#change spreading like wildfire cannot be put out as fast as it grows

[tautozhone]

can argue to death with me about how age restrictions on youtube are necessary but i will be DAMNED before i say Hinds Hall deserved to be age restricted. average american child on youtube can listen to H*rbu D*rbu (censoring in hopes to avoid algorithm engagement with the song) which is IOF praising genocidal propaganda, and- big fucking shocker- its not age restricted. i’m 100% sure the only reason Hind’s Hall was restricted was to deliberately suppress and avoid the spread of the song.

[alwaysahiccupandastrid]

Nuffink (or: “How Nuffink Got His Name”)

When their second child is born, it doesn’t all go as it should - something goes wrong. Astrid is left weak and sick, having lost a lot of blood due to complications during the delivery. The baby is a healthy boy, Gods be good, but Hiccup can’t focus on that because of the fact his wife is lying in bed, dying as a fever overtakes her; he has never seen Astrid look so ill, so unlike her usual strong self. Their daughter is kept away from the house, staying with her Nanna Valka whilst her father worries and withdraws; even at two-and-a-half, Zephyr finds herself worrying too - about her mummy and daddy, about the new baby.

Hiccup finds himself praying to the Gods, begging that they do not take Astrid from him; he has already lost his father, his best friend...he cannot lose her too. He knows that he will be lost without her by his side, without her smiles, her intelligence, her bravery, her support. He doesn’t want to live in a world that does not have Astrid in it. He sits by her side all day and all night, hoping that she will get better - she has to. His council - Snotlout, Tuffnut, Ruffnut, Fishlegs, Eret, Gobber, his mother - all band together and do their best to take over his Chief duties for the time being, they alone being the few who know exactly what is wrong. The rest of New Berk knows something is wrong but can only rumor and whisper as they wait for the Chief to tell them himself.

Gothi visits regularly over the following few days, doing everything possible to get Astrid better. No method or medicine is overlooked - there are herbs, mixtures, practices she tries, and everyone waits with bated breath for something (anything) to work. She also checks over the baby in the meantime, confirming that he is indeed a healthy and strong boy, if a little on the small side from being early.

After three and a half days of worrying, of sleepless nights, of praying diligently, Astrid wakes. She’s weak and exhausted, but she smiles at the sight of her husband, laughing quietly when he clutches her to him. “Not getting rid of me that easy,” she jokes. He’s so relieved that he can’t help but laugh too, tears streaming down his face.

When Astrid is strong enough to sit up, they bring the baby to her to nurse; some of the midwives hesitate and suggest that maybe she should take it easy, that one of the other mothers in the village do it instead. Astrid merely rolls her eyes and brings the babe to her breast pointedly. She is then quiet and astounded by the baby boy, running a finger over the tufts of blonde hair so like her own, and she loves him so much so fast. Hiccup is slightly sheepish that he hasn’t seen the baby much in the last few days, but all of that falls away when he sits by his wife’s side and gazes at their son in awe. He has never had his breath taken away like this, except for when their daughter came into the world and changed his life just two and a half years previously.

Zephyr is finally allowed to visit too, now that Astrid is better, and she is impatient to meet her new baby brother. She checks for herself first that her mother is okay, reassuring herself as she cuddles up with Astrid, and then her brother is brought into the room. She grows very quiet, wide-eyed as she peers at the bundle her father holds in his arms.

“Small,” She says finally, voice a mere whisper, and then, “Love baby brother.”

The family sit there for some time as the baby fusses, wanting a feed and screwing up his face until he gets it. When he’s settled, Hiccup realizes something.

“You know, we haven’t got a name for him yet,” He states. “Got any ideas?”

Astrid shrugs and frowns, unsure herself. ‘Stoick’ - the name they had decided on should the baby be a boy - doesn’t really fit their small, blonde son, and they both know it.

Half-joking, Hiccup turns to their daughter and picks her up before putting her in his lap; she giggles at him. “What about you, little lady? Got any ideas?”

Zephyr shrugs too, not really concerned. “Nothing,” she says, though it comes out as “Nuffink”, because of her lisp.

Both of her parents laugh quietly and fondly at this. Encouraged, she giggles again. “Nuffink!”

“Call the baby, ‘Nothing’,” Hiccup jokes, deadpan, and he shakes his head in amusement when she nods. “We can’t call your brother ‘Nothing’, Zeph.”

“Nuffink,” She says again happily, looking at her brother. Neither of her parents take this seriously, still laughing between themselves when Valka comes to collect Zephyr for the night, just to give them both some more time to adjust to the new baby.

As Valka carries Zephyr through the village, they’re approached by the former dragon riders, who dote on her at sight. Zephyr revels in this attention, particularly when Snotlout puts her on his shoulders and lets her steal his helmet.

“So?” Tuffnut asks expectantly. “What’re they calling him?”

“Baby,” Zephyr says before Valka can explain there’s no name yet, and the little girl beams with excitement. “Nuffink! Baby Nuffink!”

She giggles at her own joke, and the adults are all amused. After a moment, Tuffnut muses “Heh, Nuff-ink. Hey, that’s actually a good name!”

Ruffnut nods in agreement. “Yeah - he could be one of us, Tuff!”

It becomes a running joke by the next morning; whenever anyone asks what the Chief’s new baby is called, someone replies “Nuffink, according to young Zephyr”. It spreads through the village like wildfire.

Hiccup goes to greet their friends in the morning, only to find himself face to face with several people eager to see “Nuffink”. For a moment he’s confused - and then he realizes and is astounded. “That’s...That’s not his actual name.”

“Yeah it is,” Snotlout informs him. “Zeph said so.”

Hiccup tries to convince his friends that his newborn son is not in fact called “Nuffink”, but his friends don’t listen.

“Zeph’s next in line, right?” Tuffnut reminds him. ��Whatever she says goes.”

It shouldn’t surprise him that his friends take orders from his two year old daughter more than they do him, it really shouldn’t.

“It’s not his name,” Hiccup insists, mostly because he knows Astrid will murder him if he doesn’t make this clear.

“Then what name did you pick for him?”

“Well...Nothing ye-“

“So it IS Nuffink!” Tuffnut interrupts triumphantly.

“It is NOT-“

But they’re all talking over him. Hiccup deflates, sighing as he turns to go back into the house. He is not looking forward to explaining this to Astrid. In truth, they still haven’t been able to come up with any other names, and they can’t keep calling their son “the baby” forever.

And so it sort of just starts to stick.

“Nuffink!” Zephyr cries when she comes to see him again, excited and laughing happily.

“Nuffink is so cute!” Fishlegs gushes when he comes over that afternoon, unable to contain himself.

“Aww, lil Nuff is sleeping,” Tuffnut says to his twin.

Ruffnut nods in agreement. “Hey, we should make him an honorary -nut - Nuffnut!”

Astrid nearly throws them both out of the house right then and there.

Unfortunately, it starts to catch on with everyone else too. Gobber visits with a small toy hammer, exclaiming he’s excited to see little Nuffink. Eret visits with gifts too, and when he’s allowed to hold the baby he grins. “He’s a chip off the old block, Hiccup - Nuffink will do us all proud.”

Even Valka starts calling him that, much to Hiccup’s chagrin.

“Mum, no...”

“Oh, but it suits him, son,” She tells him cheerfully, enamored by her new grandson. “It has its own charm, don’t you think?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” He mutters for himself dryly. “I mean, you did call me ‘Hiccup’.”

“And you turned out to be the strongest of them all!” She reminds him fondly, and he feels his annoyance drift away slightly.

Soon enough, even Hiccup and Astrid are calling him that - it just happens, despite them trying not to give into it.

“Well, at least he won’t have to live up to anyone,” Astrid sighs, swaddling their son in furs to keep him warm one morning. “Nuffink...well, we can make it work. We’ll make it great, won’t we, Nuff?”

Nuffink gurgles happily at her, quite unconcerned. She smiles, pressing a kiss to her son’s forehead as Hiccup chuckles fondly at her.

“There are worse names,” He reminds her. “He could be a Hiccup, like me, or...or a Snotlout.”

She narrows her eyes at him, though he sees the playful smirk tugging at her mouth. “We are never - and I mean never - naming one of our children after a Jorgenson, Hiccup.”

Hiccup laughs, and she laughs too in amusement. “Well, thank Thor we can agree on that, at least.”

Perhaps it’s mostly because their daughter picked it, but they both grow to love the name quickly - almost as quickly as their family grows to love their son himself.

[samanthabrielle]

Gendry x Arya [after the proposal]

(I’ve been crying since this morning because of episode 4, I rewatched the scene over 10 times today already. I know they love each other and we could not expect Arya to say yes to that, but all our hearts are breaking for Gendry and this is something I wanted to think to comfort myself everything would still turn out good. I’m assuming things happening behind what is seen in the series. Enjoy reading and thank you if you do.) 

***

His head was spinning. He stood there frozen, staring at his feet. Each twang from her bow was like a snap on his ears. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, he didn’t really know, all he felt was his stomach lurching, gurgling and then heaving. His feet was cold from the wind. He slowly dragged himself out of the storage. Arya was saying something but he doesn’t here it anymore. Drunk with all that he heard. His head swimming. He felt the cold bite his cheeks and realize he was already in the courtyard.

He started towards the forge, to keep himself warm. But when he got there, no one has stoked the fire. It took him twice as long as it should have to make the fire. His cold hands was barely able to move. Alone in the forge, he glanced at the glass strewn across the table. Metal scraps and a bit of cloth. He found himself looking longingly at the entrance, even with opened eyes, he could almost see her standing there, a brow raised as she watched him hammer iron. He shook his head once, twice, and again to push the memory away. 

He clapped his hands, the echo louder than he expected. He headed out to grab the wasted breast plates and armor he collected earlier today. He knew nothing but this. This is what he was good at. This he knew perfectly well. He slammed the armor on the cluttered table and searched for his hammer. 

***

She stood there watching him silently. She had no words to say anymore. Nothing she can say will change what she has already said. She was definitely not taking her word back. She was no lady. She thought he already knew that. She’s been saying it over and over again and she doesn’t understand how can he not understand that. She was infuriated, she felt as if he’d back her down in one corner. But his eyes, his eyes were no longer a storm. His eyes was what made her more infuriated. There was something missing in those eyes. She didn’t understand how to change it again. To bring back the fire and storm it had just a few minutes ago. The glint in his eyes as he told her he loved her. That she was beautiful. That she worth all those things. She stood there trying to shoot more arrows, when he suddenly lurched forward, as if to be sick, but kept moving forward instead, as if not seeing her, leaving quietly and stumbling across the courtyard. 

She didn’t want to follow him. She knew he needed time. Needed to accept her answer. 

But she argued herself as she raced to the battlements. Looking over the stones to see his slumped figure in the darkness as he made his way back to the forge. Stopping randomly and swaying again as if he was drunk. He went inside the forge and she could no longer see. She wanted to make sure he was alright but thought better than following him there. He needs time to accept it. It would be unfair for her to keep on giving him false hope. She knows what she needs to do, and bringing him with her will not be a very wise decision. She knew he’ll do anything for her. That was exactly the problem. 

She willed herself to get back to her chambers, had to drag her own feet from turning back. 

Sansa was on her way back too. Arya didn’t even notice her turning the corner. Sansa stared at her sister before taking a step towards her.

“The Dragon Queen has been giving lands and titles tonight. Did you hear?” Sansa’s straight face was not enough for Arya to be convinced she didn’t know exactly who she was talking about.

“I heard” biting her lip, Arya knew Sansa was asking more than that. 

“His loyalty cannot be bought though.” Sansa searched her sister’s face for the answer she was looking for, but Arya’s mask was sturdy, her eyes fixed on the chamber doors they were approaching.

“No, they cannot.” Arya turned to her door, “Good night Sansa.” she said without facing her sister. Her stomach lurching as if she was to go sick. Sansa still stood behind Arya’s door, thinking whether she should ask more questions, but thought better of herself and walk to her chambers.

Arya bit her lip hard, until she tasted blood. She closed her eyes, but all she can see was his blue eyes, deep as the ocean, staring at her. His eyes will never be the same, she thought. The storm was gone. They became empty pits of ocean water. She opened her eyes but she still can’t get it out of her head. She pulled of her cloak and layers of clothing and slipped in to her bed clothes, pulling all the blankets close to her. Her stomach felt as if she had a batch of bad eggs. It was a pain she never felt before, growing and spreading to her insides like wildfire. She was having trouble breathing and had to sit up in her bed, her arms felt tingling and she closed her fists close to her heart, feeling its beat as it drummed out of her chest. Her face stinging as if she was swarmed by bees. It was then that she realized she was crying. She buried her head in her hands and felt a river of tears in her face. She doesn’t know how she slept, curled up at one corner of her bed, her face smothered in a pillow as she cried herself to sleep.

***

Gendry was on his sixth armor when he realized the sun was already up. His arms were covered in soot and ash. He was covered in sweat and soot in the middle of the forge, his ragged breathing and the singing metal was the only thing he knew in this world. It was Davos who had to slam 3 swords on his table before he pulled himself out of the trance he has been in.

“I thought you were celebrating your Lordship all night, not cooped up here to work.” His eyebrows were raised as if to ask his problem.

“There’s a lot of work to be done.” He mumbled, turning up the breast plate he’s been hammering, smoothing the surface before hammering on it again.

Davos came round his table before standing in front of Gendry again. His eyes squinting at him as if something was there to be seen. But whatever he saw, he did not bother pointing out. Davos simply picked up one of the armors he’s finished working on the whole night. 

“You were not in the council this morning.” Davos made his voice clear over the hammering that was growing louder and louder. His eyes were focused on the metal armor, but Gendry knew the old man was watching him carefully.

“No need for me to be there, I’m better working here in the smithy.” Gendry did not bother hiding the anger in his tone anymore. He just wanted to be out with it. He wanted to be left alone as soon as possible.

They both stood there quietly as they both listened to the clang and bang of the hammer against the armor for what seemed to be hours.

Finally Davos broke his silence “being lord of Storm’s End will suit you.”

“I am no lord of anything.” he quickly answered before hammering too fast, too hard, causing his hard work to go to waste by bending the arm plate out shape. He sighed in frustration and chucked the arm plate to the fire, causing Davos to jump at his sudden burst of anger. Gendry took his hammer and almost slammed it on the table too, but caught himself and thought better of it. He simply let it fall on the table before slumping his shoulders and headed back to the store room, wanting to be left alone. 

But Davos followed him quietly and watched him sit by his makeshift cot. Gendry picked up the bucket of water and clean cloth and he started to wipe the soot of his face, hands and arms. 

Davos sighed in resignation and left Gendry alone in his thoughts, thinking better than to bombard him with anymore questions. “We’re leaving for King’s Landing this afternoon. Jon will want you to join him once you’ve gathered your men.” Davos approached him carefully, putting a hand over his shoulder “You’re a good man lad. Whatever may have been her reason, I’m sure you’ll come to terms with it.” Gendry’s eyes snapped up to look the old man in his face, worn and tired, but the old man gave him an encouraging nod. Gendry only nodded as he dipped his head to look at his feet again. He heard the rustling of robes and when he looked up he was alone again.

***

He was not in the dining hall all day. Arya waited to see if he would look for her this morning. Her eyes raked the courtyard but found no sign of him. She did not dare go near the forge in case she won’t be able to stop herself from talking to him again. It was Davos she sees climbing the stairs as she made her way to the walls of the castle. “My lady.” he greeted, his eyes sweeping her from head to toe. She felt his gaze lingering longer than usual, but his face was full of ... regret? She cannot be sure. She cleared her throat before walking away. “He’s a good lad my lady, I wish you knew that.” She could still feel his eyes behind her but Arya froze at his words.

Her mind went racing in an instant. She closed her eyes and bit her lip as she tried to search her tongue for an answer. She spun on the heels of feet, facing the old man and stared at his eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Lord Gendry, my lady. He’s a good lad.” Davos had a pained look in his eyes, he shook his head.

“I know that Sir Davos. And please don’t call me that. Its Arya.” she said it icily. Her tone very much that of Sansa’s when she commands. Arya turned again and walked quickly to her chambers. She clutched her heart once she closed the door behind her. Biting back the tears that threatened her eyes again.

***

A week has passed and Gendry has lived in the forge since, refusing to go out even for meals, Keepley started to bring him bowls of rice by the second day he refused to go out. The Hound even brought him ale the fort night and asked to have a sword. Gendry saw no signs of her. He couldn’t stop himself from hoping she would come, a new wish for her weapon in hand. But every time he saw a glimpse of a furred cloak, it was not hers. He stomped and hammered once more after realizing she won’t come. He wanted to bash his hands in his own hammer, but he can never do it. By the end of a quarter moon, he finished all the armors and swords, and arrows needed for the troops. He laid down in bed half-asleep, looking up at the ceiling when he heard it. As if the wind carried it down to him, her voice was like that of an angel, he wasn’t sure if he dreamed it. “Gendry” just his name, as if called by the howling wind. It was all he needed to be fully awake. He sat right up and squinted in the pitch black darkness of the night. A blow of the wind seem to pass and it was quiet again. He let himself lie awake the rest of the night, thinking over and over again about what she said. But in the end, he wanted nothing but to hold her again, to feel her lips against his, to feel her warm hands on his neck as she reached for him. 

*** She closed the door swiftly and quietly behind her. She sighed in relief to be back in her chambers. She wan’t able to stop herself tonight. She was leaving tomorrow and she wanted to see him for the last time. His face was still half- covered in soot when he slept. She wanted nothing but to take the cloth by his table and wipe his face. To feel his warm cheeks against he palm. To feel his warms hands against her waist and his sturdy arms around her. To see the glint of the storm in his eyes again. But she knew better than to wake him. Instead she said his name over and over again in her head, as if a prayer, but when she breathed, she may have whispered his name. It was enough to wake him in the dead of night, but she knew he won’t be able to see her as she quickly stepped into the darkness. She can’t let him know she was there, he was in enough pain as it is. She couldn’t bare seeing those hollow ocean pits again when she broke his heart. 

She crawled back in her bed that felt cold even under the furs. It was as if the Night King himself was in her room, forcing her to freeze dead into the night.

***

[touchmyhobi]

Professor Kwon: Chapter IV

Genre: Teacher AU, Smut, Fluff, Angst.

Word Count: 3,119

Chapter: 4/?

Pairing: G-Dragon x Reader

Warnings: I know I said there was gonna be smut here but I changed how I’m going to plan my chapters so you’re just gonna have to hold on until then ;))

Although I hadn’t lived there long, the light brown hallway leading to my apartment had become a huge comfort for me. I observed each pathway the patterns of carpet could take as I slowly walked down the corridor, using the time to clear my mind of Mr. Kwon’s strange mood shifts. Just as I found a new intricacy to follow, my shoulder hit something, causing me to lose my balance and fall backward.

“Shit! I’m so sorry, I should have been paying more attention. Are you ok?”

I looked up to see an oddly familiar stranger peering down at me with a hand outstretched and offering assistance. As I cautiously took the help, my eyes analyzed the man’s every feature in an attempt to make a connection. His brown hair was quite long and styled into a middle part. However, his most obvious features were his sharp, serious eyes and beautifully tan skin.

“Are you ok?” he repeated his question.

“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. It was my fault anyways, I always daydream when I wander down this hall,” I tried to laugh it off.

“No, it’s all on me. I was too busy staring at my phone to even notice you,” he apologized yet again. However, the contorted face of worry did little to help me match his features to that of those I have met.

“Don’t worry about it,” I reiterated, causing the man to look down at his feet and that’s when I recognized him. “So do you live on this floor?” I asked.

“Oh no, but my girlfriend lives in apartment 26,” he pointed behind him as he spoke.

“That’s where I know you from!” I exclaimed, much to his confusion.

“Excuse me?”

“I live in apartment 26 as well. Your girlfriend is my cousin!” I explained, but his face was still twisted with confusion. “What I mean is, I saw you over the other morning when I was leaving for school. I’m Y/N by the way”

“Oh, well it’s nice to finally meet you Y/N. I’m Youngbae,” he looked as if he was going to speak again until his phone began vibrating uncontrollably. “Listen, I have to get going but next time I’m over we’ll get to know each other.”

With that, he was speeding off down the hall before I could even respond. I watched him as he disappeared, before shaking my head and skipping to the door of my apartment.

“Ji Soo! I’m home!” I exclaimed. However, she did not respond. “Ji Soo?”

Suddenly, a head popped out of the bathroom and a hyperactive Ji Soo came barrelling toward me.

“Hello lovely. How are your one on one sessions with Mr. Kwon going? Did you kiss him yet?” she giggled as she wrapped her arms around my waist and clung to me like a koala bear.

“No, Ji Soo!” I scolded her with a smack to the arm. “We’ve done nothing but strictly school work. I can promise you that.”

“Ugh, boring!” she yelled loud enough to create a minor echo. “You need to get in on that action soon before you miss your chance.”

“Enough Ji Soo!” I raised my voice at her, growing tired of the teasing. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What action have you been getting?” I interrogated her. “I just met your boyfriend in the hallway.”

Suddenly, Ji Soo’s eyes widened and her face changed to one of concern.

“You didn’t!” she nearly shrieked.

“Oh I did! Why didn’t you tell me you had a boyfriend!”

“Listen to me Y/N. I can’t tell you why but you need to stay away from him. There’s a reason I don’t want you to be around when my friends are over and he is part of that reason. So please, do not speak to him. Ever,” she warned me and the frantic look her in eyes scared me into compliance.

I nodded and swallowed nervously. Ji Soo looked so far away, as if the cousin I had known all my life was hidden and longing to be released. Suddenly her phone vibrated in her hand and her face contorted into an undecipherable expression.

“I need to go again kiddo, I might not see you tomorrow either. Take care of yourself okay? Promise me you’ll actually eat supper for once tonight?” I promised and she pulled me into a desperate hug. “I love you Y/N.”

“I love you too Ji Soo,” I mumbled into her shoulder. “Please stay safe.”

She pulled away and looked at me with an apologetic expression before running towards the door.

My heart sank with worry. Ji Soo’s taste in men had frequently gotten her into trouble in the past and I could see it unraveling before me once again. But, no matter how bad the situation ever got, she always managed to find a way out. With a sigh, I dismissed my worries and prayed that this would once again be one of those circumstances.

Staying true to the promise I made her, I grabbed the food Ji Soo left me in the fridge from yesterday and set up my laptop at the kitchen table. I pulled out the notes Mr. Kwon had given me and decided to work on my sonnet to take my mind off of Ji Soo.

My mind refused to grasp the words on the page and soon numerous lines faded into one giant black abyss.

-

“Many sonnets have been written on the topic of lust. Most notably forbidden lust,” Mr. Kwon looked at me from behind his desk. A devilish smirk teased his lips as he made his way towards my desk. “You’ve felt that before, right Y/N? That overwhelming feeling you get when someone is so close and so willing but you have to restrain yourself simply because, it’s the ‘right’ thing to do?”

I swallowed, preparing my dry mouth to speak only to discover my inability to form words. Mr. Kwon’s face was now mere centimetres in front of mine, staring daggers into my eyes.

“You’ve felt it haven’t you? The immense tension. That heat in the very core of your being whenever that certain someone is around. It’s thrilling isn’t it? Imagine what it would be like if you acted on it,” he was closer than ever. His hand had snuck onto mine and soon he was running his fingertips gently up my arm.

I couldn’t move or speak. I was frozen in place and I began to panic as I struggled to communicate with my provocative professor.

“Admit it Y/N, we’re both aching for it. Make your move,” with that he leaned in and I finally managed to release the tension in my muscles and move toward him.

Suddenly, I woke up only to find myself lying on the floor with Mr. Kwon’s course outline held tightly against my chest. As I regained consciousness, I realized my steamy exchange with my teacher was all just another one of his malicious appearances in my dreams. In a bout of frustration, I sat back up at the table determinedly and proceeded to do exactly as I was told in my dream and write a sonnet about forbidden lust.

The next morning I made the dreaded trek to school with the poem tucked away safely in my book bag. With each step I took toward Mr. Kwon’s room, I felt a strange burn building in my stomach. However, the moment I entered the room, the heat exploded and spread like wildfire to the rest of my body. Without even bothering to look at my professor, I looked down and made my way to an empty seat near the back of the class. I didn’t dare look up until my temperature had cooled and when I did I found Mr. Kwon staring at me with confusion woven into the lines on his forehead.

My gaze shot back down to my desk immediately and I stared at the carvings in the wood until I heard his voice.

“Now that everyone is settled let’s get started,” was all I heard before I spaced out; my mind now occupied by much more pressing matters than grammar.

Am I being too bold? Is he going to tell me off when he reads it? Am I going to look like a fool?

I was treading into very risky waters. Although it wasn’t blatantly about him, the poem was obvious enough that the risk of him understanding the inspiration was all too real.

“We’re going to begin a novel study as you all may know. I hope you’ve all brought your books today. I’m going to give you the rest of class to begin your novels if you haven’t yet. You should have three chapters done by next Wednesday,” he instructed the class before turning around to erase the words he had scribbled on the whiteboard mere minutes ago.

Fuck, I totally forgot.

I must have been so focused on the poem that I forgot to check my other due dates. Stress immediately overwhelmed me as I now had to worry about Professor Kwon’s reaction to not only my poem but my lack of preparation as well.

To avoid looking like I was doing nothing, I took out my notebook and finished writing out some definitions for my philosophy class. Hoping to God my absence of a novel did not catch my teacher’s eye.

Nearly twenty minutes into the reading time, footsteps rang out within the depths of my ears. The distinct sound of expensive dress shoes clicking against the ground. I knew who it was, but I refused to face him. As the footsteps reached my side I heard them come to a sudden halt and I immediately immersed myself into shamelessly not doing the assigned work. Much to my surprise, his footsteps resumed yet again and before I knew it, class was over and everyone was collecting their things in an impossibly fast blur. I struggled to keep up with the pack and ultimately ended up being the last student to exit the classroom.

I approached Professor Kwon’s desk. Looking up only to meet his suspicious gaze.

“I - ahem - I finished my sonnet,” my shaky hand delivered the papers to his steady one.

“I’ll take a look at this tonight. Thank you Y/N,” he said and I started for the door only to be stopped by his gentle voice. “Oh and I expect you to have your independent study novel on your desk by tomorrow. I appreciate you putting so much effort into extra studies but you cannot let your main class work falter as a result,” I nodded again but was met the same disruption. “Also, take care of yourself Y/N. You seem off today.”

If you only knew, I thought to myself before finally exiting the room.

The train ride home was comfortably lonely. As I normally spent the entire commute home with Seungri talking my ear off, having some time to collect my thoughts in seclusion was more than welcome. Unfortunately, that peace of mind proved to be short-lived.

“Why didn’t you get off at your stop?” a soft, foreign voice whispered from behind me, shocking me like a jolt of electricity. Before I knew what my body was doing, my hand had connected with the side of the stranger’s face. Only to discover he was not a stranger at all. He was Seungri.

“Why would you do that? I thought you were a stalker?!” I scolded the boy as he clutched his rapidly reddening cheek.

“I thought you would recognize my voice!” he whimpered.

I looked around the train at the scowling faces surrounding the scene Seungri had inspired. I sighed heavily in an attempt to gather what little patience I had left.

“I’ve only talked to you once. How would I know your voice?” I pulled his hand away from his rosy flesh to survey the damage. “I’m sorry for hitting you. Next time please just approach me face first so I don’t feel like I’m about to be abducted.”

“Fine,” he pouted, continuing to play up the hurt little baby act.

I rolled my eyes and proceeded to treat him like the child he wants to be and ignore his tantrum. Turning my attention back to the window in front of me, it didn’t take long for the boy beside me to suffer from attention deficit.

“Well?” he urged, causing me to stare at him expectantly. “Why aren’t you getting off the train?”

“Why aren’t you?” I shot back.

“Because we’re hanging out. I go where you go.”

“Since when?” I began to challenge him until I realized what would truly deter him. “You know what? Fine. If you want to hang out so bad then you can come along with me to the bookstore.”

“Why would you want to do that?” the disgust in his voice was evident.

“Because I need a book for class. If you don’t like it, don’t come!”

“No, no! I love the bookstore, go there every day!” he slapped his hands together and rubbed them as if he were about to sink his meaty paws into a large feast.

I just stared at him in disbelief.

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Thank you!” he beamed.

“I didn’t mean it in a good way,” I muttered.

Seungri must not have heard my final comment as he jumped straight into another topic. As he rambled on about the party he somehow ended up at on the weekend, I began to realize something about Seungri; he genuinely loved the sound of his own voice. Which surprisingly made his company quite easy to swallow. Albeit annoying, I soon realized that I could just space out and leave a few “hmm’s” and “ahh’s” of understanding to keep him validated. Maybe we could be friends, I thought to myself as the train halted at my stop and I exited, Seungri following diligently behind.

Jiyong’s POV

“Lee Seungri. Fifth year student, hoping to be final year student. I’ve written this paper five years in a row. Therefore, do you need to know more?” I spoke the final sentence of my recurring student’s four sentence paper with a sigh.

“When is that boy ever going to leave my class,” I chuckled to myself as I gave him a zero and moved on to the rest of the papers waiting to be marked.

I reached for what felt like the final paper, but as my eyes met the 12 point font I soon realized it was not an essay but rather, a sonnet.

Eyes locked on the sheet below me, I retrieved my special crimson pen. A strange urge built within me. I longed to actually use that marker of error this time. Why? I didn’t know. I didn’t want her to fail. In fact, I desired her success. However, that itch remained and with that I immersed myself in her thoughts.

Wicked whispers of naive schoolgirl desire,

Tantalize my ears long before my tardy eyes.

A pulse pounding in my veins, a fear of fire.

My averse pupils become gossip’s allies.

Fleeting glances of observation trace,

Features that could grant any absolution

Inky strands frame a benevolent face.

The forbidden fruits of bland institution.

Omens of red flash hazardously in my mind,

Resistant, I heed the inflamed warning.

But discovery finds his grace entwined,

In a silken, dreamy web before morning.

With lust now on his lips, I feign control.

Whilst frantically seeking the shreds of sanity he stole.

My arms went numb and my heart began to pound until my chest rattled like a cage. The realization of what this poem was about struck me immediately. However, this violent physical reaction I was having was not a negative one. Although the situation was taboo and inappropriate, it only made me more excited. My student had feelings for me, lustful feelings. Feelings that I reciprocated. A smirk caught the edge of my lip as I re-read the poem and felt just how frustrated she was becoming.

However, as excited as I was, I knew I shouldn’t get too ahead of myself. For all I know her feelings may have been unknown to her, totally subconscious. So I decided to lay low and wait until she makes the first move. I’ve worked too hard to achieve my position and I would not let a mere hunch jeopardize my life.

With that thought, an alarm went off on my phone, signalling the beginning of my class.

“Y/N, when are you going to tell me what’s going on?!” a familiar voice echoed through the exodus of students filing through the door.

“Seungri! Enough! Stop asking!” my head shot up at the sound of the second voice and my heart sank.

Y/N was staring back at Seungri with an aggressive, warning glare.

If looks could kill, I thought to myself.

However, that glare was beside the point. What truly caught my eye was her unusual state of appearance. From the puffy eyes, black bucket hat, and uncharacteristically oversized clothing, I could tell she had a rough night. I couldn’t hold myself back…

“Seungri, do us all a favour and find your seat,” the blonde-haired boy stared at me briefly before turning to Y/N and sending her the most indiscreet eye roll I had ever witnessed. “Far away from Y/N,” I added and he sighed pathetically before stomping away. Without missing a beat, I looked at the hidden girl in front of me. “Are you okay?” My words took form in a whisper as I was careful not to show too much emotion.

“I’m fine,” she spoke without looking beyond the rim of the hat that was currently eating her alive. “You didn’t have to do that. To Seungri, I mean. It’s my fault for making things obvious”.

“What do you mean? What did you make obvious?” I asked as my head clouded with confusion.

“It’s nothing,” she peered up at me for a split second. Her eyes looked nervous, scared almost. “Thanks anyways”.

I tried to stop her. I nearly reached out to grab her sweatshirt clad arm, but I restrained myself. I had to remind myself that she was a student and grabbing a student would only spur an investigation. Instead, I watched her retreat to a seat at the back of the room. Far away from me.

The patient gaze of twenty-something students brought me back to reality. Although tearing my heart away from the faceless girl proved to be a more of a struggle, I proceeded with my lesson. My torn priorities taking solace in the fact that I would have her alone after class. I just hoped she’d reveal to me her face.

[newstechreviews]

Imagine Massachusetts on fire, literally the entire state engulfed in flames. That is how much land has already been ravaged—at least 5 million acres—in the wildfires of California, Washington and Oregon. Put another way, in just a few weeks these fires have burned as much land as was destroyed by a decade of using napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. With temperatures over 100°F, toxic air now blankets tens of millions of people, power outages have afflicted vast regions, and dozens have already died from the blazes. Air quality in West Coast cities has ranked among the world’s worst, with Portland’s air at points being almost three times more unhealthy than in notoriously polluted cities like New Delhi. The scenes of red skies out of America’s West have an unreal quality to them, as if they come from a different planet. In a sense they do—they are portents of the future.

There are many proximate reasons for these forest fires—fireworks, campfires, a stray spark—but there is one large cause that is blindingly clear: human actions that have led to climate change. To put it simply, the world is getting hotter, and that means that forests get drier. A yearslong drought, which ended in 2017, killed 163 million trees in California—and that deadwood proved to be the kindling for this year’s devastation. A scientific study led by Stanford, released in April, found that California’s five worst wildfires—whether measured by deaths, destruction or size—all occurred during 2017 and 2018. And we can be sure of one thing: it’s going to get worse. Temperatures continue to rise, drought conditions are worsening, and the combined effect of all these forces will multiply to create cascading crises in the years to come.

Cascades, in which small sparks cause great conflagrations, are happening all around us. Think of COVID-19, which began with a viral speck that was likely lodged in a bat somewhere in China—and is now a raging global pandemic. While viruses have been around forever, they mostly originate in animals and, when they jumped to humans, remained largely local. But over the past few decades, many viruses have gone global, causing widespread epidemics—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika and now the novel coronavirus. In a recent essay in the scientific journal Cell, the country’s top infectious—disease expert, Anthony Fauci, and one of his colleagues, David Morens, warn that we “have reached a tipping point that forecasts the inevitability of an acceleration of disease emergencies.” In other words, get ready for more pandemics. The fundamental reason behind this acceleration, they argue, is human action—the ever increasing scope and pace of development.

Damon Winter—The New York Times/Redux. A housing development on the edge of undeveloped desert in Cathedral City, Calif., on April 3, 2015, during the state’s punishing drought.

We have created a world in overdrive. People are living longer, producing and consuming more, inhabiting larger spaces, consuming more energy, and generating more waste and greenhouse gas emissions. The pace has accelerated dramatically in the past few decades. Just one example: a 2019 U.N. report, compiled by 145 experts from 50 countries, concluded that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.” It noted that 75% of all land has been “severely altered” by human actions, as has 66% of the world’s marine environments. Ecosystems are collapsing, and biodiversity is disappearing. As many as 1 million plant and animal species (of 8 million total) are threatened with extinction, some within a few decades. All these strains and imbalances produce dangers—some that can be foreseen, and others that cannot.

The pandemic, for its part, can be thought of as nature’s revenge. The way we live now is practically an invitation for animal viruses to infect humans. Why do diseases seem to be jumping from animals to humans at a faster pace in recent decades? As cities expand, they bring humans closer and closer to the habitat of wild animals, making it more likely that virus in a bat could be transmitted to a pig or a pangolin and then to humans. Developing countries are modernizing so quickly that they effectively inhabit several different centuries at the same time. In Wuhan and other such cities, China has built an advanced, technologically sophisticated-economy—but in the shadows of the skyscrapers are wildlife markets full of exotic animals, a perfect cauldron for animal-to-human viral transfer. And the people who live in these places are more mobile than ever before, quickly spreading information, goods, services—and disease.

Our destruction of natural habitats may also be to blame. Some scientists believe that as humans extend civilization into nature—building roads, clearing land, constructing factories, excavating mines—we are increasing the odds that animals will pass diseases to us. COVID-19 appears to have originated in bats, which are hosts to many other viruses, including rabies and Ebola. Bats used to live farther from humans. But as we encroached on their habitats, their diseases increasingly became our diseases. “We are doing things every day that make pandemics more likely,” said Peter Daszak, an eminent disease ecologist. “We need to understand, this is not just nature. It is what we are doing to nature.”

As economic development moves faster and reaches more people, we are taking ever greater risks, often without even realizing it. Think about meat consumption. As people get richer, they eat more meat. When this happens globally, the effect is staggering: about 80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. (And that doesn’t even count fish.) But supplying this enormous demand comes at great cost to the environment and our health. Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide yet take up 80% of the earth’s farmland. Meanwhile, meat is now produced on a vast scale with animals packed together in gruesome conditions. Most livestock—an estimated 99% in America, 74% around the world—comes from factory farms. (Organically farmed, grass-fed meat is a luxury product.) These massive operations serve as petri dishes for powerful viruses. “Selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost genetically identical,” Vox journalist Sigal Samuel explains. “That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more virulent.” The lack of genetic diversity removes the “immunological firebreaks.”

Sebastián Liste—NOOR for TIME. A slaughterhouse in the Brazilian state of Rondônia in February 2019. The company boasted an expansion would allow a cow to be killed every eight seconds at the facility.

Americans should know better. The country has experienced several ecological disasters, most notably the 1930s Dust Bowl. The event is seared in the American imagination. The bitter tale of desperate Dust Bowl migrants inspired John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—describing the plight of people who could be called America’s first climate refugees. And it is a story of human actions causing a natural reaction.

The Great Plains are the semiarid places east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River. The wind blows fast over these lands, sometimes scarily so. Over centuries, probably millennia, nature’s solution was to grow grass that held the loose topsoil in place. But by the late 19th century, as the pioneers headed west, lured by promises of fertile farmland, they tilled the prairies, turning the grassy plains into wheat fields. The farmers felled trees that served as windbreaks, and turned the soil over and over, until there was no grass and the topsoil had been reduced to a thin, loose layer just covering the hard land beneath.

Then came bad weather. Starting in 1930, the region was hit by four waves of drought. With the drought came winds—ferocious gales that blew off the entire layer of topsoil with a force that few humans had seen before and kicked up dust storms that blackened the sky. By 1934, the topsoil covering 100 million acres of land had blown away. The heat intensified the suffering—1934 was the nation’s hottest year on record until 1998. Thousands died and millions fled. The farmers left behind were plunged into a decade of poverty.

We are tempting fate similarly every day. We are now watching the effects of climate change on almost every part of the natural environment. It is bringing a warmer climate to more of the world, thus creating more hospitable conditions for disease. It is also turning more land into desert—23 hectares every minute, by the U.N.’s estimate. In 2010, Luc Gnacadja, who headed the organization’s effort to combat desertification, called it “the greatest environmental challenge of our time,” warning that “the top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.” Thirty-eight percent of the earth’s surface is at risk of desertification. Some of it is caused less by global climate change than by something more easily preventable: the overextraction of water from the ground. One of the world’s most crucial water sources is the Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls through the Great Plains and supplies about a third of the groundwater used to irrigate American farms. This seemingly bottomless well is in fact being emptied by agribusiness so fast that it is on track to shrivel by 70% in less than 50 years. If the aquifer ran dry, it would take 6,000 years for rainfall to refill it.

Travis Heying—Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service/Getty Images. An irrigation pivot sprays water onto a young corn crop in Grant County, Kans., in 2015.

You may say that this is not new. Human beings have been altering natural processes ever since they learned how to make fire. The changes picked up speed with the invention of the wheel, the plow and, most dramatically, the steam engine. But they intensified, particularly in the 20th century and in the past few decades. The number of people on the planet has risen fivefold since 1900, while the average life span has doubled. The increase in life span goes “beyond the scope of what had ever been shaped by natural selection,” explained Joshua Lederberg, the biologist who won the Nobel Prize at age 33 for his work on bacterial genetics. In a brilliant, haunting speech in 1989 at a virology conference in Washington, D.C., Lederberg argued that we have changed our biological trajectory so much that “contemporary man is a man-made species.”

Lederberg called human beings’ continued economic and scientific advancement “the greatest threat to every other plant and animal species, as we crowd them out in our own quest for lebensraum.” “A few vermin aside,” he added, “Homo sapiens has undisputed dominion.” But he pointed out that we do have one real competitor—the virus—and in the end, it could win. “Many people find it difficult to accommodate to the reality that nature is far from benign; at least it has no special sentiment for the welfare of the human vs. other species.” Lederberg reminded the audience of the fate that befell rabbits in Australia in the 1950s, when the myxoma virus was unleashed upon them as a population—control measure. Eventually, rabbits achieved herd immunity, but only after the virus had killed over 99% of those infected in the first outbreaks. He concluded his speech with a grim image: “I would … question whether human society could survive left on the beach with only a few percent of survivors. Could they function at any level of culture higher than that of the rabbits? And if reduced to that, would we compete very well with kangaroos?

This is a gloomy compendium of threats. And given the unstable nature of our international system, it may seem that our world is terribly fragile. It is not. Another way to read human history is to recognize just how tough we are. We have gone through extraordinary change at breathtaking pace. We have seen ice ages and plagues, world wars and revolutions, and yet we have survived and flourished. In his writings, Joshua Lederberg acknowledged that nature usually seeks an equilibrium that favors mutual survival of the virus and the host—after all, if the human dies, so does the parasite.

Human beings and our societies are amazingly innovative and resourceful. This planet is awe-inspiringly resilient. But we have to recognize the ever greater risks we are taking and act to mitigate them. Modern human development has occurred on a scale and at a speed with no precedent. The global system that we are living in is open and dynamic, which means it has few buffers. That produces great benefits but also vulnerabilities. We have to adjust to the reality of ever increasing instability—now.

Joe Raedle—Getty Images. The aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which made a devastating landfall as a Category 5 hurricane near Mexico Beach, Fla., in October 2018.

We are not doomed. The point of sounding the alarm is to call people to action. The question is, what kind of action? There are those, on the right and the left, who want to stop other countries from growing economically and shut down our open world. But should we tell the poorest billion in the world that they cannot escape poverty? Should we close ourselves off from the outside world and seek stability in national fortresses? Should we try to slow down technology, or the global movement of goods and services? Even if we wanted to do any of this, we would not be able to arrest these powerful forces. We could not persuade billions of people to stop trying to raise their standards of living. We could not prevent human beings from connecting with one another. We could not stop technological innovation. What we can do is be far more conscious of the risks we face, prepare for the dangers and equip our societies to be resilient. They should be able not only to withstand shocks and backlashes, but also learn from them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that we create systems that are “anti-fragile,” which are even better than resilient ones. They actually gain strength through chaos and crises.

We know what to do. After the Dust Bowl, scientists quickly understood what had happened. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration produced a short movie to explain it to the country, The Plow That Broke the Plains. Government agencies taught farmers how to prevent soil erosion. The Administration provided massive aid to farmers, established the Soil Conservation Service and placed 140 million acres of federal grasslands under protection. In the past three-quarters of a century, there has been no second Dust Bowl, despite extreme weather.

“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,” says Larry Brilliant, the American physician who helped eradicate smallpox 45 years ago. What he means is that we may not be able to change the natural occurrences that produce disease in the first place, but through preparation, early action and intelligent responses, we can quickly flatten its trajectory. In fact, the eradication of smallpox is a story that is only partly about science and mostly about extraordinary cooperation between rival superpowers and impressive execution across the globe.

Similarly, climate change is happening, and we cannot stop it completely. But we can mitigate the scale of change and avert its most harmful effects through aggressive and intelligent policies. It will not be cheap. To address it seriously we would need to start by enacting a carbon tax, which would send the market the right price signal and raise the revenue needed to fund new technologies and simultaneously adapt to the already altered planet. As for economic development, there are hundreds of ways we could approach the process differently, retaining traditional ingredients like growth, openness and innovation while putting new emphasis on others like security, resilience and anti-fragility. We can make different trade-offs, forgo some efficiencies and dynamism in some areas, and spend more money to make our societies prepared. The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared with the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis. More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability. Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity.

And what about preventing the next pandemic? Again, we need to balance dynamism with safety. Much attention has focused on wet markets where live animals are slaughtered and sold, but these cannot simply be shut down. In many countries, especially in Africa and Asia, they provide fresh food for people who don’t own refrigerators. (In China, they account for 73% of all fresh vegetables and meat sold.) These markets should be better regulated, but they pose limited risks when they do not sell wild animals like bats, civets and pangolins. It is that exotic trade that must be outlawed. Similarly, getting the world to stop eating meat may be impossible, but promoting healthier diets—with less meat—would be good for humans and the planet. And factory farming can be re-engineered to be much safer, and far less cruel to animals. Most urgently, countries need strong public-health systems, and those systems need to communicate, learn from and cooperate with one another. You cannot defeat a global disease with local responses.

Marcio Jose Sanchez—AP. Firefighter Ricardo Gomez, part of a San Benito Monterey Cal Fire crew, sets a controlled burn with a drip torch while fighting the Creek Fire in Shaver Lake, Calif., on Sept. 6, 2020.

So too California can’t stop climate change or wildfires alone. But, like America after the Dust Bowl, it can learn from its policy mistakes, using controlled burns to clear out underbrush and practicing sustainable construction. Unfortunately, earlier this month it took a step in the wrong direction when lawmakers killed a reform bill that would have allowed denser housing development. Without new action, single-family homes will keep sprawling outward into the forest, expanding the human footprint and making future destructive fires inevitable. Rather than subsidizing settlements on the coastline and in forests and deserts, governments should encourage housing in safe and more sustainable areas. We have to recognize that the way we are living, eating and consuming energy are all having an impact on the planet—and increasingly it is reacting.

Human beings have been developing their societies at an extraordinary pace, expanding in every realm at unprecedented speed. It is as if we have built the fastest race car ever imagined and are driving it through unknown, unmarked terrain. But we never bothered to equip the car with airbags. We didn’t get insurance. We have not even put on our seat belts. The engine runs hot. Parts overheat and sometimes even catch fire. There have been some crashes, each one a bit worse than the last. So we douse the vehicle, tune up the suspension, repair the bodywork and resolve to do better. But we race on, and soon we are going faster and faster, into newer and rougher terrain. It’s getting very risky out there. It’s time to install those airbags and buy some insurance. And above all, it’s time to buckle up.

This essay is adapted from TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. Copyright (c) 2020 by Fareed Zakaria. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

[realrhythmskrp]

DISPATCH, (05/13/17): Mirage Media has officially released information about leader, Park Hanui, also known as Honey, on skyLectric’s official website! Honey is a ‘92 liner and has been beloved by fans since her debut in 2012. Find out more about Honey below!

I, Park Hanui, have read and understand the terms and conditions as my position of Leader and agree to honor the standards that are to be expected of me as an employee of Mirage Media.

OOC INFORMATION

Preferred name: Randi

Pronouns: She / Her/ They

Timezone:  UTC -4

Other muses: N/A

Skype (this is optional, but if you would like to join the RHYTHMSgc please leave your skype username here): N/A

IC INFORMATION

Faceclaim: Kim Hyorin ( SISTAR )

Name: Park Hanui

Stage name (if applicable): Honey

Idol concept: Smooth, Sultry, Coquettish Hanui is however, pretty much the same on and off the stage – She’s kind to pretty much everyone she deems fit ( such as her group mates who she shows unconditional love and support to), yet at times can give off a coldish demeanor to some people and has mastered the RBF ( resting bit** face ). She enjoys flirting, not only with men but women as well and is open about it — has on numerous occasions said that she should have been born a male so she could have many girlfriends. Her private life is just that, private. But being as though she is the same everywhere she is, it’s expected the same at home.

Birth date and age: 12/ 24/ 92, 24

Company name: Mirage Media

Group Name (if applicable): skyLectric

Group Position (if applicable): Leader

Strengths: Singing; singing for hanui has always been easy, always been something she loved to do. She’s constantly working in the studio to improve herself, even after having debuted. She finds that it’s very important to work hard, and so she kept her practices up in hopes that one day she can possibly debut as a soloist. Dancing; as much as she practiced singing, she worked just as hard to improve her dancing. She has even worked hard on a few choreography’s that went unnoticed, but she still enjoyed making them up. Modelling; Even though she has been criticized for her looks ( and as well as her darker skin tone ) a few too many times, she still goes out there and models for magazines as if she were a professional.

Weaknesses: Rapping; this was never at the top of her list whenever she was a trainee, so it was pushed to the back burner so she could focus on her singing. Though everyday she practices so that way she can thrill the fans with the new and improved Hanui Acting; she has a hard time representing a character on tv for all to see, mixes up her lines or completely forgets them and other times she just simply cannot get the words to come out of her mouth. But she continuously finds the time to sit down and practice just in case someone wants her on the big screen one day. Emotions; though Hanui loves her fans, she hasn’t quite mastered her emotions too well. She is sometimes criticized for being not being too honest with them or being too cold. Nobody can seem to make up their mind about her — She’s either too hot for them or too cold. She has come to not mind this so much, she is who she is and she isn’t changing.

Positive traits: Kind. Respectful. Confident.

Negative traits: Possessive. Naive. Indecisive.

PERSONAL HISTORY

( tw; divorce, cancer, death )

Most of her life she lived rather sheltered by the hands of her mother, her father despising the shadows since he was use to living in the light — Use to being out there in front of everyone. Her mother knew this going into the relationship all those years ago but went ahead and fell in love with the man of her dreams, the life of an idol wasn’t always private and things were aired out there for all to see. She was slowly hating this life, everything she did whether it was small or big was known to the world within a matter or moments — Soon the only life she had known she grew to hate more and more with every passing day. The longer her husband was away, the worse her hermit lifestyle took over and she grew afraid of everything in the outside world.

Even though Hanui was young, she could see the impact of everything and the dwindling relationship of her parents right in front of her. She was too young to have a say in anything, but for the best it was decided that a divorce was necessary and the couple went through with it only to find out a few months after everything had been finalized did her mother have pancreatic cancer and wasn’t going to make it to her next birthday; She died at the end of that month leaving Hanui a mess and her ex husband about the same. Hanui was upset, more than her own father with the loss of her mom — Now all she could think about was how she wasn’t going to grow up with her best friend, with the woman she could cry to whenever a boy breaks her heart or get the motherly advice the other kids were getting — Sure she had her father, but with him he wasn’t around as much as he should be. And even though several months had passed, he never properly mourned his  ex-wife’s death and instead continued on with his career — constantly leaving the young girl with his parents so that way he didn’t have to be responsible for anything if she were to cause trouble.

During the times she was left alone she took to writing in a journal, not about her days but music, writing lyrics since it seemed to help her keep her mind off of the world around her and soon with the permission of her grandfather and grandmother she started taking singing classes so that way she could put a voice to the words she had wrote down — She loved what she was doing, and made sure she did all her chores early as well as homework so she could go to her classes and practice harder and harder. It was there she got the idea to become an idol just like her father, and with permission again from her grandparents she started taking dance classes after her vocal coach suggested she start early and recommended her to a few places that were close to home for her.

Eventually, news spread fast that her father had abandoned his daughter back home and all he could see was work ( which was true to an extent ), and it took its toll on him and he decided enough was enough and he was ready to join his beloved wife up above. Before he left he made sure to visit his parents and signed custody paperwork so that way she would never be alone, and gave them sealed documents that would give her all of his earnings from over the years and be set in life with whatever she chose to do — He left before she could tell him that she was going to be just like him.

“Hanui, you’re not alone… You have us. We won’t leave you”

Two tragedies happening so close together left it’s horrible mark on the young girl who was only but thirteen — The only solace she found was in music and time spent alone in her bedroom writing, finding comfort as she sang. Music helped her forget her pain. Music was there for her and she knew she was going to be able to move on with her life.

Her grandparents had decided then and there that they were to move away and start over new, where nobody knew her and knew of her past so that way she could live normal and try to move on. They chose Seoul since both were originally from there and still they were only four hours away from where they use to live. The move was for Hanui, to make her feel better — She started high school like any other teenager, though news about her being the daughter of a deceased idol spread like wildfire and she soon transferred to another school she felt was much more suiting to her; The School of Performing Arts at Seoul. There she became friends with a male student who was older than her who introduced her to a few new genres of music and helped her with her songwriting — Soon the two were inseparable and she followed him whenever he went to audition for bkb entertainment.

“Come with me and be my support team?” He was accepted on his first try and it prompted her to try for herself.

Eventually getting permission to do the same since she was only fifteen by her grandparents to officially follow in her father’s footsteps and auditioned at bkb entertainment where her friend was — The first time was no good, but she came back with a stronger attitude and just knew it was her time. Second time around she chose to go to Mirage Media and auditioned; she was accepted to be a trainee and began her rigorous training period while attending school and balancing her family life. There were many nights she went home crying, or falling asleep in classes — But it was all worth it, she was going to be an idol. Her dream was coming true.

It was soon announced that she would training to debut in a six member group known as skyLectric — she was ecstatic and ready to show the world that her and the other five girls were going to shine brighter than the brightest of diamonds out there — Though their debut was pushed back inevitably and she grew irritated.  She tried to look past it, thinking of it as being just a small bump in the road of her career and almost made the decision to move to another company before her company came to her and said that they were still to debut as skyLectric, only as a four member group instead of six — And she was chosen as the leader of her group. Hanui was speechless, but accepted the position and trained even harder, almost skeptical at first of them choosing her over the other girls to be the leader, but she was strong yet kind. It was known all throughout the company.

Their debut came on them faster than she anticipated, but they were well received and everyone loved them — Something she was worried about somewhat. Things were great, things were fine ~ Hanui was excited and pushed herself and her girls, though she made sure to be there for them whenever and wherever they needed her. She was like the mother figure, even though she wasn’t the oldest — She was still the leader, still their group mom. They were her life now as was their group, and she made sure to treat them as so. Her family. Things were looking so well for them, and that kept a constant smile on her face and made it easier to practice and improve her vocal ability and dancing before focusing on her rapping — Never really allowing herself to sway away from what she loved, or be let down by rude comments brought on by people online that didn’t know her. She was happy — She was living the dream.

“Look how the world lights up for you girls ~ You’re idols!

[cequalsn-blog]

AI and structural inequality

There is a moment in time between the creation of a technology, its adoption, and the point where it becomes so ubiquitous as to fade into the background. Printed books revolutionised 16th Century Europe to the point that wildfire ideas accelerated human development, upset the traditional order, and the aftershocks took three centuries to shake out. AI scholorship emerged, arguably, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in that she critques the idea of man creating a being in his own image. Playing god with electricty. The artificial man turned on by the real monster its creator, and the mob rising up to attack something which outwardly appeared hideous, but inwardly was confused and misunderstood.

Around the same time as Shelley wrote her polemic, the Luddite movement in Britain was fighting a loosing battle against the rise of mechanisation and the loss of jobs flowing from cottage weavers into the growing towns and cities. Their anxiety, pain, and empoverishment were brought about by the progress of efficiency and economic concentration, their lives changed by forces far beyond their control. It took two world wars and the disestablishment of the British Emprire to bring about anywhere near the rise in living standards that brought those city dwellers into ease and comfort. And still their lives were wrapped up in the industrial grind even with a realitve social security blanket of the NHS, pensions, and the welfare state. Those gains were hardfought, battle won, and relied on a society that both had work for the workers, and taxes that flowed into government coffers. In turn the State were from a punitive legal code at the start of the industrial era to one where access to justice and education were accessible to most people. The caviat being that systemic biases and inbuild prejudice carried through and was never tackled at the highest levels.

Fast-forward through Thatcher’s root and branch hacking down of industry, New Labour’s rising of living standards but failure to address structural inequalities, and then post-2010 a systemic failure by the UK government to address those structural failures with austerity, Brexit, and the embedding of the private sector within the British state. Why does this matter to AI and legal ethics? Because structural inequality gets inbuild into the systems governments and private companies develop and promote to the general public. Conscious and unconscious biases are hard coded, from the obvious ones of facial regonition systems more likely to plack people of colour as criminals, to the more subtle AI coding on Youtube that targets content to users. Every programmer and producer has bias, and that flows through through all the code they produce.

In addtition to the code, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and the plethora of other social networks offer their services for free, or at a low cost, because data is their currency. Ease of access for the price of personal data is the accepted price most people pay for use of these systems, with all the inherent biases and marketing that comes with it. If these services charged for their platfoms how many would use them? In the early days of the internet many models were tried to monertise, and the current one drive by data and advertising proved to be the most successful because most people do not consider the cost of access too high. Much like McDonalds and Coca-Cola market their products as easy and accessible, Facebook and Youtube do the same. Ease of access for both users and marketers means that fast content is churned through at the flick of a thumb, easily digested, easily related to, and ever so bite sized. All served up through AI controlled systems that no lay person will ever see, and few non-technical citizens will understand the base code.

Social platforms in al their shapes and sizes embed structural inequality through ring fencing people into their own walled gardens, the consumer only ever seeing content pleasing to the eyes and ears. There is little critique, users can block and ignore content that projects them out of their comfort zone, and the AI spoon feeds and amplifies the bubble that each person creates for themselves. When books and pamphlets were first utilised to spread ideas, the biggest hurdle to consumption was illiteracy. This held back the vox populi from engaging in debates, and it was the education of the masses that turned the printed word into a weapon of social change. In the AI era all our senses are engaged, with videos, memes, podcasts, blogs, and other bitesized content flowing through AI driven channels to sate our inner need to belong and participate in the wider conversation. Revolutions have started because one person set themselves on fire in a market in Algeria, with the hot embers of that fire still raging in Lybia and Syria. That video was virally shared around the world in  matter of hours, with commentary and opinion flying from all corners of the political spectrum. In the 10 years since those algorithms have evolved and developed to the point that the death of an innocent person of colour in Minniapolis ignites protests and condemnation the world over, yet at the same time AIs deliver protest related content from across the poltical spectrum to respective audiences, further driving apart communities and citizens.

AIs, for all their vaunted machine learning, are still tools of their respective masters. At present there is no sapient, let alone sentient, AI, and as such the content we are served serves those who sit behind the tools. The messages we receive, the perspectives we are shown, are all reliant on an AI understanding who we are as people on the freely given data we choose to give. Each data point you provide tells the system your tastes, your fears, your desires, your hopes, your hates. It tunes itself to you, serves you up what you want to see to better sell you products and ideas. To encapsulate you within your bubble to better make you want to stay and scroll. It embeds messages that you may be conscious of, and at the same time serve you up messages that are subtle and reinforce your world view. All the time it embeds within your perspective the structural inequalities of the world around you, without challanging you to gain fresh perspective. And we let it because it suits us to use these platforms for free.

So what is the flipside of this? What if there was a platform that charged you and stripped out the marketing? Who would engage? There are plenty of media outlets that serve content for a price, from Netflix to the Wall Street Journal, each with their own AIs and their own biases. The paywall itself is a closed gardner only for the few who wish to pay to enter, excluding those who choose not to pay, and more pertinently cannot afford to pay. Poverty of information is just as compelling as food poverty, with ill nurishment of the mind having a socially corrosive effect on people’s lives as nutrition deficient food. This is not an argument of liberal v conservative, popular entertainment v high brow. No, this is a defecit in engagement, a deficit in opportunity. If you are shut out from engagement, from stimulating your imagination and your interlectual curiosity then your ability to challenge ideas and engage with them becomes deminished. Much as a £2.00 burger once in a while is a treat, but everyday could clog your arteries, the same goes for the content that is served to you. A cat meme or Donald Trump tweet in and of itself has no impact, but the context within your life gives it impact. Every time you consume media you add to your persona context, you intepret it and it adds to your tapesty. AIs attune themselves to this, and the more you consume through them the more the serve you up to fit your context.

Poverty comes in many forms, one being the time, or lack of, to engage with ideas and concepts. If you have to work 12 hours a day to make rent and put food on the table you are unlikely to be able to spend hours reading or critically thinking about the world. AI driven content fills that space because it is easy to consume, and no hassle to digest. You get that bite size moment of catharsis, or rage, and you are stimulated. Yet, in the long run it embeds whatever biases the coders and marketers want you to see. Intrinsically, whatever platform you use projects those biases onto you, and if you do not have the time or inclination to critically engage with it then you are unconsciously absorbing those biases. This is where education, reduced work hours/higher salaries, and an ability to critically engage with friends and colleagues can lift people out of this desert of ideas.

Ultimately an AI is only as effective a tool as the person who wields it. We as a society have gotten so used to those platforms that to think of a world without them is almost inconceivable. 30 years the internet commons was between elite universities sharing information, with AIs experiments in a lab. Today we inhabit a hyper connected world that few foresaw, with powerful machines in our pockets that given instant access to all of recorded digitised time. We freely give our data to access this information, allowing AIs to shape our personal narratives, and embedding their biases into our own. Is there a solution? Can we just cut ourselves off and exist without it? Yes, you can, but the price is that loss of access to knowledge, connections, friends, and the wider world. Is education the solution? We teach healthy eating and living, promoting nutritional consumption that cares for our bodies, yet allowing fast food. There is already much out there warning of the pitfalls of social media platforms, of additiction and the negative impacts of our polticial views, yet there is little education on economic underpinnings of this, that without our data currency the internet as we know it would be unsustainable. 

In conclusion, It is a paradox that the very thing that we now depend on for growth and connectivity is destabilising and distorting our world. In the hundred years after moveable type revolutionised Europe wars and political upheaval convulsed the continent, eventually leading many to flee to North America and bring radical ideas with them. AIs have had less than 30 years to impact our lives, and their impact has been far more intense and concentrated. By embedding biases and information poverty they have driven communities even further apart, yet also brought online communities closer together. Like drawn to like through the algorithm. A critical way to fight the ingrained biases is to engage, dabate, discuss, and critique everything you consume, while at the same time understanding that while there is no monatary cost to your participation, the personal cost is one you must account for. Inequality starts in people, and we must address this in ourselves, our own content, and in turn shape the AIs to fight back against whatever biases they have been programmed with. We as a society, as individuals, have the power to reshape them, it is up to us to choose to do so.

[the-record-columns]

March 6, 2019: Columns

‘Confessions’ of an old man…

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

At Monday’s meeting of the Rotary Club, I had the pleasure of presenting the program. By program, I mean, I got to tell some stories — some old, some new, but all stories I love to tell.

However, there was one story that I just didn’t get around to because I was only given 45 minutes. What follows are, as the title states, are ‘confessions.’

Of sorts…

Okay, up front let me explain the quote marks around the word confessions in the title of this column.

There used to be a television show I watched in which a statement was made each week to the effect of “…the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Well, in this case a couple of names have been left out to protect the guilty.

That being said, growing up on Hinshaw Street, there were limited opportunities to make money. Mrs. Minnie Jarvis next door was a wonderful soul who paid me way too much to mow and rake her little yard, but that was just every two weeks or so. Mrs. Spurgeon Minton on up the street would work you all day for a dime and a glass of lemonade. You could almost always make enough money to go to the Liberty or the Allen  Theater by picking up pop bottles (it wasn’t called “soda” back then) and returning them to the grocery store for the deposit. I suppose I should point out to the younger among you that the “deposit” I am talking about is from the days that bottling companies re-used the bottles, and, this was a way of making sure they were returned, instead of being thrown away, When I was a young puppy it was a penny each; later two cents; and, I think, eventually it went up to a nickel.

This was actually a fairly popular way of making some pocket change.

However, there was one family of infamous boys in the neighborhood who were constantly getting into trouble. I mean real trouble, with the police and everything. At night, these boys would sneak out of their house and climb over the chicken wire fence behind the Lowe’s Supermarket on Second Street Hill and haul off cartons and cartons of pop bottles – and return them to the store the next day and collect the deposit. This worked well for a while, but they got greedy and hauled off so many it was noticed by the workers at the store. On the advice of the police department, the folks at the grocery store marked a bunch of the cartons, and, when they brought them in for a deposit refund, caught the offenders red-handed so to speak. The news spread like wildfire around the neighborhood that those boys were probably going to be sent to “reform school,” surely a fate worse than death.

Enough about them; what did I do worth confessing, you might be asking yourself.

Well, during my misspent youth, vending machines of many types became more and more popular. As you might imagine, it wasn’t long till the old Coke and Pepsi machines that held only one kind and size of drink became obsolete and had to be replaced with ones that could dispense several different flavors. To that end, a version of machines used by all the major bottling companies began to appear around town which featured a long narrow door on the left side which had eight or 10 slots for various bottled drinks to be dispensed horizontally. An aside to this is the fact that if you tried to pull one out without putting the money in the machine, the bottle would come out about two inches and stop abruptly — often pulling the skin off your hand as the bottle cap was somewhat unforgiving.

It was this small fact, however, that allowed the great unwashed from Hinshaw Street and Second Street Hill to realize that, if the bottle will come out two inches or so even without putting any money in the machine, all you need is a bottle opener and a cup to get most of a drink for free. In no time, the more enterprising of these delinquents figured out that, with a straw, the rest of the bottle of pop was readily available as well. It wasn’t long until word spread and these machines were basically cannibalized by Monday morning of each week. Soon, these machines had been re-tooled to accommodate cans instead of bottles.

I actually have one of this style machine in my vast collection of things that most everyone else can live without. For what it is worth, every time I walk by it, I am reminded of my past youthful transgressions.

Penance, I suppose, is in the heart of the offender.

 March forth, child

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

“Do not let the actions of others define you”

“Be the change”

“Speak your truth”

Inspirational quotes inundate us at every turn. My momma said, “Pick your battles. You had better never start anything, but if you see (insert injustice here) you had better finish it.”

This was not an avocation of violence, this was instilling in us the courage, even as kids, to always stand up for what was right, to not be afraid of the backlash and taunting of our peers.

Monday, March fourth, marked 21 years since we lost my mom. She was 48. A bleeding ulcer was misdiagnosed, and she ended up having an aneurism in her stomach. The loss of blood was too great, and she was transferred to Baptist CCU in Winston. She never recovered, and we had to make the decision to unplug her.

At the time of her death we were close, like Thelma and Louise. For a decade and a half I blamed myself for not checking in on her the day she was admitted to the hospital, thinking I had failed at not fighting hard enough to protect her when we had to make the decision to unplug her. Anyone who has grieved knows “Time heals all wounds” is a lie.  

I have been on social media since 2009, and my feeds this past week have been full of “memories” of posts made about her by friends, my siblings and myself over the last ten years.

One of my Facebook memories was from four years ago, marking a cold and cathartic day at Widow’s Creek at Stone Mountain State Park. There were still several inches of snow on the ground, it was barely above freezing, but I had a conversation to hold with my mom, and some reckoning to do with my guilt, so I made the trek down the path to one of my favorite childhood places.

The post in part reads: “Nothing like putting your bare feet in the coldest water you've ever known, in winter for grounding, for healing…from the past 17 years of guilt.”

This year the date snuck up on me- not that I forgot, but there wasn’t a week of horrid lament wreaking havoc inside my soul, stealing sleep and sanity. I realized that I no longer carry burdening guilt. Not for my mother. Not for my siblings. Not for anything in my past, and especially, not for my future.

Our healing is ours alone, and we cannot, we must not, allow another person to help carry those weighty dark parts of our innermost workings, no matter how much we want  to trust them, or how much they promise to protect our heartstrings. And we sure as hell should not be tricked into carrying someone else’s guilt.

This is MY path. Everything else is a swarm of butterflies coming in and out along the way. And I think these are the lessons my Mom wanted me to learn from her. Yes, help others, but do not sacrifice your self worth in the process; you can’t ‘do unto others’ if you don’t take care of yourself first. She even left a message for us on her death day. March fouth- March FORTH, do not look back.

                                                          RIP

                                                     Lynn Rae

 Final wake-up call

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

Israel is constantly facing major international military and political challenges yet, for all of her internal and external problems, Israel is more militarily secure now than ever before. In April there will be major elections in Israel.  Whether or not Prime Minister Netanyahu is able to hold fast to the reins of his government remains to be seen however it is certain that the current policies which serve to strengthen Israel’s defense forces will not be changed or weakened.  Soon there will be another peace plan on the table but until Israel has a true partner for peace, the efforts to work out any agreement are futile. 

Israel understands that her position within the international community is becoming increasingly fragile. The Europeans are intensifying their biased policies against her and other governments, to include Britain and even the United States, have anti-Semitic officials serving in public office.

We’ve all heard that President Trump has a peace plan which he calls the deal of the century.  However, the contents of that deal have yet to be revealed but an educated guess leads me to believe that it may contain some unpleasant surprises for Israel.  While President Trump has proven himself to be a friend of Israel, the liberal left (a.k.a. the Democrat Party) is growing increasingly radical and anti-Israel.

Israel is well aware that her largest support base in the United  States is within the Evangelical Christian community which is often more Zionistic than American Jews and their leaders.  It seems that during the presidency of Barak Obama, Jewish leaders became increasingly silent when it became apparent that Barak Obama was hostile toward Israel.  Perhaps they feared that speaking out in favor of policies which under-girded Israel and the Jewish people might cause his hostility toward the Jewish state to intensify.

Yet surprisingly, despite President Trump’s pro-Israel actions to include moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and passing legislation which stopped all U.S. funding going to the Palestinians’ “pay for slay” program, some progressive rabbis and Jewish lay leaders regard him as their enemy.  One example of this Jewish anti-Trumpism is the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) refusal to endorse anti-BDS legislation or actively support pro-Israel activities on college and university campuses.  Furthermore, despite the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has, in part, an anti-Israel agenda, they still enjoy the support of many American Jews and the ADL.  

Another example of toxic anti-Semitism comes from the highly publicized Women’s March movement which agitates against Israel at every opportunity. Co-chair Tamika Mallory refuses to recognize Israel or dissociate herself from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, America’s most notorious anti-Semite, who refers to Jews as “satanic” and “termites.”

Even more disturbing is the unprecedented election of openly anti-Israel agitators to Congress. Among these is Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who was photographed at an event with Abbas Hamideh, who openly promotes Hamas and Hezbollah and likens Zionists to Nazis. Freshman Democratic legislator Ilhan Omar, a Muslim Somali-American, is another who is bitterly anti-Israel and enthusiastically promotes BDS. She has described Israel as “evil” and an apartheid state and claimed that it had “hypnotized the world.” One of her initial acts after her election was to meet with anti-Semitic women’s activist Linda Sarsour. But, topping the shock list, was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's appointment of this anti-Semitic newly elected congresswoman to the prestigious and powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee, which oversees foreign aid and national security issues such as terrorism and the proliferation of non-conventional weapons.  For this action alone, Pelosi should be tried for treason. 

Being passive is no longer an option.  America has reached a turning point. The appointment of Democratic legislator Ilhan Omar to the Foreign Affairs Committee is a final wake-up call for all who embrace freedom, democracy, our free enterprise system, and Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.  We must stand up and speak out before it’s too late. God says He will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who do otherwise.  I, personally, prefer a blessing but fear my country is heading in the opposite direction. 

  An Irish Tale  

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

Katie, who works at the post office asked what I was working on this week. I replied, “a few things are on the schedule but the first is a story about the Irish heritage in the Carolinas.” to which she quickly replied. “I’m part Irish.”

Katie went on to tell me about her family that settled in Pennsylvania. Her great grandmother did not want her sons working in the coal mines. Her husband was no longer in the picture, so she planned a move to Detroit, Michigan, where safer employment was available. This would prove to be a good move for the family. As time passed, she sponsored and helped other families make the same move. The positive impact of lives saved is countless.  

The Scots-Irish influence in the Carolinas is profound. It is reported that in the 18th century as many as 250,000 Europeans sailed to America. Some would become indentured servants as they did not have the funds to pay for the voyage. Unfortunately, for many the life of an indentured servant was little more than slavery.

Settling in the eastern part of the Carolinas was not an option for large numbers and for this reason many settled in the back country of the Carolinas. The feel of the land was not unlike that of their homeland.

Many were craftsman such as spinners and weavers. They worked hard and cared for the land. The making of whiskey was skilled and would not be uncommon.

Mecklenburg County would also become home to many Scots-Irish. So many in fact that in 1775 when the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was signed almost all the signers were Scots-Irish.

It was the fighting tenacity of the Scottish and Irish immigrants that fueled the victory at the Battle of Kings Mountain, which was a turning point in what would become American Independence.  

United States President Andrew Jackson was born in the Carolinas with Scots-Irish parents and so was U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun from Abbeville, S.C.    

The folk traditions and culture of the Irish and Scottish will forever influence who we are in the Carolinas. Many of us are aware of our connection and many are discovering via DNA tests that tell us where we come from.

I always feel a closeness to the people when I attend the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games. The gathering of the clans is a gathering of families with common interests and pride in their heritage. It happens every year with no regard to weather or anything else. The people make a way to come together. Maybe that’s a good lesson for all of us.

What would happen if we all started to come together more often and celebrate just being together?

Maybe that small or large piece of Irish or Scottish DNA will give us the will to fight against the obstacles that keep us apart. And just maybe we can defeat the problems of life, or at least sleep a little better knowing that another kinsman has our back.

 Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 10th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My 12. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com.

[newstechreviews]

Imagine Massachusetts on fire, literally the entire state engulfed in flames. That is how much land has already been ravaged—at least 5 million acres—in the wildfires of California, Washington and Oregon. Put another way, in just a few weeks these fires have burned as much land as was destroyed by a decade of using napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. With temperatures over 100°F, toxic air now blankets tens of millions of people, power outages have afflicted vast regions, and dozens have already died from the blazes. Air quality in West Coast cities has ranked among the world’s worst, with Portland’s air at points being almost three times more unhealthy than in notoriously polluted cities like New Delhi. The scenes of red skies out of America’s West have an unreal quality to them, as if they come from a different planet. In a sense they do—they are portents of the future.

There are many proximate reasons for these forest fires—fireworks, campfires, a stray spark—but there is one large cause that is blindingly clear: human actions that have led to climate change. To put it simply, the world is getting hotter, and that means that forests get drier. A yearslong drought, which ended in 2017, killed 163 million trees in California—and that deadwood proved to be the kindling for this year’s devastation. A scientific study led by Stanford, released in April, found that California’s five worst wildfires—whether measured by deaths, destruction or size—all occurred during 2017 and 2018. And we can be sure of one thing: it’s going to get worse. Temperatures continue to rise, drought conditions are worsening, and the combined effect of all these forces will multiply to create cascading crises in the years to come.

Cascades, in which small sparks cause great conflagrations, are happening all around us. Think of COVID-19, which began with a viral speck that was likely lodged in a bat somewhere in China—and is now a raging global pandemic. While viruses have been around forever, they mostly originate in animals and, when they jumped to humans, remained largely local. But over the past few decades, many viruses have gone global, causing widespread epidemics—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika and now the novel coronavirus. In a recent essay in the scientific journal Cell, the country’s top infectious—disease expert, Anthony Fauci, and one of his colleagues, David Morens, warn that we “have reached a tipping point that forecasts the inevitability of an acceleration of disease emergencies.” In other words, get ready for more pandemics. The fundamental reason behind this acceleration, they argue, is human action—the ever increasing scope and pace of development.

Damon Winter—The New York Times/Redux. A housing development on the edge of undeveloped desert in Cathedral City, Calif., on April 3, 2015, during the state’s punishing drought.

We have created a world in overdrive. People are living longer, producing and consuming more, inhabiting larger spaces, consuming more energy, and generating more waste and greenhouse gas emissions. The pace has accelerated dramatically in the past few decades. Just one example: a 2019 U.N. report, compiled by 145 experts from 50 countries, concluded that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.” It noted that 75% of all land has been “severely altered” by human actions, as has 66% of the world’s marine environments. Ecosystems are collapsing, and biodiversity is disappearing. As many as 1 million plant and animal species (of 8 million total) are threatened with extinction, some within a few decades. All these strains and imbalances produce dangers—some that can be foreseen, and others that cannot.

The pandemic, for its part, can be thought of as nature’s revenge. The way we live now is practically an invitation for animal viruses to infect humans. Why do diseases seem to be jumping from animals to humans at a faster pace in recent decades? As cities expand, they bring humans closer and closer to the habitat of wild animals, making it more likely that virus in a bat could be transmitted to a pig or a pangolin and then to humans. Developing countries are modernizing so quickly that they effectively inhabit several different centuries at the same time. In Wuhan and other such cities, China has built an advanced, technologically sophisticated-economy—but in the shadows of the skyscrapers are wildlife markets full of exotic animals, a perfect cauldron for animal-to-human viral transfer. And the people who live in these places are more mobile than ever before, quickly spreading information, goods, services—and disease.

Our destruction of natural habitats may also be to blame. Some scientists believe that as humans extend civilization into nature—building roads, clearing land, constructing factories, excavating mines—we are increasing the odds that animals will pass diseases to us. COVID-19 appears to have originated in bats, which are hosts to many other viruses, including rabies and Ebola. Bats used to live farther from humans. But as we encroached on their habitats, their diseases increasingly became our diseases. “We are doing things every day that make pandemics more likely,” said Peter Daszak, an eminent disease ecologist. “We need to understand, this is not just nature. It is what we are doing to nature.”

As economic development moves faster and reaches more people, we are taking ever greater risks, often without even realizing it. Think about meat consumption. As people get richer, they eat more meat. When this happens globally, the effect is staggering: about 80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. (And that doesn’t even count fish.) But supplying this enormous demand comes at great cost to the environment and our health. Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide yet take up 80% of the earth’s farmland. Meanwhile, meat is now produced on a vast scale with animals packed together in gruesome conditions. Most livestock—an estimated 99% in America, 74% around the world—comes from factory farms. (Organically farmed, grass-fed meat is a luxury product.) These massive operations serve as petri dishes for powerful viruses. “Selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost genetically identical,” Vox journalist Sigal Samuel explains. “That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more virulent.” The lack of genetic diversity removes the “immunological firebreaks.”

Sebastián Liste—NOOR for TIME. A slaughterhouse in the Brazilian state of Rondônia in February 2019. The company boasted an expansion would allow a cow to be killed every eight seconds at the facility.

Americans should know better. The country has experienced several ecological disasters, most notably the 1930s Dust Bowl. The event is seared in the American imagination. The bitter tale of desperate Dust Bowl migrants inspired John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—describing the plight of people who could be called America’s first climate refugees. And it is a story of human actions causing a natural reaction.

The Great Plains are the semiarid places east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River. The wind blows fast over these lands, sometimes scarily so. Over centuries, probably millennia, nature’s solution was to grow grass that held the loose topsoil in place. But by the late 19th century, as the pioneers headed west, lured by promises of fertile farmland, they tilled the prairies, turning the grassy plains into wheat fields. The farmers felled trees that served as windbreaks, and turned the soil over and over, until there was no grass and the topsoil had been reduced to a thin, loose layer just covering the hard land beneath.

Then came bad weather. Starting in 1930, the region was hit by four waves of drought. With the drought came winds—ferocious gales that blew off the entire layer of topsoil with a force that few humans had seen before and kicked up dust storms that blackened the sky. By 1934, the topsoil covering 100 million acres of land had blown away. The heat intensified the suffering—1934 was the nation’s hottest year on record until 1998. Thousands died and millions fled. The farmers left behind were plunged into a decade of poverty.

We are tempting fate similarly every day. We are now watching the effects of climate change on almost every part of the natural environment. It is bringing a warmer climate to more of the world, thus creating more hospitable conditions for disease. It is also turning more land into desert—23 hectares every minute, by the U.N.’s estimate. In 2010, Luc Gnacadja, who headed the organization’s effort to combat desertification, called it “the greatest environmental challenge of our time,” warning that “the top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.” Thirty-eight percent of the earth’s surface is at risk of desertification. Some of it is caused less by global climate change than by something more easily preventable: the overextraction of water from the ground. One of the world’s most crucial water sources is the Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls through the Great Plains and supplies about a third of the groundwater used to irrigate American farms. This seemingly bottomless well is in fact being emptied by agribusiness so fast that it is on track to shrivel by 70% in less than 50 years. If the aquifer ran dry, it would take 6,000 years for rainfall to refill it.

Travis Heying—Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service/Getty Images. An irrigation pivot sprays water onto a young corn crop in Grant County, Kans., in 2015.

You may say that this is not new. Human beings have been altering natural processes ever since they learned how to make fire. The changes picked up speed with the invention of the wheel, the plow and, most dramatically, the steam engine. But they intensified, particularly in the 20th century and in the past few decades. The number of people on the planet has risen fivefold since 1900, while the average life span has doubled. The increase in life span goes “beyond the scope of what had ever been shaped by natural selection,” explained Joshua Lederberg, the biologist who won the Nobel Prize at age 33 for his work on bacterial genetics. In a brilliant, haunting speech in 1989 at a virology conference in Washington, D.C., Lederberg argued that we have changed our biological trajectory so much that “contemporary man is a man-made species.”

Lederberg called human beings’ continued economic and scientific advancement “the greatest threat to every other plant and animal species, as we crowd them out in our own quest for lebensraum.” “A few vermin aside,” he added, “Homo sapiens has undisputed dominion.” But he pointed out that we do have one real competitor—the virus—and in the end, it could win. “Many people find it difficult to accommodate to the reality that nature is far from benign; at least it has no special sentiment for the welfare of the human vs. other species.” Lederberg reminded the audience of the fate that befell rabbits in Australia in the 1950s, when the myxoma virus was unleashed upon them as a population—control measure. Eventually, rabbits achieved herd immunity, but only after the virus had killed over 99% of those infected in the first outbreaks. He concluded his speech with a grim image: “I would … question whether human society could survive left on the beach with only a few percent of survivors. Could they function at any level of culture higher than that of the rabbits? And if reduced to that, would we compete very well with kangaroos?

This is a gloomy compendium of threats. And given the unstable nature of our international system, it may seem that our world is terribly fragile. It is not. Another way to read human history is to recognize just how tough we are. We have gone through extraordinary change at breathtaking pace. We have seen ice ages and plagues, world wars and revolutions, and yet we have survived and flourished. In his writings, Joshua Lederberg acknowledged that nature usually seeks an equilibrium that favors mutual survival of the virus and the host—after all, if the human dies, so does the parasite.

Human beings and our societies are amazingly innovative and resourceful. This planet is awe-inspiringly resilient. But we have to recognize the ever greater risks we are taking and act to mitigate them. Modern human development has occurred on a scale and at a speed with no precedent. The global system that we are living in is open and dynamic, which means it has few buffers. That produces great benefits but also vulnerabilities. We have to adjust to the reality of ever increasing instability—now.

Joe Raedle—Getty Images. The aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which made a devastating landfall as a Category 5 hurricane near Mexico Beach, Fla., in October 2018.

We are not doomed. The point of sounding the alarm is to call people to action. The question is, what kind of action? There are those, on the right and the left, who want to stop other countries from growing economically and shut down our open world. But should we tell the poorest billion in the world that they cannot escape poverty? Should we close ourselves off from the outside world and seek stability in national fortresses? Should we try to slow down technology, or the global movement of goods and services? Even if we wanted to do any of this, we would not be able to arrest these powerful forces. We could not persuade billions of people to stop trying to raise their standards of living. We could not prevent human beings from connecting with one another. We could not stop technological innovation. What we can do is be far more conscious of the risks we face, prepare for the dangers and equip our societies to be resilient. They should be able not only to withstand shocks and backlashes, but also learn from them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that we create systems that are “anti-fragile,” which are even better than resilient ones. They actually gain strength through chaos and crises.

We know what to do. After the Dust Bowl, scientists quickly understood what had happened. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration produced a short movie to explain it to the country, The Plow That Broke the Plains. Government agencies taught farmers how to prevent soil erosion. The Administration provided massive aid to farmers, established the Soil Conservation Service and placed 140 million acres of federal grasslands under protection. In the past three-quarters of a century, there has been no second Dust Bowl, despite extreme weather.

“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,” says Larry Brilliant, the American physician who helped eradicate smallpox 45 years ago. What he means is that we may not be able to change the natural occurrences that produce disease in the first place, but through preparation, early action and intelligent responses, we can quickly flatten its trajectory. In fact, the eradication of smallpox is a story that is only partly about science and mostly about extraordinary cooperation between rival superpowers and impressive execution across the globe.

Similarly, climate change is happening, and we cannot stop it completely. But we can mitigate the scale of change and avert its most harmful effects through aggressive and intelligent policies. It will not be cheap. To address it seriously we would need to start by enacting a carbon tax, which would send the market the right price signal and raise the revenue needed to fund new technologies and simultaneously adapt to the already altered planet. As for economic development, there are hundreds of ways we could approach the process differently, retaining traditional ingredients like growth, openness and innovation while putting new emphasis on others like security, resilience and anti-fragility. We can make different trade-offs, forgo some efficiencies and dynamism in some areas, and spend more money to make our societies prepared. The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared with the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis. More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability. Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity.

And what about preventing the next pandemic? Again, we need to balance dynamism with safety. Much attention has focused on wet markets where live animals are slaughtered and sold, but these cannot simply be shut down. In many countries, especially in Africa and Asia, they provide fresh food for people who don’t own refrigerators. (In China, they account for 73% of all fresh vegetables and meat sold.) These markets should be better regulated, but they pose limited risks when they do not sell wild animals like bats, civets and pangolins. It is that exotic trade that must be outlawed. Similarly, getting the world to stop eating meat may be impossible, but promoting healthier diets—with less meat—would be good for humans and the planet. And factory farming can be re-engineered to be much safer, and far less cruel to animals. Most urgently, countries need strong public-health systems, and those systems need to communicate, learn from and cooperate with one another. You cannot defeat a global disease with local responses.

Marcio Jose Sanchez—AP. Firefighter Ricardo Gomez, part of a San Benito Monterey Cal Fire crew, sets a controlled burn with a drip torch while fighting the Creek Fire in Shaver Lake, Calif., on Sept. 6, 2020.

So too California can’t stop climate change or wildfires alone. But, like America after the Dust Bowl, it can learn from its policy mistakes, using controlled burns to clear out underbrush and practicing sustainable construction. Unfortunately, earlier this month it took a step in the wrong direction when lawmakers killed a reform bill that would have allowed denser housing development. Without new action, single-family homes will keep sprawling outward into the forest, expanding the human footprint and making future destructive fires inevitable. Rather than subsidizing settlements on the coastline and in forests and deserts, governments should encourage housing in safe and more sustainable areas. We have to recognize that the way we are living, eating and consuming energy are all having an impact on the planet—and increasingly it is reacting.

Human beings have been developing their societies at an extraordinary pace, expanding in every realm at unprecedented speed. It is as if we have built the fastest race car ever imagined and are driving it through unknown, unmarked terrain. But we never bothered to equip the car with airbags. We didn’t get insurance. We have not even put on our seat belts. The engine runs hot. Parts overheat and sometimes even catch fire. There have been some crashes, each one a bit worse than the last. So we douse the vehicle, tune up the suspension, repair the bodywork and resolve to do better. But we race on, and soon we are going faster and faster, into newer and rougher terrain. It’s getting very risky out there. It’s time to install those airbags and buy some insurance. And above all, it’s time to buckle up.

This essay is adapted from TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. Copyright (c) 2020 by Fareed Zakaria. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.