. Assassination of general Park, southern dictator, seemed like a perfect opportunity – but before democratic movement could raise its momentum it was brutally squashed.

***

“If we all go, they won’t be able to hold him! We need to get him out!”

Every frantic sentence is met with loud approval. You weren’t surprised when they formed a new government without looking back at people. You weren’t surprised when Chun Doohwan took over KCIA while still holding his position in the Korean Army. Of course he would. Even martial law wasn’t a surprise. But a few hours ago you heard that they arrested Kim Daejung.

Kim was an oppositionist. He was fighting for democracy in your country, and what was more important he was from your region. Rumors said that he was being held on charges of instigating demonstrations.

What a bull…

You were there all because you wanted to be there, and wanted better for your country.

“They are closing the university!” The shout could be heard above the other voices. Suddenly the thirty of you fell silent. You focused on the man that shouted it. You knew his face, you might have seen him once or twice in the library.

“What…?”

“Chun declared universities to be dangerous to society!” The roar that follows is deafening. There is no more “inciting”, all of you immediately walk to the university, gathering other students while marching.

The road leading to the main entrance is long, which gives you a perfect view of army vehicles parked in front of it. Soldiers organizing were also visible, moving with purpose or watching you with caution.  Your group wasn’t big. Maybe two hundred souls. You weren’t sure what was the plan – but the goal was clear – to show that you wouldn’t take it lying down. They couldn’t take it all. Freedom, Kim Daejung, universities.

You weren’t sure who threw the first stone. It was all a blur. There was shouting, screams and orders, flying stones and falling batons. The students’ group dispersed only to form back, and to scatter once more but this time closer to the Provincial Office.

This time soldiers were wearing riot gear.

*

“You know well that I am going back out there!”

Your mother's eyes are filled with tension. The same tension pushes her lips into a thin line drawing her wrinkles out. She won’t back down, but neither will your brother and you.

“Mom, it’s what we have to do. They killed Gyeongcheol,” says Chanhwan. He is a high school senior and his goal was to get into your university.

“His poor mother,” whispers your mother as if against herself. That was something she said every time this was mentioned. Soldiers in riot gear killed Kim Gyeongcheol as he was passing by protesters. It infuriated the city and their protest was gathering momentum, but every person counted.

They needed to pay. For Gyeongcheol and for those who were killed yesterday.

What you wouldn’t tell your mother is the fact that you got guns. Yesterday you raided one of the military warehouses. It wasn’t an usual protest anymore, it was an uprising. Chanhwan told you that he heard that folks were talking about liberating Gwangju and making it into a free city. An official request for help was being drafted to be sent to the US Embassy. A country so enamored with freedom would for sure help you.

Freedom.

That’s what you longed for.

A horn outside let you know that your transport was there. Chanhwan was already out the doors, you stalled a second to grab your mother’s hand.

“Believe in us, mom. We will be back, victorious,” you said with emphasis. The world was yours to take and you wouldn’t hesitate. You run outside, not waiting for her to answer, and jump into the waiting taxi.

What an odd vehicle to be driving to a fight.

*

City was cordoned off and outside communications were cut. It didn’t scare you off. Nothing could, really.

Taxi was slowly rolling down the street, Chanhwan laying low in the driver's seat. He knew that as soon as he raised his head, he’d be dead. You knew that there were forces on the other end of the street aiming at you with their guns, hidden behind covers.

You and Chanhwan’s friend Sunwoo were slowly creeping along the car, using it as a moving shield. You could see a body that you were tasked with retrieving. You hoped the girl was alive. You all knew that not moving after being shot increased your chances of surviving if you couldn’t move on your own.

Suddenly you heard a loud bang and sounds of automatic fire.

“Run!” yelled Chanhwan and you didn’t need to be told twice. With Sunwoo you lurched forward trying to match Chanhwan’s accelerations. You kept your head low as smoke filled the street. Sunwoo was the first to reach the body.

Dead.

Boy opened back doors and together you pushed the lifeless body inside – not caring for decency you jumped inside as Sunwoo closed doors behind you. You heard him get in and Chanhwan was speeding off.

Girl’s hair smelt of flowers.

*

A helicopter was flying overhead. You’ve never would have guessed that you’d learn how to make Molotov’s cocktail. But there you were pushing a rag into a bottle. Sunwoo was in the field hospital, chances of saving his leg quite high. Which was more than could be said about many of your friends.

Casualties were high, but you weren’t ready to give up. The uprising cost the city too many lives to be so easily abandoned.

How could your government do that? You didn’t know. But you hoped for those soldiers to spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed their own.

Chanhwan was on the other side of the street, giving you signs. You focused on him and he started slowly counting down with his fingers. As soon as you saw him countdown to zero, you threw your bottle.

There was an explosion and a sudden yell. You didn’t stay put to see the effect, you needed to escape as fast as possible. On your left you could see a group of fifteen or so students running the other way. There were fires and smoke and it could be hard to realize what was happening.

You lost your footing as you realized that Chanhwan was not running parallel to you. It seemed like eternity as you looked back to see him lying on the corner of the street. You could see his dark uniform jacket slowly dampening with even darker liquid.

It wasn’t conscious. Nor your scream, nor your leap.

The first bullet going through your arm was more surprising than painful. Second one caught your leg, tripping you down, the third one pierced through your clavicle as you fell. You saw smoke, and soldiers moving forward with riot shields, and your brother laying on the street, and an abandoned taxi. You saw another group of students running somewhere to your right.

Pavement was hot from the sun as you fell down. It didn’t hurt, or maybe it was so painful that you couldn’t feel it.

You saw a blue butterfly flying away.

***

Kim Shin forced his way into the fighting city. Through fields and through the army, he walked into the fray. No one knew. A village ten kilometers away? No one knew what was happening in the city. There were rumors, but not one could have prepared him for the riots he saw.

He saw students organizing, he saw local militias forming, he saw field hospitals being erected, he saw taxi and bus drivers using their vehicles to help the cause.

Had he done everything he could? No. Was it resignation? Maybe.

How many times had he seen her fighting? Why every time he saw her she was either suffering or leading a good fight. Why was she always selfless, and always right in the center of a turmoil ailing his nation. Just once couldn’t she be selfish and live?

Seeing her protest against authoritarian government barely half a century after she did the same against occupation filled him with unfamiliar annoyance. Rage. Why her. What did she do to be always reincarnated into such circumstances.

Was it even worth pursuing her?

Was it his atonement for not killing his king eons ago, even when she sacrificed herself. Was she destined to be laying her life for a cause while he watched her do it?

Defiance. That was what stopped him from acting. He could have gone on a rampage. Just like when he was a general, fighting with Gaya’s warriors. It wouldn’t have been hard, decimating troops. Those already stationed in the city, and those that would undoubtedly come to reinforce them.

He felt old. He was old. Looking at the fighting city he felt like it wasn’t his fight.

In the city he saw a foreigner. A foreigner with a camera. Documenting what was happening, what atrocities were committed on Gwangju’s streets.

Instead of watching her die once again he decided to protect the foreigner. To make sure that his recordings would be seen by the world.

As Kim Shin protected the foreigner, he didn’t realize that he could no longer hear prayers.

[bookreadingelf]

Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag 2022

Hi all, I made a booklr and would like to share my reading year so far. Please, let me know your favourites!

Number of books read: 96

Best book you’ve read so far in 2022

Fiction

Lonely Castle in the Mirror – Mizuki Tsujimura, Philip Gabriel (translator)

Japanese book about bullying and loneliness is beautifully told using fairytales and a magical castle in a mirror.

Howl’s Moving Castle – Diana Wynne Jones

Whimsical and amazing!

Green Bone Sage – Fonda Lee

Fantasy series about an island where some people can use jade to enhance themselves. You follow a family who owns one of the gangs controlling the jade.

Non-fiction

Know My Name – Chanel Miller

The story of Chanel and how the juridical system failed her when fighting her rapist.

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

Informative about sleeping, very interesting!

Maar je ziet er helemaal niet autistisch uit – Bianca Toeps (English title: But You Don’t Look Autistic at All)

Originally a Dutch book about a woman with autism. This book made me realise that I can have autism, which I wasn’t sure about before.

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? – Caitlin Doughty

Fun book where a mortician answers kids’ questions about death.

The Girl with Seven Names – Hyeonseo Lee, David John (translator)

An impressive and eye-opening story about a woman who escaped North Korea into China. How she lived there, tried to go to South Korea, and tried to get her family safe.

Manga

A Silent Voice – Yoshitoki Oima

A beautiful story about bullying and communication.

Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2022

Jade War (The Green Bone Saga 2) – Fonda Lee

Biggest disappointment

Dark Matter – Blake Crouch

Did not like the ending and I know too much about physics to suspend my disbelief. Not for me, but not a bad book.

A Natural History of Dragons – Marie Brennan

Very petty, but very few dragons for a book with Dragons in the title. Otherwise a good book with a funny main character.

10% Human – Alanna Collen

Wrong information is given and calls autism a disease. Would not recommend it.

Biggest surprise

Fiction

The Ninth Rain – Jen Williams

Combines witches, an Indiana-Jones wine-aunt middle-aged black woman (she is amazing!) and a vampire elf. It worked great!

Bunny – Mona Awad

Very weird book, but in a good way.

Non-fiction

A Taste for Poison – Neil Bradbury

A cool book that talks about different poisons. It starts with an anecdote, explained the poison, and goes further with the anecdote.

Previously mentioned: Why we Sleep, Maar je ziet er helemaal niet autistisch uit

Favourite new author (debut or new to you)

Fonda Lee

Newest favourite character

Sophie (Howl’s Moving Castle), Vintage (Ninth Rain)

Book that made you cry

Not really cry but Know My Name made me angry about how Chanel was treated by some.

Book that made you happy

Howl’s Moving Castle, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

The most beautiful book you’ve bought so far this year (or received)

A Magic Steeped in Poison – Judy I. Lin

A Rush of Wings – Laura E. Weymouth

The Girl Who Fell beneath the Sea – Axie Oh

New release you haven’t read yet but want to

All those above… Oops

Most anticipated release for the second half of the year

Babel – R.F. Kuang

What books do you need to read by the end of the year?

A Magic Steeped in Poison, A Rush of Wings, The Girl Who Fell beneath the Sea, Babel, parts 2 and 3 of Ninth Rain

[tbartss]

you said to ask you about the Cold War and the Russian Revolution so. this is me asking you about the Cold War and the Russian Revolution

Alright y’all are just straight up playing with fire now, but you know what I’m Gonna Sip My Drink and Watch. Here you have it.

The Cold War is the most ridiculous and unnecessary historical event to have ever occurred, because it’s basically An Extra Long Dick Measuring Contest that both of them know they can’t win because it would mean the end of the world. Seriously. That’s why it’s called the cold war because everything that happens from 1945-1991 is basically a passive aggressive bitch fight. Never do they use the atomic bombs that they built in all that time as a “my dads better than your dad” evidence because the atmosphere at that point was literally so Fucked Up By WWI and WWII that any use of atomic weapons in any way would result in the end of the world as we know it.

Historians say it’s The Great Battle Between Capitalism and Communism, but I say that it’s the cause of Every Misery Experienced By The Current Generations. (It’s the cause for why latinamerica, the middle east and Vietnam is so fucked up, as well as North Korea’s Isolation, as well as Mao’s Rise to Power In China, just to summarise a few).

On the one hand it feels good to finally talk about my opinions about Great Historical Events and being taken seriously and not like I’m some gullible, delusional know-nothing, but on the other hand talking about all of this makes me angry so. Let’s move on to my favorite topic AND THAT IS:

The Russian Revolution (aka the fall of the Romanovs)

So I mentioned earlier that The Russian Revolution was caused by Rasputin’s dick (You know, ra-ra-rasputin russia’s greatest love machine) but that’s a bit of an overstatement. It was part of it tho.The Romanovs fell because of several factors. Nicholas II’s leadership (it was crap basically), the loss of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, the entrance into WWI and finally, Rasputin’s influence on the royal family.

Basically, the Romanovs were hated on because they allowed Such A Man As Rasputin to get as close to the royal family as he did. They believed he was controlling them basically, and they were not pleased with that because he was a literal cultist and Got All Of Russia’s Women (yeah this is where love machine is accurate, it’s not even a lie). They were also angry that Nicholas II entered WW I, since the people were starving from the massive loss of riches when they lost to the Japanese in 1905. (I don’t really remember what that war was about... I think it was about China.... Anyway--)

SO the people finally got enough in 1917 after so many people died not only from the war (that they were losing) but also the massive famine, and they decided to overthrow the monarchy.

Now, the funny thing is that the Russian Revolution happened twice. Once in February and Once in October. February resulted in the menschaviks coming to power, which wasn’t communism it was something else I don’t remember what tho, but they fell to the October revolution because they sucked at leading lmao, and because there was a somewhat large dissent about the removal of the monarchy. This is also when the Bolscheviks (read: Lenin, Trostsky and Stalin) decided to kill off the monarchy so that they could never reclaim the throne and rise to power again. They tried to kill Rasputin in so many ways (poisening, shooting, drowning) but in the end he died of fucken hypothermia as he tried to escape. That’s my favorite history fact. It’s so fucken funny

[chaoticinternetflower]

It is sad to admit but The Socialist has done everything they possibly can to limit the people and hide the truth. Theyve factually printed trillions of dollars to flood the economy fundamentally reducing the already small minimum wage. The Socialist will always seek to erase your rights to not only keep and bare arms (albeit both firearms and bladed tools) but to silence your voice, your final instrument to maintain your rights. Theyll attack your stabilizing braces which literally makes the gun safer by improving accuracy. They will attack which guns you can keep by mislabeling them as dangerous. And the Socialist will attack all your guns all the time. One person attacks the rifle, one the handgun, another the bullets, yet another the magazine size. All these attacks on your rights diminishes your capacity to protect yourself, your family and even your community.

As we seen with the Social Media, entire groups of people are silenced for revealing the intentions of the socialist. The Socialist will give the people all sorts of labels to hide you from seeing the person, the socialist will fill your mind with buzzwords and as we seen they will attribute traits as a catchall to these groups. It is clear that the socialist made up a vague strawman and call this strawman "Whiteness". they give "Whiteness" not only terrible traits such as racism and sexism but they also attribute positive traits like punctuality, politeness, forethought to lump them together to make them seem as bad or worse than racism.

It is sad that so many fell for lies of Socialism. But there is a Hope, Tumblr. Neither I nor you can force them into reality because they already convinced themselves the worlds racist and that theyre the only protagonist to stand up against the world.

The World can be saved. We can embrace The American Values of Live and Let Live. We can recognize tradition for what it is, a force that brings the people together, common values. We can recognize that Countries and their people are ruled over by different levels of oppressive governments.

North Korea is governed extremely by communism, where the state is the sole benefactor. China where the communist state is the only voice that bends smaller countries around it to submit to communism. Russia, where the oligarchs control the people. Venezuela where the socialist state collapsed into blatant Authoritarianism. Even America has awoken to The Socialist takeover of Corporations and Government.

But there is a Hope. When the people had enough of the disinformation, of the lies, of the red fist. There is a hope that everyone speaks up for Reality to call out Socialism. There is a hope that people realize they are the government, that they are the militia, that they are the many.

[universaltantra]

Nice Jewish Girl Runs Away From Home, Becomes Tantric Lama

Alexandra David-Neél was a Franco-Belgian singer, explorer, author and Tibetan Mystic who became a Tantric Lama.  She was the first westerner to visit the forbidden city of Lhasa in the year 1916. Long before Heinrich Harrar spent his 7 years in Tibet making nice with the Dalai Lama, Alexandra had been there, done that, and why her life has never been immortalized on film remains a mystery that only the Hollywood patriarchy can answer. She wrote over 30 books covering the subjects of Buddhism, Tibetan Tantra and Esotericism and that’s just for starters.She was also a much accomplished and sought after translator, being fluent in French, English, Sanskrit and Tibetan. Sadly, only two of her books are still in print today: “My Journey To Lhasa” and “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”. Alexandra lived to the age of 101 and to this day remains the most authoritative source for Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

Alexandra was born in Paris, October 24, 1868 to an anarchist father who nearly escaped execution by firing squad after the failed revolt of the Paris Commune and a mother who was a deeply religious, conservative heiress. This social incompatibility led to many arguments between the parents during Alexandra’s formative years. No doubt this created a pattern in her life of wanting to runaway from conflict and instilled a desire to find balance through travel.  Her earliest attempt to runaway was at the 5, she only got as far as the local park before the Gendarmes found her and promptly returned her home. This was the first of many attempts to runaway until she reached adulthood and was able to claim her inheritance; allowing her to satisfy her wanderlust. I myself being a product of a dysfunctional upbringing, related to many of her situations, which made her story to be particularly compelling on a very personal level.

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she would find the opportunities to escape her bourgeois  surroundings in search of adventure: While vacationing with her parents Belgium, she ran away to the Netherlands, was found and returned home. Later that same year, she embarked on a bicycle trip from Paris to Spain, “forgetting” to tell her parents, naturally. But perhaps her most ambitious and successful attempt to fly the coup was at age 17, when she boarded a train from Brussels to Switzerland, hiked across the Alps where she wound up in Lake Maggiore, on the Italian side of the Alps. This last escapade was certainly a primer for her future adventures in the Himalayas. As she loved to say about herself: “I learned to run before I could walk”.

When she turned 21, she moved out on her own and set herself up in Paris, where she enrolled in the Paris Conservatory of Music while at the same time began to study esoteric traditions with the well known mystic of her times, Madame Blavatsky. She also discovered Paris’ venerable museum to Asian art and culture: Le Musée Guimet; which still exists today. It was here that she fed her hunger for exotic cultures, traditions and converted to Buddhism.  Right around this time Alexandra received her inheritance and she flew the coup once again, this time to India. She traveled through India, studying Sanskrit, visiting temples until she ran out of money and returned to Paris.

Upon her return to Paris, she sadly discovered that her desire to share the experiences of her visit was met with antipathy. Since women did not do those things and studies of other cultures were done from an observers point of view. Not as Alexandra had done, as a participant. Needing to find gainful employment, she fell back on her earlier training in voice to pursue a career as an opera singer. As a singer she achieved a fairly acceptable amount of success, traveling the world and finally landing a permanent residency at the Saigon Opera. She even found the time to compose an Opera herself! She continued traveling the world and while performing a gig in Tunisia, she met the man who was to become her husband and would be the facilitator of some of her greatest adventures. Philippe Neel was a civil engineer who worked for the government of France and like Alexandra was extensively well traveled as a result of his job. Together they had an unconventional marriage by the norms of the times. It could be called an “open marriage” but open only in the sense it was Philippe’s support of her travels that facilitated some of Alexandra’s greatest adventures. But let’s not confuse Philippe for a pushover, because underneath all the generosity was an ulterior motive: Philippe also had a mistress and  dispatching his wife off to yet another globe trotting mission kept her out of the way. All evidence suggests that Alexandra was ok with this and chose to look the other way.

The Ultimate Late Bloomer:

On August 9, 1911, with her husband’s blessing, Alexandra  returned to India. She told her husband she would return in a few months. She would be gone for 14 years. But during all this time Philippe was supportive both emotionally and financially. The letter between them prove this. Even though there was little physical connection between them, their correspondence reveals a strong intellectual connection and more importantly, a heart connection.

Upon arriving in India she travelled north to the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim where she was a guest of Maharaja. Here she met the Dalai Lama, whose only advice for her was “Learn Tibetan!” and a great Buddhist mystic named Lachen Gomshen Rinpoche (more about him later). In one of the monasteries she met a teenager named Lama Yuphur Yongden who would become her lifelong companion and whom she would eventually adopt as her son. The proximity of Sikkim to the Tibetan border sparked Alexandra’s desire to visit the forbidden city of Lhasa, which was closed to Westerners. But with no success; she did cross the border illegally a few times but was turned away.

During her mentorship with Gomshen, she lived in an anchorite cave. Essentially as a hermit, practicing yoga, Tibetan Tantra and the study of Buddhist Scriptures. So accomplished did she become in her studies that she was awarded the title of “Lamani” (female Lama) and “Kadoma” a reincarnated female spirit. As a result of this she was allowed to wear the sacred red and white vestments of a Lama as depicted in the pictures here.

On July 18, 1916, she once again attempted to illegally enter Tibet, hoping to make it to Lhasa. She did manage to visit a few important monasteries and struck up a friendship with the Panchan Lama and his mother. She was given an honorary Doctorate in Tibetan Buddhism by the Panchan Lama, who wanted her to stay on as his guest. But Alexandra refused, wanting to return to Sikkim. This was to prove to be a great error on her part. Once she returned to Sikkim, she learned that her actions had sparked the ire of the British Colonial Authorities. Remember ant this point in time, Sikkim, India and the rest of the kingdoms of the subcontinent were under British colonial rule and travel to Tibet was forbidden. So consequently poor Alexandra was kicked out of the country.

This began Alexandra’s Iliad through the countries of Asia. Since WW1 was raging throughout Europe, it was too dangerous to go back. Instead she headed east, visiting China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia with the faithful Yongden at her side. Determined to return to Lhasa, she and Yongden devised a plan where they would attempt to enter Tibet by traveling from Mongolia, via the northern deserts through the shared border of China and Tibet. In order to make her entrance with as little fanfare as possible (it’s obvious by now that Alexandra had a flare for the obvious) she darkened her skin with soot, dressed in rags and passed herself off as Yongden’s mother. A foreshadowing of things to come. This time her journey was a success, by now it was 1924 Alexandra had now been wandering the face of the earth for almost 14 years. Even though she had achieved a personal Nirvana, Alexandra felt the need to return home. So she packed up and returned to France with her companion Yongden in tow and returned to France

Inner Iliad/Outer Odyssey:

Upon her arrival in France, Alexandra discovered that she had attained something of a celebrity status in France, due to her writings, translations of Buddhists manuscripts and reports of her adventures in popular magazines. She wound up settling down in the village of Digne-les-Bains in the region of Provence. She earned a reputation as a Buddhist scholar of record. The accounts of her adventures were published in many of the major newspapers and magazines of the day.  It was here that she wrote her book “Magic and Mystery of Tibet”. She worked on expanding the property and by all accounts created the first Tibetan Tantric temple in the western hemisphere.

During this period of her life from 1925 to 1937 that she began what I like to call her “Inner Odyssey”. Alexandra had clocked in more travel miles than most of her contemporaries an amazing feat for anyone back then, in particular a woman. The origins of her wanderlust began as a way of escaping from her dysfunctional past. As she progressed on her outer journey to forbidden lands, she also began a journey of inner exploration in a quest to find balance. Through the study of ancient and sacred texts, she was able to shed her outer shell to realize to achieve a personal nirvana and become a “Lamani”.

In her book, “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” she recounts many unexplainable phenomena which may appear to be inconceivable to the average Westerner. Some of which are explained here:

Tummo: The ability to control the temperature of your body. This technique came in handy for Alexandra and her companions as they hiked through the Himalayas. Since they often traveled by foot or by horse and on a shoe string budget, learning to control your body’s temperature for personal warmth or to start a campfire would become a mainstay survival technique throughout her travels.

Tulpa: This is not to be confused with the western concept of an Egregore or a Golem. A Tulpa is the creation of a physical being through one’s own thought process. In order to survive under dangerous conditions while trekking through the Himalayas, Alexandra recalls creating Tulpas to serve as her guides and to endeavor protection. Apparently none of these emanations survived for more than a few days according to her.

Bardo Thödel: A death and rebirth ritual in which the Lamas have the ability to die, and in doing so their spirits would leave their physical body and then return at will. This was accomplished by the insertion of a thin bamboo reed or straw into the fontanelle of the skull. This straw or reed would serve as a conduit for Spirit to exit and enter the body, once the magical words had been uttered. These magical words (which I will not disclose here) were also uttered when a Lama would be midwifing a transition of a human from this existence to the next Bardo. In other words, serving as a guide for them at the time of death.

Flying Yogis/Levitating Yogis: In her book “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”, she describes seeing yogis with the ability to levitate or even fly through the air to get from point A to point B. There has been much speculation about this phenomena in particular especially since many Indian Fakirs have been discredited when it was discovered that they were creating the illusion of levitation by relying on a specially rigged chair disguised with cloaks. But what Alexandra describes in her book is nothing of the sort; She witnessed grown men flying across open fields with out any visible means of support.

To the average westerner, these anecdotes may border on the delusional or ridiculous. And yes they sometimes they are a bit difficult to believe. But keep in mind of the environment and culture that produced these assertions: They were produced in the rarified air of Himalayan Kingdoms that are free of are western distractions such as internet, cell phones, televisions, traffic, unhealthy foods. These “modern conveniences” that are more of an addiction than a convenience. There the mind is free of distractions and free to manifest at will. To paraphrase Alexandra: Our thoughts manifest our reality, and the mind that is free of distractions can manifest anything. So there is no doubt in my mind that she used these techniques not only to expand her knowledge of to also heal from her fractured past, make herself whole and to impart healing to others.

Her Relevance Today’s World:

So again, to the Western mind these recollections would seem improbable, but I am here too say that one needs to take themselves out our linear Occidental mindset and learn how to appreciate how these techniques can be applied to our own urban enlightenment. The Tantric Yogis may have had the capacity to fly through the air  but they would probably shrink in horror at the thought of us climbing into a big metal bird that flies through the sky. We may laugh at yogis inserting straws into their skulls in order to experience life and rebirth, but how about her modern medical traditions that keep people alive through organ transplants or defibrillation when in some cases the patient may be way past their time to transition?

Our society today is fractured, some say way beyond repair. But I refuse to subscribe to that opinion. Because if these teaching that have existed for thousands of years before our current western traditions, then they will still continue to flourish long after our ministries have been reduced to dust. Today there are advanced thinkers who would have mediation taught in schools not as any part of a religious agenda but as a way of calming a child’s hyperactive mind. As a former art instructor, I can confirm that teaching some simple breath works prior to art class can open a student’s mind so that they can experience a great creative awakening.So imagine, if we can plant a small seed of awareness, what amazing children we will create. Alexandra would have been proud. In fact there are many Tantric techniques that couples can practice in order to bring an enlightened child into this world. But this will be the topic of another blog later on.

Le Troisième Etape:

In 1937 Alexandra was now 69 years old, most people would be entering the third stage of their life, but not Alexandra; She had spent a good 12 years in Digne-les-Bagnes, making improvements on her home, expanding a portion of the structure to which she named the “Samtem Dzong” or “Fortress of Meditation”. The purpose of this structure was for the teaching of mediation making it the first Lamaist Temple in the west and it would later become part of her museum.

At this point in her life she was ready to return to her beloved Tibet and to travel through China in order to study Taoism which is the Chinese form of Tantra. This time she decided to take the Trans Siberian Express so she could enter Tibet through the Northern route. But as the fates would have it, for the second time in her life, she was caught once again in the midst of a worldwide conflict: The war between China and Japan. This event was to be a precursor to World War II and it’s ironic to think that Alexandra who many considered to be a warrior for peace,  was now compelled to witness the horrible atrocities that were committed by both sides. But always wanting to make herself useful, she actually worked as a medic and a healer for both sides of the conflict.

Finally in 1938, after a year of navigating the conflicts of WW2, she was able to at last enter Tibet, where she visited monasteries, studied sacred scriptures and settled down in the village of Kangdin for what was to become five years retreat of solitary meditation. It was at the end of these five years when she learned that her husband had passed away. It was now 1946, she had been wandering through China and Tibet for 9 years. It was time to return to France in order to tend to the estate of her deceased husband. So she left Tibet via India this time, departing on a new invention called the jet plane which flew her back to Paris.

Now back in France, Alexandra settled her husband’s affairs. She stayed in at Digne-le-Bains where the accolades began to pour in as a result her accomplishments. The French government named her a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. She was awarded the Gold Medal by Geographical Society of France. There were streets and schools named after her. Alexandra David-Neel became the foremost authority on Tibetan Tantric Buddhism.

But fate was to give Alexandra one final cruel blow, in 1955 Yongden, her beloved travel companion and now adopted son, died suddenly of kidney failure. The years of hardship traveling under impossible conditions took its toll on his fragile body. Alexandra was heartbroken, but after cremating his remains, vowed that they would once again return to Tibet. She was now 87 years old. Even though her body was showing signs of wear and tear, there were many who said she looked younger due to her lifestyle of yoga and meditation. She continued writing, translating, teaching and became known as the “Wise Lady of Digne”. Buddhist scholars from all over the world made the pilgrimage to her house in Provence to sit at her feet and drink from her well of wisdom.

Finally, at the age of 100, she felt the need to return to Tibet and so went about filing the papers to obtain her travel visa. On September 8, 1969, she transitioned to the next Bardo a month shy of her 101st birthday and just as her travel visa was approved by the Chinese government. Her body was cremated and her ashes, along with those of Yongden, were taken by her followers to Varanasi India so they could be thrown into the Ganges River.

I would like to think that her ashes traveled the Shakti trajectory of the Ganges to the Himalayas, where her Spirit roams the sacred mountain passes as the Lamani, Kadoma, Flying Sky Dakini, always everywhere and nowhere.

Did you enjoy this Blog? For more information, please visit my website: universaltantra.org or you can contact me by email: info@universaltantra.org or by phone: +1 (832) 743-8148 

[jenroses]

So this is some backstory I wrote a few years back about the apocalypse. Four years later, I think I may have been overly optimistic about how long it would take for things to fall apart. 

~~~  The apocalypse wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy. Parts were dramatic and rapid, say, when the United States dissolved into chaos in 2020 and six new nations emerged from the rubble. The Pacific States of America became the progressive destination of choice, between California’s wealth and the Pacific Northwest’s natural bubbles of relative safety between the mountain ranges. Canada followed a few years later into disaster, with French Canada going its own way and British Columbia joining the Pacific States. The continent was re-shaped again by rising sea levels and sinking earth falling into the empty aquifers and the remains of fracking operations. 

The biggest issues early on were in the Confederacy, The Republic of Texas, and the Great Plains Republic. Rampant deregulation combined with widespread corruption resulted in the complete loss of vast areas to poisons both visible and invisible. 

Chaos in North America bred chaos elsewhere. A brief nuclear exchange in 2038 left vast parts of the Middle East, East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent uninhabitable. Washington DC and Moscow were hit, but as neither were particularly politically powerful by that point, the political fallout was less than the actual nuclear fallout of the 8 bombs. The EMPs from strikes in Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China and Tripoli took out communications and governments alike. In the resulting chaos, many nuclear materials were “liberated” and attacks with “dirty” bombs became common in many areas of the world. 

Texas did not fall to bombs or to the poisons or to war, but to the increasingly tight focus of the sun through God’s magnifying glass, with temperatures soaring beyond the capacity of failing machines to compensate. Between the floods, hurricanes, and summer temperatures upwards of 150° F, without a larger federal infrastructure, civilization in the Lone Star quickly stopped working, and those who relied on the grid were forced to flee ever-climbing temperatures. California, being a large and wealthy state and later the cornerstone of the new Pacific Union, managed fairly well at first. Two dams were built to try to protect the Bay and the Sacramento Valley from rising seas, but the Golden Wall fell to sabotage before it could be completed, and Vay-deo dam, as the locals called it, cracked in the Big One, causing one of the largest, most rapid floods in history in what was already a time of great floods. Los Angeles didn’t fall into the Pacific, the Pacific fell into Los Angeles in creeping, inexorable inches, but the heat and drought and weather sent people north long before a large section of the metropolitan area was submerged. A dirty bomb in Hollywood in 2045 sent anyone who was still in the area, north.

The Northeast crumbled under the weight of too many people and not enough resources. The flooding of New York was an afterthought compared to the bombing of Washington, which didn’t do anywhere near as much damage as the civil uprisings of the 2020s. Pockets of well-armed wealth remained, tiny Corporation States which promised survival in exchange for freedom once it was obvious that the federal government was not coming back.

Refugees were everywhere, fleeing the food shortages, the fallout, the rising waters. In 2048, rampant use of greenhouse gasses, combined with ever rising ocean temperatures and acidity combined to cause massive slips of land ice into the ocean in both hemispheres. The seas had already risen more than predicted, but the catastrophic shift of ice from land to sea brought sea level an average of 33 inches higher worldwide. In some places, the net effect was closer to 40 inches. The impact on water circulation was severe, and Europe plunged into an ice age. The surge stopped, even subsided a bit as storms dropped record amounts of moisture into the mountains in a winter that would not quit, but the damage was done, and the lowlands were abandoned. The death toll was unimaginable. 

It was 2050 before things were stable enough for the PSA to do more than triage the daily catastrophes. New technologies had been developed on the fly to deal with immediate problems. Domes and filters to protect from fallout. Desalination to give the mountains near the Bay Area water, and then water reclamation everywhere as people stopped trusting anything that came from the sky. Mechanical pollinators helped keep people fed. Every home had a garden, indoors or out, on a wall if need be where space was limited, shelving systems with tiny twinkling LEDs and recirculating water. 

By then, the birth rate in what had once been the United States had declined from around four million babies per year to four thousand, and of those four thousand children, eighty percent were born early. Fully half of those births were within the PSA.

It was when they realized that the pregnancy rate across the continent was likely close to two million that it became clear that something was fundamentally wrong with humanity’s ability to sustain pregnancy. Individual tragedies became a countrywide fear and then a worldwide terror.

The bees were mostly gone by then, the few remaining hives living in research facilities in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. 

Animal births faltered and stopped, but by that point the science of meat meant the vast majority of animal protein in the PSA was vat grown, indoors, no brain, no bones, no ethical backlash. Refugees came looking for food, but fewer and fewer children accompanied them. 

Concerted efforts sprang up at universities around the world, but as each fell, their best and brightest converged on the last functioning, tech-capable democracy in the world. 

The internet was no longer reliable enough for worldwide communication due to lack of maintenance of infrastructure and widespread sabotage, but the tech corridor of I5 and the data centers survived, and the PSA sent out drones with food, communication equipment and emergency supplies. Carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals, harvested and reassembled from dumps and compressed into shelf-stable bricks, accompanied durable, simple water purifiers, basic survival supplies, and informational pamphlets - pictorial as fewer and fewer people in the rest of the world knew how to read. 

The earliest iteration was called Project Dove, and the mission was to get as much information about humanity in other parts of the world as possible. Some of the drones were shot down. Some made contact and returned. A few simply vanished without a trace. The birth data that did come back was terrifying. Starvation in many areas was too widespread and rapid for the drops of supplies to make even a dent, but in the places closest to the PSA, they were a lifeline, and not always happily received. They had included information on birth control in the drops, because of the high rate of maternal death in unsuccessful pregnancies. What they did not do was put contraceptives in the food. But despite their adamant statements to the contrary, they could not shake the rumor.

Food Not Bombs, the second iteration of the humanitarian project, became not a nice pacifist organization but the only foreign policy that worked. Nutrient drops from the PSA, sent by drone, happened regularly across all territories that might be able to still threaten the PSA with terrorist attacks, and irregularly anywhere the PSA wanted information.The rhetoric against the PSA across the rest of North America was fierce, and fueled splintered and uncoordinated attacks by civilians, but after the Independent State of Exxon-Mobil was cut off completely from these drops for 12 weeks following their last incursion, no established government made any official attempt to wage war on the PSA.

The last year babies survived past infancy, anywhere in the world that the researchers could contact, was in 2059. 200 children were born within the domes of the PSA and nowhere else, where early doming and fanatic attention to clean food supplies kept the novel endocrine disruptors out longer than in most places. Their parents came from all over the world. However, a terrorist attack by religious zealots caused widespread contamination in the middle of 2059, and no more babies were born after that; though many pregnancies were documented, most failed in the first 30 days, and none survived past 15 weeks. Families with children banded together in several clusters, so that their children could take advantage of the wealth of expertise at the universities. But as the population of young people dwindled, first daycares shut down, then elementary schools, and families tightened their clustering so that the remaining children could be educated together. The Last Generation grew up with the knowledge that either they would figure out how to fix humanity’s problems, or that humanity would end with them.

Rapid transit built in the ‘30s still functioned from Eugene to Vancouver, and Seattle’s industry persisted even when families with children fled south to higher ground and less upheaval. Half of Portland was underwater, but the larger metropolitan area survived with varying levels of liveability. 

The University of Oregon ended up being the last fully functioning school by default, with enough agriculture and infrastructure to make it livable and just enough isolation to make it hard to get to for those without means. It was one of the oldest system of domes on the West Coast. 

It wasn’t invulnerable. The Jefferson Dissent, which began half an hour south of Eugene and ended in the mountains of Northern California, sent occasional raids until wildfires obliterated much of the area in the Great Draught. 

Parts of the school lay in disuse and disrepair, but groups of research scientists had colonized parts of campus that would otherwise have fallen by the wayside. A large team of scientists worked on nanotech and microtech in conjunction with the biology department, modeling tiny machines after viruses, bacteria and insects. 

In Portland and Seattle, competing teams of fertility specialists worked on the problem of the crashing population rate, but it was not until the agricultural specialists in Corvallis pitched in that they started making real progress at extrauterine gestation.

They found the problem quickly, once they understood the magnitude of the issue. Without the political chaos of the 2020s, they might have picked up on it ten or fifteen years earlier, when it was still fixable. But by the time it was determined that complex endocrine disruptors, wind- and water-borne, had spread worldwide in storms and floods and in the food supply, their epigenetic and generational effects were beyond easy remedies. Pregnancies might happen, but more things went wrong. In the war between placenta and endometrium, the endometrium had found a potent ally. Autoimmune disorders were endemic. And the last straw was a new disruptor, one which managed to interfere with the shift to placental support. 

Anyone who became pregnant died where medical support and birth control were inadequate. The resulting demographic shift did not help the political situation. The PSA became a refuge for people with uteruses. More conservative nearby nations screamed about the Godless heathens stealing their women. Within the PSA, gender was seen broadly as a social construct, though there were enough different religious and cultural groups with different ideas that the notions of binary gender were not completely obliterated.  

“God’s punishment,” the religious called the deaths during pregnancy. Science was blamed. Scientists were blamed. The last green places were blamed. In the transformed labs and classrooms of the last universities, frantic efforts were made to counteract the toxins in the environment, to find some way, any way for the human race to survive past the last generation. 

The population aged.

Suicide rates skyrocketed early, and surged even further when the fertility collapse was made known.

Animals started to be born that had been gestated from stored cells in vats, restoring extinct species from scratch, but the human puzzle was a tougher nut to crack. Fetuses could be grown, to a point. A few even made it to scrawny, translucent viability, but the children did not survive long, even with the highest tech support. 

Some changes were made to the tanks, with a regular program of stimulation, vibration, and auditory recordings. And a small cohort of infants were born, to cautious but joyful researchers. But the children did not adapt well, once born, and while they lived, the behavior issues and profoundly antisocial behavior they exhibited pointed to some deep flaw in the underlying gestational program. Babies screamed when held, preferring mechanical soothers. Language development was minimal, with babies averse to unfamiliar voices. Development was stunted and consistently unusual from child to child. They did not form attachments to the people who desperately wanted them.

At first, the researchers thought it was autism, but when autistic adults who specialized in the care of autistic children were brought in, it became clear that something different was going on. 

Brain scans were done which found profound abnormalities in many parts of the brain, abnormalities which were uniform across the cohort. 

As the children got bigger, slowly, they began to lash out, and it became obvious that the extrauterine gestational process was not going to be the answer as it stood.

The resulting scandal was huge, and an ethical oversight committee that had been bypassed on the grounds of emergency was reinstated. Meanwhile, The Babylon Cooperative worked frantically to salvage the human race, as the planet deteriorated around them. 

It became clear that cleaning the Earth would be a much longer-scale process than humanity could survive. The rest of the planets in the solar system were even worse. There was a Mars colony, a desperate, abandoned group of settlers too old to reproduce, the planned resupply missions scrapped when the world fell apart. 

No one wanted to say it, but there was a strong possibility that by the time the fertility problem was solved, there would be no one left to raise the resulting children.

Computing progressed, even in the chaos, in part due to breakthroughs in biosynth. DNA was a compact and complex data storage medium, and its structure could be used and mimicked to create self-replicating devices that stored their complete process in tiny spaces, scavenging what they needed from the materials around them. When the problem of controlling growth was solved, a research team made an excursion to an old dump, dropped a gluey ball of nano- and microtech on top of the trash, pointed a strong light source at the area to be salvaged, and waited.

Nanobugs were developed which could selectively break down molecular bonds. Microbugs were created to analyze, sort, inventory and group raw materials, and when that process was finished, they could then assemble into larger devices that continued the process of refinement and reconstruction. The self-replicating technology meant that a properly programmed bug could be placed on, for example, an old office building, or a pile of rubble, climb to the highest point, and digest it into a thousand more of itself, then consume the spawned bugs and create larger, more complex machines out of the result, eventually creating new structures in place of the old, from materials on site.

The end result was a pile of sugarplastic bubbles filled with raw materials and isolated waste products, which were set aside for more study, and along the edges, new gluey balls for other dumps. The remaining machines waited for further instructions.  

Someone asked if they had to be so sticky, and if they needed to have an artificial light source. “Not in an undomed dump,” the lead scientist said. “Plenty of bright light out there.”

The “genetic” programming was altered, and the next generation looked more like large pillbugs than badly drawn jellyfish. When the researchers built in the ability to power themselves from the waste heat of the molecular breakdown process, they could even work underground.

The raw material distribution included so many rare elements and complex hydrocarbons that as soon as word got out, and a few of the “pilebugs,” as they came to be called, were stolen, whole new resource battles broke out where there was not tight social control.

Control tightened everywhere. 

Biological interfaces with microscopic sensors and transmitters allowed many researchers to streamline their efforts with direct neural-computer wireless interfaces. Gone was the larger worldwide web, but enough had been saved, and the PSA had dedicated much of its resources to maintaining connectivity up and down the coast. Seattle was the hub, with redundant data backup of much of the cloud everywhere they had enough locals and infrastructure to support it. Redundant archives became a cultural obsession of a dying world. A hardcopy repository was started, in case civilization collapsed beyond help and humanity somehow survived.

The pilebug programming was a closely held secret, because of the potential for harm.  Backwards engineering was impossible for those without the Co-op’s resources. 

Within the PSA, the Babylon Cooperative became a dominant power. There were only a few people who truly understood how the bugs worked at a core level. It was clear that the potential applications were huge, but there just weren’t enough people who comprehended them well enough to make use of the tools to their best effect in the available time. Training the remaining young people became the driving goal of the Pacific States. 

As the PSA stabilized, it became clear that the entire population was suffering widespread psychological trauma. Efforts were made to train people to cope with the resulting stresses in productive ways, with varying success. Community beautification efforts were promoted as therapeutic.

Within the research clusters, neurodiversity was seen as an asset. New ways of thinking were prized, quirks and coping mechanisms supported, special interests encouraged. “Think outside the box” became “There is no box. The survival of humanity depends on new ideas.”

Skin-based links to the net abounded, traceries of gold at the temples and key points on the head for those who used it the most, headsets for more casual users. With the development of ever smaller and more powerful transmitters, it became clear that mental states could be influenced, if not controlled, and those without links grew increasingly suspicious of those with. Thus, “old-fashioned” data inputs did not die out, but the speed gains of working with a direct connection were obvious to those in the Co-op.

A wider culture of inclusion—motto, “We need everyone”—made for eclectic neighborhoods around the University, but farther from the research clusters, old tendencies for humans to sort themselves into distrustful subcultures persisted. As the years passed and no children played in the streets, nihilism and social unrest grew. As it became easier to rebuild and more people returned to school to learn about the newest technologies, the University grew, and changed, and became more isolated. Most people who came into the University were there to join the research projects, and only those trained for specific purposes in the larger nation ever left. 

In 2077, the last freshman class, about 80 students, gathered at the University of Oregon. The classes ahead of them were still attending, but what had, in its heyday, been a campus with 20,000 students was now a campus with 1500 researchers, 2000 educators and about 4000 students.

The speed of the population crash showed nowhere more than here. 2% of the student body were freshmen. 6% sophomores. 10% were juniors and 15% were seniors. The rest were grad and community education students of varying ages. There was no tuition. There was also no real salary, but the University, as the seat of power for the Babylon Cooperative, was already self-sufficient enough and powerful enough in the region to trade for whatever was needed. A monetary system still existed, of sorts—the robust local and regional networks also allowed for sophisticated tracking of barter of resources, skills and labor, but the social support networks that had come out of the Fall had matured well where they were allowed to thrive. 

Where the science was tolerated, housing could be grown, and with greenhouses built into the designs, food grown within the housing. Even computing resources could be grown. 

The science was not tolerated widely. Even within the PSA, dissent came and went in waves. Never monolithic, when crisis gave way to chronic, old divides resurfaced. As the population aged and skepticism about possible scientific solutions grew, rumors and rivalries brought political change.  

[ckret2]

The Butterfly (Dream/Effect)

Mothra's going on a world tour. The Chen family is going on vacation. They arrange for a get together on an island just south of the Korean Peninsula.

Mothra and the Chens really do need to get caught up. It's been a few millennia, after all. And whether she realizes it or not, Mothra left them with quite an unusual legacy.

This is part of an ongoing series of KOTM oneshots. If you don't wanna read the others, all you need to know to understand this fic is that the Chen twins are sort of human shobijin and as such can communicate telepathically with Mothra, and in this AU Mothra survived Boston but lost a wing which is why she's riding around on Godzilla's back instead of flying. Links to the other fics are in the source at the bottom of this post.

###

The tiny crew of a cargo ship stood on the deck and stared as a giant, prehistoric, radioactive, laser-breathing, amphibious reptile with a building-sized moth riding on his shoulder loomed out of the ocean beside them.

The reptile looked down at the chunk of floating metal three times longer than him and the dozen-odd microscopic primates that were steering it.

"That's so weird," the reptile muttered.

You've seen boats before. A few humans were waving. Mothra waved back.

"Sure, but they used to be wood. That's fine. Wood floats. Tricking metal into floating is weird."

Gesila (whose name wasn't always Gesila, but it was when the eyes of Mandarin-speaking humans were upon him) waded past the ship into deeper water, pushed off the sea floor, and switched to swimming on the surface. Mothra moved lower on his back.

That had been far from the only ship they'd seen so far—Gesila and Mothra seemed to have stumbled into one of the ships' migratory routes—but it was certainly the biggest yet.

"And they're loud, too," Gesila went on. "Underwater, I can't hear anything but the boats' hearts and stomachs now. And they've just been getting louder since I woke up. They're even drowning out the whales."

That's awful. If Gesila couldn't even hear the whales, then they probably couldn't hear each other, could they? How could they talk to each other. Mothra looked back at the ship more coolly. It didn't sound that loud to her, but Gesila had assured her that everything was louder underwater, and she had no reason to doubt him.

They had left Infant Island at the Chen twins' request to meet the rest of their family—two sets of ancestors and one set of descendants that had lived their lives knowing of her, at least in a vague sense, but had never had the opportunity to meet her. It ultimately worked out; Mothra needed to do a circuit of the world and check out her egg sites—reset their hatching timers, see where she needed to lay fresh eggs. It was convenient—beneficial, even—to stop at a nearby island on the circuit to meet some of the people that should have been her representatives before setting out.

And so she and Gesila turned toward Jeju Island off the coast of South Korea.

###

"Look at this," Mei said, holding up another pamphlet. "Lava tubes! A hollow cave left behind by the volcano. We can walk a whole kilometer!"

"Ma," Huidie said tiredly, "you don't want to walk a kilometer in a cave. You're over eighty."

"And yesterday I saw a woman my age diving to catch octopus," Mei said. "If she can catch an octopus in nothing but a wet suit, I don't know why I can't walk a kilometer in a cave."

"Because you have arthritis, Ma."

Mei waved Huidie off with a huff and returned to the pile of pamphlets balanced carefully on her knees.

This was the first time Mei had left China since she'd retired from Monarch. She and and her daughters Congdie and Huidie typically got to see Ling for the major public holidays, Monarch permitting; but they rarely saw Ilene or the Chen family's youngest generation, Athena and Diana, for more than a week in December and a week in the summer—and it was hard to spend time with them one-on-one with the rest of the family dividing their attention and eager to see their wayward American relatives. It was high time that all four generations have a family vacation, twins only.

More importantly, though, it was a chance for the family to meet Mothra.

Ilene and Ling had arranged this trip several days ago—negotiating back and forth while speaking with Mothra on Infant Island, skyping with Dr. Russell in Colorado who was currently babysitting Ilene's children, and chatting with their mother and aunt in Beijing over WeChat. Mothra had needed to make a tour to inspect her eggs, the Chens had wanted this vacation whether they met Mothra or not, and it hadn't been be difficult for the Chens to assemble on Jeju Island and wait for Godzilla to bring Mothra right to them.

Monarch made the arrangements with the nearby nations—no firm promises from North Korea, but China and South Korea had agreed not to swarm the traveling titans with military escorts as long as Monarch could assure them that they were on a pre-planned route and definitely not going to flatten any cities. In fact, Monarch could even promise that no less than two current Monarch agents and three retired ones would be on site when the titans swung by South Korea, which did a great deal to soothe any ruffled feathers.

With that promise of relative privacy, the Chen family trooped out in shorts and shirts and sandals and sun hats, found an isolated stretch of coastline away from the more popular beaches the tourists to Jeju usually visited, helped Mei and Huidie down an uneven slope to where water washed over rocky shore, and waited for their visitor to arrive.

And in the meantime, planned out the rest of their vacation.

"I'd kind of like to go hiking," Congdie said, to Mei's delight and Huidie's exasperation. Congdie and Huidie were sitting on either side of Mei, who insisted that the water washing over her feet didn't bother her a bit on such a warm, sunny day, but wore a towel like a blanket spread across her and her daughter's knees anyway in deference to their concern. It held a dozen glossy travel brochures out of the water. "Look, there's a hiking trail on the volcano. We can do it in a day if we get up early."

"We could do it in a day when we were their age," Aunt said, gesturing toward Ilene, busy with keeping her daughters entertained, and Ling, checking Monarch's titan tracking app to see how close Godzilla and Mothra were. "We're old. My knees can't take a volcano, can yours?"

"Maybe there's an easier route," Congdie said. "I miss getting out in the field."

Huidie waved her off dismissively. "We're on vacation. It's not going to be like getting out in the field no matter what. Look—" she held out another brochure, "there's a couple of spas that look nice. I like the sound of that. Don't you?"

Congdie huffed.

"What about the local culture?" Mei asked. "I haven't spoken with a mudang since Park Chung-lee got a hold of them." (She said this with great disdain. Before joining Monarch, she'd spent years in South Korea, learning what she could about the local religions that the adherents were willing to share, documenting old oral traditions that had been passed down for generations. She was invested enough to take personal offense when the government's "anti-superstition" policies in the 1970s attempted to stamp them out. She saw more parallels than she'd like to the treatment of folk religion in her own nation at the same time.) "I've heard the practice is reviving, I'd like to see if it's true on Jeju."

"It's mainly baksu on Jeju, not mudang," Ilene said distractedly, glancing away from her daughters playing in the surf for only a split second before her gaze focused right back on them. "They've got more male priests than female. They even have different stories about the origins of baksu—they ascribe it to a prince rather than a princess."

Ling, who had moved atop a tall rock and was glancing between her phone and the horizon, said, "I think I see them."

The whole family fell silent, turning toward the horizon. Even Athena and Diana only splashed each other a moment longer before catching the mood and craning their heads to see what their elders were looking at.

And there, on the horizon, they could faintly see Mothra's head and one half-raised wing.

No one said a word for nearly a minute.

"She doesn't look that big," said Athena.

Ilene laughed. "Wait until she gets closer."

Ling, Ilene, Athena, and Diana drew toward their seated elders as Mothra approached. Only Ling and Ilene didn't react when they began to feel her psychic influence, by now used to it. Athena and Diana clapped their hands on their heads at the same time, looked at each other, and burst into quiet giggles. Congdie gasped sharply and Huidie reached for her hand. Mei, who had remained warm, smiling, and collected at her own twin sister's funeral, blinked fast to stop a tear from rolling down her cheeks.

A couple of far ships crested the horizon, more vaguely trailing the titans than actually pursuing them; by the time they were visible, Mothra was close enough that they could make out the scutes on her ride. Diana excitedly whispered "Godzilla" to Athena, whose initial giggles had worn off and left her staring almost petrified at the approaching titans—who were, in fact, that big.

Hello.

The family collectively jumped at Mothra's greeting—Ilene and Ling not because they hadn't been expecting it, but because everyone else's starts startled them. Diana cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed "HELLO!" back, which made everyone but Athena start again.

Godzilla's back hunched as he moved into shallow enough water that he had to push off against the ground with his arms rather than swim outright—even at that, he was still in deep enough water to drown a human several times over—and he stopped once he was close enough that Mothra could hop off and delicately walk the rest of the way to shore herself. They all stood as she approached; Congdie helped Mei to her feet and Ling helped Huidie.

They had to crane their necks to look up at Mothra, even when she folded up her front legs to rest her chest on the rocks in front of them. They could feel her pleasure at seeing all of them—nothing near the various awe and jubilation the Chens felt at the sight of her, but the same sort of pleased satisfaction that came from visiting a distant town that one hasn't been to in a decade and finding that one's favorite restaurant is still in business and the elderly chef remembers your face. You know who I am, Mothra thought, but allow me to properly introduce myself anyway. I am Mothra. She thought without language, her sentiment automatically translating into words in each of her audience members' minds: Mosila to the five elders, Mothra to the two children. And who are you?

"I'm Athena-like-the-Greek-goddess!" As she always introduced herself, explanation included. Before Ilene could chastise her for not giving her elders a turn first, Athena's younger sister piped up, "And I'm Diana, like Wonder Woman!"

Which was not who she was named after; "Diana" the Roman name for the Greek goddess Artemis, chosen instead of the Greek because it was easier to write in Mandarin—dai-an-na rather than the cumbersome a-er-te-mi-si—and it allowed both girls' names to end with the same character for "na." But if comparisons to Wonder Woman has finally cured her sulking over getting "the boring name," Ilene wasn't going to discourage it.

She cast Mei an apologetic look for her daughters. Mei simply chuckled and looked up at Mothra. "I'm Chen Mei. Just Mei."

You are missing one.

Mei slowly nodded. "My elder sister passed on a couple of years ago."

Remarkable. Usually my twins die close together—within a few months at most. But you look well. The psychic inflection behind the word my was odd; not like she was claiming ownership over "her" twins, but like she was taking responsibility for them.

Mei shrugged. "If I'd died without meeting you first, she would have killed me."

Mothra's antennae twitched as she puzzled her way through the human humor. Then I'm glad you can now meet her without fear.

"But not for another few years, Ma," Congdie said lowly. Feeling Mothra's attention focus on her like a single sunbeam through the clouds, she straightened up. "I'm Chen Congdie. It's an honor to finally meet you."

Her younger twin said, "And my name is Huidie, and I've got a bone to pick with you."

"Sister!"

Do you now? Mothra asked serenely.

Huidie waved off Congdie's scowl. "You've put my family through a load of trouble! Maybe it's no problem for a moth, but do you know how hard it is for a human woman to be a single mother? Especially with twin daughters?"

And this was the main reason the Chen family had taken such pains to meet with Mothra alone, remaining isolated enough that even if anyone tried to record them from afar they'd just be vague dark-haired pale-skinned woman-shaped blurs. At Ilene and Ling's insistence, Monarch hadn't even released the names of the translators who'd been providing transcripts of Mothra's conversations with other titans; nobody outside a select few colleagues and loved ones knew about the family's connection to her. They'd like to keep it that way.

And they had some matters to discuss with her now that they couldn't let anyone else overhear.

For generations, Chen women had given birth to twin girls—without the assistance of a father. Usually between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Usually only one half of each pair became a mother in such an unusual way—unless they were living far apart, in which case both might get pregnant independently. The twin girls would always be their firstborn children, no matter how early or often they'd tried for children with a husband; some women had tried and failed to conceive for half a decade, had their twin pregnancy, and then easily conceived their next children. A miscarried or aborted twin pregnancy would just be followed by another twin pregnancy about a year later, as would the infant death of one of the twins; only once a set of twins reached about the age five would the death of one not cause their mother to have another set. The right contraceptives would reliably put off the inevitable pregnancy—Ilene hadn't stopped taking contraceptives until she had received her Ph.D., been hired by Monarch, and felt ready to start a family—but not all contraceptives successfully prevented this spontaneous conception even when they prevented normal conception. They'd been living with this miraculous burden for hundreds of years that they knew of, perhaps thousands of years that they'd forgotten; they'd had a long time to observe, to speculate, to experiment, to puzzle out the limits and rules and exceptions, and to pass on their knowledge to their children.

There was some small comfort in the certainty of twin girls. Whether they wanted them or not, each Chen girl at least knew it would happen when she grew up, either to herself or to her sister; and every mother and aunt prepared every daughter and niece for the inevitability of either spontaneous daughters or the task of supporting one's sister through them.

But the consequences outweighed the comfort. For starters: 50/50 odds that the decision to become a mother would be completely out of their hands and control, and that it would start with two children at once. If one of them wasn't married by the time her mysterious pregnancy manifested, she risked local infamy; and even if the impact of the scandal was mitigated by the support she'd receive from her female relatives, it could follow her for years. If she wanted to avoid that, her only option was a shotgun marriage to whoever would agree, and it would have to be arranged quickly enough to pass off her pregnancy to the public as the result of her new husband; passing it off to him as his own was harder, and there were steep dangers in quickly marrying a near stranger who'd soon realize that his new bride had wed him already pregnant.

Having the twins inside an established marriage wasn't without danger either, because what if the new twins decided to conceive themselves a month their faux father was out of town? What if a husband had distinct enough physical features that he grew uneasy when his firstborn daughters were the spitting image of their mother but didn't have any looks in common with him?

What about more modern problems—what about how employers, especially more traditional ones, would look at an employee who began showing that she was with child but wasn't married? What about how employers in general looked down on the career potential of expectant mothers? What about how frustrating it was for an unmarried mother get healthcare and schooling for her children without paying exorbitant fees or producing their "father"—and if she brought in a fake boyfriend to play the father long enough to register the children, what did they do if, as so often was the case for births out of wedlock, they requested a DNA test to confirm that the man was related to the children?

These were issues that all of the adult Chens had turned over and over—either ones relevant in their own lives or ones they had wondered about on behalf of their ancestors. Ilene had tried to shield her daughters from them, but even Athena and Diana were vaguely aware of the fact that they'd been born in the United States mostly because of their mother's work, but partially because it was easier for children without fathers to get American social security cards than Chinese household registration records. None of these concerns were directly shared with Mothra; but they felt her stir through their old family knowledge all the same, her mind washing over their memories like the surf washing over their ankles.

I'm familiar with wedlock, Mothra thought, in a way that indicated a sort of vague theoretical knowledge not unlike how the average telemarketer who'd made the mistake of majoring in art history might be "familiar with" the concept of photosynthesis. I know that many human cultures value completing that ritual before reproducing. My representatives have usually been considered exceptions to that rule, though—their communities have considered their unique ability to reproduce independently something worthy of reverence. Yours did.

Huidie laughed bitterly. "Maybe it did, a millennium ago," she said. "We don't even know where that community was. Humans move and memories are short."

You don't know your home? Mothra asked, surprised.

At the word home, the seven of them thought of four completely different neighborhoods: three in Beijing and one in San Jose.

"All we have is a myth of the place we originally came from," Ling said.

It was one that had been passed down for generations, mothers to daughters, a fairy tale for three-year-olds to explain why almost all the girls in their family had twins when no one else did. Once a butterfly the size of a mountain cast its shadow over a small village and landed on a cliff overlooking the sea. Everyone in the village was terrified of the butterfly except for one young woman, who that night dreamed that she was the butterfly, traveling over the sea. When she woke up, she could hear singing that no one else could. She scaled the cliff and sang the song to the butterfly, who was so pleased she granted the woman twins, born only from the butterfly's blessing, as well as twins to all her descendants; and gifted the village with silk that could be woven into clothes strong enough to stop arrows, enough silk to fill a ship.

Affronted, Mothra thought, Butterfly?

"We've never written it down. We lost a few details over the centuries," Congdie said apologetically.

Ilene said, "I actually think the story cross-pollinated at some point with Zhuangzi's butterfly dream. 'I dreamed I was a butterfly, but when I woke up, I didn't know if I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly or if I'm a butterfly dreaming I'm a man.' The silk suggests that the story was originally about a silkworm moth. It's really quite fascinating—I've been trying to reverse-engineer our original story based on what other stories might have influenced it over time."

And it was a fine story for inside the family; but try it on a husband or a neighbor and expect to be called a liar, a lunatic, cursed, or worthy of exploratory medical examination.

So they'd kept it their family secret. Passed down orally from generation to generation, along with family anecdotes never written down, the private Chen mythology, the clever ways they lived with their unique biology.

Here a married and an unmarried sister who had switched places for almost a year when the unmarried one became pregnant, and a baffled husband who spoke of how his wife grew cold and distance during her first pregnancy, how her milk had stopped only two months after the births, and how her body had recovered so fast it looked like she'd never given birth at all.

There a younger brother taken into his older sisters' confidence who had been sent home in disgrace for "accidentally" destroying several imperial census records in the Yellow Register Archives through his "carelessness," erasing evidence of his own maternal ancestors in order to protect them from the possibility that some future governmental official might notice they produced twin girls not just three or four lucky generations in a row, but for centuries.

A twin who had children giving one to a sister who wanted a daughter and raising them from infancy as cousins rather than siblings. Women who claimed they felt, from hundreds of miles away, when something happened to their duplicates. Girls who woke up feeling as though they remembered a song they'd never heard before, to be told by their mothers and aunts and grandmothers and grandaunts that they knew the song too but had never sung it in the girls' lives.

"We've been trying to figure out where we came from for a long time," Congdie said. "Ma and her sister, my sister and I, my nieces... The only compass we've had is our myth."

Tao and Mei, sharing their mother's fear in the fifties that the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to eradicate folk religions would also eradicate anyone else's memories of the myth that explained their family, turned themselves from unambitious teenagers into untrained researchers. Mei traveled between rural communities collecting old local beliefs, even having her daughters on the road. When she married a man who was pleased to offer his services when she said the girls had no other father that wanted them and who didn't need to know more when she didn't want to say more, she simply brought him along on the road with her. Tao dug through papers and records hundreds of years old to try to pick out traces of their family farther back than their living memory could recall. She'd even found a point where their twin matrilineal line had branched at the tail end of the Ming dynasty when the sisters had been separated as teenagers and each had twin daughters; she'd lost these cousins' paper trail sometime in the 1850s, but thought their descendants might still be alive somewhere today. And with Monarch's assistance, as the state mounted pressure against folk religions and the people who championed them, they'd quietly left China with their families and their research to continue documenting folk religions in Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

(Ironically, they'd even made it to Infant Island, never knowing how close they'd come to finding out their past. The islanders, who over the past few centuries had grown justifiably wary of foreigners asking about their beliefs, had shown the Monarch agents to some interesting fossilized bones of what happened to be a Titanus gojira specimen, as a test to see what they'd do. When the first thing they did was start snapping pictures, the islanders had hastily explained that these days the population was half Muslim and half Hindu and really none of them remembered very much about their local folktales—did you say "Mosura" was the name the Dutch colonists had written down for this... yakshini? No, never heard of her, they must've named the wrong island—while a handful of kids were sent running into town to go hide their moth-wing-patterned wooden shields.)

Congdie, deeply impressed at five years old by the Godzilla bones and seeking physical proof of the "butterfly," had gone into paleontology, and to this day any college powerpoint presentation on insect fossils included an average of three photographs she herself had taken. Huidie, seeking the people who had invented the butterfly, had gone into archaeology, and was hailed by the CCP for rediscovering ancient human settlements that even China's long memory had forgotten and digging up temples that a generation earlier they'd tried to bury; together, they unearthed bones and buildings along half the east coast of Asia.

Ilene and Ling had both followed their grandmother into mythology, albeit in different directions: Ilene had climbed to the upper echelons of academia to study beliefs that stretched across the planet, spending her time in universities and libraries rather than small villages, hoping to either find parallels in other stories to their own or else find a new perspective that might give them a new avenue to search; and Ling had taken cues from both her grandmother and her aunt, traveling again through rural communities to seek local knowledge of prior cultures and using that to find old ruins and religious sites.

Their butterfly myth had even touched the lives of Ilene's daughters, from birth named for two famous foreign goddesses whose virtues she hoped they'd emulate: Athena whose most prized possessions were a dense book on Greek mythology with the pages describing her namesake earmarked, and a precious illustrated edition of Journey to the West (purchased in San Francisco's Chinatown before it was flattened by MUTOs) which she used to motivate herself in Chinese class; Diana who would look at entomologist Dr. Mancini's insect collection with Madison any time Ilene took her to work and who constantly drew self-portraits with insect wings (sometimes also sporting a Wonder Woman-esque costume and a "moth silk lariat").

And generation after generation, without meaning to and without trying to, their research brought them all to Monarch.

And at last, Monarch had brought them to Mothra.

She read the family's lives—between the seven of them, over a combined three centuries of experiences—in seconds, sifting through everything they'd ever known and ever been. I understand, Mothra thought. I'm sorry that I left your family for so long that you felt the need to search so diligently for me. It's sometimes difficult to wrap my mind around how short your lives are—or that you can't pass your memories on to your descendants as I do. I never intended for my gift to be such a burden.

"Well," Huidie said, "maybe I'll forgive you."

"You didn't even have twins," Congdie snipped, "you've got nothing you need to forgive."

"I can decide whether to forgive her on behalf of my family," she said grandly.

I can't remove my modifications from any grown humans, Mothra said, but when they become pregnant, I can change Athena and Diana's children so that they won't parthenogenetically produce twins, if you want.

"I think that decision should be up to them," Ilene said, putting a hand on each of their shoulders. She'd meant when they're old enough to worry about kids, but they each immediately voiced their opinions: "I don't want babies." "I want them to have dragonfly wings!"

I can't give humans dragonfly wings, Mothra thought.

Diana flung her hands up, as though to ask then what good are you?

"They'll think about it," Ilene said.

In the meantime—I can at least answer your questions about where you came from. Images filled their heads: a small fishing community that had popped up on the coast near a hill millennia ago; the hill concealing a subterranean hollow that held one of Mothra's buried eggs; a half dozen excited teens who'd abandoned their chores and ignored the warnings of their families in order to scramble up the hill and inspect the colossal moth; one girl, just a little bit more psychic than her neighbors, who had heard the song stuck in Mothra's head and sang it to her, and as a reward had won for herself and her village stewardship over Mothra's egg.

Ling gasped quietly, and Mei nodded; the hill had collapsed, the nearby flora had been replaced with a small town, and the shore was now a port, but they both recognized the landscape all the same. Ling had visited it to follow up on a myth Mei had recorded there fifty years earlier: a goddess had placed her baby in a cradle near the village and left it under the protection of two attendants, but under the cover of a furious storm, three white snakes had disguised themselves as bolts of lightning to sneak past the attendants and devour the baby. No butterflies in dreams, no girls that heard songs nobody else could hear. And yet it was part of the same story. Two different compasses pointing at the same truth from different directions.

If your family chooses to continue on as my representatives, I can ensure any of your descendants will be born knowing their history as well, Mothra thought, so no matter how many more generations pass, your family won't forget where you came from again. I wouldn't ask you to waste any more lives just trying to find your own past.

"My sister didn't consider her life wasted," Mei said firmly. "Neither do I. Nor do my daughters and granddaughters."

Mothra's mind brushed over the family's memories again, checking for the truth of Mei's proclamation. They'd all lived strange lives; but they'd also lived rich lives, glorious lives full of gods and monsters; and while none of them would have chosen to force such a life on every generation of their family for millennia, each of them would have gladly chosen this life for herself.

I'm glad.

###

Once Mothra and Godzilla had departed, the Chen family beat a hasty retreat before anyone could get close enough to identify them, managed to find two taxis that hadn't fled to the far side of the island at the titans' approach, and returned to their hotel for a late lunch.

As Ilene drilled her children on what they were not going to tell the other kids at school about what they'd done on summer break, and Congdie and Mei tried to talk Huidie into into touring the lava tunnel, Ling emailed Monarch about a small hill along the northeast coast of China that might have the remains of an ancient Mothra egg.

###

They'd traveled far enough that Mothra's mount's name had changed from Gesila to Gojila to Gojira—and soon any human names would cease to touch him at all—before she spoke to him. Do you ever stop to think about the huge impact even tiny actions can have on humans?

Gojira contemplated the question so long and so deeply it felt to Mothra like his brain was trying to form its own weather system. And then, after this prolonged moment of deep meditation, he said, "Nah."

Mothra rapped on his skull with her legs.

"All impacts are huge to something tiny," Gojira said. "Why? Do you?"

When I alter the way my future generations will be born, it's always just a slight tweak to me. I'm only stuck with it for a couple of centuries if it doesn't work out. Then I can declare the experiment a failure and go back to how things were,Mothra thought. But in humans, in the span of a couple of centuries, eight or nine generations can be born whose entire lives will be affected by a tiny tweak. And what about when I can't get back to them in a couple of centuries? What about when it takes millennia? If human society changes enough that what was once a boon becomes a burden...

Gojira considered that. "You can't help if humans change."

Perhaps I could help by not getting involved in the first place.

"How do you know that would help? Maybe what you gave them let their family survive millennia longer than it would have," Gojira said. "Every little thing everyone does permanently changes the future, right? We don't know how the little things now will affect big things millennia later. You just got to see a more obvious consequence of that than most of us do. Don't blame yourself for not predicting the future."

She rapped on his head again. When did you get so smart?

"After hanging out with you."

Still. She fell silent a moment, listening to the sound of the ocean. Straining to hear human ships in the distance. Wondering how their noise disturbed the future in ways she couldn't yet see. Still. I think I should be more careful with humans.

"You're already more careful with them than anybody else I know."

Maybe so; but nobody else Gojira knew was intimately, telepathically aware that, no matter how small and brief humans were, each and every one of them contained a whole, complete, sentient person. An entire brilliant vibrant life that flared and vanished as soon as it had ignited.

And yet they carried on anyway, their societies marching on in defiance of their finite timespans—the way one ember on dry wood could ignite five more could ignite fifty more, the way an inferno was just a billion tiny embers all together, pushing outward and consuming as it went.

Could she be certain she wouldn't smother a few embers by accident? Who was she to play with fire?

They continued silently swimming east.

###

(Replies/reblogs are welcome & encouraged! Check the “source” link below for my masterlist of KOTM fics set in this continuity, as well as my AO3 and Ko-fi links.)

[arcticdementor]

Yesterday, on the Denver Post (I think! It’s a Colorado Newspaper anyway) site I came across a headline that’s so wrong that wrong would be an improvement.

“US tops 500000 Covid-19 cases. Europe looks on in horror.” [For those correcting the “typo” via various means: I think they meant NEW cases.  The article was muddled, but that was the feeling I got. The headline was JUST that.]

Do I need to break it down?

Half a million cases means, of course, a half million tests positive right now. Which means we have almost 0.2% of people positive for a respiratory virus.

…

Let’s then drill down into cases. What the hell are cases, actually? I bet you most people reading that headline think cases are deaths, or at the very minimum hospitalizations.

I want to point out right now even if we had a half million residents in hospitals right now, all it would mean was that the hospitals would not be laying off medical personnel, and perhaps it would cut down on the tik tok dance time for some nurses, but still no, let’s be clear cases aren’t hospitalizations.

And cases aren’t deaths — I have run into people who thought this too — and sure, if we topped half a million deaths it would be bad. Very bad. It would be about five times the mortality of a normal “bad flu year.”

Which when all is said and done would still leave us rather far of “condition zombie apocalypse.”

Why precisely Europe would be looking on in horror at that kind of numbers is something else. But of course, it depends on who in Europe they asked, which countries in Europe, and actually what the hell they mean by Europe or how Europe even heard about our “cases.”

Let me start by saying I have family in Europe. Despite their marked tendency to call me when there are fires in California, because this is “near” Colorado and therefore I must be at risk, I have yet to get a panicked phone call asking me if my sons — even my son who is a medical professional — are okay, or if I — who am notoriously hampered in the lung department and also have a tendency to catch everything that comes through town or even waves from the next town — am being careful, take all precautions, etc.

In fact, while my father in law asks us in every call if health professional son is okay and is taking all precautions, my family in Europe is more worried about whether we all have jobs, because of what this insanity is doing to the US economy. If they mention the dread plague from China, it usually starts with “I don’t understand why the US seems to be so scared. This is what is scaring our own government/s, that they think the US knows something special.”

Uh uh. To an extent, they are in fact looking on in horror, and wondering if we should have put anti-psychotics in the water a while back. In fact, their tone reminds me exactly of the tone I heard around me in 1968 (about the earliest I remember hearing the US mentioned) and it has this undertone of “Whatever the hell is going on in America, can you guys fix it already?” To the extent they are worried about the bug in their own countries, it is because they have this, totally unwarranted, belief that the Americans are possessors and learners of secret knowledge, and that if we are going ape shit, there must be something they aren’t seeing.

…

Who in hell is horrified? Poles? Swedes? Spaniards? Europe, despite the EU is — for purposes of culture and communication — not a version of the US with the countries instead of states. Europe, fragmented into languages and dialects and broken into very, very different cultures (yes, the US has very different cultures per state and region, too, but not that different. For those differences you need to marinade in insularity for a few centuries) is a fragmentation of peoples most of whom until the EU would need a passport (for the cat) to swing a cat, and would need a translator to tell their neighbor to duck while the cat is swung.

If Europe is horrified at our number of cases, exactly why are they so?

Is it because they have no idea that our population is somewhere between 300 million and 350 million? Or is it because their governments lie to them and tell them they’re doing much better? Or is it because their entire information about our country comes via CNN who makes up shit to make it seem like we’re all dropping dead in the streets and then is spun by THEIR individual press, in their individual countries who firmly believe the government in the US has some control over the press, and therefore what they hear via CNN is dressed up to “best case scenario?”

Yeah, I imagine Europe (Whoever the hell is meant by that) looks on in horror at the US. But they also look down in horror at our crime situation, which they believe to be something out of Fast and Furious, our gun ownership (speaking of fast and furious) because — I swear I’m not making this up — they believe we all fight duels in the streets all the time, and our health (in general, not just winnie the flu) situation, because they believe that our hospitals refuse to treat the uninsured, and therefore we’re all piling up dead at the door to the hospitals. (Which of course means they’re horrified. As many decades as they think we’ve been shooting/murdering/refusing care to each other, not to mention the fact that they take those idiotic “hunger” surveys from the Obama years (remember, when they asked if you ate everything you wanted to that day and took a no to mean you were suffering from hunger. (To be fair, most of us are dieting, so that too is not even wrong.)) and assume we’ve been starting for decades. I mean, at this point they probably think the last half million Americans just fell down dead.)

And given the silliness of that picture above, and the bizarre ideas of the trolls who regularly come here to school us about what is “really” going on in America, bring up the most interesting question of all: Who the f*ck actually cares if Europe is “horrified”? They neither pay our taxes nor are in any state to make war on us. They have nothing we want, and know nothing about us and why PRECISELY should we give a d*mn if they’re horrified, elated, jumping for joy, or picking their nose?

Of course, this plays on the insecurities of the pseudo intellectuals with journalism degrees, who have been taught that Marxist Europe is the be all and end all, the pattern card of perfection of which we will forever fall short. They’re afraid that some random European will tell them how backward America is.

I have a solution: leave. Go to Europe. Leave there. Only before you go give up your citizenship, because when you try to come back — and you will. It will in fact take tops 5 years — I want to be able to make sure you’ve learned better.

But this is the kind of nonsensical headline people are being scared with. The ridiculousness is at a point some survey found that Americans thought “10%” of Americans had died of Covid-19.

…

So– what in actual hell? Why do people believe that ten percent of the population have died?

Well, it’s the news. In the few times I had to read a local paper for some reason, or was trapped in front of streaming news, or got input from the MSM in some way, they always fudge “cases” with “cases actually needing treatment” — the second is a fraction of the first — and “deaths” which is a much, much smaller fraction, and even that inflated by the fact that they are counting people dead while positive for covid, instead of people who died of COVID-19.

And always, always, our media sneeringly implies that other countries did much better/are doing much better. Even if they were — they’re not — when is the last time they told us we were so much harder-hit by the flu or the common cold than oh, Spain, and therefore Spain is better? Never?

But no, they’re not. In fact if you take away the cases in places that are hives of humanity, like NYC or Chicago (where being ventilated with a shot through the chest causes COVID-19) our cases are right in the middle of the pack for north European and Scandinavian cultures, whether they locked up or not. Which makes perfect sense, of course, because what actually matters is not the measures but the culture. And in the US, the chances of you coming cheek to jowl with humanity is zero or close to it.

Which, btw, bring us to “But Korea” well, yes, Korea — and other Asian countries — had to do a lot more control and be a lot more proactive because they live in density and proximity and social conviviality that would in fact make most Americans start singing “don’t stand so close to me.”

Look, guys, if this virus hasn’t actually utterly depopulated North Korea? No big.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Bizarre entry to Moon’s orbit as empire fell and a cult flourished

Hamish McDonald

Asia-Pacific editor, Sydney Morning Herald

September 8, 2012

To Moscow with the Moonies! Of all the assignments that can come in a reporter’s career, this had to be the weirdest.

Across my desk at the old Far Eastern Economic Review office in Hong Kong in early 1990 came a letter inviting me to speak at the forthcoming World Media Conference in Moscow, all expenses paid.

It was clear from back-up information that this was ultimately sponsored by the Unification Church. Indeed its founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, would preside in person.

Quibbles about dubious sponsorship were set aside by my boss: this was a genuine news event, one of the more bizarre conjunctions happening as the Soviet system unravelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On arrival at Moscow’s international airport, Moon’s guests were ushered into a shabby VIP room with an equally dubious collection of VIPs, including several former Latin American dictators, the widow of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat and a former vice-president to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

At the Slavyanskaya Hotel, fellow delegates proved an eclectic mix. The most engaging company at the breakfast buffet was Nikolai Tolstoy, a British author of wartime history and a descendant of Russia’s greatest writer, and Sir Alfred Sherman, a lively London political gnome who had been a trusted adviser to Margaret Thatcher.

At the opening session in the main hall, some of America’s most fiercely anti-communist commentators and think-tankers filed in. This was a gathering of hawks in the very heart of the “evil empire” – there to watch its downfall. Some did not trust their eyes, wondering aloud if they were being inveigled into a Soviet front organisation.

Moon and his wife greeted delegates in a reception line. His handshake was perfunctory. The eyes in the granite face barely made contact. If he was the new messiah, it wasn’t much of a blessing.

Rising from a vast podium, Moon began a sermon. It went back to basics in his theology, starting with the original sin, which he said was Eve’s illicit sex with Satan, the unfinished mission of Jesus that Moon himself had taken up by forming the “perfect family”, and the ongoing battle with Satan that would end with Armageddon, fought roughly along the 38th parallel between North and South Korea.

As it went beyond an hour, Moon’s audience of Cold War warriors gazed fixedly at different points of the ceiling, not catching anyone’s eyes.

Next morning in the breakfast line, one of them quipped: “I gotta say, I was rootin’ for Satan.”

My turn to speak came, after a former Japanese vice-minister of transport suggested a network of highways around Asia, so that perfect families could motor over to see one another. I gave a rundown on current Asian affairs. The audience dozed. A few journalistic colleagues smirked.

After the conference, I went on a tour of the Soviet republics in central Asia. Russian settlers gathered fearfully in their nomenklatura clubs and hotels, getting drunk and dancing the lambada. In Ashkhabad, Ukrainian missile officers shared gassy Georgian champagne and wondered in which army they would be the following year. In Samarkand, local Aeroflot pilots filled me with vodka and put me on the flight back to Moscow.

When I arrived, the May Day parade in Red Square had become a shambles, the crowds waving the Russian tricolour and imperial double-headed eagle instead of the hammer and sickle.

With this notch in his pulpit, Moon was on his way to the final stage of his crusade against communism. A year or two later, he visited Pyongyang to meet Kim Il-sung, founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the lifelong political satan in the Moon world view. Kim gave him a licence to set up a car assembly plant.

“They were reconciled,” says Leonid Petrov, a Korea specialist at the University of Sydney. And why not? As Petrov notes, Moon’s “cocktail” of religions and ideologies – Christianity, Confucianism, shamanism and anti-communism – was a mirror-image of Kim’s Juche (self-reliance) mix of nationalism, communism, neo-Confucianism, and Korean nativism.

Both played heavily on the Korean dream of national reunification. Moon was to claim Kim nominated him as the one to bring the two halves together. When Moon died this week, aged 92, it still hadn’t happened.

Cults flourish when empires weaken. In 19th century Korea, as European powers and Japan forced the hermit kingdom open, there was the Tong Hak (Eastern Teaching) movement, which became fiercely anti-foreign, like the Taiping and Boxers in neighbouring China.

Moon’s church grew in a Korea humiliated by 35 years of Japanese annexation, then ravaged by the vicious Korean War. It was one of the exotic faiths, including even Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo (which carried out the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo metro), that were taken up by some Russians in the “crisis of faith” as communism collapsed.

Moon was a prominent lobbyist for South Korea’s military dictator, Park Chung-hee. Moon’s jail term in the US for [document fraud and] tax evasion was seen as a kind of martyrdom by his followers, and a badge of honour among many American neo-cons.

Criticising him was risky. A skinny Presbyterian theology professor, Tahk Myeong-hwan, who set out to expose Moon and other cults, was arrested many times. I am told Tahk was found murdered [outside] his apartment more than a decade ago. He would have angered many fanatics, not just the Moonies.

South Korea is now a prosperous, wired society, where the past that nurtured Moon and the Unification Church is a foreign country for the young. That country still exists across the 38th parallel. 

What strange flowers of belief will emerge there, in North Korea?

Strange flowers of belief ... Unification Church founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

_______________________________________

A representative of Rev. Sun Myung Moon offered a Russian minister $1 million as a personal gift to distribute Moonie textbooks

My experience within the hierarchy of the Moon cult during its years of expansion in Russia and in the CIS

Press Release on the FFWPU by the Department of Communication, Nizhny Novgorod province, Russia

Testimony of Tahk Myeong-hwan who was murdered

World Domination – Sun Myung Moon’s many attempts ended in failure

[newstfionline]

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One-Third of All U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Nursing Home Residents or Workers (NYT) At least 27,600 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, according to a New York Times database. The virus so far has infected more than 150,000 at some 7,700 facilities. Nursing home populations are at a high risk of being infected by—and dying from—the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is known to be particularly lethal to older adults with underlying health conditions, and can spread more easily through congregate facilities, where many people live in a confined environment and workers move from room to room. While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.

Coronavirus shuts the Mexican beer industry down, and the country is running dry (Washington Post) During the bone-dry days of Prohibition, Americans slipped over the border to guzzle beer in Mexico. A century later, Mexican towns are the ones going dry. The government has largely shut down beer production, saying that it is not essential during the country’s coronavirus outbreak. The last bottles of Tecate, Corona, Modelo Especial and Dos Equis for Mexican consumption rolled off the lines in early April. “Many people are desperately searching for beer,” said Raúl Funes, the head of a craft-brew association in Tijuana, just south of San Diego. “It’s like toilet paper.”

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Pandemic shows contrasts between US, European safety nets (AP) The coronavirus pandemic is straining social safety nets across the globe—and underlining sharp differences in approach between wealthy societies such as the United States and Europe. In Europe, the collapse in business activity is triggering wage support programs that are keeping millions on the job, for now. In contrast, in the United States more than 33.5 million people have applied for jobless benefits and the unemployment rate has soared to 14.7%. Congress has passed $2 trillion in emergency support, boosting jobless benefits and writing stimulus checks of up to $1,200 per taxpayer. That is a pattern seen in earlier economic downturns, particularly the global financial crisis and the Great Recession. Europe depends on existing programs kicking in that pump money into people’s pockets. The U.S., on the other hand, relies on Congress taking action by passing emergency stimulus programs. Economist Andre Sapir, a senior fellow at the Bruegel research institute in Brussels, said budget policy in the U.S. plays partly the role that Europe’s welfare system plays because the American welfare system is less generous and a recession can be much harsher on workers.

French parents anguish over sending children back to school (AP) As France prepares to start letting public life resume after eight weeks under a coronavirus lockdown, many parents are deeply torn over a question without a clear or correct answer: Should I send my child back to school? Due to the slow startup, as well as ongoing fears about COVID-19 in hard-hit France, school attendance will not be compulsory right away. Parents and guardians may keep children at home and teachers will provide lessons like they have during the nationwide lockdown. Returning students will find their classrooms running differently. Teachers will wear masks and remind children to social distance from each other and to wash their hands several times a day.

Italy has long been Europe’s wild card. The coronavirus has upped the risk. (Washington Post) After two months of ambulance sirens, mourning and isolation, this is the damage report from Italy: The novel coronavirus death toll has surpassed 30,000. The country is hurtling into its steepest recession in modern times. Tourism has gone bust. Many restaurants and shops lack the cash to ever reopen. The government’s brittle finances are becoming ever more stretched. All the while, many Italians feel embittered and alienated. They are disappointed in the continent’s early response to the pandemic and its fallout. Anti-European sentiment has spiked. So has the uncertainty about what might happen next in Italy’s topsy-turvy politics. Even before it was hit by one of the world’s deadliest outbreaks, Italy was seen as the wild card of Western Europe—flirting on-and-off with populism, sometimes seeming to be only one mismanaged crisis away from becoming the continent’s next Brexit or Greek-style debt disaster. Now that crisis has arrived, and what hangs in the balance is not just Italy’s stability but that of Europe, as well.

In Japan, pandemic brings outbreaks of bullying, ostracism (AP) The coronavirus in Japan has brought not just an epidemic of infections, but also an onslaught of bullying and discrimination against the sick, their families and health workers. A government campaign to raise awareness seems to be helping, at least for medical workers. But it’s made only limited headway in countering the harassment and shunning that may be discouraging people from seeking testing and care and hindering the battle against the pandemic. Apart from fear of infection, experts say the prejudice against those even indirectly associated with the illness also stems from deeply rooted ideas about purity and cleanliness in a culture that rejects anything deemed to be alien, unclean or troublesome. Medical workers risking their lives to care for patients are a main target, but people working at grocery stores, delivering parcels and carrying out other essential jobs also are facing harassment. So are their family members.

Infections rise in Asia (AP) China and South Korea reported new spikes Sunday in coronavirus cases, setting off fresh concerns in countries where outbreaks had been in dramatic decline, and new protests against pandemic restrictions erupted in Germany despite the easing of many lockdowns in Europe. Worldwide, health officials are anxiously watching to see just how much infection rates rise in a second wave as nations and states emerge from varying degrees of lockdown. Later Sunday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was expected to take a different tack, keeping most restrictions in place as he reveals a ‘road map’ for the future of the country that has the most official virus deaths in Europe at over 31,600.

Virus Forces Persian Gulf States to Reckon With Migrant Labor (NYT) The Kuwaiti talk show panelists were holding forth on an issue that the coronavirus has pushed to the forefront of national debate: whether their tiny, oil-rich monarchy should rely as heavily as it does on foreign laborers, who have suffered most of the country’s infections and borne much of the cost of its lockdown. “Go to malls in Kuwait—would you ever see a Kuwaiti working there?” said one guest, Ahmad Baqer. “No. They’re all different nationalities.” Not long after, a South Asian man slipped into the camera frame, serving tea to each panelist from a tray. He appeared three times during the program, his presence unacknowledged except by one panelist who waved away a fresh cup. In the Middle East’s wealthiest societies, the machinery of daily life depends on migrant laborers from Asia, Africa and poorer Arab countries—millions of “tea boys,” housemaids, doctors, construction workers, deliverymen, chefs, garbagemen, guards, hairdressers, hoteliers and more, who often outnumber the native population. They support families back home by doing the jobs citizens cannot or will not take. But as oil revenues plummet, migrant labor camps become coronavirus hot spots and citizens demand that their governments protect them first, the pandemic has prompted a reckoning with the status quo. “The two things that Gulf countries depend on the most, oil prices and foreign workers, these two have been hard hit with the coronavirus,” said Eman Alhussein, a fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “The coronavirus has unleashed all these issues that have been put on the back burner for a long time.”

South Africa’s alcohol ban during lockdown reveals its deadly drinking habits (Washington Post) South Africa has taken some of the most drastic measures in the world to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus, but one has generated fierce debate like no other: a ban on the sale, and even transport, of alcohol. On one side: drinkers who say their rights are being impinged on and bottle shop owners and liquor companies that are going broke. On the other: a public health system that is unburdened by thousands of monthly hospitalizations resulting from accidents and violence attributed to drunkenness. More than 5,000 fewer admissions to trauma units per week can be attributed to the alcohol ban, according to Charles Parry, director of alcohol research at the South African Medical Research Council. The council’s data also shows a decrease in excess deaths in South Africa, suggesting that the lockdown, with its alcohol ban and decrease in vehicle use, may have saved the lives of more South Africans than the 186 that the coronavirus is confirmed to have killed so far. “Instead of patching people up with stabbing wounds, nurses can focus on training how to handle covid cases,” Parry said, referencing covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. “Based on our model, at least 15 people who would have otherwise died from alcohol-related traumas are being saved every single day.”